It's a week or two later than I expected, but at least it's finally happened.

Liu Di, 23, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the computer name "Stainless Steel Mouse", was freed from Beijing's Qincheng prison on Friday, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said on Sunday.

Two other "cyber dissidents", Wu Yiran, 34, and Li Yibin, 29, also were freed from a jail for political detainees on Friday, it said in a statement.

The release came just over a week ahead of a visit by Premier Wen Jiabao to the United States. China frequently times releases of dissidents to coincide with important trips abroad or visits by world leaders.

This was predictable. The case was simply too controversial, too shocking for China's trading partners (and everyone else) to just accept with a shrug. She was just a kid, and her arrest sparked a well-deserved international outcry.

So should we break out the Champagne and celebrate? Afraid not. From the same article:

Police also detained at least two people for organising online petitions for Liu's release. Du Daobin, a civil servant, was detained in October, while Luo Changfu, a 39-year-old laid-off worker, was sentenced to three years in prison.

China has been cracking down on Internet content -- from politics to pornography -- as the government struggles to gain control over the new and popular medium.

I hope that 's clear to everyone. By releasing Liu Di, they're admitting they didn't have enough evidence to indict her. But the petitioners, who we now all know were correct in claiming her imprisonment was unjustified, they are now in jail! There's a twisted irony here.

So as crackdowns on cyber-dissidents increase, this happy ending to one of the more outrageous cases should not be any reason to celebrate or let down our guard. To the contrary; all the recent news indicates the problem is getting much worse, not better.

If you remember, when this story broke a week or so ago, all the honorable officials would say was, "There is no AIDS here!" and refuse to give their names to the reporters.

Oh, what a difference a week can make. Now the government is confirming that there is indeed an AIDS breakkout in the region, brought about by the government's blood-donation business that started in 1984 and was closed a decade later:

A new outbreak of HIV/AIDS has surfaced in northeastern China's Jilin province where up to 300 villagers could be infected with AIDS after donating blood at government blood stations, villagers and a rights group said.

"Right now there are three or four villages that have AIDS," an official at the Soudeng township in Jilin city told AFP by phone.

He refused to estimate how many people in the area had been infected by the virus that causes AIDS, but the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said that up to 300 people could be infected.

"My uncle was infected with AIDS and died yesterday morning. My mother and father also have AIDS," Huang Rui, a villager in Liujiatun village told AFP.

China is opening up about AIDS and they are finally showing signs of dealing with the catastrophe, or at least of doing more than nothing. Maybe it's time they do away with their knee-jerk reaction of lies and denials everytime AIDS appears someplace new.

That is to say, his face gets plastered on the Chinese Budweiser bottles. Go take a look -- it is absolutely hilarious.

1980: Soldiers prepare party official Wang Shouxin for a public execution by dislocating her jaw so she can't proclaim her innocence. Charming.

This is a remarkable review of a book I wrote about earlier, Red-Color News Soldier by Li Zhengsheng, full of previously unpublished photographs of the Cultural Revolution and the years following

What makes this review special is that the reporter and his wife actually lived in Beijing throughout the Cultural Revolution and the review is infused with the passion of an eyewitness.

You had to be there - and, 30-odd years ago, we were, a Canadian foreign correspondent and family living in Beijing, bullied by the loudspeakers that poured forth Mao worship, day and night, to hundreds of millions of Chinese. It was laughable, and it almost drove us crazy.

Those mad times came flooding back the other day when leafing through Red-Color News Soldier, an extraordinary book of images by Li Zhengsheng (Phaidon Press).
[....]
The photos can be startling. Monks stand in embarrassment, forced to hold up a banner reading: "To hell with the Buddhist scriptures. They are full of dog farts." Softcover books litter the floor of a ransacked library; Li notes all the hardcover books had been taken by rival groups for use as projectiles.

One which brings back memories shows a parade in which wax mangoes are carried reverently in glass cases behind a statue of Mao. This commemorated the great man's gift of real mangoes to worker-peasant propaganda teams. I saw one of the originals when I visited a factory in Beijing; it was preserved in formaldehyde and exhibited like a sliver of the true cross.

This is one book I want to own. Maybe I can pick up a copy when I'm in Beijing next week...?

Amazing. A big fat article in the NY Times about the Guangzhou sex kitten. Everything you ever wanted to know about her is here.

For the past month, as China's propaganda machine has promoted the nation's new space hero or the latest pronouncements from Communist Party leaders, the Chinese public has seemed more interested in a 25-year-old sex columnist whose beat is her own bedroom.

"I think my private life is very interesting," said the columnist, Mu Zimei, arching an eyebrow and tapping a Marlboro Light into an ashtray. She added: "I do not oppose love, but I oppose loyalty. If love has to be based on loyalty, I will not choose love."

Mu Zimei is both reviled and admired, but she is not ignored. The country's most popular Internet site, Sina.com, credits her with attracting 10 million daily visitors. Another site, Sohu.com, says Mu Zimei is the name most often typed into its Internet search engine, surpassing one occasional runner-up, Mao Zedong.

It's great that the Times is giving this so much space, taking a look not only at who she is but at how this episode has ignited a major nationwide debate in China on women and sex. A debate that's making the government squirm.

Damn. After cresting at more than 1,000 hits on Thursday, traffic's now returning to normal. With a mere 422 hits yesterday, I hang my head in shame.

It taught me a big lesson: The more photos of gorgeous three-quarters naked Korean transexuals I post, the more visitors I'll get.

Well, it's not really that bad, but the praise I offered yesterday is a bit more tempered today; at least regarding the technology (not the concept of the meta-blog).

It started when I went online this morning and saw that there were seven posts on the aggregator list by one poster, which might be totally legitmate; he may have posted them one after another all around the same time with no one posting in between. So, no problem. Then I went back about an hour later and saw that all seven posts had been replaced with new posts -- so things were working as they were supposed to, right?

But then I returned a minute ago, and lo and behold all of those new posts are gone and all seven of the posts I saw more than two hours earlier were back! That means that some participating blogs could be getting little or no representation while a couple lucky bloggers are featured there for many hours.

This is just a technical glitch and obviously not intentional. But if people keep coming to Living in China and keep seeing the same posts listed, traffic will drop. A key reason for logging on again and again is, after all, to see what's new in the community's many blogs.

So I recommend we work this out as soon as possible. What makes Living in China so exciting is its robust, constantly changing nature and instant access to all that is new out there. That's its "unique value proposition," as we PR people love to tell our clients. If it doesn't stay vital, it will rapidly lose its lustre.

As China becomes ever more capitalistic and obsessed with "hip Western culture," how can the CCP keep today's young people interested in stodgy old Mao? Easy! Turn him into a rapper:

In a desperate appeal to China's fashionable youth, the Chinese Communist Party has approved the repackaging of Mao Tse-tung as a rap artist.

Mao's favourite exhortation - the Two Musts - is to be set to music and released alongside pop versions of all the Great Helmsman's old slogans, such as The East is Red and Serve the People.

The rap album to honour the 110th anniversary of Mao's birth next month follows another record, A Red Sun, released to mark his centenary.

The Beijing Times said yesterday: "Ten years ago, the album A Red Sun brought a crimson tide of songs rushing through our music industry. This year, the China Record Company has finished the production of the powerfully red Mao Tse-tung and Us."

With Mao's 100th birthday fast approaching, the CCP is desperate to do whatever it can to rekindle enthusiasm for the Great Helmsman, now regarded by most young people, thank God, as utterly irrelevant.

So how did European Union and Chinese delegates meeting on human rights in China wrap up their meeting this week? By visiting an AIDS treatment center in Beijing. And in light of China's history of not acknowledging its AIDS catastrophe, this is a breakthrough.

Stories like this are suddenly becoming the norm. Bill Clinton's recent participation in an AIDS conference in Beijing received massive media coverage, despite the CCP chieftains distancing themselves from the event. And China declared November "AIDS Awareness Month" and has plans to further spread the message on Monday, World AIDS Day.

You have to remember that it wasn't so long ago that the CCP was denying that AIDS existed in China at all. Even after the AIDS-tainted-blood made it into the news.

So what was it that made China finally take on the AIDS issue, speaking in public about it, putting ads about it on TV, making publicized visits to AIDS treatment centers?

I'd guess that it wasn't one thing, but a confluence of factors, including a huge crescendo over the past 8 weeks or so of international concern over China's apparent unwillingness or inability to embrace the situation.

It was only a few weeks ago that a whole new angle was added to the media coverage of China's AIDS crisis -- the concern that AIDS was more than a social/medical nightmare for China, but a financial nghtmare with direct and painful ramifications for the economy. If anythings going to perk up the CCP's ears, it's that.

It's hard to say exactly where/when the turning point began (and it may even be too early to call it a turning point at all). I'm going to take an optimistic viewpoint for once, and venture that it's real, similar in many ways to their sudden enlightenment over SARS: It took all hell breaking loose and a shrill international outcry to get the CCP off their asses in both instances. It was only in the face of chaos and catastrophe that they budged.

But once they crossed that threshold, once they acknowledged they had a crisis that could no longer be brushed aside or covered up, they pulled out the stops and dealt with it. I really think we are seeing that now. It's only just starting, and there is no excuse for their taking so many years to arrive at this realization. And thanks to their keeping their heads in the sand, its going to be much more difficult and expensive to contain the epidemic.

Still, if they are serious now, if they are actually making a true commitment and not just gesturing, maybe, just maybe they can deal with AIDS while there is still time. If they aren't serious, then China will almost certainly be the next Africa, and the misery and death will be compounded exponentially.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

Adam has an eyewitness account of the latest AIDS awareness ads on CCTV. From what I've been reading, there will be a lot more of these. It's years late, but certainly a step in the right direction.

In an editorial today, the WaPo describes how much the "new" China is trying as hard as it can do divorce itself from the "old" China's image as a prickly, paranoid, irrational and ideologically crazed nation.

And, the editorial says, it's been doing a good job. Except when it comes to Taiwan, an issue that brings to life the old blustery, bellicose China we all know and love:

Beijing fears that constitutional changes could make Taiwan's de facto separation from the mainland explicit, or that a referendum could be called on independence. Its apparent strategy is to frighten Mr. Chen into backing down -- or more likely, push the United States into using its leverage on the Taiwanese president.

Such tactics demonstrate that China's new leaders are not as pragmatic or enlightened as they seem. What Mr. Wen and Mr. Hu fail to perceive is that Mr. Chen is a typical democratic politician engaged in a tough reelection campaign. Though his party is pro-independence, he is unlikely to aggressively press that agenda even if he wins, if only because Taiwan's economy is now deeply dependent on trade with the mainland and most Taiwanese people favor preserving the status quo.

Pointedly, the editorial cautions Bush not to give in to Wen's demands that the US speak out against the referendum:

Mr. Bush should do no such thing. Instead, he should explain to Mr. Wen that his government's approach to Taiwan needs some modernizing. Now that Taiwan is a democracy, threats of invasion will only strengthen its independence movement -- just as the recent rhetoric only spurred the parliament into acting on the referendum law. The only way Beijing could achieve its goal of unification would be by winning over the Taiwanese public. That would take time and greater economic integration. It would also require China's new leaders to deliver on Mr. Wen's fluent rhetoric about democracy and rule of law.

Interesting. I read in a blog comment yesterday (don't remember where) that Americans don't realize that most Taiwanese want to reunify with the Mainland, but only after the Mainland has fixed up its act in regard to free elections, free trade, human rights, etc.

Would it be rude of me to suggest that this may prove a very, very long wait?

For those of you with the patience to have learned to read Chinese, Hailey Xie is now offering a Chinese-language blog that she says will show readers another side of her.

It seems that overnight we've become a community, certainly much more than we ever were before. All thanks to that rotating list of posts on that Living in China aggregator.

It's really quite amazing. All of those asteroids flying off in different directions are now one sleek asteroid field soaring in unison; all those desert islands spread irrationally here and there are suddenly each part of a carefully architected archipelago; all of those....well, enough with the metaphors.

I just want to note how in just a few short weeks Living in China has changed my (and probably your) surfing habits. I now go to a lot more of the regional blogs than I used to, often selecting them based on the headline that appears in the aggregator. (Big lesson here -- write good headlines if you want to boost site traffic.)

I also feel like I now know some of these bloggers on a much more intimate level. Many have been emailing me, and not just about the upcoming meeting in Beijing. I know that at least a portion of my improved site traffic is thanks to LiC. And my Comments have gone through a complete metamorphosis over the past few weeks, with a lot more inputs from a much broader spectrum of readers.

And now for the bad news. No, it's not a criticism, just an observation I made the other day. Due to the aggregator, I've been making more and more visits to LiC, and fewer and fewer visits to the sites I always made a point of visiting daily. This was driven home to me two or three days ago when I went to either Adam's or Conrad's site (I forget which) and scrolled through and realized there were several posts I had missed -- because I didn't catch them on the aggregator, and I was no longer making my daily romp through their blog!

No system is perfect, so I guess we just have to be diligent and keep in mind that the aggregator can't show everything all the time. We still need to visit each other's blogs on a regular basis, or we will definitely lose out.

Meanwhile, if that's the worst criticism I have of LiC, then I have to say it's a damned good system. Thanks to those who took the time and the effort to make it happen.

One quick question: Do we have any data on site traffic for LiC? I think we'd all like to know how it's growing, and which geographies are generating what proportion of the hits. Something like that would be really useful. Thanks again.

That's the title of a new post I just put up over at Living in China on the unique mindset of the new middle-class Chinese consumer, and how marketing to them is anything but business as usual for the Western marketer and public relations practitioner. I hope you can check it out.

There's an interesting summary of this week's little uproar over talking with Mainlanders about sensitive political issues like Taiwan. Very perceptive.

This is an interesting story:

Neil Bush, younger brother of President Bush, detailed lucrative business deals and admitted to engaging in sex romps with women in Asia in a deposition taken in March as part of his divorce from now ex-wife Sharon Bush.

According to legal documents disclosed today, Sharon Bush's lawyers questioned Neil Bush closely about the deals, especially a contract with Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., a firm backed by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, that would pay him $2 million in stock over five years.

Marshall Davis Brown, lawyer for Sharon Bush, expressed bewilderment at why Grace would want Bush and at such a high price since he knew little about the semiconductor business.

The link comes via Atrios, who wonders aloud what kind of a media storm this would have precipitated had it been about Roger Clinton and not Neil Bush.

This won't be of interest to everyone, and maybe not to anyone, and I guess I want to put it down more to save the memory than anything else. I take that back. It is a beautiful letter that will add depth and quality to the life of anyone who reads it.

My dearest friend from Beijing, Ben, wrote me the most beautiful email two days ago, and I asked him if I could post it to my site. It makes me so excited to see his enthusiasm for life, his need to always strive for something better, his youthful ambition that doesn't know any boundaries.

Maybe I'm so touched because I remember how I was once the same way, and I wish I had known at that age exactly what I wanted my life to be, the way Ben does. He asked me to edit the grammar, but I think the way he writes it, just as it is, is part of what makes it so endearing. (He mentions some names and some institutions that I've either changed or deleted to avoid any problems.) He also talks about how he could have joined my favorite political party, the CCP, and why he didn't. I never knew these things before.

As I said, it's more for myself, but I'm hoping maybe someone somewhere will see the beauty of Ben's innocence and total goodness which even now makes me long for China's success. There must be so many people like Ben in China, and they deserve to have great lives. I'll leave it at that. Here's what he wrote:

----------------------------------------------
Richard, one of my old classmates (we shared same dormitory in university) who worked at Ji Nang(Shangdong province) came to Beijing today. We had a lunch together, then went to visit our previous tutor, Ms Li, a warm-hearted and kind person.

Ms Li gave me a lot of help during my college time, especially when I just came into Beijing. She learned my family financial status and made all her efforts to help me, she recommendated me to that charity agency to get aid of RMB1500 per year. It is very helpful at that time. Ms Li was very happy to met us, because both her husband and her had retired, and they always want to meet their students.

She mentioned one of her students, Mr. W whom she took pride in and often talked about during my college times. He was former president of [names of companies], he was promoted by former premier, Zhu Rongyi. Richard, you know how pride I felt because this excellent alumni, he also had promising political future at that time.

