China hands - Vol. 5, Issue II, Spring 2017

China Hands STO R I E S A N D A N A LYS I S O F CO N T E M P O R A RY C H I N A

The Spring of Chinese Green Energy Economics & Business, p. 29

CONSTRUCTING CORRUPTION Diagnosing corruption in the Chinese real estate industry.

Features, p. 6

There Shall Be A University Life & Culture, p. 35

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CELINE YAN WANG EDWARD COLUMBIA & KATERYNA BUGAYEVSKA

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Words from the Editors

F 6 10

Features

ANDREA MONETON

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JAYLIA YAN

25 27

JACOB LENGACHER

MICHAEL BEIT LIONEL CHENTIAN JIN WILLIAM MIN

29 31 33

Constructing Corruption Eternal Flame

Politics & Diplomacy

Gone with the Wind The Correspondent's Dilemma?

The Road Well-Traveled

Economics & Business

Springtime for Chinese Green Energy In Tech, China Marches Forward China’s IPO Market

Life & Culture WENBIN GAO WENBIN GAO LUCAS SIN YUNKE LIU

AMANDA WALENCEWICZ ASPEN WANG CHINA HANDS STAFF

35 37 49 40

42 44 46

There Shall Be A University “Altered Accents” and A Global China Our City, Our Food See You in the U.S. after the Age of CUUS

Opinion

The Great Wall: Zhang Yimou's Mystic China Planned Comradeship: China-Pakistan Relations Conversation with Leyla Sudbury

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VOLUME 5, ISSUE II EDITORS IN CHIEF Alexander Herkert, Yale ‘17 William Magliocco, Yale ‘18

MANAGING EDITORS

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Anna Lu, Yale '18 Nicholas Wu, Princeton '18

Zishi Li, Yale ‘18

FEATURES EDITOR

Madeline Bauer, Yale ‘17

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY EDITOR Amy Xiaomeng Cheng, Yale ‘19

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS EDITOR Kevin Fung, Yale ‘17

LIFE & CULTURE EDITOR Wenbin Gao, Yale ‘19

OPINION EDITOR

Jacob Ly, Yale ‘19

Cover Art by Zishi Li 4

ILLUSTRATORS

Joanne Zhenheng Li, Yale ‘17 Julia Shi, Yale '20 Yiou Wang, Duke '18 Catherine Yang, Yale ‘19

SENIOR EDITOR

Yifu Dong, Yale '17

BUSINESS DIRECTOR Jacob Faber, Yale ‘18

Dear Readers, Thank you for opening the ninth edition of China Hands Magazine.

We have learned a great deal putting this issue together. We hope you gain as much from reading it as our team of editors, writers, and artists did from creating it.

This spring, we too a closer look at some well-worn narratives of contemporary China. Jake Lengacher offers a comprehensive history of China’s “One Belt, One Road” policies in Central Asia (“The Road Well-Traveled”), while Andrea Moneton, Jaylia Yan, and Lionel Jin offer new perspectives on three familiar topics: pollution (“Gone With the Wind”), political censorship (“The Correspondent’s Dilemma”), and technological innovation (“In Tech, China Marches Forward”). Celine Wang’s coverage of the complex web of political corruption that plagues China’s real estate industry (“Constructing Corruption”) elucidates an oft-cited but poorly understood phenomenon.

This issue also spotlights articles that touch on underappreciated narratives. Aspen Wang’s personal account about the geopolitical significance of China’s relationship with Pakistan (“Planned Comradeship”), Michael Beit’s report on China’s burgeoning green energy industry (“Springtime for Chinese Green Energy”), and Lucas Sin’s critique of the fine dining industry in Hong Kong (“Our City, Our Food?”) all bring to the fore perspectives that readers may encounter for the first time.

Lastly, we hope this issue will afford readers moments of discovery, with Wenbin Gao’s personal account of a civil education initiative in Nanjing (“There Shall Be a University”) and Edward Columbia and Kateryna Bugayevska’s photo essay of the Yi Torch Festival in Liangshan, Sichuan (“Eternal Flame”).

We are proud to present this latest issue of China Hands and we hope you enjoy reading it!

Yours Truly, Alexander Herkert William Magliocco Anna Lu Nicholas Wu Zishi Li Editors of China Hands

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FEATURES

CONSTRUCTING CORRUPTION

Institutional Failure in China’s Urbanization Strategy CELINE YAN WANG scrutinizes corruption in the Chinese real estate industry.

Illustration // Julia Shi

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arlier this year, a housing frenzy swept across Chinese cities. “School district housing,” or xuequ fang, has long been a buzzword among Chinese urban middle-class families with school-age children and a catalyst for the increase in real estate prices near certain schools in megacities such as Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. This year, China’s Ministry of Education stipulated that all primary and middle school students in nineteen major cities must enroll in schools near their homes. Fearing that they might let their children fall behind at the starting line, many parents are scrambling to do whatever possible to secure housing in elite school districts. This craze has already led to housing investment bubbles in Beijing’s top school districts, exacerbating an existing bubble in a country where middle-class housing costs are more than in Paris or New York City. According to Caixin, a financial news outlet, by mid-March of 2017, the school district housing price in Desheng neighborhood of Beijing’s Xicheng District had already spiked from 165,000 yuan ($23,946) to 200,000 yuan ($29,025) per square meter.

As China's housing prices continue to soar, the skyrocketing prices of coveted school-district homes are merely the tip of the iceberg. According to the China Real Estate Association, Beijing’s housing prices had risen by 15.6 percent in the previous 17 months in March 2017, from 52,500 yuan ($7,619) to 60,700 yuan ($8,809) per square meter. Cities experiencing exorbitant housing prices are not only first-tier cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, but also second-tier cities including Hefei, Suzhou, Wuhan, Tianjin, Fuzhou, Jinan, and spreading even lower to many third and fourth-tier cities such as Langfang and Baoding, both of which are in the newly proposed Jingjinji megacity.

On the other hand, China’s rapid industrial development over the past three decades has been predicated on urbanization and correspondingly high growth in materials industries like steel, cement, and glass. The real estate industry has played a significant role in helping lift millions out of poverty and into urbanized environments. However, along with the economic boom, the inevitable increase in housing prices has become one of the three main challenges facing the contemporary Chinese middle class along with securing medical insurance and education. Even though the real estate industry has served as an economic powerhouse in modernizing the country, it is also one of the most corrupt economic sectors in China.

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FEATURES Collusion between corrupt local government officials and property developers leaves citizens living in China’s newly urbanized society with little legal recourse for the social ills of housing bubbles.

· · · From the late 1970s, the State Council began to reform the socialist housing system and privatize urban public housing. China’s real estate market only emerged at the end of the 1980s in the wake of relaxed rules for foreign direct investment from overseas Chinese. However, housing bubbles did not come into being until the late 1990s, after a 1994 State Council directive commercialized and privatized the work unit-based housing system and 1995 banking reforms introduced new financing channels for property investors. By 1998, the state’s mainstream housing policy had begun to encourage private homeownership, and as a result fueled explosive growth in housing markets across the country.

However, the nascent Chinese private real estate market has yet to improve market organization and introduce institutional safeguards. The rapid expansion of both the real estate industry and real estate market over the past decade has highlighted deficiencies in the immature market and called into question the government’s ability to administer the market itself and to control rampant corruption within the industry.

Although corruption in the real estate sector is not a phenomenon unique to China, it has unique features in China due to the political and economic system under which it operates. The coexistence of centralized and decentralized corruption in the real estate industry has emerged in a variety of entities, and power-for-money deals between real estate developers and government officials run through the whole process of real estate development—land acquisition and transfer, approval and permission, project bidding, planning and construction, property registration, and sales. According to an article by China Daily, a real estate project on average needs approvals from 166 government departments from start to finish, involving about 180 officials. Such complicated administrative procedures almost naturally invite corruption.

Characterized by high investments and risks and extremely fierce market competition, the Chinese real estate industry makes it very difficult for small and medium-sized development companies to survive and grow without the aid of government. As a result, the interlocking interests of developers and governments lead to clientelistic collusion—client developers have to pay their tribute to patron officials at every stage of the government approval process. Chinese economist Cheng Siwei asserted that most of the approximately 30 percent profit margin taken by developers goes to the grey costs of bribery.

· · · According to Professor Zhu Jiangnan, an expert on corruption in China, most corruption in the real estate industry occurs during the process of transferring land-user rights, which is concentrated in interactions with the local government and local land management department. According to Article 2 of the Land Administration Law, all land ultimately belongs to the state. At the center, the State Council exercises the right of ownership on state-owned land and makes the major decisions, policies, and regulations related to land, including setting the price of land. According to a 2012 order by the State Council to encourage more market forces in the urban land market, land-user rights, particularly of commercialized housing, are tradable and transferable on the open market through open tender, auction, and listing.

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FEATURES Nonetheless, the local land administration bureaus are the de facto owners of most forms of land and hold the power to allocate land resources under the current land system. Most local governments implement central government policy only reluctantly. To be granted land for construction, real estate developers communicate with local government authorities and establish close ties with them through so-called “public relations activities.” Given the lack of a monitoring mechanism for the loopholes in legal, regulatory, and administrative systems of land transfers, land has become the primary source of performance ratings improvement for local officials, and of fiscal revenue for most local governments. This collusion of developers and local governments has become so entrenched that the latter have been stereotyped as addicts to land finance. Some scholars have speculated that many local governments in China would simply collapse without the revenues from auctioning off collectively-owned land for commercial re-zoning, which are kickbacks from the developers. Such speculation implies that local governments are not passively soaking up easy institutional rents; instead, they are often aggressively seeking land transactions that focus on extending the campaign of land enclosure, so as to fulfill their budget requirements as well as fill up their own pockets.

· · ·

of housing. The inflated prices have not only increased payment pressure on buyers but also created a sizable amount of wealth flow to the hands of corrupt local officials. As private consumption remains sluggish and new developments remain empty, the price of housing around attractive school districts continues to deprive citizens of core government services such as education, healthcare, and housing itself.

China’s real estate market needs to develop countermeasures in accordance with the current market situation as well as the current state of relevant laws and regulations in the Chinese market. Such measures will make it possible to combat corruption in the Chinese real estate sector.

It is also imperative to change the government’s power management by separating land market management from land transfer operations and the related proceeds. As both land owner and land market manager, the government’s double role has blurred the boundaries between administrative and operating powers, resulting in the abuse of administrative power, rent-seeking, and power-for-money deals.

In addition to strengthening real estate regulations and closing institutional loopholes, the central government also needs to improve supervisory mechanisms, both within the government and outside of it, to prevent the abuse of powers. Internal supervision includes administrative supervision among the government agencies on the same level or between higher and lower levels, judicial supervision by prosecutors and courts, and supervision by discipline inspection and supervision departments, such as the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection. External supervision should come from genuine third-party public service agencies.

For all the economic benefits that urbanization has brought to China, the still immature real estate market coupled with an institutionalized failure of local government means that the central government must improve the legal and regulatory environment around land-rights and transfers in order to maintain stable macroeconomic control. In a system rampant with corruption and rent-seeking, local government officials and land developers are locked in a binary institutional arrangement of mutual corruption. The Chinese government should not only continue the anti-corruption campaign, but reform local government budget mechanisms, introduce stronger citizen protections for land-user rights, and move towards fee simple ownership. Without these systemic changes, students in Beijing’s top high schools will grow up only to enter a system that requires institutional corruption to educate their own children.

In addition to land, construction, installation, taxes, and other business operations, the cost of corruption occupies a large proportion of the real cost

Celine Yan Wang is Research Intern at the Public Policy Research Centre in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She is a 2016 “25 Under 25” honoree of China Hands Magazine. Contact her at celine.wang@yale.edu.

In addition to land, construction, installation, taxes, and other business operations, the cost of corruption occupies a large proportion of the real cost of housing.

Although their primary motivation is to fund government activities, authorities engage in numerous illegal practices through the land expropriation process. These practices include forced land acquisition, forced demolitions, grossly reduced compensation for property and relocation, as well as embezzlement and seizures, local authorities severely damage the interests of both urban and rural residents. In recent years this has led to intensifying disputes and socalled “mass incidents.” According to Lynette Ong and Christian Gobel, land disputes are a primary cause of social unrest, accounting for 65 percent of mass incidents in China. This subjugation of land-occupiers to land development and land regulators has raised more concerns about social stability, according to Feng Yujun, a law professor at Renmin University.

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FEATURES

ETERNAL FLAME

EDWARD COLUMBIA and KATERYNA BUGAYEVSKA explore the Yi Torch Festival in Liangshan, Sichuan.

Text // Edward Columbia Photos // Kateryna Bugayevska

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I

didn't see the bull at first.

I'd walked through a muddy pasture where unbridled horses grazed, into a smoky campgrounds of parked vehicles.

Vendors sold toys out of their trunks. Women in headscarves pulled skewers of hotdog meat and corrugated potatoes from vats of oil. The discarded rubbish of food containers and plastic wrapping littered the ground.

Four hours driving on a gut-scrambling road brought me to this site, called Ri Du Di San, just above the Yi village of Gan Tian Di, high in the mountains of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, Sichuan Province. I arrived together with my friend Kateryna Bugayevska, a photographer and researcher of ethnic minority culture based in Beijing, along with A Ni Zi Zu and Wu Er Ri, two young Yi men from the area. I lost the rest of the group almost as soon as we arrived: they'd taken the high ground to avoid the mud, while I'd gone the way of the horses.

