The other side of Shanghai's success story

11 August 2004

The oak-panelled walls and Ionic marble columns of the Astor Hotel's reception hall lend it a grandeur that war and revolution have not altered since Bertrand Russell and Bernard Shaw succumbed to Shanghai's splendid decadence. Inside, the plumbing in the rooms (each marked by a brass plaque and a faded photograph) has deteriorated, but outside the beggars would have been familiar. "Just something to eat," pleaded an old peasant woman thrusting forward a four-year-old, far too young to be her own son, holding a broken plastic disposable cup. "We are Anhui peasants who lost our land in last year's floods; please give a little.''

The child beggars are back on Shanghai's streets, pestering the shoppers browsing the fashion boutiques in Nanjing Road and Huaihai Road or embarrassing revellers as they leave the nightclubs heading for their chauffeur-driven BMWs and Porsches. While an embryonic capitalism booms, its grim underbelly is being exposed.

Prostitution, the symbol of all that was wrong with old China, is so widespread, with an estimated three million prostitutes in the country, that the experts are debating whether to legalise it. Fifteen years ago in the former "city without night" there was not a single private bar: Shanghai now boasts the whole gamut from exclusive businessmen's clubs, yuppy bars and private "KTV rooms" where you hire the girls by the hour, to the massage parlours on every street corner that offer a briefer moment of pleasure.

By the 1930s, Shanghai's beggars were almost as infamous as its courtesans and spawned an alluring mythology. Its 50,000 beggars were said to have been organised in eight leagues ruled by a beggar king who traced his ancestry back to the Ming dynasty. The leaders allocated begging patches, prevented turf wars and operated a parallel hierarchy to respectable society. The beggars even supported the patriotic May 1919 protest movement and negotiated with the city's bosses: the gangsters and foreign capitalists. The foreigners who ran the British, French and American concessions never found a solution.

Shanghai's professional beggars traditionally came from five places, including Fengyang in Anhui province where Deng Xiaoping's agricultural reforms started after Mao Tse-tung's death and which has a tradition of organising seasonal beggary. It was the home of Zhu Yuanzhang, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty.

Most beggars, especially those with young children, claim to come from one of these places, but they also tend to change their story under questioning like the elderly man at the entrance to the Astor who first blamed his misfortunes on natural disaster and then on a physical handicap. "Actually, it's my leg," he said suddenly demonstrating a limp and walking off to avoid further questions.

Residents seem divided on whether to expel the beggars or to treat them as innocent victims of misfortune. "Of course, you shouldn't beat them. How can you be inhumane to poor peasants?" said Zhang Weidi, a taxi driver. The police have now proposed setting up a task force to deal with the problem and the media has been reporting on the "tricks" used by the beggars.

China News Service said Shanghai had its own Fagin, Bao Wulian, 36, who recruited a gang of children aged six to 12 whom he trained to beg, cheat and steal. He taught them how to pick pockets and snaffle mobile phones and wallets until he was arrested.

Shanghai and other cities in China have begun debating new ordinances to deal with beggars. Until last year the police could detain and arrest anyone with a peasant resident card and punish them with a stint in a work camp if they had no written exemption. Last year the "arrest and repatriation" regulations were changed for the first time in nearly 50 years after a case in Guangzhou where a man, Sun Zhigang, was detained for not carrying a valid residency card. He died in police custody, causing a public scandal.

Under the new regulations, police cannot use force to expel beggars but are supposed to persuade them to accept 10 days of food and shelter at government expense. "The problem is that most beggars are not willing to leave the streets because they think they can make more money by begging," Pan Zihan, a senior police officer, told municipal legislators last year.

In Guangzhou, the authorities prohibit begging in government buildings, subways, hospitals, stores, parks and other places of public entertainment. A poll taken by the Southern Daily found that 52 per cent of residents said that the ban would not solve the overall problem of rural poverty although 30 per cent agreed that the beggars damaged the city's image.

In Shanghai some people have opposed a ban. "The country is a country of citizens, and all citizens enjoy equal rights," the Yangcheng Evening News said. "Begging bans are a form of administrative coercion."

A similar form of leniency is now taken towards prostitution. In Shanghai, it is becoming more open. It flourishes along such streets as Maoming Nan Lu, where in a string of bars such as Manhattan or Judy's, women accost foreign businessmen. "Oh, are there girls like that coming here?" said Judy. A women in her late 30s, she set up the bar 10 years ago but now has other businesses. "We must stop that," she said, then added, after a minute's thought: "Perhaps we could allow only a few of them in. Just the very beautiful ones. I like to have beautiful people around me."

The business has made her rich and she now has a portfolio of investments in nightclubs, bars and residential properties. Judy goes on holiday to Italy a few times a year and drives a BMW convertible. Some working girls say they have also done well, buying themselves flats and imported cars.

As in the 1930s when the city was full of White Russian refugees, some of the girls are Russians or Mongolians, adding a touch of exoticism to the jaded palates of the Shanghai nightclubbers. As the competition between the bars heats up, some feature scantily dressed girls gyrating on the tables, or project images of half-naked pole dancers on the walls. A few doors down the street is the Babyface Disco. Earlier this year, police had to break up a brawl between Chinese and Western clients, yet police who patrol the street in force seem more concerned about the noise levels than public morality.

Last week, all of the bars were ordered to stop playing music because it was annoying a new and powerful resident. Judy's bar acquired a noise meter to ensure that it did not antagonise the authorities.

Perhaps Shanghai will soon regain the reputation it enjoyed in the 1930s, when it was presented as the new Babylon and a "corrupt, pleasure-mad, and squalor-ridden city". As one writer, Stella Dong, put it, "the sickly sweet smell of opium permeated every lane and side street, and in its myriad fleshpots laboured a tragic army of prostitutes and 'taxi dancers'."

Greater Shanghai reportedly had 100,000 prostitutes and when the Red Army marched into Shanghai in 1949, it arrested the prostitutes and other social parasites. They were sent to camps to be reformed and re-educated in socialist morality and emerge with new and more useful skills.

Shanghai's reputation has inspired a small but growing volume of academic research devoted to studying the phenomenon of its prostitutes. In Dangerous Pleasures: Prostitution and Modernity in Twentieth Century Shanghai, the American academic Gail Hershatter points out that at a time when China's power was sapped by foreign aggression, "sex work was taken as paradigmatic of a social decay that was then evoked to explain China's position vis-a-vis the colonising powers".

Some of the reformed girls were put on stage to act out their escape from degradation to scenes of mass hysteria from the audience of students. Prostitution, nationalism, and memories of former humiliation at the hands of the outside world still provoke the same moral outrage. Last year, when 400 Japanese sex tourists arrived in Zhuhai, Guangdong for an orgy with 500 Chinese girls, there was a diplomatic protest. The hotel management protested that "prostitution is a common phenomenon in hotels across the country" but the incident was timed as an insult to the Chinese nation. It took place two days before the 72nd anniversary of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Hershatter argues that in old Shanghai the better class of courtesans were in fact not so much victims of capitalism as empowered. They amassed some semblance of power "by manipulating standards of masculinity, and by shaping discourses in society, law, and China's own deteriorating political situation". Chinese sociologists are treating the problem as an inevitable part of economic reform. The left-wing economist Yang Fan, who assumes a figure of 20 million prostitutes nationwide - the police assume three million - has calculated that the income and spending associated with prostitution amounts to about 6 per cent of gross domestic product. He claims that after Beijing issued new regulations on the management of places of entertainment in 1999, GDP dropped by 1 per cent because bars and dance halls closed.

One of the leading experts is Pan Suiming, a sociologist from the University of China in Beijing, who has spent seven years studying the issue. He and seven researchers interviewed 700 prostitutes and pimps in 13 red-light districts in the Pearl River Delta, Sichuan province and two north-eastern provinces.

The research looked at the economic pros and cons for investment- hungry towns if they encouraged or at least tolerated prostitution. Some cities such as Shenyang have tried to regulate the industry by taxing prostitutes' earnings. In Wuhan, working girls have been issued with work permits. Towns in the Pearl River Delta encourage prostitution as a way of attracting investors to set up factories.

The debate about how to deal with prostitution, and with begging, is not unlike that recorded in the minutes of the Shanghai municipal council. In 1920, it resolved to end the system of licensed brothels in the International Settlement with a plan to restrict the numbers until there was none left.

Professor Pan thinks that China should legalise the industry, or at least ignore it. "The biggest problem in the sex industry is the banning policy. I hope this policy will be changed," he said recently. He argues that when prostitution is illegal, women fall under the control of criminal gangs. "If these people treat the girls violently, they cannot go to the police because they are afraid of getting arrested or fined," he said. He also argues that if the girls worked independently, the use of condoms would rise and the rates of sexually transmitted diseases would drop.

Shanghai is beginning to worry about a sharp rise in HIV cases which is being blamed on the unwillingness or ignorance of the influx of young sex workers. An Aids expert at Shanghai's Hua Shan Hospital has found that in 2002 the rate of HIV infections, although still low, increased by 45 per cent.

Shanghai health officials say that, of those infected, 67 per cent of married and 45 per cent of single males caught the disease from prostitutes and infected their partners. A survey found that most clients were middle-class office workers under 35 - the very people fêted for driving the other end of the city's booming economy.

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29 July 2004

Only paw prints in the snow and the two small puncture marks in the neck of a sheep drained of blood reveal that the elusive snow leopard had come and gone. "This leopard killed a dozen animals, including my prize breeding buck," Surengerel, a wind-burnt herdswoman, tells the visitors enjoying mugs of tea at the stove of her round felt tent, pitched in a remote corner of the Gobi Desert.

We are at Bayantooroi, a tiny settlement 600 miles south-west of the capital Ulan Bator, on the edge of the Great Gobi Protected Area, home to 50 snow leopards, rare breeds of wild camels, goats, sheep and Ursus arctos gobiensis , the world's only desert bear.

