Foundinchina.com

I don’t yet have the ear of the editorial team over at the offices of The New York Times, nor does the said publication pay enough attention to a crisis which is already upon us. Therefore, it was refreshing to read Wei Jingsheng sound out the dangers of allowing the CCP to bring their own brand of governance to the world stage:

“The message was clear for all those who sought restraint from a newly powerful China … since you made a fuss about releasing Mr. Liu after his arrest, we will punish him even more severely. In no uncertain terms, that will let you know that not only don’t we care what you think, but we don’t have to.”

Here’s the complete op-ed:

Last week, a moderate reformist in China, Liu Xiaobo, was sentenced to 11 years in prison by the Chinese government for the mere act of organizing and signing a petition, Charter 08, calling for political reform and the basic human rights much of the world already enjoys.

The message was clear for all those who sought restraint from a newly powerful China that now sits prominently at the tables of global governance: Since you made a fuss about releasing Mr. Liu after his arrest, we will punish him even more severely. In no uncertain terms, that will let you know that not only don’t we care what you think, but we don’t have to.

Though diplomats from Germany and Australia were among the two dozen people allowed to observe the “public trial,” the fact that no one from the American Embassy was admitted should be read as a particularly clear and open challenge to the United States.

We Chinese are intimately acquainted with this authoritarian arrogance.

During the eras of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, when I was jailed for 15 years for the “heinous crime” of putting up a wall poster, the Chinese government regarded international public opinion with this same attitude. If the Chinese people saw how the government blithely dismissed the concerns of powerful foreigners, the Communist Party rulers reasoned, they would also see they had no alternative but to submit to the overbearing authority of the government.

During Jiang Zemin’s time there were some changes. In an effort to reduce international pressure and develop the economy under favorable trade conditions from the United States, the Chinese regime yielded. Among other actions, I was released from jail and deported to the United States. That resulted in a strong backlash from the hard-liners inside of the Communist Party despite the fact that, over the years, America’s huge trade deficit is what largely fueled China’s rapid growth.

Now that China’s leaders believe their prospering nation has emerged as a player in world history just as America’s prestige has been weakened by the Iraq war and the recent financial meltdown, the hard-liners have been able to wrest the upper hand once again.

No doubt there is some truth in the notion that their revived arrogance is inspired by China’s role as America’s largest creditor. Surely this is one reason China’s leadership feels free to insult President Barack Obama, as it did during his visit to China, when they blocked broad news coverage of his public speech, and when they sent lower-level officials to negotiate with him at the Copenhagen climate talks until the last minute when Prime Minister Wen Jiabao finally granted him an audience.

Their humiliation of President Obama was not personal. It served to mark China’s power on the world stage. But more importantly, as under Mao and Deng, standing up to the American superpower is meant to stem growing internal opposition and cow China’s restless people into subservience under a one-party dictatorship. This is particularly critical as greater democracy in China would expose its own economic problems.

How President Obama responds to this challenge is not just a matter of his own honor and position; it is a matter of defending the democratic value system of the West against a challenge for ideological leadership in the 21st century.

The case of Liu Xiaobo presents an opportunity for President Obama to save face and stand up to the hard-liners’ untoward arrogance. As Mr. Liu’s case is appealed to a higher court, the United States and the rest of the West should insist that his sentence be suspended. Such a strong stance will weaken the hard-liners while strengthening the voices of peaceful reform within China.

If the United States doesn’t push back, the hard-liners will push on, with negative consequences across the whole spectrum of issues, from trade and currency valuations to global security and climate change.

The United States may owe a great deal of debt to China, but it owes a greater debt to its founding principles of freedom and human rights. If the West, led by the United States, does not counterbalance China’s new might in the world order, who will?

Wei Jingsheng, a prominent Chinese dissident who spent 18 years in Chinese prisons, now lives in exile in Washington.

Global Viewpoint/Tribune Media Services

Wei Jingsheng is clearly a man who can empathise with the plight of Liu Xiaobo, comprehends the nature of what happened in Copenhagen, and understands the global nightmare of a world that sings to the tune of the CCP.

http://www.chinese-tools.com/

The Australian pretty much spells it out. There are many salient points relating to Chinese tactics in Copenhagen, which explains the length of material quoted. But it’s well worth reading (my emphasis in bold):

The deal itself was anything but historic. But the implications of how the Chinese handled this negotiation well might be.

In a disastrous result for the world’s environment and for 19 years of difficult and painstaking environmental diplomacy, China undoubtedly won.

Chinese chief negotiator Xie Zhenhua said China was leaving Copenhagen “happy”, before walking out of the Bella conference centre late on Friday night with his clearly cheerful team .

They are about the only people in the world who are happy about Copenhagen’s failure, except perhaps those who are sceptical about the science of global warming and who therefore think global emission reduction efforts are not necessary in the first place.

Part of the problem was the complete refusal of the Chinese to engage in the talks.

