OP-ED FT: China’s strange fear of a colour revolution

[Housecarl]

Hummm......In light of what's come out regarding Ukraine (ETA: and Egypt), this might well not be unjustified paranoia on the part of the Chinese Communist Party......

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February 9, 2015 4:41 pm

China’s strange fear of a colour revolution

Gideon Rachman

Beijing seems to share the Russian view that America organised the uprising in Ukraine

Comments 213

China’s education minister has just issued an edict to the country’s universities that sounds like something from the heyday of Maoism. “Never let textbooks promoting western values enter our classes,” thundered Yuan Guiren. “Any views that attack or defame the leadership of the party or socialism must never be allowed.”

As a visitor to Beijing last week, it struck me that it is rather late in the day to crack down on western influence. The Chinese capital is the home to every western brand you can think of — from Lamborghini to Hooters. In the cafés near Beijing’s university campuses, Chinese students gossip and surf the internet, much like their western counterparts. Yet apparent familiarity can be deceptive. Logging in from my hotel, I was naively surprised to run straight into the great firewall of China that blocks access to Google, Twitter and many other sites.

In recent months, the great firewall has been raised higher amid a crackdown on western influence that has affected universities, bloggers and television schedules. People directly involved in liberal politics have suffered much more directly. Human rights organisations say that hundreds of activists have been detained over the past year. Foreign non-governmental organisations are also under intensified scrutiny and pressure.

This crackdown points to a surprising sense of insecurity in China’s ruling circles. Events in the outside world have made the government increasingly anxious about the threat of a “colour revolution” that would challenge the Communist party’s grip on power. That links to anxiety about the internal stability of China, at a time when the economy is slowing and President Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign is creating discontent among the ruling elite.

The wave of revolutions in the Arab world stirred deep anxieties in the Chinese Communist party about popular risings against undemocratic governments — and the chaos they can unleash. The role of western institutions and technology in stoking these revolts was noted in Beijing. The fact that the Egyptian uprising of 2011 was labelled the “Facebook revolution” and that one of its most prominent early activists was a Google executive helped to seal the fate of those two companies in China.

Over the past year, Chinese official paranoia about the threat of a colour revolution has been stoked by events in Ukraine and, above all, Hong Kong. China seems to have sincerely embraced the Russian view of the uprising in Ukraine, namely that it was essentially organised by the Americans, using all their nefarious tools, from the internet to NGOs. In April, months before the protests in Hong Kong broke out, Wang Jisi, a prominent Chinese academic, wrote that the main concern of Beijing’s leaders in dealing with America is “alleged US schemes to subvert the Chinese government and to penetrate politically and ideologically into Chinese society”.

The Hong Kong protests, which broke out in September, seemed to confirm Beijing’s deepest fears. Viewed from China, they looked dangerously like the arrival of the techniques of the colour revolution within China’s own borders: the sit-down protests, the students, the foreign television crews, the use of social media and the emergence of a catchy brand name, the “umbrella movement”. The Chinese government succeeded in damping down the protests in Hong Kong. But some in Beijing claim to see a sinister pattern of western meddling — stretching from the Arab world to Ukraine, Cuba, Venezuela and now Hong Kong.

What is more, all this international disorder is coming at a time of heightened political tension within China. Mr Xi’s trademark domestic political initiative is his anti-corruption campaign. This has gone on longer and struck deeper than many expected.

The anti-corruption drive is said to be popular among ordinary Chinese. But it is threatening powerful interests. In the past couple of months, the government has formally charged Zhou Yongkang, the former head of China’s internal security police and announced an investigation into Ling Jihua, who was the senior aide to Hu Jintao, Mr Xi’s predecessor. There is also said to be discontent in the massed ranks of party officials, many of whom have got used to supplementing their relatively meagre official salaries with bribes. Some even argue that the slowing of China’s economy has something to do with the chilling effect that the anti-corruption campaign has had on business deals.

