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	Can China continue to grow at its incredible pace without political reform by PBS Online Newshour China / USA   Broadcast: Oct. 14, 2005. (Transcript)   Paul Solman explores whether China can continue to grow at its incredible pace without political reform.   Chinese Communism saved its greatest abuse for its own people. This was the Cultural Revolution of the '60s and '70s, but as recently as 1989 a protest against government repression and corruption was brutally crushed, leaving a thousand or more dead in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.   And yet on the surface, today's China looks about as menacing as a suburban shopping mall. Behind the scenes, however, there still lurks Big Sibling. As others regularly document, China remains, in many ways, a police state. As for our own experience, we were forced to hire government minders to approve and accompany every shoot: Very friendly; very present.   Our Internet access and emails were monitored. In our hotel, a CNN report about the Microsoft Network censoring Chinese bloggers was - censored -- or at least, the TV went blank.   And just last month China ordered that all Internet news sites must be "directed toward serving the people and socialism." At Tsinghua University the campus intranet is censored.   PAUL SOLMAN: And we ourselves were nearly censored, when we tried to ask about such restrictions without a minder.   BYSTANDER: No, why you ask these questions?   PAUL SOLMAN: We pressed on -- but so did our bystander.   Someone reported us to the authorities and, warned not to stray, we called off a shoot with a pair of student journalists, mainly for fear of getting them into trouble.   Censorship and economics   PAUL SOLMAN: But what does a culture of repression have to do with economics? Well, we Westerners assume that political freedom and technological innovation go hand in hand. And indeed, innovation is essential. For China to keep growing, it has to evolve into a more advanced economy; has to innovate because right now it relies almost entirely on exports, says MIT's Yasheng Huang.   YASHENG HUANG: Japan is usually viewed as a country obsessed with export and foreign trade; the ratio is about 20 percent. The US is a free trading nation; the ratio is about 20 percent. China has 70 percent of its GDP tied up in foreign trade.   PAUL SOLMAN: Trade based on cheap manufacturing, cheap labor. But manufacturing is becoming more and more mechanized -- in China like everywhere else. In fact, between 1995 and 2002, China lost 15 million manufacturing jobs, compared with a loss of 2 million manufacturing jobs in the US   So who makes and designs the machines; comes up with the new products; the intellectual property? Who innovates? Not China. Not yet, anyway. Most factories here are foreign investments, using foreign technology, making foreign-branded goods -- goods not really "made in China," -- try to think of even one Chinese brand -- but "processed in China."   Yes, it's impressive, says Professor Huang --   YASHENG HUANG: But we are not talking about the kind of economic success that we saw in Korea and in Japan.   PAUL SOLMAN: The spirit of innovation is instilled at an early age, says the head of China's biggest microchip company, which built its own more Western school for its employees. Richard Cheng.   RICHARD CHENG: Chinese students, they work hard. But the, their own educating system pretty much emphasize memorizing things, and US society from kindergarten already encourages to be innovative, to be, independent.   PAUL SOLMAN: Jim McGregor, a Wall Street Journal reporter turned businessman who's worked in China for twenty years, says the classroom control never ends.   JIM McGREGOR: It's hard to innovate and create in a society that controls the media, controls, controls thought in many ways at universities. Chinese people perform best out of China when it comes to research and development.   PAUL SOLMAN: And those who stay in China to do R&D, like these employees at the company developing Tsinghua University's technology seem oblivious -- or defensive -- about thought control.   I told them about watching the censored CNN report:   PAUL SOLMAN: So the story started and suddenly the TV was blank.   EMPLOYEE: So your view is?   PAUL SOLMAN: That somebody stopped the story --   EMPLOYEE: Not necessarily; might be a technical problem from your side.   PAUL SOLMAN: Well it was, somebody came --   EMPLOYEE: This is a report you got only from CNN journalist, so the view might not be objective enough. In fact, China is much more open than you can imagine. We are doing fine and we are making progress every single day.   Government corruption   PAUL SOLMAN: Wanting to ask about the effects of repression, I wound up debating its very existence. But why do young Chinese still look the other way?   DAVID MOSER: Sometimes the people who are the youngest, the most well-educated, the most Internet savvy are the ones who are least likely to say anything against the government.   PAUL SOLMAN: American David Moser is something of a celebrity in China, appearing on TV as a commentator, a talent show judge and occasionally, Confucius.   DAVID MOSER: Remember another one of my famous sayings..   PAUL SOLMAN: But it's only when he's off Chinese TV, and on PBS, that Moser can criticize uncritical Confucian authority worship, which also leads to a second economic problem he says: unchecked corruption.   DAVID MOSER: One of the biggest problems with the evolving Chinese economy is corruption and that if you don't have a free flow of information you don't have a free press, you really cannot address the issue of corruption, right. That's one thing.   PAUL SOLMAN: Right, because there's nobody to blow the whistle.   DAVID MOSER: There's nobody to blow the whistle, right. And what you have now is a situation where a very small group of people in the government are making very, very massive and important economic decisions with virtually no public forum for discussion or for dissent.   PAUL SOLMAN: For example, says Moser --   DAVID MOSER: You've had massive social disruption as the one-child policy creates this generation of only children. You have all these parents and grandparents retiring that no longer have the, the guaranteed cradle-to-grave benefits they were suppose to get under, under Marxism. And yet, you don't have the public forum in which this stuff can be talked about.   