China Hands Spring 2016

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WORDS FROM THE EDITORS

China Hands

CHINA LOOKS TOWARDS IRAN Economics & Business p. 34

THE GREEN TURTLES Overseas Chinese students studying environmental reform

Features, p. 19

CHINESE SOCCER’S LOFTY GOALS Life & Culture p. 36

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WORDS FROM THE EDITORS

China Hands EDITORS IN CHIEF Yi-Ling Liu, Yale ‘17 Jean Young Koo, Yale ‘17 MANAGING EDITORS Yifu Dong, Yale ‘17 Alexander Herkert, Yale ‘17

FEATURES EDITOR Ian Spear, ‘17 POLITICS & DIPLOMACY EDITOR Will Magliocco, ‘18 ECONOMICS & BUSINESS EDITOR Jake Faber, ‘18 LIFE & CULTURE EDITOR Lillian Foote, ‘17

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITORS Christina Zhang, ‘17 Zishi Li, ‘18 ILLUSTRATOR Zhenheng Li, ‘17 PHOTOGRAPHY EDITOR Jennifer Lu, ‘16 WEBMASTER Janice Poon, ‘17

OPINION EDITOR Wenbin Gao, ‘19

OUTREACH DIRECTOR Colette Chiaranussati, ‘18

ONLINE EDITORS Will Magliocco, ‘18 Albert Cao, ‘19

SOCIAL MEDIA DIRECTOR Shirley Kuang, ‘17

EDITORS-AT-LARGE Christian Rhally, ‘16 Erwin Li, ‘16

Cover Illustration by Zishi Li

CREATIVE DIRECTOR Sherril Wang, Yale ‘17

BUSINESS DIRECTOR Jake Faber, ‘18 BUREAU CHIEFS Zara Zhang, Harvard University, ‘17 Emily Schell, Brown University, ‘16

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Table of Contents 4

Words from the Editors

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Features

TAO TAO HOLMES

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Politics & Diplomacy

XIAOYING ZHOU ELENA URSU NICHOLAS WU

YI-LING LIU

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32 JACKSON TSE 33 CAMILIA RAZAVI & DANIEL KHALESSI 34 APRIL DAN FENG 35 ALEXA CARUSO

LAYNE VANDENBERG ZIYU YVONNE YAN ANASTASIIA ILINA

36 38 39

EDWARD COLUMBIA

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CHAO WANG WENBIN GAO YIFU DONG

44 45 46

An Outsider’s Inside Look at Xinjiang

We All Belong to the Same People No Law’s Land Domestic Troubles in the South China Sea Crisis

Features

The Green Turtles

Economics & Business

Paying to Cut the Line The Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank China Looks Towards Iran China’s Supply-Side Reforms

Life & Culture

Chinese Soccer’s Lofty Goals Zhao’s Not My Name Can Women Hold up Half the Sky?

Features

Kunming’s Meter Gauge Rails

Opinion

Love For the Papa, But Not His Gala China-Dreaming: Interview with Stephen Wilmarth The Cost of One Child

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WORDS FROM THE EDITORS

Dear Readers, Now releasing our seventh issue of China Hands, we continue to reflect on mission of China Hands and ways in which we can innovate and improve the quality of the publication. As increasing numbers of Chinese students come to the United States and American students engage in China-related discourse, we continue to affirm the belief that the most important insights on China today are being formed by our own generation, and deserve a platform. In all of our submissions, we look for original reporting, personal narratives and rigorous analysis.

This academic year, we have also sought to foster a greater sense of community, a hub of intellectual exchange and discourse. On campus, here at Yale, we have initiated a series of weekly dinners, where board members, writers and friends of the organization come, talk about the magazine and discuss recent general events regarding the broader US-China sphere. We have begun to collaborate with New Haven start-up restaurant Junzi Kitchen, an organization whose vision—reshaping how China is perceived by a global audience—is closely aligned with our own. Outside of Yale, we have continued to consolidate our bureaus across the United States, expanding into Asia, namely Singapore (Yale-NUS College, the National University of Singapore) and France, through our merger with Le Mandarin Magazine.

China Hands has always valued its aesthetic presentation, but this issue, we placed greater emphasis on experimenting with visual modes of storytelling and reportage.

Flip through the pages, and you’ll find in our Features section, a personal essay on the experience of being half-Chinese in Xinjiang, and our first photo-essay which seeks to capture the essence of life by Kunming train tracks. Our cover article, a long-form article profiling “Green Turtles”—overseas Chinese students studying the environmental sciences—is woven together with original photographs taken by our new photography editor Jennifer Lu. Our other sections draw from an equally diverse array of topics. In Politics & Diplomacy, we have an in depths investigations into crisis in the South China Sea and analysis on the implications of the recent Taiwanese elections; in Economics & Business, a writer follows Chinese money to Iran and the United States. Our Life & Culture section explores Chinese feminism, soccer and new forms of online slang, and in our Opinion section, we present an op-ed on China’s latest propaganda efforts, an interview with educator and activist Stephen Wilmarth and a book review of One Child by Mei Fong.

We hope you enjoy our issue.

Yours Truly, Yi-Ling Liu Jean Young Koo Yifu Dong Alex Herkert Sherril Wang EDITORS OF CHINA HANDS

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FEATURES

An Outsider’s Inside Look at Xinjiang TAO TAO HOLMES shares her experience as a perceived insider and perspective as an outside observer in Xinjiang Photography by JAKE FROMM

FEATURES

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hen I walked past storefronts in China’s far west Xinjiang region, I would sometimes catch shopkeepers pointing and mouthing the words “Weiwu’er.”

At security checkpoints, I would be treated more rudely and roughly than China’s majority Han people, at least until I dug into my pockets and flashed my navy blue passport. When I walked into Han restaurants, a hush would often fall upon the room, guests eyeing me warily from above their bowls of noodle soup.

“My Mandarin isn’t great… I’m American,” I would publicly announce in Chinese. “Could you recommend me something tasty off the menu?”

Instantaneously, the tension in the air would disperse, smiles lighting up guests’ faces. A moment later, someone would always declare, “We thought you were Uighur.” Other guests would nod along. “You really resemble a Uighur.”

Uighurs are a Turkic group of people with a look distinctly different from Han Chinese: there are Uighurs who are redheads, who look Slavic, some with very angular features, and others who look more conventionally Chinese. Historically, they were rivals of the Han, and most were eventually driven further west; today, people in Turkey can easily understand the Uighur language. Xinjiang, after all, is ancient Silk Road terrain, home to different bloodlines mixing over the millennia. Today, however, it is a region best known for terrorism and ethnic unrest—between when I accepted my teaching post and when I arrived in the region, there were two reported terrorist attacks in northern Xinjiang.

I spent most of last year at a university in Shihezi, a small, predominantly Han city out in the desert, a two-hour drive northwest of Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital. There, I taught a variety of graduate and undergraduate courses alongside two other Americans through the Princeton in Asia Fellowship. I think my students were less excited to have a foreign teacher resembling the local oppressed minority rather than a character from Friends, even if she did go to “Ye lu” University.

I identify as half white New Englander and half Beijing Chinese, meaning that I am tagged by Chinese as a hunxue (“mixed blood”) and have the privilege of passing through the world with racial ambiguity. My facial features have oriental undertones and European overtones; in the past, I have been mistaken for Filipino, Portuguese, and Kazakh, but never have I fit into a racial fabric so seamlessly as I did in Xinjiang.

In Xinjiang, I looked distinctly Uighur, yet was also distinctly American, making me both an insider and an outsider—treated kindly by local Uighurs, racially profiled by Han Chinese, and protected by the power vested in me by an American passport.

Among Uighurs, my ambiguity was a privilege.

Among Han, it was a liability.

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Photography by Jake Fromm

FEATURES

8 • XINJIANG IS CHINA’S ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM. It is the largest Chinese province, making up one fifth of the nation’s geography—the size of Great Britain, France, Spain, and Germany combined—and a region different from “mainland” China in almost every conceivable way. People in Xinjiang use the term nèi dì, or “inner land,” to refer to China’s other provinces, and the rare foreign travelers you meet passing through the region will tell you they landed a great deal: entry to a seemingly different country, without the need for another visa.

It is a land made up of contrasts. Geographically, it is split between snow-capped mountains and desert basins. It borders eight countries—Mongolia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and the disputed territory of Kashmir. Culturally, it is split between the Uighurs (45 percent) and Han Chinese (40 percent), with other minorities contributing to a medley of forty different ethnic groups. Religiously, it is divided among atheists, Buddhists, and Muslims.

Linguistically, it is split between government-mandated Mandarin, and Uighur, a Turkic language that uses an Arabic-derived script. Most places have both a Uighur and Chinese name. For example, the ancient city outside of Turpan is known as Yar in Uighur and Jiaohe in Mandarin.

Xinjiang is often referred to as China’s Wild West; the name “Xinjiang” itself translates to “new borders.” But Xinjiang as a “Wild West” is more desolate than romantic. During China’s Qing Dynasty, thousands and thousands of convicts and other prisoners were exiled to the region. Soon after, regular civilians followed. Today, Xinjiang still feels like both an outlier and an outsider.

• The first thing every Shihezi cab driver always asked me was: “What ethnicity are you?” Or to cut straight to the chase, “Are you Uighur?”

The answer, “I’m American,” prompted the same response every time: “Oh, I thought you were Uighur,” often followed by, “Then why would you come to Shihezi?!”

I had a choice to come live in Xinjiang. Uighurs do not: the government makes it nearly impossible for them to get the paperwork they need to leave the region, not to mention the country. And the Uighurs, whether they genuinely desire independence from China or simply want a modicum of human rights, are silenced and swept under the rug, away from the eyes and ears of international media.

With the escalation of the last few years, there have been different forms of repression—no beards, no burqas, no Korans in public. With tight curbs and high risk of punishment on both local and foreign journalists, less than five percent of clashes in Xinjiang are reported, according to Shohret Hoshur, a Uighur journalist and political exile. And in the global games of realpolitik and power balancing, feigning ignorance to realities on the ground is often in the best interest of foreign countries and their companies. With current murmurs about Uighur recruitment by ISIS, foreign powers are only further turning away.

Since the 1950s, the Xinjiang Production and Military Construction Corps (XPCC), better known in Chinese as the bingtuan (brigade), has been the main institution behind Han migration, reclamation, and resettlement in the region. XPCC soldiers were the first to colonize Xinjiang after the region was officially incorporated into the People’s Republic, an event that has been politically branded as the “Peaceful Liberation of Xinjiang.” From the 1950s to 1970s, tens of thousands of Chinese citizens from major cities like Shanghai were given clothes, food, and tickets to Xinjiang, many of them migrating involuntarily, leading to swift economic growth and urbanization.

One of these citizens was Uncle Jia, my building’s 70-year-old garbage man. He arrived in Shihezi in 1960 at the age of 16; his father and three sisters had died of

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FEATURES

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hunger back in their home province of Henan. Uncle Jia worked in a coal mine for most of his life, and he now has two daughters and a son who also live in Shihezi. His grandchildren are starting to head off to university in the “inner land.”

When I passed in and out of Beijing—2,000 miles to the east and a four-hour flight—over the course of the year, everyone I met there was shocked to hear that I was living in Xinjiang, a place of unrest and historical exile, beyond the boundaries of the “inner land.”

Older women and men alternately viewed my willingness to live and teach there as either brave and daring or foolhardy and illogical.

Why go to Xinjiang when you could go to so many other places in China? The same word came up again and again to describe the region: luàn, or chaotic. “Xinjiang is too chaotic,” Beijingers would say, shaking their heads.

• The land that is now Xinjiang has a history of being tugged back and forth. Under control of Chinese dynasties at different points in history, from Genghis Khan to the Qing, it wasn’t until 1955, after several decades of shifting leadership and allegiances, that the landmass was established as an “Autonomous Region.” At that time, the Chinese government’s policies towards Xinjiang’s minorities were relaxed and accommodating, the XPCC having just begun laying out its initial groundwork. Then, in the late 1990s, China’s increased economic investment in Xinjiang, and consequent growth and development spurred increasing economic inequality between

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Hans and other groups. In the city of Karamay, for instance, the oil rigs only employ Han workers, while Uighurs are publicly pushed to the fringes.

Years of economically infused ethnic tensions came to a head on July 5, 2009, when Uighur riots in Urumqi led to the deaths of an estimated 200 people. The event became known in colloquial parlance as “qi wu” or “seven-five.” Ever since qi wu, the city’s security has been ramped up: there are military tanks outside all of the major bus and train stations, guarded by stone-faced personnel holding machine guns and long, baton-like spears, and security checkpoints everywhere.

Nowadays, Han migrants to the province are brought in not by coercion but by the potential for better economic prospects. If you ask Han folks of any age in Shihezi or Urumqi why they came all the way to Xinjiang, many of them will say fewer people, less competition, and thus better odds of making money.

• THERE’S STILL GREAT DISPARITY BETWEEN THE NORTH and south of Xinjiang. The northern half of Xinjiang has been much more diluted by Han populations, Shihezi being the best

example. The south, however, is still very much Uighur, despite being plastered with abundant government propaganda—messages about loving China and professing loyalty towards the Communist Party. In Kashgar, the biggest city in the south, far less Mandarin is spoken. For foreigners, it’s best to stick to English; Mandarin, the state language, is unwelcome, a cue for repression. The south, too, is where conflict goes unreported. You might hear whispers of a village being massacred or officials being murdered. Yet our university administrators insisted that southern Xinjiang was perfectly safe. For us, it was all very odd and disconcerting, and with a closely controlled press, there was never any way of confirming, denying, or substantiating the rumors.

Most of my time in Xinjiang was spent within a distinctly Han community of students, teachers, and Shihezi residents, though with regular visits to Uighur restaurants. It was only on a trip to Turpan that I got a real sense of Uighur life. A mostly Uighur city a few hours south of Urumqi, Turpan felt altogether different from the many Chinese cities that I’ve passed through over the years: more relaxed, more carefree. Encountering us foreigners, Uighurs in Turpan were friendly but unflustered, outgoing rather than diffident. The city felt equally lively and relaxed, with all its raisin sellers, kebab stands and the mixed array of hair colors, eye colors, and cheekbones.

FEATURES

Photo of the author Tao Tao, provided by herself

When I returned to the US from Xinjiang, I met up for coffee with a local college professor. A number of years ago, he had penned an essay on mistreatment of Uighurs that went into a published book, and thanks to that, he had been banned, like many academics, from re-entering China. We chatted for nearly two hours, his memories and descriptions of life in Xinjiang animated and infused with passion. He told me that he would love to go back, if he could. He loved the Uighur people and the region’s physical beauty. He also told me that if I were to mention him in any form of writing, that it’d be in my best interest to give him a pseudonym, “for your sake, not mine.” He suggested the name Professor Lee. Associating myself with his name, he said, might flag unwanted attention.

I asked “Professor Lee” what he saw for the future of Xinjiang. He sighed. “It’s going to go the same way as it did for the Navajo in America.” Lee said the treatment of Uighurs in China and of Native Americans in the US holds uncanny parallels, which he says does not bode well for the Uighurs’ future. As with many native peoples, the Uighurs are being steadily disenfranchised. Xinjiang’s natural resources are being exploited by Chinese companies and oil wealth funneled away. Their land is being taken, their language repressed, their religion suppressed, and their customs increasingly policed and restricted.

• I’LL NEVER FORGET A CERTAIN WINTER AFTERNOON at the Urumqi bus station, where I and my two fellow American teachers were waiting in a clump of people to get inside and buy our tickets back to Shihezi. Any semblance of order was already a lost cause, yet a male policeman looked over and barked at me to

get in line. I did the best I could, pushed up, penguin-like, against the people in front of me.

Suddenly and out of nowhere, the policeman leaned forward and shoved me in the chest, sending me backwards. “Get in line!” He repeated. Flustered, I continued to do my best to merge with the crowd. A moment later, the man stepped forward and shoved me in the chest—again. This second time, his touch shook me to the core, and an uncontrollable eruption of English expletives burst forth, showering over him.

He looked surprised. I realized later, that I don’t think he expected me to speak English. I think he felt entitled to treat me like livestock because he assumed I was Uighur.

A female police officer nearby told him to back off. He withdrew, and the three of us proceeded through the security checkpoint and over to the ticket counter. I was stiff with disbelief that a figure of authority had just indulged in using physical force, choosing to single me out. Patiently standing among more than 15 others, I had been viewed a fair target.

It was the moment in Xinjiang that I felt the most Uighur.