It may be that Mr Xi is so perfectly in control of the political system that he can afford to take on powerful interest groups. But well-connected people in Beijing now speculate openly about the possibility of an attempt to remove the president. Some note that previous bouts of popular unrest in China, for example in 1989, coincided with divisions at the top of the Communist party.

Yet, in many ways, China has never looked stronger. A few months ago, the International Monetary Fund announced that China is the world’s largest economy, measured by purchasing power. Foreign leaders are queueing up for audiences with Mr Xi, usually in the hope of attracting Chinese investment. Viewed from the outside world, the apparent anxiety of China’s political leaders looks excessive, even paranoid. But, as the famous (western) saying goes: “Only the paranoid survive.”

gideon.rachman@ft.com

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.voanews.com/content/univ...al-revolution-in-china-education/2636270.html

University Head Sees Signs of Cultural Revolution in China Education

William Ide
February 10, 2015 8:04 AM

BEIJING— At a time when China is working to silence criticism of a new push to strengthen ideological teaching at schools, and keep textbooks promoting Western values out of the classroom, a professor has warned in a state-media interview that the growing education debate runs the risk of becoming too extreme.

In an interview with the Communist Party-backed People’s Daily website, Nankai University President Gong Ke said that some of the response to the campaign was dangerously similar to the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution. During those two periods intellectuals were brutally persecuted in China.

In the interview, Gong said that while some believe the ranks of China’s academies of higher learning should be cleansed, purified and rectified, he did not agree.

"That is the mentality of 1957 and 1966,” he said.

The debate picked up steam recently when China's education minister warned about the danger of Western values in textbooks.

China’s propaganda authorities have ordered the media to disseminate the ideas of Education Minister Yuan Guiren's, who is spearheading the campaign, and those of Maoist scholar Zhu Jidong and to delete any criticisms, according to an apparently leaked censorship directive published by the China Digital Times.

Zhu, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, has voiced his support for Education Minister Yuan Guiren’s perspective that China's youth are at risk and more controls are needed. He argues that businessmen, lawyers, artists and professors who have criticized the minister should be dealt with harshly.

Gong said that while there are those within the rank and file of teachers whose political views may be problematic, or who have lifestyle, financial or academic failings, more trust was needed.

“You cannot generalize, you cannot use them to represent the broad core of teachers,” he said.

Gong also warned that such an approach runs the risk of repeating the mistakes leftists made in the past, and going from one extreme to another.

Tightening control

Before stepping into office, hopes were high for reforms under China’s new leader Xi Jinping. Xi was only a teenager when his father was jailed during the Cultural Revolution and like many others during that era, his classes were halted so that students could criticize and fight their teachers.

Because of his experiences many thought he would avoid such extremes, but concerns continue to grow as he cracks down on civil society, tightens access to the Internet and now sets his sights on institutions of higher learning.

The new campaign not only focuses on ridding campuses of harmful western ideals, but also about restructuring the way institutions approach study in Marxism and Communist Party ideology.

Some have even warned about the threat scholars who have studied overseas pose to universities. But that was an idea the state-run Global Times recently shot down in an editorial entitled “Returned Scholars not a foe of Core Values.”

In it, the nationalistic tabloid argued that China can only be successful by continuing along the path of reform and opening up.

“Promoting ideological education in colleges can be considered a reform, with the goal of fostering a new generation of talented people who are faithful to their nation and its people,” it said.

But it also added that given China’s integration with the world, its education cannot be a closed system.

Hong Kong student protests

Some analysts have argued that Xi Jinping’s shift in attention to universities is an indirect result of the student protests in Hong Kong. China has long worried about Arab Spring-like protests reaching its shores.

Others argue that eventually the education minister may have to reverse course, given the unusually public backlash that continues.

Russell Moses, the dean of academics and faculty at the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies, has a different view.

