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	Tiananmen Square, 25 years on: A bitter echo of the past by UN News, NYT, agencies China   3 June 2014 (UN News)   UN rights chief urges release of detained activists ahead of Tiananmen anniversary.   The United Nations human rights chief today voiced concern about the detention of civil society activists, lawyers and journalists in China ahead of the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, while also stressing the need to establish the facts surrounding what transpired between 3 and 4 June 1989.   “I urge the Chinese authorities to immediately release those detained for the exercise of their human right to freedom of expression,” the High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay said in a news release. Dozens of individuals have allegedly been detained by the authorities ahead of the 4 June anniversary, including several reportedly detained and charged with “creating a disturbance” for participating in a private discussion about the 1989 Tiananmen Square events.   There are also reports that the authorities have been placing anniversary-related restrictions on social media, traditional media and internet usage.   “Rather than stifle attempts to commemorate the 1989 events, the authorities should encourage and facilitate dialogue and discussion as a means of overcoming the legacy of the past,” stated Ms. Pillay, who also stressed the need to carry out a truth-seeking process into the events.   “Much remains unknown about what exactly transpired between 3 June and 4 June 1989. In the absence of an independent, factual investigation, there are dramatically differing accounts. The death toll, for example, ranges from hundreds to thousands, and many families of victims are still awaiting an explanation of what happened to their loved ones,” she said.   “It is in the interests of everyone to finally establish the facts surrounding the Tiananmen Square incidents,” the High Commissioner added.   “China has made many advances over the past 25 years. Learning from events of the past will not diminish the gains of the past 25 years, but will show how far China has come in ensuring that human rights are respected and protected.”   June 2014   Tiananmen Square, 25 years on: A bitter echo of the past, by John Garnaut - Asia Pacific editor for Fairfax Media.   China’s President Xi Jinping was 13 years old when his father was abducted, tortured, forced to confess and then publicly paraded with a wooden placard around his neck. In those days children were used as hostages. Doctors denied medicine to sick prisoners while prescribing hallucinogens to make the healthy mad. No tool was too barbaric to force the Communist Party’s victims to submit.   After Mao’s death when Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun, returned to power he advocated for laws that could guard against unbridled power and protect those who spoke unwelcome truths. “Everyone likes to hear nice things and agreeable words, but many of these words are lies,” he said, while pushing for a speech-protection law, in his role as director of the legal affairs committee of the National People"s Congress.   This and other endeavours to create a more inclusive polity were suddenly aborted on this day 25 years ago, when peacefully protesting students were gunned down around Tiananmen Square.   A surprising proportion of the lawyers, journalists and intellectuals who are leading today’s citizens’ rights movement in China are veterans of the Tiananmen protest movement. Some have been sent back to prison, like writer Liu Xiaobo, whose crime was to circulate a charter in 2008 that called for the Party to abide by its own laws.   Others chose to stay just inside the line, believing that useful work could still be done. That’s why the May 5 arrest of one of Liu’s close friends, the celebrated free speech lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, is so significant.   I once joined Pu late on a Saturday night in a smoke-filled board room, together with a businessman and a journalist, just after Liu Xiaobo had won his Nobel Peace Prize. He had reassured his security shadows that he wouldn’t talk about Liu. So instead we talked about Pu"s annual private pilgrimage to Tiananmen, of which he always kept his security shadows informed.   His tone changed when he placed his jar of green tea on the table, next to my recorder, and talked through the calculus of when to step outside the line:   “You must see that sometimes it can feel too dark to achieve anything. But you can also see more and more people using law as a tool to defend their dignity, property, land and rights.   "…I will speak the facts and let journalists write so that there will be more and more pressures on individual cases and the people will see there is a way for them to get relatively fair treatment and handle issues without bribing judges with money and sexual opportunities. I am focused on the process as well as the result. The process is a process of raising awareness about human rights.   “No matter what, we must not lose confidence in justice and human nature. We believe this will overwhelm the leviathan. Our aim is not to knock it over but to ensure a peaceful transition after its fall. Even when the ghost of communism evaporates, society still needs to move forward. We can"t afford another revolution.   “I am constantly pushing and standing at the furthest point within the boundary, but not outside it. I cherish my identity as a lawyer. If I have to step out, I will calculate before doing so. Liu has stepped out and won a prize."   A month ago, on May 3 Pu Zhiqiang calculated the time had come to step outside the line. Carefully, he replicated a commemoration of Tiananmen as had been done five years earlier, in the privacy of a friend’s home. In other words, Pu effectively sacrificed himself to highlight exactly how far the boundaries have recently contracted under Xi Jinping.   Pu and four other prestigious civil society leaders at the same event were charged with “picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, when five years earlier there"d been no repercussions. “They are the conscience and cream of Chinese intellectuals,” wrote Monash University’s Warren Sun, an authority on Chinese elite political history, explaining why he had brought one of them, Xu Youyu, to Australia for a study and speaking tour.   