Tao Tao is a 2014 graduate of Yale College and 2014-2015 Princeton in Asia Fellow and is now working at Atlas Obscura. Contact her at taotao.holmes@gmail.com.

Jake was a 2013 English and Judaic Studies major at University of Michigan and is now a Brooklyn-based photographer. You can see more of his photography at www.jakefrommphotography.com or contact him at jakefrommphotography@gmail.com.

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY

We All Belong to the Same People XIAOYING ZHOU asks what implications recent political trends in Taiwan may have for Cross Strait Relations Hundreds of Chinese faces sprouted up the second I walked in. The auditorium of Minuteman Regional High School in Lexington, Massachusetts was packed, inundated in a sea of red for the celebration of Chinese New Year. As I sat down next to my landlady Stella, a Taiwanese expat in her eighties, she observed with a smile that I hadn’t changed at all.

Two weeks before the celebration, Taiwan had elected its first female president in history, Tsai Ing-wen, chairwoman of the island’s pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), commonly known as the “Green Party.” Tsai won by a landslide with 56.12% of the votes.

I asked Stella what she thought about the election.

She shook her head in disapproval at the victory of the DPP. Taiwanese separatists, she said, have forgotten that “blood is thicker than water,” quoting an old Chinese saying that urges people to always remember blood ties.

“We all belong to the same people,” she said. “Why fight with each other?”

The daughter of a Chinese Nationalist officer, Stella left the Mainland for Taiwan when she was nine, after the Communists forced the Nationalists off the Mainland in China’s civil war in 1949. She spent her formative years in Taiwan, before moving to the United States with her husband. For Stella and many Taiwanese with Nationalist ties, both the Mainland and Taiwan are home. Since the civil war ended more than half a century ago, they believe the Nationalists and the Communists should work together to unify the Mainland and the island of Taiwan, like East and West Germany in 1989. But as the generation of Nationalist immigrants gets older, their children have started to regard Taiwan as their only home, identifying as Taiwanese rather than Chinese.

The generational divide is not the only reason for Taiwan’s rising nationalism. Like in the United States, Taiwanese politics has been plagued by strong partisanship in the last two decades. In a sense, the DPP’s victory in the 2016 presidential election is but an indicator of Taiwanese dissatisfaction with the Nationalist

Party (KMT), or “Blue Party,” as it’s more commonly known today.

Thanks largely to the KMT government, Taiwan saw much political turmoil in the latter half of the twentieth century. In 1947, the KMT took control of Taiwan following Japan’s defeat in WWII. After fifty years of Japanese colonization, many in Taiwan thought they were finally liberated. But they were soon proven wrong. During the so-called “228 Incident” in 1947, the KMT regime brutally repressed an anti-government uprising, killing tens of thousands of Taiwanese civilians. In 1949, Chiang Kai-shek, the first president of the Republic of China (ROC) and then-chairman of the KMT, imposed martial law in Taiwan, beginning a period that would last for 38 years. During this time, known in Taiwan as the “White Terror,” the KMT government killed thousands of political dissidents and intellectuals.

In the 1980s, Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang Kai-shek and third President of ROC, was more tolerant of political dissent and opened up Taiwanese internal politics by inviting non-Chinese to join the KMT and non-KMT to join the government. In 1988, Lee Teng-hui became the first ethnically non-Chinese person to be elected President in Taiwan. After Chen Shui-bian became Taiwan’s first DPP president in 2000, the KMT redefined itself as the explicitly pro-reunification party, reaching a rapprochement with its former enemy, the Mainland’s Communist Party of China (CCP). While the KMT reclaimed the presidency in 2008, its recent policies have been regarded as a failure.

A proud member of the “Four Asian Tigers” in the 1970s, Taiwan today is beset with economic stagnancy, which many attribute to the pro-China policies of KMT president Ma Ying-jeou. The youth unemployment rate is high—about 12 to 13 percent, according to a 2014 report by Taiwan Today. In retrospect, Ma’s policies, which promised economic growth by opening up to the Chinese market, are now seen to have benefited only big corporations and elites.

But beyond the divide between Blue and Green, there is also a third force developing in Taiwan that seeks to

No Law's Land ELENA URSU studies judicial independence in China and how new reforms may change its future

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he annual meetings of the National People’s Congress and the China People’s Political Consultative Conference, commonly known as the “Two Sessions,” took place in Beijing this past March. The Sessions represented an opportunity to reaffirm the government’s commitment to judicial reform and to discuss new guidelines issued by the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) in 2015. In its report the SPC envisioned the implementation of conspicuous reforms relating to the organization

and administration of the courts and called for judicial independence. But is there space for such far-reaching reform in China?

Calls for legal and judicial reform in China have persisted since Mao Zedong’s successor Hua Guofeng promulgated China’s new constitution in 1978. In his 1978 speech introducing the policy

surpass the partisanship on the island. Ketagalan Media, founded three years ago by two Taiwanese-Americans interested in informing and inspiring the “movement of ideas and trends” in Taiwan, is one example of the many new media outlets that have established themselves as moderate voices in Taiwan today. In a recent piece published by Ketagalan, for example, author Calin Brown discussed the subtle but pernicious racism that exists in Taiwan, drawing attention to the unresolved issue of the status of South Asian immigrants and other ethnic minorities on the island. New political groups and parties have emerged as well. For instance, Taiwan’s third largest party in terms of legislative seat count, the New Power Party (NPP), draws many of its leaders from the “Sunflower Student Movement,” which staged protests after the KMT negotiated a new trade pact with the Mainland in 2014, during Ma’s presidency.

Rebellious and idealistic, the NPP represents a sizable portion of Taiwanese youth disaffected youth. “I’d like to think that they distinguish themselves from the other parties because they never play dirty,” said Chen, a college student and supporter of the NPP. “The NPP may need to mature as a political party, but overall their current existence is proof of a better balance and greater diversity among those in power,” argued Pai, a Taiwanese-American student living in the United States.

While the NPP shares the DPP’s pro-separatist position, it has set its sights on loftier goals by advocating for human rights and the expansion of civil and political liberties. The NPP has also sought to move past the partisan hang-ups that have plagued Taiwan for decades. Recently in Ketagalan Media, former political activist Jou Yi-cheng called for leaders of small parties such as the NPP to look beyond empty political slogans and focus on rebuilding Taiwanese society. After nearly seventy years of first authoritarian and then partisan rule, young Taiwanese are looking to transcend not only the policies of a given party, but also what they view as a broken political system. As Jou wrote, “What we need is not one small party after another calling themselves the Third Force,” referencing the NPP’s popular nickname. “What we need,” he continued, “is to build Taiwan’s new post-war political society.” Whether Tsai Ing-wen will use her mandate to eclipse partisanism and collaborate with the hopeful architects of Taiwan’s new political society, only time will tell.

Xiaoying is a first-year Master’s student at Harvard Divinity School. You can contact her at xiaoying_zhou@ mail.harvard.edu.

of reform and opening to the outside world, Deng Xiaoping identified the creation of a socialist legal system as a foundation of China’s socialist democracy. Some scholars have argued that Deng inaugurated a golden age of legal reform in China which is still ongoing. At the Thirteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1987, the Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang announced his decision to start “working on (economic) construction with one hand and working on the legal system with the other,” referring to the creation of laws to regulate economic development. Rule of law came to the fore again in 1996, when PRC President and CCP General Secretary Jiang Zemin addressed the importance of “ruling the country according to the law.”

The vitality of legal scholarship has also increased

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in China since 1978. Legal scholars and practitioners have advocated for human rights laws (which was acknowledged for the first time in a 2004 amendment of the Constitution), judicial reform, and fair enforcement of the Constitution with increasing urgency. Recent Chinese legal scholarship has also debated topics in the domains of intellectual property, trade, and investment, along with the relative merits of rule of law in accordance with international standards. The CCP has at times shown its support for these principles in the international community, signing the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in 1997 and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1998.

The Party has also continued to show limited support for legal reform domestically. At the Seventeenth National Congress of the CCP in 2007, President Hu Jintao again called for the establishment of the concept of socialist rule of law. Yet, in the same speech, President Hu also stressed the the importance of Party leadership and the Party’s role in shaping the development of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

In recent years, judicial reform has emerged as a key Party goal. In 2012 when the Eighteenth Central Committee was elected, CCP authorities made legal reform the focus of their annual plenum for the first time.

In a speech, President Xi Jinping, declared that the party “should build a socialist country with the rule of law, and develop people’s democracy with wider participation.” Xi’s administration has continued to identify judicial reform as a central priority.

Limiting the influence of local officials, improving judicial professionalism, standardizing judicial procedure, and distinguishing between the role of judges and that of other state officials are among the key features of the new blueprint for the rule of law in the country. Nevertheless, it is difficult to predict whether these ideas will materialize.

What does judicial reform entail in China?

Xi’s challenge has been to achieve judicial reform within the political constraints of a single-party state. Xi’s predecessor Jiang Zemin stressed the fundamental role of the Party in shaping the legal reform agenda: “Leadership by the Party is the fundamental guarantee that the people are the masters of the country and that the country is ruled by law. Ruling the country by law is the basic principle the Party pursues while it leads the people in running the country.”

An independent judiciary is generally considered to be the key to legitimate rule of law. In 1985, the United Nations adopted the “Basic Principles on the Independence of the Judiciary.” Under these principles, every member state is expected to constitutionally guarantee independence to its own judiciary.

Furthermore, contemporary international law recognizes judicial independence as a core and foundational principle. On the surface, Chinese law guarantees judicial independence, too.

According to article 126 of the PRC Constitution, “the people’s courts exercise judicial power independently, in accordance with the provisions of law, and not subject to interference by any administrative organ, public organization or individual.”

A 1995 law which stipulates the rights of judges, states that there should be “no interference from administrative organs, public organizations or individuals in trying cases according to law.” Yet neither provision explicitly prohibits interference by a political entity. Therefore, the central question of judicial reform in China remains whether an independent judiciary can coexist with the CCP. China is a socialist country where the CCP is the permanent ruling Party. Former President of the Supreme People’s Court (SPC), Xiao Yang, clarified in 2007 that an unequivocal separation between the Party and the judiciary is inconceivable: “the power of the courts to adjudicate independently doesn’t mean at all independence from the Party. It is the opposite, the embodiment of a high degree of responsibility vis-à-vis Party undertakings.” Legal scholars and practitioners outside China should not take this remark as a complete rebuke of the principle of judicial independence. In a single-party State, the Party necessarily influences the work of the Courts, but the Party does not literally hold dominion on every decision issued by every judge in every legal proceeding.

Its presence is no more overwhelming in the judiciary than in any other sphere of public interest.

To reform or to rebuild?

It is difficult to know, then, what judicial reform can entail given the CCP’s restrictions. In 2012, a white paper issued by the Information Office of the State Council called for the establishment of an impartial, authoritative, and efficient judicial system aimed at safeguarding the legitimate rights and interest of the citizens. It also stated, however, that the judicial system may not infringe upon the interests of the State, the interests of society, or upon the lawful freedoms and rights of other citizens.

Given the Party’s constraints, academics and public interest lawyers have called for bottom-up judicial reform through legal scholarship and public participation.

Advocacy groups such as the Weiquan Movement, comprising of lawyers, legal experts, and intellectuals have criticized the Party’s oversight of the justice system. But reforming a legal ideology which prioritizes political legitimacy over professional autonomy will be an onerous task, especially since the Party has already built a system that serves its political interests and legitimizes its own actions.

role in the state with more limited powers. It is, nevertheless, implausible that the Party will completely abdicate its role in shaping the ideological and political orientation of judges. In 2015, the Supreme People’s Court emphasized the interdependence between justice and politics in China: “people’s courts deepening judicial reform shall adhere to the Party’s leadership to ensure that judicial reforms maintain the correct political orientation.”

Stanley Lubman, a leading scholar of Chinese legal reform in the post-Maoist era, has addressed the interdependence of justice and politics in the unique Chinese legal context and the potential for substantial reform. In a 1991 study, Lubman acknowledged the novelty, fragility, and incompleteness of Chinese legal institutions. What political leaders rendered as “Chinese characteristics,” he called “Chinese limits”: the lack of an integrated legal system, the view of law as an instrument of administration, and divergent conceptions of “rights.”

More important than castigating China’s efforts at legal reform, however, is comprehending the forces that are at work today shaping China’s path.

Efforts to understand Chinese society and culture should complement endeavors to understand the forces that influence legal institutions. The Party’s instrumentalist approach to law remains the dominant influence in China’s legal development.

While the Party continues to employ an instrumental approach to legality and while judges continue to follow the Maoist concept of unity in law and politics, China continues to see positive developments toward the rule of law. As Chinese law expert Jerome Cohen has noticed, judicial independence has increased, especially in cases involving business law.

In China, law is a mechanism for the exercise and safeguard of the Party’s power and legitimacy. The role of law has traditionally been that of preserving social order and achieving prefixed marketoriented goals. Application of law by the judiciary has necessarily suffered from related shortcomings.

Complete judicial independence in the style of liberal Western democracies is unattainable in the short term, but in the past decades the government of China has embraced the case for reform of its legal institutions, at least on paper. While the CCP’s efforts at judicial reform may appear inadequate when measured against countries in the West, its rhetoric on the topic of rule of law indicates that the Party at least takes the issue seriously.

In the years to come, China may shape its own path toward rule of law in a manner inconsistent with our expectations and hopes.

Elena is a Yenching Scholar at Peking University.

You can contact her at aeu@pku.edu.cn.

In order to curb political influence in the legal system, the Party would have to take on a different Illustration by Zishi Li

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Domestic Troubles in the South China Sea Crisis NICHOLAS WU examines the possible impacts of the worsening dilemma in the South China Sea

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lthough there has been no armed conflict in the South China Sea since 1988 when China and Vietnam last skirmished, tensions have again flared due to China’s recent land reclamation efforts in the region. Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Taiwan all lay claim to portions of territory where China has been engaging in land reclamation efforts since mid-2014. Many of those nations have also been engaging in land reclamation efforts, but China’s have drawn international attention and condemnation for their unprecedented scale.

Chi-Hung Wei, a research fellow at Princeton University, postulated that in the view of some countries, China is aiming to increase its security perimeter, creating a bigger “yard” for itself. The United States would prefer for the regional balance of power to be tipped to the American advantage.

The particularly dangerous issue in this crisis is that the United States and China have framed the conflict in entirely different ways, which could make it difficult to reach a compromise. There is hope, though, as overall stability in the region is in the best interest of both countries.

The United States’ official position is that it does not take sides in sovereignty disputes. Nevertheless, it has become increasingly involved in the the ongoing dispute in the South China Sea, staging two freedom of navigation operations (FONOP) in October 2015 and January 2016. In early March 2016, the United States Navy dispatched the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis and its attached carrier group to patrol the South China Sea. China claims most of the disputed territory based on the so-called “nine-dash line,” a territorial claim covering most

Illustration by Christina Zhang

of the South China Sea that the Nationalistgoverned Republic of China originally staked after World War II. After the Communists defeated the Nationalists in the 1949 civil war, the newly established, Communist-governed People’s Republic of China coopted the Republic of China’s territorial claim based on its “One China” policy.

Many of the other claimants, who were not independent nations when China staked its original claim, would prefer instead for individual territorial claims in the region to be determined by maritime law. Maritime law, in this case the United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), grants a nation a territorial sea extending twelve nautical miles out from the island over which they have sovereignty as well as an exclusive economic zone within two hundred nautical miles. Islands and rocks have territorial seas, but improved landmasses and reefs like Subi Reef do not. The United States specifically objects to maritime laws in several of the nations that make territorial claims in the South China Sea. These laws require ships passing through foreign waters to give prior notification to the foreign government, regardless of the nature of the ship’s passage.

Under traditional conventions of maritime law, “innocent passages,” like those conducted by US Navy ships during the two FONOPs, do not require notification, so the FONOPs functioned as displays of American opposition to those laws that the United States believe violate freedom of navigation on the high seas. As Josh Earnest, the White House Press Secretary, has put it in past press conferences, “the United States will fly, sail, and operate anywhere that international law allows.” Freedom of navigation is in the interests of the American Navy as well as American commerce.

The United States couches its arguments about the Chinese territorial claims as issues of international law, but, curiously enough, the United States has not ratified UNCLOS, the body of international law governing these disputes. According to Christina Lai, a research fellow at Princeton University, Chinese state media has attacked the United States’ position for its hypocrisy, an argument that she argues has some resonance in American policymaking circles—even President Obama has called upon the US Senate to ratify UNCLOS. Although it is not a signatory, the United States still abides by the provisions of UNCLOS as a matter of customary international law, meaning that the United States follows its provisions as a matter of established state practice rather than a codified statute. Thus, while the United States itself is not subject to the legal repercussions of violations of international law, it follows all of the provisions of UNCLOS. According to Graham Webster, a senior

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research scholar at Yale Law School, the American Freedom of Navigation Operations were intended to force China to explain its claims in the region and actually stake a claim to sovereignty to them because it has not previously done so.

