David Wall - The Japan Times

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David Wall

For David Wall's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 15, 2001

Can China's private sector be co-opted?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- President Jiang Zemin of China, who is also general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, made a remarkable speech last week to a handpicked audience of party faithful. The audience had been called to the Great Hall of the People to celebrate the 80th birthday party of the CCP. In the two-hour speech, full of the usual praise for the party's achievements, Jiang called on the party to welcome representatives of China's emerging private sector into its ranks. What made this remarkable was that the Chinese character for "communist" means "no private sector," more or less.

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 16, 2001

Time for the suits to make way for dresses

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Japan is going through an interesting period of political change. Or is it? A Japanese colleague in Cambridge who was in Tokyo a couple of weeks ago came back to say that it was only an interlude and that the government of Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would only last a few months, after which the old men in suits would take over again. The patriarchal leaders of the factions are regrouping, he said, and planning their moves to regain power.

COMMENTARY / World

Jun 2, 2001

End World Bank charity for bureaucrats

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Freedom of speech died a little death last week. The World Bank Group announced (on a Saturday, so that it did not get much attention) that it was canceling its annual European conference on development economics. The meeting was canceled because the global protest movement that disrupted the group's annual meetings in Washington last year had threatened to disrupt this get-together too. The Bank described the cancellation, in a twisted piece of logic, as taking "a stand against this kind of threat to free discussion." It seems strange to support free discussion by canceling a meeting.

COMMENTARY / World

May 18, 2001

Beijing masters tit-for-tat trade policy

CAMBRIDGE, England -- China is on a steep learning curve. There is a tendency to forget that only 20 years ago, China had none of the institutions of a market economy -- nor the trained personnel to operate them.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 27, 2001

Is Asia's little dragon awakening at last?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- When Vietnam set out on the path of economic liberalization in the early 1990s, everyone expected another Asian miracle, Chinese-style. The liberalization program adopted by the country, known as Doi Moi, was expected to bring about the same radical reforms of economic policy that had achieved so much in China. Many of the ideas of Doi Moi were borrowed from the program adopted north of the border by Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. However, while Deng was able to bring the "Old Immortals" on board in China by persuading them that, to survive in the long run, the Communist Party had to adopt capitalist practices, Vietnam had no leader similarly capable of bringing the anticapitalist brigade on board.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 21, 2001

An Asian financial crisis, Chinese-style

CAMBRIDGE, England -- The Chinese government has announced that death sentences have been imposed on seven people for tax fraud, in this case fraudulent claims for value-added-tax refunds on export sales. More death sentences, followed quickly by executions, are expected during what Premier Zhu Rongji has described as an "urgent economic struggle" against export-rebate fraud, which he said is an "outstanding social and economic problem." In some ways, the deaths of these cheaters can be seen as a consequence of the way Zhu and other members of the Chinese government chose to respond to the Asian financial crisis.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 18, 2001

Confucius rescues China's communists

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Sometimes it takes a while for the significance of statements made by Chinese leaders to sink in. At a propaganda conference organized by the Communist Party Central Committee on Jan. 10, President Jiang Zemin said that the rule of law alone is not enough; there must also be rule of virtue.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 1, 2001

Don't bet against China's industrial policy

Cambridge, ENGLAND -- At a recent conference in Berlin organized by the Institute of Asian Affairs of Hamburg, Ireland's leading China specialist said quite unequivocally that China's industrial policy has failed. As the speaker has long been known as one of the most vocal supporters of China's state-owned enterprise system, this was something of a shock.

COMMENTARY / World

Feb 10, 2001

Who's afraid of the WTO? Not China

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Among U.S. President Bill Clinton's wilder statements on China were those he came up with when recommending that Congress pass the Permanent Normal Trade Relations Bill. The bill, which Congress passed last September, was a necessary precondition for the United States' support of China's accession to the WTO.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 27, 2001

Corruption in China: business as usual?

Hardly a week goes by in China now without some leader being executed or arraigned for corruption. And the level of the officials being charged and convicted (much the same thing in China) is rising.