But unfortunately, he met "serious political issue" in 2001 and forced to resigned, at the same time, was expelled from CCP's qualification. The problem was happened when he acted as president at [company name], and raised after he was president of [company name]. According relevant report, his problem laid in his corruptive life, someone muckraked he owned a luxury house in New York. Relatively, our other alummi who acted as vice president of [name of government agency] and had even been promoted by Mr. W., also had forced to resign.

This matter already passed for 2 years, and I was aware of the media report before. But Ms Li told us with a little pity, she said Mr. W was not so starring during his college life, but he studied and worked very hard. Mr. W was also kind and friendly, not so bureaucratic. Even when he acted as president of [company], he always answered every detail questions from my tutor with big patience. "How silly and venturous he was, why he would bought so luxury house in obvious New York", Ms Li said with plaint.

Later, our topic went further and talked about dark side of politics in China. Richard, as an ambitious student majored in public administration, you know my dream had been to be president and great stateman. But I made drastic change when I was a junior college student, I found my character and thoughts could not fit in with China's political condition, and I did not want to change myself from heart to fit it just in order to get my political objective. I love freedom and do not want to be controlled by dark human relationships. Actually, I had opportunity to become a CCP member when I was in my high school, but I did not take CCP's lesson and gave up actively, even it also meaned I would lose lot's benefits. The reason was simple, I felt boring about it.

As Roosevelt's saying said, "To be president, otherwise advertising man". I gave up my political future at so early age and decided to devote advertising and communications world. Maybe at this industry, I could find the thing which will make me feel excited for ever, otherwise, I will go on finding...........-:)

This is a pretty amazing story from this past Sunday. Unfortunately, it's from "the unlinkable South China Morning Post," so I can't link to it (duh). Therefore, I'm offering the entire thing.... It's long; whatever you do, don't miss that next-to-last paragraph.

Aliens invade China!

SIMON PARRY

A shimmering blue and white object hovered past the cockpit window of the Xiamen Airlines plane as it started its decent into Nanjing. It drifted across the path of the passenger jet, the pilot later told officials, then accelerated sharply and disappeared at lightning speed into a bank of cloud.

His story might have been dismissed as a delusion had it not been for the fact that two other pilots in different planes hundreds of kilometres apart independently radioed similar reports to air-traffic controllers within minutes of each other. One was flying a Shandong Airlines plane 120 kilometres north, also over Jiangsu Province. The second was flying 300 kilometres south over Tonglu, Zhejiang Province.

All three pilots flying on that November morning last year described the UFO as a blue and white oval-shaped spacecraft that moved noiselessly across the sky then sped away at a velocity sufficient to render it visible, within a brief period, from three aircraft hundreds of kilometres apart.

There are more UFO sightings over China than anywhere else in the world, with one in every five "flying saucers" reportedly seen over the mainland. It has the world's biggest network of clubs, the China UFO Research Organisation, and a monthly UFO magazine that sells 400,000 copies. It has some of the most spectacular sightings and some of the most bizarre tales of encounters; estimates by the UFO Research Organisation suggest more than half of China's 1.2 billion population believes in flying saucers. Sightings are reported widely by state media and pilots talk openly about close encounters, without the fear their counterparts have in the West of being dismissed as dangerous cranks.

In 1998, a Chinese jet fighter reportedly played a game of cat and mouse with a UFO picked up by four radar stations as it flew over a military training base near Changzhou. More than 100 people watched from the ground as the two-seat Jianjiao armed interceptor chased the UFO, which was described as a mushroom-shaped dome with rotating bright lights underneath it. The pilot said it looked "like the UFOs in foreign sci-fi movies". With the air force jet about 4,000 metres away, the UFO shot upwards, leaving it trailing in its wake. A request from the pilot to fire on the UFO was refused by ground control, official media reported.

Wendelle Stevens, an 80-year-old former US fighter pilot and one of the world's top UFO investigators, says the emergence of China as the epicentre of UFO activity is all the more remarkable considering there were no officially recorded sightings until less than 25 years ago. "UFOs seem to be taking a very close interest in China," Stevens said from his home in Tucson, Arizona. "From 1949 until 1979 the bamboo curtain was in place and no information about what was happening was coming in or out - but that's all changed now."

Even though UFOs were reportedly sighted across China as long ago as the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s and 40s, there was an official reluctance in the post-war years to recognise the phenomenon because of a widely held belief that they were American spy planes, according to Stevens. The Russians convinced the Chinese government that UFOs were a United States trick," he says. "They persuaded the Chinese to give them all the information they had. During those years the only cases anyone heard about were the spectacular ones."

That changed one day in 1979 when two dish-shaped objects reportedly flew backwards and forwards over Beijing at a height of about 150 metres. There were thousands of witnesses, and the first official reports of flying saucers in China's state media meant the newspapers were full of the incident the following day.

Stevens, co-author of UFOs Over Modern China, which documents 400 sightings, said: "When those newspaper stories appeared, people who had had experiences thought the lid was off so they began writing letters to newspapers describing what they had seen - thousands and thousands of letters."

A group of scientists at Wuhan University, led by former diplomat Professor Sun Shili, was given permission to start researching the phenomenon. A network of UFO enthusiasts' clubs was formed under the umbrella of the Chinese UFO Research Organisation. Stevens recalls his first meeting with Sun, in Mexico City in the early 1980s.

"My opening words were, 'Do the Chinese have crashed UFOs in their possession?' He answered: 'Of course.' Although Sun did not elaborate on the whereabouts of these aircraft, he said China was taking a different approach to the US with its research. "Sun said the Chinese were researching crashed UFOs to produce airliners that could rise and descend vertically, and unlocking the secret of unlimited supplies of energy. The US was using the technology from crashed UFOs to build bigger and better weapons.

"The Chinese are quite far along in that field [aeronautics]. They have experimental vehicles that rise and descend vertically. They haven't got them in production but when they do - and it might take 10 years - the economic balance of the world could shift. They are going into space using the knowledge they have got from the examination of crashed vehicles," Stevens says.

Sun, meanwhile, revels in academic freedom: an estimated 30 per cent of the Research Organisation's core members are Communist Party officials. Most are engineers and scientists, and members must have a degree and have published research before they can be admitted to its inner sanctum. The group receives government funding, its research papers are covered by state media and military officials attend its meetings. As long as it steers clear of politics, respect is assured.

Now 66 and retired, Sun worked in the diplomatic service and was once a translator for Mao Zedong. His only encounter with a UFO came in 1971 when he was working in a rice paddy after being sent to a labour camp in Jiangxi Province during the Cultural Revolution. "I thought it was a Soviet spy plane," he says. It was only years later when he read Western books on the subject that he realised it might have been a flying saucer.

Sun is on record as saying he has a "gut feeling" that there are "aliens living among us, masquerading as humans". One is reminded of the film Men In Black.

Moon Fong has an air of disappointment that hovers over her like a UFO that won't go home. She is 43, single, lives with her mother in Sha Tin, and eight years after seeing her only spaceship still hasn't been abducted by aliens.

"I want to go up in a flying saucer," she says wistfully over lunch. "I want to go up and see an alien planet - badly. I wish I was a contactee - I really wish I was."

Moon (not her real name) set up the Hong Kong UFO Club after seeing a UFO in Mexico. At the time she was staying with a cult-like group led by a mystic and didn't regard her experience as unusual, she says. "Everyone around me had seen a UFO, been to another planet, been abducted by an alien. It was only when I came back to Hong Kong that I began to think maybe the encounter was meant for me to bring the message back." In the early days it was a mission. "I was energy-high. Whenever I met UFO people it was like an instant merging, an instant hugging."

Now she feels that energy and sense of mission are ebbing and says she thinks "they" - the aliens - want her to slow down, sort out her life and play more of a background role in the UFO movement. She clearly isn't about to be whisked off her feet to another planet, however much she'd like to be.

The Hong Kong UFO Club has more than 300 members, including academics, company executives and a number of well-known movie industry figures. Moon says "at least 100" have seen UFOs or dreamed about them "in an abnormal way or frequently". She claims "dozens" have been awake during their extraterrestrial encounters.

Despite its proximity to the mainland, Hong Kong is not the best place to be if you want to be abducted by an alien, it seems. "They don't stop," Moon says. "They pass over, flying north to south and south to north. It looks like they are going back and forth to China from the ocean. No one has seen any landing. A lot of people have seen them from the Wah Fu Estate, southern Hong Kong Island, and over Tolo Harbour, skimming across the sky.

"It's too crowded and polluted in Hong Kong for UFOs to land. China on the other hand is a big place. Often they show up where there is military activity. That's why the Roswell incident [the alleged UFO crash of 1947 in New Mexico, after which the US government supposedly captured aliens] happened, and why there are so many sightings in Mongolia, where there are a lot of military installations from the Cold War era." The Roswell incident has an eerie parallel in China in the reported discovery of alien skeletons in the remote mountains of Bayan-Kara-Ula, Qinghai Province, in 1937. Archaeologists apparently found a group of skeletons with abnormally large heads and small bodies in a cave tomb. The skeletons were reportedly surrounded by granite discs with strange hieroglyphics that, according to one translation, tell of a UFO crash 12,000 years ago.

The Hong Kong club has contacts with mainland UFO groups but Moon gives the impression the relationship isn't an easy one. "A lot of them are weird," she says. "We are suspicious about whether some of them are sane. They all want to have contact with us because we are the ones with the money and power to get things done. A lot of them want to live here. When you ask them for photographs they ask you for money. They want money for anything they can offer you because they are so poor."

Moon acknowledges, however, that mainland UFO clubs operate in difficult political circumstances. "They can't do anything that is not scientific otherwise they will be treated like the Falun Gong. If they did anything seen as remotely religious or political they'd be banned."

What if all the stories are true? What if flying saucers really are shooting over Hong Kong and China? And why? Why don't they come down in peace or invade us and demand to be taken to our leaders?

It is a question Stevens has spent much of the past half century pondering and one for which he has a plausible answer. "It appears to me they are simply observing and reporting back to their own societies," he says. "They are far ahead of us technologically. They have no need of anything here. They are simply observing us at a stage when we are birds about to leave the nest. They have already left the nest and live in space in huge planetoids and have produced a utopian society. There are thousands of mother ships big enough to hold half a million people and travel forever. They are watching us approach the stage where we try our first flight."

Sun believes China is seeing a surge in UFO activity now for the same reason the US was attracted it in the 1950s: it is emerging as the world's leading power and extraterrestrials are almost as interested in China as foreign investors appear to be. "In the past, there were more flying saucers over developed countries like the US," he says. "Now China is developing, and this is what has aroused the interest of beings from other worlds."

Moon believes the aliens have a more esoteric motive and are trying to show at least some of us the way to a better life. "People who have seen UFOs say everything is so warm, so heavenly. It is like an inner knowing that there is something better. There are much better worlds everywhere. This is really negative, this world. It's just that most people are very good at pretending." There is a faraway look in her eyes as she declares: "There is something better out there. I know there is."

[UPDATE: Here's the plan. We will meet in the lobby of the Novotel Hotel in Wangfujing (easy walk from the subway) at 12:30 p.m., Dec. 6. Then we can head off to the restaurant together in two or three taxis. If possible, please confirm via comment or email to me.]

When I first put out the word on this I expected three, maybe four attendees. So far we now have 10 bloggers who've asked to participate. Now we just need to all agree on the time and the place to meet.

Adam M. tells me we'll meet at a kaoya restaurant (how appropriate) near Wangfujing. Can someone please post a comment with the exact address? Would 1 PM next Saturday (December 6) work for everyone?

Based on emails and comments, these are the participants as of today (and sorry, I don't have urls for all of them):

Brendan (bokane.org)
Emile Kroeger
Li Tong of Sophie�s World
Adam (robots.org)
Josh Krieger
Alan Murphy
B Raffa, Soapbox Jams
Adam Morris
Jeremy of Danwei
Richard (me)

If I left anyone off, please let me know. If we want to increase the attendance, feel free to put up a notice on your own site. Thanks to everyone for helping to make this happen.

(Oh, and if anyone can convince Hailey to change her plans and be available, we'd all love to meet her.)

A shocking report from Amnesty Intenational makes China's control of the Internet seem downright tame.

In Viet Nam, clicking on the 'send' button carries the risk of being sent to prison and having your friends and family put under 24 hour surveillance.

While the internet has given those critical of the government a place to express their opinions, the Vietnamese authorities have become very sophisticated in tracing their electronic footsteps and arresting and imprisoning them.

The report says Vietnam has already sentenced "at least 10 people to long prison terms for criticising the government online and emailing overseas Vietnamese groups."

Also worth nothing: Amnesty International is setting up a new Web site dedicated to human rights abuses in the Asia Pacific.

The much-vaunted reforms don't seem to have reached this province yet:

Villagers in southern China's Guangxi province accused local police on Tuesday of arresting Bible owners and sentencing them to labour camps as part as a campaign to weed out "illegal religious organisations".

Written testimony supplied to AFP by villagers in Xilin county accused up to 40 policemen of descending on Christian villages in the middle of the night and ransacking homes in search of Bibles and other religious materials.

Official arrest documents also show that following their detention three people from Weishan and Tianbao villages were sentenced without trial to 18 months in a labour camp run by the Nanning Glass Factory in the provincial capital.

Actually, it seems to be an equal-opportunity crackdown, with similar incidents taking place against "illegal religious organisations" in three other provinces. The article says the wave of crackdowns began after Hu Jintao had completed his transition to power in March.

So much for Hu ushering in a new era of measurable reforms.

[Link via Radio Free China.]

I staggered out of bed at 7 a.m., made some coffee and checked my site traffic to see I had already had 300 unique visitors in the first 7 hours of the day. Now, it is always nice to see your traffic go up, but this is utterly, totally, ridiculously crazy. Yesterday's total was 600.

For the past four months traffic was amazingly consistent at about 250 on weekdays, 150 to 200 on weekends. I won't complain, but it's definitely bizarre.

(Adam, when you reinstalled my sitemeter a week ago did you do anything weird?)

Be sure to read Hailey's take on the debate that's been going on today. She is great.

I wasn't happy about a couple of the things she pointed out, and hope there's something for us to learn here:

We have different points of view because we grow up in completely different environments. There's nothing wrong about it. But what finally caused me to click the button "delete" was that I learned some of you jumped into this debate not only because you want to debate. Your insulting emails first made me sad, then I learned it was my fault to talk about sensitive issues on my blog while so many people will read it. It was my fault to generate such a debate. I'm sorry.

I disagree. It was not your fault at all, because a blog is there to express your opinion. As I said in my long post today, Westerners will see Tibet and Taiwan and many other issues through a totally different filter than people in the PRC. We can disagree and try to persuade one another, but there is no excuse for anyone sending insulting emails to you or anyone else whose opinion differs from theirs. You do not need to apologize.

Keep up the great work, and I hope you reconsider and share your thoughts on political issues. I am very interested, and I am sure others are, too.

God knows, she's gorgeous enough. Too bad that not too long ago she was a he.

If you think selling a mute teenager as dog meat is weird, try this:

Local police Monday detained a group of burglars including 13 HIV carriers in Hangzhou City, the capital of Zhejiang Province, east China.

It is the first time in the country that HIV-carrying criminal suspects have ever been detained by police, according to official sources.

....

One of the members, whose surnamed was only disclosed as Qin, told police that they had purposely injected themselves in order to contract AIDS so as to scare away police.

So far, 13 of these suspects have been confirmed as carrying the HIV virus, while some others are found to have hepatitis-b and tuberculosis.

When I lived there, I kept a tally of how many times each day I repeated the phrase to myself, "Only in China." I'm still repeating it.

[Link via Drudge Report.]

What some people won't do for money:

Vietnamese drug addicts kidnapped a mute teenager, bundled him in a sack and sold him to a dog-meat eatery as a stray canine, state media said on Saturday.

The Gia Dinh Xa Hoi (Family and Society) newspaper said the two addicts grabbed the homeless 13-year-old from a busy market in Halong city.
[....]
The kidnappers tied up the boy, bundled him into a sack and sold him to the restaurant for $19, the newspaper said.

The restaurateur, shocked to find the boy, fed him and released him. Police were investigating the case but had made no arrests, said the newspaper, mouthpiece of the state Population, Family and Children Committee.

