Peter Foster

 It is amazing how quickly the mood-music of US-China relations appears to have turned sour.

 Only a year ago, as the G20 prepared to meet in London for a world financial crisis summit, the watching world was feting China for its new sense of global responsibility and leadership.

 Although China seemed reluctant to help at first – “we’ll do our bit for the world by fixing our own problems” – there was a palpable sense of hope in the months after that summit that China was preparing to enter more fully into the global financial and commercial architecture. 

 The noises were similar on the environment. China was ‘greening up’, leading the way in renewable and ‘shaming America’ in its commitment to putting its economy onto a low-carbon trajectory. Britain own Climate Secretary, Ed Miliband led the charge.

 Then, after putting off meeting the Dalai Lama, Obama visited Beijing in November and visibly crawled to… Read More

After making such an enormous splash earlier in the week the world has been waiting for the fall-out from Google’s announcement that it was preparing to quit China.

Instead, for all the frothing of the media and the writing and re-hashing of the issues raised by Google’s move, there has been nothing but stony silence from Beijing.

Google employees in China are – as David Drummond’s blog post made clear – deliberately being kept out of the loop to protect them from any possible trouble with the Chinese authorities.

Everyone has been ordered to keep quiet. An acquaintance of mine in the advertising sales business in Beijing who has several good friends among Google China’s management said that even his phone calls are not being returned.

Officially Google has only said that it has ‘been in touch’ with the Chinese government to alert officials to its plans but when asked, the company’s spokesman said… Read More

Google has taken the ‘nuclear option’ and threatened to pull out of China if it is not allowed to run its Google China website free from the intrusive hand of Chinese government censorship. Only one word to describe this bombshell: ‘Wow’.

Many Chinese netizens worry about what the pull-out means (Photo: Reuters)

You could read this cynically as a brilliant PR move to restore battering the company’s reputation has taken during its four years in China, but all the same it must be a major moment when big business finally takes a stand against the repressiveness of the Chinese state.

The world has grown accustomed to the necessity of ‘doing business’ with China, however unpalatable some aspects of its ruling regime, but Google’s move questions the long-term rationale… Read More

Just back from a long – and deeply chilly – afternoon covering a small protest by a group of disgruntled veterans outside the Political Department of the People’s Liberation Army in Beijing.

 In fact ‘protest’ might be too strong a word, since it conjures images of people chanting slogans and holding placards, but there was none of that – just 50 or 60 very cold veterans trooping into the PLA’s petition office to register their grievance, watched by a smattering of foreign media who’d been tipped off in advance.

 It wasn’t long, of course, before the journalists were all corralled inside the courtyard of the petition office by some polite, but rather insistent men in military uniforms.

 I use that word ‘coralled’ since I can’t think of a better one. We asked if we’d be arrested or detained (Chinese has several words for this, with different inferences for the seriousness of the ‘detention’)… Read More

Apologies for the absenteeism of late on the blog. I’m afraid I’ve been sucked into a mad pre-Christmas rush writing up a few delicacies to keep everyone amused over the Christmas holiday period when news can be a bit thin.

I had hoped to post on the fact that the government has backed down on the new e-bike rules that I posted on a few days ago.

It’s interesting that on non-political matters (think back to the climb down over Green Dam Youth Escort internet monitoring software) the Chinese authorities are prepared to listen to the cries of ordinary people and business interests when they get things wrong.

Of course, when it comes to politics, or challenging the Party’s self-appointed right-to-rule, there is no quarter given. If anything – and her I rely on the testimony of those who’ve lived and worked here a lot longer than me – the Party is more… Read More

The rise of China is the most-read news story of the last decade, according to new research published by Texas-based Global Language Monitor.

You won’t be surprised to hear that for someone who earns his crust writing about China’s rise, this is gratifying news.

It’s also mildly surprising. In the news trade China is essentially a ‘glacier’ story – huge, unstoppable but moving in increments that only become discernible over time. Everyone registers China’s growing importance, but too often the drip-drip nature of the story keeps off the top of the news agenda.

And yet according to this research – based on tracking keywords on news and social networking sites – China’s rise has easily trumped what you could call ‘volcano’ stories: spectacular, erupting events such as Michael Jackson’s death, Barack Obama’s meteoric ascendancy to the presidency or the south Asian tsunami.

The research begs the question (and this not from the… Read More

They are the silent assassins of the Beijing road, zipping along the pavements at outrageous speeds and blasting over pedestrian crossings, leaving mums, grannies and toddlers diving for cover.

And yet for some reason I find myself outraged to learn that China’s ubiquitous electric bicycles (e- bikes) will, from January 2010, be subject to new regulations that require them to be treated as motorbikes for legal purposes.

This means that some 120m ordinary Chinese people will now have to pass a driving test, buy licence plates and get insurance before they can hop on their electric scooters to work.

E-bikes might be annoying, even dangerous sometimes, but personally I’ve found the Chinese use of electric bikes to be a revelation: an instant, green transport solution for a low-carbon world. London, where I used to commute daily, should be flooded with them.

China will make some 30m e-bikes next year, but if these new regulation… Read More

Just back from watching local elections in the Taiwanese tech-city of Hsinchu which is one of 17 places electing mayors and county bosses this weekend.

It’s only been nine months since I moved to China but seeing the democratic process in action was exhilarating. I hadn’t realised quite how much I missed it.

Elections, Taiwanese-style involve huge amounts of fireworks liberally and dangerously dispensed by troupes of campaigners crawling through the streets of the city igniting great ribbons of firecrackers, while firing screeching squibs and rockets from the back of mopeds.

Candidates have numbers rather than symbols (as in India, where parties are identified by a bike or an elephant, say) which supporters yell out at passers-by and shopkeepers as they wend their way through the streets.

The crocodiles then converges at open-air rallies where Taiwanese pop songs blare out, tinsel flies and the candidate emerge on stage to speak in front of a… Read More

This from the Taiwanese island of Kinmen (‘Jinmen’ in Chinese, ‘Quemoy’ for those with very long memories) which is just a few miles off the Chinese mainland and for 30 years the frontline of the stand-off between Communist China and Nationalist Taiwan.

 There were some bloody encounters – a Chinese invasion attempt in 1949 which was repelled and a 44-day artillery exchange in 1958 – but in latter years these fizzled out into a ‘propaganda war’.

 Between 1958 and 1978 the Chinese fired more than half a million “propaganda” shells at the island, loaded not with high explosive but leaflets extolling the virtues of return to the bosom of the (Communist) motherland.

Falun Gong poster in Kinmen Island off Taiwan

It was all rather civilised in a Cold War sort of way,… Read More

What a difference a week makes.

Having watched Barack Obama treading on egg-shells all week during his visit to China, the contrast with the red-carpet welcome dished out to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in Washington could hardly have been more stark.

 You might be tempted to dismiss this warmth as simply cosmetics, designed to keep the Indians happy as they feel increasingly uneasy about the rapid expansion of US-China ties evident since Mr Obama took office last January.

 But the atmospherics, as the White House discovered to its cost in Beijing last week, matter greatly because, like it or not, they reflect on the substance that underlies them.

Even though the China-US Joint Statement was hailed as a potentially groundbreaking document by sections of both the US and Chinese policy community, its significance was completely obscured by the negative publicity spawned by that dreadful Hu-Obama press conference.

The US Ambassador to China, Jon… Read More