–Prince Genji, The Tale of Genji

You are standing on the coast, your bare feet against the cool sand as you peer out over the vastness of the sea. The tide has receded beyond its usual point and stones, shells and sea creatures dot the exposed shore; you look to the horizon and see a colossal column of water headed your way—the tsunami is almost here. Easy to dramatize and hard to ignore, the silver tsunami will strike most of the developed—and even parts of the developing—world in the coming half century. As birthrates decrease and people live longer, the natural forces of aging will beat against public finances, political processes and educational institutions like waves on the shore. Communities will change on the most fundamental level: even family practices and cultural values are likely to bow to demographic pressures. Nowhere will these forces appear sooner and with greater foreshadowing than in Japan.

Japan is already the oldest society in the world, with the greatest share of people over 65 years, and the greatest number of centenarians. It also has incredibly low birthrates, especially since many young Japanese are deciding to forgo marriage or parenthood in exchange for a career. (Ronald, Hirayama, 2009) While the United States is also graying, it receives a population stimulus from its large immigrant population—something Japan does not, and is not likely to, have. Communities in the United States are changing in real ways, but Japan’s dilemma is more likely to be mirrored in the rest of the developed world, in places like Western Europe and East Asia where immigrant populations are not as big and cultures more homogenous. Understanding the implications of population aging in Japan will go a long way to telling us what can be expected to happen in other countries. It is an important exercise in addressing the coming challenges to productivity, learning and living in the developed world—like a rock dropped into a pond, these demographic ripples are likely to have far-reaching effects.

One of the greatest ripples to disrupt the pond will be seen in domestic migration. Interregional migration, in particular will go down, reflecting the preferences of the decreasing young and increasing old—the elderly tend to stay in one place, the young to move where their work opportunities take them. (Higuchi, 2008) In fact, this phenomenon is already being seen across Japan, with an added nuance: because children are also living with their parents longer than ever before (sometimes called “parasite singles”), they have less incentive to move and are more likely find work close to home. (Sakamoto, Kitamura 2007) The greatest migration rates are being seen in 30 to 34 year-olds—perhaps newlyweds or new parents—but even in this group, migration is limited to a prefecture; people are increasingly settling down close to home. (Higuchi, 2008)

Not only is the Japanese labor force less mobile, it is also shrinking. Urban centers, long seen as incubators for economic growth in Japan, may have a difficult time attracting the labor needed to sustain booms—the dynamism of the national economy is then, very vulnerable. As dependency ratios rise—ratios of those who don’t work to those who do—a greater burden is placed on workers and public finances; simply put, the few support the many, there are more people taking out of the system than putting into it. A realization of the powerful currents of population aging, has led many policy makers to push for more generous maternity-leave benefits and government credits to new couples and families—ways to increase fertility. (Guest, Swift, 2008) But the effects of these policies are small at best and unlikely to be felt for decades; accordingly, attention has shifted to finding ways to draw out people’s productivity. The necessary adjustments—more handicapped seats on buses or shorter working days at firms—needed to make the work place more accessible and elderly-friendly represent drastic changes to the way people do, and think about, business. Communities may need to be re-worked or reconnected in order to facilitate the work of the elderly—geography may be altered by demography.

And that is to speak nothing of the great changes that will happen inside and around the home. One great question will arise for the aging adult: who will take care of me when I can no longer look after myself? Strong cultural currents in Japan have historically made this out to be a filial duty. But what of couples with no children at all? In 2000, the Japanese government introduced a Long-term Care Insurance scheme (the United States has no comparable scheme) to assist—and at times replace—family care for the elderly. (Long, Nishimura, 2009) This has proven costly, and it is forecasted that the overwhelming number of elderly, and especially the growing number of childless marriages, will eventually make providing such care unwieldy and untenable—at least as a public service. Perhaps communities in Japan and other rapidly aging countries like Italy and Spain will be further transformed by growing use of public, and more than likely, private services, designed to tend to the needs of the elderly. Affordable and accessible housing, as well as new means of transportation are already being explored by the Japanese. (Hirono, 2009) And perhaps in some isolated circumstances, children will repay their parents for extended time spent at home by offering them refuge in their older years. Only time will tell.

What time has already told us is that aging has a real and measurable effect on savings. Using the Life-Cycle Model it becomes clear that as populations age, savings decline—there are more people, retirees and hospital patients for example, depleting their savings than there are people replenishing them. (Braun et al., 2009) In Japan, reform of the pension system in 2004 may have alleviated some of the downward pressure on savings by introducing a pay-as-you-go component, but the added benefits are likely to be negated by a consumption tax needed to support public finances. (Horioka et al., 2007) This means that, as time goes by, the intergenerational disparities currently present in Japan could grow even wider. This would, in turn, affect levels of investment and could even lead to great debates on the national government’s role in providing some minimal net of support for its citizens—aging is a deeply political issue.

It is political in other ways too. This is perhaps nowhere better evidenced than in the debate on education. Japan is known around the world for its high standards of education, and its commitment to long class days and school years has been reflected in high international test scores. Its universities are also world renowned for research and inquiry in the natural sciences, mathematics and engineering. The country’s human capital is considerable, and a decrease in family size should contribute to a favorable rise in human capital in the coming decades. (Heckman, 2008) But demography carries with it certain risks to the educational system, some easier to address than others. For one, there may be insufficient numbers of children to populate local schools—already a well-documented issue in the countryside—or attend national universities, and the numbers of people trained in teaching may also not placate the national palate for education.

Another risk, called by some the “gray peril”, is that older voters won’t support funding for educational initiatives. (Duncombe et al., 2003) Voting disparities between the young and the old are small for national elections—in some presidential elections in the United States, for example, voter participation was nearly the same for both groups—but can be considerable for smaller, local elections—still more evidence that demography has measurable implications for even a small community. This demonstrated elderly voter apathy for educational funding may also find some followers in the ranks of young singles living in Japan—it need not be seen as a mere issue of age.

Nevertheless, it is an issue of tremendous import. There are reasons for the elderly to vote in favor of funding for educational expenditures. Everyone, including the elderly, benefits from the fruits of education, namely an ability to approach problems critically and creatively with an ingrained sense of civility and public purpose. Future innovators, future policy makers and future leaders—all in a way, responsible for adjusting to demographic changes—will need to be educated to succeed. If not them, then who? Another reason for supporting educational funding is purely economic: housing prices tend to be higher in areas with good systems of education. And another observed impetus for supporting funding has been coined “intergenerational altruism,” by which the elderly feel some sort of contractual obligation to the young to provide them with as much funding as they themselves had. (Cattaneo, Wolter, 2009) Despite the concerns, it is unlikely demographic fluctuations will completely erode the profound cultural belief of the Japanese that a good education is the greatest gift you can give your children.

But that doesn’t mean that some small form of erosion won’t take place—that the waves of the tsunami won’t cause some damage inland. With rising health care costs across the developed world, people in places like Japan may have to make a difficult decision between their health and a whole host of other things. (Ohmori-Matsuda et al., 2007) An elderly voter in Japan, faced with the tradeoff between greater healthcare spending and educational expenditures may find it hard to ignore the pressing economic as well as social realities of old age. Factoring in the possibility that they may be without a family or care provider, and short of savings or in need of work, it becomes very evident that there is potential for educational and health care initiatives to clash. Elderly voters don’t have all the power, but they do possess a significant share.

Today, people aged 65 and older make up nearly 21 percent of the Japanese population, greater actually, than the share of people who are below 19—more grandparents than future parents. By 2050, the discrepancy will be even greater; upwards of 36 percent will be older than 65. While voter turnout in national elections is relatively balanced, and the shares of old and young roughly equal, this will not always be the case. In the next four decades, the elderly may gain enough clout to effectively decide national elections—and in a parliamentary-style democracy one-third of voters acting as a bloc is extremely influential. National public policy may come to reflect the will of the aged—how will the young be represented? (Komine, Kabe, 2009)

There are a number of policy implications related to the aging of Japanese society, many of which will be replicated in other parts of the world in coming years. If no action is taken, the consequences would be severe. There is a lot to think about and very little time to act. But Japan may be better equipped than other countries to face up to the challenges posed by its demographic changes. A respect for the elderly, and an ability to innovate and educate set Japanese society apart from others. Productivity losses could be erased with continued technological innovation, and the Japanese, who have been very successful in managing land and resources, are constantly addressing the space challenges associated with an aging population. If history is any indication, the Japanese will again, improvise, adapt and overcome these new challenges. The effects, however, will be felt on a very fundamental level—residences, hospitals, schools and public transportation will all change. Businesses might think differently about their employees and young people about their marital prospects—culture and community will evolve in response to the changing environment. Changing demographics means changed communities.

And so, you stoop to pick up a shell on the coast. Holding it close to your eyes, you notice that the sun has disappeared behind the great column of water still quite a distance away. The sky is dark and the breeze picks up; you turn around and break into a run. The only thing you can think about is the massive wave behind you slowly crawling toward your village. And how your life is about to change.

References

Braun, R., Ikeda, D., & Joines, D. (2009). The Saving Rate in Japan: Why It Has Fallen and Why It Will Remain Low. International Economic Review, 50(1), 291-321.

Cattaneo, M., & Wolter, S. (2009). Are the Elderly a Threat to Educational Expenditures?. European Journal of Political Economy, 25(2), 225-236.

Duncombe, W., Robbins, M., & Stonecash, J. (2003). Measuring Citizen Preferences for Public Services Using Surveys: Does a ‘Gray Peril’ Threaten Funding for Public Education?. Public Budgeting and Finance, 23(1), 45-72.

Guest, R., & Swift, R. (2008). Fertility, Income Inequality, and Labour Productivity. Oxford Economic Papers, 60(4), 597-618.

Heckman, J. (2008). Schools, Skills, and Synapses. Economic Inquiry, 46(3), 289-324.

Higuchi, Yoshio.  (2008) Circumstances behind Growing Regional Disparities in Employment.  Japan Labor Review, 5(1), 5-35.

Hirono, K. (2009). Housing Policy for the Elderly: A Policy to Build Barrier-Free Rental Housing. Pacific Economic Review, 14(5), 694-704.

Horioka, C., Suzuki, W., & Hatta, T. (2007). Aging, Savings, and Public Pensions in Japan. Asian Economic Policy Review, 2(2), 303-319.

Komine, T., & Kabe, S. (2009).  Long-term Forecast of the Demographic Transition in Japan and Asia. Asian Economic Policy Review, 4(1), 19-38.

Long, S., Campbell, R., & Nishimura, C. (2009). Does It Matter Who Cares? A Comparison of Daughters versus Daughters-in-Law in Japanese Elder Care. Social Science Japan Journal, 12(1), 1-21.

Ohmori-Matsuda, Kaori, Shinichi Kuriyama, Atsushi Hozawa, Naoki Nakaya, Taichi Shimazu, and Ichiro Tsuji. “The Joint Impact of Cardiovascular Risk Factors on Medical Costs.” Preventive Medicine 44 (2007): 349-55.

Ronald, R., & Hirayama, Y. (2009). Home Alone: The Individualization of Young, Urban Japanese Singles. Environment and Planning A, 41(12), 2836-2854.

Sakamoto, K., & Kitamura, Y. (2007). Marriage Behavior from the Perspective of Intergenerational Relationships. Japanese Economy, 34(4), 76-122.

I. Introduction

On October 22, 1962 some twenty thousand troops of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army crossed the McMahon Line into present day Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh, taking the ill-prepared Indian army completely by surprise. China, fighting from strategically superior positions and with heavier weaponry, won decisive victories, quickly pushing back Indian forces which had advanced into Aksai Chin as part of the forward policy.  Fear of all out war was in the air in New Delhi; Indian Prime Minister Nehru asked President Kennedy to dispatch an American carrier group to provide air coverage for Indian cities. After a month of fierce fighting, and before the carrier group arrived, PLA forces had advanced forty to sixty miles in both theatres of the war. On November 21, 1962, China astonished the world by declaring a unilateral ceasefire and withdrawing from the lines of control.  Virtually no territory exchanged hands during this conflict.

The clash between these two emerging Asian powers goes against a decade of genuine efforts to pursue peaceful coexistence by leaders of both nations. The question of how these two massive neighbors got on this collision course is a difficult one to answer. As British journalist Neville Maxwell notes in the seminal work in this field, India’s China War, “of all recent quarrels between nations, none has been so fully documented as that between China and India…and yet the facts beneath the dispute seemed so obscure — and so few were ready to inquire into them objectively — that no recent international incident has been so widely and totally misunderstood as this.” [1] The cultural memory of India’s defeat continued to weigh on Indian politics decades later, as Indian Prime Minister AB Vajpayee cited China’s armed aggression against India in 1962 and the unresolved Sino-Indian border dispute as a justification for India’s nuclear tests in 1998.  China has consistently contradicted this version of the war, “charging India with intransigence and irredentism and presenting its military action as reactive and pre-emptive.”[2] In his 1970 seminal work, India’s China War, Maxwell challenges the depiction of the border conflict as an act of Chinese expansionism, popular in the Western press and the official accounts of the conflict by Indian politicians. This paper revisits Maxwell’s account of the border dispute and examines the scholarship that has since developed.

To understand how Sino-Indian relations spiraled into conflict over stretches of barren land, one must examine the imperial origins of the border dispute. The so-called “Great Game” of the British Empire did not end when China and India emerged from under the yoke of Western colonialism and asserted their independence as nation states, but instead, took on new dimensions. The logic of empire became infused with national pride in both India and China, creating volatile foreign policies as both nations attempted to secure its hard-won autonomy from external threat.  The borders drawn by the British during China’s Century of Humiliation, often times without Chinese acquiescence, were not viewed as legitimate by the PRC. China’s efforts to redefine its borders diplomatically, as it had done with Burma, did not receive cooperation from India. Indian policy makers’ insistence on seeing border issues through the lens of Indian nationalism and Nehru’s pursuit of the forward policy would eventually elevate tensions with China and push Chinese leaders to go to war.

This paper seeks to situate the 1962 Sino-Indian War within the history of imperial geopolitics in the Himalayas.  The disputed border between India and China are certainly legacies of the ‘Great Games’ of British imperial strategists.  When India and China became modern nation states in the 1940s, it revolutionized the geopolitical significance of the Himalayan frontier.  However, the 1962 conflict was far from inevitable.  Seemingly amicable relations between India and China deteriorated into a war over barren land because of misperceptions and miscalculations on both sides.

II. The Great Game

Neville Maxwell echoes the reflections of a British historian of the Anglo-Afghan Wars, stating that the logic of power drives empires to expand into their frontiers until they meet the resistance of a strong neighbor or reach a physical barrier.[3] British imperial expansion in India encountered both.  The British Empire in India expanded through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, eventually reaching the foothills of the Himalayas where it encountered the shadow of the Qing Empire of China. The vast arc of the Himalayas that separates northern India from western China has been the site for imperial jockeying and geopolitical maneuvering ever since. The central sector of this frontier zone, including present day Nepal and Bhutan, was the site of numerous feudal states that became pawns of imperial rivalry but also served as buffer states between China and India.  However, at the eastern and western extremities of the Himalayan range, present day Askai Chin and Arunchal Pradesh, the inhospitable terrain permitted no independent polities to serve as buffer states between British India and Qing China. Though the British sought at different times to settle these boundaries with China in the nineteenth century, these efforts made little progress.  British policy makers often imposed linear borders in the absence of Chinese acquiescence. British diplomacy, which at the time seemed deft and effective, would set the stage for the twentieth century boundary disputes between modern India and China which would culminate in the Sino-Indian Border Conflict of 1962.

Needless to say, British strategists were not contemplating the historical impact of their frontier policy in the nineteenth century. To them, China was not a central security concern but instead a pawn in the “Great Game” of imperial rivalry against the Russian Empire to the north. They were weary of Russia’s southward expansion towards the Himalayas. As Russia toppled one Khanate after another in Central Asia, British attention was occupied by the security of the crown jewel of the empire. “A constant and basic British aim developed: to keep the Russians as far as possible from the plains of India.”[4]

British frontier policy, in which China would play a central role, was formulated to counter the Russian threat and protect India.  Two schools of strategic thinking emerged regarding British frontier policy: “first, the forward school, which wished to see Britain advance to meet the Russian threat directly and as far away from the plains as possible; second, the moderate school, which…proposed that interposing a third power between the lion and the bear.”[5] As Maxwell observes, “the history of British boundary policy [in India’s northern frontier] is an alternation of the forward and moderate schools in influence in London and India.”[6] The forward school gained popularity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Strategists of this school feared that greater Russian influence in Afghanistan would jeopardize British control of India; they advocated establishing a British presence in Afghanistan to deter Russia. These views led to a costly Afghanistan War and humiliating defeat that brought very little gain for the empire. [i] Meanwhile, China, well established in the region before either Russian or British power ever reached the Himalayas, was recognized by the moderate school as the perfect pawn.

In contrast to Britain’s logic of modern empire and its conceptions of sovereignty, China was a traditional empire, comfortable with loosely defined boundaries that faded into no-man’s land.  Qing policy makers were unwilling and suspicious of British attempts to create a linear boundary between them.[7] As Lord Curzon observed at the beginning of this century, “the idea of a demarcated frontier is itself an essentially modern conception, and finds little or no place in the ancient world…demarcation has never taken place in Asiatic countries except under European pressure.”[8] Yet, the Qing Dynasty became increasingly weak and ineffective as massive civil unrest took its toll in the nineteenth century.  The Taiping Rebellion alone resulted in the deaths of 20-30 million Chinese.[9] China’s internal weakness made it vulnerable to external pressures; beginning with the 1842 Treaty of Nanjing, signed after the Qing defeat in the Opium War with Britain, China was forced to sign a series of unequal treaties with Western powers.  Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and later Japan all claimed spheres of influence on Chinese soil.[10] Turmoil in the Central Plains diverted Qing attention from its frontiers, making it an ineffective player in the shaping of the frontiers.  Tibet would play a greater role north of the Himalayas after the collapse of the Qing, gaining a larger degree of autonomy and building a modern army drawn from the sons of the aristocratic classes. South of the Himalayas, Britain would steadily exert more direct control over the local Sultans, maintaining tight suzerainty by keeping very tight reigns on the foreign policies of the princely states on India’s northern frontier. The geopolitical balance across the Himalayas throughout the nineteenth century heavily favored Britain. It could afford to negotiate, even dictate, border policies from a position of power and had the greatest interest in shaping boundaries on its northern frontier.

On the western edge of the Himalayan boundary between India and China, the British worked to define the boundary between Ladakh and Tibet after they wrested control of Ladakh from the defeated the Sikh confederacy in 1846. In 1865, British surveyor W H Johnson, with the support of Director of Military Intelligence John Ardagh, recommended that the boundary lie along the Kuen Lun Mountains and proposed the Johnson-Ardagh Line, which placed Aksai Chin in Kashmir.[11] China rejected the arrangement, and the British Viceroy, Lord Elgin, also harbored doubts that the line was too far forward. The newly created border known as the MacCartney-MacDonald Line was proposed to the Chinese, and both British-controlled India and China now began to show Aksai Chin as Chinese. However, with the 1911 Revolution in China, the Viceroy Lord Curzon unilaterally extended the boundaries to the Johnson-Ardagh Line once more, and so the line appeared on Indian maps at Independence. China never accepted these lines proposed by the British; in 1892, before the issue had been resolved, China erected boundary markers at Karakoram Pass on the ancient caravan route between Xinjiang and Ladakh.

A similar dispute arose in the East with the Tibetan-Chinese border with what was then the North East Frontier Agency (NEFA), present day Archducal Pradesh, over the Tawang Tract. Tawang had been under Tibetan cultural, religious, and political influence for centuries and the British regarded Tawang as an extension of Tibet throughout most of the nineteenth century.[12] The last years of the Qing Dynasty saw a temporary increase of Chinese military activity in its western frontier.  Chinese forward presence near Assam was disconcerting for the British and prompted a new program of exploration and surveying between 1911 and 1913.[13] In 1913, representatives of Great Britain, China and Tibet attended the Simla Conference to negotiate the borders between Tibet, China and British India. British negotiator Henry McMahon pursued the goals of making Tibet into a buffer state and setting an Assam Himalaya boundary[14].  He produced a map that placed Aksai Chin in the west and Tawang in the east firmly under Tibetan control in what would henceforth come to be known as the McMahon line. McMahon, who drew up the proposal, decided to bypass the Chinese and settle the border bilaterally by negotiating directly with Tibet. The details of the Indo-Tibetan boundary were not revealed to China at the time; the Chinese central government refused to cooperate in the conference because it saw accurately the British design to enhance Tibet’s autonomy.[15]

The practitioners of the ‘Great Game’ of British imperial geopolitics pushed around Himalayan boundaries as was convenient, to hedge against Russian and Chinese threat to India, never paying much heed to Tibetan, Indian, or Chinese political actors.  As retired Indian general, V.K. Singh, noted, “at Simla the British were, in reality, negotiating with themselves.”[16] The role of British power and leverage in other areas, internal instability in China kept this border dispute from being central on China’s foreign policy agenda. The fact that local actors had very little say in boundary making process only made matters worse.  These disputes were never settled and would be a major source of friction between China and India as both were reborn as modern nation states in the 1940s. The British, preoccupied with immediate calculations of security, failed to assess the historical arch of their policies, McMahon’s decision to deal with Tibet over the protests of the Chinese, celebrated as brilliant diplomacy at the time, would be a source of contention in later disputes when China regains control of Tibet.