Dog meat is a delicacy in parts of China and in some other Asian countries such as Korea, Cambodia, Indonesia and Laos. In Vietnam, eating specifically farmed breeds is believed to bring health benefits and is seen as auspicious.

This has the potential to be an emotionally charged post, so I'll need to measure every phrase carefully to keep from stepping on the third rail or scattered landmines.

I'm going out on a limb and writing this based on two recent incidents in our regional blogosphere:

1. Over at Glutter, Yan has posted an extraordinary post requesting (demanding?) that HK bloggers remove her from their blogrolls. This was the result of a very heated debate in her comments over her suggestion that some HK bloggers might be homophobic.

2. The newly discovered Chinese blogger Hailey Xie wrote a post on Taiwan a few days ago, that also generated some very spirited comments from the foreign blog community; I was going to post a comment of my own last night, but when I went over to her site, I saw that the post had been deleted. And that's a bad sign.

In both cases, there was a pattern. A bright young female Asian blogger expressed her honest feelings about a controversial issue, and was "attacked" (or at least criticized) by an army of bright older, mostly male foreign bloggers. Each of their posts generated heated threads of comments which, in the end, resulted in extreme action, ending the comments and denouncing the HK bloggers (Yan) and deleting the entire post and its comments (Hailey).

Both of these reactions saddened me because I think both of them are terrific bloggers and they obviously both went through some pain in this process. It also sadened me bacause I think they both made the wrong decision. Putting myself in their shoes, I completely understand why they did it; still, I wish they hadn't.

If you read the comments to Yan's post, you'll see they get pretty intense. To a degree, as some commenters pointed out, Yan set herself up for this by having her own racial stereotyping on her site, referring to some HK blogs as "The Sick World of White Men with Asian Fetish who has the Pleasure to live in Asia and the Dumb Women who Date them." So, with some justification, some criticized her for living in a glass house and recklessly throwing stones.

Hailey Xie in her post on Taiwan expressed wonder at the fact that Taiwan is so strenuously resisting unification with the PRC. What Hailey wrote was completely in line with what many in the PRC believe. It is simply inconceivable and amazing that Taiwan would not welcome reunification. The commenters, equally amazed, asked why a country with free elections, a true free-market economy and a high regard for human rights would want to be subsumed into a country that offers none of those things.

(This was strikingly similar to an interaction I had with a young Chinese blogger last year on Tibet, which she said was now modernized and liberated and free of an oppressive theocracy where most lived as serfs. I printed her entire email in that post, which blew me away. But living in Beijing, I was to learn that this belief is totally status quo, and I strongly recommend you not get drawn into an argument about it; you won't win.)

Anyway, I have a point here, somewhere, but it may be challenging to articulate without sounding racist on one end and patronizing on the other.

So here comes the controversial suggestion: Maybe we Western bloggers, who were brought up in a way very different from those in our host countries, should exercise a little more cultural sensitivity. This applies especially to the PRC, where the sort of aggressive challenging we do with one another might not be understood by the local blogger.

I know that sounds patronizing, but I'm not sure how else to say it. Shouting at each other the way we Western bloggers do, with aggressive assertiveness, sometimes is simply difficult for the young Asian blogger to digest and process.

At the risk of sounding racist, I tend to put on a gentler tone with these bloggers. There are so few young Asian bloggers writing in English about political and social issues, and I want to encourage them, not intimidate them. Even if they are wrong, maybe we should try to let them know in a way that won't injure their pride. A double standard? Yes. But we all know that communicating with a native Chinese person is not the same as communicating with a native New Yorker. This is true in international negotiations as well as in blog comments.

So to summarize: I think that in both cases, the comments made by the Westerners were shrewder and more likely to hold up in court. I just think it's a shame that in both cases it resulted in the blogger in question shutting down, getting hurt and most likely feeling she had been overwhelmed with criticism.

The real shame is that while I absolutely do not agree with Hailey's view of Taiwan, she offers us a fantastic (unprecedented?) opportunity to see such situations from the eyes of a bright, sensitive Chinese citizen. In English. It would be a real loss if she now decides to avoid such topics, fearing a repeat of yesterday's full-frontal assault (at least in her eyes).

So can we all just get along? If our regional blog community doesn't have voices like Hailey's and Yan's, it runs the risk of getting mighty dull mighty fast.

It makes no sense. I haven't posted anything remarkable and I haven't been linked by Instrapundit, but over the past three days my site traffic has been in the range of 400 unique visitors each day. I know, it's a teensy drop in the bucket for Phil and Conrad (they get that much each hour), but for me it's pretty amazing.

In Beijing I often got thousands of hits a day due to my posts on SARS (posts on AIDS, gays in China and The Great Firewall also helped). It was a short ride that ended the day I moved to Singapore. Daily traffic dropped to less than 150 a day for my first two months here, then stabilized at about 250 a day. The leap of the past three days is inexplicable.

400 visitors a day is nothing to brag about. But it is nice to know that a couple hundred people around the world "make an appointment" to come by every day. Let's see how long the current spike lasts.

This is one of the strongest-worded warnings yet, with very specific references to Al-Qaeda and what they plan to do. Most unusual.

WORLDWIDE CAUTION November 24, 2003

This supersedes the Worldwide Caution dated September 26, 2003. It is being issued to re-emphasize the continuing threat that U.S. citizens may be a target of terrorist actions. This Worldwide Caution expires on April 21, 2004. The U.S. Government remains deeply concerned about the security of U.S. citizens overseas. U.S. citizens are cautioned to maintain a high level of vigilance, to remain alert and to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness. We are seeing increasing indications that Al-Qaida is preparing to strike U.S. interests abroad. Al-Qaida and its associated organizations have struck in the Middle East in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and in Europe in Istanbul, Turkey. We therefore assess that other geographic locations could be venues for the next round of attacks. We expect Al-Qaida will strive for new attacks designed to be more devastating than the September 11 attack, possibly nvolving nonconventional weapons such as chemical or biological agents. We also cannot rule out that Al-Qaida will attempt a second catastrophic attack within the U.S.

Unfortunately, they put out a lot of these since 911, and to many they''ve become the boy who cried wolf.

Conrad and I stand accused of "cutural snobbery" in a post everyone should read, regarding Conrad's account and my reaction to the sickening story of a Palestinian woman murdering her own daughter because the daughter refused to commit suicide after her brothers raped and impregnated her.

This post lives up to all my worst fears: that there are people out there, obviously well educated and bright, who can rationalize barbarism and excuse the most sickening crimes under the mantra, "It's a cultural thing."

While I personally grieve at the death of the child, I believe that the mother is equally a victim of social conventions and beliefs. Richard calls this 'hard-wired irrationalism' here; but what is rationality to begin with? It would probably -- but I make no assumptions/presumptions here -- have been entirely rational in the mind of the mother to have killed the daughter, in order to, as the article mentions, protect the rest of her family.

He then looks at the factors justifying what the mother did: if she had not murdered her own daughter, perhaps the religious community would have reacted with violence to the family. Perhaps, in her mind, she would have been disgraced in the eyes of God. And, of course, these beliefs were inculcated in the mother and the family as Truths, passed down from generations to generations (a point I make in my own post).

Therefore, the writer concludes, Conrad and I are guilty of "the crime of demeaning other cultures and societies by virtue of one's own ignorance, and self-righteous bloody enthusiasm."

Yikes. Where to begin?

It's getting late, so I'll try to be succinct. Let's look at the argument of inculcation, that in their culture there was nothing wrong with what the mother did, and to her it was actually quite appropriate. That was what she was taught.

So do we just shrug and say, "Oh, I see; it was something she was taught as part of her culture" and then let it go? I say no. Let's look at another example of inculcation. For generations in the South, it was okay to lynch "niggers" and treat them as half-citizens or worse. It was okay; gramma taught us they are like animals and if you don't hold them in line, who knows what they'll do? It truly was a cultural phenomenon dating back centuries.

So what? It was still evil. By making a lot of noise about it, by passing and enforcing laws against it, by putting it under the spotlight, the problem has improved from one generation to the next. Yeah, big problems still linger, but only the most demented racists believe today that it's fine and dandy to lynch innocent black people.

Much of the space in this blog is used to criticize the Chinese government. Its actions, too, are steeped in cultural tradition. That doesn't make them right and it certainly doesn't mean that they are above criticism. As I said in the original post, evil is evil, and most of us know it. Many in China know that what the government is doing is wrong, and they risk going to jail every day to let people know about it.

And the poor murdered girl -- she knew what her mother wanted her to do was wrong and evil. She wept and she fought. If it had been so deeply inculcated as the right thing to do, why didn't she just grab the knife and cheerfully slice her own throat? She knew it was an act of evil. [Update: I didn't express this point clearly so let's strike it for now.]

I am not saying everyone should adopt Western culture and convert to Christianity (to paraphrase Ann Coulter). After living in Central America, North America, Europe and Asia, I can pretty safely say that most people, no matter their culture, have a fairly similar definition of evil. Not exactly the same by any means, but there are fundamental standards of human decency.

Once you deny that, once you invalidate those standards, you can pardon and justify even the most unconscionable act. In fact, that's just what the blogger has done.

As a liberal, I find it frustrating that there is a whole school of liberal thought that, through its "cultural sensitivity" can excuse and justify murder, torture and just about any type of deranged behaviour imaginable. While I agree we must always consider and respect the culture of others, we can't let this become a blanket excuse for acts that all of us know are simply wrong.

UPDATE: If you made it this far, you must read Conrad's rebuttal. Needless to say, his response is more pointed and, ahem, outspoken than my own.

It's easy to get numb to all the stories about AIDS in China and, in certain cases, to the government's bending over backwards to either cover it up, minimize it or avoid responsibility.

The latest horror story comes from northeastern China's Jilin province, where more than 60 have been infected (the number is possibly closer to 300) and at least 20 have died from AIDS after donating blood. According to Frank Lu, director of the HK-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, the government is being its usual slippery self:

Government officials at various levels have covered up the infections to protect Liu Baozhong, party secretary of Soudengzhan, who has been singled out for praise by former President Jiang Zemin, Lu said.

"It is because of this that officials have covered up this serious matter," he said. "AIDS is spreading in that town and other places around the country."

A woman who answered the telephone at the Soudengzhan town government said only that "no one has contracted AIDS here." She would give only her family name, Yao.

At Jilin's city health bureau, which oversees Soudengzhan, a man who answered the telephone said he "hadn't heard anything about the cases." He refused to give his name.

I chatted online last night for the very first time with my cherished friend from Beijing, Ben, who asked, "Why are you always so hard on China?"

I tried to explain that it's very simple: I hate the government that represses one of the world's most industrious and brilliant people. I would do anything to give them a break, but the most I can ever say is that they are being less bad than they were in the past. This story only makes me more convinced that we need to remain on their case, day and night, highlighting that there is more to China than gleaming office towers, astronauts and unending cheap exports.

I still don't think Ben understood. He is so proud and ambitious. I wanted him to understand that if I didn't care about people like him, I wouldn't care so much what the CCP does with its people.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

A most humorous post over at danwei re. an ad for a Chinese real estate development featuring an endorsement from none other than Bill Clinton. I love the translation of the copy.

Conrad's latest picks of recent China-related posts are up at Winds of Change. (Yes, I'm included, but there are lots of others, some of which I would have missed if not for the round-up.)

Am I imagining this, or has Phil of Flying Chair fame managed to hijack Living in China's rss feed?

Don't believe me? Go to the site right now, scroll down to China Bloggers - Latest and tell me whose post is on top. See what I mean? I log on in the morning, Phil's post is on top. I log on at lunchtime, same thing. I log on now, at 10 p.m., and the same post from this afternoon is sitting right there on top of the list, while the posts of less worthy regional bloggers are cruelly expunged from the list after a mere 15 minutes of fame.

I always thought Phil was a decent fellow, a gentleman. This effort (successful so far) to usurp the prime spot for himself makes me wonder.

Phil, if you tell me how you do it and share the code with me, I will delete this post right away! (Edward and Andrea, if Phil is paying you off for this advantage, tell me who I should write the check to!) Thanks.

(Note: If you aren't involved with Living in China, this post will be pretty meaningless. If you haven't been there yet, go now -- it's a great site, despite Phil's machinations.)

Update: Well, I just saw that Phil's post dropped a notch, so maybe my theory is imperfect. Maybe you should just disregard this post. Still, I'm suspicious.

A long, in-depth article in the NY Times notes that China's approach to AIDS in the countryside, while "better than nothing," is simplistic and inadequate.

The main reason, the article says, is that China is haphazardly handing out retroviral drugs with no patient care or counsel. (The reporter likens it to a food drop.) A few are improving, but without adequate supervision, many are becoming sick from the pills and even discontinuing treatment. Patients who can't deal with the side effects are totally on their own.

Reading the article, one is hardly inspired with hope:

Bates Gill, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that while anti-retroviral pills need to be taken under a precise regimen, waiting for China's health system to improve was an imperfect answer.

"Do you begin the treatment now, learn as you do it and make mistakes?" he asked. "Or do you wait? It's a tough choice."

The social costs and stigma of AIDS, meanwhile, are scarcely being addressed. Villagers here in Dongguan estimate that as many as 100 children have lost one or both parents to AIDS or live with a parent dying of the disease. While villagers say the government gives the families two sacks of flour a year and a small discount on school fees, children of H.I.V.-positive parents are often segregated at school.

Mr. Zhao's wife earns about $1.60 a day mixing cement and does not dare tell anyone her husband has AIDS. "They wouldn't employ me at all," she said, asking not to be identified by name.

The underlying theme throughout is the role of the government, which will determine whether the people live or die.

Mrs. Zhao, the mother who sold blood to buy her son toys, now considers herself one of the lucky ones because she has suffered no side effects. Her worry is that the government will decide that the medicine is too expensive.

"We don't know how long we'll be able to take the medicine," she said, adding that local health officials also were not certain. "They tell us they don't know either. They hear from the people on top. It all depends on the people on top."

A story from Shanghai that raises my hopes for increased tolerance in China:

No one ever knows how much courage and resolution Zhitong had to take before deciding to confess his gay identity and lecture the optional course "homosexual health sociology" at Fudan's medical college.

He had been keeping tight-lipped on his sexual orientation to persons of the same sex as "I hate to be stared like a monster by people around and especially by those who seek novelty in me".

However, he made up his mind finally to make this step out and stood on the platform on November 7, the first class of his course, saying "For medical students, anatomical practice is important. And as a gay, I'm willing to serve as a living sample for you to study on homosexuals."

To his surprise, students in the classroom responded with a big applause to show their appreciation and understanding for his courage and responsibility.

This is a very touching story. Let's hope this kind of tolerance spreads. Usually this topic is extreeeemely taboo in China, so it's a very healthy sign that the students were unfazed and even supportive.

Related Post: Gays in China

A haven for those seeking to flee the all-too-predictable avalanche of stories about the freakish boy-child that parents idiotically (greedily?) send their children to sleep with.

Update: Come to think of it, with this post I guess it's more accurate to say this site is 99% MJ-free.

In two comments, Conrad makes some very perceptive points about where Massachusetts really stands in regard to the highly charged and potentially explosive issue of gay marriage. Is it a step in the right direction, or does it set the stage for an unprecedented backlash? It's useful to have a lawyer's viewpoint of what it all really means. And I'm afraid that what he says makes a lot of sense.

Can moral or cultural relativism somehow excuse the sickening, unfathomable story that Conrad relates (in a post from a few days ago that I just discovered)? Can we simply say, "Their culture is different from ours? We have to accept that this is how they treat women"? Sorry, I can't.

In short, brothers rape and impregnate their sister, the mother insists her daghter kill herself to maintain the "family honor," she refuses, the mother then murders her own daughter herself. (But my words can't do it justice; read the post.)

Is speaking out against this sort of thing a sign of ignorance, of simplistic thinking? Does it betray a lack of cultural understanding and empathy? I can't believe that. Simplistic as it may sound, evil is evil, and while I may not be able to formally define it, I definitely know it when I see it.

