Teaching Comparative

Be careful what you wish for

They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.

Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.

That’s when the party realized it had a problem.

The authorities moved quickly to crush the efforts of the young activists, detaining several dozen of them and scrubbing the internet of their calls for justice — but not before their example became a rallying cry for young people across the country unhappy with growing inequality, corruption and materialism in Chinese society.

“You are the backbone of the working class!” the protesters chanted at one rally, addressing workers at an equipment factory. “We share your honor and your disgrace!”

Protests are common in China, especially by workers who have nowhere else to turn in a nation without independent unions, courts or news media. But the demonstrations in Huizhou were unusual because they were organized by students and recent graduates from some of the country’s top universities, who have generally stayed off the streets since the 1989 pro-democracy movement that ended in bloodshed outside Tiananmen Square.

In the decades since that massacre, university students have generally helped advance the party’s economic and political agenda, focusing on jobs, homes and other aspects of material well-being while supporting authoritarian rule, or at least eschewing politics. As economic growth has slowed, party officials have grown more nervous about Western influences on the nation’s youth, who are more worldly and digitally connected than ever before.

But the Huizhou activists represent a threat the authorities did not expect.

Carrying portraits of Mao and singing socialist anthems, they espoused the very ideals that the government fed them for years in mandatory ideological classes, voicing grievances about issues like poverty, worker rights and gender equality — some of communism’s core concerns…

Zhang Shengye, union organizer

Since President Xi took power in 2012, the party has sought to restrict the use of Western textbooks and stop the spread of “Western values” on campus, referring to ideas about rule of law and democracy that could undermine its hold on power.

At the same time, Mr. Xi has demanded that universities expand their teachings on Mao and Marx…

But some in the party seem uneasy about the proliferation of these groups, apparently worried that their calls for greater economic equality and worker rights could undermine China’s modern-day embrace of capitalist markets.

While only a small minority of students are involved, they represent a leftist critique of Chinese society that seems to be gaining traction on college campuses, partly because the authorities have been more hesitant to suppress it than other political discussion…

Younger Chinese are often described as apathetic, selfish and obsessed with money. But Eric Fish, a writer who has studied Chinese millennials, said that the generation born after the Tiananmen Square massacre lacks the instinctive fear of authority of older generations…

Labels: China, cleavage, communism, ideology, participation, political culture, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Overwhelming detail on Chinese election

In about one year, 2,287 delegates have been elected to attend the upcoming 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC)…

The elections started in November 2016 after the CPC Central Committee stated the quota of delegates, their qualifications and the election procedure.

According to requirements, nominees must be highly qualified politically and ideologically, have good work and life styles, be competent in discussing state affairs, and have been successful in their work…

Party committees at various levels encouraged wider participation of grassroots-level CPC members in the nomination process.

Besides media coverage, lectures, and leaflets, they also used video connections, text messages, messages on instant messaging service WeChat, and telephone talks to include more Party members into the process.

Those in remote regions such as Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region even took mobile ballot boxes to towns and villages for voters.

All grassroots-level Party committees were included, with 99.2 percent of Party members participating…

The electoral units then conducted thorough investigations of nominees, listening to the opinions of both their supervisors and the public.

After passing the investigations, the delegates, elected from across the country when local Party committees held their congresses this year, will need to pass a further check to get final approval to attend the congress…

… 771 delegates are from frontline production and manufacturing, including workers, farmers, and technicians, accounting for 33.7 percent of the total, up by 3.2 percentage points from five years ago.

These delegates not only come from traditional industries like manufacturing, transportation, steel and coal, but also from sectors such as finance, the Internet, and social organizations.

The representation of female CPC members and members from ethnic minority groups is also rising, reaching 24.1 percent and 11.5 percent of the total respectively.

The average age of the delegates is 51.8, about 0.2 year younger compared with the 18th CPC National Congress, and about 70.6 percent of them are under the age of 55.

Labels: China, Communist Party, elections, participation

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Best governed countries

The Legatum Institute, a policy research group, has released its annual "Global Prosperity Index," a major survey that ranks countries based on factors including national wealth, education levels, and safety.