III. Game Changers: Decolonization and Nationalism

Decolonization and nationalism in China and India radically changed geopolitics across the Himalayas. The retreat of British power in Asia corresponds with the emergence of two massive nation states.  Modern conceptions of territorial sovereignty were laid upon the millennia-old civilization states, casting a new focus on the importance of territorial boundaries.  As a pre-modern states India and China could exist within frontiers, which were not lines but areas, zones of transition between state powers: modern states need boundaries[17].  Modern India and China inherited both the historical legacy of empire and the calling of nationalism.  As Maxwell notes in Sino-Indian Border Dispute Reconsidered, the two nations faced a common task when they came into existence in the middle of the century: “completion of the conversion of their frontiers into boundaries. That was in fact among the first formal expressions of their new identity as modern states.”[18]

Prior to Indian independence, the British strategists were centrally concerned about the protection of British interests in the sub-continent from perceived threat by Russia and China. Indians themselves viewed the British frontier policy as part of the so-called, ‘Great Games’ with Britain’s imperial rivals, as measures to confirm their own subjugation.[19] Additionally, British power could be leveraged across the globe to protect these interests, pressuring other political actors elsewhere to achieve regional strategic objectives. Independence dramatically altered this view, “the boundaries of India ceased to be the pawns of the British and their ‘Great Games’ with their imperial rivals, and became the cell walls of a new national identity…henceforth they enclosed the sacred soil of the motherland.”[20] The notion of sacred geography, that India’s territorial limits were historically fixed and absolute, took hold amongst both Hindu and secular nationalists.

Indian nationalism was a potent force in domestic politics and India’s territorial integrity was a unifying issue; mismanagement of this would have had tremendous domestic political cost.  Therefore, concessions in territorial issues were inherently difficult. Nehru, who was already criticized by the opposition that he was too accommodating of China, would not afford to show any weakness on territorial issues.  Steven Hoffmann’s study of the India-China border issue focused on the choices available to Indian political leaders leading up to the war and the factors that influenced their behavior.  His research shows that Nehru’s concerns over Aksai Chin were not strategic but political, Indian fixation on Aksai Chin was due more to “national sentiments” roused by “loss of national territory” than by the desire to seize Tibet as the Chinese leadership suspected.[21] Even though the engine driving the India state took on a dramatically different, its foreign policy apparatus and philosophy remained largely unchanged.  Indian frontier policy therefore was a continuation of those established by the British. In Tibet for example, business proceeded as usual the day after independence, the only thing that changed was the flag.  India continued to pursue a policy of suzerainty in regards to Tibet while trying to develop good relations with the People’s Republic of China.

As much as Indian independence altered the nature of geopolitics south of Himalayas, if not the policies themselves, the establishment of the People’s Republic of China would have radical impact on the geopolitics north of the Himalayas. China had reached its greatest size during the rule of the Qing Dynasty, which held vast tracts of territory that lie within the modern boundaries of its neighbors. Much of China’s frontier territory was subsequently lost to European and Japanese imperial expansion during the Century of Humiliation in unequal treaties.[ii] Additionally, outlying regions that were tributary states to the Qing gained a large measure of autonomy as Chinese influence diminished in the frontier regions, Tibet being the key example of this. The Chinese power collapsed in Central Asia when the Qing dynasty was topped in the 1911 Xinhai Revolution.[22] With the Dalai Lama’s return to Tibet in 1912, Tibet enjoyed de facto independence during the warlord era to World War II.  Various Chinese administrations would assert suzerainty, claiming to control of a tributary state’s foreign affairs while granting it domestic autonomy, over Tibet but Chinese weakness and turmoil in Central Plains prevented direct control of Tibet.

This all changed when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) emerged victorious from the Chinese Civil War and began consolidating their hold of Chinese territory. In China as in India, nationalism drove the desire to bring borderlands under firm central control. The PRC was not content with mere suzerainty over Tibet, an arrangement that was much desired by India, but instead embarked on a campaign to ‘peacefully liberate’ Tibet in 1950. The People’s Liberation Army won a decisive victory over Tibetan forces at the Battle of Chamdu in 1950 and marched on Lhasa. Tibet appealed to the UN for help but with no international backing and the peaceful conduct of Chinese troops towards Tibetan civilians, the Tibetan government was induced to enter into negotiations with the PRC and signed the Seventeen Point Agreement declaring that Tibet is part of China.[23] While the Lhasa government supported adhering to the Seventeen Points and applied it to Tibet, the regions of outer Tibet (Qinghai) were more restive. Kham entered into open rebellion against PRC rule in 1956 and bypassed efforts of Lhasa to mediate by reaching out the CIA.[24] By 1959, the “peaceful liberation” of Tibet had gone awry and Lhasa was in rebellion. The PRC reprisal was swift and deadly; the Dalai Lama was forced to flee to India.

The Dalai Lama and many other Tibetan refugees were welcomed by India, Nehru had thought that the Tibetan leader could work out a deal with Beijing to restore a degree of autonomy as had been the case in 1951.[25] However, China felt that India’s welcome of the Dalai Lama, the leader of a rebellion against a friendly neighboring state, was part of a larger, more ambitious scheme to undermine Chinese control over Tibet. “India was insisting that China accept the unilateral Indian definition of the boundary, and in doing so was not only clinging to the boundary in the east which had originated in Britain’s secret agreement with the Tibetans in 1914, but in the west was advancing a claim that British imperialism had fabricated covertly but never dared to put forward.”[26]

Politics of nationalism in China played an equally important role in shaping the perceptions and decision making of the leadership. China had emerged from its Century of Humiliation; its leaders were keenly aware of the importance of territorial sovereignty. [27] Chinese leaders felt that China had finally stood up and was wholly unprepared to compromise in what it saw as core territorial interests. Frontier regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang were thought to be historically Chinese because of the past exercise of centralized Chinese power over them.[28] The incapacity of the central government to administer these regions under the Qing led to foreign influence and autonomy but since the Chinese government was strong once more, legitimacy by its own people would be required to control these territories.[29] These beliefs regarding Chinese sovereignty over its frontiers stem from the ancient notion of the Mandate of Heaven. Chinese leaders felt that they needed to regain these territories lost during periods of Chinese weakness to demonstrate that they hold the mandate. At the same time, Communist ideology also plays a role in the Chinese view of India; Mao calls India the “big bourgeoisie” in his writing and sees Nehru as epitome of bourgeois. He believes that Nehru represented someone whose ideas needed to be struggled against. Additionally, the mentality of Chinese leaders, who are veterans of a long and bloody civil war, over the use of force differed from those of Indian leaders, who gained independence through Ghanaian non-violence.[30] Chinese political leaders understood the utility of decisive application military force while Indian political leaders saw war as a relic of the past.
The Himalayan border became important area of geopolitical concern for both India and China for similar reasons. The nationalism that accompanied these new national identities created tension along the borders. India wanted to maintain the territorial integrity of it new nation and keep itself secure. China wanted to re-exert control over Tibet and Xinjiang and needed key passes along the Sino-Indian border to do so. Additionally, Chinese leaders became increasingly suspicious of India’s intentions to bring Tibet within its own sphere of influence.  Thus territorial disputes that lay dormant for decades were revived in the 1950s.

V. The Great Game (Goes On)

A classic case of the security dilemma played out across the Himalayan borderlands between India and China in the aftermath of the Lhasa uprising.  As both nations moved to secure what it considered its national interest, they heightened the insecurities of its counterpart.  The key issue was the 1956-57 construction of a Chinese military highway in the disputed territory of Aksai Chin connecting Tibet to Xinjiang. From the Chinese perspective, this all- weather road system had considerable defensive value. The arrival of Chinese power on its northern borders, however, threatened India as it had Britain.  In 1959, India initiated a forward policy of sending Indian troops and border patrols into disputed areas. This program created both skirmishes and deteriorating relations between India and China.  The 1959 dispute, failure of Nehru government in settling disputed territory of Aksai Chin, in combination with India’s forward policy, would spiral into war a few years later.

On Aksai Chin, the Indian government chose to endorse the Johnson-Ardagh line, which puts the region within India’s territorial boundaries.[31] Similarly, in regards to the Tawang tract, the Indian government ignored the McMahon line. According to Indian claims, this border with Tibet was intended to run through the highest ridges of the Himalayas, as the areas south of the Himalayas were historically Indian, and thus should be the modern boundaries of India.[32] However, the McMahon Line lay south of the boundary India claims. The position of the Chinese government is that the disputed area in the Himalayas has been geographically and culturally part of Tibet since ancient times.

Nehru’s refusal to open border negotiations with regards to the McMahon line left little room for how to settle the dispute over the Tawang tract. Maxwell notes, “when such an approach is applied to boundary questions it points the way to armed contention for disputed territory.”[33] Nehru’s response to a parliamentary question about Chinese claims to Ladakh and Tawang was very telling, as he claimed, “our maps show that the McMahon line is our boundary, and that is our boundary — map or no map. The fact remains and we stand by that boundary, and we will not allow anybody to come across that boundary.”[34] Indian and Chinese patrols would clash in initial confrontations in Longju and Kongka pass in 1959.[35]

In refusing the Chinese offer to return to the 1959 status quo and declaring that Chinese presence in Aksai Chin was, in fact, an act of aggression, Nehru limited the diplomatic options available to India and painted his government into a corner. He rejected war in principle but was pressured domestically by his opposition, who advocated for the use of force, to take a stronger stance.[36] Thus, Nehru pursued a third option, the forward policy. The objectives of the forward policy were, “first, to block potential lines of further Chinese advance; secondly, to establish an Indian presence in Aksai Chin.”[37] Thus, in the forward policy, “implicit at the onset, was the intention to undermine Chinese control of the disputed areas by interposition of supply lines and ultimately forcing them to withdraw.”[38] There was something fundamentally illogical in Nehru’s calculations regarding the forward policy; he was assuming that China would not attack even as India built up its strength in Aksai Chin. “That war might arise from Chinese reaction to anticipation of Indian moves never crossed civilian minds in New Dehli.”[39] The forward policy was a politically expedient decision that made the miscalculation that military challenge to a militarily superior neighbor would not be met with force.

Unsurprisingly, the Chinese strongly protested the forward policy and warned against Indian patrols into what it considered Chinese territory. The Indian government dismissed Chinese warnings as bluffs.[40] The Indian seizure of Goa also made the Chinese leadership even more apprehensive, confirming in their minds the expansionistic nature of Indian policy. Meanwhile the forward policy began to “bite in its toothless way,”[41] when small Indian posts were being constructed overlooking Chinese positions and threatening Chinese lines of communications despite Chinese warning of “grave consequences.” India was prepared to talk to China about “the steps by which Chinese withdrawal from the territory which India claimed could be affected” rather than discussing the alignment of the boundaries.[42] India was sending the message that it demanded unconditional surrender in Aksai Chin, even though it lacked the military power to defend this claim.  This left Chinese policy makers few options, . In September 1962, China issued its final diplomatic statement, saying, “shooting and shelling are no child’s play and he who plays with fire will eventually be consumed by fire.”[43] By October, “the new ‘Great Game’ on the borders of India, the giants’ version of chicken, had reached its climax.” At the same time, the Cuban missile crisis was about to unfold in the western hemisphere, an event that would take the attention of US and USSR policy makers away from Asia for the time being.

A set of contingent factors aligned to move India-China relations away from friendliness in the early 1950s to war in 1962. The key factor was a miscalculation by Nehru about China’s passive reaction to his forward policy.  The adoption of the forward policy satisfied domestic political considerations but represented poor geopolitics.  Nehru underestimated the importance of Aksai Chin to what China perceives a core national interest in Tibet. In doing so, he confirmed Chinese suspicions that India was attempting to regain control of Tibet.  The additional permissive condition was that the US and USSR were occupied by the Cuban Missile Crisis, allowing China more room to maneuver internationally.

IV. Reading the Opponent: Perceptions and Misperceptions

The origins of the 1962 Sino-Indian War remain a rich subject of study because of the lack of consensus around the legitimacy of the claims made by both sides about the casus belli. In many ways, war was baffling given the amicable relations between India and China in the 1950s.  Nehru believed good relations with China were essential to achieving his vision of third-world leadership. He was criticized domestically for his “befriending and placating” of China.[44] Ironically, Chinese leaders saw Nehru as the ultimate bourgeois, continuing the British policy of strengthening Tibet to weaken China. Recent analysis of the decade leading up to the 1962 conflict focuses on perceptions and misperceptions Indian and Chinese leaders had for each other in the lead up to the conflict.

The rhetoric of ‘Hindee Chinee bhai-bhai’, Indian-Chinese brotherhood, characterizes the early diplomatic history of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of Indian. Nehru was committed to building a peaceful relationship with China, which would underpin his broader vision of the role of China and India in post-colonial Asia.[45] India was the second country to recognize the PRC in 1949. It played an important, though ultimately unsuccessful, role in meditating US-China relations during the onset of the Korean War.[46] Five Principles or panchsheel were established in 1954 to build a harmonious relationship between India and China.

The reassertion of Chinese sovereignty over Tibet represented a difficult decision for the Nehru administration, made harder after the 1959 Lhasa Uprising. Maxwell’s analysis of Indian intent focused on Nehru’s initial decision not to intervene in China’s “peaceful liberation” of Tibet.  He notes that India’s efforts to keep Tibet as a buffer state between itself and China had failed in 1950.  Nehru wanted to uphold Tibetan autonomy while maintaining a positive relationship with China.  Though it had protested Chinese military action in Tibet diplomatically, India lacked the military power or political will to intervene directly.  Ultimately, “India did not support Tibet’s appeal to the United Nations, and as the Chinese confirmed their authority in Tibet so Indian ambivalence about China’s right to be there faded.” [47] Critically, India in essence sacrificed Tibetan independence for friendship with China. [48] To Indian policy makers, China was an expansionist state, and India must not show weakness.

For Chinese leaders, the developing picture looked very different.  John Graver, a political scientist, argues that in light of Chinese publications of the early 2000s, there is renewed analysis of Chinese perceptions that triggered the decision to go to war in 1962.  He articulates two primary factors that preoccupied Chinese leaders in 1962: “a perceived need to punish and end perceived Indian efforts to undermine Chinese control of Tibet [and] a perceived need to punish and end perceived Indian aggression against Chinese territory along the border.”[49] Garver claims to be able to look more closely at the Chinese decision-making process and test the Whiting-Maxwell hypothesis that China went to war because of perceived Indian aggression. He argues that, in the pursuit of deterrence along the border, Chinese perceptions were substantively accurate, but Chinese perception of Indian policy towards Tibet was substantively inaccurate. [50]

Chinese policy makers read Indian moves through the lens of Tibet, and the thought that Nehru had designs for Tibet was ever present in Mao’s mind.  Mao believed that India wanted to return Tibet to its pre-1949 status and turn it into a buffer zone; his remarks in the People’s Daily after the 1959 Lhasa Uprising reflected his belief that Nehru had a role in instigating the uprising in Tibet.[51] Chinese military leaders shared this belief, Chief of the PLA’s Zuo Zhan Bu (War Fighting Department), reported to the Politburo that the Indian operation to cut off Chinese troops atop Thagla Ridge in Aksai Chin was due to Nehru’s designs on Tibet, that because Nehru’s plot to use reactionaries to split China had failed, he was sending Indian forces to aggress against Chinese borders.[52] Garver argues that the belief that India had designs on Tibet represented was a misconception.  Indeed, documentary evidence from India suggests that Nehru believed that a compromise over Tibet would provide the basis for a broad program of cooperation between India and China on behalf of the peoples of the developing world.[53] Garver asserts that Nehru’s desire to uphold Tibetan autonomy was therefore not born out of a desire to overthrow Chinese sovereignty but instead part of a larger scheme for achieving grand accommodation with China.[54] Though the CIA was working with Tibetans in India, it was unclear how much the Indian government actually knew about these activities. [55]

To defend Maxwell’s original thesis, it must be noted that Garver’s separation of the perceptions of Tibet from the perceptions about India’s forward policy is an arbitrary one, as the two were intimately linked in the minds of Chinese policy makers.  From their perspective, a different set of calculations was at work. In essence, it does not matter what Nehru’s vision for India-China cooperation was, nor does it matter that he may not have knowledge of CIA operatives supporting Tibetan resistance fighters from within India.  Aksai Chin was of crucial strategic importance, and the road to linking Tibet and Xinjiang was a linchpin of Chinese frontier policy. Chinese leaders had long suspected Indian intentions towards Tibet, and these suspicions were only confirmed when India’s forward policy threatened to cut off Chinese forces in Aksai Chin.  However, as Maxwell acknowledges in his book, the forward policy did not arise out of a desire to seize Tibet or violate Chinese sovereignty, it was an effort from India’s perspective to preserve Indian sovereignty without appearing weak but still not resort to the use of military force.  It is important to recognize that the policy was adopted for domestic political expediency rather than for its strategic brilliance. Chinese military and political leaders felt the threat to what they considered a core national interest, saw a window of opportunity in the international distraction caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis, and struck with overwhelming force. The repeated defeats suffered by the Indian Army in the Himalayas was the price paid for the policy of the using a weaker force to provoke a stronger, entrenched army.

VI.   Conclusion

The geopolitical determinist would argue that the stage for the 1962 border dispute was set from the start; because the north-east and north-west extremities of India’s Himalayan border with China lacked buffer states, the two would eventually come into conflict. However, this oversimplifies the events that led to war.  Domestic politics and national pride played a key role in China’s decision to go to war in 1962. The border conflict was far from inevitable. Even though India’s frontier policy followed the imperial British frontier policy very closely, considerations of Chinese national pride and interests could have averted conflict.  However, Nehru was trapped domestically by his commitment to non-violence and the duty to defend to India’s ‘sacred territory’. Ironically, because Nehru wanted to work with China, he could not afford to make concessions to China on the politically sensitive issue of Aksai Chin. Thus, though maintaining control of Aksai Chin did not benefit India at all, Nehru was uncompromising on an issue that was considered by China to be vital to its national security. India’s forward policy left China little recourse than to use force to obtain the diplomatic agreement they had been pursuing from the start: Chinese control of Aksai Chin and Indian control of Archsal Pradesh. Chinese nationalism and misperceptions also played an equally important role as Indian nationalism in beginning the conflict. The Chinese leadership believed that to maintain its mandate to rule China, it must secure Tibet and perceived Indian efforts in Aksai Chin as efforts to seize Tibet from China.

As both China and India become increasingly powerful players in world politics, the border issue is increasingly important. Though Aksai Chin and Arunachal Pradesh remain disputed territories today, continuing talks and confidence-building measures working toward reducing tensions have taken root.[iii] China and India continue their security and foreign policy dialogue started in 2005 related to the dispute over most of their rugged, militarized boundary, regional nuclear proliferation, and other matters. It seems that, as both nations mature, they are much more capable in their diplomatic dealings with one other.  It is, however, crucial that policymakers consider issues of territory from the perspective of their counterparts and take into account the constraints of national pride on domestic politics.  There is plenty of room for India and China to peacefully co-exist across the Himalayas.

Bibliography

Abitbol, Aldo D. “Causes of the 1962 Sino-Indian War: A Systems Level Approach” Josef           Korbel Journal of Advanced International Studies 88.

Frankel, Francine R. and Harding, Harry. Ed. The India-China Relationship: What the United        States Needs to Know (New York, Columbia University Press, 2004)

Garver, John. “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962,” New Directions in the Study of        China’s Foreign Policy (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006).

Hoffmann, Steven A. India and the China Crisis (Berkley, University of California Press, 1990)

Lamb, Alastair. The China-India border: the origins of the disputed boundaries (London, Oxford  University Press, 1964)

Lord Curzon, Frontiers (O.U.P., London, 1907), p.53.

Maxwell, Neville. India’s China War (London, Jonathan Cape Limited, 1970).