It was an unusual winter, when the vast desert was covered with a foot of snow and Surengerel's family struggled to save the flock of 200 goats and sheep, plus 20 camels, on which they depend to scrape a living in one of the world's harshest climates. Some neighbours lost all their animals; nobody could recall anything like it. For a month, delivering fodder to the livestock was impossible, she said, because even four-wheel drives stuck in the snowdrifts. The snow leopard went hungry too. Unable to hunt their usual prey - wild argali sheep, antelope and ibex - the big cats came out of the mountains to attack the herds.

Surengerel's visitor says soothingly: "It is good that nobody went out and killed the snow leopard." Doljinsuren, a Mongolian who works for the Seattle-based International Snow Leopard Trust (many Mongolians have only one name) has travelled here armed with bundles of cash. First, she pays the herders a bonus of 500,000 Tughrik (£230) for honouring their contract to protect the snow leopard. Then she sorts through a pile of camel-hair slippers, scarves, socks and little wool effigies of the silky predator, which she is going to buy and ship to America. The herdswomen had knitted the handicrafts during the winter, and soon the goods will be sold in international zoos in a worldwide conservation effort to save the shyest and most beautiful of all the great cats.

The first photograph of a wild snow leopard was taken only in the 1970s in Chitral, Pakistan, because they are harder to track than tigers and live in the wildest parts of the earth. The silver-grey fur is such good camouflage in the hunting dusk that even when radio-collared, with signals showing the big cat is present, the predator can be hard to spot.

The animal was first studied by the American naturalist, George Schaller, but it was elevated into a poetic symbol when he went on an expedition to Nepal with Peter Matthiessen, author of the bestselling The Snow Leopard in the late 1970s.

Although snow leopards range across the high and remote mountains of Asia, that isolation no longer protects the species. Some of these mountains are in civil war zones, such as the Tora Bora mountains in Afghanistan, the Hindu Kush, Jammu and Kashmir and the Pamirs of Tajikistan.

With the spread of the market economy to inner Asia, the predator fell victim to hunters in more peaceful zones, including Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia and Xinjiang in China. Shops in areas of China - as in Tibet, Qinghai and Gansu - openly sold snow leopard pelts and their "tiger" bones, used to make Chinese medicine.

Some snow leopards are also caught for private zoos in Middle Eastern countries where the animal is traditionally prized as a symbol of power and nobility. In ancient times, loyal subjects had gifted Mongol Khans, a ger or tent made from snow leopard pelts instead of felt. In Kyrgyzstan, poachers may have killed a third of the snow leopard population since 1994. The pelts can fetch as much as $70 (£38) a skin, as much as some herders earn in a year. Customs officers in Mongolia seized so many illegal snow-leopard skins they put them on public display at the Genghis Khan tourist camp near the capital.

Worldwide, there may be just 3,500 snow leopards left, although the figure could be much higher, depending on the result of research starting in China. The country, especially Xinjiang, has the world's largest snow leopard terrain and may hold up to 2,500 of the animals. Until recently, there were few study tools available, other than looking at the potential habitat and dividing it by the average hunting territory each cat would require.

When a biologist, Tom McCarthy, spent seven years doing field research in this part of Mongolia, he concluded that a snow leopard ranges over 150 square miles, depending on the availability of ibex, antelope, wild Argali sheep and marmots.

Scientists are looking at hi-tech methods such as genetic fingerprinting and photo-traps for a more reliable population estimate, vital in forming conservation strategies. Two years ago, environmentalists from 17 countries met at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle to form the first global plan to save the snow leopard. A key issue was developing ways to persuade those who live with the predator to help the conservation effort.

Here in the Gobi-Altai, the nomads have little affection for the snow leopard, and see it is a living vampire, a notion Tom McCarthy says is not founded on fact. The trust is also trying to change the image of the snow leopard by using snow leopard clubs to teach children the necessity of conservation.

Doljinsuren well remembers four years ago, when his group began teaching the nomads how to wash and thread their wool. "Getting people to trust us was a big step," he says. "The first year, the products were not saleable, but we bought them anyway."

The International Snow Leopard Trust is promoting other efforts, hoping the nomads will help protect the habitat, the prey and the animals themselves. In Pakistan, herders have been persuaded to pay into insurance funds to compensate herders who lose livestock to wolves and snow leopards. Another project aims to help herders with veterinary advice to help reduce the high number of livestock lost to disease - about 20 per cent - so they care less about the much smaller numbers killed by predators.

In Kyrgyzstan, wildlife rangers who earn $15 a month are being offered incentives such as school fees for their children if they protect the animals and their prey from poachers.

Saving the snow leopard also needs cross-border solutions and experts from India and Pakistan are discussing how to work together in the disputed Kashmir region. Indian environmentalists plan to copy the schemes that worked in Pakistan and the Pakistanis are interested in the handicraft schemes started in Mongolia four years ago.

Purevjur, a Mongolian biologist, who has spent 17 years tracking the 1,200 or so snow leopards in Mongolia, thinks the population has stabilised in the past few years. "Maybe it is even beginning to increase slowly," she says.

But the nomads killed about six snow leopards in the Gobi Altai last year and as many in other parts of the country. Those caught face fines of 1m Tughriks, a large enough fine to wipe out their capital, measured in livestock.

The biggest problem facing the conservationists and the herders has been the unusually severe weather, and over-grazing. Dr Mizhiddorj is a director of the Gobi reserve and a biologist who studied the snow leopard with Tom McCarthy. "There's been hardly any rain the past seven years, just a little in May, and the average temperatures keep rising," he says. "It is hard to pinpoint the reason but perhaps it is to do with global warming."

On the way to Bayantooroi, we stopped by the ruins of the Nomuun Khaan Buddhist monastery which stands by what was once a river and a lake that helped support a thriving population of monks and farmers. Gelegbuu, our 45- year-old driver, says: "When I was small, children and lambs could hide in the grass it was so high; flocks of cranes and pelicans covered the lake."

The drought in a long-dry region is having a severe impact on animals and people. Half of the province's two million head of livestock have died in the past few years of drought, leaving the plains littered with whitening bones. Gelegbuu says: "If the drought goes on, everyone will leave."

Lester Brown, a environmentalist for the Worldwatch Institute in Washington, suspects that over-grazing, led by demand for cashmere wool, is largely to blame for the drought, hurting farmers and herders in many parts of snow leopard territory. Herders doubled the size of their cashmere goat herds in the 1990s. "There is more pressure on resources so the deserts are expanding," Mr Brown says.

For Surengerel, the $60 she has earnt for family from handicrafts has become a vital asset. The snow leopards are now beginning to protect the people. Doljinsuren says: "Of course, people are glad to see me. Everyone wants to learn now."

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28 June 2004

Wangfa Liang remembers clearly the whipped cream, the roof top orchestras, the prayers in the synagogue when this slummy stretch of Shanghai dockland was called "Little Vienna".

"There were tables outside on the street, and I remember the wedding parties in Café Vienna. My boss was a Russian Jew, Mr Stein, and the other waiters came from Berlin. We were all friends and lived in the ghetto," he said in careful English.

Now 85, Mr Liang has finally been forced to move out of the house he bought from his Jewish colleagues when they left before the Communist takeover in 1949.

Along the northern bank of the Huangpu river, just beyond the Bund and across an iron girder bridge, is the district of Hongkou, an area of docklands which became famous when it was home to nearly 30,000 Jews during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. It looks much as it did when Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun , based on J G Ballard's autobiographical book, was filmed in 1987. The area is now back in the news because of a daring plan to preserve it from the wrecker's ball and transform it into a conservation zone and a symbol of Chinese and Jewish friendship. It is also a last-gasp effort to save what remains of Shanghai's architectural heritage and prevent it being turned into a cold megalopolis of glass-and-steel towers.

Already, the area, better known in the past as Hongkew, is full of cranes and building sites. Over the former Vienna café looms a 40-story concrete hotel and Mr Liang and his neighbours are quickly being moved out of the last of the pink-and-grey brick houses, where the refugees had lived, to new residential blocks. Mr Liang is now the guide at the Ohel Moshe synagogue which was once at the centre of the ghetto and is now a museum.

Visitors, including Hillary Clinton, Madeline Albright, Gerhard Shröder and all Israeli leaders, are shown a video inside the offices of what was once the headquarters of the Zionist Youth League.

The area was destined to be demolished under a government plan to turn the whole of the North Bund into "a masterpiece of the 21st century", that is to say, another ultra-ambitious scheme to remake Shanghai from scratch. The city invited big developers to put forward ideas which included the inevitable skyscrapers as well as a Ferris Wheel, fun fairs and a dock for luxury cruise passengers to disembark.

Worried that nothing there would be left for the visitors to see, Shanghai is now studying several plans to try to preserve the ghetto. One plan has been put forward by Canadian-Jewish businessman Lan Leventhal, and designed by Christopher Choa of one of New York's oldest architectural firms, HLW International.

They want to make the synagogue the centre of a memorial park that would include gravestones of former inhabitants and link it to the waterfront and an ornate Buddhist temple. Already, a small monument in a park near the synagogue is dedicated to the "stateless refugees" of 1937-1941.

The Jewish gravestones were moved in 1958, and destroyed and scattered during the Cultural Revolution. A few have been discovered in outlying villages where they were being used as flagstones and washboards.

The idea seems to be to copy the success of Xin Tiandi, a two-square block of tenements in the old French concession which was saved and turned into a lively centre for shopping and dining. This is the work of Benjamin Wood, an American architect who persuaded a Hong Kong property developer, Vincent Lo, the chairman of the Shui On Group, to preserve the area around the girl's school where the Chinese Communist Party held its first meeting.

