They must be a global superplayer; after all, they’ll soon have the world’s biggest airport.

A new airport being built by the Chinese government in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics will be the world’s biggest and be “truly awesome”, according to its British architect, Lord Foster.

In further evidence of the Chinese obsession with building bigger, faster and higher than any other country, the plans for Beijing Airport will outdo both the current biggest, Hong Kong’s, and Heathrow, which is set to double in size when Terminal 5 is finished.

It will also take less than three years to complete, Lord Foster said. That compares with Terminal 5, which was put before a public inquiry in 1995 and approved in 2001 but which is not expected to open until 2008.

In this case I have to give some credit to the CCP, which has trimmed down the grandiose project a bit because, “They have been keen to present a more modest image in recent months, reducing the scale of plans for the Olympic stadia and saying they wish to focus more on poverty reduction.”

“Saying.” I certainly hope it’s true, but one can’t avoid the fact that they’re now committed to building the world’s tallest skyscraper, the world’s largest dam, the world’s longest bridge and the world’s biggest airport. I just wish they’d announce they were launching the world’s most ambitious distribute-the-wealth project. Then they might really gain some of the international respect they so desperately crave. (And I don’t mean welfare — just paying their people for the fruit of their labor and lessening the unsustainable unconscionable division between the haves and have-nots.)

Meanwhile I’m glad to hear they’ll be doing away with the current Beijing airport, which ranks among the drabbest and shabbiest on earth., at least for a major capital city.

Thanks to the two different readers who pointed me to this great article in the Washington Post on the new militancy of many factory workers in China who are refusing to simply take what they’re given.

Heralded by an unprecedented series of walkouts, the first stirrings of unrest have emerged among the millions of youthful migrant workers who supply seemingly inexhaustible cheap labor for the vast expanse of factories in China’s booming Pearl River Delta.

The signs of newly assertive Chinese workers have jolted foreign and Chinese factory owners, who for the last two decades have churned out everything from Nikes to baby dolls with unbeatably low production costs. Some have concluded that the raw era in which rootless Chinese villagers would accept whatever job they could get may be drawing to a close, raising questions about China’s long-term future as world headquarters for low-paid outsourcing.

“One dollar, two dollars, it used to be they didn’t care,” said Tom Stackpole, originally from Massachusetts, who is quality control director here for Skechers USA Inc. and has been involved in shoe manufacturing in southern China for a decade. “That has passed.”

Stella International Ltd., a Taiwanese-owned shoe manufacturer employing 42,000 people in and around Dongguan, faced strikes this spring that turned violent. At one point, more than 500 rampaging workers sacked company facilities and severely injured a Stella executive, leading hundreds of police to enter the factory and round up ringleaders.

“We never had anything like that before,” said Jack Chiang, Stella’s chief executive.

This poses a huge dilemma for a government whose very existence is founded on its standing up for the workers. As the article notes, due to the ultra-intrusive approach the CCP takes to business, they have their tentacles inextricably entwined in the very businesses against whom the poor workers are making demands. So do they go against their own financial self-interest — and against their rich supporters who profit handsomely from these businesses — or do they choose to go against those they’re supposed to protect? And, of course, if labor costs in the Pearl River business zone soar, that can pose a big threat to China’s greatest commodity, dirt-cheap labor.

The growing assertiveness of factory workers has posed a particular political problem for the governing Communist Party, which ideologically should champion poor laborers struggling against capitalist managers. But local governments have become shareholders in many of the factories, steering officials toward the management side of labor relations.

“The government is the largest boss in the area,” said Liu Kaiming, a labor analyst and director of the Institute of Contemporary Observation in nearby Shenzhen.

This is just one more headache for a government that faces staggering challenges, but how it’s resolved will be extremely interesting to watch. No doubt they’ll try to negotiate some give-and-take that will cause minimal pain to all involved — but someone’s going to be left unsatisfied, and my guess is it’ll be the workers.

People have been saying for years that the “two Chinas” phenomenon would be the government’s undoing. They’ll figure out a short-term solution as they always do, but this is really the mega-ton elephant lurking in the corner of China’s living room, the one no one wants to talk about though everyone knows it’s there.

After all the fanfare I’ve been hearing about giving out condoms in China to fight AIDS, this is surprising.

China’s top two universities have suspended a free handout of condoms, describing the plan as inappropriate.

China is grappling with AIDS but the country’s top two universities do not want their students touching condoms.

Beijing University and Tsinghua University yesterday stopped a disease prevention centre handing out 2,500 free condoms.

Administrators said it was not acceptable and that organisers had not obtained approval.

Despite the urgent need to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS, conservative attitudes about sex in China often keep the prevention message from being broadly publicised.

