Just how bad are U.S.-Chinese relations these days, and who's to blame for the downturn? China's former Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei has published an essay in Foreign Policy today on the worrying state of the world's most important relationship. The Obama administration's pivor to Asia, he writes, has "aroused a great deal of suspicion in China."

High-ranking Chinese officials rarely speak so directly about China's concerns, and He's essay is one of the most comprehensive explanations of Beijing's views published in U.S. media since China's new president Xi Jinping was appointed in November.

He, who's currently deputy director of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office in the powerful State Council, is known to be outspoken. During a 2009 U.N. climate change conference in Copenhagen, for instance, he told reporters that the top U.S. negotiator "lacks common sense or is extremely irresponsible."

In what may be the most alarming section of his FP essay, He writes:

[S]uspicions deepen when the United States gets itself entangled in China's dispute with Japan over the Diaoyu Islands and in the debates over maritime issues in the South China Sea. Should this ill-thought-out policy of rebalancing continue and the security environment worsen, an arms race would be inevitable. China, despite its intention to pursue a strategy of peaceful development, might be forced to revisit some aspects of its policy for the region.

I sent He's article to several scholars who closely follow the U.S.-China relationship to get their take on his argument, and I've summarized their reactions below.

Orville Schell, Arthur Ross director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society, called He "one of China's most experienced, smartest and most articulate diplomats" but said that Beijing "often has a difficult time realizing that China has, in effect, become a Great Power." That newfound status, he explained, makes the country's aggressive behavior more worrying than before.

Trust is also a major concern in the U.S.-China relationship, and Beijing seems unaware of the mistrust with which other countries view its foreign policy. In his essay, He writes that the "United States has nothing to fear or worry about, and everything to gain, from a strong, peace-loving, and prosperous China," and that the threat of China revisiting its regional policy won't materialize if the United States and China can work through their issues.

Meanwhile, however, China has disputes with Japan over the Diaoyu (which the Japanese call the Senkakus), with several Southeast Asian nations over territory in the South China Sea, and with India over the border between the two countries. China "will be unable to reassure neighbors and the United States of its commitment to a 'peaceful rise' as long as China is presenting such a pugnacious and intractable face to its neighbors," Schell wrote.

Shen Dingli, associate dean of the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, also noted the importance of mutual trust -- as He writes, "trust will not just fall out of the sky." An arms race, Shen said, "would be ridiculous." Instead, he added, both sides should build trust by taking a "criticism and self-criticism" approach, welcoming criticism from the other party with "enhanced humility and confidence."

Perry Link, a professor at the University of California Riverside who recently wrote a book on language in Chinese politics, had a more negative opinion of He's essay:  "In their 2011 book Mao's Invisible Hand, Sebastian Heilmann and Elizabeth Perry write that today's Chinese Communist Party (CCP) policy-making inherits Mao Zedong's 'guerrilla policy style,' which they summarize as fundamentally dictatorial, opportunistic, and merciless," Link noted. He's essay "is but a tool in this policy style. Its purpose is to maximize the power of the CCP. Period."

Link noted how the Communist Party, in He's essay and elsewhere, has tried to equate itself with China. "Rule 1 for U.S. policy should be to recognize that the China = CCP claim is far from true. No one is clearer about its falsity than the CCP itself, whose overwhelming concern in recent times has been how to stay on top of a rising, ever-better-informed, and, thanks to cyber-assembly on the Internet, ever-better-organized populace who resent CCP bullying and corruption."

The Party's rule will "not last," Link wrote. "The big questions are how bloody the transition will be and what kind of regime will come next. A wise U.S. policy would be crafted with these questions in mind, and with the whole Chinese population in mind -- and that would mean seeing the He essay as only a grain of irritation on a vastly broader canvas."

What do you think about He's essay? Let me know in the comments.

On Friday, we wrote about the arrest of Egyptian activist Ahmed Maher, who was detained at Cairo International Airport as he returned from a series of meetings with officials and speaking engagements in the United States. The Daily News Egypt reports that Maher was released on Saturday after spending the night in Cairo's al-Aqrab prison, and that he remains under investigation for "inciting a protest" in March at the home of the minister of the interior. Several Egyptian political parties have condemned Maher's arrest, though they have also distanced themselves from his politics and protest tactics. Upon his release, Maher tweeted out thanks to his supporters and urged them to show the same support for Egyptian political activists still in prison.

