This method in one form or another is used for example by many companies to let employees remotely connect to the company’s secure network or for banks to establish safe channels for information flow. The usage of VPNs in one form or another is ubiquitous in a business environment, without which information flow would break down immediately. China is no exception to this. And in order to not interfere with all this, the Great Firewall of China just ignores VPN connections and lets any encrypted information pass through.

Now, there is of course nothing that stops a private user in China from using a VPN service to circumvent the Great Firewall of China, except of course for the $40 a year you have to pay for a regular VPN service and the fact that you need a credit card to pay for it… which is of course not “nothing” at all for the average Chinese.  I would guess that less than 5% of China’s internet users have a credit card and are either willing or able to pay for such a service if they knew about it.

And this has worked out just fine for the censors in China. If you are so unhappy with the Great Firewall of China (and its not like people don’t know about it) that you are willing to use a credit card and pay for a VPN, then fine. Better than having a horde of upper middle class netizens getting up in arms.

But what if Google does leave China? Whats there to stop them from turning around and making available a free VPN for every Chinese netizen? That, the Chinese government would not like at all, however there is little they could do right away short of blocking all VPN connections and thereby instantly crippling the entire financial sector. Long term, however they could retry the failed and much hated Green Dam Youth Escort incident (more on that here).

Who really know what could happen. But for the heck of it, here are my top 3 scenarios:

1) The VPN service would only gradually catch on with a small fraction of internet users and the government would let it go just like they did so far.

2) Google suddenly widely publicizes their free VPN service, catching the censors off guard. The VPN gets downloaded millions of times before the censors can catch on and the file spreads like a virus.  All efforts by the censors to contain the spread of the file prove futile.

3) Same as number 2, except in this scenario, some new form of the Green Dam Youth Escort program will be launched on a massive scale and something like a China-only Windows update will be released that removes Google’s VPN program from all computers.

Alas, this is just a thought experiment that will probably never see the light of day.

Since I have left Chengdu 2 years ago I have been hearing an increasing amount of stories of expats having visa trouble and getting jilted. The nice way – not getting a visa-renewal, or the not so nice way – police giving you 48 hours to leave the country.

The latest I am hearing, anyone in Chengdu who is not thereon a foreign expert visa and has been in the country for more than 5 years is getting the boot – i.e. all English teachers who are there on one or two year contracts, those laowai “models”,”DJs” and all other “creatives” and all those deadbeat China-bums (you know who I’m talking about) who having been lounging around on those agency arranged visas and student visas are in trouble.

The reason? In my time in Chengdu I have met quite a few deadbeats, teaching here and there or doing a number of “jobs” they would never get money for back home. Oftentimes they teach English and do a horrible job at it or they just lounge around and do much of nothing. Now China wants to get rid of them. I am convinced this is the case in Chengdu because I have heard about the kinds of people who are getting the boot and I have also just heard from two of my friends who have been in Chengdu for 3 and 4 years that a very good Australian teacher who has been working at their school for 5 years did not get the boot because the school fought for him and got him a foreign expert visa. So in the end this might just be a bureaucratic hoop that most school or companies are simply unwilling to jump  if the person they have to do it for is not really worth the extra trouble.

At this point I want to stress that all the individuals I am referring to are or were in the Chengdu area. Even though sometimes it seems like, or at least one is lead to believe, that policies coming from the almighty CCP center in Beijing are followed to the dot throughout China, the reality is that China is a vast and disparate place and provincial, municipal and local governments have vastly different interests and implement or enforce policies to vastly different degrees. So you might find that other provinces and cities completely ignore this new rule or are more harsh in its implementation.

I have also been reading on James Fallow’s blog about all teachers aged 60+ getting the boot. Again, one hears different stories from different places in China. For more on that here.

I occasionally follow Fox News and CNN just to be up-to-date with all the misinformation that the infotainment media is currently spewing.

And I continue to be entertained, particularly by the “Was-Obama-really-born-in-the-US debate” and most recently the Health Care Reform “euthanasia-scare“.

In contrast to China’s controlled media with “official truths”, I find it absurd that the world’s supposed prime democracy with the the worlds supposedly most open media, getting so tied up by manufactured misinformation.

Instead of looking or truthful answers to some of the information that is floating around, the media’s only concern seems to be to keep up the status-quo of misinformation and to fuel outrage on both sides to keep the debate going as long as possible. In China, one can blame the government for people’s ignorance about certain topics.

But who can you blame in the US?

For a detailed debunking of the health care reform scare-campaign, have a read of Steven Pearlstein’s op-ed column in the Washington Post here.

