Armed with short skirts and leather boots, China's Women's Liberation Army make its debut

Was anyone else watching China's national day parade surprised to see the massed ranks of short skirt and leather boot-clad female soldiers goose-stepping through Tiananmen Square?

For a brief second, I though I was watching an Austin Powers or Carry On film - come to think of it, Carry On People's Liberation Army has a certain ring to it.

Obviously women soldiers have played a key role in previous military parades in China but for this year's extravaganza, the requirements for female participants were altered from just being "brave" to being "brave, beautiful and elegant", according to state TV channel CCTV.

Presumably, the powers that be thought that the best way to honour Mao's legacy and pay tribute to China's transformation was to get some lovely ladies showing a bit of leg.

Given exclusive access to the women's preparations, a CCTV reporter found that "the female soldiers on the training ground are as good as the male soldiers in doing leg lifts and other movements".

But, unlike the lads, the ladies have some additional equipment they are required to carry on top of their weapons.

"We consider sun cream and other skin care products necessities," the leader of the female soldiers Chang Donghua told CCTV.

Photo from Xinhua. More photos here.

A China-dominated world will be very different but will it be better?

As China prepares to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, most observers agree that it will take less than another 60 years for the rapidly-growing nation to become the world’s pre-eminent superpower.

The more vexed question is what a China-dominated world will look like in 2050. Martin Jacques, a British academic and journalist, has just published a book called When China Rules the World that attempts to offer up some possible answers.

Jacques addressed a meeting of Singapore’s Foreign Correspondents Association on Friday, when he argued strongly that the world would be a very different (and better) place with China, not the US, as the dominant power.

He claimed that those who believe that the West has a monopoly on modernisation and that China would therefore become more Western as it becomes more modern were wrong. He outlined a number of key historical factors that explain why a Sino-centric world will look so different:

1. China is a civilization-state, not a nation state like most European countries or the US.
2. China used to govern East Asia through a tributary state system and East Asian economies are now being reconfigured to be China-focused.
3. Unlike Brazil, India and the US, China is not a multi-racial country, with 92% of the population describing themselves as Han. There is a very weak conception of cultural difference, as evidenced by the treatment meted out to the Tibetans and Uighurs.
4. The Chinese polity is constructed in a different way to the West, with the Chinese state seen as representing the embodiment of Chinese culture (see 1). Unlike in the West, the pre-eminence of the Chinese state has rarely been contested – i.e. China has not experienced the challenges to the central state from the people, the church, merchants and municipal councils that were commonplace in the West. Hence the Chinese state is used to operating through supplication and favour rather than bargaining.

Jacques concluded the rise of China “has got be a good thing because it’s the most rough and ready democratisation in the last 200 years”. Evidently his view of “democratisation” has more to do with balancing out the power of America and the West than it does with free and fair elections.

While his historical argument about the heterogeneity of China's development is convincing, I find it hard to share his quixotic and rather Utopian view of China's wider influence. The presence of a single, hegemonic superpower is potenitally a threat to the wider world, whether the top dog is the US or China.

The push-back against China’s growing global influence has already begun in Australia, in some African countries and, closer to home, in Vietnam.

Interestingly, Jacques admitted that his “single greatest concern” about China’s rise was the lack of recognition of different racial and religious groups. I wonder if that has anything to do with the tragedy that befell his Indian-Malaysian wife, who died in a Hong Kong hospital in 2000 after receiving sub-standard treatment because of Chinese racism, according to Jacques.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user gadgetdan.

Why I wish I was working in China

China appears to be opening up to foreign journalists, with a senior official from the State Council Information Office announcing that government ministries should adopt a "zero refusal" policy with foreign correspondents.

"Zero refusal means that the ministries must designate people to deal with calls and interview requests from foreign media and that they have to give a response within 24 hours or the period they prescribed, no matter what the result is," Guo Weimin, director of the SCIO press department, told China Daily, the government's main English language mouthpiece.