Maxwell, Neville. “China and India: The Un-Negotiated Dispute,” The China Quarterly,  No. 43. (Jul. – Sep., 1970), pp. 47–80.

Maxwell, Neville. “Sino-Indian Border Dispute Reconsidered,” Economic and Political Weekly. April 10, 1999 p. 905.

Maxwell, Neville. “Forty Years of Folly,” Critical Asian Studies, Volume 35, Issue 1 (March         2003) pp 99 – 112.

Spence, Jonathan. The Search for Modern China (New York, WW Norton & Company, 1990)

[2] N. Maxwell. “Sino-Indian Border Dispute Reconsidered,” Economic and Political Weekly. April 10, 1999 p. 905.

[3] Maxwell,  India’s China War,  p.19

[4] Ibid., p.20

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ibid., p. 21

[8] Lord Curzon, Frontiers, Romanes Lecture of 1907 (O.U.P., London), p. 49.

[9] J.Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: Norton Press), p. 178.

[10] Ibid., p. 181

[11] Singh,p. 43 , Maxwell, p. 64

[12] S. Hoffmann. India and the China Crisis (Berkley, University of California Press, 1990), Maxwell

[13] Hoffmann,  p. 18

[14] Ibid.

[15] Hoffmann, p. 19

[16] V.K. Singh, “India-China Boundary Question: How do we Resolve the Dispute?” Emerging Trends in India-China Relations (India, Hope India Publications, 2006) p. 40

[17] Maxwell “Sino-Indian Border Dispute Reconsidered”, p. 905

[18] Ibid.

[19] Maxwell, India’s China War, p. 67

[20] Ibid.

[21] Hoffmann

[22] Maxwell

[23] Hoffmann

[24] Hoffmann, p. 38

[25] Garver, p. 97

[26] Maxwell, India’s China War, p. 268

[27] Ibid., p.261

[28] Hoffmann, 29

[29] Ibid.

[30] Garver

[31] Hoffmann, p. 27

[32] Hoffmann,  p.27

[33] Maxwell, India’s China War, p.75

[34] Ibid.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid, p.174

[38] Maxwell, India’s China War, p.174

[39] Ibid.

[40] Ibid., p. 226

[41] Ibid., p. 235

[42] Ibid., p. 249

[43] Ibid., p. 255

[44] Garver, p. 99

[45] Ranganathan, C.V. p. 27

[46] Maxwell

[47] Maxwell

[48] Maxwell

[49] Garver, 86

[50] Garver, 87

[51] Ibid. 95

[52] Ibid. 96

[53] Ibid. 96

[54] Ibid. 97

[55] Hoffmann

[ii] Treaty of Peking, Treaty of Tianjin, Treaty of Nanking

[iii] CIA Factbook, territorial disputes

Introduction

It is a well known fact that China’s exports have increased drastically since the beginning of the 1990s. From $91.7 billion in 1993 to $1.4307 trillion in 2008, the increase is staggering (United Nations Statistical Division). However, it is not simply the dollar value of the exports that has changed, but also China’s export composition. In the late 1990s, the percentage of “sophisticated” products, such as electronics and machinery, in China’s total exports has begun to increase while the percentage of goods with lower technological requirements in production, such as apparel, has begun to decrease (Cui and Syed 9). There are many potential reasons behind this phenomenon, and the existing literature on this subject provides many different interpretations.

In the existing literature discussing the factors that have changed China’s export composition, there are two main camps of opinions. One group believes that the change in export composition is due to industrial upgrading in China. The most prominent voice in this group is Dani Rodrik, who specifies that government policies create economic environments that are conducive to shifting the export structure toward high-tech products. In other words, “factor endowments and ‘other economic fundamentals’” cannot fully explain this phenomenon of industrial upgrading (Rodrik 4). His argument is based on the assumption that in a developing country, investors considering entry into “new, non-traditional activities face considerable uncertainty about the costs of operation” (Rodrik 5). These early entrants bear all the costs of failures. On the other hand, if they succeed, they will provide technology and information spillovers as other firms emulate these early investors. As a result, innovative investments must be prompted by non-market forces, namely, the government. Once the first entrants succeed, new firms will enter immediately. Thus, according to Rodrik, strategic government policies have prompted the increase in more sophisticated exports.

The other group believes that the change in export composition is not caused by a change in the export production structure. Rather, the trends of Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) inflow as well as those of exports and imports to China suggest that no significant industrial upgrading occurs; the increasing sophistication in China’s export bundle is due to the fact that multinational corporations export sophisticated components from their home countries to China, which then assembles these components to be exported to other countries, such as countries of the European Union and the U. S. (Liang 108). In other words, China ends up in substantial processing trade in export production, focusing on the labor-intensive steps that do not require sophisticated technology (Liang 106). Like Rodrik, experts of this opinion point to the Chinese government’s policies as an influential factor contributing to the current export structure; specifically, this situation is caused by China’s policies on imports and on FDI, which end up encouraging FDI-led processing trade. For example, some intermediate inputs are imported duty-free (Liang 107). Before this duty-free policy, although imported materials used in production by foreign invested enterprises (FIE) have been taxed, tax exemptions and rebates can be used on exports that utilize these imports. This policy has directly promoted an environment favorable to processing trade (Liang 107).

Exports of Electrical, Electronic Products

Exports of electrical and electronic products, the dependent variable in this paper, take up a significant portion of China’s sophisticated exports and have increased percentage-wise from 1993 to 1998. Two independent variables help explain this increase; the more important contributing factor is the increase in processing trade, and the less influential variable is industrial upgrading. These two factors directly influence the increasing percentage of electronics in exports, but it must be noted that each factor is a situation created by numerous other factors, which in turn have their own causes, resulting in a chain of causations. Thus, the two main factors are in actuality two chains of causations. The data on electronics is retrieved from the UN Comtrade database. The commodities are categorized according to two-digit HS1992 codes. Out of the 97 categories, three categories have always been in the top-four in terms of percentages of total exports from years 1993 to 2008; these categories are “electrical, electronic equipment,” “articles of apparel, accessories, knit or crochet,” and “articles of apparel, accessories, not knit or crochet” (United Nations Statistical Division). The two categories of apparel are combined into one because, for the purposes of this paper, it is not necessary to distinguish knit apparel from non-knit. First, I have compared the percentages of apparel in total exports to the percentages of electrical and electronic equipments (“electronics” for brevity) over the years 1993 to 2008. It is important to compare the export trends of electronics to those of apparel because both categories are prominent in China’s exports.  Figure 1 suggests that before 1995, apparel was slightly more dominant than electronics, but in the following years, electronics have grown at a much faster rate than apparel although apparel certainly has continued to grow. Shown as percentages of total exports in figure 2, the contrast between apparel and electronics is glaring. The percentage of electronics exhibits a continual upward trend while the percentage of apparel exhibits a downward trend. Why do exports of electronics increase much faster than exports of apparel while both are top categories of export commodities? To answer this question, I draw on insights from the existing literature by combining the opinions of the two camps.

Chain I: Processing Trade

The increase in processing trade (in dollar value and percentages) is the main reason for the increase in the percentage of electronics in total exports. While China is exporting an increasing amount of electronics, it does not participate in much value-added production. In fact, China’s overall processing trade increased both in dollar value and in percentage of total trade (Liang 110). In table 1, processing exports increased from 40.9% of total exports in 1990 to 54.7% in 2005. Granted, there is a possibility that the trends in overall processing trade may not apply to the category of electronics. However, the increase in processing trade with little value-added production can also be interpreted through the relationship between high-tech imports and exports in figure 3. As shown, the imports and exports of high-tech products display a nearly perfect correlation although in recent years, from 2003 or so, exports have grown faster than imports. The reason for this pattern of processing trade and the correlation in imports and exports of sophisticated products is the Asian production network. More specifically, the countries of the Asian production network are increasing their FDI in China. Foreign invested enterprises (FIE) over all make up over 70% of the total processing trade in China while countries or regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore claim approximately 60% of all FDI to China from the late 1990s until 2008 (Liang 110, United Nations Statistical Division). For comparison, the U.S. contributes less than 5% of the total FDI that China receives (United Nations Statistical Division). Most of the firms from these Asian countries are efficiency-driven; the products that are assembled in China are eventually exported to other countries, mainly Western European countries and the U.S (Liang 108). Electronics are particularly prominent commodities. Unfinished electronic or electrical components dominate the top-ten commodities exported to China from the Asian countries (Lee et al. 4). Unfinished products imply a future step of assembly into finished products in China. These Asian countries have sharply increased their FDI into China particularly after China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) since 2001 (figure 4). For instance, Hong Kong, the largest contributor of FDI out of these Asian countries, doubled its FDI between 2005 and 2008, seen in figure 4. The reason for the increase in FDI is that after China joined the WTO, China has become more integrated into the global economy, and Chinese goods can enter more markets. Taking advantage of this condition combined with China’s cheap labor costs, efficiency-driven foreign Asian firms create subsidiaries in China through joint ventures with domestic firms or as wholly foreign-owned firms.

Chain II: Industrial Upgrading

The second reason that results in higher percentages of electronics in exports in recent years is industrial upgrading. Although not prevalent, some industrial upgrading has occurred. As seen in table 1, the value-added rate in China’s over all processing trade has increased from 17.8% to 34.2% in 2005, which means the expansion of the processing trade also correlates with value-added production. However, in the case of electronics production for exports, industrial upgrading is far less influential than the increase in processing trade because industrial upgrading is still rather limited. This is mainly due to the fact that FIE’s, “particularly wholly foreign-owned enterprises, monopolize high-tech production and generate little spillover to their local counterparts” (Liang 110). It also does not help the domestic industry when wholly foreign owned enterprises “tend to adopt higher-level technologies than joint ventures” (Xu 8). This means that whatever technology that spreads to domestic firms may not even be the latest technology. However, this does not mean that no technology transfers to the domestic firm at all. It merely suggests that the process through which the technology is transferred is inefficient. Industrial upgrading should theoretically occur through two channels, though both are related and influence each other. One is through government policies. The second is through technology spillovers unguided by government policies. The first reason is differentiated from the second in that the former intentionally transfers knowledge to domestic firms and market while the latter may be unintentional or driven purely by market forces. However, due to the monopolizing behaviors of wholly foreign-owned enterprises, the first reason, government policies, has far more real effects on industrial upgrading while the so-called spillovers effects are not prominent.

The Chinese government’s policies aiming to induce industrial upgrading target two groups: the domestic firms and foreign investors. To help purely domestic firms, the government pours money into R&D. While the majority of state-sponsored firms fail, some do achieve success, notably Lenovo (Rodrik 14). This method of helping domestic firms is highly inefficient since most investments are wasted on failed operations, and industrial upgrading achieved through this method is not widespread at all. However, efficiency of state sponsorship is unrelated to the topic of this paper; the result of state sponsorship is what matters. In face of prominent brand names like Lenovo and Haier, one cannot deny that some industrial upgrading has in fact occurred through state sponsorship. As for foreign investors, the central government and the local governments use both carrots and sticks in attracting FDI, such as giving tax breaks and requiring foreign investors to enter into joint ventures with domestic firms. (On top of such requirements, government policy has also promoted the proliferation of economic and technological development zones and high-tech industrial zones. Their share of China’s exports “has risen from less than 6% in 1995 to about 25% in 2005 (Wang and Wei 226).) For instance, in consumer electronics, fully foreign firms are rare in China. Instead, the industry is mostly composed by joint ventures, followed by non-FDI domestic firms (Rodrik 14). The government has made recent changes to export and import policies to discourage processing trade, which in turn promotes industrial upgrading. For instance, a regulation passed in September 2006 removes export tax rebates for a list of prohibited products under processing trade; such products are “primarily low-value-added, high-energy consumption, and high-pollution products” (Liang 114).

Conclusion

Given the current data, it is clear that processing trade is the dominant reason for the increase in percentage of electronic product exports in the past 16 years. Increasing FDI from such East Asian countries goes toward low-value-added production in China instead of contributing to industrial upgrading. The strong correlation between imports and exports of sophisticated products demonstrates that China imports unfinished sophisticated parts from other East Asian countries, and then it simply assembles the parts without adding much value in this portion of the production chain. Very little industrial upgrading has occurred because technological spillovers from foreign firms are rare, and because the Chinese government’s method of inducing sophisticated research and development is highly inefficient. While industrial upgrading is not very prevalent currently, the trend is increasing. Over time, one may see less processing trade between China and other Asian countries and more sophisticated production in China. However, we must wait a few years to see new developments, particularly because of new policies aimed to restrict processing trade.

References

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44, no. 3: 38–41.

Cui, L., and M. Syed. “The Shifting Structure of China’s Trade and Production.” IMF

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Chinese Exports to the U.S.” Duke University.

Liang, Y. 2008. “Why Are China’s Exports Special?”. The Chinese Economy 41, no. 6: 99-118.

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Evidence from China.” China Europe International Business School.

A quick glance at contemporary Korean popular culture reveals a much more exaggerated version of the American woman’s quest for aesthetic perfection. South Korea has been dubbed the cosmetic surgery capital of Asia and this moniker is well deserved. In 2005, it was reported that 50% of South Korean women in their 20s had had some form of cosmetic surgery (Scanlon, 1).  New York Times article reported that in 2008 alone, an estimated “30 percent of Korean women aged 20 to 50, or some 2.4 million women, had surgical or non-surgical cosmetic procedures, with many having more than one procedure” (Fackler, 1). The Korean obsession with beauty extends beyond surgery and cosmetics and into everyday items such as mainstream foods and beverages. Soonbaekcha, 17 Tea and Thera Tea are just a few examples of the bottled tea varieties that promise weight loss, whiter, more radiant skin and firmer bodies. Indeed, as Park Sang Un observes, new words, such as eoljjang (“face king,” a person with a handsome face), momjjang (“body king,” a person with a nice body) and ssaengeol (a pretty face without any make-up), have been introduced into the Korean language to facilitate discussion of the ideal body (Park, 55). Do Korean women experience a more intense identity crisis at a younger age? Is aging, and its bodily manifestation, a greater nemesis for Korean women that it is for American women?[1]

One of the new terms that Park notes is dongan (a young looking face), which shows that youth plays as large a part in the Korean ideal of female beauty as it does in its American counterpart. Indeed, the parameters of youth could be said to be even narrower than in the US. For instance, the average age of FHM’s “Top 10 Sexiest Women of 2008” was 24.1 years old and the average age of People Magazine’s “Top 10 Sexiest Men Alive in 2008” was 31.2 years old. By contrast, the average age of the 10 most searched musicians on a given day in 2009, on the Korean search engine Naver, was 20.6 years old.[2] While Miley Cyrus might be considered a child star in the US, a Korean singer of the same age, such as Sohee of the overnight sensation, the Wonder Girls, has received very little attention because of her age. Many scholars have asserted that physical appearance is important to a Korean woman’s sense of self. Indeed, sociologist Woo Keong Ja states, “[A]ppearance is one of the important factors that constitute women’s identity in Korea” (Woo, 66). In her article “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, The Mirror Stage, and The Literary Imagination,” American scholar Kathleen Woodward argues that we fear aging because it is evidence of our own mortality. Watching our bodies, the physical signifier of ourselves, decay with time reminds us of our inevitable fate that our identities, the signified, will decay with them. She hypothesizes that, because we are afraid of this evidence of our own mortality, “we increasingly separate ourselves—what we take to be our real selves—from our bodies” (Woodward, 55). If we assume Woodward’s theory to be correct and universal, aging should be a more imminent threat to Korean female identity because youth not only plays a large role in defining a woman’s identity, but also because the standard of youth she must meet is even more stringent. Is she not more likely to disassociate herself from her body at a younger age?

I believe the answer to this question lies in the re-evaluation of what comprises Korean female identity. The extent of Korea’s obsession with beauty has led many to assume that assertions that the body has become a primary resource for the construction of self-identity for Korean women hold true throughout a woman’s lifetime (Park, 42). However, I propose that physical beauty plays a much smaller part in defining Korean womanhood than an analysis of the beauty industry would lead us to believe; it is not the most crucial factor in forming a woman’s identity. I further argue that the importance of beauty is expected to decrease over the course of a woman’s life and hence, aesthetic decline poses less of a threat to Korean women’s sense of self. As such, aging is a less frightening experience for Korean women than American women.

Korean femininity is not defined by sex appeal. A study conducted in 2005 found that South Korean women’s magazines typically featured very little sexual advertising content. The study compared the degrees of sexuality in advertising within seven national editions of a single issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. An arbitrary numeric value was assigned to the level of nudity in each of the advertisements in the magazines. At 1.08, the South Korean edition had one of the lowest mean scores of nudity—1 being defined as “sexy lips/subtle sexual nuance”—and was second only to the Chinese edition (Nelson and Paek, 378). As marketing campaigns seek to encourage consumers to identify with the subjects of their advertisements, if women are not portrayed as sexual objects to the same extent as they are in America, we can infer that Korean women are less eager to identify themselves as sexy women. The study suggests that being the object of male sexual desire is not a Korean woman’s primary criterion for self-identification. It can further be inferred that in Korean society, gender and sexuality are not interchangeable concepts and sexuality does not completely determine gender identity.

Indeed, although sexuality does play a part in defining a Korean woman’s identity, a huge component of it is defined by her relationship to her family. As a direct point of comparison to the previous example, let us consider the results of a 2006 study of gender role portrayals in advertising. The study found that “the majority of Korean women were depicted in family and recreational situations, while most US advertisers featured women in decorative roles.” The study concluded that, “considering the central role that family and home play in the role of Korean women, this finding was not surprising” (An and Kim, 199). Similarly, in a study entitled “What Makes Koreans Happy?” researchers at Hoseo University, Korea, found that relationships with children, parents and siblings, and spouses ranked first, second and third, respectively, as factors of happiness. The authors write, “It is worth to note that relationship with children was rated the most important factor of Korean happiness. This result seemed to reflect cultural values of Korea…In Korea, most parents invest a lot of psychological and material resources in their children” (An et al., 284). Further, as Woo Keong Ja remarks, the trends in Korean cosmetic surgery reveal that even the aesthetic a Korean woman seeks is less sexual than the aesthetic an American woman might desire:

Even in today’s reality, where the consumerist images of women’s appearance are packaged as sexual, provocative and pleasurable, Korean women express a preference for the type of face and body that seems obedient and is expected to bring good fortune to their husbands and children. (Woo, 60)

These examples suggest that a Korean woman’s primary identification is as a mother, not as a wife or lover. A more concrete instance of this can be seen in the vernacular that still persists in contemporary Korean interactions: upon the birth of a child, a woman’s friends and family-in-law will usually address her as “someone’s mother” rather than using her own name (Park, 50). Only those who know her in a professional context or those within her uterine family will address her by name. I propose that if motherhood is so definitive of her identity, a Korean woman will naturally be willing to move on from maidenly youth to matronly mother—without fear of the negative connotations that accompany the latter descriptor; motherhood, which can only come with age, completes her.

The Confucian family ideal thus allows women to relinquish their youth with more ease than American culture does. Historically, Korean women have eagerly transitioned from maidenhood to motherhood. Rather than eventually being forced to disassociate herself from her aging body, a Korean woman would voluntarily switch the primary physical signifier of herself from her own body to her child’s. The benefits of associating her identity to her son’s body would be twofold in traditional patriarchal Korea: her new embodiment would not only be younger, but also male. In an article published by the George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research, Myung-Hye Kim writes that “…during the Yi Dynasty, the son was a medium of self-expression of the mother,” and she extrapolates:

South Korean mothers have a strong sense of inseparability from their children, especially their sons, and identify themselves with sons. Late-industrial capitalism endorses the filiocentric self-identity of married women and their attainment of full adulthood through motherhood. (Kim, 187)

Instead of struggling to hold on to a disembodied sense of self later in life, a Korean woman can point to a tangible body as a vessel or signifier of her identity—a child. This can explain, perhaps, the notion that Korean parents frequently derive a vicarious happiness through the success of their children (Kim et al., 284).