In an article Moses recently wrote on The Wall Street Journal’s China RealTime blog, he said the campaign wasn’t really about anxiety of unrest at colleges in China or even educational reform.

“The real fear is that another of Xi’s campaigns, the broad and ongoing anti-corruption crackdown is beginning to focus on colleges,” he said.

And that presents conservatives with a threat, or maybe an opportunity, if they play their cards right, he added.

__

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[Housecarl]

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http://www.breitbart.com/national-s...s-to-ban-western-ideas-from-college-campuses/

Paranoid China Attempts To Ban Western Ideas From College Campuses

By John Hayward
10 Feb 2015
Comments 13

The easy joke to make, upon learning that China’s authoritarian rulers are trying to ban Western ideas (other than Communism, of course) from college campuses, is to say that they are only trying to accomplish what American universities already did forty years ago.

The New York Times article on China’s ideological crusade is actually a fascinating look at just how contagious those Western ideas are, in the estimation of both liberty-loving advocates and totalitarian critics.

The point man for China’s exercise in campus ideological purity is education minister Yuan Guiren, and he appears to be running into about as much pushback as could be expected against an iron-fisted authoritarian State, with his critics noting that he seems to have changed his tune about the challenge posed by Western thought quite a bit in a short period of time.

“Young teachers and students are key targets of infiltration by enemy forces,” Yuan wrote on in February in a state journal, describing the impetus for the new censorship. He accused other nations, without naming names, of having “stepped up infiltration in more discreet and diverse ways.” The Times notes, however, that he had previously claimed in public that China was not under the threat of any ideological infiltration. “We even sent so many people abroad and they weren’t affected in the nest of capitalism, so why fear they would be affected here?” he asked.

This led to a bit of jeering from Yuan’s critics, including Chinese college students, who felt the minister’s posture indicated a lack of backbone. Others wondered if this welding shut of the Chinese mind could signal the beginning of another “Cultural Revolution,” which was noted for its aggressive efforts to bury both foreign ideals and a large number of Chinese citizens.

The still-employed Chinese academics who provided critical quotes to the New York Times preferred to remain anonymous. The Times reports that “Party ideologues have counterattacked” critics through State-run media in recent days, “demanding harsh punishment for would-be liberal enemies, including prominent entrepreneurs, lawyers, artists, and professors.”

The depressing thing about this debate is that Yuan Guiren had it right the first time: exposure to Western ideas, deposited in the ears of Chinese students studying both at home and abroad, haven’t done much to weaken the Communists’ grip on power or liberalize Chinese society.

It is a cherished belief in the West that its ideals will spread like a virus through authoritarian societies after infection through commerce, news, entertainment, and education. We heard this argument most recently when President Obama announced his desire to normalize relations with Cuba. It was a particularly laughable assertion in that case, since the Cubans have already enjoyed plenty of commerce with Western nations other than America, and 92% of every U.S. dollar paid to Cuban workers by American companies will go straight into the Castro family’s treasure vaults. Unfortunately, the sober truth is that modern authoritarian regimes have grown very adept at inoculating themselves against ideological contagion. Commerce and educational exchange with the West have done little to thaw China or the oppressive regimes of the Middle East, not even in officially friendly Saudi Arabia.

Despite this recent history, the Chinese regime appears threatened enough to visibly fidget about foreign “infiltrators” planting ideas that could threaten their great socialist revolution. The Financial Times reports that the ham-fisted crackdown includes a set of forbidden topics – press freedom, respect for civil society, elected government, constitutionalism – called the “Seven No-Speaks,” plus more layers of censorship added to Chinese Internet access, and even a move to install closed-circuit cameras in classrooms so teachers can be monitored by Party officials. Young people have responded to this rising tide of oppression by significantly increasing their applications to study abroad – a safety valve Beijing can choke off any time it pleases.

 

[Millwright]

Zero should be able to book unlimited speaking gigs in Chinese colleges.

