Christina Larson's blog

This afternoon in Shanghai, U.S. President Barack Obama held a townhall-style meeting with university students. It was an event that his staff had worked hard to include on his China trip itinerary. After a brief speech extolling the importance of core values to the success of the United States as a nation and Americans as individuals, Obama took questions from the audience and online.

It has since come to light that not all of the questions came from bonafide students. One questioner was a vice director of daily affairs for the Communist Youth League; another was a young-looking teacher. Obama's answers about Internet freedom weren't heard by most remote audiences because several networks, including CNN, mysteriously cut away for commentary at that moment. The response among expats in China was, by and large, negative -- with many complaining Obama had minced his words, talking for instance of "universal rights" rather than "human rights." If one is looking to be cynical, there's plenty of fodder.

On the other hand, from the point of view of most Chinese I've spoken, these official efforts at censorship might have been silly, or nefarious, but they didn't have much impact. The notion of a president taking questions, not a frequent occurence in China, was itself the point. The symbolism was more arresting, to them, than the content. "Why does he want to talk to Chinese students?" one 29-year-old Chinese woman asked me, without irony. She was puzzled, impressed, and a bit amused at the spectacle. 

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The editor of China's most influential financial muckraking journal, Hu Shuli, has resigned. For several months, Hu had been under pressure to tone down the aggressive, investigative tone of the magazine from Caijing's business partners, who in turn had come under pressure from government officials. Hu will assume a new post as dean of Sun Yat-sen University's School of Communication and Design, and is expected to launch another editorial venture, likely involving several of her top editorial staffers, who quit alongside their editor-in-chief.

More details will surely come out in the coming days, but already one thing the incident shed light on is how censorship works in China. To western audiences, when we hear about "state-run media," we are accustomed to envisioning a censor with a red-pen, a list of forbidden topics, and an army of automaton scribes marching out to do the state's bidding.

In fact, the reality is much more subtle, and pernicious. There are indeed directives sent from the central propaganda office to the editors of major news outlets in China detailing forbidden topics. But aside from this high level communication, most censorship actually happens internally -- Chinese journalists, who by and large are bright and inquisitive (and drawn to journalism for the same reasons as western journalists: curiosity about the world, desire to travel, etc) work within the system and gradually learn the boundaries of what can and can't be said.

Official politics, for instance, are off-limits, as are details about the personal lives of political leaders. A friend who edits the Beijing-based Environmental Protection Journal once complained to me that he was struggling to make climate change interesting, and lamented that he couldn't tally and lampoon Hu Jintao's carbon footprint, as American publications have done for Al Gore. (Also off limits are any details about Hu Jintao's hair dye, which a reporter at Beijing Youth Daily classified, only half-jokingly, as "deepest state secret.")

What makes Hu Shuli so unique is that she's operated effectively within this system, without ever internalizing it. She has spent time studying and working abroad, not uncommon among Chinese journalists, but never accepted that the rules must be entirely different in China. Caijing has not been directly dependent on state-funding, also relatively rare in China, because Hu went out and secured independent financial backers who, until recently, allowed her greater editorial space.

Now this delicate balancing act has fallen apart, as Hu's departure indicates. It's also telling of how Chinese bureaucracy and censorship works that she wasn't fired. There were no high-profile stories that inflamed the government into a high-profile response and rebuttal. Instead, the end of Hu's tenure at Caijing has been brought about in subtler ways, through pressure exerted by middle-managers raising complaints about whether certain editorial content will turn off readers or advertisers, always tip-toeing around the real issue at hand. 

This, too, is typical. When activists or trouble-makers, from the official point of view, face censure in China, they are usually presented with relatively benign-sounding charges. Xu Zhiyong, the pioneering rights lawyer in China and founder of Gongmeng (Open Constitution Initiative), was held in detention earlier this year after being charged with tax irregularities. Environmentalists in Beijing who come under scrutiny have been cited for failing to obtain the proper motorcycle licenses. In other words, small alleged sins (and the chaos of daily life in China means almost everyone has something on their record) are suddenly discovered and pounced upon by authorities when an individual begins to be seen by the government as too troublesome.