Stories like this leave me incensed, and also rather hopeless. It will take generations to change this sort of fundamentalist mentality, this hard-wired irrationalism. Maybe it will take forever. I don't have the magic answer. I do know that these people are treating women worse than animals, and it is hard for me to feel sympathy for them. I consider myself a liberal, but when I see liberals take up their cause I feel absolutely sick.

I'm now watching Bush and Blair as they do their little dance in front of the press together. As usual, Blair is dazzling; his words flow with a noble logic, with no pause or hesitation, and the ideas he articulates are instantly clear and infinitely wise. Bush stands there, looking like a confused child, and you can see him trying with all his might to achieve something close to Blair's gravitas. Frequent "ummmms" and "uhhhhhs" pepper his sentences; he tries so hard to look casual and relaxed, and the platitudes flow like water.

Okay, I won't be too hard on our president tonight. (The number killed in Istanbul has just gone up to 25, with an inconceivable 392 injured.) I just wish Bush could could clean up his act as a communicator. After all, that's 90 percent of what being the president is all about.

I'm watching the carnage live on the BBC. All British targets, five separate explosions, at least one caused by the usual car packed with explosives and driven by a suicide driver, Al Qaeda-style....

So where are we going with the War on Terror -- down the same road we travelled with the War on Drugs? Is it another great big black hole? How can we really "win" when the enemy is so eager to sacrifice his own life?

I don't mean to sound hopeless, but looking at the chaos and the death right now, I don't see how we can cause a tectonic shift in the mindset of the monsters who are willing to do this sort of thing.

Update: My god, they just showed amatuer video footage, someone taping his/her family just as the explosion at the HSBC is about to go off -- incredible. Such horror.

I don't often write about or even allude to sports in my blog. In fact, I never do. But this article on how sports writers make a whole lot of idiotic noise about nothing in regard to steroid abuse is one of the funniest (in the very darkest of ways), best-written, intelligent pieces I've seen in a long time. The idiocy all goes back to one event, the writer contends: the death of Len Bias.

Len Bias would have been 40 years old in November had he not celebrated by putting the Cali Cartel up his nose on the very night in 1986 that he'd been drafted by the defending champion Boston Celtics. The tragedy was put to immediate use by a bipartisan passel of opportunistic hysterics led by then-Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, who demanded a tough new law to placate the angry and mournful Celtics fans among his constituents. (You think I made that part up? Dan Baum limns the whoopin' and hollerin' splendidly in his history of the drug wars, Smoke and Mirrors.)

That October, President Ronald Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which was sort of the drug war's Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and which visited upon ourselves a whole number of really fine ideas, including the mandatory minimum sentences so beloved these days by so many judges. Of course, we learned almost nothing from the whole Bias saga and certainly nothing about the perils of making policy by letting the hottest heads prevail.

It gets much funnier. Link via Andrew Sullivan, who also never writes about sports.

There's not much I can add to this. It sounds too depressing to be true:

A retired worker from Shanghai will be tried on subversion charges for publishing Internet articles promoting democracy in China, a human rights organisation said yesterday.

One of 61-year-old Sang Jiancheng's articles appealed to the Communist Party to protect the interests of retired workers and said corrupt officials needed to be eliminated from the system, the Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said.

This kind of thing, like the arrest of "stainless steel butterfly" Liu Di, is self-destructive. It does little to enhance the image of the New China the CCP is striving for, an image of a more enlightened, fairer and reform-minded country.

That sure didn't take long. Already, yesterday's ruling in Massachusetts seems poised to bring change to my home state. If only Barry Goldwater (a true liberal on this subject) could be here to see it.

UPDATE: Sullivan has updated his site since I posted this. He addressed the point I was trying to make, and I give him credit for it.

I'm not sure if it's propoer blog etiquette, but I'm deleting my post. I don't want there to be any misunderstandings.

How ironic, that as China is doing everything it can to break free of the curse that Mao imposed on it, Hu is now planning a Mao-a-thon of truly epic proportions:

There can be nothing more incongruous in fast-modernizing China than a gargantuan effort to celebrate Chairman Mao Zedong, famous for his self-sufficient, ultra-conservative theories.

Right after it has put a man in orbit and signaled large-scale privatization of state enterprises, however, the administration of President Hu Jintao is readying marathon festivities to mark the Great Helmsman's 110th birthday next month.

Aside from galas, lectures and conferences, there are plans to launch commemorative stamps, TV and film shows as well as revolutionary opera performances.

The article suggests, however, that this burst of Mao worship is inspired less by Hu's love of the Great Helmsman than by a will to assert his own leadership, and to step out of Jiang Zemin's shadow:

While neither Hu nor Wen will roll back China's open-door policy or quasi-capitalistic practices, their apparent championship of Mao's serve-the-masses philosophy will serve to pacify sectors such as the unemployed which have suffered setbacks due to the country's embrace of the marketplace.

For Hu, a cunning refurling of Maoist standards has the extra effect of putting ex-president Jiang in his place.

In a variant of the time-tested ploy called "hoisting the red flag to counter another red flag," Hu has used the Helmsman's "be close to the masses" dictums to marginalize Jiang's much-ballyhooed Theory of the Three Represents (that the party represents the most advanced productivity and culture as well as the masses' interests.)

So there's to be no end in sight to the ongoing lovefest over the long-dead Chairman. It's going to be a big chapter in my book, this anomaly, this need we have for heroes, and how, in the absence of such heroes, we cling to old myths even though we know they are myths.

I just started reading Jasper Becker's book The Chinese, which begins by sifting through the damage caused by Mao in the countryside, the catastrophe Mao meant for so many of China's poor, and it is so heartbreaking. After reading just the first 50 pages, I can only wonder how the Chinese can bear to see Mao's face anywhere, let alone everywhere. And this reminds me of how different my own mind works; I can talk with my Chinese friends, I can spend time with them, but I cannot think as they think, I can't get inside and know how they process Mao's image, what they feel when they see it.... It's one of the things I am determined to understand before I pack up and go home to America.

The lead story of today's ST tells us the local economy has "soared 17.3 percent" over the last quarter, exactly as our wise and magnanimous leaders told us it would:

SINGAPORE'S third-quarter economic figures more than lived up to the hints given earlier by Deputy Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong. In fact, they showed the fastest growth in eight years.

The July-to-September quarter posted a blistering 17.3 per cent expansion compared to the quarter before - definitely 'not bad' - the tantalising description used by Mr Lee before yesterday's figures were announced.

The rah-rah feel-good wording that permeates the article brought back my memories of China Daily, where the good shepherds always knew what would happen, and their predictions always came true. And the news was always suffocatingly cheerful.

This is a very, very bad time in Singapore. It is the topic of just about every conversation. It was just announced, for example, that new teachers' salaries are being cut, and retrenchment is still the word of the day.

I speak not just as an observer, but as an active participant in the Singapore business world. This is about as tough as anyone here can remember, and no one seems to believe it is going away anytime soon. Unlike Hong Kong, Singapore has no China to pull it up from the quicksand.

On the surface, the city is functioning just fine. But it will take more than rosy headlines and cheerful chirping about how great things are before Singapore snaps out of its deep funk. Maybe things really did "soar" last quarter. But if so, it made little difference to the man on the street. The best we can say right now is that retrenchment levels have stabilized, and fewer workers are being laid off than before. In other words, things are less bad, but they are no where near being good yet.

I don't like Bush, but to see the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone referring to him as "the greatest living threat to life on the planet" makes me cringe with embarrassment.

Livingstone throws so many idiotic charges at Bush that he damages the cause of those who want to see Bush unelected. He damages our own credibility by justifying all those complaints out there about irrational Bush hatred.

Livingstone rants against Bush in regard to genetically modified foods (another topic on which many in Europe appear to be deranged), Bush's stealing the last election, and the evil "American agenda." There are some kernels of truth in his rant, but by foaming at the mouth like this, Livingstone makes a total ass of himself.

If we want to see Bush deposed unelected, this is exactly the type of brainless, self-destructive tact we need to avoid.

I am going to presume that Hailey Xie is a young Chinese blogger who most likely lives not too far from Beijing. Her recent post on the 21-year-old AIDS activist who's been accompanying Bill Clinton is a beautiful display of tolerance and compassion.

I am not sure why she writes in English and not Chinese; whatever the reason, I am grateful for it.

A friend sent me an email pointing out a post that she recently wrote about my own site, and I have to say she is one perceptive lady.

Please check out her site, not for what she says about me (although it's fine if you read that, too) but to see what is going on in the life and in the mind of a young Chinese citizen experiencing life in the PRC during these amazing times. Whatever you do, don't miss the post on AIDS.

[To read a complete interview with Liu Di, go here.]

]Liu Di, the 23-year-old student whose arrest as a cyber-dissident in China has showered the CCP with bad publicity, appears on the verge of release:

A 23-year-old "cyber dissident" detained last year for criticising the Chinese government may be released soon, family members say.

Four officials from the Beijing Public Security Bureau visited Liu Di's home last week to convey the news, her grandmother said on Monday.

Liu Di, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the screen name "Stainless Steel Mouse", became a high-profile symbol for democracy and free speech in China since her detention in November 2002.

Liu's case comes during a crackdown on Internet content -- from politics to pornography -- and as the government struggles to gain control over a new and popular medium.

Liu's heinous crimes were satirizing the CCP online and calling for the release of other "cyber-dissidents." Her arrest was simply too indefensible, and it ignited a flurry of worldwide media protest.

Such pressure apparently works. There are many others serving hard time for similar crimes against the state, some hit with sentences up to 10 years. Each and every one should be let go, and the international media should not muffle its outcry now that the most famous one appears to be going free.

Update, from the BBC --

It was unclear whether her [Liu Di's] release would have any bearing on other people arrested at the same time for posting critical material on the internet.

China's authorities have been keen to promote the commercial potential of the internet, but are anxious to control its political content.

The campaign group Reporters Without Borders estimates that China employs 30,000 people to watch what its people are doing online.

UPDATE: She is free!

You mean Japan's sex business is hotter than Singapore's? From today's Straits Times:

Despite a spluttering economy, Japan still has Asia's largest and most voracious sex market, one that has lured as many as 150,000 foreign women, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

Japan's sex industry likes foreign workers for the same reason other industries do - they are cheaper and willing to take on jobs others don't want, says Mr Takashi Kadokura, an economist with Dai Ichi Life Research Institute.

Mr Kadokura recently set the size of Japan's 'entertainment trade' in 2001 at a staggering 2.37 trillion yen (S$37.7 billion).

Filipinos, Thais and increasingly Chinese and South American women can be found doing everything from pouring drinks in karaoke and hostess bars to offering cut-price sex massages

Most of these women come to Japan using a special "entertainment visa," and an amazing 19 out of 20 foreign women interviewed by the UN in Japan say they were 'forced to engage in sexual practices in their job'.

So what was it like to actually work in Beijing as a PR flack? What are companies going through as they try to crack the China market ? What were some of the strange things you observed in this regard?

These are some of the issues I try to address in a new article over at Living in China. The theme is how many MNCs are "chasing the China Dream," trying to tap the world's biggest market, usually with limited success.

I don't speculate or cut & paste from what other people say. It's only what I actually saw and did in Beijing. I hope you can check it out.

You have to read this hilarious post, which brought back a flood, a stream, a pile of memories. Great writing that takes you right there. Not for the delicate.

We now have eight bloggers who've told me via email or comments that they'd like to join the party. That's pretty good! I'm looking at Saturday December 6 around lunchtime. Sunday is possible, too -- please let me know if you have a preference.

Also, if someone has a suggestion for a meeting place, let me know. Somewhere easy and central, like Wangfujing or Guo Mao would make sense. Thanks to all who've responded (and if you haven't, what are you waiting for?).

Damn, I am having a true "China fit" today. All I can think about is China, my last days there, the things I never put into this blog, the very very last day in Beijing when I swore I would never go back to that city, my sitting and shivering alone in my apartment with no heat and only my laptop and the world's slowest Internet connection (my property agent assured me it was broadband), the despair I felt when the waitress misunderstood my request again and brought me some kind of animal's guts, the evil guard at Fudan University who wouldn't let me visit my friend at his dorm, the sensation that with SARS Beijing had spun out of control and was off somewhere in The Outer Limits, the fight every morning at work to get on the elevator, the first time I saw a woman -- very well dressed -- blow her nose Chinese-style, the half-day wait at the bank, watching someone brush her hair over the food at a buffet, the lady at the barbershop who tried to drag me upstairs for a special massage, the time when I.... Well, you probably get the point.

So what is a "China Fit"? Is it when you feel disgust at China? Revulsion? Anger? No, it's absolutely the opposite. It's when all you can do is recount those things, and in spite of the shock, in spite of the frustration, in spite of the infinite sense of helplessness, you still miss it and you still wish you were back there.

I thought of Singapore as a haven, and it was -- for a few weeks. China, for all of its, um, challenges brought out my creativity. It inspired me. I almost had a sense of mission as I wrote about it between January and May. And now, as I try to write about it from far away, I often feel it is forced, like I'm grasping at things to write about. Not always. But often enough. I have never, not once, felt as inspired as I did during those five months. The only time I came close was when I wrote about saying goodbye to my friend Ben, and that's only because I managed to mentally transport myself to that night in Beijing; I was actually in Beijing as I wrote it, at least mentally.

[Uh-oh. I can see this is going to be one of those posts that I'll consider deleting later. Too emotional and written too quickly.]

Anyway, the only thing on my mind at this instant is What Next? As much as I am tempted, I feel I cannot go back to China for more than a visit. I have some major commitments back home. But I would be lying if I were to say I don't want to go back, and if the oportunity arose in the future for me to return, under more comfortable terms than before, I would be damn tempted.

Maybe my upcoming trip to Beijing in a few weeks will remind me of China's myriad "uniquenesses" and sober me up. But tonight, for some reason, I am intoxicated. (No, not literally.) Writing this will hopefully bring me back to earth.

Gou le.

Anyone curious about the Great Leap Forward and the mass famine that resulted should read this wonderful review of Jasper Becker's book Hungry Ghosts.

I especially recommend it to those who see Mao's role in the tragedy as a passive one, and to those who see the famine that killed tens of millions as a a kind of accident, a by-product of a well-intentioned cause ("Oops!").

There are some generous excerpts from the book, and the comments are good, too, with several pointing out how the number of dead is almost certainly higher -- way higher -- than 30 million, the usual number being bandied about.

The writer draws some intelligent parallels between Mao's famine of 1958 with Kim Jong Il's famine of today. Depressing and horrifying beyond words.

Link via Radio Free China.

I'm not making this up -- and it's fully supported by the WTO. No, not that WTO; I mean the World Toilet Organization:

Pop the lid on the cleanser, get out the scrub brush and be sure to leave the seat down -- it's time to get ready for World Toilet Day.

The Singapore-based World Toilet Organisation has begun collecting tips to improve bathroom etiquette to mark the day, held annually on November 16.
The suggestions will be used to create the agenda for next year's World Toilet Summit in Beijing, the group said in a statement Friday.

"If everyone joins in, there (will be) better public toilets and happier people," said Jack Sim, a founding member of the World Toilet Organisation and president of the Restroom Association of Singapore.

What are you doing to contribute to World Toilet Day?

Another one, I mean. Be sure to read his thoughtful post on this often uncomfortable, often very interesting circumstance. I applaud his courage.

Related Post: Gays in China

While I don't like John Derbyshire very much, I enjoyed reading his recent article on the Xi'an student riots, one of the more bizarre events in recent weeks to come out of China. He makes some keen observations on how outraged today's Chinese can become over perceived slights to China, and why this same patern of irrational outrage keeps on repeating.

China seems to me a very sad place. If she were a normal country, under constitutional government, China could lead the world. She has an energetic and talented population, with a higher average intelligence than any Western nation and a long, strong tradition of intellectual endeavor. If she could let go of her non-Chinese colonies (Tibet, East Turkestan), she would have a homogeneous population without any of the distractions caused by fractious minorities. With the Confucian ethic of family solidarity still more or less intact, she could run a welfare state much smaller and cheaper than those required in individualistic countries like the U.S.A. Having almost no "installed base" of 19th-century technology, she could carry out infrastructure planning and development from scratch, using modern materials and techniques. China could quite easily be a paradise on earth.

