Official China Discussion Thread

Bringing record rainfall, Typhoon Soudelor killed 14 people and left four others missing in eastern China, local officials said Sunday.

All of the victims were buried in house collapses or landslides or washed away by flash floods, authorities in Zhejiang province told the state-run New China News Agency. The city of Wenzhou tallied 12 dead and four missing. Two others died in the nearby city of Lishui.

Several counties reported more than 27 inches of rain over 2 1/2 days, the most in 120 years, New China News Agency said. About 188,000 people in Zhejiang were forced to relocate at least temporarily. More than 200 houses were destroyed.

Provincial authorities put the economic losses, including damage to crops, at more than $600 million.

Soudelor made landfall on mainland China late Saturday after raking across Taiwan, where it killed seven and injured more than 400. It hit Fujian province first, then moved into Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Anhui provinces.

Tourist sites were closed and hundreds of flights were canceled on the mainland. Three airports in Fujian were closed. Six highways were reported shut and high-speed rail service was temporarily suspended.

In Taiwan, authorities launched a search for 100 missing people in Wulai district in New Taipei City, the Central News Agency reported. Officials said the residents of Xiaoyi village, a mountainous part of the district, have not been heard from since Saturday. Firefighters and other rescue personnel have been flown to the area to look for the residents, New Taipei authorities said.

New Taipei fire department official Chen Chung-yueh told the agency that homes in the district had “disappeared” during heavy rains and strong winds caused by the typhoon.

Beijing (AFP) - Social media users blasted a new Chinese film Monday for depicting a summit of world leaders during World War II which embellished history by portraying revolutionary leader Mao Zedong as vital to a conference he never attended.

The Cairo Declaration — an upcoming war film produced by a company affiliated with China's military — is part of a host of government-directed events to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Japan's surrender.

The US, Britain and China met in Cairo in November 1943 to map out a post-war path for Asia, during which they decided that territories ceded to Japan before the war should be returned to China.

But the film's trailer and poster have faced a backlash on social media and state media, with internet users pointing out Mao played no major role at the conference.

China — then known as the Republic of China — was instead represented by Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, who went on to lose China's civil war to Mao's Communist forces.

"I'm sad that my contributions at the Cairo Conference haven't been recognised in the film," joked one user on Monday.

Others were more jaded.

"Let Mao be a part of the conference, it's not like the rest of our history is real anyway," wrote another user.

July was a good month for voyeurism in China. The month began with a sprawling teahouse tape scandal on the eastern coast of Fuzhou and ended with a blurry, 27-second clip of a nude couple having discreet sex under a bridge, far to the west, in steamy Chengdu. Way up north in Shenyang, an enthusiastic couple’s display of affection while onboard a subway drew the attention of fellow passengers, not to mention Internet users everywhere. And then there was the apex of summer sex scandals: two randy students filming themselves in the dressing room of a flagship Uniqlo department store in Sanlitun, the main nightlife drag, right in the heart of the capital, Beijing.

Denied legal access to pornography, China’s 649 million web users have often afforded unusually high status to low-grade footage of amateur sexual activity. If the ensuing fuss over the Uniqlo tape — numerous memes, T-shirts, and tattoos — seemed a little much, the heavy-handed response, which included arrests and reprimands, was undoubtedly so. Vowing to completely purge the Internet of all such content, Beijing managed to place an otherwise unremarkable video along the fault lines of free speech: between a twitchy, humorless bureaucracy and a shrinking public space in which feminist activists, rights lawyers, and student exhibitionists are all squeezed.

From the viewpoint of an increasingly conservative government, the Uniqlo video and the reaction to it neatly encapsulate the declining standards of the age. The act it depicts is short, its cast young and slim; the content is narcissistic and so thoroughly branded that many at first thought it was some sort of guerrilla marketing campaign by Uniqlo itself. The dialogue, already forgettable — “Call me husband,” the bespectacled man croons to his distracted mate — reaches a laughable climax when an off-screen customer announcement begins droning about shopping opportunities on “the second and third floors.” And like a crass Hollywood sequel, the kids love it: Groups of selfie-snappers clamor before the vast façade of the offending Uniqlo every weekend, powered by social platforms like mobile app We Chat with its 549 million users.