"Xin Tiandi is successful, but you can't call that preservation," says Professor Ruan Yisan of Tongji University. The old buildings were torn down, the residents evicted, and new buildings erected housing ultra-stylish bars and nightclubs. Yet as one of the parts of Shanghai built on a human scale, it has become immensely popular with visitors and residents.

Ilan Maor, the Israeli consul general in Shanghai, is convinced the new plan for the ghetto area in Hangkou will be as successful. "I am sure it will be an important tourist attraction," he said.

Professor Ruan said: "It is also important to preserve it to show the strong bonds between the two peoples."

The first wave of refugees arrived in the 1920s, fleeing the Russian revolution. They settled in Harbin which was home to 20,000 refugees until the mid-1930s. There, the Chinese authorities have just restored two synagogues, a cemetery and a Jewish school and are planning the Harbin Museum for Jewish History and Culture.

"There was no other shelter open to the Jews. It was a unique situation. The Chinese not only let them in, they made them welcome," Mr Maor said.

The next group came in the 1930s, fleeing from the Soviet invasion of Lithuania, Latvia and Poland. Israel is still grateful to the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, who disobeyed Tokyo's instructions and issued over 2,000 visas to Jews who until 1941 used them to take the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok. From there they took a boat to Kobe, Japan, and then another to Shanghai.

Other refugees fled Germany, Austria and other countries as they came under the Nazi heel. The Chinese consul general in Vienna, Dr Feng Shan Ho, also ignored the Kuomintang's orders and issued over 20,000 visas between 1938 and 1940.

The KMT had strong ties to Germany in the 1920s but turned against Hitler when he formed a pact with Japan. Among Chiang Kai-shek's followers was Morris "two-gun" Cohen, a bodyguard who rose to be a general in the Chinese Army.

The Jewish refugees joined the White Russian refugees and crowded into a city caught up in bitter fighting between the Japanese and KMT forces under Chiang. By the time the Japanese seized Shanghai, 25,000 people were crammed into less than one square mile.

In fact they survived more thanks to the Japanese than the Chinese. After the start of Japan's war with the US, they were forced into a ghetto, about a square mile in size, where some 100,000 Chinese already lived. It was a crowded, working-class area near the docks, but they were free to open their own restaurants and shops, though they needed special permits to leave the area. The British and others were interned in camps outside Shanghai.

In July 1942, the Gestapo chief in Japan, Colonel Josef Meisinger, came to Shanghai and put forward his plan for a "Final Solution in Shanghai". The Japanese authorities refused to listen. Many powerful figures in Japan felt a debt of gratitude to Jewish bankers who had organised loans and issued government bonds which enabled the Japanese government and the military to finance its modernisation program 30 years earlier. After Japan's defeat, many of the refugees eventually reached America, Australia, Israel and other countries. The great Jewish families of Shanghai, the Kadoories, Hardoons and Sassoons never got their properties back, although some branches still prosper in Hong Kong. The Kadoories still own China Light and Power, Hong Kong's largest power utility.

These Jewish families were among the first group of immigrants, some 700 Sephardic Jews, to arrive from Baghdad, Spain, Portugal and India when the British and French began to turn Shanghai into China's premier trading city 150 years ago. Until the early 1920s, just 1,700 Jews were in Shanghai but they were prominent and the Chinese Communist Party has been reluctant to preserve or celebrate their capitalist legacy.

The Sassoons, who arrived in 1844, built the luxurious Cathay Hotel (now the Peace Hotel). Sir Victor Sassoon lived in a fantastic nouveau Tudor villa with a minstrel's gallery and a fireplace big enough to roast an ox in. It is now the Hotel Cypress.

The Kadoories left behind a white, wedding cake-style mansion which is now the Children's Palace. The famous Shanghai Musical Conservatory is housed in the former Shanghai Jewish Club. "These people were big capitalists, speculators, opium-dealers. They came here to make money, like the English went to America," said Professor Ruan.

The Ohel Rachel Synagogue, the majestic building built in 1920 by Sir Jacob Elias Sassoon in memory of his wife, Rachel, is now on the World Monuments Fund list of the 100 most endangered sites. It remains closed to the public and for years was used as offices by the city's education commission The question of what to do with the heritage of all the capitalists and colonialists which remind people of the good-old, bad-old days when Shanghai was the Paris of the East remains a headache.

They left the city full of architectural gems: the neo-classical facades of the Bund, the elegant Art Deco hotels, the Gotham-Gothic mansions, complete with mullioned windows and stained glass, of the rich Chinese and Western tycoons, and the Edwardian suburban villas of the middle classes.

Only three areas have been earmarked for preservation and just 400 old buildings. According to the Shanghai government, more than 20 million square meters of old buildings, half of Shanghai's old neighbourhoods have been torn down in the past 15 years.

The Chinese Communists want to trump this legacy and present the world with a a dazzling modern city by the time it hosts the World Expo in 2010.

It can be a harsh process. Developers have free rein to evict people and often do so overnight. The inhabitants of a stretch of land in the French concession, not far from Xin Tiandi, were pushed out last month by 300 police and thugs hired by a relocation company when they refused to move quickly enough. There were reports of beatings and some houses were set on fire.

"Shanghai property prices are rising so fast that people can't afford to buy new apartments so they refuse to leave without better compensation," said Mr Liang.

The decrepit houses around the ghetto are a sad, dishevelled sight with the washing hanging from the windows. The rooms have been divided again and again and most people are, he says, happy to move out.

They will have to rebuild from scratch before the project can become the symbol of the new ties growing between Israel and China that its supporters want to see.

Shanghai's new Jewish Community is growing fast and now numbers around 500, including 150 Israelis. An Orthodox rabbi, Shalom Greenberg, moved here five years ago although the Chinese government refuses to let the community open, or re-open a synagogue because Judaism is not considered one of the five official religions.

Even so, commercial ties are flourishing and Israel sent a delegation of over 100 business leaders last week. The Chinese are particularly interested in building up ties with Israeli hi-tech companies.

One of those who escaped from Germany and found shelter in Shanghai was Saul Eisenberg. Later, in Israel, he built up a commercial empire in the defence sector, the Eisenberg Group. He died recently but had tried to broker the sale of arms to China, including an Awacs early warning surveillance aircraft, which was blocked by the US. Israel still needs to find a way to counterbalance China's ties with Arab countries as it becomes more reliant on imported oil to run its economy.

If the ghetto is preserved, it will be another sign that the tide is turning against skyscrapers in Shanghai, which has built over 3,000 in just over a decade. Work resumed last year on the 101-storey Shanghai World Financial Centre which aims to be the world's tallest building when it is completed in 2007.

Shanghai has become a city of towers, a city designed to impress outsiders with its modernity but not one to live in.

The sheer weight of all these towers is causing the city to sink into the swampy banks of the Huangpu river. Experts say it sank about 8 feet since 1921 and is still sinking at roughly half an inch a year. Even the city's prized, German-built, magnetic railway is sinking.

"There are too many tall buildings. Profit-chasing by developers has destroyed the urban space. The competition for higher and higher buildings has created a dinosaur city, with more and more gigantic buildings. It is not on a human scale, it is not good for the life of ordinary people," admitted Zheng Shiling, a prominent architect who heads the Shanghai Urban Planning Commission's Urban Space and Environment Committee.

"Many of them are empty and can't be sold. Perhaps 30 per cent. If you go around at night you will see there are no lights, said Professor Ruan.

Another 40 or 50 high rises have been approved and can't be stopped but he thinks they will be the last.

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04 June 2004

Most days, the Avenue of Eternal Peace is jammed solid all the way to Tiananmen Square, but now and again it comes back to me: the rumbling tanks, the bodies on the overpass, the window-panes riddled with bullet-holes, the pall of smoke over the city.

There, in front of that hotel lobby, an enraged mob beat to death groups of soldiers, and here, a few days earlier, the ecstatic crowds waving banners saying, "Give me democracy or death" and laughing and holding up V signs, confident they had won.

Occasionally, as I sit in my car watching my neighbours as we inch along the 12-lane highway that passes the new ministries and department stores housed in towers of steel and glass, I wonder what might have happened if 15 years ago, the student protesters had not lost.

China would now be democratic and the Communist Party would be gone. Instead of Chairman Mao's squat mausoleum on Tiananmen Square, there would be a white statue of the Goddess of Democracy. The Dalai Lama would be back in Tibet, former Premier Li Peng, who declared martial law, would be in jail or exile in Cuba. Instead of wasting their time on a campus in distant America, some of the brilliant student leaders, including Wang Dan, would have formed a Democracy Party and won the first elections.

Perhaps, as in Russia, the young generation would have been ousted after fumbling a sweeping privatisation programme, and former Communists in a Socialist Party of China would be back in power.

As it is, the head of the reformist wing of the party, the former general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, who had gone to Tiananmen Square to tearfully apologise, saying he had come too late, is still under house arrest. At 84, he is close to death, a prisoner in an old courtyard house, his name excised from all official histories.

The world too would have been a very different place. China would not just be the largest democracy in history but for the first time most of the world's population would be living in democracies. This would have left the Arab world and parts of Africa as the last holdouts.

China would probably have emerged, after messy politicking, into a sort of federal super state, a cross between the United States and a Chinese version of the European Union. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang might have fitted in easily into this scheme. The rest of the world would have looked different too. North Korea might have disappeared. Vietnam and Laos might be democracies too and Cambodia would surely not be ruled by former members of the Khmer Rouge. Instead, every 4 June, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre (known in China as Liu Si or 6/4), we go through the same almost ritualised programme.

Clusters of armed police and plain-clothes police ring the square where the hunger-strikers pitched their tent city, to make sure not a single wreath or gesture of grief finds a public display. China's vast secret police force is mobilised to ensure not a single word appears in public. CCN broadcasts are cut short. Every internet website and chat room is monitored or blocked. The handful of remaining dissidents are hustled out of town and kept under guard.