I wonder what brought on this change of heart…? Recent stories like this had given me hope this would become a nationwide movement. I should learn by now never to get my hopes up about China becoming more liberal about sex. (Anyone remember the Vagina Monologues fiasco last winter?)

That’s the title of an intriguing article in today’s WaPo on how today’s parents in China, many of them victims of the Cultural Revolution, have reacted to the nightmare of their youth by spoiling their kids rotten.

Teenagers, particularly those from wealthy or intellectual families, were forced to leave cities and live with farmers, sharing their hard lives and, it was hoped, gaining new insight into the Maoist revolution. Red Guards, meanwhile, took over schools and universities, substituting political criteria for academic achievement.

Millions of lives were smashed in the resulting chaos. Now that they are parents, those who were caught up in the turmoil have displayed unshakeable determination to see their children live more enjoyable lives by using the opportunities available since China opened to the world and adopted market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s.

Tian Shi, 50, the son of a doctor and grandson of a landowner, was sent to a military camp just below the Russian border, where he spent his entire adolescence. Although far from rich, he recently forked over nearly $400 for a cell phone for his 14-year-old daughter, who spent her last vacation in Australia perfecting her English.

Tian’s older sister, Lu Jiang, 53, spent seven years on a flea-ridden farm planting crops and slopping pigs. Her son Ha Li, who graduated from Shandong University, all expenses paid, has gone on to graduate studies in computer science at the University of Paris, where he receives regular cash infusions from his parents.

I would have only one question for the writer, and that’s whether this is truly a result of the Cultural Revolution’s effect on the parents’ psyches, or whether it’s not just a fact that Chinese parents tend to spoil their kids. I saw a lot of this in Hong Kong and Singapore — parents treating their kids like princelings and making them feel the earth revolved around them. I’d love to know what readers think about this.

I was lucky to see John Pomfret, former bureau chief of the Washington Post’s Beijing office, address a group in Scottsdale last week. I was scribbling notes the whole time and now I’m finally going to decipher them. I was also lucky to spend some time with John afterwards at a local bar with my first cousin, who was John’s friend at Stanford. (Sorry, but I promised not to blog about our conversation at the bar.)

I always thought John was the best of the Beijing correspondents, followed by Joseph Kahn. John is now moving to Los Angeles, where he’ll be the new WaPo bureau chief. (His replacement in Beijing, Phillip Pan, is also doing an awesome job.) What I liked most about John was his honesty and courage. More than any other foreign correspondent in China, he wrote about the really controversial issues — Ma Shiwen, evictions of peasants who were thrown on the street, the SARS ambulance story (which he broke) — he wasn’t afraid to say what the government was doing and how bad some of those things really were.

That same honesty permeated his talk in front of an ultra-conservative group of lizardy gazillionaire businessmen.

“The longer I lived in China,” he began, “the less I came to believe China is really a great nation in the making.”

Now, I have to make it clear that he was not in any way slamming China. He was setting the stage for explaining just how tough China’s problems are, and that Westerners, immersed in romantic depictions from starry-eyed visitors, have no idea what kind of challenges China is facing.

This was at the heart of Pomfret’s talk: the West badly misunderstands China’s economic, medical, political, social and environmental hurdles. He was particularly emphatic that there is no need for the West to fear China becoming a global superpower along the lines of the USA. “Not all of China�s dreams are going to be achieved because hard-wired into their DNA are serious constraints that will keep China from becoming what it aspires to. Most of China is a third-, fourth- and fifth-world country” under constant threat from unimaginable poverty, so many people to employ, AIDS, a devastated environment, etc.

Last year the number of people living below the poverty line in China grew by some 800,000 people, he said, at the time of the nation’s great economic miracle. The wealth gap is simply too staggering for most Westerners to envision. He said one way China is trying to offset the people’s anger is by inciting nationalism (an old trick in China, used to masterful effect by Deng after Tiananmen Square).

“But the nationalism we are seeing is only skin-deep,” Pomfret said. “Michael Jordan retired is more popular among Chinese citizens than Yaoming. All the Chinese young people want to work for US companies and own US goods.” They know their futures and their salaries will be far more limited at a state-owned business, he said.

He later repeated his metaphor when he said “serious constraints are hard-wired into the Chinese DNA and the Chinese political, economic and social system that could stop China’s meteoric rise.” The major constraint, he made it clear, is corruption, which seems to make things work in the short term, but which could help unravel China’s great success over the long term. He praised this success again and again, but said the CCP is caught in a conundrum of failing to address how a single party can control absolutely everything when absolutely everything is changing right underneath its feet.

I was surprised at just how hopeless Pomfret views so many issues in China. For example, when someone asked about Chinese-Japanese relations, he described it as a “Gordian knot with no solution in sight. Relations between them won’t get better anytime soon, but there won’t be any war.” He added that the CCP uses this issue to unify the country, appealing to the masses’ raw emotions.