We don't know the full details of what's happened behind the scenes at Caijing. Likely we will know more in the coming days, though Hu, as a smart, savvy operator, probably won't fully spill the beans,

But I am reminded, sadly, of the fate of another, much smaller, but also innovative publication in China that met an unhappy end two years ago. ChinaDevelopmentBrief.com was a bi-lingual Chinese and English web site founded by a Brit, Nick Young, and employing several Chinese reporters, that examined a variety of development and environmental issues facing China. The staff was smart and sometimes cutting-edge in its analysis, but always extremely cautious not to finger-point or inflame the authorities.

Still, as environmental topics became hotter in China, and the site's traffic grew, it was perceived as a threat. (Being run by a foreigner was also a liability.) Young, who is no longer in China, left an account of how the house of cards fell, which is painful, haunting reading for the mundaneness of the charges: "On July 4 [2007] our Beijing office was visited by a joint delegation of a dozen officials from the Beijing Municipality Public Security Bureau, the Beijing Municipality Statistical Bureau, and the Beijing Municipality Cultural Marketing General Legal Implementation Team ... I, as editor of the English language edition of China Development Brief, am deemed guilty of conducting "unauthorized surveys" in contravention of the 1983 Statistics Law."

The other telling detail of Young's account was this: "After investigations and interviews lasting around three hours, they ordered the Chinese edition of China Development Brief to cease publication forthwith. The authorities are now deciding what punishment to apply. It appears that initially they were considering a relatively modest fine." In the end, the publication was permanently banned, and Young's visa revoked. But that wasn't a foregone conclusion.

There can be an extraordinary arbitrariness to how rules, including rules pertaining to media, are enforced in China. That's easy to miss if, from the outside, one has the impression of the PRC as an efficient police station. If you've lived in Beijing, you quickly realize that it's anything but.

And so, with regards to Hu Shuli and her new venture, it's clear that everyone -- muckraking scribes and wary officials alike -- are improvising their roles, and circumspect about what comes next. There isn't a firm policy, or clear marching orders. If this was China of 40 years ago, Hu might have been jailed, or exiled, or worse. But today, China's government is trying to control and curb the influence of independent voices like Hu Shuli in a more circuitous and at times uncertain way, with the final outcome - what degree of editorial freedom Hu will have in her next incarnation -- still unwritten.

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The Dalai Lama is in Washington this week, but he won't be meeting with Obama. This will be the first presidential snub since 1991, and as the Washington Post reports:

The U.S. decision to postpone the meeting appears to be part of a strategy to improve ties with China ... Obama administration officials have termed the new policy "strategic reassurance," which entails the U.S. government taking steps to convince China that it is not out to contain the emerging Asian power."

Recently, FP contributor Wen Liao explained the thinking:

The pragmatism that is Obama's diplomatic lodestar, it seems, comes at a price: Illusions must be abandoned. Publicly recognizing China's territorial unity is the sin qua non for effective bilateral diplomatic relations, and Obama knows it."

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On the day of China's big 60th anniversary parade, the Beijing sky was bright blue -- thanks to some strategic short-term factory shut-downs and and a fleet of 18 aircraft equipped with rain-clouds disperal chemicals. The female militia units, clad in red mini-skirts and go-go style white boots, goose-stepped to perfection. The procession of nuclear missiles, some capable of striking Washington, went off without a hitch. China sure can put on a stellar parade.

And President Hu Jintao's ten minutes speech .... yawn. He gave no clues as to new directions or aspirations for the country, the economic or environmental crossroads China now finds itself at, his proposed solutions or looming questions. Riveting excerpts include:

The development and progress of New China over the past 60 years fully proved that only socialism can save China and only reform and opening up can ensure the development of China, socialism and Marxism ...Today, a socialist China geared to modernization, the world and the future has stood rock-firm in the east of the world."

