By Richard McGregor, the FT’s former Beijing bureau chief

Most commentaries about modern China these days stress how far the country and the state has moved on from the totalitarian rule of Mao Zedong. The parade to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China through the centre of Beijing today is a reminder of the opposite, and largely overlooked, trend - just how communist the Chinese state still is. Continue reading "China celebrates 60 years of Communist rule"

Last week a Tibetan mastiff was flown into Xian airport in central China, where it received a welcome fit for an emperor. The dog was swept into town by a convoy of 30 Mercedes-Benz cars. Tibetan mastiffs are a rare and noble breed – and the pampered pooch had cost his new owners Rmb4m ($586,000, €402,000, £351,000). Reporting the story, the China Daily newspaper commented nervously that such an extravagant display of wealth might “heighten tension between rich and poor”.

This shaggy dog story is just a particularly weird example of the new wealth of modern China. When I last visited the Pudong district of Shanghai, in the mid-1990s, it was a ramshackle area of factories and warehouses. Last week, I found it transformed into a forest of neon-lit, modernist skyscrapers. China has shrugged off the global recession and should grow by 8 per cent in 2009.

This year the country has passed a number of economic milestones. It is now the world’s largest exporter, surpassing Germany. It is the world’s largest market for vehicles, surpassing America. Its foreign reserves, the world’s largest, are now over $2,000bn. The biggest landmark of them all – the moment when China becomes the world’s largest economy – is getting closer. Goldman Sachs famously predicted a couple of years ago that China would hit that target in 2027. But that was before the financial crisis. If America is now set for a long period of slower growth, the big moment could come rather sooner.

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I just bumped into a Malaysian friend, here at the “Summer Davos” in Dalian, up on China’s north-east coast. “What are you doing here?” I asked - “Paying tribute”, he replied.

There is quite a lot of that, here in Dalian.  Last night, Wen Jiabao, China’s prime minister, told us that the economy would grow at the politically-required 8% this year. With the US still reeling, the international business people and foreign politicians here are increasingly looking to China for trade and investment opportunities.

I got a strong sense of that at the session that I chaired on the “The global downturn and the developing world”. Before we got talking the organisers took a poll of the audience, asking them to say what part of the world they expected to do most to pull the world out of recession? There were 67 votes for “Greater China”, about 30 for non-Chinese Asia, five for the US, two for Europe. I felt like finding the two people who had voted for my home continent, and buying them both a drink. Continue reading "Paying tribute in Dalian"

I am sitting in Shanghai airport – and was about to file a glowing piece about the transformation of the city since my last visit in the mid-1990s. But it has just been announced that my flight to Dalian has been delayed, so my mood has darkened. And I have just read a report from a Chinese think tank, claiming that the country has lost 40m jobs since the onset of the Great Recession. Continue reading "A view of Shanghai"

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy - Christina Larson in The New Republic: A Journal of Politics and the Arts

Obama meets the Lobby - Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy  (Walt returns to the subject of his bitterly controversial book, “The Lobby”)

On Versions of Goodness - Bagehot in The Economist

The New Scramble for Africa - Mark Weston in EMEA Finance

Someone give the FT a dose of valium, please - Daniel W. Drezner in Foreign Policy

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, it suddenly became obvious that the USSR had never been a proper country. It was a multinational empire held together by force. Might we one day say the same of China?

Of course, any such suggestion is greeted with rage in Beijing. Chinese politicians are modern-minded pragmatists when it comes to economic management. But they revert to Maoist language when questions of territorial integrity are touched upon. Supporters of Taiwanese independence are “splittists”. The Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of the Tibetans, has been described as a “monster with a human face and an animal’s heart”. The Muslim Uighurs who rioted violently last week were denounced as the tools of sinister foreign forces.

According to David Shambaugh, an academic, the main lesson that the Chinese drew from studying the collapse of the USSR was to avoid “dogmatic ideology, entrenched elites, dormant party organisations, and a stagnant economy”.

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Last time I was in Beijing, I met a reporter from a newspaper called the “Global Times”, which deals mainly with international affairs. The reporter said, slightly defensively, that “people say my newspaper is very nationalist, but that is not really true.” This made me suspect that it probably was true.

Now we can all judge for ourselves. This week, the “Global Times” launched an English-language edition and web-site. Those on the look-out for signs of a more assertive China might be struck by the fact that the lead story is - “China’s navy sails onto world stage”. The peg is that the “Chinese People’s Liberation Army Navy” (PLAN) is staging some exercises to celebrate its sixtieth anniversary this week. The accompanying article told me some things I should have known, but didn’t: China and Britain staged joint naval exercises in 1997; there are Chinese ships taking part in the anti-piracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. There is no sabre-rattling - and no mention of Chinese plans to build new aircraft carriers.

As for the rest, the lead story is on the South African election, there is a disapproving piece about the Japanese prime minister and the Yasakuni shrine and there is a lifestyle article about Beijing University discriminating against short, fat and spotty students. The main item in the Europe section is about Manchester United - which I think is a fair summary of what really interests the Chinese about the old continent.

I have just spent a fascinating couple of days, closeted with some Chinese academics in a house outside Paris, at a seminar organised by Sweden’s “Glasshouse Forum“.

Several of the assembled profs were members of China’s “new left” - people like Zhiyuan Cui, an economist from Tsinghua University and Shaoguang Wang of Hong Kong university. I was surprised by how confident they seemed. The consensus seemed to be that China would weather the global economic crisis better than most - and that the Chinese political system is sufficiently robust to withstand higher unemployment and slower growth. One of the participants pointed out that in the late 1990s, 60m Chinese people had been thrown out of work in the aftermath of the Asian economic crisis and the restructuring of China’s state-owned enterprises. But the country’s long-term trajectory remained ever upwards.

Another participant joked that China had discovered that whatever country it models itself on is doomed. In the 1950s China had modelled itself on the Soviet Union; in the 1980s there was a fashion for imitiating Japan; and more recently, there has been a fascination  with American capitalism. Continue reading "Chinese views of the crisis"