If (and it's a big if) upheld, this new policy from the cautious, censorious Chinese authorities contrasts sharply with the approach from many government ministries in open Singapore.

It may be one of the easiest places to do business in the world, but it is perhaps one of the hardest to do journalism.

Government spokespeople here rarely return calls before a deadline, perhaps hoping that journalists (representing both domestic and foreign publications) will not chase them and they will be spared the precarious task of actually speaking to a journalist.

Another favourite practice is not to invite foreign correspondents to any important government press conferences, perhaps because they are concerned that the news will be mis-interpreted.

To illustrate, earlier this week, I contacted the press office of the Singapore Police Force to speak to them about the rising rate of loan shark crime.

After claiming initially that I was not an accredited journalist in Singapore (I am, of course, a bona fide foreign media representative) I was eventually told that they would not speak to me, answer any questions or even provide me with any statistics because the publication I was working for on this story, the Asia Sentinel, was "not accredited".

Thanks a lot guys. Oh to be in press-friendly China...

UN fund kowtows to China press restrictions

The Common Fund for Commodities is a little-known inter-governmental financial organisation, set up under the auspices of the United Nations to help fund the exploitation of commodities from bananas to bamboo in developing countries.

The Common Fund is holding a big international conference in China later this month on "the importance of commodities in economic development of Asian countries and on the role the Common Fund can play in assisting countries in the region to make full use of their commodity-related potential".

As part of the Common Fund's drive to reach out and explain its work to the wider world, it initially announced that it would sponsor journalists to cover the conference, paying either for their flight to China or hotel costs.

I was one of the few who contacted the Common Fund about this opportunity and they seemed keen to get me to come along, promising to set up interviews with all the head honchos so that their work could be better understood.

However, having submitted all the necessary registration documents, I was surprised to receive the following email yesterday from Charles Jama in the Common Fund's communications department in Amsterdam:

I regret to inform you that we have reconsidered the media sponsorship program for the China meeting and will not be extending the offer to journalists NOT based or credentialled by the Press Bureau in the MoFA in Beijing.

The call for journalists to apply for sponsorship on the Common Fund's homepage was removed yesterday.

When I asked Guy Sneyers, the chief operating officer of the Common Fund, if he wanted to provide an official explanation for this sudden change of heart, he replied with a one-word answer: "no".

It is very disappointing (if not entirely surprising) to see an inter-governmental organisation with 107 member states that was set up under the UN framework caving in to Chinese press controls in such a meak fashion.

Without any proper explanation from the Common Fund, I can only guess at the reasons for their rapid about-turn. It was quite possibly simply because they could not be bothered to deal with the voluminous paperwork and bureaucracy necessary to procure a visa for a visiting journalist in China.

If that's the case, they are playing straight into the hands of the Chinese government which, like other authoritarian regimes, makes it very complicated for journalists to get visas precisely because they want to put foreign reporters off coming in the first place.

So that's Chinese censorship 1, UN 0.

Wireless hotspot has a different meaning in Mongolia

From Bangladesh, one of the world's most densely-populated countries, to Mongolia, one of the world's least, the mobile phone continues to change the way that poor people live.

In Mongolia, the World Bank has been subsidizing the construction of mobile phone masts in the vast countryside in the hope that once the physical infrastructure is in place, private companies will be able to offer mobile services on a commercial basis.

But according to David Dollar, the World Bank country director for China and Mongolia, the population of nomadic herders is so sparsely spread out that it would be impossible to offer full mobile phone coverage.

So the World Bank has instead focused on the development of a series of "hot zones", designed to ensure that every herder is within a 30 minute horse or motorbike ride from getting a phone signal.

For some reason, this conjures up the bizarre image in my mind of a nomad mounting his steed and galloping through the freezing cold for half an hour so he can use his iPhone to post his latest Twitter update.

Or, as the wonderfully-named Dollar, who had ventured into the Mongolian countryside on a World Bank "retreat", puts it rather more prosaically,"for a family with any kind of medical emergency, or simply a need for information, this connectivity significantly reduces their vulnerability".