Many grew up in the first flush of Internet sex culture, under a government in full denial (the needle has barely moved since, on either curricular or official views on sex). The restrictiveness cultivated pockets of extreme innocence and experience among millions of urban graduates: cliques who were loud about their adventurous habits and those who could barely discuss the subject among themselves. These groups tended to be exclusive, not absorbing much from the other, making assessments of sexual progressiveness an exercise in cherry-picking (however fruitful). One thing they did have in common: Because of the frequent, viral, and news-like nature of amateur sex films, almost everyone had seen one.

China’s down-low affair with DIY porn goes back years and starts with a celebrity scandal: the theft, in February 2008, of 465 private photographs from Hong Kong heart throb Edison Chen, featuring sexual encounters between Chen and famous names including married actress Cecilia Cheung and Gillian Chung, a pop starlet who’d long claimed to be a virgin. Publicly, the leak disgraced both Chen and his female costars, who received death threats and lost sponsorship deals. The online world, meanwhile, could not have cared less about their morals or more enjoyed their embarrassment: Chen was the mainland’s “most searched” term that year.

“Mainstream Chinese youth had never seen such sexually explicit images of their favorite stars,” wrote youth trends consultant Mary Bergstrom in All Eyes East: Lessons from the Front Lines of Marketing to China’s Youth. “A change in youth’s attitudes became palpable.” The revelations seemed to untap an unquenchable prurience among the mainland Chinese, whose media, politically curtailed, funds itself through the relentless pursuit of entertainment news. Suddenly, sex tapes cropped up everywhere, with the public interest devolving into merely a matter of what interested the public. While Chen and public figures like 26-year-old reality star Yan Feng Jiao were deemed fair game, so too were the ordinary students secretly filmed coupling in a Hebei classroom. Or the young Qinghai-Tibet train attendant, thrust into Internet infamy by an act of revenge porn, released shortly after the Chen scandal.

The attention wasn’t always unwelcome. If the famous guarded their sex lives jealously, others saw the brief publicity that DIY porn provided as a potential route to fame. In late 2008, months after Beijing triumphantly hosted the Summer Olympics, a fascinated crowd of onlookers, toting handheld cameras, began mobbing the Shanghai No.1 Eastern Department Store. They were trying to catch a glimpse of a saleswoman who’d been dubbed “Kappa girl,” whose 12-minute homemade sex tape had just gone viral across the Chinese-language Internet. She worked for Kappa, a foreign sports brand, and for a few weeks in late 2008, “Kappa Girl” became the most infamous woman in China, where big-time pornographers risk ending up in jail for life. As a November 2008 editorial in the (usually prim) English-language state mouthpiece China Daily reasoned, “The obsessive attention given to the topic means public thirst for such subjects cannot be satisfied elsewhere.… The Kappa Girl madness has clearly shown that sex education in our schools has failed, despite a sexual revolution among mainstream society.”

Market signals suggest the revolution has been real and enduring. Although Kappa Girl’s tape was dull — fellatio on an anonymous recipient in an equally anonymous hotel room — its heroine, whose real name is Lin Jiani, was not. After being fired by Kappa for “tarnishing its image,” Lin pursued a life beyond her 15 minutes of notoriety with vigor. “How can I use my fame for profit?” she wondered aloud on a blog she opened in response to the attention: “I’m now sincerely looking for advertising sponsorship.” Lin offered an escalating series of rates, from $3,000 for a personal appearance to $7,500 for a modeling assignment.

For all her moxie, Lin seemed to overlook a basic principle: Pornography may be as common as prostitution, but it’s still technically illegal. While authorities forced a halfhearted response — Shanghai cops declared that Kappa Girl’s video was “one of the most popular downloads on the mainland” — Lin continued punching up. “It does not seem like I broke the law!” she riposted. “Those who are spreading my video and disseminating my news are breaking the law! Either way, I still look good on the screen.” When Harmony Films, a British outfit whose press release promised “consistently over-the-top productions that can compete with the best in the adult market,” offered Lin a movie contract, its marketing manager argued, “When China does open up to adult content, partnering with someone identifiable like Kappa Girl will help us gain a foothold in that market.”

