Gordon G. Chang's Blog, page 16

Chinese Generals Lash Out at America, Japan

Lieutenant General Wang Guanzhong, the deputy chief of general staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, attacked the US and Japan on Sunday, charging them with conspiring against his country. Speaking on the final day of the Shangri-La Dialogue, the Asian regional security forum in Singapore, the general displayed, among other things, how out of touch the Chinese leadership has become.

The dialogue occurred at a time of tensions off China’s coast. In the South China Sea, China and Vietnam remained locked in an escalating dispute over the placement of a Chinese oil drilling platform near Vietnam’s shoreline and in waters surely within Vietnam’s Exclusive Economic Zone. Beijing, with its infamous nine-dash line on official maps, claims 90 percent of the South China Sea as its own. Over the East China Sea, Chinese jets dangerously buzzed Japanese reconnaissance planes operating in international airspace.

Conversations at the dialogue, naturally, were all about Beijing. Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gave the event’s keynote, expressing deep concern about China’s actions, although he did his best to avoid mentioning that country by name.

US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel then specifically called out Beijing. “In recent months, China has undertaken destabilizing, unilateral actions asserting its claims in the South China Sea,” he said. “It has restricted access to Scarborough Reef, put pressure on the longstanding Philippine presence at the Second Thomas Shoal, begun land reclamation activities at multiple locations, and moved an oil rig into disputed waters near the Paracel Islands.” Hagel also declared this: “We firmly oppose any nation’s use of intimidation, coercion, or the threat of force to assert those claims.”

General Wang, finding himself on the defensive, lashed out. First, the fast-rising flag officer departed from prepared remarks and went on a bender. The Japanese prime minister and the American defense secretary, he declared, were conspiring: “They supported and encouraged each other in provoking and challenging China, taking advantage of being the first to speak at the dialogue.” In particular, he went after Hagel: “His speech is a speech with tastes of hegemony, a speech with expressions of coercion and intimidation, a speech with flaring rhetoric that usher destabilizing factors into the Asia-Pacific to stir up trouble, and a speech with unconstructive attitude.”

And then Wang showed how Beijing viewed the world. “China has never initiated disputes over territorial sovereignty and the delimitation of maritime boundary,” he maintained. “China only takes countermeasures against others’ provocation.” The general told us who is to blame: “Assertiveness has come from the joint actions of the United States and Japan, not China.”

After Wang finished, his comrade, Major General Zhu Chenghu, went to work, mocking America for having allies. “As US power declines, Washington needs to rely on its allies in order to reach its goal of containing China’s development,” the general said. Then he mocked the US for suffering from “erectile dysfunction.” “We can see from the situation in Ukraine this kind of ED,” he told Phoenix TV.

The implications of this arrogance are deeply troubling. Thinking the US is done and believing itself without meaningful opposition, the Chinese evidently think they can do what they want. They are not only behaving like they represent a great power, “they’re behaving with a sense of entitlement,” said one “analyst” speaking anonymously to the Wall Street Journal.

Joint Chiefs Chairman General Martin Dempsey, also in Singapore, left the door open to Beijing joining its neighbors in a new architecture to maintain security in the region, but, after the arrogant and unreflective comments from Generals Wang and Zhu, he has to know that China is the region’s principal threat to peace. 

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Chinese Fighter Jet in Near Miss With Japanese Recon Planes

On Monday, Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told reporters that his government had lodged a protest with Beijing for Chinese jets closing within meters of Japanese reconnaissance planes over the East China Sea. Tokyo has every right to be upset. Beijing, from all indications, looks like it was trying to create incidents by flying too close for safety.

On Saturday, Chinese Su-27 jets flew within 50 meters of a Japanese OP-3C and within 30 meters of a Japanese YS-11EB, both propeller-driven reconnaissance craft. “This is a close encounter that is outright over the top,” said Japanese Defense Minister Itsunori Onodera on Sunday. At no other time since World War II have Chinese and Japanese military planes come into such close proximity.

Beijing justified its provocative actions by saying it had declared a no-fly zone over joint naval maneuvers with Russia in the East China Sea—the first ever between the two countries in that body of water—and that the Japanese craft had flown into the area. “Japanese military planes intruded without permission on the exercise’s airspace and carried out dangerous maneuvers, in a serious violation of international law and standards, and this could have easily caused a misunderstanding and even a mid-air accident,” declared a statement issued by China’s Ministry of National Defense on Sunday.

