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	People power on the march in China by Howard French USA Today / New York Times China   Beijing.10 August, 2005   "Retreat in China", by David J. Lynch. (USAToday)   An intensifying crackdown on domestic dissent is dashing hopes that China's economic opening will produce greater democracy anytime soon.   Chinese authorities in recent weeks have arrested prominent intellectuals and foreign journalists. They have tightened restrictions on Web sites and praised the killing of anti-government protesters in nearby Uzbekistan, which Human Rights Watch labeled a "massacre." And they've rounded up the leaders of unapproved religious observances.   The current domestic chill is a far cry from what was expected when Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao took command in November 2002. Long groomed for leadership, Hu, 62, was seen as representing a new generation of Chinese rulers. His rise — more than a decade after the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square — revived hopes of gradual political reform.   Hu's response to a crisis over the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) virus in April 2003 — firing two top officials and briefly delivering greater openness — seemed to legitimize those dreams.   But hopes of broader change have evaporated. Since adding the title of Chinese president in March 2003, Hu has followed a two-track strategy. Publicly, he emphasizes policies aimed at helping those left behind by China's boom. This populist campaign stresses development of poorer regions long neglected under Hu's predecessor, Jiang Zemin.   At the same time, Hu pursues an unapologetic effort to rebuild centralized control, including unleashing the security services on domestic and foreign journalists.   Zhao Yan, a researcher for The New York Times, has been jailed since September on unspecified charges of leaking state secrets. Ching Cheong of The (Singapore) Straits Times, was detained April 22 while seeking an unpublished manuscript of interviews with Zhao Ziyang, the Chinese leader deposed in 1989 for opposing the use of force in Tiananmen Square. Just last week, China said it had formally arrested Ching and charged him with spying for Taiwan.   China also recently required all Web sites and blogs to register with the authorities. And the party is using undercover agents to steer online conversations in chat rooms away from criticism of the authorities, according to the Nanfang Zhoumo newspaper. In one city, the newspaper reported, propaganda office officials posing as chat room participants were ordered to: "Develop actively, increase control, accentuate the good and avoid the bad, use it to our advantage."   A stubborn one-party system   After a quarter-century of economic reform, Hu's hard line is confounding the conventional wisdom that economic liberalization inevitably will unravel China's one-party system. Most analysts still expect market freedoms to someday spawn greater political openness. But that evolution appears likely to take longer than once thought.   Today's tight grip is likely to persist through the next Communist Party conference in 2007 and the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008, analysts believe. "I would say there's going to be a four-year hiatus. ... Today, the words 'political reform' can barely be mentioned," says Minxin Pei of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.   So far, the domestic repression hasn't affected Sino-U.S. relations. In internal party speeches, Hu might castigate unnamed "hostile forces" that want to westernize China. But with the United States as China's top export market, he wants to preserve the lucrative relationship with Washington.   China's economic advance — far from threatening the Communist Party's monopoly on power — is helping the authorities maintain their grip. The security services are flush with cash, equipment and personnel, and the government can afford to lavish comfortable salaries upon potentially restive intellectuals. "They have more resources to strengthen the police state," Pei says.   As its factories dominate one industry after another, China might appear to be an unstoppable economic behemoth. But the current moves to quell dissent reflect the leadership's private nervousness over Beijing's myriad problems. In recent years, there has been a notable explosion of public protests — over unpaid pensions, official corruption and land seizures — across the country.   It's a reminder that China's Communist Party is trying to accomplish something unprecedented: a permanent marriage of economic freedom with political repression. Hu and his Politburo colleagues have not forgotten the instability that attended the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, where political reform was implemented before the state-run economies were dismantled. That's why Hu welcomed Uzbekistan's tough response to May's embryonic anti-government revolt. "They're terrified of this happening to them," says Edward Friedman, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.   