The Claremont Journal of International Relations | Fall 2019

VOLUME 5 ISSUE 1

the CLAREMONT JOURNAL of

INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

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Claremont Journal of laremont ournal of International Relations

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I nternational R elations Volume IV | Issue 2 | Spring 2018 May 2019 - Claremont, CA

Volume V | Issue 1 | Fall 2019 January 2020 - Claremont

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Masthead Volume V | Issue 1 | Fall 2019 EDITOR IN CHIEF HELENA GABRIELLE ONG, POMONA COLLEGE '20 MANAGING EDITOR KARI SIEGENTHALER, POMONA COLLEGE '22 EDITORIAL BOARD B RY N N PA R K I N S O N , P O M O N A CO L L EG E ' 2 0 D A P H N E YA N G , P O M O N A C O L L E G E ' 2 0 JUSTIN HSU, POMONA COLLEGE '20 SELINA HO, SCRIPPS COLLEGE '21 T I F FA N Y C H A R V E T, C L A R E M O N T M C K E N N A C O L L E G E ' 2 2 WRITERS A M E L I A H U T C H L E Y, S C R I P P S C O L L E G E ' 2 3 ( S TA F F ) A N A H I TA FA R I S H TA , P O M O N A C O L L E G E ' 2 3 ( S TA F F ) J A C I N TA C H E N , P O M O N A C O L L E G E ' 2 1 ( S TA F F ) BECKY ZHANG, POMONA COLLEGE '22 H A N N A H K I R L E Y, W A S H I N G T O N U N I V E R S I T Y S T. L O U I S ' 2 0 J O S E P H WA L D O W, O C C I D E N TA L C O L L E G E ' 2 0 Articles in the Claremont Journal of International Relations reflects the opinion of the author and do not represent the Claremont Journal of International Relations, its editors, other staff members or the Claremont Colleges.

Claremont Journal of International Relations

Claremont Journal of Volume V, Issue 1, Fall 2019 nternational Relations Published in 2020

by Helena Gabrielle Ong and the editorial board of the Claremont Journal of International Relations.

Volume IV | Issue 2 | Spring 2018 Geoffrey Herrera, Pitzer College Faculty Advisor(s): Professor For enquires please contact: Helena Gabrielle Ong, Editor in Chief May 2019 - Claremont, CA helenagabrielle.ong@pomona.edu Journal e-mail: claremontjir@gmail.com Web: www.claremontjir.wordpress.com Twitter: @ClaremontJIR Cover, image courtesy of GDJ (pixabay.com) 4

Contents 6

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR HELENA GABRIELLE ONG DEBILITATION & DESTRUCTION: THE EFFECT OF U.S. MILITARY BASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST HANNAH KIRELY

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WHAT CAN ITALY LEARN FROM CYPRUS & GREECE? AMELIA HUTCHLEY

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“REVOLUTIONARY” BALLETS IN THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S DOMESTIC & FOREIGN POLICY TOOLKITS JACINTA CHEN

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URBAN CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES FOR CITIES TO IMPROVE THE U.S.-CHINA BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP JOSEPH WALDOW

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THE PARIS AGREEMENT: POINTS OF WEAKNESS & OPPORTUNITES FOR REFORM ANAHITA FARISHTA

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POLARIZED PERSPECTIVES: HONG KONG’S STUDENTS IN THE EXTRADITION-BILL ERA BECKY ZHANG

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Letter from the Editor

Editors of CJIR

Brynn Parkinson, PO '20; Daphne Yang, PO '20; Justin Hsu, PO '20; Selina Ho, SC '21; Tiffany Charvet, CMC '22

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Over the course of my college years, I’ve worked in six different student publications in a variety of roles. I’ve been a copy editor, staff writer, contributing writer, designer, production editor, and, at CJIR, editor-in-chief. But my time working in these different roles continuously force me to rethink structure within organizations, especially in student publications. Even two years into the role, I am still wary of the title Editor-in-Chief.

Too often, we imagine leadership as a vertical structure of power. We depict the path to leadership as climbing a singular ladder, up and away from the masses. I'm particularly fascinated by the common metaphor that compares a leader to an orchestra conductor, but I'm uncomfortable with the characterization of the conducter as the person who makes all the important decisions, waving their arms with command and authority.

Perhaps there is some truth that this type of structure functions well in other environments but, in my experience, not in publications such as these.

Publications such as magazines, newspapers, or academic journals like CJIR are products that recognize their own complexity of voices.

Bylines, attributions, and mastheads speak to the mixture of voices that go into the production of the finished piece. Our names are not only attached to the product’s underpinnings; they’re bared to the surface.

In this manner, these publications present a unique opportunity for democratic discussion and practice.

In CJIR, we emphasize building solutions to ongoing problems around the world, encouraging our writers and readers to grapple with the problems facing democracy. The articles in this issue highlight the possibility for change. Amelia Hutchley’s article on the economic policies of Greece and Cyprus provides a recommendation to Italy's current financial crisis. Joseph Waldow reckons with a stagnant federal government by turning to cities and local communities in order to bridge an international divide. Hannah Kirley addresses the harm of US militarization around the world and proposes steps to reduce that damage. Anahita Farishta provides a recommendation for how we might continue environmental change in the face of a fallen Paris Agreement.

Jacinta Chen pries open the history of ballet in China’s communist party and sets a groundwork for addressing the use of art as political tools.

Becky Zhang analyzes discourse around democracy protests in Hong Kong as a method to understand the next steps.

These writers tear open the issues in the world and pose new ideas for ways forward. Admittedly, none of our writers propose simple solutions.

They are not convenient or efficient to enact. But democracy is not meant to be efficient. It is difficult and complex; there are no simple structures

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

or ladders to creating a democracy.

In a similar way, leadership in a publication such as CJIR is an experiment in democracy. In the editorial committee, we often disagree on the submissions that we review; there are setbacks and frustrations. And yet, we come out of it the better. Our conversations teach each of us to be better communicators, listeners, and leaders. We learn from each other’s expertise, we push each other to defend our political views, and we learn to find value in these complex, not-always-pretty answers.

When we return to the metaphor of the orchestra conductor for leadership, we remember that it takes time, practice, and rehearsal in order for an orchestra to perform on the same page. Like a democracy, it doesn’t happen overnight. More importantly, it doesn’t happen without the musicians. Technically, an orchestra can stumble through the music without a conductor, but a conductor without the musicians is silent. My role as editor-in-chief is nothing without those who I work with, managing editor Kari Siegenthaler, the editorial team of CJIR, and the writers who send in their submissions. So, to them, thank you for the privilege of allowing me to be part of this experiment in democracy and music.

Sincerely, Helena Gabrielle Ong, Pomona College '20

L E T T E R F R O M T H E E D I T O R

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Hannah Kirley

DEBILITATION AND DESTRUCTION: THE EFFECT OF U.S. MILITARY BASES IN THE MIDDLE EAST

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IMAGE COURTESY OF WIKIMEDIA COMMONS, L I C E N S E D U N D E R C R E AT I V E C O M M O N S

Introduction Picture an American summer camp, a place with a swimming pool and classic American food. Now imagine a military base in the Middle East. Most likely, the images that come to mind are of spartan-like facilities in a deserted area, not the modern facilities of a summer camp. Yet those qualities are just as applicable to a U.S. military base. Through slow violence, environmental imaginaries, and Orientalist ‘othering’, military bases in the Middle East debilitate the local people and land, transforming environmental imaginaries in both the eyes of the American soldiers and the native civilians.

Slow violence is delayed destruction dispersed across time and space, and is typically a product of environmental occurrences, such as climate change or varied forms of pollution. Slow violence is a form of structural violence; violence which occurs when social structures differentially expose bodies to vulnerability and harm. However, due to its delayed temporalities and fluidity in form, slow violence is less static and more agentless than structural violence. The agentlessness of slow violence is reflected in the fact that responsibility is rarely taken for the violence caused, as the violence is typically naturalized via colonial environmental imaginaries. Environmental imaginaries are “ideas that groups of humans develop about a given landscape...that commonly includes assessments about that environment as well as how it came to be in its current state”.

Environmental imaginaries can be toxic. By thinking of a certain landscape as barren or harsh, any damage that happens to the land (manmade or otherwise) is seen as natural because it was such a harsh environment to begin with. This process is known as denaturalizing. The concept of ‘Othering’ is the “disregarding, essentializing, denuding the humanity of another culture, people or geographical region” . To expand on Edward Said’s definition of othering, Naomi Klein writes that “Once the other has been firmly established, the ground is softened for any transgression: violent expulsion, land theft, occupation, invasion. Because the whole point of othering is that the other doesn’t have the same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction”. The ‘other’ in this conversation is the land bases are built on, and the local people who live on this land. Because they are from the Middle East, this type of othering is specifically known as

Orientalist othering, as the Orient is viewed as inferior and undeveloped compared to the West. Many Westerners’ imaginaries of the Middle East include vast spaces of desert, a harsh, infertile land - see the imagery conjured when imaging a military base in the Middle East. We then transfer these properties onto the people that live on this land. If the people are able to endure such a harsh environment, then they must be a tough people able to endure hardships and more accustomed to such struggle, like invasions, occupations, war or bombing. These imaginaries are emphasized by the separation of U.S. servicemen and women from the local people and contribute to the slow violence.

I ask my audience to take note of two things: first, this essay is not concerned with broader effects of military bases on countries, such as long-term economic effects, or international political ramifications. There is much existing research on these subjects, as well as the debated merits of bases as a military strategy. This essay instead seeks to demonstrate the detrimental effects on the people whose land is occupied by the bases, as their voices are often left out of the narrative or go unconsidered. This leads me to my second note. My research was much more difficult than I anticipated, largely because of the significant absence of an important voice in the literature: the voice of the people surrounding the bases. I sifted through countless works arguing against military bases and deployment which all cited the harms and costs to Americans but failed to mention the harms to the people native to the land the bases are built on. Given the classic imperialist erasure of a key narrative i.e. the voice of people local to the base area , many of my initial questions have gone unanswered, such as, what happened to the people that used to live on the land the base was built on, and how have Middle Eastern civilian views on America and its military changed? I was unable to find interviews with civilians living outside these bases, or interviews with soldiers describing their expectations of life on the base compared to the realities. However, despite these unanswered queries, I believe I have gathered enough information to claim that U.S. military bases in the Middle East perpetuate slow violence through harming local peoples and their land. In turn, these harms, directly and indirectly, alter the environmental imaginaries of both American soldiers and Middle East civilians perpetuating an imperialist view of the Middle East.

I M A G E S R E F E R E D T O I N T H I S A R T I C L E A R E P R O V I D E D B Y H A N N A H K I R E LY W I T H C I TAT I O N S I N T H E B I B L I O G R A P H Y

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Background on U.S. Military Bases A Forward Operating Base, or FOB, is a military base used for tactical operations. The first U.S. military base in the region was established in 1945 in Saudi Arabia through an agreement between President Roosevelt and the Saudi royal family that consisted of “military protection in exchange for cheap oil for US markets and military”. This was the start of American occupation in the area. Research has been conducted on U.S. military bases finding more sites established in undemocratic states as a means to secure American hegemony, as well as the dual purpose of military bases which is not just to defeat terrorism, but also to provide resource security i.e. protection over American economic assets in the region - primarily oil. This hegemonic strategy has given rise to an enormous U.S. military presence in the Middle East, with over 50,000 troops still stationed there. Given the size of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, there are between 600-800 bases in the region. Due to the number of secret bases, and smaller temporary camps, the actual number of bases is unknown. This is an alarming fact in itself as not disclosing this statistic demonstrates the imperialist entitlement the U.S. military exercises over the land they occupy.

Most U.S. bases in Iraq were built from preexisting Iraqi bases but a number have been renovated completely, including Camp Bucca, the largest prison camp with some of the most modern facilities in the region.

Many of these bases are like miniature cities, with movie theaters, pools, fast food restaurants, retail stores, their own sewage treatment facilities, and power plants.

Human Harm U.S. military bases harm humans through slow violence by denying civilians connection to the land, debilitating people through toxic waste, and deteriorating relations between civilians surrounding the bases and the rest of the host nation’s citizens. Bases implement a modern form of colonization and deny civilians’ connection to the land in the Middle East through imposing the colonizer’s culture upon the colonized people. When the U.S. military sought to create a base in Soldiers enjoying leisure time at Camp Arifjan southern Iraq, they told a laborer he would be working in a place called Bucca. The man, an Iraqi native, insisted there was no such place, and he was right. The U.S. created the whole city of Bucca, named after American fire marshal Ronald Bucca, out of thin air. By creating a new place on the map and naming it after something or someone that has nothing to do with Iraqi culture, this base is a perfect example of how modern colonialism denies Iraqis their connection to the land because they don’t have control over their own space or cities.

This colonialist renaming is not unique to Bucca. Camp Justice in Baghdad in fact used to be called Camp Banazi but was Aerial view of Camp Arifjan renamed in 2004 in an U.S. Army campaign to promote a friendlier image. Renaming the camp belittles the Baghdadi citizens’ connection to the former Camp Banazi just as does occupying it in the first place .

The two photos (right) are taken from a U.S. soldier’s blog while he was stationed at Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. The blue luxury of the swimming pool and relaxed attitude conveyed in the first photo contrast the second, sepia toned and spartan looking base, but they exist as one. The setup of this FOB is standard; large hangars spread out over a stretch of land that is clearly not integrated with the surrounding environment.

The borders of the FOB are clearly demarcated in the second photo, defining the separation between the soldiers and the civilian community. The aerial view allows us to see into the nearby farmland and community that seems from this angle not too distant from the camp. This is significant because U.S. military bases are not built in the isolated desert of our environmental imaginaries. They are surrounded by villages, 10

rivers, cities, and farmland. The isolation of soldiers - seen through the separation of base and village in the aerial photo of Camp Arifjan - affects their imaginaries because they aren’t able to understand how life in the Middle East interacts with the land.

Confined to the base, American soldiers occupy the space, rather than integrating with it. Notice the caption of the second photo, taken from a U.S. soldier’s blog while he was stationed at Camp Arifjan in 2012. There is not a single mention of the civilians in close proximity to the base, but rather a detailed description of the base’s modern amenities. The modernity of the base only exacerbates imaginaries of the Middle East as a rural wasteland, because of the contrast it creates with the surrounding village. Technology has become the hallmark of civilization, so it is unsurprising that these bases are a haven of modernity in a landscape perceived to be backwards and technologically inferior by the architects of these bases. Because these technologies are so different that what can be found in the surrounding area ( a New York Times article notes that the bases are “a world apart from Iraq, with working lights, proper sanitation”) the soldiers are exposed to the contrast between their lifestyle and the lifestyle of the civilians nearby.

These so-called “cities in the sand” are built entirely from the ground up by companies contracted from the U.S. military to give the American soldiers some semblance of “civility” while they are posted in a strange country with foreign and unfamiliar surroundings. Who decided that Subway restaurants are essential to U.S. military operations? Why does a McDonalds signify to American soldiers that they are living in a civilized community? These needs, as well as the swimming pools and malls, speak to the barrier Westerners impose on themselves, to separate themselves from the ‘other’, less civilized “Orientals.” When European colonizers first wrote back describing the people they encountered in the Americas, the words they used were “barbaric” and “savages.” They dismissed the natives’ way of dress, religion, food, and daily rituals.

They established their own European camps and attempted to convert the American natives to their way of life. By establishing U.S. military bases and bringing their own restaurants and technologies with them, the American military is practicing the same form of imperialism their European ancestors began centuries ago.

The physical setting of FOBs is important in

understanding the dynamic between the civilians and the soldiers. While Camp Arifjan was in a more rural location, this photo, taken by Private First-Class Al Barrus, shows Iraqi Shiites protesting outside the main gate of Camp Justice, formerly Camp Banazi. These photos demonstrate the way U.S. military bases occupy land in a way that disregards the local connection to the land. As Ghassan Hage writes, there is an “intrinsic connection between the invasion, occupation, domination, and exploitation of an ‘othered people’ and the invasion, occupation, domination, and exploitation of an ‘othered nature’” The protesters in this photo are living out the intrinsic connection between the occupation the ‘othered’ land, and the occupation and ‘othered’ people.

The next harm is the most tangible. There has been a rise in respiratory illnesses, birth defects, rashes, cancer, and general unexplained illnesses in civilians that have lived near U.S. military bases in the Middle East. In order to address the reason behind the rise in health risks, the harms must be contextualized. Respiratory illnesses and birth defects are not the same as death, but they are so debilitating that the continuation of a normal life is impossible. Debility is intentional endemic injury. When the U.S. military burns over 1,500,000 pounds of toxic waste per day in open-air burn pits that carry lethal chemicals into nearby fields and rivers and pollute the air, the injuries that result from this are both endemic - contained to those who are exposed to the toxins, and intentional the harm is not great enough to kill, only maim so as to be life-altering, but not life-threatening. This burned waste consists of plastics, Styrofoam, electronics, and unexploded weapons. The image (next page) is what burning that waste looks like. The photo comes from an article detailing the illnesses U.S. veterans are facing due to their exposure to burn pits. When examining the image we see only the agent of destruction, the aerosol cans, and are told about the immediate victim, the U.S. soldier.