The mothers of those killed on the night of 4 June, led by the redoubtable Ding Zilin, smuggle out protests and condemnations. Bao Tong, the former aide of Zhao Ziyang and the most senior party official to be jailed, has again called on the party to reconsider its "verdict" that the protests were a "counter-revolutionary rebellion". The only legal protests in China are in Hong Kong where tens of thousands are expected to stage a a march and the annual candlelit vigil tonight. The democracy drive galvanised the supposedly apolitical Hong Kong Chinese, and a million people took to the streets.

This week, Yeung Sum, chairman of the Democratic Party, said mainland officials made him an offer: drop the annual demands for apology for the 4 June crackdown and we can negotiate about more democracy for Hong Kong. He refused, against a backdrop of mainland efforts to harass and intimidate public figures, such as the popular radio host Albert Cheung. Three radio hosts known for their pro-democracy views, have fled the territory after threatening phone calls from Chinese officials.

Although 4 June and democracy remains the key issue in Hong Kong, in Beijing one could be forgiven for thinking it never happened. The government demanded a collective amnesia and seem to have achieved it. On the eve of the anniversary, I spent an evening with a senior Chinese journalist talking about press freedom; the issue never came up.

Amnesty International believes more than 50 people are still imprisoned for their part in the protests, but this is only a fraction of the true figure. At least 30 demonstrators who disappeared that night have never been accounted for. Some were recently discovered in unmarked graves in central Beijing, and Ding Zilin, whose 17-year old son, Jiang Jielian, was shot in the back near Tiananmen Square, believes the reconstruction of Beijing makes it "extremely difficult to find any more remains".

Dr Jiang Yanyong, who became a national hero for speaking out about the official lies about last year's Sars outbreak, is the only one to have shed new light on the events. He now lives in far away Xinjiang, exiled for writing a letter urging an apology. "Errors committed by our party should be resolved by the party," he wrote. "The sooner this is done, the better. The vast majority of people I know in every quarter of society are all clear in their hearts that the 4 June crackdown was absolutely wrong. But because of the pressure from above, they haven't dared speak their mind."

In the letter, Dr Jiang told how the bodies arrived at the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Hospital 301. In two hours, 89 victims with bullet wounds were treated. He said he treated seven victims who had been hit by dum-dum bullets or bullets which expand on impact. These are banned under international law.

He said the PLA acted in "a frenzied fashion, using tanks, machine guns, and other weapons to suppress the totally unarmed students and citizens, killing innocent students".

He revealed that Yang Shangkun, the senior PLA warlord who imposed martial law through loudspeakers on Tiananmen Square, had opposed the army's entry in Beijing and had insisted no blood should be shed. With another senior leader, Chen Yun, he later tried persuade Mr Deng to overturn the verdict.

Before Yang Shangkun died, he told Dr Jiang in 1998 that "The 4 June incident is the most serious mistake committed by our party in history ... I don't have the ability to rectify it, but it will definitely be rectified."

Although the events were seen as a struggle between innocent students and a wicked dictatorship, the students were pawns in a power struggle between two factions. This paralysed the security apparatus, allowing the dissidents and student activists to do whatever they wanted.

And although the drama was played out in Beijing, millions more in cities across the country mounted the largest political protests to grip China. Even in the rural towns in peripheral provinces, such as Guangxi or Guizhou, students organised protests sanctioned by local party officials who thought they were obeying instructions from party headquarters.

The reformers were confident they had the people on their side, but the die-hard military men won easily after they arrested the titular party chief, Zhao Ziyang. The hardliners seized power in a coup, even before the troops entered Beijing, and it is still not clear who ordered the bloodshed or why.

Over the 20th century, six armies had marched into China's ancient capital, including the Japanese, but the PLA was the only one to smash its way in. There was fierce and unexpected resistance and I saw dozens of burnt-out tanks and armoured personnel carriers, stopped in their tracks by a furious resistance.

Some stories blame Deng Xiaoping for insisting that blood must be shed, but Yang Shangkun and his brother, General Yang Baibing, were in control. Mr Deng was shunted aside and took until late 1991 to force the Yangs out.

In 1989, the country hovered on the brink of civil war as each player moved loyal military units to the centre for a showdown. Just how close China was to the edge of disaster we may not know for decades, but the CIA and many others seemed confident when they kept predicting that political chaos was just round the corner.

Deng Xiaoping's ability to relaunch the economic reforms in 1992 probably saved China's Communist Party although at the cost of embracing capitalism. Among other things, this meant student leaders who fled the country were denied the support of wealthy overseas Chinese in Hong Kong who might have financed an opposition party.

Mr Deng started a stampede of investors by gestures such as opening stock markets. Overseas Chinese tycoons quickly changed sides and the students, including Wang Dan, Chai Ling and Wu'er Kaixi, found themselves out in the cold in America, on a useless conference circuit, or trading their ideals for Wall Street jobs.

Deng Xiaoping's formula has been used repeatedly. Every time the party has run into trouble, as it did last year or in 1998, it has pumped huge amounts into infrastructure projects - airports, roads, motorways, railways, ports, telecommunications systems, sewage works, offices, housing - that lifted growth to double digits.

Although much has been wasted with over-investment in most industrial sectors, it worked wonders at home and abroad. The lure of the market won over the moral scruples of Western governments who wanted to treat China like a giant rogue state after 1989. The divisions in the party were buried as many of the 60 million members became fabulously wealthy through trading monopolies or selling off state assets, especially land.

But prosperity is underpinned by an apartheid-like pass system which keeps 900 million peasants tied to the farm, forbidden even to own the land they work. For others, unemployment runs at 20 percent in many rust-belt industrial cities. Rural incomes have stagnated for most of the past 15 years, and wages for the unskilled have barely risen.

In fact, whatever the official figures may say, the economy has veered wildly with periods of flat growth in years such as 1990, 1991, 1995 and 1998. Yet everyone does live better now. China is being touted as a model to be copied by India and others. Yet some the lessons to be drawn in the 15 years since Tiananmen Square are less than appealing.

China shows, or seems to, that democracy is not the key to prosperity. It is no closer to democracy or respecting basic freedoms of association such as the right to strike or even to form trade unions.

Mutual fear remains the pillar of political stability. The party is so nervous of its support that Jiang Zemin has ordered that the smallest sign of opposition must be "nipped in the bud".

The past 10 years have seen a draconian "strike-hard campaign", in which even the rudimentary safeguards of the Chinese legal system have been ditched by a powerful police apparatus which has tripled in size. It remains in power at the point of a gun.

I wept for the people, betrayed by their leaders

Exactly 15 years ago, Michael Fathers was filing for The Independent on the protests in Tiananmen Square. This is an abridged version of his report on 4 June 1989

It will go down in the annals of China's Communist party as The Glorious 4th of June, when the army founded for the people turned on the unarmed citizens of Beijing to destroy a peaceful student-led democracy movement.

The killing around Tiananmen Square started soon after midnight. I was at the southern end of the square when two armoured personnel carriers roared down the boulevard, smashing barriers. They were followed by 3,000 soldiers. One vehicle stalled and was set on fire by the mob. Flares and tracer bullets shone from behind me and gunfire could be heard. The troops were advancing on the square. My colleague, Andrew Higgins, was behind, at Qianmen Gate, the front entrance to the square. He said troops were met with a hail of bricks and stones. Everyone fled, then regrouped.

To the north, more gunfire could be heard. I moved up a side street, heading for the Avenue of Eternal Peace, where tanks had broken through a barrier of burning buses. It was 1.30am and the start of a huge troop advance. I hid at the entrance to a lane. The armour was followed by troop trucks interspersed with petrol tankers and lorries with mesh trailers for prisoners.

I decided to leave the lane and follow this other army to Tiananmen, half a mile away. The Avenue of Eternal Peace was deserted. Gunfire mingled with explosions from buses behind me, a lorry and two Jeeps ahead. I looked behind as I walked on the opposite side: a squad of army goons, waving pistols, cattle prods and batons, was running towards me. They jumped me, screamed, pointed a pistol at my head, beat me about the legs and dragged me to New China Gate. They pulled off my spectacles and crushed them, then took me behind a stone lion guarding the gate.

If this is the People's Army, God spare China. They behaved like the Red Guards, with a systematic and frenzied brutality. They were the very institution once called out to protect China from Red Guard excesses. Now they are killing civilians.

The smooth face of the Communist establishment appeared two hours later, in cream flannels and a pastel T-shirt, the image of "moderation" the Foreign Office has come to believe is the new China and which it can trust over Hong Kong. "You have committed an unfriendly act," he said. I thought that was a bit much. "You fell over, didn't you? That's why you have that bruise on your arm." I also had boot marks and bloodstains on my shirt. My right knee was swollen, my hips ached, my trousers were ripped. He confiscated my notebook and gave me a receipt and a written pass to get beyond the army lines into a side street.

Higgins was by now crawling in the mud beside Mao's portrait at the Gate of Heavenly Peace, as bullets whizzed over his head. At first, he said, there was some panic among the soldiers when they saw the crowd. But they were ordered to fire. An armoured personnel carrier was set alight when it stopped. The crew were beaten but students intervened and rescued them.

The army had nabbed me at 2am. By 4am, when they let me go, gunfire could still be heard. At one stage students came from side streets, shouting "Go home, go home" to stalled lorries outside the leadership compound. They were scattered by militiamen with clubs, probably the one occasion during the night when they did not use guns.

I blubbed when I got back to my hotel. I couldn't stop. Perhaps it was shock, or maybe it was because of the carnage. I was weeping for the people of Beijing. I cannot see how they are ever likely to trust their leaders again.

RETURN TO MENU

27 May 2004

Radiating smiles and beatitude, the 14th Dalai Lama is back in Britain on his endless peregrination around the world's capitals and will probably hear the usual pious but insincere expressions of support.