Indeed, Hu's signature initiative is aimed at strengthening the party's ability to rule. A throwback to the pre-1978 Maoist era, the effort "to maintain the advanced nature of Chinese Communist Party members" requires the party's 69 million members to attend special lectures and engage in "self-criticism."   "On the ideological level, there's no question Hu's been quite tough. He is pulling things in. He's reining in the intellectual atmosphere," says Boston University's Joseph Fewsmith, an expert on the Chinese leadership.   Because of changes in society, though, Hu's crackdown is irrelevant to all but a small, politically conscious elite. It was easy for the party to exert influence when everyone received their salary, housing, medical care and education through jobs with state-owned enterprises. But now that only 27% of urban residents work for state factories, the old levers of control are no longer as effective. And that means Hu ultimately faces a decidedly uphill battle.   (Veteran foreign correspondent David J. Lynch recently returned to the USA after a three-year tour in China, where he opened USA TODAY's Beijing bureau).   Xinchang, China. July 20, 2005 (NYT)   After three nights of heavy rioting, police took no chances on Monday, deploying busloads of officers to block every road leading to a rural factory.   But the angry villagers had learned their lessons too, having studied reports of riots in towns near and far that have swept rural China in recent months.   Sneaking over mountain paths and wading through rice paddies, they avoided police as they made their way to a pharmaceuticals plant, determined for a showdown over what they see as an environmental threat to their livelihoods.   Almost 15,000 people waged a pitched battle with the authorities on Sunday, overturning police cars and throwing stones for hours, undeterred by clouds of tear gas.   Residents of this factory town in China's wealthy Zhejiang province vow they will keep demonstrating until they have forced the 10-year-old plant to move and take its pollution with it.   "This is the only way to solve problems like ours," said one protester, 22, whose house sits less than 100 metres from the smashed gates of the factory, where police were massed. "If you go to see the mayor or some city official, they just take your money and do nothing."   The riots in Xinchang are part of growing discontent in China, with the number of mass protests like these hitting 74,000 incidents last year, from about 10,000 a decade earlier.The protests share a common foundation of accumulated anger over the failure of China's political system to respond to legitimate grievances and in defiance of local authorities, who are often seen as corrupt.   A sign of the leadership's growing concern with the protests is evident in a proliferation of high-level statements about the demonstrations.   In a nationally televised news conference this month, Li Jingtian, deputy director of the Communist Party's organisation bureau, complained that "with regard to our grassroots cadres, some of them are probably less competent, and they are not able to dissipate these conflicts or problems". In another statement, Chen Xiwen, an economics vice-minister who oversees agricultural affairs, saluted the internet's role in allowing central government authorities to learn of unrest more quickly, and praised demonstrating farmers for "knowing how to protect their rights".   The people of Xinchang were reluctant to speak openly about the uprising, since they would be arrested if identified. The problems at Xinchang started with an explosion - in a vessel containing deadly chemicals - at the Jinxing Pharmaceutical Company this month. It killed one worker and contaminated the water supply.   Villagers say they appointed representatives to press for compensation but when they sent a group on July 4 to demand an audience with factory officials, security guards beat the representatives. The next day, the villagers returned in larger numbers and managed to grab a security officer, whom they acknowledge beating. As word spread of the beating of the village representatives and of the worker's death in the explosion, villagers demanded that the factory close.   The protesters are sustained by the example of the city of Dongyang, 80 kilometres away, which was the scene this year of one of China's biggest riots, in which more than 10,000 residents routed police in a protest over pollution from a pesticide factory. Despite tight controls on news coverage of the incident, the riot in Dongyang, where the chemical factory remains closed, has been seen as proof that determined citizens can force authorities to deal with their concerns.   "As for the Dongyang riot, everyone knows about it," a man in his 20s said. "Six policemen were killed, and the chief had the tendons in his arms and legs severed. Perhaps they went too far, but we must be treated as human beings."
