Category Archives: China

by | 19 March 2025 · 6:28 am

First Hong Kong to California Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 19-21:

California gold arrived in Hong Kong at Christmas, 1848. It came as a packet of gold dust sent by George Allan, the San Francisco agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The envelope contained a small sample taken from a payment that Allan had made for a shipment of goods, sent from the company in Hawaii to San Francisco—$6,720—payment that was made entirely in gold dust, about 420 ounces of it (two and a half cups in volume). Allan wrote to his counterpart in Honolulu, “No one here seems to doubt for a moment the purity of the Gold Dust,” but he asked that the sample be sent “forward with all dispatch” to British experts in China for evaluation.

The same ship that brought gold dust to Hong Kong also carried recent issues of the Polynesian, a Honolulu newspaper. Hong Kong’s English-language weekly, Friend of China, often reprinted articles from the Polynesian for local consumption. In the January 6 edition, Hong Kong readers learned that six thousand people had taken gold valued at $4 million out of the earth in the six months since its discovery in California. The account predicted at least twenty thousand more arrivals in the coming year and the production of $62 million of gold in 1849, one-third of the world’s total product of gold and half of the world’s silver product in 1846. If the numbers (just predictions, really) weren’t exciting enough, the paper reported that digging for gold was not complicated. It involved simply collecting gravel in the bed of a stream and separating gold from the dirt by means of gravity and a little mercury. The arrival of the latest news and of gold itself sent a wave of excitement throughout the British colonial port. The following week the English brig Richard and William carried the first gold seekers from Hong Kong to California. They were not Chinese but Americans, including a former opium runner, a tavern owner, and a livery stable keeper.

Chinese gold seekers were not far behind. Yuan Sheng, a businessman, left Hong Kong on May 6 on the English bark Swallow, along with two other passengers and a cargo of Chinese goods. Yuan Sheng was from the Zhongshan region of Guangdong province. He was born on Sanzao, one of the small islands off the coast, near Macao. Yuan had actually been to the United States before: he had traveled to New York in 1820, probably on one of the clipper ships of the early China trade, and from there he had gone to Charleston, South Carolina, where he became a merchant. While in the United States, Yuan Sheng became a Christian and a naturalized American citizen. It’s not known when he returned to China, but in 1849 he decided to go back to America, this time to California, most likely not to dig for gold but to find business opportunities in San Francisco, another kind of golden fortune. He already knew English and something of the ways of American life, notwithstanding the differences between New York, South Carolina, and California.

Yuan Sheng went by the Anglicized name of Norman Assing. His selection of this name is intriguing. His surname is a homophone for the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) that was founded by Kublai Khan, the son of Genghis Khan. He might have chosen Norman after the medieval Europeans, a contemporary analogue of the Yuan. The Normans and Mongols were formidable conquering forces of their time. Sheng, his given name, means “birth”; Assing is a rendering of “Ah-Sing,” the familiar form of address of his name in Cantonese. Yuan Sheng means “born of the Yuan”; Norman Assing suggests “born of the Normans.” His choice was a clever point of pride even if it remained opaque to his American acquaintances. An English-speaking merchant, Yuan Sheng was one of the few Chinese headed for California who were named in the ship’s passenger manifest. We are not certain of those who ventured before him. Only seven Chinese arrived in San Francisco in 1848. When Yuan Sheng arrived in July 1849, there were barely fifty Chinese in California. Euro-Americans writing about exciting polyglot scenes on the streets of San Francisco in 1849 invariably commented on the Chinese they encountered, both high-cultured men in flowing silk robes and miners carrying bamboo poles strung with tools, straw hats, and gigantic boots.

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by | 17 March 2025 · 6:03 am

Chinese Empire Demand for Silver

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 9-10:

AT THE TIME OF the gold rushes, China was already in the grip of European colonialism. China was never directly colonized by a Western power; in fact, by the mid-eighteenth century the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) had built an empire of its own, having expanded China’s boundaries to the west, most notably by annexing Tibet and Xinjiang. But in the mid-nineteenth century China was battered by European aggressions: the opium trade, gunboat diplomacy, and the forced opening to Western trade and missionaries. China’s humiliation stood in stark contrast to the position it had once held, even relatively recently.