We don’t see or hear about the other Iraqi victims.

Eric Bonds, who has researched this phenomenon behind burn pits, articulated this point: “ [while journalists] describe the pollution itself, how it billowed over military bases and covered living quarters with ash and soot, such accounts never mention that this pollution would not 11

have stopped at the cement barricades and concertina wire at base boundaries, but must have also settled over civilians’ homes and the surrounding landscapes.”

Studies have been conducted on American veterans who were exposed to the toxic burn pits, but not on the civilians who were also subject to harm. The missing narrative is precisely why this is an example of slow violence. By writing about the harms of burn pits of U.S. soldiers, and then separately documenting the maladies that Iraqis are experiencing, the media is enforcing the ‘agentless’ aspect of slow violence that makes birth defects in the new generation of Iraqis seem fluke-like and unrelated to the environmental injustice that occurred, even when at some camps, the people operating the pits were Iraqis. This is certainly not to discount the harms suffered by the U.S. soldiers, whose’ maladies are very real, despite continued denial by the Department of Defense on any mal-effects from burn pits. Still, Bonds makes an important point, which is that if strong and healthy young men, as U.S. soldiers are our best physical specimens, are suffering from these illnesses, then how can local civilians, populations comprised of the old, weak, pregnant, and very young, possibly stand a chance against this debilitation?

The next harm is qualitatively different than physical debilitation, but still just as toxic for communities. Camp Speicher was one of the few military bases to employ local civilians instead of third-country labor. In fact, almost all the young men in Sokur, the town by the base, worked at the base for almost the entirety of the nine-year war. During the war, this helped and hindered the townspeople.

While employment and general well-being increased, death threats against the townspeople from their fellow Iraqis also increased.

The idea that the town was working with the Americans was blasphemous. So much so that the Sokuris couldn’t go into the next town over to shop because of attacks against them. During the war, the villagers say that this hostility from their own countrymen didn’t bother them, as the American soldiers would construct fences around the town and drop off groceries to keep the townspeople safe. However, now Camp Speicher is empty. The people Iraqi civilians protesting outside Camp Justice in Baghdad of Sokur don’t have the job security, or the protection, that came with cooperating with the base. And the townspeople certainly can’t seek employment nearby, due to their reputation as traitors among Iraqis. As the Americans were leaving Camp Speicher, all townsmen who had been employed at the base received letters of recommendation and commemorative plaques. Said one former employee of his letter of recommendation, “When I want to die I’ll show this to a business” in Iraq”. The implied animosity here of his fellow Iraqis is part of a pattern that follows U.S. military bases in the Middle East; terrorist attacks on U.S. bases have risen alongside the anti-American sentiment that is a product of the occupation and invasion. By building FOBs, the American military is risking their Soldiers outside a McDonalds at a base in Kuwait own soldiers’ lives, and the lives of the civilians who live near the base. By forcing locals to participate in a conflict merely by being in the same vicinity, military bases strip civilians of their autonomy and potentially their lives.

Environmental Harm

Aerosol cans in a burn pit at Balad Air Base 12

U.S. military bases harm the environment in multiple ways. From continuing to occupy the land long after the bases are abandoned, to polluting the water and land, to toxifying the air from burn pits, the environmental damage is evident.

“Once overseas bases are established, they tend to be remarkably

durable, regardless of how the actual functions of those bases evolve…even when military technologies, economic climate, or geopolitical alignments change”. This quote from Embattled Garrisons speaks to the unnatural way bases will dominate a landscape. Even after the U.S. military has no use for their bases, they will remain on the land, occupying a space that could be used for farming or houses, because they are so indestructible. They remain a permanent reminder of military invasion.

This photo (top-right), originally from MSNBC, was used in a Daily Mail article describing “Iraq’s New Ghost Towns”. Taken in Camp Cooke, this photo shows the 1000-building camp, now entirely empty. While the outer shell of these bases is likely to endure almost forever, the abandoned equipment, machinery and materials are not as impervious to climate. The Environmental Protection Agency has a list of sites demarcated as the most toxic and dangerous to humans and environment alike; 900 out of the 1300 sites are abandoned military bases. Through leaks and spills, hazardous chemicals like explosive fluids, metal solvents, and pesticides, filter into the soil and groundwater - the same groundwater used to grow local civilians’ crops. In locations with nearby rivers, civilian drinking water is contaminated as well. Like the chemical leaks from equipment, toxins from the burn pits also infiltrated the groundwater, toxifying the nearby land and water. In the U.S. burning waste in one’s backyard is illegal, due to the damaging effects it can have on a person and the land, but US military bases still burn waste in other countries fully knowing the harms that it carries. Thus, environmental imaginaries of the Middle East as a hostile environment only continue to expand as people will regard the land with a whole other level of toxicity. U.S. military bases don’t just perpetuate climate change, they perpetuate environmental orientalism.

In addition to the chemical changes to the environment, burn pits alter the environment aesthetically. At Balad Air Base in Iraq, the base where the picture of burning aerosol cans was taken, (photo on the next page) the smoke produced from the burn pit was so intense and “such an invariable part of the horizon that software engineers writing a program to help fighter pilots navigate their way onto the base made it a central part of the digitally simulated skyline”. The plume of smoke was so constant it actually was drawn into a map of the area. What does this alteration mean for the

The now empty Camp Cooke in Iraq

people who rely on the map, and the people who live under the plume of smoke? How does its permanence affect the environmental imaginaries?

Had one not known what this photograph was depicting, the source of the smoke could easily have been mistaken for a car bomb, or other explosion, instead of a burn pit. Behind the cloud of smoke in the upper left-hand corner, we see the sun completely obfuscated by the thick toxic smoke.

This photo was taken by Staff Sergeant Greg Roberts, who’s housing unit was only half a mile away from the burn pit. Roberts states that “there was a constant plume in the air and the black silt combined with the powdery sand covered everything”. The imaginary of a hostile land comes not just from the smoke plume, but also from the isolation, both physical and conceptual, of the military bases. From the aerial photo of Camp Arifjan, we saw how the rigid borders of the camp isolate soldiers from the civilians, but these borders also isolate the soldiers from truly experiencing the land. As soldiers are interacting more with their base than the surrounding environment, they are exposed to a different environment than the civilians living on the land. This image (next page) is from another veteran’s blog documenting his time at FOB Gaines-Mills in Kurdistan. The perspective of the photo is so directly aimed at the mud, we can tell what the soldier is trying to convey even without reading the caption.

“In short Gains-Mills was a truly miserable place. Now to add to this picture of misery I need to explain something about Iraq. It has only two seasons. Hot (and dusty) and the muddy season. It doesn't really rain, just kind of stays over cast, and there's mud everywhere. Its kind of like living in a swamp, 13

rished. While this study draws on the perspective of U.S. military servicemen, as previously mentioned it is missing the critical voice of local people displaced by these military bases.

Future studies should seek to include this narrative, perhaps via first-person interviews or social media posts by locals on the topic. Going forward, this article should serve as a reminder for the military-industrial complex that by building bases, harmful imaginaries are also being built. These have detrimental consequences for all human life that surrounds these bases. Further research should be done on how to reduce the slow violence induced by bases, and this article fits well within the discussion on the overall necessity of military bases.

The infamous smoke plume at Balad Air Base

A road outside Camp Gaines-Mills

and even walking takes effort. Worse, it gets mighty cold, with a pretty nasty wind that does its best to sap the warmth right out of your bones. In short, it is a miserable country year round."

The last sentence is precisely the sort of destructive and naive narrative constructed from an institution that isolates its members. Toxic from the smoke, and miserable from the mud, these imaginaries turn the Middle East into a sacrificial land, barren and inhospitable, with no reference to the slow violence that made them this way, reinforcing the agentless injustice.

Conclusion By examining the mindset of U.S. military servicemen stationed at bases in the Middle East, we can conclude that US military bases successfully ‘other’ the land they occupy, and the people who inhabit this land. Through direct physical, environmental, and mental harm, the landscape of the Middle East is so othered that the land and the people, both physically through disfigurement and mentally through disconnection, cannot return to the homeland that once flou14

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Accessed April 27, 2018. http://www.flopit.net/blog/index.php?blogid=1&archive=2009-2-9.

Vine, David, and Simon Winchester. Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World. New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2017.

"Where U.S. Troops Are Based in the Middle East." Digital image. Forbes. Accessed April 27, 2018. https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/smart/https://blogs-images.forbes.com/niallmccarthy/files/2017/06/20170607_Bases_Middle_East. jpg.

Amelia Hutchley

WHAT CAN ITALY LEARN FROM CYPUS & GREECE?

IMAGE COURTESY OF FLICKR. COM/PHOTOS/37815348@ N00/34914757352

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The 2008 financial crisis sparked a period of economic uncertainty that resulted in near-bankruptcies and dramatic increases in national debts. The European Union, particularly the euro zone within it, was the site of many of these crises, with good reason: a common currency between many separate nations means that each nation's economic health is linked. This renders these nations, such as the ones that make up the euro zone, vulnerable to recessions or financial crashes both domestic and international; the euro zone demonstrates this weakness via its multiple financial crises over the past ten years. Many members of the euro zone, such as Portugal and Ireland, have faced rising debts since 2008, but perhaps the most famous case is Greece: its debts and subsequent inability to borrow money came on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, leading the country almost to bankruptcy within a year. In 2009, Greece's debt was at 126.7% of GDP, rising to 146.2% of GDP in 2010. Meanwhile, nearby countries that had purchased Greek government bonds, such as Cyprus, lost money, sometimes enough to cause another crisis. Greece's ratios of debt to GDP in 2009 and 2010, while dramatic, are not unique and are in fact common enough that patterns emerge.

While Greece has taken steps to pay back debts and restore trust in government finances, its financial situation of 2009 is reflected now in its neighbor, Italy. Like Greece, Italy's debt, over 130% of GDP in 2018, has soared past the maximum set by the EU of 60%. Bond yields have risen substantially, indicating that investors are concerned about Italy's ability to repay loans. Italy's new government has also come into conflict with the EU over its proposed national budget, which includes even more government spending and borrowing; this budget would increase the national debt even further, worsening the issue. Additionally, both Greece and Italy have or had substantial amounts of government bonds held by foreign banks.

Greece sold billions of euros' worth of bonds to Cypriot banks, and Italy owes large sums of money to foreign European banks. Any substantial decline in investors' confidence in Italy, therefore, will drastically affect the stability of those banks and their customers. The same applied to Greece. This paper will compare Italy's looming financial crisis with previous ones faced by the euro zone and propose how the Italian government can best address their debt.

The use of the euro substantially shapes how each of these countries can respond to financial crises.

Investors who lose confidence in the government of one country will sell their bonds, driving interest rates up and creating even more uncertainty about whether the government will be able to pay. The declining bond prices hurt banks, which, combined with increasing economic uncertainty, can worsen recessions.

Countries in the euro zone do not have much control over the money supply due to a shared currency, but they can make deals to receive large bailouts, as seen in the billions of euros Greece received from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission. Additionally, because so much of the debt of countries like Greece and Italy is held by other members of the EU, the EU itself has a vested interest in ensuring that none of its members collapse or go bankrupt. A financial crisis in one country can spread to many others, as seen with Greece and Cyprus, potentially leading to international financial instability.

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that Italy's problems can be solved by copying Cyprus or Greece. Italy's economy is substantially larger, as is its debt: while "[g]overnment-to-government loans were enough to bail out smaller countries such as Greece," Italy's trillions of euros of debt would have to be guaranteed by the European Central Bank. While this exacerbates the urgency of the issue, as more money is at stake, the increased scale does not impact the basic ideas of how Italy can deal with their debt. However, their possible strategies are complicated by political turmoil. In late May of 2018, the two political parties that were recently elected, Lega and the Five The flag of the European Union. Courtesy of Wiktor Star Movement (M5S), failed to establish a new government, Dabkowski, Creative Commons which caused a sharp depreciation in the euro and a rise in the perceived risk of Italian bonds. As part of Italy's financial trouble comes from its political instability, any financial solutions introduced by Italy will have limited success.

The government needs stability to reinvigorate investors' confidence in their ability to pay back loans. That 16

being said, political stability in and of itself cannot solve their debt crisis, and Italy can take its lead financially from other countries such as Cyprus and Greece that have recently gone through similar situations.

Italy can turn to different examples for how to respond to its growing debt. Greece raised enough money to begin repaying loans from the IMF early.

The actions they took to solve their debt problem resulted in reduced debt and even a budget surplus beginning in 2016. However, Italy could also look toward Cyprus's example. While Cyprus also needed sizable loans from the IMF, EU nations, and even Russia, it exited its bailout program early and fully paid off its loans in September of 2019. Italy's plan for addressing its national debt should take into account the factors that made both Greece and Cyprus successful in reducing debt, as well as the differences that allowed Cyprus to pay off its loans quickly and forced Greece's economy into a dramatic decline. While doing so, Italy should take steps to ensure that their current taxation system and government spending are efficient; otherwise, they cannot achieve maximum benefit from the money they raise. The sooner Italy creates and implements such a plan, the longer their time horizon will be to implement it. The EU and IMF can be expected to set a deadline for paying back a certain percentage of the debt if Italy accepts bailout funds from them. In line with that expectation, the more debt that Italy can pay back before its situation is drastic enough that it must accept loans from the EU and IMF to recover, the more freedom it has to set smaller, gradual goals that will not risk shocking the economy.

Addressing Italy's debt before it becomes a crisis with international implications is a necessary step, although perhaps unlikely as of right now. The previous party in control of the government adhered to the austerity measures set by the EU, making it and its leader grossly unpopular with its citizens; the current two parties were elected based on campaign promises of increased spending. Nevertheless, in order for Italy to steer clear of bankruptcy, its government must immediately acknowledge the debt problem and begin to take steps to pay it back, protecting the stability of its economy as much as possible.

Cyprus' addressing of its national debt is relevant to Italy's current situation because of both the speed with which Cyprus paid back its loans and the way in which it did so. Its main success lies in how it raised sufficient funds without levying taxes on smaller bank deposits, which protected both its citizens' bank accounts and the stability of its economy. The crisis in Cyprus proves that financial issues in one country in

the euro zone can easily affect other countries. When Cypriot banks bought large quantities of bonds from the Greek government, they unwittingly made themselves vulnerable to the Greek financial crisis and later lost billions of euros. Between 2009 and 2011, their debt climbed from 54.3% to 65.9% of GDP and continued to rise, hitting its highest point at 109.2% in 2014. Once Greece crashed, Cyprus's own rising deficit made it unable to sell bonds as well. Its government secured loans from the IMF and other European countries by agreeing to make substantial changes: for instance, they restructured banks, even closing down the second-largest bank in Cyprus, levied taxes on deposits of over â‚Ź100,000, and adopted austerity measures. Originally, Cyprus had planned to levy taxes on all deposits, but fierce popular protest and fears of a bank run led them to protect deposits of under â‚Ź100,000 and establish capital controls. The key component of the Cypriot government's plan remained, however: taxes. Austerity measures can focus on raising funds from either increased taxes or decreased government spending; because changes in government expenditures have a stronger effect on the economy, raising taxes allows governments to raise the same amount of money with less risk of worsening their recession.

Cyprus's focus on taxing bank deposits meant that its economy could avoid the losses associated with large cuts in government spending. While protecting smaller deposits may have reduced the amount of money the Cypriot government could raise to pay back loans, it did not significantly harm their recovery. Cyprus exited their bailout program early, and this year, it financed the repayment of a large loan from Russia through the sale of long-term government bonds and a budget surplus. The finance minister, Harris Georgiades, stated that "Cyprus can now comfortably finance its needs from the international markets." Cyprus's successful issuing of new bonds, an indication that investors trust the government's ability to pay back loans, proves that it has overcome the worst of its debt crisis and can largely return to normalcy.

So what can Italy learn from Cyprus? At first glance, not much. While the drastic restructuring of the Cypriot banking system was a requirement for Cyprus to receive bailout funds, doing so in Italy's larger economy might send shockwaves through other countries from which large deposits have been made to Italian banks. Whether the benefits are worth the risks is impossible to know for certain; certainly, other countries might prefer Italy fund their loan repayments through austerity measures that place the 17

burden of raising funds solely on Italy. As Italy's economy has striking differences from Cyprus's, notably scale, copying Cyprus's financial restructuring would not have the same effects. However, Cyprus's government proved responsive to its citizens' opinions, dramatically revising the parts of their plan that drew protest.