One key factor the survey considers is governance, which is broken down into three categories: effective governance, democracy and political participation, and the rule of law. Legatum measured these variables by considering things like voter turnout, legislative independence, and the number of women in parliament.

While European countries dominate the list, there is also room for a handful of countries on the other side of the Atlantic… [As I look at this list, Japan [#17] is the only really non-European country.]

• Japan, number 17 this year
• Belgium
• Austria
• Ireland
• Australia
• Iceland
• United Kingdom
• Germany
• Canada
• Luxembourg
• Denmark
• Switzerland
• Sweden
• Netherlands
• Norway
• New Zealand

and the top ranked country:

• Finland

Labels: concepts, governance, participation, rule of law

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Dancing or pledging?

The 12 “core socialist values” are memorized by schoolchildren, featured in college entrance exams, printed on stamps and lanterns, and splashed on walls across China. Now they have made their way into 20 song-and-dance routines… to promote to the country’s millions of “square dancers,” the mostly middle-aged and older women who gather in public squares to perform in unison.

At a news conference kicking off the campaign on Tuesday, a dozen women in white pants and chartreuse shirts bounced and twirled to the lyrics of one of the songs: “Freedom, equality, helping one another! Patriotism, dedication, everyone loves it!”

Freedom, equality, patriotism and dedication are four of the values enshrined in 2012 at the 18th Communist Party Congress. The other values in the set of 12, which are written using 24 Chinese characters, are prosperity, democracy, civility, harmony, justice, rule of law, integrity and friendship…

Tang Zuobin, an official at the Hunan Culture Department, said in a telephone interview on Thursday that the province was preparing 10,000 textbooks accompanied with videos of the dances for distribution across China…

Mr. Tang said that the popularity of square dancing made it an ideal vehicle for the propagation of the core socialist values.

But not everyone in China has embraced the idea of either square dancing or the core socialist values.

There have long been complaints in China about square-dance music blaring near people’s homes…

Many other online commenters have mocked the routines as a form of “loyalty dance,” performed during the Cultural Revolution to show fealty to Mao Zedong…

Labels: China, participation, political culture, political values

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Silenced majority?

In the little shade provided by Tehran’s Freedom Tower, a group of about 200 Iranian hard-liners... sat in the searing heat Tuesday on blue plastic chairs next to blaring loudspeakers.

Speakers railed against the devil, a.k.a. the United States, and its “oppressive” actions... They called for a “good nuclear deal” in the negotiations this week in Vienna, meaning one with few, or preferably no, Iranian compromises…

If the long discussion over Iran’s nuclear program and a potential lifting of sanctions illustrates anything in Iran, it is the growing divide between those seeking desperately to hold on to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and those with the desire to move on, at least a bit…

In the distance Ali, 35, revved his 250-cc Honda motorcycle, shaking his head. The reality of those demonstrating was completely different from the one he lived in, he said.

A factory worker, he said he had increasing trouble making ends meet, even working a double shift. “I do not care about nuclear energy. These people do not represent me,” he said, pointing at the rally far off across the square. “They are 200 out of 12 million.”

Ali, who asked that his last name be withheld to avoid retribution, said there were many more like him. “I want a normal life,” he said, driving off into the traffic.

Few Iranians are as outspoken. Yet, most urban Iranians, forbidden to organize or hold demonstrations, want no part of confrontational policies, at home or abroad, asking instead for a more relaxed atmosphere, socially and politically.

In the privacy of their own homes, they have kept up with changing times. Statistics show that they divorce more frequently, have fewer children, connect to the Internet, watch satellite television and sometimes even spend a vacation on the beaches of Turkey or Dubai.

They seem to vastly outnumber the hard-liners, though it is hard to know by how much. Since the uprising in 2009, after disputed elections, when millions took to the streets, state television has shown them only when they confirm their love for the country, or when they party on the streets to celebrate a volleyball or soccer victory.

“There is a sea of invisible people out there who seem voiceless, but they strongly yearn for a deal,” said Saeed Laylaz, an economist and a political activist…

In Iran’s news media the debate is stilted, appearing only along the lines of political affiliations, with those in favor of a deal treading far more carefully than the critics.