Tokyo denies that the incidents in the air took place near the exercise, but even if they had, the Japanese had every right to fly there. China, on the other hand, had no authority to close off international airspace.

Moreover, China’s ministry in the same statement made another provocative claim: “Chinese military aircraft have the right to maintain safety in the air and to employ necessary identification and prevention procedures against foreign aircraft entering China’s air defense identification zone over the East China Sea.” Beijing, in other words, is beginning to enforce the expansive ADIZ that it declared in November without consultation with affected nations.

Yes, every country with a coast can declare an air zone, but China’s zone includes what is considered the sovereign airspace of Japan, the air over the disputed Senkaku Islands. The People’s Republic of China claims those islands too—asserting sovereignty in 1971 after essentially acknowledging they were Japanese—but Japan in fact has controlled them for more than a century. So, the inclusion of the airspace over the islets in China’s air zone is a provocative move.

Saturday’s incidents inevitably recall the one in April 2001 when a Chinese jet clipped a US Navy EP-3 in international airspace over the South China Sea. The reckless Chinese pilot tumbled into the sea and was never found, and the American plane limped to a base on China’s Hainan Island, where it made an emergency landing. Beijing imprisoned the 24 crew members for 11 days and stripped the craft of its electronic gear. The Bush administration issued a statement akin to an apology to the Chinese and paid $34,000—essentially a ransom—for the release of the aviators. America’s response was a disgrace.

Bush defenders say the White House was able to move beyond the crisis, but the White House taught the Chinese that there was no price to be paid for aggressive conduct in the skies and what was an act of war on the ground. And today we can see that the Chinese are once again engaging in dangerous flying. Feeble foreign policies always have a cost, even if the price is not immediately apparent.

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US Indicts Chinese Military Officers for Cyber Spying

On Monday, US Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictments of five officers of China’s People’s Liberation Army for “serious cybersecurity breaches against six American victim entities.” The significance? “These represent the first ever charges against known state actors for infiltrating US commercial targets by cyber means,” the attorney general said at a press conference.

Every nation spies, but China, as a matter of state policy, collects information and passes it on to state enterprises to help them compete in the international marketplace. Washington has continually complained but gotten nowhere with Beijing. Exasperated, Holder on Monday said “enough is enough.” Hence the criminal charges.

China’s cyber thefts are no ordinary crime. Estimates of annual loss range from $20 billion to more than $300 billion, with best guesses around $110 billion. If China did not engage in this thievery it’s estimated that there could be 2.1 million more Americans employed each year. “It’s the greatest transfer of wealth in history,” said General Keith Alexander in January 2012, when he was director of the National Security Agency. Therefore, it is also the biggest heist in history.

In one sense, the indictments are largely symbolic. No one expects the accused Chinese officers to surrender at the federal courthouse in the Western District of Pennsylvania, where the grand jury was impaneled. And if they did, criminal proceedings would take years to complete. Finally, even if prosecutors obtained convictions, it wouldn’t make a difference. The PLA would replace the quintet with five more hackers back in Shanghai to jockey communications links and to steal technology, know-how, and information.

The indictments, however, do serve notice that the US is prepared to seek legal redress in US courts and, one assumes, in international courts and bodies where China could face additional consequences. In addition, the charges also show the Chinese that the US has the capacity to detect the thefts in extraordinary detail. . Yet even if the Chinese are shocked at how good we in fact are, it seems unlikely they will change course. They derive too much benefit from what David Hickton, US attorney for the Western District of Pennsylvania, called “this 21st century burglary.”

Hickton on Monday demanded the Chinese burglar stop, and the question confronting American policymakers is how to end the serial crime. As powerfully symbolic as criminal prosecutions are, they are unlikely to be a sufficient deterrent when the rewards are so great. Unfortunately, the only way to end China’s commercial spying is to impose costs greater than the benefits.

Because this is a pocketbook issue, Washington needs to take away the cash. Last spring the Blair-Huntsman commission on cyber attacks proposed a series of measures to counter China’s assault on American networks (pdf). One proposal that will work is its “last-ditch” one, a tariff on all Chinese products. An article in the New York Times at the time of the commission’s report suggested that the idea is of doubtful legality under our trade agreements, but it should pass muster under the World Trade Organization’s exemption for national security.