When building their own loan repayment plan, Italy should consider Cyprus' focus on tax-based austerity measures while still protecting smaller bank deposits . Because Italy is already politically unstable, they cannot afford to adopt wildly unpopular measures, such as the bank levy in Cyprus on deposits under â‚Ź100,000. Implementing austerity measures in Italy will be difficult enough, even without directly taxing citizens' bank accounts, because the governing parties both promised during campaigns that they would increase government spending. The potential civil upheaval as a result of policies drawing money from personal bank accounts would further reduce confidence in the Italian government and Italian banking, worsening their situation even more. However, austerity measures in their most basic form, the idea of increasing revenue and decreasing expenditure, are necessary to reverse a pattern of accumulating debt and begin paying that debt back before interest accrues to an unmanageable amount; thus, the government must find a way to implement them.

If Italy focuses on raising taxes on large bank deposits, and increasing taxes in general as opposed to cutting spending, they can raise money without overtly breaking campaign promises; successfully reducing debt while maintaining or increasing spending on public services would also assist in retaining popular Italian support for their government.

Greece is an example of another approach to reducing debt, with considerably different results.

While Greece has also raised enough money to begin paying back loans, its economy has suffered; the plans it made involved dramatic cuts to public spending in ways that would ultimately cause a substantial contraction in the national economy. Greece needed to be stabilized for the sake of other countries, such as Cyprus, and to maintain faith in the euro as a sustainable form of currency. Like Cyprus, Greece also had to implement austerity measures to receive bailout funds from the IMF and the EU; for example, they reduced pensions, raised the retirement age, cut pay for public sector workers, and raised taxes. However, 18

Cyprus, Aiya Napa; image from Wikimedia Commons

unlike Cyprus, Greece's austerity measures hurt its economy in the long run, meaning that its recovery will take significantly longer. As we know, expenditure-based austerity measures are less effective than tax-based measures and can even harm economies through reduction of output, meaning that the results of Greece's drastic austerity measures come as little surprise.

Reducing the income of a large amount of the population exponentially reduces the amount that an economy can grow, because those people will have less money to circulate back into the economy; Greece was no exception to this principle. The cuts that the Greek government made to government spending included large cuts to sources of income for many Italian citizens, compounding the risks of their expenditures-based approach to austerity.

While Greece has had a rising budget surplus since 2016, and it began issuing bonds in 2017, indicating that it too is past the worst of its crisis, the process of reducing its debt has severely impacted its economy. Unemployment is strikingly high, at over twenty percent, and almost fifty percent among younger workers; government spending decreased by over thirty percent and the economy itself "has contracted by more than 25% since the peak of the pre-crisis boom". Losing output, as Greece did, makes government debt an even higher percentage of a newly lowered GDP; such a situation means that the government has imposed or worsened a recession to pay back debts that become harder and harder to pay. Greece has made drastic, often unpopular changes (such as those that reduced both pay and employment for public sector employees) to keep their economy afloat, making their victory hard-won. However, where Cyprus acceded to

popular protest, such as that which took place against the potential Cypriot bank levy, Greece stood firm.

The alternative measures that Cyprus took, which involved shutting down one of their largest banks, may have seemed too drastic and destabilizing to Greek authorities; nevertheless, the fact remains that Cyprus exited their bailout program and paid off their loans much earlier. Economic losses aside, Greece's approach did succeed in its most important goal: reducing the critically high levels of debt that the country had accumulated. They even managed to do so without leaving the euro as a form of currency altogether. In that regard, their example also provides key takeaways for Italy.

First of all, Greece's debt built up over a long period of time, just as Italy's has; officials cannot claim ignorance about the dire state of Italian finances. Part of the severity of Greece's austerity measures came from their necessary ambition. They needed to cut government spending by thirty billion euros within three years, and to achieve that goal, they targeted anything they could, including everything from reducing pensions to cracking down on tax evasion. Because both Lega and M5S promised to make earlier retirement possible when campaigning, imitating Greece's approach of raising the retirement age would substantially hurt popular support of the government. To avoid cutting government spending so drastically, especially in areas that hurt citizens such as pensioners and public sector workers, Italy should implement austerity measures immediately, before a bailout deal with the EU forces them to impose a strict deadline. They can address debt more incrementally than Greece did and therefore have the luxury of avoiding cutting spending in areas that their citizens depend on as a source of income; this mitigates the risk of recession as a result. Additionally, protecting the incomes of their citizens will in turn protect the Italian government from the protests that Greece endured and prevent the kind of economic overhaul that hurt Greece's growth. The central reason that Greece's austerity measures led them into a deeper recession is that Greece took a government expenditures-based approach to raising funds; by minimizing cuts to government spending in their plan for austerity measures, Italy can then in turn minimize its risk of a similar result.

An Italian recession would signal a potential increase in economic problems throughout the rest of the EU and even the rest of the world. Each country in the euro zone has an impact on not only its own economy, but that of every other country that uses the euro. In 2018, the euro zone comprised over sixteen percent of global GDP; thus, the economic health of the euro zone, the financial rating of its governments, and the security of its banks also have a significant impact on the health of the global economy. Just as Greece's national debt caused a corresponding crisis in Cyprus, Italy's debt represents not only a threat to the economic stability of a subsection of European countries, but a threat to the stability of international economies.

The possibility of a snowball effect with global implications makes Italy's quick and non-disruptive recovery from this debt a necessary priority.

By using the examples of Cyprus and Greece, Italy can make informed decisions about how best to approach its financial situation while mitigating the risk of recession. The EU frequently requires austerity measures before providing bailout money, and the only way to reduce debt is to have it erased or to pay it back; given these two conditions, reducing government spending and increasing taxes seem inevitable, even if the government focuses on one or the other. Adding to the burden, Italy's debt has more in common with Greece's than Cyprus's in terms of scale. Protecting smaller bank customers as Cyprus did is less feasible because Italy simply needs to raise more money, so the Italian government may have to cut spending and raise taxes in many more areas than Cyprus did to pay back its debts. The size of Italy's national debt will prohibit its government from adopting certain strategies and may force it to create a budget more in line with Greece's approach than Cyprus's.

That being said, Italy can still apply lessons learned from Cyprus along with the ones it can take from Greece: Cyprus's tax-based austerity measures proved more successful than Greece's expenditure-based measures; thus, Italy should implement a plan where the majority of funds are raised from increa-

The Euro, the currency in Italy.

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sing taxes rather than cutting government spending.

Taking steps to protect the customers most vulnerable to substantial financial loss in a recession can help solidify popular support of Italy's government, an especially important measure because of the current Italian political turmoil. The government should focus on taxes that will impact large corporations and the wealthy, such as levying a tax on bank deposits over a certain amount.

The governing party should maintain popular trust in their government as much as possible. They can do so by making a visible effort to preserve their constituents' livelihoods and avoiding cutting government spending, a goal that has positive implications for the Italian economy in general.

Cyprus' approach preserved the long-term health of the economy by targeting wealth held in savings for fundraising, rather than wealth being re-circulated into the economy such as pensions and the wages of public-sector employees. Italy can and should follow their example of where to draw funds from to ensure that their economy is still able to grow.

Time is a crucial factor in determining the success of this strategy. By taking a proactive approach to the issue, Italy can begin reducing its debt before conditional bailout funds from the EU impose a deadline; the government can then take a more incremental, less invasive route to financial stability than Greece did.

Italy's debt is on a scale larger than Cyprus's and Greece's, which raises legitimate concerns about whether the government will be able to successfully reduce debt enough to avoid a crash or bankruptcy.

Italy's current system of taxation and government expenditures may also be contributing to the rising debt through inefficiencies and wasteful spending.

However, by drawing on these six conclusions, Italy can begin to address its debt with a plan that minimizes risk to the health and stability of its government and economy. In turn, a return to financial stability in Italy will maintain faith in the viability of the euro as a common currency and reduce pressure on other EU countries to contribute money for bailout funds, as well as protecting against crashes like Cyprus' in other countries. Given these results, the rest of the euro zone has a financial stake in the health of the Italian economy and may attempt to push Italy to adopt austerity measures and other plans to reduce debt. Italy's populist government may need some kind of international pressure to 20

actually take action; further research could look at the political and economic incentives that the rest of the EU might offer to force Italy to address its debt.

Overall, while it might not be in the current government's interest to acknowledge problems resulting from high expenditures, failing to do so will result in economic instability and renewed fears of crashes in every country financially tied to Italy.

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Jacinta Chen

“REVOLUTIONARY” BALLETS IN THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY’S DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN POLICY TOOLKITS: EXPLORING THE POLITICS OF THE RED DETACHMENT OF WOMEN AND THE WHITEHAIRED GIRL

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As communist China entered the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and other members of the Gang of Four, a dominant faction of officials in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), called for all forms of art to be “revolutionized.”

These central leaders in the CCP dismantled traditional forms of Chinese folk dance and opera, spearheading the Central Opera Ballet Troupe’s production of The Red Detachment of Women (1964) as well as the Shanghai Ballet Company’s production of The White Haired Girl (1965)—two highly emblematic and spectacular propagandistic ballets. Since both ballets were part of Jiang Qing’s repertoire of eight model operas, it is no surprise that productions of them dominated domestic and foreign theatres throughout the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). In addition to impressing U.S. President Richard Nixon during his first visit to China, state-sponsored performances of The Red Detachment of Women have recently received acclaim from audiences in prominent Western opera houses. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping recently staged The White-Haired Girl to mark the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China. In a nutshell, this paper seeks to explore how the CCP has leveraged “revolutionary” ballet as a political tool during the Mao and post-Mao eras. More specifically, this paper will argue that the Gang of Four utilized choreographic elements—techniques from Russian ballet, Chinese martial arts, and Chinese folk dance— as well as extrachoreographic elements—costumes, sets, props, and music—to convey its social, political, and economic attitudes through both productions.

Additionally, this paper attempts to explain why the CCP has more recently deployed a tour of The White-Haired Girl within China as a domestic policy tool, on the one hand, and a tour of The Red Detachment of Women around the world as an indirect domestic policy tool and direct foreign policy tool, on the other.

With a strong Sino-Soviet alliance in the 1950s, the spectacle of Russian ballet garnered immense excitement in China. Many Chinese strove to learn ballet from their Russian partners, and soon, enough interest mounted that China established its first ballet company in 1959. While the Chinese initially performed typical Russian ballet dances, Chinese choreographers chose to intermingle elements of Chinese folk dance with classical ballet in their first original production, The Magic Lotus Lantern (1957). By mixing in movements, costumes, set designs, music, and props from other Chinese traditions, the CCP stylized “revolutionary modern ballets” like The Red Detachment of Women and The White Haired Girl. These ballets 22

allowed the CCP to transform the landscape of performing arts, instill a strong sense of national pride among Chinese people, and conduct cultural exchanges during the Cold War. Although the CCP’s sponsorship of ballet—as a dance form that originated in Italy—may seem to contradict its rejection of the West, many Chinese saw ballet as a “universally significant artistic form whose cultural value transcended particular ethnic, racial or class associations.” Agreeing with this perception that ballet was not merely a Western form of artistic movement, the Gang of Four felt justified in adopting ballet as an official dance form. Since ballet could transcend particular ethnic, racial or class associations, the CCP was comfortable utilizing ballet, rather than traditional Chinese dance, as a social, political, and economic propaganda tool during the Cultural Revolution.

Beyond simply producing another Russian-style ballet, the CCP prided itself on creating a “revolutionized” dance form in The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl. One contemporaneous review of The Red Detachment of Women from the choreographer Huang Boshou implies that the production was not considered “copying of Western forms… but rather as an intervention that fundamentally revolutionized the Western form itself.” The Gang of Four saw itself as a proponent of a new form of dance— independent of Italian, French, British, American, and Russian ballet. From the CCP’s perspective, “an intervention” required the removal of “bourgeois,” “feudal,” and “Western” elements. In both ballets, the performers maintained technical elements from ballet by dancing with pointe technique and using ballet postures and lines. However, the CCP claimed this dance as its own by incorporating choreographic elements from Chinese martial arts and folk dance as well as unique Chinese extrachoregraphic elements, which include costumes, sets, props, and music. Ultimately, the CCP used these two types of elements to communicate its social, political, and economic ideals to its audiences.

In light of the feminist, communist, and socialist nature of these ballet’s storylines, Western scholarship has cast these ballets as Mao-era propaganda. Their powerful messages have kept “revolutionary” ballet at the forefront of Western scholarship. Though the dance form of ballet has been tied to the state since its inception, my paper is the first to fully analyze how the CCP’s social, political, and economic beliefs were bolstered by striking choreographic and extrachoreographic elements in The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl.

The Red Detachment of Women Based on events that occurred on Hainan Island during China’s Second Civil War (1927-37), The Red Detachment of Women tells the story of Wu Qionghua, a female peasant-turned-soldier who fights for feminism, communism, and socialism. Wu barely escapes from bondage of Nan Batian, a wealthy landlord. After meeting Hong Changqing, a Red Army commissar, Wu joins an all-female detachment that battles against the aristocracy and the Kuomintang (KMT) Party. Wu’s detachment plans to attack her former landlord, though she tries to kill Nan on her own. Her attempt is unsuccessful, allowing Nan to eventually gather his own troops to challenge the detachment.

The two sides battle, and eventually, the detachment prevails. However, Wu’s commissar, Hong, is killed during this exchange and Wu becomes the detachment’s new leader.

In The Red Detachment of Women, the CCP highlighted gender equality as a sign of social strength by blending choreographic techniques. Although women had long been subservient to men under Confucianism, the CCP encouraged female participation outside of the household. Wu Qionghua, the female protagonist, performs moves from ballet and Chinese martial arts. Sometimes, her arms gracefully glide through the air and her hands serve as an extension of her arms in typical ballet fashion. In certain scenes, her arms gracefully glide through the air with hands serving as an extension of her arms in typical ballet fashion. However, in scenes with the landlord or her fellow soldiers, Wu draws from Chinese martial arts, swinging her arms with clenched fists. This amalgamated choreography allows the audience to appreciate the spectacle of ballet, while underlining the “fiercely determined” nature of women. Additionally, the highly “athletic” choreography performed by both the male and female dancers indicates the practical contribution of women at this time. Arranged in lines with their male counterparts, the female soldiers even stand out for perfecting “masculine” moves. The female dancers’ masterful performance of athletic choreography suggests that women made more practical contributions to society.

Beyond choreographic elements, the CCP used extrachoreographic tools to indicate its support for gender equality. The female dancers often wielded traditionally masculine props, such as swords, hand grenades, and rifles, demonstrating the “readiness” of women to fight alongside male soldiers. For the purpose of reducing the physical differences between men and women, the female soldiers have short hair and don standard gray uniforms—rather than traditional Chinese dresses. However, Mullis notes that “the women wear color-coordinated tailored shorts, puttees, and pointe shoes… and show more of the body than costumes worn by male characters.” Although this costume difference between genders may seem to conflict with the CCP’s feminist perspective, the female dancers likely need costumes that allow them to showcase their advanced ballet technique. Thus, both choreographic and extrachoreographic elements helped the CCP promote gender equality.

In addition to illustrating the social strength of gender equality during the Mao era, the CCP employed choreographic techniques to cultivate Chinese pride in its military and political system in The Red Detachment of Women.

The athleticism of the male and female dancers, who often struck poses that accentuated their musculature, helped communicate that the Party had immense military power. Since the Gang of Four had “revolutionized” ballet, Wilcox recognizes many of the dancers’ moves as “xiqu-style tumbling elements and acrobatic highlights borrowed from Chinese dance.” The inclusion of these distinctive athletic Chinese choreographic elements supported the idea that the Party was strong. The dancers also struck poses that accentuated their musculature, demonstrating that the Party’s immense military power. As the CCP mobilized and trained many dancers to perform at a high level, this production showed that its political system and military were very sophisticated.

The CCP further demonstrated its political strength by playing with extrachoreographic details. Mirroring Chinese propaganda posters of strong and orderly youth, the stage was filled by young soldiers “wear[ing] clean uniforms with crisp hairdos.” Each dancer carried out a specific duty to serve the Party, ranging from teaching other soldiers how to use rifles to sewing uniforms. Additionally, the CCP employs the flag of the Red Army, the production’s largest and most central prop, to illustrate the Party’s political importance. The dancers are Chinese dancers in 2007; image from Wikimedia Commons 23

constantly oriented toward the flag, marching and dancing around it in unison with perfect posture. Wu Qionghua physically embraces the flag and dances en pointe around it, demonstrating her allegiance to the Party and desire to focus her energy on the political revolution. Since many of the soldiers perform acrobatic moves around the flag, the audience often associated the political prowess and spectacle of the production with the CCP. Ultimately, the CCP manipulated both choreographic and extrachoreographic tools to garner support for communism.