On Tuesday, the mouthpiece of Iran’s hard-liners, the Kayhan newspaper, was blunt: There will be no nuclear deal, the editor in chief, Hussein Shariatmadari, wrote. “Like in the past 12 years of negotiations it will fail again in the final phase,” he predicted…

Labels: cleavages, Iran, participation, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:30 AM 0 comments

Too much participation

TRAVELING in Europe last week, it seemed as if every other conversation ended with some form of this question: Why does it feel like so few leaders are capable of inspiring their people to meet the challenges of our day? There are many explanations for this global leadership deficit, but I’d focus on two: one generational, one technological.

Let’s start with the technological…

The wiring of the world through social media and Web-enabled cellphones is changing the nature of conversations between leaders and the led everywhere. We’re going from largely one-way conversations — top-down — to overwhelmingly two-way conversations — bottom-up and top-down. This has many upsides: more participation, more innovation and more transparency. But can there be such a thing as too much participation — leaders listening to so many voices all the time and tracking the trends that they become prisoners of them?

This sentence jumped out from a Politico piece on Wednesday: “The Obama and Romney campaigns spend all day strafing each other on Twitter, all while decrying the campaign’s lack of serious ideas for a serious time. Yet at most junctures when they’ve had the opportunity to go big, they’ve chosen to go small.”

Indeed, I heard a new word in London last week: “Popularism.” It’s the über-ideology of our day. Read the polls, track the blogs, tally the Twitter feeds and Facebook postings and go precisely where the people are, not where you think they need to go. If everyone is “following,” who is leading?

And then there is the exposure factor. Anyone with a cellphone today is paparazzi; anyone with a Twitter account is a reporter; anyone with YouTube access is a filmmaker… And, if you’re truly a public figure — a politician — the scrutiny can become so unpleasant that public life becomes something to be avoided at all costs…

As for the generational shift, we’ve gone from a Greatest Generation that believed in save and invest for the future to a Baby Boomer generation that believed in borrow and spend for today…

When you have technologies that promote quick short-term responses and judgments, and when you have a generation that has grown used to short-term gratification — but you have problems whose solutions require long, hard journeys, like today’s global credit crisis or jobs shortage or the need to rebuild Arab countries from the ground up — you have a real mismatch and leadership challenge…

Labels: concepts, democratization, leadership, participation

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:00 AM 0 comments

Women in Nigerian politics

There has been a long standing cry for Nigerian women in politics to assume more active and participatory roles…

The Beijing conference of 1995 recommended 35% allocation for women in political positions, power and decision making but that has not been the case in Nigeria where women can barely boast of 5 percent. It is not as if the women are not trying or that they are not capable, but it is just that they are not able to fit into the political system practiced in Nigeria where violence, rigging and party politics do not encourage women to participate…

The patriarchal nature of Nigerian politics where men are always leading and women following has relegated the participation and success of the women to the background, preferring to acknowledge the woman as the backbone behind the success of the man rather than ascribe the success to a woman's' ability…

Women in the north where disenfranchised in 1957 by the Northern opposition on religious grounds, their franchise was re-imposed in 1976, but this setback shouldn't have retarded the progress of the women as it has done, as women have never been legally disenfranchised from holding high political offices, yet, women have made very limited political influence since the nation's independence and democratic rule…

In a paper delivered by… Joy Ngozi Ezeilo at the International Republican Institute (IRI), Women's Conference in Abuja, she said "women in the main are disillusioned with politics and are indifferent to the current trend of events going on around them. There is evidence that even educated women continue to have less interest in political matters and where the interest is shown, women mainly pursue different political goals"…

Community organizations such as, political parties, trade unions, military etcetera are all entities that have been created as sacrosanct for men…

Religious restraints have also been among the many retardations of women political participation in Nigeria…

Political godfatherism has also militated against the participation of women in politics…

Political gangsterism (thuggery, Kidnappings) has not much helped the female politicians, referring to the do or die method of Nigerian politics…

Ezeilo… advocated for political party quotas and other forms of affirmative action to mainstream women in the party structure and leadership, to eliminate violence and engage with traditional and religious institutions opposed to women leadership, enhance women's capacity and mentoring for female political aspirants.