He also echoed a point that several bloggers have made, namely that the war on terror has been “a windfall” for China in every way. “From the Chinese perspective, it diverted the attention of those Republicans who saw the PRC as a competitor and a threat, and it focused them instead on the Middle East. Now China can crack down on radical Islam in Xinjiang and Americans don’t say anything. There will be many more executions — the Chinese will just crush these people.”

Contrary to the article in the Atlantic I linked to Friday, Pomfret say relations between Taiwan and China won’t degenerate into war. “The US won’t let Chen Sui Bian go too far off the rail. China understands that the key to Taiwan’s not declaring independence is Washington. And China uses the issue to win hearts and minds at home. In a way, it benefits from the continual bad relations.”

He was critical, too, of the CCP’s treatment of HK, but most of you know the story so I won’t write down all he said. Money quote: “They’ve given a lot of benefits to Hong Kong on the economic side, playing to the people’s love of money. But in the long-term, the conflict is an ominous development. Now, China is a potential enemy to Hong Kong, when before [HK protested] they were considered a friend.”

China’s military is another example of Westerners seeing more than is really there, John said. “It has pockets of excellence, including great missile technology, but all in all it is still a middling power.” He added that any invasion of Taiwan would be all but impossible, if only because of Taiwan’s lack of beaches. “It would end up being a million-man swim…Many military people say that China is nowhere near ready to threaten Taiwan. There’s huge military spending, but in terms of bang for the buck, what they’ve got just isn’t that significant.”

This was in many ways a sad talk. What China dreams of being simply isn’t coming anytime soon and probably not ever. “They want to be seen as a great country, as a good country….but I am a cautious pessimist.” He didn’t say China was going to fail or crash — just that it’s ultimate dreams would elude it, made impossible by a harsh reality that in many ways the one-party system only exacerbates.

John made it clear how outraged he is over Joseph Kahn’s assistant in Beijing being thrown in jail for 6 to 10 years for his alleged involvement in the NY Times’ story on Jiang’s imminent resignation (which came out days before the official announcement). “He wasn’t even involved in Kahn’s story, but they don’t care about things like that. They just wanted to teach the Times a lesson.”

While critical of the CCP, John also says that under the circumstances he doesn’t know how they could do things any better than they’re doing now — but only because they created the situation in which there’s no alternative. That’s an important point: “They completely smashed the opposition so there’s no one in the wings who could replace them. If any new voice were to arise, it could be an even uglier one that what they’ve got now.” He was a war correspondent in Bosnia, and he compared China’s political situation to Yugoslavia under Tito, where one strong man crushed all the opposition and held the country together through brute force. Once he was gone, it all disintegrated.

Last of all, when asked what the Chinese now believe in, John said, “Chinese students have told me they simply have no beliefs. They have less respect for the family than earlier generations. Will there be a renaissance during which the youth of China rediscover their traditional values? I don’t see it. So many people in China live to rip other people off — this takes place on such a huge level, it’s scary. One has to worry that China is a society devoid of values.”

Yes, it was a sad talk, and there was little to celebrate. Maybe I’ll take hope in that he didn’t say China is doomed to defeat or that it will all come crashing down — only that its vision of itself doesn’t jibe with reality, and that its opportunities are more limited than they’ve led themselves to believe. And with that, I have to sadly agree.

Update: By the way, this all ties in with a good article in yesterday’s Guardian on why China’s roaring markets still don’t in and of themselves make it a great superpower. It’s really quite amazing — the author makes so many of the points Pomfret did. Thanks to the reader who alerted me. I can’t recommend it enough.

Update 2: With this post, a new commenter joined this blog named Mark Anthony Jones, and he comments at great length below. It was frustrating to later learn that literally all of his comments were cut and pasted from articles he found using Google searches. My apologies for all of those who were made fools of.

I just booked my tickets. It’s been my dream for more than four years to travel through Yunnan province, and I’ll arrive in Kunming on March 3 for a two-week trip. (If anyone has any suggestions on where I should go, please tell me now — I’m going to start booking my hotels soon.)

I had mapped out the exact same trip in 2003, but unfortunately it was scheduled for that terrible time, April/May 2003, when all travel through rural China was stopped because of SARS. I’ll never forget, being the only tourist in Xi’An going to see the Terra Cotta Warriors. SARS shut China down like a clamshell. I made it as far as Guilin, and finally left the country in despair when I was told the highway to Lijiang had been sealed.

Here’s to hoping I have better luck this go-round. The idea of going back makes me absolutely thrilled, even if it’s only two weeks.

There is a somewhat disturbing article in the unlinkable Atlantic titled “Straits-Jacket,” and it could lead you to wonder whether war between China and Taiwan is all but written in the stars. (The article can’t be linked, but you can find a PDF of it here.)