As China looms ever larger in the world, European leaders are increasingly shunning the Buddhist monk and the cause of Tibetan independence grows dimmer. In France where the Dalai Lama passed through, President Jacques Chirac has not met him since 1998.

In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Shroeder has never dared meet him in the five years since he took office although his junior coalition partners, the Green Party were once vociferous in demanding full independence for Tibet.

In Britain, Tony Blair - who met him in 1999 - has not found time in his schedule for another meeting, provoking questions in Parliament. The Prime Minister responded by denying he was avoiding him. "I've actually met the Dalai Lama on previous occasions. I'll be very happy to meet him again on subsequent occasions," he said.

"As for the issue of Tibet, which is a matter of concern to MPs on all sides of the House, this is an issue we raise constantly with the Chinese - most recently on the visit of Premier Wen, when we had a significant and long discussion on Tibet," he continued.

Alison Reynolds of the Free Tibet campaign group attacked the decision. "Given the world's pre-occupation with the 'War on Terror' it seems extraordinary that the Prime Minister would pass up the chance to meet the most prominent man of peace," she said. "Britain, more than any other western country, has a longstanding relationship with Tibet and should therefore be at the forefront of efforts to promote an end to China's present day occupation of Tibet."

The Dalai Lama will however meet Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Prince Charles and has been invited to visit the Scottish Parliament. Another factor is China's economic boom, and the desperation of Western leaders to stay on side with Beijing, so that businesses continue to enjoy the good times.

A Nobel Peace prize winner and the world's most famous advocate of non-violence, the Dalai Lama ought to have found his standing rising in a world obsessed with the War on Terror but though he remains universally admired, he is on the contrary increasingly ignored.

The Tibetan issue has gradually faded from prominence and the Dalai Lama's demands have shrunk in the past 20 years from full independence to not much more than a plea for tolerance and autonomy.

China is trying hard to make him an international non- person, the way it has succeeded in doing with the leadership of Taiwan. Even the United States does not dare officially to allow President Chen Shui-bian permission to enter the country for fear of offending Beijing except on a transit visa.

With Beijing's blessing European Union representatives such as Chris Patten or Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson, are happy to meet a tyrant like North Korean leader Kim Jong Il responsible for the deaths of millions. Yet they have all ostracised President Chen, a democratically elected leader of a prosperous and peaceful state.

Until now, the Dalai Lama has been saved from a similar fate by his unique status as both a spiritual guru and as the political leader of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Yet on present trends, the Dalai Lama will no longer be received at the highest levels for much longer.

All of China's neighbours have given in to Chinese pressure and refused to allow him in on anything resembling an official visit. Even countries with a strong Buddhist tradition - South Korea, Japan, Thailand, Mongolia and Burma have all rejected visits or declined to accord him the protocol his rank had hitherto commanded..

Russia is insisting that there can be no official meetings even though it is now considering letting him in to perform religious pastoral duties for his followers.

India, home to the Tibetan exile government, is being forced to reconsider its position as Beijing and New Delhi are drawn together by economic interests.

Last year Nepal, the chief conduit for the thousands of refugees who flee the country every year, suddenly reversed its tolerant policy and began handing over the escapees to the custody of the Chinese embassy in Kathmandu. Only after intensive pressure did it stop this and resume allowing the refugees to be handled by UN High Commission for Refugees. Outside a few small countries in Europe, the Dalai Lama's remaining hold out is in North America. President Bush has not hesitated to invite him to the White House on two occasions and Congress continues to pass motions supportive of Tibetan rights.

This month the Dalai Lama spent 19 days touring Canada attracting huge crowds and the support of pop stars like Alanis Morissette. In Ottawa, Paul Martin became the first Canadian premier to meet the Dalai Lama, defying protests by China and the fears of the powerful Canadian business community. Even so it was only a brief meeting which the Canadians stressed was only about religion

Beijing routinely threatens to punish those that deny its edicts. Chinese officials threatened to strip Liverpool of its status as a twin city to Shanghai unless it withdrew its invitation to the Dalai Lama. In China, the Dalai Lama continues to vilified in a stream of propaganda and those who show their support for him by openly displaying his photograph risk long prison terms.

"The destiny and future of Tibet can no longer be decided by the Dalai Lama and his clique. Rather, it can only be decided by the whole Chinese nation, including the Tibetan people," said a White Paper issued last week by Beijing.

"This is an objective political fact in Tibet that cannot be denied or shaken." The 30-page white paper, released by the Information Office of the State Council robustly rejected the Dalai Lama's offer to accept a limited autonomy.

"It is hoped that the Dalai Lama will look reality in the face, make a correct judgment of the situation, truly relinquish his stand for 'Tibet independence', and do something beneficial to the progress of China and the region of Tibet in his remaining years," said the document entitled Regional Ethnic Autonomy in Tibet .

Even though the Dalai Lama has officially declared he is no longer seeking independence and would keep Tibet inside China, all this suggests he is never going to allowed back to Tibet and may never be welcomed in Beijing. Since 1995, he has pressed to make a pilgrimage to the holy mountain of Wutaishan in north-west China as a way of getting talks started. Such a visit seemed highly possible during US President Bill Clinton's visit to China in 1998.

At 68, and in exile for 45 years, the Dalai Lama cannot have many years left to carrying on his peregrinations and some analysts suspect the Chinese are only waiting for him to die in order to replace him with a candidate of their own.

After the 10th Panchen Lama died almost 14 years ago, the Chinese rejected the Dalai Lama's choice of his successor and seized the boy and his family. Instead Beijing appointed their own candidate who will one day probably be called upon to lead the Tibetans during the period until a new Dalai Lama is recognised and reaches adulthood.

The pace of Chinese immigration has stepped up and will be further boosted when the first railway line linking Tibet to the rest of China opens in a few years.

Certainly, the hopes which flared among Tibetans during the 1980s when Beijing opened indirect negotiations with the Dalai Lama and faced down an uprising which started in Lhasa have now faded. The unrest was stamped out after 1989 when Lhasa was put under martial law by the current President of China, Hu Jintao. At least 800 Tibetans were arrested, many of them monks and nuns, and given long prison sentences. Even 15 years on - by official accounts - more than 145 Tibetans serving terms for political crimes.

"China is not yet ready to seriously discuss more freedoms for Tibet," the Dalai Lama observed during his tour of Canada but he said he was confident that "democracy, rule of law, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, open information - these things will come."

The Dalai Lama's best hope now rests with Washington. He emerged from the White House last autumn saying that Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell had shown "interest and genuine sympathy" for Tibet.

A White House spokesman said: "The president reiterated the strong commitment of the US to the preservation of Tibet's unique religious, cultural and linguistic identity and the protection of the human rights of all Tibetans."

Optimists believe that as relations between Washington and Beijing have warmed after China entered the World Trade Organisation and the US was no longer threatening trade sanctions on human rights issues, China has been more willing to start a dialogue with the Tibetans. Yet despite strong support from the US, the dialogue has made little or no progress.

Instead the Chinese government is intent on tightening its grip over the Tibetans by launching new campaigns targeting the Dalai Lama's followers across the country. In October 2003, another monk, Nyima Dragpa died, reportedly as a result of repeated torture while serving a nine-year sentence for advocating Tibetan independence.

54 YEARS IN TIBET

1950: Chinese Army invades.

1951: Tibet becomes a "national autonomous region" under Dalai Lama's rule. Actual control held by Chinese Communist Party.

1959: Tibetans launch an armed separatist revolt, which is suppressed. Dalai Lama flees to India with 80,000 followers, establishes a "government-in-exile".

1965: Tibetan Autonomous Region formally established.

1966: Cultural Revolution begins in China. Red Guards take Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Religious practices banned, at least 4,000 monasteries destroyed.

1976: Religious ban lifted.

1989: China imposes martial law. Tibet's "government-in-exile" disbands.

1991: China agrees to hold talks with exiled leaders.

1999: Beijing rules Tibet an "inseparable part of China" and Dalai Lama must drop demands for independence.

May 2004: Dalai Lama in UK Tony Blair refuses to meet.

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08 May 2004

Off the remote north-east coast of Borneo, a Malaysian patrol vessel hailed a suspicious looking trawler last week. When marine police boarded, they found a catch of 160 dead giant leatherback turtles, the most endangered of all sea turtles. The poachers, who had poisoned the waters with cyanide, came from China's southern province of Hainan, more than 1,000 miles away.

That same day, stock markets across Asia and Europe shuddered when the Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao - who arrives in Britain for a three-day visit tomorrow - warned that he was taking "very forceful measures" to slow China's runaway economy.

"The coming slowdown in the Chinese economy should be viewed as a global event," warned chief Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach. "There is good reason to believe that the impacts of a sharp slowdown in the Chinese investment cycle could spread well beyond Asia."

For better or worse, every ripple from this giant economy, which is driven by the fast-expanding needs of 1.3 billion consumers, can now be felt across the world. Without China, even the mighty US could not run its huge trade and budget deficits. China is the world's second largest buyer of US government debt, as it recycles a $124bn trade surplus with the United States. No less significantly, the country's frenetic construction boom is driving up world prices of nearly every commodity, while large-scale foreign investment is powering a flood of exports which is bringing down global prices for manufactured goods.

Officially, China represents less than 4 per cent of the world's economy. But its spectacular rate of industrial production - which grew by 16.3 per cent last year alone - is making its effects felt all over the world. Last year, China accounted for 7 per cent of global oil consumption, 27 per cent of steel, 31 per cent of coal and 40 per cent of cement. And its appetite for raw materials has been growing for years.

Optimists are busy making plans on how to make money by satisfying China's growing demand for timber, iron ore, copper, grain, water, power, fish, meat, cars and everything else.