Automatic rejuvenation and potential empowerment through masculinization aside, another advantage of this Confucian approach to aging lies in the longevity of the tradition. This intergenerational function is paradigmatic by now and guarantees mutual respect between mother and child. In an article published in the Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, Kyu-Taik Sung writes, “Parents too devote themselves to children. Thus, the system of filial piety resembles a mutual exchange. It appears that respect for the aged in particular is the key element which can maintain the status and integration of the aged in the industrialized society of modern Korea” (Sung, 442,). Indeed, Howard Giles concurs that “It is possible that the ethic of filial piety means that young people in Asian cultures feel obliged to be respectful to elders—regardless of whether that respect is earned, and regardless of young people’s own feelings” (Giles, 22). This is clearly reflected in contemporary Korean culture. For example, the South Korean government runs a Campaign for Respect of the Elders, Respect for the Elderly Week and a Filial Piety Prize System, whereby citizens are nominated and acknowledged by the President for their devotion to their parents. The protocol and etiquette surrounding hwanghap, a celebration of a person’s 60^th birthday, is equally demonstrative of this unquestioned respect. Children plan and finance a huge celebration for each parent and during the ceremony, must take a full bow to the floor before the celebrant to show their respect (Chin, 146). Similarly, in Korean wedding ceremonies, the groom will give his mother and then his bride a piggy-back ride to symbolise his acceptance of his obligations to both his mother and wife. An and Kim’s cross-cultural comparison of advertising also found that “many Korean companies engage in branding efforts and advertising campaigns that emphasize family orientation and harmony” (An and Kim, 348). The guarantee of intergenerational respect and exchange, which has long been an unchallenged concept that underlies much of Korean customs, can buffer or ease the transition a woman makes from maidenhood to motherhood.

Finally, there is, of course, the intrinsic comfort of constancy to be found in an intergenerational relationship. In her article about the relationships between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-laws, Myung-Hye Kim argues that “women who consider motherhood as life employment continue to intervene in both familial and personal matters of their sons even after their sons marry” (Kim, 12). Time, or aging, does not challenge an identity as defined by intergenerational relationships in the way that it challenges an identity defined by a male-female dyad. The difference is biological: in the case of the former, the bond is eternal and no subsequent event can change a mother’s relationship to her child. However, in the latter case, the relationship is changeable. There is an inherent sexual component to a dyad and where sexuality is involved, we must leave room for eventual change because the body, through which sexuality is expressed, must face what Woodward so frankly describes as the “biological fact of decay” (Woodward, 49). Furthermore, the relationship between a mother and child is exclusive—a mother is irreplaceable, biologically speaking—but a sexual partner can be replaced. The patriarchy of both American and Korean societies means that the threat of this reality affects women more than it does men. In short, a woman whose primary identification is through motherhood is less likely to feel her identity threatened with the passage of time, and therefore, less likely to be defensive or insecure about aging.

Thus, even when a Korean woman ages, her sense of identity is not threatened in the way that an American woman’s might be. A Korean woman can maintain her “cult of self” at any age as an aging body does not challenge her identity in the same way. This is because Korean society makes a greater distinction between sexuality and gender identity than American society does. Instead, Korean femininity is defined by motherhood; the collectivist nature of Korean society allows women to identify with a body outside of their own and thereby rejuvenate and empower themselves as they age. The maternal bond is guaranteed and preserved both by social paradigm and biological truth.

The stakes of this argument are huge, theoretically at least. Korean women’s attitudes towards the aging experience draw attention to the fact that American women’s fear of aging is socially induced. The idea that old age necessarily leads to a loss or crisis of identity depends on the premise that female identity is consistently and primarily derived from a woman’s sexuality; American womanhood is defined in relation to manhood in the context of a dyadic yet unilateral relationship. The Korean model presents a fundamentally different alternative.

However, it would be rash and naïve to conclude that the Korean model is any less patriarchal—Korean women are no less objectified. The objectification is simply of different nature. Korean femininity is eroticized to a lesser degree but it is still defined in terms of another’s masculinity. Only when a woman mothers a son, does she become an individual of worth. Indeed, Myung-Hye Kim writes:

The daughter-in-law was a semi-member of her husband’s patrilineal family, and became a full member only after her death as an ancestor of the son she bore. When she bore a son, the daughter-in-law was freed from her first obligation in the husband’s family, namely, perpetuating the family, and was treated better by family members. (Kim, 187)

Further, as the obsession with beauty evinces, a Korean women does rely upon her sexuality to some degree in her youth. However, rather than hoping to be an object of sexual desire her whole life, a Korean woman seeks to be an object of sexual desire in her youth and then refocuses her ambitions to be the perfect mother; the male gaze to which she caters shifts from her husband’s to her son’s. I would argue, though, that this is the lesser of the two evils as the power dynamic of a mother-son relationship is more flexible and bilateral than that of a husband-wife relationship.

We have seen that a different relative definition of identity makes aging an entirely different process for Korean women. One question I would like to further investigate is whether the situation Korea will change as women’s lives are increasingly defined outside of the home and domestic arena. This status quo may be generation-specific and the mentality I have discussed may only apply to the generation of women to whom aging is currently an issue. Many scholars have noted that there might be a generation of women who might suffer a double loss (Giles et al., 2003; Myung-Hye Kim, 1996; Oh, 1996). These women might have submitted to the authority of their mothers-in-law, traditionally the most powerful role a woman can have, yet will be unable to exercise the same sort of control over their own daughters-in-law due to the reluctance of younger generations to subscribe to traditional values. Already there are signs that Korean family politics are changing rapidly. For example, the New York Times reported that the Korean divorce rate increased by 250% between 1993 and 2003, in keeping with women’s rising social status (Onishi, 1). What sort of ramifications will these changes have upon the Korean female aging experience? Will the young women of today, who have invested so much time, money and blood into looking perfect, have a harder time letting go of their youth?

References

An, Daechun and Sanghoon Kim. “Relating Hofstede’s Masculinity Dimension to Gender Role Portrayals in Advertising: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Web Advertisements.” International Marketing Review 24.2 (2007): 181-207.

Barak, Benny, Anil Mathur, Keun Lee and Yong Zhang. “Perceptions of Age-Identity: A Cross-Cultural Inner-Age Exploration.” Psychology & Marketing 18.10 (2001): 1003-1029)

Chin, Soo-Young. “Korean Birthday Rituals.” Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 6 (1991): 145-152.

Fackler, Martin. “Economy Blunts Korea’s Appetite for Plastic Surgery.” New York Times 1 Jan. 2009. 14 Apr. 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/02/business/worldbusiness/02plastic.html?fta=y>

Giles, Howard. Kimberly A. Noels, Angie Williams, Hiroshi Ota, Tae-Seop Lim, Sik Hung Ng, Ellen B. Ryan and Lilnabeth Somera. “Intergenerational Communications Across Cultures: Young People’s Perceptions of Conversations with Family Elders, Non-Family Elders and Same-Age Peers.” Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 18 (2003): 1-32.

Kim, Myung-Hye. “Changing Relationships between Daughters-in-Law and Mothers-in-Law in Urban South Korea.” Anthropological Quarterly 69.4 (1996): 179-192.

Kim, Myung So, Hye Won Kim, Kyeong Ho Cha and Jeeyoung Lim. “What Makes Koreans Happy?: Exploration on the Structure of Happy Life Among Korean adults.” Social Indicators Research 82 (2007): 265-286.

Kim, Taeyon. “Neo-Confucian Body Techniques: Women’s Bodies in Korea’s Consumer Society.” Body & Society 9.2 (2003): 97-113.

Naver Popular Searches: Singers. 14 Apr. 2009. Naver Search Engine. 14 Apr. 2009. <http://searchc.naver.com/pw/index.nhn?where=people&section=0>

Nelson, Michelle R. and Hye-Jin Park. “Cross-Cultural Differences in Sexual Advertising Content in a Transnational Women’s Magazine.” Sex Roles 53.5 (2005): 371-383.

Onishi, Norimitsu. “Divorce in South Korea: Striking a New Attitudes.” New York Times 21 Sept. 2003. 14 Apr. 2009 <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/21/world/divorce-in-south-korea-striking-a-new-attitude.html?pagewanted=1>

Park, Keong-Suk, Voonchin Phua, James McNally and Rongjun Sun. “Diversity and Structure of Intergenerational Relationships: Elderly Parent-Adult Child Relations in Korea.” Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 20 (2005): 285-305.

Park, Sang Un. “‘Beauty Will Save you’: The Myth and Ritual of Dieting in Korean Society.” Korea Journal 47.2 (2007): 42-71.

Scanlon, Charles. “The Price of Beauty in South Korea.” BBC News 3 Feb.

2005. 14 Apr. 2009. <http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/4229995.st>

Sung, Kyu-Taik. “Family-Centered Informal Support Networks of Korean Elderly: the Resistance of Cultural Traditions.” Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 6 (1991): 431-447.

Sung, Yongjun and Spencer F. Tinkham. “Brand Personality Structures in the United States and Korea: Common and Culture-Specific Factors.” Journal of Consumer Psychology 15.4 (2005): 334-350.

Yun, Rebecca J. and Margie E. Lachman. “Perceptions of Aging in Two Cultures: Korean and American Views on Old Age.” Journal of Cross Cultural Gerontology 21 (2006): 55-70.

Woo, Keong Ja. “The Beauty Complex and the Cosmetic Surgery Industry.” Korea Journal 44.2 (2004): 53-82.

Woodward, Kathleen. “Instant Repulsion: Decrepitude, The Mirror Stage, and The Literary Imagination,” Kenyon Review 5.4 (Fall 1983): 43– 66.

[2] I could not find a comparable “sexiest” list in Korean magazines. I would argue that Korea’s music industry is very image-oriented and that a musician’s popularity is a more accurate indicator of their sex appeal than their musical ability. although “sexiest celebrity” and “most popular musician” are not exactly parallel search parameters, there are grounds for comparison.

In the midst of economic disparities and the decentralization policy in China, certain local governments perform better in providing public goods than others. This interesting phenomenon was discussed by Lily Tsai in her Accountability Without Democracy. According to her, those communities with successful performance established informal institutions under which public officials are bound by powerful moral obligations. As opposed to the informal institutions, she defines formal institutions as “supervision of lower offices by the higher ones” (Weber, 957) or having the leverage to eliminate “lackadaisical bureaucrats” (Mill, 229-230). Tsai argues that the informal institution alone can provide accountability (Tsai, 17). This brings us to the question: how do we establish the informal institution?

The Sacred Edict provides an answer to this question. The author K’ang hsi (康熙帝) was the third emperor of Manchu-led Qing Dynasty (Schiprokauer, 234-235).[1] He wrote the sixteen sections of The Sacred Edict to promote certain values and legal guidelines by which people should abide. Most chapters in the book talk about the justification for certain rules and the punishment when those rules are breached. The book was written in an attempt to achieve social stability by promoting the following values: collectivism (Chapter II: Clan Relationships and Harmony, Chapter IV: Farming and Mulberry Culture, Chapter XIII: Sheltering Deserters), hierarchical relationships based on seniority (Chapter I: Duteousness and Subordination, Chapter IX: Courteousness), education (Chapter VI: Schools and Academies, Chapter XI: Education of the Young), tolerance (Chapter III: Keeping the Peace, Chapter XVI: Making up Quarrels), rule of law (Chapter VIII: Rule of Law, Chapter XV: Wards and Tithings), perseverance (Chapter X: Abiding in One’s Vocation), stringent life style (Chapter V: Thrift and Economy), honesty (Chapter XII: Prevention of False Accusations), orthodox Confucian belief (Chapter VII: Heretical Sects), and duly payment of taxes (Chapter XIV: Payment of Taxes).[2]

In The Sacred Edict, K’ang hsi does a good job of portraying his ideal hierarchical and collective society, which reflects Confucian values (Johnson, 325). Based on his affection for the traditional Chinese values, he succeeds in harmoniously combining foreign Mongolian philosophy from the pre-Qing Dynasty with Chinese philosophy (Smith, 139).[3] Accordingly, K’ang hsi is considered one of the greatest emperors in Chinese history because he paved the road for the Qing Dynasty’s most stable and prosperous time for the next 100 years (Smith, 2).

The Three Remnants of The Sacred Edict

In the following section, I will argue that the philosophical teachings and the behavioral guidelines found in this book provide a foundation for the key components of Chinese culture today including the informal institution that Lily Tsai explored. To prove my point, I will first review established literature claiming The Sacred Edict represents the work of ancient philosophers that sufficiently influenced contemporary Chinese society. Second, I will next explore the three remnants of the norms portrayed in The Sacred Edict: 1) hierarchical social order, 2) collectivism, and 3) informal institutionalism. The first two are the pre-conditional basis for the informal institution to work. Finally, I will conclude by discussing the importance of studying ancient culture in understanding modern China.

The book represents what defines traditional Chinese thinking. The values and norms emphasized in The Sacred Edict stemmed from Confucius (Brians, 1999). The similar form and the content of the Sacred Edict are found in other works from previous times as well. The Ming Dynasty’s Six Maxims [六渝] is one of the examples (Johnson, 327). However, the Qing Dynasty’s The Sacred Edict more justifiably and comprehensively represents the ancient Chinese culture. Richard Smith, for example, argues that the Qing Dynasty in many ways “epitomized the best of China’s cultural tradition” (Smith, 3).  Scholars attribute the realization of the traditional Confucian ideal of the unity of state and knowledge being consolidated during this period to Qing’s third emperor, K’ang hsi (Kessler, 169; Ho, 193; Smith, 139). In fact, the emperor strategically employed the Confucian philosophy to facilitate Qing’s success. William Rowe, in China’s Last Empire, states that Qing’s implementation of the neo-Confucian ideology in governance contributed to its prosperity and stability (Rowe, 32) Thus, traditional Chinese philosophy was enforced top down, which in other words, it was more comprehensively prevalent than ever before.

Sufficient evidence buttresses the argument that these norms created by literati elites of Qing successfully instilled the Confucian ideas in the minds of civilians at the time. In fact, the book was to be read aloud twice a month in every village and town (Brians. 1999). Given that the literacy rate during the Qing Dynasty reached 45 percent among men and 10 percent among women (Smith, 231), the influence of the book’s teaching can easily be overwhelming. The teaching of the book was even played on stage which served as a more popular and effective educational channel (Smith, 232). Furthermore, the punitive mechanism associated with the norms surely accelerated the implementation process. For the people who breached the rules, punishments such as beating, striking, and the death penalty were given, which could effectively regulate people’s behavior with the Confucian ideas. The practice of giving and attending lectures about how to interpret The Sacred Edict was still in use even after 1900 (Brians. 1999).

This ancient thinking still affects the way Chinese people think and view the world nowadays. The revolutions and reforms that the modern Chinese state went through made it “sacrifice the integrity of its inherited culture” (Kuhn, 1). Yet, like the scholars who elaborate on cultural continuity, Kuhn also admits that the key components of traditional Chinese culture remain largely influential even after the modern Chinese state was established (Kuhn, 24).  Therefore, it is safe to say that The Sacred Edict represents traditional Chinese Confucian values, and its impact on the Chinese society is significant.

Not surprisingly, the traces of the informal institution are found in The Sacred Edict. First, K’ang hsi emphasizes establishing and maintaining strict hierarchical relationships in families, clans, and society. For instance, the first chapter discusses the importance of duteousness and subordination. It says “Duty to parents (孝顺) is a self-evident principle of nature, and the root of virtuous conduct of man” (K’ang hsi, 2) thus “… in the sixteen sections of The Sacred Edict, duteousness and subordination (孝弟) are first in order” (K’ang hsi, 1). Also, chapter two solemnly cites “let the residents in each community rank according to their ages: and whoever transgresses this order shall receive fifty light blows” (K’ang hsi, 38). The book forbids the young to “bring a charge against a senior relative, even though it (may) be substantiated.” According to him, those who breach this rule will be beaten one hundred heavy blows. I argue that this hierarchy is the fundamental basis for the informal institution because in a strict hierarchy, the constituents are less likely to challenge the authority.

Hierarchy serves as a constraint of provocation even in contemporary China. For instance, the Chinese people tolerate the current authoritarian government (Shi, 402). Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimension model also demonstrates that Chinese people accept and expect a shockingly high level of inequality in power and wealth distribution even compared to other Asian countries (Hofstede, 105). This, I argue, is partly because subordination in the hierarchical order is explicitly encouraged in The Sacred Edict. [4] Authoritarianism refers to the principle of blind submission to authority, as opposed to individual thought and action, although a limited level of freedom is allowed. [5] The Chinese government falls under this category as the regime lacks a meaningful electoral process to reflect people’s demand. Instead, the Chinese Communist Party trains political leaders in the system and promotes only the approved leaders.[6]

Second, one of the significant features of Chinese national culture is “collectivism” or “low individualism,” (Hofstede, 91) which is also encouraged in The Sacred Edict. K’ang hsi stresses collectivism throughout the chapters. In the second chapter, he says “ (if) you wish to live in harmony, just aim at reflecting honour upon your ancestors and do not have divided interests” (K’ang hsi, 24). Also, the book recommends “not to go (to) extremes to out-do (everybody else)” in funerals and partying (K’ang hsi, 61). The way that criminals are punished also reflects the importance of collective values that K’ang hsi highlights. Those who crossed the line that the state set up are to be ousted. The ones who shelter these ousted criminals are considered accomplices and severely condemned. The author even spends a whole chapter out of 13 talking about community values. The strategy of never giving criminals a chance to be reintegrated into society powerfully functioned as an incentive for constituents of a community to live by the rule.

Finally, upon these pre-conditional foundations of hierarchy and collectivism, The Sacred Edict attempts to build informal institutions. K’ang hsi’s kingdom established a strong constitutional state with strict penal codes. It is, in fact, surprisingly modern the way the emperor set punitive principles. For example, chapter VIII discusses the purpose of the law that is to achieve justice by rehabilitating the wrongdoers, and protecting the innocent people, but to never taking revenge on criminals. The punitive system also takes proportionality into consideration, condemning recidivism and allowing different degrees in sentences according to the severity of the crime (K’ang hsi, 88-91). The process of appeals from the lower court through the higher court is also evidence that K’ang hsi’s thoughts on the legal system were very similar to that of modern democratic countries. Although the principles are not always consistent with the degrees and methods of punishment, the discussion itself is meaningful in that a medieval sage several hundred years ago already tried to establish a fair and just institution.

Interestingly, however, K’ang hsi discourages people from relying on formal institutions in three ways. First, he looks down on lawyers and accuses them of mastering the law only to take advantage of other people (K’ang hsi, 111).  Although he admits that the society needs “hangers-on at law courts,” he says they “completely lost to shame, and only scheme to make money for present advantage” (K’ang hsi, 111). By actively putting down the legal practitioners, the society could maintain only a small number of them, which in turn discouraged filing legal cases in general. Second, the emperor orders not to sue an elder even if the case can be substantiated (K’ang hsi, 38). As discussed earlier, suing an elder was not only prohibited but also severely punished. The ban on bringing charges against the elderly shows that K’ang hsi’s teaching puts more weight on seniority as a guideline for social order than the legal system. Third, K’ang hsi specifically says not to “become a frequenter of the law courts” (K’ang hsi, 142).  The book, instead, discusses how to avoid quarrelling by emphasizing tolerance (K’ang hsi, 41; 102; 105).

K’ang hsi emphasized informal intuitions because he saw the world without formal institutions as a utopia, because it would mean that “the punishment will not need to be used” (K’ang hsi, 98) as no one causes problems. I believe that his philosophy stemmed from the view that formal institutions are ex-post instruments that are to redress administrative inefficiencies or injustice as he emphasized the punitive side of institutions. Informal institutions, on the other hand, were seen as pre-emptive tools as they regulate people’s behavior under the name of morality and provide checks and balances without punishing anybody.

Conclusion

Many political scientists argue that China’s foreign policy cannot be explained simply by looking through the rational or materialistic lens that Western academia has developed, thus normative values must be considered in analyzing its behavior (Kim, 55). The Sacred Edict, as a representative work of the Confucius teaching, is valuable because it allows us to trace back what defines modern Chinese culture that has remained a conundrum in Western academia. For one, this book review focused on the aspect of informal institutionalism. The Sacred Edict hints us clues how the informal institution in China has been implemented. We learned that Informal institutions were enforced to facilitate centralized governance during the Qing Dynasty. To do so, K’ang hsi utilized punitive mechanism on the firm foundation of hierarchy and collectivism.

Although this review focuses on Chinese institutions, other phenomenon observed in modern Chinese history can also be traced in The Sacred Edict. For example, The Sacred Edict provides an answer for the question why communism failed in China. Scholars probe overseas Chinese people’s business as well as traditional Confucian values as supporting evidence to the claim that Chinese society is deeply capitalistic (Redding, 2). Not surprisingly, The Sacred Edict concerns individual wealth, and it recommends for everyone to save money when the economy is good, in preparations for bad times (K’ang hsi, 58). It praises wealth, and passing on inheritance is not only justified but also encouraged. Chapter V, discussing thrifty life style and economy, states that “wealth is obtained with much labour in order to pass on a little happiness for their descendants to enjoy” (K’ang hsi, 61).

As seen above, by studying more about the cultural roots of China, we will understand more about interesting phenomenon such as the informal institution and failed communism. In this sense, K’ang hsi’s The Sacred Edict provides abundant useful information that is relevant particularly in studying Chinese institutions.

