AHS Comparative Government

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwestern China is one of two Chinese administrative divisions in which Han Chinese are not the most populous ethnic group. (See blog post of 4 June 2011). In recent years, Uyghur separatist groups have attacked Chinese officials, troops and police stations in Xinjiang; in 2009, communal violence in Urumqi, Xinjiang's capital, claimed at least 197 lives. The Chinese government hopes to quiet separatist agitation in the region by promoting rapid economic development. The Economist, however, argues that promoting such growth is unlikely to prove any more successful in pacifying Xinjiang than it has proven in calming the Tibet Autonomous Region, China's other administrative division in which Han Chinese are not the biggest ethnic group:

http://www.economist.com/node/21524940

Maiduguri is a predominantly Muslim city in northeastern Nigeria. In July 2009, five days of fighting in Maiduguri between Nigerian security forces and members of Boko Haram, a violent Islamist group opposed to what it considers the immoral westernization of Nigeria, left hundreds dead and thousands displaced. At the end of the fighting, Boko Haram's founder, Mohammed Yusuf, was shot to death while in police custody.

On Christmas Eve 2010, Boko Haram detonated several bombs in the central Nigerian city of Jos (for the past decade, the site of violence between Muslim Hausa-Fulani herders and Christian Berom farmers), killing dozens and triggering a new wave of communal violence. The same night, Boko Haram attacked several churches in Maiduguri, killing six. A week later, on New Year's Eve, Boko Haram bombed an army barracks in Nigeria's capital, Abuja.

This year, Boko Haram has carried out a series of bomb attacks in Maiduguri. More than 140 Nigerians have been killed in the attacks. Boko Haram, for example, has repeatedly bombed Maiduguri bars and beer gardens in an apparent effort to discourage residents from frequenting such establishments (consumption of alcohol being forbidden in Islam).

Nigerian security forces in Maiduguri have not succeeded in stemming Boko Haram's terror campaign, and have been accused of significant crimes of their own, including murder, mayhem, rape, extortion and kidnapping. On 9 July, following a Boko Haram bomb attack, the Nigerian military's Joint Task Force allegedly went on a rampage, killing 25 people and injuring 45 others. On 23 July, following another attack, the Joint Task Force allegedly killed 23 Maiduguri residents:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-14292427

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, the five countries where it is the most dangerous to be a reporter include four of the countries that we will study in AP Comparative Government: Iran, China, Russia and Mexico. (According to the Committee, the most dangerous country in the world for journalists is Iraq).

In Iran, China and Russia, the threat to reporters comes from the government. In Iran and China, dissident journalists are routinely prosecuted and imprisoned. In Russia, 16 reporters critical of public officials have been murdered in the past decade; although almost all of the killings remain officially unsolved, some of the murders appear to have been carried out by thugs with indirect ties to Russia's Federal Security Service (the FSB).

In Mexico, the threat to reporters (and to the freedom of the press) comes from the country's drug traffickers; gangsters have targeted journalists covering the ongoing war against organized crime. In the past two months, for example, two crime reporters for the Mexican newspaper Notiver have been killed in Veracruz:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-14305364

Last fall, the editors of El Diario de Juarez responded to the second murder an El Diario journalist by publishing an editorial asking the local drug cartels to establish censorship guidelines for the newspaper to follow, so that other members of its staff would not be killed:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-11370310

Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan has appointed Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala to serve as his government's Finance Minister. Okonjo-Iweala, currently the Managing Director of the World Bank, previously served as Finance Minister between 2003 and 2006 under former President Olusegun Obasanjo. During her previous tenure as Finance Minister, Okonjo-Iweala paid down much of Nigeria's external debt and negotiated cancellation of the remainder of that debt. She also referred a number of corruption cases to Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and supported the EFCC's former Executive Chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, as he investigated and prosecuted corrupt Nigerian government officials. Indeed, many observers saw President Obasanjo's 2006 "promotion" of Okonjo-Iweala to the position of Foreign Minister as a way of ridding himself of a Finance Minister whose ministry was becoming too effective at discovering corruption among his political allies; Okonjo-Iweala resigned as Foreign Minister after only two months in that position, following President Obasanjo's decision to remove her as chief of Nigeria's Economic Intelligence Committee:

http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/opinion/2011/july/20/opinion-20-07-2011-001.html

Zhang Feng, director of the Population and Family Planning Commission in Guangdong, China's most populous province, has asked the Chinese Government to relax how the country's one-child policy is applied in Guangdong. Zhang's request is unusual in that he made it publicly; provincial and local Chinese officials generally avoid making public statements that criticize central government policy, even by implication:

http://www.economist.com/node/18988926?story_id=18988926

The scandal that began with allegations that reporters for The News of the World hacked into the phone messages of British celebrities and crime victims (see blog post of 13 July) has broadened considerably in the past week. First came allegations that reporters at The News of the World, and other Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers, bribed British policemen for information about criminal investigations. Then came revelations about the "cozy relationship" (to quote Prime Minister David Cameron) among senior (London) Metropolitan Police officials, including those responsible for investigating the phone hacking and bribery allegations, and the editors and executives of Murdoch's British publications.

