The Motion Picture Assn. of America has complained for years about strict government limits on the number of foreign films that can be shown in Chinese theaters, which in turn encourages piracy. Warner Bros., a pioneer in cineplex building in China, pulled out in 2006 when Beijing banned majority ownership of cinemas by foreign firms.
The U.S. scored a victory when the World Trade Organization ruled that China must end the government's monopoly on the distribution of imported books, movies and films by March 19. But that ruling said nothing about the film import quota, which remains intact for now.
China Tracks Foreign Journalists
Western journalists have lately been tolerated in China, if grudgingly, but the spread of revolution in the Middle East has prompted the authorities here to adopt a more familiar tack: suddenly, foreign reporters are being tracked and detained in the same manner — though hardly as roughly — as political dissidents.
On Sunday, about a dozen European and Japanese journalists in Shanghai were herded into an underground bunker-like room and kept for two hours after they sought to monitor the response to calls on an anonymous Internet site for Chinese citizens to conduct a “strolling” protest against the government outside the Peace Cinema, near Peace Square in Shanghai.
In Beijing, several plainclothes officers planted themselves on Saturday night outside the home of a Bloomberg News correspondent who was severely beaten by security officers the previous week as he sought to cover a similar Internet-inspired protest there. In a telephone interview, the correspondent said that seven officers in two separate cars had trailed him to a basketball game on Sunday, recording his trip on video the entire time.
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The intensified scrutiny came as China released budget figures showing that for the first time annual spending on law enforcement and public security would outstrip the military budget. The government said it planned to spend $95 billion on the police, state security, armed civil militia and jails, 13.8 percent more than last year. Military spending rose 12.7 percent to $91.5 billion.
The anxiety of the Chinese government was on full display on Sunday afternoon at Wangfujing, Beijing’s upscale pedestrian shopping street, and another shopping district called Xidan, both near the Forbidden City. Anonymous organizers had urged protesters to gather outside the McDonald’s on Wangfujing for a public revolt modeled after the one that toppled Tunisia’s government in January. China countered it with the kind of smothering security blanket that in many countries is reserved for visits by heads of state.
Security officers and volunteers were present every few feet on both sides of Wangfujing and on side streets. There were police officers in black uniforms; civilian volunteers wearing red armbands; men dressed as street sweepers and officers disguised in plain jackets who were easily distinguished from normal civilians by a telltale black wire running from inside the jacket to an earpiece. Many of these men had crewcuts and carried videocameras or small shoulder bags or backpacks; those with videocameras would occasionally take shots of the crowds.
Security vehicles of every stripe — squad cars, vans, unmarked buses with few windows — were parked on all corners.
Throngs of shoppers and tourists strolled the street, which is lined with luxury stores and includes a food alleyway with live scorpions squirming on a stick. The police seemed to be resorting to racial profiling in an attempt to weed out foreign journalists. While Asians appeared to encounter little or no harassment, officers flanked by burly Chinese men pulled aside white foreigners to check their passports.
Uniformed police officers stood in a line across the north entrance of Wangfujing, eyeing everyone who entered. In midafternoon, large street-cleaning vehicles rolled up and down the street, spraying water to disperse pedestrians.
Fake construction-site walls that had been erected last week outside the front entrance of McDonald’s blocked the plaza there.
Did China Just Change Its Growth Model?
“We will actively boost consumer demand,” said Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Saturday when he gave his Work Report—often described as China’s State of the Union address—at the National People’s Congress annual meeting in Beijing. “We will continue to increase government spending used to help expand consumption, and increase subsidies to low-income urban residents and farmers.”
And to drive home the point, Zhang Ping on Sunday said the central government “will focus on the establishment of a long-term mechanism to boost domestic demand.” The head of the National Development and Reform Commission, the Chinese cabinet’s planning agency, also said the 12th Five-Year Plan, which took effect this year, would shift the government’s efforts from creating growth to “improving people’s livelihoods.” That message was certainly in line with the thrust of the premier’s remarks yesterday.
And that’s exactly what everyone—Chinese consumers, Washington’s trade officials, and American marketers—wanted to hear. Unfortunately, we have heard this from Premier Wen and other Beijing officials before.
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“It looks great on the surface but it isn’t clear whether they have the political capital or will to push through those changes,” said Alistair Thornton of IHS Global Insight, referring to Beijing’s leaders.
Actually, it’s clear they do not. Reform during the Hu Jintao-Wen Jiabao years has shifted into reverse as the duo has gone back to policies that betray more than just a trace of Maoism. Hu and Wen have, for instance, taken steps to renationalize the economy, to increase state ownership of partially privatized enterprises, and to build up “national champions.” In short, they are abandoning Deng Xiaoping’s policy of “reform and opening up.”
Premier Wen could afford to sponsor regressive policies because, despite doing so, gross domestic product soared in recent years. Although his investment-led growth is increasingly inefficient—it now takes seven yuan of debt-fueled government spending to create one yuan of economic output—the government has enough resources to continue old policies.
A Disturbing Counterpoint To Wen Jiabao's Big Speech On Social Harmony
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