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China’s claims are particularly difficult to resolve through international arbitration because China has not acknowledged any legal controversy, nor does it accept the legitimacy of some of the international arbitration bodies despite its being a signatory of UNCLOS. The Chinese response to the American FONOPs were telling. Soon after each of the FONOPs, editorials published by China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, declared that the “U.S. maneuvers in South China Sea threaten China’s sovereignty and security interests.” A spokesperson for the Chinese Ministry of National Defense used similar language, referring to “US threats to China’s national security and sovereignty,” reaffirming the Chinese government’s position that the American FONOPs were in violation of Chinese maritime law. There is a subtle difference in language in these statements, as they fall short of calling the American operations an absolute “infringement” (weifan) or “violation” (qinfan) upon Chinese territory. Calling the operations an “infringement” or “violation” would have staked a concrete Chinese claim, which would then expose China to binding international arbitration, in Professor Graham Webster’s opinion.

To “threaten” (weixie) does not imply a concrete claim. The Philippines has taken China to court at the Permanent Court of Arbitration over the issue of China’s overall claims, but the Chinese have not acknowledged the legitimacy of that international tribunal on the grounds that the tribunal has no jurisdiction over the matter and that bilateral action between the two countries would be a better solution to the dispute.

Amidst withering criticism of China’s actions in the region, American commentators have generally overlooked the potential effect of China’s domestic politics on its foreign policy. Much of the Chinese government’s rhetoric regarding the South China Sea has been targeted at domestic consumption.

In early January, between the first and second FONOPs, the Chinese government landed civilian airliners on the Fiery Cross Reef airstrip, conducted a photoshoot with the stewardesses aboard the airliner, and then welcomed Chinese citizens to the reef as a demonstration of Chinese authority.

This episode was well-documented and then posted on 163.com, a major online news source. China clearly intends to resolve this crisis as a domestic matter, and the FONOPs have not caused China to remove its installations or revoke its claims to the South China Sea islands.

American policymakers and commentators must consider China’s domestic political landscape and resist the urge to caricature the Chinese government as a monolithic body that can pass policy by fiat regardless of public opinion. American officials cannot afford to make that mistake, given the volatility of the South China Sea situation. If planners miscalculate in their strategy, it could provoke a huge domestic backlash in China that will affect the strategy of Chinese leadership.

Chinese foreign policy is in part predicated on the

perception in China of a long history of encirclement and humiliation. Henry Kissinger famously wrote in his book On China that a large degree of Chinese strategic thinking is aimed at preventing encirclement by foreign powers, as in the Chinese intervention to save North Korea during the Korean War. That theme of encirclement still resonates strongly among the Chinese public. Even the Xinhua and Global Times editorials about the South China Sea allude to the “threatening of national security” by American FONOPs. The concept that China has been subject to a “century of humiliation” by foreign powers and is only now coming out of that period is a very salient argument for the Chinese national psyche.

American planners need to be wary of China’s domestic political conditions and of China’s effort to avoid another “century of humiliation” regarding foreign incursions on its territory.

In the eyes of many Chinese citizens, the issues at hand in the South China Sea are critical.

According to Bonnie Wang, a Chinese national currently living in North Carolina, “the advocacy of national sovereignty is very important to an ordinary Chinese citizen.” According to Professor Jessica Weiss, Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University, “Perceptions of foreign humiliation and encroachment on Chinese sovereignty and interests are easily reawakened by new slights and perceived insults. In the absence of tough words and actions, many among the Chinese public—particularly ‘netizens’—will accuse the Chinese government of being too soft in standing up for Chinese interests.” Indeed, after the first FONOP, netizens posted on sites like Weibo that China needed to resolutely defend itself against “foreign incursions” to prove that the nation’s defenses were not merely “paper tigers.”

Furthermore, there is a precedent for large-scale grassroots demonstrations in China in response to perceptions of Chinese foreign policy weakness, as with the anti-American protests after the accidental bombing of the Sarajevo Chinese Embassy in 1999 or the large-scale anti-Japanese protests in 2012 after the Japanese government purchased the Diaoyu/Senakau Islands from private owners. The threat of domestic backlash can have large consequences for the Chinese government’s foreign policy-making and diplomacy.

Perhaps surprisingly, no major protests have occurred yet over the South China Sea, be they government-organized or grassroots protests.

Professor Weiss explains, “The Chinese government has held the upper hand so far in its territorial disputes with Vietnam and the Philippines, so Beijing has not needed protests to convey its

resolve. But the situation could change with further US involvement and the international ruling on the nine-dashed line.” China is attempting to expand its physical presence in the region without provoking severe regional backlash. The illiberal nature of an authoritarian system allows it to frame, organize, or suppress domestic protests in a way conducive to diplomacy as a form of providing credible signals in negotiations. The government’s position could be contingent upon the cost of suppressing protest.

If the cost of suppressing protest would be too high, as in the case of the 2012 anti-Japanese protests, then the government will permit them. But in cases regarding smaller countries like Vietnam that lack historical animus with China, the cost of suppressing protest is significantly lower. Yet, the United States’s involvement threatens to change that dynamic, as belligerent action from the US might make it more difficult for China to mitigate domestic backlash.

Herein lies the particular danger of the crisis: as the government of the PRC moves away from its traditional ideology-based legitimacy and as the government’s economic performance-based legitimacy flags amidst economic difficulty, nationalism becomes an increasingly important tool. Nationalist causes can provide a “rally around the flag” effect that increase support for the government. Alternatively, if the government is seen as too weak on issues related to nationalism, it could endanger the legitimacy of the CCP. According to Dalton Lin, a research fellow at Princeton University, Chinese nationalism can be built upon two ideological tenets: one is antiimperialism; the other is the drive to move China away from colonialism. With the decline of the former colonial powers, however, what used to be anti-colonialism has become blurred with antiimperialism. Taiwan and the United States are very much linked to the anti-imperialism issue because of historical animosity, but smaller countries like Vietnam and other claimants in the South China Sea are not as much of a part of China’s antiimperialist narrative. Nationalist fervor in China is much stronger than most outside observers realize.

As evidenced by conversations with Chinese citizens and the posts of the netizens, a perceived weak foreign policy remains a central political concern.

American planners need to be wary of China’s domestic political conditions and of China’s effort to avoid another “century of humiliation” regarding foreign incursions on its territory. No major protests have yet occurred against the United States, but the possibility remains. If China does see protests, the cost of suppressing them will only rise for the Communist Party because of the way that the United States could be tied into the historical anti-colonialist narrative. In other words, more aggressive Freedom of Navigation actions could provoke a huge anti-colonialist backlash in China because of the perceived slight against Chinese territorial integrity. This could even lead to the Communist Party being forced to adopt a more aggressive foreign policy stance in order to placate domestic opposition. American planners neglect this domestic element of the crisis at their peril.

Nicholas is a sophomore at Princeton University.

You can contact him at nmwu@princeton.edu.

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The Green Turtles YI-LING LIU profiles the “Green Turtles,” overseas Chinese students who leave China for the United States to study environmental reform and discusses their dilemma of whether or not they should return home Photography by JENNIFER LU

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t is August 23rd, 2006 and Yong Zhao is up in the air. He is seated in a classic commercial jet, on a

13-hour, 30-minute direct flight from Beijing to New York City. As the plane cruises above the Atlantic, at the midway point of PEK and JFK, Zhao floats between two behemoth nations straddling opposite ends of the globe, two time zones, two lives. The engine of the Boeing 777 hums quietly.

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Zhao is full of uncertainty. He will be going to New Haven, Connecticut, to do his Master’s Degree at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He will be away for two years, if not longer. He does not know when, or even whether or not, he will return. After his studies, will he stay in the United States? Or will he go home and return to China?

This is the dilemma of the prospective “haigui,” an old dilemma that not only Zhao but also hundreds of thousands of other Chinese students who have studied in the United States have grappled with for more than a century, and continue to grapple with today. “Haigui” is a term that refers to Chinese citizens who return to their homeland after studying abroad. The term puns on the word “gui”—a homonym of the words “turtle” and “to return.” They are, in other words, sea turtles.

The first batch of haigui, who arrived in the U.S. in the late 19th century as China was beginning to modernize, came to reap the benefits of an American education, and return to contribute to the modernization of China. Among them was my great-grandfather, who left Shanghai in the 1920s to get his PhD at the Cornell Agricultural Science Program, and returned to lobby for agricultural reform back home.

The second wave, who arrived on foreign shores after Deng Xiaoping announced the Reform and Opening-up Policy in the 1980s, which would allow Chinese scholars to study abroad for the first time since the chaotic aftermath of the Communist revolution, were similarly wide-eyed and idealistic. As a freshman at Wellesley, my mother struggled through advanced chemistry, despite her complete mediocrity in the subject, because she wanted to be the Chinese Madame Curie and “save the country with science.”

China’s economic boom in the last decade has brought to shore a third wave: an exodus of 274,000 Chinese students in the last year alone, representing the largest group of internationals studying in America. They are the New Turtles, the Chinese millennials, the post-90s Youth—and Zhao is one of them.

Unlike their predecessors, Zhao and the New Turtles land in JFK International airport on a commercial jet, arrive with more money in their

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pockets, more prior exposure to American culture, and an abundance of potential job prospects waiting for them when they return home. They’ve been criticized and stereotyped as pragmatic, cushioned and materialistic.

Serving the motherland is not on the top of their agenda.

“There are only two paths for Chinese students,” Lei Zhao, another student at the Yale School of Forestry, will tell his classmate Yong Zhao, a couple years later. “Wall Street or Silicon Valley.”

Why then, is Zhao coming all the way to the United States to study the carbon composition of the Connecticut river? Environmental work, a friend told me once, is unglorifying and arduous —not a particularly sexy cause in China.

If most Chinese students are looking for a surefire path to prestige and financial I. The Green Turtles of Yale University success, who are these handful of students trickling through the Yale School Forestry Pale afternoon sunlight streams through the windows of Kroon Hall, the each year? What drives them? What will home of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (FES). compel them to stay or lure them back I’m sitting on a sofa in the third floor BYOC (Bring Your Own Cup) Café home? with Yinong Sun, one of fourteen Chinese graduate students at Yale who I have interviewed, nine of which are affiliated with Yale FES. Originally Zhao has two years to figure it out. from Liaoning Province, Sun completed her undergraduate studies in atmospheric physics at the prestigious Peking University, and is now in her third year at FES to receive a masters in environmental management. She has a slight frame, and dons a pair of delicate, rimless glasses.

The first five seconds of each interview is always a linguistic juggling act— our initial greetings are usually in English (“Hi, are you Yinong? Thanks so much for speaking with me”) followed by an abrupt switch to Mandarin Chinese, as I ask the interviewee which language they prefer to use. Like the others, Sun picks Mandarin, and I apologize in advance for my own Mandarin, mongrelized after years of studying in an international school in Hong Kong, where I grew up.

“I’ll probably stay here for a couple of years and get some work experience.”

Sun responds when I ask her about her plans after graduation. “But in the long term, I see myself going back to China.”

Almost all the Chinese graduates at Yale that I have spoken to, envisage a similar professional trajectory: hang around for a bit, soak in American professional culture, and then head home. Their future plans fit neatly in a broader statistical trend: increasing numbers of Chinese students, more than 272,000 last year (a 46 percent increase from 2011), are deciding to return after studying abroad.

The trend makes sense. Returning to China has obvious perks. Returnees do not need to secure a H1-B Visa or deal with racial and cultural barriers on their way up the corporate ladder—the so-called “bamboo ceiling.” Back home, thanks to China’s thriving market, jobs are a-plenty. Both international and domestic firms, from Alibaba to J.P. Morgan, adore haigui for their bicultural and bilingual flexibility, and offer fat paychecks and cushy lifestyles in return. Many haigui have rich family networks to draw on.

There are nonetheless turtles who defy the norm. Sun is from a middle-class family in Anshan (her parents are both high school teachers), does not have connections back home, and is not trying to work at J.P. Morgan. She wants to work in clean energy consulting, and when she returns, must rely on her own finances.

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Photos courtesy of Jennifer Lu

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China’s economic boom in the last decade has brought to shore a third wave, an exodus of 274,000 Chinese students, the largest group of internationals studying in America, in the last year alone.

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Lei Zhao’s own professional trajectory also appears to contradict his claim that Chinese students must choose between “Wall Street or Silicon Valley.” After leaving Yale, he did indeed work at a New York City hedge fund for a year, but his stint in finance was short-lived. He left the city for the quiet laboratories and oak-lined streets of Princeton University, where he now conducts research on urban heat islands as a post-doc at the Woodrow Wilson School.

When I talk to Lei on the phone, he spends an hour patiently explaining to me his research. Climate modeling, anthropogenic heat. The jargon goes over my head, but his enthusiasm is infectious.

If the majority of Chinese students are allegedly hyperpragmatic and unpatriotic, why then, I asked, did Lei ditch the glory and high-paying salary of his job on Wall Street to clock hours instead in a university lab?

Lei pauses on the other end of the line. “I guess patriotism is a bit too strong of a word,” he said. “But I feel like I need to go back and do something.”

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Over and over again, in all of my conversations, I hear variations of this same impulse—something quieter, subtler and more understated than conventional patriotism—this desire to “go back and do something.” Yong Zhao describes it as an itch to “change something;” Jiani Yang, another second year at Yale FES and classmate of Sun, calls it a “sense of duty, but not quite.”

As students of the School of Forestry, they recognize that they are a self-selecting group. “We are probably more chuncui than the other students,” said Zhemin Xuan, a doctoral fellow at Yale FES and current President of the Chinese Students Association at Yale. In English, the phrase translates as “fresh-faced,” or more directly as “pure and candid.”

When I ask the students why they do what they do, their

They’ve been criticized and stereotyped as pragmatic, cushioned and materialistic.

Serving the motherland is not on the top of their agenda.

responses ring with this sense of “simple and candid” idealism, and I am struck by the concise candor of their answers.

“My reason is simple,” Xuan said. “I want the skies to be blue and the grass to be green.”

His response seems something like a Disney character or my nine year old sister would say. Simplicity of purpose, however, does not suggest naiveté or lack of experience.

Over the last eight years, Xuan has worked with the U.S. National Science Foundation, The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and a whole smorgasborg of impressive organizations. Before Yale, Xuan spent six years in stormwater management academy established by the Florida Department of Transportation in Orlando. His research can be found in 38 different publications. After Yale, he wants to bring his knowledge to China and strengthen the quality of academia on water management back home. Thanks to social media, there is a rising sense of environmental consciousness in China, Xuan notes, but not the rigorous academic research needed to support it. He raises as an example, Under the Dome, the recent Chinese documentary film about air pollution made by journalist Chai Jing.

It was viewed over 150 million times within three days of its release, and has been compared to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

“She obviously has huge influence given her background in media, but her data analysis wasn’t very professional and some people criticized her for that,” said Xuan. “That is why academics like me need to go back. To go back, and help tell the truth more effectively.”

There is more at stake for Xuan, however, than just the truth. In all of his decisions, Xuan, along with his wife—his high school sweetheart and now also a post-doc at the FES—are thinking about how his work will affect the future of their newborn daughter, 7-month old Alice. “On one hand, we want to go home and make the country the best possible place for our family and child to live in,” said Xuan. “And yet on the other hand, we are aware of all the difficulties that she must face—the lack of good healthcare and education, the water she must drink, the air she must breathe.” Chai Jing herself created Under the Dome after her unborn daughter developed a tumor in the womb, one that doctors blamed on Beijing’s toxic smog.

But Xuan is sure that he will return. He actually decided to work in Orlando because it was close to Disneyworld, and his long-term dream is to one day build a green technology theme park in his native city Shanghai, one that could rival Walt’s solar-paneled roofs and nitrogen-treated streams. “I want to infuse an eco-consciousness into the psyche of the next generation,” Xuan said.

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He gestures towards the interior of Kroon Hall, pointing out the 100-kilowatt rooftop array of solar panels and the red oak walls, harvested straight from the Yale Myers Forest. “We need to immerse young children in this kind of stuff,” he says with a tone of wistful admiration.