Instead, poor China is stuck in some horrible time warp. Unable to let go of her 19th-century imperial acquisitions, she garrisons vast territories populated by resentful non-Chinese peoples. Her national psyche poisoned by the humiliations of 70, 100, or 150 years ago, she snarls and spits at those who should be her natural friends and trading partners, and amasses armaments whose only purpose can be, or at any rate is, to fill her neighbors with fear and mistrust. Cumbered with a stupid, reactionary and corrupt ruling class, her people cannot make their voices heard. Instead of striding forward into the bright future that should rightly be theirs, they seethe, and burn, and from time to time boil over. Why do you treat us like this? Poor China; poor, poor China.

Link via The Cerebral Smurf.

Why do I dislike Derbyshire? Here's why.

The BBC has a strange piece about a trend in America -- naming babies after popular brand names:

Americans are increasingly turning to the world of popular culture to name their children, a study has found.

Children have been named after big brands as diverse as beauty company L'Oreal, car firm Chevrolet and designer clothes company Armani.

There are even two little boys, one in Michigan and one in Texas, called ESPN after the sports channel.

Can you imagine going through life introducing youself as ESPN? Car models are especially popular, with 55 American boys named Chevy and 5 girls named Celica.

(If I have a child -- and it's not likely anytime soon -- some of the names I'd consider might be Clorox, Bumble Bee, iPod, Haagen Daz, Lucent, Snickers, Pentium, BandAid, Durex, and Noxzema.)

The expert quoted in the article says the trend most likely reflects the parents' material hopes:

"It is no different from the 19th century when parents named their children Ruby or Opal... it reflects their aspirations" he says.

Orcinus has a great post about the Republican's strategy of demonizing Democrats as weak-kneed and even treasonous in regard to Iraq. This is to be a major theme in coming elections and is already manifesting itself (he gives plenty of examples). Such reckless talk subtly encourages violence against the evil liberals:

This is not mere hyperbole; it is an exercise in eliminationism. As Buzzflash recently observed, talk like this is part of an increasing trend in conservative rhetoric: Pat Robertson wishing to "nuke" the State Department, Bill O'Reilly saying Peter Arnett should be shot, Coulter wishing Tim McVeigh had set off his bomb at the New York Times Building, John Derbyshire wishing for Chelsea Clinton's demise. Unsurprisingly, the same kind of talk is now heard on the "street" level, and it often pops up on talk radio. As we learned in Oklahoma City, eventually this kind of "hot talk" translates into all-too-real tragedy.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that conservatives are less and less inclined to rely on "intellectual" or political exchanges, and are turning more to an eliminationist strategy that seeks to demonize liberals and make them social outcasts -- and concomitantly, acceptable targets for violence because of the "damage" they cause the nation through their ostensible treason.

As usual, Dave's post is scrupulously researched. His conclusion -- that the Republicans are actively attempting to create what is in effect a one-party system -- is scary as hell.

I looked back this afternoon at some of the posts I wrote early this morning and I felt a true sense of mortification. How could I write such emotionally overwrought, hot-headed, self-righteous and pompous crap? According to blog protocol, you aren't supposed to go back and delete posts, but I may do some serious pruning before I go to sleep.

(By the way, my site's clock is off by about 8 hours; it's about 9:30 pm here in Singapore right now. If anyone can tell me to how to reset, let me know.)

See how everybody smiles? (Click to enlarge.)

Somehow I missed until now this amazing treasure trove of Chinese propaganda posters. Incredible number of posters and Communist memorabilia from every phase of the glorious revolution, including the Great Leap Forward, 100 Flowers, the Cultural Revolution, etc. Amazing.

Link via danwei, where you can find lots of other great links.

Intriguing article on how China's one-child policy has created unique challenges for today's teachers, and how China is trying, not yet sucessfully, to inspire creativity in its young students:

At Heipingli, where 300 board from the age of six, a particular attraction for ambitious parents is the school's emphasis on "creativity", the new buzz word of China's highly centralised education system, which is responsible for one in four of the world's schoolchildren.

"Be creative" exhort the Chinese characters above the main entrance. Upstairs is a music room with a dozen saxophones, an art room containing Greek and Roman busts, a ballet studio complete with barres and mirrors and a computer suite with 56 machines. On every landing, there is a whiteboard for the children to draw on during break.

Yet, it all feels false, as if hurriedly bolted on. For the bulk of the teaching here, as in all eight of the schools I visited, is extremely formal. In classes of between 45 and 55, the pupils sit in packed rows facing the teacher, who stands in front of a blackboard and works steadily through a government-approved text book - approved for "ideological content, scientific spirit and adaptability to classroom instruction".

The children are extraordinarily - almost eerily - well behaved and attentive, but their learning is passive; any "interactivity" is highly stylised, the questions and answers being learnt by rote. All proceed at the same pace. They work through printed exercises, complete piles of homework and are tested four times a year. It is an efficient drill-and-practice formula that anyone educated in Britain in the 1950s and earlier would recognise, and it doesn't sit easily with creativity.

"We need to change our outdated teaching notions," insists Dr Zhang Tiedo, vice-president of the city's Academy of Educational Sciences. "We're trying to promote the learner-centred approach. That's why we're so interested in multiple-intelligence theory [the notion that academic ability is only one among many], which is very big in the United States. We want the children to be more involved in their lessons and have more freedom and independence.''

This is a long and at times funny article. While it finds much to admire, especially regarding the students' good behaviour and eagerness to learn (qualities that Chinese parents instill in their children at a very young age), it's obvious the writer is somewhat amazed at the lack of individual attention students receive as well as the lack of self-expression that is encouraged (i.e., none at all).

Sorry, but I decided to delete the body of this post. I wrote it when I was really pissed off at a Berkeley blogger, and I'm making a resolution: whenever I write something in a state of passion, I will wait at least a few hours before posting it to ensure objectivity and calm. Mind you, I still think I was totally right and the Berkeley guy was way off-base....

A new article on the newly announced 3-year jail term for a businessman who wrote on the Net about rural unrest in China boasts the subheadline: "Beijing steps up Internet monitoring":

A Chinese businessman who posted an article on the Internet on the sensitive topic of rural unrest has been sentenced to three years in jail for subversion, in a further sign that the authorities are stepping up their monitoring of political activities online, RFA's Mandarin service reports.

Cai Lujun published four articles on an overseas Web site last year, in which he detailed the unfair levying of taxes and fees from rural residents of the northern province of Hebei, a Hong Kong-based human rights group said in a statement.

....

In a recent interview with RFA, Chinese economist He Qinglian said the Chinese government had recently launched a major overhaul of its existing system for monitoring Internet usage by its citizens, moving away from traditional firewalls and towards a centralized monitoring and control system.

"This monitoring system was jointly built by China's Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of National Security," He said. "The initial investment for this project has reached as high as U.S. $800 million."

He, a former editor with the Shenzhen Legal Daily newspaper, said the system was among the most advanced of its kind in the world. "This is an attempt to establish a completely new centralized monitoring system after the firewalls installed in the 1990s began to lose effectiveness," she said.

[Link Via Radio Free China]

Also, see Adam's recent post for more reflections on this situation and how he deals with it.

Check out danwei's article on the new paper that seems poised to start a newspaper war with its competitiors. Good photos, interesting story.

Treating SARS may be as simple as...a bowl of Chinese herbal soup:

Hong Kong (dpa) - Doctors believe Chinese herbal soup may be as effective in treating SARS as western anti-viral medicines, a news report said Wednesday.

Patients on mainland China were served with ``qing fei jiy du tang'' - which translates as soup for clearing the lungs - and showed better recovery rates than people in Hong Kong.

The SARS mortality rate in mainland China was 7 per cent, 10 per cent less than in Hong Kong where patients were treated with the drugs ribavirin and interferon.

University of Hong Kong microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung, quoted in the South China Morning Post, said the soup had been analysed and found to contain the chemical compound baicalin which is active against the SARS virus.

He said that although results were preliminary, the soup could offer a cheap alternative treatment in places where western drugs could not be afforded.

In the US, government officials playing golf with rich business execs wouldn't be anything strange. It seems to be an issue in China, though, where the head of the CCP demonstrated poor judgment by dying on the green:

The head of the Chinese Communist party in Chairman Mao's home town has died on a golf course, prompting a full investigation into his presence at such a potent symbol of capitalism.

Li Zhen'e, party secretary of Changsha in Hunan province, was at the course with two representatives of a local car manufacturer and two Japanese visitors. Late for his next appointment, Mr Li drove off in a golf buggy, but the vehicle went out of control and fell 10 feet on to a concrete road, killing him.

The location of his death raised many eyebrows and the party opened an inquiry. It concluded that there was no evidence of corruption, but it also found many niggling questions concerning the relationship between the party, big business and the sport of the "very wealthy".

The findings did not satisfy some internet commentators, who asked whether Mr Li was doing public relations for his city, the car manufacturers or himself.

"Whatever the truth, public perception of corrupt officials seems to have been reinforced," reported Xinhua, the state news agency.

Odd. There are golf courses in China, so how can someone be faulted for dying at one? Do all good CCP biggies die at the Great Hall of the People? As for a government official hanging out with car manufacturers, all I can say is Big Deal.

I was about to write a post on a story I just saw on BBC about AIDS in China when I saw that Adam had once more scooped me on it, so I won't regurgitate the whole thing.

Let me just say that it was far more terrifying and heart-breaking on video than in print. Bottom line is that the BBC reporter visits an AIDS-afflicted village in which 600 of the 3000 inhabitants are afflicted and many have died already. The village is off-limits to foreigners. The authorities spot them, the reporters manage to flee but their Chinese escorts are arrested and are proabably in jail right now.

Adam also looks at the flurry of AIDS news generated by the Clinton-led conference this week in Beijing and concludes that things appear to be getting better. True. But we urgently need to keep in mind (and I'm sure Adam does) that it is getting better from a point below zero. IOW, they have such a long way to go that the government's recent efforts ("November is AIDS awareness month") seem hopelessly trivial. Still, they have to start somewhere, so let's hope they are getting serious.

To give you an idea of how wretched life is for AIDS sufferers in China, let me just remind you of the first thing that happens when someone is diagnosed with AIDS there: The doctors must report it to local authorities who immediately report it to the unlucky victim's employer. They are usually if not always fired at once and left in a state of permanent stigmatization. And it's all downhill from there. There is no safety net, although this week the government says it will start helping the poorest victims with free drugs.

Okay, I know I tend to go on about this topic. But I'll keep at it. The CCP would rather the world forget it, but we won't let them, will we?

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

The Hong Kong bloggers are talking about getting together sometime before Christmas in order to....well, I don't exactly know why, but it seems like a cool idea. I will be in Beijing on December 4-7, so if any of the Chinese bloggers are in the neighborhood, please send me an email and maybe we can meet up.

An article I prepared for Open Source Politics on China and the liberal mentality has just been posted. Please check it out.

[For various reasons, I had to use a pseudonymonous last name in the article. Mainly it's because my site delves a bit into my personal life and I don't want future prospective employers checking up on my background to snoop around here.]

The court has rejected the appeal of the four "cyber-dissidents."

I really can't describe how tragic this is. With prison sentences up to 10 years (!), the four Internet essayists now have no hope,

There was that glimmer of hope just a few days ago when their appeal was being considered. Hope, not just for the "subversives," but for China itself. Hope that they could truly demonstrate an easing of their obsession with control of people's minds, hope that things were truly changing. Hope that there was some substance behind Hu's promises of reforming the media.

And then the criminals themselves. I try to visualize it. I try to imagine what 10 years in a Chinese prison might be like. I can't.

In a related story, 500 brave Chinese intellectuals have signed a petition demanding the release of another Internet subversive, Du Daobin. The most optimistic aspect of the story is that the 500 have not been arrested themselves -- yet.

But this was the scariest article of all, warning us that absolutely no one is safe in China when it comes to "cyber-subversion."

A Chinese crackdown on online activism -- highlighted by a mounting wave of arrests and trials -- is unlike other recent government campaigns, because anyone can become a victim, experts said Monday.

The year-long detention of Liu Di, an ordinary Beijing student who posted democracy essays on the Internet, shows that this time the target is not just a well-defined group of open-mouthed intellectuals.

"What you see is a pattern in which the government is arresting more and more people who are not 'dissidents'," said Bobson Wong, a New York-based researcher on the social impact of the Internet.

"Liu Di wasn't a dissident, she was just a kid."

How ironic, that only weeks ago Hu was being congratulated as a reformer, someone who really wants to change things. Some have speculated that he really does, but his hands are tied by the local courts and authorities. I can't believe that. If he truly wanted to take action, he could.

Links via Radio Free China, possibly the most important site for those who wish to keep track of the CCP's crimes and misdemeanors.

In case you don't know, Singapore's in a tizzy over a controversial law that makes oral sex a crime. I can't write it up better than Conrad has, so see his post and whatever you do, don't miss the comments (especially Hemlock's; I was laughing out loud).

I just saw Bill Clinton on the news addressing the AIDS conference in China, and once more I realized just how great a communicator he is, right up there with Ronald Reagan and Tony Blair.

Clinton's words were dramatic. He said China's window of opportunity for "stopping AIDS in its tracks" was fast disappearing, but that there still was time.

Most movingly, he brought up to the podium a 21-year-old Chinese man infected with AIDS after a blood transfusion. This was so important, to give a face to AIDS, China's great taboo. The young man is now an AIDS activist and he addressed the audience. This sort of thing is unprecedented in China.

This conference was momentous in every way. The speakers actually criticized the government's AIDS policy, a sign that, at least when it comes to talk, China is loosening the reins -- a little, and very slowly. (After all, the AIDS problem goes back to the 80s.)

But sadly, not a single high-ranking Chinese official chose to attend the conference despite the ultra-high-profile speakers, including Nobel Prize winner Dr. David Ho, pioneer of the AIDS "cocktail."

This tells me that, as always, the Party is still not ready or willing to come to grips with AIDS. The messages at this conference were powerful, but it is only the CCP that can turn them into action. As long as they distance themselves from the crisis, the more perilous it will become. They have absolutely no time anymore. They have to act now. This is truly a ticking time bomb.

Straight from the horse's mouth:

China may be the fastest- growing economy in East Asia but it is not in danger of overheating, said the country's top government economist.

Key economic indicators such as retail sales, fixed asset investment and real estate investment figures will likely grow far slower this year than they did 10 years ago, when China's economy last overheated and grew 13.5 per cent, said National Bureau of Statistics commissioner Li Deshui.

Well, if China's statistics wizard says it, it's okay by me. We all know their track record with statistics. I'll sleep a little more soundly tonight.

An encouraging sign, at last! It could be quite significant. From the NY Times:

The Chinese government has started providing free treatment for poor people with H.I.V. and AIDS and plans to expand the program next year until every poor person who has tested positive is receiving medical help, a top Health Ministry official said in a speech this week.

The speech on Thursday by Gao Qiang, the executive deputy health minister, confirmed anecdotal reports from AIDS sufferers in central China, who say health workers began handing out free anti-retroviral drugs several months ago in Henan Province, a region ravaged by AIDS.

[....]

Mr. Bekedam said the free drug program was the latest example of what appears to be a new, more proactive attitude toward AIDS taken by China's senior leaders. This week, Beijing was host to one major international AIDS conference, while an AIDS meeting led by former President Bill Clinton will be held here on Monday. China also recently received a $98 million grant, largely to fight AIDS, from the Global Fund.

International pressure, especially after the SARS debacle, has apparently helped the leaders to wise up. They still face huge infrastructure challenges in dealing with the epidemic, and it needs to supply not only medication but education. With most of the people in China unaware of the dangers of AIDS and what they can do to protect themselves, the disease will continue to spread.

Nevertheless, this is a big step in the right direction.

Link via Radio Free China

Update: Adam has a good post on this topic as well. A little more pessimistic than my own, for a change.

Interesting. I want to know who's inflicting violence on the journalists up:

Frequent beatings make journalism the third-most dangerous occupation in China, behind work in the coalmines and in the police force, state media said.

Newspaper The Guangzhou Daily cited official statistics showing more than 260 cases of violence against reporters in China over the past three years.

Attacks of various kinds have added to risks inherent in the profession, such as being near natural disasters, according to the paper.

The paper did not report if any of the hundreds of recent cases had led to journalists' deaths.