She also recommended constitutional and legal reforms, launching of a women political support fund…

Labels: gender, Nigeria, participation, political culture, women

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:42 AM 1 comments

Voter registration in Nigeria

After almost three weeks of fits and starts, Nigeria's election commission, INEC completed a voter registration exercise. The commission sought to register 70 million citizens and managed to register almost 64 million…

INEC and all other contributing parties must be commended for getting so many Nigerians to register. The reality is that conditions for the exercise were far from ideal in several parts of the country…

INEC has announced that citizens will have between February 14th and the 18th to verify their information on the register. That gives only four days for this to be accomplished. That is a short amount of time for even half of the 64 million voters to check the register.

If the register can be verified using the Internet, that will make it easy for those with Internet access to check that their information on the register is correct. For the majority of Nigerians who do not have access to the Internet, they will be forced to endure lines and possibly ineffective procedures. Still, for those truly committed to participating in the upcoming polls, that will be but a small price to pay. Yet it would be foolhardy for election officials to not make the process as smooth as possible…

This leaves INEC very little time to ensure free and fair elections. One can only hope that the commission will achieve it's mandate. After the hiccups of the last few weeks and given the realities of the country, anything can happen. Still, all hands must be on deck to help create a good ending. Hopefully, it will not include any extension or postponement of the elections.

See also: Official: More than 63M Nigerians register to vote

Labels: elections, Nigeria, participation

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:07 AM 0 comments

Quasi Quango?

The Department of Health is putting the fast food companies McDonald's and KFC and processed food and drink manufacturers such as PepsiCo, Kellogg's, Unilever, Mars and Diageo at the heart of writing government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease, the Guardian has learned.

In an overhaul of public health… health secretary Andrew Lansley has set up five "responsibility deal" networks with business, co-chaired by ministers, to come up with policies. Some of these are expected to be used in the public health white paper due in the next month.

The groups are dominated by food and alcohol industry members, who have been invited to suggest measures to tackle public health crises. Working alongside them are public interest health and consumer groups including Which?, Cancer Research UK and the Faculty of Public Health…

In early meetings, these commercial partners have been invited to draft priorities and identify barriers, such as EU legislation, that they would like removed. They have been assured by Lansley that he wants to explore voluntary not regulatory approaches…

Lansley's public health reforms are seen as a test case for wider Conservative policies on replacing state intervention with private and corporate action...

Responding to criticism that industry was too prominent in the plans, the Department of Health said: "We are constantly in touch with expert bodies, including those in the public health field, to help inform all our work. For the forthcoming public health white paper we've engaged a wide range of people, as we are also doing to help us develop the responsibility deal drawn from business, the voluntary sector, other non-governmental organisations, local government, as well as public health bodies. A diverse range of experts are also involved."...

Labels: governance, participation, politics, UK

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:12 AM 0 comments

Not too scared to vote

Campaign offices had been bombed, candidates had been threatened and killed, and dead bodies were even hung from bridges on the morning of the polling.

But Mexico’s voters still turned out in relatively large numbers to choose new governors, mayors and state representatives over the weekend and managed to send an inspiring message amid all the violence: Mexico’s democracy, flawed as it may be, endures.

One of the nation’s most powerful factions — the country’s drug lords — had attempted to hijack the process. Through bloodshed, they managed to keep voter turnout down in some states and scare off many poll workers, prompting one former president of the Federal Election Institute, Luis Carlos Ugalde, to lament that this was the first Mexican election in which drug dealers played a visible role in interrupting the process.

But the polling went on and the results were accepted, with voters appearing to steer away from candidates with perceived links to traffickers…

Political analysts had predicted a huge victory for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the P.R.I., which ruled Mexico for 71 years before voters broke its grip on the country’s politics a decade ago. And the P.R.I. did take 9 of the 12 governorships that were up for grabs on Sunday…

The P.R.I. — a party that represented autocratic rule and is attempting to remake itself as an efficient pragmatic one — hung onto six states and gained three more…

But the P.R.I. was also handed its hat in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, where its rule has been as sure a thing as the market opening for business…

“Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Sunday’s elections is that democracy is surprisingly healthy in Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington…

“Mexico remains an imperfect democracy, like all, but there do appear to be some mechanisms of accountability at work that allowed these elections to be meaningful referenda on local political performance,” Mr. Selee said...