Maher co-founded the April 6 Youth Movement, which was instrumental in Egypt's 2011 revolution. Though he supported Mohamed Morsy's presidential campaign, he has since become a vocal critic of Morsy's government and the pace of security sector reforms.

In addition to still being under investigation, Ahram Online reports that Maher was injured in a severe car crash today. The circumstances of the crash are unclear, and Maher is now filing a police report to determine if the collision "was caused by a criminal act."

This is a guest post by Gissou Nia, executive director of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, in response to our May 2 post, "The unlikely winner in the war on drugs? Iran."

When it comes to the death penalty, European governments are ardently abolitionist. Yet the European taxpayer may in fact be unwittingly fueling executions for drug-related offenses in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In a recent post on Iran's war on drugs, Marya Hannun mentions the "steep price" of the country's drug war -- namely the execution of hundreds of individuals annually for the possession, use, and trafficking of narcotics.

While Hannun referenced the praise that the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has bestowed on Iran's anti-narcotics program despite the high execution rate for drug-related offenses, what is not discussed is the funding provided by European nations for these efforts. Countries such as France and Germany provide funds to the UNODC's integrated program of technical cooperation on drugs and crime in Iran, which ultimately results in gross human rights violations perpetrated by Iranian authorities.

According to the UNODC website, the integrated program was launched in March 2011 thanks to a "generous financial contribution" from the government of Norway.  The program "aims to support national efforts on drugs and crime" and consists of three sub-programs: 1) illicit trafficking and border management; 2) drug demand reduction and HIV control; and 3) crime, justice and corruption.

There are counter-narratives to UNODC's high regard for Iran's anti-narcotics efforts, including allegations that law enforcement personnel in Iran are in fact partaking in and facilitating the sale of illicit drugs for profit on the black market. Regardless of government complicity, the fact remains that thousands of individuals are arrested each year with the technical and material support provided by sub-program 1, including body scanners, drug-detection kits, sniffer dogs, vehicles, and night-vision devices.

Of those arrested, hundreds will subsequently be sentenced to death by Iran's judiciary on drug allegations. Iran is a global leader in executions, with only China exceeding it in number of people put to death annually. According to Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based group that documents executions in Iran, at least 580 people were executed in the country in 2012. In these documented cases, at least 76 percent of executions were due to drug-related charges.

Since news of the frequency with which Iran puts individuals to death for drug-related offenses has come to light, UNODC and donor countries have come under fire for their support of the program, and human rights groups have encouraged donors to request greater transparency from the Iranian government about how their money is spent in this joint initiative.

While the Norwegian government provided the initial cash infusion to the integrated program, it has since ceased funding sub-program 1 and requested that its support only be applied to sub-programs 2 and 3. The Danish government, meanwhile, announced last month that it would no longer provide financial support to the program following revelations that its donations were indirectly sponsoring the death penalty in Iran. At the time of the decision, the Danish government had provided about 5 million Danish kroner (or $875,000) annually in the previous two years to the program and was expected to provide about 7 million Danish kroner ($1.2 million) over the next two years.

While Denmark's decision to cut the funding has been welcomed by human rights groups, there's more work to be done. Questions remain over the transparency of the program -- specifically UNODC's ability to ensure that donor countries who have restricted their support to only sub-programs 2 and 3 will indeed have that money applied to the intended targets.

To this end, the France-based anti-death penalty group Together Against the Death Penalty (Ensemble contre le peine de mort, or ECPM) has started a petition calling on other European Union member states to follow the Danish example. Short of governments cutting off funding altogether, ECPM and its organizational co-signers are requesting that funding from donor countries be conditioned on an immediate moratorium on death sentences for drug-related offenses in Iran and that contribution amounts be made public and solely allocated to prevention programs.

Given that abolition of the death penalty is a pre-condition for entry of any nation into the European Union, it is time the EU call on its member states to apply more scrutiny of its support for such activities abroad as well. The case of Iran is a fine place to start.

This morning, FP published our newest ebook, Bird of Chaman, Flower of the Khyber, Matthieu Aikins's great read about his wild ride in a Pakistani truck, starting in Karachi and following the military supply route into the Afghan war zone. The book, the second in our Borderlands series of dispatches from the world's most contenious fault lines, is now on sale on our site and for the Kindle on Amazon.