Of course, by now the US has no choice. The Chinese, after all, are bleeding American industry dry. In any event, this is not a matter of the technicalities of trade law.

Rather, it is a matter of raw power, and we have much more of it than China. Last year, the Chinese merchandise trade surplus against the US was $318.4 billion. That was 122.6 percent of China’s overall trade merchandise surplus. We can replace Chinese suppliers, but China cannot find another American market.

Moreover, the Chinese are particularly vulnerable now. At this moment, their economy is fragile—growing only in the low single digits and seemingly headed to a debt crisis of monumental proportions—and that gives us enormous leverage, should we care to use it. President Obama can tell Xi Jinping, his Chinese counterpart, that he needs us more than we need him. 

Economic retaliation against China will hurt us too, but we are already suffering great losses. We have to do something to make an impression on the Chinese prowler, and preferably now. 

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Why Is the Pentagon Honoring a Chinese General?

General Fang Fenghui, China’s chief of general staff, is now in the US on a five-day tour of American military facilities, including the naval air station in San Diego, where he inspected the USS Ronald Reagan, one of America’s 10 active aircraft carriers. Most notably, he will receive a “full-military-honors arrival ceremony” at the Pentagon on Thursday.

The visit comes as , both military and civilian, are protecting a drilling rig that China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a Chinese state-owned enterprise, positioned just off Vietnam’s coast at the beginning of this month. China’s ships rammed and collided with Vietnamese craft defending waters that Hanoi believes to be within its exclusive economic zone. The rig’s location is near the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea.

Beijing, with its infamous nine-dashed line on its official maps, takes the position that about 90 percent of that body of water is China’s, including the drill site. The expansive—and largely indefensible—claim includes the coastal waters of Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Indonesia as well as Vietnam. 

Secretary of State John Kerry has been trying to calm the situation. “He urged both sides on both calls to de-escalate tensions, to engage in high-level dialogue, to ensure safe conduct by their vessels at sea, and to resolve the dispute through peaceful means,” said State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, referring to Kerry’s conversations with his Chinese and Vietnamese counterparts. The Chinese flatly rejected these even-handed comments, blasting Kerry for just trying to keep the peace in the region. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post has called the exchange a “war of words.”

According to one Chinese oil official, Beijing apparently directed its state oil company, commonly known as CNOOC, to drill in order to bolster its sovereignty claim. “This reflected the will of the central government and is also related to the US strategy on Asia,” said the official, speaking anonymously to Reuters, about drilling in Vietnam’s waters. “It is not commercially driven.”

Beijing, with its particularly provocative move, is obviously testing President Obama, who had just left the region after an eight-day tour to reassure allies and friends. Vietnam was the perfect target for the Chinese, as it is not allied with Washington. Yet the Chinese gambit nonetheless affects US interests as it directly impinges freedom of navigation, something America has defended for more than two centuries. Moreover, Beijing’s act against Vietnam’s coastal water mirrors moves against American allies Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

The Chinese do not take American warnings seriously, reports the Wall Street Journal. And why should they? General Fang is about to get military honors while his country’s vessels are deliberately creating turmoil and directly challenging American interests.

Washington may think it is preserving regional order by seeking to develop a cooperative relationship with Beijing—hence the honor for Fang—but Chinese policymakers evidently perceive them differently, seeing America’s hopeful and generous moves as symptoms of weakness. After all, they have continually increased the pressure on their neighbors and challenged Washington directly, especially during the last half decade.

In any event, there is no arguing with history. China has, in recent years, been harassing American vessels in international waters, dismembering the Philippines, and appropriating international airspace. The Chinese have regularly violated the territorial integrity of Japan with their probes on the sea and in the air. Last October, for no apparent reason, Beijing publicly boasted about its ability to kill Americans in the tens of millions.

The assumptions that guide American policy toward China are obviously incorrect. It’s not too late to change course and maybe even send General Fang home without his Pentagon ceremony.

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China Demolishes Megachurch

Local officials in the Chinese city of Wenzhou, in coastal Zhejiang Province, are denying that the demolition of the Sanjiang Church late last month was the result of religious persecution.