For two hundred years, from 1550 to 1750, China had been arguably the most important economic actor in the world. It was not only the single largest domestic economy; it was also at the center of global trade, both with its Sino-centric tributary and trading networks in East and Southeast Asia and as the premier destination market for silver produced in Spanish America and Japan. Europeans shipped silver to China not as “money” but as commodity arbitrage: the Ming Dynasty’s (1368–1644) demand for silver for fiscal and commercial purposes fetched the highest silver prices in the world, double its price in Europe. China was the world’s great “silver sink” that not only drew but also stimulated its production in the New World.

Through the seventeenth century, Europeans traded silver for luxuries, including gold. For example, the British East India Company’s first direct transaction with China in 1637 exchanged 60,000 Spanish dollars for sugar, silk, spices, porcelain, and “loose gould.” Chinese traders also made handsome profits by buying low and selling dear, earning gross profits of 100 to 150 percent on silk and silk textiles sold to Europeans. Economic historians Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giràldez describe these late sixteenth-century dynamics of global trade as “multiple arbitrage.”

Europeans began trading silver for tea in large quantities in the early eighteenth century. Like silk, tea was a luxury item in Europe, but it had greater potential for mass consumption. The creation of a mass market for tea in Europe coincided with the rise in consumption of sugar from the plantation-slave colonies of the Caribbean in the late seventeenth century. Indeed, tea and sugar, along with tobacco, undergirded a global trade in stimulants—“food drugs”—based on a symbiosis of colonialism and slavery, on the one hand, and new mass-consumption economies in European metropolitan societies, especially Britain, on the other.

By 1800 silver’s arbitrage advantage in China had ended. The British, now hooked on tea, looked for a different means of exchange. The East India Company had already drained India of much of its silver to sell in China; now it turned to India for the mass production of opium for export to China.

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Filed under Britain, Caribbean, China, drugs, economics, Europe, Japan, Latin America, Mexico, nationalism

by | 16 March 2025 · 2:52 pm

Chinese Gold Rush Emigration

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 2-4:

THE CHINESE WHO WENT to the gold rushes were part of an expanding population of Chinese living abroad in the nineteenth century. Since at least the thirteenth century of the Common Era, people from China’s southeastern coastal provinces had traded in Southeast Asia, from Indonesia and the Philippines to Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula to Thailand. But in the nineteenth century they traveled much farther from home, spurred by both need and opportunity. A quarter-million Chinese went as indentured laborers to European plantation colonies in the Caribbean as part of the notorious coolie trade that exploited Chinese and Indian workers after the abolition of slavery.

An even greater number of Chinese, more than 300,000, went as voluntary emigrants to the United States and to British settler colonies in the nineteenth century, attracted first by the gold rushes. The Chinese gold seekers were not, of course, the first to cross the great ocean—that distinction is held by the Polynesian peoples whose seaborne migrations began over one thousand years BCE. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish ran a yearly galleon trade between Acapulco and Manila, the long middle leg of a journey that traded New World silver to China for silks, porcelain, and other luxuries for Europe. By the early nineteenth century, a budding U.S.-China trade of northwestern American furs and pelts and Hawaiian sandalwood drew new routes across the ocean.

But the gold rushes were of another order. They exploded the early modern Pacific maritime world. Vibrant new routes and networks of trade and migration were established, nourished by gold first in California, then in Australia. Three new and lasting nodes of the transpacific rose to prominence: Hong Kong, San Francisco, and Sydney.

The goldfields were international contact zones on the frontiers of Anglo-American settler societies. The rushes attracted gold seekers from around the world—from the eastern and southern United States; from the British Isles and Continental Europe; from Mexico and Chile and Hawaii; from Australia and China. The gold seekers’ arrival to the frontiers of white settlement made them participants, to one degree or other, in the elimination of indigenous peoples and in the formation of new communities and nations. How would these new polities reckon with the diverse character of the goldfield populations? Who would be included and who would be excluded? And who would decide, and by what means?