It also did not give any details about the violence, or whether is was performed by government officials or private citizens.

I wonder if journalism is this dangerous anywhere else? (I would imagine it's far worse in Iraq and any other war-torn country.)

For those intrigued with the Pvt. Jessica Lynch saga and its implications, there's a thought-provoking article today from NYT critic/pundit Frank Rich that underscores Pvt. Lynch's own dignity and the lack of dignity of those who have sought to manipulate her and her story:

Few of this war's images have had such longevity or proven more pliable than that of the smiling face of Pfc. Jessica Lynch. In the seven months of virtual silence since her rescue from a Nasiriya hospital, she has become the Mona Lisa of "Operation Iraqi Freedom." Americans have been able to read into her pleasant but unrevealing snapshot whatever story they choose. Those stories, usually imposed on her by others, have become a Rorschach test for homefront mood swings.

When American forces were bogged down in the war's early days, she was the happy harbinger of an imminent military turnaround: a 19-year-old female Rambo who tried to blast her way out of the enemy's clutches, taking out any man who got in her way. When those accounts turned out to be largely fiction, she became a symbol of Bush administration propaganda and the press's war-time credulity in buying it. Then came her months of muffled recuperation: a metaphor for the low-grade fever of inertia and unease that has set in at home in the months since that Saddam statue fell.

Particulary moving were these two pararagraphs (not that I'm a big fan of Cher as a political activist):

The Bush administration tries to shut down pictures as effectively as it has stonewalled Congressional committees and the bipartisan commissions looking into intelligence failures surrounding 9/11. On the day of the Chinook's fall, the president stayed off-camera on his ranch in Crawford, resting up for his next round of fund-raisers, and sent out only a written statement of grief. Reuters reported on Monday that journalists seeking access to Ramstein, the American air base in Germany to which Private Lynch was first taken, had been told that the defense department would not lift its policy prohibiting photographs of flag-draped coffins, even for the Chinook casualties. The president did not go to the funerals of the nine fellow soldiers who died in the same ambush that led to Private Lynch's capture; he hasn't gone to any funerals for soldiers killed in action, The Washington Post reports.

Two weeks ago, after spending the day visiting the wounded at Walter Reed, the same hospital where Private Lynch recuperated upon returning to the United States, Cher, of all people, crystallized the game plan. She called into C-Span to tell of her experience talking with "a boy about 19 or 20 who had lost both his arms" and then asked: "Why are none of Cheney, Wolfowitz, Bremer, the president � why aren't they taking pictures with all these guys? Because I don't understand why these guys are so hidden and why there aren't pictures of them."

This is something Bush could/should ameliorate fast. Will he?

Link via Atrios.

Or "Why they Love Us." From Fox News:

The U.S. military swept through Iraqi neighborhoods early Saturday, firing at houses suspected to be harboring hostile forces in the wake of an apparent attack on a Black Hawk helicopter that killed six U.S. soldiers.

Backed by Bradley fighting vehicles, American troops bombarded buildings with machine guns and heavy weapons fire.

"This is to remind the town that we have teeth and claws and we will use them," said Lt. Col. Steven Russell, commander of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment.

I really do understand the need to use force in the wake of the downing of a US helicopter. But shooting at houses like this seems a rather random approach that can only win us more hardened enemies. Imagine if it was your house, with your kids inside.

Link via TPM, who also posts this wonderful quote from Dick Cheney on the stump yesterday:

In Iraq, a ruthless dictator cultivated weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them. He gave support to terrorists, had an established relationship with al Qaeda -- and his regime is no more.

Cultivated??

Why is Cheney doing this? How long can he be allowed by Bush to consciously continue a blatant disinformation campaign?

Don't get me wrong -- Saddam is right up there with the world's nastiest men. But there's plenty we can say about him that is true; why does Cheney insist on playing up the extremely shaky (and probably non-existent) al-Qaeda link?

The fact that he does so indicates he has a deep and cynical contempt for the intelligence of the American people. (I guess if he can actually get away with it, that contempt may, sadly, be justified. I hope not.)

Police with guns drawn burst into a South Carolina high school yesterday looking for....marijuana! (They didn''t find any.)

Surveillance video from Stratford High School in Goose Creek shows 14 officers, some with guns drawn, ordering students to lie the ground as police searched for marijuana. Students who didn't comply with the orders quickly enough were reportedly handcuffed.

What is wrong with these people? What were they thinking? How could they do somethjing so blatantly wrong and stupid?

It's a dizzying time for Taiwan as it takes the lead in Asia when it comes to human rights, not just in words but in legislation. Now, they have just announced a law for the abolition of the death penalty -- and the legalization of gay marriage and womens rights as a bonus!

Taiwan on Saturday unveiled its draft Human Rights Basic Law which abolishes the death penalty and legalises gay marriage.

If the law is passed, it will make Taiwan the first country in Asia - and the fourth in the world - to legalise gay marriage. The Netherlands, Belgium and Canada have legalised gay marriage.

Vice President Lu Hsiu-lien, head of the Human Rights Consultative Committee under the Presidential Office, unveiled the draft law at a meeting with reporters.

The Basic Law stipulates that the death penalty must be abolished, gay marriage should be legalised and homosexual couples should be allowed to adopt children.

The Basic Law bans cloning human beings, protects equal rights for women and foreign workers, and grants asylum to foreign asylum seekers.

70 percent of the Taiwanese public is reportedly against the ban on the death penalty, so there will be "an adjustment period," where it remains legal but won't be executed carried out.

(Update Nov. 9, 1:50 pm.)

Apparently Taiwan, which just held its first "gay pride" celebration, is light years ahead of its Asian neighbors when it comes to gay rights:

Gay pride parades are commonplace in Vancouver or Boston or Berlin. But for Taipei, Taiwan, capital of a supposedly conservative, Confucian society, last weekend's demonstration broke new ground. Mayor Ma Ying-jeou called it "the first such parade in Taipei, the first in Taiwan, even the first in the Chinese world." It was more than that, too. The emergence of an open gay culture in a non-Western society is yet another sign that modern societies around the world are becoming more and more alike -- homogenizing, if you like.

Legalizing gay marriage is next on Taiwan's agenda, a move that is so astonishing I can scarcely believe it. Even if the initiative fails, there's a huge lesson here about just how quickly a society's culture can grow more tolerant.

Remember, Chiang Kai Shek and his Nationalists 80 years ago were just as brutal and murderous as their successors, Mao and the CCP. And look at how far they have progressed in Taiwan. Why not China? Do we really have to keep saying, "No, that's impossible. China has its own unique culture"? Taiwan had its own unique culture as well. But look at how, with a little bit of freedom and education, a culture can shake off the chains of ignorance and intolerance. Why not China?

Related Post: Gays in China

Dazzled by the promise of increased demand for electricity in China, investors are rushing to scoop up their share of the upcoming IPO of the company financing the Three Gorges dam. The initial subscription is already 84 times oversubscribed (somewhat reminiscent of the hysteria for shares of Webvan and Dr. Koop back in the late 90s).

There's also another story receiving way less coverage, namely the recommended closing of another Chinese dam plagued by a problem that many say will inevitably afflict Three Gorges:

Celebrated water engineer Zhang Guangdou has for the first time publicly called for the disastrous Sanmenxia dam on the Yellow River, which he helped design in the 1950s, to be shut down.

The project has been plagued since its completion in 1960 by the rapid accumulation of sediment in its reservoir, a worry that also surrounds the Three Gorges dam. (The seriousness of that concern was apparent in a report last week in The Times of London: "Engineers have given warning that a silt build-up could cripple the [Three Gorges] turbines, allegedly leading Siemens, one of the main suppliers, to turn down the offer from Beijing of a contract for maintenance work that would make it responsible for running the turbines.")

I know, I know, enough of the bad news! Sorry, but I am in many ways a product of the late 90s, and I remember what happened when people made a choice, en masse, to abandon their critical faculties in favor of a pipe dream. I was one of them, and it taught me to look beyond the glitter. There's a lot that is stunning about China's growth. But don't ignore the silt or you may get stuck in it.

As mentioned earlier, the new message about AIDS in China is that, if left unchecked, it will create a financial nightmare for the developing country and have a direct effect on business. Now, international business leaders are urging China to allow private businesses to take on the menace:

International business leaders are urging China's government to head off what some fear may be an explosion of AIDS cases in the world's most populous country. Participants at the World Economic Forum in Beijing say China's government should allow private businesses to lead the fight against the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

[....]

Dr. Peter Piot, the head of the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, warns that a rising infection rate would have grave economic consequences for China. "The choice is very clear. It's either act now or pay later," he says. "Act now and prevent millions of Chinese from being infected or deal with it five or 10 years from now, when the cost of treatment, the cost for business and for individuals will be much higher. That's why this is such an important issue for the government and for business to tackle now, before there is a big problem."

The experts are urging the Chinese government to allow businesses to do more to educate people, especially in the impoverished rural areas of western and central China where infection rates are higher.

The article notes that with even less than one percent of the Chinese population now infected, the country's infection rate is now where South Africa's was in 1990; now, the infection rate has soared to above 25 percent.

As the business leaders are urging Beijing to allow businesses to take up the battle, one can only wonder why they should have to "urge" the CCP to allow such an obviously pressing need. Wouldn't the government do whatever is necessary to save the lives of tens of millions of its citizens? But never mind. Let's hope the new argument, based on dollar signs, has some results.

I just read a comment that someone left today to one of my most heartfelt posts. It made me feel that maybe all the work that goes into keeping this thing going just may be worth it.

An article in today�s International Herald Tribune strongly defends China against charges from the US that it is failing to adhere to WTO free trade practices, and charges that, �Whole armies of lobbyists and special interest groups are working themselves - and the American public - into a China-bashing frenzy.�

In fact, he says, it is China that is the victim of unfair trade practices, not the US:

China is the victim of unparalleled violations of the principle of nondiscrimination upon which the entire WTO system is built. They threaten literally millions of jobs in China's manufacturing sector.

The story in agriculture is even more shocking. Having received a large increase in farm subsidies in 2002, U.S. farmers demand that China open up national agricultural markets. According to U.N. figures, government support to U.S. agriculture amounts to around $50 billion a year. China is being asked to expose its farmers to competition from subsidized U.S. agricultural surpluses sold at a fraction of their cost of production. Rapid liberalization would compound rural poverty and exacerbate China's already extreme rural-urban inequalities.

I�m no expert, but judging from everything I�ve read there is probably plenty of blame to go around. The US has always protected certain industries (cotton, grain) with unfair subsidies, and this really does make a joke of free trade and threaten the livelihood of farmers in poor countries.

On the other hand, China�s no angel of free trade either. Its failure to come up to speed on WTO commitments is legendary, and they seem to be constantly stalling.

Where I definitely take issue with the writer is this bold pronouncement toward the end of the article:

Over the past two decades, China has lifted more people out of poverty more quickly than any country in recorded history. Trade has played a vital role. The danger now is that unfair trade rules will stall China's progress.

First, it was the Chinese people who lifted themselves out of a poverty that was virtually guaranteed by the backward-looking policies of Mao, that made competition and free trade with the outside world impossible. This great awakening should not be credited to the current government, whose policies of taxes and fees and graft only make free trade more difficult. Deng loosened the reins, and the ever-productive, creative and hard-working people of China ran furiously forward, usually despite Deng, not because of him. So let's be sure to give credit where it is truly due.

Second, for China to shout out about unfair trade practices toward it is definitely a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. Ask any Western company trying to do business in China about unfair practices! Ask them about the process for getting a business license. Ask them about the fees and the different bureaucrats along the line whose palms must be greased.

So I'm not about to call China the victim and the US the perpetrator. I'm afraid that both are on equally weak footing when it comes to calling foul on the field of fair trade.

That's the banner headline splashed across Matt Drudge's news site at the moment (no separate link to the story) and this is the text that follows:

Jessica Lynch criticized military for exaggerating accounts of her rescue and recasting her ordeal as patriotic fable.... MORE.. Asked by ABCNEWS anchor Diane Sawyer if military's portrayal of rescue bothered her, Lynch said: 'Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong' ... Asked how she felt about reports of her heroism: 'It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, Yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't' ... Asked about claims the military exaggerated danger of the rescue mission: 'Yeah, I don't think it happened quite like that'...

Tri-dots are Drudge's. Lynch's story as told by the military, with its made-for-TV action and heroism, defied belief from the very beginning, and I congratulate Lynch for having the courage to speak out about it. (After all, the BS from the Army only made her look good.) It only underscores why so many Americans have a hard time believing anything their government tells them.

Update: More here.

An update:

A Chinese court on Thursday sentenced a veteran pro-democracy activist to eight years in prison on subversion charges, including accusations that he posted anti-government articles on overseas Web sites, a human rights organisation said.

He Depu, who was tried last month at the Beijing No 1 Intermediate People's Court, is one of five Internet activists accused of subversive activities for signing an open letter calling for political reform posted on the Internet ahead of the landmark Communist Party congress in November 2002.

The others - Jiang Lijun, Zhao Changqing, Ouyang Yi and Dai Xuezhong - have all reportedly been tried or sentenced on subversion charges.

For whatever reason, the AIDS crisis in China seems to be yet another calamity to which many, inside China and outside, turn a blind eye. The UN is now warning that the epidemic may soon threaten China's economy:

Peter Piot, head of the United Nations AIDS program, says he has warned the Chinese government that the epidemic could lead to social instability and political paralysis. Yet the highest-ranking government leaders have failed to make any strong statements on the issue, making it easy for business leaders and local officials to ignore the crisis, he said yesterday.

Indeed, half of the Chinese population doesn't know what AIDS is, Mr. Piot said. "The first thing we have to do is to break the silence about AIDS," he said. "A lot of work needs to be done with the provinces."

Because of China's deteriorating public health system, Beijing doesn't even have any basic statistics on the number of cases in each province, he said. In some parts of the country, AIDS activists have been arrested, harassed and jailed.

Well, a few days ago the government declared November to be AIDS Awareness Month, so they can't be accused of doing nothing. But pretty close. What will it take to force the leaders to see this crisis for what it truly is?

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

Here's a very intelligent article on Singapore's recent history and possible future. It looks at how Singapore rose to be a regional giant, how it then lost much of its lustre under the great shadow of China, and how in the wake of this it is now reshaping itself to once again attain its place in the sun.

In some ways, Singapore's demise was beyond its control and inevitable:

Truth is, nothing that Singapore did was ill conceived, just that rest of Asia has caught up with them. Today global companies wanting to set up in Asia ex-Japan, be it a representative, sales or manufacturing entity, has a choice. It could be Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia (maybe) or Singapore in South East Asia or Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea and the inevitable China in North Asia. They all now offer an acceptable set of infrastructure and a reasonable enabling environment, which for many years was almost a monopoly of Singapore.

When cost becomes an overriding consideration, China wins hands down. China is responsible, for hollowing out a large proportion of existing manufacturing operations of global companies from other Asian countries. The shift of manufacturing from Singapore to China has been relentless and is partly responsible for the current high unemployment and low growth. But all is not lost. When it comes to a decision of spreading the risk that is not putting all your eggs in one basket, in this case China, Singapore features well.

Despite huge advances in China, it still remains unpredictable, multinationals prefer to cover this risk by considering stable Singapore as a regional headquarter or sometime even establish a manufacturing unit irrespective of its high cost base. High productivity also favours Singapore compared to China. Notwithstanding, Singapore has suffered badly from the advent of China as a global manufacturing base.

The one point I have to disagree with, very sadly, is Singapore's lingering appeal as a regional headquarters. That was true some years ago, when the SE Asian "tigers" were still hot and it looked like Malaysia would arise as the great high-tech manufacturing hub.

Now, I am afraid that Hong Kong is a smarter choice for the Western firm seeking entree to China. Just look at a map and you'll see why. And, sadly for both HK and Singapore, many of these Western firms are simply skipping the traditional "stepping stone" and setting up headquarters right in Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Singapore is now in a frenzy to position itself as a regional hub for all kinds of industries. From biotech to semiconductors to nanotechnology, Singapore is claiming this is where it is all happening:

Singapore has accepted that it can no longer be a serious contender for manufacturing. It now wants to be a knowledge based society. So at the high end they are building infrastructure and an enabling environment for creating a hub for research and design. Biotech and Infocom are a major focus.

