China's Olympic run-up shows weak links of emerging power
Reuters, August 05, 2007

China's leaders hope to bask in a blaze of national pride when the Beijing Olympics open in a hyper-modern stadium next year, but reaching that moment has cast a harsh light on the vulnerable underbelly of the country's rise.

The ruling Communist Party has seized on the 2008 Games to show off its credentials as overseer of a fast-modernising global power.

"Successfully hosting the Olympic Games is a demonstration of a country's power and influence," Liu Qi, Party boss of Beijing and president of the Games committee, told officials on July 30.

"Make these Olympics a milestone recording the great revival of the Chinese nation."

But while China surely anticipated Western criticism of its tight rein on political dissent in the run-up to August 8, 2008, officials have been battered by unrelenting attention on pollution, unsafe products and labour abuses that reflect the government's own institutional shortcomings.

The Games preparations have indeed become a scale model for the nation's big ambitions, and have shown how the government's own often unsteady feet could lead to a stumble.

"The Olympics are vital for the ruling party as a symbol of what it can achieve. They're a huge source of legitimacy," said Zheng Yongnian of Britain's University of Nottingham.

"But when you want to project an image of power and responsibility, that means that when problems happen they can be that much more difficult to handle."

PLAYING ON THE RUINS

China's hope in hosting the Games is clear from a billboard in front of the centrepiece "bird's nest" national stadium.

The picture shows the game's cuddly "Fuwa" mascots playing on the ruins of the Old Summer Palace, the elaborate imperial pleasure grounds that French and British soldiers ransacked in 1860, making it a lasting symbol of national humiliation.

For China, the Games are a chance to show that after three decades of economic growth it has re-emerged as a confident power capable of hosting the massive spectacle.

"The Olympic Games are opportunity for China to shows its massive changes to hundreds of millions of people who normally don't care about what's happening in such a far-off country," said Guo Xiangang, Beijing-based editor of China International Studies.

"All the links -- the services, the transportation, food safety, the environment, crowd behaviour -- are meant to display those changes."

The Games have also become a focus for international criticism of China's human rights restrictions and its relations with Sudan, Myanmar and other diplomatic dark spots.

Beijing has responded by defending itself loudly and often as a "constructive" force in resolving international conflicts.

DOMESTIC STRAINS

But organisers have appeared ambushed by this year's torrent of mini-crises over pollution, food and product safety, and citizens' rights that have raised broader questions about the government's robustness.

A succession of scares, big and small, with toxic Chinese-made chemicals found in exported medicines and animal food, tainted seafood, and most recently toys have fuelled worries about what athletes and other visitors will eat.

The past months have also seen revelations of workers in slave-like conditions a day's drive from Beijing and children making Olympic Games merchandise in a factory in the far south.

For all China's promises to clamp down on polluters, Beijing's air is still a fetid mix of vehicle fumes, factory smoke and dust. Some foreign teams are worried how healthy the air will be this time next year, as they prepare to compete.

"If China is perceived as a risky place to eat and breathe, that's going to have reverberations and they know it," said David Zweig of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Problems with food and drug safety, pollution and labour exploitation were by no means unknown before this year; nor are they unique to China.

But they have underscored how a government ill-equipped to cope with ever more complex pressures is among the weak links troubling China's transformation.

A root problem is the inability of officials at the top to enforce policies across a vast bureaucracy that often heeds local interests focused on growth or self-enrichment.

"They are struggling to find ways of developing a more effective government without democracy," said Susan Shirk, a former U.S. State Department official in charge of China affairs and now at the University of California, San Diego.

The laser beam of attention on the Games has generated expectations that the government has the money and ability to surmount these shortcomings.

"What the Olympics changes is that it creates a timeline for dealing with all these problems," said Zweig.

Last week, Games chief Liu called for a propaganda counter-offensive against what he called a "crisis".

"Pay serious attention to media services and appropriately respond to this crisis in public sentiment," he said.

Officials have held constant news conferences seeking to defuse worries. But the preparations have already underscored problems that will linger long after the Games close.

"I think China's governance problem will only continue to be a problem as it grows in power," said Shirk.

Beijing restricts timber from Myanmar but trade continues
AFP / July 17, 2007

Environmentalists in Myanmar have expressed their shock at seeing mountains of logs being transported on trucks across the border into China despite efforts to halt the trade to save the country's forests from total destruction.

"I was shocked to see mountains of logs and big timber trucks" heading from Laiza into China, the spokeswoman for one local environment group, the Pan Kachin Development Society said.

On condition that she not be named, she said she had counted up to 80 trucks crossing the border each day during a visit to the town in April.