I stepped from the haze of the campgrounds onto rolling grassland flanked by a cluster of scrub-pocked hills. Hundreds of people squatted on the slopes and milled about the flatland.

The sound of cheering brought me to the edge of a circular field marked with white spray paint between two crowded hills. Odd‌the circle was empty, yet the cheering continued from all sides.

Just then, the crowd on the hill to my right swelled and broke like a frantic wave. Two small children in sweat-suits rushed past me, laughing. A tall young man in a black jacket adorned with silver balls dashed partway up the hillside.

Others followed suit, dashing this way and that. As the crowd parted, I saw that people were dodging the path of a massive brown bull. The animal's nostrils flared and spouted steam into the air as it lumbered.

From a long table perched on one of the hills, unfazed announcers narrated the action below in a rolling chant of Yi language. Soon several young men with wooden crooks wrangled the wayward bull, which had made its way across the circle and into the crowd on the opposite hill. One of the men got hold of the bull's nose ring and led it away, subdued.

Activities resumed without missing a beat. Two groups of handlers led two new bulls into the middle of the circle, and the next bullfight was on. The bulls took heady whiffs of each other. They stepped in close circles, pressed together.

Frenzied eyes bulging from their sockets, they nudged their horns into each other's paunch. The announcers continued their unabated stream of narration. The people in the crowd urged on their favored bull. The bulls bloodied and jostled each other until one fled the circle, leaving the victor to stamp the dirt triumphant.

This was my introduction to the Yi Torch Festival—the biggest event of the year in the Liangshan region.

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The annual Torch Festival begins on the 24th or 25th day of the sixth lunar month of the Yi calendar (corresponding to late July or early August in the Gregorian calendar) and lasts for three days. The legend of the holiday’s origins most commonly told in Liangshan involves a momentous wrestling match between two demigods, one on earth and one in heaven. The earthly demigod prevailed, evoking the wrath of a powerful god in heaven, who sent a wave of pestilence to afflict the mortals below. The victorious hero guided the Yi in lighting wicker torches to ward off the pestilence. The Yi people I spoke to about the holiday might share this myth, but they more often spoke to the practicality in earlier times of using fire to cleanse one's home and fields of insects during the height of the summer rainy season, in order to combat sickness and ensure a good harvest.

Today, the necessity of a torch-lit purge of pestilence may not be what it once was, but the practice continues, to banish evil spirits and usher in good fortune in their stead. The holiday now involves not only torch processions and bonfire building but also bull-fighting, ram-fighting, horse-racing, beauty pageants, dancing, singing, and wrestling matches (between mortals).

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Celebrations in many urban areas lean toward commercial practices in favor of traditional culture, often imbuing such Torch Festival gatherings with a feeling more of a carnival fairgrounds than a traditional Yi holiday site. Still, these events represent an economic boom for the host towns and draw large numbers of local Yi and Han Chinese, particularly young people eager for a bit of excitement.

High up in the mountains at Ri Du Di San, we

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were a far-cry from the concert pavilions and grandstands of the county town's government-sponsored festivities. What makes the arduous trip to Ri Du Di San worthwhile is that Torch Festival celebrations there are organized and carried out exclusively by Yi communities from the surrounding areas. Ri Du Di San is among the oldest sites of the Torch Festival in the region; local Yi people describe it as a “place of origin” (发源地) for the holiday ceremonies.

FEATURES After many hotly contested bullfights, with more than one bull finding its way into the crowds of onlookers, the next event at Ri Du Di San was a series of ram versus ram battles. Each pair of rams, encircled by a pulsing crowd, would pace backward away from one another before charging full speed into a head-on collision. They crunched horns again and again, until one of the two ran out of the ring, sending one side of handlers into cries of joy and the other into groans of defeat.

As rams clashed on the grass a hundred meters away, the circle that had been used for bullfighting was converted into a horse track. Young Yi riders raced one another, two at a time, around the pitch at breakneck pace. Some jockeys wore Yi formal clothing, while others opted for rough-riding blue jeans and t-shirts.

Friends and family of the riders stood on the inside edge of the track and whipped the horses with long switches as they galloped past.

A young rider in a traditional embroidered jacket ultimately won the competition. No more than fifteen years old, his intensity made up for what he lacked in stature. He bent to his horse's mane and hissed and whispered and yelled encouragement into its ear. The green tassel of the horse's bridle whipped the air in front of his face, as he whipped the horse's rump. He overtook the older rider in front of him, whose cigarette miraculously stayed tucked behind one ear one lap after the next.

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While the horses churned up mud below, music blared from speakers on either side of the announcers' table. An old Yi man sat beside the head commentator and sang into a microphone. The veins in his neck bulged as he swayed back and forth on his stool. Next a group of young girls in embroidered dresses and ornate hats sang mountain songs. Their high-pitched melodies lighted on the meadows and echoed against the hills.

Soft rain began to fall on Ri Du Di San, and bursts of yellow sprung up through the crowd as Yi women opened their umbrellas. The crowd gravitated toward the beauty pageant. Young Yi women in huge silver-studded hats and long dresses draped in silver jewelry paraded through the audience. They strode in circles around the pageant judge as observers pressed in from all sides for photographs and a closer look at their outfits. The women peered through the silver baubles that dangled from the brims of their heavy head-dresses, holding their

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smiles beneath the weight.

After the beauty contest ended, people began to leave Ri Du Di San, first at a trickle, then in large numbers. A heavy rain would make the mountain road at best treacherous, at worst impassable. Not wanting to be stranded on the mountain, most decided to pass on the wrestling matches—the last event of the day—and walked back to their motorbikes, cars, and trucks. On our way out, we paused to watch one match. Two men with swollen biceps wrapped their arms around each other's waist, holding blue sashes between their hands. Not unlike the pairs of bulls and rams feeling each other out, the men took teetering half-steps, bodies pressed tightly together, before one found an opening to hurl the other to the ground.

Daylight waned, and the clouds darkened. An upbeat flurry of car and motorcycle horns sounded from the traffic on the road, as the crowds departed Ri Du Di San.

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On the third and final day of the Torch Festival, Kateryna and I were hoping to observe the last ceremonies of the holiday in a small, local Yi community. We had spent the previous day at events in Puge Town and in a Torch Festival fairgrounds on Luoji Mountain, and while these provided entertainment for people from all over Liangshan, they were more commercial and less geared toward Yi culture than the celebration at Ri Du Di San. A friend of ours named Da Ji Bi Ze offered to host us in his home village for the last evening of the holiday. We rendezvoused with Da Ji on Luoji Mountain. Driving down the steep slants of mountain road, with turns so sharp they felt more

like rotations, we passed Yi families gathered outside their homes plucking chickens and weaving wicker torches for the final night of ceremonies.

Near the foot of the mountain, we pulled over to chat with one family sitting around their small front courtyard. The children looked on as their father pulled the guts from a freshly killed black chicken. The man's mother, grandmother of the family, sat opposite him, fashioning a long torch from thin branches. She carried on conversation and cracked jokes with the family as her hands coaxed the branches into shape and bound them with strips of plastic.

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FEATURES “Does she make all of the torches for the family?” I asked the man, as he drained the chicken’s organs in the pan beside him.

“She does,” he said. “She always does. And you know what—she's already 81 years old!”

The man laughed, and his wife and brothers laughed, and the children laughed. Soon the entire family was laughing, looking in awe at the old grandmother, who had begun to chuckle as well. She chided them in Yi and grinned at us with many wrinkles and few teeth.

Just when the torch in her hands appeared complete, the grandmother tied off the top bundle of ends and continued to add branches from the heap in front of her. The torch grew longer and longer, and the grandmother showed no sign of stopping.

The torch grew so long that had she lifted it from her lap and held it aloft, she could have touched the youngest generations of her family, playing on the other side of the courtyard.

Da Ji drove us to his village of Sha He Mo, where he and several of his neighbors proudly showed us around.

In 2009, the village received investment from the local government in the form of newly paved roads, new homes, a refurbished town center, and a gate that welcomes visitors with both Yi and Chinese characters. The villagers I spoke with, including Da Ji, acknowledged that such action on the part of the government was as much about incentivizing cultural tourism and demonstrating the government's support for minorities as it was about actually helping the villagers of Sha He Mo. Still, they spoke of the work as an improvement.

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A number of Sha He Mo's older homes remain intact—some have chosen to move the short distance to new homes, while others have stayed put. A man named Ji Mu A Qie welcomed me into his mother's courtyard in the new section of the village, where his wife and two young sons sat around a barbeque pit roasting pork and chicken. The family had returned to Sha He Mo from Xichang, where the couple

work as red jade merchants, to spend the Torch Festival with Ji Mu A Qie's mother. As we ate, the two boys—four-and six-years-old—sat on the stoop of their grandmother's house playing with unlit wicker torches.

As darkness approached, members of the community stood on a path to the fields, waiting for the final torch procession of the holiday.

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“Tonight each family appoints one torch-bearer to carry the fire out to the field," Da Ji Bi Ze explained.

"Once the last torch goes into the bonfire, everyone tries to walk away as quickly as possible. Being last from the fire is bad luck!”

A strapping young man bore the first lit torch down the path toward a fallow area of the fields below the village. The other members followed behind, forming a parade that shimmered the air. When they reached the field, each person cast his or her torch into a growing bonfire, then set about making a small structure of wicker twigs. These represented prayers of prosperity and health for each household.

Last to arrive and throw in his torch was the bimo—the shaman priest— of the community, a man named Nie Le A Hei. Quite the character, he found great hilarity in our wanting to take pictures with him near the sweltering bonfire, and kept making funny faces and chattering to himself. The bimo, already on firm spiritual ground, did not seem to mind that he would be the last away from the fire and risk the bad luck Da Ji had spoken of. He lingered with us until night fell in earnest.

The skeletal wicker structures stood silhouetted between the bonfire and the fields. Evil spirits shooed away, blessings ushered in.

With that, we turned our backs on the last flames of this year's Torch Festival in Puge County.

Edward is a junior in Yale College. Contact him at edward.columbia@yale.edu.

Kateryna Bugayevska is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Xiamen University. Contact her at kateryna.bugayevska@ gmail.com.

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POLITICS & DIPLOMACY

GONE WITH THE

WIND ANDREA MONETON uncovers China's worsening air pollution problem.

Image // Juqiang Song

新浪微博@飘在英伦

“W

e only wait for the wind.”

Zheng Liang, a Chinese teacher at Minzu University in Beijing, describes what she and most Beijingers anticipate when smog storms hit China’s capital with no end in sight. Speaking frankly to a class of two students, including myself, her frustrations bleed through in the way she teaches us our lesson about pollution in China. To a certain extent, she means every word of her comment about the wind.

When smog storms strike Beijing, the only thing to do is wait. Oftentimes, however, even waiting for the wind is woefully insufficient; mountains that border three sides of Beijing trap smog particles in the metropolitan area, which means the only wind that can truly clear smog must come from the north.

However, Liang also uses this expression in a more figurative way, as a subtle criticism of Beijing and the Chinese government at large. Like many concerned citizens, she is dissatisfied with the way that the government handles China’s air pollution problem, and criticizes its neglect of an issue for which its development policies are partly responsible. She believes that waiting for the government to take swift action to reduce air pollution is ultimately akin to waiting for the wind to come. When referring to the Chinese Ministry of Environmental Protection, Liang said it has absolutely no teeth in fighting the suffocating air. As a resident of a city whose mere air can be poisonous, her frustrations mirror those of many young people in Beijing considering raising families in the city.

“It has no authority over whether companies produce machinery in an envi-

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POLITICS & DIPLOMACY ronmentally-friendly and sustainable way, and even with proof to the contrary is unable to inflict any punishment on these companies,” Liang said with a tinge of frustration and disappointment. This inability is also often mixed with unwillingness: coal-burning factories often employ thousands of employees, and shutting them down would put them out of work and hurt the local economy. China’s GDP growth is slowing: in 2014, the country failed to reach the government’s target for the first time, and its reported growth of 7.4 percent was the slowest since 1990.

Given these circumstances, it seems unlikely that the government would shut down large factories simply for environmental reasons. Both the wind and the government are temperamental and unreliable solutions; while their temporary nature may hold off the air pollution for a handful of days or weeks, both have failed to trigger long-term changes to China’s environment. However, for short-term events that thrust China onto the global stage, like the 2008 Olympics in Beijing or the 2016 G20 Summit in Hangzhou, a Southern Chinese city, the government has taken measures to curb pollution by shutting down factories and construction sites, resulting in a near-immediate change in lucky cities. For many Chinese citizens, these welcome breaks from pollution remain bittersweet, as they also serve as more reminders of the government’s unwillingness to bring about meaningful change.

Air pollution has long been known to be an ongoing phenomenon that affects daily life across China, a sprawling developing nation that depends on coal as its primary energy source. The problem, however, was thrust under the international spotlight last December when Beijing issued its first ever pollution-related red alert. A second one came within the following week after the city government lifted the first. The red alert all but paralyzed the capital: schools closed, construction sites and factories shut down, and the city government placed restrictions on the number of cars allowed on roads.

Accurately measuring the amount of pollution in the air is challenging. The Air Quality Index (AQI), a measurement of air pollution that takes into account pollutant particles of varying sizes, is commonly used by both Chinese and foreign residents of Beijing. However, the index reaches only up to 500 units, making it difficult to truly measure the scope of the air pollution, especially during a red alert.