Labels: elections, Mexico, participation, parties

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:52 AM 0 comments

Workers strike in China

AS CHINESE strikes go, the one that crippled Honda’s car production in late May was relatively discreet: no picketing, no clashes with police, little sign of copycat action. But it was significant. The stoppage was one of the biggest and longest-running in an enterprise with foreign investors. And it has exposed worrying problems for the government and factory owners in China’s industrial heartland…

Workers have been emboldened by a law introduced in January 2008 aimed at strengthening their contractual rights. The global economic downturn kept wages down and increased workers’ grievances…

Several workers complained that despite paying membership dues of around 10 yuan ($1.50) a month, they had received virtually nothing from the union, least of all help negotiating with managers. But their ability to keep up their strike for nearly two weeks seems to have rattled the government. Normally worker protests dissipate rapidly, with unions usually taking the side of managers…

Wen Yunchao, a prominent blogger in Guangdong, says [that]… at most factories, managers and their government backers will retain the upper hand. The Honda workers are unusual, he says, because many of them are “interns” sent by technical colleges. Their bonding as fellow students means they can organise themselves more easily than can workers who are usually migrants from different rural areas...

China has been hit with a recent wave of labor unrest, including strikes and partial shutdowns of factories, underscoring what experts call one of the most dramatic effects of three decades of startling growth: A seemingly endless supply of cheap labor is drying up, and workers are no longer willing to endure sweatshop-like conditions.

China's export-driven growth has long been linked to its abundance of workers -- mostly migrants from the impoverished countryside who jumped at the chance to escape a hardscrabble rural life to toil long hours in factories for meager wages.

If they were unhappy, they rarely expressed it through action, and if they did, they were quickly fired and replaced from among the hundreds of others waiting outside the factory gates.

Now all of that has started to change…

The recent cases -- particularly the Honda strike -- are also noteworthy for receiving extensive coverage in the Chinese media. While labor unrest has become increasingly common across China in the past two years, experts said, most incidents typically go unreported…

In mid-2008, China introduced a labor law that allows workers with grievances to file complaints and opens a new mechanism for mediation. Publication of the law probably made workers more aware of their rights, experts said.

Since the law went into effect, the number of known complaints has doubled to about 700,000, and they "are going up even faster now," said Mary Gallagher of the University of Michigan, an expert on Chinese labor…

The labor unrest poses an acute challenge to China's ruling Communist Party and a dilemma for the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. That group, China's only officially sanctioned union, is supposed to represent workers but in practice has worked more as a partner with the government to enforce labor discipline and keep production high.

Zhang Jianguo, a top official with the federation, said the reason for the current unrest is the huge income disparity in China. He said the portion of the country's gross domestic product that has gone to wages has declined by almost 20 percent in the past two decades.

But some say China's official union is itself part of the problem. "The labor union should promote fairness in society instead of promoting economic development," said Lin Yanling, a professor at the China Institute of Industrial Relations. "But in China, the labor union doesn't do that."

After years of focusing on luring foreign investment, Chinese government officials are now endorsing efforts to improve conditions for workers and raise salaries. The government hopes the changes will ease a widening income gap between the rich and the poor and prevent social unrest over soaring food and housing prices…

Economists say that China’s labor force is growing increasingly bold and that over the last year, periodic strikes in southern China — some supposedly involving global companies — have been resolved quietly or not reported in the media...

Striking workers at a Honda auto parts plant here are demanding the right to form their own labor union, something officially forbidden in China, and held a protest march Friday morning.

Meanwhile, other scattered strikes have begun to ripple into Chinese provinces previously untouched by the labor unrest…

The Chinese government has not allowed unions with full legal independence from the national, state-controlled union. But the government has occasionally finessed the issue by letting workers choose their factories’ representatives of the national union, or by allowing the creation of “employee welfare committees” in parallel with the official local units, said Mary E. Gallagher, a China labor specialist at the University of Michigan...