By stepping foot into Kroon Hall, I get a sense that I have stumbled upon a group of young people who have remained somehow untainted by the pragmatism, rampant commercialism and profit-driven mindset that allegedly governs youth in Chinese society today. They are lured home by a sense of purpose more visceral and less explicit than their predecessors, but no less pressing.

“Everytime I go home and step off the plane into Beijing International Airport, I cough,” Zhao told me. “I feel the particles of smog in my lungs, and feel this heightened sense of urgency.”

II. Swimming Home It is hard not to feel the lure of China in the spanking new and glossy building on No. 38, East Ring Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing, where the offices of the National Resource Defense Council (NRDC) are located.

The NRDC is a non-profit international environmental advocacy group.

Aily Zhang, a Chinese-American Yale College graduate from San Francisco, and her colleague Jonathan Luan, a haigui who grew up in Hangzhou and did his Master’s Degree at George Washington University, currently work at their offices in Beijing.

Like other progressive, environmentally-minded Beijingers, Zhang and Luan bike in the city’s congested lanes, go on hikes in places other than the Great Wall, are part of WeChat Groups like “The Beijing Energy Network,” and are obsessed with new monitoring systems for air quality. (“Picture a typical Greenpeace person,” said Luan, “but with a Chinese twist.”)

“Here, you feel like you are in the center of things,” says Aily, her face centered on the screen of my laptop. It is a sunny noon in Beijing — and both Aily and Jonathan take time out of their lunch break for a Skype call.

“This is a country where a new coal power plant is built every week, where the desertification of Xinjiang can affect the climate in California.”

Aily had the option of working in the Bay Area after graduation, but she chose Beijing instead. In San Francisco, Aily explained, she would be working with issues that are important “but so abstract that you can’t see it,” whereas in Beijing, where she is writing a report on coal industries in China for the NRDC’s Coal Consumption Cap Project, “I can see the literal smog produced by these industries right outside my office window.”

Actually enacting change in the “center of things” and addressing these pressing and urgent environmental problems in China, however, is a

hǎiguī

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grueling process, and many haigui swim back home only to find themselves disillusioned by all the obstacles they face.

At international NGOs such as the NRDC, professionals are “used to formalism, red tape,” said Aily. Faced with these obstacles, it is “easy to feel like there is nothing that you can personally do to tackle the huge task of dealing with environmental degradation in China,” said Aily. “It is easy to feel small.” Not to mention, because international NGOs are also closely monitored by the government, “we face the constant threat of being deported,” Aily added.

Working in the Chinese government itself is a whole other challenge.

One must navigate through an entire ecosystem of bureaucratic networks, petty jealousies and vested interests. The alumni and graduates that I speak to draw on a whole array of crazy metaphors to describe to me what it means to reform the system and enact change. “It’s like trying to dig a well with a tiny screw,” Yinong Sun said. Yong Zhao likened it to “pouring a gallon of milk into an ocean.”

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Firstly, unlike in U.S. organizations, which are significantly “flatter,” “you have to call your boss “laoshi” (teacher), no matter where you come from,” Aily explained. “You have to respect the hierarchy.” In state-owned institutions, Zhao adds, the supervisor is king. He tells me a story of a friend of his, a recent

This sense of disenchantment among hǎiguī has spawned the emergence of its inversion—the guīhǎi, or “returnees to the sea.”

Guīhǎi are sea turtles who, disillusioned with their natural habitat, leave China once again for a life abroad.

graduate who worked for the China Nuclear Group. She submitted a report, her supervisor did not like it, and threw the report, literally, in her face.

The most frustrating obstacle that all the students raise, is the problem of guanxi.

In Chinese culture, a person’s “guanxi”—their personal connections and networks—is paramount to professional success. Who you know, in other words, matters much more than what you know.

“Say you are working at the Environmental Protection Agency, and want to get promoted,” said Zhao. “You have to be a player. At banquets, you have to figure out beforehand, where the most powerful person sits, and then where the second most powerful person sits, and then adjust yourself accordingly.”

“But say, after you get all this right, your big boss loses power, or your big boss gets thrown in jail.” Zhao continued. “What happens now? You go down with him.”

Player? Banquets? Big Bosses thrown in jail? Zhao’s language points to a world I associate with God-fatheresque television dramas, not a government agency involved in deciding how many animal conservation NGOs are permitted in a local district. “It is literally like the House of Cards,” another Chinese student, who preferred to remain anonymous, explained to me.

This sense of disenchantment among haigui has spawned the emergence of its inversion—the guihai, or “returnees to the sea.” Guihai are sea turtles who, disillusioned with their natural habitat, leave China once again for a life abroad.

And then there are the overseas Chinese students, who having heard about the murky waters back home, spare themselves the disappointment. There are those who simply decide not to come back at all.

guīhǎi III. Staying on Foreign Shores Flash forward nine years after arriving in New Haven, Zhao, now in his early thirties, is still in the United States, with a Master’s Degree from the Yale School of Forestry, and a PhD in Environmental Science under his belt.

Now, he is a Yale Entrepreneurship fellow and the confounder of a new startup, the fast-casual Chinese restaurant Junzi Kitchen, which opened up a month ago on Broadway, one of downtown New Haven’s busiest retail strips.

After Zhao gives me a short tour of the new store—plywood walls, shelves stocked with hip gourmet-food magazines, and a state of the art freezer in the back of the shop stocked with cuts of locally-grown pork from Wallingford, CT—we move to the basement downstairs, away from the lunchtime din. The basement still has the haphazard feel of a business just starting to get on its feet, with half-opened boxes of soy sauce bottles and star anise scattered on the shelves. I make myself comfortable on a chair, and Zhao sits down on a cardboard box.

“When I first started my PhD at Yale FES, I thought that I would go back to China, and work in public service as a government official,” said Zhao.

Zhao and I speak in English. He speaks in a quick and confident staccato.

But after surveying the situation back home, Zhao decided he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and to take a road less, and arguably rarely ever taken—to stay in the United States and become a Chinese entrepreneur in America.

“Being a Chinese entrepreneur back home, bringing an American concept back home, creating a Chinese Google or a Chinese Twitter or a Chinese this-and-that is pretty common,” said Zhao.

In order to create change, and create something of true value, Zhao believes that one needs to step out of China, where one could easily get sucked into the demands of “soul-sucking guanxi,” and exert influence from afar. He returns again to his bizarre but apt milk-and-ocean metaphor: “If the original pool is polluted, it is hard to get anything done without polluting yourself.

Instead of pouring a gallon of milk into the ocean, how do we create an entirely different ocean of our own?”

Zhao’s solution to this problem, is the “chunbing”—a Chinese-style burrito served with braised meats, vegetables, garnish and sauce.

As an undergraduate student of conservation biology at Peking University, Zhao earned the nickname “Mr. Chunbing” from the wraps that he ate all the time. He found himself yearning for the food from home, and decided to put his doctoral research on hold, and open a restaurant. In August 2013, Zhao, along with his wife Wanting Zhang, FES’11, the operations

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director and Ming Bai, ART’ 13, the designer—all three of whom grew up in northeast China before pursuing graduate degrees at Yale—came together to create Junzi Kitchen.

However, Zhao is quick to note that Junzi is more than just a restaurant. It is a “value-driven commercial brand.” A Chinese term that once denoted “prince,” “junzi” was retooled by Confucius to refer to a gentleman, a paragon of virtue.

Although the term “value-driven commercial brand” sounds lofty and self-promoting, straight out of a Business School textbook, Zhao hopes to cook the junzi values—community, leadership and balance—into the very bing themselves.

To help address an American problem with food waste, Junzi connects with local farms and buys their undervalued cuts: beef shank, fatty cuts, pork heart, chicken thigh—foods not valued as much in American cuisine. “Traditional Chinese food is based on a harmony with the agricultural ecosystem,” said Zhao. “Something that we can bring to the industrial farm-intensive, fossil fuel-reliant American agricultural system.”

“Being a Chinese entrepreneur back home, bringing an American concept back home, creating a Chinese Google or a Chinese Twitter or a Chinese this-and-that is pretty common.” said Zhao.

In their menus, instead of listing calorie counts, Junzi emphasizes the Chinese dietary system’s division between “fan” and “cai,”—“fan” being the energy-filled starchy part and “cai” being the nutrition-intensive part—keeps meals automatically and intuitively balanced.

They have also started working with the New Haven Farm on a bicycle compost program. Every week, someone comes to pick up leftover beans and potato skins, and shuttles it up to the farm. Used to collecting exact figures for his graduate research, Yong is detail-oriented and meticulously records Junzi’s weekly wastage (3 percent of their 8 gallons of beans this week). Junzi is also the first restaurant to work on this initiative, and are helping write a guideline for the Farm to use for future partnerships.

The restaurant has only been open for five months, but Zhao has big aspirations. He names Patagonia and Tesla as companies he admires and

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seeks to emulate. He wants to expand Junzi’s products beyond food, to furniture and clothing. One day, he hopes to open 1000 stores or more. He wants to first build a household brand in America. Eventually, when China is ready, he wants to open up shop there.

“China is lost right now, and the Chinese people do not know how they want to lead their lives and how they want to behave,” Zhao said. He is not the first to point out the nation’s wayward moral compass. Online Weibo blogs, daily conversations on the street, Chinese academics and foreign correspondents alike have long lamented the nation’s so-called “spiritual void.”

But Zhao does more than just to wax poetic on the selfish, apathetic millennials of the new Middle Kingdom. “I will start small. I want to recreate junzi values here, on a university campus in a developed country, where people are full of talent, ideas and inspiration,” explained Zhao. “And then one day, export these revitalized junzi values back to China.

As we walk out of the basement back into the store, Zhao hands me a tofu bing to try—replete with vegetable garnishes and a savory soy sauce. I hold the bing in two hands and take a bite: the taste of my grandmother’s kitchen fused with the yuppie, Whole Foods-esque goodness that my palette has grown to love over three years studying in an East Coast liberal arts college.

“For people like your great -grandfather, or your grandmother, or even for haigui ten years ago, it was easy to equip yourself with mission and sacrifice yourself for it.” Zhao said. “But now, it’s hard to feel important. It’s hard to find a purpose.”

Zhao, leader of Green Turtledom, nevertheless seems to have found a promising one.

And of all places, he found it in a Chinese fast-food restaurant.

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IV. Turtles Adrift A week later and I’m at another Chinese restaurant. Dining together appears to be the go-to activity for Chinese students, far away from home and weary of the American collegiate dining experience. So when Jiani Yang invites me to join her and her team for lunch at New Haven favorite Chao Chao, I accept her invitation eagerly.

Yang and I are seated around a circular table with the rest of her team: Lan Jin, a Chinese Public Health PhD candidate, Ajit Rajiva, a Master’s student in Environmental Science at the School of Forestry and Abhinav Rawat, a student from New Delhi doing his MBA at the School of Management.

They are the brains behind Nuoton, a new startup developing an air pollution app targeted to Chinese and Indian markets.

Rawat, the CEO of the company, first approached Yang and asked her to collaborate with him a year ago after a conference on Chinese Overseas Investments. “The conference made me realize that my work had much larger global repercussions, that I could not limit my work to the scope of U.S. China relations,” explained Yang. “I needed to look at other countries, like India.”

According to the WHO, China and India together account for 37 percent of the total population of the world. Both economies are witnessing the emergence of a fast-growing middle class, which translates into a huge potential market, but also severe issues of air pollution. “Last Sunday, air pollution levels in Shenyang, a central province in China, were 50 times the WHO standard,” Jin explained to me. “It’s not any better in India,” said Ajit, “And we have the annual pollution disaster otherwise known as Diwali.”

We are interrupted mid conversation, as the food is served on the table: wonton soup, bowls of fluffy rice, green beans and a whole steamed fish, with Sichuan peppers. As we dig in, Abhinav patiently explains to me how Nuoton fits into the equation.

“Government sustainability efforts rely on a top-down command and control model, which is ineffective,” Abhinav explained. “What we need to do, is enact change on a micro, community, local level. So Nuoton hopes to bypass government inefficiency altogether, by harnessing the power of the consumer.”

Through sensor and mobile data technologies, the app will provide high-quality information to the public, and allow them to make informed decisions on how to reduce

The Green Turtles, in that sense, are not much different from millennials worldwide. They are at, the end of the day, twenty-somethings— energetic but uncertain, idealistic but in constant flux.

their exposure to pollution. Users who download the app will receive advice from experts in the field, for example, on what mode of transport or commute they should use that day.

While Xi Jinping and Modi negotiate over commas, square brackets and single words in a repeatedly revised text, at the bleak and windy site of the Paris Climate Change Conference, two pairs of young, fresh representatives from each of the superpowers are putting their heads together in New Haven, collaborating over a plate of steamed Sichuanese fish.

“Eat!” Jiani commands, as she helps load beans onto my plate. They are keen to feed me, despite the fact that as the fifth luncher—an undergraduate English major from Hong Kong—I offset their perfect symmetry. In some ways though, I straddle somewhat their two identities: while Hong Kong is ultimately a part of China, it nevertheless shares with India the British colonial experience.

“So where is home for everybody?” I ask, as they pass around what’s left of the beans. I explain that I am curious about the idea of the overseas student in America, and the question of return.

“I’d say Mainland China, because it’s good to have this feeling that you are from a place, that you know who you are,” said Jin. “But at the same time, it can tie you down, make you feel small and limited.”

“It’s actually hard to say that anyone is Indian,” added Ajit.

“Take any Indian person, and there will be one place in the country that that person is a minority. If you go back far enough in history, my great great grandmother is Chinese.

Something to do with the Indo-Sino War, I think.” He

flourishes his chopsticks. “So in my opinion, the whole concept of a nation state is kind of moot.”

My great-grandfather had a singular focus and mission: 1) Acquire knowledge from America.

2) Go home.

3) Rebuild nation.

For the Green Turtles, young idealistic haigui today, when home is nebulous, geographical boundaries are porous, and the concept of a “nation” is as Abhit says, all but “moot,” this sense of mission is no longer tied to a discrete nation or shoreline to call home.

“When I’m here, I don’t really miss China. And when I’m in Beijing, I don’t hanker for New Haven, I’m not one to get attached to places.” said Zhao. “In five years we’re probably going to still be hanging around here or in New York. Ten years? Flying around probably. Twenty years? I have no clue.”

The Green Turtles, in that sense, are not much different from millennials worldwide. They are at the end of the day, twenty-somethings—energetic but uncertain, idealistic but in constant flux.

Like their materialistic peers, they are tied not to nation states, not to lofty ideals, but invested in tangible things: the particles of air they breathe, that their children breathe, the taste of steamed fish, Palm trees, blades of grass, blue skies, API indexes, an authentic and sustainably sourced Chinesestyle burrito.

Yi-Ling is a junior at Yale University and co-Editor in Chief of the magazine. Contact her at yi-ling.liu@yale.edu.

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ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

Paying to Cut the Line ALEXA CARUSO examines the benefits and drawbacks of fast-track immigration for wealthy Chinese to the United States

C

utting the line at Disney is a quick way to get berated by a portable fan-wielding fanatic donning black mouse ears damp with sweat. However, paying to cut the line is another story.

It is now common to see multiple, adjacent queues for riders at amusement parks. One line is full of sweaty visitors

trudging five inches every thirty minutes; the other is practically empty until a travel group eventually strides through and makes its way to the front, embarking on the ride in a matter of minutes.

This “shortcut,” devoid of grumbling throngs of impatient customers, is for Fast Pass purchasers.

The people who cut the line in Disney pay a pretty penny to do it, and it is easy to picture the bitterness in the eyes of the impatient group, so close to yet so far from fresh air and a seat on the coaster. It is even easier to shrug and say, “whatever, it’s just a line at Disney World.” But, what if it isn’t?

What if you are not in line to ride Disney’s Soarin’, but instead in line for a spot in the United States?

In line for a green card that would open doors, literal and figurative, for you and your loved ones to a new opportunity and home? What if you are in this line, and others are paying exorbitant amounts of money to cut you?

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In fact, this situation has been transpiring within the realm of US immigration with the rise of an investor visa program. Dubbed the EB-5 visa, it works by awarding green cards to wealthy immigrants able and willing to invest either $1 million into the US and create at least 10 jobs, or invest $500,000 in a low-income region of the US. Though available to all countries, wealthy Chinese represent a majority of EB-5 recipients.

Popularity of this visa has skyrocketed in the past decade, resulting in a two-year wait-list to buy even the expedited visa, bringing an increasing amount of capital and economic development to the United States.