Though Liang bitterly recalled the December smog storms, she did laugh as I, a foreigner in Beijing, complained about an AQI of approximately 200. “We start getting concerned when we see an AQI of 350 to 400. What would our lives be like if we worried about lower levels of pollution!” Liang said. Her sentiment seems to extend all the way up to the state level: for example, Beijing’s standards for acceptable air quality far surpass those of the World Health Organization.

Her words serve as a reminder that while the rest of the world watched time lapse videos of a smog storm rolling into Beijing and shadows of human beings enveloped by thick

and dark smog, residents of Beijing live the reality of air pollution every day. Beijing’s citizens are regularly exposed to PM2.5 air pollutants. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, PM2.5 particles are small enough to enter a person’s bloodstream through their lungs, and are extremely harmful to the human body even in small doses, let alone chronic exposure. These pernicious particles are also responsible for environmental pollution and Beijing’s thick smog — they have emerged as an unavoidable part of China’s air for a few reasons.

The first reason behind their emergence is applicable to all of China, which is the world’s leading consumer and producer of coal. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), China was responsible for half of the world’s coal consumption in 2012. The EIA projected only a slight decrease in that share to 46 percent by 2040. Within China, the amount of coal burned only to generate electricity across China was more than double total U.S. coal consumption, and China’s industrial sector similarly burned just under double total U.S. coal consumption. Overall, China consumes approximately four times as much coal as the U.S., showing the importance of electricity generation and industrial use in China’s total coal consumption. Considering the lack of enforceable environ-

Both the wind and the government are temperamental and unreliable solutions. mental protection regulations, this rampant coal consumption has been the major contributor to China’s overall air pollution problem.

Yet, pollution often also comes from within China’s biggest cities. In 2015, the Ministry of Environmental Protection cited exhaust fumes as a major contributor to air pollution, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences has published a study that puts exhaust fumes as the leading cause of pollution in Beijing specifically. The root of the exhaust fumes problem lies in the sheer number of vehicles owned by Beijing residents, which is estimated at 5.4 million by the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy in 2014. Twice a day, rush hour traffic causes massive spikes in PM2.5 levels, creating hazardous conditions for passers-by.

The government also bears partial blame for the severity of exhaust fume pollution in Beijing and China’s other major metropolises. Because of the Environmental Protection Ministry’s failure to enforce regulations aimed at reducing air pollution, many trucks traveling in and out of the city to transport trash, construction materials, and basic necessities like food produce use low-quality gas that fails to meet quality requirements. Thus, as the amount of cars in Beijing continues to grow, the city’s residents are left “waiting for the wind” for the government to take stricter 23

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY environmental protection measures, all the while suffering the consequences of each breath of air filled with polluted particulate matter.

Despite the government’s evident failure to curb pollution and enforcing environmental regulations, the citizen responses have remained limited. While many citizens willingly acknowledge the government’s shortcomings in dealing with environmental issues, the past few years have witnessed only a few instances of open criticism. In 2014, Chai Jing, a Chinese journalist who gained nationwide renown following her reports on the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province, produced Under the Dome, a self-financed documentary on air pollution in China. The documentary features her undercover investigative reporting, including interviews with people ranging from coal plant operators and Beijing truck drivers to experts from China’s best universities. One week after its release, it had been viewed nearly 300 million times, and the Chinese government removed it from any website accessible in Mainland China.

The documentary, still available on YouTube, represented the first major public criticism of the government’s handling of China’s air pollution situation. It also sheds a human light

In addition to the methods that members of Chinese civil society have found to voice their frustrations, it seems that willingness to criticize the government's efforts suffers from a generational gap. on the issue of air pollution in China by explaining Chai’s motivation to produce the film. While the successful journalist was pregnant, her daughter developed a benign tumor. In the documentary, Chai expresses her belief that China’s polluted air caused her daughter’s tumor, and made her unable to provide a safe and healthy environment for her child.

Ultimately, this also plays into Liang’s and many young citizens’ fear of raising families in China: when starting a family, especially in a major city, they are choosing between preserving a connection to their extended family and culture and sacrificing access to a reliably healthy environment.

In response to this difficult choice, some regular citizens have also engaged in protest to demand more from the Communist Party. In Xi’an, a few hours northwest of the nearest major city, Chengdu, students at the Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts placed masks on 1,000 stone statues of lions as part of an environmental protest. In the southwestern city of Chengdu, a group of artists all wearing masks participated in a small-scale silent protest in Tianfu Square, the heart of the city, in December 2016. Authorities questioned them and subsequently closed down the square, a bustling shopping 24

district, for the weekend. As I walked around Tianfu Square in March on a trip to Chengdu, nothing seemed amiss as tourists and locals alike shopped in the cloudy but mostly clean air. Often, however, Chengdu’s air pollution levels rival Beijing’s, which ultimately triggered the artists’ protest.

The limits of the Chengdu protest show that China’s strict laws prohibiting public assembly have made protest a mostly ineffective way of expressing public opinion. Thus, some citizens have also taken different routes to protest the government’s inability to reduce pollution in China’s biggest metropolises. Following the December smog storm that triggered Beijing’s first pollution-related red alert, a group of lawyers brought a lawsuit against Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei Province’s governments, as the three combine a high concentration of heavy industries and manufacturing with a high population density. Although the government has the ability to simply reject the lawsuit, government media outlets like the Global Times reported on the lawsuit, and the Communist Party has set up specific legal channels to accommodate environmental lawsuits against companies accused of violating government regulations.

However, in addition to the varied methods that members of Chinese civil society have found to voice their frustrations, it seems that willingness to criticize the government’s efforts at dealing with pollution suffers from a generational gap. While younger Chinese citizens like Liang seem more open to criticizing the government and even taking action to protest China’s air pollution problem, older people often seem more reluctant. I spoke to my Chinese host mother, a longtime resident of Beijing, about her views on the situation, as we walked through a park near her home. She and her husband form a classic picture of Chinese retirees: together, they volunteer at their local community service center, and spend most mornings at the park near their polished home, participating in traditional singing and dancing activities with friends. During our conversation, I was disappointed to hear what sounded like the content of a government campaign to promote individual responsibility for reducing air pollution.

Though she acknowledged that Beijing’s air quality had worsened over the long-term, she insisted that in the past few years the government’s measures had improved the quality of the city’s air. She praised an increase in the use of public transportation and in the city’s green space, as well as the limits on the use of heating in winter. “I truly believe our city’s air quality is improving and will continue to improve,” she continued, despite my questions about the December smog storm and her thoughts on how the pollution might affect her newborn grandson. As we walked, I could not help but notice the beautiful weather around us, and remembered that the Chinese government’s annual summit, the Two Sessions, was in progress—yet another reminder that the government ultimately has the power to at least alleviate the problem. Meanwhile, Beijingers wait for the wind.

Andrea Moneton is a junior at Georgetown University. Contact her at asm252@georgetown.edu.

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY

THE CORRESPONDENT'S DILEMMA JAYLIA YAN investigates tightening restrictions on foreign journalists in China.

Illustration // Yiou Wang

C

hina positioned the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games as the nation’s grand re-introduction to the international community—and to cover the event appropriately, foreign correspondents in China enjoyed eased restrictions and unencumbered coverage that suggested a liberalization for foreign media in China. After the curtains of the Olympics closing ceremony lowered, however, Chinese officials have reversed their open stance towards foreign correspondents, enforcing regulations more stringently, heightening bureaucratic obstacles, and increasing intimidation in order to curtail reporting counter to party rhetoric. For the first time since 1998, China began expelling foreign journalists and forbidding visa renewals and re-entry, beginning with Melissa Chan from Al-Jazeera in 2012 and Paul Mooney of Reuters the subsequent year. Following Xi Jinping’s ascension to power in 2013, as reported by PEN America, restrictions on foreign journalists markedly increased. Additionally, there was speculation following an announcement from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology that online foreign media would require explicit government approval, spurring concern from political leaders and news organizations worldwide.

The People’s Republic of China has always been wary of foreign media. Following the formation of the state, foreign

correspondents were closely monitored by officials and forced to live in military housing. While mandatory housing policies are no longer enforced and correspondents today are able to travel outside of Beijing without government approval, foreign correspondents who step out of line still face punishment. These include increased bureaucratic pressure through threat of withheld visas or other necessary traveling permits, as well as intimidatio.

Such incidents have increased since the transition to Xi’s administration. So precisely what is allowed? The Chinese Constitution guarantees freedom of speech and press, but censorship is practiced regularly in the name of protecting state secrets—a vaguely defined concept that allows for flexible selection of censored materials by the Central Propaganda Department. Some foreign media and journalism are openly mistrusted and discredited by state-controlled domestic media outlets.

Foreign correspondents face entry barriers that verge on censorship. They include requiring foreign journalists to first obtain permission to work in the country. This allows for China to strictly control the inflow of journalists, barring entrance to writers with portfolios and past reporting not to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) liking. Journalists who are allowed entry must take great pains to avoid 25

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY bureaucratic intimidation and detention, engaging in practices akin to counter-surveillance in order to protect evidence, notes, and sources. Works deemed too inflammatory or illegal by the CCP can result in suspension and expulsion from the country. Censorship may also extend to the parent media organization in order to induce self-censorship practices, as has become the norm for the vast majority of Chinese-produced news and blogs. This might have been the case for Bloomberg journalist Michael Forsythe, who reported on China beginning in 2000. Forsythe’s articles often covered the large financial holdings and corrupt dealings of notable Chinese officials and citizens. Forsythe’s superior, Matthew Winkler, was once overheard by a co-worker stating, “If we run the story, we’ll be kicked out of China,” as first reported by the Telegraph. Winkler has since refuted that controversial stories were scrapped and has not responded to media inquiries regarding the matter. Though Bloomberg has denied self-censorship practices, the reality of the tightrope that foreign media faces in order to operate in China is evident.

Despite allegedly tightly controlling content, Bloomberg’s compliance with CCP censorship failed to bring any advantages when working with the government. Beyond moderating content, correspondents may also control the timing of publication of their work to avoid visa complications. Since journalists must renew their visas annually, they are vulnerable to the whims of CCP bureaucracy and sometimes opt to publish contentious material after the visa renewal deadlines in December to avoid additional controversy that may impact visa renewal for the upcoming year.

When a controversial article is published, CCP censors will often punish the writer individually. Chris Buckley, a correspondent for the New York Times in 2012, had worked in China for over a dozen years. He had most recently assisted associate David Barboza in reporting on the family fortune of former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao. The article detailed a network of assets held by Wen’s family valued at over $2.7 billion, seemingly accrued within a single generation through nepotistic advantages and government awards. The exposé provoked the Chinese foreign ministry to publicly decry the New York Times and block the publication’s website, subsequently denying visa renewals and journalist replacements.

Provocative journalists’ nerves are tested with visa expiries, with some like Buckley forced out of the country as their visas expire, or others such as Buckley’s superior, Hannah Beech, only obtaining a renewal of a visa the day of expiry. Visa renewal procedures typically last two months.

In China, censorship is thought a necessary tool to curb damaging influence and lies—the same logic used in the construction of the Great Firewall. However, the Great Firewall is relatively easy to circumvent for determined users, and the evolving nature of content and technology means that the massive bureaus tasked with monitoring are constantly falling behind internet users. Foreign correspondents and media organizations arguably find it less difficult to circumvent censors’ bureaucratic efforts, with greater resources and protections than Chinese nationals.

Organizations with banned sites have articles reprinted and widely replicated on the Chinese blogosphere by virtue of 26

an adept internet community intent on increasing domestic consumption of and access to information. Reporters who have taken to social media have amassed followings on Weibo and microblogs that are more difficult for the CCP to monitor. Foreign media also can act as a shield for Chinese media—translations of foreign correspondents’ provoking investigations can be translated and reprinted and information can be sent from locals to foreign media with much less fear of being reported. While journalists increasingly risk repression and government ire, the tools to circumvent and independently report have increased in tandem.

No journalists have been expelled through visa manipulation since 2013. China’s flirtation with kicking out journalists has most likely been deemed too visible. However, in 2013, the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China (FCCC) reported that over 80 percent of surveyed journalists faced similar or worsening conditions. Beyond bureaucratic difficulties, foreign correspondents have faced more severe consequences.

Journalists that write more sensitive articles can be forced to sign confessions of guilt and retractions, face detention, harassment and arrest—every consequence is compounded for domestic assistants or sources. These practices and guidelines, codified by the State Council in 1990, have seen recent expansions. News organizations’ sites have been banned from Chinese cyberspace, following the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s aforementioned new policy toward foreign-owned companies. Affected foreign media include Bloomberg, the Independent, Le Monde, Reuters, and the New York Times.

To date, the Chinese government has received only verbal admonishments from foreign politicians regarding censorship of foreign correspondents. As a diplomatic last resort, states have the ability to reciprocally deny access to Chinese journalists from state media organizations abroad—but many countries, just like news organizations in China, have been reluctant to burn bridges in order to protect individual journalists, a stance that damages free speech as a whole. As Mooney puts it: “Governments are reluctant to go tit-for-tat on this issue, but when it comes to trade or security, diplomats don’t have their visas renewed and there are consequences— why should the media be held to a higher level?” In this vein, suggestions to protect journalists include outlining terms in trade and security agreements vital to Chinese economic growth, refusing new media visas for replacement correspondents working for Chinese media organizations abroad, or blocking the heads of Chinese media organizations from attending news summits. Most solutions outline consequences and publicity—there is currently no incentive for China to permanently amend policies and practices against foreign correspondents. While major events like the 2008 Summer Olympics and upcoming 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing may bring about temporary increased transparency, it is imperative that new responses are crafted to ensure that foreign correspondents can rely on reduced intimidation and repression. Protection of foreign correspondents is vital and difficult, but not impossible.