While the CCP conveyed the social and political strength of Chinese society using both choreographic and extrachoreographic elements, it utilized distinctive choreographic techniques to showcase the economic viability of socialism. In order to emphasize its egalitarian ideals, the dancers performed the same moves in unison. Additionally, certain segments of The Red Detachment of Women included “agrarian Yangge folk dances originally used for communal celebrations of spring harvests.” By incorporating stylized Chinese folk dance into the ballet, the CCP not only highlighted the peasantry’s contributions to Chinese society but also sought to impart national pride in Chinese traditions that it did not consider “feudal.”

To supplement this attitude of the peasantry’s importance, the CCP utilized extrachoreographic elements in The Red Detachment of Women. Many of the dancers wear simple peasant clothing. Wilcox observes that certain scenes showcase “women and men in peasant clothing dancing to folk melodies.”

(151). Moving to lively Chinese folk music, dancers wave red handkerchiefs and lift baskets full of food from the spring harvests. The CCP connected props that are normally associated with peasants to happy music, suggesting that its rule allowed common peasants to flourish. Members of the dance ensemble hold hands and dance around other baskets of food, demonstrating that peasants happily benefited from plentiful harvests under socialism. how socialism provided commoners with access to plentiful harvests. As Alexandra Kolb suggests, these extrachoreographic elements “conveyed idealist visions of peace and plenty under Communism.” Choreographic techniques coupled with extrachoreographic elements implied the benefits of socialism; the peasant class was strong and stable—with enough food to live joyously, overthrow the landlords, and fight the KMT Party.

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The White-Haired Girl Based on the highly illustrious Yangge-style opera (1945), The White-Haired Girl follows the story of Yang Xier, a young girl who is claimed by her landlord because her family cannot pay the debt that they owe.

Her fiancé Wang Dachun is distraught and joins the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to fight against the landowning class as well as the Japanese soldiers who had invaded China. While Yang manages to escape the landlord, she lives in an isolated mountain cave.

Her hair turns white since she is malnourished, surviving on wild fruits and small animals for many years.

At the end, Wang helps bring the villainous landlord to justice and reunites with Yang, who elects to join the PLA. Thus, the CCP has spectacularized this tale in order to convey its social, political, and economic attitudes.

The CCP has emphasized gender equality as a social strength through a mix of choreographic techniques from ballet and Chinese folk dance in The White-Haired Girl. Yang, the female protagonist, artfully combines elements from ballet and Chinese dance, gracefully dancing en pointe to the slower music and swinging tight fists through the air once the music crescendos. This blended choreography suggests the CCP’s push to erase traditional gender roles, which had confined women to the household and charged men with the responsibility to fight. Her moves largely draw from ballet, yet they are “determined, sustained, and forceful,” indicating the CCP’s desire to glorify women as heroes and mobilize women to rally behind its cause. Once Yang liberates herself from bondage by the landlord, she interrupts her elegant pointe technique with acrobatic cartwheels and handstands. By drawing attention to Yang’s performance of traditionally “masculine” moves, the CCP has shown that women have the same athleticism and thus the same capacity to contribute to society as men.

Beyond these choreographic techniques, the CCP has utilized extrachoregraphic elements to demonstrate its support for gender equality. Whenever landowners abuse Yang, cymbals and drums disrupt the mostly harmonious music whenever landowners abuse Yang. The CCP has problematized the oppression of women under feudal Chinese society by playing jarring music during moments in which Yang is hurt or mistreated. To dramatize the suffering that Chinese women endured, the CCP “create[d] a cold and dark atmosphere” with dim lighting.

As Yang gradually ages, her dark braid unravels into free-flowing white strands. According to the historian Wang Kefen, this transformation in Yang’s physical appearance criticizes traditional Chinese society that “turns a person into a ghost.” At the same time, the fact that Yang triumphantly emerges from the cave and joins Wang as a member of the PLA has signaled the CCP’s belief that women have the power to overcome damage—both physical and psychological— from their feudal oppressors.

In addition to highlighting gender equality, the CCP has combined choreographic techniques from ballet and Chinese folk dance to illustrate the strength of its military and the communist regime. A group of male dancers dressed as peasants jump across the stage with “their backs beautifully arched backward,” showcasing their highly advanced and technical ballet training. The dancers kick their legs in unison to demonstrate the control that the CCP has over its people and its ability to mobilize many people to work toward one goal. Their arm movements are angular and precise, suggesting the intensity and sophistication of the Chinese military. These male dancers are soon joined by some female dancers who hold their fists in the air as they perform the “‘square step’ from the Rice Seedling Dance.” By amalgamating moves from Yangge folk dance and ballet, the CCP has connected China’s large peasant class to the military and sought to lend a sense of legitimacy to the military. In the pas de deux, Wang masterfully lifts Yang in the air to demonstrate that Wang, as a soldier of the PLA and the CCP, has the strength to save Yang from the injustice of feudal society. Thus, the CCP has adopted advanced ballet techniques as well as militant elements from Chinese dance to indicate the sophistication of both China’s political system and military.

In order to underscore its political strength, the CCP has employed distinctive extrachoregraphic elements.

Many props are red, which is both culturally and politically significant. Once a peasant covers Yang’s white hair with the scarf, “the cave is lit a bold red” and the music crescendos. Since red can represent “good luck, happiness, and prosperity” in Chinese culture, as well as communism, the CCP introduced this red scarf as a prop and lighting to draw attention to its power to renew oppressed Chinese people with strength. Moreover, Wang, as a member of the PLA, wields a broadsword, which he swipes through the air, and a pistol, which he happily directs at the sky. Wang’s possession of both weapons implies the PLA has a diverse arsenal, while his artful usage of the props

showcases how well-trained the military has always been. Therefore, the CCP has utilized these particular props and music in order to convey its political fortitude.

Building on this message of political strength, the CCP has highlighted the stability and equality guaranteed through socialism by blending choreographic elements from ballet and Chinese yangge-style folk dance. The CCP has mixed in various yangge dances such as the Rice Seedling Dance and the Ribbon Dance, which are emblematic “of revolutionary ideals that promoted egalitarianism and placed peasants at the center of a new vision of Chinese modernity.”

These yangge dances have been polished with ballet posture, pointe technique, and “codified ballet steps” in order to demonstrate the CCP’s power to elevate the peasantry through socialism. Equally noteworthy is the CCP’s decision to reduce the gendered nature of the original opera. While the performance of athletic and masculine moves by female dancers has signaled feminism, it has also reduced the centrality of gender to this story, allowing class struggle—the CCP’s ultimate priority—to come to the forefront of The White-Haired Girl. Thus, the CCP has employed choreographic elements in order to focus the audience’s attention on how socialism and the erasure of class boundaries has resulted in economic flourishing.

The CCP has incorporated extrachoreographic elements to indicate the economic value of socialism through extrachoreographic elements. Wilkinson notes that the “somewhat stylized peasant and soldier garb (rather than traditional ballet costume)” contributed to the ballet’s success. These bright and colorful costumes would have underscored the military and peasantry’s access to resources—demonstrating the material benefits of socialism. While the music is mostly solemn, it “becomes faster and more dynamic” once the peasants are liberated from their landlords.

This music generates feelings of joy, so the CCP has hoped that the audience would associate those positive thoughts with the CCP’s efforts to improve peasants’ lives through socialism. The dancers seem particularly enthusiastic as they swirl around with “fruit baskets on their shoulders,” implying the CCP could guarantee an abundance of food. Furthermore, the colorful ribbons and oval-shaped drums add to the authenticity of the ballet. By filling the air with a flurry of colors in zigzags, circles, and other shapes, the CCP has spectacularized the ribbon dance, impressing the audience with its ability to instill happiness and distribute wealth to the peasants. Therefore, the CCP has

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used these extrachoreographic elements to showcase the economic assistance afforded to peasants under socialism.

A Tool for Domestic Policy Since both The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl have spectacularized the notions of feminism, communism, and socialism, it is easy to imagine how these ballets furthered the CCP’s domestic agenda during the Mao era. In the two ballet productions, the CCP utilized amalgamated choreographic techniques as well as specific extrachoreographic elements to communicate to the audience that it supported gender equality, produced a strong political system that was backed by a robust military, and it raised living standards for the peasantry through socialism. Domestic audiences would have left performances of The Red Detachment of Women particularly inspired by the strength of women and the prowess of the military under communism as showcased in the female rifle dances. In The White-Haired Girl, the embrace of yangge dance elements would have moved domestic audiences, while the performance of athletic ballet moves would have made Chinese people proud of their military. During the Mao era, both “revolutionary” ballets would have instilled within the Chinese people a strong feeling of pride in the CCP as well as the conviction that the Party was responsible for transforming China into a strong, powerful, and modern nation.

In the post-Mao era, the CCP has sought to advance its domestic policy agenda by sponsoring performances of The White-Haired Girl in China and performances of The Red Detachment of Women abroad. The spectacular nature of the choreographic and extrachoreographic elements transform these ballets into enjoyable shows that foster mass support for the CCP. Due to “their nostalgic value,” Alexander Huang suggests these ballets continue to serve as tools for domestic policy. Di Bai agrees, citing that “nationwide nostalgia” has enabled newer productions of The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl to become “instant commercial successes, and their political messages, previously thought to be outdated, have seemed to regain vigor.” Regarded as “national treasures,” these productions are embraced in remixed forms on television, in karaoke bars, and on the top charts of mainstream music. The overarching social, political, and economic attitudes embe-

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Chinese stunt acrobatics ballet.

dded within the ballets remain relevant, as the CCP continues to value women’s contributions to Chinese society, promote the communist political system as well as its military, and maintain a socialist market economy.

However, The White-Haired Girl has more directly and obviously been utilized as a tool for the CCP’s domestic agenda than The Red Detachment of Women. With an eye to President Xi Jinping’s speech in 2014 about cleansing and utilizing art, the Ministry of Culture marked the seventieth anniversary of The White-Haired Girl with a national tour. In June 2019, President Xi Jinping staged the ballet for the seventieth founding anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. The White-Haired Girl could easily cultivate feelings of national pride in Chinese folk traditions among domestic audiences due to its roots in yangge opera—without invoking the same feelings of trauma as The Red Detachment of Women, which was born out of the Cultural Revolution. A recent study notes that The Red Detachment of Women’s clear “association with the Cultural Revolution” is the primary reason why “it is rarely performed in China now.”

However, the study also suggests “the export of Red Detachment and media stories of its acclaim may be seen as a strategy to reinforce China’s seeming international cultural excellence amongst its own people.”

Therefore, the CCP has likely employed the performances of The Red Detachment of Women around the world as an indirect means of garnering domestic support for its political agenda.

A Tool for Foreign Policy Although the CCP utilized both ballets as vehicles to advance its agenda for domestic affairs during the Mao era, The Red Detachment of Women received far greater international recognition. This success was exemplified by the fact that The Red Detachment of Women was performed for more people across

Europe, the United States, and Asia than The White-Haired Girl. While the Shanghai Ballet Troupe performed The White-Haired Girl in North Korea in 1972 and in Canada in 1977, the Central Ballet of China toured with The Red Detachment of Women to Yugoslavia, West Germany, Austria, the United States, Albania, and Romania during the Mao era. This clear difference in the international community’s exposure to these two ballets can likely be attributed to the CCP’s desired foreign policy agenda.

In the context of Cold War geopolitics and the CCP’s split from the Soviet Union in particular, The Red Detachment of Women played a larger role than The White-Haired Girl in furthering its political agenda for external affairs during the Mao era. The CCP’s leadership perceived ballet as a key vehicle to “assert its cultural legitimacy.” Since The Red Detachment of Women premiered just a week prior to China’s first successful atomic test, the central role of weapons as props was likely inspired by the Chinese government’s push to project itself on the world stage as a nuclear power. The highly militaristic storyline as well as the mixture of masculine and athletic choreography were likely closely linked to these efforts. In February 1972, the CCP included a performance of The Red Detachment of Women in the itinerary for U.S. President Richard Nixon’s first visit to China. Given that the CCP had eight different “revolutionary” works in its repertoire, the CCP’s decision to treat Nixon to The Red Detachment of Women signals that it saw this particular ballet as key to humanizing communist China, painting China as a modern nation, and reigniting diplomatic relations with the United States. Although The White-Haired Girl was well-received domestically for its undeniable celebration of socialism and the peasantry, its political attitudes were neither as salient nor as spectacularly portrayed as those in The Red Detachment of Women.

The Red Detachment of Women has remained a valuable political tool for foreign affairs in the post-Mao era, though the CCP has not utilized The White-Haired Girl in the same way. The political, economic, and social attitudes in The White-Haired Girl do not quite as effectively convey the CCP’s desired message to foreigners as The Red Detachment of Women in the post-Mao era. To promote its masterful traditions, values, language, and culture on the world stage, the CCP has sponsored revivals of The Red Detachment of Women in major opera houses in Paris, New York, Washington D.C., and Melbourne. Remembering that The Red Detachment of Women was once performed for President Nixon, foreigners tout the spectacular nature of the ballet, calling it “amazing,” “bright,” “iconic,” “bold,” “stylish,” “flashy,” and “epic.” The Sydney Morning Herald praised “its cast of gravity-defying, rifle-toting, flag-flying, stern-faced ballerinas,” while critics from major Western news outlets were astounded by the advanced technical quality of the choreography. Critics have also expressed appreciation for its modern feminist story, the female dancers’ athletic moves, and their striking use of rifles as props on stage. The primarily glowing reviews for this production indicate the ballet’s success in enhancing China’s image and legitimacy all around the world. By maintaining a highly professional and well-funded national company that performs such an apparently awe-inspiring production, the CCP has shown that this ballet is one of many tools it can utilize to leverage “soft power.”

By drawing on the history of the initial adoption of ballet in China, this paper highlighted how ballet, a dance form imported from the Soviet Union, became a vehicle for the CCP to communicate its political, social, and economic beliefs. The CCP valued ballet for its “universal” essence and easily adapted it for “revolutionary” purposes. Through the inclusion of special choreographic and extrachoreographic components in The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl, the CCP not only spectacularized the notions of feminism, communism, and socialism on stage but also ignited strong feelings of pride in the Party among Chinese people or awe among foreigners.

With an eye to this paper’s analysis of political, social, and economic attitudes in both ballets, this paper showed how the CCP has incorporated these two marquee “revolutionary” ballets into its arsenal for both domestic and foreign policy. The two ballets were originally designed with propagandistic purposes in mind, so the messages that they communicated were domestically salient during the Cultural Revolution. In order to cultivate strong feelings of pride in the CCP and its accomplishments among Chinese people, the CCP has transformed The White-Haired Girl into a domestic political tool. Although the National Ballet of China has not performed The Red Detachment of Women within China recently, the CCP has indirectly used this ballet to advance its domestic policy goals; the Party has impressed Chinese citizens with the positive international media coverage of state-sponsored productions in the West. Meanwhile, the state-sponsored company performing The Red Detachment of Women has travelled quite extensively, allowing the CCP to leverage “soft power” through ballet since

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the Mao era. Contemporary audiences cannot help but feel special for having the opportunity to view the same “spectacular” ballet that the CCP showed U.S. President Nixon in an attempt to rebuild bilateral relations. One limitation of this study was that I viewed more recent performances of The Red Detachment of Women and The White-Haired Girl and treated them as static productions. Since both ballets have evolved over time, future studies should point out and attempt to understand the changes that have been made since these ballets’ inception in the 1960s.

More broadly, this paper underscored the importance of dance in advancing the CCP’s political agenda with two particular ballets. Given the domestic and foreign political salience of “revolutionary” ballet, it is the task for future scholars to explore how the CCP has utilized other dance forms for political purposes.

The next step in scholarship could involve an analysis of the political implications of the highly “spectacular” opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympics with the same social-political-economic framework that I employed in my paper. As dance scholarship continues to expand, we will have a better understanding of the place of dance in the world of politics.

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BBC News. BBC, July 18, 2012. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-18826565 Cheng, De-Hai. “The Creation and Evolvement of Chinese Ballet: Ethnic and Esthetic Concerns in Establishing a Chinese Style of Ballet in Taiwan and Mainland China (1954-1994).” PhD dissertation, New York University School of Education, 2000.