It might seem odd to American audiences that Beijing's political elite would put more apparent energy into enforcing a pigeon ban within a 125-mile radius of Tiananmen Square, than into prepping the Chinese president for his 10 minutes in the global spotlight -- a chance to make a big statement about China's place in the world at this significant milestone. 

At Washington Monthly magazine, where I previously worked as an editor, my boss was Paul Glastris, a former speechwriter for Bill Clinton. After every State of the Union Address, a swarm of foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, would call him to dissect the meaning of particular presidential turns of phrases, exploring how each speech measured up in the canon of great presidential oratory.

But expectations are radically different in China. One of the results of a political system that doesn't hold elections is that its political leaders aren't required to kiss babies, craft compelling personal narratives, or learn how to inspire the public with speechs that exhalt the spirit or signal new directions for the country.

In a sense, public speeches in China are a bit like Madlibs; the major nouns (dates, names, countries) are duly swapped out, but the essential structure and enduring slogans remain the same.

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Roman Polanksi, the famed director of Chinatown and The Pianist, who has not set foot in the United States for more than three decades, is now facing extradition proceedings in Switzerland -- at the request of the Los Angeles district attorney's office.

Upon touching down at the Zurich airport on Saturday, after departing his native France, Polanksi was detained by authorities. Unlike France, Switzerland has an extradition agreement with the United States that applies to cases like that of Polanski, who is wanted in connection with a 32-year-old sex case.

In 1977, Mr Polanski admitted to having sex with a 13-year-old in Los Angeles. The woman has since identified herself and publicly offered her personal forgiveness. But that has not changed the course of legal proceedings.

As Sandi Gibbons, a spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, told the New York Times:

"Any time word is received that Mr. Polanski is planning to be in a country that has an extradition treaty with the U.S., we go through diplomatic channels with the arrest warrant."

Polanski's case is perhaps not unique in the world of extradition law, but it is provocative. The notion of the Los Angeles DA's office for 32 years tracking the director's busy European travel schedule, waiting for an opportunity, whilst he chose to appear at various film festivals via video-conference rather than in person, is fascinating. But beyond the celebrity factor, it's hard to pin down exactly what seems so incongruous.

Is it simply that in a post-9/11 world we're now accustomed to thinking of "extradition" in connection with national security interests, and clear-and-present danger?

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After a slate of big speeches yesterday at the U.N. climate summit in New York, the jury is still divided on how significant the new carbon mitigation steps announced by China, India, Japan, and other countries are. (There's even a range of opinions on this site. But there seems to be a growing consensus on one thing: the US is increasingly seen as falling behind, isolated.

Funny that, in China, they saw this coming. This summer in Beijing, I spoke with one of the leading private-sector Chinese energy analysts, someone present at the last big round of climate negotiations held in Bonn. In between meetings, he and some of his colleagues had joked about something they called the "Chinese conspiracy." The gist was, as he put it, to view future climate talks as "an opportunity" and "to keep America off the table at Copenhagen."

He was kidding, of course, and even were he serious, he wouldn't have been speaking for the government. But as it happens, something like that scenario may be unfolding.

In the final weeks before Copenhagen, several countries, including China, are rushing to claim the mantle of leadership, to define what "success" means, and to offer their own proposals. At a press conference this morning in Washington, the director general of climate change for Mexico's ministry of the environment was talking about his country's proposal for the architecture of a redistributive "green fund," which would collect money from the world's economic leaders and then steer money toward green-friendly development in poorer countries. Next up, rumors are swirling of a coalition of Latin American countries preparing to offer their own pre-Copenhagen proposals.