Economically, it is sensible for the United States to desire wealthy immigrants and to continue to expand its EB-5 visa program. This program has been heavily lauded for the economic benefits it brings to the states as it has generated an estimated $6.8 billion since its creation. A majority of EB-5 visa recipients invest their money through regional centers, which allocate these investments to larger projects, including infrastructure development, modern hotel and housing complexes, airports, and product distribution centers. Such projects indirectly create local employment options, serving to develop parts of the US economically and socially. It seems from an American

perspective, there exists no reason to slow down or even discontinue the EB-5 visa program.

Moreover, the economic benefit of these rich immigrants continues long after the initial investments. Once in the door and on the ground in the US, these new citizens need to purchase new homes on American soil. Along with the Chinese monopolization of the EB-5 visa, US real estate has felt similar effects of wealthy Chinese purchasing power. Chinese immigrants are snapping up many expensive coastal and suburban properties. In fact, the average price of a house purchased in the United States by Chinese immigrants in 2015 was $831,800, which is over twice the price of the next most expensive average house price: Canadians at $380,300. In short, the capital invested in the US economy continues long past the investment required by the EB-5 visa.

tensions in China. Increasingly, those who leave the country are being seen as unpatriotic. A common view of the Chinese working class is that these fleeing Chinese are benefitting from and being blessed with wealth by China, but in return they take that success to the United States.

In a move to take a stance on this migration, many state-run publications, like The People’s Daily, have called for harsh consequences for Chinese who relinquish their nationality, in addition to making it more difficult for them to leave.

On one hand, the United States benefits enormously from the influx of wealthy migrants. On the other hand, this migration is harming China economically and socially. Should the United States, which often portrays itself as a global policing force and advocate for international goodwill, take responsibility for the tumult its EB-5 visa has abetted in China? In short, no.

From the American perspective, the EB-5 visa is a seemingly never-ending influx of capital— as some call, a cash cow.

Nonetheless, the United States is not the only one affected by the EB-5 visa. Put aptly by Professor Denise Ho, a professor of History at Yale University focused on twentieth century China, this cannot just be viewed from the American lens. “What does this mean for the Chinese system? It’s not just what happens if you have these rich people coming to the US. The flip side is, what happens if you have elites leaving China?” The wealth entering the US from Chinese immigrants is just as detrimental for China as it is good for the United States. The loss of resources for China will lead to a greater inequality gap, which has already begun to widen. China’s current Gini coefficient, a statistical index representing income distribution, with a 0 indicating perfect equality, was around 55—14 points higher than the United States, which already has one of the higher Gini coefficients ammong developed nations. The issue for China here is, as Professor Ho explains, “If the elite can opt out because they have a passport and other people don’t, then they will be even less inclined to care about China’s problems. As political scientist Kellee Tsai showed in her study of Chinese entrepreneurs, people in business who have political grievances are ‘more likely to invest in exit strategies…than to advocate political reform.’” As the wealthy leave, so too does the opportunity for their money to go into economic development of China and the chance for this inequality gap to be bridged.

Though the system currently in place for immigration from China to the US is not as egalitarian as it could be, the United States, as a sovereign nation should reserve the right to instate immigration policies which act in its own best interests. Furthermore, the United States should not deny those capable of leaving China that right, for the sake of pleasing China. Arguably, the phenomena of China’s fleeing wealth, encouraged by the United States’ and other countries’ investor visa programs, will force China to effect considerable domestic economic, environmental, and social reform if it wishes to keep these citizens and their money.

Of the people leaving China, the primary reasons cited, according to a study conducted by the Hurun Report, a Chinese magazine that publishes an annual “China’s Richest” list, are escaping the environmental pollution and food safety concerns, the political corruption, and providing children with better educational opportunities. The United States in no way caused these issues by creating the EB-5 visa. It merely made the opportunity to escape China’s issues more feasible for those with the financial means to do so. In recent years, China has undoubtedly suffered from the severe loss of so much domestic capital. The Chinese market is currently experiencing its slowest growth rate in 25 years, at 6.9%, and China recently surpassed the United States as the country with the largest income gap between its wealthy and poor. Yet the observation of Professor Ho is that this is a result of the system in China. If China does not place the concerns of its people’s safety and prosperity ahead of political designs and self-serving policies, it will continue to risk the wealthy who have the right to leave for another state that provides them with what China does not.

Aside from economic ramifications, this issue of fleeing wealth has also led to growing social

Alexa is a sophomore at Yale University. Contact her at alexa.caruso@yale.edu.

“The wealth entering the US from Chinese immigrants is just as detrimental for China as it is good for the United States."

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

The Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank A Window Into How Asian Countries View China and How China Views Itself

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JACKSON TSE analyzes the impetus behind the AIIB and what implications it may have for the future

nitiating operations in January 2016, the Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank (“AIIB” or “The Bank”) is a Chineseconceived multilateral institution aimed at financing infrastructure projects in the Asia Pacific region. The AIIB was established to “complement and cooperate with the existing MDBs to jointly address the daunting infrastructure needs in Asia,” an annual shortfall which the Asian Development Bank pegs at approximately $800 billion. So far, 57 countries have signed onto the Bank’s Articles of Agreement, providing it with an authorized capital stock of $100 billion.

relevance of Deng’s dictum. Referring to the One Belt One Road project and land reclamation projects in the South China Sea, Paul Haenle, Director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy, notes that the policy is “increasingly irrelevant… [given the] active and muscular approach to foreign affairs [adopted by] President Xi Jinping.”

Normatively, however, Haenle states that “there is still an active debate as to China’s desired end state.” Scholars like Yan Xuetong argue that Beijing should assume greater leadership on the world stage by establishing military alliances, pursuing a more aggressive foreign policy, and preparing for greater competition vis-à-vis Washington. Others, like Ambassador Wu Jianmin have asserted the need to continue “maintaining a low profile” and focusing efforts inwardly at domestic development.

The Bank’s modus operandi further reflects these dual-pronged realities. China possesses the largest voting share at roughly 26 percent, and holds a 30.34 percent stake in the Bank. Yun Sun, a fellow of the Brookings Institute, notes that this governance structure gives China power over the voting process on issues that require a supermajority, such as the board, the President, capital increases, and other significant policies, leading some to believe that the AIIB is a tool the Chinese government is using to unilaterally seek benefits from. As Haenle stresses, “the worst outcome is that China uses AIIB to soak up its own industrial capacity and give contracts to state-owned enterprises, [demonstrating] that Chinese external initiatives are in reality a vehicle to address its own domestic challenges.”

While this sum may not seem momentous, measuring two-thirds of the Asian Development Bank’s budget and half that of the World Bank’s, the establishment of a Chinese-led multilateral institution in and of itself is significant. As recent as 2013, Georgetown University Professor David Shambaugh wrote that China remains “a partial power,” a power that remains isolated, whose reach remains decidedly “shallow.” Assessed alongside the “One Belt, One Road” initiative, increasing activeness in the South China Sea, and blossoming trade deals through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Bank accentuates China’s increasing desire to seek a leadership role in the Asia Pacific. In light of these developments, how does China see itself?

The debate around the AIIB captures this division. Most scholars argue that while the Chinese leadership continues to prioritize itself via internal development, it has sought out a more active role in the surrounding region—for good or for bad. According to Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, the AIIB serves as a means by which China can not only park its vast exchange reserves, but also to “enhance influence with neighbors and thus improve security in both the economic and the military senses.” This facilitates the leadership’s attempt to “maintain peace and stability domestically, in the periphery, and globally—but also at the same time, to use China’s gradually increasing clout… to build out toward increased security and global influence.” Similarly, former Rear Admiral Yang Yi highlighted how the AIIB is part of Chinese efforts in “bringing a better life for its own people” and strengthens China’s position in “[creating] a harmonious world [and] making countries wealthy, secure, and friendly.”

At the same time, the regional and non-regional distribution of capital shares—75 percent regional and 25 percent non-regional—means that now, more than ever, Asian countries, especially smaller ones, are better positioned to vocalize their developmental priorities and demands. Indeed, the fact that China has given up veto power over day-to-day operational issues has convinced many countries like the United Kingdom and Germany that Beijing is willing to make the AIIB line up with international norms.

Following the Cultural Revolution, China viewed itself as a politically weak, economically poor country. In 1978, Deng Xiaoping asserted that “as a socialist country, China shall always belong to the Third World and shall never seek hegemony.” To belabor this point, Deng advanced the taoguang yanghui strategy – that China should “hide [its] capacities and bide [its] time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.”

Such a policy made geopolitical sense. At the cusp of market reforms, China’s GDP per capita measured a mere $165. In 1981, close to 85 percent of the populace lived under the poverty line of $1.25/day. Since Reform and Opening, however, China has undergone a dramatic transformation.

The country’s annual average growth rate has exceeded 10 percent. GDP per capita has risen to $7,590, and close to 600 million people have been lifted out of poverty.

At present, there have been differing opinions amongst China watchers as to the continued

Most scholars argue that while the Chinese leadership continues to prioritize itself via internal development, China has sought out a more active role in the surrounding region—for good or for bad.

Consequently, Asian countries have assumed a range of positions when dealing with the AIIB and, more broadly, China. While Japan has adopted a “wait and see approach” to membership and has engaged in what many see as soft balancing by announcing a $100 billion package deal for “high quality and innovative” infrastructure development, Vietnam has acquiesced relatively quickly to joining the Bank. The Philippines has taken a middle position, joining the Bank, but only after an extended period of consideration in which it voiced its unease.

All share a recognition of China’s immense economic clout and the need for engagement, as well as a distrust of Beijing’s geopolitical intentions.

Time will tell as to whether these apprehensions are justified.

Jackson is a Yenching Scholar studying Economics and Management at Peking University. He graduated from Columbia University in 2015 with a degree in Political Science and Business Management. You can contact him at jacksonltse@ gmail.com.

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ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

China Looks Towards Iran CAMILIA RAZAVI & DANIEL KHALESSI look in depth at the implications of Chinese economic trade and investment in Iran

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n 138 BC, a Chinese imperial envoy named Zhang Qian set out to traverse the dangerous plains of Central Asia on horseback, ultimately entering the Persian Empire. On January 30th, 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping descended from his airplane in Tehran, marking the continuation of a two-thousand-year-old relationship between the two civilizations.

maintaining a balance of power in the region,” says Paul Haenle, Former China Director on the National Security Council staffs of the Bush and Obama administrations and Founding Director of the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center. “China sees Iran as a Middle Eastern partner in ensuring the United States is not dominant in the Middle East.”

Moreover, China’s partnership with Iran and the recent multilateral negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program may have been mutually reinforcing.

“Iran has historically been one of China’s most significant trading partners,” says Dr. Lu Yang, Professor in the Department of History at Peking University. “For centuries, Persia and China engaged in trade over land and sea. During the Tang Dynasty, Persia transferred important technology for sea travel to China.”

Despite receiving little media attention, the economic relationship between China and Iran played an important role in the outcome of the nuclear negotiations. “During the P5+1 negotiations, China was able to offer Iran the prospect of greater bilateral economic cooperation that would benefit Iran’s stressed economy if an agreement was reached,” says Mr. Haenle. Indeed, China argued that the suspension of sanctions would

Today, Chinese leaders and entrepreneurs are reinvigorating the history of close economic ties between the two countries. President Xi became the first foreign head of state to visit Iran in the aftermath of the recent nuclear deal and the suspension of international sanctions against Iran.

After a series of meetings between President Xi and Iranian leaders—namely Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani, and the Majlis (Iran’s parliament) — the two governments ambitiously agreed to increase bilateral trade from $55 billion to $600 billion over the next decade. In September 2015, only a few months after the P5+1 finalized the nuclear deal, a single Chinese businessman Sheng Kuan Li invested $200 million in a steel mill in Zarinabad, even bringing laborers from China to work at the facility.

President Xi’s decision to increase bilateral trade with Iran, however, coincides with recent economic problems in China. Last year, China’s 6.9 percent increase in GDP marked its slowest growth rate in a quarter century. Likewise, the economic activity of China’s manufacturing and services sectors experienced a slowdown. Despite these challenges at home, China has continued to place a high value on its increased trade and investment in Iran.

China’s greater involvement in Iran can also be viewed as a means of strengthening its strategic and economic foothold in the Middle East. “Chinese officials frequently emphasize their interest in

partners” in his One Belt, One Road Initiative, which attempts to promote greater economic connectivity between China, Central Asia, and the Middle East.

Some scholars, however, point out that the partnership between the two countries is more likely grounded in pragmatism than political ideology.

“Iran and China have become natural allies because of practical necessities and not certainly due to ideological compatibility,” says Mahmood Monshipouri, Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley and Middle East expert. “Iran is a stable country in a region of political instability and has a great deal of resources that China needs.” The proxy wars and conflicts between Iran and Saudi Arabia can increase regional instability and pose risks to China’s ease-of-access to Iran’s resources.

Despite tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, it is important to note that President Xi visited both nations during his Middle East tour. The simultaneity of President Xi’s economic diplomacy with the two geopolitical rivals of the region could potentially allow China to serve as a third party mediator in the event of a conflict. According to Monshipouri, the rationale for these strategic visits might be to show the world that China is “keen on maintaining stability in the region and has worked assiduously and diligently to have bilateral relationship with all key countries in the region.”

Greater regional stability, in turn, can strengthen the confidence of Chinese investors as they contemplate new ventures in the Middle East.

While many experts and policymakers discuss the merits of an American pivot to Asia, China is pivoting to the world, starting with Iran. create immense economic advantages for Iran.

According to Mr. Haenle, “China repeatedly called on Iran to take advantage of the opportunity to lift the economic burden caused by international concerns about its nuclear program and reap subsequent economic benefits, including Chinese investment and joint infrastructure development.”

Before this agreement however, sanctions prevented European countries from accessing Iranian oil markets, allowing China to purchase oil from Iran and invest in Iran’s energy production sector. Indeed in 2014, China doubled its quota for infrastructure investments in Iran. As reported in the Chinese newspaper Xinhua, President Xi stated that China and Iran would be “natural

The trade and investment trends emerging in the aftermath of the Iran nuclear deal provide a valuable window into China’s possible strategic ambitions in the Middle East. In the midst of economic challenges at home and brewing tensions in the Middle East, President Xi’s historic visit to Iran and the new $600 billion trade deal may be part of China’s larger strategy of sustaining a balance of power against the United States while reaping the economic benefits of a more globally integrated Iranian economy. While many experts and policymakers discuss the merits of an American pivot to Asia, China is pivoting to the world, starting with Iran.

Camilia is a Middle East analyst, graduate of UC Berkeley, and former intern at the White House Domestic Policy Council. You can contact her at Crazavi@berkeley.edu.

Daniel is a Yenching Scholar at Peking University and graduate of Yale’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. You can contact him at daniel.khalessi@ aya.yale.edu.

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

China’s Supply-Side Reforms APRIL DAN FENG presents the pros and cons of China’s supply-side reform

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n November 10, 2015, during the Chinese Communist Party Working Conference on Economic Policies, President Xi Jinping introduced a series of policies to stimulate Chinese economy known as the Supply-Side Reform. Of the numerous policies, Xi emphasized the importance of cutting the state-owned enterprises’ (SOEs) sprawling over capacity and announced that the government would start ordering mergers of SOEs by pooling together their resources to obtain bigger market shares and more efficient operating structures. In short, the bigs are getting bigger, per government’s request.

Over the years, China’s SOEs have become less profitable, especially when compared with private enterprises. According to a national survey conducted in March 2015 by the National Bureau of Statistics, total profits of SOEs decreased by 37 percent compared to the year before, whereas profits of their private counterparts increased by 9.1 percent. However, SOEs continue to occupy a major share of markets and resources and overproduce under such inefficient privileges. In the steel and coal industries especially, almost half of the world’s yield is attributed to the overproduction of Chinese SOEs. Since the Deng Xiaoping administration, the Chinese Communist Party has been gradually reforming China’s economic structure by actively supporting private-owned firms through various policy combinations like transferring ownership of state-owned assets and setting up a budget system for managing state capital. The efforts on behalf of strengthening the private sector have definitely bore fruit. According to a report by the World Bank, growth of the private sector has steadily increased since the 1980s. In 2003, the private sector had grown to employ 74.7 million people, surpassing, for the first time, the 74.6 million employed by SOEs. Under such a trend, China’s economy has achieved unprecedented growth over the past thirty years.

However, Xi’s proposal of merging SOEs seems to flip the focus from empowering private enterprises to strengthening the state-owned sector. The president confidently argued that such efforts could further advance the efficiency of the market and provide benefits to consumers. But could it really?

Although the proposed supply-side reform could

conceivably lower costs through merging, it cannot drive down prices without creating a more competitive market for the SOEs. In other words, these firms would have the resources but not the incentives to provide lower pricing.