They maintain that the building, big enough for 3,000 worshippers, was “illegal,” far exceeding its permitted size of 1,881 square meters. Jin Leibo, a propaganda department spokesperson for the county where the towering structure was located, told CNN that church leaders had built 7,928 square meters without authorization. They then had failed to “self-rectify” by April 22nd, so a convoy of bulldozers and excavators, backed by armed police, destroyed the building by April 28th, leaving an enormous pile of rubble. The red-spired Protestant church, built over 12 years and costing 30 million yuan (about $4.7 million) to construct, took only a few days to tear down.

In one sense, Jin was right in saying the size of the structure had everything to do with its demotion. Xia Baolong, Zhejiang’s Communist Party chief, had apparently become concerned about the large dimensions of church structures dotting his rich province, saying they were “too conspicuous.”

Yet in another sense, the destruction of the Sanjiang Church had nothing to do with its size. Lesser houses of worship are also under attack. The BBC’s Carrie Gracie, also reporting from Zhejiang, notes that a smaller church, under a threat of demolition, was recently ordered to take down the cross from its roof. Congregants, after “soul searching,” ultimately complied in order to save their place of worship.

There are many themes illustrated by the destruction of the massive Sanjiang Church. For instance, we can see that the Communist Party persecutes religion in sporadic fashion, that local officials are willing to tolerate worship so long as it is out of sight, that party-state policies can change without warning and with devastating consequences. 

Yet the most important trend is that Chinese people have lost much of their fear of the Communist state, as one poll, commissioned by the BBC and released at the end of March, indicates (pdf). One consequence of the perception of freedom is that Christian worshipers in Wenzhou believed that they could build a massive structure in violation of a building permit and that they would be able to use it with impunity.

That, in the face of the party’s hostility to religion, was unrealistic, but China’s Protestants seem to be especially bold. And at least in the long run, they have every reason to believe they will prevail. The officially atheistic Communist Party seems helpless to stop them, something evident from the comment of Feng Zhili, head of Zhejiang’s ethnic and religious affairs committee, who recently admitted that the spread of the Christian faith was “too excessive and too haphazard.”

In Wenzhou, sometimes called the “Jerusalem of the East,” there are more than a thousand churches. There, about 15 percent of the population is Christian according to estimates, but no one really knows the exact percentage because persecution drives believers underground. And no one knows how many Christians there are in China, but the number is undoubtedly in excess of a hundred million, far more than the 85 million members of the Communist Party, the world’s largest political party. Some believe that China will soon have more Christians than any other country. No wonder the Sanjiang congregants felt confident about building a megachurch in plain view.

No repressive campaign in the history of the People’s Republic has ever worked against Protestants and Catholics for long. As Christian activist Bob Fu of ChinaAid said to the Telegraph, “History has proved and will prove again with this case that another church revival will happen after this new wave of persecution.”

So don’t be surprised if another church appears soon on a hillside in Wenzhou, this time bigger than the one just demolished.

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China’s Campaign Against Foreign Words

Twice in late April, People’s Daily railed against the incorporation of acronyms and English words in written Chinese. “How much have foreign languages damaged the purity and vitality of the Chinese language?” the Communist Party’s flagship publication asked as it complained of the “zero-translation phenomenon.”

So if you write in the world’s most exquisite language—in my opinion, anyway—don’t even think of jotting down “WiFi,” “MBA,” or “VIP.” If you’re a fan of Apple products, please do not use “iPhone” or “iPad.” And never ever scribble “PM2.5,” a scientific term that has become popular in China due to the air pollution crisis, or “e-mail.”

China’s communist culture caretakers are cheesed, perhaps by the unfairness of the situation. They note that when English absorbs Chinese words, such as “kung fu,” the terms are romanized. When China copies English terms, however, they are often adopted without change, dropped into Chinese text as is.

This is not the first time Beijing has moaned about foreign terms. In 2010 for instance, China Central Television banned “NBA” and required the on-air use of “US professional basketball association.” The irony is that the state broadcaster consistently uses “CCTV” to identify itself, something that has not escaped the attention of China’s noisy online community.

In response to the new language campaign, China’s netizens naturally took to mockery and sarcasm last month. They posted fictitious conversations using ungainly translations for the now shunned foreign terms. On Weibo, China’s microblogging service, they held a “grand competition to keep the purity of the Chinese language.” The consensus was that People’s Daily was once again promoting the ridiculous and impractical, as the substituted Chinese translations were almost always longer and convoluted.

