Talking Points, March 3 - 17, 2010

Talking Points
March 3 - 17, 2010

China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC, where seven out of ten delegates are Chinese Communist Party members) , and China’s united front advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), are meeting in Beijing this week. One of the gatherings’ recurring themes is that China is misunderstood and that foreign countries often deflect attention from their own shortcomings by blaming problems on China.

Earlier today, China’s foreign minister complained that too many are biased against China.

"We hope the world will appreciate China's uniqueness and real national circumstances, and abandon their colored spectacles, or stereotyped perception about China, particularly psychological bias against China.”
     – Yang Jiechi, March 7, 2010

A top trade official, China’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization, noted that 118 trade cases were lodged against the country in 2009, some 23 of them from the United States. He didn’t expect things to improve this year.

"China was the scapegoat in most cases and some countries simply blamed China for their own economic problems such as trade deficits.”
     – Sun Zhenyu, March 7, 2010

China’s top leaders, however, also acknowledge the country faces great economic challenges. Huge investments in infrastructure and massive lending kept China’s overall economy growing in 2009 (a remarkable 8.7% GDP growth according to official statistics), still, Premier Wen Jiabao told the NPC that leaders were concerned about public debt, official corruption, job creation, and the widening gap between rich and poor. As it has for the last six years, the government set 8% GDP growth as its target. We will have the full text of Wen’s speech and other NPC reports available in the documents section of our website tomorrow.
 

Target GDP growth has been a fixture of "government work" speeches for years. There was an exception in 2000, when Premier Zhu Rongji declined to offer one.

Launching a business has been a way up for many in China and some entrepreneurs have built companies that now employ thousands. But starting a business is never easy and acquiring even a bit of capital to do so is beyond the means of many in China. On Thursday, noted Berkeley sociologist Thomas Gold visits USC to discuss these issues and to note how contributors to Wokai 我开, a microcredit internet network, are helping Chinese pursue their ambitions. Gold will examine how programs such as these are tying people together across borders and what the implications are for Chinese business and society. We hope you can join us for his presentation. Details about it and China-related events across North America are available below and in the calendar section of our website.

In part thanks to the huge popularity of Avatar, the Academy Awards ceremony here in Los Angeles will draw a large worldwide television audience this evening. On Friday, People’s Daily, the official voice of the Chinese Communist Party, weighed in with an article on the “7 Deficiencies “ of the nominees. The first deficiency listed was discrimination against China. The article complained that films from Israel, Germany, France, Argentina, and Peru were included in the best foreign language film category while films from China were not. The article

Forever Enthralled, China's submission for Academy Award consideration.

didn’t mention that China’s official submission for the award was director Chen Kaige’s Forever Enthralled (Chinese title 梅兰芳) about opera star Mei Lanfang. (Mei was a megastar, USC presented him with an honorary doctorate during his 1930 tour of the US.) Only two Chinese submissions over the past three decades were nominated for the Academy Award, Zhang Yimou’s Ju Dou (1990) and Hero (2002). Neither was selected for the award.

One film about China, however, is up for an Oscar for the best documentary short. Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province (Chinese title 劫后天府泪纵横) is a 40-minute film broadcast on HBO last May, a year after the 2008 earthquake that took 70,000 lives. Shortly after the tragedy, filmmakers Jon Alpert and Matthew O’Neill visited schools where children died and where parents and others grieved. They documented the anger and frustration many felt when officials sought to limit discussion of whether or not shoddy construction was partly to blame for the deaths of children in their classrooms. This is a sensitive subject in China. One activist, Huang Qi, was compiling data on schoolchildren deaths when he was arrested in June 2008. Last November he was sentenced to three years in jail for “illegally holding state secrets.” In its comprehensive Chinese language list of Academy Award nominations, the official Xinhua agency included four of the five films nominated in the documentary short category. Unnatural Disaster was omitted. It was included, however, in the agency’s English language list.

Poster for Academy Award - nominated documentary short, Unnatural Disasters.

Months before HBO broadcast Unnatural Disaster, Pan Jianlian, a Beijing filmmaker screened Who Killed Our Children at the Pusan International Film Festival. Angilee Shah interviewed him there for US-China Today. Pan focused on a single school, Muyu Middle School, and was briefly detained during one of his several visits. Though Pan held up his being able to talk about China’s problems as evidence of how much more open the country had become, his film also included a scene which suggests the range of expression permitted. A Chinese Central Television camera crew films students singing patriotic songs, but turns off the camera when parents arrive to protest.

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The USC US-China Institute
china.usc.edu

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Events

USC 

03/11/2010: Microcredit, The Internet and Community Building in China and Beyond
USC University Club, Pub Room, Los Angeles, CA 90089
Free
Time: 4:00PM - 5:30PM
UC Berkeley’s Tom Gold speaks at USC.