Promoting communism.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.realcleardefense.com/art..._7_fears_when_it_comes_to_america_107620.html

February 11, 2015
China's 7 Fears When it Comes to America
By Michael Pillsbury

(Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the new book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury. For book publishing rights please see the end of the excerpt.)

***

Beyond seeking to avoid arousing the American ba by inducing complacency, China’s strategy is largely intended to respond to the types of threats Chinese leaders believe the United States poses to China. Many U.S. officials—myself included—were late to recognize just how seriously Chinese leaders considered the U.S. “threat” to be; the accumulation of evidence to this effect convinced many, although not all, of us to look at Chinese perceptions differently. China was far less interested in conventional force projection than it was concerned with countering the American threat. The Assassin’s Mace is a key component of this approach.

I was tasked by the Pentagon to study Chinese threat perceptions. Many of my findings were greeted, then and now, with disbelief. Yet these Chinese threat perceptions, which I refer to as China’s “Seven Fears,” reflect the underlying attitudes of Chinese military and political leaders, particularly because those who wrote about these fears did not intend for their writings to shape popular opinion. The Seven Fears are derived solely from internal Chinese military sources; this was no propaganda effort designed to influence public opinion more broadly.

As China’s leaders see it, America has sought to dominate China since at least the time of Abraham Lincoln. I asked my Chinese contacts for evidence of this purported grand American scheme. Several Chinese military and civilian authors handed over a set of books and articles. From these materials, as well as interviews I conducted during six trips to China from 2001 to 2012, I concluded that China’s leaders believe the United States behaves like an ancient Chinese hegemon from the Warring States era. At first, it seemed to me to be illogical, even bizarre, for Chinese leaders to assert that American presidents from John Tyler to Bill Clinton had somehow learned the statecraft axioms of the Warring States and then decided to apply these esoteric concepts to contain China’s growth. This is a radical departure from the reality; in truth, the United States has labored to support China’s sovereignty, to promote Chinese economic development, and to give China a strong place in the global community.

I was astonished that my own report confirmed a revelation that I and others had previously dismissed as implausible even though it came from one of the highest-ranking Chinese defectors. Chen Youwei, a defector from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, identified several pathologies in Beijing’s decision making: reading the worst intentions into an adversary’s actions, ideological ossification, and disconnection from reality. Strangely, the Chinese had presumed that China was at the center of American war planning.

China’s Seven Fears are as follows:

1.) America’s war plan is to blockade China:

The behavior of most strategic actors is influenced by their psychological peculiarities: factors such as emotions, culture, and fears. China seems to fear blockades of its long coastline, and the string of islands off most of its coast makes the leadership feel even more vulnerable. Many in the Chinese military fear that China could be easily blockaded by a foreign power because of the maritime geography of the first island chain stretching from Japan to the Philippines that is perceived to be vulnerable to fortification. The islands are seen as a natural geographical obstacle blocking China’s access to the open ocean. Indeed, a former Japanese naval chief of staff has boasted that Chinese submarines would be unable to slip into the deep waters of the Pacific through the Ryukyu island chain, north or south of Taiwan, or through the Bashi (Luzon) Strait without being detected by U.S. and Japanese antisubmarine forces. Chinese military authors frequently discuss the need for training exercises and a military campaign plan to break out of an island blockade. One operations-research analysis describes seven lines of enemy capabilities that Chinese submarines would have to overcome to break a blockade. The United States, in their estimation, has supposedly built a blockade system of antisubmarine nets, hydroacoustic systems, underwater mines, surface warships, antisubmarine aircraft, submarines, and reconnaissance satellites.

