Five Strangest Targets of the Anti-Corruption Campaign

Ridding the Party of hedonism and excess has given us a fairly sensible ban on lavish, expensive banquets held for minor guests of the state, and even veteran China watchers are feeling the pinch.  The nation's prostitution and liquor industries have been decimated. Rumblings from the lower echelons of the CCP hierarchy tell of daily Party directives detailing how multimillionaire politicians can act like a poor person are dispatched from Zhongnanhai (er, can we check this? Ed.).

Some of the items on the Do Not Buy List are a little odd to say the least, and one wonders how the princelings are really going to cope in this new age of austerity.  At best they provide an insight into actually how much officials got away with - one can only wonder what didn't make the list.

On the bright side, at least there's no danger of car pooling your teenage daughter with Lei Zhengfu.

Did Xi Jin Ping Recieve "Help" At University?

An interesting report on The Australian a couple of days ago says that Xi Jin Ping may have cheated been "helped" while he was writing his final dissertation.  Also, the actual content didn't have that much to do with the actual degree that he was studying for.  While Xi was allegedlystudying for his law degree, the thesis he submitted was entitled "A Tentative Study on China's Rural Marketisation".

In the text, Mr Xi thanks three academics and a researcher "for giving me great help while I was writing the paper". It cites as sources 97 books in Chinese and 26 in English. Mr Xi's official biography says the degree was granted through an "on the job" programme in Marxist theory and ideological education for work done between 1998 and 2002.

Given the huge amount of cheating helping that goes on during the insanity that is gaokao week, it's probably not much of a surprise that the leader of this great nation (China, in case you're wondering) did a bit of cut and pasting from Wikipedia in his younger days too.

Xi was not alone in having trouble fitting in his studies, since he was also working at the governor of Fujian, and earning pocket money as deputy leader of the province's Communist party.  It a wonder that he found time to attended lectures at all...

Literary scholars found several areas in the 161-page dissertation that would raise academic eyebrows - among them what seemed a lack of original research by Mr Xi.

They said it appeared to combine extracts from government reports with translations from foreign works in a leaden Marxist style, suggesting it was drafted by a group and finalised by the author.

Well, that's what communism is, right?

Rough Justice for China's Migrant Workers

China's migrant workers power the country's economy - working in shopping malls, factory production lines, expat bars and a myriad other diverse, low paid occupations. They help increase urbanization, seen by the government as a key factor in economic growth. Typically moving from villages and small towns outside the major cities, they travel to major cities, taking menial jobs and sending their wages back home. Recently, however, it's become apparent that these much-needed workers are on the lowest rung of the economic ladder, and seemingly are regarded as second class citizens in China's emerging class system.. Lacking any qualifications, and often  naive to the power-plays that have evolved in China's major economic and political hubs.

Earlier this year, Yuan Li Ya fell, or as some would have it, was pushed off the roof of a shopping mall in Beijing's Fengtai district. Officially recorded as a suicide, video footage emerged, along with accusations that the 22-year-old had been gang raped by six or seven security guards working at the mall.

Accusations of a police coverup, and general discontent stemming from the less than stellar treatment that migrant workers receive in the cities, culminated in a protest by workers from outside the city demanding answers from the Beijing authorities that brought the south of the city to a standstill. No answers were forthcoming, the local media doing little more than posting police briefings. The girl's family was eventually paid off with 40,000rmb, little consolation to Li Ya's cancer stricken father for the loss of his daughter.

On August 7th, a similar case was reported in Shenzhen, where a 13-year-old child had all allegedly fallen by accident from the roof of a factory dorm where she was apparently living with four other men. Since the legal working age in China is 16, questions were almost immediately being asked about what exactly the girl was doing sharing a dorm with four other men in a factory complex.

Local police have said that there had been no evidence of sexual assault, but questions still remain as to how the girl ended up in the factory, since she wasn't visiting friends, and how she came to fall out of the window to her death. Her father said that she had argued with a couple of other girls in the complex over laundry, there was nothing to indicated that the girl was suicidal.

Suicides aside, other cases, including the fire at a Jinan poultry factory highlight the low regard in which rural workers are held in. The fire, China's worst since 2000, claimed 119 lives, and injured over sixty other workers, who said that the emergency fire doors had been securely locked, leaving people on the factory floor no escape route. While accidents like this are on the decline, when they do happen, factory owners are often left unpunished.

Bar staff are particularly at risk from abuse, let alone the girls who find work as prostitutes in the pricey bars favoured by the sons of Beijing's elite. Commenting, like everyone else in the Chinese blogosphere, on Li Tian Yi, currently standing trial in Beijing for in yet another high-profile gang rape trial, Tsinghua University law professor Yi Yan You drew the wrath of Weibo by saying it was better to rape a bar girl than it would be to rape "a good woman". Presumably, a good woman being one who doesn't work for a living or get married to money. According to Yi, girls who work in bars area more likely to consent to sex than those fine, upstanding women like Gu Kai Lai, who probably don't get laid nearly as often, but definitely spend more time in prison.

Often both parents leave their rural home town in order to provide for their families, traditionally leaving their children in the care of their grandparents. Charity organizations estimate that 37% of all children living rural areas have parents working in a major city away from home. Reports have emerged of the sexual abuse that these "left behind children" suffer.

One such case in Ruichang, Jiangxi provoke national outrage in the press and in social media around the country. A teacher was arrested for molested seven pupils in his class, leaving them with STDs. In May this year, eight cases of sexual abuse were reported in a space of 20 days. Lack of any kind of sex education compounds the problem.

Speaking to the BBC, Wang Xingjuan, founder of the Maple Women's Psychological Counselling Centre said that "Some children are molested when they are about seven or eight, but they don't realise that they have been abused", observes. They are not comfortable with the situation; they are afraid and they know there is something wrong, but they put up with it". When faced with giving a sex ed class, many teachers do the bare minimum, and some even ask the students just to read their textbook at home. The legal code as it stands is far too lenient, providing little in the way of deterrent for would-be offenders. Having been found guilty of molesting four girls, a school principal recently had his sentence increased by six months to three years.

