Valerie Niquet is Senior Research Fellow at The French Institute of International Relations (IFRI), Sinologist and Japanologist, Doctor in political science and writes about the evolution of regional balances and strategic issues in Asia since the end of the Cold War. Funded in in 1979 by Thierry de Montbrial, IFRI is France’s leading independent international relations center, dedicated to policy-oriented research and analysis of global political affairs.

This is how she describes her work:

Thirty years after the start of the policy of reform and opening up launched by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the political system and Chinese society are considerably more open. However, there still are many gray areas, one of which is the question of decision-making: the way the decision-making process is concretely implemented remains opaque. Between statements of principle and apparent inconsistencies, an analysis of the decision-making process helps to shed light on the conflicts within the political apparatus, the debates on the evolution of the regime, the interests at work, and the power games that take place.

This is a very interesting piece of work if you are interested in how complex and opaque the decision-making process at the top political level in the Middle Kingdom is. Above all, she deserves all the credit for bringing to the mass – me (sic)- in less than 30 pages:

- The management of the Olympic Games

- How China is handling the international financial crisis and social challenges

- Environmental issues and the promotion of the “China” brand

- Last but not least, corruption and the power of influence networks

p/s. All the credit goes to Arnaud de la Grange who first spotted this article. You can download it here (PDF-122Kb).

Arnaud de La Grange from Le Figaro asks whether this is going to turn into the “New President Security Services’ Nightmare“, Aujourd’hui La Chine collects Chinese reactions in Beijing here and ChinaSmack has translated an impressive list of Chinese reactions there.

BTW, you noticed Wen is speaking in Chinese… at Cambridge !

“This is spine-tingling and hair-raising stuff” says Shanghaiist.

Global Voices Online has sum up some Chinese comments as well.

I don’t remember having sung such song at school, seems that some Chinese pupils do. Here is an excerpt of the transliteration from the China Digital Times:

Lead: Earthquakes, shifting back and forth like the positions of Sarkozy, with his dirty tricks, trying to shake the great China

Lead: Did China retreat?

All: No. The Shenzhou-7 launched. We are victorious!

Lead: Pathetic Europe will never stop the insurmountable force of our great dynasty

All: Just the aftershocks from the earthquake would destroy France!

Watch the video. I am sure Sarkozy will love it !

Apparently, David was chocked and he says it. Here are a few excerpts, buckle-up :

I can honestly say that I have rarely if ever been mistreated in China. I don’t count the arguments over quality or the multiple times I’ve been the target of random theft. I mean, I’ve hardly ever been treated badly by my Chinese hosts in terms of politeness and acceptance.

But that changed this last week. Three separate experiences have really damaged my opinion of the depth of Chinese hospitality. First is the excoriating, racist and downright scary language that is being thrown around in China right now towards foreigners in general and the US and France in particular. From actual riots to virtual (internet) lynchings, from racial comments vocalized without knowing I can speak Chinese to outright bullying and intimidation of foreigners shopping at Carefoure. China is moving farther from its goal of “one world” than it has in more than a couple of decades.

But today is different. I’ve been saying for almost 15 years that China has national-size insecurity complex. They’ve had it for at least 30 years (if not 100 years), but now you see it daily. They want to be welcomed onto the world stage as a player, but can’t handle the heat from the spotlight. They want the world to think that they have arrived, but expect a free pass for their xenophobic view of domestic and world history. They have the glass and metal buildings and freeways and factories, but except for cheap labor, what inside is really “Chinese?” As one client of mine, who recently came to China, asked: “What do the Chinese believe in other than money?” Well the superiority of (presently constituted) China and the Chinese race, for one.

China claims that it’s not their fault they have a bad attitude; that the world has hated and abused China for the last 100+ years and the world is now scared of the rise of China. I say bullshit to both. Sure China was colonized, what country other than England was not?! Africa has a much worse history of colonialism and abuse by the West (and now by China) than does China, but the rampant racism and love-it-or-leave-it attitude doesn’t exist there.

The arguments by Chinese to support their racism are not only conflicting but weak. They claim that Westerns don’t understand China, and at the same time claim that the West is trying to split China because we know that all Chinese dynasties split from within rather than fell from without. They claim that the West doesn’t want a powerful China, yet the financial grow (FDI) has, up until the last few years ALL come from either the west or other Asian Democracies.

Now back down to a personal and business level. First, I am acutely aware that I am a minority in China. Maybe I stand out as a target, but I also get some special treatment because of my different looks (and presumed higher economic status). This means that most Chinese are fantastic hosts and overly polite. It also means that my prices are higher than local would be charged for almost everything in China that is not scanned at a register—and yes, I was here when they still had official “foreign” pricing so I know its relatively better but the attitude is still pervasive.

Secondly, recently, being a foreigner has been, to be honest, at bit scary. Crime against foreigners is high. Anti foreign sentiment is rising fast. Now in China I’m not even a “normal” person (of course not special), now I’m “bad” and I’m “them” and sometimes I even get called “French.”

