As I was looking through Taiwan News online I found an article for today about a new policy that Taiwanese McDonalds locations are implementing, and I thought it was applicable to some of the points that we have made in class about McDonalds.  It was a short article, but basically Taiwanese McDonalds are beginning to use score cards where frequent customers can accumulate points on a card that they can trade in later for “free” items.  This policy is nothing new to the fast food industry, and many different restaurants use similar policies.  However, it does show how McDonalds is using different strategies to accumulate a larger customer basis, and get more people in the habit it eating their food all across the world.  This is similar to how they have events for children and give away toys to get children in the habit of eating there, but seems to be targeted at an older audience who have the ability and responsibility to keep track of their points.  This adds a sense of fun and excitement to eating there where the more you spend the more free stuff you can get for your points.  Even though in reality those participating are spending more money.

The movie to live was very interesting, and did have a clear message by the end of it that was difficult to pick up on in the beginning.  It made use the Yuigi’s set of puppets, which he used to provide for his family after he gambled away their entire livelihood, as a symbol to show the resiliency of the Chinese people through hard times and a turbulent and fast changing world.  And not only that, but they show how despite all of the changes that China was going through at this time, that traditions still held a place in the new Chinese world, and could still be relevant.  However, now that the puppets have been burned by the family it will be interesting to see how that affects the rest of the story.

Although China has taken many steps towards more democratic and capitalist styles of government and economics, the authoritarian nature of the regime is still alive and well in the daily lives of its citizens.  According to BBC, Chinese lawyer Wang Quanzhang was detained by Chinese authorities in 2015, along with many other Chinese lawyers.  The difference in the case of Mr. Wang however, is that he has not been heard from at all for the last two years by family, friends, or his lawyer.  Even his own wife does not know if he is dead or alive.  The authorities have not afforded him the right to contact with the outside world.  This crackdown, the “709” crackdown as it’s now known – a reference to 9 July, the date it began – is widely seen as a sign of a growing intolerance of dissent under President Xi Jinping.  Many of those who have been detained have been given further investigations, leading to long jail sentences for most.  There have been allegations that some of the lawyers have been tortured during their detention, force-fed drugs, shackled, beaten and kept in stress positions for long periods of time.  Many have confessed, most have been public confessions on state-run television.  Many believe that these confessions are false, only given to escape the conditions that they were put under.  His wife believes that his further incarceration is due to him being unwilling to compromise with the authorities.  It is difficult to say what exactly Mr. Wang has been incarcerated for, but his work has involved advocating for many things that are contrary to party rules, particularly defending those on trial for practicing China’s spiritual movement.  In any case, this sort of behavior by the party is a perfect example of how insecure the CCP actually is, and how far they are willing to go to intimidate their citizens into submission, and despite their progress in other areas, the issue of human rights is still one that is controversial at best in China.

This documentary was very interesting and informative in many ways. First of all, it had a very wide range of evidence to support their argument about the pollution and smog problem in China.  They used not only data and tables, but they brought in interviews with doctors talking about health problems, used statistics showing correlation between pollution and lung cancer deaths.  They also used comparative historical evidence with other countries who have gone through similar crisis in the past to highlight the potential problems that could be in store for China.  However, the most effective form of evidence and argument that was used multiple times throughout the talk was the connection to average Chinese people, and especially when she makes a personal connection to the problem through the troubles she went through with her daughter.  The involvement of interview with average citizens as well as children offered a very interesting perspective on the pollution problem.  One thing that especially surprised me was the fact that a lot of Chinese citizens seemed to be unaware of the severity of the pollution, or that pollution even existed in their cities at all.  She even admitted herself that she, as a journalist, was fed the lie that it wasn’t smog that she was seeing on a daily basis, but simply just fog, and she embarrassingly admitted to buying into that story.  Even the workers in the factory that she visited seemed to be in denial about the fact that they were giving off so much pollution and their filters were not working properly.  So it seems that the main problem with pollution is not the smog itself and the health detriments, but just the need to educate people who seem to be being kept in the dark by the government who does not enforce many standards of carbon emissions.   Another interesting point that she talked about was that Chinese companies such as steel, technology, and big name companies such as Coca Cola who outsource Chinese labor, are overproducing goods, which has lead to the increase in emissions as well.  The government props up these companies and allows for the overproduction without regulation of emissions.   This increase in production has a ripple effect.  It leads to growth in infrastructure, which leads to increase in cars, which leads again to more emissions.

