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March 2000
Human rights and democracy are at the heart of the European integration project. The domestic affairs of member states are also increasingly influenced by neighbours. So should the European family be telling Vienna that they don’t much like Jörg Haider’s party joining government?
As the inclusion of Jörg Haider’s freedom party in Austria’s new government loomed, the other fourteen member-governments of the European Union (EU) announced that, if it came about, they would react by drastically downgrading political relations with Vienna. While understandable, this step has proved highly controversial, and raises some fundamental questions about the right of the Union — or its member-states, which are not quite the same thing — to ‘intervene’ in another member’s internal affairs.
Professor Roger Morgan is a Visiting Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, and a member of the Chatham House Council.
US Presidential Election: Dollar Power, by Godfrey Hodgson
Big money talks in American politics. Presidential candidates need it to try to achieve office, and once there, favours must be repaid. So why not reform a system that protects the freedom to give and the freedom to receive?
On 28 january, bill clinton delivered his eighth and last state of the Union address, the longest and by all odds the most upbeat for many, many years. Only the previous day, newspapers carried the result of the Iowa party caucuses, the opening shot in the campaign to succeed him.
Clinton, and the presidency, had made a remarkable recovery. Only a year before, Clinton, actually impeached by the House of Representatives, faced a Senate trial that could have brought his term in office to a humiliating close. And the presidency, as an institution, looked back on more than three decades of frustration, declining power and occasional disaster.
Godfrey Hodgson is the Director of the Reuters Foundation Programme at Oxford University.
Indonesia: Tearing a Nation Apart, by Peter Carey
In November 1998, two hundred Christian gang members retreated to Ambon after losing a turf war in Jakarta’s notorious Ketapang casino district. The conflict in South Maluku had begun in earnest. Rival Christian and Muslim gangs started to organise in church halls and mosques. The Christian ‘Reds’ — named after their red bandannas — and the Muslim ‘Whites’ confronted each other on the streets. The red-and-white of the Indonesian national flag was symbolically torn down the middle.
Now, over a year on, the impact of the continuing communal violence in Maluku is reaching to the very heart of Indonesian politics. There is even talk of a creeping military coup against the democratically elected government of President Abdurrahman Wahid and Vice-President Megawati Sukarno-putri. Richard Holbrooke, the US Ambassador to the United Nations, has spoken of a ‘great drama between the forces of democracy and reform and the forces of backward-looking corruption and militarism’.
Peter Carey is Laithwaite Fellow and Tutor in Modern History, Trinity College, Oxford, specialising in the history and politics of Indonesia and East Timor.
The Internet and Free Speech: Web Offence, by Mariyam Joyce-Hasham
Has freedom of speech gone too far on the Internet? Or are racist and extremist views a small price to pay for a medium that encourages expression? As governments try to work out how to respond, two contributors examine whether it is liberating or dangerous.
If recent newspaper reports are true, the internet has become a haven for neo-nazis, extremists and terrorists of all persuasions. Copies of the Terrorist Handbook, a how to manual for would be terrorists, can be freely acquired by anyone with a computer and a modem. Instructions on manufacturing bombs and hacking are similarly accessible. There are even directions for creating an underground terror cell or running a resistance movement.
The formation of virtual communities in cyberspace means that extremists or activists can find others of like mind and exchange information and ideas. The Internet provides almost instant access to millions around the world, bypassing traditional censors and existing legislation on libel, incitement to violence or racism.
Mariyam Joyce-Hasham is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House.
China and the Internet: The Pen, the Sword, and the Networked Computer, by Stephen Green
The Internet could be an important weapon for undermining regimes which lack a democratic mandate. With eight million online and counting, China’s rapid Internet development should be a major threat to the political order. However, with the right rules in place — and more just issued — the government has little to fear. At least, for the moment.
If the pen is mightier than the sword, then how powerful is a home PC equipped with a 400 MHZ processor, some browser software and a modem? Policy-makers in the People’s Republic of China believe the answer is very, but that is not stopping them actively fostering Internet development.