So why scary now? Because the government may not be able to or willing to control it as the hype for the 0lympics draws near—how do you shut down nationalism in the next 100 days as the 8 year hype of the 0lympics finally crescendos? And instead of shutting it down (and some chats are closed, I realize) they are instead telling Chinese to just not talk with or share “sensitive” information with foreigners—yes, the new official line is to “exclude” anyone that is not Chinese from conversations about real issues. Or just don’t giv them visa’s any more. Welcome (some of you) to China, please shut up, spend your money and then go home as quickly as possible. Nice.

Drawing a line in the sand and saying that “all foreigners are untrustworthy” is a scary position for a government to take—especially when that government has for 50 years also promoted the idea of Chinese racial/national superiority. (At least the US government abuses everyone, citizens and non, equally in our post 9/11 fear of foreigners.) If you don’t think that this is a big deal, look at the crowds supporting the torch relay in Australia, New Zealand or South Korea—do you see anyone supporting the torch that is not Chinese? NONE.

I shared with is a long-time China hand and lawyer friend of mine here in China and he said: “as I tell people who only see the soft side of China, do not be fooled. This is an authoritarian state. It will get less authoritarian only when the citizens insist on something different. It has nothing to do with being a world power and it has nothing to do with us foreign guests.”

if you don’t think that events unfolding now will affect your business in China, then you are not fully aware of who you’re working with in China.

Yup, David was clearly upset… Read the full article here.

I heard this from a friend and wanted to find out if Yan Jiechi really meant this… Thanks to Danwei and Countdown To Beijing, I did.

At a press conference in March, China’s foreign minister, Yang Jiechi said:

I believe that Chinese is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn. Otherwise, how can you explain why 1.3 billion people have chosen it as their mother tongue?

How do we take this ? I did not really had the choice of my mother tongue myself, did you ?

Maybe Yan was just joking… maybe not !

I have Just finished reading “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong, largely based on the author’s experience and written under a pen name, who only recently revealed himself to be former political prisoner.

Just loved it…

Written in 2004 but translated in English and French only in March 2008, the book, set on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia during the Cultural Revolution, has been a publishing phenomenon in China, where it has sold twenty million copies in its legitimate imprint and several million pirated copies since its release in 2004, despite Rong’s desire to keep a low profile, as reported by the Herald Tribune.

The NYT reports:

“Wolf Totem” engages the foreign reader only in its attempts to diagnose the spiritual malaise of contemporary China.

The main line of inquiry is announced on the very first page when a suitably old and wise Mongol tells Chen: “You’re like a sheep. A fear of wolves is in your Chinese bones.” As if on cue, Chen is soon “saddened to have been born into a line of farmers” who have “become as timid as sheep after dozens, even hundreds, of generations of being raised on grains and greens, the products of farming communities; they had lost the virility of their nomadic ancestors.”

Jiang Rong tries to defuse Chinese pride in their splendid agrarian civilization, even disparaging Confucius, now belatedly embraced by the Communist Party. There are laments about how timid Chinese peasants fell prey to canny Westerners who, as “descendants of barbarian, nomadic tribes such as the Teutons and the Anglo-Saxons,” have the blood of wolves in their veins. Chen concludes that the Chinese “are in desperate need of a transfusion” of such “vigorous, unrestrained blood.”

The LA Times gives a different outlook:

It could have been a spectacular novel. Instead it fails to rise above ordinary and at times ventures into the realm of batty.

There is an odd calculus at work throughout this much-heralded book. It basically goes like this: Han Chinese ethnicity, bad. Mongolians, good. Being the sedentary, agrarian people that they are, the Chinese naturally hate wolves. The nomadic, spiritual Mongolians revere them. Why do the Chinese hate wolves? The Chinese are like sheep — weak, complacent, docile and easily led — and sheep hate wolves, that’s why. Mongolians are not like sheep. They are brave, fearless, wise warriors; you can’t fence them in. Why are the Mongolians like this? They have a wolf as their totem, of course. How else could Genghis Khan have conquered most of the then-known world? The Chinese, the poor saps, have a dragon as their symbol.

The most remarkable point, as reported by the NYT is that:

It seems strange that the Chinese censors missed this indictment of Han imperialism. It’s even more remarkable that a novel so relentlessly gloomy and ponderously didactic has become a huge best seller, second in circulation only to Mao’s little red book. This success may be due, at least in part, to its exhortations to the Chinese to imitate the go-getting spirit of the West. However, “Wolf Totem” also captures a widespread Chinese anxiety about their country’s growing physical and moral squalor as millions abandon the countryside in search of a middle-class lifestyle that cannot be environmentally sustained.

Let’s have a look at the conclusion by the Times Online:

The underlying allegory – that people should cease being led about like sheep and should instead emulate the wolf’s fierce independence – seems hardly in keeping with China’s usual heavy-handed emphasis on conformity.

More articles available in French here, there, also here, and there.

“Do you critic China ? You have never been to China…”

“You live in China and you critic China ? You haven’t lived long enough in China…”

“You spent your life in China and you still critic China ? You’re a bad Chinese…”

Guess in which of these three I fill in…