The gold rushes occasioned the first mass contact between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Unlike other encounters in Asian port cities and on Caribbean plantations, they met on the goldfields both in large numbers and on relatively equal terms, that is, as voluntary emigrants and independent prospectors. Race relations were not always conflictual, but the perception of competition gave rise to a racial politics expressed as the “Chinese Question.”

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, China, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, U.S.

by | 23 January 2025 · 5:26 am

Long-term Effects of Pacific Crossings

From Conquering The Pacific: An Unknown Mariner and the Final Great Voyage of the Age of Discovery, by Andrés Reséndez (HarperCollins, 2021), Kindle pp. 242-244:

Among other things, the newfound transpacific connection led to a population boom in Asia, driven by the introduction of New World crops, especially sweet potatoes, corn, and peanuts. Today, China is the second-largest producer of corn in the world, after only the United States; China and India are the top two producers of peanuts; and New Guineans obtain more calories per person from sweet potatoes than anyone else in the world. Corn, for example, was domesticated in the Americas at least nine thousand years ago but spread across the Pacific only in the sixteenth century. In China, this New World crop made inroads along the Yangtze and Han River valleys, where rice had been cultivated for millennia. Rice requires flooded fields of arable land, so cornfields sprang up at higher elevations and in drier conditions, where rice cultivation was marginal or impossible, thus extending China’s agricultural frontier and transforming what had once been forested hills into cornfields. Roughly speaking, corn produced the same number of calories per hectare as rice, but with far less irrigation and labor. This led to a significant population boom. Although the precise timing and magnitude of this demographic expansion varied from one Asian nation to another, all of them benefited from the incorporation of New World crops. A full accounting of this vast energy transfer from the Americas to Asia has yet to be made, but the preliminary information shows that it was enormous.

Regular transpacific contact also created the first global trading system recognizable to us even today. Economic activities in the Americas came to depend not just on colonial-metropolitan relationships across the Atlantic but on supply and demand around the world—especially in Asia. Excellent examples are the great silver mines of Peru and Mexico, which constituted a mainstay of the economy of the Americas in colonial times and structured life for hundreds of thousands of Native Americans who directly or indirectly, forcibly or not, became a part of the silver economy. Traditionally, this is told as a story of European empires extracting valuable resources from their American colonies. Left unsaid is that the most important end-market customer by far was not Europe but China, where a major tax reform known as “the single lash of the whip” replaced paper money with silver in the sixteenth century. With this tax reform, China instantly became a worldwide magnet for the white metal, absorbing the silver production of neighboring Japan and then turning to the New World mines, which produced upwards of eighty percent of the world’s silver between 1500 and 1800. Without China’s massive and persistent demand for silver, the mines on the American continent would never have attained the scale they did, nor would their profits have spilled over into other colonial enterprises and affected so many lives throughout the hemisphere. The sixteenth century gave rise to the first truly global economy, in which Asia’s relative demographic and economic weight was significant and at times paramount. This feature of our world economy has become familiar to us, as China has continued to demand global resources such as soybeans, copper, and steel, affecting markets all around the world.

By the end of the eighteenth century, British and especially American merchants began building on these earlier transpacific linkages to launch their own ventures. As the Spanish empire in the Americas crumbled in the early nineteenth century, American ships came to replace the old Spanish galleons. The story of the United States’ expansion through the Pacific is well known, as the nation took control of Hawai‘i, Guam, and the Philippines, opened direct trade with Japan and China, and forged a vast network of transpacific interests. As we live in a world increasingly centered on the Pacific, it is imperative that we understand how we got here. The voyages of Urdaneta and of Lope Martín, the Black pilot who now takes his place in world history, were at the dawn of this transformation.