COMMENTARY / World

Jan 14, 2001

China tightens grip on the Net

CAMBRIDGE, England -- The Chinese government has been issuing more regulations to control the use of the Internet. As with the earlier ones, there are no surprises. They simply tidy up what was already accepted practice and add nothing new. It is still the slow bureaucratic machine catching up with reality. For example, last week Sina.com received permission to function as an Internet content provider, something it has been doing for two years already.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 24, 2000

How fast is China's economy growing?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- It is that time of year again when statisticians in Beijing have to decide how fast the Chinese economy grew in the last year. Or rather, not so much how much it grew but how much they are going to claim it grew. More so than anywhere else the figures for growth in gross domestic product.

COMMENTARY / World

Dec 5, 2000

A Taiwanese lesson in statesmanship

CAMBRIDGE, England -- So our great leaders were unable to reach agreement in The Hague last month on how to save the planet from environmental pollution. So we can continue pumping out ozone-destroying fumes to our hearts' content, especially gas-guzzling drivers in the good old United States. Forests can go on being destroyed, grasslands turned into deserts, seas turned into sewers and our children and grandchildren turned into asthmatics while politicians sit around slanging each other.

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 22, 2000

Two countries, one system?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Last week, Willy Wo-Lap Lam lost his job as the China correspondent on the South China Morning Post. That technically he resigned rather than be "promoted" to a non-China-related job is irrelevant, as it was clear that he was not going to be allowed to continue writing his weekly opinion piece about developments in China.

COMMENTARY / World

Nov 9, 2000

Jiang's troubling ambitions

CAMBRIDGE, England -- So the U.S. presidential-election campaign is over and we will soon know who is the next "leader of the free world." This time no one has alleged that any Chinese organization or individual has tried to affect the outcome. But why shouldn't they? Analysts say that Texas Gov. George W. Bush's statements imply that he wants to move away Clinton's policy of constructive engagement to one more like earlier containment policies.

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 28, 2000

What price NATO's new philosophy?

CAMBRIDGE, England -- While you were on the beaches of Hawaii or Hainan or wherever else you spent the summer, the secretary general of NATO, or U.S.-led NATO as Beijing calls it, spelled out the new philosophy of that organization, as it was expressed in the Kosovo war. Referring to Kosovo in a speech at the Mansion House in the City of London, Lord Robertson said that "the international community has delivered a message: that where we can be decisive, massive violations of human rights will not go unopposed."

COMMENTARY / World

Oct 16, 2000

The Net surviving in China

CAMBRIDGE, England -- China is in the process of establishing the rule of law. Not common law as in England or civil law as in most other countries, but socialist law. The basic difference between socialist law and other forms of law, it seems from recent practice, is that only the Chinese Communist Party can set the law and decide whether or not the courts and other enforcement agencies are correctly interpreting it.

COMMENTARY / World

Sep 30, 2000

Vietnam proves a reluctant reformer

CAMBRIDGE, England -- Foreign investors have not been showing any confidence in Vietnam's Doi Moi (liberalization) program recently. Socialist market economics, Vietnamese-style, have not proved as attractive as the Chinese version. After the initial euphoria of the early 1990s, when foreign companies were almost falling over themselves to get a piece of the action, they are now more often found stumbling over each other as they head for the exit door.

COMMENTARY / World

Sep 18, 2000

North Korea drawing the right lessons

CAMBRIDGE, England -- We may never know if North Korea's Dear Leader Kim Jong Il went to Beijing in May, ahead of his historic meeting with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung in June, on his own initiative or at the insistence of Chinese President Jiang Zemin. What we do know is that, very unusually, Jiang divulged at least some of the contents of those supposedly secret talks.

COMMENTARY / World

Jul 17, 2000

Private sector CCP's double-edged sword

BEIJING -- It is not often appreciated that accession to the World Trade Organization is a one-sided process: The applicant country has to make a series of concessions to existing members in return for gaining access to the trade concessions that existing members have extended to each other over a period of years. In the case of developing countries such as China, they already have access to such concessions through the various Generalized Systems of Preferences schemes and the US MFN/NTR deals. The matching concessions that China has made in its bilateral negotiations with existing members are the membership dues it has paid to put these benefits on a permanent basis and also to get the protection through the disputes procedure processes of the WTO.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

When trying to trace your lineage in Japan, the "koseki" is the most important form of document you'll encounter.

Climbing the branches of a Japanese family tree

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

Vol. 35: Travel in time — and stay there

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