Numbering 262.6 million, the migrant worker population is something that the Politburo can ill-afford to ignore. The government has tried to placate them by announcing changes to make the draconian hukou system a little more flexible to allow people to work outside their home province and enjoy some social benefits.  In truth, the hukou is merely a membership card to a less than exclusive club.

It is, to say the least, not the most ideal of situations, especially considering the amount of blood that was shed supposedly in the name of the Chinese rural poor.  The communist system ideologically set out to ensure that all men are born equal, but the downtrodden migrant worker class in China is quickly finding out the hard way that some are born more equal than others.

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VIDEO: Red Reign Trailer

A trailer for a documentary exploring the the organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners is available online.

Falun Gong, a offshoot of Buddhist Qi Gong, has been illegal since 1992 in mainland China.  "By the late '90s there were more than 100 million practicing Falun Gong members," said director Masha Savitz,"It made [Communist officials] very nervous, and jealous ... the Communist party cannot have people not afraid of them. That’s how they control people."

Savitz follows David Matas, the co-author of Red Harvest, an investigation in forced organ donated using detained Falun Gong practitioners.  The director says that she was motivated to confront the issue "head on" after reporting on a speech made by Matas on the subject.

The Communist Party's refusal to acknowledge the religious group, made it difficult to obtain reliable interviews and information about the extent of the problem in China, so the documentary makers relied on first-hand accounts and personal connections.  The frank and graphic descriptions left her shaken, "I almost couldn't bare it,", she said, talking about the last few days of editing before the film was ready for screening.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rwe_jxzomiw

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Journalist Arrested Ahead of Bo Xi Lai Trial

Reuters is reporting that a journalist has been arrested for "causing trouble" days ahead of Bo's trial. Song Yang Biao, a left wing supporter of the disgraced politician has been using his (now deleted) Weibo account to call for peoe to protest the trial.

A friend journalist said that Song was "no threat to society", but the raster highlights the governments skittishness about the trial.

Despite his spectacular fall from grace along his wife Guy Ku Lai, who was found guilty of the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, Bo still has his supporters thanks to his extensive reforms and public housing projects in Chongqing. Writing on his microblog account, Song said that "All members of the Chinese Communist Party should rise up together to oppose the illegal trial in Jinan." Any inflammatory messages have been purged from Sina's servers, but have been archived on an anti censorship site, freeweibo.com.

Bo is almost certain to be found guilty at the end of the trial, and state media have been running thundering editorials in order to rally support behind the government. The case has been neatly turned around from an exposé of how the country's political elite abuse power and hoard millions into a flagship example of the Communist Party's anti-corruption crackdown.

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A Risky Business: Whistleblowing in China

In a bid to bolster it's image in China and abroad, Xi Jin Ping is leading a crackdown on corruption, but the consequences that some whistleblowers face might take the wind out of the CCP's anti-graft sails. 

The English voice of Chinese party propaganda, The China Daily, could hardly contain itself when Ed Snowden went public with details of the NSA’s PRISM project.  “This is not the first time that U.S. government agencies’ wrongdoings have aroused widespread public concern,” it bellowed.  Certain that political Armageddon would follow, “experts” painted a picture of “strained” US-Chinese ties, with the reassurance that hardworking Chinese diplomats would once again ensure world peace.

The news came after a testing time for the Chinese.  A PLA backed hacker group had been identified and publicly exposed by US cybersecurity analysts, Google accused the Chinese of hacking into it’s servers, and Hilary Clinton had singled out China especially her Internet freedoms tour.  Thankfully, news of the NSA spying on it’s own citizens, using services that had long been demonized in the Chinese press, broke in the nick of time.  Fueling the fire further, the whistleblower had sought refuge in Hong Kong, prompting a slew of amusing tweets, one noting that a freedom of speech hacktivist seeking asylum in China would be akin to a religious rights activist seeking refuge in Tibet.  State media wasted no time in using the story to reiterate China’s commitment to cybersecurity, while neatly sidestepping any suggestion that it’s government actively censors Internet content and selectively blocks sites based outside of China.

Blocking social media sites in China has a number of benefits for the country’s ruling Communist Party.  First, there’s little chance of a copycat Jasmine Revolution, Facebook being blamed for everything from Tibetan self-immolations to riots in Xinjiang.  Secondly, and possibly more importantly, the Chinese start-ups that would ordinarily face competition from the likes of Twitter, Youtube and Facebook are free to flourish with millions of users being served millions of ads.  The systems operate within Chinese cyberspace, and are therefore subject to the filtering, deletion and blocking that is part and parcel of Internet life these days in China.

Chinese spokespeople repeatedly cower behind a variety of excuses to justify it’s blocking of “harmful content”.  The Internet in China isn’t censored, it’s carefully managed “in accordance with relevant laws and regulations” - dissenting voices are quietly shut down, and unfavorable news coverage from overseas is blocked by what has become known as The Great Firewall of China.  When an investigation by the New York Times revealed former Premier Wen Jia Bao had a personal fortune of $120million, the entire NYT website was blacklisted and blocked lest his incredible wealth become common knowledge amongst the Chinese.

Tackling corruption, especially with Bo Xi Lai’s trial looming, is top of the CCP’s agenda.  It’s not the first time that the government has tried to get a grip on backhanders in the People’s Republic.  In 2009, the government set up a website that allowed citizens to report anyone suspected of graft, traffic was so high that hours after it was officially launched, it crashed, unable to cope with the huge volume of traffic.

Events took a more sinister turn earlier in the July of this year, when a well known anti-corruption crusader, Li Jian Xin was attacked, kidnapped and doused in acid.  After being hacked at with knives, he was left in a pool of his own blood to be discovered by a local woman in a park several hours later.  Using the pseudonym “Uncle Ou of Huiyang”, Li had posted several reports on a website that embarrassed local officials.  Li was left blind in one eye and had to have two skin grafts in Huizhou Municipal Hospital following the attack.