Jaylia Yan is a junior at Arizona State University. Contact her at j.yan7@ lse.ac.uk.

POLITICS & DIPLOMACY

THE ROAD WELL-TRAVELED

JAKOB LENGACHER evaluates China's efforts to extend its influence into Central Asia.

Illustration // Yiou Wang

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irst proposed by Xi Jinping in late 2013, the “One Belt, One Road” (OBOR) initiative covers a wide range of objectives, aiming to “instill vigor and vitality into the ancient Silk Road, connect Asian, European and African countries more closely and promote mutually beneficial cooperation to a new high and in new forms,” according to the text of the policy itself. As a development strategy, OBOR creates two main directions of the expansion of China’s international influence as Beijing seeks the authority, strength, and respect required to become a world power.

“One Road” refers to a maritime Silk Road, which strives to connect Chinese trade with South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the South Pacific. One Road pushes Chinese investment in these countries not only with the goal of diversifying China’s export market, but also with hopes of spreading China’s sphere of influence to new regions. Where One Road looks to the sea, “One Belt”—the Silk Road Economic Belt— pushes Chinese investment in countries along the historic land-based Silk Road, stretching through Central Asia to the Middle East and even to Africa. Despite the initiative’s romanticizing of an ancient tradition, One Belt can be seen as a continuation of China’s highly successful Central Asian development strategies implemented over the past fifteen years, strategies that would not have succeeded without the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Utilizing the SCO, China has diminished Russian influence in Central Asia over the past decade and a half, meeting its needs for

economic development and providing the basis for OBOR. The SCO evolved from the Shanghai Five, a cooperative organization formed in 1996, when China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan sought a means of defusing tense border relations in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Agreements signed by the five countries ensured that each member would demilitarize its borders to a minimum level while promising mutual nonaggression, a process which has helped to stabilize Central Asia. Professor David Schneider of the University of Massachusetts Amherst argues in American Diplomacy that a stable Asia is what every Chinese regime since the Zhou dynasty in the 11th century B.C.E. has required in order to maintain control over its western frontier. Schneider further argues that without secure borders China cannot ensure sustainable growth. The People’s Republic of China helped secure its western border with the founding of the Shanghai Five, thereby allowing for economic growth and subsequently pushing the group’s focus towards economic cooperation.

With Uzbekistan’s entry to the group in 2001, the group was reborn as the SCO with a new objective of combating terrorism, separatism, and extremism within its six member states.

Greater cooperation between member states via intelligence sharing, treaty-backed support for each state’s sovereignty over breakaway regions, and a still-growing membership have led to a more stable Central Asia and further expansion opportunities for China.

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POLITICS & DIPLOMACY The framework established by the SCO has allowed China to diversify its energy imports while increasing its economic presence in Central Asia through investment. Bilateral agreements signed during the last decade ensure a steady flow of fossil fuels from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan into China, fueling development while reducing reliance on coal. Besides bailing out Kazakhstan following the 2008 financial crisis, China has become both Uzbekistan’s second-largest trade partner and the largest investor in its transportation sector, with bilateral trade between the two countries increasing 60 percent year-on-year during the first half of 2013. In exchange, Chinese products flow into Central Asian markets to meet increased demand, making China a key economic player in the area.

Since OBOR’s implementation, the SCO has become an even more critical component of China’s policy in Central Asia. Just after launching OBOR, China deepened its commitment to the region in 2014 by announcing the allocation of USD $5 billion worth of available credit for further joint ventures with member states. OBOR adds a new facet to this expansion, seeking to extend China’s cultural influence into Central Asia using the indispensable economic ties set up under the SCO. In December, 2014, the Chinese Ethnic Cultural Foundation under the Ministry of Culture and the Kazakh People’s Spiritual Civilization Development Foundation launched the Silk Road International Forum in Astana, Kazakhstan as part of OBOR. Launched with the blessing of Zhang Hanhui, who in addition to being China’s Kazakh ambassador also represents the SCO in that country, the forum focuses on international cultural exchange and development between countries historically along the Silk Road, ranging from Asia to Africa.

Part of this cultural exchange initiative includes granting Chinese government scholarships to 30,000 students from all SCO member states, attracting foreign students such as Achmed Dauev to China. Dauev currently studies at Shaanxi Normal University in Xi’an, having chosen to come to China over France, South Korea, and Malaysia in part due to China’s presence in his native Kazakhstan. “There are a lot of Chinese companies [in Kazakhstan]. So [if you study in China] you can easily find a job with a high salary,” he says. While not a Chinese scholarship recipient himself, Dauev says that many of his fellow Kazakh classmates receive scholarships from the Confucius Institute or the Chinese government directly.

With greater numbers of students from Central Asia bringing money into China and bringing Chinese culture back home, China’s presence in Central Asia grows each year. Dauev has developed a great appreciation for China over his four years in the country, and says he actively engages in cultural exchange by bringing Chinese gifts back for friends and family in addition to cooking Chinese food at home. While one student may not make a marked impact on China’s cultural presence in Central Asia, the influence of more than 30,000 cannot be ignored.

As China fills the vacuum left by the Soviet Union in Central Asia, Russia is striving to maintain its presence in the region. Most of Moscow’s response has occurred in the energy sector, with Vladimir Putin shifting the SCO’s focus towards

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energy in 2006 where Russia holds an upper hand. As a part of this shift to energy trade, Putin proposed that SCO member states only make energy deals with each other in order to strengthen regional trust and economic exchange. This move had limited impact on China, which imports most liquid fuels from Russia, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan. However, Russia’s proposal also lays the foundation for a Russian energy monopoly on natural gas and gasoline, while at the same time deterring China from turning towards alternative sources like Afghanistan for potentially lower prices. While Beijing no doubt benefits from the energy trade, as a net energy importer China is beholden to its sources of natural gas and petroleum, which gives Russia potential leverage to check Chinese expansion in Central Asia.

More recently, Russia has responded to OBOR within the confines of the SCO as well. The SCO Energy Club, first proposed by Russia in 2006, has recently become a functioning arm of the organization, with the stated aim of deepening energy cooperation among both member and nonmember states while bolstering energy security.

The club may give energy suppliers among participating states—Russia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Iran—an economic advantage over the consumers via consensus on price setting, tariffs, and transportation, but for now the body is too young to have any substantial impact. What will come of Russia’s response to China’s success with OBOR remains to be seen, but it may prompt preemptive action from China to keep energy prices low. It may also provoke China to erode Russia’s cultural presence with initiatives like the Silk Road International Forum, which not only instructs Central Asian students in Chinese, but also seeks to revive pride in Central Asian ethnic languages.

By emphasizing the development of traditional folk art and culture along the Silk Road, the forum hopes to inspire these countries to take pride in their historic cultural heritage and move away from their recent Soviet history.

OBOR is a natural extension of China’s Central Asian development strategy over the past decade and a half.

Facilitated by the SCO, Beijing has sent waves of investment into Central Asia to aid in infrastructure and economic development, stimulating demand for Chinese goods while establishing business ties in the region at the same time.

One Belt seeks to further develop these strategies to increase Beijing’s cultural presence in Central Asia, while One Road seeks to apply them further afield. As a result, China has continued to prosper while Russia has been dealt the losing hand despite its maneuvering in the energy sector. The SCO will play a key role in the coming years. SCO laid the groundwork for OBOR, allowing Beijing to fully flex its economic might while simultaneously building a cultural presence in the Central Asia. Russia in turn has used the same organization to make gains in the energy sector and resist Chinese expansion, but these tactics are have yet to show concrete gains. China’s global presence will likely continue to spread under OBOR, keeping the SCO relevant fifteen years after its birth and making it worthy of close examination as its membership grows.

Jakob is a Fulbright Student Researcher at Heilongjiang University. He can be reached at jakob.lengacher@yahoo.com.

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

SPRINGTIME FOR

CHINESE GREEN ENERGY

MICHAEL BEIT charts the unexpected rise of China's green energy industry.

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n 2015, the state-owned power company China Three Gorges Corporation (CTG) announced a $3.7 billion deal to acquire the operational rights for the Jupia and Ilha Solteria dam in Brazil, becoming the second largest private power producer in Brazil. These two dams can produce an energy output of up to 3,444 MW and 1,551 MW of energy (the Hoover dam can produce up to 2,080 MW). This was hardly CTG’s first notable investment in Brazil; acquisition deals have occurred since 2011. The CTG case in Brazil demonstrates a larger trend in the investment preferences of Chinese companies—movement away from Chinese domestic fixed-asset investment and towards outward foreign direct investment (OFDI). This trend has been exacerbated by recent renewable energy supply chain shifts and changes in China’s domestic energy and monetary policy, just as consumption of green energy domestically is on the rise, with the twelfth Five-Year Plan outlining a renewable energy target of 11.4 percent of domestic primary energy. The CTG case illustrates this trend and demonstrates that China is poised to be a leader in not only the consumption of green energy, but in its development, production, and distribution as well.

Chinese private individuals and corporations are changing the ways they invest, transforming behavior in both the sectors of investment and the shape of deals that occur. For example, these actors have shifted from development-focused domestic investments to global investments in industries beyond heavy industrials. An August 2016 report from the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission noted a decline in domestic investments from private entities compared to government entities, including state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Over the last two years, there has been a 20 percent decline in year-on-year growth in fixed-asset investment from private investors domestically. Yet despite this decline, national GDP growth in China has remained strong, hovering above 6.5 percent. Where and how, then, are these Chinese entities investing?

Generally speaking, Chinese investors are willing to invest in geographic regions and countries that are too politically unstable for Western investors, which has created an array of international opportunities. These investments occur in countries such as Ecuador, Sierra Leone, and Zimbabwe, where Chinese investments comprise 57 percent, 70 percent, and 82 percent of the total FDI, respectively. As domestic

Image // BG Elements

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ECONOMICS & BUSINESS growth has slowed and the economy has shifted from industrial to service-based firms, these international investments have grown relatively appealing. These international investments have drawn much criticism, both for exploiting countries with a weak rule of law, and for importing Chinese labor, providing little opportunity for domestic workers in the countries receiving investment. Strengthened rule of law and developing domestic environmental policy may deter investors from domestic opportunities, driving them towards foreign investment. Regardless, this willingness to take on greater financial risk is not limited to geographic choice.

As for how people are investing, Chinese OFDI now exceeds the foreign direct investment received by China.

This is a significant shift in the Chinese economy, which was strongly supported by FDI during the initial years of reform and opening-up. In the early 2000s, the Chinese government started the “Go Global” initiative to encourage investors to search for opportunities abroad. These investments range from entertainment to agriculture, but among them, renewable energy investments have garnered particular attention. According to a report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, Chinese foreign investment in renewable energy reached $32 billion in 2016. The investments and acquisitions are often in developed western countries, like Germany, the United States, and Australia, but do include developing countries as well. These investments now frequently take the form of leasing and business services, such as the case with CTG in Brazil. The capital lease model, in which the Chinese firm leases the operational rights instead of purchasing the asset, is less binding and could potentially act as a long term buffer should the economic situation decline in these countries. Amid China’s total OFDI stock, the single largest category was leasing and business services, further demonstrating a preference for this mode of investment. In many M&A cases, Chinese investors keep the existing workers at a particular site, and opt for a capital injection to revamp failing businesses, instead of taking a more direct interventionary role.

Chinese companies are not just taking over the investment side of renewable energy, but the development and manufacturing side as well. China now invests more money annually in the research and development of renewable energy than any other country. In manufacturing, Chinese companies are similarly dominant. Two of the top three solar panel manufacturers worldwide are Chinese and three of the top ten wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese. Chinese investors have been known to acquire Western companies to gain access to more advanced technical and management skills, but with renewable energy equipment manufacturing, they seem to be far surpassing their Western counterparts.

Despite this global dominance, government policy has had a mixed impact on the manufacturing and investment side. In China’s thirteenth Five-Year Plan, the government stated its intention to “build a modern energy system that is clean, low-carbon, safe, and efficient, and will safeguard the country’s energy security.” Later on, the government also announced plans to invest roughly $360 billion in green energy investments between 2016 and 2020. However, Chinese

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foreign exchange reserves fell 22 percent between 2014 and 2016, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, creating a cash exodus, which has pushed the government to enact protective monetary policy, suggesting that the “Go Global” campaign may have been too successful. As a result, even regular cross-border business transactions between Hong Kong and mainland, nominally part of “One China,” have become more difficult.

The value of solar energy has also declined, leading some skeptics to wonder if the government will follow through on their declared initiative. While the Chinese government has previously advocated investment in sustainable energy sources and investment abroad, recent actions hint at a potential change in policy in the future. Monetary policy could drive current interest in green energy investment into the domestic market. This is still unlikely though as large industrial SOEs make the environment harmful to competition. According to the China Statistical Yearbook, SOEs comprise 66.4 percent of energy production firms as of 2011. However, despite these mild barriers to investment and development there is another recent development contributing to China’s growing lead in green energy: the United States.

