All Work and No Play Unmakes China

It is hard to imagine how one of China's innovative business leaders or beautiful movie stars could look at the Chinese loyalists hunched over their desks at a Chinese Communist Party Congress and commit all their energy to further the will of Chairman Xi. Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who decided to end the 1989 democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Sq uare by force, proclaimed, "It is a glorious thing to be rich." Yet, Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, who is said to be among the leaders receiving the highest remunerations in the world, does not pocket any interest on her funds. Prompted by fear of US sanctions, she has no bank account and keeps her cash at home. Mr. Deng neglected to include joy, happiness, fun, freedom, beauty, truth and privacy on his list of glorious pursuits. In AMERICAN FACTORY, the Netflix documentary film about a Chinese factory in Ohio, a Chinese factory manager reveals he has had to commit to two years working away from his family. Even so, the factory manager is one of the lucky men his age who has a wife. China's earlier one-child policy has left 30 million men without mariageable women in 2020. And China's well educated urban women expect to marry men with money; they are not about to settle for villagers. While the Chinese Communist Party focuses on collecting data to control its 1.4 billion Chinese population, the Chinese people entertain other ideas. Ignoring social distancing and assorted restrictions imposed to prevent the coronavirus, China's young people flocked to see Mickey Mouse as soon as Disneyland reopened in Shanghai in May, 2020. For relief from China's "996" work schedule requiring labor from 9 am to 9 pm six days a week, fun-loving Chinese also ignore the government's distain for the lack of socialist values associated with playing Tencent's "Honour of Kings" or watching amateur dancers, singers and comics on Douyin, China's version of TikTok. Some have discovered they can discuss taboo topics away from censors on the Clubhouse app. Unfortunately, a team of Buddhist monks and nomad sheep and yak herders failed to play in a 2019 international basketball tournament because their participation was canceled by Chinese police who felt they might be unable to control a crowd of fans during the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. Watching the Chinese Horse Club owners cheering when their Triple Crown winner, "Justify" won the 2018 Kentucky Derby, no one would have known China bans gambling. China's race horse buyers and trainers also can be seen at the New Zealand Jockey Club. Casinos on Macau, the former Portuguese island that is now a Special Administrative Region of China, continue to attract wealthy Chinese. Less affluent Chinese hide in the woods to gamble on mahjong games. At the same time, the Chinese culture that cultivates cheating and lying to achieve business objectives caught up with Lin Qi, the billionaire developer of "Game of Thrones: Winter is Coming," who died of poisoning on Christmas Day, 2020. Founded in 2009, Mr. Lin's Chinese YooZoo Games studio launched his popular strategy game in 2019. Accordig to the BBC, Mr. Lin was poisoned at the hands of a suspect, identified by Shanghai police only as Xu, but later as Xu Yao, the head of YooZoo's film productio unit. YooZoo holds the film adaptation rights to the popular Chinese sci-fi novel, THREE BODY PROBLEMS, the first of a trilogy by Liu Cizin. Like other Chinese movie projects, the plan for the book's film adaptation never developed. But Netflix now seems ready to adapt THREE BODY PROBLEMS for television. China expected its 1.4 million-plus population and twice as many eyes to serve as waving strobe lights attracting film-makers to Qingdao's new 2016, $8 billion film production complex. At first they came, but they soon refused to deal with the demands of censors in China's State Administration of Press Publications, Radio, Film and Television. China's popular film star, Fan Bingbing, was on her way to international fame until the government charged her with tax fraud, and she disappeared. Nowadays, the fledgling movie industry that made a Netflix romantic comedy despite electricity outages in poor little Zimbabwe offers more promise than China. Just as China allows its population limited film fare, readers have to be content with propaganda slogans on factory walls. In 2015, the owner of Hong Kong's Causeway Bay Books was arrested and charged with the "illegal sale of books," the political thrillers and bodice-rippers the Central Propaganda Department decided the Chinese population should not read. Before moving his bookstore to Taiwan in 2020, he observed, "Contemporary China is an absurd country." No doubt, most cowed Chinese will self-monitor their activities to conform to Beijing's control requirements. But some will defy personal recognition by shielding their faces with umbrellas and masks, wear black-face makeup to trick artificial intelligence into thinking they are apes, point lasers to disable surveillance cameras and travel on crutches or in wheelchairs to "disguise" their gait. What will the top tier geniuses China needs do? As some have done in the past, they will tire of finding their natural human desires unsatisfied and flee to Silicon Valley.

Challenging Chinese New Year

A Chinese delegation, now in the United States, is not there to celebrate the beginning of China's Year of the Pig on February 5, 2019. Instead, the visit signals a transition between what has been an extended period of U.S.-Chinese economic cooperation to what students and global businesses need to regard with caution as an impending era of competition.

     Setting speculation aside, Beijing, which already uses facial recognition technology to track 2.5 million troublesome Buddhists and Muslims, also expects to be on high alert on other days in the Year of the Pig:
March 10: 60th anniversary of Tibetans uprising against Chinese rule. Dalai Lama subsequently escapes to India and the government he led in Tibet is dissolved.
May 4: The 100th anniversary of a student movement that welcomed science and democracy.
June 4: The 30th anniversary of the crack down on the democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square.
October 1: A military parade marking the 70th anniversary of the founding of Communist China.