The conference had been bogged down for almost two weeks by procedural blocking tactics by developing countries and China, which senior negotiators believe were almost entirely engineered by the Chinese.

Despite the fact that the “texts” that negotiators had worked on for more than two years were hopelessly far from agreed, China and the G77 block of developing nations resisted all attempts to bring politicians into the talks.

They skilfully exploited heavy-handed tactics by the Danish presidency to achieve a political agreement by describing it as a plot to “kill” the Kyoto Protocol, and were strongly supported by many of the environmental and aid activists at the conference, who in turn provided sound grabs to the assembled world media.

Initially these tactics were seen by negotiators as a strategy by China to force through a more favourable deal in the final days as negotiators grew more and more tired and desperate for a deal and more intent upon getting home for Christmas.

But when Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao, who was already in Copenhagen, refused to attend the Friday morning talks and was represented by China’s third-ranking official instead, negotiators realised they were dealing with something far more serious.

It was a snub to the US President that deeply angered US and European negotiators because it subverted the purpose of the meeting to crunch a leaders-level deal.

Making progress even harder was the insistence by the G77 group of developing nations that its hardline negotiators, including Sudanese ambassador Lumumba Di-Aping who has now twice likened developed countries’ attitudes towards climate change to Nazism, should be in the room.

In his speech, Obama repeated the demand that developing nations’ emission reduction promises had to be verifiable, a demand China was fiercely resisting in the grounds that it was an assault on its sovereignty.

“Without any accountability, any agreement would be empty words on a page,” Obama said, reportedly offending the Chinese Premier so much that he returned to his hotel.

And Wen did not show again for another leaders-level meeting after the speeches, sending an even lower level official.

When the President and the Premier finally met bilaterally there was an altercation between officials over access for each state’s media.

Finally, late in the day Obama and Clinton met the leaders of China, India, Brazil and South Africa and clinched the “Copenhagen Accord”. According to some reports, quoting unnamed US officials, that meeting only came about because the Americans barged in on a gathering of the developing nation leaders and insisted on taking part.

In any event, having refused to engage in political-level discussions for two weeks on the grounds that everything had to be done by consensus and with the democratic inclusion of all 192 parties to the talks, at the eleventh hour the Chinese did do a deal with just a handful of the most powerful nations in the world.

And that deal protected its own interests, setting back international efforts to put Chinese and Indian emission reduction targets into an international legally binding treaty and weakening demands for international verification.

But it did not protect the interests of the developing countries who had been supporting the Chinese blocking tactics all through the conference, because it did not achieve deeper emission cuts from the main emitters that came anywhere close to what will be needed to contain rising world temperatures.

In fact it achieved a deal far weaker than the worst-case scenarios that might have been imagined when delegates arrived two weeks before.

Even the crucial timetable to achieve a legally binding treaty by 2010 was taken out at the insistence of the Chinese, who said they would otherwise reject the pact.

The powerful G77 block had already fractured during these talks, with developed nations including Australia putting in a lot of effort to convince countries that their best interests did not lie in continuing to be allied with China.

As they left, Copenhagen negotiators were wondering whether, having been abandoned so dramatically, China’s allies will trust the superpower again. It appeared the fracturing of the G77 may have become a permanent fissure.

They were also questioning why China had taken the attitude that it did.

No one was asking China to do anything more than the energy-intensity based emission reduction targets that it had voluntarily announced a few weeks before the negotiations began.

And while there are political and cultural reasons for China to have particular sensitivities about questions of sovereignty, they have not prevented China from participating in verification regimes in other kinds of international agreements.

Nor was it apparently a tactic to secure greater concessions from the US, such as an improvement in its emissions reduction target of 17 per cent by 2020 based on 2005 levels, because these talks never got down to the details.

The endless debate about process, the endless argument about whether or not to talk about a deal, the endless rhetoric about the historical responsibility of the West, the rants about the evils of the capitalist system, meant there was no real top-level negotiation about what emission targets each country would take on.

This negotiation never really got to discover each nation’s bottom line. Business representatives wandered somewhat aimlessly around the conference centre because there wasn’t really a debate in which they could become engaged.

In the end, it probably came down to the fact that China won either way. If a deal collapsed, then they were off the hook of ever having to commit to legally binding targets, If the tactics succeeded in watering down a deal, then a legally binding target could still be shoved off for years.

Of course, among the protesters the US got the blame. As exhausted delegates finally left the Bella Centre they were confronted with a small band of demonstrators bearing posters of Obama with the slogan “climate shame” across his forehead.

But according to the negotiators who ploughed through these past two weeks of bitter negotiations in the bitterly cold Danish winter, China should also take a large share of the opprobrium. Climate is shaping as an issue that will test how China deals with the international responsibilities that sit alongside its emerging superpower status.

In Copenhagen [China] failed that test.

It’s almost as if this outcome was predictable.