In stark contrast to China’s focus on renewable energy, the U.S. government is backing down on green energy, withdrawing from international agreements, and creating an unfavorable domestic business environment for renewable energy enterprises. Previously, renewable energy was 9.9 percent of the United States’’s total energy supply, which is marginally below that of China. However, with the recent announcement of the Trump administration’s America First Energy Plan, it is unclear how this will change in the future.

The plan places an emphasis on support of the coal and oil industries, which already present competition to renewable energy ventures. Additionally, the Trump administration has expressed a desire to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord, marking the exit of a former key player in the green energy field. However, according to Joy Dantong Ma, a research associate at the Paulson Institute, it is difficult to say at this point how the recent changes in political landscape will impact future investments. Large investment projects take several years to put together, whereas trade would more likely see a direct and noticeable impact.

Despite the headwinds of respective monetary policy or more general challenges in renewable energy, China is currently poised to be a leader in the green energy industry. Chinese investors have established a strong hold on the market abroad. Chinese companies control a significant portion of the manufacturing of goods related to green energy, and the Chinese government, as well as the private sector, has dedicated significant resources to continuing research and development. In contrast to China’s enduring commitment, the United States, formerly one of the major players in green energy, has stepped down. Amid an international political climate that is increasingly nationalistic and conservative, China has emerged as a leader in an industry where it has often been subjected to criticism.

Michael Beit is a freshman at the University of Chicago. Contact him at michaelbeit@uchicago.edu.

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

IN TECH,

Illustration // Julia Shi

Background // PIXELS | Chroniques des (R)évolutions Numériques

CHINA MARCHES FORWARD

LIONEL CHENTIAN JIN studies China's transformation into a global center of innovation.

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hy can’t China innovate? That was the question the authors of a 2014 Harvard Business Review article set out to answer. In a country often perceived as “a land of rule-bound rote learners, efforts to leap ahead in innovation were ultimately limited by the country’s rigid hierarchies and limits on intellectual freedom”, the authors concluded.

Skepticism about China’s innovation prowess is not new. For many, China remains the land of bootleg DVDs, knock-off iPhones, and second-rate appliances. Successful companies like Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent are often dismissed as “fast followers”— ruthlessly efficient at imitating Western counterparts but ultimately barren of their own creative spark.

These stereotypes are now being shattered.

Live in Beijing and Shanghai for a couple of weeks and it becomes apparent how Chinese companies have seized the lead in mobile technology. After starting as an imitator of messaging apps like WhatsApp, Tencent’s WeChat app has leapt ahead.

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ECONOMICS & BUSINESS It pushed the boundaries of social networks, enhancing the social media experience with its early introduction of features like video messaging. But more than a social media app, it is a complete digital platform. WeChat added e-payment functionality before companies like Facebook thought to do so, and now allows users to do everything from hailing a taxi to paying the utilities bill to accessing government services.

In 2016, WeChat hit 768 million daily active users. Its robust growth has propelled its parent company Tencent to become the most valuable publicly-listed company in Asia.

In artificial intelligence, while Google and Microsoft continue to captivate the public imagination with the incredible feats like Google software AlphaGo’s victory over Go grandmaster Lee Sedol, Chinese AI researchers are making their presence felt in a big way. At AI conferences, Chinese researchers have nearly caught up with their American colleagues in terms of the number of papers published. In its strategic plan for AI research, the Obama administration observed that China has overtaken the U.S. in publications regarding deep learning, a state-of-the-art approach that builds multi-layered modules of artificial neuron networks and that has achieved impressive results.

In 2014, Chinese tech giant Baidu also pulled off a major coup, hiring Andrew Ng—one of the leaders of the burgeoning field – away from Google, where he led the Google Brain project. “I thought the best place to advance the AI mission is at Baidu,” Ng was reported to say when asked why he decided to take on the chief scientist role at Google’s Chinese counterpart.

Ng led the rapid expansion of Baidu’s AI team, allowing Baidu to not only develop search capabilities that rival those of Google but to also move into new business areas like autonomous driving. While Ng recently decided to leave Baidu to pursue new projects, he leaves the 1,300-strong team and its pipeline of promising technologies in the hands of rising stars who are well-positioned to further Baidu’s remarkable rise.

China’s rise as a leader in innovation is fueled by the convergence of three forces: government investment, the emergence of a cohort of tech-savvy millennials, and a fierce work ethic.

The Chinese government made innovation a top priority in its thirteenth five-year plan. The plan, released in 2016, emphasized funding and support for technological innovation projects and called for the establishment of innovation parks in cities like Beijing and Shenzhen to attract leading researchers.

State-backed venture capital firms in China have helped jump-start the startup scene, and the establishment of a $30 billion fund in the Southern tech hub Shenzhen generated a flurry of excitement. Increased funding for technological research has also spurred the expansion of research departments in Chinese universities.

The influx of government spending into technological projects also coincides with the emergence of a generation of avid tech users and skilled programmers. The six hundred million internet users in China constitute the largest single market of tech users in the world, providing local companies

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with a powerful incentive to innovate.

As computer science gains popularity, elite universities like Tsinghua are graduating formidable numbers of young coders and engineers who leap at the opportunity to work at some of the nation’s hottest firms. In fact, worried that their children will be left behind, parents are sending their kids for coding lessons, starting from pre-school.

China’s doubters argue that the country’s high-pressure, exam-centric education system incentivizes rote-learning over creative thinking, limiting the innovative ability of Chinese software developers. This line of reasoning overlooks the fact that much of engineering involves rigorous problem solving, and on this front, the Chinese education system fares better than many Western ones, at least according to measures like the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA).

Besides, even if the average Chinese student may be conditioned to be less creative than his or her American peers, top Chinese students have demonstrated that they can hold their own in solving novel, challenging problems that require “leaps of insight.” At the 2016 International Olympiad in Informatics—the Youth Olympics of Computer Science— Chinese students swept both first and second place, with the Chinese delegation ranking first in the world.

While it is true that the Chinese tend to be less entrepreneurial and more risk-averse, what they lack in inspiration they make up with perspiration. The sheer number of start-ups and the intensity of competition in China mean that companies are forced to execute projects remarkably quickly. This culture of rapid adaptation to provide users with a flawless experience underpins the success of apps like WeChat and Alipay.

China still has formidable challenges to overcome as it seeks to transform into the world leader in innovation. Part of the success of homegrown tech giants stems from the protectionist advantages they have been given over foreign players, notably in the form of restrictions on foreign companies. Besides, even as Tencent has perfected its WeChat app to cater to the idiosyncrasies of Chinese customers, it has struggled to make headway in foreign markets where competitors have already established a strong network.

Still, China’s appeal is clear. More and more U.S. firms are moving to start R&D centers in China to draw on talent from the country and support their growing Chinese operations. Last October, Apple CEO Tim Cook made a surprise visit to Shenzhen to announce the opening of its second R&D center in China, as Apple seeks to fend off the fierce challenge from Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE. From Beijing to Shanghai to Shenzhen, city governments are vying to emulate the success of Silicon Valley and position themselves as the destination of choice for global companies and foreign talent.

For long periods in its history, China was a cradle of innovation. It was the Chinese who invented gunpowder, the compass, and paper, shaping our understanding of and interaction with the world. Now, as China rediscovers its innovative spark, it is set to shake things up once again.

Lionel Chentian Jin is a junior in Yale College. Contact him at chentian. jin@yale.edu.

ECONOMICS & BUSINESS

Image // Shutterstock

CHINA'S IPO MARKET

WILLIAM MIN explains a worsening logjam in the Chinese IPO market.

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n 2016, growth in the global IPO market declined significantly from its pace in 2015. While the number of IPOs dropped in Asia as well, the decrease in growth in the Asian market was not nearly as severe. According to figures from KPMG, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE) was the second largest IPO market in terms of funds raised in 2016, behind the Hong Kong Stock Exchange but ahead of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

While the decline of activity in the U.S. IPO market can be attributed to a string of disappointing IPOs and a lack of superstars to reverse the trend, the Chinese IPO market suffers from a traffic jam of companies looking to go public. After filing for an IPO in China, a company has to wait an estimated 30 months before being able to raise public capital—an exponentially longer timeframe than the three months needed in the United States. As a result, there are over 600 companies still waiting in line, according to figures from December 2016 gathered by the China Securities Regulatory Committee.

The sluggish pace of the IPO process in China is dependent on a multitude of factors.

First, China’s stock exchanges are extremely volatile. After a crash in July of 2015, China halted all pending IPOs until November later that year. IPO activity has been sluggish ever since, as regulators seek to stabilize the market and fear that a flood of new listings could cause crashes similar to the one seen in 2015.

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ECONOMICS & BUSINESS Second, government regulation is stringent and companies looking to go public must undergo a rigorous vetting process.

One particularly limiting requirement is that companies filing for an IPO must demonstrate three consecutive years of profits. Companies are also not allowed to change their ownership structure once they apply, preventing companies from participating in mergers or acquisitions that may bolster their business.

One result of the time-consuming vetting process is that any companies that do manage to go public have seen highly successful IPOs. The limited number of IPOs heightens early market demand, and as a result only two percent of listings on the Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges fell on the first day of trading from 2009 to 2015. Conversely, the uncertainty surrounding IPOs has damaged corporate management structures, making it more difficult for publicly listed companies to retain executives since their influence companies is reduced.

The rule has pushed some companies to pursue backdoor listings by merging with a company that is already public.

One high-profile company which elected to take this route is SF Holdings, the holding company that operates SF Express, one of China’s largest courier companies. By purchasing Maanshan Dingtai Rare Earth & New Material Co, a manufacturer of steel wire, and using it as a shell company to inject their assets into, SF Holdings was ultimately able to publicly list its own company. The reverse-merger has been extremely successful, as SF Holdings now has a market cap of $33 billion, the largest market cap of any company listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange.

In September 2016, China introduced a new fast-track policy that was meant to reduce the congestion of IPO traffic. The new policy stipulates that companies from poor areas of the country can have their application approved in a few months rather than years. Some companies have even relocated their headquarters in attempts to go public faster under the new rule. Tibet Aim Pharma, a Lhasa-based pharmaceutical company, is legally registered in Lhasa but still has its production center based in Sichuan.

Their IPO was approved months after they filed and their shares are valued at over $30 (at the time of publication) since opening at $7.27 in December of 2016. However, it still remains unclear what exactly a company must do to be officially reclassified as being from a poor region.

The fast-track policy has been ineffective. For starters, very few companies—perhaps as few as four according to the Securities Times, a subsidiary to the state-operated People’s Daily—in line for IPO approval can utilize the rule.

Hundreds of IPO applicants are clustered in the richer provinces on the coast, while the majority of poorer, inland provinces have less than five applicants. Additionally, the method by which a province was considered poor and included in the rule was based on numbers that have barely been updated since their initial collection in the 1980s. This process left out counties from the Gansu province, which ranks as one of China’s poorest. Unsurprisingly, the new fast-track has done little to alleviate the IPO bottleneck.

The choice of counties suggests that the main focus of

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the Securities Regulatory Committee may have been to redistribute wealth, rather than to unburden the overloaded queue of companies waiting to IPO. Yet, the policy also fails in that regard if so few companies will benefit from the rule. One company that goes public and supplies the local government with tax payments, while a step in the right direction, cannot change the economic status of an entire county. If companies cannot sustain themselves in poorer markets, ultimately they may need to relocate back to larger ones, further widening the wealth gap regulators are trying to close.

Looking forward, the glut of companies in line will likely remain for years to come. There are over 600 currently waiting, but nearly 700 more in the wings awaiting provincial approval before they also join the stagnant line. Regulators have also looked to prune the waiting list, sifting through companies in line and removing those that do not meet their standards.

China’s superstars, however, are not affected by the status of the Chinese IPO market. Instead, they look to list on foreign stock exchanges, with tech giants Alibaba listing on the NYSE, Baidu on the NASDAQ, and Tencent on the HKSE. Even unlisted state-owned enterprises look to foreign stock exchanges to raise capital, with Postal Savings Bank of China Co. going public on the HKSE and raising $7.4 billion in the largest IPO of 2016.

At the outset of 2017, the global IPO market is preparing to bounce back from an uninspiring 2016 and the Chinese market looks to follow suit.

An encouraging sign at the tail-end of 2016 was the Twilio IPO. Twilio, a tech company, was able to surpass its private sector valuation, unlike the majority of tech companies that went public last year. Its shares were up 90 percent on the third day of trading, and they are up over 100 percent from their initial offering price of fifteen dollars per share. Two of the most anticipated IPOs of the year are Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba, and Snap, the parent company of the messaging app Snapchat. Ant Financial was valued at $60 billion in its last round of fundraising and could look to raise up to $25 billion at a $100 million valuation. Meanwhile, Snap is looking to raise over $3 billion at a valuation over $20 billion.

China is also currently deliberating on a new fast-track policy that would grant first priority to domestic tech giants looking to list. One of the obvious candidates is Ant Financial.

If Ant Financial were to list on a Chinese exchange, such as the SSE or SZSE, this would represent a huge boon for the Chinese IPO market as a whole and could pave the road for future high-profile IPOs. It would also greatly accelerate China’s goal of establishing the global reputation of its stock exchanges.

The Chinese IPO market looks to maintain its strong global position in terms of funds raised and companies looking to list. The SSE surpassed the NYSE last year in funds raised and it will only continue to distance itself further as the market and country both continue to mature.

William Min is a sophomore in Yale College. He can be reached at william. min@yale.edu.