     Like global businesses, young people around the world, who will be in China competing in the 2022 Winter Olympics, need to learn more about this important country.  When children learn a Chinese tradition includes giving kids money in red envelopes at the beginning of a new year, they will want to adopt the tradition where they live. Adults everywhere already enjoy multi-course meals at Chinese restaurants.
   

     

Youth and Social Media Fuel Democracy

Young leaders in both China and Russia show they are not buying into the Communist indoctrination their elders accepted with little or no question. Fear of arrest, prison terms, the gulag, and being sent to a penal colony now have to compete with exposure to the alternative future social media describes for young digital pros.

     Sparks of democratic fervor have erupted before social media existed. The Hungarian Revolution in 1956, Czechoslovakia's 1968 reforms, and the pro-democracy movement that brought students to China's Tiananmen Square in 1989 were unsuccessful. But activists persisted and broke up the U.S.S.R. in 1991. Now they have the social media that helped fuel the 2009 Green Movement named for the campaign color of the losing presidential candidate, Mir-Hossein Mousavi,  in Iran; the Arab Spring; the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong; and anti-corruption rallies in Russia.

     When the three under-30-year-olds who led Hong Kong's Umbrella Movement were sentenced to prison terms in August, 2017, they said they considered their arrests a threat, rather than an end to confrontation. China shows it recognizes the threat of social media by trying to monitor who is saying what on the internet and by demanding ID verification for posts. Beijing's leaders refused to allow Liu Xiaobo, a Nobel Peace Prize winning leader in Tiananmen Square, to leave China for treatment of liver cancer. In the West, unlike in China, they knew he would be able to share his poems about democracy in person and on social media.

     It should be mentioned that not only social media, but also travel and education connect the world's democracy advocates. In  Hong Kong, for example, the Penn Club is a network of the University of Pennsylvania's alumni, families, and friends. Students from Penn and the families that sent them there recognize the university's home in Philadelphia also is the location where the US Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written to inspire the American Revolution. Recently, faculty visitors from the University of Pennsylvania conducted a Global Forum in Hong Kong that brought business and government leaders together with alumni to consider the key issues facing global business. Who knows what else these leaders could have discussed when they got together. Hong Kong protests that began in early June, 2019, aimed to eliminate the threat of transferring domestic criminals to the China mainland for trial. As demonstrations continued into August, both demands for democratic reforms and police intervention increased with no end in sight.

     In Russia, corruption by the select group that has benefited from the country's newly found oil and gas wealth motivates anti-government marches and rallies. Led by the blogger, Alexei Navalny, young protesters risked arrest to take to the streets throughout Russia in March and June, 2017. When Navalny was sentenced on a false charge in 2013, 10,000 protesters marched in Moscow to secure his early release. Russia's leaders can only imagine how many more protesters social media will bring out to welcome Alexei's younger brother, Oleg, when he finally is released from a false charge that sentenced him to a penal colony for three and a half years.

     For protection, in April, 2016, Vladimir Putin created a Russian National Guard loyal to him alone. By creating his private cadre of as many as 300,000 troops, however, Putin also created a prime target for infiltration by anyone out to do him harm. It is no wonder that, as head of the Guard, Viktor Zolotov, Putin's long-time personal bodyguard, is in a position to monitor those authorized to get close to Putin, and Putin is in a position to monitor Zolotov's activities. In September, 2018, whether from irritation or real fear, Zolotov challenged Alexei Navalny to a duel.

     But what will China's and Russia's students find when they go West for advanced educations in the United States and England? They'll meet President Obama's daughter at Harvard and Nobel-prize-winning Malala at Oxford. Students from Hong Kong, who attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, found they could sit on a bench next to a statue of Ben Franklin, and they probably ventured downtown to tour Independence Hall and to visit the Liberty Bell. Democracy stands ready to outlive the current leaders in China and Russia.

(Also, check out earlier posts: China's Manifest Destiny East, West, and South; Hong Kong Update, Remember Liu Xiaobo, Russia's Alternative to Putin, and 29 Countries Influence 7 Billion People.)

       

Remember Liu Xiaobo

Whenever we see China's Tiananmen Square in the news, we should remember Liu Xiaobo. China would like the world to see its economic progress, growing military strength in the Pacific, even its efforts to combat climate change. But those of us who hoped China's Communist Party would grant the reforms peaceful pro-democracy demonstrators requested in April, 1989, will never forget how, on June 3-4, 1989, tanks and soldiers poured into Tiananmen Square to crush their own people.

     Along with the 31 pro-democracy leaders who were tried and executed, Liu Xiaobo was under arrest for 28 years until he died of liver cancer in July, 2017. China prevented him from receiving his 2010 Nobel Peace Prize in person or leaving China for treatment of liver cancer in the West, but it will never be able to remove his name from the list of those who have received Nobel Peace Prizes for trying to make the world better for all of us.