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Filed under Britain, China, economics, food, Mexico, migration, Pacific, Philippines, Spain, U.S.

by | 9 September 2024 · 5:43 am

Caribbean Return to Indentured Labor

From The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, ed. by Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (U. Chicago Press, 2013), Kindle pp. 399-402:

The Caribbean of today began to form half a millennium ago, impelled by European colonial expansion harnessed to nascent capitalism and centered on resource extraction and sugar plantations producing for a global market. Within 50 years of Columbus’s landing, indigenous Caribbean populations had been dramatically reduced, largely due to disease and the harsh conditions of labor imposed by the Spanish colonizers. This diminution of indigenous peoples was accompanied by the addition of foreigners from the “Old World” of Europe, Africa, and later Asia—a socially engineered assemblage of disparate ethnolinguistic groups under conditions of coerced labor and massive wealth accumulation. The imported groups included indentured Europeans, enslaved Africans, and, later, indentured Africans and Asians.

The transformations of the plantation system had various effects on the racial and demographic composition of different colonial territories. For example, the Hispanophone Caribbean, particularly Cuba and Puerto Rico, was not significantly developed for the global sugar market until the 19th century (although by mid-century Cuba and Puerto Rico had emerged as the first and third largest producers of sugar in the hemisphere), and the proportion of European populations compared to non-European populations was far greater there than in the Francophone and Anglophone colonies.

Over the 19th century, slavery was gradually abolished in the Caribbean. Newly independent Haiti (formerly Saint-Domingue) abolished slavery in 1804, followed by the British West Indies in 1838, the French possessions in 1848, all Dutch territories by 1863, and Cuba in 1886. Emancipation presented plantation owners with a dilemma: ensuring sugar and other production at high levels without the benefit of enslaved labor, or with diminishing numbers of freed workers willing to engage in plantation labor under the conditions offered by the plantocracy. One strategy implemented by Britain and France was that of freeing Africans from the slave trade of other European colonizers (Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) and then sending them to British and French Caribbean colonies as indentured laborers. Almost 40,000 Africans were thus sent to the British West Indies and approximately 16,000 to the French West Indies (Schuler 1980).

Another form of 19th-century indenture brought immigrant laborers from Asia into the region. Organized as either state projects or private enterprises, indenture schemes evolved over eight decades and changed the demographic, cultural, and social terrain of the Caribbean as irrevocably as African slavery had done earlier. Between 1890 and 1939, for example, the Dutch recruited almost 33,000 Javanese, primarily from Central Java and Batavia, for their Caribbean colony of Suriname. The two principal source regions of indentured labor, however, were India and China. Itself a British colony, India experienced indenture as a government-regulated industry, with laborers recruited primarily from the regions of Oudh, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh and shipped out from the ports of Calcutta and Madras. Between 1838 and 1917, almost 400,000 Indians arrived in the British Caribbean, the majority in Guyana and Trinidad. Although China was never colonized, its political vulnerability allowed private interests to orchestrate indenture schemes, largely from Canton. Between 1840 and 1875, approximately 142,000 indentured Chinese arrived in Cuba (Helly 1993, 20); from 1853 until 1866 and in trickles thereafter, about 18,000 Chinese were indentured in the British West Indies (Look Lai 1993, 18). Later—beginning around 1890, and concentrated between 1910 and 1940—a second wave of Chinese immigrants, this time not under indenture, arrived in the Caribbean.

The relationships of Asian indentured laborers with the local populations they encountered have influenced the values, identities, and cultural practices of their respective societies. To one extent or another, all the Asian immigrants were initially viewed by the locals as labor competition. Particularly where they constitute a large percentage of the population, Indians have been represented by local anti-indenture interests as “scab” labor, yet historically they also have been pitted against Afro-Caribbean workers. The tensions arising from perceived and actual labor conflicts have left a monumental legacy of racial politics in such contemporary societies as Guyana and Trinidad, where Indians represent more than 40% of the population. Perhaps because of their relatively smaller numbers, Chinese and Javanese laborers have had less fraught relationships with established populations, especially with those in similar occupational and class positions. In Cuba, for example, Chinese indentured laborers worked side by side with enslaved Africans. Enmity between these two groups was encouraged by colonial authorities as a divide-and-rule strategy, but tensions expressed in racial terms did not significantly persist into the present, either in Cuba or in other parts of the region. Once the Chinese found their economic niche primarily in the retail trades and shopkeeping, they no longer represented labor competition to other populations.