LIFE & CULTURE

THERE SHALL BE A

UNIVERSITY

A Bold Civil Education Initiative in Nanjing

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stumbled upon the application form for Xiuhe Academy on Wechat in the summer of 2015. Formally on medical leave for anxiety and sleep disorders, I was looking for an activity to reinvigorate my broken body and mind. I was vaguely aware that I would take part in a one-week liberal arts curriculum focusing on Chinese history and politics and that I would receive a modest scholarship of $120 to cover transport and lodging. Getting off the train in Nanjing, I was greeted by the organizer Yang Yurong and a small group of student volunteers from Nanjing, Shanghai and Guangdong.

I had no inkling that I was embarking on a wonderful academic endeavor.

Over the next seven days, I attended lectures delivered by leading scholars from across Taiwan and mainland China.

I was fortunate enough to befriend Dr. Lim Chuan-Tion, renowned Taiwanese scholar on East Asia regional diplomacy.

Our friendship resulted in a formal interview on political identity in East Asia, the first of its kind published in the Chinese popular press. I met Rinchen Namgyal, a Tibetan student at Nanjing University who dreamed about building primary schools in his impoverished hometown. I met Mr. Guo from Beijing. A retired civil servant in his late fifties, Guo planned to travel extensively and had become an amateur scholar. I also met Chen Guojun, a philosophy student from an unheard-of college in Shanghai who was determined to get his Ph.D. in the United States. A group of dreamers who could not find their niches in state-controlled institutions gathered at a flourishing civil education initiative.

Located in Nanjing, the Xiuhe Academy is a one-week summer school. Every year, instructors from prestigious mainland and foreign institutions provide brilliant insights across the humanities and social sciences in front of a diverse

Photography // Yang Yurong

WENBIN GAO recounts his experience at Xiuhe Academy in Nanjing.

audience. Fees are minimal and scholarships are widely available. Instruction at the academy applies the Socratic Method.

Classes are small, often consisting of fewer than ten people.

Alimu, a Uyghur student from Xinjiang, was most impressed with the interactions between professors and students: “I have never received so much attention from teachers in my life,” he said. “They are really passionate and they genuinely care about us.”

The academy began in 2012 as a commemorative lecture for the renowned historian Gao Hua, who passed away in the previous year. Famous for his opus, How Did the Red Sun Rise, Gao dedicated his career to exploring the reasons for the rise of Mao Zedong and his brutal dictatorship. His poor health and early death at 57 are considered by many as the bitter fruit of an uneasy relationship with the Chinese government which forced Gao into poverty. Widely revered as an icon of free-speech and intellectual integrity, Gao’s untimely death not only sparked national mourning, but also inspired a group of his students in Nanjing to pass on his legacy by creating a lecture in his name.

The first lecture took place in a modest classroom in Jinling High School. Yang Yurong recalled the scene: “Professor Liu Woyu from Nanjing University gave a lecture on the Chinese civil war. It started in the morning. By the time it ended, I could already see the moon outside the window.” In the most recent session in 2016, the Academy proudly presented a seven-day series of twenty-six lectures organized by twelve professors including prominent figures like Taiwanese Confucian scholar Lin Anwu and science historian Zhang Butian. Topics ranged from solar technology to cross-strait relations. Students came from ten provinces. Recreational activities included a welcome banquet and performances of zither and Kun opera.

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LIFE & CULTURE The organizers of the academy, however, dream of something even bigger. In “A Letter to Friends of the Academy,” they wrote: “We dream of building a global, multidisciplinary, and inclusive university. In the past decades, private institutions of higher education have become extinct on the mainland. No one has any experience of building and managing a university. We started from organizing seminars and lectures and we believe eventually, probably after thirty, fifty or even a hundred years, we will have a university.”

Before 1949, private universities, often founded and funded

by Western churches, were a formidable presence in China.

Nanjing, for instance, was famous for Nanking University founded by the American Methodists. So in one way, Xiuhe Academy is not exploring alien territory but reconnecting with the city’s past. It would be a gross simplification, however, to equate the Academy with a liberal arts college.

The concept of a “shuyuan” is a uniquely Chinese concept

for which “academy” is only a generic translation. Stemming from the learning communities of the Confucian tradition, it is more than an educational institution in the Platonic sense.

A shuyuan is an intimate social network that nourishes and protects its members. Its maintenance is a collective effort and the relationship between instructor and student is often similar to that between a father and son.

Every year the academy encourages each participant to donate ten RMB in an effort called the “one hundred tens.”

The meager income, combined with larger donations from scholars and entrepreneurs, has sustained the nonprofit thus far. Utilizing new technology, the academy is also a vibrant online intellectual hub. A small team of volunteers run several Wechat chat rooms where hundreds of people are constantly discussing politics and social issues. When a university in Guangdong disciplined a lesbian student for

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proposing to her girlfriend on campus and condemned the act as “public obscenity,” members of the academy quickly mobilized and drafted an open letter calling for tolerance and constructive dialogue.

Under the Communist regime, education remains largely a state prerogative. Private endeavors can be dangerous. Right now the organization remains technically “illegal.” Yang confessed that this was a cause “with zero hope.” “I have no five-year plans,” he joked, alluding to the five-year economic plans of the Chinese government, “The next year is enough to worry about.”

I cannot help but remember Martin Luther King’s famous line, “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” I memorized Dr. King’s speech in high school when learning about democracy in Chinese schools was less taboo than today. And I believe its truth still resonates, despite the tightening grip of censorship. I have volunteered for the academy for the past two years. I interviewed high school applicants interested in queer theory and gave online lectures on sexuality and religion attended by more than a hundred students. I did things that my communist grandfather would rail against and my liberal parents could only imagine in their wildest dreams.

My co-workers at the academy, and thousands of others working for similar civil initiatives, are the unsung heroes of our age, discreetly and diligently striving for intellectual diversity in China. In September 2014, Liren Library, a nonprofit famous for building libraries in rural areas, was forced to disband after consistent harassment from the government. The incident was a heavy blow to the burgeoning civil education movement, but more people carried on. Prominent reading groups include the Veritas Summer Academy (founded in Nanjing in 2015) and the Symposium Salon (founded by Columbia students in Beijing in 2013). Students read works of great thinkers like Plato and Max Weber and think critically about politics and social issues. While the majority of participants come from well-to-do families, one should remain hopeful that similar initiatives will eventually benefit students from more humble backgrounds. The Chinese government is likely to tolerate some limited form of civil education since cultivation of talent usually translates into economic growth.

In the Soviet propaganda film Lenin in 1918, Vasily says to his hungry wife, “There shall be bread. There shall be milk.”

The film is familiar to many Chinese young people like me who “grew up under the red flag,” and I would like to add a third line, forming a Ciceronian tricolon, “And there shall be a university.”

Special thanks to Li Guanda from Fudan University for providing valuable information on the Academy.

LIFE & CULTURE

“ALTERED ACCENTS” AND A GLOBAL CHINA In Memory of Professor Anthony C. Yu WENBIN GAO traces the life story and academic career of Professor Yu.

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his upcoming May marks the two-year-anniversary of the death of Anthony C. Yu, renowned scholar on comparative studies of literature and religion. Former Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago, Yu is best remembered for his decade-long landmark translation of the Chinese novel Journey to the West (xiyouji). The novel tells the story of Xuan Zang, a Chinese monk who journeyed to India in search of the true Dharma. A seminal work of Chinese literature, the novel was considered untranslatable because of its great length (more than a hundred chapters) and loaded religious symbolism. Yu’s groundbreaking translation pushed the limits of inter-cultural dialogue by faithfully rendering a foundational text in the East for a Western readership.

Yu started his career as a scholar of Christianity and Western literature. On the ship across the Atlantic, Yu came across a news report of American Sinologist John Fairbank. Yu remembered asking himself, “If Americans can be so good at studying China, why can’t I be as good at studying the West?” It was not until late in his career, when he had already established himself as a leading expert on the traditional Western canon, when China reemerged in his scholarly vision. He was well-aware of the precariousness of his task. The Chinese literary tradition, famous for its symbolic obscurity, can be grossly simplified and even distorted through translation. And yet such dangers are accompanied by the exciting potential of dialogue. As Yu pointed out, 37

LIFE & CULTURE The point that should at all times be emphasized is not the equivalency of expression or that only a poet should translate poetry, just like a “plant must spring again from its seed,” as Shelley says eloquently, “or it will bear no flower.” My contention, rather, is that a literary translation is always a different flower, a progeny of cross breeding. Because a translated text is always a tissue of similarity and difference, of cultural continuities and contrasts, of opaqueness and transparency.

Professor Anthony C. Yu 1938–2015 38

“China in translation” need not be one hundred percent faithful to the original text. The process of translation is itself a transformative agent in comparative literary analysis—described as building bridges while celebrating differences. David Lattimore of Brown University praised Yu’s work as “one of the great ventures of our time in humanistic translation and publication.” In other words, Yu’s translation transcends cultural boundaries and speaks directly to the common human spirit.

Yu was no stranger to human suffering. Born in Hong Kong in 1938, he fled to the mainland in 1941 with his family during the Sino-Japanese War. To distract him from the fear and danger of the conflict, Yu’s grandfather told him fantastical stories of a wise monk and his companions Monkey and Pig—retelling the classic Journey to the West. In his scholarly writing, Yu compared Xuan Zang’s pilgrimage to that of Dante and derived from both a universal thesis of seeking beauty and truth.

Yu described his academic career as one of “altered accents.” His experience is not uncommon among scholars of his generation who were in constant exile, first from Japanese invaders, then from political persecution. Ms. Kang-I Sun Chang, Yale professor of Chinese literature, has written a heart-wrenching autobiography entitled Journey Through the White Terror. A victim of Chiang Kai-shek’s communist witch hunt, Sun intentionally tried to forget Chinese after her arrival in the United States. She eventually established her name as a pioneering scholar on female poets in late-imperial China. Her feminist critique, previously unheard of in the Sinophone world, has made her works widely known on both sides of the Pacific. Her rising fame in China is a prominent example of “the Sinology Frenzy” in recent years. People are eager to know what the developed world thinks of them, often through Chinese translations of English works on China. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this new trend is Yale Sinologist Jonathan Spence, who has become an icon of Western scholarship and widely revered by Chinese readers. Chinese identity in a global age is the combined effort of China and the West. The altered accents of Yu and Sun have miraculously developed into avenues of dialogue which once again speak to the human spirit of mutual understanding and coexistence.

In 2007, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, Institute of History and Philology of Academia Sinica in Taiwan and Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History at Peking University jointly launched The China Biographical Database (CBDM). The long term goal of CBDB is to include all significant biographical material from China’s historical record and to make the contents available free of charge, without restriction, for academic use. As of April 2015, the database provides biographical information (name, date of birth and death, ancestral place, degrees and offices held, kinship and social associations, etc.) for approximately 360,000 individuals.

Consistent cooperation between Chinese and American scholars, unimaginable a decade ago, hints at a cosmopolitan outlook that will hopefully dissolve misunderstandings. Pioneers like Anthony C. Yu will always be remembered for their long-lasting efforts in fostering inter-cultural research as we now know it.

Wenbin Gao is a sophomore in Yale College and an associate editor of China Hands. Contact him at wenbin.gao@yale.edu.

LIFE & CULTURE

OUR CITY, OUR FOOD? An Identity Crisis in Hong Kong LUCAS SIN exposes a troubling trend in the Hong Kong restaurant industry.

Illustration // Catherine Yang

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ong Kong still is—among many other things—a gourmet paradise, a world’s fair of food. Today, Hong Kong is still a prime site for converging global cuisines. And the people of Hong Kong still sport some of the most discerning palates in the world.

But something odd is going on in the local restaurant industry.

Consider Eater’s “12 Hottest Restaurants in Hong Kong Right Now,” a definitive guide to local dining. None of the restaurants that make the list are Chinese. Yes, some of them are helmed

by Chinese chefs trained in Western kitchens. But none of their restaurants serve Chinese food.

Then consider CNN’s “Hong Kong Best New Restaurants of 2016.” These restaurants are Modern French, Basque, Japanese-Peruvian, and draw from Monaco, Mexico City, and Moscow, but none are remotely Chinese.

Then there’s Conde Nast Traveller’s list of “The Best Restaurants in Hong Kong Right Now”, which does feature a handful of Chinese restaurants—three, in fact. But not without heavy modifiers like “creative Chinese,” “elegant Cantonese,” “twists on Chinese comfort food,” “or new-wave dim sum.”

The Michelin guide also publishes in Hong Kong. For the first time, the number of Chinese restaurants that received stars was more than a third of the list. And yes, it is newsworthy that now a significant portion of the

best restaurants in Hong Kong can be Chinese.

Then, a month ago, San Pellegrino and Acqua Panna’s Asia’s 50 Best Restaurants were announced. The award is well-known within the industry as the primary anti-Michelin competitor: its awards are peer-nominated and widely seen as less stodgy and less Eurocentric.

The good news is that this year, seven Hong Kong restaurants made it onto Asia’s 50 best restaurants—a testament to the industry-approved excellence that can be found in the city. But of course, only two are Chinese. The number is only all the more significant in comparison: all three restaurants in Korea on the list serve Korean food.

And seven of the nine restaurants in Japan are Japanese.

So, something odd is going on: the best cuisine the city has to offer is not, in fact, the cuisine unique to the city. On the contrary, the culinary scene most worshiped and celebrated in Hong Kong is brought upon by a massive import of foreign chefs. The hottest, newest restaurants in the city are applauded for pioneering a nouveau cuisine that prefers foreign technique and foreign chefs to our own.