In fact, mergers of SOEs inevitably reduce market competition by concentrating the market share of state-owned monopolies and raising the barrier to entry for private enterprises. On December 30, 2014, China’s two largest state-owned rail companies, China CNR Corporation Limited (CNR) and China South Locomotive & Rolling Stock Corporation Limited (CSR) announced that under government order from Beijing, they would merge to form China Railway Stock Corp.

(CRRC). The newly merged company controls over 90 percent of China’s industry with a market value of $26 billion and a combined annual revenue of $32.3 billion, making it virtually impossible for smaller private enterprises like the Shenzhen China Technology Industry Group Corporation Limited to survive in the industry.

Such a policy might end up hurting consumers —a problem that China, if it hopes to expand its domestic demand, should be wary of.

Since merging SOEs will almost inevitably reduce the number of competitors in specific industries and stymie competition between the private and the state-owned sectors. It is unlikely that the newly merged SOEs will lower prices. Thus, such a policy might end up hurting consumers—a problem that China, if it hopes to expand its domestic demand, should be wary of.

How can the Party address the long-lasting issue of SOEs slowing down market efficiency then?

Professor Eva Dziadula from the University of Notre Dame provides an insight into the problem,

“The reform should encourage competition and needs to be more market oriented. If you want to create incentives for growth, then benefits such as preferential tax treatments should also benefit the private enterprises.” Essentially, as Dr. Dziadula points out, the reform indeed should be on the supply-side, but the Chinese government has targeted the wrong suppliers. To truly benefit the consumers, it is best to help private companies thrive instead of equilibrating the market with the giant SOEs. The key to solving the slowdown of market growth is to help private enterprises by ending the government-provided preferential treatments that SOEs receive. Since the 1960s, Chinese SOEs have enjoyed preferential treatment from the government in areas such as licensing, government contracting, and financing—ultimately securing an unfair competitive edge over private enterprises. Many leaders of SOEs have been found guilty of corruption and collusion with government officials. According to the official Xinhua News Agency, 115 business leaders of SOEs were arrested and charged with corruption in 2014 alone. Lack of market competition and corruption have worsened the SOEs’ efficiency. Only by ending the preferential treatments to SOEs can the government really achieve the important goal of allocating capital and resources fairly across different market sectors on the supply side. The new market structure would push some SOEs to merge and will increase the likelihood that they lower prices proportionally to their actual costs.

So what has pushed the government to make the proposal? One guess is that such moves form national champions that can better compete overseas. Since the policy was first raised in December last year, there had been rumors of mergers of some of the biggest SOEs in the railway, telecom, steel and airline industries. According to the Wall Street Journal, a merger of China Railway Group and China Railway Construction will create a combined revenue of 1.2 trillion yuan, giving China a much greater say in the global market. The combined company of China Unicom and China Telecom has an annual revenue of 609 billion. A merger of Wuhan Steel and Baosteel would create the world’s No. 2 steel company by production. A merger of Air China and China Southern Airlines would create the world’s largest air carrier by fleet size. However, as the Chinese SOEs gain more say in both the domestic and the global markets, they face less competition in their respective industries and gain more bargaining power in setting prices at their will.

As the bigs go bigger, Beijing tightens its grip on key parts of world industry. In the next few years, however, under this shadow China casts on the global economy, the domestic consumers and private enterprises will still likely be struggling in the dark.

April is a junior at the University of Notre Dame.

Contact her at dan.feng.13@nd.edu.

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LIFE & CULTuRE

Chinese Soccer’s Lofty Goals LAYNE VANDENBERG discusses the current state of Chinese soccer and the ways China can foster a soccer culture.

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ven with a population of 1.3 billion, China is still experiencing significant trouble fielding a successful, elevenman national soccer team. While soccer is China’s most watched sport, hardly any Chinese soccer fans are footballers themselves.

Instead, Chinese fans are spectators. English Premier League soccer matches reach more than 320 million Chinese households, and in 2015, the Chinese Super League (CSL) had an average game attendance of 21,800 people, the largest in Asia. China’s love for watching football could be seen in the rising popularity of the term “soccer widow” used to refer to Chinese women whose husbands would stay up all night to watch soccer matches during the 2014 FIFA World Cup. But Chinese fandom hasn’t produced players.

While the Chinese Basketball Association reported that 300 million children and adults play basketball, the Chinese Football Association has only 7,000 registered soccer players under the age of 18.

So why don’t Chinese children play soccer?

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There are cultural and institutional factors that influence why Chinese kids don’t play. First, Chinese parents often discourage their children from participating in any extracurricular activities, including soccer. Even if Chinese children do play soccer, the club structure in China is not strong enough to encourage kids to keep playing.

Lastly, if a child does play and belongs to a club, he or she still lacks a role model that demonstrates that Chinese soccer players can be successful on the international stage. I discovered these factors when speaking with three prominent figures in the Chinese soccer world, each with his own vision for how to get China off the sidelines and into the game.

—The American — Tom Byer, an American soccer coach credited with Japan’s national soccer success, is a technical coach who believes Chinese kids don’t play soccer because of their parents. Many Chinese parents discourage sports because they doubt that sports can contribute to their children’s academic

success. Leaning in and crossing his arms across his chest, as he often does with players at his training sessions, Byer explains, “Parents are the biggest stakeholders.”

Byer’s idea is not exclusive to China. It applies to any country where soccer is not part of household culture and kids aren’t playing soccer at a young age, including the United States and Japan. Byer’s research reveals that the top 50 players in the world, including players like Pelé, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Lionel Messi, “all attribute early childhood development of soccer skills to their parents, and they had all mastered

While soccer is China’s most watched sport, hardly any Chinese soccer fans are footballers themselves. their technical ability before they received coaching around the ages of 10 or 11 years old.”

By having parents introduce their children to soccer in their early years of development, Byer is nurturing a toddler’s ability to learn at a more accelerated pace than even ten-year-olds can. If Byer’s strategy catches on, China could tap into a potential player pool of over 250 million Chinese children under the age of six.

Although convincing Chinese parents to actively promote extracurricular sports isn’t easy, there are some families who are buying in by giving soccer balls to their kids and even enrolling them in newly created “soccer schools” financed by the Chinese government. These soccer schools primarily offer elementary school enrollment and include soccer as a curriculum requirement for all students.

To better understand this small number of families, I interviewed the mother and father of Yuan Shijia, a five-year old who attends one of the suburban Beijing kindergartens where Byer has started a soccer training program. Shijia has been playing football for around two years, ever since his father first met Byer at a training session. When

Byer and I arrived at the Yuans’ small, two-bedroom apartment in Beijing, we realized we had forgotten a soccer ball. Luckily, the Yuans already had one sitting on top of their TV that Shijia plays with every day.

Both of Shijia’s parents expressed their desire for their son to play soccer for its rational benefits: health, friends, teamwork, and responsibility.

Shijia’s father, a dedicated fan of Beijing Guoan, Barcelona FC, and the Brazilian and German national teams, also expressed desire for Shijia to “build the same interest” in the sport.

Through his family-targeted approach, Byer is slowly beginning to convince parents that soccer does not negatively impact their child’s future success. Instead, he argues it can contribute to their personal growth while solidifying relationships between Chinese parents and their children.

— The Brit — Rowan Simons may be the current president of Guinness World Records China, but his 29 years in China have revolved around soccer and turned him into a de facto expert on Chinese soccer. He’s the only author who has ever extensively written about Chinese soccer in his memoir, Bamboo Goalposts: One Man’s Quest to Teach the People’s Republic of China to Love Football.

Simons told me that soccer was never the people’s game; instead, it was the government’s game. China has watched its many leaders, including Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping, and current President Xi Jinping, claim ownership over the game for political gains. Until recently, the Chinese government officially controlled the Chinese Football Association, the governing body of Chinese soccer, in clear violation of FIFA’s regulations against government interference.

Simons believes soccer clubs can return the game to the people. According to Simons, soccer clubs foster a community strong enough to supplant “fear of the government that is currently the shared basis of [Chinese] society.” In August 2001, to prove clubs can work as a social enterprise, Simons started Beijing Wanguoqunxing FC Limited, or ClubFootball, the first amateur soccer club in Beijing. Although ClubFootball started with only one club consisting of foreigners living in China, it now has 25 locations with over 3,000 registered kids, 60% of whom are Chinese.

Simons also believes that clubs personalize the game. For instance, in the past, soccer matches frequently broke out into violence because players would attack government-employed referees over their calls. At ClubFootball’s adult leagues, private referees become familiar faces. Overall, Simons explains, “clubs avoid the negative parts of the sport: corruption, bribery, [and] government control.” By weakening the negative associations Chinese people make with soccer, Simons hopes more players will pick up a ball and join the soccer community.

“Chinese players are just as good [as foreign players] technically, they are just as fit physically, but they have no creativity. They lack a football brain.”

When I asked his opinion on the creation of “soccer schools,” Simons responded, “China cannot just have school reform. It needs club reform.” To prove his point, Simons refers back to his roots, stating in his enunciated accent, “In England, there [were] over 37,000 clubs and 32,000 soccer schools in 2010. You have to have both. You need to have links between the two. China has plans for the schools, but what about the clubs?”

Although China aims to compensate for its lack of clubs with schools, Simons comments with confidence, “China will have to change.” Simons further argues that this change must include China’s approach to teaching soccer fundamentals. Right now, “Chinese players are just as good [as foreign players] technically, they are just as fit physically, but they have no creativity. They lack a football brain.”

Soccer schools may be able to teach technical skills and physical fitness, but Simons believes they cannot teach creativity. Clubs, however, can nurture creativity by providing a community setting and safe environment where players can experiment, fail, and grow. Through this process of building an environment that welcomes all levels of players, clubs generate “emotional attachment and loyalty,” two crucial elements that help get Chinese kids on the field.

—The Brazilian and the Chinese soccer captain — Elkeson de Oliveira Cardoso presents another key barrier to popularizing soccer among the Chinese: the prevalence of foreign imports and the consequent lack of a Chinese role model.

In 2013 Elkeson left the Brazilian club Botafogo for Guangzhou Evergrande, the most popular Chinese club, for $6.5 million USD. That same year, Elkeson led Guangzhou to win the Asian Football Confederation’s Champions League for the first time ever.

Elkeson is easily one of the most recognizable faces in Chinese soccer, but he isn’t the only foreigner playing in China. Since his arrival in 2013, clubs in the Chinese Super League have paid even more money than the English Premier League—the wealthiest soccer league in the world—for foreign players. Elkeson attributes this surge in imports to the full pockets of Chinese investors, who are “investing a lot in player contracts and attracting trainers and coaches from Brazil and Europe.”

soccer team.

Even though foreign imports like Elkeson may have goals to improve Chinese soccer by drawing attention to the sport, I’m not convinced they encourage Chinese kids to play soccer. After my conversation with Elkeson, I reached out to Wei, one of the student captains of Peking University’s club

When Wei and I met at the only coffeeshop on PKU’s campus, he arrived late and panting, as if he had just run full sprints across a field. He was coming from soccer practice, which explained his full tracksuit. I broke the ice by asking when he first began playing soccer. He succinctly explained he started when he was 10 years old, but then quit.

When I asked why he quit, he said, “When I was around 15 years old, I turned to basketball,” he paused. “Because of Yao Ming.”

Yao Ming was important to Chinese basketball for various reasons, but first it is important to understand why it was monumental for Yao to be good at basketball specifically. Basketball is what the Chinese call a “big ball” sport. As Xu Guoqi, Professor at the University of Hong Kong and author of Olympic Dreams: China and Sport, explained to me, “the Chinese believe they are good at ‘small ball’ sports, such as ping pong. But there is an issue with big ball sports, such as soccer, where China is still fighting for its manhood.”

Before Yao’s career, China could not compete in the international arena in most “big ball” sports, and it impacted Chinese national pride. Yao dispelled the “big ball” myth, first gaining fame in China before moving abroad to the NBA in mythic success story fashion. Yao proved that a Chinese man could not only play but excel at basketball to the point of becoming a household name even in the United States. As a result, more Chinese companies invested in the NBA, more Chinese watched basketball, and kids like Wei picked up a basketball and looked to Yao as a role model.

When it comes to soccer, Chinese kids don’t see a Chinese, soccer-playing Yao Ming dominating the field. They see foreign players like Elkeson. When I asked Wei if there was a Yao Ming of soccer, he sat quietly thinking before finally answering, “No one is good enough.”

It is no wonder that Chinese kids don’t choose to play soccer. Why would they ever aspire to join the national joke that is the national Chinese soccer team, when they could instead aspire to be the next Yao Ming?

Chinese soccer lacks an inspiring Chinese footballer who can challenge the assumption that the Chinese are incapable of being successful soccer players. In addition to attracting foreign imports, China needs to turn its gaze inwards and search for a Yao with unprecedented foot-eye coordination.

•

A

lthough the Chinese soccer landscape will continue to be dominated by the non-Chinese in the coming years, the domestic industry is just warming up. To turn Chinese soccer lovers from spectators into star players, the Chinese government is beginning to take action.

In February 2015, President Xi Jinping introduced a rather revolutionary fifty-point plan for the development of soccer as a sport. First, it officially separated the Chinese Football Association from the Chinese government’s General Sports Administration, making it the only one of China’s 72 sports organizations to be ostensibly independent from the government. The plan also aims to open 50,000 soccer schools by 2025, making soccer a staple of many schools’ national curricula.

Lastly, Xi established a presidential task force to promote soccer at the highest level alongside other task forces dedicated to Chinese economic affairs, cyber-security, and the military.

This political push for soccer ultimately reflects China’s desire for international recognition, echoing the sentiment of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. This time, President Xi’s goal is to participate in, host, and win the FIFA World Cup. To achieve its World Cup Dream, however, China is quickly realizing it needs more than an army of soccer players. It needs a soccer culture, and getting Chinese children to play soccer is crucial to creating it.

A combined approach of introducing soccer at an early age, encouraging the establishment of more soccer clubs, and developing Chinese soccer superstars, however, still will not solve all the barriers preventing China from succeeding on the field. At all levels, China must begin to strip away institutional and cultural practices of top-down enforcement in favor of grassroots efforts.

This includes removing government intervention in the sport, changing the cultural mentality towards academics from punishing to rewarding kids who exhibit creativity and participate in activities outside of the classroom, and allowing social groups to organize freely to generate their own communities. These substantial changes not only give kids the opportunity to play and the desire to keep playing, but they will also result in a very different China; a China much more likely to become soccer-crazed and capable of winning.

Layne is a master’s student at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing and a US Fulbright Research Scholar in Rio de Janeiro. Contact her at laynevdb@umich.edu.

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LIFE & CULTURE

Zhao’s Not My Name ZIYU YVONNE YAN explores the meaning behind novel expressions on the Chinese Internet

“T

he True Story of Ah Q,” a novella by the famous early twentieth-century Chinese writer Lu Xun, is a classic in Chinese literature.

The protagonist, Ah Q, is a poor peasant living at the bottom rung of Chinese society. When the son of his landlord Zhao passes the Imperial Examination, Ah Q celebrates with his landlord’s family and presents himself as a “Zhao.” Landlord Zhao retorts, “You think you are also worthy of the surname Zhao?”

Since Lu Xun wrote the novel in 1923, the idiom “Ah Q Spirit” has become popularized, used commonly to refer to a disadvantaged person who denies reality and tends to think optimistically.

Starting December of last year, however, a new, more cynical Lu Xun-inspired metaphor has outshined “Ah Q Spirit,” and become viral on the Internet —“Zhao Family,” or Zhao jia ren.

Behind the rise of the phrase “Zhao Family” is a growing divide between social classes, a divide fueled by Party-led political favoritism. “Zhao Family” is an explicit reference to the wealthy and the powerful in Chinese society today, typically “princelings,” the well-connected offspring of Mao-era revolutionaries who utilize their social connections with large state-owned companies to gain support for their financial ventures.

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Although “Zhao Family” is typically used in a light-hearted and sarcastic way, underlying political, economic, and cultural connotations of the phrase highlight serious fissures in Chinese society today. Frequent references to “Zhao Family,” be it in daily conversations at dinner or on online microblogging platforms like Weibo and WeChat, indicate a rising wave of cynicism. Jokes, jingles and literary references have become an outlet for people to express their political discontent and frustration with the Chinese authorities.

There are many other examples of online slang that, like “Zhao Family,”

reveal popular frustration with the growing economic divide in Chinese society. “Compare fathers,” Pin Die, for example, literally meaning “dad fight,” has become popular in recent years. The phrase is used by teenagers and young adults who believe that the socio-economic status of their families is a crucial determinant of their future success. “Compare Fathers,” now used as a term to criticize this generation’s foul play with money and political power, reveals a clear resentment for those who use powerful familial connections to get ahead.