Despite publicly calling for more whistleblowers like Li to report cases of corruption, and the technical provision of whistleblower protection established, the law doesn’t provide adequate protection when it comes to revenge crimes.  The maximum sentence that can be handed down in such a case is seven years.  As is common in China, the law exist, but they’re just not enforced by anyone.  Those who make legal challenges are often hounded and victimized.  Earlier last month, after signing an open letter that demanded certain officials disclose their assets, eight people were placed under house arrest in Beijing.  Their lawyer, Xu Zhi Yong had his computers and mobile phone confiscated.

Journalists who try to expose the misdeeds of the Party elite.  Lei Zhengfu, a cadre in Bo Xi Lai’s former stomping ground of Chongqing was filmed having sex with his 18-year-old mistress and was subsequently arrested, imprisoned and kicked out of the Communist Party.  The blogger and amateur muckraker Zhu Rui Feng who came into possession of the Lei’s sex tape.

Not counting a couple of death threats that were probably made by disgruntled associates of Lei, Zhu was didn’t attract the attention that had traditionally accompanied such high profile exposes.  In an interview with the Washington Post, he reflected, “In the past, I’ve encountered a lot of threats, censorship and even kidnapping, but this time, my Web site wasn’t shut down. There was no blocking or attack.  I think maybe the sky really is changing.”  Two months later, the police, claiming to be from the Beijing Security Bureau were knocking on his door.  Worried that he might be “disappeared” by the authorities in Chongqing, Zhu has sent copies of other, unreleased sex tapes to friends overseas, with instructions that should he go missing, the tapes should be released.

The extramarital exploits create another, more unlikely, breed of whistleblower - the jilted lover.  Fan Yue, a deputy director at The State Administration of Archives, was due to marry a 26-year-old, Jin Yang Nan.  When she discovered that he had married long before they even met, Jin took to the Internet to get her revenge, posting photos and a detailed shopping list of the luxury goods that Fan had showered her with - luxury items that he shouldn’t have been technically able to buy on his “modest” government salary.

The first time “they went shopping, Ji said, the couple went to Prada and paid $10,000 for a skirt, a purse and a scarf. A month after they met, Fan rented an apartment for them that cost $1,500 a month and spent more than $16,000 on bedsheets, home appliances, an Apple desktop and a laptop, according to Ji. Then he bought her a silver Audi A5, priced in the United States at about $40,000, she said. ... 'He put cash into my purse every day,' said Ji in a letter to the Communist Party complaining about Fan's behavior," the story was originally that carried on The Washington Post revealed.

The photos, which spread across the Internet faster than Chinese censors could delete them show the kind of life that one can lead in the upper echelons of government.  After they had been engaged for a year, Ji repeatedly asked why they hadn’t started planning their wedding, and details of his existing marriage soon emerged.  Determined to get even, Ji published the photos on the Internet, and started handing out videos on DVD at the gates of Zhong Nan Hai - the secretive government compound in Beijing.

It’s apparent that the anti-corrupt campaign is nothing more than another PR stunt by the Chinese Communist Party.  When it was announced that Xi Jin Ping would be cleaning up the Party’s reputation, a number of anonymous editorials suggested that wiping out corruption completely would be impossible and that it would be best to focus on reducing it to a level that would be acceptable to the general populous.

State media has pounced on the court cases, proclaiming them China’s watershed moment, where the rule of law actually does mean rule of law.  Xinhua, the state run media organization reported on the trial of form Ministry of Railways chief, Liu Zhi Jun saying “The sentencing shows on one hand the judicial system and top leaders' resolve to target both high-ranking "tigers" and low-ranking "flies" in its anti-corruption efforts, and on the other hand the judicial spirit of everyone is equal before the law,” adding that the Party was “Ringing a renewed alarm to the 85 million Party members, especially officials, Liu's case reflects the CPC Central Committee's determination to investigate each graft case and punish any corrupt official.”  An editorial by the China News Service said that the indictment of Bo Xi Lai "tells the whole party and the entire society that in a country ruled by law," it said. "No matter who you are, no matter how high your ranking is, you will be seriously investigated and severely punished if you violate party discipline and state law."

Even officials who are standing trial for bribery and corruption, the off-center wonderland of Chinese politics means that despite earning illicit millions, many still have the support of the public. Neatly turning something that highlights the very worst in a corrupt, one party state, the crackdown on graft turned the murder of Neil Heywood and the imprisonment of Gu Ku Lai for his poisoning became the flagship of the "no one is above the law" rhetoric that the Party is so desperate to impress on the Chinese people.  However, given the actual good that Bo Xi Lai did in his home city of Chongqing, he still has his fans.

In a Marketplace China report last year, the housing plans and school reforms that we enacted under Bo’s leadership of the city meant that even after he was placed under house arrest, many Chongqing residents didn’t believe that he’d been arrested.  Indeed, there are plans for some of his more fervent supporters to protest outside the courthouse in Jinan when the trial begins.  Even in one of the most high profile (and damaging) anti-corruption cases, the whistleblower who blew the lid off the whole thing, Bo's former partner in crime, Wang Li Jun is serving a 15 year sentence for abuse of power.

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Satirizing Shenzhen Corruption

Despite his promises that he will tackle the growing problem of Chinese corruption, Radio Free Asia reports that "at least 14 activists associated with a nascent anti-graft movement have been formally arrested or criminally detained since March, on charges ranging from subversion to public order offenses."

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I'm Swiss. I live here now, but I'm actually a Swiss... nationally.

It's been kinda difficult to be British in Beijing lately- first there was the spectacular Youku implosion of a video of drunken/stoned/retarded/possibly-all-three Briton attempting to rape a Chinese woman in Xidan.  Now we're even more in hock with the CCP because David Cameron met up with His Holiness The Dalai Lama.