China relentless economic expansion (which over past three decades in many ways has become the governments sole source of credibility) has until recently trumped all policy decision (besides political self-preservation of course), with little regard for the environment. Yet, it is become increasingly clear that a paradigm shift has taken place. Economic expansion is still the government’s primary concern, but not at all costs. Rivers are being cleaned up, dirty and inefficient coal plants are being shut down,  large chemical refineries are being moved and face tighter regulations and now China is becoming very serious about curbing CO2 emissions. In fact, China is doing more to curb its CO2 emissions than any other counry in the world!

Hard to believe? I agree. But lets have a look at the numbers.

At the end of last year, China’s energy generating capacity stood at close to 800 Gigawatts. By 2020 it will be 1500 GW. This is huge. How huge? In a matter of 12 years, China is going to install almost as much additinal energy generating capacity as the entire US has today!

The question is where this additional capacity will come from.

Even by today’s modest estimates, more than 60% of it will be “green energy” – Wind, Hydro, Solar, Bio-Fuels and Nuclear (I am not using in the same capacity as the headline term “renewable energy”. I am talking about anything that is not fossil fuel based). This of course leaves 35-40% of energy generating capacity still to come from coal and natural gas. Hence, China in 2020 will produce more CO2 than today. A lot more. However when you hear this fact in the news, or when this comes up in political debates, the simple fact that China’s energy requirements are still rapidly rising as the country is modernizing vs. the fact that western energy needs are going to be relatively constant in the foreseeable future is mistakenly ignore. I believe it is a great error to hold China to the same standard of emissions reduction as we should Western Europe or the US. It is a political move with the sole purpose of bogging down the debate and to continue with business-as-usual, particularly by the US.

To underestimate China’s efforts today might mean a rude awakening just a few years down the road, when Chinese companies become the industry leaders in just about every field of renewable energy technology.

Part 2: Spinning Tiger, Flying Dragon: China’s Wind Revolution

With the export sector completely imploding in the past year (down 25%), economic expansion in China has been driven almost entirely by investment. And while GDP growth this year will likely reach the magical 8% that the government is looking for, a lot of economists are worried about long term problems due to excess money supply, non-performing loans and excess capacity. A good summary of the issue can be found on the China Financial Times blog here.

I believe that the problem of short-term over-capacity China is facing is being over-estimated.
With double digit growth in demand of nearly every commodity as well as energy over the past years and presumably well into the future, even a 100% excess capacity will be absorbed in a few short years.
Also, I believe the Chinese government is not at all worried about non-performing loans. Only a few years ago the government spend 200 billion dollars to clean up the bank’s balance sheets. And they have no compunction about doing it again. That problem is 3-5 years in the future. Nothing to worry about right now.

Excess money supply might turn into a bigger problem if by the end of next year China is seeing double digit inflation. But if the government manages to turn down the money faucet delicately enough so as to not choke off capital investment and also mop up excess liquidity, then excess inflation can also be avoided.

Given the global climate, the government had to act quickly and decisively and it was probably the lesser of two evils (the other being pumping too little money into the economy)

A recent Wall Stree Journal article talks about a paper recently posted to the National Bureau of Economic Research’s website, arguing that because there is a shortage of women in China (China as a whole has 120 boys born for every 100 girls, in some regions up to 192 boys for every 100 girls), families have to save more to make their boys more attractive for marriage. There also seems to be a clear correlation between the disparity of boys to girls and the extent of the disposable income savings. This high savings  rate (30% of disposable income in 2007) ultimately gets converted into US treasuries which then pushes down interest rates and with it makes borrowing in the US too cheap for their own good. No arguing there.

But I just don’t see a clear cause-effect relationship between an overpopulation of boys and high savings rate. More rural areas have more sons and also have higher savings rates, but they are also poorer – maybe that’s why they have higher savings rates.  Places like Shanghai have the lowest boy-girl disparity (108 boys for every 100 girls) and also have the lowest savings rate, but they are also the richest.

What do you think?

In light of the recent Green Dam debacle, Chinese internet censors are trying to make a point by picking on Google.

It seems like Google has been reluctant to compromise its search algorithm which gives the most popular sugestions for any given search term.

As can be seen in the picture above, in some cases this can lead to surprising results. In this case when one types in “儿子“ （son), the first suggestion Google give is incestuous intercourse between mother and son.

Since Google does not manually configure suggested search term suggestions, it would seem that this in fact is a very popular topic to be searched on Google China.

But the National Office of Internet Pornography will have none of it. They are now clamping down on individual search results on Google China and blocking them. According to Xinhua, authorities have “urged the search engine to carefully follow the country’s laws and regulations, take effective technical and management measures to filter pornographic content from its search”.

No reply from Google as of yet.

I have been recently quoted in Aimee Barnes’ blog where she poses the question: What Makes China Uniquely Cool? 

I’m not sure I agree with the “cool” premise, but its certainly unique and alluring and most foreigners I know who lived there are addicted. 