Labels: China, civil society, dissent, economics, participation

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:47 AM 0 comments

The model worker program continues

A rally honoring Chinese national labor heroes and advanced workers opened at 10 a.m. Tuesday in Beijing, with attendance of the country's top leaders.

President Hu Jintao attended the rally, along with other Chinese leaders including Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin, Li Changchun, Xi Jinping, Li Keqiang, He Guoqiang and Zhou Yongkang.

The rally is to honor 2,985 outstanding workers from grass-roots levels and at the forefront of specific industries.

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday called for more efforts to promote the "model worker spirit" nationwide to further advance social and economic development…

Hu, also general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, praised the model workers and advanced workers for their "outstanding contributions in pushing forward the country's social and economic advancement."

"They are the outstanding representatives of hundreds of millions of working people in China who have made noticeable efforts to help build a well-off society in an all-round way," Hu said...

Labels: China, participation, policy

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:41 AM 0 comments

History and analysis of Nigerian politics

How did we get here? In 1999, after years of military rule which followed Nigeria’s independence from Britain and failed experiments in democracy, the country finally embraced civilian rule and the democratic process. However, the self-serving attitude and actions of a supposedly democratic leadership, which often seems to be no different from that of the former military rulers, continues to prohibit Nigerians from fully reaping the fruits of democracy and from having the country run at full capacity.

Let’s be clear what “not running at full capacity” means. It means that Nigerians are now used to power outages that can last months. They have become used to sitting for hours in traffic on roads with gigantic pot holes and no road signs in which innumerable vehicles, people and perhaps even a random animal jostle for space. They have become used to the corruption that has become a part of the fabric of everyday life, and the incredible gap between the poor—who can live on top of each other in shacks—and the rich—who live close to them in compounds and mansions. They have become used to substandard education and universities that spend half of the year on strike. They’ve become used to their leaders enriching themselves out of the pockets of the people who they are supposed to serve...

If there is indeed anything to be gained from what has been going on, it is that Yar’Adua’s absence has sparked an outrage in Nigerians. For the first time in years, people have not just been talking about what’s going on, but taking action. Protests and newspaper articles are part of that. Many organizations dedicated to change have sprung up, including the nonprofit Nigeria Leadership Initiative (NLI), of which I am a member. NLI is made up of Nigerians, both inside and outside of Nigeria, who are dedicated to transforming leadership and values for the benefit of the Nigerian society...

Labels: leadership, Nigeria, participation, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:31 AM 0 comments

The Un-legislature?

YAO LIFA, a primary schoolteacher who in 1998 became one of the first legislators in China to be elected without the backing of the Communist Party, is wearily resigned to frequent summons by the police. As China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC) [opens its annual session] jittery authorities are stepping up surveillance of Mr Yao and others they fear might use the occasion to air grievances about the party’s grip…

As usual, China is preparing for the... parliamentary meeting with a propaganda blitz about the session’s importance as a conduit for public opinion. Online opinion polls seek votes on the topics of most interest at the meeting. Corruption, income disparities and soaring house prices rate highly. But internal directives suggest that in recent years the party has been keeping tight control on the legislature in an effort to minimise embarrassment to the party leadership…

In 2008 leaders met party officials in the NPC to stress the importance of securing resounding endorsements for the party’s choices for top national posts. This included the re-election of President Hu Jintao and the prime minister, Wen Jiabao. Apparently to prevent critical comments from leaking to the press, the internal bulletins circulated among the delegations to keep them informed of each others’ discussions were banned from mentioning what delegates said about official appointments. Such comments were to be relayed directly to the party leadership. Until the voting, even the names of the officials up for election were to be kept secret. Since 2007 each delegation has had to name a secrecy officer to enforce such rules. That year foreign journalists were barred from any meeting taking place next to a room being visited by a senior leader. The party did not want leaders buttonholed...

Labels: China, legislature, participation, parties

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:39 AM 0 comments

NPC meets

If Chinese media reports are correct, the standing committee of China’s national legislature will vote on changes to the state secrecy law at its annual meeting, which began Friday in Beijing. The revisions have been in the works for 14 years.