“Chinese Ballet-The White Haired Girl Excerption Pt1,” YouTube video, 15:18, posted by “zushiXilaiyi mz,” May 16, 2013. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=wrpp8d56OGo “Chinese Ballet-The White Haired Girl Excerption Pt2,” YouTube video, 15:21, posted by “zushiXilaiyi mz,” May 16, 2013. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=0Hh7py_FbbA “Complete Ballet The Red Detachment Of Women HD 720p,” YouTube video, 1:59:01, posted by “Harry_D2012,” December 4, 2018. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=wUs769eqoE0 Cotton, Pia. “Bringing China to New York, Orchestra and All.” The Wall Street Journal. Dow & Jones Company Inc., July 8, 2015. https://www.wsj. com/articles/bringing-china-to-new-york-orchestra-and-all-1436396434 Dance Informa Magazine Australia. “National Ballet of China to perform ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ for Arts Centre Melbourne’s Asia TOPA.” Dance Informa, October, 2016. https://dancemagazine.com.au/2016/10/ national-ballet-of-china-in-arts-centre-melbourne-asia-topa/ Di Bai. “The Cultural Revolution Model Theater.” In The Columbia Companion to Modern Chinese Literature, edited by Kirk Denton, 234-239. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

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but to where?” The Conversation. The Conversation US, Inc., February 16, 2017. https://theconversation.com/the-red-detachment-of-women-marches-forward-but-to-where-73124 Greskovic, Robert. “‘The Peony Pavilion’ and ‘The Red Detachment of Women’ Dance Review.” The Wall Street Journal. Dow & Jones Company Inc., July 14, 2015. https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-peony-pavilion-and-the-red-detachment-of-women-dance-review-1436911393 Huang, Alexander C. Y. “Model Operas and Ballets.” In Encyclopedia of Modern China, vol. 2, edited by David Pong, 618-19. Detroit: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2009.

Jaivin, Linda. “Can we embrace the Asian century?” The Sydney Morning Herald. The Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2019. https:// www.smh.com.au/entertainment/can-we-embrace-the-asian-century-20190206-h1axg4.html Jia, Bo. “Gender, Women’s Liberation, and the Nation-State: A Study of the Chinese Opera The White-Haired Girl.” Master’s thesis, Rutgers University, 2015.

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Kourlas, Gia. “Review: ‘The Red Detachment of Women,’ by the National Ballet of China, Soldiers On.” The New York Times. The New York Times Company, July 13, 2015. https://www.nytimes. com/2015/07/14/arts/dance/review-the-red-detachment-of-women-by-the-national-ballet-of-china-soldiers-on.html Liu Siyuan. “‘The Brightest Sun, The Darkest Shadow’: Ideology and the Study of Chinese Theater in the West During the Cold War.” Theatre Survey 54, no. 1 (2013): 27-50.

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Joseph Waldow

URBAN CLIMATE DIPLOMACY: OPPORTUNITIES & CHALLENGES FOR CITIES TO IMPROVE THE U.S.-CHINA BILATERAL RELATIONSHIP

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Introduction As the U.S.- China relations crumble at the national level through contention of the latter’s Belt and Road initiative, Huawei disagreements, and an ongoing trade war in which each nation continues to respond to one another with retaliatory tariffs in the tens of billions there is an understanding that tensions are high between the two world powers. Yet just as these economic disputes send shocks across the globe, so do the country’s industrial carbon footprints. Today, China and the United States are the world’s largest overall emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2). Looking toward the next several decades, maintained cooperation between China and the United States will be paramount to reaching the necessary greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions to lessen the impacts of climate change.

Both states need not only improve upon and implement their own climate policy actions domestically but do so in a collaborative way that shows the rest of the world that they have followed through on their responsibilities. If they can honor these commitments, other countries will know their own climate policies will be meaningful, and not futile in the face of noncompliance

by China or the U.S. Doing this will require not only a radical structuring of industry, transportation, and energy in each state, but ambitious negotiation and cooperation between the United States and China.

Climate change has been a powerful component of U.S.-China cooperation for decades. Under the Obama Administration, the focus on climate policy drove both countries to engage in collaborative policy exchange, develop technology, and shape global climate agreements. The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement in 2017 has signaled a total retreat from these exchanges at the national level. These challenges to national-level climate action have kickstarted a reorganization of traditional diplomatic approaches toward cooperation among sub-national actors like cities and NGOs. The ineffectiveness of national-level actors in the United States has caused heads to turn toward subnational approaches and provide a new opportunity for an emerging political will.

Despite a new Washington consensus emerging against China, there has been a longstanding history of cities taking positions and making decisions on climate collaboratively with international actors like China. Yet now more than ever, these cultural, educational, and economic exchanges taking place on a city-to-city level between the two powers is emerging as a 30

more robust and flexible form of U.S.-China cooperation. Outside of coordinated international networks are an array of informal and formal partnerships across the public, private, and civic sectors in U.S. cities and their Chinese counterparts. With no fewer than 201 existing city-city-partnerships between the United States and China, there exists enormous potential for building upon existing sister-city infrastructure to bolster subnational climate diplomacy through bilateral agreements and policy idea exchange on mitigation and adaptation efforts.

Globalization has ushered in an era of unprecedented communication, trade, and economic investment in large urban centers, allowing for the pushing of local interests and policy priorities onto the global stage.

Today, cities are responsible for 70% of GHG emissions.

By 2030, there will be 41 megacities with populations of more than 10 million, and urban areas overall will have 70 million more inhabitants. Efforts to ensure cities get a seat at the table in international processes are already well underway. As Michele Acuto has documented, the number of coordinating international networks of cities on climate change and sustainability, such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, has increased by more than a third since 2001. Altogether, the collective efforts of cities and regions have begun to break down the traditional 9hierarchy of diplomacy and shift ability away from the nation-state toward a range of levels and interests to participate on the international stage.

The Trump administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement is just one of a host of examples that point to the traditional structures of international diplomacy being ineffective. Ideological inflexibility, intangibility, and idealism have made the nation-state incapable of the necessary cooperation and compromise needed to address climate change.

Already, U.S. mayors are forming partnerships with cities that extend beyond the mostly ceremonial and ritualistic framework of sister-city partnerships.

In 2013, the state of California partnered with Shenzhen to collaborate on policy practices for developing cap-and-trade programs, mutually growing low-carbon markets, and reducing GHG emissions. Portland, Oregon developed a strategic partnership with its sister-city of Kunming, Yunnan province to create an exchange of technical policy aimed at improving each other’s public transportation infrastructure and growth management boundaries. And Los Angeles has fostered climate leadership partnerships focused on limiting GHG emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 with the cities of Zhenjiang, Beijing, and Shenzhen. Exam-

US-China discussions over trade, 2019; Wikimedia public domain

ples of cross-collaboration on climate policy are not only restricted to large metropolitan cities, but also through various western Chinese counterparts. Boulder, Colorado developed extended its sister-city partnership with Lhasa, Tibet to focus on policies aimed at reducing vehicular emissions. Albuquerque, New Mexico engages in several inter-university research initiatives on clean energy with its sister city of Lanzhou, Gansu.

More informal meetings are showing how local leaders can collaborate on shared learning from peer experience. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto recently met with Vice Premier Liu Yadong and officials from the ministry of science and technology to discuss how Pittsburgh overcame its dependency on steel production to become the technology and healthcare center that it is today. With so many of China’s urban centers having traditionally prioritized 14 industrial manufacturing in the past two decades, lessons from America’s rust belt cities can prove worthwhile as China shifts away from smokestack chasing toward efforts to develop strategic renewable industries and reduce conventional air pollution within the central planning process.

These interactions exemplify a localized approach to diplomacy that is actively creating lasting rapport, trust, and substantive policy improvements as a result of peer-to-peer exchange.

Comparing China & U.S. Capacities for Subnational Climate Diplomacy While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintains authority over the climate policymaking apparatus at the highest levels vis-a-vis the National

People’s Congress (NPC) and the Central Committee, matters of implementation and specific programming are transferred downstream toward subnational provincial, county, city, or local governments.

Although major laws are indeed created by the NPC, these laws are merely foundational for substantive policy documents developed at the various levels down the hierarchy. Hence, climate-related decrees have been released at various subnational levels, particularly in large urban centers ; for example, a provision for the legal basis for the regional cap-and-trade system in Shenzhen was passed by the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Congress in 2012. As a result of this localization, municipal governments in major Chinese cities have become better equipped to organize amongst themselves to engage in ad-hoc climate diplomacy through initiatives like the Alliance for Peaking Pioneer Cities (APPC) at the U.S.-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change in 2014; whereby 21 participating cities pledged to peak their emissions before the national target date of 2030. In the United States, local governments at the city level have been much more informed in climate action policy at the international level. To date, 159 cities and counties are participating in the United Nation’s Cities for Climate Protection program whereby they agree to receive technical assistance and training on accelerating GHG reduction policies. In addition, 21 US cities hold much more flexibility in signing on to international climate agreements aimed at broad policy goals like GHG emission targets. While they can take on certain adaptation commitments, it is much more common for local governments to informally indicate support for country-level climate action like the Paris Agreements in the form of domestic legislation or policy efforts. And while states are formally forbidden from entering into agreements with other governments per Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution, local governments have found ways to go around constitutional authority through non-binding or obligatory memorandums of understanding to support the Paris Agreement. Yet while cities in the United States and China are more networked than ever in the fight against climate change, their potential to bridge the current divide is hampered by obstructed by poor collaboration with the federal government, a lack of funding for city-to-city partnerships, and meager data collection and policy exchange. While U.S. cities carry far more jurisdictional power than Chinese cities, they carry limited authority and are bound by the geographic scope of the city itself. Key aspects of

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climate governance policy remain out of jurisdictional authority, and more attention has historically been paid to the adaptation of existing agreements rather than city-wide mitigation efforts.

Also, many partnerships are ad hoc and lack coordination within the context of greater national interests.

Indeed, the Obama Administration had sought to increase the strength of international city-to-city relationships through an office for a Special Representative for Global Intergovernmental Affairs, but it was left vacant in Obama’s second term. The Council on Foreign Relations reports that the position is filled with just two full-time staff members who track and support subnational diplomacy efforts via local outreach. Without these resources in place, the State Department will continue to be unable to harness the powers of state and city governments to advance U.S. interests abroad. Other efforts at the federal government level to coordinate subnational diplomatic efforts have deflated. CityLinks, an initiative set up between International City/County Management Association (ICMA) and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) to provide technical assistance to policy practitioners at the city and county level, has not updated its website since Fall of 2016.

What Can Be Done to Increase Capacity for U.S. Cities?

For U.S. cities to develop successful networks with China, they need to be provided with advisory and capacity building resources, harness the full power of the private and civic sectors, and be better supported financially and politically. Even with such examples of exceptional progress, limits on subnational diplomacy in the climate policy area should not be understated.

Cities possess no constitutional basis on which to negotiate substantive treaties or trade agreements. Local governments are strictly bound by their geography in matters relating to national security, revenue streams, and organizational capacity. Even in major cities with staff dedicated to international affairs, teams are generally small and can only do so much with the data, funding, and staff that they possess. As a result, I propose several trajectories whereby city diplomacy can be strengthened as a more robust form of U.S.-China climate cooperation.

(1) The U.S. Department of State should increase resources for Sister Cities International. In 2005, the State Department provided the Sister Cities International Network just $400,285 in grant aid, most of which went to training. For many municipal budgets, Sister Cities remains a 28 line item falling under tourism departments, with average budgets of under $25,000. Peer-to-Peer exchange has proven remarkably effective in allowing leaders to manage, share, and analyze insights, successes, and failures. Increasing the capacity and importance of the existing Sister Cities infrastructure can strengthen these peer exchange networks.

(2) The U.S. Department of State should also provide capacity support to trade delegations and intermediary networks being pursued by city entities. Additional needs may be required for resources, leverage tools, and coordinate diplomatic efforts with cities to ensure that communication channels work within broader strategic interests Pressure should be mounted to advocate for an existing bill sitting in the Foreign Affairs Committee that seeks to broaden subnational diplomacy resources. The City and State Diplomacy Act, introduced by Ted Lieu (D-CA) and Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) aims to establish a dedicated office of Subnational Diplomacy within the Department of State whereby to oversee local and municipal diplomatic programs.

(3) The U.S. and China should enhance mutual investment and joint data-driven research development among universities, businesses, non-profits, think-tanks, and other local entities. This will require that cities’ offices of international affairs coordinate with other municipalities to manage, share, and analyze data. Data should be accessible, transparent, and standardized for all sectors to use collaboratively. For inspiration, we can look to existing organizations like the Energy Foundation China, a San Francisco based non-profit, assists in capacity building and research on development and climate challenges at the national and municipal levels. The Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s China Energy Group and the Rocky Mountain Institute also play importance in clean energy centered policy exchange in the spirit of cross-collaboration at municipal and provincial levels.

(4) Cities should reach out to all forms of civic and private capital for new strategies for communication and innovation. As subnational diplomacy is undergirded by cultural and economic exchanges, financial intermediaries like the Bay Area Council’s China Initiative are one of dozens of organizations across California bridging the divide between local markets in the Bay Area/ Silicon Valley and the cities of Yangpu, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Beijing. Voluntary organizations and associations that recognize these concerns within the realm of the trade agenda or educational exchange can facilitate even more open platforms and networks for policy idea exchange.

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Conclusion While developing a framework for local leaders may face risks, obstacles, and challenges, it remains imperative that cities fill their roles as global actors not only as of the gap filler in U.S.-China relations, but in the fight against global change. Through the role of local leaders in the public, private, and civic sectors, cities can create more modes of cooperation, policy idea exchange, and strengthen the overall bilateral relationship between the U.S. and China. As the next decade looms over us, the coming years will no doubt test the United States’ relationship with China, and climate policy may continue to be put on the backburner of bilateral cooperation. In the face of disengagement by the federal government on supporting collaborative climate change agreements, cities will need to reach out to new partners for collaboration to extend beyond the purview of a gridlocked federal government. It cannot be ignored that with this call to capacity building, there exists the possibility of conflict between federal and municipal sectors. As is with the case of the formation of any new international political body, the rise of the city-state will bring about new opportunities- and new challenges into the fore.

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A. Michael Armstrong, B. Xuehai Wang, and C. Chong Tang. “Accelerating low-carbon development in Portland, Oregon and Kunming, Yunnan” Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy 7, 041508 (2015); doi: 10.1063/1.4928418 Acuto, Michele. “Give Cities a Seat at the Top Table.” Nature 537, no. 7622 (September 28, 2016): 611–13. https://doi. org/10.1038/537611a.

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Biniaz, Susan. (2017) Act Locally, Reflect Globally: A Checklist of Options for U.S. Cities and States to Engage Internationally in Climate Action. Columbia Law School: Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. http://columbiaclimatelaw.com/files/2017/05/Biniaz-May_2017-Act-Locally-Reflect-Globally-.pdf Boden, T.A., Marland, G., and Andres, R.J. (2017). National CO2 Emissions from Fossil-Fuel Burning, CementManufacture, and Gas Flaring: 1751-2014, Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy, doi 10.3334/CDIAC/00001_V2017.

Bulkeley, Harriet, and Vanesa Castan Broto (2013) “Government by experiment? Global Cities and the governing of climate change” In. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38(3): 361-375.

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Rocky Mountain Institute China Program. https://rmi.org/ wp-content/uploads/2017/12/RMI_City_Peaking_Decaboization_Handb ook.pdf Shan, Weijan. “The Unwinnable Trade War: Everyone Loses in the U.S.-Chinese Clash-but Especially Americans.” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2019.

Shenzhen People’s Government. 2014. “Decree of the Shenzhen Municipal People’s Government (no.262): Interim Measures of Shenzhen for Administration of Carbon Emission Trading.” Shenzhen People’s Government. http://www. sz.gov.cn/zfgb/2014/gb876/201404/t20140402_2335498.htm Sister Cities International. 2015. “A study on the economic benefits of sister city relationships in the U.S. and their impact on the global economy 2014-2015.” https://sistercities.org/ wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Measures-that-Matter.pdf.

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Anahita Farishta

THE PARIS AGREEMENT: POINTS OF WEAKNESS & OPPORTUNITES FOR REFORM

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COURTESY OF JEANNE MENJOULET IS LICENSED UNDER CC BY 2.0

Introduction When President Donald Trump was inaugurated into office in early 2017, one of the first promises he made to the American public and the world was that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Agreement, an agreement among nearly 200 countries that encourages multinational cooperation to cut greenhouse gas emissions and (ideally) mitigate the effects of global warming. President Trump does not support US involvement in Paris primarily on the basis that the Paris Agreement would hurt the United States’ economic growth. Of course, whether the United States truly stays out of the Paris Agreement is a question that will take time to answer, as it is likely that a democratic victory in the United States’ 2020 election will result in continued support for the Paris Agreement from the White House. This is not the first time that such an event has occurred, as party switchover in the United States with George W. Bush is what resulted in the US Federal Government abandoning the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. The situation has changed today, as the effects of climate change seem to be intensifying exponentially and the need for action is greater now than it has ever been before.