In echoes of the Cultural Revolution, three of Pu’s close associates have also been arrested on similar charges, like hostages to encourage Pu"s confession. Pu and Xu are cut off from the outside world and their lawyers have been gagged.   They have both been refused access to their usual medicine despite suffering from high blood pressure and acute diabetes. Both were reportedly offered pills they didn’t recognise, which Xu rejected and Pu reluctantly accepted.   Another activist, Cao Shunli, who was healthy when detained last September, was deprived of crucial medicine and died on March 14.   Dozens of other leading civil society leaders have been arrested ahead of this historic anniversary. One was Gao Yu, a leading journalist and Tiananmen veteran, who was famous for being too tough to break. But after her son also “disappeared”, Gao gave a confession that was videotaped and aired on the prime time evening news.   It is not just leading Chinese citizens who are being jailed for failing to forget. The latest to be "disappeared" is artist and Tiananmen veteran, Guo Jian, who has been a pillar of Australian public diplomacy for years. He has drawn the world"s attention to one of his inspired installations in Beijing: a large, as yet unexhibited, diorama of Tiananmen Square decorated with 160 kilograms of minced meat.   The world would do well to accept that the story of modern China is not only how much society has changed since 1967, or 1989, but also how the political system has not. Lies and brutality beget more lies and brutality, and no end to this cycle is yet in sight.   High hopes remain that Xi will push through economic reforms even while imprisoning dozens of his country’s best people and intimidating millions of others into saying "nice things and agreeable words".   But, as his own father once pointed out: “If people who give differing views of current policies are criticised as anti-Party and anti-socialist, then how is it possible to carry out reform?”   Liu Si. What was it all About, by Helen Gao.   I don’t remember the first time I heard the term liu si — June 4 — which is how the Tiananmen protests, the widespread demonstrations in 1989 that ended in bloodshed, are referred to in China. It was perhaps sometime around 2003, when I was 15 or 16. The word was probably uttered at the dinner table by one of my parents, both of whom were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the street in front of Tiananmen Square, on that night. They bore witness to the senseless killing, a memory that has haunted them ever since.   I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”   Twenty-five years after the massacre, the topic remains taboo here. I try to piece together the events of that spring through underground documentaries, foreign reports and conversations with my parents. Yet the more facts and anecdotes I gather, the more those crowds and gunshots seem unreal, like tragic scenes from an old foreign film.   To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.   Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.   This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.   Many of my Chinese peers, for example, are unfamiliar with the stories of Chen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei, whose courageous struggles against the state are better known among my Western friends. Topics such as the religious repression in Tibet and military crackdowns in Xinjiang barely make a dent on the collective consciousness of my generation. The few times that I’ve spoken to my Chinese friends about the self-immolations among Tibetan monks, I’ve been met with looks of surprise. A few seconds later, some have asked, “Why?”   Perhaps nowhere is this indifference toward politics and civil rights more pronounced than in the insouciance of young people about the Communist Party’s attempts to expunge historical truths from public memory.   The majority of my generation still believes, for instance, that the war against Japanese invasion in the 1930s and ’40s was fought primarily by Communist soldiers, while the Nationalist army “passively resisted the Japanese and actively combated the Communists,” as told in my high school history textbook. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution mean little more than the scanty facts we had to memorize for the national college entrance exam.   The massacre of 1989, the most recent tragedy of all, is also the most forgotten: One of the first victims of the massacre, Jiang Jielian, was a junior at my high school. While his mother, Ding Zilin, and other mothers of the victims, are still seeking justice for the death of their sons and daughters, Jiang’s name is known to few of my classmates.   The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change.   When I returned to China after finishing college in the United States in 2012, I was shocked to discover how few of my friends use VPN, software that allows one to scale China’s Great Firewall and access blocked sites like Twitter and other media platforms. Well-educated and worldly, they nonetheless see censorship more as a nuisance of daily life, something to be begrudgingly endured, rather than an infringement on their freedom of speech.   “I have to keep an eye on my watch when I browse foreign websites,” a friend at Peking University told me. Contrary to academic institutions worldwide that aim to make information available to students and scholars, Peking University charges an hourly fee for on-campus access to foreign websites. “It’s a little annoying, but I don’t browse them often anyway,” my friend explained. “Except when I check my email.”   If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. These inconveniences — from censorship to the vehicle license lottery, a system that distributes a limited number of license plates to a huge number of new drivers who apply each month — feel not unlike the dogmatic words of Marxist philosophy in our school textbooks, which we mock in private but dutifully memorize and copy onto exams.   Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little.   Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the harms in our daily lives caused by state power.   Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.   Last October, Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, was dismissed from his job after making bold demands for political change. The school insisted that Mr. Xia was fired for poor teaching skills. When the news broke, scores of university students rushed to defend the school’s claim on social media from what one called “Western media’s typical tactic to smear the image of China.”   “Outsiders may pay more attention to freedom of speech, but students here care more about academics and teaching,” a friend who was a student at the university said to me at the time. “Neither side should impose its opinion on the other.”   Today, most of my high school friends, having graduated from top Chinese universities, are working at state banks and government-owned enterprises. Several have passed the competitive civil-service exam and landed cushy positions in government. Nationwide, China’s best and brightest are chasing the stability and prestige offered by the state system: A survey conducted by Tsinghua University reveals that state-owned enterprises and government organs rank as the two most desirable destinations for university graduates.   Outsiders, as my Peking University friend might say, may lament the contrast between the conservative outlook of today’s Chinese youth and the unbounded liberalism of the Tiananmen generation. But among the minority of my peers who are familiar with liu si, the rosy romanticism on the square in 1989 takes on a different hue today, when viewed in the fluorescent light of a government office cubicle.   In a recent conversation with a high school friend, who is now an editor at People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, he brought up the subject of Tiananmen. An avid follower of Western news and user of Facebook, he shrugs off the urgency for Chinese society to revisit the event. “What do you think it can bring us, to resurrect liu si?” he asked. “Nothing is going to change. We have to move forward.”   * Helen Gao is a journalist based in Beijing. Visit the related web page
	Only an economic revolution can defuse the global inequality timebomb by Nicholas Lusiani, Helen Dennis, Jacques Leslie Poverty Matters & agencies   15 May, 2014   Economist Thomas Piketty warns that unless action is taken to redistribute wealth, inequality will widen until it becomes unsustainable. Development goal-setters ignore him at their peril.   The focus on global inequality has gone mainstream. From papal proclamations to warnings of impending doom by the economist Thomas Piketty, social injustice is making headlines. Yet the issue is still not being considered seriously enough in the byzantine process of setting new development goals: the spotlight has remained on economic growth.   Tackling economic inequality is not easy, but as Piketty and others have stressed, ignoring it could create a timebomb, not least because it limits a country"s ability to uphold human rights.   An ambitious, post-2015 fiscal revolution is needed to address key questions at the heart of sustainable development: how to raise enough resources; how to ensure those resources are used to tackle inequality and ensure no one is left behind; and how to provide transparency and accountability over public policy.   The question of who pays for all this is a political hot potato. The cost of delivering new sustainable development goals (SDGs), including climate change commitments, will be about $1tn per year.   The millennium development goals (MDGs) have been underfunded to the tune of $120bn, and with the SDGs we are talking about a much more ambitious programme.   Despite the financial crisis, the world has never been richer. The challenge is to use this wealth better, but a new approach is vital. That is why ideas such as a sustainable development solidarity capital tax, based on Piketty"s proposal for Europe, should be considered.   The French economist suggests a 1% tax on all property and financial assets worth €1m-€5m, and 2% on capital above that. As with financial transaction taxes, there are practical questions about whether a sustainable development solidarity capital tax should be levied and spent domestically, or to what extent it should go into a global pot. These are questions the committee of experts on sustainable development financing should explore at its meeting in New York this week. All options, including those that may seem politically difficult, must be considered.   Fiscal measures such as this, and proposals to tackle illicit financial flows, offer the greatest hope of raising enough cash to pay for the SDGs. But raising money is not enough. The human rights principle of equality demands that we also attend to the impact of how resources are found and spent.   In many countries, regressive tax systems – which are heavily reliant on goods and services taxes, often at the expense of more progressive income and wealth taxes – have disproportionately burdened poor people. They have also fuelled rising income and wealth inequality.   Full transparency and meaningful public participation is required in domestic and global fiscal policymaking. Yet there is a long way to go before the conditions for accountable fiscal governance are in place worldwide. The new sustainable development framework must address accountability gaps at the international level.   It should include firm and monitorable pledges by powerful countries and international financial institutions to tackle tax evasion and other illicit financial flows. It should also ensure that tax policies in poor countries do not undermine their ability to meet human rights and sustainable development commitments.   The new SDGs could include targets to reduce economic inequality through enhanced use of progressive taxation on income and wealth. Indicators could track progress towards ending cross-border tax evasion, returning stolen assets, forgiving odious debt and progressively combating tax abuses.   Human rights and development advocates will also be watching to see whether member states involved in the financing conversation are brave enough to promote the fiscal revolution that will be vital for achieving post-2015 goals.   