Migrants to the Caribbean from the Levant—known as “Syrians,” “Syrian-Lebanese,” or árabes—also began to arrive in the 1860s, increasing their numbers significantly by the 1890s. Most were Maronite Christians leaving Ottoman-occupied regions. Lebanese immigrants came first, followed by Syrians and Palestinians. Although they spread out across the Caribbean (and into Latin America, where they are also called turcos), certain communities predominated in particular countries. For example, of the three groups from the Levant, Lebanese comprise the largest population in Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, and Palestinians in Haiti (Nicholls 1980). These immigrants came as individuals, or sometimes in families, rather than in an organized migration arrangement; over the years, other family members followed. Although a few went into agricultural production, others became itinerant peddlers. Within a few generations these communities branched out into import-export trading, and today they comprise a large population of affluent and politically active citizens.

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by | 4 September 2024 · 5:26 am

Capt. Cook & Sea Otters

From The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook, by Hampton Sides (Knopf Doubleday, 2024), Kindle pp. 244-246:

COOK’S MONTH AT Nootka Sound would have far-reaching impacts—and not only in terms of establishing England’s early presence in the region that would eventually become British Columbia. Of the many ripple effects emanating from Cook’s visit here, perhaps the most consequential had to do with a single vulnerable creature: Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. These marine mammals, affectionate and mischievously cute, flourished here, feasting as they did on the huge populations of urchins and shellfish found throughout this extensive waterway. Sea otters appeared to lead a charmed existence, most of it spent cavorting on their backs.

But the trait that made them so beautiful, their thick, glossy coat, was also their curse, for in certain parts of the world—Asia, especially—the pelts were considered “soft gold.” Affluent Chinese men coveted sea otter cloaks as a status symbol and would pay astronomical sums for them. The lustrous fur was soft but also resilient, and it could be brushed in any direction, a result of its incomparably high fiber count—sea otters produce upwards of six hundred thousand hairs per square inch, twice the density of the fur seal.

During those heady days of the Manchu Dynasty, the market for pelts was becoming frenzied, akin to the tulip mania that gripped Holland in the 1630s. The potential profits staggered the imagination. Up until that time, most of the sea otter pelts that found their way into Chinese ports came from the Russian Far East and from the first, tentative Russian forays into Alaska. But stories from Cook’s visit here would lure crass armies of European and American fur hunters to Nootka and nearby locales, setting in motion a brutal industry that became so wildly competitive it would nearly ignite a war between England and Spain to control access to the sound.

Relentless hunting of sea otters, combined with the fact that they are slow breeders—typically producing only one pup every other year—meant that within a few decades of Cook’s arrival they would become virtually extinct. The fur trade springing up around Nootka Sound would doom the sea otter and cause enormous dislocations among the Mowachaht and other tribes living here—for the Europeans brought the deadly triad of alcohol, guns, and disease, which in short order would cast the Native cultures into a tailspin.

In their trading with the Mowachaht, Cook’s men procured many hundreds of sea otter pelts. The sailors called them “sea beaver,” and they well understood, as Midshipman George Gilbert put it, that their fur “is supposed to be superior to any that is known.” At the time, though, the men were not scheming to earn fortunes in Asia. They simply thought the velvety furs would come in handy in the Arctic—and, indeed, they would fashion the pelts into handsome greatcoats, caps, and gloves that would see them through many an Alaskan cold front. “To us who were bound for the North Pole,” said Samwell, the pelts “were extremely valuable articles and every one endeavored to supply himself with some of them.”