While China’s authorities have been resolute to keep that market out, it has steadily swelled. If anything, the transgressive nature of amateur porn has been its most potent attractant. For viewers of the Uniqlo video, “the actual enjoyment cannot be separated from the police action,” Katrien Jacobs, a writer and researcher in pornography, media, and censorship at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, told Foreign Policy. “The fact that there is very old-school legislation on pornography makes all these cases much more interesting.” The threat of getting caught “makes it so much more exciting for people to watch.”

The bar and club-packed district of Sanlitun, which Uniqlo dwarfs like a totem, has always loomed large in Beijing’s youth conscious. Controversial, fashionable, and aspirational (everything a Shenyang subway carriage is not), it carries now, like the grainy video, an illicit thrill. The brutal murder of a woman outside the same store last week, by a man wielding a samurai sword in broad daylight, has made the notorious spot only more so. Flocking to pose at Uniqlo, the film’s fans are not simply gawkers but participants, insiders to a juvenile conspiracy against which authority, with its fusty views and outdated laws, can only fulminate. The Uniqlo film makes stars of the generation that delights in producing and sharing viral content — and shrugs off the adult world’s critiques.

In Blood Sex Tape, a 2007 documentary-style film, a Chinese couple’s sex video leaks online, leading the girlfriend to commit suicide in shame. In real life, the actors of the Uniqlo tape have proved less dramatic, answering more modern instincts. The male, intent on capturing every moment with his gold iPhone together with his vain partner, fascinated by her own naked reflection, could be a vignette of middle-class Chinese clichés about materialistic youth. Their poses are a private joke whose punchline was to appear in the same trivial news feed they mock. Even those drawn to the scene of the crime find its continued appeal oddly banal. “I went to check out the Uniqlo” in Beijing, a male friend recently remarked, perplexed. “It was boring.”

For the Japanese clothing company itself, now dependent on China for growth, boring is preferable to controversial. The scandal has managed to overshadow recent strikes in the southern city of Shenzhen promoting workers’ rights; Uniqlo CEO Tadashi Yanai, Japan’s wealthiest man, told the Wall Street Journal, “Just hearing” of the video “makes me sick. It’s disgusting.” The Chinese authorities were no less hyperbolic, given the nature of the offense. Internet overlords at the Cyberspace Administration of China declared the clip a “virus” that had “violated core socialist values.” Executives at Sina and Tencent were keelhauled, and six were arrested in connection with the video’s dissemination. Once more, the editor of the nationalist Global Times deplored wayward netizens for showing “low taste” toward “phenomenon that are moving further away from our noble traditions.”

It’s that “our” that’s the problem. Like any great civilization, Chinese culture offers a richly variant canon of erotic art and literature that its current aging leadership would rather wish into (more distant) history. Appeals to “core socialist values” mean little to those pursuing the consumerist lifestyle on which China’s economic future now depends. It is the outlawing and attempted whitewashing of these sexual outlets that many believe lie at the root of the “phenomenon” the Global Times deplores. Pornography’s current illegality echoes sporadic strains of conservatism in China’s history, but the authorities’ insistence on a heavy prosecutorial tone brings them into more direct confrontation with present-day attitudes. Jacobs calls it “a system from another era” — the heavy hand of state censorship may have been relatively invisible to previous generations who got their news from state mouthpiece People’s Daily and their gossip from the street, but in the age of the Internet, where many have seen censorship in action, “there are so many young people who say outright that they cannot support — or even understand” the government’s approach.

It’s an approach less infused with morality than it might first appear; raunchy videos have proven a particularly virulent medium for challenging power and corruption, which is something only the government deems itself qualified to do. In 2013, a long-running honey trap, in which numerous city officials in the southern megacity of Chongqing were made complicit in a huge real estate scam, was exposed after a brief video clip depicting a middle-aged official, Lei Zhengfu, heaving over a supine 18-year-old, became world news within a day of its posting. Quite apart from the political fallout, there was extra, exquisite embarrassment for Lei, the frog-like fall guy, whose haplessly hasty performance earned him the name “Brother 18 Seconds.”