Sometime after 2005, Chinese will overtake Americans as the Internet’s most numerous national community. The numbers piling online in China are breath-taking; ten million by the end of 2000, probably rising to eighty-five million by 2005. Chinese Internet entrepreneurs — complete with American MBAs and venture-capital indigestion — are the new heroes of both the government and students.
Under the ground, China already has a quality infrastructure — despite frequent complaints from surfers about slow connection speeds — and more is coming. A venture led by the State Administration of Radio, TV and Film aims to wire up China’s eighty million cable-TV users for Internet access. Two other ex-state companies, Jitong and China Unicom, though still small, are forcing China Telecom to transform itself from a plan-ministry monopoly into a competitive telecommunications service provider. An Internet revolution is sweeping China, and government-linked companies are at the forefront.
Power to the PC
So what on earth is the Chinese Communist Party thinking of? Conventional wisdom has it that the Internet is intrinsically democratic. Every user is empowered by all that information, and you can say anything you want, anonymously. At the same time, the Internet seems to make a nonsense of national boundaries and attempts to control the free flow of information.
From Chiapas to East Timor, the Internet has been heralded as a technology pre-programmed to catalyse revolution. It allows critical ideas to be spread, it enhances the ability of suppressed dissident groups to organise and it can be used to create new global support communities. If authoritarianism didn’t die with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, then many believe that any residual dictators will meet their nemesis in the virtual world.
Networking for growth
If just a phone socket and a personal computer can do all this, then unpopular governments everywhere, including ones that enjoy the legitimacy of the ballot box, are in trouble. For those accustomed to controlling civil society, the inability to install editors and easily censor material must be especially galling. We might expect these types of governments to do all they can to limit popular Internet use.
Not China. The government has shown a clear resolve to attain the best of both worlds — use the Internet to support economic growth, while making provisions for maintaining political stability. In 1993, the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ High Energy Physics Institute linked its Intranet to the Internet. Only three years later, the Internet was formally opened to the public.
Conservatives in the Communist Party who believed the technology was simply a weapon of American domination were over-ruled. Previous limits on fax usage and a ban on satellite dishes had proven impossible to police. Jiang Zemin, the leader of the Communist Party and Head of State, has made technological development one of his top priorities for modernising the economy and society.
Register, Monitor, Censure
The trick has been to put in place institutional controls that will minimise any political threat. Control is difficult, but not impossible. The Computer Information Network and Internet Security Protection and Management Regulations (1997) set out three tactics: register, monitor and censure.
Firstly, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) must co-operate with the Ministry of Public Security to register all Internet users. Bulletin board visitors are special targets, since this is where any salacious chat — and efforts to organise — could run wild. In contrast to the famous adage, this means that in China they technically know you’re not a dog. Registering with an ISP means that your personal details are passed to the government’s China Internet Information Centre, the bureau that handles domain names and addresses.
Secondly, the international gateways for data flows are still controlled by the state. This means an individual’s surfing activity can, in theory, be monitored. Thirdly, foreign sites like the BBC, the New York Times and Voice of America are frequently blocked.
If all this was not enough, the Communist Party’s Central Committee is now rumoured to have prepared a new set of regulations which are to be included in the future Telecommunications Act. These follow up a document circulated internally in February 1999 that urged increased control over website contents.
The new rules would force Internet Content Providers (ICPs) to dissociate themselves from traditional media. Newspapers would not be able to publish Internet news, and Chinese content providers would be prevented from using stories from the Web. Such controls are already informally in place and there are reports that major portals are minimising their news content and moving to e-commerce in anticipatory defence. Sinanet.com is said to be planning to downgrade its coverage of America and Taiwan in favour of concentration on the mainland, a strategy which would certainly reassure the regulators.
In a circular from the State Bureau of Secrecy issued in January, the sending of e-mails containing state secrets was formally prohibited. The discussion of such secrets on bulletin boards or in chat rooms was also banned. State secrets are sometimes defined very broadly in China, and can deal with apparently harmless matters like agricultural output. Any government will want to limit the spread of real state secrets, but these regulations also contain more Orwellian overtones. They attempt to force all internet providers to seek government approval before they publish news.