Of course, it would be disingenuous to say that the best food representative of Hong Kong should only be local.

Certainly, the wonder of Hong Kong’s cuisine owes itself much to its external

influences. Even before Hong Kong’s colonial history, the cuisine of the land was a healthy, messy mix of the foods ways migrants had brought with them.

First as a small fisherman’s village, locals benefited from plentiful subtropical bounty and subsisted on a diet primarily of seafood and rice. By the Qing Dynasty, Hong Kong had become a military and trading outpost. Throngs of Punti, Hakka, Tanka, and Hokkien migrants then arrived to work, live, and cook in the city. Waves of trade and exchange pushed the cuisine to suit the diverse palate of the newcomers. But it wasn’t until British colonization in 1841 that cuisine in Hong Kong could begin to compare with the more refined Cantonese cuisine developed in the imperial courts of nearby Guangzhou.

It was during British colonization that Hong Kong’s East-meets-West identity began to truly flourish. In the prosperity that preceded the Second World War, Chinese restaurateurs used the very segregation of the colony, along with recipes and techniques from Cantonese, Shanghai, and even Japanese cuisine to build a dynamic restaurant economy.

Consider some of the iconic foods of Hong Kong served in cha chaan teng or Hong Kong tea restaurants: milk tea, lemon tea, ham and macaroni soup, peanut butter-stuffed French toast, corned beef and egg club sandwiches, egg tarts, and pineapple buns. All of them are products of Chinese 39

LIFE & CULTURE immigration and British colonization.

Today, Hong Kong’s cosmopolitan culinary tradition continues. And yet there is a fundamental difference. The most exemplary chefs in Hong Kong are no longer products of “East meets West” as they were, uniquely so, in the case of Hong Kong tea restaurants.

Nor is there any meaningful collaboration between local and foreign. These new chefs from Europe, Australia, and the United States are almost all young, ambitious, and talented but still totally alien to Hong Kong. Recruited by global restaurant groups, they cook in restaurants they hardly have the chance to help build, and end up building a menu rather than a team, a brand rather than a dining experience.

Margins are higher when restaurant oligopolies minimize culinary creativity, so new chefs never get to know Hong Kong, its produce, and its culture.

The old guard doesn’t help either.

Very little has been done to encourage the transmission of tradition and technique to new generations. Often, restaurants close when bloodlines end.

As a result, classic recipes disappear.

There might be hope if there were any sense of excitement for the culinary arts, but culinary schools in the city are primarily hubs only for vocational training in Western cuisine with no emphasis on cuisine as art.

Perhaps the city is plagued by fickle customers who demand high price tags and extravagant meals. Perhaps we should blame the oversaturated restaurant review sites for drowning out neighborhood mom-and-pop shops that fail to go viral. But whatever the causes for the decline of local cuisine, Hong Kong should begin to look within.

So many culinary techniques and food ways can be found in the city’s Chinese cuisine. And that cuisine should be duly celebrated, molded, and innovated upon to build a fervent cuisine culture that is unique to Hong Kong. For even the seemingly trivial matter of food and drink deserves to be evaluated with the Confucian doctrine of loyalty and consideration. This is our Hong Kong. We cannot afford to lose it.

Lucas Sin is a member of the Yale College Class of 2015 and the current chef at Junzi Kitchen.

Contact him at sin.lucas.ly@gmail.com.

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SEE YOU IN THE

U.S. AFTER THE AGE OF CUUS YUNKE LIU studies the proliferation of Chinese applicants to US universities in recent years.

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hinese Undergraduates in the United States (CUUS) is the Chinese equivalent of College Confidential. Started as a modest chat room in 2001, when computers were just entering urban households and studying in the United States was barely conceivable, CUUS became the go-to forum for the rare species of mainland student gunning for admission to top-tier U.S. colleges. As those fledgling applicants barely had any external guidance, they created a collaborative community on CUUS, helping one another to prepare application materials, navigate financial aid portals, polish personal statements, and ace admissions interviews.

Now, times have changed. The number of Chinese high school students seeking college education in the United States is at an all-time high. According to the Institute of International Education, China has been, for the past seven years, leading the charts for feeding students into U.S. colleges. In fact, almost one in every three international students in the United States is from mainland China. The demographics of Chinese applicants have also changed drastically. As the level of affluence rises, the middle class expands, and the cachet of a U.S. degree increases, more families from tier-two and even tier-three cities are willing to invest in their children’s education abroad and eager to begin the process earlier. A U.S. high school diploma is becoming highly sought after for its perceived a competitive edge in college admissions.

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, fewer than 1,000 students from China were enrolled at U.S. secondary schools in 2005 but 10 years later, the number skyrocketed to approximately 32,300.

The irony, however, is that with a burgeoning Chinese

LIFE & CULTURE

application pool, membership and readership of CUUS hit rock bottom. This phenomenon can be attributed to the numerous college admissions consulting agencies that have sprung up over the years. Such agencies provide packages that CUUS cannot. With fees of up to 300,000 yuan (approximately $43,500), high-end counselors will lead students through their entire high school careers from selecting the right courses to applying for prestigious summer schools and crafting compelling admissions essays. Many agencies also provide a plethora of enrichment opportunities, from learning Eastern European cinema in Serbia to researching snub-nosed monkeys on Baima Snow Mountain, for students who would otherwise not have the extra-curricular experiences needed to craft stellar essays. Nowadays, agencies have evolved into the crutches of not only college applicants but also current undergraduates. With specialized career-coaching companies eyeing this lucrative market, Chinese students, starting from their freshman year, can hire agents to beef up their resumes for recruitment to “bulge bracket” banks, or to ace the LSAT and gain admittance into prestigious law schools.

However, the prevailing mindset that getting into a top-30 institution according to the U.S. News National University Rankings is the be-all end-all can backfire on students. In order to be admitted, some unscrupulous agencies desperately resort to morally dubious shortcuts such as selling SAT answers and faking school transcripts and recommendation letters. In October of 2016, Reuters exposed how Dipont, a Chinese education company, bought access to admissions officers at almost twenty top U.S. colleges to help students

get into to those schools. In the end, students are the ones who suffer. The black sheep in the crowd severely mar the credibility of the entire mainland China application pool.

Moreover, as many parents and agencies overly emphasize getting into the best-ranked colleges, instead of the best-fitting ones, well-packaged applicants get into schools beyond their actual caliber. Coupled with factors such as culture shock, high family expectations, and relationship issues, many are reported to suffer from mental problems. The University of Houston conducted a mental health survey of 203 Chinese international students (144 from mainland China), which found rates of 47.5% for depression symptoms and 48% for anxiety symptoms. Shortly after the 2016 Commencement at U.C. Berkeley, an article by a Chinese graduate’s mother went viral on WeChat. She expressed her deep regret about interfering too much with her son’s college and major selection, resulting in his depression and unsatisfactory academic performance. As one particularly poignant line goes, “For the entire four years, my son has never adapted to Berkeley and Berkeley has never recognized his worth.”

Right now, there are groups going against the current, hoping to change the status quo for the better. Panopath, a student-run organization initiated by three Chinese undergraduates at Claremont McKenna College, has become a sensation. Starting in May 2016, Panopath has organized numerous online and offline activities where current Chinese undergraduates in the United States share their insights into the college application process and reveal the dark secrets of certain agencies. The momentum of Panopath is unstoppable—its recent article on xenophobia and cultural identity after many Chinese students’ name tags were torn off their dormitory doors at Columbia University resonated deeply with the Chinese student community in the United States, garnering more than 100,000 hits overnight. The Panopath app, designed entirely by volunteers, offers an extensive network, where more than 3,000 applicants can reach out to over 500 current students at almost 80 U.S. colleges and universities and ask them questions directly.

With almost a double-digit annual increase in the number of Chinese students studying in the United States, undergraduate applications from China will become more frenetic in the future. The bar will rise and the competition will be fiercer than ever. CUUS is now poorly managed and gradually declining in quality. The rise and fall of CUUS mirrors the sea-change that has taken place in technology, education, and society in mainland China. With new social media outlets emerging and pragmatic values prevailing, peer-to-peer support on CUUS that is purely based on goodwill is becoming increasingly inefficient and unsustainable. However, CUUS will remain a repository of experiences, knowledge, and insights. Many still reminisce about genuine exchange and long-lasting camaraderie shared by members during its heyday. As more jump on the bandwagon of studying abroad after the age of CUUS, the forum will always be relevant to any Chinese undergraduate in the United States searching for advice on how to make the most out of their college years.

Yunke Liu is a senior at Dunman High School in Singapore. Contact her at priscilla_yk@outlook.com.

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OPINION

THE GREAT WALL:

Zhang Yimou's Mystic China AMANDA WALENCEWICZ examines the the controversy surrounding Zhang Yimou's 2016 film The Great Wall.

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s promotional stills and trailers were released for the American-Chinese co-production The Great Wall, much controversy arose from the film’s alleged whitewashing of a Chinese story. A historical fiction action film, The Great Wall tells the story of a group of international warriors, led by the American actor Matt Damon, who band together to fight monsters on the Great Wall of China. The most circulated takedown of the movie on the web comes from the American actress Constance Wu, who wrote, "We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that [only a] white man can save the world.” Wu’s criticism is based on her rejection of the “white savior” motif common in film and literature, in which a white character rescues non-white characters from some form of hardship. The motif is explicitly Orientalist, given both its implication that white culture holds the solution to the problems of non-white characters and its designation of non-white characters as an unfamiliar Other in their own space.

The Last Samurai, starring Tom Cruise, is often referenced as exemplary of the trope, and it is especially relevant in this instance, given The Great Wall’s similar setting in a pre-modern Asian country. Wu has not claimed, as some have mistakenly said she has, that Damon’s central role in The Great Wall is an instance of whitewashing, as Damon’s character is not based on a historical figure, nor was the character originally written as a person of color and then revised to suit Damon.

Some critics like Flavorwire’s Jason Bailey have argued that the film is actually a subversion of the white savior trope, where Damon first appears to embody the role and then is revealed to be the one who must learn from the Chinese, while others like Vulture’s E. Alex Jung disagree. Ultimately, though, the contention here is not solely concerned with

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whitewashing or the “white savior” trope, both of which are still far too common—but with the ownership of stories. To tell a story set not only in China, but on one of China’s great national symbols, and invoke Orientalist tropes while refocusing the plot away from Chinese characters, is troubling to say the least.

While some coverage of the film in the United States has focused on the debate of whether the film is Orientalist or not, the main target of criticism has been Matt Damon’s involvement in the film. Many headlines have referred to the film as “Matt Damon’s Great Wall Movie,” and the majority of articles lead with a still of Damon. With his face on the poster, and as the first-billed actor, Damon is an easy target for criticism leveled at the film. What this neglects, however, is the career of the man behind the camera, arguably the most famous mainland Chinese director of all time: Zhang Yimou. Even without prescribing to the auteur theory of total directorial authorship of a film, at least some responsibility for the film’s troubling portrayal of China lies with Zhang, and some of the blame for producing a film that forgoes the opportunity to create a Chinese epic with Chinese faces is Zhang’s. When this latest film of Zhang’s is viewed within the context of his previous work and the ideologies that they advance, The Great Wall seems less of an aberration or an American product foisted upon Zhang to direct, but of a piece with the narrative of his career.

Zhang Yimou began his career as a cinematographer, studying the practice at the Beijing Film Academy in the late 1970s.

He became a part of the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers, along with Chen Kaige and Tian Zhuangzhuang. Famous for their experimental mood pieces, the Fifth Generation would come to define Chinese filmmaking post-Cultural Revolution,

OPINION especially for Western critics and art-house audiences. But the praise lavished upon the Fifth Generation was countered by criticism, especially as this new wave of Chinese film entered its second decade of relevance. As Zhang Yimou emerged as the primary star of this group of directors (with some competition from Chen Kaige), the style and content of his films would soon ossify into a formula, which many other Chinese directors then began to take cues from.

This formula, of pre-1949 period settings, of peasants and bandits and concubines, of rural locales untouched by time, presented a mythic China of sorts. It shied away from the social realism that had characterized Chinese cinema up to that point, eschewing direct engagement with contemporary China and its issues. And in the eyes of some scholars, Zhang’s films self-Orientalize by creating this romantic, allegorical China. In her article “The Zhang Yimou Model,” Tonglin Lu, using Zhang’s film Raise the Red Lantern as an example, explores the symbolic connotations of the visuals in Zhang’s films. She concludes that they are ultimately Orientalist, catering to a Western audience with little knowledge of China. Many of the “traditions” seen in Zhang’s films are inventions of the director, like the titular raising of lanterns to indicate which wife in a compound has the favor of the master of the house that night. With these inventions, Zhang self-consciously creates an imaginary and unrecognizable China to both Westerners who were never familiar with Chinese traditions and Chinese who have never encountered these fictional ones.

Zhang’s fabricated and embellished China is meant to be distant from the China of reality and more like the China of the Western imagination—the unchanging China, an amalgamation of traditional Chinese symbols and tropes, pieced together through distorted glimpses of the culture through a Western lens.

As Lu argues, Zhang preserves the hierarchy perpetuated

by Orientalism of an advanced West and a backward and mysterious China by creating “fantasized difference,” which has lost relevance as China assimilates to the global capitalist model and becomes less of an Other. Contemporary China, with its modern urban centers and population familiar with most aspects of Western culture, no longer looks as different from the West as it once did. But Zhang Yimou’s films return the Western viewer to a time when China and the West were very different, and includes some elements of his own creation to accentuate that difference.