PAUL SOLMAN: And you can't raise that when you're on one of your shows? You can't kind of work that in, in some clever comedic way?   DAVID MOSER: Let's see. How can I put this? No.   China's younger generation   PAUL SOLMAN: So repression allows for corruption, for poor economic policy-making, and, it stultifies innovation. So why do cosmopolitan young Chinese allow it?   DAVID MOSER: They've made a bargain with the devil here because they, the young people are the ones who are most set up to benefit from the economic modernization itself, right?   It's a little distressing to talk with them sometimes, especially during the recent anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. A lot of them are not really aware that, exactly what happened and they don't care. A lot of them really don't care.   HANDEL LEE: A friend of mine described it as the anaconda in the chandelier.   PAUL SOLMAN: Handel Lee is a very successful Chinese-American businessman who's opening a new nightclub in Beijing.   HANDEL LEE: The anaconda may never come out, but it's up there. Sometimes you can feel it, and a lot of people say, oh, it's a communist. It's not communist. It's Chinese. It's authoritarianism that's very, very Chinese or Confucian.   PAUL SOLMAN: Confucian, I thought Confucianism was a good influence on societies like China, Asian societies, with respect for the elders, hard work --   HANDEL LEE: Well in Confucianism, you don't question authority. I mean, that's just unheard of in a Chinese household. Governments demand that same sort of respect.   Future economic development   PAUL SOLMAN: So where is this unique blend of Communist Party dictatorship, Confucian authoritarianism and a free market free-for-all headed? Pessimists like Labor leader Han Dongfang fear that continuing economic growth simply sustain Communist Party oppression.   HAN DONGFANG: We're basically facing the worst marriage in human history which is capitalist and communist; and the workers on one hand they have to deal with this evil critical power that make them cannot open their mouth; on the other hand you face this huge economical giant which is running around the globe.   PAUL SOLMAN: But optimists like Liu Chuanzhi, who managed the Chinese buyout of IBM's personal computer business, claim that as the economics develops, so will the politics.   LIU CHUANZHI: In China we have to first to start with the economic one and I think with that kind of person it will be reform in the political area soon. At the very beginning, it is up to one person, the leader to use his authority and his power and control the situation, but later on, when everything is okay, there's no need for the leader to do everything.   PAUL SOLMAN: There remains a third possibility, however, one that we in the US might find especially hard to swallow: that there won't be political reform in China anytime soon. Yet economic growth will continue, even to the next, more advanced stage of development, in which case, some might read a worrisome moral into the story of China's economic success: Perhaps growth can co-exist with corruption and soft authoritarianism. Maybe successful economic decisions can be made by a few at the top; and just possibly, maybe there can be innovation without representation.   Click on the link below to access further reports from PBS Reporter Paul Solman's recent tour of China. Visit the related web page
	US Senate moves to ban Prisoner Torture by NYT / AP / Los Angeles Times   Washington. November 8, 2005   Bush stance on torture terrible - Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. (AP, Washington Post)   A leading Republican senator says the Bush Administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing a congressional ban on torture and other inhumane treatment of prisoners in US custody.   Senator Chuck Hagel, said yesterday that many Republican senators support the ban proposed by fellow party member Senator John McCain, a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.   The ban was approved by a 90-9 vote last month in the Senate and added to a defence spending bill.   The White House has threatened a veto, but the fate of the proposal depends on negotiations between the Senate and the lower house on the spending measure. The house does not support the ban.   Vice-President Dick Cheney has lobbied Republican senators to allow an exemption for those held by the CIA if preventing an attack is at stake.   "I think the Administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing John McCain"s amendment on detainees and torture," Senator Hagel said on the American ABC network. "Why in the world they"re doing that, I don"t know."   Senator McCain, citing the Senate vote as well as support from the public, former secretary of state Colin Powell and others with government service, said he would push the issue with the White House "as far as necessary".   "We need to get this issue behind us," Senator McCain said on the Fox News Sunday program. "Our image in the world is suffering very badly, and one of the reasons for it is the perception that we abuse people that we take captive."   Over the past year, Vice-President Dick Cheney has waged a largely unpublicised campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defence, state, intelligence and congressional officials.   Last winter, when Democrat Senator John D. Rockefeller vice-chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA"s interrogation practices, Mr Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, according to three US officials.   In recent months, Mr Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defence Department"s rules on treatment of military prisoners, putting him at odds with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and acting Deputy Secretary of Defence Gordon England. On a trip to Canada last month, Dr Rice interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Mr Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input..   October 09, 2005   "The Senate Draws a Line" by Rosa Brooks. (Los Angeles Times)   USA: 46 Republicans joined Senate Democrats to issue a stinging rebuke to the administration"s interrogation and detention tactics in the war on terror.   