Officials admit that these controls can never be comprehensive. The distribution of e-mail newsletters and the use of proxy-servers to access banned sites from within China cannot be stopped. Keeping track of eight million people exploring cyberspace is impossible, and the number not bothering to register is growing fast. Government bureaus will drown in bureaucracy if every piece of Internet news has to be approved. Even the threatened closure of Internet cafés may have limited effect.democratic spirit. In a multitude of minor ways, the Internet will improve that most amorphous of things, the country’s democratic spirit. It is likely that it will provide more access to a freer, more objective global media, more evidence that markets make better managers of resources than Party cadres and perhaps even encourage an awareness of human rights as an ethical issue rather than as a stick that ‘westerners’ use to beat China.
The Internet is just one of a number of means through which these ideas are infiltrating. However, it will not foster serious alternative politics until such time as the Communist Party is in serious trouble. This is because there are overwhelming disincentives to bad behaviour and a general lack of interest in anti-government activities. In November 1998, a businessman, Lin Hai, was charged with inciting subversion against the power of the state. He had collected and supplied thirty thousand mainland e-mail addresses to the American dissident journal Great Reference. Mr Lin was sentenced to two years imprisonment.
Faced with such trials, and the knowledge that use of the Internet could be monitored, few are likely to cross that delicate line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour. Far more importantly, there is little popular appetite for actively opposing the government, or the party that still runs it. Intellectual dissent is also almost entirely absent, which means there is no university-bred Internet opposition.
The reason for this is simple: the government is not all that bad. Despite its dubious human rights record, it has delivered the economic goods and maintained public order. This matters a great deal since it affects the majority of lives. The government is not perfect, but there is no groundswell of opposition, however much most people wonder what on earth Marxism has to do with their daily lives.
Containing the low-level dissatisfaction that dares not speak its name is therefore the art of maintaining political stability. Only when the Communist Party becomes vulnerable to organised opposition and vocal public criticism, could the facilities of cyberspace become a useful catalyst for political change. And then it is only a tool of protest; it can not construct the institutions of democratic government, and certainly does not guarantee good governance even when these institutions are built.
Yet, even the protest role of the Internet is likely to be limited. The prime threat to the current order is disgruntled unemployed industrial workers, and, as they are laid off in their thousands, they are going to remain unwired and probably unorganised. If their protests are co-ordinated with a revived, thinking liberal movement, which knows how to communicate and foster support through the Internet, then it will be time for the Party to go and meet its founder. But it is a big if, and it is certainly a long way off.
The rules that have been put in place mean that cyberspace presents no new threat to the current order. And the bet the authorities are making is that if they get the economy wrong, the Party is doomed anyway, whatever the relative merits of the pen and networked computer.
Stephen Green is an Associate Fellow of Chatham House and a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics.
Taiwan: Strait Choice, by Graham Hutchings
‘After the successful resolution of the Hong Kong and Macau issues, people are naturally turning their eyes beyond the Taiwan Strait — where lies the final leg of China’s reunification march.’ That was the view of China’s official Xinhua News Agency in December as officials hauled down the Portuguese flag over the first — and last — European colony in East Asia, and China declared Macau the second of its Special Administrative Regions after Hong Kong. In case the message should be lost on ‘Taiwan compatriots’, the agency added, ‘Chinese leaders have said on many occasions that settlement of the Taiwan question cannot be delayed indefinitely. With Macau’s return to the Motherland, the Taiwan issue is urgently placed before the entire Chinese people.’Taiwan, or the Republic of China on Taiwan as it prefers to be known, is indeed the last remaining territory severed from China in the nineteenth century yet still outside the control of the People’s Republic — the entity all but about thirty countries regard as the sole legitimate government of China. In this context, the idea that the recovery of Hong Kong in 1997 and Macau last year under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle has paved the way for complete reunification on Beijing’s terms, has a certain logic.