A Chinese man living in Paris was recently shot dead by police in his home after allegedly attacking police with a sharp object, possibly a pair of scissors as claimed by police, after they entered his home.  This has caused the Chinese population of France, and specifically Paris, to become outraged and engage in protests and other demonstrations against law enforcement.  So why is this significant? The first part that is interesting is that the protests seem to have taken a similar form to the protests against the actions of police in the United States.  They are both based on similar sorts of events, and some have even turned violent, similar to American protests.  This is also significant because it has prompted the Chinese government to get involved.  The government of China has often criticized the treatment of the Chinese population in France, but this is the first time it has publicly criticized the actions of its law enforcement against Chinese citizens.  Through this it is reasonable to believe that the Chinese population of Paris has undergone hardship and injustice living in France for sometime, and this seems to be an ignited powder keg that has lead to protests.  It would also be reasonable to hypothesize that this sort of action by Chinese abroad could spark more protests back home in China, ones that are even more far-reaching than the ones now.

For this post I read an article from the Washington Post about Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and his recent meetings with the Chinese leadership in Beijing. Tillerson is attempting to build a constructive and mutually beneficial relationship with China.  He and president Xi Jinping both believe that the U.S. and China relationship needs to be defined by cooperation and friendship.  However, he has received some criticism for “handing China a victory.”  This is because there seems to be a disconnect between what the U.S. and China’s definitions are for “mutually beneficial.”  This Chinese believe this means that this means that each side will respect eachother’s core interests respectively.  In other words, this means the United States will not contest China on hot-button issues such as Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong.  China also seems to not understand what might entail the United States core interests.  At the same time, Donald Trump publicly criticized China and branded them a security threat.  In order to combat all of this, the United States and China need to come to some sort of mutual understanding on what their mutual interests are, in order to alleviate Trumps fears about China as a threat to our security.

In the journal article, “The Political Economy of Governing ISPs in China,” Henry Hu discusses the role that ISPs (Internet Service Providers) play in the CCP’s censorship and filtering capabilities.  These include not only making certain sites and content unavailable to Chinese citizens, but also making it impossible for foreigners to access domestic Chinese content by using the “Great Firewall.”  The government does this in an attempt to keep out content, media, and information that they deem “harmful” to the party.  They believe that they can censor the thoughts of their citizens by only exposing them to approved Chinese content and by keeping out foreign media.  This is similar to what has been done in other communist regimes, such as Russia and North Korea.  The leaders of these countries seem to be convinced that if their citizens get their hands on Western Media, that it will put dangerous ideas in their heads that are against the party, and will ultimately lead to their downfall.  This definitely seems to be what is happening in China, mainly due to the fact that the Great Firewall is run by the central government.  While the creation of censored content in mainly the domain of the local governments of individual cities, the central government is in charge of keeping foreign media out, and prevent foreigners from accessing their media.  This shows a great level of insecurity within the regime, that they seem to believe that just giving their citizens access to youtube will be dangerous to their party.  In some sense I can see where they are coming from.  Social media has become a powerful tool to be used against governments in the past decade. Like in Egypt, the protests and riots were organized using social media, so if this is truly of concern to the CCP then it could be a smart strategy to censor their internet.

In his journal “Rightful Resistance revisited,” Kevin O’Brien addresses whether the form of resistance to the government found in China is consistent with the definition of rightful resistance.  Rightful resistance is a form of  popular resistance against the state where citizens seek to legitimize their cause by using the states own rules or rhetoric.  I agree that the resistance in China is rightful resistance due to the fact that the citizens use legal modes to achieve their ends.  An example used by O’Brien is the people of Henen, who used the regulations of the central government to get out of excessive taxes being placed on them by their local government.  They threatened to report the violations if they did not repeal the taxes.

I thoroughly enjoyed the talk the guest speaker gave on the economic climate in China, and how innovation has had a turbulent past with the Chinese people.  I particularly enjoyed how he incorporated cultural hypotheses to explain why China did not become, and still has not become, the world leader in science and technology, even though at one time they were thousands of years ahead of the west.  Personally I enjoy looking at cultural and historical factors to explain modern phenomena, so learning  how Confucianism and imperialism and communism overtime worked to stifle innovation from the ground up in China is particularly interesting to me.  I believe that it is a combination of all of these factors that has contributed to the modern economic climate in China, and not so much the geographic or other factors.  I believe that China is a very traditional, backwards facing society, that is comfortable in tradition and in their particular niche in the world, and has not until recently decided to look forward more.

In his writing Yang discusses how the Chinese Government has a hybrid system, where the government is still centralized, but there is still a certain amount of federalism that exists for local governments.  The local governments do this through what he calls fiscal federalism, where the local governments are able to maintain autonomy over local economies, laws, infrastructure, schooling, healthcare, and a variety of other areas.  I believe that this offers an explanation for what we saw in the documentary about Dandong. The mayor was directly responsible for the infrastructure projects of the city, and the citizens went directly to him to help solve their problems.  These problems that were unique to the city itself, and not particularly in other cities such as Shenzhen, which is undergoing rapid growth and modernization, while Dandong is falling behind.  This gives evidence to the fact that the central government does not have power over individual cities economies.  I also believe this is comparable to the American federalist system, where the states have their own economies and power over their own economies and infrastructure, education, etc.