Nearly three years after President Trump has announced the end of U.S. involvement in Paris, the process of formal withdrawal has now officially begun. The fact that the United States, the world’s largest economy, has decided to back out of the Paris Agreement means that the coherence of the Agreement is more in question now than ever before. Although U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has publicly announced that the United States will continue to support climate action in other ways such as the development of renewable energy, Jonathan Pershing, a former special envoy for climate change during the Obama administration, has declared that the United States has lost the trust of climate diplomats and “has been written off in many cases as a partner” (Friedman 2019). Facing the reality that the Paris Parties will have to continue on their climate mission without the United States, it becomes essential to identify the weaknesses of the Paris Agreement and recognize how much it lacks in its ability to achieve the goals laid out in COP21 (The United Nations Climate Change Conference in 2015, the 21st Conference of Parties). Many environmental activists and climate scientists are harboring a sense of frustration with half-hearted actions of policymakers in regards to fighting climate change, one

such example of this half-heartedness being the Paris Agreement, and they feel this for good reason (Finneran 2016). The Paris Agreement has some serious limitations that prevent any change from materializing at all; this article has the goal of examining the components of the Paris Climate Agreement, identifying the sources of its ineffectiveness, and proposing recommendations for how to address the insufficiencies of the Paris Agreement.

The Paris Agreement Lacks Effectiveness DISTRACTED NATURE OF PARIS AGREEMENT One of the primary flaws of the Paris Agreement is that it serves as a distraction from true change in regards to the fight against climate change. First, the very structure of Paris, the fact that an individual country can choose how much it is willing and able to curb emissions, means that there is little room for any sort of accountability or enforcement; no one can seriously enforce the rules upon you when you are the one who makes them. But furthermore, aside from the obvious issues of accountability, the structure of the Paris Agreement precludes any mention of the need to curb resource extraction, which is a major contributor to greenhouse gases, and it “sets goals far below those needed to avert a global catastrophe” (Browne & Goldtooth 2016). In fact, with our current trajectory, predicted warming will be above 3 degrees Celsius, which is quite embarrassing considering the goal of the Paris Parties is 1.5 degrees Celsius (Biniaz 2019).

The fact that the Paris Agreement is framed through a lens of short-termism means that it inevitably ignores the roots of the climate crisis and ignores the people who have the determination and experience to fight climate change and its effects (Kojima, Tamura, & Institute for Global Environmental Strategies 2015; Browne & Goldtooth). The Paris Agreement’s ineffectiveness is apparent on many levels, making it a weak tool with which our climate diplomats can fight climate change.

Moreover, the Paris Agreement’s approach to the fight against climate change allows for contradictions in practice, “such as the Obama administration, on the one hand, pledging net emission reductions, and on the other proposing a five-year expansion of offshore oil drilling across the Arctic and Gulf of Mexico” (Browne & Goldtooth). If the Paris Agreement allows for these contradictions to occur, it is serving as a distraction for world leaders as it allows our gover35

nment leaders and diplomats to present a guise of action and benevolence while they continue to engage in environmentally-damaging practices. This paints a very clear picture of how blatantly the Paris Agreement lacks any way to truly reach the emission limits needed to prevent the 2° C increase that would spell disaster and cause irreversible damage for planet Earth.

THE POWER OF CLIMATE FINANCE Money is a large part of how our climate solutions are manifested. Whether it’s money from governments or private investors, climate finance is what drives geoengineering and other research efforts to determine the quickest and most effective way to combat global warming and its effects. However, the climate finance infrastructure is falling apart at the seams for two reasons: 1) countries are falling behind on their commitments, and 2) climate finance is currently grossly mishandled and misallocated by investors.

First, the Green Fund through which climate finance was (somewhat) structured is largely ineffective because it lacks any sort of enforcement mechanism, much like the Paris Agreement itself. The Green Fund was a desperate idea conjured up in Copenhagen in 2009 which required all “developed countries” to pay $100 billion in climate finance per year to developing countries to fund clean technology as a solution to climate change. The Green Fund seems excellent in theory, but the downfalls become starkly apparent when getting these industrialized countries to cough up the money. This large transfer of wealth from developed countries to undeveloped countries seems utopian, which it certainly is. Some countries, such as Canada, committed to only providing $300 million per year, which wouldn’t be a significant problem, but all of the other countries also did not meet their annual goal of $100 billion.

Furthermore, the “lack of a legal framework and insufficient regulatory oversight regarding the use of such technologies” makes it impossible for climate finance to get up to the level it needs to be to be effective (Bojovic & Pulfer 2015). Furthermore, in addition to the insufficient quantity of climate finance funds, how climate finance is currently being allocated is ineffective and even detrimental to climate action efforts.

Most climate finance is targeted towards large-scale projects that take large amounts of time to design and deliver, meanwhile the people in Sub-Saharan Africa do not have time to waste. If climate finance was more

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Couretsy of Glassholic, licensed under Creative Commons

purposefully targeted on a local level, we would see a much better allocation of it and more effective ways of fighting the effects of climate change. Particularly in areas of the global south that are more affected by climate change, local-level climate finance would fund small-scale decentralized projects that would, unsurprisingly, have a bigger impact (Rai 2017). Moreover, local communities “need to be included in decisions about how money is spent and have enough funding to act effectively.” This foundation for a more effective allocation of climate finance is critical to delivering the Paris Agreement at the pace we need it to happen (Rai).

OBSTRUCTIONISTS Another source of Paris’ ineffectiveness concerns what Sanja Bojovic (2015) refers to as “holdouts” and “obstructionists.” These are countries that do not support and intentionally thwart, any attempts made by the Paris Parties to create binding collective commitments to fight climate change. One such example is Canada. Canada has been regarded as a country that is unwilling to make meaningful commitments towards the vision of the Paris Agreement and another climate diplomacy. At first, the Canadian government claimed that they would not take any action until the U.S. did so, based on Canadian economic survival.

However, even after the Obama administration made a climate deal with China and joined the Paris spirit in 2015, Canada remained idle regarding climate action.

This is an understatement; Canada does not remain idle, but rather actively contributes to the climate crisis by continuing to invest in the development of oil and gas exports. When probed about why Canada holds such a stance on fighting climate change, the Canadian government claimed that it had already invested billions of dollars in developing clean technology and

they vowed to contribute $300 million to the Green Fund to fund further research and development (Bojovic). However, when Corporate Knights asked further questions to substantiate Canada’s claims about their contributions, the Canadian government declined to provide more information (Bojovic).

A POST-U.S. PARIS AGREEMENT Another major problem with the Paris Agreement is that it appears to be too dependent on support for the United States. While the Parties of Paris would likely oppose this statement, the truth lies in the fact that the structural integrity of Paris is dependent on the positive peer-pressure that is sourced from influential countries such as the United States. The Paris Agreement does not mandate developing countries to curb emissions, and in the context of Paris, both India and China are considered “developing” and therefore have no obligation to curb emissions. The only reason these countries stepped up their commitment to fighting climate change and making an effort to limit pollution and greenhouse gas emissions is because the United States was stepping up and applying pressure. With the United States gone, these “developing countries” have no one left to compete with or impress.

This indicates that other developed nations will have to replace the U.S. and apply that same pressure on China and India (Friedman). This complicates the efficacy of the Paris Agreement, as the influence and pressure from the United States was a driving factor to get some of the world’s biggest polluters on board with the fight against climate change.

Of course, one could argue that other superpowers in Europe could easily replace the U.S.’s role in Paris, but this seems unlikely, especially as China is currently resisting any efforts to deliver on its promises made at COP21 (Friedman 2019). With Europe currently divided over how to curb coal power, there is very little political capital available for European leaders to win concessions with China regarding sustainability.

And, lastly, with the United States out of Paris, China has lost the vigor with which it signed the climate deal with the United States. Moreover, the United States is not only absent from the Paris discussions, but President Trump’s antagonistic discourse towards climate diplomats and climate action serves as another barrier for other countries to act on climate change. The United State’s influence, whether it’s positive or negative, is a significant determiner of Paris’ success in rallying important actors to play their part.

THE LACK OF A HUMAN RIGHTS COMPONENT The next problem with the Paris Agreement, a problem which I would argue is the most problematic, is that the Paris Agreement shows little respect for human rights. In the face of climate change, human rights violations are amplified as climate change disrupts many people’s access to fundamental resources for survival, especially in vulnerable areas. This can occur in both direct and indirect ways. The direct way is when people are denied access to basic human rights for survival, such as food, potable water, and suitable living conditions. The indirect violation of human rights is through radical climate solutions such as geoengineering and the construction of mega-dams that may result in the displacement of certain populations and infringe upon their human rights. The text of the Paris Agreement is progressive in the sense that it is one of the first documents of its kind that explicitly recognizes a need to consider and respect human rights. However, as is often the case with UN documents, the discussion of human rights stops at the preamble of the text of the Paris Agreement (2015), in which it states that “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.”

This is the first and last time the phrase “human rights” appears in the official document. In practice, it is also evident that the Paris Agreement does little to deliver on its promise to respect and promote human rights.

In fact, not only does the Paris Agreement ignore human rights, but practices under the Paris Agreement will violate even more human rights than are already being violated. One such way in which this will happen is indirect, at the hands of geoengineering practices that the Paris Agreement funds with little regulatory oversight (Browne and Goldtooth). The likelihood of pieces of land being privatized for the sake of “research” will affect indigenous populations and people of color the most, especially in the global south, as they have their homes taken away from them. Thus, the Paris Agreement once again finds itself in contradiction; there is a vision for the promotion and protection of human rights, but the actual practices and mechanisms of the Paris Agreement will make it impossible to achieve that vision.

Moreover, not only are developed countries going to directly fund the displacement of indigenous peoples, but those same countries will also deny any sort of responsibility, financial or otherwise, to compensate for the loss and damage done to areas of the global south at the hands of the climate change caused by these superpowers. As stated before, the

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rules of the Paris Agreement are made by the winners, which means the losers do not receive any sort of compensation for the damage caused by the winners. The fact that the Paris Agreement blatantly facilitates the violation of human rights is arguably the most disappointing element of Paris. It appears as though the mention of human rights in the official text of the Paris Agreement serves more as an accessory to the document than a critical part of climate action.

Some will make the substantial argument that these issues of human rights were so contentious that they would have compromised the integrity of the entire Paris Agreement, so the Paris Parties decided to ignore the touchy subject of human rights for the sake of the agreement (Atapattu 2016). For example, if Paris required some sort of protection of human rights, countries like China, Venezuela, and Russia would refuse to participate.

However, the argument about avoiding touchy subjects precludes asking the question of why human rights are a touchy subject in the first place. The issue of human rights lies at the heart of the climate issue; it isn’t the wealthy, Western populations who are affected by climate change, it’s the vulnerable populations in the global south.

Perhaps it is possible that a discussion of human rights at COP21 would have resulted in fewer countries making commitments to climate action, but even that smaller group of participants would have meant more meaningful conversations and practices about how to combat climate change and mitigate its effects, especially in vulnerable areas. It became a question of quality or quantity, and the Paris Parties chose quantity, which was a major mistake for the future of human rights.

A Hopeful Future Despite the language I have expressed thus far, the Paris Agreement is not a lost cause entirely. There are several ways in which the Paris Agreement can be reformed efficiently to fill the gaps that currently exist. One particular method is not more correct than any others, but rather I argue that all of these ways of reform must be arranged and permuted in conjunction with each other for Paris to achieve some sort of success.

POLICY COHERENCE Policy coherence in this context refers to how local and provincial governments step up and take more of a responsibility to monitor emissions and engage in climate action. This would be most practical if climate finance was more locally targeted.

As stated prior, issues of climate finance impeded the realization of Paris’ vision because the current top-down, centralized blueprint of climate finance is ineffective as it fails to supply sufficient funds at the pace needed to crucial areas. By decentralizing climate finance, we gain the advantage of having “accountability, efficiency, and sustainability” for the climate investments made in a particular region. One practical method through which this can be done is through alliances with government and non-government bodies. There have been successful systems of devolved climate funds in Kenya, Tanzania, Mali, and Senegal, in which there is an alliance between these bodies and national planning systems that allows funds to be directly channeled to the people of affected areas, allowing them a sense of ownership over how the money is handled (Rai). This also allows local concerns to be addressed immediately and effectively, which manages risks and ensures sustainability. Having a coherence between the top-down approach and the local micro-level approach will pave the way to more effective climate action, which needs to be a critical component of the Paris Agreement.

Further, there needs to be more coherence not only between governmental and non-governmental actors but also between visions of mitigation and adaptation. While adaptation is largely concerned with minimizing the impacts of climate change, mitigation is more focused on dealing with the causes, the latter being what most climate policy centers itself around. In the status quo, climate diplomats and the leaders of the Paris Parties view mitigation and adaptation as zero-sum, in which we can only focus on one or the other, and this view is largely what informs climate policy. Focusing on both the causes and effects of climate change shapes a more holistic approach to how we face the climate crisis, expanding the tools we can use. Sarah Burch writes in a policy brief from 2016 that “holistic responses can deliver other sustainability benefits as well: recreational areas that enhance public health, build community vitality and strengthen biodiversity.” Burch’s analysis points to the conclusion that by excluding half of our potential sources of solutions to the climate crisis, we are possibly missing out on the crucial ways in which approaches can be combined to create a complex, coherent solution.

A BETTER IMAGE FOR HUMAN RIGHTS As discussed, the primary context of human rights violations is with the geoengineering mechanisms of the 38

Paris Agreement. William Burns (2016) discusses how a human rights-based approach to geoengineering would include several key components, and the most compelling of these are outlined here.

First, the Paris Agreement must identify what Burns refers to as “rights-holders” and “duty-bearers,” the former being citizens and the latter being governments. In the Paris Agreement text, there is no way of scoping human rights interests and where obligations lie. Having a method to determine this would revolutionize the promotion of human rights because it would directly pin responsibility on those who are responsible.

Second, Burns discusses that an agreement like Paris should include “an evidence-gathering process to help assess the potential impacts of geoengineering research or deployment.” In the status quo, there is no follow-up with how communities are being affected by geoengineering practices; there is only the assumption that geoengineering is working and is not causing any harm to the communities in which it is heavily practiced. Having a process through which leaders can monitor geoengineering practices would not only help the problem of human rights violations, but it would also allow for greater monitoring of the success of such scientific practices.

The third component of Burns that I would like to highlight is a combination of the former two, as it is a mechanism that would include analysis and recommendations to allow an “assessment of the human rights impacts of the proposed geoengineering intervention (research or deployment), and an assessment of state responsibilities to respect, protect and fulfill human rights in this context.” If the Paris Agreement had this mechanism, it would significantly improve the conversation between duty-bearers and rights-holders, creating a more constructive space through which expectations are vocalized. Across all three of these solutions, the common denominator is having more accountability for governments and leaders, which is a large part of what is missing in the Paris Agreement.

As the climate situation across regions and jurisdictions looks different, there is no key solution that can serve as a panacea to the problems rampant in the Paris Agreement, but what all successful approaches have in common is that they use the same fundamental tools: decentralization, carbon pricing, and sustainable community plans. These practices form the basis for successful climate policies that Paris should adopt. Moreover, there is also an emphasis on holistic and long-term approaches, rather than the more

common narrow and short-term approaches (Kojima and Tamara 2015). Embracing holistic approaches would go a long way for governments to overcome the problems that the Paris Agreement poses for meaningful climate action. Some authors (Biniaz 2019) may argue that the responsibility of climate action is misplaced in the hands of the Paris Parties and that other transnational organizations (such as the World Bank) would be better suited to fighting climate change. However, this view is not an effective way to perceive opportunities for reform because as a planet, we are not in a situation to be able to afford the time to start from scratch on climate policy. It is quite idealistic to propose the idea that we abandon what little we have with the Paris Agreement and to start over in a place where we aren’t sure we will obtain the needed commitment. Although this may not apply in every situation, in the case of the Paris Agreement, it is better to fix a broken machine than to build a new one.

It appears as though Paris is here to stay, so we must do what we can to adjust it to our needs.

Conclusion The Paris Agreement has quite a few issues that impede its ability to serve as the revolutionary pact we need to save the planet from impending doom.

While the Paris Agreement has the potential to serve the role we need it to, it must first overcome the issues of climate finance, human rights violations, obstructions, and influence. Only by adopting the methods of decentralization and policy coherence can the Paris Agreement overcome its current status as a distraction and turn into the impetus for change that it needs to be. Above all, Paris lacks accountability more than anything; installing accountability systems would put Paris years ahead of its current trajectory. Until the Paris Agreement can resolve some of these inherent issues in the system, our future will remain bleak.

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Becky Zhang

POLARIZED PERSPECTIVES: HONG KONG’S STUDENTS IN THE EXTRADITION-BILL ERA

IMAGE COURTESY OF STUDIO INCENDO; C O M M O N S .W I K I M E D I A . O R G / W I K I / F I L E : 2 0 1 9 - 1 0 - 0 1 _ D E M O N S T R AT I O N _ H O N G _ KO N G _ 2 9 . J P G

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Introduction THE NEW GENERATION Hong Kong’s youth is once again at the forefront of the city’s burgeoning politics. Echoing the Umbrella Movement of 2014, recent uproar prompted by the suspended-but-not-withdrawn extradition bill has been spearheaded by young people, making up the core of Hong Kong’s sustained protests.