Update

Hat tip to contributor Neddy – everyone should read this Guardian reporter’s account of exactly how China deliberately derailed the climate talks. Truly worrying stuff, not least because its actions were clearly predetermined.

Update 2

Danwei has addressed the Copenhagen fallout in an interview with The Guardian’s Jonathan Watts:

Danwei: A bit of media speculation frenzy has been caused by Mark Lynas’ article published in The Guardian, where he claims that China refused to agree on targets and intentionally humiliated Obama during Copenhagen’s final meetings. Should we trust his account or just see it as one voice in a cacophony? What’s your take?
JW: Lynas has given a partial view from the inside. It is fascinating, but we will need a lot more than this to build up a full picture of what happened. The post-conference blame game is now well underway. Europe, and the UK in particular, have come out of Copenhagen with guns blazing. They are frustrated because their strategy for the conference fell apart almost from day one.

Their plan had been for the Danish hosts to introduce a compromise deal at some point early in the talks. About a dozen countries, including China, India and Sudan, had been consulted about this in advance, according to one European negotiator. But this strategy collapsed when someone leaked the “Danish Draft” to my Guardian colleague John Vidal. Nations that were not part of the consultation were furious. The authority of the chair was undermined. From then on, the talks ground to a halt. Almost the entire two weeks was wasted as a result.

Was China to blame? Well, there is no smoking gun. The killing of the Danish draft served the interests not only of China, but also other nations such as India that were determined to block any proposal that might constrain their future growth. Nonetheless, China was repeatedly cited as the main obstacle, particularly on the final day. While Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and a core group of leaders from about thirty nations or regions tried to hammer out a deal, Wen Jiabao sent officials in his place. This was primarily a defensive tactic. He did not want to be strongarmed into a deal. Those negotiators choked almost every numerical target.

Three European negotiators confirmed to me that Chinese negotiators not only blocked targets for themselves, but also a target proposed by Angela Merkel for developed nations to trim emissions by 80 percent by 2050.

I found that disturbing and perplexing. Was China doing this because it will be a developed nation by mid-century? I would like to hear China’s explanation, but its delegates have been very quiet since the end of the conference.

Disturbing and perplexing indeed.

http://static.guim.co.uk/

Once again China is content to snipe away at ‘rich’ countries (and the US in particular) while abdicating her own responsibilities as she hides behind the convenient – and somewhat spurious – cloak of a ‘developing’ country. I’m prepared to bet that the Chinese delegation was behind Sudan’s criticism of developed nations a couple of days ago. Enlisting a dictatorial puppet in their machinations, or coercing minnows to throw a spanner in the works are well-worn China strategies.

Let’s be clear about what China has put on the table in Copenhagen. Beijing proposes not to cut emissions, but to continue increasing them at a slower rate, to 40 to 45 per cent (per unit of GDP) below 2005 levels by 2020. In other words China is proud to be both the biggest polluter and largest holder of foreign reserves on the planet, but would rather not share the tab for this particular – or any – undertaking that does not explicitly benefit China above all others. For the second time this year, China has dissed the Earth.

It’s all one big game of hardball scheming to China, where the object isn’t to come away with a climate deal, but rather to position itself as the champion of the poor (restrain your laughter, please) and tag the ill-defined ‘west’ as the bad guys who can’t be trusted to stick to their pledges.

For once in their shabby, narrow-minded, selfish, dictatorial lives why can’t the Chinese government treat a global conference as something other than a winner-takes-all game of risk?

Answers on a postcard to P.O. Box 666, Zhongnanhai.

Update

The Australian spells out the problem:

RICH nations, including the US and Australia, are demanding that China and other major developing-nation greenhouse gas emitters pledge clear reduction targets in an internationally binding agreement that allows the promises to be checked.

The US special envoy on climate change, Todd Stern, arrived in the Danish capital with a clear message: China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, had to take on a binding and verifiable commitment.

Mr Stern said the US accepted its responsibilities, but added “the country whose emissions is going up really rapidly is China”.

“You can’t even think about solving this problem without China,” he said. “You just have to do the math. There is no way to solve this problem by giving developing countries a pass.

“Virtually all of the growth in emissions going forward . . . will be coming from developing countries, of which about 50 per cent will come from China alone.”

And there you have it.

Just when you think China might be prepared to sit down and cooperate on currency/trade issues, Wen Jiabao invokes the ‘c‘ word:

Speaking at a summit with EU leaders in Nanjing, Mr Wen said it was unfair of Europe to demand exchange rate changes while maintaining trade protectionism.

Mr Wen condemned countries that demand an appreciation of the yuan while engaging in “brazen trade protectionism against China”.

He added: “This is unfair. In fact, this amounts to restricting China’s development.”

(Note to self for next meeting with WJ: tell him to grow the fuck up and get a new hat, because the old one is far too CCP).

Update

Now he wants to ban golf. Power’s clearly gone to his head.