Over the course of six days and 1,000 miles, Aikins encountered roadside bandits, Kalashnikov-wielding tribal patrols, predatory police, and hawk-eyed toll guards. But he also befriended a group of rural Pashtuns, among the many who have left their tribal homelands for jobs as truckers, carting supplies into Afghanistan and, in the process, becoming crucial actors in the U.S. and NATO military operation there.

Aikins rode with two such Pashtun men -- a pair of hash-smoking brothers from the northern border town of Landi Kotal -- in the back of their rickety 1993 Nissan, where he took the short video above, just as the truck was entering the famed Khyber Pass between Pakistan and Afghanistan. 

On Saturday, Pakistanis will vote in historic general elections -- the first transition from one elected government to another in the country's tumultous history. For this and several other reasons, Mosharraf Zaidi argues in Foreign Policy that Pakistan is heading into this weekend's polls better off than you might think, despite the spate of violence that has preceded it. But Pakistani writer Rafia Zakaria might beg to differ.

On Friday, she penned a blistering op-ed for Dawn, Pakistan's leading English-language daily, on the state of the country. The column, entitled "The great expectations of historic elections," invokes Miss Havisham. For those of you who weren't paying attention in high school English class, she is the withering old maid in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations -- as Zakaria puts it, "a woman frozen in time."

Abandoned by her fiancé on the eve of her wedding, Miss Havisham never quite recovers and, years later, still wears her tattered wedding dress. As Zakaria sees it, she is a lot like Pakistan:

Like old Miss Havisham who sat at her dressing table, refusing to let time enter, refusing to change out of her wedding dress and refusing to see the horror of her situation; Pakistanis weep for an injured cricketer and a dead white tiger and forget the ordinary tragedies that surround them....

In the song singing, change chanting moment, there is no room to talk about the pile of trash outside the mosque, the outstanding IMF loans, the wedding dress worn for two decades, the groom that never came, the frauds of elections past and the tragedies of dead leaders. In Dickens's novel, Miss Havisham never really changes. Frayed and yellowed, her nuptial garment catches fire and she and it are burned to death, frozen still in their denials and beyond rescue by any hero.

It might seem odd for a Pakistani author to employ Dickens in making sense of the challenges facing her country, but highlighting Pakistan's Dickensian side actually seems to be something of a trend. Here are just a few examples of how the British titan of Victorian-era social realism has been trotted out in the Pakistani op-eds of news cycles past.  

Bleak House

Yousuf Nasim, in a scathing 2012 op-ed about Pakistan's judicial system, begins with an epigraph from Bleak House, Dickens's novel ridiculing England's arcane legal system by chronicling a never-ending court case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce:

"The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away into the other world." - Bleak House by Charles Dickens

Nasim goes on to write:

I have no hesitancy in asserting that there are numerous cases currently pending in Karachi, which would put to shame Dickens' dystopian portrayal in Bleak House. Yet there persists a myopia which prevents legal practitioners from seeing what is plain before their eyes: that the system is broken. There is, effectively, no access to justice for the vast majority of society. Public confidence in the legal system as a means of resolving disputes is plummeting, and unless drastic measures are taken to arrest this decline, the outcome for our society and our polity will be alarming.

A Tale of Two Cities

In March, Dickens's masterpiece on the French revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, made an appearance in an op-ed blasting wealth inequality and patron-client relations in Pakistan. Titled, "A Tale of Two Cities," the article, written by columnist Aasin Sajjad Akhtar, states:

This lack of concern, as I have suggested, is explained by the fact that those with power and influence actually have nothing to gain from redressing the prevailing state of affairs.

Meanwhile, those who are taught not to ask questions, to dutifully obey their superiors and then accept it all as divine will continue to be an easy prey for the reactionary ideologues that thrive on having a captive public to do their bidding.

If there is to be a happy ending in this tale of two cities, we need first and foremost to empathise with the voiceless masses that keep this country running in spite of, rather than because of, their self-absorbed, slothful and subjugating masters.