With panther-like reactions, the Global Times churned out an op-ed that lambasted the UK and Norway for their arrogance (yes, that's Chinese men calling other countries arrogant, just in case you didn't get it first time around.  Incredible I know).  Like a lot of Chinese tub thumping, the actual content is questionable, and the article is one of those paper-rattling nationalist things that Chinese people like so much.

The speculation is probably correct. In both cases China's core interests have been offended. Proper countermeasures are necessary for a big country. If China takes no action, it would be tantamount to tolerating a vicious provocation. This indifference would be despised at home and in the world.

Er.  No.  Just at home, as it happens.  No one else cares.  Ok, so the anonymous author doesn't really point out why China has the right not to be offended.  Lots of countries and lots of governments are attacked by media outlets everyday.  China's just going to have to grow up and learn to take it's knocks like everyone else.

Since its reform, China has accepted some political concepts of the West, but that is not the same as unconditionally following orders from the West. Studying the West has to take place under the condition of resisting its pressure, otherwise, it is to accept being conquered by the West.

As I commented on the story itself, China didn't really "reform and open up", the government just stopped interfering with people's lives so much after Mao died.  A classic CCP maneovre of waiting and seeing and then taking credit for what happens next.  As far as anyone knows, the political system that China did take from the west was one of the worst political ideologies created that China's inept leaders of the time thought they needed in a deperate bid to modernise the country.  Almost every country that embraced communism (and most have subsequently discarded it) ain't exactly the type of place that you'd want to retire in.  With the exception of Cuba, but they've actually got a decent health system.

The UK and Norway are developed countries with relatively small populations. China is aware of their political advantages. However, governing a country of 1.3 billion people is beyond their imagination. It is naïve and arrogant to try and teach China what to do. 

It was only a matter of time before one of the Holy Trinity of Chinese excuses was trotted out.  Chinese people are immensely proud of their immense population, and their apparent inability to manage it properly.  Corruption running rampant?  Well, China has a large population.  Poison in your milk?  Well, China is a developing country, you know. 1.3billion people isn't beyond our imagination, it's just that the systems that the corrupt morons that run China can't scale up beyond the neighbourhoods of the politicians that dream them up over a baijiu soaked dinner.

 They must pay the due price for their arrogance. This is also how China can build its authority in the international arena. China doesn't need to make a big fuss because of the Dalai or a dissident, but it has many options to make the UK and Norway regret their decision. 

The way to build authority in an international arena is to stop personalising every little slight and stop making overblown puff pieces about how sensitive you all are and how we should treat you all with respect.  If Chinese politicians actually just stopped brown-nosing the CCP machine for just five minutes, and started doing things for the good of the people, rather than saying that they're doing stuff for the good of the people, we might be able to make some progress.

Spending thousands of RMB on banners saying that Chinese people are 文明 doesn't actually do anything to change people's minds.  Becoming civilised and not acting like a dick in public is not something that people can osmotically achieve simply by being bombarded with thinly veiled propaganda day and night.

Oh, and by the way, outside of Bond villians, no one "must pay the price" for shit these days.

China-UK cooperation will have to be slowed down. Free trade agreement talks between China and Norway have also been upset. The ensuing loss is a small one for China. 

Free trade won't be upset, the sky will not fall, and the worst that would happen is that China goes a sulks in the corner for a while.  No one likes a cry baby and you have to stop playing the victim.

It's not easy to have Chinese society's sympathy on China's sovereignty issues. The West has presented various honors to Chinese dissidents, and Chinese people won't be fooled into believing it is a simple coincidence.

Shockingly, what happens in "the West" is that people that try and change things actually get recognised for trying to change things.  We don't give out random gongs to people just because we want their job when they retire (with the obviously exception of the British Civil Service, naturally).  To get a pat on the back, you need to do something other than get fat and smoke cigarettes and retire to go die of cancer, it's just doesn't work like that.  The Chinese government has to stop looking at everything as though governance is one long gaokao.  There are certain things that you can't be taught, and as long as current status quo exists, it never will be.

Microwaves Make Headline News

When Attaturk wanted to modernize Turkey, he wanted to ban the use of the veil by women. He didn't ban the veil outright, as a boring, conventional thinker might have - he made the veil compulsory for prostitutes. Since China can't really avoid the encroachment of the Internet and social media, some lateral thinking will be needed if the CCP wants it's citizens to toe the line online.

China has embraced capitalism in all it's glory, unfortunately, in their scramble to get their hands on as much money as possible as soon as possible, they tend to clone what they deem to be successful in another country (usually America) and set it loose on an unsuspecting population. A false sense of "if you build it they will come" is the chronic mindset, Chinese English school owners despair that people aren't falling over themselves to throw buckets of cash at them and shameless clones of western websites get themselves into endless amounts of trouble with their user bases because they delete messages and search results from their databases.

There's a reluctance to embrace new ideas here. The people have a strange way of making one feel that they've made an important contribution to a discussion, or proposed an effective solution to a problem, but at the same time, there's a lurking sense the idea has been pretty much instantly dismissed in favor of what you might term an old school solution. The closed-shop boys club of the government departments doesn't really help, and the yes-man mentality compounds matters, all you can really do is sit back and watch them fail, hoping against hoping that someone somewhere learns their lesson.

The Chinese people have figured out one pretty safe rule in life: if it gets blocked on the Internet, it's probably worth gossiping about. This week, quite a few things, despite the hugely popular microblog service instituting it's real-name registration, have been blocked: A mysterious crashed Ferrari, the fate of politician Bo Xi Lai, and now, images of tanks rolling down Chang'an Avenue as an alleged military coup gets underway.

Of course there was no such thing as a coup d'tat in Beijing - surely a Beijing correspondents wet dream - and the whole thing started with a single tweet.

