Changing China

China kinder to Obama than Bush?

How does one measure how U.S. President Barack Obama was received by the Chinese government?

I like to read the tea leaves and decided one measure might be to compare the reception Obama got in comparison with that given his predecessors.

For me, an indication is the most senior Chinese official greeting an American president at the airport.

Chinese Vice-President Xi Jinping was the first Chinese leader Obama met in Beijing when Air Force One touched down on Monday. Xi had rushed back on the same day to the Chinese capital from the northern province of Shaanxi, where he was on an inspection tour.

An Internet search showed that in 2002 and 2005, Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing was on hand when U.S. President George W. Bush arrived. Li’s replacement, Yang Jiechi, turned up when Bush landed in 2008.

Judging from the rank of the top official greeting the two U.S. presidents, China appears to like Obama more than Bush.

It is no coincidence that Xi was tapped to welcome Obama.

From Canada, looking back

I first visited China in June 1997.  It was eight years after the Tiananmen crackdown, weeks before the Hong Kong Handover back to China marking the end of British rule, and over a decade before the 2008 Summer Olympics. It was a family trip — my parents were looking forward to a college reunion with classmates they hadn’t seen in decades and I had just finished my second year of university. I was looking forward to finally seeing the place I’d heard so much about.

Born and raised in Canada, I grew up listening to stories of the past — lessons in history, humanity, tragedy and survival. And like many children of immigrant families, there is a constant search for a balance and a place between the different worlds that shape our identity.

(Caption: Neon lights from skyscraper and 1997 Handover signs cast a glow over Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbour and the extension of the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre (R, foreground) in this long exposure zoom photograph.  Picture taken June 21, 1997. REUTERS/Dylan Martinez)

Over the years I’ve witnessed a dramatic change in my parents’ attitude toward China. For them, the changes in China since they left — over 45 years ago for my father and 35 years ago for my mother — have been beyond anything they could have imagined in their lifetime.

Born just before Japan invaded China in 1937, my parents were children during the Sino-Japanese War and teenagers when Mao Zedong founded the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Over the next 25 years, the dramatic upheavals, failures and deaths from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution spared no one.

In the spring of 1952, my grandfather was falsely accused of corruption and was executed about a month later. He was posthumously cleared and declared a victim of the anti-corruption movement at the time.

Chiang knew he’d lose to Mao

War is the last thing on the minds of Taiwan’s leaders these days as the island government moves to make friends with rival China. Even in far more hostile times, Taiwan’s KMT leadership had privately given up dreams of using force to take control of the mainland, according to documents that are now available for public viewing.

A public opening in May of the forested Back Cihu compound outside Taipei teaches 400 eager visitors per day how the island-based Republic of China government aimed to strike back at the Communist People’s Republic of China, but it ultimately abandoned the idea.

As the county now in charge of Back Cihu worked toward opening the site and its historical treasures to visitors, it came across documents left over from strongman Chiang Kai-shek, detailing schemes to retake China in the 1950s through the early 1970s. Visitors can see some of the records at Back Cihu, which features five buildings and a tunnel that would have housed the government if Beijing ever attacked central Taipei.

from Environment Forum:

‘Borrowing’ water, Chinese style

"The south has plenty of water and the north lacks it, so if possible why not borrow some?" China's revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong said in 1952.

That probably seemed a great idea at the time.

But it is causing pollution as well as discontent among farmers facing forced resettlement to make way for a mammoth construction to help the parched north -- the South-to-North Transfer Project. Much of the system, of dams, canals and tunnels, is due for completion in 2013-14.

Read my colleague Chris Buckley's fascinating feature about the project as well as a related story and a factbox. The photo above left, by David Gray, shows a fisherman near the village of Shizigang, located on the Danjiangkou Dam that is part of the project in Henan province.

Among the statistics -- about 12.5 million Chinese have been moved to make way for 86,000 dams since 1949, according to one study.  (12.5 million people is more than the entire population of countries such as Greece, Cuba, Belgium or Tunisia). And the "dam migrants" (as they are known) have long fanned unrest.   

“We have eaten too much suffering already,” farmer Zhao Jingzhou said in Shizigang, using a common Chinese saying. He is among the survivors of an exodus to the high northwest from 1959 -- thousands of others, lured by the promise of a more secure life in the arid highlands of the northwest province next to Tibet, died from hunger.

The picture above right shows work on the Danjiangkou Dam in 2008.