Others fear the environmental consequences of unconstrained growth. Last year, China added 1.8 million cars to its roads, bringing the total to over 10 million. At recent growth rates, the number of cars could double every three to four years.

The world's top carmakers are rushing to build new factories in China. Volkswagen announced last weekend plans for a new plant in China to help it ramp up output to 1.6 million vehicles there by 2008. DaimlerChrysler has just signed a €1bn contract to build a Mercedes-Benz car factory in Beijing in the hope that current annual demand for 12,000 of the top models will soon double.

Yet were car ownership rates ever to match those in the United States (135 million for a population of 270 million in 2002), then there would be about 600m vehicles on China's roads, more than all the cars in the world today.

China's own environmental record is so lamentable that if it were ever to import Western consumer habits, we might all suffer the consequences. Imagine, for example, what would happen if coal production were to double. China relies on coal for 75 per cent of its energy and already spews out 19 million tons of sulphur dioxide a year, compared with 11 million tons for the United States. It would soon rival the US as the world's largest source of greenhouse gases - although as a "developing nation" China is exempted by the Kyoto treaty from cutting its carbon dioxide emissions. The implications for global warming hardly bear thinking about.

Environmentalists point out that China's "ecological footprint", though large and increasing, is considerably less per head than that of either the US or the UK. Even now, however, the inhabitants of roughly two-thirds of the 340 Chinese cities, where air quality is monitored, breathe air that fails to meet national air-quality levels (which are considerably less stringent than World Health Organisation norms). Indoor pollution from coal burning takes more than 700,000 lives a year.

Then there is water. Two thirds of China's major cities are now seriously short of fresh water, and as many as 700 million people drink water that is contaminated with human and animal waste and that doesn't come close to meeting government standards (also below world norms).

Most lakes and rivers are now heavily polluted; coastal waters are plagued by red tides of algae. Fishing stocks are so exhausted that Beijing has had to impose ever longer fishing moratoriums and to try to cut the size of its fishing fleet.

But it isn't just China that suffers. The North China plain, home to 200 million peasants who used to grow half of China's wheat, is drying up. The spring dust storms which swirl out of North China and Mongolia are now depositing dust as far away as the US.

As the water table falls, large areas of farmland will be taken out of production and China will soon need food imports so large they will dwarf existing world reserves. Wheat production has been falling in China since 2000, and its once massive stockpiles of wheat and corn have disappeared. World food prices are bound to rise as a result, causing hardship for the 800 million people around the world who are already short of food.

China has so far succeeded only in exporting its environmental problems. When a national logging ban was introduced following disastrous Yangtze floods in 1998, timber imports from Burma, Thailand, Laos and Indonesia shot up. Imports from Burma reached 1 million cubic metres in 2002 and, according to the environmental organisation Global Witness, may have reached 1.4 million cubic metres in 2003. As a result, hundreds of square miles of ancient tropical forests in Burma have disappeared.

South-east Asia is also reeling under the impact of China's plans to build dozens of new giant dams across the Mekong, the Salween, the Irrawaddy, and the Brahmaputra. The Mekong River Commission, an international body representing Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, made official protests this year because the 4,500km-long river has seen record low flows since January and strange and unprecedented fluctuations in levels. China's construction of two large hydroelectric dams - the Manwan and Dachaoshan - is blamed. Two more dams are under construction, while at least another four are being planned.

After protests in Thailand and Burma against plans to build 13 hydro-power dams on the Salween River, China ordered one of the dams to be cancelled. Sooner or later, however, all China's rivers will be completely dammed. To keep its economy expanding, China needs some 800 million to 900 million kilowatts of electricity a year. Yet it currently generates just 350 million kilowatts.

In the past four years, China has gone from a surplus of energy to a deficit so serious that even cities like Shanghai have had to start rationing electricity. From being nearly self-sufficient in oil ten years ago, China is now the world's second biggest oil importer - and is on the verge of needing massive coal imports as well.

China is likely to realise plans to triple installed hydroelectric capacity to 270,000 megawatts by 2020: 28 large-scale hydropower projects are now being built, adding to 835 existing large hydropower plants. Many are in the central Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces where power outages were frequent last year.

Yet China's growing needs are also creating a boom for its neighbours. Many are now busy investing in giant gas fields or long oil pipelines to satisfy demand. Kazakhstan has said it will start building a 3,000km oil pipeline to China from the Caspian Sea later this year.

Moscow will soon declare a decision on a pipeline to carry up to 20 million tons of oil each year from Siberia to China. And most of Angola's oil exports now go to China.

Chinese oil companies are planning big investments in the Persian Gulf, while this year China National Offshore Oil Corp bought Indonesian offshore reserves from Spain's Repsol YPF for $585m. To provide more natural gas, China has turned to Australia. In 2002, an Australian-led consortium and an Indonesian gas field operated by Britain's BP won contracts to supply China with liquefied natural gas (LNG). This year ALNG, a consortium led by Australian energy giant Woodside, won a 25-year deal worth up to $13.5bn to supply an LNG terminal in China's Guangdong province while Indonesia will supply LNG for a proposed second terminal.

China's construction frenzy has fuelled a sustained rally in world commodity prices. It all started after the Asian financial crisis in 1998 when Beijing feared a wave of social unrest. The fires were fanned again last year during the Sars epidemic, when the economy looked like it was heading for a contraction until the government stoked lending to encourage a new wave of mass construction.

Although Chinese leaders are now busy trying to organise a "soft landing" for an economy which saw a 43 per cent jump in fixed-asset investment in the first quarter of the year, they may find it hard to put the genie back in the bottle.

China has doubled its steel output since 2000, with half being used in construction. It is now the world's largest producer by a wide margin, but capacity will double again in the next three years. The pace of spending on new steel mills tripled from 2002 to 2003, making a world-wide glut more or less inevitable.

Many countries, including Australia and Brazil, are gambling on the belief that the music will not stop. Rio Tinto has just said that it will rush ahead to open a new mine in central Queensland, Australia, to export 5.5 million tons of coking coal a year to China. BHP Billiton is expanding cooper output at its mines in Chile, and spending $1.4bn on developing a new nickel deposit in western Australia.

Other companies are preparing to invest more than $5bn to upgrade Brazilian ports and railways, in order to handle a surge in deliveries of iron ore and soya beans to China. China has suddenly become Brazil's third-biggest single export market after a 51 per cent jump in trade last year.

Meanwhile, South Korea's exports to China expanded 48 per cent last year, accounting for 80 per cent of the country's $15bn trade surplus, and most of its recent economic growth. Much of the trade is in parts for processing into manufactured consumer goods that are destined for the US.

The growth of China's foreign trade has also breathed new life into the world's ailing shipping industry, with tanker rates tripling over the last two years. Thanks to Beijing, the shipping industry is now running at full capacity.

But the boom will surely have to end sooner or later. When it does, the world is likely to be left with vast overcapacity in steel and cars - just as the previous boom left China producing too many TV sets and motorbikes, now being dumped on world markets.

By then, however, enough fortunes will have been made in China to create a new surge in demand for high-priced luxuries, from Armani suits to sea turtles. In Borneo or Milan, the China effect is likely to carry on being felt for some time yet.

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In Crawford, Texas, last October and on the phone this month, Chinese President Jiang Zemin confidently promised his new friend President George W. Bush that he would do his utmost to help solve the North Korea problem. Speaking after the Crawford summit, Jiang told reporters, "China has all along been a supporter of a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula. ... [W]e will continue to consult on this issue and work together to ensure a peaceful resolution." In return, Bush has thanked Jiang effusively, praising China for being "very helpful" and singling out Jiang for his "constructive leadership."

The reality is less sanguine. China has minimal influence with Pyongyang, which has distrusted Beijing for years. Despite this, China has been milking the North Korea issue for some time to show the United States it can be an upstanding member of the international community, and China has been earning a rich reward for doing very little regarding Pyongyang.

Despite historical links, enmity between Beijing and Pyongyang runs deep. China may have sent one million soldiers to rescue North Korea from defeat after it invaded the South in 1950, but relations have been poor, if not actively hostile, for most of the last 35 years. First came angry name-calling during the Cultural Revolution, when China's Red Guards attacked the former North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung for living too extravagant a lifestyle.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in China in 1978, the relationship soured further. Fresh from winning a mandate to demolish Maoism, Deng arrived on a state visit to Pyongyang in September 1978 and could not help expressing revulsion at the absurdity of Kim Il Sung's personality cult. Like all other visitors, Deng was brought to pay his respects to the statue of "eternal president" Kim Il Sung. China's diminutive leader looked up at the 70-foot statue and noticed it was covered from head to toe in hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of gold. He complained to his hosts that they had squandered massive amounts of Chinese aid by building the monument and now had the nerve to demand more money. Later, Deng refused to grant future aid and demanded that the North reform its economy.

The statue incident triggered a serious rift not only with Kim Il Sung but also with the eternal president's eldest son, Kim Jong Il, who was busy assuring his eventual accession to his father's throne through flattery, erecting ever more grandiose monuments to his father. Even before Deng's slight, Kim Jong Il had few natural ties to China. While Kim Il Sung, who was educated in Manchuria, spoke Chinese and had even joined the Chinese Communist Party, Kim Jong Il only came to China for the first time in 1983 on a brief visit.

Accordingly, when he first began assuming power in 1980, taking over most day-to-day duties from his father, Kim Jong Il bridled at Beijing's suggestion that he deviate from his father's Stalinist policies. Instead, he plunged the country into a half-baked scheme to increase grain production by building huge seawalls to turn tidal flats into fields. Throughout the '80s, in fact, Kim Jong Il allegedly encouraged anti-Chinese feelings among the North Korean public and purged his party of anyone with strong links to China. In response, the Chinese began demanding hard currency for exports.

