Globalization

Following the massive earthquake in China, there was much discussion of the new media and communications technology that Chinese were using to spread news and opinions about the earthquake and the response to it. It seems that this earthquake and the use of this new media and new political tools has lead to the emergence of a new politics in China. From Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed in the New York Times last week:

In the aftermath of the great Sichuan earthquake, we've seen a hopeful glimpse of China’s future: a more open and self-confident nation, and maybe — just maybe — the birth of grass-roots politics here.

In traveling around China in the days after the quake, I was struck by how the public and the news media initially seized the initiative from the government. Ordinary Chinese are traveling to the quake zone to help move rubble, and tycoons, peasants and even children are reaching into their pockets to donate to the victims.

"I gave 500 yuan," or about $72, a man told me in the western city of Urumqi. "Eighty percent of the people in my work unit made donations. Everybody wants to help."

Private Chinese donations have already raised more than $500 million. That kind of bottom-up public spirit is a mark of citizens, not subjects.

This political cycle in America, the Obama campaign has revolutionized fundraising through the internet by enlisting supporters as partners in the campaign, not just voters. Just as American politics has changed, so too are Chinese taking politics into their own hands through individual giving. As Kristof argues, China is going through a fundamental change, as its people think of themselves as "citizens, not subjects." Kristof continues:

China may claim to be Marxist-Leninist, but it’s really market-Leninist. The rise of wealth, a middle class, education and international contacts are slowly undermining one-party rule and nurturing a new kind of politics.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao is hard-working and blessed with nearly a photographic memory, but he also may be the second-most boring person alive (after his boss, President Hu Jintao). Both Mr. Hu and Mr. Wen rose through the system as classic Communist apparatchiks — Brezhnevs with Chinese faces. Yet Mr. Wen has seen the political landscape changing and has struggled recently to reinvent himself. When the earthquake hit, Mr. Wen flew immediately to the disaster area and appeared constantly on television, overseeing rescue operations.

Heroic tidbits seeped out. Mr. Wen fell and cut himself but refused medical attention. He bellowed directions to generals over the telephone and then slammed the handset down. He shouted to children buried in a pile of rubble: "This is Grandpa Wen Jiabao. Children, you’ve got to hold on!"

Mr. Wen’s conduct is striking because it’s what we expect of politicians, not dictators. His aim was to come across as a "good emperor," not to win an election. But presumably he behaved in this way partly because he felt the hot breath of public opinion on his neck.

Yesterday, the world (and Mike, who tipped me off to this) was shocked to find Prime Minister Wen on Facebook. That’s right, facebook.com, the social networking site started by Harvard students and spread through America’s universities, is now impacting Chinese politics. As of this posting, Wen had just surpassed 16,000 supporters.

China's transition from a compltely closed society in the three decades ago to one in which individuals are coming together to develop civil society - in large part with the help of these new tools - is indicative of broader change happening in that country. Kristof predicts that within two decades, the Chinese Communist party will transition to a "a Social Democratic Party that dominates the country but that grudgingly allows opposition victories and a free press." Indeed, there is already evidence of this in the aftermath of the earthquake, as the Chinese government realizes a free but professional press is of great use to them in that it provides important services that free-wheeling and unaccountable media cannot.

In this short period of time since the US chose to normalize trade relations with China, there has been much improvement in economic freedom. China's economy is moving toward a free market model and many sectors are extremely entrepreneurial and open. There can be no doubt that the liberalization of relations with the west and the opening of China and its markets to American goods, services, and ideas has worked. Time will tell if a market of ideas, that ultimately leads to a more democratic and liberal China, takes hold, even if that process does begin on Facebook.

Today in Miami, Barack Obama will deliver a major policy address on Latin America at a Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) luncheon. According to the release, Obama "will deliver a major foreign policy address that rejects the Bush-McCain approach that has neglected the Americas and failed to adapt to the realities of our changing world. He will renew the leadership of the United States in the hemisphere by using direct diplomacy to advance democracy, forging a new regional approach to combat insecurity, and aggressively promoting economic opportunity through new trade, aid and energy policies."

While I doubt the speech will be exactly like the one Obama delivered in Little Havana, I would be surprised if it didn't borrow somewhat from a speech that Gov. Bill Richardson delivered to the NDN/UCLA communities on October 27, 2007 in Los Angeles. You can watch his speech, A New Partnership with Latin America, below. You can also print or download the transcript here.

