The FP Top 100 Global ThinkersForeign Policy presents a unique portrait of 2011's global marketplace of ideas and the thinkers who make them.
中国有央行行长李小川,艺术家艾未未,北京法学院教授贺卫方和共产党员俞可平
【第十名】周小川:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,9#thinker10
With smoke still rising from the wreckage of the world's financial system, it's up to three wise men to salvage what's left. And with their eyes on the villainized central bankers of the 1930s, each has tried to avoid the currency wars and protectionism that plagued the world during the Great Depression, aiming instead to steer a calm path through the rubble, above the daily fray of politics and name-calling.
People's Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan, whose country owns a whopping $1.14 trillion in U.S. debt, has been forced to cope with the unpleasant fact that China's entanglement with U.S. and European markets makes it dependent on the health of Western economies. To that end, he has pursued a course of letting the yuan gradually appreciate, in a bid to slowly build up domestic consumption and decrease China's reliance on foreign markets. Ben Bernanke, who has become a political punching bag in the U.S. presidential campaign, has had a tougher job. The Federal Reserve chairman's efforts to spur bank lending by expanding the monetary supply were described as almost "treasonous" by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, while candidate Newt Gingrich promised to fire him. Bernanke has nevertheless pressed forward with his plans to keep the Fed's benchmark interest rate near zero to encourage investment and has nudged Congress to get its act together as he warned that America's recovery is "close to faltering." But the problems of Bernanke and Zhou paled in comparison with those of Jean-Claude Trichet, who as European Central Bank chief faced a full-blown debt crisis in Greece and the potential for a slow-motion fiscal collapse in Italy, Spain, and possibly even France. Trichet, who retired at the end of October, did his best to calm the crisis threatening the euro he helped create, pledging unlimited cash to eurozone banks and buying up the bonds of financially distressed countries. His mountingfrustration spilled over during a news conference in September: "We are in the worst crisis since World War II.… We do our job. It is not an easy job." We all feel their pain.
【十八名】艾未未:http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,17#thinker18
On Aug. 5, a simple four-character message appeared on Chinese artist Ai Weiwei's Twitter feed: "Wen ge hao ba" ("What's up?"). It would have been utterly unremarkable, but for two things: It was Ai's first tweet since spending three months in prison, and it was written in defiance of the Chinese government's orders to stay quiet.
Ai's arrest on April 3, putatively on charges of tax evasion, was probably inevitable. The son of a famous poet who was forced into internal exile during the Cultural Revolution, the avant-gardist known for his confrontational nude self-portraits has dissidence in his DNA. A vocal democracy advocate since the 1990s, Ai infuriated the Chinese Communist Party by disavowing the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, for which he had helped design the iconic Bird's Nest stadium, and pushing for an investigation into Sichuan earthquake deaths later that year.Throwing Ai in jail put a famous face on a worrying trend: Since this spring, the number of human rights activists, lawyers, artists, and other dissidents vanishing into government custody without explanation has quietly but sharply spiked in China. Now Ai has taken up their cause, railing against this state of affairs -- in open violation of the terms of his release. "[T]here are many hidden spots where they put people without identity," he wrote in a searing Newsweek essay. "With no name, just a number.… Only your family is crying out that you're missing."
【十九名】贺卫方和俞可平http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/11/28/the_fp_top_100_global_thinkers?page=0,18#thinker19
A nervous Beijing has cracked down viciously on dissidents this year, jailing dozens of lawyers and human rights supporters and placing scores under enforced supervision or house arrest. Yet among the many activists keeping hopes for reform alive, two stand out. One surprising advocate from inside the system is Yu Keping, a bureaucrat and head of the government-advising China Center for Comparative Politics and Economics, whom the New York Times has described as a "mild-mannered policy wonk" and a proponent of slow but steady change. His straightforwardly titled essay, "Democracy Is a Good Thing," insists that China can transition into a democracy that works for the Chinese. In a China Daily op-ed this summer titled "Reform Must Be Incremental," Yu wrote that though the go-slow approach has been on balance good for China, "The country still lacks a mechanism to counter the selfish behavior of the bureaucracy, corruption is still rampant and public service rendered by the government is far from enough."He Weifang, meanwhile, is an outspoken critic of the Chinese legal system who was sent to internal exile in Xinjiang for signing the Charter 08 manifesto against the government in 2008 and then was told last year that he couldn't leave the country. For He, a Peking University law professor and longtime writer on judicial abuses who says he sees China growing more repressive over time, reform cannot come fast enough. And if the Communist Party doesn't adapt, he has warned, "then that process of transformation will not occur peacefully, and if the extreme violence comes, then there will be no Communist Party. It is a case of adapt or die." So will it be Yu's way or He's?
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