Pan Shi Yi, a property magnate with 9.2 million followers has garnered a reputation for posting cryptic messages on his Weibo account. On Monday night, he posted "This evening Weibo was strange indeed, there were some words that could not be sent out on Weibo. I saw a line of commentary dropped several times from Weibo, but what I saw made my scalp tingle; was it gremlins? Better to turn off the computer and go to sleep.". Over 3,000 users commented on the post, some trying to figure out what exactly Pan was getting at, and others simply advising him to get some sleep.

On Tuesday morning, someone posted a message claiming that "According to reports, Beijing people said that last night the 38th Army was seen on Chang’an Avenue [which runs in front of Zhongnanhai] and an accumulation of police and military vehicles were in front of the Diayoutai State Guesthouse, signaling there will be big changes soon in our government.". The Epoch Times, a Chinese news portal with Falun Gong (a banned Chinese spiritual movement) published a photo that supposedly showed that there was indeed military action taking place in the capital. Research by Chinese netizens finally debunked the photos, showing them to be nothing more than night rehersals for the 2010 National Day celebrations.

Of course all this rational thinking didn't do much to stop the single tweet snowballing, turning it from a paranoid delusion limited to a small number of online freaks into stuff that people were gossiping about around the water cooler. One SMS message that I received about the strange case of the black Ferrari suddenly had two naked girls in it. Aside from the fact that the night the accident happened was so cold that snow fell in Beijing, the only details given to the press about the two female passengers were about their injuries and their ages, and since the crash happened at 4am in the morning in the northern part of Beijing, it's unlikely that there were many eyewitnesses. But we never let the facts - or lack thereof- get in the way of a good story

Rumors, gossip and unhelpful stories fanned by text messaging and microblogging are pretty much part and parcel of life in a country where government departments and spokesmen live in a walled garden sheilded from the people that they're actually supposed to be interacting with, and simply blocking out stuff that you don't want people to talk about isn't the best way to enforce any kind of rumor control, transparency and accessibility is the best way to go because even if you pull the wool over the eyes of the Chinese people, western audiences are much more sophisticated and cynical enough to flatly reject the "because we say so" attitude towards governace.

It's Been a Funny Old National People's Congress and Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference

The Internet is almost inaccessible, dissidents, writers, bloggers and activists are "disappeared" - bundled off to black jails to be tortured, and an apparently unending stream of armed troops descend on restive regions of the country.  No, it's not a dystopian vision of the future, it just means that the NPC/CPPCC is in town.  Referred to as The Two Meetings, this the place were Five Year Plans are approved, the Beijing Police do their best to outwit foreigners and prevent them from getting up to anything subversive, like filming and taking photos.  And of course, there was the Bo Xi Lai Thing.

The drama that has been playing out since February starring Bo Xi Lai and Wng Li Jun was never really going to end happily.  Something of a mix between Nero and Warren G. Harding, Bo managed to economically cripple Chongqing, spending huge amounts of money importing ginkgo trees, and supporting the local satellite TV station.  Subsidizing the TV shows took at least 50% of the budget, and importing the ginkgoes (and watching them promptly die off in the unsuitable soil and climate) cost something in the region of 10% of the annual government budget.  Things came to boil when the head of the local PSB, Wang Li Jun spent the night at the local US Embassy, sparking rumours that he was ready to defect, and had amassed a documents that proved the connection between Bo and his dodgy deals with a local property tycoon Weng Zhenjie.

About a month later, The Two Meetings hit full tilt boogie, but Bo Xi Lai was the only member of the 25-strong ruling Politburo not to attend one of the first high-level sit-downs.  Later, towards the end of the gathering, Wen Jia Bao roundly rejected Bo Maoist efforts to force people to sing "Red Songs", saying that "Reform has reached a critical stage. Without successful political structural reform, it is impossible for us to fully institute economic structural reform and the gains we have made in this area may be lost.  The new problems that have cropped up in China's society will not be fundamentally resolved, and such historical tragedies as the Cultural Revolution may happen again."

The day after, news broke that Bo Xi Lai has been removed of his government post.  But it didn't end there.  The week after his removal from the Politburo, unconfirmed reports now suggest that Bo has been placed under house arrest, and that he attempt to block a criminal investigation centered on his wife.

Little more than a rubber stamp parliament, the 2012 NPC saw several new toothless laws were passed, including one that addressed the problem of illegal detentions by the police.  Reforms to the Criminal Procedure Law were, at least on paper, intended to give citizens more protection and reduce the powers of the police.  That was the theory anyway, closer inspection reveals that while the law requires the police to notify the detainee's relatives, it doesn't require them to tell the relatives where the detainee is being held, as well as giving the police powers to deny the suspect access to a lawyer, and if the police deem that informing relatives of the arrest could impede the investigation, then they don't need to do it.

It was only 50 years ago that the first few National People's Congress was performed to a select few, and behind closed doors.  In 2012, enterprising young Weibo members are combing through hi-res images taken in the conference hall to find out who's sleeping, texting and gaming their way through the proceedings. This year's NPC/CPPCC has been particularly entertaining, if not for the fact the while The Two Meetings were going on, air quality improved as clampdowns on car usage and making sure that while the politicians were in town, the factories toed the pollution line. This year we've had Tibetan representatives fleeing in terror at the sight of a foreign correspondent, the ongoing, epic saga charting the eventual downfall of Bo Xi Lai and Wang Li Jun that made Dr. Zhivago pale in comparison.

Nailing Jello to the Wall: What's Weibo Up To?

The much vaunted Weibo real name registration kicked in today, leaving pretty much everyone confused as to what the bloody hell people at Sina.com are playing at.

This morning, many users were reporting that even though they hadn't actually filled out their info - giving their state issued ID number and real name - were greeted with a thank you message informing them that they had indeed given their state issued ID number and real name.