As my colleague Joshua Keating noted, there was a great deal of anticipation ahead of Chinese president Hu Jintao’s speech this morning at the UN climate summit in New York. U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer, who has the at times unenviable job of cheerleading for progress in so far ho-hum international climate talks, even went so far as to say China was poised to become “a world leader on addressing climate change.”  A headline in yesterday’s Guardian fanned the flames: “China's president expected to announce radical climate change targets.”

It would have been hard for anything Hu might have said to live up to the hype.

In a speech that lasted less than ten minutes, Hu said that China intended to include “carbon intensity” targets in its next five-year economic blueprint. Hu stressed that China is taking steps to reduce future carbon emissions, at least as compared with business as usual. China is indeed already doing much more to expand renewable energy production than many western observes give it credit for.

But has China achieved, in de Boer’s words, “front-runner” status? Well, that stretches definition.

As Julian Wong, a senior policy analyst at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC, said: “Maybe they’re leading in specific policies, but it’s premature to say they’re a leader. Climate leader … I’m not quite sure what that would mean.”

Hu began his remarks by reiterating the principle of “differentiated” responsibilities for developed and developing countries. He didn’t make any pledges about carbon caps, or otherwise indicate a softening on China’s position going into Copenhagen. China still wants developed nations to largely foot the bill for its carbon mitigation efforts – an argument with some merit, but also many critics; in sum, hardly an open invitation to move climate talks forward.

Yet in a sense, the recent hype about China as a climate-change “leader” is less about what China is doing than about what the US isn’t doing.

The US Senate now seems unlikely to pass a climate bill before Copenhagen. Speaking to Bloomberg TV this morning, Senator John Kerry, head of the committee drafting climate legislation, now said he now hoped the Senate would begin to debate a climate bill before December – debate, not act on. Talk about lowered expectations.

And in his first full speech on climate change, delivered this morning in New York, President Obama said that “unease is no excuse for inaction,” but crucially he did not mention any emissions reduction targets or firm financial commitments. Obama’s climate speech was in a way even less remarkable than Hu’s.

The upshot is while China hardly has an undisputed claim to being the world “leader” in fighting climate change, it now seems to have pulled ahead in the global warming PR wars. That’s not a bad thing if it helps pressure Washington into action.

But it could be a bad thing if it gives China much greater leverage to set the terms of the debate and define what “success” means at Copenhagen. And unless the US steps up to the plate in the next three months, that’s exactly what will happen.

For the record, Lord Nicholas Stern thinks his famous handiwork, the 2006 Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, was a bit off. Or rather, its projections were underestimates.

Three years ago Stern's report galvanized international attention with its main findings: that addressing climate change sooner would cost far less waiting until later. But in a speech last Thursday in Oxford, UK, he noted that economics is a dismally flawed science - forecasting tools aren't yet up to the task of modeling scenarios involving the scale and uncertainty of climate change. "Looking back," he said, "I think we actually under-did the story."

Stern is known in Britain alternately as Mr. Climate Change and Lord Climate Change. It's always struck me that the man responsible for putting climate change squarely into mainstream international debate was not a scientist, a politician, an advocate, a poet, a celebrity, or a writer, but an economist. (Until recently, Stern served as economics advisor under both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and before that at the World Bank.) While most economists have lately fallen out of public favor, Stern seems an exception.

These days he's trying hard not to be a doom and gloom guy. Rather than envisioning future catastrophes, he's focusing now on how to build the political alliances necessary to find workable ways forward. His speech coincides with the release of his new book: A Blueprint for a Safer Planet.

Aside from stressing that the crucial question now is how to get developing nations(read: China) on board in Copenhagen - any deal must be "efficient and equitable," he noted - Stern's main point was that predicting and accepting doomsday could well be a self-fulfilling prophecy: "Collective pessimism about our inability to act will deliver an inability to act."

So what will holding global C02 levels to a livable level cost -- and who will pay? On the first question, Stern estimates about $2 trillion. On the second,well, that remains the big unknown. 

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