Following up on recent work on the power of mobile communications in the developing world, the Bush Administration has provided an important step on this issue in its Cuba policy. Americans will be allowed to purchase and pay bills for cell phones that they can ship to Cuba.

From yesterday’s New York Times article by Sheryl Gay Stolberg:

President Bush announced Wednesday that Americans would soon be allowed to give their relatives in Cuba cell phones to use. The move is intended to challenge Cuba’s new leader, Raul Castro, to make good on his promises of reform, by giving ordinary Cubans more freedom to communicate with one another and the outside world.

"If the Cuban people can be trusted with mobile phones, they should be trusted to speak freely in public," Mr. Bush said, during a White House ceremony attended by dozens of Cuban-Americans, including the families of imprisoned dissidents. He added, "The world is watching the Cuban regime."Since Mr. Castro succeeded his ailing 81-year-old brother, Fidel, in February, he has initiated a series of changes in the country, including opening up access to cell phones, computers and DVD players.

But most Cubans cannot afford to buy such luxuries, Mr. Bush said, so the policy changes have amounted so far to "nothing more than a cruel joke perpetuated on a long-suffering people." He added, "If the Cuban regime is serious about improving life for the Cuban people, it will take steps necessary to make these changes meaningful."

We at NDN applaud this move by the Bush administration, but the fact is that this move is far too little in terms of broader Cuba policy. It is a positive development that the administration is on board with mobile communications as a tool to advance human rights. The lessons from China and Egypt, among others, are too significant to ignore.

In case you missed them, here are a few must read articles from the last few days:

From Center on Foreign Relations Economist Sebastian Mallaby’s strongly worded op-ed in yesterday’s Washington Post entitled “Rice and Baloney:”

We are now several months into the global food crisis, which is a much bigger deal than the subprime meltdown for most people in the world. Food prices have almost doubled in three years, threatening to push 100 million people into absolute poverty, undoing much of the development progress of the past few years. The new hunger has triggered riots from Haiti to Egypt to Ethiopia, threatening political stability; it has conjured up a raft of protectionist policies, threatening globalization. And yet the response to this crisis from governments the world over has been lackadaisical or worse.
...

The governments of the world are conspiring to undermine farming in developing countries. Do they mean to inflict hunger on tens of millions of people?

The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin, in response to an article from Sunday’s Times by Keith Bradsher and Andrew Martin, draws a parallel between incredibly low funding for both agricultural development assistance and basic research and dropping funding, from the federal government and private sources, for basic energy research.

In Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, UC Berkeley professor Dan Kammen lays out the challenges that that policy makers must confront on climate change:

Over the next five decades, progress to meaningfully address the risk of significant climate change will require an estimated 80 percent - or greater - reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions. The United States and China together account for almost half of all greenhouse gas emissions, so the work needs to begin here.

At the same time, no nation is better positioned to adopt a low-carbon energy diet than we are. The United States not only has tremendous clean energy resources, but it has major companies looking to take advantage of a change in federal policy to compete in the global clean energy economy. The United States must mobilize the world's largest R&D if we are to address climate change.

The central challenge of the 21st century will be to replace the vast fossil-fuel infrastructure with a new economy based on low-carbon technologies. The issue on the table is the need to finance clean energy research programs and to build markets where low-carbon technologies are rewarded. In other words, we must begin to price pollution.

Finally, Matt Bai’s column in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine examines John McCain’s foreign policy, support for the war, and his relationships with fellow Vietnam War veterans in the Senate, and, on Salon, pollster Paul Maslin takes an early look at the electoral math for Barack Obama.

In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake in central China last week, the western media has reported on the role that new media – blogs, mobile phones, and instant messages – have played in communicating news of the earthquake around China. These communications mark a vast change in the flow of information surrounding a disaster from previous disasters in China.

From Cara Anna of the Associated Press:

Almost nonstop, the uncensored opinions of Chinese citizens are popping up online, sent by text and instant message across a country shaken by its worst earthquake in three decades.

"Why were most of those killed in the earthquake children?" one post asked Thursday on FanFou, a microblogging site.

"How many donations will really reach the disaster area? This is doubtful," read another.