2.) America supports plundering China’s maritime resources:

Chinese authors claim that valuable resources within China’s maritime territorial boundaries are being plundered by foreign powers because of China’s naval weakness, thereby threatening the country’s future development. Various proposals have been advocated to improve the situation. Zhang Wenmu, a former researcher at a Ministry of State Security think tank, goes so far as to say, “The navy is concerned with China’s sea power, and sea power is concerned with China’s future development. As I see it, if a nation lacks sea power, its development has no future.” A 2005 article in the Chinese military journal Military Economic Research states that China’s external-facing economy, foreign trade, and overseas markets all require having a powerful military force as a guarantee.

3.) America may choke off China’s sea lines of communication:

Many Chinese writings touch on the vulnerability of China’s sea lines of communication, especially the petroleum lifeline in the Strait of Malacca. Advocates of a blue-water navy cite the insecurity of China’s energy imports. According to one Chinese observer, the U.S., Japanese, and Indian fleets together “constitute overwhelming pressure on China’s oil supply,” though another study concludes that “only the U.S. has the power and the nerve to blockade China’s oil transport routes.” Similarly, Campaign Theory Study Guide, a 2002 textbook written by scholars at China’s National Defense University, raises several potential scenarios for the interdiction and defense of sea lines of communication. The Science of Campaigns, an important text also published by that university, discusses the defense of sea lines of communication in its 2006 edition. Some authors express urgency: “Regarding the problems . . . of sea embargo or oil lanes being cut off . . . China must . . . ‘repair the house before it rains.’” These advocates seem to want to shift priorities from a submarine-centric navy to one with aircraft carriers as the centerpieces.

4.) America seeks China’s territorial dismemberment:

China has outlined campaign plans against various invasion scenarios in a training manual intended only for internal military consumption. An influential 2005 study conducted by researchers from China’s National Defense University, the Academy of Military Science, and other top strategy think tanks assessed the vulnerabilities of each of China’s seven military regions, examining the various routes that an invading force could take. They used the military geography of each region and the frequency of historical invasion by foreign forces to forecast future vulnerabilities to land attack, even identifying neighbors as potential invaders. Recent changes to the structure of the People’s Liberation Army appear to be directed at improving the country’s resistance to land invasion.

5.) America may assist rebels inside China:

The three military regions along the northern border with Russia, including the Beijing military region, are said to be vulnerable to armored attacks and to airborne landings, as expressed in the 2005 study China’s Theater Military Geography. The “Northern Sword” exercise in Inner Mongolia in 2005 involved elements of two armored divisions: more than twenty-eight hundred tanks and other vehicles performed China’s largest field maneuver involving armored troops and an airlift over two thousand kilometers that simulated an attack on terrorists who were receiving foreign military support. Chinese spokesmen claimed the exercise scenario was foreign support of domestic terrorists but did not mention America explicitly.

6.) America may foment riots, civil war or terrorism inside China:

Constant Chinese proclamations against foreign support for “splittists” in Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang have become accepted as part of ordinary Chinese rhetoric, but these statements reflect a deep concern about China’s territorial integrity. A researcher with the Central Party International Liaison Department placed internal threats from splittists and the Falun Gong religious movement on the same level as the threat posed by U.S. hegemony.

7.) America threatens aircraft carrier strikes:

For at least a decade, Chinese military authors have assessed the threats from U.S. aircraft carriers and analyzed how best to counteract them. Operations- research analysis has suggested how Chinese forces should be employed to deal with the vulnerabilities of U.S. aircraft carriers, while other research cites specific weapons systems that China should develop. The Chinese anti-carrier missile is one of the responses to this fear of carrier strikes.



Michael Pillsbury is the director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute and has served in presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Educated at Stanford and Columbia Universities, he is a former analyst at the RAND Corporation and research fellow at Harvard and has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and on the staff of four U.S. Senate committees. More information on the book is available at: http://100yearmarathon.com/



Publishing Rights: Excerpted from THE HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON: CHINA’S SECRET STRATEGY TO REPLACE AMERICA AS THE GLOBAL SUPERPOWER by Michael Pillsbury published by HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, LLC. Copyright © 2014 by Michael Pillsbury. All rights reserved.