As with the Chen effect of 2008, Lei’s downfall spurred a torrent of similar revelations, like a copycat crime wave. With each passing month of 2013, Chinese media discovered new images of yet another sorry-looking man in his mid-40s, dressed in socks or sometimes just a thong, who also happened to be the deputy secretary of a forestry department, or something, somewhere deep in China, far from Beijing’s view. In the right hands, it seemed like a bad sex tape could be a populist tool for wronged or disenfranchised victims to heap potent revenge upon moralizing Communist Party officials and hypocritical judges. Unusually, the whistle-blowers were often young women, turning the tables on their villainous male lovers. Like Kappa Girl, they insisted on their own narrative, an inversion of the old one, meting out retribution as a champion of the people.

This couldn’t be the case if there weren’t hordes of influential men willing to join Chinese youth in the country’s general loosening of attitudes. Top leaders may be almost certain their own behavior will escape broadcast — but the possibility casts a pall, and officially sex is sometimes discussed as if it were a threat to Communist Party strength. When the procession of mistresses coming forward with videotaped evidence seemed to go around the block, the People’s Daily was clearly fazed. “Mistresses are led by fallings out with corrupt officials to denounce them … both their motives are the same — to satisfy each other’s greed,” the Party mouthpiece claimed. “It is not the right path for the will of the people.” Cadres echo the Maoist rhetoric, with constant recourses to authoritarianism as the quick-fix solution.

It’s all part of a China where elements, however harmless, become a threat — from mistresses who share too much to students showing off in a department store. While official attitudes prefer to wall off these lifestyles as “un-Chinese,” persistent cracks expose the limits of censure, revealing a vibrant, diverse sexuality that’s often a shock to the system.

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia — Faced with slower growth at home and rising labor costs, Chinese entrepreneurs are seeking foreign markets as never before. But as they rush abroad, they are grappling for the first time with unruly trade unions, independent courts and meddlesome journalists. And for many, navigating the unfamiliar waters of multiparty politics and confronting the power of public opinion makes for heavy going.

As they venture into foreign democracies, many Chinese companies experience culture shock. Having made their money in a one-party state, where political connections are the key to a successful business and the rule of law is easy to sidestep, they are finding things just aren’t as simple abroad.

From the United States to Asia, Chinese entrepreneurs have a litany of complaints and have made a succession of costly mistakes. Even in tiny Cambodia, where China has become a major investor in the garment industry, they can sound bitter.

“Trade unions are all the same: They are black-hearted,” complained He Enjia, president of the Textile Enterprise Association of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia.

“In the last two years, things changed in Cambodia,” he added, explaining that factory owners used to be able to hire police to suppress striking workers. “Now it’s impossible. The influence of the opposition party is growing, with the help of the Western media.”

By some measures, outward investment from China outpaced foreign investment into the country for the first time last year. But abroad, where the public often demands greater transparency and courts enforce stricter environmental and labor laws, it is a steep learning curve for many Chinese companies, experts say, that mirrors the challenges foreign companies faced when they first entered China more than two decades ago.

“If you look at foreign companies going into China, it was extremely difficult for them to adjust,” said Thilo Hanemann, who tracks global investment flows at the Rhodium Group, a New York-based economic advisory firm. “Chinese companies are now going through the same thing, but it is even more complicated for them. The regulatory environment they grew up in is so vastly different than in markets overseas.”

The flow of capital out of China had begun to make it expensive for the country’s central bank to maintain the yuan’s value against the dollar. Last week’s surprise devaluation will push up the price of foreign investment for Chinese companies, but — if investors think the currency will weaken further over time — could encourage some to invest abroad now before the exchange rate falls further.

Some of the first major movers were state-owned companies, extracting the raw materials, such as oil and iron ore, that China needed to fuel its booming economy. Construction companies have also followed government money abroad, as China builds roads, dams and other infrastructure from Asia to Africa.

But, as rules governing outward investment have been liberalized, private companies, from garment manufacturers chasing lower wages in Southeast Asia to IT companies chasing new markets, are also moving abroad.

Official figures show outbound direct investment from the country rose 14 percent last year to $103 billion, and the government says that if outbound investment through third parties is included, it would exceed foreign direct investment for the first time.

That would be a major milestone for China, even if the figures are not exactly reliable. In any case, Rhodium’s Hanemann said the hasty expansion abroad should not be seen as a sign that China is about to take on the world.