While China basked in record harvests by beginning to privatize agriculture, Kim Jong Il's promises to increase grain production became a nightmare. Grain harvests fell by half, and by the mid-'90s North Korea was not only broke but also starving. Not surprisingly, China became more and more irritated by the North's continuing demands when it could have used reforms to boost agricultural yields. Chinese schools and leaders began talking less and less about Chinese ties to the North or about the Korean War.

In response, North Korea began an absurd effort to expunge all traces of Chinese influence from Korean history. Chinese characters were no longer used, as they are in South Korea, to supplement the alphabet. When I visited the North in 1986, museum exhibits about the Korean War made no mention of Chinese involvement whatsoever. Students in the North complained to me about being insulted by China. Relations became even more frigid after Beijing established diplomatic links with South Korea in 1992 without insisting that Washington simultaneously recognize the North. In the eyes of the North, this was betrayal of the worst kind.

By the mid-'90s, China and North Korea were still putting out propaganda saying the two were as close as "lips and teeth," yet Beijing's influence over Pyongyang had dwindled to almost nothing. Occasionally, China's actions made a difference. In 1994, China's decision to cut off grain exports to the North helped force Pyongyang to swallow its pride and deal with the international community by appealing to the United Nations for emergency food aid.

Yet the grain decision was an exception. Beijing's leaders realize that Kim Jong Il, who understands little of how economies function, has mismanaged his country's economy since he was effectively put in charge of it in 1980. Were Kim Jong Il to reform, China's northeast, one of the poorer areas of the country, would greatly profit from increased rail and road links. Yet China's lack of influence shows in its continuing failure to persuade the North to copy China's economic reforms, which, if implemented, might raise food production and possibly even bring in foreign investment. What's more, China played only a minimal role in resolving the 1994 nuclear crisis, which was dominated by U.S.-North Korea meetings, and in 1998 it played a similarly small part in defusing the crisis that erupted after North Korea shot a missile over the Japanese islands, doing little more than using its state media to criticize U.S. intervention in Northeast Asia.

Frustrated by the lack of economic change, China has also in recent years suspended flights to Pyongyang, cut off commercial lines of credit, closed down border crossings, and even restricted goods from entering the North. Chinese companies have pulled out of the Rajin-Sonbong free-trade zone, an early '90s scheme to lure foreign capital to an area of North Korea along the Chinese border. China even helped scuttle Kim Jong Il's most recent project, a special economic zone similar to Rajin-Sonbong, by arresting a Dutch-Chinese businessman Kim Jong Il had charged with running the zone. China was more hesitant to send food aid to the North in 2002 and, until recently, ignored the hundreds of thousands of North Korean refugees fleeing into China, even though Pyongyang pressured Beijing to round up the refugees and deport them.

Despite its lack of influence, Beijing has portrayed itself to the United States as a crucial go-between to North Korea. In response, the Western press has begun lionizing Beijing, running headlines such as The Philadelphia Inquirer 's on October 26, 2002, " JIANG AGREES TO HELP DISARM NORTH KOREA. " Leading China academics, such as Kenneth Lieberthal, have announced that China could be on the verge of becoming a friend to America. In a New York Times article last October, Lieberthal asked in the headline, " HAS CHINA BECOME AN ALLY? "

But it is unlikely China will be able to help sway Kim Jong Il. In fact, many academics familiar with China and North Korea, such as Scott Snyder of the Asia Foundation in Seoul, say China is as badly informed about what goes on in the secretive North as anyone else and that the prospects of Jiang Zemin or other Chinese leaders directly influencing Kim Jong Il's policies seem remote. Jiang has had several meetings with Kim Jong Il about the nuclearization of the peninsula, but all evidence suggests that Kim Jong Il has paid no heed at all. After all, though China has been saying for a decade that it desires a nuclear-free North Korea and has put pressure on Pyongyang not to go forward with nuclear development, the North has continued with a covert nuclear weapons program.

In fact, in recent years, China has drawn closer to Seoul than to Pyongyang. Today, China and South Korea conduct over $100 billion in two-way trade annually, and South Korea is now one of the largest investors in China. These days, the Chinese joke is that North Korea is the official wife, but it is the concubine, South Korea, which is loved. Unfortunately for the Bush administration's efforts at multilateral diplomacy, Pyongyang feels just about as warmly about Beijing.

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BEIJING DISPATCH
Mussolini Redux
by Jasper Becker

Post date 06.16.03 | Issue date 06.23.03

With clenched fists raised high, the rows of students in red neckties stood solemnly amid the baroque ruins of the great Qing Emperor Qianlong's Garden of Perfect Splendor and swore an oath of loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Amid this tangible symbol of how the West humiliated China--British and French troops burned down the garden in 1860--they vowed to sacrifice their lives to the nation and affirmed their belief that only the CCP can restore China to its former glory.

The ceremony was only one of hundreds of similar rituals performed regularly by youth cadres these days in China, where the CCP has abandoned even its pretenses of being a communist organization. Yet this jettisoning of communism is hardly reason to celebrate. As the militaristic garden rite suggests, China today is replacing communism with something at least as bad: It is becoming a right-wing fascist state eerily similar to 1920s Italy.

In the last two decades of the twentieth century, former Chinese leaders Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin discarded nearly every element of communism. Current leader Hu Jintao, who met President George W. Bush last week for the first time in Hu's current capacity, is continuing Deng's and Jiang's work. State farms and factories have been privatized. Stock markets have been opened in Shanghai, Shenzhen, and other cities. China has joined the World Trade Organization and has begun to adhere to international commercial laws. Guaranteed health insurance and pensions have been jettisoned. People have become freer to move around the country, purchase consumer goods, travel abroad, and generally live private lives.

At the sixteenth CCP Congress last November, where Jiang handed over the reins to Hu, the CCP cut its last links to its past as a revolutionary Marxist organization. For the first time, CCP leaders formally allowed capitalists into the party. They abandoned their long-standing claim to represent only the working class and now champion all of society's interests and embrace free-market economic policies. At the conference, keynote speakers dropped all references to Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Stalin. In fact, party leaders now often boast that China's cheap and docile labor force is its greatest attraction to foreign businesses.

Realizing that the demise of communism deprived the CCP of an ideology and a reason to exist, Jiang, Hu, and their peers are quietly remaking China into a fascist state bearing a striking resemblance to its '20s predecessors. This is not the fascism of the Nazis, with its racial-extermination campaigns and ambitions to reshape the world through total war, but the kind of highly nationalistic right-wing dictatorship that emerged in the '20s and '30s in Germany, Spain, Japan, Romania, and, most notably, Italy. Since at least the late '80s, CCP leaders have demonstrated a commitment to protecting private property while supporting interventionist, futurist industrial policies, an economic program recalling fascist ideas of "planned capitalism." One of the oft-repeated phrases about Benito Mussolini is that he "made the trains run on time." In other words, in Mussolini's Italy, the state took responsibility for an extensive program of public works that glorified the nation, boosting economic growth and encouraging industrialization. Il Duce doubled iron and steel production; drained the Pontine Marshes, a massive area of mosquito-infested bog land; and built the autostrada, a national highway system--all with state deficit spending.

Similarly, the Chinese government has embarked upon an unprecedented series of massive public projects that glorify China and the CCP. These projects range from the Three Gorges Dam, the world's largest, to cross-country oil pipelines. And, just as the public works-heavy economic policies of fascist Italy, Germany, and Japan initially produced strong growth--Germany's economy expanded by 73 percent between 1933 and 1937--so too has China posted high growth rates in recent years. Mussolini himself oversaw an extensive program of public works that stimulated employment for a time.

Beyond supporting massive public works, China's still-developing fascism encompasses other aspects of state intervention combined with limited private entrepreneurship. In Mussolini's time, Italian fascists grouped businesses into legally recognized syndicates, such as the National Fascist Confederation of Commerce. Beijing is doing the same. Il Duce himself personally rejected the Soviet Union's goals of abolishing private property and emphasized that corporate interests were important components of society--as long as they were kept in syndicates and guided by the state. China allows private business ownership but demands that its network of CCP cells, which operate within all medium- and large-sized companies, coordinate among corporations within the same industry and ensure that the party remains in control of competition between companies. At the November CCP Congress, many Western media outlets reported that Jiang announced that "market forces [should] play an essential role in the allocation of resources" within China's economy. But Jiang actually said that market forces should "play an essential role ... under the state's macroeconomic control." Indeed, in recent years, the CCP has ensured that the fixed-line and wireless-phone industries are controlled by a few large, state-linked companies and has consolidated the country's airline industry into several large air groups.

And, like Il Duce, China's Mandarins have made high technology a centerpiece of their economic ideology. Mussolini was the first leader to closely link a right-wing nationalistic program not with conservative establishment forces but with forward-looking technological changes. In Mussolini's time, this focus was reflected by the fascist artists of the futurism movement, who celebrated technology as a means of advancing future state goals and building a glorious Italy, a nation Mussolini said must be restored to the power and glory it possessed in the days of ancient Rome. Mussolini portrayed Italy as a nation in decay that needed to be reunited and reinvigorated through technology used by private companies but ultimately controlled by the state. The CCP, which also frequently portrays China as a great nation ready to be awakened, has focused on acquiring the most modern technology possible. Visitors to China's museums are taught that China needs to acquire Western science both to defend itself and to restore its former greatness. Accordingly, when China builds new economic projects, it insists on only the most cutting-edge ideas: Shanghai's new light-rail employs magnetic levitation technology that makes it the fastest rail line in the world, technology that Shanghai demanded from the European firms building the rail.

To complement its economic policies, the CCP has developed a neo-fascist political program of mass rallies, nationalist indoctrination, and party control over private lives--but not such control that China today could be called totalitarian. To teach average Chinese that China is a waking power that has often been abused by outsiders, the CCP organizes frequent mass events, such as the garden ceremony and giant pageants attended by hundreds of thousands, as well as other propaganda. And, just as the press under Mussolini played up foreigners' invasions and humiliations of Italy, endless articles in China's state-controlled press remind the Chinese of the West's dominance of Chinese politics and economics before World War II and of Japan's invasion of China in the '30s. In so doing, the party instills a permanent resentment of foreigners, even though far more Chinese have been killed by the CCP than by the United States, Japan, and Great Britain.