Here is my take on what makes China “cool”:

For me it’s the unique cultural experiment that made China what it is today. The Cultural Revolution was in a very real way a social experiment on the scale and magnitude that has never been seen in human history. One party rule, yet the people are (mostly) happy? That just goes against our deepest fundamental western values. The country is so full of contradictions. It’s so disparate, yet so homogenous. So safe, yet so dangerous. So synchronized, yet so chaotic. Xenophobic, yet so warmhearted! Of course you know what I mean.

It’s a country that until just 30 years ago was so isolated and removed from our western world that people still thought that the Great Leap Forward was a success! It might as well have been a different planet!

And of course the pace! It’s just relentless. In Europe we have cultures that are set in their tracks. For a couple of generations now nothing fundamental has changed. But even the two world wars don’t compare the the social topsy turvy that China has undergone. And all of it so recently, you can see it happening in front of your eyes! You are right in the middle of it! It is really mind boggling what has happened in the last 35 years. And that’s what makes China so cool!

The whole article can be found here.

As Dan Harris tersely pointed out: Where would you rather be in terms of freedom, Saudi Arabia/Egypt (where Obama just held speeches without directly addressing their human rights record) or China? And without thinking twice, I will say China as well!

Nancy Pelosi isn’t doing anyone a favor by making ignorant statements such as “If we do not speak out for human rights in China and Tibet, we lose moral authority to speak out for them anywhere” (oh please, why don’t you start talking more about human rights in India, Pakistan or the US itself?) or by continuing the mindless mantra that all the participants in the Tianan Men protests were completely pacifistic, democracy seeking heroes.

We know that a lot of protesters were in fact not students and that some of them set trucks and buses on fire, threw rocks and attacked and by some accounts also killed soldiers. Today, some thirty people remain in prison on charges directly related to the TiananMen Incident. What did those thirty people do? We don’t know. Nancy Pelosi thinks she knows. According to her they are in prison simply for “speaking out about anything other than the party line.”

I abhor the 6/4 massacre and the suffering it has brought to the people affected. But how about some historical perspective here? If the US were so vigilant in pointing out all other (or just half or one in ten) injustices going on in the world, then the continual denunciation of 6/4 would seem righteous. But taken in the context of US policy elsewhere, it is just hypocrisy.

What do you think?

]]> http://www.chinaoutsider.com/2009/06/06/us-human-rights-hypocrisy-exhibit-numero-uno-nancy-pelosi/feed/ 1 http://www.chinaoutsider.com/2009/06/03/the-gao-kao-%e9%ab%98%e8%80%83-a-creeping-giant/ http://www.chinaoutsider.com/2009/06/03/the-gao-kao-%e9%ab%98%e8%80%83-a-creeping-giant/#comments Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:49:07 +0000 Thomas Rippel http://www.chinaoutsider.com/?p=19

I have been following with quite some interested the discussion on the Gao Kao(高考) on James Fallow’s Blog and also discussed the issue with some of my friends who have recently gone through the ordeal.

From teaching in China and knowing quite a few High School (高中) students, I witnessed the immense pressure that they were under. My personal opinion from my observations has been that the skills needed to pass the gaokao are not the skills needed to succeed in academia or real life and hence it is an arbitrary meritocracy in which the ones that succeed the most, wind up also giving up the most in terms of creativity and independent thought.

Now, I still think that is the case, but my views on what has to change have changed. I now believe that the gaokao is probably the fairest system possibly in a country that still very much relies on bribery, nepotism and the ever elusive guanxi （关系）. So, however much imperfect the system may be, I believe it is already moving in the right direction and I believe that progress could be accelerated by greater reliance on a varied system of trial and error (something China is already trying with its experimental schools 实验学校) and extrapolating the systems that work on a national scale.

To finish, some opinions of Chinese students who just did and didn’t do the gaokao.

This is from a top student at the school where I was teaching, who is now studying in France:

I learned something from the gaokao, but once is enough, I don’t want to live through it for a second time. Yes we work 12 years for this exam, but I think it’s the exam [that’s] the most fair in China, thanks for gaokao, the kids from the poor families have a chance to change their lives. The students say that they work too much, they suffer too much, but when you enter into society, you know that life is harder than in high-school. The situation in China is much different from that in the USA and in Europe. China, as you k now, can not do exactly what the schools do in the other countries. We need to change the educating system, But step by step.

And this is from a more artistic student, whose intuitive feel for English far surpassed any “high achiever” in the gaokao system:

I was an anti (高考) blogger 2005 through 2007. But later I got tired of everything that related to it. We can’t describe the whole thing clearly to the world and the world can’t fully understand the whole thing [ourselves] .It’s a pain in my (and not only my) ass. The CEE system in China is a tool to control our thoughts, which [seems to be] much like the stereotyped writing system in Qing and Ming dynasty. [The way] things turn out,half of the students in China become nerds and puppets while the other half became “traitors” like me. It’s a little bit of an overstatement to have used the word “traitor”, but indeed the nerds will use it.