The derision has not stopped China’s policymakers from taking extraordinary steps to defend their language. In 2012, the Chinese government established a linguistics committee to standardize foreign words. In 2013, it published the first ten approved Chinese translations for terms such as WTO, AIDS, and GDP, ordering all media to use them. A second and third series of approved terms are expected this year. How French.

There is a bit of obtuseness in all these elaborate efforts. As People’s Daily, China’s most authoritative publication, talks about foreign terms damaging “purity and vitality,” it forgets that innovation, in the form of borrowing, is the essence of vitality. And as for “purity,” the Chinese people are not buying the Communist Party’s hypocritical argument. “Do you think simplified Chinese characters pure?” asked one blogger.

The party, starting in the early Maoist era, replaced what are now called “traditional” Chinese characters for a set of “simplified” ones, thereby making a wholesale change of the script. The new set of characters may be easier to write, but the forced adoption meant that young Chinese in the Mainland can no longer read classic works in their own language unless they have been transcribed into the new characters.

The party, it seems, is just anti-foreign. “Since the reform and opening up, many people have blindly worshipped the West, casually using foreign words as a way of showing off their knowledge and intellect,” said Xia Jixuan from the Ministry of Education, quoted in People’s Daily. “This also exacerbated the proliferation of foreign words.”

Are foreign words inherently bad? In China, unfortunately, we are seeing further evidence of the closing of Communist Party minds.   

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Skipping China, Obama Seeks to Reassure Asian Allies

President Obama is “wheels up” Tuesday, beginning an eight-day, four-nation visit to East Asia. The most notable aspect of the trip is not where he is going but where he is not. He is not going to China.

That’s a good thing because Washington in recent years has been paying far too much attention to Chinese autocrats and not enough to America’s five democratic allies and many friends in the region.

The president will meet three of the allies—Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines—and one friend—Malaysia—yet the week in Asia is all about a country that is neither, China. An expansionist China covets territories of all four nations, and it has been attempting to close off international waters, bringing itself into contention with an America that has defended freedom of navigation for more than two centuries.

On Friday, Susan Rice denied there was any anxiety about Washington’s resolve in East Asia. According to the controversial national security adviser, the administration has not heard any concern from regional allies, who, she said, “look to the United States as a partner of first choice.”

Of course, countries in the region would rather partner with Washington than a militarized and belligerent Beijing, but that does not mean they are not deeply worried about America defending them. In particular, South Korea and Japan are looking at Vladimir Putin’s unopposed grab of Crimea when they think about the willingness of the US to stand up against China and its only ally, North Korea.

Should Asian leaders be concerned? Administration officials have sought to justify their insubstantial policies on Ukraine by pointing out that Kyiv is not a treaty ally, but the Philippines has been one since 1951, and Washington refused to defend it when Beijing threatened Scarborough Shoal in 2012. Early that year, Chinese vessels swarmed the South China Sea reef, long considered part of the Philippines, in an attempt to control it. The Obama administration brokered a deal in which both Beijing and Manila agreed to withdraw their ships, but only the Philippines did so. Washington then failed to do anything to dislodge the Chinese, despite the fact that Beijing had dishonored the agreement and thereby seized the shoal.

American fecklessness prompted Philippine President Benigno Aquino in February to mention the abandonment of Czechoslovakia while comparing today’s policies toward China to the appeasement of the Third Reich. After Scarborough Shoal, he has a point, and that is why Obama will go to Manila to patch up relations with Aquino—and show the rest of the region that America is there to stay.

There are no big events on the president’s Asian schedule, but the point is that this trip is about providing reassurance to a region that thinks it could be heading to conflict. In January, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Davos compared this time to 1914.

Many in Asia, like Aquino, are beginning to agree with Abe. The West’s inability to oppose Putin’s aggressive moves has made the region think a belligerent China could easily be emboldened by events in Europe.

President Obama is not about to change that perception with eight days of talk, but he is at least giving himself an opportunity to begin to undo in East Asia the damage of his failed diplomacy elsewhere. 

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Mysterious Suicides in China's Leadership

A spate of suicides among officials in China has caught the country’s attention. Beijing’s censors have quickly moved to end speculation about the deaths, indicating the Communist Party’s sensitivity, but everyday people remain suspicious.

The body of Xu Yean, 58, of the State Bureau for Letters and Calls, was discovered on April 8th in his Beijing office. He was the fourth high-ranking official to take his own life in recent months. 