References

Authoritarianism. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica. Last access on Mar. 13, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/44640/authoritarianism

Brians, Paul. et al. 1999. Reading About the World, Vol. 2, 3rd edition, Harcourt Brace College Publishing. Last access on Mar. 12, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.wsu.edu/~wld
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Communist Party of China, China Today. Last access on Mar. 16, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.chinatoday.com/org/cpc/

Ho, Ping-ti. 1967. “The Significance of the Ch’ing Period in Chinese History.” The Journal of Asian Studies Vol. 26. No. 2. (February, 1967). P. 189-195

Hofstede, Geert. 1993. “Cultural Constraints in Management Theories”, Academy of ManagementExecutive, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp.81-94.

— 1980. Cultural Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values. CA: SAGE Publications.

Hsi, Kang. 1924. The Sacred Edict. Translated by F.W. Baller. Limited Fascimile Ed. 1979. The National Poetry Foundation, Orono, MI: University of Maine at Orono.

Johnson, David. et al. 1985. Popular Culture in Late Imperial China, Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

Kessler, Lawrence. 1976. K’ang-hsi and the Consolidation of Ch’ing Rule, 1661-1684. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Kim, Samuel (Editor). 1998. China and the World – Chinese Foreign Policy Faces the New Millennium. 4^th Ed. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Kuhn, Philip. 2002. Origins of the Modern Chinese State. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Mill, J. S. 1951. “Considerations on Representative Government.” Utilitarianism, Liberalism, and Representative Government. London: Dart

Niou, Emerson. 2010. “Local Self-Governance with Chinese Characteristics” Computer printout, Department of Political Science, Duke University. 2010.

Prawdin, Michael. 2005. The Mongol Empire: Its Rise and Legacy. New Jersey: Rutgers University.

Redding, S. G. 1990. The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism New York, NY: W. de Gruyter.

Rowe, William T. 2009. China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Schiprokauer, Conrad. 2006. A Brief History of Chinese Civilization, Thompson Wadswoth.

Shi, Tianjian. 2001. “Cultural Values and Political Trust: A Comparison of the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan.” Comparative Politics. Vol. 33, No. 4 (Jul., 2001). pp. 401-419

Smith, Richard R. 1994. China’s Cultural Heritage The Qing Dynasty, 1644-1912. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Tsai, Lily L. 2007. Accountability Without Democracy : Solidary Groups and Public Goods Provision in Rural China. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Weber, Max. 1978. Edited by Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich. Economy and Society (Wirtschaft und gesellschaft). Vol. 1. Edition. 1. Berkeley & Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.

[2] This categorization of the chapters neither exclusively nor exhaustively fit. Some chapters are about more than one theme. Yet, this categorization gives a rough idea about the book.

[3] The pre-Qing Dynasty was the Yuan Dynasty (元朝), the continuation of Mongol empire founded by Jenghis Khan. (Prawdin, 22-24)

[4] This, however, does not mean that Chinese culture is automatically authoritarian. For instance, Niou (2010), in
“Local Self-Governance with Chinese Characteristics”, shows examples of democratic features in Chinese history such as Lu Family Community Compact.

[5] Authoritarianism, Encyclopædia Britannica

[6] Communist Party of China, China Today.

U.S. Finalizes Arms Sales to Taiwan

Cross-strait relations grew tense earlier this month as a result of two key events, one dramatic and the other bureaucratic. The first event came in early January, when the United States awarded billion-dollar contracts to Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation to supply Taiwan with advanced defensive missile systems. The sales, which include over 250 ground-to-air defensive missiles, make up a large part of the $6.46 billion dollar arms sale agreed up on October 2008 by the Bush administration. The weapons include the state-of-the-art Patriot Missile Defense System, a ground-to-air missile interceptor which has been installed throughout Taiwan to counter the over 1,000 ballistic and cruise missiles reportedly stationed just across the strait in Mainland China. Taiwan, while it has enjoyed friendlier relations with China since the election of President Ma Ying-jeou in March 2008, is still at odds with China on many issues and claimed that the arms would strengthen its position in reconciliation negotiations with the mainland. Beijing, which still views the island as part of its territory, has long regarded arms sales by the United States as meddling in its domestic affairs, and issued a harsh rebuke on January 12.

However, the Chinese undertook a far more significant step to express their displeasure on January 11 by successfully testing their own anti-missile defense system. The strategic implications of the test are open to interpretation, with international analysts pointing out the technical advancements indicated by a successful test of this complexity, while Chinese officials continue to emphasize the defensive nature of their military capabilities in situations such as this. Though most around the world saw the test as a direct show of Beijing‘s disapproval of the Taiwan arms deals, Zhu Feng, deputy director of Peking University‘s Center for Strategic and International Studies, argued that the test was also intended as a show of strength and pride for Chinese domestic audiences: ―China still lacks the leverage to force the White House to stop these sales…so they feel like they must make a lot of noise.

China Retaliates Against US Arms Sales to Taiwan

On January 30, the Chinese government announced its retaliatory measures in response to the U.S. $6.4 billion arms sales to Taiwan, claiming the sale endangers its national security. The measures announced include sanctions against U.S. companies involved in the arms sales and cancellation of some military exchange programs between the U.S. and China. China‟s Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi stated China‟s solemn position on this issue, and urged the U.S. to stop the sales. Later on February 2, Beijing reaffirmed that there would be measured retaliation.

The Obama administration notified Congress on Jan. 29 its proposed arms sales to Taiwan, which includes 60 Blackhawk helicopters, and 114 Patriot missiles, together with items such as two Osprey mine-hunting ships and tracking equipment. The arms sales, covered in the January 25th issue of the China Brief, provoked the toughest Chinese response in the past three decades.

When considered in light of recent points of contention between the two sides—Copenhagen, Google, the Dalai Lama and monetary policy— this issue only deepens the tension between the U.S. and China, predicting Sino-U.S. relations will be bumpy in 2010. However, some experts believe the frictions are normal. “The U.S. needs China’s help on many aspects, including the Korean and Iranian nuclear issues. It will weigh its action first and try to contain the risks,” said Fan Jishe, a scholar in US studies with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Chinese Officials Protest Obama’s Plans to Meet the Dalai Lama

Adding to the already tense atmosphere surrounding US-China relations, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry spoke out on Tuesday against President Obama’s plans to meet with the Dalai Lama. In an official statement, Ma Zhaoxu declared that “China resolutely opposes the visit by the Dalai Lama to the United States, and resolutely opposes the U.S. leader having contact with the Dalai Lama in any name or any form.” In response, White House spokesman Bill Burton stated that President Obama had declared his intention to meet with the Dalai Lama to his Chinese hosts during his visit in November 2009, and that he holds firm in his intention to do so, though no date has yet been set.

In fact, this exchange is already the second controversy involving the Dalai Lama during Obama’s thirteen months in office. In the first incident, which came in October 2009 and was covered in the October 19th issue of the China Brief, President Obama declined to meet with the Tibetan leader during his visit to Washington; while Obama may have hoped the move would mollify Chinese leaders, it sparked mild outrage in Washington D.C., where some accused the president of “kowtowing” to Chinese pressure.

Obama Finally Meets Dalai Lama in Spite of Strong Protests from Beijing

After months of anticipation and frequent warnings from China, President Barack Obama met with the Dalai Lama at the White House on February 18, continuing a series of meetings between U.S. presidents and the Tibetan leader which first began with the elder George Bush. However, this meeting in particular has been the subject of great anticipation ever since Obama declined to meet with the Dalai Lama when he visited Washington D.C. in November 2009 for fear of angering the Chinese in advance of his visit to China later that same month. (For prior coverage, see the February 8, 2010 and October 19, 2009 issues of the China Brief)

The meeting between the two leaders took place behind closed doors in the Map Room of the White House, perhaps symbolizing a more informal meeting than a conversation in the Oval Office would have. Despite the discrete, low-key nature of the meeting, Beijing was nevertheless furious, issuing a strong statement through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, claiming that the summit ―seriously interferes in China’s internal politics and seriously hurts the national feelings of the Chinese people. Chinese leaders even went so far as to summon the American ambassador, Jon Huntsman, to voice their discontent.

This level of outrage, which may be baffling to outside observers, is a product of China‘s extreme sensitivity on issues of ―sovereignty and territorial integrity. Tibet is not the only issue in which this sentiment plays a role: the recent U.S. arms deal with Taiwan probed another sore point in Chinese national pride, as the PRC still considers Taiwan a rogue province which will one day be reunited with the mainland. The meeting between Obama and the Dalai Lama was offensive, at its root, because it continued to confer legitimacy on the claims of the Tibetan government-in-exile, which Beijing considers a separatist movement and which in recent years has wavered between advocating full independence and accepting its status as an autonomous region under Chinese rule.

Google and China at Odds over Alleged Cyber Attacks

In the afternoon on Jan. 12th, the Internet giant Google disclosed in its official blog its decision to consider quitting the Chinese market, followed a cyber attack it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights activists.

The move follows a clampdown on the Internet in China, where search requests that include words like ―Tiananmen Square massacre or ―Dalai Lama come up blank. In recent months, the government has also blocked Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Google‘s video-sharing service. Google acknowledged the decision “may well mean” the closure of Google.cn and its offices in China. While Google‘s business in China is now small, analysts say that the country could soon become one of the most lucrative Internet and mobile markets, and a withdrawal would significantly reduce Google‘s long-term growth. “We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all,” it added.

After the disclosure of Google‘s decision, hundreds of Chinese college students went to Google.cn’s headquarters in Beijing to commemorate Google. ―Google‘s search engine is much better and inclusive than that of Baidu, a randomly interviewed student told a journalist. However, in China, there is also different voice, mainly from Chinese professors and journalists. They claim that Google‘s threat to quit the China market is premeditated: the true reason Google wants to quit the China market, said one Mr. Gao, a Chinese journalist, is their failure in competition with the largest search engine company, Baidu. Emphasizing on localization, Baidu has proved a huge success in China and has a market share of over 70% in China. Google.cn is actually on the brink of being eliminated and used this incident as a noble excuse for decently quitting the China market. Mr. Gao added that Google‘s complaints about Chinese government regulations and censorship are completely unjustifiable. ―Those regulations and censorship have been there long before Google entered China; at that time, Google entered China market despite the heavy regulations. Now, Google imputes all its failure to the Chinese government when it sees little chance to make profit in China; this is obviously ridiculous.

In the time since Google‘s stunning announcement, the issue has only gained in stature. The U.S. issued a formal protest to China concerning the incident, escalating the issue from a conflict between a U.S. corporation and the Chinese government to a point of tension between the two nations themselves. Google continues to weigh the consequences of an exit from the Chinese market, while Beijing has issued a vehement denial of any government involvement in the attacks, stating that such claims, ―[are] groundless and [aim] to denigrate China.

Google Cyber Attacks Traced to Two Chinese Schools; Beijing Vehemently Denies Any Involvement

In the wake of Google‘s announcement on January 12 that it had been the target of repeated hacking attacks from within China, the New York Times and other news outlets reported on February 18 that the source of these intrusions had been traced to two schools in China. The first school is Shanghai Jiaotong University, a prestigious technical institution which boasts one of China‘s best computer science programs. The second, which was described in sensationalist headlines as a military institute, was the Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province. Despite this new information, it seems that investigators—mostly private software firms hired by Google or other victimized U.S. companies—are no closer to learning the identities of the hackers. In the process of denouncing the ―baseless accusations‖ against Shanghai Jiaotong University, its spokesperson pointed out the fact that the Times report was based on a simple IP address, which does little to determine the perpetrator of the attack. As a SJTU professor explained in a separate statement, it is entirely possible that ―that one of the university‘s I.P. addresses was hijacked by others, which frequently happens. Lanxiang Vocational School, for its part, responded to the accusations through Li Zixiang, the school‘s party chief, who said that ―investigation in the staff found no trace that the attacks originated from our school and that the school had no ties to the Chinese military. Zhou Hui, the director of the school‘s general office, qualified this statement in admitting that 38 of the schools graduates had been recruited into the military since 2006, but that they were mostly selected for talents in ―auto repair, cooking and electrical welding. However, this description directly contradicts the assertions of a Washington Post article from February 20, which described the school in the following terms: ―Lanxiang Vocational helped create what has become known as China’s “Great Firewall,” which filters Internet information in the country. According to the school’s Web site, it established a military department in 2006 to train “high quality technology officers.” Many of those students have gone on to form “the important technology backbone” of the People’s Liberation Army, the site said. Though there is still debate about the involvement of the two schools and the identities of the hackers themselves, their method of entry into various websites has been identified. The hackers reportedly exploited a security weakness in Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer 6 to gain access to secure information, introducing their malware into the target system by mimicking a message sent from a co-worker and attaching the hostile software

Introduction

[Her] parents have worked in Beijing for many years. She is eager to live with her parents. But they lead a laborious life and they have to take care of her younger brother at the same time. Her parents had to leave her with her grandmother. Her father took her to Beijing once, but she could not be enrolled by Beijing schools because the tuition fee was as high as several thousands Yuan, which is an astronomical figure to their family. She had to be sent back…

(China Agricultural University, 23)

The above vignette is unique—but also just one story out of several million. In rural China, many children are growing up in households where one or both parents have migrated away indefinitely to find work in the cities. There has been growing public concern about the welfare of these children—known as the “liushou ertong,” or “left-behind children”—not only in terms of physical safety but also in terms of psychological, emotional and social development. The situation of these children has also begun to receive attention from the government and policy-makers, who are now recognizing that the outcomes experienced by this present generation of children will also influence the future picture of the entire Chinese society.

To consider what has contributed to today’s phenomenon of ‘left-behind children’ in rural areas, this paper will explore the Chinese hukou system—an administrative measure that registers households according to place of origin—including its history, its present sociological consequences, and its future policy implications. It will argue that this system has prevented migrant workers from accessing the same services as registered city residents, making it unfavourable for them to bring along their families, and hence contributing to the growing number of children left behind in the countryside.

Discussion

The children in China who are growing up in incomplete families where one or both parents have moved away to the cities represent a remarkable proportion of the population; estimates place the number of such children between 13 and 26 million (Yeoh & Lam, 4). Migrants are not only attracted by the lure of urban life or more opportunities to amass wealth, but are also frequently desperate to pay medical bills and repay financial debts. Their children are then taken into care by other guardians, such as elderly grandparents or kin, and often become responsible for taking care of themselves and their own siblings. The deepening trend of such arrangements raises the question: Why do so many children have to stay behind in the countryside, rather than following their parents to the cities?

Writers across many academic and media sources that grapple with this issue often refer back to one important institutional factor—the hukou system. The hukou (or household registration) system is a state-administered scheme of citizenship under which every individual in China has to have a formal recording of residence, whether urban or rural, made at his or her local office (Cheng & Selden, 644). Besides serving the primary purposes of state identification and monitoring, the hukou system also regulates the resources available to each Chinese household and shapes the citizens’ participation in civic life. Being registered according to residence affects a household in almost all domains of life, from “food, clothing or shelter… employment… school” and marriage (Cheng & Selden, 644). In essence, this single policy has extensive bearing on human activities.

Even while the hukou influences multiple domains of life in Chinese society and families, it itself has been influenced by many broad forces. The following section will look more closely at the background of the hukou system—its historical origins and purposes—to see how it came about, in order to better understand how it is now still shaping the situation of many children in rural China.

As chronicled in detail by Cheng & Selden (1994), the hukou system was implemented at a time of transition to socialism, when many aspects of the economy such as agriculture and metal-making were being collectivized for the common good. It was conceived by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950’s and modeled after the ancient baojia system, a method that was used for thousands of years to assign households into different collective groupings and to facilitate central control over a vast nation. The hukou system found its initial basis within the 1954 Constitution of the National People’s Congress, which stipulated that citizens should be allowed “freedom of residence and freedom to change their residence” (646), so long as they remained within the bounds of state regulations that aimed to maintain “social peace and order” (649). However, tension between ideals and practice began to manifest itself in a variety of outcomes brought about by the hukou system.

From the sociological standpoint, the hukou system exerted a significant role. It served to monitor and regulate human movement within the country for purposes of population control. Not long after the collectivization of agricultural land, hukou restrictions tightened as a response to rural residents seeking to leave the land they had been assigned under collectivization. The system did not allow rural residents to easily leave their villages for the cities. People who desired to even leave their rural places of residence in 1958 needed to obtain certification from urban authorities through near-impossible bureaucratic processes (Cheng & Selden, 663). Of course, undocumented incidences of rural-urban migration still occurred, even with the knowledge of the state; but the central government sought to continue restricting this process by imposing new regulations to encourage rural workers to migrate alone, and by providing incentives and even pressures to make sure that these workers would return to their place of their registered hukou after a short period of time (661).

From a social perspective, the original hukou system already had the characteristics of the present-day state policy that still confers different services between urban and rural areas. In the 1950’s, however, even the provision of food and grain was rationed according to a household’s hukou status (Cheng & Selden, 658). The urban areas were prioritized by the government, which believed that the collectivized agricultural communities were virtually self-sustaining. The differential welfare entitlements based on hukou registration initiated a long-standing and growing discrepancy in the resources available between the rural and urban areas.

Up to this point, the internal movement of any citizen was highly restricted—and so there was little opportunity for children to be separated from their parents as a result of labor migration. However, the hukou system began to evolve in the 1980’s, as a result of strong social and economic forces pushing for increased internal movement. This was at the end of the Communist era, and as the government began to become less centralized, the state began to loosen its control through the hukou system, granting more freedom for internal migration (Zhan, 15). In 1984, the state formally sanctioned the movement of workers from one place to another, albeit temporarily and under continued regulation (18). That is, the hukou system changed from the ‘urban’ versus ‘rural’ classification, to ‘permanent’ versus ‘temporary’ residence statuses; temporary hukou permits were available for people working outside their place of origin for more than three months (Amnesty International, 5).

While workers were gaining more freedom to migrate within the country, economic forces were also increasing the supply and demand for migrant labor in the cities (Fang et al, 4). Agriculture was becoming a less and less viable source of income for farmers, in such a way that rural dwellers had to begin looking for new ways to provide for their families (Ping, 3). Market reforms that began in the 1970’s also then began raising the prospects of attaining wealth, particularly within Chinese cities, at the same time as urban industries were seeking to employ more and more rural workers for low-wage labor (4).

In conjunction with these rapid social and economic changes, the loosened hukou policy had important consequences. Before, rural areas contained the majority of China’s population; however, due to massive migration from the countryside to the cities, particularly major ones such as Beijing and Shanghai, there has been a demographic shift—with rural-to-urban migrants numbering from one to two million in the 80’s to over 100 million today (Zhu, 65). In addition, there has been an economic push, with China’s rapid GDP growth currently owing almost 16% to the presence of migrant workers engaging in construction or factory work in the cities (Zhan, 13).

In light of these changes and consequences, it is appropriate to look at the current state of the hukou system, and how it may be interacting with the high incentives for rural-to-urban migration to contribute to the unexpected situation where migrant workers have to leave behind their children and families. The paradox is that although internal migration is unabashedly encouraged in the interest of economic growth, migrants are still denied essential support and resources once they have moved to the city for work. Legally, it remains difficult or impossible for a migrant worker—even one that has been working in the city for a long time—to switch to an urban hukou, or present the necessary certification to obtain certification of permanent residency. This difficulty is compounded by the fact that most services in the cities are only available for people who have permanent urban hukou. As documented by Amnesty International (2007), there are few services provided by the government for migrant workers, and the ones that are available are usually quite expensive relative to the workers’ low-paid incomes. For example, housing is only subsidized for permanent residents, and so the costs of living are very high for migrants who do not have that certification (15). Health care is also very costly; according to Amnesty International’s report, only 6.7% of migrant workers have access to subsidized social insurance (16).

A particularly important urban service to consider while discussing hukou, family migration and child welfare is education. City schools are generally held responsible only for providing education for children of registered permanent residents; for all others, they will charge “temporary schooling fees” (Amnesty International, 32). These fees not only include non-subsidized tuition fees but also expensive and often arbitrary ‘sponsorship’ payments that together often amount to more than the monthly income of migrant workers (Yan, 2). There are also various other bureaucratic measures that migrant parents have to negotiate in order to help their child gain access to state-funded schools, which usually prove to be too expensive or complicated. In some cases, even, children of migrant workers are expected to attend the schools where their family is registered; that is, back in the rural areas from which they have come. Indeed, it is not a surprising statistic that “more than 80% of migrant children are unable to attend middle schools in China” (Fang et al., 9)—which may not actually be so shocking given China’s investment in education, estimated to be a mere 2% of the country’s GDP (11).