Stacks of teak, tamalan and other woods lined the roads waiting to go, she said.

"It seems they have set up sawmills in the forest and chopped the trees to be easier to carry," she said. "Some logs were only about one-and-a-half feet [0.45m] in circumference," although China usually wants trees nearly twice that size.

"That means that people even cut small trees because there are no more big trees left," she said.

The trade endures despite China's efforts to stop it because of a complex mix of interests.

For Myanmar's junta, timber is one of its major sources of desperately needed foreign currency.

MyanmarTwo main ethnic Kachin groups who have partial control over the region also see the timber trade as a key source of income and have shown varying degrees of willingness to stop it.

LAX ENFORCEMENT

Local Chinese authorities along the border have not consistently enforced the year-old ban, creating pockets where timber still flows across the border.

Laiza, a village about 1,000km north of Yangon, is the base for the Kachin Independence Organization (KIO), one of 17 armed ethnic groups to have signed ceasefires with Myanmar's military junta.

After the KIO signed its ceasefire in 1993, the group received a degree of autonomy in their part of Kachin State, a region sandwiched between China and India that is home to virgin forests as well as jade, gold and other mineral reserves.

Laiza quickly turned into a significant trading town, especially for timber which once flowed freely across the border about 16km away to feed China's insatiable appetite for raw materials.

HUGE APPETITE

Some 1.5 million cubic meters of timber worth US$350 million was exported from Myanmar to China in 2005, most of it illegal, according to Britain-based forestry watchdog Global Witness.

That was a 12 percent gain over the amount of timber shipped to China the year before, and roughly double the amount exported in 2000, Global Witness said.

China, which has imposed stiff limits on logging in its own forests amid fears of deforestation, uses the wood to supply its construction boom and its soaring exports of wooden furniture.

But in the face of international pressure that followed the Global Witness report, China decided a year ago to officially close its borders to Myanmar's timber.

Global Witness said one of its teams spent a couple of weeks on the border in April, and they believed the ban has had a major effect on the Chinese side, although some problems remain.

"What we are seeing from the Chinese side is there has been a ban in all areas along the border, no question about it," said Mike Davis, Global Witness team leader for the Southeast Asia forest campaign.

With scant data from Myanmar's government, environmental groups analyze Chinese import and logging data to estimate the size of the trade, but no precise data has been made available since the ban took effect last year.

But to illustrate the ban's overall effectiveness, Davis pointed to the town of Pianma, a major border timber town.

Migrant workers flocked to the city a decade ago when the illegal trade turned it into a boom town, driving its population from 3,000 to about 40,000.

Since last year, Davis said the town was down to 10,000 people as migrant workers found the logging business drying up.

"That said, there is stuff still coming across in various places, and in some places at times in quite large volume," he said.

"We are concerned, I think these types of activity are on the increase," he said.

SUPPORT UNDERMINED

At the government level China appeared to be genuinely working at shutting down the illicit trade, Davis said, but he added that those efforts had been hampered by Chinese companies fiddling with their quotas or hunting for loopholes in the ban.

Some of the trade is just plain smuggling, he said.

"Chinese businesses involved in the trade are increasingly choosing to buy pieces of forested land within Kachin State in order to clear-fell all tree cover," Davis said.

"This is a particularly destructive approach to logging that causes huge environmental damage," he said.

Clear-cutting in Myanmar's interior also makes it difficult to estimate the extent of the deforestation because outsiders have so little access to the area.

But Global Witness says huge swathes of land along the border have been logged.

One former military man who was involved in the trade in Myanmar said that logging was still possible if big enough bribes were paid to local police, forestry officials, military personnel and local militia groups.

"If we got a logging permit for 10 tonnes from an official, we would cut at least 30 tonnes of trees just from that permit paper," the former military source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

BRIBERY

He said he had left the armed services after the pro-democracy uprising in 1988, and like many other former soldiers ended up taking a job in logging where he used his military connections to facilitate the passing of bribes from companies to the government.

He believes his company made a lot of money, but says that wealth didn't trickle down. He finally quit the business in 2000 because he was fed up with the corrupt system.

Sometimes, he said, he had received permits to log in areas that had already been clearcut.

"What we did then, we'd just find a place where there were still trees and cut them down," he said.

Despite the concern about the future of the Myanmar forests, Davis said he believes the Chinese authorities had managed to significantly curb the trade, in part because they wanted to avoid negative publicity ahead of next year's Beijing Olympics.

"We think that although the restrictions that the Chinese imposed are not an end solution in themselves, they are an encouraging start," he said.