The widening scandal has led to the arrest of Rebekah Brooks, the former head of the corporation that owns Murdoch's British newspapers, and a personal friend of Prime Minister Cameron. The scandal has also resulted in the resignations of Sir Paul Stephenson, the head of the Metropolitan Police, and John Yates, third in command at Scotland Yard. Two Parliamentary inquiries into the scandal began this week, amid calls for Prime Minister Cameron to explain his 2007 decision to hire former News of the World editor Andy Coulson (recently arrested in connection with the bribery allegations) as his Communications Director, and his own "cozy relationship" with Murdoch publication editors and executives:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/19/world/europe/19hacking.htm

The Russian government has announced plans to double the geographic size of Moscow, and to relocate government offices to what are now sparsely-populated areas on the city's southern and southwestern flanks. The Russian government claims that expansion of Moscow is essential to ease overcrowding in the capital, which has been growing at an estimated annual rate of 200,000 people. (During the Soviet era, internal migration was strictly controlled; Moscow developed as a densely-populated city, well-served by public transportation and surrounded by a greenbelt of farms and woodlands). Critics of the proposal claim that the planned expansion of Moscow will result in the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people and environmental degradation:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jul/14/moscow-double-size-overcrowding

One of the wealthiest men in Russia, Mikhail Prokhorov, has established a new political party, Right Cause, to compete in Russia's December parliamentary elections. Although Right Cause supports the decentralization of political power in Russia, and seeks to reign in Russia's frequently abusive police and security services, Prokhorov has taken pains to emphasize that the party is non-ideological and will not serve as a locus of opposition to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin or Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. At the same time, the party does not appear to be another in a series of parties started by Putin and Medvedev supporters to gain votes for Putin and Medvedev from Russians frustrated by the cronyism of United Russia, the main party supporting the prime minister and the president:

http://www.economist.com/node/18898276

An article in the 25 June issue of The Economist praises a series of economic reforms implemented in Iran earlier this year by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Under the reforms, the Iranian government is phasing out subsidies for food, gasoline and electricity and replacing them with cash payments to Iranian families:

http://www.economist.com/node/18867440

News Corporation is the world's second-largest media conglomerate. Its leading shareholder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer is Rupert Murdoch. In the United States, News Corp. owns Fox Broadcasting, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal; until last month, it owned MySpace. In the United Kingdom, it owns The Times and The Sun; News Corp. also owned The News of the World until it ceased publication last weekend. (News Corp. operates in the UK under a number of different corporate names; for the sake of simplicity, I'll refer to them all as News Corp.).

In 2007, two News of the World staff members went to jail for hacking into Prince William's phone mail and writing stories based on what they learned. The editor of The News of the World at the time, Andy Coulson, resigned, although he insisted that he knew nothing of the phone hacking and that it was an isolated incident. Coulson was soon hired by David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, as the Party's Communications Director. When Cameron became Prime Minister following the May 2010 British general election, Coulson became the Prime Minister's Communications Director.

By January 2011, however, it had become clear that Prince William was not the only victim of phone hacking by News of the World reporters; the other victims included film stars, football (soccer) players and politicians. The scope of the phone hacking suggested that The News of the World's editors knew that their reporters were engaged in illegal and unethical activity. Moreover, former News of the World journalists anonymously alleged that Coulson had known about the phone hacking -- and had even listened to hacked phone messages. Coulson resigned as the Prime Minister's Communications Director in January 2011, though he continued to insist that he hadn't known about the rampant phone-hacking at The News of the World.

On Monday, 4 July, lawyers for the family of a 13 year-old girl who was kidnapped and murdered in 2002 alleged that News of the World reporters had hacked into the girl's cell phone after she had been kidnapped and before her body had been found (cruelly giving her family the false hope that she was still alive). Later in the week, family members of some of the victims of the 7 July 2005 London terror bombings alleged that the cell phones of their relatives had been hacked by News of the World reporters after their relatives had been killed.

The resulting public uproar could not have come at a worse time for Murdoch's News Corp. News Corp. owns 39.1% of the shares of British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB), a British satellite broadcaster, and has been attempting for years to acquire the remaining 60.9% shares. Such a takeover requires the approval of a British government regulatory agency because of its potential adverse effect on press competition in the United Kingdom. When the scandal exploded last week, News Corp. had not received approval for the takeover of BSkyB -- although that approval was seen as likely. But the public outrage over the phone hacking allegations led to calls in the (non-News Corp. owned) press and from politicians for News Corp. to withdraw its bid for BSkyB, or for the government to block News Corp.'s takeover of BSkyB.