The week before, Zhou Yu, a police official in Chongqing, was found hanged, in a hotel. Said to be suffering from depression, he was involved in the high-profile investigation of the now-imprisoned Bo Xilai, the former boss of that metropolis. In January, Bai Zhongren, a former president of the heavily indebted China Railway Group, killed himself. State Council Information Officer Deputy Director Li Wufeng, considered China’s top internet cop, jumped to his death from the sixth floor of an office building on March 24th.

Minor officials have also been taking their lives. All told, there have been at least 54 “unnatural deaths” of Chinese officials since January of last year. Of these, 23 are listed as suicides. Drinking and accidents contributed another nine deaths.

It is not clear whether the 23 acknowledged suicides exceed the average for the Chinese population as a whole, but it is apparent that Beijing is concerned about the high-profile deaths. The Central Propaganda Department issued media instructions to not report without authorization the “accidental death” of Li Wufeng, and news of Xu Yean’s demise was scrubbed.

Beijing’s strategy is to deny such deaths are suicides, suppress news, or when all else fails blame “depression.” Most Chinese, it appears, are not buying the official explanations. As one poster on Sina Weibo, the microblogging service, explained, “A new rule for officials who have committed suicide: Every single one must be depressed, every single one must be unhealthy.”

What is unhealthy is the Communist Party’s increasingly corrupt political system. Take Xu Yean, for instance. His bureau, according to Yu Jianrong of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is one of the most venal in Beijing, extorting bribes from officials across China. The office is supposed to give ordinary citizens a means to complain about local tyrants, but it has become a moneymaking machine for central officials, who bury complaints in return for large payments. One of Xu’s senior colleagues, Xu Jie, was relieved of responsibilities last November and placed under investigation for “serious violations” of party discipline, code for corruption.

Most reports state Xu Yean was not publicly named as the subject of a probe, but the South China Morning Post cites a source “close to the CCDI”—the party’s Central Commission for Discipline Investigation—indicating he was a target nonetheless. “Everybody is in the same boat,” said thesource. “Someone in Xu’s position is not immune.” 

Chinese leader Xi Jinping in fact says no one is immune from his corruption probes and that he is going after both “tigers” and “flies,” party lingo for officials high and low. Few in China actually believe that Xi is trying to rid China of that evil, however. After all, the Communist Party has become completely infested, and the president appears to be targeting only political adversaries, such as the infamous Zhou Yongkang, the former security czar, using “corruption” as an excuse.

Yet Xi’s purges are wide-ranging, touching hundreds of officials, and they have gone so far that former leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are now asking him to slow the effort, in part because he is threatening their extensive patronage networks and also because his investigations could shake the foundations of the party itself.

At this moment, it looks like fear pervades Chinese officialdom, and that some officials are choosing the easy way out by taking their own lives. As the purges continue, we can expect more unnatural deaths—and perhaps even political instability.

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India Goes to the Polls

On Monday, voters started to go to the polls in what a recent Economist editorial called “the largest collective democratic act in history.” When voting ends on May 12th, Indians will have chosen a new parliament—and a new leader of their democracy, the world’s biggest.

Manmohan Singh, the 13th and current prime minister of India, is stepping down. His party, Indian National Congress, has dominated politics since independence in 1947. Yet it is now conducting a dispirited campaign under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the fourth generation of the country’s most famous political dynasty. 

The great-grandson of the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi talks about how no one person can run India, and that is a concession—implicit but clear nonetheless—that this election is all about Narendra Modi, chief minister of Gujarat state, who is leading the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the main opposition to Gandhi’s Congress.

Anything can happen in an electorate of 815 million citizens, but most people are betting that Modi will be the next leader of India. Considered to be clean in a country laden with corrupt politicians, Modi is a reform advocate in an economy held down by world-class red tape and a pro-business celebrity in a country desperately needing economic growth.

So why is this opposition figure so controversial? Modi, unfortunately, is accused of whipping up anti-Muslim sentiment among Hindus. Rights groups say he permitted—and some say encouraged—riots that killed about 2,000 people—most of them Muslims—in Gujarat in 2002. He has never been charged for his role in the communal violence, and supporters now say Modi has changed, that he favors an India open to all.