A vote would be news to Fang Qing, one of 2,987 delegates to the legislature, called the National People’s Congress. As of Tuesday night, Ms. Fang, a 40-year-old primary school teacher named in 2008 to help represent Zhejiang Province, had yet to be informed of the agenda for the nine-day session.

“You shouldn’t ask me this kind of question, it’s too serious,” she said when queried in a telephone interview about what votes were on the agenda. “You should interview the person in charge.”…

This year’s session also has little on the agenda, pre-decided or not, that seems likely to capture people’s attention. Besides the usual votes approving the government’s work, the biggest item may be an amendment to balance the ratio of urban to rural lawmakers. Political analysts say that, with a turnover of top party leadership just two years away, top officials are not pressing a major slate of reforms...

Despite the lack of drama, the meetings of the National People’s Congress, and a 2,252-member advisory body called the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, are the political event of the year. More than 3,200 journalists have registered to cover the sessions, including 800 from foreign media outlets, according to the government...

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao of China said Friday that the nation would expand social spending, bolster lending, curb inflation and meet its traditional 8 percent economic growth target in 2010, but he cautioned that China still confronted “a very complex situation” in the wake of the global financial crisis.

Delivering his annual report to China’s unelected legislature, the National People’s Congress, Mr. Wen said that “destabilizing factors and uncertainties” in the world economy posed a challenge to China’s continued growth. But he effectively said that China’s plan to slowly ease away from last year’s enormous economic stimulus program, which spared China the worst of the recession, would continue unchanged…

But Mr. Wen’s address also referred to problems in China’s booming economy that some experts say could hamstring future growth if they are not addressed quickly…

China’s official military budget will rise by just 7.5 percent in 2010, a government spokesman said Thursday, a rate that is about half the official increase in recent years and the first to fall below 10 percent since 1989...

Labels: China, legislature, participation

posted by Ken Wedding @ 7:26 AM 0 comments

Big shots meet in China

The Third Session of the 11th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), the country's top political advisory body, opened in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing Wednesday.

More than 2,000 CPPCC National Committee members, from across the country, will discuss major issues concerning the nation's development during the annual meeting scheduled to conclude on March 13…

Founded in 1949, the CPPCC consists of elite members of the Chinese society who are willing to serve the think tank for the government and for the country's legislative and judicial organs.

Labels: China, leadership, participation, regime

posted by Ken Wedding @ 8:31 AM 0 comments

Quiet protest

Early yesterday morning, Joseph Danley Obiechie, dressed in milk suit and chocolate shirt filled the trunk of his grey Hummer jeep with bottles of water and two protest placards and drove off from his Maitama office to the National Assembly complex at the Three Arms Zone.

At the Assembly’s major entrance on Hospital Street, he parked his vehicle off the road, took... his placards which were connected with strings to form a vest and headed for the security check point at the entrance.

After what seemed like a clearance, he then wore his vest of placards and began a solitary protest that lasted for the rest of the day at a popular spot for protesters in front of the Assembly.

One of the placards, which covered his front, read, “We Can See Jonathan.” This was his protest point. Mr. Joseph wanted everybody to read his message, especially the lawmakers entering the National Assembly. Almost everybody entering the National Assembly through that entrance could notice him and the short message he wore on his dress...

Labels: leadership, Nigeria, participation, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:42 AM 0 comments

Creating a party system

For a few days this month, Moscow political circles were transfixed by a rather exotic spectacle: the leader of an opposition party was criticizing Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.

This was not just any leader. It was Sergei M. Mironov, whose career in the opposition has been distinguished by passionate loyalty to Mr. Putin…

Many observers long ago wrote off A Just Russia as “pocket opposition,” devised to give the appearance of political competition where none existed. So it came as a surprise when Mr. Mironov, who Mr. Putin installed as speaker of the upper house of Parliament, told the television talk show host Vladimir V. Pozner that it was “outdated information to say that we, and personally I, have supported Vladimir Putin in everything,” noting that the party members “categorically opposed” Mr. Putin’s budget...