The young people of Hong Kong do not comprise a monolith, however; while mass media tend to display the pro-democracy activism of students, the narrative painted is incomplete. There exists a variety of stances on Hong Kong’s relationship with mainland China. While certain voices do outnumber others—as demonstrated by the record-breaking protest turnout of up to two million people on June 16 this year—it is also true that some voices are simply louder than the rest.

While assessing the complex nature of Hong Kong-China relations, during a time when frictions are record-high and some refuse to even engage with opposing camps, one must heed the entire spectrum of public opinion—even those that may not align with the mainstream ideology—in order to better understand the issues at stake.

IDENTITY CRISIS AND POLARIZATION In 1997, Hong Kong was returned to China from Britain under the precondition that the region would retain partial autonomy for the next fifty years. This special autonomy would take the form of an independent judiciary, a partially popularly elected legislature, emphasis on the rule of law, and an aim toward universal suffrage. China would gain control over Hong Kong’s foreign affairs and military.

A sort of identity crisis has since emerged among Hong Kong citizens: many have grown accustomed to the greater freedoms inspired by British rule and some are unsure about their original allegiance to China.

Critics believe that Hong Kong has seen significant economic, sociocultural, and political integration into mainland China in the first 22 years since its handover. They cite issues such as the kidnapped Causeway Bay booksellers, excessive police force, the Greater Bay Area plan—signaling active integration of Hong Kong into the mainland, and the allegedly unfounded removal of select legislators in 2016 as examples of Hong Kong’s eroding autonomy.

Since 1997, the shift in Hong Kong’s already-convoluted identity has heightened tensions between mainland Chinese and locals in Hong Kong. Other than 42

the occasional MTR scuffle or shopping-mall dispute, such conflicts take place rather notably on university campuses, which are increasingly populated with mainland students.

Large-scale protests such as those in 2003, 2014, and this year, combined with the increasingly efficient and accessible tool of social media, have demonstrated clear sociopolitical divides. These frictions have caused echo chambers, in which people share their opinions only with those who are like-minded. Less acute but also present is a fear of political discourse, where certain topics are dodged and discussed only among trusted circles.

Both of these phenomena contribute to political polarization, especially noticeable within the contained environments of university campuses. The rifts among Hong Kong’s university students are more often than not marked by regional origin; local Hong Kong students, mainland Chinese students, and other international students tend to separate socially, a product of various factors including language barriers, university practices, and cultural and political differences.

The last factor is especially relevant given Hong Kong’s recent landmark protests against Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s now “dead” extradition bill, which critics argue would erode the promised firewall between Hong Kong and mainland China’s legal systems, a precondition to the 1997 handover. Students, moreover, constitute a majority of those advocating for liberal democracy and resisting the central government’s tightening grip on the city. It is therefore crucial to consider the varying views of Hong Kong’s young adults, in particular those most directly attached to the issue: that is, the students who grew up in Hong Kong or mainland China.

MAINLAND-LOCAL TENSIONS As a precursor to the interview compilation and discussion, the following are significant indicators of mainland-Hong Kong conflicts on campus.

Student unions at Hong Kong’s universities have become more politically active due to the city’s increasingly contentious political status. These bodies of student government are populated by local Hong Kong students with similar political views, and concerns about lack of representation and prejudice against mainlanders and other nonlocal students have sprouted. A few cases in particular, where either mainland students or politically-moderate students have lost in elections, have demonstrated some local students’ widespread mistrust in mainland China.

Moreover, in recent years, “democracy walls” —

bulletin boards erected by university administrators initially to promote students’ free expression—have been a hot topic ever since pro-democracy, pro-independence and pro-establishment camps came to clash in the shared forums. Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and Hong Kong University (HKU) administrators resorted to removing “extreme” signs calling for Hong Kong’s independence, a move which received backlash from some students and support from others who saw such radical views as dangerous or insensitive.

Even abroad, there have been clashes over Hong Kong’s relationship to China. After a student at Emerson College in the United States wrote a piece for the student newspaper (titled “I am from Hong Kong, not China”) rejecting her personal identification as a Chinese, mainland Chinese students from her university responded in anger and some wrote an article countering her piece, stating that the op-ed failed to properly inform readers about the political realities (that is, the political ties to China) of regions such as Hong Kong, Tibet, and Taiwan.

HKU Associate Professor of Sociology, Xiaoli Tian, from mainland China, cites scarce personal contact as the primary cause of divides between mainland and Hong Kong students. After interviewing a wide range of mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong and taking note of social spaces, she details that “fragmented daily living space, protected interpersonal space, and politicized online space” are the primary contributors to observed divisions.

Similarly, Professor Ke, who teaches economics at an established university in Hong Kong and chooses to remain anonymous, says that she has felt a significant sociocultural change between Hong Kong a decade ago and today. Having grown up in mainland China, she studied for a semester “abroad” at a university in Hong Kong and found the city exceptionally welcoming and open. Now, having returned to serve as a professor, she has observed a stark difference in the once-open nature of locals in Hong Kong, as well as a sharp decline in their interactions with mainland Chinese students and visitors. Professor Ke’s question is: What happened between 2004 and 2014 that brought about such a tangible change?

Research Methods I had the opportunity to interview 13 students from four Hong Kong universities—HKU, Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), PolyU, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST)—

regarding their perspectives on the S.A.R. and its future, as well as their experiences interacting with other opinions on campus. I also spoke with an economics professor, as previously mentioned, who is originally from mainland China. The interviews were mostly coordinated via personal networks, and thus there may be a bias toward more culturally international students.

In addition, the timing of these interviews during the June and early July of the summer holidays, within a limited timeframe, made it challenging to access more students.

The presented interviews and my analyses of them are intended to be exploratory and qualitative. There are too few interviewees for the collected responses to be evaluated in any empirical scale, and most questions elicit reflective rather than measurable responses. Therefore, the following dissection of conversations with Hong Kong students is to be used simply for an increased understanding of the sampled students’ perspectives. It cannot be representative of any demographics on the whole.

That said, there is an intentional balance between interviewees who grew up in Hong Kong and in mainland China. Most sections of this paper are divided into local and mainland students’ responses. Furthermore, students interviewed attend a variety of universities, are studying in diverse courses, and are at varying stages in their academic careers (eight undergraduates, three postgraduates, and two recent alumni).

I will thus nonetheless offer patterns amidst the responses received, so that they might assist the reader in assessing and developing their own understanding of the political climate among today’s youth in Hong Kong. This compilation of responses also seeks to function as a “constructed” dialogue among a diverse group of students, who might not otherwise have the opportunity to discuss such topics with one another.

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Interviewees: Details on interviewees below—their student status, university, field of study, etc.—may be used for reference while reading. Pseudonyms are used for privacy.

From Hong Kong: (students listed attended international school in Hong Kong unless otherwise mentioned) - Cedric: undergraduate, HKU, humanities - Crystal: undergraduate, CUHK, professional - Daniel: undergraduate, PolyU, STEM , local school - Emma: undergraduate, HKU, professional - Kristine: undergraduate, HKU, STEM, originally from Singapore - Lisa: undergraduate, PolyU, professional, local school - William: undergraduate, HKU, professional From mainland China: (all students listed attended local school in mainland China) - Anthony: postgraduate, HKU, social sciences - Harry: postgraduate, HKU, social sciences - Jasmine: undergraduate, HKU, professional - Roger: postgraduate, HKUST, STEM - Sharon: alumna, HKU, professional - Zach: alumnus, HKU, STEM

I. The Key Aspect of HK-Mainland Relations The interviewed students share what they each believe is the most critical aspect of the controversial and convoluted relationship between Hong Kong S.A.R. and mainland China. Responses vary: among local students, issues such as maintaining economic autonomy in Hong Kong and clarifying the implementation of “one country, two systems” are critical. To mainland interviewees, enforcing the notion of China as a singular entity and reshaping both parties’ mutual perceptions is vital.

Asked what the she thinks is the key aspect of Hong-Kong-mainland relations, local student Crystal puts it simply: “Hong Kong people feel that it’s unfair that they promised us 50 years of special status, and now they are moving so fast. They are angry that China is going back on its promise.” Along the same vein, Kristine attributes the controversy to “a lack of clarity” and “the many gray areas in the ‘one country, two systems’ law.”

Cedric thus highlights the importance of Hong Kong retaining the freedom it should have while also working together with China “because we have to.” “Hong Kong would go to crap without China right now,” he says, “So it’s more about working together without losing the values of freedom, democracy, and whatnot.”

To Emma, however, the most important thing is specifically keeping Hong Kong’s financial situation “relatively independent” from China’s. William, too, worries that as the two economies get linked further, Hong Kong companies will hire more mainlanders and immigrants, thereby disadvantaging local people and even altering Hong Kong’s working culture. He says, “[Hongkongers] worry that, with economic growth, how much of it is just going to the Chinese people coming here to work?”

Daniel, on the contrary, argues that society must rearrange its priorities: “It is not actually about the issues but about the attitude. Most people here are putting efforts into earning money, which is regarded as the core value. There are tons of problems going on, yet money is still the first priority. ‘I have to work and I have to earn money, or else I will lose my job!’ But you will even still lose your job, you will be arrested by China, if you are still neglecting society and neglecting what’s happening around you. You are still being affected—politics is everywhere.”

According to mainland student Anthony, the following is critical: “Hong Kong is in a passive position; things are increasingly decided by Beijing. They stand still, keep the hard line, and deal with any uprisings.” He adds, “It’s very different from 2003, when at least the liberal party responded to public protests. There is a paradigm shift in the way they deal with Hong Kong and Taiwan… they don’t care that much about popular opinion. They care whether their strategy is successful. Increasingly, they realize they’re not able to win the majority’s hearts. What they can do is remain strong, and they tend to believe that over time the majority will surrender.”

Local student Emma echoes Anthony’s observations: “I do feel that China has been extending its soft power quite a bit. In the past, they really did care about how China was presented to other countries, but nowadays it feels more and more like they’re strong enough to not need that—not need to save face as much. They’re more determined to state their sovereignty, and to them, the fact that other countries might have an opinion about Hong Kong’s political climate is a threat to that sovereignty.”

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Mainland-Chinese Zach says that the issue of Hong Kong-mainland relations stems primarily from local perceptions. “It’s all about how Hongkongers perceive the mainland—is mainland China a good partner to grow with, an enemy to be defeated, or…?”

To this question Jasmine would respond that Hong Kong must see China as one whole. “We were taught in school that there is only one China and there will always be one China only. Hong Kong is a part of China,” she says. “This is mainly the political standpoint of China, and it’s also my own political view. Maybe I’m biased—I acknowledge that. I’m quite influenced by my upbringing.”

Recognizing one’s biases can serve little more than superficial purposes, however; arguably, to truly confront and reckon with biases one must actively strive to counterbalance them, either via reading opposing media platforms, talking to different people, or endeavoring to play devil’s advocate. This understandably is easier said than done, and even when executed may not bring ideal results. Some may also believe that personal biases are essentially inerasable—that they are so deeply embedded into our mindsets—or that they are mutable, but still inescapable—no completely objective thought-space exists for one to think completely bias-free. Even in trying to take in diverse perspectives, while equipped with a certain lens from the outset, one might only become further locked in their original stance. Moreover, biases can be tied less to ideology and more to personal interest, which can be even more difficult to separate oneself from.

While Jasmine defends the “one China” view, Roger instead focuses on clearer legal processes as a key to Hong Kong and China’s relationship: “It’s important that everyone knows what this [extradition bill] is actually doing and what are the consequences for Hong Kong and China. There needs to be transparency and enough information, because people tend to just follow the masses.” He adds, “The judicial process in China should be clearer to gain Hong Kong’s trust that China is a decent place. Obviously, China was pretty questionable before—especially before the country opened up.

But times have changed, and China is not as dark as people think.”

II. Assessing the Pro-Democracy Movement Almost half of the 13 students interviewed, from opposing political camps, bring up their own doubts regarding the practicality and potential of the anti-establishment movement.

Roger, like some of his mainland peers, argues that

the recent Hong Kong protesters are not pragmatic enough. He asks, “What exactly are they opposing? Is it the extradition bill, police violence, or anti-democracy camps? They are now going to protest democracy, and they’ve forgotten why they went out to oppose the bill in the first place.”

He continues, “The mainland doesn’t really want to harm Hong Kong; it’s their own people. Hong Kong needs to think carefully about what policies are really going to benefit them, and not just fight for democracy.”

Mainlander Zach concurs: “I’ve seen very few constructive opinions on how they need to mend the bill’s loophole. No one is issuing alternatives; they’re just paralyzing the traffic and making this city look ugly instead of better.”

Though he supports the anti-establishment movement, mainland student Anthony says, “The movement in Hong Kong is a blueprint; the whole thing is too handicapped by a moral agenda, with very little strategic thinking. It’s a campaign doomed to fail.” Anthony’s comments raise questions about how the movement ought to be executed if aiming to succeed, including the idea of less innocuous methods such as violence as a protest strategy.

Even Daniel, a local student dedicated to the pro-democracy camp, agrees that the movement lacks a clear objective: “Most of us have the same opinion that something should be changed in Hong Kong, although we can’t tell what specifically.”

III. What Will Happen in 2047?

Under the Sino-British Joint Declaration signed in 1984, Hong Kong’s highly autonomous legal and judicial systems are set to “remain unchanged for 50 years” from 1997 onward. In 28 years, China will no longer be legally bound to this agreement. Students reflect on the implications of this, with relatively anxious and pessimistic outlooks offered by those who grew up in Hong Kong.

According to Hongkonger Cedric, “There will be chaos in terms of political movements, and a massive clash of opposing ideologies. Physically, it will be a very overt change because China will easily just say, ‘All the policies apply to you. All your freedom’s lost.’”

Daniel agrees that integration cannot happen smoothly. “I regard Hong Kong more as a culture than a country, region, or whatever,” he says. “This is not about land; it’s about acceptance as a Hong Kong people. When the government tries to blend two cultures (Hong Kong and the mainland), they should know that there are differences behind them. We are born in different areas, with different environments and educa45

tions. And if the government puts too much force on integration, then it won’t be good. There will be resistance.”

Emma is equally pessimistic, though slightly more ambivalent: “Yes, Hong Kong in 2047 will be part of China again. To what extent that is is really up to China… though I do think there are enough people in Hong Kong that care about Hong Kong’s future so that we won’t just be completely subsumed by China in 2047.”

Crystal argues, “I don’t think China is going to give up—I think by 2047, integration will happen. And that was the agreement, after all.”

Like some of his peers, Cedric says this integration is already in the works: “I definitely see various physical manifestations of China slowly taking in Hong Kong, even though there was the whole 50 years of no change thing. There’s the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge… and the border to Shenzhen is slowly coming down.”

While William says he doesn’t know enough to comment on 2047, he offers, “I’ve heard that we can remove the ‘one country, two systems’ thing. I’m not too sure about that, but if we can’t, then I really hope China’s development by then will have less of a gap (from a legal perspective) with Hong Kong, so it won’t be as bad of a transition.”

Most mainland students say they haven’t thought about 2047 before, with graduate student Roger being unaware of the 50-year contract of “one country, two systems.”

Sharon sees 2047 as a definite bearer of change; she believes the Chinese government will be more involved in Hong Kong’s affairs, though she is unsure on what grounds they will collaborate and hopes that both sides can have a say in their mutual affairs. “Of course there will be more integration and the two places will become more similar,” she says. “I think that’s a natural evolvement.”

To Harry, the expiration of the contract may go one of two ways. If all goes well, he says, people will start to accept the fact that Hong Kong people are Chinese citizens. “Since Beijing will understand that the locals will no longer challenge the ‘one China’ policy, then they will grant more freedom to Hong Kong and let people do what they want,” he adds. “Most mainlanders don’t care how locals want to run Hong Kong, I think. it’s not my business at the end of the day.” If things go wayward, Harry has the following vision of 2047: “Beijing will totally ignore Hong Kong’s interests, and Hong Kong won’t allow debates with Beijing about

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policy. It becomes all emotions, throwing rocks at each other.” (Ironically, his description already matches some people’s views on the present situation.)

Anthony, on the other hand, doesn’t necessarily see 2047 as groundbreaking: “I don’t believe in everything changing in 2047. I don’t think it’s going to happen. It’s always smart for Beijing to maintain ‘one country, two systems,’ no matter how fake it is. There are certain parts to it, such as this legal autonomy, etcetera, that have to stay, and the Hong Kong public isn’t ready for that kind of violent uprising.” (Note that this response was given prior to the record-breaking extradition bill protests.)