The Resolution and the Discovery, thoroughly refurbished, were towed out of the cove on April 26, 1778. Mowachaht men, keening songs in their canoes, accompanied the two ships almost to the mouth of the sound. As a parting gift, a chief bestowed upon Cook a handsome cloak made of “soft gold,” a fur raiment that nearly reached down to Cook’s ankles. In return, the captain presented the chief with a fine broadsword with a brass hilt—which, Cook thought, “made him as happy as a prince.” The Mowachaht implored the Englishmen to return soon. “By way of encouragement,” Cook wrote, the chief promised that he and his people would “lay in a good stock of skins for us, and I have not the least doubt but they will.”

The two ships, their sails rapidly filling, turned out of the sound and into the open sea.

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by | 6 August 2024 · 5:58 am

Reporting Corruption: All Sides Bad

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 196-198:

There are many different lessons to be learned from everything that happened in Chongqing. I learned mine. In reporting on what seemed like an isolated case of land auction manipulation, I’d failed to discover its deeper roots, which only became clear to me later.

I should have reached back all the way to the 1950s, when the planned economic system was established in China, purging capitalism and centering economic control with the state. Private property rights were soon abolished, all resources were nationalized, and the Chongqing Cosmetics Factory was founded under collective property rules rather than private ownership for the sake of idealistic utopian ideals.

The experiment failed; the factory encountered operational difficulties. After the reform of the market economy had begun, factory leadership established a new brand, Olive, in a joint venture with a Hong Kong company in 1991. Olive grew rapidly to become the only enterprise in China that could compete with Procter & Gamble, but collective property rights hobbled the company. External market competition was fierce, and everyone’s decision being counted at Olive equaled no one’s decision being enacted. It was yet another failure of the government-monopoly style of managing supply, as well as the marketing model on which it relied. Despite strong performance in the nineties, the company eventually ended up on the verge of bankruptcy due to internal leadership struggles. The government had no reform program for companies with this type of ownership.

The owners in Hong Kong finally left the enterprise. They wanted to sell the land they had bought for the factory, so as to recoup what was owed to them by the leadership in Chongqing, but because the land had been registered collectively in the factory’s name, there was a long dispute over whether they had the right to do this. The former manager from the Hong Kong company told Mr. Wu, one of their debtors, to find a buyer who would purchase the land cheaply, then resell it at market value, so as to generate proceeds that would be passed along to the Hong Kong leadership in the form of agency fees that would repay the outstanding debts.

Wu had to take this route, because he had already been borrowing money just to maintain Olive, and he couldn’t get another loan from the bank. Private companies, which contribute over 50 percent of Chongqing’s tax revenue and support over 80 percent of its employment, can use only one-third of the credit resources available to them. So Wu ended up borrowing money from Chen Kunzhi, whose loan shark resources exceeded four hundred million yuan. With an enormous amount of money coming to him from state-owned institutions as well as black market enterprises involving court presidents, police officers, and government officials, he could get loans at very low interest rates.

In short, unclear property rights and unfair financial policies gave Chen Kunzhi room to manipulate the eventual land auction through underground operations. With his connections to those in power, the big fish ate the small fish in a continuous cycle. In countries that have transitioned from a traditional planned economy to a market economy, there is often serious organized criminal activity. The absence of the rule of law stems from a government that is failing to fulfill its role as the guardian of a functional market economy.

But without sufficient analysis of these root causes, pathos and righteous indignation encourage people to pursue simple solutions with a black-or-white moralistic mentality: removing all the “bad guys” at the expense of the justice system and demonizing the privatization process in favor of a state-owned economy is a nostalgia for utopia, to narrow the gap between rich and poor.

In Chongqing, during the ten years between 1997 and 2007, the private economy rose from 22.64 percent of GDP to 45.5 percent, an average annual increase of over two percentage points; but in the four years between 2008 and 2011, when the “crackdown” was at its worst, the private economy grew by less than 1 percent per year. Many private enterprises began to flee Chongqing, taking capital along with them.