By a vote of 90 to 9, the Senate approved an amendment to the defense appropriation bill. The amendment - whose main sponsor was Arizona Sen. John McCain - prohibits the Defense Department from using interrogation techniques other than those authorized by the Army Field Manual and provides that "no individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States government, regardless of nationality or location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."   The Bush administration fought tooth and nail against the amendment, claiming that it would tie its hands in the war on terror. Naturally, no administration spokesperson would say that they intended to treat terror suspects in a cruel, inhuman or degrading way, but that"s what they mean. The administration has walked a fine line, claiming that techniques such as "waterboarding," forced nudity, "stress positions" and mock executions are legally permitted because they"re not technically "torture" (a conclusion shared by few experts) and because they"re still "humane" (a conclusion shared by practically no one).   With the amendment, the Senate made it clear that such hairsplitting wasn"t fooling anyone. As McCain put it, his emotion and authority contrasting sharply with the president"s recent shallow rhetoric: "Mr. President … I don"t think I"m naive about how severe are the wages of war, and how terrible are the things that must be done to wage it successfully…. But what I do mourn … is what we lose … when by official policy or by official negligence we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget that best sense of ourselves, our greatest strength: that we are different and better than our enemies; that we fight for an idea … that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights."   The McCain amendment defines "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment as that which would be prohibited by the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. This sets a clear and realistic standard for how U.S. personnel should treat detainees, regardless of whether the Geneva Convention applies. The Supreme Court has interpreted the 5th, 8th and 14th amendments to prohibit interrogation and detention tactics strikingly similar to those approved by the Bush administration for use against terror suspects.   In 2002, for instance, the high court looked at the case of an Alabama prisoner who was left handcuffed to a post in the hot sun, bare back, for seven hours with limited access to water and with no bathroom breaks - treatment less severe than what many detainees held by the U.S. in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay have been subjected to. Yet a 6-3 majority of the court condemned the "obvious cruelty inherent in this practice" in the Alabama case as "antithetical to human dignity" and "degrading and dangerous."   The McCain amendment, which passed despite an explicit White House veto threat, is the Senate"s clearest rejection yet of the administration"s claim that "anything goes" in the war on terror. And though the amendment must still pass in the House - and survive the threatened veto - to become law, it may be a harbinger of other Senate rebellions to come. Former counsel Alberto Gonzales, who requested the now infamous 2002 Justice Department memo asserting that the president is not bound by federal laws prohibiting torture.   President Bush is struggling to regain support for his increasingly incoherent foreign policy agenda while trying to push through his minimally qualified Supreme Court nominee here at home. He"d do well to consider Justice Robert Jackson"s famous words in the 1952 Youngstown Steel seizure case. "When the president takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress," Jackson wrote, "his power is at its lowest ebb."    October 9, 2005   "Binding the torturers" hands". (The New York Times)   When the U.S. Senate voted last week to bring America"s chain of military prison camps under the rule of law, President George W. Bush threatened a veto. The White House explained his objections by saying the measure would bind the government"s hands. Yes, exactly.   The rules would finally bind military prisons to democratic values and the standards of behavior recognized by every other civilized nation. They would bind the U.S. government to a code of conduct that will help protect those in the nation"s uniform.   The measure would ban "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment of prisoners held by the military - which, by the way, is already against American law and a long-standing treaty. Bush, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales are about the only ones left who want to defend the justness and practical value of the abhorrent practices introduced at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and then exported to Abu Ghraib. Ninety senators voted for the new law, including 46 Republicans.   More than two dozen retired senior military officers endorsed it, including two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Shalikashvili and Colin Powell. Generals know that turning American servicemen and servicewomen into torturers endangers Americans captured on the battlefield. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, the primary sponsor of the legislation, was among the Americans tortured by North Vietnamese jailers. He said that "Every one of us - every single one of us - knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies."   Not only is the Bush administration trying to block the Senate"s efforts to finally fix this enormous problem, but it continues to block any serious investigation of the abuse, torture and murder of prisoners.   The senators who voted for the law on the humane treatment of prisoners should also lend their backing to another measure that would create a truly bipartisan and independent commission, armed with subpoena power, to investigate the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and other military detention camps - like the one that investigated the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The Republican majority in the House should also pass the new law on interrogations - then override Bush if he has the bad judgment to veto it.
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