Hard Times

In another Pakistani English-language daily, The News, Jamil Nasir, an economist based in Lahore, refers to the novel Hard Times in a column about income inequality in Pakistan:

When a society undergoes a metamorphosis from an agrarian to an industrial economy, there are both losers and gainers. The industrialists and the middle class gains, while in a world of ‘mechanisation and desperation', the labourers work only for subsistence wages due to obvious reasons. They live in pitiable conditions as depicted vividly by Charles Dickens in Hard Times. Once industrialisation becomes the predominant mode of economy, pressure mounts on the government for redistribution due to heightened awareness of rights - and consequently inequality declines.

Any thoughts on why Dickens keeps cropping up in Pakistani political commentary? Leave them in the comments. And even if you can't turn to Dickens for the answers to all of Pakistan's troubles, at least now you know where to turn if you want to brush up on your British lit.

With Pakistan's election just around the corner on Saturday -- and amid a month-long campaign of violence that local papers have dubbed the "reign of terror" -- the New York Times reported Friday that Pakistan's Interior Ministry has demanded that the paper's Islamabad bureau chief, noted journalist Declan Walsh, leave the country. From the Times's report:

The ministry gave no explanation for the expulsion order, which was delivered via a two-sentence letter by police officers to the bureau chief, Declan Walsh, at 12:30 a.m. Thursday local time at his home.

"It is informed that your visa is hereby canceled in view of your undesirable activities," the order stated. "You are therefore advised to leave the country within 72 hours." The timing of the order means Mr. Walsh must exit Pakistan on the night of the elections.

Walsh has reported from Pakistan for the past nine years for the New York Times and the Guardian, and his journalism is characterized by an eye for detail and a knack for making a frequently perplexing country comprehensible. For the past month, his reports have focused on the run-up to Pakistan's May 11 election: political maneuvering and rivalries, patronage networks, and the string of attacks that have punctuated the campaign. We've collected some of his greatest hits from recent weeks below.

From his May 8 article on Pakistan's feudalistic patronage networks:

As a result, Multan has been transformed, residents say. The city is ribboned with new roads and expressways, while a modern airport, capable of accommodating wide-body jets, is near completion. The railway station has been overhauled, some neighborhoods have new sewerage and young students have been awarded generous scholarships.

A giant billboard outside Mr. Gilani's house lists his achievements: 34 major development projects, costing more than $280 million, all financed by Pakistani taxpayers. "Multan has become like Paris for us," said Muhammad Bilal, a 28-year-old laborer and enthusiastic Gilani supporter, at a rally last week....

Mr. Gilani, for example, was in jail from 2001 to 2006 during the rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf on a charge of arranging 600 government jobs for his constituents during a previous administration in the 1990s. "If giving jobs is a crime, then I am a criminal," he told voters at one rally, to loud cheers.

In fact, the practice is institutionalized: The government gives each Parliament member, no matter the party, about $200,000 a year to spend on "development" -- effectively, a patronage slush fund.

He writes a riveting lede, like this one from his May 5 article about Pakistan's hardline Islamist candidates:

Dust swirled as the jeep, heralded by a convoy of motorcycle riders and guarded by gunmen in paramilitary-style uniforms, pulled up outside the towering tomb of an ancient Muslim saint.

Out stepped Maulana Abdul Khaliq Rehmani, a burly cleric with a notorious, banned Sunni Muslim group. Thanks to a deft name change by his group, he was now a candidate in Pakistan's general election, scheduled for Saturday.

Or this intro from his April 21 article on the Pakistani Taliban's intimidation tactics:

When Shahid Khan started talking, his gunmen clambered onto a school's rooftop, scanning the surrounding hills with flashlights, anticipating a possible attack.

In the past 10 days, militants have carried out five attacks against Mr. Khan's party.

Below them, Mr. Khan, a candidate for his region's provincial assembly, addressed potential voters - poor farmers and village traders, gathered on a cluster of rope beds outside the school, listening raptly to his promises. Then, after wolfing down snacks offered by his hosts, he abruptly left.

"They say it's not safe around here," said Mr. Khan, as he leapt into a waiting car, trailed by a bodyguard. "We'd better get going."

No stranger to Pakistan's extremist groups, Walsh profiled Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the leader of Lashkar-e-Taiba, in February:

...Mr. Saeed lives an open, and apparently fearless, life in a middle-class neighborhood here.

"I move about like an ordinary person -- that's my style," said Mr. Saeed, a burly 64-year-old, reclining on a bolster as he ate a chicken supper. "My fate is in the hands of God, not America."