This paradox—where migration is encouraged but the hukou system continues to be a barrier for services available to migrants—has far-reaching implications. The most striking (and common) result is that because costs of living are high and access to education is a challenge, migrant workers often decide that it is best to migrate alone, opting instead to send remittances back home to provide for the families they leave behind. An immediate consequence of this is that migrant workers are able to earn wages from their city jobs, and thus raise the incomes of their households, and perhaps also the standard of living of their family in the countryside. Most workers, however, become part of a ‘floating’ population that goes back and forth from countryside to city. With the emergence of this population in the past decade, there is concern about the urban-rural divide being perpetuated rather than diminished (Chan, 1996, Solinger, 1999, as cited by Zhu, 66).

Also, as another consequence, the structure of society is changing. With children being separated from their parents through migration, the traditional concept of the family unit is being disrupted (Yardley). Community-based studies by institutions such as the China Agricultural University (2005) have investigated the impact of this disruption, raising and echoing popular concern that these children may actually be at risk for a variety of poor physical, psychological and social outcomes. It may be that the stress of being separated from familiar caregivers—of having to redefine attachments and readjust to new family relationships and roles—is compounded by the difficult conditions in villages, which include poverty, lack of social support and infrastructure, and natural disasters like flooding.

With migration continuing to be pushed along by China’s economic expansion, but the current hukou policy limiting the services available to families, the outlook is not promising: the population of children left behind in rural areas may continue to grow and experience chronic difficulties in their day-to-day lives. These present concerns are beginning to take hold of future-oriented policy work, and the following section will analyze what measure have been taken, and what gaps (if any) remain.

Since the hukou system has been described thus far as a determining factor to whether single individuals or whole families migrate from the countryside to cities, it is expected that changes to the hukou policy itself may be an important step in addressing the challenges of a large left-behind population. Reform of hukou policy began officially in 1997, and led to “both significant changes and remarkable continuities” from the past system (Wang, 115). For example, the government abolished some of the hukou-linked quotas set to limit the number of migrants in the bigger cities. Although these have made it more feasible and acceptable for more people to move to those areas for work, it does not address the gaps in service provision that have existed and that have led to the separation of families.

One interesting aspect of reform occurred in 2001, when the Chinese government reduced requirements needed to obtain a temporary permit for staying in some small cities, and even allowing some individuals to qualify eventually for permanent hukou—which would allow them to obtain the necessary urban services for themselves and their children (Zhan, 25). However, the “entry conditions” for this are still very difficult to meet: the state still uses hukou measures to regulate migration by requiring the workers to fulfill a set of criteria that most regular migrants cannot meet—for example, by providing certification of sources of income, as well as evidence of a stable place of residence (Wang, 120).

The consensus in Chinese policy circles is that the hukou system will not be able to be abolished immediately; in the meantime, efforts have also focused on providing the services that have traditionally been inaccessible to migrants because of that system. For example, the government has been drafting several documents to bring attention to the conditions of migrant workers and emphasize the provision of education, health care, and other basic services. In terms of education, the government has enacted the Compulsory Education Law, which according to Amnesty International (2007) posits that children should have access to education wherever their parents are working (32). However, these pledges have yet to be fully enacted in practice to guarantee education for migrant children in the cities. For example, measures such as allowing migrant children to attend state-funded schools with tax exemption have limited impact, since certification is required in order to obtain that exemption, and involves a complicated and hard-to-fulfill process akin to obtaining the permanent hukou permit itself.

Conclusion

The increase in internal migration across China has been spurred by broad social forces over several decades. If barriers to public services such as education continue to exist for migrants in China’s cities as a result of the residual hukou system, then migrant workers will continue to face the decision of having to leave their children behind.

In order to address the problem, some scholars and policy-makers suggest abolishing the hukou measures completely. However, the feasibility of this option is unclear. Rather than simply allowing as many rural-dwellers as possible to move to the cities with their families, the greater issue for the national and local governments is to address the rural-urban divide that threatens to drive internal migration at such a great rate. The deeper reality is that while cities expand and receive more funding from the national government for all sorts of social services, conditions and opportunities for families in rural areas are not improving nearly as quickly.

The Chinese government should continue to fulfill its commitment to education by increasing investment in both rural and urban schools, paying attention to rural development while also addressing the discriminatory attitudes towards migrants that affect their treatment in the urban public sphere, including the provision of key services.  Most pressingly, since internal migration will continue at a fast rate while policies like the hukou system have yet to catch up in terms of reform, it is imperative to find effective interim measures to deal with the ongoing physical, social, emotional, and psychological challenges faced by the population of left-behind children.

References

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Chan, K.W. & Buckingham, W. (2008). Is China abolishing the hukou system? The China Quarterly, 195, 582-684. Retrieved April 5, 2010, from http://faculty.washington.edu/stevehar/Chan%20and%20Buckingham.pdf.

Cheng, T. & Selden, M. (1994). The origins and social consequences of China’s hukou system. The China Quarterly, 139, 644-668. Retrieved November 03, 2007, from JSTOR.

China Agricultural University. (2005). Impact study on rural labor migration on left-behind children in mid-west China. Plan International Publications. Retrieved October 6, 2007 from http://www.plan-international.org.cn/english/resources/E-files.jsp?wbtreeid=279.

Fan, M. (2007, February 18). Rural Chinese families feel migration’s strains. The Washington Post, p. A20. Retrieved October 18, 2007 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/17/AR2007021701473.html.

Fang, R., Miller, E., Trieu, H., & Yang, X. (2006). Migrant labor and social welfare policy. Retrieved November 03, 2007 from http://www.umich.edu/~ipolicy/china/11)%20Migrant%20Labor%20and%20Social%20Welfare%20Policy.pdf.

Hong Kong Liaison Office. (2007, May 15). Society and welfare: International day of the family. Retrieved October 20, 2007 from http://www.ihlo.org/LRC/SW/190506.html.

Ping, H. (2003). China migration country study. Asia Regional Migration Conference. Retrieved November 03, 2007 from http://www.livelihoods.org/hot_topics/docs/Dhaka_CP_3.pdf.

Wang, F. (2004). Reformed migration control and new targeted people: China’s hukou system in the 2000s. The China Quarterly, 177, 115-132. Retrieved November 05, 2007, from PAIS International.

Yan, F. (2005). Education problems with urban migratory children in China. (Electronic version). Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, 32(3), 3-11. Retrieved November 05, 2007 from Academic OneFile.

Yardley, J. (2004, December 21). Rural exodus for work fractures Chinese family. (Electronic version). New York Times. Retrieved October 25, 2007 from http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/21/international/asia/21china.html?_r=1&oref=slogin.

Yeoh, B. & Lam, T. (2006). The costs of (im)mobility: Children left behind and children who migrate with a parent. Regional Seminar on Strengthening the National Machineries for Gender Equality to Shape Migration Policies and Protect Migrant Women. Retrieved October 18, 2007 from http://www.unescap.org/esid/gad/Events/RegSem22%2D24Nov06/Papers/BrendaYeoh.pdf.

Zhan, S. (2005). Rural labour migration in China: challenges for policies. UNESCO. Retrieved November 10, 2007 from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001402/140242e.pdf.

Zhu, Y. (2007). China’s floating population and their settlement intention in the cities: beyond the hukou reform. Habitat International, 31, 65-76. Retrieved November 10, 2007 from Elsevier.

Yasunari Kawabata’s desolate, beautiful, and flowing prose, sometimes compared to the traditional Japanese Zen woodblock print, has been called beyond understanding, and above critique.  His art for art’s sake approach, which simultaneously brings together the old and the new, has distinguished his works and aided in their elevation to a special place in the Japanese literary canon. In his article “Writing out Asia: Modernity, Canon and Kokoro,” James Fujii establishes the critical and public reception of works, the publication and translation of works, and the formation of a national identity as the main factors contributing to an author’s canonization.  (Fujii, 178) By examining Kawabata’s Snow Country and Old Capital, two of the three works cited by the Nobel Committee upon awarding Kawabata the prize, and the glaring absences in those works, we can come to better appreciate the denial of shared histories between East Asian countries that the canonization of Kawabata has affirmed. The goal of this paper is not to attack Kawabata for the absences in his works; rather, it is to better understand how the process of canonization contributes to historical absences and omissions.

Snow Country is considered by many critics to be Kawabata’s masterpiece. (Phillips, 423) It tells the story of a tragic love affair between a mountain geisha and a Tokyo dilettante.  In his introduction to the novel, which was first serialized in the Asahi Shinbun between 1935 and 1937, translator Edward Seidensticker writes:  “The hot springs, one of which is the locale of Snow Country, also have a peculiarly Japanese significance.”  (Kawabata, vi) Another of the novel’s peculiarly Japanese traits is its writing style, which resembles that of the 17^th century “haiku.”  Even today, Kawabata’s works are seen in this light; as having clear origins in venerated Japanese poetic traditions such as haiku, and sharing the themes of loneliness and passion that prevailed during the Heian Era, considered Japan’s Golden Age. (Mathy, 212) In the mid -1930’s the traditional themes explored in Snow Country would have helped to define the “Japanese” nation as one that was unique—perhaps even peculiar—possessing a special and beautiful tradition.  This in turn may have contributed to the development of Japanese ideas of superiority that were present in the Pre-War Years, which were often used in justification of Japan’s presence on the Korean peninsula and later its involvement in mainland China.  The themes and even the setting of Snow Country more than likely helped to reinforce the popular image of a venerated, noble and isolated Japanese society at a time when that image could serve political and war room agendas. Snow Country thus was an “art for art’s sake” composition that would easily support an ideology complicit with imperialism.

“It would become a relatively common experience for Japanese writers to experience first hand the Japanese occupational presence in Asia, without letting it touch his/her literary production,” Fujii stated in his “Writing out Asia: Modernity, Canon and Kokoro”.  (Fujii, 174  ) Kawabata is no exception.  He was good friends with, and at times a creative partner to, Yokomitsu Riichi, a revolutionary author forgotten by history but nevertheless important in his own time.  (Phillips, 422) While Kawabata was writing Snow Country, Yokomitsu was busy adding to his already considerable number of works.  In 1935, the same year in which Snow Country was first serialized, Yokomitsu published Shanghai, an account of the experiences of Japanese expatriates in the sprawling metropolis of Shanghai.  In the novel, which would have undoubtedly attracted Kawabata’s attention, Yokomitsu seeks to define what it means to be Japanese outside of Japan.  While Yokomitsu dabbled in many different styles, Kawabata remained sensitive to the unique styles he had been exposed to as a young writer and whereas Yokomitsu would explore Eastern Asia looking for different settings for his works, Kawabata refused to.  One thing true of all of Kawabata’s works is a unity of setting:  every story takes place in modern Japan.  In Snow Country, as in his other works, Kawabata strives to define the Japanese identity in the modern world through bridging the past and the present, tradition and modernity.   However, the absence of Japanese living abroad as either colonizers or expatriates betrays the historical reality of a Japanese population with a considerable presence outside of Japan, especially in Korea and China.  If one were to read Snow Country as a representative work of the 1930’s in Japan, Japan’s legacy abroad would be missing from the picture.  Kawabata’s “print” would be as advertised:  what is omitted is just as important as what is included.  What is omitted is actually a shared history between China, Korea and Japan; a history that Kawabata seems to be content to ignore.

Though Kawabata’s works focus only on the Japanese struggles with modernity, it is important to remember that Kawabata did not view himself as an imperialist.  He may not have perceived Japan as an imperial power at all, and the glaring absences in his works are as readily attributed to his desire for a “pure” and traditional Japan as anything else.  Perhaps he did not intend to paint a realistic and accurate picture of the Japanese, but rather purposefully altered his portrayal of the Japanese.  The ambiguity of Kawabata’s works, the result of these nuances, is what makes Kawabata’s works both compelling and inscrutable.   Many scholars have claimed that the neglect of Korean and Chinese struggles with modernity in his works may have been a consequence of his obsession with Japanese Tradition. (Brown, 375) In 1938, he wrote to a friend that,  “I had gained a full awareness that I was a writer of Japanese traits, and that I would carry on the beauty of the Japanese Tradition.” (Kawabata, 22) Kawabata was an artist who desired to find harmony between man, nature and emptiness.  But to see his works as only pieces of art, above the criticism of scholars, degrades the value of his works because it devalues his great mastery of traditional forms and intense thought. (Phillips, 420) Though no author intends for his work to be canonized, (and admittedly he plays a very limited role in its canonization) canonization nevertheless occurs and literary works like those of Kawabata reach large audiences, influence popular perceptions, and ultimately become “representative.”

In 1940 there is an instance in which Kawabata reveals his knowledge of colonial affairs and the occasional imperial whim in the competition for the Akutagawa Prize.  Kawabata knew about events outside of Japan, even if he did not reference them in his works.  The Akutagawa Prize is named after Ryonosuke Akutagawa, a successful writer of the 1920’s, and is still considered the most prestigious Japanese literary award today. (Kwon, 6)  In 1940, the eventual runner-up was the Korean-national Kim Sa-ryang.  Kawabata praised his “Hikari no naka ni,” a story about finding identity and growing up in colonized Korea, as a great achievement in contemporary Korean Literature.  Though Kim did not win the prize that year, Kawabata is rumored to have favored his work, if only because he had sympathy for Kim’s being a Korean; this serves as an indicator of Kawabata’s patronizing attitude toward Korean writers, though the work imitated some of the features of the uniquely Japanese “shishosetsu” and was written in Japanese.  This was probably an attitude shared by many Japanese writers at the time.  Kawabata was still at this time a fairly young writer, and many of his greater works were still to come, but none of his later works would address the “Korean Problem” cited in Kim’s “Hikari no naka ni.” (Kwon, 8 ) The story also suggested a Japanese problem—that of being both Korean and Japanese—but Kawabata’s prose fails to address (unlike Kim’s) the Japanese-Korean identity, another absence in the his works.

It has already been established how Kawabata’s connections to Japan’s traditions helped give his works unique connotations.  His works helped to construct an image of the Japanese as a pure people with a two thousand year-old tradition of beauty and singularity.  This is exactly the image that the Japanese government of the 1930’s dedicated vast resources to trying to achieve. In composing this image, Kawabata passively promoted Japanese justification of colonialism. As Donald Keene wrote of Kawabata: “He was esteemed by the militarists even though he had done nothing to ingratiate himself.” (Brown, 379) The absence of Japanese-expatriates, Japanese-Koreans, and the Japanese colonizers and the colonized themselves also contributed to a denial of shared histories, and an indifference to imperialism.  The works of Kawabata also subtly affected the imperial movement in Japan by highlighting the East-West struggle that had preoccupied Japanese writers for decades.  Though he would not take the East-West struggle as far as his protégé, Yukio Mishima, Kawabata nevertheless expressed his antagonism toward Western thought.  In 1938 he noted, “I have never experienced such bitter grief and anguish as belong to the West. I have never found that nihilism and decadence which are Western.” (Kawabata, 22) This is similar to the view of Japanese imperialists, who realized Japan’s imitation of the West, but were nevertheless eager to free themselves from Western entanglements.  To again bring up Yomokitsu’s Shanghai, there were a number of people in Japan, China and Korea who wanted a united Asia strong enough to fend of the West.  Some asianists (as they were called) hoped that Japan, being the most modern and technologically advanced country in East Asia, would colonize Asia and bring its people under one banner. (Yokomitsu, 66) Kawabata, on the other hand, was a believer in Japan’s sacred heritage and would have been against Japan’s involvement in an initiative that sought to bring all of Asia together.  To Kawabata, who in Snow Country reflects on loneliness and isolation, an integrated Asia is a far cry from the ideals of Japanese Tradition.  However, politicians in 1930’s Japan were seeking to redefine Japanese Tradition, and the ambiguity of Kawabata’s works allowed for varying interpretations, some of which were complicit with imperialism.  Kawabata’s works had a wide governmental, public and critical appeal, and it is important to remember that a nation’s identity is largely formed through the interplay of these spheres. (Fujii, 178) It is entirely possible that the many readers of his works were able to draw near opposite conclusions, with some in favor of traditional isolation and others bent on colonization of the East to save Japanese tradition from the onslaught of Western thought.

For decades now, Kawabata’s works have enjoyed large audiences in both Japan and the West.  Both the Japanese and their western counterparts read Kawabata for the same reason:  the ability of his works to communicate universal themes while also glorifying tradition.  Kawabata has been a bridge-builder of sorts when it comes to linking Japan and the West.  (Mathy, 211) Thanks in large part to the attentions of Donald Keene and more especially Edward Seidensticker, two revered Japanologists, Kawabata enjoys great reverence in the English-speaking as well as his home country.  It is important to realize the great influence that scholars such as Keene and Seidensticker had on the canonization of Kawabata’s works.  Canonization is an evolving process, and the way we read works will change as our societies change.  Keene and Seidensticker provided readers with the first interpretations of these novels, and they remain the most authoritative.  Their critical acclaim for Kawabata’s works elevated his literature to a higher plane where the traditional themes of Kawabata’s works, coupled with their own preoccupation with traditional themes, worked together to create an image of a Japan free of imperial entanglements.  The Japanologists Seidensticker and Keene gave Western audiences an impression of Japan that was appropriately passive at the time considering there were still American misgivings about the Japanese after World War II; today, however, that popular image of a Japan without an imperial legacy only contributes to the denial of historical fact.

The ultimate result of Seidensticker’s efforts to translate Kawabata, and Keene’s mission to bring Japanese classics to the West, was Kawabata’s Nobel Prize.  (Brown, 375) Nowhere is the praise of Kawabata higher, the obsession with his “Japaneseness” greater, or the desire to understand his antagonism toward the West, better displayed than in the Nobel Presentation Speech.

In common with his older countryman, Tanizaki, now deceased, he has admittedly been influenced by modern western realism, but, at the same time, he has, with greater fidelity, retained his footing in Japan’s classical literature and therefore represents a clear tendency to cherish and preserve a genuinely national tradition of style. In Kawabata’s narrative art it is still possible to find a sensitively shaded situation poetry which traces its origin back to Murasaki’s vast canvas of life and manners in Japan about the year 1000. He has experienced his country’s crushing defeat and no doubt realizes what the future demands in the way of industrial go-ahead spirit, tempo and vitality. But in the postwar wave of violent Americanization, his novel is a gentle reminder of the necessity of trying to save something of the old Japan’s beauty and individuality for the new.

In awarding Japan its first Nobel Prize in Literature, the Committee brought worldwide attention to the works of Japan’s premier modern writer and also to the classical works of Japan that he incorporated into his writings; works that they stated would help to “preserve a genuinely national tradition of style.”  Three works were cited by the Committee as demonstrating Kawabata’s mastery of the traditional Japanese traits of melancholy, loneliness, nature and poetry.  The most perfect among them was The Old Capital, the work that Kawabata called his “abnormal product.”  The story takes place in Kyoto, the ancient capital of Japan, which Kawabata brings to life with descriptions of its summer-time festivals and camphor tree lined parks.  The city is a symbol of Japan, a cultural and historical center that Kawabata subtly suggests is undergoing major transformations. (Brown, 378) It is interesting that the Nobel committee selected this work, which includes an elegiac testament to Japan’s traditional city and a compelling case for its evolution, as Kawabata’s best.  However, it is not altogether surprising.  The Committee has served as an agent of canonization, and its endorsement of a work attesting to the Japanese Tradition and warning against Western transgression into Japanese culture affirms and strengthens the denial of shared histories in Kawabata’s works.  The Committee effectively placed greater emphasis on Japan and the West, and in so doing diverted attention away from the imperial legacy of Japan.  The Old Capital was Kawabata’s “gentle reminder” to the Japanese to reflect on the effects of the “violent wave of Americanization” that were causing the erosion of traditional values and practices.

In 1968, the year Yasunari Kawabata won the Nobel Prize for Literature, only three of his works had been translated into English; Snow Country, Thousand Cranes, The Old Capital, all of which were cited by the committee as qualifying Kawabata for the award.  In the fifties, Donald Keene introduced his Anthology of Japanese Literature to English-speaking audiences.  Naturally, readership of the Japanese poetry and Heian period Classics that he included in his volumes went up, and prompted a higher demand for Japanese authors.  The authors that were translated, namely Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki and the relative newcomer Mishima, were chosen for their great literary talent as well as their connection to the classics that Keene had introduced.  For years, the only available books by Japanese authors were those by such masters, and so the translators, who also had a hand in affecting the decision of the Nobel Committee, steered Japan’s literary canon in a direction away from writings that addressed a Japanese imperial legacy.  Only recently, have the works of the likes of Kim Sa-Ryang, Lee Sang and Yuasa Katsuei—colonial writers—garnered serious scholarly attention.  It may be much longer still before they reach the mainstream, and with such denial of shared histories present over all of East Asia there are doubts as to whether they ever will.