Since I hadn't registered my ID number (I'm not Chinese, and don't have an ID card) I was pretty much locked out of the web interface.  I'd bought my phone pre-pay SIM card from an anonymous vendor in Dazhalan (which causes its own problems because the SIM card is tied to Hebei province and not Beijing) and Weibo steadfastly refused to send a confirmation SMS to my phone.   Whenever I tried to post a message, an alert box popped up over the text box informing me that I had to register to post.

Fortunately, both the Android client and my iPad client were working fine, and I could quite easily reply to threads started on Weibo, I just couldn't start any of my own.  For all its security theatre, the real-name registration hasn't actually prevented those who want to post subversive stuff anonymously.  In fact, they've probably compounded the issue, since mobile devices and tablets that are much easier to carry around and photograph Chinese policemen beating the hell out of a disabled beggar on the street than a laptop.

It's difficult to figure what's going on.  Most of the whistleblowers, commentators and dissenters who currently use Weibo  are usually the relatively well off middle class, most of whom can quite easily afford a smartphone or even an iPad, which currently allows you to circumvent the registration process. The other group of users are those who are reliant on using smokey Internet cafes that are routinely checked by the police, and you need to present your ID card in order to buy time on the computers anyway.

And how did I eventually register?  I used a false name and corresponding number that I found on an MMORPG forum.

Merkel's China Gaffe

Democracy in China

I've often said that the Chinese people wouldn't know what to do with a vote, since the vast majority of them (in Beijing, at least) seem to have problems operating a subway ticket machine, but the news wires are abuzz with a village election in...Wukan.

Malcolm Moore at The Telegraph, as well as China Digital Times have weighed in with coverage of the first free and open democratic election in China since, er, forever.

Even though the elections were only a prelimiary round of voting ahead of the main even in March, everything - bar a "scuffle" between reporters from Hong Kong - went as smoothing as could have been expected.

“We had to make a big thing, a big show, out of it to underline its importance and to guarantee that it was all fair and transparent,” said Yang Semao, one of the chief organisers.

“Wukan has been in the dark for so many years; its elections always manipulated. It is the first time we have done this so we want to do a good job,” he added. In the past few days, several academics and students have also arrived in Wukan, partly to observe the proceedings, and partly to offer advice to the villagers.

“This is very meaningful,” said Chen Liangshan, 61, who used to work in one of the village’s temples. “I have already got the list of people I will vote for in my mind. I am glad to get the chance to choose people who will actually do something. This is the first time we have ever seen a ballot and we are excited about it.”

Mr Chen filled in his ballot, a sheet of A4 paper, at a table covered by a bright red tablecloth and deposited it in one of seven shiny aluminium ballot boxes. According to an official press release, he was one of 7688 eligible voters, with 1043 voting by proxy.

The BBC has a short photostory on voting in the village, and blogosphere analysis from the WSJ.

Related articles

• Wukan protest village goes to polls (telegraph.co.uk)


• Residents Vote in Chinese Village at Center of Protest (nytimes.com)


• Rebel China village to hold first ever democratic vote (thehimalayantimes.com)


• Wukan goes to the polls (guardian.co.uk)


• China villagers head to the polls (ibnlive.in.com)

We Hope For a Miracle

A cartoon currently doing the rounds on Weibo (thanks to Emma Lau for the link and the translation) - the last frame says "we can only hope for a miracle!" showing Ministry of Railways spokesman Wang Yong Ping tied to the train tracks as an out of control train hurtles towards him.

 

Quote/Unquote: Wang Yong Ping

...During the emergency rescue operations, the area was very complex, and there was a marsh below, so it was very difficult to do our best job. We also had to deal with all the other train cars, so (the earth-moving equipment operator) buried the front car below, covering it with earth, and it was mainly just a case of dealing with the emergency. This was the explanation he offered. Whether you believe it or not, I certainly do.

- Ministry of Railways Spokesman Wang Yong Ping explaining why the carriages from the Wenzhou train crash were buried.  Thanks to Shanghaiist for the quote.

Wenzhou Crash Media Aftermath

The western and English language media in China is going into overdrive providing coverage and commentary on the aftermath of the Wenzhou Train Crash.

Xinhua is reporting that Wen Jia Bao has called for a “swift, open transparent investigation”, although Grandpa Wen has pretty much been calling for whatever he wants since he’s going to to be stepping down as Premier next year – he promised political reform when he was in England earlier in the summer.

Time Magazine has a piece on the “murmurs of dissent” in China following the crash – although almost every foreign reporter in China is probably playing up the idea that Chinese people are disagreeing with the government

The ever-excellent Ministry of Tofu (which I keep mistyping as the Ministry of Tudu for some reason) has a rundown and translation of the microblog surveys that have been run through the Chinese cyberscape.  Needless to say, people ain’t happy.

China Realtime Report has a slideshow of pictures from the crash site  and another Chinese language gallery shows how the newspapers on the mainland are reporting on the tragedy.

Both the Global Times and the China Daily have ripped the government a new one over the Ministry of Railways handling of the crash.  The Global Times has attacked the department’s officials, saying that their “arrogance results in bad PR” (another brief tells of the total cost that the new rail system might total up to).  The Global Times editorial ominously ends with the lines that “the relationship between the government and the public is like that of a ship and water. Water can keep the ship afloat or sink it.”

Wenzhou Train Crash Round-Up

By now you have probably heard about the Wenzhou Train Crash, which is China's worst train crash since the Qingdao derailment in 2008.

The actual accident and the belated, lacklustre response from the government (and you might want to do a wordcloud on how many times "government reponse appears in this post) have been amplified well beyond any level that the CCP would wish for.

The Beijing-Shanghai high speed line was, of course, one of the flagship engineering projects that the government had been trumpeting for the last year or so, and the opening of the line coincided with the 1st July celebrations that were organised to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party.  It's no big secret that things were pretty much rushed through to meet the deadline, and the Kunming Highway Project had already claimed ten lives a mere day and a half after it was opened.  What began as a unifying, rallying celebration of Chineseness has quickly dissolved into a backlash of fear and paranoia fostered on the Chinese internet through Weibo and Youku and has become a platform for scathing attacks from both the national press on the government, and for angry journlists who have begun demanding more that the usual excuses from party officials.