	This is no way to wage the War on Terror by Amin Saikal The Age Australia   July 2005   Actions such as the war on Iraq have alienated many ordinary Muslims.   The terrorist carnage in London has once again put the spotlight on al-Qaeda as the most likely perpetrator. Prime Minister Tony Blair, President George Bush and their allies around the world have reaffirmed their determination to continue the war on terrorism until a final victory. Yet the London tragedy also reminds us that the war on terror has so far done little to seriously impair the operational capacity of al-Qaeda and its associated groups. How resilient is al-Qaeda and how inadequate has the war on terror been?   Al-Qaeda has certainly proved to be more self-generating and robust than could have been anticipated at the start of the war on terror more than three-and-a-half years ago. The organisation has become highly franchised and dispersed, capable of adapting to changing conditions and circumventing enemy tactics.   The fact that its top leaders, Osama bin Laden and his strategist deputy Aiman al-Zawahiri, have become fugitives seems to have made little difference. They continue to serve as significant symbols of inspiration to galvanise some Muslims to respond to their call.   Although Muslims are very diverse, two clusters appear to have become increasingly receptive to al-Qaeda''''s causes, with a willingness to serve as the network''''s operatives and foot soldiers.   One cluster is made up of radical Islamists, who believe in Islam as an ideology of political and social transformation and the use of violence under special circumstances to achieve their objectives. They are not all narrowly educated and unworldly as has often been claimed. A good number of them have evidently come from well-educated and privileged backgrounds.   The other cluster is made up of neo-fundamentalists, who are very narrowly educated within a particular social and cultural setting as defined by certain conservative Islamic leaders. While a great deal of ideological overlap exists between the radical Islamists and neo-fundamentalists, the latter are far more inward-looking, discriminatory and xenophobic than the former. A prime example of this group was the Taliban, whose remnants are still active in Afghanistan. Elements of this group are recruited as al-Qaeda''''s foot soldiers, often at the behest of radical Islamists.   Both sides have resorted to extremism, each reinforcing the position of the other."   These two clusters constitute a small minority compared with moderate Islamists, who share part of the radicals'''' political platform but reject violence and are open to inter-faith dialogue, peaceful co-existence and good relations with the West. However, they can always draw on the political and social deprivation of Muslims, whether in Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Pakistan, and their disempowerment and humiliation at the hands of foreigners, whether in Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan, to widen their circles of popular support and recruitment among ordinary Muslims everywhere.   Meanwhile, the way the US and its allies have sought to combat the radical Islamists and neo-fundamentalists has boosted Muslim support and sympathy for them.   The war on terror has so far focused primarily on the symptoms rather than the deep causes underpinning al-Qaeda''''s resilience. It has given primacy to the use of military force over identifying and addressing the root causes of al-Qaeda''''s terrorism in order to delegitimise its actions and dry up its sources of moral, human and economic nourishment.   It was a fatal mistake by the Bush Administration and its British and Australian allies to invade Iraq. Instead of concentrating on rapidly securing and rebuilding Afghanistan, resolving the Palestinian problem as a major source of Muslim discontent towards the US and working with democratic forces in the Muslim world to build democracy from within, they diverted their resources to creating a new theatre of conflict for none other than geopolitical ambitions.   The US mismanagement of post-Saddam Iraq, together with many instances of American prisoner abuses and human rights violations against the backdrop of mounting carnage and destruction in Iraq, has created an unprecedented backlash in the Arab/Muslim world. This has enabled al-Qaeda and many groups in its name to fight the Americans and their allies from a wider base of popular sympathy.   It has become clear to most Muslims that Iraq was invaded not to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam''''s dictatorship or to destroy his weapons of mass destruction capability. If those were the reasons the US could have acted much earlier, instead of courting the dictator as a potential ally as it did in the 1980s.   The war on terror has certainly lost its focus, and many Muslims are left wondering whether the war is against them and their religion or against a few misguided malcontents.   When Blair declared last year that the future of relations between the West and the Muslim world would be decided in Iraq, he in effect echoed Osama Bin Laden''''s wishes. It appears that both sides have resorted to extremism, each reinforcing the position of the other.   Unless Washington and its allies rethink their war on terror strategy to address the root causes of international terrorism, the future looks very grim. A sound political strategy is badly needed to deal with those causes of terrorism that defy military solutions and to rebuild bridges of understanding and trust with Muslims as the best way to delegitimise the position of al-Qaeda and its associated groups.   (Professor Amin Saikal is director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies at the Australian National University and author of Islam and the West: Conflict or Co-operation?)
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