Likewise, Zach says that if the next three decades see little change, then Hong Kong might just retain its special status.

IV. Is Independence Viable?

While the interviewed students unanimously believe that independence is not a viable option for Hong Kong, those from Hong Kong credit this to logistical obstacles, while those from the mainland tend to argue against its fundamental intentions.

To Hongkonger Cedric, the current “one country, two systems” setup, though flawed, is preferable to independence because there exist too many variables that need to be accounted for.

Daniel, also a local, elaborates on the predicament facing the minority who do advocate for independence: “China is too much to deal with. We don’t have armies, even though we have a distinct political system, ministry, and currency.” He suggests, however, “I would hope that people could choose what Hong Kong would be. There should be referendums, or there should be platforms for people to share their opinions on the future of Hong Kong.

They should self-determine.”Though Daniel admits that there would be flaws to the idea of referendums, he says they would still be preferable to the situation now, with only “one-sided opinions flooding around.”

Emma points to other unsuccessful Chinese independence movements. “I don’t think Hong Kong can separate from China,” she says. “Taiwan still struggles to have that distinction. It’s just not the direction Hong Kong is heading toward… I think the Chinese government is really, really strong now.” While the mainland students also agree on the impracticality of independence, most also suggest the moral wrongness of such an act.

Social sciences student Harry highlights the specific ways in which Hong Kong is bound to China: “When you have most of the drinking water, the agricultural products coming from the mainland, then how can you

have independence?” He adds that Hong Kong prosperity cannot be achieved without the mainland given mainland businesses’ heavy involvement in Hong Kong markets.

Sharon cites a need for drastic reform before one might consider the option of independence. “When independence is viable,” she says, “the social situation will have already changed much from right now. If the two societies change to all democratic systems, nation-states, then I guess it’s possible. But even independence wouldn’t have too much significance by that time; by then, independence wouldn’t do much because the two would still need to collaborate on a lot of things.”

One or two mainland students express vague sympathy for the pro-independence camp, however. Anthony’s view stands out: “I don’t think that their belief in independence is that naïve. Their statement merely means that independence is a valid, legitimate request. They are not naïve at all; they probably know more than I do.”

While Roger opposes independence, he says it is not because of the “one China” idea. He offers, “I can understand why the people want independence, like Tibet or Taiwan. These desires are normal.” However, he argues, “Once a government is actually independent, is it really good? It doesn’t necessarily help the masses, unless the government is good and the leaders are good. But if you separate and your leader is bad, then who can help you, guide you?” Roger arrives at the following conclusion: “For a society, it’s more important that it avoids variation than its overall average. People would rather have a slightly poorer, tougher society than have greater instability.”

V. Economic vs. Sociopolitical Interests Roger brings up the critical issue of navigating economic and stabilizing interests with more ideological and sociopolitical ones. Some of the interviewed students share their thoughts on the matter, raising difficult questions about how countries ought to be governed.

Local student Kristine, originally from Singapore, sees Hong Kong politics almost as a game of thrones, relating more to issues of stability and control than any universal ideals. “I feel less inclined to be politically engaged in the issues here, as opposed to those where people's direct well-being is affected,” she says. “The life here is arguably of good quality, with access to clean water, amenities, healthcare, etcetera, and so that contributes significantly to my lack of engagement with the politics here.”

Kristine continues by comparing local politics to the issues she believes have a stronger influence. She reasons, “I think with politics in places like the U.S.—maybe take the recent abortion issue as an example—there's a direct impact on the people of Alabama the moment the law is passed, in that people can be denied abortions and could die, etcetera. In the case of Hong Kong, there are looming fears of China's tightening grip. Taking the current issue with the extradition bill as an example, there are arguably pros and cons in passing it, and any repercussions or fears (such as China extraditing people on the basis of pro-democracy beliefs) are much further away than the direct repercussions of the abortion law in the U.S.” While comparing local politics to U.S. politics, which tends to take place on the international stage, Kristine raises questions regarding recent foreign “interference” or “intervention” regarding Hong Kong events. Should recent clashes in Hong Kong matter on a global scale, as issues in the U.S. tend to do? To answer this demands an answer to whether Hong Kong’s democratic movements are intrinsically connected to similar struggles around the world.

Alternatively, the question can be answered by whether one sees China as a major global force to be reckoned with.

William takes a distinct stance from other local interviewees, arguing that countries cannot implement such sociopolitical ideals before first setting a basic standard of living via economic growth. Doing so, he says, would actually delay the process of democratization. Addressing the risks of liberal democracy, he says, “If you let a really big group of uneducated people elect their government, then it is so easy to bribe them.” On the other hand, William argues, authoritarian government seems to be effective in China. “In order to be a CCP member, you have to be a socially upstanding member, someone people look up to,” he says. “It’s actually an honor to become a CCP member, so I think the Chinese government on the whole is being ruled by competent people with the right qualities.”

William continues, “The Chinese government, on the whole, is doing a good job—from an economic point of view, and culturally and technologically. 70 to 80 years ago the country was a mess, and now it’s getting better and better.” He admits, “It’s committed a lot of crimes in its history, it’s not been perfect, but what country has been perfect on its way to development?”

Of the mainland students interviewed, Sharon feels unsatisfied with the question posed, arguing, “Economic benefits

" R E V O L U T I O N A R Y " B A L L E T S I N T H E C H I N E S E C O M M U N I S T PA R T Y ' S T O O L K I T.

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and morality are not an A or B option. We need both, and the two must exist at the same time. I think it’s a strange thing to think that one is more important.” With audible conviction, she observes, “Taking care of economic needs is actually a moral action.” To Sharon, mainland China and Hong Kong have comparable issues to confront. She argues that China generally has more economic needs, even though “Hong Kong actually has severe poverty as well,” though China also has a lot of human rights issues.

“Similar issues exist,” she says. “Maybe they just look different on the surface.”

Harry, a graduate student in the social sciences questions the prioritization of liberal ideals. “As long as you don’t challenge political authority, you can do a lot of things you want to do,” he says. “I know that’s not the standard definition of human rights or freedom—but overall you have a lot of economic freedom.”

Roger similarly argues for a balance between democracy and stability. “I think Hong Kong has excess democracy right now,” he asserts. “Before, the mainland was very closed off, and that threatened Chinese stability.

Now Hong Kong is so chaotic, and I think there need to be changes to adjust and re-stabilize.”

Anthony feels more ambivalent about the sometimes-opposing notions of economic goals and political ideals. “It’s much more complicated than what’s right or wrong, simply put,” he says. “Of course, putting stability over everything else is ridiculous, but having no place for stability in any political deliberation is too thoughtless.

There is a limit to which you can keep this friend-enemy framework. It can’t go on; once the [political] movement is over, the economic interest comes back.”

To Zach, stability is always at stake. “Going from non-democratic to democratic is not a smooth transition,” he says, saying that countries usually lack “a good enough mechanism” to undertake the transition while maintaining economic growth. “At least in the short term, they will have a bit of a tough time. Whether it will recover at all will depend on the future.”

VI. Changes in Perspective While Studying "Abroad" Students from mainland China were asked about how studying in Hong Kong has—or has not—influenced their sociopolitical perspectives. All six students say they have developed an understanding of, though not an agreement with, the distinct and more liberal opinions of local students. Amidst this reflection, students say they have recognized the challenging complexity of political beliefs and advocacy.

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Unlike the other interviewees, Anthony highlights his behavioral changes since moving from China to Hong Kong for university: “When I go back to the mainland, I do feel the difference in how people treat each other. I feel that when I go back to China, I often behave differently than what I’d behave in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is rule-abiding, and China is less so.”

Other mainland students discuss how they have developed sympathy for local students. “Now I understand better what Hong Kong people are opposing when they oppose the extradition bill,” says Roger. “It’s not about the bill; it’s about the oppression of democracy. Coming to Hong Kong, I’ve gained more understanding on how they think, their logic. I still think they’re overdoing it, though. I just see why now.”

Similarly, Zach says, “In Hong Kong I have more information than I may be able to get in China, helping me see that part of what they are doing makes sense. If I were back in China, it would be much more difficult to really see the reasons behind what Hong Kong people are doing.”

Half of the students interviewed, independent of their regional origin, say they have recently acknowledged the deep complexity of political frameworks and have thus accepted the coexistence of multiple truths. “Before I left China for my postgraduate, I did believe Beijing was correct,” says Harry. “After studying overseas, I see more legitimate claims by other perspectives. [That’s] not to say Beijing is incorrect, but there are a lot of correct ideas and arguments. Unfortunately, these arguments clash, but most of them are correct.”

Jasmine, also from mainland China, has undergone a similar transition: “I’m starting to consider more possibilities. There was never one way, and this is not the only way we’re going to go for the country to develop. There are always many more possibilities.”

Likewise, Hong Kong-raised Cedric says that his views are “always shifting” and “open to new perspectives.”

Local student William shares his take on evaluating moral truth: “I’m very wary that what is popular does not necessarily mean something is right. Whenever I see something where 100 percent of people agree, for example against the extradition bill, I become wary. Why is nobody saying the opposite thing?”

“My views right now are actually not that strong— they’re very nebulous. My only view is that if you have a strong view on something, you might be wrong,” he chuckles. (Cedric’s views are similar; he has “opinions on other people’s opinions on politics,” and not necessarily

his own opinions on politics.) William continues, “The world is a really complicated place. If you want to change something, you don’t actually know what the consequences are. As people who just have a high school or university education, we don’t know enough about the world to know what is good for it. We don’t have enough experience to really affect change, so the best thing to do is, before you ask the world to change, first work on your immediate environment—ourselves, our family—and then change the bigger thing to be better.”

Along the same vein, mainland student Sharon says that arguing with impassioned hostility is neither effective nor inclusive. “I no longer have strong opinions like that,” she says. “I hope I can develop a more human way of understanding things, of treating other people. Right now, I think this is more important than discussing—or getting involved in—social issues.”

Mainland student Anthony, visibly distressed by the political turmoil in Hong Kong, represents a greater population of its youth today: “I have suffered from what went on in the first few years of the Umbrella Movement.

Since then, I have started to think of my ways of contributing to society very differently.” While initially planning for a career in academia, he is now considering contributing more directly via other junctures and spheres. “But I need to take care of myself,” he stresses.

Lisa, a Hong Kong local, also highlights the importance of self-care: “You need to protect Hong Kong, but first you have to protect yourself.”

Anthony struggles greatly in deciding what is right and wrong. “I think Hong Kong’s political reality is very much a deadlock,” he admits. “One can never be that simple-minded in terms of what ought to or ought not to be done. In fact, I think anyone who takes these things seriously cannot escape the constant battle they are situated in—because anything you do will backfire and doesn’t seem to be entirely free from doubt.”

“That complexity,” he sighs.

Conclusion

THE FORMATION OF DIVERSE PERSPECTIVES The students’ varied responses suggest that the following key factors impact the formation of their political views: Cultural and Academic Upbringing All mainland students interviewed depict their environmental and educational upbringing as pulling them toward acceptance of and a lack of engagement in their country’s politics. Many of the local students similarly

state that Hong Kong’s preprofessional culture does the same, though to a lesser extent, and beginning only toward the end of their secondary school studies.

Students regardless of regional origin discuss the substantial impact of comprehensive liberal studies on their political “awakenings.” Moreover, students studying the social sciences and humanities at university tend to be more informed—and opinionated—on current events; they tend to be more pro-democracy.

Parents’ Political Views Almost all students acknowledge that their parents’ ideologies have largely impacted their own, although they also unanimously highlight the sociopolitical singularity of their own generation. Parents’ stances tend to align with their children’s cultural and academic upbringings, unless the children are immigrants or expatriates.

Socioeconomic Status and Personal Stakes Financial needs tend to trump ideological objectives, and thus students such as Lisa and Sharon have either edged away from local politics or made plans to do so in the future. Conversely, students who are politically engaged will either prioritize political ideals over economic goals or simply “vote with their feet” and move abroad.

Those who do the latter usually have ample financial support and a more international background. While this may contribute to a more open-minded and global approach to politics, these students may hardly implement such values through advocacy in Hong Kong before they leave. Students who attended local school or will remain in Hong Kong have more stakes in local politics and thus tend to have stronger opinions; however, they may feel less comfortable voicing such opinions due to their personal investment in the topics discussed.

Media and Technology Social media and news sources, combined with students’ tendency to selectively read, can additionally strengthen—and narrow—political views on either side, potentially contributing to the polarization of opposing camps.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DIALOGUE In the introduction of this paper I called the dissected interviews a “constructed” dialogue among vastly different young people. Such a conversation—or cooperative interaction, if you will—between such opposing ideas would seem quite far-fetched today. This paper’s ability to compile conflicting perspectives is largely attributed to the interview style, in which students were asked questions and listened to without interruption, judgement, or rebuttal. If their responses were vague or seemingly unfounded, I only asked for clarification.

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With intentional space and time to think on these challenging questions and topics, interviewees communicated their thoughts clearly—even ones they didn’t realize that they had. The honesty, composure, and thoughtfulness of each student interviewed demonstrates solid potential for important discussions between differing camps among youth— and across generations—in Hong Kong. Most interviewees admit that they tend not to participate in such controversial conversations in real life. For instance, while mainland student Roger is perplexed by opposition to the extradition bill, he admits to lacking a wholistic view on the issue: “I don’t really have Hong Kong friends, though, so I don’t really know what they actually think about this.”

Harry is one of the few students interviewed who is able to disagree strongly with a friend, also from mainland China. He attributes their success in part to their shared “base knowledge” and the energy and respect they invest into such heavy discourse. They both, moreover, share a similar regional background and are studying the social sciences.

“We disagree,” he says, “but during this process we understand why we have different views based on different interpretations of the same facts. It takes time, patience, and willingness to explain and disagree constructively.”

LOOKING FORWARD Regardless of regional origin, most interviewees view Hong Kong’s current political and social tensions as nondurable. Almost all students who stay updated on political issues are pessimistic, with mainlanders tending to be less engaged and therefore more ambivalent toward, or accepting of, their present conditions of governance. The responses of the twelve university students support the notion that “one country, two systems” has been subject to vastly different interpretations, due to its contradictory definition and ambiguous implementation. This has caused the pro-government and pro-democracy camps to hold drastically different ideals for Hong Kong because of their respective emphases on the former and latter parts of the term. Going forward, both the Hong Kong and central governments must make stronger efforts to elucidate and legitimize the legal foundations behind their complex and strained relationship. There remains a gaping lack of consensus on the Hong Kong-mainland China arrangement, which is only abetted by the enigmatic nature of the CCP’s procedures and their structural ability to enforce their will without widespread public knowledge or consent.

The indefinite nature of “one country, two systems” is additionally tied to undefined motives behind anti-government protests, which have since evolved from the Umbrella Movement to the present pushback against Hong Kong’s extradition bill. Some of the students interviewed worry that since the movement has grown to be increasingly leaderless, it may appear mercurial, even diluted, in that it lacks a clear vision or set of goals, and each person may be in it for rather different reasons. Perhaps protestors and activists may have to refine their demands and sharpen as a collective in order to be regarded as more legitimate or effective.Based on this sample of university students from contrasting upbringings, it is evident that young people who grew up in Hong Kong are raising substantial questions regarding the way their region is governed. In a broader lens, the Hong Kong-mainland conflict can be viewed as a case example of two highly oppositional value systems clashing in an unclearly governed territory, locked in an intensifying identity crisis. Students interviewed raise important and challenging questions: When is stability more important than democracy? Are the two always at odds with one another? What types of freedom might be more pressing than others?

Without a clear direction ahead, it is unsurprising that both groups have polarized and grown at odds with one another. The tensions among young people studying at universities in Hong Kong is not dissimilar to those at the higher level among government officials and elites—different camps are approaching the issue that is Hong Kong’s relationship to China with completely different priorities. To this end, there is nebulous direction as to what may follow. Hong Kong will continue to teeter in mainland China’s partial grip until there is some way forward, either compromised or directed by the top down. Whether that clarity comes in the form of a rigid tightening of controls or the enactment of democratizing policies is uncertain. What’s certain, now, is merely the unsustainability of the present moment and of the two regions’ rancorous sociopolitical tensions.

Until the local and central governments respond comprehensively to those protesting on the streets and taking part in university and local activism, many of Hong Kong’s people will continue to make their wants heard. As Taiwanese presidential elections approach in the following year and the CCP, under Xi’s tightening leadership, faces heated frictions with the U.S. while rapidly expanding its global reach, there is little understanding as to what might happen next.

Lam’s extradition bill has opened a Pandora’s Box that will only continue to complicate HK-mainland relations until something sweeping is done to stop the bleeding.

Bibliography

Tian, Xiaoli. (accepted and in press) “Space and Personal Contacts: Cross-Group Interaction between Mainland and Local Univer50

sity Students in Hong Kong,” pp. 13. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships.

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