Nearly every review of Piketty"s book has stressed how unrealistic his recommendations are. But a "mansion tax" in the UK is now a mainstream proposal, and a financial transactions tax – until recently dismissed as impractical – is poised to be implemented across Europe.   The SDGs are likely to take 2030 as their end date, and a lot can change in that time. This is no time for low ambitions. Given the magnitude of today"s sustainable development challenges, and the mandate for transformative change that human rights provide, the international community should embrace proposals that think big and think ahead.   * Nicholas Lusiani is senior researcher at the Centre for Economic and Social Rights. Helen Dennis is senior adviser on poverty and inequality at Christian Aid.   http://www.cesr.org/downloads/fiscal.revolution.pdf http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/Africa-tax-and-inequality-report-Feb2014.pdf   The True Cost of Hidden Money, by Jacques Leslie. (NYT)   Gabriel Zucman is a French economist who decided to solve a puzzle: Why do international balance sheets each year show more liabilities than assets, as if the world is in debt to itself?   Over the last couple of decades, the few international economists who have addressed this question have offered a simple explanation: tax evasion. Money that, say, leaves the United States for an offshore tax shelter is recorded as a liability here, but it is listed nowhere as an asset — its mission, after all, is disappearance.   But until now the economists lacked hard numbers to confirm their suspicions. By analyzing data released in recent years by central banks in Switzerland and Luxembourg on foreigners’ bank holdings, then extrapolating to other tax havens, Mr. Zucman has put creditable numbers on tax evasion, showing that it’s rampant — and a major driver of wealth inequality.   Mr. Zucman estimates — conservatively, in his view — that $7.6 trillion — 8 percent of the world’s personal financial wealth — is stashed in tax havens. If all of this illegally hidden money were properly recorded and taxed, global tax revenues would grow by more than $200 billion a year, he believes. And these numbers do not include much larger corporate tax avoidance, which usually follows the letter but hardly the spirit of the law.   According to Mr. Zucman’s calculations, 20 percent of all corporate profits in the United States are shifted offshore, and tax avoidance deprives the government of a third of corporate tax revenues. Corporate tax avoidance has become so widespread that from the late 1980s until now, the effective corporate tax rate in the United States has dropped from 30 percent to 15 percent, Mr. Zucman found, even though the tax rate hasn’t changed.   Mr. Zucman, an assistant economics professor at the London School of Economics, is part of a wave of data-focused economists led by Thomas Piketty, of the Paris School of Economics. Mr. Zucman’s short book on tax evasion, “The Missing Wealth of Nations,” was a best seller in France last year.   Mr. Zucman’s tax evasion numbers are big enough to upend common assumptions, like the notion that China has become the world’s “owner” while Europe and America have become large debtors. The idea of the rich world’s indebtedness is “an illusion caused by tax havens,” Mr. Zucman wrote in a paper published last year. In fact, if offshore assets were properly measured, Europe would be a net creditor, and American indebtedness would fall from 18 percent of gross domestic product to 9 percent.   Only multinational corporations and people with at least $50 million in financial assets usually have the resources to engage in offshore tax evasion. Since the less wealthy continue paying taxes, the practice deepens wealth inequality.   Newly invigorated efforts in the United States to curb personal tax evasion, codified in the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, have armed the Internal Revenue Service with strong sanctions to levy on foreign banks that fail to disclose accounts held by American residents. This has made it “more difficult for moderately wealthy individuals to dodge taxes,” Mr. Zucman says, while the richest account holders still have more elaborate evasive techniques at their disposal.   “There’s a profound shift in attitudes that happened in the 1980s,” Mr. Zucman says. “In the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, taxes were much higher, yet it was not considered normal to try to aggressively minimize your tax bill and even to evade taxes.” He finds it “no coincidence” that the era of widespread tax evasion began in the Reagan era, with the rise of the idea that government is a beast that must be starved.   Because large-scale tax evasion skews key economics statistics, it hampers officials’ ability to manage the economy or make policy, Mr. Zucman says. It erodes respect for the law, preventing the government from carrying out one of its essential tasks. And it discourages job creation, since it rewards people and corporations for keeping money overseas, instead of investing it domestically.   Despite the obstacles that the tax compliance act faces, Mr. Zucman believes its passage marked a global turning point, starting an era of “progress” in reducing bank secrecy. Even so, only an international approach has a chance of stopping tax evasion, he says. Its most important feature would be a global financial registry, which would track wealth ownership. “If you can’t measure wealth,” Mr. Zucman says, “it’s almost impossible to tax it.”   A registry would make it impossible for multinationals to falsely attribute profits to tax havens instead of the countries where the profits should be taxed. The United States and Europe could build momentum for a global registry by establishing national registries for their own residents.   What’s beyond question is that there is no economic, political or moral justification for tax evasion — it exists only because of the political influence that wealth buys. A society that fails to fight widespread tax evasion proclaims its own corruption. Visit the related web page
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