Posts tagged with "Civil Society"
Saturday, 5. May 2007, 08:40:38
Politics, Civil Society
By Thomas Riggins
Countercurrents.org
28 April, 2007Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at pabooks@politicalaffairs.netFriday’s New York Times (4-20-07) had a front page story by Joseph Kahn with the headline “In China, Talk Of Democracy Is Simply That.” The following is an analysis of Kahn’s article.
Kahn begins by telling us that Chinese leaders are saying they want their country to become “more democratic.” Scholars and retired officials are writing articles advocating "political system reform" and more "socialist democracy." Some are even saying China should model itself on Switzerland and its "worker-friendly democratic governing style." I will get back to this as "socialist democracy" and the Swiss system are antithetical since Switzerland is an advanced monopoly capitalist country.
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Friday, 20. April 2007, 00:04:57
Human Rights, Civil Society
By Pallavi Aiyar
Asia Times
2007-3-22Pallavi Aiyar is the China correspondent for The HinduBEIJING - After years of galloping economic growth in China, the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has much to celebrate. However, the growth has come at a cost, and rather than strengthening the party's hand to press ahead with further economic reforms, growing inequalities, rampant corruption and vanishing provisions for health care and education have put China's leadership in somewhat of a tight spot.
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Thursday, 19. April 2007, 23:39:29
Human Rights, Civil Society
By Wu Zhong, China Editor
Asia Times
2007-4-18HONG KONG - According to China's Ministry of Public Security, there were about 80,000 demonstrations across the country in 2005, each involving 100 protesters or more, not taking into account those involving smaller numbers. Most of the protests were set off by unfair compensation for land requisitions. Some of these demonstrations were bloodily put down.
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Thursday, 19. April 2007, 04:09:41
Activism, Injustice, Civil Society
By JOSEPH KAHN
The New York Times (Times Select)
April 10, 2007It was the first public statement by Gao Zhisheng, one of China’ s most outspoken dissidents, since his conviction in December.
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Tuesday, 17. April 2007, 23:56:46
Human Rights, Politics, Civil Society
Murray Scot Tanner
Senior Political Scientist, RAND Corporation
Brookings Northeast Asia Commentary, March 2007
The Brookings InstitutionFrom the time protests in China began attracting our attention in the late 1990s, foreign observers have wondered how great a challenge they could constitute to the regime, and how effectively the regime would cope. The questions of "what is possible?" and "what is likely?" in China's political future have recently been revived by the publication of such high profile, compelling books as James Mann's The China Fantasy and Pei Minxin's China's Trapped Transition which forecast, respectively, an enduringly oppressive Chinese autocracy and a China spiraling into corruption and decay.
China's recent protests do indeed show many signs of a serious threat: their sheer volume and growing organizational sophistication, the willingness of many protestors to resist police repression, and the often stunning speed with which many return to the streets even after suppression. Less than a year after police opened fire slaying between six and twenty protestors in the southeastern village of Dongzhou, some press reports indicated local citizens took to the streets again recently. For those of us who remember the years of public passivity that followed the 1989 Beijing massacre, such resilience stands in stark contrast.
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Sunday, 15. April 2007, 00:28:45
Politics, Civil Society
Pei Minxin
2000 Pacific Symposium
Asian Perspectives on The Challenges of ChinaConcerns about China’s political and social stability figure prominently – and rightly – in Western governments’ formulation of their policy toward Beijing. Unlike a strong, stable, but less-than-friendly China, an unstable (and presumably weak) China presents a different set of strategic and political challenges to Western policy-makers. Instability – whether economic, social, or political – makes it difficult to protect some of the important interests that have been pursued by the West in the last two decades (such as improvement in human rights, governance, and access to the Chinese market). Internally, political instability usually triggers large-scale violence and loss of government authority. In the case of China, which has a large arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, a likely fallout from such instability would be ineffective control regimes over the exports of such weapons and related technologies.
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Saturday, 14. April 2007, 23:55:03
PHILOSOPHY, Politics, Civil Society
MALCOLM BULL
New Left Review 40
July-August 2006The question of agency remains the central lacuna in the construction of systemic alternatives. Building on ‘The Limits of Multitude’ in NLR 35, Malcolm Bull proposes a reconceptualization of the relation between collective will and invisible hand. Can bearings drawn from Hegel, Gramsci, Sartre indicate the route to a new global order through dissolution of the Western imperial state?The state is not ‘abolished’: it withers away. - Engels, Anti-Dühring
The more the social bond is stretched the slacker it becomes. - Rousseau, The Social Contract
In an earlier article I argued that the contemporary crisis of political agency reflects the division between the aggregated outcomes of individual choice and the decisions of the collective will. [1] Yet the contraction of political possibility to the invisible hand of the market and populist reaction does not restrict individual actors to one or the other. It is precisely because different types of agency are not exclusive to particular actors that the cycle of unintended effect and ineffectual intent is so obvious. Appealing to the agency of the multitude serves only to reinforce the divide, for the multitude acts either as one or as many, and becomes a political agent either through the unity of the will or through the workings of the invisible hand. Starting with the multitude, as early modern political theory invariably did (and as Negri, Hardt, and Virno now propose to do once more), results in a dichotomy: general will or general intellect, the political or the social, state or society.
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Monday, 2. April 2007, 00:46:20
Activism, ABSURDIST, Journalism, Civil Society
Josie's Blog on a Changing China
China in Transition
March 29, 2007About Josie Liu: Born in China, graduated from Peking University with a Bachelor's degree, and from Missouri School of Journalism with a Master's degree; worked as a journalist for both Chinese and English newspapers for more than five years, including Beijing Today, South China Morning Post.Other homeowners protesting on the site of the Chongqing nail house (left)
Looking at the construction site from a nearby light rail station (right)
While the Chinese public is hungry for the latest update about the Chongqing nail house after the mainland media were largely squelched in their coverage, thanks to a young and restless blogger, people are now satisfied with on-site reporting published online.
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Friday, 30. March 2007, 00:46:12
Public Media, Politics, Civil Society
By Aynne Kokas
Asia Pacific Arts
UCLA Asia Institute
2/16/2007Mao's Yan'an talks on art echo in the villages of China, as documentarian Wu Wenguang leads a team of videographers on a mission to teach ordinary people to make films about their own communities.
Chinese documentary director, writer, and educator Wu Wenguang's most recent project, the China Village Self-Governance Film Project is entertaining and charming, despite its best efforts to be a public diplomacy collaboration between China and the European Union. The film series, a palette of combined works including video village self-governance reports by rural Chinese and a documentary describing the process of preparing the villagers to take their role behind the camera, provides a startling and guileless view of the lives of the people most underrepresented in Chinese media.
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Friday, 30. March 2007, 00:38:32
Politics, Civil Society
Re-Public
26th September 2006Deliberative polling offers a thick conception of democracy, argues James Fishkin. It serves the values of political equality and deliberation, by representining potentially all citizens and by spreading an ethos of participation in politics.Read more...
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