Graham Hutchings was China Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph from 1987-1998, based in Beijing and Hong Kong. His book, Modern China: A Companion to a Rising Power will be published by Penguin this year.
Taiwan: Tense Times, by Peter Ferdinand
Taiwan has been doing well. Over the last thirteen years, it has been transformed, and now enjoys a per capita standard of living that is fourth in East Asia after Japan, Singapore and Hong Kong. Whereas in 1988, it was only just beginning to emerge from decades of authoritarian rule, it is now one of most vibrant democracies in the region. Whilst internationally, it has not achieved the goal of returning to the UN or any of its agencies, it is on the threshold of admission to the World Trade Organization. Yet there is every indication that this month’s presidential elections will be the most closely contested ever. The outcome may strongly affect relations across the Taiwan Straits. At worst, this dispute may provoke a confrontation between the United States and Beijing. Whatever happens, there will be a major impact on regional security.
Since the last presidential elections in 1996, the economy has continued its healthy growth, despite the regional financial crisis and despite — or perhaps because of — the moderate devaluation of the currency in autumn 1998. Overall growth last year was around 5.4 percent, despite the devastating earthquake that hit the Taichung region. This year, the government target is 6.1 percent growth. At over $100 billion, Taiwan has the third largest foreign exchange reserves in the world, after Japan and the People’s Republic of China (PRC).
Peter Ferdinand is Director of the Centre for Studies in Democratisation, University of Warwick, and former Head of the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House.
Saudi Arabian Youth: Children of Oil, by Mai Yamani
Who will run Saudi Arabia — the world’s biggest oil producer — once the current generation hands over? What are the attitudes of young people in a society where they are in the majority? Mai Yamani reflects on the results of her two-year study. Hundreds of interviews have been distilled into composite characters, three of which are presented here.
Saudi Arabia sits on at least a quarter of the world’s proven oil reserves and is the largest single oil exporter. The world energy sector has seen huge transformations during the last decade with oil conglomerates becoming more powerful in setting future energy trends. Individual governments have lost some of their power to price oil, and become susceptible to international market forces. Saudi Arabia relies heavily on oil and its income has fluctuated with global developments. We cannot know what this means for the internal and external security of this giant energy producing country unless we understand the thinking of those who will be the decision-makers in the 21st century.
Dr Mai Yamani is a Research Fellow of the Middle East Programme at Chatham House.
Cuba: Freedom’s Charm, by Brigitte Granville
Development as freedom — these three words — the title of Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen’s book — kept coming back to me as I was listening to the opening remarks of the second international meeting of economists on globalisation and development problems in Cuba at the end of January. There were four opening addresses, and to my surprise, all were about six year old Elian Gonzalez and the ‘imperialist’ ultra-right country — the United States — which prevented his return home. There was a mixture of propaganda and real concern for the boy’s well-being.
Little Elian is a superb present to the regime, I judged from watching Fidel Castro listening to these interventions. Demonstrating for Elian does not feed the eleven million Cubans, but it does divert public opinion from the regime’s failures. It also provides a unique opportunity to crack down on opponents — so-called counter-revolutionaries.
Brigitte Granville is Head of the International Economics Programme at Chatham House.
Cities: Urban Futures, by Hugh Wenban-Smith
Urbanisation will be one of the big issues of the new millennium. According to UN estimates, half the world’s population will soon live in cities. Cities are at a cross-roads. Will they be able to capitalise on their strengths — many-layered opportunities for economic and social contact, accessible leisure and cultural facilities, dense networks — leading to an urban renaissance; or will suburbanisation intensify, becoming sprawl, because the disadvantages of city life outweigh the benefits? How can cities reconcile economic vigour with sustainability? What will be the impact of new technology? What should be the role of governance? What do cities need to do to succeed and prosper in a globally competitive world of increasingly footloose industries and individuals?
Hugh Wenban-Smith, a former Director on the transport side of the British Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, has coordinated a project based at Chatham House to develop scenarios for cities in 2020.