Bo [Xilai] and Wang [Lijun] were punished as “bad guys.” But it did not solve the problem. Among their successors, another Chongqing municipal party secretary and two police chiefs were jailed, all involved in corruption. If the world is divided into only two camps, black and white, moral and immoral, it becomes like a cube. Once you roll it over, it’s still the same, just with a different side facing up.

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by | 5 August 2024 · 6:07 am

The Gangster Boss of Chongqing

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 181-182:

“He had a gun,” said Mr. Wu, a key witness in the investigation of Chen Kunzhi. “He put it to my head and made me sign a contract.”

After Wu had borrowed ten million yuan from Chen and couldn’t repay it, Chen had locked Wu up in a hotel for twenty days, then seized the company’s official seal and used it to sign a collusive auction contract with COFCO, a large state-owned enterprise in China. Mr. Wu said he had been in hiding for the two years since the incident. He warned me that interviewing Chen would put everyone in danger. “He would have killed me. I don’t know if CCTV can handle this.”

The judge who’d overseen the land auction also refused to show his face on camera, fearing for his safety. When more companies had tried to bid, some men had stopped them from entering the auction site and dragged them away. The judge brought in six police officers, but Chen Kunzhi countered with six times as many, and each one had a knife. These gangsters called the judge’s superiors in front of him to put on the pressure. “You’re just a minor figure,” they told him. “Who do you think you are?”

In a last-ditch attempt to save his integrity, the judge called off the auction. But his superiors demanded that he start it again ten days later. When he acquiesced, it was the same situation as before: the other companies set to participate in the bidding didn’t show up, because they were afraid of the “complications.” The only two companies that took part in the auction were Chen’s company and COFCO. After four bids, the land was finally sold to COFCO for 37.1 million yuan. A year later COFCO announced it would offer the land up for 140 million.

I wanted to interview Chen myself. But my boss knew it would be dangerous. He asked me and each member of my team to use disposable phone cards to avoid being followed in retaliation. He said, “If you don’t interview Chen, will the story still stand?”

“The basic evidence is already there,” our producer, Jian Feng, said. “Then the interview might not be necessary. We have to think about security first,” the boss said.

I worried that security would be the least of our problems. If the interview went poorly, the whole show might be endangered. Chen Kunzhi was not a traditional street thug. He’d been a police officer for fifteen years, and after being removed from the force for assault, he’d started running a casino. After escaping a homicide charge, he went into the loan shark business. As China’s urbanization continued to speed up, Chongqing’s real estate industry was desperate for capital, financing some 90 percent of its expansion with funds borrowed from loan sharks. Chen Kunzhi had already made over a million yuan in profits, according to Mr. Wu.

Unlike any gangsters I had interviewed before, Chen was one of those men who controlled the economic lifeline of the city through the underground economy, armed with ties to the entire judicial system, which allowed him to escape justice despite obvious evidence of lawbreaking.

My fear was that once I interviewed Chen, the huge forces behind him would stop the episode from airing. It would be like a cigarette dropped into a toilet—a soft hiss and the flame would go out, only to be flushed away, worthless. So we decided to leave without the interview.

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by | 11 July 2024 · 11:09 am

Domestic Abuse Law in China, 2011

From Seeing: A Memoir of Truth and Courage from China’s Most Influential Television Journalist by Chai Jing, trans. by Yan Yan, Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, 2023), Kindle pp. 88-90:

In 2011, Kim Lee, an American citizen, posted a picture on the Internet in China. In it, her ninety-kilogram husband rode on her back, pulling on her hair and smashing her head into the ground. After he’d struck her over ten times, she sustained injuries to her head, knees, ears, and more. Her husband was Li Yang, a Chinese celebrity who’d founded a famous English-language education brand. They used to work together.

The day the assault occurred, Kim needed her husband’s help with paperwork. She wanted to take their three children to the United States to visit her mother, but her driver’s license and teacher’s certificate were expired. Li Yang said he didn’t have time to provide the assistance she needed because he was only at home two days a month, otherwise occupied with touring the country. After arguing for several hours, he screamed, “Shut your mouth.”