References

Brown, Sidney D. “Yasunari Kawabata (1899-1972): Tradition versus Modernity.” World Literature Today 62.3 (1988): 375-79. Print.

Fujii, James A. “Writing Out Asia: Modernity, Canon, and Kokoro.” N. pag. Print.

Kwon, Nayoung Aimee. “Empire, Nation, and Minor Writer:

“Colonized I-Novel” and the Conundrum of Representing the Colonized.”

Kawabata, Yasunari. “A Thematic Study of the Works of Kawabata Yasunari.” The Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 5.2 (1968): 22-31. Print.

Kawabata, Yasunari. Old Capital. Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2006. Print.

Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Print.

Mathy, Frank. “Kawabata Yasunari : Bridge-builder to the West.” Monumenta Nipponica 24.3 (1969): 211-17. Print.

“Nobel Prize in Literature 1968 – Presentation Speech.” Nobelprize.org. Web. 03 Dec. 2009. <http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1968/press.html>.

Phillips, Brian. “The Tyranny of Beauty: Kawabata.” The Hudson Review 59.3 (2006): 419-28. Print.

Riichi, Yokomitsu,, and Yokomitsu Riichi. Shanghai A Novel (Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies, 33). New York: University of Michigan, 2001. Print.

Introduction

In this paper I will analyze the contemporary internet situation in the People’s Republic of China – a nation that is quickly polarizing the globe as an eminent second superpower contender– through the lens of sociology. I hope that the use of social science methodology can overcome biases of contemporary discourse on this topic, which often is often spurred on by the unpredictable political weather and unscrupulous media coverage. Priority in this paper has been given towards the reflection on the past buildup of internet technologies, diagnosis of the present internet use through empirical data, and social policy recommendations for the future. I have tried to minimize unnecessary political commentary or expression of personal attitudes wherever appropriate. In this paper, I will address the core issue of censorship of the Internet in China, strategies that can be explored by government officials, and finally, realistic recommendations that China can adopt in the 21st century.

Issues

Although a relatively recent invention, the Internet has revolutionized the way people obtain information and communicate around the world. Its original use was for file sharing, but today, it is used for numerous rationales including email, the World Wide Web, streaming media, and collaboration. It is estimated that as many as 1.4 billion people have used the Internet, proving the ubiquitous nature of its existence (Noguchi 2008). Thus, the growth of the World Wide Web has possibly been the single greatest trend in the incorporation of a digital lifestyle for the average human. Even more recent to the use of the Internet has been China, who has seen rapid growth in their economy, and a desire to use the Internet liberally like the rest of the world. However, the Chinese government has produced one of the most extensive internet censorship networks in the world, in accordance with the values of their culture and their government officials. Reporters Without Borders, a non-governmental international organization that advocates freedom of the press, publishes a Worldwide Press Freedom Index each year. According to this prevalent index, China places 163 out of 169 for freedom of press (Grenzen 2008). As a comparative barometer, the United States is 48 on the list and Russia is 144. Since the onset of the Internet in China, the government has been policing the Internet, choosing what its citizens can and cannot see. The main reason for this policy is that the Chinese government is trying to protect the state’s interest, and feels as though the Internet could provide a potential threat to their existence. Thus, the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars to develop matrix systems to censor content and limit personal freedoms on the Internet.

The issue of censorship in China is a fairly recent one, as China was late to pick up on the use of the Internet. As Asia was quickly engulfed by the internet in the past ten years, China was forced to take action regarding censorship, and recent studies have shown that China has 94 million internet users, half of whom have broadband access (Esther 2005). The sheer size of Internet usage in China proves the robust job that the Chinese government faces when trying to regulate the Internet. Censorship in China is conducted under a variety of laws and administrative regulations developed by the government throughout the years. This is done largely through the existence of an Internet police task force that is in charge of both developing the technological software used in censoring, as well as ensuring that adherence to the rules occurs (Kahn 2006). In order to spearhead the initiation of a program directed towards censoring content on the Internet, the Ministry of Public Security created the Golden Shield Project. Started in 2003, this project had the desired goals of constructing a communication network and computer information system for government officials to improve their capabilities and efficiencies in policing the Internet. This culminated in the creation of the “Great Firewall of China,” which uses all of the complex technological hardware and software to censor content. The next few paragraphs will serve to discuss the ways in which China has been so prolific in censoring content on the Internet.

Although China has spent billions of dollars implementing technology used for censorship, including the reportedly $800 million Golden Shield Project, China has created the largest firewall in the world. One reason why this is possible is because China has rewired the fiber optic cables to only enter the country in one of three points: Beijing-Qingdado-Tianjin in the north, Shanghai on the central coast, and Guangzhou in the South where it comes from Hong Kong (Fallows 2008). By doing so, they essentially limited the number of places where they have to monitor and control content. At each of these three international gateways, China has installed tappers, which is a new technology that can mirror every packet of data going in or out – including lightly encrypted caches. Information travels along fiber-optic cables as little pulses of light, and as they travel to these international points, numerous tiny Chinese mirrors bounce reflections and separate the data, which then gets analyzed by Golden Shield computers that decide whether or not the content should be flagged. The Golden Shield computers are programmed to detect and stop information, and do so according to four different pieces of technological software. The first is the DNS (Domain Name Service) block, which in laymen terms, is the telephone directory of Internet sites. Each Web address coincides with a number sequence such as 38.1456.555, and if the number sequence matches the number sequence of a website on the forbidden list provided by the government, then the DNS will give back no address. This is how the Chinese government prevents citizens from going to specific websites, such as <www.freetibet.org>.

The second piece of technology they utilize is the connect phase. After allowing the web address to be processed, the computers can still prohibit the connection to this website, and will interrupt the transmission and prevent it from going through. This scenario applies as an early deterrent to ‘harmful’ e-mails sent by China’s internet users, especially if the e-mail server is located within national boundaries. The third barrier that the Golden Shield project possesses is the URL keyword block. Although the numerical Internet address that one is trying to reach might not be on the blacklist, the words in the URL might include forbidden terms. If this is the case, the computers are designed once again to pick up on this and the connection will be reset. An example of this may be a website that is not prohibited by the government, but contains the word ‘Falun Gong’, which in fact a search term prohibited by the government. This will be picked up by the computational mirrors and prevented from being patched or transmitted.

The final protective barrier that the Chinese government has is perhaps the most sophisticated and secretive of the four: scanning the actual contents of each page. Although the exact software coding utilized is not directly known, engineers have developed a way where the tiny sensors can actually scan the content on every page, judging page-by-page the websites accessibility. Whenever surveillance systems flag an IP address or see prohibited content within the mirrors, authorities have developed technologies that can pinpoint the origination of that search. Thus, there is a good chance that the authorities know what registered user/address is sitting at the computer and where the terminal is located. Within a short duration of time, sometimes less than half-an-hour, authorities can be at their door threatening imprisonment, or they can readily find the address of the home or café in order to mandate fines and further restrictions on Internet usage. An example of this was the story of journalist Shi Tao who had used a Yahoo email account to post pro-democracy materials online. Within a week, local authorities searched his residence, arrested him on suspicion of acting against the government, and jailed him for months. Using the new technology of page-by-page scanning, the computer systems picked up Tao’s blog and the pro-democratic comments that he wrote, and rerouted warnings to the proper officials of the crime. This example shows how serious the Chinese government is about upholding the regulations that they have in place regarding Internet usage.

The censoring of content by the Chinese government has had a great effect on the population of China. This includes not only the general population, but also the academia world as well. Majority of the general population in China does not have direct access to the Internet, so the use of Internet café’s in China is extremely popular. These internet café’s are called Net Bars, and over 50,000 of them exist throughout all of China. Net Bar’s have been particularly hard to regulate, so from October to December of 2004, Chinese authorities closed over 12,000 Net Bars and implemented more stringent laws regarding Internet usage, providing a further inconvenience for the general population. Not only is it extremely hard to get internet access in your own home, which mostly only the wealthy are fortunate enough to afford, but Net Bars now have their own guidelines that they must follow in addition to the typical Golden Shield protocols. In 2005, China implemented new rules banning children under the age of sixteen from Net Bars and required that business owners keep detailed logs for 60 days of Internet usage and the pages visited by the customers. In addition, people must sign in with specific identification cards before they are granted access to the Internet. Firstly, this vastly limits the way children are able to access the Internet. With many homes not having Internet connections, children often must rely on computers at school to access the Internet, which severely limits their capabilities to communicate and obtain relevant information. This stringent Chinese control also has large effects on academia; it is becoming increasingly hard for researchers and scholars to obtain necessary and harmless information that is crucial to their studies.

For example, Professor Chu Huongqi of Beijing Normal University commented that if a Chinese researcher, or any researcher for that matter, wanted to study the Tiananmen Square “situation,” they could not simply put that into Google China and come up with adequate results. Rather, a study at the Beckman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School found that the only results obtained when entering Tiananmen Square related to tourism and the travel industry (Zittrain & Edelman 2005). They did conclude, however, that China is by no means static, and the list of prohibited sites is updated daily and sites are blocked and then unblocked arbitrarily. However, this still suggests that researchers have trouble accessing relevant information because of technological software that China has developed which censors and prohibits specific content.

The uneven implementation of policy that the Chinese government has enacted is quite surprising. For example, none of the censorship seen throughout Mainland China is seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Macau. Rather, these regions have essentially free Internet, and most internet restrictions do not exist in these territories. In Taiwan, their own municipal government regulates their internet, and has done so more liberally than the Chinese government had previously. In Hong Kong, a lot of the same laws do exist, but there are virtually no consequences for violating the rules vis-a-vis blogging or using external servers to allow sites (Kahn 2006). Even pornography is de-regulated in Hong Kong and is fairly accepted by mainstream society. On the other hand, the Chinese government is much stricte censoring Tibet because of their past history with the region, and computer systems are even more limiting as to what they allow and what they don’t allow.

As the Harvard Law Study concluded, there is inconsistency within Mainland China as to what is censored and what is not censored. During the course of the empirical study at Harvard, specific news sites such as CNN and Slashdot were blocked and unblocked in the course of a week. Researchers concluded that news sites with sensitive content do not appear to take long to be blocked, but are taken off the prohibited list with similar expediency. Thus, it is not explicitly known what criteria is used to evaluate which sites are to be censored and which sites are not to be. Specifically, pornography is considered to be one of the most heinous crimes on the internet in China next to blogging about the government; yet during the course of the Harvard Study, only 13.4% of the sample of well-known sexually explicit sites seemed to be blocked from access by the government (compared to 86.2% of the same sites blocked in Saudi Arabia). Nevertheless, sites dealing with such generic concepts as democracy or massacre are almost always prohibited by the government. Thus, the Chinese internet policies are by no means static, and there is a great deal of dynamic inconsistency within the regulation of policy itself.

The increased global attention of censorship within China has resulted in the creation of a number of devious ways by which people sidestep the restrictions and are able to get the information they need or want. Although it was previously believed that only businesses (especially those based offshore) were capable of sidestepping the restrictions via private cache reserves and encrypted data packet streamlining, recent research has indicated that the general population has the capability, given enough technical knowledge and effort, to get around the censors. The first way that people get around the firewall is through a proxy server. A proxy server in essence is a way of connecting a computer inside China with another computer outside out China, allowing it to retrieve information from American or Japanese servers and transferring it to Chinese ones. This is a cheap way to get around the regulations, which makes it popular among students and hackers.

Using proxy servers does, however, make Internet usage very slow, so more businesses choose to use VPN’s, or Virtual Pirate Networks. The VPN basically creates your own private, encrypted channel to run alongside the normal Internet, and can transfer information from a server outside China to one inside China. VPN’s only cost $40 per year, but for the average Chinese worker who makes a little over a dime a day, this cost is too exorbitant and cannot be used (Fallows, 2008). Although this problem is easily correctable by the government, the bottom line is that every bank, every foreign manufacturing company, and every retailer needs VPN’s to exist, and the Chinese government could not survive without the survival of these firms. Thus, although certain individuals are now exploiting the loopholes in the system, the Chinese government currently has little choice and must allow some exceptions to its control if it wants the economy and its culture to remain intact.

Since there are currently loopholes within the censoring system, it is evident that the Chinese government needs assistance by various companies and organizations throughout China and the rest of the world. It is simply not reasonable for China to police the internet by themselves, so they have adopted policies to garner help from others. The Internet Society, which is a state-owned ISP, recently enacted laws requiring that domestic internet providers, as well as content creators, sign a pledge that they will self-filter. Though somewhat flimsily dependent on self-governance, this is the first line of defense for the government. By having the domestic Internet providers such as Baidu self-filter, they eliminate a great deal of work that they would otherwise have to do on their own. It also shifts some of the costs from the government to the corporations. This also applies to search engines in China such as Google. There was a lot of public outrage in America that Google entered the Chinese market knowing that they would be censored, calling it un-democratic and anti-American. However, Google was faced with only two live options: enter and comply with Chinese internet procedures or ignore the Chinese market altogether (Ghitis, 2006). There was no third option for Google of entering the Chinese market and refusing to comply with state-imbued policies.

Not entering the Chinese market would have extensively damaged the potential economic success for the company, and Google was not ready to sit back and allow competitors compete for valuable international market share. A series of unyielding transparency requests from the search engine Altavista back in the early 2000’s hindered its entrance to the Chinese sector. This proves the power that the Chinese government yields over foreign companies, even those that pledge to make large direct investments in technological infrastructure and software improvements. Not wanting to miss out on an exponentially expanding consumer market, most foreign firms are willing to sacrifice some or their organizational morals and typical protocols to take share in some of the burgeoning profits. Google is only one of the countless examples of foreign firms (including Cisco Systems, who allegedly helped create the mirror software that the Chinese government employs) which succumb to the pressure of the Chinese government in order to gain profit from this new emerging market.

Policy Alternatives

In line with the other powerful nations on the planet and the rest of the world as a whole – the internet is becoming an ever-increasingly difficult entity to monitor. The act of trying to contain this phenomena from conducting its course becomes a difficult, if not impossible decision altogether. China’s stringent internet policies and strict codes of conduct are becoming harder and harder to enforce, especially as the number of Chinese internet users and younger generations familiar with computer systems increases. (Kahn, 2006) After much analysis of the current situation and outlook on China’s internet system, a total of three feasible solutions were conceived to represent realistic and ‘live’ options for the ruling party.

First, China could decide to restrict internet even further than they are currently doing in order to demonstrate the concept of protecting the ‘security’ of the state and elevating it way above the rights of the individual. All inbound and outbound e-mail would be filtered and flagged for sensitive information, while intense server notification systems would alert authorities over potential ‘trouble makers’. More ‘illegal’ websites would be blocked from Chinese users, and the list of internet offenses would be updated on a constant basis. What this means is that the Chinese government would have to invest heavily in upgrading existing technological monitoring systems and establishing a larger budget portion (currently unknown) to pay the increased hike in the recruitment of additional ‘internet police’. Of course, labor in China is not very expensive, and with the esoteric design of the current system in place, China would not have to radically alter anything. It can be expected that there some protests would break out amongst the population internally, but nothing radical (i.e. Tiananmen Square) would be expected. Note that this choice is hardly discussed among academic critics or political figureheads of the Western world – many believe that China’s current system is already acceptable as it is and do not entertain the thought of it getting any worse. But for fairness’ sake, this presentable option must be included into the list of all possible choices for the CCP.

Second, the Chinese government could open up the internet by increasing users’ freedoms within Chinese-governed provinces. The mobilization towards such a move would be simple; the Chinese government could choose to literally do nothing. All existing internet security personnel would be redirected towards other jobs in the government, and the current firewalls and filtering systems would all but become obsolete by the year’s end. In this regard, the actual mechanism of the choice is a passive one – increased internet freedom generally means a lower rate of governance and an increased expectation on personal discipline, which should not be a problem for many Chinese. However, the strain on the Chinese government in making this decision is actively opening up the possibility that China’s state rule will be suspect to revolutionary change in its functional role as the authoritative government. Individuals within China might see this slack in policy as the catalyst for China to slide down that slippery slope into eventual democracy. While many external nations and organizations would like to see this progressive change within China – it is not clear how well China will take any significant alterations to its rule. The economic, social, and political impacts would be entirely impossible to accurately predict from within Chinese Communist Party rule, much less a limited Western perspective. If Russia’s transformation to democracy is any example of what a communist state must go through in order to reach true democratic ideology, then the option of reducing control on citizens becomes unappetizing.

Third, the Chinese government may decide to play it by ear and maintain the current system until it reaches a critical point at which it is forced to confront the two above options. Waiting it out would give the Chinese government more time to consider all possible risks and benefits associated with either of the above choices. In addition, there should not be much increased negative publicity on China’s current practices as long as they maintain the status quo – that is, things should not get much worse in the public spotlight of Western nations if China stays on course. This would give the CCP an unbiased and clear head to think things through, with the possibility of testing minor technical policies or regulatory techniques along the way.

Keep in mind that, for all of the three choices listed, there is very little involvement of any actual public involvement in this policy. The unique setting of the dominant Chinese government gives it ultimate reign in matters like these, which are considered quasi-issues of national security. As such, the ramifications of a potentially wrong choice are almost internally (within China, that is) nonexistent, save for a few localized incidents or minor protests. In other words, no matter what policy China chooses, all will be considered to be superficially ‘correct’ by the Chinese population because there will not be any public dissent tolerated. Thus forth, it is extremely difficult to accurately gauge the level of agreement that the majority of Chinese internet users will have with any of the policies selected above. All quantitative or qualitative data may be skewed in favor of a rather ‘nationalistic’ mindset, rather than to reflect a true, discerning common perception. (Abrams 2008)

Let us consider, without incidental bias, the effects of other highly restrictive internet systems in the world, as rated by prevailing beliefs in the modern era. Kim Jong Il’s North Korean regime has some of the world’s toughest internet regulations, but it is a ridiculously harsh state in which citizens living in Pyongyang need a permit just to leave the city. Iran’s new Ahmadinejad-led government has recently cracked down on the accessibility of particular regions to photojournalists, but how similar is Iran’s geo-political climate in comparison to China’s internet landscape? The internet security of Myanmar (formerly the Union of Burma) is one of the globe’s most stringent, but a causal comparison between Myanmar’s population and the amount of Chinese internet users reveals how such a prolific control is possible for a relatively encumbered few. A picture is beginning to manifest that, not surprisingly, China is a unique example of a large, influential global power still holding on to its preventative early communist roots. Even if internet regulatory techniques are similarly contrasted between China and other countries – the history, culture, and sheer volume of China’s people are an overwhelmingly difficult and unique population to govern. As with much of the past five thousand years in which China isolated itself in times of crises, a policy originating from within China might be the best solution once and for all. (Grenzhen 2008)

Eventually, there will be a critical ‘bottleneck’ point – the proverbial fork in the road in which China has to decide which path to follow. Until that juncture, China may maintain its current status quo by playing a balancing act between strong censorship and individual license to browse. The dilemma still exists, though, as to when China will have to choose a single road. The CCP cannot maintain this constant juggling act forever. Consideration and planning today for that future decision could have a vital effect on whether or not China successfully deals with the thriving Asian technological boom.

From an economic standpoint, China has a great deal to benefit from ‘opening’ up the internet. The sanctioning of unlimited online action would have tremendous consequences for the business and economic world. Companies from all over the world would not have to rely on a few privately monitored servers anymore; instead, numerous servers and hosts would replace the need for the slow and inefficient process of screening incoming and outgoing e-mails or invoices. (Pan 2008) In fact, the possibility of outside proxy servers and foreign IP address all accessing China’s mainframes without harassment raises the potential for increased business communication within China.

In addition, the average consumer would seek to benefit from an opening in China’ internet security with fewer restrictions communicating with the ‘outside world’. A flurry of new possibilities in academic and institutional exchanges can come about if China is willing to relax the austere principles which govern her internet policies. With the impressive statistic that over 60% of China’s internet users view media files (i.e. video, music, pictures) online on a daily basis, lessening the restrictions can be seen as releasing the floodgates of freedom to the mounting frustrations regarding the slow bandwidths and connection speeds in relation to large media files. (Zittrain & Edelman 2005)

From a personal perspective, the technological landscape in China seems to be changing at a volatile pace. As the world’s leading country in economic growth the past few years (close to 10% GDP annual increase), why would any bureau or organization seek to slow down the boom by way of clandestine technical matters? Economic incentives to ‘open’ the internet are far greater than to ‘close’ it even further.