The China Media Project has a comprehensive  rundown of the salient points of the accident, starting with the now infamous claim from Wang Yong Ping that  “The Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway and Japan’s Shinkansen can’t even be raised in the same breath, because many of the technologies employed by China’s high-speed rail are far superior to those used in Japan’s Shinkansen,”

ChinaGeeks has been covering the days (Sunday, Monday and Tuesday since the crash, offering translations and reposts of the Chinese reaction to the accident and the government response.

Much has been made of the Chinese Propaganda Department’s media directives that were almost immediately leaked online that show exactly how the Chinese government manipulates the media to stir up feelings of national pride:

The latest directives on reporting the Wenzhou high-speed train crash:

1. Release death toll only according to figures from authorities.

2. Do not report on a frequent basis.

3. More touching stories are to reported instead, i.e. blood donation, free taxi services, etc.

4. Do not investigate the causes of the accident; use information released from authorities as standard.

5. Do not reflect or comment.

Reminder on reporting matters: All reports regarding the Wenzhou high-speed train accident are to be titled “7.23 Yong-Wen line major transportation accident.” Reporting of the accident is to use 'In the face of great tragedy, there's great love' as the major theme. Do not question. Do not elaborate. Do not associate. No re-posting on micro-blogs will be allowed! Related service information may be provided during news reporting. Music is to be carefully selected!"
「温州事故报道的最新要求：1、死伤数字以权威部门发布为准；2、报道频度不要太密；3、要多报道感人事迹，如义务献血和出租车司机不收钱等等；4、对事故原因不要挖掘，以权威部门的发布为准；5、不要做反思和评论。

宣传提示：温州动车脱轨事故报道名称统一使用“7.23甬温线特别重大铁路交通事故”。温州动车事故从现在起以“大灾面前有大爱”为主题报道，不质疑，不展开，不联想，个人微博也不要转发！节目中可提供相应服务信息，音乐注意氛围！」

The Chinese microblog site has been at the centre of much of the outrage, starting with the survey that showed 97% of it's users were unhappy with the government's handling of the accident.  Chinese Youku users have been uploading videos to Youku and other sharing sites, including one  that shows a body being recovered from the crash.  Angry journalists demanding answers from the officials in charge of the recovery operation have also been posted online.

The Economist has an overview of how The Party responded in typical fashion - not blaming anyone and firing a few token officials (God forbid that they should resign and say sorry) and there's blunt response from Stan Abrams over at China Hearsay to Megan MacArdle's article in The Atlantic.

Related articles

• Death toll from China's train crash rises to 39, including two Americans - Xinhua (news.google.com)


• Public calls for change of track following bullet train crash in China (csmonitor.com)


• VIDEO: Chinese baby survives train crash (bbc.co.uk)


• China orders safety inspection after train crash (ctv.ca)


• You: Bullet train crash kills 32 in China (nation.com.pk)


• China Tries to Calm Fears After Train Crash (online.wsj.com)


• China Tries to Calm Fears After Bullet-Train Crash - Wall Street Journal (news.google.com)


• WENZHOU, CHINA: At Least 35 Killed, Hundreds Injured In High-Speed Train Crash (lostchildreninthewilderness.wordpress.com)


• Propaganda Instructions on Wenzhou Train Crash (businessinsider.com)


• The Propaganda Instructions For The Wenzhou Train Crash (businessinsider.com)

Congratulations to the CCP

Among those congratulating the Chinese Communist Party on reaching the grand old age of 90 years old was one Boris Gryzlov, who remarked that the CCP had " weathered war flames and various hardships and led the Chinese people on the road toward peace and prosperity".  Conicidentally, he's also the very same Boris Gryzlov who was quoted in Time  saying "Parliament isn't a place for political discussions".  He's also the same Boris Gryzlov who defended electoral violations in the 2007 Russian election by saying "They in no way put in doubt the final result. The fact that these violations have been registered shows that we have a transparent ballot."

Mwai Kibaki sent in his congratulations, and he should know all about poltical reform since he was...er... accused of electoral fraud in the 2007/8 Kenyan elections.  The Independent Reviews Commission noted that during the Kenyan elections " there were too many electoral malpractices from several regions perpetrated by all the contesting parties to conclusively establish which candidate won the December 2007 Presidential elections. Such malpractices included widespread bribery, vote buying, intimidation and ballot-stuffing by both sides, as well as incompetence from the Electoral Commission of Kenya".  The head of a local democracy watchdog,  the Institute of Education in Democracy, said on the day of Kibaki's swearing-ine that "This is the saddest day in the history of democracy in this country. It is a coup d'etat,"

Projects that were supposed to highlight the technical achievements of the CCP completed in time for the celebrations have included:

• A new high speed rail link connecting Beijing and Shanghai which has suffered three malfunctions in two days that resulted in scores of late arrivals.  When asked if the trains used any Japanese technology, Wang Yong Ping, the spokesman for China's Ministry of Railways scoffed at the suggestion, saying  “the Beijing-Shanghai High-speed Railway and Japan’s Shinkansen can’t even be raised in the same breath, because many of the technologies employed by China’s high-speed rail are far superior to those used in Japan’s Shinkansen.”

• Another flagship construction project was a new road in Kunming that promptly collapsed down the cliff that it was built on a mere day and a half after it was "completed" killing two people and injuring ten others.

• Finally, the chief engineer, Shao Xin Peng, has reassured everyone (including the BBC ) that the Jiaozhou Bay Bridge is safe for traffic.  Construction workers had told CCTV that the bridge was at least 2 months away from being completed, and reporters found missing bolts, missing safety barriers and even missing lighting.  Thankfully Xin Peng pointed out that "The status of secondary features does not affect the main project or the opening of the bridge."  So that's all right then.  Locals have pointed out that the  $US2.3 billion bridge has resulted in only a 10 minute reduction in travel time - compared to the highway that runs parallel to it -and  thanks to the fact that there are only 3 toll booths installed, a 1.5 hour journey is now compressed into a 3 hour wait in the queue at the exit of the bridge.