Another phrase that has become popular is ni guo, “your country.” This phrase emerged in response to use of the phrase wo guo, “our country,” by Chinese media outlets in official statements announcing China’s recent achievements. For example, a CCTV reporter on the nightly news or a headliner on People’s Daily often says, “Our country’s economy has been looking positive.” The use of the possessive pronoun in state-regulated mediums indicates a sense of shared pride and dignity resented by a public that feels that it is not truly being represented by its government. The separation between “my country” and “your country” indicates a growing disillusionment with the government in present-day China, a desire to separate one’s personal identity from the national identity dictated and imposed on its citizens by the Chinese government.

Wang Jun, a Chinese ping shu artist familiar with the folk slang that appears frequently in traditional stories, explains that “folk slang originates from people’s dissatisfaction and even resentment, yet they often don’t have specific and effective suggestions for the sources

of their discontent to improve.” This is evident in the now commonly used phrase zhuan jia, or “brickspert,” used to describe experts who downplay economic, health, and safety problems in the face of government pressure. The witty yet ironic replacement of the first character in the Chinese word zhuan, meaning “expert,” to another homophone meaning “brick” conflates bricks and China’s supposedly erudite scholars.

“Brickspert” has become the customary word that netizens use in response to any professional comments that seem politically orchestrated.

Most people don’t have their own suggestions for solving the problems, yet they nevertheless ridicule the experts for whatever they say as an outlet for their discontent.

This frustration with the authorities also stemmed from former president Hu Jintao’s call for a “harmonious society.” To achieve harmony, government censors “harmonize” the community by stifling free online discourse. From online blogging to even TV dramas, Xi Jinping’s administration has further strengthened the state’s control over various media sources. Results for phrases like “Zhao Family” on search engines such as Baidu are partially or fully blocked with an explanation that some of these results violate “relevant laws, regulations, and policies.” Nevertheless, the widespread usage of phrases like “Zhao Family” calls to attention class differences and social inequality in China. More importantly, such popular online slang rallies those who don’t belong to the “Zhao Family” against the elites that are responsible for such the deeply inequitable society China is today. Introducing new ideas and new mindsets, Internet slang has tremendous potential to facilitate an online dialogue that pushes for a social order that doesn’t just belong to the “Zhao Family.”

Ziyu is a senior at the Lawrenceville School. Contact her at yvonnegegeyan@yahoo.com.

LIFE & CULTURE

Can Women Hold Up Half the Sky? ANASTASIIA ILINA examines the relationship between women’s organizations and the Chinese authorities.

O

n April 13, 2015, the world sighed in relief as five female activists, later referred to as the “Feminist Five,” were released from prison after a 37-day detention. Their offense? On the eve of International Women’s Day, they were caught planning to hand out leaflets protesting sexual harassment on public transportation services. During their detention, Wei Tingting, Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Wang Man and Zheng Churan received support from public figures and international media.

The support was not only coming from abroad.

Women all around China posted photos in support of the “Feminist Five.” Although the feminist movement in China is still fragile, feminist activists are gaining ground through a variety of channels that seek to negotiate a hostile institutional environment constructed by the Chinese authorities.

Feminism in China does not consist of a Chinese woman with bands on her arms and posters in hand, ready to publicly protest. Chinese feminists are fighting a calculated battle so well-planned that authorities may see their actions as politically destabilizing and therefore subject to crackdown. Unlike the planned demonstration by the Feminist Five, most organized feminist activism operates within small circles on social media platforms such as Sina Weibo or WeChat. Vera Peneda is a journalist and author running the online project Feminism in China, a cause that grew out of a university task force and that has developed into a portal raising awareness about women’s issues in China.

“Feminism is not widely discussed, while feminists have a hard time and are looked down upon,” she commented. “If women declare in public or to their family that they are feminists, people would think that they were mentally ill.”

Feminist organizations in China are certainly not new. The first official NGOs advocating women’s rights were established in the late 1970s following the Chinese government’s enshrining of gender equality in its 1950 Marriage Law. In March 1995, Beijing hosted the Fourth World Conference on Women, attracting over 50,000 delegates and feminist NGOs to draft the Platform for Action, a pledge to advance gender equality for all women in the world.

Despite their visible presence in civil society since the late 1970s, feminist organizations have faced limited success in advancing the goals outlined during the Fourth World Conference. According to a special issue on women’s organizations published by China Development Brief in 2015, the main concerns facing women include equal participation in the workforce, domestic violence, prostitution, and sex trafficking. In fact, according to a 2009 report from Peking University’s Center for Women’s Law and Legal Service, 1 in 4 women in China has been denied a job due to her gender.

While the Communist Party of China officially upholds gender equality, claiming to support cooperation with civil society actors on legislating

new governmental policy, these NGOs derive their true influence on the government by raising public awareness of women’s issues, relying on public pressure to capture the attention of China’s legislative body.

Domestic violence is a concern that clearly illustrates the constrained power of feminist activists while working under unfriendly conditions fostered by the government. The All China Women’s Federation reports that 25 percent of women in China have experienced domestic violence in their homes yet only forty thousand to fifty thousand complaints have been registered. The Anti-Domestic Violence Network (ADVN) was the only NGO in China centered on domestic violence issues, but it was forced to close in 2014, taking down affiliated organizations such as Peking University’s Women’s Legal Aid Centre this past January. Both organizations experienced management issues as some of its leading members were scholars and opinion leaders who may not have made the organization’s work their top priority.

Sustainable funding also became more difficult after the 2009 global financial crisis with the main funding sources of the ADVN dropping off significantly in the years leading up to its closing.

Lack of external support in the face of an unresponsive government brings women to voice their concerns through personal campaigns such as the “Blood Brides.” In 2012, two members of the laterknown “Feminist Five” walked down the streets of Beijing in wedding gowns stained with blood while distributing anti-domestic violence pamphlets.

Although it was one of many demonstrations, the strong public reaction they provoked combined with a significant number of recently reported domestic violence cases bore its first results. On March 1, 2016, China passed its first ever law against domestic violence.

Although the feminist movement in China is still fragile, feminist activists are gaining ground through a variety of channels that seek to negotiate a hostile institutional environment constructed by the Chinese authorities.

Female workforce participation is another issue that Chinese feminist organizations have been limited in

addressing due to institutional inaction. Although more women have taken on professional careers since the late 1970s, female labor force participation still lags far behind that of men. A survey published in the Harvard Asia Pacific Review reveals that 63.4 percent of female graduates become employed straight after university compared to 72.1 percent of male graduates. In the absence of governmental legislation for bolstering women’s presence in the workforce, women unite in support groups to help each other climb the career ladder. Charlotte Xu Han, one of the co-founders of the first Lean In circle in Beijing, an international initiative first introduced to China in 2013, shares that group members aim to encourage “women in China to achieve their own definition of success and happiness through leadership, mentorship and mutual support.” In less than three years, the organization established chapters in 16 cities and 40 colleges across China.

While the Chinese government has undertaken some institutional initiatives to aid and support women, their effectiveness as well as intentions are questionable. The All-China Women’s Federation (ACWF), an organization whose leadership has always included Communist Party members, was first established in 1949. The Federation sponsors affiliates such as Women of China magazine, a news source for issues concerning Chinese women as well as a media platform for promoting ACWF. Jane Willborn, a journalist working for Women of China, observes that although the Federation “sponsors events and charity organizations to get women training, at the same time they have to follow the Party line and they are not going to say anything radical.” In fact, the China Development Brief identifies the ACWF as the most dominant yet the least Party-independent women’s rights organization. The publically influential position of ACWF creates a uniquely complex relationship between itself and other feminist civil society actors.

The ACWF’s strong social presence, thanks to official Party support, may minimize the importance of other non-Party affiliated feminist organizations, giving the public the wrong impression that women’s issues are already being adequately addressed by the government. Strong Party ties and the ability to mobilize mass media attention, however, may make the ACWF a valuable ally for feminist grassroots organizations, providing them a political channel through which they can exert pressure on government policy-makers.

Unfortunately, much of the power to resolve these issues is still vested in the government. In early April, China’s state-regulated microblogging site Weibo suspended all user accounts and denied new registrations that contained the words “women’s rights” (nü quan). While a New York Times report from the United Nations’ Global Leaders’ Meeting on Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment in September 2015 quotes Xi Jinping as vowing to “reaffirm China’s commitment to women’s rights,” his promise rings empty as long as unofficial channels through which feminists voice their concerns are cut off. In order for the Chinese Dream to be truly realized by all, men and women included, greater operational freedom must be granted to feminist organizations.

Anastasiia is a master’s student at the Yenching Academy of Peking University in Beijing. Contact her at anastasiiailyina@gmail.com.

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FEATURES

Kunming’s Meter Gauge Rails EDWARD COLUMBIA reflects upon his time spent in Kunming and the city’s old railway which has taken on a new life

W

hile living in Kunming last summer, I became entranced by the city’s old meter-gauge railroad tracks. I would often walk to where the tracks crossed Jianshe Street, near Yunnan Normal University, and stare at the ties extending in both directions. Narrowing, endless.

These tracks have a history. They are vestiges of the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway built by the French in the early 1900s. Now, but for the occasional freight train, they are rarely used for their original purpose. On weekend afternoons, old men use the tracks to fly kites. The trees on either side of the narrow passage make it an ideal wind tunnel for takeoff. Morning and night, people walk the rails from central Kunming to the outskirts, and back, for their working commute. Men and women from many ethnic groups set up markets where the tracks intersect with city streets. They sell handicrafts and wares, snacks, fresh fruits and vegetables.

Photos by author Edward Columbia

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A stream flows beside the tracks. Young lovers, old couples, grandparents with grandchildren, all stroll hand in hand between the stream and the rails, winding with them. Here on the tracks, people breathe. There is leisure in this place of locomotion. Leisure, and rest.

Nestled between the rails and the water, weary travelers sleep under the overhanging branches. Waking to rekindle a bone pipe or to check their possessions, and drifting off again. Children play on the stream bank, hop the wooden ties, balance one-legged on the thin steel lines. They stake claim to hewn bends, where few trains pass anymore, but where the bolts are still greased black.

One day, I turn right off of Jianshe Street, onto the tracks. With the first step I know that I have given my day to the rails. I walk for hours and miles.

A young father walks his daughter home from school.

A dutiful brother guides his tiny sister along the gaps in the ties.

The little girl is hungry for her mother’s Dehong style wuhua pork.

Always roasted, never fried. She knows her mother has been to visit her family’s village in Dehong, and has brought back the special yancai-gao sauce that takes a month to make.

Mix and fry the ingredients, then dry them in the sun, fry them again, dry them again. She doesn’t know what it means to take so long for something so small and delicate, but she knows how it tastes.

Father is expected soon at his job, but the little girl has asked to take the long way, so that she can swing along the rails, holding hands. He knows it is not a time to be late for work, not now, when the stock crisis is sending shockwaves even as far as here. But she is happy, swinging, and he is.

Brother has finished work and wants to see the rail museum. Wants to imagine himself shoveling coal into the hot belly of an old caboose. He has bribed her with ice cream to tag along quietly.

But the museum is closed today.

Rubble. Snapped beams and crumpled metal and cracked brick. A building is swept away and in its place a trove of trash to be collected. A building is raised from nothing and in the place of nothing a trove of trash to be collected. Someone discards, someone gathers.

Puddled rain doubles the haul.

Trash is big business in this city. Here you can find entire lots full of flattened cardboard boxes, layered to heights of houses.

Who lived in the contents of the bags?

As of a slaughtered animal, the inconceivable bits have value.

The man lets out line, and the spokes turn gently. The kite is taking flight on wind channeled between the trees.

The wheel eases a groove into his belly and snuggles there. The kite soars. He nudges the rubber handles, only when he needs to. Invisible thread links a cluster of old friends to a cluster of specks in the sky.

Trackside, plum blossoms tickle the rust on an old warning sign. Wu wu! The man laughs. His belly jiggles, the wheel jiggles, the line jiggles, and the kite is unfazed. Wu wu! The bellow of a train that is never coming.

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I pass through the quick shade of the market umbrellas.

Melons and melon seeds. I think of Qiuji’s story about the young girl who stole one too many handfuls of melon seeds from the Miao woman’s food stand. A gu, an ancient poison, set on her, finally undone with an egg that swelled with black insects.

Under their umbrellas, the women grin. They shuffle cubes of stinky tofu on the barbecue and turn skewers of spicerubbed pork. They gossip over the hiss in throaty, resonant Yunnanese. I ask for tofu. They scoop the cubes into a paper bag, then sprinkle a powder of sugar and spice on top. I close my hand around the bag and shake it until the powder carmelizes on the hot cubes, then poke them out with a toothpick.

Sharing the same shade, a pair of Hani women crouch beside one food stand, selling small embroidered pouches. I smile and they wrinkle back. A-peeee, I greet them, singing out the second syllable of the Hani word for grandmother—Aqpiq. I don’t know whether that’s quite right, but it’s worth a shot. They are amused.

In front of me, a sea-foam green taxicab cuts across what was never a sense of distance.

I bend my ear to the track. Nothing. I wrap a hand over the cool metal. Nothing. An adventure necessitates these childish, unnecessary things. If I dally on the bridge, the consequences will be mine to bear. I don't dance or sun myself over the shadowed water.

I consider myself warned.

The train appears, one car after another bursting into space. It overtakes me midway across the bridge. I jump out of its way, plunging into the shallow water, where I drown.

Grandfather watches the rippling fronds. The tiny child throws rocks into the stream, watches the rippling water. They are two moments, one posture of the same person.

The father squats between them, the son squats between them. Grandfather hawks, a muddled rasp. He spits phlegm into the water. The child throws another rock. The water flows, and I imagine the rock sinks to the bottom.

Father is at work, his hands turning the color of motor oil.

The stream becomes a gutter. It thins to haggard slime. No longer itself, at all.

Miles from the center of the city, the overpasses here are streaked with exhaust belched out over and over onto itself.

The wooden ties have turned to stone. A makeshift filter traps fish bones, greasy bags, and clumps of wigs. I sit and enjoy this junction. The most human beauty of the walk.

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Friends come to Kunming from home villages where there is little money and much love. They can only confront so many black overpasses before they long to return home. Some do and some don't. Depends what 'promise' means.

The boys crawl through gaps in the brick walls. This stretch of tracks and muck and stone is their territory.

This gang of four. Three are brash and playful. One is shy, and always ducks just out of sight. The smallest leads them. He has a long scar on his cheek, and the knees of his jeans are brown. The oldest holds a gun magazine. He eats the pictures. They cut their own hair and they cut class and they puff unfiltered cigarettes. They live in one of those buildings, over there.

Dinnertime is a ways away.

The boys tell me where to turn, and where to turn back.

They climb the wall in practiced pulls and disappear into the seams.

They have walked the tracks to and from work for years. Feel a train, even when it’s going somewhere else.

They used to run. They feel the trains that used to run. They are looking at the end of the line.

With retirement, the frightening prospect of neglect. Other, brighter prospects too. How long to keep this up?

They watch the freight. It comes so loudly, there is no sound.

Edward is a sophomore at Yale University. Contact him at edward. columbia@yale.edu.

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Love For the Papa, But Not His Gala CHAO WANG sheds light on China’s latest propaganda efforts: the making of Xi Jinping’s media image and the staging of the Spring Festival Gala

I

winced when I found that the TV screens on Beijing’s subway were showing videos of China’s World War II Victory Parade on September 3, 2015.

It was the start of 2016, already four months after the parade, when I had just come back from the US after a five-month exchange program. Soldiers were marching on Tiananmen Square in impeccable goose steps. President Xi Jinping, standing on the majestic Tiananmen, the ancient gate of the Forbidden City, was waving to the soldiers whose faces turned to him to pay respect. Now daily commuters packed tightly in the carriages had to kill time by staring at the moving phalanx on the screen.

My memory is still fresh with the spectacle on the Chinese Internet, where state-owned media and patriotic netizens competed with flamboyant remarks expressing their pride for the nation and love of the CCP at the time of the parade. Five months later, however, when extracts from the parade scene were screened again on the annual Spring Festival Gala on China Central Television (CCTV), some netizens felt offended.