As before, the state is providing the initial impetus by investing in physical infrastructure and seeding some of these projects. Multinationals have gradually begun to follow in its footsteps. Business cost has been reduced, through tax breaks, reduction in mandatory pension contributions and depressed market condition has also seen to a fall in office rentals.

It sounds good, but I can safely say that so far there has been little measurable response.

It is an eerie time in Singapore, a time of anxiety and confusion. We all hear the government's grandiose intentions, the talk of turning the city-state into "a hub," but there have been no results. Obviously that will take time, but they've been at it now for years.

The article ends on a note of cautious optimism based on the government's efforts to encourage entrepreneurship and to get out of the people's way. But many in Singapore right now are worried as the comforts and security they had taken for granted are being whittled away. As in every other country in the region, many businesses are turning to China, hoping that some of its prosperity will rub off on them.

That's definitely a gamble, but what's the choice? With every other economy flat, where else is there to turn? As some may know, I'm a bit pessimistic about this strategy, at least in the long term, but I completely understand it. Let's hope it keeps Singapore afloat, at least until the country gets back on its feet and actually becomes the hub city the government wants it to be.

This is going to be a difficult and painful transition, but at the moment it seems to be Singapore's only hope.

An article in today's New York Times points out that credit agencies fear China's government-owned banks may require a major bailout thanks to overdue loans.

Responding to hints in recent weeks from senior Chinese financial regulators that another bailout of the country's biggest banks might be needed, two credit rating agencies issued separate reports on Wednesday suggesting that China's previous efforts had not solved the banking system's troubles.

The ratings agencies, Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service, said that the banks' troubles had not been resolved by an attempt in 1999 and early 2000 to shift $170 billion in nonperforming loans into asset management companies. The companies resemble the Resolution Trust Corporation that the United States used successfully to dispose of bad loans after the collapse of much of the American savings and loan industry in the late 1980's.

Gordon Chang, author of The Coming Collapse of China, always maintained that China's banks are hopelessly insolvent and would prove to be China's Achilles heel. Things still look okay, but if the slowdown feared by so many materializes, a serious problem, starting with the banks, could escalate into a catastrophe.

I'm not trying to be an alarmist, spreading hysteria about China's imminent collapse. (It may not be imminent at all.) It's just that China's banks seem to be an elephant in the corner of the room that everyone wants to ignore. It's a big elephant.

[Update, 7:35 am Nov. 7.]

Phil has revamped his site and it not only looks good, it no longer takes all day to load! Also new is a prominent photo of the chicken beater, taken with an eerie chiaroscuro effect that makes him look a bit like a blood relative of Dr. Evil.

The Public Relations Society of America has an article out on how to pitch bloggers. This was inevitable, and it'll get worse, at least for the superbloggers; as soon as you have people reaching millions of other people with words, you get PR people trying to vie for some of that "mindshare."

The same article also mentions that UC Berkeley's journalism school will be offering a graduate course on blogs. A graduate course? Like there is that much to study and learn about writing a frggin' blog?? I would love to see the curriculum for this class, which could only be offered at Berkeley.

Morgan Stanley has issued a dark, somber (yet sober) warning about the latest fear in Asia, i.e., the overheating of the Chinese economy and the disaster that could follow in its wake.

This topic is everywhere, including the front covers of Fortune and Business Week. And yet it seems no one is taking any notice.

This is urgent; it could affect the lives of all of us living and working in Asia, where so many stars have been hitched to the so-called unstoppable engine of the Chinese economic miracle. Morgan Stanley economist Stephen Roach writes, in near-apocalyptic language:

Asia is not prepared for a China-led slowdown, in my view. Midway through this two-week Asian tour, I am struck by a growing sense of complacency in the region. Memories are amazingly short these days. A seven-month run in the stock market did the trick, I guess. Not unlike the case in post-bubble America, the post-crisis Asian economy seems to have all but wiped out the painful lessons of five years ago. I spent a few days over this past weekend at the Boao Forum for Asia in Hainan, China -- a relatively new pan-regional celebration of the Asian miracle modeled after the World Economic Forum in Davos. Heads of state and policy makers spoke eloquently and predictably of the new potential for pan-regional integration and resilience. But the real message, in my view, was the widespread acceptance of an unmistakably Chinese-centric character to the region�s growth dynamic. To some extent this is the inevitable outgrowth of the Asian crisis of 1997-98 -- a region that has subsequently turned inward after having been burned by the hot-money capital flows from the West. There was a real sense of self-congratulations in the air in the halls of Boao. China�s spectacular performance over the past five years has given the rest of the region great confidence in the payback from such a strategy.

But there are no guarantees that this latest incarnation of the Asian model will perform any better over time than earlier growth strategies. If the slowdown in the Chinese economy materializes as we suspect, the rest of Asia will have to face the consequences of its new strain of dependency. And that could well unmask many of the region�s lingering structural deficiencies -- namely, shaky financial systems and inefficient corporate sectors. Reluctant to embark on the heavy lifting of post-crisis restructuring, Asia thought it had found in China a new recipe for prosperity. As China now slows, my sense is that the region doesn�t have a clue as to what�s coming.

Wow. I'd have to agree; virtually all of the companies I meet tell me how their plans for revitalization and growth are based on those mythical 1.2 billion Chinese consumers, the Holy Grail of world trade. If that engine sputters, a lot of plans and hopes will be dashed.

Link via T-Salon -- thanks!

Chinese health officials have declared the month of November to be AIDS Awareness Month, and they'll be stepping up AIDS education accordingly.

It's certainly about time. After years of ignoring this issue, it's nice to see they are doing something, anything, to address this nightmare. All I can say is they have a long way to go. Let's hope this announcememnt really means something, and that they continue the momentum.

Today the Christian Science Monitor profiles Liu Di, the Chinese "cyber-dissident," and in so doing smashes the myth -- the lie -- that the CCP is slowly but steadily increasing press freedoms.

Things are getting worse, not better. The reporter notes how publications that for a moment gave us hope that things were really changing, have been pressured and threatened into silence.

"People talk about changes in the Chinese media," says a Beijing-based media expert. "But it goes up and down. All political news still goes through the state. When it comes to important questions, there isn't any independent media."

Liu Di sounds like one brave lady. I have boundless admiration for heroes like this who are willing to say what they believe, letting the cards fall where they may. And in China, we all know where the cards are going to fall:

A third-year psychology student at Beijing Normal University, Ms. Liu formed an artists club, wrote absurdist essays in the style of dissident Eastern-bloc writers of the 1970s, and ran a popular web-posting site. Admirers cite her originality and humor: In one essay Liu ironically suggests all club members go to the streets to sell Marxist literature and preach Lenin's theory, like "real Communists." In another, she suggests everyone tell no lies for 24 hours. In a series of "confessions" she says that China's repressive national-security laws are not good for the security of the nation.

If that doesn't merit a decade in a Chinese prison, what does?

From my own experience in China, where all I did was work with the media, I know that there are pockets of press freedom, and some editors still push the envelope. But this is more likely to occur in smaller, more "vertical" publications -- those with a relatively small readership in a specific niche industry. These publications are far less likely to be read by government censors (and even if they are, their sphere of influence is so small they may escape censorship).

These are drops in the ocean. In its last paragraphs, the article acknowledge the crumbs of anecdotal evidence of "improvement" (very small crumbs) but its conclusions are unequivocal:

But these are exceptions. The rest - labor activists, upstart college students, journalists, writers, intellectuals, professors, dissidents, religious believers with too much spunk, those who stand out in a too-public fashion or attract too much attention - are warned, or arrested. In this reading of China, free expression is not improving in the short- and midterm.

Despite some changes of style, more arrests are taking place, and ordinary Chinese are still strictly censoring themselves.

I'll say it again: Reform is as reform does. Anyone who wants to believe the spoon-fed CCP mantra that China's press is becoming freer is entitled to do so. But the evidence doesn't back up such lofty phrases; just ask the "cyber-dissidents" sitting alone in Chinese jail cells this very moment.

Be sure to check out Josh Marshall's great article on the Republican's insistence that they never portrayed Iraq as an "imminent threat." Sample:

It�s true that administration officials avoided the phrase �imminent threat.� But in making their argument, Sullivan and others are relying on a crafty verbal dodge � sort of like �I didn�t accuse you of eating the cake. All I said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth.�

He gives examples aplenty of the Bushies strongly implying that there was an imminent threat, even if they didn't use those exact two words.

Here's another site that gets it right on China and its knee-jerk paranoia when it comes to human rights and religious freedom. How did I miss it for so long?

Its descriptor:

News from China and bordering countries of N. Korea, Bhutan, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, and Mongolia. The focus is on human rights and the persecuted church.

Well worth a visit.

Interesting post from Josh Marshall on how President Bush said in a recent speech:

"We see a China that is stable and prosperous, a nation that respects the peace of its neighbors and works to secure the freedom of its own people."

That's how the original transcript reads. (Well, if that's how he really sees China, what can I say?)

But then, the speech turned up on the White House Web site with the second word changed from "see" to "seek"! That's a whole different statement, and I suspect the less-than-honest change was made to appease Bush's far-right donors who still cling to the notion that China is ruled by a brutal dictatorship that abuses its citizens, sneers at the concept of human rights, has dangerous and self-serving ulterior motives and can never be trusted.

Hey, wait a minute....

I'm scared to post about Iraq at the moment because I can't figure out what The Truth is.

Conrad led me to two excellent articles that paint a relatively rosy picture and give a lot of hope that things are truly improving there. Then, I see a book-length article in The NY Times Magazine that is bleak beyond words.

It's an interesting phenomenon, to have one little country where one side tells us conditions there are chaotic and another says they're good and getting better. All of these articles were written by intelligent reporters who have obviously done their homework and come up with solid examples to make their points.

So I'll hazard a guess that things are somewhere in between joyous and hellish. (I know, that's the chicken's way out, but it's the only rational conclusion I can arrive at.)

For many Iraqis, life is truly getting better. For others, like those who served in the military, we made some bad decisions that left them feeling screwed and vengeful (as the Times points out). While this constitutes a major headache, there's more to Iraq than that.

All in all, being barraged by bad news 24/7 -- and here in Singapore the media tend to be anti-US, or at least not pro-US -- I have to admit I lean more to the pessimistic side nowadays. But seeing those articles Conrad referenced made me wonder whether there really might be hope and light somewhere at the end of this long tunnel. Let's hope we see more and more of it.

You saw it here first: A former reporter for the much esteemed CCTV-9, China's English-language propaganda machine that knows no limits when it comes to parodying itself, has written a scathing and delightful expose of what goes on behind the scenes there.

For example:

If you�re not one of our satellite subscribers outside China, you can go to cctv-9.com and watch our broadcasts to get an idea of why we�re here. China has opened up and reformed! Our news shows look just like yours! We have actual anchors who wear neckties! (Another channel, CCTV-12, has an interview set so similar to Larry King�s that it�s probably some sort of copyright infringement.) One thing management has provided is a mission: to make our employer, the central government, look good.

That�s why �Your first window on China� always affords a sunny view. When a British tourist was murdered near the Great Wall, CCTV-9 knew nothing about it. When the police shut down all the internet cafes in Beijing, our coverage never questioned the party line that it was for safety reasons.

When Falun-Gong-hunting cops raided my hostel one winter midnight, putting dozens of foreign backpackers and workaday Chinese out on the street without a moment�s notice, CCTV-9 staffers were amused and sympathetic�but there was no coverage.

When a group of North Koreans made a dramatic break into the Spanish embassy in Beijing that was played repeatedly on CNN, you never heard a word from us. I went down to the Spanish embassy that afternoon in March 2002 and found Beijing�s small community of real journalists. Reuters, CNN, Hong Kong�s Phoenix, the BBC�everyone was there except �Your first window on China.�

When an enterprising intern who also worked as a translator and interpreter wanted to do an expos� on China�s woefully unsupervised translation and interpretation business, she was told to forget it. �Why would you want foreigners to know about this problem?� demanded those in charge. The irony seems lost on them that this method of making China look good is simply exposing the country as a joke.

Long-time readers know this is a topic close to my heart. Remember, it was CCTV-9 I wrote about back in April for interviewing people about how thrilled they were that SARS was no longer a problem in China and a record number of tourists were now flowing in -- and this was days before Beijing became a veritable city under siege, finally forced to acknowledged it harbored more SARS patients than any other city on earth.

I'd actually like to post this entire story here, every paragraph is so revealing. Hilarious, too. Just one more snippet:

You would have thought it was a real newsroom, except that the propaganda reached such heights of crassness that it provoked some minor revolts among the Foreign Experts and served as the catalyst for my finally sitting down to write all this. We�re talking about an authoritarian government with a legacy of tens of millions of murders that claims it has always served the best interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people; it will later censor SARS coverage after supposedly coming clean about its coverup and establishing information networks on the disease.

Now, during the NPC [National People's Congress], it is anointing its new elite, with the commander-in-chief of the Tiananmen Square massacre [Li Peng] in the field of candidates and an unspecified intention to drag 1.2 billion people headlong into its latest political experiment. Imagine the kind of press coverage it�s demanding. Imagine Uday Hussein describing his own dick.

While the world was counting down to war in Iraq, the entire first block�not just the first story, but the first block�of every CCTV-9 broadcast was dedicated to the �profound historical significance,� the �major event not only for China but for the rest of the world,� the �significant landmark,� that was the 16th National Party Congress of the Communist Party of China.

What was so pressing and momentous? What was the story that so desperately needed to be told? Well, that �Delegates interviewed all spoke highly of Jiang Zemin�s Three Represents thought,� that �Serving the people wholeheartedly is the aim of the Communist Party of China,� that Chinese abroad �noted that as China�s ruling party, the Chinese Communist Party is praiseworthy for its ceaseless efforts to keep the country stable and prosperous,� and that �It was a proud moment for many overseas Chinese when President Jiang Zemin stepped onto the podium and began to deliver his report at the opening session of the CPC National Congress.

The event kept them glued to their screens, their hearts beating in time with their motherland�s.� If you�re not sold on the significance of these carryings-on then you�re in an insignicant minority, as CCTV-9 reported.

This is priceless. I've been ranting about CCTV for a year, and it is so wonderful to see that those who work there loathe it as much as I do. It's not a news network, it's not a source of information, it is simply a dressed-up tool for telling lies, misleading foreigners and making the CCP look good. Go read the whole article.

One more paragraph. I can't resist:

Educated young Chinese in the newsroom tell me the Tiananmen Square massacre was an attack on the People�s Liberation Army by vicious students, and I dismiss them as peasants. I look for better journalistic practices in a Chinese writer freshly returned from a coveted CNN training junket, only to find that she�s been promoted to censor. I help my coworkers write applications to journalism schools at American universities, and I politely refrain from asking them what they intend to do with such an education when they get back. I turn away with embarrassment from the work of another competent, up-and-coming field reporter who is trifling away on assignments about sports, the growing popularity of the Communist Party among China�s youth, and the 100 percent safety record of the Long March rocket. (It�s the engine that�s safe, he clarifies for me�and the rocket has never failed when launching China�s Shenzhou spacecraft, only when launching other countries� stuff, like the time it blew up with an American-made satellite on it and killed over a hundred Chinese villagers.)

And we are dumping foreign investment into this country like there is no tomorrow based on the statistics the Party feeds us.

A new post over at Glutter tells us that Reporters without Borders is making itself heard over the arrest and imprisonment of Chinese who express their opinions on the Internet:

Reporters Without Borders today urged Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao to immediately release Du Daobin, the author of many essays on human rights and democracy, who was arrested on 29 October in Yingcheng, in the central province of Hubei.

Du is one of the organisers of a campaign to draw attention to the imprisonment of the young Internet user Liu Di by urging people to shut themselves in the dark during the day to "simulate detention."

"We regret that the Chinese authorities have turned a deaf hear to the growing number of voices speaking out in China and abroad against their policy of cracking down on cyber-dissidents," Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert M�nard said.

[....]

Liu is a sociology student who has been detained without being tried since 7 November 2002 for messages she posted in Internet forums. A total of 39 people are currently imprisoned in China because of their Internet activities.