“It’s not a sign of strength; it’s a sign of weakness,” he said. In the past, Chinese companies could reap such handsome profit growth at home that “they neglected global value chains” and did not develop overseas expertise, he said.

But as China’s economy slows, as it confronts huge overcapacity in its steel and cement industries, and as labor and land costs rise, companies are being forced to diversify abroad, to “play catch-up” and learn new skills in order to survive.

It has not been smooth sailing. Indeed, there are countless examples of costly miscalculations.

In the United States, Chinese companies are facing hundreds of millions of dollars in damage claims over drywall imported to rebuild thousands of homes in the wake of Hurricane Katrina; it is alleged to have emitted toxic gas, caused respiratory problems and corroded electrical appliances.

In Texas, state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) is being sued for $7.5 billion by a former joint venture partner, Tang Energy, which claims it cheated on their deal to develop wind power — partly by creating competing businesses in the same field. It is something AVIC might have gotten away with at home but not in the West.

“In China, the state owns the enterprises, and it owns the court. So if you’re a state-owned company, you never have to worry about having a fair fight. And here they have a fair fight on their hands,” E. Patrick Jenevein III, Tang’s chief executive, said last year, according to the Dallas Morning News.

In Poland, China Overseas Engineering Group had its contract to build a highway in the run-up to the 2012 European soccer championships canceled after costs ballooned: The company had failed to allow, among many other things, for the cost of compliance with local environmental laws, including the need to build tunnels under the road for frogs to cross.

All over the world, Chinese companies have faced a political backlash for bringing in their own workers rather than employing locals — and for mistreating the locals they do employ.

There are, of course, very different problems in different places. Strict laws against pollution and corruption might pose problems in the West, but they are less of a concern in countries such as Cambodia, entrepreneurs say.

But Li Yi, secretary general of the Guangxi province branch of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Cambodia, says Cambodia’s many nongovernmental organizations are a nuisance.

“To grab Western funds, they do everything they can to pick holes and deliberately target big projects,” he said.

There are cultural differences, too. Chinese managers complain that Cambodians are not as hardworking as Chinese, but their heavy-handed efforts to increase productivity are not always successful.

In June, a Chinese construction site manager was reported to have screamed at his workers once too often for being lazy, according to the Phnom Penh Post. After their shift was over, a group of workers returned to the site at night and hacked the manager to death with an ax, police told the newspaper.

Li said that at least the business culture here is similar when it comes to bribing officials — Cambodians, he said, usually keep their word, unlike their counterparts in certain other countries. “They take money, and they keep their promise,” he said. “If they can’t do something, they say so directly. Not like some officials, who take money but then say they can’t help.”

In Burma, the transition from military rule to military-controlled democracy brought problems for Chinese mining and dam-building companies not used to a world where public opinion suddenly mattered.

Li Guanghua, general manager of the China Power Investment Corp., said his company learned painful lessons from the suspension of the Myitsone dam project in 2011, after questions about its environmental impact, and whether Burma would see much of the benefits of the dam, turned public opinion strongly against the project.

Now the company is being more careful to talk to local communities, opposition politicians and the news media as it tries to get the project restarted.

“We think transparency is very important now,” he said in an interview.

But have other Chinese companies learned that lesson?

“I can’t guarantee that,” he answered, with a smile.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pledged to establish a $2bn (£1.3bn) fund to assist developing countries and to significantly increase investment.

Addressing a UN summit on development goals, Mr Xi said investment would reach $12bn over the next 15 years.

He also said China would cancel debts to the world's least developed nations, including small island nations.

His pledges of aid give a big boost to the launch of the UN's new Global Goals for Sustainable Development - the day after all members states committed themselves to a hugely ambitious programme, the BBC's James Robbins in New York reports.

The plan aims to eradicate poverty and hunger by 2030.

It was China's extraordinary record shifting so many families out the ranks of the poor which ensured that the overall global record in poverty reduction under the previous Millennium Development Goals was substantial, our correspondent says.

But it was very patchy, he says, adding that now China is offering to help other countries - particularly in Africa - make the same transformation.

This new initiative also suggests China is willing to take on more of the responsibilities that go with its status as emerging superpower, our correspondent adds.