The Great Wall, then, is a continuation of the Orientalism that is characteristic of Zhang’s previous work, with the added element of the white savior myth, resurrecting the trope from his previous film The Flowers of War. It must be noted here that Zhang himself did not write the screenplay for The Great Wall, but Zhang has not written the screenplays for any of his films, and it is unlikely that a director of his stature

would be willing to direct a script that he fundamentally did not believe in. The film is set in the Song dynasty, centuries removed from the present day, and the action concerns attacks on the Great Wall by alien monsters. Zhang is again telling the story of a fantastical China bearing little resemblance to its modern incarnation. China, in Zhang’s portrayal to Western audiences, can still be the land of dragons and emperors, unknowable and unrelatable.

Artistically, there is no reason that Matt Damon’s character in The Great Wall could not have been played by a Chinese actor. The plot would change in some ways, but there is nothing inherent in the role of a strong, intelligent warrior who conquers monsters on the Great Wall that requires it to be played by a white man. Instead, The Great Wall is another entry in the film canon that singles out Westerners for their heroism and relegates China to a legendary, mysterious backdrop. While Zhang has been complicit in this practice for decades, he has not, until recently, prioritized white characters in his films. He said in a recent interview that, “The way the market is right now, we can’t make an international-

ly successful film on our own. If we didn’t have Matt Damon, if we didn’t speak English in the film, then it would just be a purely Chinese film.” But Zhang is one of the people with the most power to change the situation as one of the few internationally lauded Chinese directors, who has proven both his artistic bonafides as well as his commercial viability.

By creating films that cater to the Western art film market that finances him, he has reinforced Orientalist Western perspectives of China at a time when China is shedding its image in the West as an Other. The Great Wall is a missed opportunity to tell a Chinese story about Chinese people and demonstrates Zhang’s failure to address these issues. One expects Hollywood to dismiss the importance of promoting Chinese actors and Chinese stories, but it is another matter entirely when a Chinese director does it himself.

Amanda Walencewicz is a senior at Tufts University. Contact her at awalencewicz@gmail.com.

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OPINION

PLANNED COMRADESHIP

China-Pakistan Relations

ASPEN WANG reviews the status of China's relations with Pakistan.

Illustration // Joanne Zhenheng Li

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ike a broken record on repeat, the border police at each checkpoint would peer into our van and, seeing a set of Chinese faces, would always say: “Pakistan China dos.” Dos means friends in the local language. If they wanted to vary the tune a little bit, some would venture to say “Pakistan China brothers.”

The continued goodwill and longevity of China-Pakistan relations—the last foreign dignitary that Chairman Mao received was Prime Minister Ali Bhutto of Pakistan—have often been compared to the rapport and perennial fidelity of U.S.-Israel relations. At varying points in its history, the People’s Republic of China has both directly and indirectly sponsored nations within its sphere of interest.

Most of these nations vacillated between greedily profiting from their relationship with China and biting the hand that fed it. In the 1960s, Albania sought China as a friend in order to pull away from the orbit of Soviet influence. However, by the 1980s, Albanian leadership no longer wanted to associate with the Chinese brand of communism, straining relations between the two countries. Thereafter, China no longer mentioned Albania in its brotherhood of Communist nations. Myanmar presents another interesting case, as Myanmar has long benefitted from China’s aid in resisting domestic liberalizing forces. China may not be pleased with the country’s recent moves to reduce its diplomatic isolation, as new leadership under Aung San Suu Kyi has made overtures towards the West. Chinese dissatisfaction with Myanmar was reflected in the initial delay of joint mining and oil pipeline projects between the two nations in 2005. For the first time, the military junta of Myanmar dared to negotiate and leverage its other relations against China. The worst episode involved Vietnam, whose relations with China have deteriorated rapidly, from the days of its alliance with China against the United States to a brief border war in 1979.

China’s constant partner amidst the vacillations of other nations, has been Pakistan.

China has seen border disputes with many of its large neighbors, but Pakistan has been an exception to the rule. For example, China and India’s border disputes have origins in colonial British India’s partition, which was not fully recognized by the

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OPINION Chinese. However, any residual border confusion between China and Pakistan was settled in a 1963 agreement. In the absence of territorial conflict, Pakistan has supported almost all of China’s territorial claims, ranging from Tibet to Taiwan.

In the words of a local Pakistani bus driver, Pakistan’s two most formidable enemies were India and Russia. The United States and other Western countries were more difficult to assess in his opinion: “They’re bad to us 95 percent of the time, and they help us 5 percent of the time, but Pakistan China dos.” He continued that most locals feel as though China is a much more loyal and long lasting ally in the vicissitudes of global politics than the United States.

Pakistan also serves as one of China’s only stable allies in the surrounding region. Since the Sino-Soviet split of the 1960s, the relationship between Russia and China has been very tumultuous. Additionally, China is wary of India’s growing economic and political clout, issues exacerbated by unresolved border disputes. Amidst these conflicts, Pakistan serves as a buffer zone and an ally in checking the ambitions of surrounding powers.

In this game of tit for tat, Pakistan has been of strategic use to China in relation to the United States and the West. Before detente between China and the United States, Pakistan was the conduit for communications between the two nations.

Today, Pakistan regularly supports China in the U.N. when China and the United States disagree. It was the only country, apart from Cuba, to continue to openly support China during the Tiananmen Incident of 1989.

In return, China has been Pakistan’s main source of military and nuclear expertise. Two sisters I met in a Pakistani mosque remarked that their brother in the army was currently in China training to fly jets. In 2016, the two nations held a joint military anti-terrorism training exercise at a Pakistani Air Force Base. Historically, the two have coordinated on a variety of military projects, including the development of the JF-17 Thunder fighter jet. Students in the top university in Peshawar, the major Pakistan city on its border with Afghanistan, noted that the top engineers in the class frequently draw from Chinese textbooks and are recommended to the military, which then stations these engineers in China for further development.

Given China’s grand plans in Pakistan, it makes sense that most of the Chinese currently there are involved in infrastructural work. China’s vision of “One Belt, One Road” is a project aimed at increasing China’s role in developing countries, such as Pakistan, and grooming its image as a leader of the Third World. Aside from being ideologically consistent with its past foreign policy, China also has an economic reason for reaching out to developing countries— to find markets that could absorb the oversupply of certain Chinese manufactured goods. The scores of secondhand Chinese cars that crowd the streets of Pakistan are one such good.

China is pursuing its vision of stronger relations with Pakistan through a combination of educational exchanges such as the China Scholarship Council, trade negotiations, and, most notably, infrastructure construction to connect

the countries along the historical Silk Road. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor will connect Gwadar Port on the Arabian Sea to Kashgar in China’s Xinjiang province. Many of the countries involved in the “One Belt, One Road” initiative also participate in the Chinese-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), a financial institution which funds the infrastructure investment in Asia. China is expanding its influence on multiple fronts, beyond just economic and political ties. China not only constructs infrastructure projects in Pakistan, but also funds them with investment secured through the AIIB. The Chinese hold the largest voting share within the AIIB, allowing the country a much stronger influence than it has within other international development institutions. This benefits many Asian countries that still remember how harsh austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund hurt the Indonesian economic recovery during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998.

In terms of telecommunications, China Mobile has declared it will invest one billion dollars in Pakistan in the next three years. However, from driving extensively in the country for two weeks and talking to locals, I found that telecommunications seems to have taken a backseat to building roads. Despite significant investment, vast swathes of the country simply have no cell reception. Building up telecommunication infrastructure will be a difficult task in the rugged terrain of the country. However, China still considers such an investment worthwhile, especially given Pakistan’s current security situation.

In Pakistan, most security issues revolve around domestic terrorism. Much of the terrorism stems from a minority of Sunni and Shiite extremists, not from the general populace, which resents such disturbances. China is wary of Pakistan’s inability to fully stanch domestic terrorism, especially considering China’s own difficulty containing minority Uighur separatist movements in Xinjiang. A stronger central government and military in Pakistan has improved the security situation in certain regions of the country, but there are still many areas in which Chinese firms must work carefully to avoid incidents.

In the past, China has invested in countries that are less secure by conventional metrics. For example, in 2009, China was Venezuela’s second largest trading partner. However there may be an upper limit on how much risk Chinese companies are willing to bear, with China’s largest private coal mining company China Kingho Group backing out of a deal with Pakistan in 2011 due to security issues. This is a company that is willing to invest in coal mining Mozambique, but not in Pakistan.

As the self proclaimed leader of the Third World, China has steadily invested in and aided Pakistan’s development over the past several decades. However, security threats and difficult conditions may test this historical friendship in coming years. Ultimately, China must decide whether or not its desire for natural resources and geopolitical influence is worth the risks associated with the partnership.

Aspen Wang is a junior at Princeton University. Contact her at aspenw@ princeton.edu.

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OPINION

CONVERSATION WITH

LEYLA SUDBURY

LEYLA SUDBURY studied Manufacturing Engineering at the University of Cambridge, U.K. and enjoys working in factories making anything from sports cars to chocolate bars. She spent a year backpacking in Southeast Asia, living in Tokyo, and working on farms in Australasia. In 2016, she moved to Beijing to study as a Schwarzman Scholar at Tsinghua University.

China Hands: Did you take Chinese when you were at Cambridge or have study abroad experience in China prior to becoming a Schwarzman Scholar?

Leyla Sudbury: No, I actually didn’t. I went backpacking in China one summer but apart from that I had no real understanding of China. I hadn’t learned Chinese before. I think that’s true of quite a lot of people in the program. The flight I was on had three people who had never been to China before. Quite a brave thing for them to sign up for a yearlong course.

CH: It will be great for people who may have a fleeting interest in China but who haven’t studied it to hear that the program is available to them, too.

LS: It’s a real mix. There are some people who seem to know everything about China!

CH: Could you elaborate on your interest in Chinese manufacturing?

LS: Sure. I studied manufacturing and did placements in factories, working for a car company every summer during my undergraduate degree. While we’re here we get a chance to do a “deep dive” where we spend a week doing something related to our area of interest. I visited car factories in Xi’an. It took a while to unpack what was going on and relate it to how factories are run in Europe.

One of the factories was state-owned and founded by a Mao-era executive order. About forty percent of the people working there were party members, far higher than the national average. It was interesting to see how they were incentivizing and promoting people in that factory.

CH: Could you talk about how the Schwarzman Scholars program is structured academically?

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LS: We have four terms and we take a mixture of classes. There are three main areas you can concentrate in: economics and business, public policy, and international studies. Lots of the modules are traditional so you go to lectures, do reading, then write term papers. Some of them require group work. We also do a thesis and have opportunities to work full-time in Chinese companies. It’s quite hard to get those jobs if you aren’t from China. Lots of the scholars seem to be thinking about working in China next year, as well, so the program is helpful.

CH: Have you found that scholars come from a variety of backgrounds?

LS: Yes, there are people from all around the world and all different disciplines.

When I applied I wasn’t sure if they would take engineers, but actually there are loads of people from technical backgrounds. There’s quite a variety.

CH: Could you talk about an aspect of the program that you’ve found most gratifying?

LS: Getting to know everyone. The coolest thing I’ve done since I’ve been here, maybe the coolest thing I’ve ever done, was taking the trans-Mongolian train from Moscow to Beijing with twelve other scholars at the beginning of the term.

We came from four different continents and many different backgrounds. There were people who’d been in finance and law, at NGOs, a guy who had served in the U.S. military in Iraq. We took this train together for ten days and got to know each other. It’s incredible to have the chance to get to know people who are different to you, which I don’t think you get a chance to do at universities because you’re often meeting people who are in the same stage in life as you, have the same experiences, and are even taking the same courses.

CH: Have you had surprising moments in Beijing?

LS: I’m surprised at how quickly things change. When we first got here we all went out and bought bikes because quite a lot of people cycle around Tsinghua campus. But a couple of months ago these apps that let you scan and ride a bike around for one yuan appeared.

Now, they’re everywhere. You can just find them on every street corner whenever you like. Half the people biking to work are riding these bikes.

CH: Switching gears— LS: No pun [Laughter] CH: What qualities do Schwarzman Scholars share?

LS: We are all open-minded about things. We’re all very curious to meet people from different backgrounds. A big portion of the course is the social side of it. We do academics but want to get to know each other outside of that. I think that’s a pretty uniting factor. Aside from that, everyone’s quite different.

CH: Is there any myth about the Schwarzman Scholars program that you’d like to dispel?

LS: Yes, I was worried that a lot of the people on the program might be difficult to get on with. I was worried they might be too driven or all obsessed with career development and networking. They haven’t been like that, which has been nice.

It’s a very supportive group and very forgiving and inclusive as well.

CH: Does the program encourage that feeling or is it a matter of who the program takes?

LS: A little of both. Also, the fact that we all live in a college together makes a difference, There’s something about living and eating and going to the gym together that builds a supportive community.

CH: Could you describe how the residential college system works?

LS: Sure. Tsinghua has a big, beautiful campus. One building on the campus was purpose built for the program. The top few floors are residential. We live in clusters of rooms and share common rooms where people can work or chat.

Other floors are for academics and teaching staff. Then on the lower floors we have classrooms and a lecture hall.

And we have a gym and dining hall and a lovely library. So it’s everything that you need combined. If you didn’t have that experience as an undergraduate and wanted to then this is an amazing way to do it.

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