News Corp. tried hard to salvage its bid for BSkyB. It tried to portray itself as a responsible corporation, turning over emails to the police that apparently suggest that Coulson knew that his reporters were making payments to crooked policemen. On Friday, 8 July, Coulson and a senior reporter for the paper were arrested in connection with the allegations. Finally, News Corp. shut down The News of the World, which had been published for nearly 170 years and which remained one of Britain's most widely-read and profitable publications.

But it was too late. With the leaders of all three of Britain's major political parties calling for News Corp. to withdraw its bid for BSkyB, Murdoch was forced to back down. This morning, News Corp. formally withdrew its bid. It was a rare humiliation for Murdoch and News Corp.

The political damage to Prime Minister Cameron, however, may be greater than the damage to News Corp.'s bottom line. Cameron's decision to hire Coulson as Conservative Party Communications Director after the revelation that Prince William's phone had been hacked, and his later decision to make Coulson his government's Communications Director, certainly raise questions about his judgment:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/13/world/europe/13cameron.html?_r=1&scp=8&sq=news%20corp%20bskyb&st=cse

The 25 June issue of The Economist contains an excellent series of articles about contemporary China. The series makes a straightforward and engaging introduction to Chinese government and politics.

The first article (apart from a brief introduction) notes the growing power of "princelings" in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The CCP enjoys a monopoly on political power in China. Although the leadership of the CCP consults with people both inside and outside the Party as it develops public policy, in the end, the nine men on the Standing Committee of the CCP's Political Bureau (Politburo) make the country's most important policy decisions. They are not elected by the Chinese public, nor are they accountable for the success or failure of their policies to anyone (except each other).

The "princelings" who are rising in the Party are the sons of former CCP officials. They include Chongqing Party Leader Bo Xilai, who is expected to be named to the Politburo Standing Committee at the next Communist Party Congress (in the autumn of 2012), and Xi Jinping, currently China's Vice-President, who is expected to become General Secretary (i.e., head) of the CCP at the next Communist Party Congress and to be "elected" President of China in March 2013:

http://www.economist.com/node/18832046

The second article examines China's remarkable economic growth over the past decade. China's rapid growth, and its continued expansion during and after a global financial crisis from which more economically developed countries have yet to recover, has given China's leaders a great deal of confidence in the so-called "China model" of economic development (i.e., economic growth involving both privately-owned and government-owned businesses, but managed by a powerful government that does not have to answer to noisy constituents or well-organized interest groups). But this confidence may be misplaced; some analysts predict that the Chinese economic growth will slow down or even stall completely, leaving China a middle-income country but not a wealthy one:

http://www.economist.com/node/18832106

Under China's hukou (household registration) system, Chinese citizens in rural areas are not allowed to move into China's cities without official permission (which is difficult to obtain). Indeed, Chinese citizens who live in a particular city are not allowed to move to another city without official permission. In practice, more than 150 million people from rural China have moved into China's cities over the past 30 years; at least 10 million more rural residents arrive in China's cities ever year. Because these migrants have moved to China's cities without official permission, they lack access to many public services (notably, free education for their children). Most Chinese citizens regard the hukou system as inhumane; The Economist argues that it is also an obstacle to China's economic development:

http://www.economist.com/node/18832092

From 1949 to 1979, the Chinese government owned every economic enterprise in China, and planned almost all of China's economic production. Beginning in 1979, the Chinese government slowly liberalized the Chinese economy, selling off government-owned businesses, allowing private investors to start new enterprises (often in partnership with local government bodies) and allowing an ever-increasing share of production to be determined by market forces, rather than by planning ministry bureaucrats. But despite three decades of such economic liberalization, the Chinese government continues to dominate key sectors of the economy:

http://www.economist.com/node/18832034

One reason for China's remarkable economic growth over the past three decades is demographic: the proportion of the population that is either too young or too old to work has fallen steadily, thanks to a big decline in China's birthrate. But this phenomenon will soon reverse, as the proportion of the population over 60 rises rapidly. The anticipated greying of the Chinese population will put tremendous strain on families and social services in China:

http://www.economist.com/node/18832070

Every political scientist who studies China is inevitably asked the big question: what are the prospects for democratization in China? There has been no significant popular democratic movement in China since 1989 (when Chinese troops killed hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators in and near Beijing's Tiananmen Square). True, the Chinese government aggressively censors news and telecommunications media, and jails anyone who publicly calls for an end to the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power:

http://www.economist.com/node/18836744?story_id=18836744

But these are not the most important reasons why there is no democratic movement in China. Simply put, the Chinese Communist Party has been successful . In the past twenty years, it has improved living standards dramatically, lifting 400 million people out of poverty. Moreover, it has made China the world's largest manufacturing economy (and second largest economy overall), and has made China an increasingly important military power. It has thus earned the tacit acquiescence of the Chinese people in its continued governance of China. But will there be renewed demands for political reform if economic growth begins to level off ? Will today's Chinese high school and college students -- many of whom take their affluence for granted, having never known the poverty from which their parents escaped -- begin to demand political reform as they come of age?

http://www.economist.com/node/18832024