New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson has written to the Pakistani interior minister protesting the decision, and journalists and analysts have voiced their support on Twitter.

"Your visa is hereby canceled." Pakistan unintentionally honors the journalism of @declanwalsh: nyti.ms/10ABvMk

— Steve Inskeep (@NPRinskeep) May 10, 2013

#Pakistan expels NY Times correspondent @declanwalsh, apparently for committing journalism: nyti.ms/10ABvMk

— Nicholas Kristof (@NickKristof) May 10, 2013

100+ already dead in Pakistan election violence; 600k security to be deployed this wknd. Hence Pak expulsion of NYT reporter @declanwalsh.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) May 10, 2013

Walsh, for his part, has so far only tweeted out the Times article about his enforced departure:

On eve of Pakistani elections, been asked to leave:nytimes.com/2013/05/11/wor…

— Declan Walsh(@declanwalsh) May 10, 2013

Declan Walsh/Twitter

Egyptian activist Ahmed Maher, a co-founder of the April 6 Youth Movement, was arrested at the Cairo International Airport on Friday, according to Egyptian press reports. He was returning to Egypt from a 13-day trip to the United States hosted by the Milken Institute and the Project on Middle East Democracy, during which he met with officials from the State Department, the Obama administration, and Congress, and spoke at universities and the Milken Institute Global Conference. "The goal of Maher's trip," according to a press release from POMED, "was to highlight the many challenges to democratic progress in Egypt, including a widespread crackdown on freedom of speech, assembly, and association."

Egypt's Ahram Online reports that Maher's arrest is in connection with a March 28 protest outside the residence of the Egyptian minister of the interior in which activists waved women's clothing and banners claiming the ministry had "prostituted" itself to the government of President Mohamed Morsy. Maher tweeted a picture from the protest, "Now in front of the house of the minister of the interior."

?? ???? ???? ???? ???????? ???? twitter.com/GhostyMaher/st…

— ?Ahmed Maher (@GhostyMaher) March 28, 2013

Four members of the April 6 Youth Movement were arrested and then released last month for their involvement in the protest. At the time, a spokesman for April 6 told Ahram Online that no arrest warrant had been issued for Maher. But today, an Egyptian official told AFP that "the prosecution has decided to jail Ahmed Maher for four days as part of the investigation."

Maher and April 6 supported the candidacy of Mohamed Morsy. But since the country's constitutional crisis in November, he has felt disillusioned by the new government. "This regime is the same old regime, but has a religious atmosphere or shape," he said at an event at the New America Foundation on Monday. It has "the same rules, the same constitution ... the same behavior, the same strategy, the same politics -- so we need to keep the struggle until step down all of that regime."

Maher also knows the potential consequences of his protests. "Our members are arrested now and in the jail, and sometimes are tortured. So our role now is to keep the struggle," he said Monday. It's not his first arrest, either -- in fact, Maher was arrested for organizing protests as early as 2008, years before the January 2011 revolution.

"Opposition figures and protestors being arrested isn't new, unfortunately," Marc Lynch, director of George Washington University's Middle East Studies Program and an FP blogger and columnist, told Passport by email. Lynch met with Maher during his visit to Washington. "What is striking is that Ahmed would be arrested after returning from the US where he spoke (I understand) to a variety of US officials as well as academics and think tankers. It just points to the ongoing urgency of real reform of the security sector in Egypt," he wrote.

Maher's arrest also demonstrates the government's unwillingness to work with even receptive members of the opposition, according to Nancy Okail, Egypt director for Freedom House, who also met with Maher during his visit to Washington. "The arrest of any activist is worrisome, but Maher's arrest is particularly significant as he was one of the strongest supporters of President Morsy before and after his elections," Okail told FP by email. "He repeatedly expressed his willingness to extend a helping hand to the government to solve Egypt's problems -- especially with regard to reforming the police. The current repressive approach of the Egyptian government is stifling constructive discussions at the very time it should be expanding dialogue with different segments of Egyptian society."

At the State Department's daily press briefing this afternoon, Acting Deputy Spokesperson Patrick Ventrell told reporters that the State Department was still trying to confirm reports of Maher's arrest, saying "of course, if it were true, we'll express our concerns, but at this time we're still seeking more information." Representatives from the Egyptian embassy did not respond to requests from FP for comment.