As I said yesterday, it is great to see that this case is finally winning the media attention it deserves. As in the recent case of Ma Shiwen, this pressure will most likely result in the "cyber-dissidents'" freedom.

The complete text of Reporters without Borders' statement can be found at their site. (You can click the link up in the left-hand corner for English.)

My extreme tracking icon is resisting all my attempts to open it, so I've been unable to measure site traffic for two days now (is that a blessing or a curse?). I'm debating switching to Site Meter and was hoping someone might have a recommendation. All input is appreciated.

Update: Problem fixed, getting an invisible tracker....

It sounds like the prosecutors' cases are disintegrating.

China's crackdown on free expression on the Internet hit difficulties after two high-profile cyber-dissident cases were forced into the spotlight Monday -- one over lack of evidence and the other after witnesses alleged police forced them to testify.

Prosecutors bounced back to police a case implicating one of China's youngest dissidents -- a student known as "Stainless Steel Mouse" detained for posting essays calling for democracy on the Internet.

The case of Liu Di, 22, a psychology student taken into custody from her Beijing Normal University dormitory last November, was returned to police Friday due to insufficient evidence, said sources, including her family.

In the other case, an appeal trial of four Internet dissidents opened Monday to decide if they deserved up to 10 years in jail for posting their views on social issues online, relatives and a Hong Kong-based rights group said.

That case is seriously flawed because three key witnesses retracted their statements used as evidence after they were released from detention, claiming police had forced them to make the claims, said Frank Lu, director of the Hong Kong Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy.

I am thrilled that there might be a happy ending to this nightmare. It's still too soon to tell, but simply seeing it being covered is a good sign. It's important to remember, however, that these were two very high-profile cases, followed closely by leading human rights groups. Are there others locked up for similar crimes who weren't lucky enough to draw international outrage? I can't say for certain, though I have my suspicions.

When there is no place to turn for justice sometimes all you can do is riot. Some say that "several thousand people" participated:

Thousands of people in east China's Shandong province rioted last week, storming a government building and smashing equipment after an official vehicle ran over and killed a vendor, a human rights group and residents said.

The riot -- one of the largest in recent years -- occurred on October 28, a day after a confrontation between officials and a man selling fresh pancakes from a roving stove-wagon in Zhoucheng city.

On October 27, the vendor, surnamed Shao, was selling the popular egg and onion pancakes when some employees from the "city management" department confiscated his wagon and loaded it onto their vehicle, sources said.

Shao -- seeing his source of livelihood being carted away -- blocked the vehicle's path. He was run over as a crowd watched, the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

The next day, several thousand people stormed the city's communist party government offices, breaking through a police line of some 800 officers, residents and the Center said.

200 people were arrested, the police claiming, of course, that they had "ulterior motives."

An article in the International Herald Tribune marvels, at least for a moment, at China's success in becoming the 3rd nation to launch an astronaut into space, and then uses it to form an analogy:

At the same time, the space flight is an apt metaphor for the risks inherent in China's economic rise. It is representative of the economy's worst element: its top-down nature.

This is what the world's most populous nation needs: bottom-up entrepreneurship that creates new businesses and jobs; a strong regulatory infrastructure for its equity and bond markets; aggressive education programs so that the tens of millions of workers being displaced by an opening economy can compete in the age of globalization; a plan to tackle a worsening AIDS crisis; and a greater effort to protect the environment.

What is Beijing offering? Vanity projects, and a fast- growing number of them. Aside from the ambitious, headline-grabbing space program, Beijing has been busy building the world's biggest dam, its tallest building, its longest bridge, its highest railway (to Tibet), its biggest stadium for the 2008 Olympics and, yes, its fastest-growing economy.

The writer, a Bloomberg reporter, cleverly points out how time and again such high-flying successes are pre-cursors to disaster, and spells out why this is a particularly strong possiblity in the case of China, where the banking system on which so much lies is rotting from the inside out:

Just as Beijing hopes to grow out of its bad-loan mess, it hopes rockets and space capsules will lift spirits and deflect attention from problems involving human rights issues, financial-system transparency, free speech and dodgy labor laws.

The biggest risk to China's outlook could lie in the "Skyscraper Curse," or the uncanny correlation between world's tallest-building projects - or other vanity ones - and financial crises.

Be it Kuala Lumpur in the late 1990's, Chicago in 1974 or New York in 1930, the erection of the next architectural monstrosity has been a bizarrely accurate economic indicator. Having claim to the world's biggest or first this, that or the other thing, is as much about ambition as it is about excess.

Periods of over-investment and financial speculation, fueled by excessive monetary expansion, tend to drive developers, investors and politicians to architectural and scientific one-upmanship. Call it towering hubris, something Beijing seems to have in abundance.

China has been to space, and it is getting the headlines it wanted. But Beijing had better begin expending the same amount of time and resources shoring up its high-flying economy.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that we are witnessing a great big bubble in the making. It may only be half-filled with air at the moment, and it may take years before it bursts. But burst it will, and I hope I'm no where near China when that painful day arrives.

An irreverent opinion piece in the Telegraph, oozing sardonic wit, draws comparisons between a recent wedding and the direction China is taking:

Many congratulations to Hu Haiqing, the daughter of China's president, Hu Jintao, who has married Mao Daolin, one of the country's richest internet tycoons.

It is a highly symbolic match. President Hu has repeatedly emphasised the virtues of a "modest and prudent" life, and is steeped in Communist lore - he was Jiang Zemin's heir apparent for a decade before his appointment as China's leader a year ago. But, behind all the rhetoric, he has been presiding over a great economic leap: China is going the way of his daughter, embracing capitalism with some passion and at a feverish pace.

After noting the highly celebrated milestones the "new China" has achieved -- a man in space, soaring economy, the 2008 Olympics, it suddenly brings us back down to earth and its tone changes markedly:

Economic freedom usually brings, in its wake, social and cultural freedoms. China is not following the model. Tibet is still repressed, Taiwan remains under threat and human rights abuses are legion: 14 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre, thousands are imprisoned and tortured for exercising their rights to freedom of expression.

There are no signs of the repression letting up. Here's hoping that the marriage of Hu Haiqing and Mao Daolin, both educated at American universities, might herald the arrival of a new generation with an enlightened approach not only to money, but also to free speech.

Yes, here's hoping. We'll see....

Of all the depressing stories coming out of China regarding arrests of innocent citizens, whistleblowers and those who simply tried to express their grievances, the story of the young men sentenced to 8- and 10-year sentences for creating an on-line discussion group on China's social problems struck me as one of the most very tragic.

It is a good sign that they are at least being allowed to appeal their stiff sentences, but it doesn't make up for the fact that they should never have been arrested, let alone sentenced to up to a decade in prison. Here's where it stands:

BEIJING, : A court opened the appeal trial of four Internet dissidents to decide if they deserve up to 10 years in jail for posting their views on social issues online, relatives and a Hong Kong-based rights group said.

Xu Wei, Yang Zili, Zhang Honghai, and Jin Haike, are scheduled to appear at a Beijing Higher People's Court five months after they were sentenced for subverting state power, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said.

"The appeals hearing began at 9 am (0100 GMT). The court won't let us in, but the lawyers have entered," Yang's wife Lu Kun told AFP.

The defendants are appealing on the basis that three key witnesses whose testimonies against them in the original trial have since retracted their statements, according to the center. Their original statements had been made while they were in detention.

Yang's wife Lu said the three witnesses -- friends of the four -- were not allowed to enter the courtroom even though they were prepared to testify in the defendants' defense.

The center's director Frank Lu said the case was seriously flawed. "They can't prove these four people are guilty. There are no new witnesses," Frank Lu said.

Xu, a former journalist, and Jin, a young intellectual, were sentenced to 10 years in jail, while the two others received eight-year sentences.

The four were arrested in March 2001 after they established the "New Youth Association," an intellectual study group that discussed China's growing social problems, including rural issues and widening inequality.

I know of so many outrages, but this stands out for its sheer senselessness, its blatant unfairness and undisguised cruelty. I know, it's an unfair world. But there are limits to how far unfairness can go. In this instance, that limit has clearly been crossed, and then some.

An article on the downing of a US helicopter that resulted in the deaths of 15 US soldiers includes a telling observation:

The region, just south of the Euphrates town of Fallujah, has emerged as a center of resentment over the U.S. occupation, and most residents gathered near the crash site celebrated the helicopter's downing as a victory. By noon, soldiers forced onlookers to evacuate the site.

"Why are the Americans here? They're just showing off their muscles," said Habib Ali, 36, a truck driver. "Force creates force."

Others from the nearby village of Albu Ali Harat gathered around. "This is an expression of our opinion," he said, "of Muslims, of all people."

"This is my land, and they came as strangers," said Jassim Mohammed, 22. "They should be afraid."

Nafia Fahed Hamoud, 32, a builder who lives near the crash site, praised the person who fired the missile as "an honest man who does not like to be occupied by foreigners."

What happened to greeting US soldiers with flowers and gifts? This is scary, because it means the atrocities are likely to continue, fueled by popular support. I'd be less nervous if the only ones against us were a shadowy foreign jihad, terrorists who seeped into Iraq to harrass us. When you have a large amount of the populace behind them, you have the ground paved for another Viet Cong.

The link is via Calpundit, who comments:

I wish we had a better clue about just how widespread this kind of sentiment is. Unfortunately, given the Pollyanna PR campaign underway by the administration, it's impossible to take anything they say at face value. So in the end, even though we're told that American reporters are practically rooting for failure, it looks like their reports are all we have.

And so far they've been pretty accurate. Certainly more so than visiting congressmen and dance troupes returning from their carefully scripted tourist trips, that's for sure.

If yesterday everyone in Malaysia was stepping over one another to say "Goodbye!" to the beloved Dr. Mahathir, today they are doing the same thing -- sort of.

Once again, the newspapers weigh a ton and are packed with supplements, just like yesterday. Once again, local businesses are jamming the papers with page after page of paid advertisements. Only today, they are not saying goodbye to Mahathir, but are instead welcoming the new PM.

The New Straits Times, in its upper right-hand corner, has a big bold headline, "We have faith in you!" And that's basically what all the ads say. Again, the smiling pictures of the new benevolent yet powerful ruler, the maudlin greetings from the sycophants and the sugary tributes, as though God had touched down in KL. The media are so drunk with praise, that I almost wonder whether the government itself controls the press here. No; couldn't be....

I tried to imagine a Western newspaper running such a headline ("We have faith in you!") upon the election of a Western leader. Of course, that's a futile exercise, as the cultures are so different; here it is absolutely the norm. In the US, once a leader is elected the press sees its function as tearing him down, or at least scrutinizing him mercilessly, looking for any flaw or screw-up.

I go back to Singapore tomorrow morning. This has been quite an adventure. I like Malaysia; it has an earthiness and unpredictability that Singapore lacks. The flight here is about 25 minutes, so KL may be my place to hang out on those weekends when I want to escape Singapore's at-times stifling monotony.

Kevin has a very funny account of my current attempts to deal with an insulting commenter who calls himself George and who expresses himself with a unique eloquence.

The gist of George's "argument" is that Kevin and I should move out of Asia because we are critical of it.

This is kind of simplistic, don't ya think? After all, I criticize Bush and his cohorts as much as I criticize the CCP. Being critical of a country's leadership doesn't mean one does not love that country. It could, in fact, mean just the opposite. (After all, why bother criticizing the CCP if I didn't care about China?) Conrad is always criticizing Tung and there doesn't seem to be much love lost between Adam and the Chinese government, either, yet I think both are enjoying in their their respective host countries.

Meanwhile, I'll let George's posts remain. They say much more about him than about Kevin or me.

For those interested in the bizarre, the surreal, the macabre, the irrational, the outlandish and the inexplicable, there is a delicious story today in Australia's The Age on the tomb of late North Korean tyrant Great Leader (Dear Leader Kim Jong Il's pop).

It starts:

Kim Il-sung looked at me, slightly hunched forward and arms out, as though ready to reach out and embrace. Behind him, the sunlit panorama of lake, mountains, and forest of blossoming fruit trees added to the uplifting aura around him.

This was odd, seeing that Kim has been dead for nine years, and his country is now heading into another grim winter rather than any kind of spring. Nonetheless, around me a phalanx of North Koreans lined up in rows, and at the cue of their stern-faced guide, bowed deeply from the waist in unison towards the wax effigy. As expectant faces turned, The Age managed an awkward nod.

From there it only gets stranger. Conclusion:

If North Korea today presents the listless, shabby appearance of the Soviet Union briefly in the 1980s, this must be partly due to the fact it is partly still ruled by a dead man.

Hmmmm. Maybe there are actually some Malaysians who don't adore Mahathir. An astute reader emailed me the link to this glowing tribute to Malaysia's outgoing strongman, pasted in full below. He says it mirrors the feelings of many, many Malaysians. I don't know if it is all true, and I must say I have been impressed with some of the things I've read about Dr. M., but I do know there's enough reality here to make it worth reading. And it's damned good reading.

Thank you, Dr Mahathir By Martin Jalleh

You have been such a tolerant leader. You tolerated the abuses of your cronies, the wastage of billions by government departments and the corruption of cabinet ministers, numerous menteris besar and members of the ruling coalition.

You have transformed Parliament into a robust �rubber stamp� of the executive, with MPs virile in verbal brawls and vulgar jokes, and more keen on venturing into the cafeteria than vital issues, and a venerable Speaker of 19 years becoming so much part of the varnish.

You have been so very courageous in your dealings with the judiciary as to declare "Hang the lawyers! Hang the judges!" and you have translated your true sentiments into reality. Chief Justices are �free� - to go for holidays with lawyers and promote whom they want.

No other prime minister has brought so many changes to this country - especially to the Federal Constitution - the number of amendments to which we have lost count of. (The Internal Security Act was amended 18 times.)

You have nudged this country on in imitating feats already long established by others. Indeed, Malaysia Boleh! � we have achieved world standards in road accidents, drug addiction, crime, corruption and violence against women.

You have worked so hard and contributed much to unity as a one-man-show. You have made us feel so proud of being one as a nation � made up of predominantly one Malay party, one Chinese party and one Indian party.

You have been an example of cooperation and collaboration, made evident in your working relationship with the cabinet where open discussion and decision-making supposedly reigned - albeit the differing opinion of your first and third deputy.

Such is your versatility - you constantly warned us about re-colonisation and at the same time employed and honed to perfection the very tools left behind by the colonial master to silence those who disagreed with you.

You have been a powerful voice of the poor and the marginalised � in spite of the groups like the orang asli, plantation worker, Sarawak and Sabah natives not being fully aware of this nor enjoying the fruits of your pronouncements.

Our children and their children should be grateful to you for making them so much a part of the mega projects you have given us today, for they will have the privilege of contributing to the loans taken and the maintenance costs of these monuments.

Your openness to change could be seen in your passion for privatisation and in putting public utilities in the hands of a few private corporations (and compensating them handsomely when they failed) � whilst we paid more for supposedly better services.

A leader of the Third World, you have boldly spoken against the concentration of power in the hands of a few rich and powerful countries � to continue doing this you had to use every means, institution and person possible, to consolidate and perpetuate your own power.

You were loud and clear when you said that currency speculation was the cause of the economic crisis in the country. You should know, after all Bank Negara's speculation in the forex market in 1992 resulted in the loss of RM9 to RM15 billion.

You stood up for the small and weak nations of the South against the bullying West, and due to such preoccupation it was inevitable that you had little time or thought for the small man or woman in Malaysia without cash, clout or connection.

You were so wise in telling Malaysians to be wary of globalisation, as you traveled round the globe seeking foreign support for your government and putting the country's opposition parties in a poor light.

You have turned the police into a formidable and a fearsome force whose achievements are documented in Suhakam�s book of records � which help confirm the late Tunku Abdul Rahman�s prediction before he died that Malaysia has become a police state.

You have been so humble in insisting that the people who voted for you and the government are obligated to say "Thank You"; that government servants must pledge their loyalty, and that Malaysians should fly the national flag to express their patriotism.

Thank you Dr Mahathir, thank you for retiring. 22 years of hype, humbug and heights of hypocrisy is more than enough.

I just hope they don't stop me at the airport tomorrow....