China is now home to the world's largest number of Internet and mobile phone users, and their hunger for quake news is forcing the government to let information flow in ways it hasn't before.

A fast-moving network of text messages, instant messages and blogs has been a powerful source of firsthand accounts of the disaster, as well as pleas for help and even passionate criticism of rescue efforts.

"I don't want to use the word transparent, but it's less censored, an almost free flow of discussion," said Xiao Qiang, a journalism professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of the China Internet Project, which monitors and translates Chinese Web sites.

China is well known for controlling the flow of information.

"We didn't know that hundreds of thousands of lives passed away during the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 until many years after the disaster took place," sociologist Zheng Yefu said in a commentary last week in the Southern Metropolis News.

But word about Monday's magnitude 7.9 quake spread quickly on Web sites and microblogging services, in which users share short bursts of information through text and instant messages. The services also publish the messages online.

"It all depends on the users; we don't edit it," FanFou founder Wang Xin said. "We just gather their words together."

A string of crises over the last few months — including crippling snowstorms and Tibetan protests — has taught the government a few lessons, Berkeley's Xiao said.

Government officials held a rare, real-time online exchange with ordinary Chinese on Friday to answer angry questions about why so many schools collapsed in the quake.

"They understand better now that to react slowly or to cover up in the Internet age is a bad idea," Xiao said in a telephone interview.

But the government is still monitoring the online conversation. Seventeen people have been detained since the earthquake, warned or forced to write apologies for online messages that "spread false information, made sensational statements and sapped public confidence," the state-run news agency, Xinhua, reported Thursday.

Even as recently as the SARS crisis, the Chinese government did not seem to understand the beneficial role of an uncensored press. Instead of allowing the media to report on the public health crisis, Chinese officials censored reports of the disease. This new media, particularly text messages via mobile communications devices, exist in great degree outside of the government’s ability to censor. NDN has written about the impact these devices are having on Chinese political movements and the power of mobile bring about major societal changes – from governance to public health.

The impact that these mobile phones has on communications in China will be far reaching. The Chinese government has been realizing that a free(er) press and communications flow serves an important role in distributing reliable information in the wake of disasters. While the blogging and texting has been valuable, rumors circulated wildly in these unrestricted media. The introduction of these technologies to the information market in China will have a profound effect on its openness going forward, as new media will doubtless improve both government responsiveness and the ability of, and necessity for, traditional media to function.

China’s poor stewardship of the environment in pursuit of economic gain has gotten to the point that the World Bank estimates that damage to the environment costs China 5.8% of its GDP annually. However, the costs of poor environmental stewardship are also political. China's leaders are starting to feel the wrath of NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) syndrome, as Chinese people rise up to protest polluted water and dangerous factories. Recent noted protests have been covered closely by the western media, the first in a New York Times article by Edward Wong over a multibillion dollar PetroChina plant in Chengdu and the second in the Economist over heavily polluted Tai Lake, the third largest lake in China.

These protests are significant, not only because the Chinese people are rejecting their government’s poor environmental record, but because of how they are organizing protests. These, like other political protests in Egypt and Tibet, are being put together by blogs and mobile phones. Mobile phones, especially, allow organizers to put together spur of the moment action in political issues in a way that the Chinese government cannot monitor in the same way it monitors the internet.

From the New York Times:

The recent protest, which was peaceful, was organized through Web sites, blogs and cellphone text messages, illustrating how some Chinese are using digital technology to start civic movements, which are usually banned by the police. Organizers also used text messages to publicize their cause nationally.

From the Economist:

The same internet and mobile-telephone technology that is helping China's angry young nationalists organise protests and boycotts is also helping other aggrieved citizens to unite. The past year has seen the first large-scale, middle-class protests in China over environmental issues: in the southern coastal city of Xiamen in June over the construction of a chemical factory, and in January this year in Shanghai over plans to extend a magnetic levitation train line.

These Chinese political organizers are developing a movement of their own, one that will ultimately make their government answer hard questions about democracy, human rights, and the environment. In large part, new technology, especially mobile, will be responsible. Simon Rosenberg recently wrote about the power of mobile to reduce global poverty, one of the many exciting broader applications for mobile technology that will be able to bring an improved standard of living to people in developing nations in every corner of the globe.