The propaganda not only looks backward but also takes in China's current competitors, competitors who threaten the Chinese "motherland." Like Mussolini, Jiang and Hu see their country in the midst of a Darwinian struggle between nations. In 1932, Mussolini announced that "fascism is the doctrine best adapted to represent the tendencies and aspirations of a people, like the people of Italy, who are rising again after many centuries of abasement and foreign servitude." Similarly, Jiang has warned the party faithful that "competition in overall national strength is becoming increasingly fierce." Beijing leverages this victimhood and resentment of foreign powers to increase nationalism and strengthen its international image as it aspires to become a global superpower. On Chinese television, performers from every kind of art express their undying patriotism and devotion to the motherland, which is equated with the party in these devotionals. When necessary, as the accidental bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999 and the U.S. spy plane incident of 2001, party leaders and the media draw upon victimhood to whip up masses of protesters against the United States or other countries. Meanwhile, Jiang and other leaders frequently tout China's unity and national strength in messages to foreign countries and in overseas visits.

While stressing China's growing nationalism, CCP leaders also make clear that they are in control. Like Mussolini, who wielded power on the basis of his brand of exuberant nationalism, which claimed to be restoring the fortunes of the Italian people, the CCP emphasizes to the public that only the party can channel their devotion to country and state. Like Mussolini's fascists, who co-opted the entire Italian political spectrum, the CCP, as part of a policy it calls "United Front," has become more inclusive than any previous Chinese party. Instead of excluding the entrepreneur or the intellectual or religious leader, it brings them inside the party's fold. Any group that remains outside the CCP, however, is punished severely. Compared with the late '80s, when there was less personal freedom in China but more room to discuss political reform, today China enforces fewer restrictions on people's individual lives, but the CCP has strengthened its restrictions on any form of free association. Tibetans, Falun Gong members, evangelical Protestants--no one can organize any collective interest group to challenge the state. Mussolini said, "The fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the state and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with the state." Seventy years later, Jiang told his colleagues that the state "organizes the nation but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual. ... The deciding power in this question cannot be the individual but the state alone."

As in '20s Italy, the CCP's policies keep the ruling elites satisfied. They ensure that profit is private and individual but that loss is public and social. In China, the children of the party hierarchy run semi-privatized companies where they are allowed to keep the rewards for themselves and leave the losses to the state. These policies also enable the party to fund a variety of showcase projects, such as a cross-country railway, that glorify China and the CCP--at the expense of the education and health of heavily taxed peasants.

Ultimately, these fascist policies could ruin the economy. Squandering vast sums on projects such as the Three Gorges Dam leads to excessive public expenditure. Some economists estimate that a proper accounting of China's deficit would place it between 100 and 150 percent of GDP, which is projected to rise significantly in the coming years. Meanwhile, retaining CCP control over the economy will prevent China from developing the rule of law and a true free market necessary to continue its economic growth.

What's more, as the CCP becomes more fascist, it could become increasingly tempted to use its military strength to demonstrate national glory, as Mussolini did by invading Ethiopia in 1935. The CCP and the army are completely intertwined--Jiang is the head of the military--and China's rhetoric is often so vehemently irredentist that a demonstration of military strength, perhaps by invading Taiwan, seems all too possible. The propaganda machine is constantly engaged in an effort to elevate the military's prestige and glorify its victories and contributions to national unity. Far from moving toward a separation of party and military, Jiang insists that "the people's army is a staunch pillar of the people's democratic dictatorship," a term for the CCP. Sometimes, party propaganda suggests that China is only biding its time until the moment comes when it is confident enough to use its national strength and assert its rightful claims in the world.

China need not go down that path. The most optimistic observers see China's neo-fascism as a halfway house to democracy and point out that Taiwan and South Korea evolved from right-wing authoritarian military dictatorships with dirigiste economic policies into flourishing democracies. But, unlike those smaller states, which as the cold war ebbed came under pressure from the West to democratize, China regards itself as an imperium for whom, as Mussolini said, "the growth of empire, that is to say the expansion of the nation, is an essential manifestation of vitality." Hence the immense pride China has shown in recovering Hong Kong and Macau and in stifling the growth of democratic institutions in these territories, tying them closer to an authoritarian government.

While China could follow South Korea, it is more likely that the CCP will remain firmly in power and on its fascist path. For now, there seems little domestic or external push for democratization. After all, Mussolini's policies were never discredited domestically, and, if not for his disastrous wars, the fascists might still be in power there, too.

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BEIJING DISPATCH
Breath Test
by Jasper Becker

Post date 05.01.03 | Issue date 05.12.03

This past week, on Beijing's roads, travelers saw images straight out of the 1950s. On streets where only a month ago the Chinese could travel largely unhindered, police checked cars to make sure people with severe acute respiratory syndrome ( SARS ) symptoms did not leave the city. I myself saw men and women with red handkerchiefs tied around their arms carrying wooden staffs. They were members of neighborhood committees responsible, in a government- mandated campaign reminiscent of the past, for patrolling, inspecting, snooping, and reporting on their fellow citizens to ensure full compliance with the regime's SARS orders.

As they patrol, the police and the red-kerchiefed men and women are doing more than simply protecting China from sinking deeper into the SARS epidemic that has spread across the country. They are signaling that, faced with perhaps its most serious crisis since 1989, the Communist leadership is not, as some foreign observers have suggested, becoming more transparent. In fact, the Beijing regime actually is falling back upon old-style campaigns of propaganda and control.

Over the past month, as the true extent of the SARS epidemic has become clear, some Western publications have expressed the hope that the disease will prompt the Chinese government to open up. After the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fired two well-known officials, Beijing Mayor Meng Xuenong and Health Minister Zhang Wenkang, last month for covering up SARS , The Economist ran a cover story titled " THE SARS VIRUS: COULD IT BECOME CHINA'S CHERNOBYL? " in which its editors predicted that the disease could lead to increased transparency and public accountability. "A health scare may herald much more profound changes," the magazine noted.

But those predictions are likely mistaken. Unlike the 1989 Tiananmen uprising, which led to a split between hard-liners and moderates in the upper echelons of the party, SARS probably will not lead to a schism. Chinese President Hu Jintao and his peers in government cut their political teeth during the 1989 protests. Accordingly, they have developed a fear of any opening that might decrease Beijing's power: In the past four years, even as China has opened some segments of its economy, they have cracked down hard on groups such as Falun Gong that the regime perceives as threatening the party's primacy. The reformers, who in the late '80s had advocated the removal of direct party control of institutions such as newspapers, hospitals, and universities, no longer hold positions of power.

The party also has maintained tight control of the media during the SARS crisis, using the press as an old-style propaganda organ. Though Meng and Zhang were fired, the regime has effectively prevented the media from reporting the true spread of SARS . In contrast to the temporary glasnost of 1989, the media have little latitude to express independence from the party. When one doctor in Beijing, Jiang Yanyong, tried to reveal this spring how quickly SARS was spreading, state television refused to put his story on the air.

In fact, the Chinese press has in the wake of SARS been recycling stock phrases that hail the heroism of top leaders and the selfless devotion of the medical-research laboratories of the army, a bastion of support for the party. To take one example, People's Daily covered an April visit by Hu Jintao to Guangdong, the province where SARS allegedly originated, by saying, "Hu, as the highest state leader who personally went to Guangdong, ... has set an example ... of cordiality and affection for the people" and of the leadership ability he shows in handling the crisis.

The press also has been highlighting the strength of China's scientific resources, which it touts as crucial to handling SARS . The CCP has long emphasized its leaders' commands of science and technology; in the '50s, for example, the party constantly highlighted the "scientific" nature of its poorly devised agricultural policies. Unlike in most countries, where lawyers or diplomats rise to power, in China top officials are now mostly trained as engineers.

Beijing is emphasizing its supposed command of science to convince the public that the party is well-equipped to handle SARS . In the past, the party led large-scale "patriotic" public-sanitation campaigns that virtually wiped out syphilis, leprosy, and other diseases in the '50s and '60s, as well as successful inoculation drives against smallpox, typhoid, diphtheria, and other killers. The message is clear: Only party control can wipe out SARS .

The government has been supporting its propaganda with "patriotic" mass-mobilization campaigns similar to those in the '50s, as well as with control of professional organizations. The regime is portraying its efforts to combat the disease as a quasi-military campaign in which citizens are required to "sacrifice" themselves to the national interest: Nurses become heroic "fighters" on the front line, and the goal is "victory" over SARS . Meanwhile, it has utilized its domination of professional organizations to prevent professionals, such as doctors, from turning against the party--by revealing more details about SARS cases to the foreign media or other outsiders, for example. Every hospital, company, and other large institution contains party officials--officials who, since SARS broke, can quash anti-government rumblings.

The party's efforts to keep control seem to be working. In sharp contrast to the closure of state enterprises, which have resulted in massive protests in many areas of China in recent years, the fear of contracting SARS has prompted the public to simply stay indoors. In fact, people have cooperated with the government's anti- SARS measures despite the increased restrictions on civil liberties.

Ultimately, SARS is unlikely to prompt more than a miniscule opening from the Chinese government. Some Chinese officials have suggested in recent days that SARS will force them to become more cooperative with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other international bodies in the future. Yet the officials stop short of suggesting that the WHO would be allowed to set up health-monitoring groups in China separate from party-controlled professional organizations.

Speaking before a group of Asian officials about SARS this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao assured the audience that the party had learned its lesson from the disease. And it has. It's just not the lesson outsiders would like it to learn.

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