Comments on: Riots in Longnan City, Gansu Province: Official Statistics and (Semi) Official Backgrounders

By: justrecently

justrecently — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:29:39 +0000

Thanks for the info, C.A. and Neddy. I’d think that the task of foreign correspondents now is to test the reliability of Beijing’s offer – that they can travel anywhere and conduct interviews with anyone without prior official permission. The problem with our mainstream media is that they seem to believe that China begins in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong and ends West of Anhui province.
That said, I think that the comparatively open media approach in China recently is news. One motive for this approach may be that there may be officials who actually think that more openness about “incidents” like the Longnan riots may help to hold local officials accountable without much more democratization (which wouldn’t be a real promising approach, but still a new approach).
Corruption is one undeniable cause for unrest. In that regard, the cnhubei article, translated by the China Media Project is pretty old-fashioned in style, but illustrative in its argumentation.
Now, for the funding that is draining away from compensation and reconstruction into unplanned budgets and pockets, I’d say it has a lot to do with the global economic crisis anyway. As long as incomes are generally rising, corruption is more tolerable than when times get tough, and budgets get tight.
I don’t want to downplay corruption in China – it is on an extraordinary scale for a country that has developped so rapidly in many fields. But public money has a tendency to arrive in unintended places. How much of the foreign aid pledged for Afghanistan during two international donor conferences has really arrived in Kabul to date? And how much of that has been used appropriately by the Karzai government and local warlords?
The opportunity I see in this crisis is that it forces governments and business people to make smarter choices – I’m really curious about the plan the US government has demanded from GM before bailing it out. As for China’s choices, I think that its more open approach can help – anything that provides information for foreign investors can create more trust than the secretive approach the CCP has taken up until now. But any unrest will come to light. You can’t hide something like the Longnan conflicts in this digital age.
I expect better work from Western correspondents in China – they must go beyond the big cities close to the East Coast more frequently. But this coverage won’t make that much of a difference in China.
I think the decisive point will be if the CCP will become more accountable to its own people. Only a government that earns the trust of its own people will earn the trust of foreign investors – no matter how Beijing spins the propaganda.
I think the picture of China within and without has become more realistic in the past one or two years.

By: Neddy

Neddy — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:25:54 +0000

Have you guys read the “The Longnan riots and the CCP’s global spin campaign” article? Not only it is a pretty comprehensive coverage of the events, with sources and links, but also a take on the CCP’s (news media) Control 2.0 strategy.

http://cmp.hku.hk/2008/11/20/1368/

As for that snippet about earthquake relief C.A. offers in her comment, I recently came across an account by someone who recently snooped around places hit by this year’s quake. He quoted a local: “We were promised a compensation at (equivalent of) $60/square metre of lost dwellings. What we got was $15. Where is the rest of the money?” Who needs a crystal ball to divine that… But I haven’t saved the link to this. Stoopid me… sorry.

By: C.A. Yeung

C.A. Yeung — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 01:24:05 +0000

It is interesting to see how Chinese officials are starting to blame everything that has gone wrong in China on the global financial crisis.

The Chinese netizens’ comments translated at Global Voices seem to suggest that people are suspecting someone is fiddling with emergency relief money. So it’s not just a case of worrying about a delay in the constructing of new homes.

A friend of mine and her family were victims of the Tangshan earthquake. She was very young at the time. She once told me that she spent her whole childhood and teenage years living in a tent, waiting for her house to be rebuilt. I didn’t quite believe in her story then, not that I thought she was lying, but more like she might have exaggerated the story. Now this incident at Gansu mades me realize how something like that might have happened.