Tu cao, “to complain” or what I would call “spuke” (a combination of the words “speak” and “puke”), has become a new celebratory activity for Chinese netizens during the Spring Festival in the past few years. Users on Weibo, the Chinese microblogging site, picked up whatever they could “spuke” about of the Spring Festival Gala, whose performances were getting increasingly absurd yet unamusing, and turned them into jokes. This year, however, those energetic writers remained quiet: the propaganda on display was so heavy that it appeared almost politically unsafe to joke about. For example, the opening performance featured a rap song, which was a synthesis of new Party policies. Besides, the notorious “red song,” “Without the Communist Party, there would be no New China,” which hasn’t appeared on the gala for decades for its association with Mao’s Red Terror, was proudly sung on stage. “North Korea is

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Although this year’s gala caught many by surprise with its blatant propaganda, it is consistent with Beijing’s intensified control over political expression.

about to catch up with us in missile technology, and we are catching up with North Korea in our New Year Gala,” a brave Weibo user remarked. Such sarcasm was immediately subject to traditional tactics of opinion control. Critical comments of the Gala were often deleted “due to legal issues” on various social media platforms.

Although this year’s gala caught many by surprise with its blatant propaganda, it is consistent with Beijing’s intensified control over political expression.

Unlike his predecessors, Xi has had to carefully manage his image on a new media platform: the Internet.

In light of the new threat, authorities have increased the intensity of pro-Xi and pro-Party propaganda.

Xi’s media image has been crafted quite differently from that of his predecessors. In general, he has been depicted as a powerful yet personable fatherly figure.

Shortly after taking office, he was given the nickname “Xi da da” or “Papa Xi.” Similarly, Xi’s wife, Peng Liyuan, formerly a popular folk singer, is depicted as a motherly figure dubbed “Mama Peng.” State media and websites often show pictures depicting the Papa and the Mama wearing matching outfits on foreign visits, pleasing audiences who are delighted to see the lovely couple representing their nation.

Adapting a Chinese pun, propagandists created a series of websites and social media accounts under the title “xue xi” which means “to study” and “to learn from Xi (Jinping)” at the same time. The term also evokes memories of “political study sessions” in the Mao era when everyone in a work unit was forced to learn and memorize by heart the teachings of the supreme leader.

Party propaganda has intensified overseas as well.

During the Fifth Plenary Session of the Eighteenth Central Committee, an English music video titled “The 13 WHAT” about China’s 13th five-year-plan was released on the English Internet, including on websites blocked by China’s Great Firewall, such as Youtube and Twitter. The video attracted wide international attention, receiving 180,000 views on Youtube and coverage in foreign media such as the popular Sinosphere blog on the website of the New York Times. The video is also well received in China, for people are happy to see their country presenting its global image in a rather international tone.

As for the effectiveness of the CCP’s recent intensification of propaganda, China’s middle class has seemed receptive to the party’s messages. I recently conducted a survey of middle class residents in Beijing. The participants in the survey were mostly well-informed, frequent Internet users, 95.2% of

whom college graduates and 67% aged 20 to 40. The vast majority of respondents approved the image of the president, calling him a “good husband,” “warm father” and “lovely Papa.” 13.3% reported that Xi’s media image is closer to an ordinary citizen compared to his predecessor, Hu Jintao. Positive phrases such as “adorable,” “vibrant” and “caring for the people” were frequently mentioned, as well. When asked about their opinions on Xi’s performance as president, respondents also gave mostly positive remarks.

Xi’s effort in crafting a positive image on the Internet is designed to attract youths. Now 53.7% of Internet users are between the age of 20 to 39, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Center in January 2016. Similarly, the Spring Festival Gala attempted the same tactic, but it went awry. In the past, concerned with both experience and political reliability, CCTV seldom invited new hits popular among the youth to the Gala. Yet this year many rising popular idols were put on stage, but all they did was parroting fashionable political jargon.

This is the reason why the Gala appeared repugnant to many young audiences: they would not buy some of the Party’s politics even if it was expressed through their favorite stars. Generally speaking, people want a show that is amusing and light on politics (since it can never be politics-free). Years ago that kind of show was still possible. But now, unbeknownst to many, the improvement of Papa Xi’s media image comes hand in hand with what many perceive as an increasingly unbearable Spring Festival Gala, which is now chockfull of propaganda. Although many audiences were not impressed, CCTV conducted a survey showing a 95% satisfaction rate with the Gala. Hundreds of comments sprang up below the web pages carrying this news, questioning the authenticity of the statistic.

As always, censors deleted most dissenting comments.

The Gala was officially a success.

Chao is a junior at Peking University. Contact her at 1300013910@pku.edu.cn.

OPINION

China-Dreaming: An Interview with Stephen Wilmarth WENBIN GAO talks to Stephen Wilmarth, educator and activist, about his visions on China and Chinese education in an era of change

China’s leading public high schools.

He continued his engagement as a faculty adviser to PEER China, a Beijing-based rural education NGO that trained 2,600 students and 700 volunteers in five provinces in the past ten years. He was also a guest lecturer at Ningxia University, Ningxia Normal University, Peking University, Tsinghua University, MIT, and Harvard.

In our conversation, Steve shied away from talking about his achievements. Instead he reminisced about his sojourns into the vast Chinese hinterlands: a midnight stroll among the carpeted stalls in a local assembly market, a dinner at the Master’s table at the Ta’er Monastery, a nearly-silent vigil shared with shepherds tending their yaks and sheep on the slopes of the Kunlun mountains, a twelve-mile hike around the perimeter of Lugu Lake in Yunnan province at the eastern end of the Himalayan mountains that included a wedding, a funeral, and a local folk-singing guide… Steve said he always felt confused, and even a little guilty. “Am I doing the right thing here in China? Indeed, do I need these people more than they need me?”

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first met Stephen Wilmarth during Lunar New Year celebrations at his house in New Haven. Chinese educators and students packed the dining room. A few teenage boys were fresh off the boat and were not yet ready to live independently, so they lived with Steve. It was a unique extended family with Steve acting as parent and teacher at the same time.

Steve is an educator and change activist. Before he went to China, he was the co-founder of Skills21, a project focusing on programs designed to bridge the education gap between underserved and high performing school districts in Connecticut. In 2006, then 60-year old Steve began a personal odyssey by accepting a teaching assignment in Ningxia, China. “I just thought I might be of some help in a place that lay beyond the boundaries of my most intense experiences as a teacher.”

During his ten years in China, Steve started in the northwest, but his trajectory would eventually span multiple provinces and ultimately close a link on both sides of the Pacific. He founded and directed a successful international school project at the No. 1 High School Affiliated with Central China Normal University, one of

Each year, over two million visitors make their way to China from the US. “Most of us are only interested in the famous historical monuments that scream out from the glossy pages of every foreign travel guide,” Steve said. In his eyes, however, these tourist meccas are not representations of the real China. For Steve, the real China is an ever shrinking China, lying at the receding edges of undeveloped frontiers in eternal reticence, immune from the fanfare of media and booming development—“the swirling vortex of human hopes and dreams.” He recalled how students at Ningxia Polytechnic University loved his interactive teaching style. Steve would stroll around the classroom and casually pick up conversations with students in the middle of their assignments. He would invite students to come on stage to give presentations. Compared to a dead-silent Chinese classroom where the only task for students was to take note of everything the teacher said, Steve’s classroom was very much “alive.” “It’s so condescending to say Chinese students are not naturally creative. Given the opportunity, Chinese students are as creative and talented free thinkers as any students I have encountered anywhere in the West.”

Unfortunately, opportunities for free thought are scarce.

As a teacher, Steve’s first shock came during a routine flag ceremony in Yinchuan, provincial capital of Ningxia, where thousands of high school students stood

motionless in a dusty sports field, seemingly as vast as Tiananmen Square itself. The scene was, in his words, “mind-blowing.” The ceremony was a metaphor for the hierarchical structure that defined the national ethos of China itself. Steve wondered aloud if his students would break the chains that tethered them like Prometheus condemned to exist in a perpetual Greek tragedy.

According to Apple Education’s Beijing office, Steve managed to set up the first one-on-one iPad classroom in China in 2010 in Wuhan where students freely read the Washington Post and the New York Times on their tablets as part of their English language learning. Steve admitted that he made the choice to “ask for forgiveness, rather than ask for permission,” by pulling cables from his office to the classroom at midnight to set up an open wifi node in his classroom. In spite of the efforts to sabotage the experiment by the school IT staff, Steve managed to keep the program running for a whole year before it was finally shut down by school authorities.

Nevertheless, Steve’s students leveraged free access to western media into placements at a number of top-notch American universities like UC Berkeley and Emory.

What Steve never managed to explain was the paradox in himself. How could he lament the loss of Chinese culture while at the same time placing iPads in the hands of his students in a bold 21st-century learning experiment?

As he said to me in our meeting, “China is an enigma wrapped in paradox, but it is a mystery to be admired.”

During his time in China, Steve met grizzled veterans of the Chinese Civil War, when Mao and the communists first took control of the Middle Kingdom. He met people of his own age, whose lives have spanned both the convulsions and insanity of the Cultural Revolution and the miraculous economic development that lifted them out of crushing poverty. And he caught himself dumbfounded by many of his students’ complete ignorance of the history of China in the 100 years between 1912 and 2012, as they lived out their young lives in an age of unlimited possibilities, with only a hint of the fragility underlying their ancient communities.

In the summer of 2008, Steve led a group of Connecticut high school students from Hartford to China. Some of these students had never traveled outside Connecticut before. Some had to raise funds from family, friends and local merchants to pay for the trip. While Steve was proud of his endeavor that united underprivileged students in the US with students in far western China who could only dream of studying abroad, it seems in the end like a Quixotic exercise. “I was struggling to deliver on the implied promise to the people we encountered in China, that we were coming to do more than just snap pictures and buy cheap souvenirs.”

Steve fumbled through the pictures he had accumulated over the years: glittering white mosques, old men proudly wearing their taqiyahs in combination with Mao suits, rural kids with burnt faces smiling timidly in front of the camera. Steve is a diehard aestheticist. For him, beauty and utility will eventually converge in a grand narrative of progress. At the end of the conversation, he confided in a secret wish. “I wish I could just have ten minutes with Xi Jinping. I would tell him how beautiful China radiates in the mind’s eye. I would tell him that the strength of the nation lies in its abundant diversity of peoples and cultures. I would ask him to tread lightly and help to preserve one of the world’s most precious resources.”

Wenbin is a freshman at Yale University and an associate editor of the magazine. Contact him at wenbin.gao@ yale.edu.

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OPINION

The Cost of One Child YIFU DONG reviews One Child, a new book on China’s One-Child Policy by journalist Mei Fong

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have always wanted siblings. This longing crept up when I was eleven, the year my family spent in the US Before and after that, my Beijing schools were packed with only children, but in the US, nearly all of my classmates and friends had siblings. Quite naturally, I grew jealous and was certain that having a sibling would be a plus in my life.

But before I was eleven, I had already known exactly why I couldn’t have a sibling. The reason was China’s One-Child Policy. This policy was proposed in the late 1970s and formally adopted in 1980. It stipulates that every family can have only one child, though certain exceptions apply. Violators of the policy are subject to heavy fines and other administrative punishments.

Although the policy has had a direct impact on my life, I have come to realize that I am one of the more fortunate victims after reading One Child: The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment. In her latest book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Mei Fong reveals the human cost of China’s One-Child Policy.

Despite the fact that the One-Child Policy was abolished at around the same time One Child was published in late 2015 to give way to a Two-Child Policy that allows families to have up to two children, Fong suggests that the impact of the One-Child Policy will reverberate for years to come.

If given some brief hints, perhaps even a first grader can tell that the One-Child Policy—two parents producing only one child—will lead to a gradual decline in population. This decline can be startling.

According to Fong, even with the Two-Child Policy now in place, most parents are wary of the cost of bringing up a second child. If this trend continues, China’s population will peak between 2020 and 2030 but will shrink to a mere 500 million, back to the 1950 level, by 2100. This “disappearance” of around one billion people will be the largest population reduction in human history, more than the mass deaths China has constantly witnessed in times of war and famine throughout centuries. Despite the excessive force used in its enforcement, the One-Child Policy is not outright mass murder, but it takes away people’s rights to reproduce and prevents the creation of hundreds of millions of lives.

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perspective of the Chinese Communist Party.

Even though it is obvious that allowing two children for each family is healthier and more sustainable in the long run, the Communist Party only focused on its short-term survival in the 1970s. The disastrous policies of the Mao era killed millions and left the living in abject poverty. By the logic of the Chinese authorities, the main reason for famines and poverty was that there was not enough food to feed everyone. Therefore, the fewer the mouths to feed, the better the economy would be. In official propaganda, people are encouraged to have fewer children and raise more pigs and plant more trees. Liu Junning, a famous Chinese liberal intellectual, once commented regarding the One-Child Policy, “It seems that if China has one person and hundreds of millions of pigs, it will become the richest nation in the world.”

The apparent flaw in the authorities’ reasoning, as Liu and other critics of the policy have pointed out, is that human beings are seen solely as a burden to the regime, not creators of wealth and contributors to society. The One-Child Policy, put simply, represents a fundamental disrespect for the value of human life. Fong does not explicitly make this point, but she shows the negative impact the policy has on different groups of individuals, echoing this broader critique of the policy.

A common rationale for the One-Child Policy is that fewer people make larger economic growth possible.

Fong corrects this misconception in the prologue by pointing out China’s economic miracle depended on a mass, cheap labor force. Indeed, China’s current economic downturn is partly due to a shortage of workers, and this problem will likely remain for years to come due to the expansive three decades of time the One-Child Policy lasted.

The impact the policy has on the whole of society, Fong reveals, includes a rapidly aging population and a huge gender imbalance. Given Chinese culture’s preference for boys to girls and the One-Child rule, many families abandon newborn girls or choose abortion if they find out the fetus is female. Fong, an ethnically Chinese woman and the youngest daughter born to a family that desperately wanted a son, pays a visit to her family village in China and personally testified to the gender discrimination: the family tree hardly recorded any women born to the family. This obsession with boys is also ominous for boys, for China will have 30 to 40 million surplus men by 2020. Fong visits spontaneous marriage markets in major parks across Chinese cities, with parents putting their own sons and daughters in ads.

She even attends a dating fair herself, where relationship and marriage have become mere commodities.

Fong also explains the increasing expense of caili (the dowry the husband pays the wife’s family) and also leads readers to a sex doll factory. Together with these new social phenomena, Fong also helpfully introduces popular newfangled Chinese idioms such as kubi, diaosi and zhainan. Throughout the book, twinges of sadness are behind the commoditization of sex and marriage, the anxiety of parents, the plight of surplus men and the discrimination facing women.

Fong exposes the unscientific and radical nature of the policy but does not go as far as some Chinese intellectuals in displaying the calculus from the

Besides ramifications of the general trends, Fong focuses on the anomalies, also vivid illustrations of the effects of the One-Child Policy. The book begins

with the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of only children and left parents in despair, an event that prompted Fong to further investigate the One-Child Policy. Since the One-Child Policy, in essence, is more an order from the Communist Party than merely a law, local government officials were pressured to adhere to the policy at all costs.

Fong reports the trauma of women who underwent late-term abortions as well as government employees who strictly enforced the policy. Fong’s investigation also goes beyond China’s borders, with stories of Chinese adoptees and their American parents, as well as Chinese parents and their American surrogate mothers.

When I first saw the title of the book, I doubted whether calling the One-Child Policy the most radical experiment in China was an overstatement.

But overall, Fong makes a convincing case by showing readers the radical origin, heavy-handed implementation and potentially severe consequences of the One-Child Policy, leaving no stone unturned.

However, the significance of the book goes beyond the One-Child Policy itself: it documents just how many individuals in China bear the cost of policies from the top.

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ONE CHILD The Story of China’s Most Radical Experiment

By Mei Fong 250 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $27.

— Yifu is a junior at Yale University and a co-managing editor of the magazine. Contact him at yifu.dong@ yale.edu.

WORDS FROM THE EDITORS

关系 guān∙xi means “relationship” 。

YALE-CHINA

ASSOCIATION

Opportunities for Yale students Exchanges | Internships | Fellowships

health education arts

It’s All About Relationship In China, building long-term relationships is the key to a significant impact.

Since 1906, Yale-China programs have forged the kind of relationships that build knowledge and capacity while developing cross-cultural understanding for both our U.S. and China participants.

YUNA and L(U)CY are two of Yale-China’s exchange programs. Each year, they bring 26 Chinese students to Yale and 18 Yale students to China, fostering academic dialogue, cultural exploration, and lasting friendships.

Learn more about Yale-China programs in health, education, and the arts, go to

www.yalechina.org

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WORDS FROM THE EDITORS