Like most articles in the Atlantic, it’s dense and substantive and serious. That said, I’m not sure I buy the premise of its writer, Trevor Corson.

He starts by telling how China has benefitted in every way from America’s war on terror, especially in the sense that it’s diverted the neocons’ attention away from one of their pet obsessions — villifying China and actively seeking conflict with it. And he points out how at least in economic terms, relations between Taiwan and China are good — but there could be trouble in paradise.

To some, these developments suggest that time is on the side of a peaceful solution to the problem of Taiwan’s disputed status. But the reality may be quite the opposite. In fact, a number of analysts in both America and East Asia believe that military conflict between China and Taiwan is not only likely but imminent. Just how imminent depends partly on the Taiwanese legislative elections scheduled for December 11. If pro-independence parties gain a majority in the legislature, the stage will be set for a confrontation, producing a hellish prospect for U.S. foreign policy: on top of its ongoing military commitment in the Middle East, the United States may face a Chinese attack against Taiwan, a fragile democracy that America has promised to help protect.

On some level, of course, the idea that China would actually attack Taiwan—rather than merely threaten to do so, as it has for years—makes no sense. Attacking would invite a military response from the United States, and even without American intervention, it’s not clear that China’s military is up to the task of seizing the island. China would also risk losing the trade relationships that drive its economic growth.

Nevertheless, the threat of a Chinese attack has loomed over Taiwan since at least 1972, when China’s Premier Zhou Enlai, in negotiations with Richard Nixon, refused to renounce the use of force against the island.

He goes into the history of Taiwan-PRC relations, the military considerations and, of course, Chen Sui Bian’s posturing for independence. Still, I never feel he makes the case as to why analysts believe war is imminent.

The most interesting aspect is the reporter’s rather unorthodox but simple solution to the entire mess: let Taiwan fight it out.

The fact that Taiwan has matured into a prosperous democracy suggests a solution, albeit a radical one: let the island defend itself. In 1998 a Cato Institute analysis proposed that the United States withdraw its pledge to protect Taiwan; in exchange it would lift all restrictions on arms sales, allowing Taiwan to buy the weapons necessary to deter a Chinese attack. This course would require delicate diplomacy, because it would infuriate both Taiwan and China: Taiwan would lose its security guarantee, and China would face a new Taiwanese arms buildup.

Bereft of American protection, however, Taiwan would be forced to face the consequences of upsetting the status quo. The immediate result would be a dramatic reduction in China’s political fears, thus removing the incentive for a pre-emptive strike and buying both sides some time to move toward a peaceful solution. For Taiwan and its supporters in Washington, the idea may sound like a betrayal. But the best way to help Taiwan mature into a full-fledged democracy might simply be to ask its people to take responsibility for their actions.

Now that’s a radical thought.

It’s been quite a while since China was involved in a newsworthy “international incident.” Could this be the next big incident?

Japan took up with China the issue of a suspicious submarine that intruded into its waters amid alarm in Tokyo that the vessel was a show of strength from its neighbour and growing competitor….

The submarine spent about two hours in Japanese waters Wednesday near the southern island of Okinawa before being chased on the high seas by two Japanese destroyers and a surveillance plane.

Both countries have been cautious in identifying the nationality of the submarine. If confirmed as Chinese the incident is expected to damage already sour diplomatic relations between the Asian powers….

The Sankei Shimbun called the submarine an “alarming sign” and suspected China wanted to show its military might to Japan, the United States and Taiwan, where support has been growing for a declaration of independence from Beijing.

“It is unlikely that China will come forward to reveal the submarine’s nationality and purposes,” said the daily, which is sympathetic to Taiwan.

“But if it was aimed to demonstrate the (Chinese) presence to Japan and the United States as well as Taiwan,” the Sankei said, “the objective seems to have been fully achieved.”

Developing…

(And thanks to the emailer for the link.)

I’ve posted before about the feisty elderly doctor, and she’s been profiled a lot this past year. But it was only after reading this article that I decided she really does deserve the Nobel peace prize. How do I nominate her?

This is vintage China:

The 2008 Beijing Olympics will begin at 8pm on 8 August, in keeping with one of the nation’s lucky numbers.

Eight is considered auspicious in China because its pronunciation in Cantonese sounds the same as the word for to make money.

The Games had originally been planned to commence in late August to avoid Beijing’s soaring summer temperatures.

But Beijing’s mayor said the sporting festival would begin in the luckiest manner possible – at eight on 8/8/08.

Mayor Wang Qishan conceded it would still be hot in early August, with the temperature often climbing above 40 degrees Celsius.

They sure take their lucky numbers seriously there, as I’ve noted before.