California

03/05/2010: Promise or Peril? The China-ASEAN Trade Relationship
UCLA Campus
2125 Rolfe Hall, Los Angeles, CA
UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies presents a colloquium with Dr. Walden Bello on the developing relationship between China and ASEAN.

03/05/2010: Leading Developments in Chinese Law Conference at UCLA
UCLA School of Law, Room 1447
405 Hilgard Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476
Cost: $30 for students and faculty; $80 for practioners and others. Lunch, cocktail hour, and materials are provided.
Time: Time: 11:00AM - 7:30PM
The UCLA China Law Association presents a one day conference on leading developments in Chinese law and their implications for U.S.-China relations. 

03/06/2010: Moderne and Modernity
UC Berkeley Art Museum
Berkeley, CA
Time: 9:00AM - 6:00PM
UC Berkeley presents a one day conference to explore the visual forms and images current in Shanghai in the first third of the twentieth century, and what these reveal, suggest, or obscure. 

03/08/2010: Films by Huang Weikai: Disorder and Floating
UC Berkeley
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Cost: Free
Time: 3:00PM - 6:30PM
UC Berkeley`s Center for Chinese Studies presents screening of two films by director Huang Weikai. 

03/10/2010: Qiao Zhou and the Intellectual Traditions of Early Medieval Shu
UC Berkeley
401 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley CA
Cost: Free
Time: 12:00PM - 1:00PM
UC Berkeley`s Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Michael Farmer on Shu intellectual traditions. 

03/11/2010: Analyzing Lineages in Early Tibetan Paintings: Taklung Portraits as a Test Case
UC Berkeley
IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Cost: Free
Time: 5:00PM - 6:30PM
UC Berkeley`s Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by David Jackson on new possibilities of dating in Tibetan art though analysis of guru lineages. 

03/11/2010: Authors on Asia
Pacific Asia Museum
46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena, CA 91101
Cost: Free for members; $9 general, $7 students and seniors.
Time: 7:00PM
The Pacific Asia Museum presents Dean King, author of Unbound: A True Story of War, Love and Survival. 

03/12/2010: The Great Socialist Transformation: Capitalism without Democracy in China
UC Berkeley
Address: IEAS Conference Room, 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor
Cost: Free
Time: 4:00PM - 6:00PM
UC Berkeley`s Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Kellee Tsai on the structural impact Chinese entrepreneurs have on Chinese politics. 

03/16/2010: How China`s Leaders Think
Offices of Arnold & Porter - Conference Room
777 S. Figueroa Street, 44th Floor, Los Angeles, CA
Cost: RSVP required.
Time: 5:00PM - 6:30PM
Dr. Robert Lawrence Kuhn will hold a discussion on his latest book. 

03/16/2010: Nai-Ni Chen Dance Company
Plaza Del Sol Performance Hall at CSU Northridge
Plaza del Sol Performance Hall 18111 Nordhof Street, Northridge, California 91330-8393
Cost: General Public: $45, Seniors: $36
Phone: 818-677-2488
Time: 8:00PM - 11:00PM
Professional multiculural touring company performs a fusion of American and Asian dance at CSU Northridge. 

North America

03/09/2010: The Song Is You: Histories of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) in the United States
School of Social Work Building, Room 1636
1080 South University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1106
University of Michigan`s Center for Chinese Studies features a talk by Professor Christan de Pee.

03/11/2010: Cultural Crossings: China and Beyond in the Medieval Period
University of Virgina
Campbell Hall 153 University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4122
Cost: Free
Time: 5:30PM - 5:00PM
This interdisciplinary conference and digital projects workshop investigates exchanges between China and neighboring cultures during the medieval period.
 
03/15/2010: China, Soft Power and the Rule of Law
Imin Conference Center, Koi Room
1601 East-West Road, Honolulu, Hawaii
Cost: Free
Time: 4:00PM
The East-West Center presents a talk with Jerome Cohen on the implications of China`s growing soft power. 

Exhibitions  

09/22/2009 - 06/30/2010: China`s Great Wall: The Forgotten Story
NYC offices of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, NY
The Forgotten Story is a series of historically-based photographs of the Great Wall of China. It is a collaboration between Jonathan Ball, a California based photographer, and David Spindler, one of the world`s foremost experts on Great Wall history.

03/28/2010 - 07/25/2010: Secrets of the Silk Road
Bowers Museum
Address: 2002 North Main Street, Santa Ana, California 92706
Cost: Adults/$18 Weekdays; $20 Weekends/ Students & Seniors/$16 Weekdays, $18 Weekends; Children (under six) Free
The Bowers Museum presents an historic exhibition of over 150 objects drawn from the rich collections of the Urumqi Museum and the Institute of Archaeology of Xinjiang reveals surprising details about the people who lived along the ancient Silk Road.

01/01/2010 - 12/31/2010: Ancient Arts of China: A 5000 Year Legacy
Bowers Museum
2002 North Main Street, Santa Ana, California 92706
Bowers Museum presents a collection that portrays the evolution of Chinese technology, art and culture.

 

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