Many, however, doubt his sincerity. Politicians of Modi’s Hindu nationalist BJP will wear Muslim skullcaps in a sign of reconciliation, but Modi will not. The Economist, for one, is dubious that he has turned over a new leaf. Washington, apparently resigned to the fact that he will soon lead a nation important to American interests, has just ended more than a decade of shunning him.

India can live with corruption and it can live with slow growth, both hallmarks of Congress rule in recent years. The one thing the country cannot tolerate, if it is to have a future, is religious violence. India was born in a spasm of hatred, and it has not been able to shake this evil, hard as some Muslims and Hindus have tried to reconcile. Democratic India has yet to heal wounds, something that Mahatma Gandhi—not related to Rahul—worked so hard to achieve. 

Voters, especially younger ones, now demand change, and there seems nothing that will stop a BJP win. Modi, in all probability, will be the country’s next leader. The issue is whether he will represent all Indians, whatever their religion.

Many say Modi can. He will surely get a chance, and his country has everything riding on it.

OG Image: South AsiaIndiaManmohan Singh

Taiwan Protests Engulfing Beijing

Over the weekend, citizens from around Taiwan converged on their capital of Taipei for demonstrations over a trade agreement with China. On Saturday, a few thousand citizens rallied to support the beleaguered President Ma Ying-jeou as he pushed for ratification of the unpopular pact. On Sunday, more than a hundred thousand citizens—estimates ranged from 116,000 to 700,000—turned out to “write history,” opposing the deal and supporting students who had taken over the legislature last month.

On the evening of Tuesday, March 18th, students broke into the Legislative Yuan and blocked the entrances with chairs. At the time, they said they would leave by the following Friday, but they have since decided to stay and remain in place. 

The takeover occurred a day after the first reading of the Cross-Strait Service in Trade Agreement, which would open 80 sectors to China. Students felt Ma, by pushing the pact through the legislature without deliberation, had broken his pledge to permit a full airing. On Saturday, Ma agreed to a line-by-line review of the now-stalled deal but did not promise to withdraw it from consideration. Ma also gave his blessing to a new mechanism that would increase scrutiny of trade agreements with China.

China trade deals are increasingly unpopular in Taiwan. There is a perception among many that Ma’s cross-strait agreements have benefited China more than the island republic. Polls show most Taiwan citizens want the services pact to undergo a full examination in the legislature. China is already Taiwan’s largest trade partner.

“I want the students to leave the Legislature,” said Chang Wei-feng, a 24-year-old from the central city of Taichung, to the New York Times. “You can’t use this sort of occupation in the middle of a democratic process.” Civil disobedience in a democratic society is always controversial, but in this case it was undeniably effective. Ma has lost trust across society—his approval rating fell to 9 percent late last year—especially as his government has seemed to undermine civil liberties. Appearing to ram the services pact through the legislature turned out to be the last straw for many.

The seizure of the legislature took most everyone by surprise. Many in the opposition had been privately grumbling for years that young Taiwanese did not seem to care about cross-strait politics or even the future of their country. Overnight, that changed.

Or maybe it only seemed that way. “My answer was that it was impossible to see the inside clearly, to witness the true spirit of the society and its potential—impossible because everything was forged,” Vaclav Havel wrote in 2003, trying to explain how he always thought he could change his country’s regime, even while it appeared mighty. “In such circumstances, no one can perceive the internal, underground movements and processes that are occurring. No one can determine the size of the snowball needed to initiate the avalanche leading to the disintegration of the regime.” 

Ma, for all his hard-line tactics, has not been running a regime, and the Sunflower Movement, as the demonstrations are now called, has yet to produce a substantive victory. Nonetheless, from seemingly nowhere a handful of students have galvanized a society and within days have changed almost every political calculus on the island. Ma, trying to move Taiwan closer to China, had pushed too hard, and now the process of reconciliation with Beijing, which was never entirely popular in Taiwan, looks like it is quickly moving in reverse.

And if Beijing thinks it has problems in Taiwan, it could see disobedience spread to Hong Kong, where the government has also been more mindful of currying favor with Chinese leaders than reflecting popular opinion at home. Activists in that city, which is a Special Administration Region of the People’s Republic, are now thinking of occupying the Legislative Council, their own legislature.

There is now resistance in the air, at least around China’s periphery, and Beijing leaders must be concerned that it will soon spread to their own domain.

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