Kim said, “Everything in my life is under your control, you can’t tell me to shut my mouth.”

When he held her hair and pinned her head to the ground, he shouted, “I will end this once and for all.”

Had it gotten any more serious, he later admitted, “I might have killed her.”

For the first time, it made the violence in elite urban families public and caused a strong social reaction. Kim refused to give any interviews, but when Old Fan sent her the footage we’d shot at the women’s prison, she agreed to talk to us. “I did not know that there were so many women living like this in China. If I stay silent, who will be there to protect my daughters?”

In the footage, I asked the female inmates, “When you testified in court, did you talk about the domestic abuse you suffered?”

They all said no.

No one bothered to ask them. The murder of a husband by an abused woman was considered ordinary murder, not “self-defense,” because it did not occur while the abuse was “ongoing” and the “abuse” was not considered a long-term process. During questioning, when an inmate wanted to talk about how her years of marriage had been, the prosecutor would interrupt her: “Are we here to listen to your life story? Get to the part where you murdered someone!”

After being assaulted, Kim Lee reported it to the police. A police officer tried to dissuade her: “You know, this isn’t America.” She said, “Of course, but there must be a law in China that says men can’t go around beating up women.” He said, “You’re right, men can’t beat up women, but husbands can beat up wives.”

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by | 10 July 2024 · 5:34 am

No Peace Dividend for Japan’s Navy

From Geography and Japan’s Strategic Choices: From Seclusion to Internationalization, by Peter J. Woolley (Potomac Books, 2005), Kindle pp. 145-147:

While Japan’s participation in UN operations constituted a dramatic change in defense policy, it was not the only change. A number of unforeseen circumstance were converging in the post-Cold War age, some in Japan’s favor, others not.

In the early 1990s predictions abounded that the U.S. economy would falter without the huge Cold War expenditures on defense. But after a brief recession in 1992 the U.S. economy boomed while it was the Japanese economy that stalled. The stock market was depressed, GNP stagnated, and commercial bank debt mounted to alarming levels. The United States sought a “peace dividend” from the Cold War’s end and cut defense spending. Japan did not.

While the United States drew down its navy, its intelligence operations, and its active duty army divisions, Japan continued to spend at its Cold War pace for several years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. By 1994 its defense budget had increased in constant dollars by almost a third over what it was in 1984. In 1995, the government made some cuts not because it apprehended a favorable change in the strategic environment but because the economy was stalled and the budget pressures were irresistible. Even so, the cuts were minimal. The maximum number of troops authorized for the ground forces was cut to 145,000 from 185,000. Since the GSDF only employed 150,000 and not the maximum of 185,000, the effect of the cut was small. The maritime forces retired the oldest vessels and gave up the equivalent of just one escort division consisting of a few destroyers and some antisubmarine aircraft. The air forces eliminated one F-4 fighter squadron. Not only did Japan not draw down its forces significantly but its relative strength in force stood out all the more starkly against the background of international change in defense postures—the most significant being the deterioration of Russia’s Pacific fleet.

For many years the old Soviet fleet continued to be regarded in official reports as large and potent but unofficial reports suggested otherwise. Sailors were underfed and in ill health, while ships were undermanned. Many had left or deserted the service and had not been replaced. Supplies, including fuel, had become tenuous and supply officers corrupt. The ships deployed less and less frequently and confined their exercises to local waters. Repairs were not made as spare parts were scarce. Not only were some ships not sea-worthy but some had sunk at their moorings. Since it takes many years and great efforts to build an effective navy, it was less and less likely that the Russian fleet could recover. By the end of the decade, Japan had sixty principle surface combatants compared to forty-five for Russia’s Pacific fleet. Neither fleet had an aircraft carrier.

As the demise of the Russian fleet became more obvious, analysts scrutinized Chinese naval forces more closely. Many suggested that China had hegemonic ambitions and its naval force, the PLAN, was growing quickly. The U.S. assistant secretary of defense asserted, “the Chinese are determined, through concealment and secrecy, to become the great military power in Asia.”

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