Future Strategies

Suspension of Judgment

As much as this might seem like a ‘cop-out’ option, suspension of judgment is probably the best choice for China would be suspend their judgment of any changes needing to be made at least until the end of this calendar year (2009), if not a few years farther. This option is the closest we have to a pseudo-compromise – one that will partition both sides of the argument for China’s internet security to be further developed before a move is made. With consequences of an enormous magnitude, this difficult choice represents a model on which to potentially base other media decisions on later. The Olympics last summer served as an excellent starting point for such trial periods in which the freedoms and limits of internet use will be tested by the CCP. Cumulative user and access data from all over the country was collected, but none of it has yet to be revealed. (Pan 2008)

There is a wide range of opinions regarding the moves that China should make in terms of changing its internet policies. Why not narrow that range and focus on small steps, one at a time? In all of its 5,000 year history, China has not been known for making wide-sweeping policy changes under government rule / kingdom domain – only drastic measures have been taken to displace current administrations or dynasties. Experimentation will likely appease, in minuscule portions, both staunch conservative advocates of China’s internal security and liberal demonstrators for its freedom. At worst, this decision would prolong the agony of waiting for a definitive clause regarding internet policies, but it would also minimize the risk of deciding on a potentially devastating choice.

It is important that China makes this decision (even if the citizens are not involved with the actual process), and that it is not made for China. A single person deciding the policy within the CCP is better than a thousand individuals planning China’s program from the outside, as the CCP must maintain autonomy and a reputable sense of control if any of its policies are actually going to be implemented successfully. Only proof-positive conclusions from an internally-generated decision will be effective in the long run. Furthermore, as seen prior demonstrations and riots, the CCP does not respond particularly well to mounting external pressure. Diplomats, trade relations, private corporations, and international events may all contribute to China’s decision – but it ultimately has to be made independently. (Noguchi 2008) An honest and candid self-examination of China is the only sufficient option.

Visibility

In any case, no matter what strategy China employs, it must be made visible. What this means is that the typical citizen can be expected to know at least the basic premises of such a policy – pleas of ignorance, even if discarded before by the governing bodies, should lessen drastically in volume as every tech user becomes aware of his or her limitations in cyberspace (if any at all). The increase in visibility regarding China’s future internet policies should not be limited to inside sources. Rather, an international understanding (and even possible approval) by foreign entities would be best for everyone. (Fallows 2008) Education is a key component here. Internet users, while annually growing by the millions, are becoming younger and younger demographically. In order to raise substantial awareness about this issue, goals should be set to teach children at a young age the rules and regulations governing China’s evolving internet policies. Questions regarding certain procedures or protocols should be directed to a single source (read: information hotline/authority) that is both easy to find and access by the common user. No shrouds of visibility should haunt the ‘borderline Democratic’ blogger uncertain about the consequences of his/her actions. Contact information regarding technical problems should be routed to a few sources with as little political red tape in between as possible. After all, the approach that was taken to analyze the current situation in China believed it to be a public policy issue – something that, while maybe not entirely decided by the public, is consistently practiced and accepted by the public. Knowledge is power – if so, then China must adapt that mantra and start to educate the masses instead of merely issuing seemingly random punitive damages. (Zittrain & Edelman 2005)

Conclusions

All in all, the course of China’s internet security and preventative systems measures reflect on the format of policy decisions within China. While few governmental policy shifts can be labeled as ‘easy’ so-to-speak, choices involving China’s freedom of expression and government censorship are of particular importance, since they dictate (no pun intended) the paradigms by which the entire communist charter operates from. Then again, are the ideals of freedom in which we are so accustomed to entirely presentable to Chinese masses that have never seen the likes of unadulterated democracy? Is China’s current system ready for such a sweeping reform or liberated internet communications? More questions than answers prevail.

It is easy to jump on the bandwagon of popular Western thought and believe that China should / can / will do only one thing – but how paradoxically close-minded is this process of thinking? Trying to view China’s issues from their lenses, while socially and politically difficult, is at least cognitively beneficial towards considering all sides of the issue. There are risks and rewards in all choices, and the consequences of a policy directing over a billion people are of high priority. The question, thus forth, remains: “What would be best for China?” Conversely, we are forced to ask ourselves if what is good for China – is good for the rest of the world?

References

Abrams, Steven. “Censorship in China.” Amnesty International USA. 19 Mar. 2008. <http://www.amnestyusa.org/business_and_Human-Rights/Internet.pago.do1101>.

“China’s Internet Censorship.” CBS News 03 Dec. 2002. 09 Mar. 2008. <http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/03/tech/main531567/shtml>.

Fallows, James. “The Connection Has Been Made.” The Atlantic (2008). 11 Mar. 2008. <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200803/chinese-firwall>.

Grenzen, Ohne. “Press Freedom: Changed by Day.” Reporters Without Borders 08 Mar. 2008. <http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?_article=240525>.

Kahn, Joseph. “China Has World’s Tightest Internet Censorship, Study Finds.” The New York Times. 4 Dec 2006. 04 Mar. 2000. <http://newyorktimes.com/china/204567_censorship>.

Noguchi, Yuki. “Internet Frims to Defend Policies.” The Washington Post 15 Feb. 2006. 09 May 2008. <http://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/article/2006/02/14/AR2006021>.

Pan, Esther. “China’s New Internet Restrictions.” Council on Foreign Relations (2005). 09 Mar. 2008. <http://cfr.org/publication/8913/>.

Zittrain, Jonathan, and Edelman, Benjamin. Empirical Analysis of Filtering in China. Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Harvard Law School. Boston: OpenNet Initiative, 2005.

Globalization, a phenomenon fueled by market economics and technological innovations, has influenced the world in such a way where it has permeated culture and thus, has impacted film. While often studied in the context of what Saskia Sassen calls, “the duality national/global,” it is equally important to conceptualize the process in terms of the “global city” (205). In terms of economics, it highlights the decline in influence of the national economy as a unit in lieu of globalization and it allows one to analyze the impact of globalization upon individuals rather than upon masses in a society. The latter is particularly useful in the study of how the growing importance of the market economy has impacted film culture. In Peter Chan’s Comrades, Almost a Love Story, the main plot revolves around a love story between two migrant workers, yet the impact of globalization and the subsequent emphasis on the market economy permeates nearly every aspect of the film. Within the backdrop of the film lies what Sassen describes as “the overvalorization of corporate capital and the further devalorization of disadvantaged economic actors” and the topic of migration within and between nations (206). As a result, the main conflict of the film revolves around two migrants’ attempts to balance their economic aspirations with their personal desires. Wong Kar Wai’s Fallen Angels is another film that explores the market economy’s ability to alienate individuals within the metropolis through the portrayal of two contrasting individuals, Wong Chi-Ming, a contract killer who upholds the careful balance of the market, and He Qiwu, a free-spirit who manages to transcend the confusion and impersonality of the city. Ultimately, these two films serve to illuminate the metropolitan man’s struggle with the market economy and the pursuit of personal identity and satisfaction.

As globalization established itself as the new world order, certain cities became centralized hubs for providing services and sites for headquarter operations and thus became globalized cities. Yet many more factors differentiate the global city from other cities in the region. While cities are typically embedded in the economies and cultures of their regions, global cities “tend … to become disconnected from their region and even nation” (Sassen 212). Inevitably, the other cities “become increasingly peripheral” in terms of culture and economy. A further consequence of globalization is its effect of “denationalize[ing] national territory” which is ultimately disorienting for the metropolitans (Sassen 214). The resulting transformation of the world economy towards “one dominated by financial centers, global markets, and transnational firms” has ultimately placed a great emphasis on the success of individuals participating in the market economy. As global cities become central locales for the global market, immigration and migration to these global cities occur. These cities become “the terrain where people from many different countries are most likely to meet and a multiplicity of cultures come together” (Sassen 217). Eventually, all these forces impact the citizens’ psyche to the point where globalization’s effect on cities is mirrored in the individuals themselves. The stressed importance of the financial market forces a highly impersonal “how much?” mentality that alienates the populace from one another. There is also a greater psychological and cultural distance between those who are considered a part of the new global market order and those who remain outside. Subsequently, the process of denationalizing national territory and the concentration of diversity disorient, alienate, and cause a loss of identity among the citizens. Ultimately, these characteristics are translated from the societies themselves to the medium of film and embody the underlying tension of two particular films, Fallen Angels and Comrades, Almost a Love Story.

At the very beginning of Fallen Angels, Wong Chi-Ming, a contract killer, states that “the best thing about my profession is there’s no need to make any decisions.” He essentially becomes the individual that Simmel argues is “a mere cog in an enormous organization of things and powers which tear from his hands all progress, spirituality, and value” (422). In Ming’s case, his role is firmly established in the money economy of the city. The very basis of his job requires him to reduce men to numerical values, a process that only serves to alienate him further. His side job as a debt collector reinforces his role in upholding the integrity of the market economy, an entity so complex that “without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos” (Simmel 412). Yet after being shot in the arm, he decides to end his partnership, though he admits it is perfect from a business standpoint. It appears that the act of being shot results in his acceptance of a blasé attitude, one that Simmel argues “results … from the rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves” (414).  In his case, the act of being shot is one of the most brutal and jarring ways to stimulate one’s nerves. However, before he retracts completely, he meets Blondie, an individual desperately seeking her own individuality. Yet it is not her personal quest for differentiation that convinces Ming, but rather her chance encounter with his former partner that allows them to meet for the first time. In doing so, he decides to forsake his business partnership and chooses to fulfill his former partner’s personal favor. Ultimately, this action carries massive implications as it not only leads to his death but also represents an act of defiance toward the economic model he had previously been responsible to maintain. Unfortunately, he is unable to alter the carefully constructed system of payment for any rendered service and as a result, reduces his own life to a numerical value to maintain the fragile balance.

In direct opposition to Wong Chi-Ming’s stoic support of the market economy, He Qiwu, through his insights into the nature of the city, embodies the level of free-will that everyone in the city desires. The nature of his character is actually in direct defiance with Simmel’s description of the metropolitan citizen. He Qiwu’s decision to be his own boss stems from his inability as a mute to function normally in both market and social aspects of the city. However, he fulfills his business aspirations by breaking into other people’s shops after hours and forcing “customers” to obtain services or goods that they clearly do not want until payment is offered to leave them alone. This act clearly defies the traditional relationship between the customer and the vendor. Yet his success is important as it allows him to maintain a role in the market economy, while simultaneously transcending its highly neutral and impersonal “How much?” nature to develop an unlikely relationship with a repeat customer. The use of force is actually quite necessary to jolt his customers from their protective shell and reengage their senses. Granted, he is only successful on one occasion, but that speaks to the affect that the metropolis has on its inhabitants. He describes his mentality by saying: “We rub shoulders with many people every day. Some may become your friends, or even confidants. That’s why I’ve never given up these chances. Sometimes I’d rub till it hurts. No big deal, as long as I feel good.” While He Qiwu does indeed find the loophole in the global city’s conundrum of personalizing the market economy, he does not alter the system in any way. Such an endeavor would ultimately translate into a effort of one man against the city, which has transformed into a much greater global construct as a result of globalization. As opposed to Wong Chi-Ming, He Qiwu simply tries to carve out a personal niche. His actions are not the acceptable norm and as a result, there are many scenes in which his advances are rejected, sometimes with violent force. Yet he manages to find his own happiness in a city where monetary gain is emphasized over personal desire, which is far greater than what many metropolitans are able to accomplish.

In Chan’s Comrades, Almost a Love Story, the struggle between success in the global market economy and the pursuit of personal happiness provides the context for the love story between XiaoJun Li and Qiao Li. In doing so, the film explores many of the consequences of globalization that Sassen details within her article. However, one of the main points established initially is the difference in knowledge of the money economy displayed by XiaoJun and Qiao. XiaoJun, after he initially arrives in the city, primarily narrates through the many letters he writes to his girlfriend, Xiao-ting, back home. As a result, the separation between Hong Kong, the global city, and Wusih, a peripheral city, is established. This disparity is particularly emphasized throughout the beginning of the film. In one particular letter, he states that his monthly salary of two thousand dollars is more than that of the mayor of his hometown, which illuminates the significant economic gain that a city attains when joining the global economic order. Another example is when XiaoJun says that he will “go to a place where Wusih people have never been” and then the scene slowly cuts to the McDonald’s logo, a universal symbol for all the multinational corporations that initiated and fueled globalization. Particularly, the lack of a McDonald’s in Wusih is a strong indicator that it is a peripheral city. Once the difference between global cities and peripheral cities is clearly established, the focus is shifted to the particular market economy in Hong Kong. One of the first lessons on money that Qiao Li teaches XiaoJun is about the ATM card. She describes it as “a card for cash withdrawal. You put it into the computer. The computer spits out the money.” Her simplistic description does not fully reveal the complexities of the market, nor does it even hint at the most basic truth: the exchange system. The ATM machine is used many times throughout the film to demonstrate Qiao’s economic state, which also indirectly mirrors the economic state of the city. As she is seen with an increasing balance, the economic prosperity of the city is implied. However, when the stock market crashes and XiaoJun comments that the regulars to his restaurant stopped going due to the economy, her balance reflects the rapid decline after dropping from 32,000 dollars to only 89 dollars. Qiao, who is also a mainlander like XiaoJun, is a very goal and money-oriented individual. Along with her many jobs, she receives a commission for introducing people to an English tutoring school. This act represents her forceful attempts to establish herself in the market economy. The jobs that she holds however are considered among Sassen’s lower economic roles in the global city. Yet she desires to escape the roles set aside for the marginalized individuals of the city and gain influence through the acquisition of money. As a result, the very basis of Qiao and XiaoJun’s relationship is formed through business partnerships in her entrepreneurial excursions.  Qiao’s experience and XiaoJun’s ineptitude in dealing with the market economy is most evident during a scene in which he forgets his pin number and has his card retained by the machine while Qiao debates investing her wealth in the stock market. By forgetting his pin, XiaoJun essentially forgets one of the most important sequences of digits in a numerically based society. On the other hand, Qiao begins to think about the stock exchange, which is the market economy in its purest form. She states that “if you want to be rich in Hong Kong, you must buy stock[s] and shares.” The acquisition of stocks is thus seen as an investment into the global economy and a requirement for any attempt to gain status in Hong Kong. While XiaoJun does eventually gain a greater knowledge of money management, he never achieves the level of success that Qiao ultimately attains.

Globalization has also led to the mass migration of people from rural areas to global cities as well as migration between global centers. Yet as one transitions from a peripheral city to a global metropolis, these individuals must decide between either retaining their old identity or alienating themselves from their past to successfully assimilate into the new global society. The film begins with a train packed full of migrant workers traveling to Hong Kong. XiaoJun is seen wide-eyed and attempts to take everything in by looking everywhere as he makes awkward steps to the escalator. As he ascends up into the white light, it is akin to a journey to heaven or paradise with Hong Kong representing such an ideal. Still early into his arrival, there is an extended scene with him skipping and jumping around with a massive grin on his face. He even plays video games vicariously by watching someone else play and joins with dancers in the streets. The wide-eyed behavior is one that Simmel calls “the intensification of nervous stimulation” and is one that the metropolitan man is unable to maintain without eventually being uprooted by an overstimulation of the senses (410). Hong Kong citizens also disdain the attitude of mainlanders. As a result, upon meeting with Qiao, XiaoJun lies about not being from the mainland. She displays a strong desire to separate herself from any non-Hong Kong association. Yet in an attempt to take advantage of the large migrant population, she tries to sell Teresa Tang cassettes, which allegedly only mainlanders enjoy. Inevitably, she is unable to sell any as she did not account for the migrant’s desire separate from the mainlander image. However, the greatest irony lies in the revelation by Qiao that “actually all Hong Kong people came from the mainland.” As a result, the true desire is to attain the global ideal and renounce the regional culture, a phenomenon that mirrors the desires of the city. For the most part, the global ideal is one that is heavily influenced by western culture. Qiao stresses the importance of learning English in the city to XiaoJun by stating that he “can work anywhere if [he] know[s] English.” The usefulness of knowing English, the global language, in Hong Kong is essentially due to globalization. Western culture also presents itself when Qiao’s aunt tells him to call her only by her Western name, Rosie. Subsequently, in a conversation about the difficulties of moving to Hong Kong, Qiao states that “if you work at it, anything is possible here.” The quote is essentially the American Dream that has spread through globalization and has now become an achievable goal in any global city.

Economic forces and an attempt to distance themselves from their mainland roots ultimately influences the basis of XiaoJun and Qiao’s relationship throughout the film. XiaoJun’s bicycle proves to be a recurring symbol for one’s attachment to one’s roots. The scenes in which XiaoJun delivers food on his bike show his ability to sense the surrounding stimulation, and it is at these moments he appears happiest. When he offers a ride to Qiao, he states that when he is riding, it is as if he is “back in Wusih.” The ride prompts them to both sing happily as they pass through the busy metropolitan street. As the city noises are silenced and replaced with music, their sheer happiness becomes a critique on the busy lifestyle of the inhabitants influenced by the necessities of the market economy.  However, eventually XiaoJun finds himself becoming increasingly embedded within the goals of economic globalization and his ties with his hometown gradually splinter. Simultaneously, the emphasis on money in XiaoJun and Qiao’s relationship steadily increases. The tension amplifies dramatically when Qiao loses most of her money in the stock market crash, while XiaoJun retains most of his wealth because he did not invest. The scene in the jewelry store exemplifies the collision of tension and economic forces that had been slowly fulminating. When XiaoJun and Qiao shop for his girlfriend’s birthday present, Qiao comments that the shop workers will look down on them because of the way they are dressed. Yet he states, “But I have money. I’m really buying. … Money in my pocket gives me confidence.” Possessing money immediately brings legitimacy and assurance. However, when XiaoJun reveals that Qiao is working as a masseuse, she immediately becomes embarrassed in front of the shop worker. Though both work in the service sector, there still exists a hierarchy of respectability in the global economy. XiaoJun shows that despite having time to acclimate to the city, he still retains certain ineptitudes about the social and economic system. He asks if the complimentary chocolates were for sale and tries to get a discount on the bracelets for buying more than one. The entire interaction reveals that XiaoJun will never be able to fully immerse himself in the global society. However, Qiao, distraught over her lack of money, is one who has come to require the security of money to remain within the global economic order. When Qiao confronts XiaoJun about their intentions to come to Hong Kong, they remind themselves that they initially migrated to achieve economic success. The decision to separate to pursue their economic goals only emphasizes the demands the money market requires upon its global citizens. As time passes and XiaoJun’s bicycle gradually falls into disrepair, thereby symbolizing his withdrawal from his roots, Qiao and XiaJun eventually succeed in achieving their goals: XiaoJun is able to bring his girlfriend to Hong Kong and Qiao becomes a successful business entrepreneur. Yet, when they talk about their success, there remains an undertone of sadness in their voices. Qiao reveals that though she finally builds a house in her hometown, her mother passes away before its completion. XiaoJun, due to the stresses of his job, falls out of touch with his wife. She discusses about how he was very talkative in Wusih and how they would go on bike rides. Ultimately globalization’s stress on an economic ideal forces them to forgo their personal desires and slowly lose their relationship to those around them. However, when XiaoJun sees Teresa Tang, he runs over for an autograph while Qiao remains in the car. His excitement reveals that he still has vestiges of feelings for the world outside of the global city, whereas Qiao, who is much further engrained in the globalized economy, does not easily act atypical to the metropolitan citizen. Yet since she remains conflicted, she eventually reunites with XiaoJun due to Teresa Tang, whom develops into a recurring symbol for ties to one’s roots.

The process of globalization of cities is ultimately reflects on the individuals within the city as well. As the city becomes increasingly isolated culturally and economically from the surrounding region, its inhabitants follow in the same vein and cease their relationships with their roots. As the city gains diversity but loses its own national identity, its individuals lose their own sense of identity. As the market economy influences the city to adopt the impersonal exchange model, the individuals become increasingly alienated from their fellow citizens. As the international money economy reinforces the importance of personal wealth, the metropolitans focus on the pursuit of gain over personal desires. As all of these factors influence societies, their authority permeates the media of film, and ultimately forms important themes in the quest for love and identity.

References

Duo Luo Tian Shi. Dir. Wong Kar Wai. Perfs. Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Charli Yeung, Karen Mok. 1998. DVD. Kino, 2004.

Sassen, Saskia. “Whose City Is It? Globalization and the Formation of New Claims.” Public Culture 8 (1996): 205-223.

Simmel, Georg. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Trans. Kurt H. Wolff. London: Free Press, 1964.

Tian Mi Mi. Dir. Peter Chan. Perfs. Leon Lai, Maggie Cheung, Eric Tsang. 2001. DVD. Tai Seng, 2001.