In an interview, Mr. Mironov was cheerful about the fallout from his remarks about Mr. Putin, saying that the feud with United Russia had brought him more fan mail than at any other point in his career…

The hard reality is that A Just Russia, envisioned by its founders as a left-wing alternative to United Russia, has never gained much traction with voters, and risks dropping below the 7 percent level needed for representation in Parliament...

Labels: participation, parties, politics, Russia

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:54 AM 0 comments

Mexican reform on the WWW

The Ministry of Government has launched a new website, Reforma Política 2010, to lay out the government’s proposals for political reform. The site includes space for citizen comment, a library of various useful documents on political reform, information on public forums on the reform, and a variety of other materials.

Labels: Mexico, participation, transparency

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:51 AM 0 comments

Generations of protest

Six months on from what the defeated candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi calls a "coup d'etat" in which Khamenei reinstalled the hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, this marathon confrontation is far from over. "Iran has totally changed since June," said Poorya Farmarzi, a student. "Now you can smell blood when you go out, you can smell teargas, you can smell injustice. This won't end soon."...

Taboos that held sway for three decades have been smashed: public attacks on Khamenei – the Vali al-Faqih, or supreme jurist, at the apex of Iran's theocratic system – have become normal...

For one middle-class Tehrani who grew up during the revolution, much of this is about young Iranians asserting themselves, as they did in extraordinary scenes of exuberance and hope before the "stolen" election. "What a lot of people are asking for is what their parents asked for 30 years ago. The difference is that their parents trusted their elders and the keepers of the revolutionary faith to do the right thing. Young people don't have that trust any more."...

Karim Sadjapour, [an] Iran expert, calls it "a fool's errand" to try to predict how this will all play out...

[The] creeping radicalization has underscored the rift within Iran’s opposition movement, analysts say, and poses a problem for its leaders, including Mr. Moussavi and the reformist cleric Mehdi Karroubi.

“The longer this goes on, the more difficult will it be for the likes of Moussavi and Karroubi to sustain their current position,” said Ray Takeyh, an Iran expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who has worked for the State Department. “They have to at some point opt for regime survival or become the leaders of an opposition movement calling for more than reform.”...

It has been a hell of a year for Iran. Just last winter the nation's elites were basking in 30 years of revolutionary triumph, launching satellites, enriching uranium, and holding neocon hawks at bay. Then, weeks of fervent presidential campaigning drew out the best and worst of Iranian society's antagonisms, culminating in a poll exactly six months ago. Overnight the revolution's orphans and cosmopolitan have-nots demanded their say...

First, the narrative of a regime death match between President Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Khamenei on one side versus Mir-Hossein Mousavi, Ayatollah Rafsanjani, and the entire Iranian nation on the other doesn't help at all. Instead, one should read the political fallout over the last six months in the terms set by Khamenei and Rafsanjani's two major Friday sermons that took place within a month after the elections. Between the speeches, the extremes of both ends of political spectrum were curbed and governing elites began to circle their wagons to preserve the system...

The losers in the trade were the northern Tehranis who supplied the bulk of the street presence after the election. But this wasn't the first time in Iranian history that group of clerics extended a hand to populist causes, reneged, and pursued their own political ambitions. There was no reason to expect otherwise this time around...

The political capital released in the past six months is now being captured by mainstream conservative elites such as the Larijani brothers and Ghalibaf as well as symbolic figures such as MP Ali Motahhari and Ayatollah Shirazi who aim to minimise the damage done to the system by the current president. Parliament and the mosque then, not the presidential palace or Tehran University, are the places to read Iran's affairs and the supreme leader's political pulse.

What is being fought for today in Iran is the preservation a small space for political dissent and the prevention of the emergence of a militarised one-party system. This is a far cry from the "regime in its last throes" image we get in the mainstream press...

Thousands of Iranian government supporters staged rallies yesterday to denounce opposition students who burned photos of the country’s supreme leader in protests this week...

The demonstrations marked the first response by Iran’s clerical leadership and its supporters to the taboo-shattering actions of their opponents on Monday, when tens of thousands of students protested at universities around Iran...

Labels: cleavages, history, Iran, participation, politics

posted by Ken Wedding @ 6:41 AM 0 comments