Change Ain't Good

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="250" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption]

“And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn't there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission.”

V, V for Vendetta

“What we need right now is a clear message to the people of this country. This message must be read in every newspaper, heard on every radio, seen on every television.  I want this country to realize that we stand on the edge of oblivion. I want everyone to remember why they need us!”

Chancellor Adam Sutler, V for Vendetta

As a fresh faced youngster in 2006, I wanted to save China.  I wanted to shine a light on the corruption, the censorship, the human rights abuses and I wanted to open the eyes of the Chinese people, and really let them see what China was, and let them understand what the western world thought of China.

Of course, it was an utterly pointless exercise.  I got my first Chinese girlfriend, a 19 year old economics student (ok, I’ll admit that I was 27 at the time), and I really thought that I’d be able to bring her around to the western way of thinking, hoping that this article that I wrote about movie censorship, or that column I wrote about plagiarism, or the things that showing her pictures of Tankman and the 1989 protests would make her see sense.  I even dragged her around the old Qianmen area that was scheduled for demolition to make her see what her government was doing to these irreplaceably historic buildings.  I got shooed off the makeshift living areas for the homeless behind the infamous “mini great wall” behind the Qianmen bus station for taking unwanted picture of the squalor.  For all my procrastinations, for all my heartfelt appeals, for all my solemn, headshaking, I didn’t make a dent.

Her father was a government lawyer, and was having none of it.  After a couple of months, I had gotten around to the idea that her life revolved around getting a manicure in Wang Fu Jing, going to KTV, and going dancing till three in the morning and coming home stinking of cigarettes and baijiu.  Occasionally seeing me, and quite possibly buying more shoes.  Things didn’t work out between us.

I like to live in a sea of information.  I’ve got Facebook open, Tweetdeck tuned to some of the top China commentators and bloggers, the TV on mute tuned to BBC News 24, and BBC World service playing via the Internet – I do all this whilst chatting on MSN, sending and receiving text messages and answering Skype calls and downloading podcasts to my iPod for later listening.  It all adds up to the fact that I know more about what’s going on in China than most Chinese people, and I barely speak the language.  All of my information about what’s going on in China comes from English news sources.  This is a source of friction between me and the Chinese people that I talk to, basically because the news isn’t always good news and Chinese people don’t believe that western news sources can be trusted.  This is a rather inconvenient situation for foreigners, because nearly all Chinese people don’t actually know that it’s illegal for Chinese journalists to work for foreign publications.  So how the hell else are we supposed to get the skinny on what’s happening in China?  What is interesting though, is that the things that I’m interesting and repost on Weibo or Kaixin, aren’t the same things that my Chinese friends are interested in.

Starved, in the first few months of my return to China from Japan, of Facebook, I signed up with Kaixin which slaked my thirst for constant new news.  Last week I disabled my account, mostly because what my Chinese friends on Kaixin were blogging about was pretty much diametrically opposite to what I was blogging and reposting about.  That and I was getting pretty pissed off with everything I was reposting as “newsworthy” was pretty much instantly deleted by the censors

And this is where we come to part one of my theory of why everyone in this part of the world defends their culture so much.  It’s a cliché, and it’s not going to be popular, but in a nutshell: everyone looks the same in this part of the world and the historical and cultural background is the only thing that can help people differentiate Korean from Chinese from Japanese.  Part two of my theory attempts to answer a question that was posted last weekend about why the Chinese government is so good at “playing the crowd” at home, but not particularly good doing it on an international scale.  Every citizen has a certain preference as to how they perceive their country.  The Chinese government has the advantage because for a long time, it’s told people how to perceive their country.

Let’s take a look at the Japanese for a moment.

The Japanese prefer to think of their country as small.  You’ll say you want travel somewhere, and they will almost faint away in shock at the very thought of the great distance you want to travel.  You’ll meet someone in Osaka, enthuse about the country to a certain extent, and hear about how small the country is.  Then you’ll mention that you want to travel somewhere like Himeji (a mere two hours away from Osaka Station on the limited stop service).  Hands will fly up in horror, girls will faint away in a swoon, sirens, klaxons and alarms will sound and Japanese special forces will abseil down from the ceiling and crash through the windows as the Japanese people you are talking to try to contemplate the great distances involved in the epic journey that you are planning and very likely may not survive.  Japan is small, but everything is Very Far Away. And Japanese like to think of it like that.  And it’s the same with China, Chinese people have certain preferences that they adhere to when they think of their country.

Chinese people prefer the idea that China has been ruled in a ceaseless, uninterrupted chain of dynasties and emperors.  The actual details of wars, in-fighting, assassination attempts, treachery and other insidious parts of Chinese history are not important.  What is important is that the rule of China as one country has been how it has been, and it is the way that things will be to come.  This is why slogans like “a thousand years of the CCP” and suchlike were so popular.  It made Chinese people feel secure that someone was actually going to be watching over them, that something would be there.  In China, there’s no corruption.  Corruption is just a means to the end of being comfortable about knowing the outcome – the accumulation of money is incidental.

Chinese people prefer to know what’s going to happen – my love life is littered with Chinese girlfriends who thought obsessively about the future – they wanted to know if I had a life plan, if they should have a life plan, if they should have a monthly or 6 monthly plans.  My most recent ex was given the advice that if she didn’t get a promotion in the next six months, she should quit the company.  That was last June, and as far as I know, she’s still at the same place.  One of my go-getter Chinese friends sits down and writes a yearly schedule for herself every January 1^st.  Last year, one of my students wouldn’t even move to Xian because (amongst a myriad thousand reasons), she was afraid of what might happen.

Fear of failure is rampant in China, and it all comes from the Chinese education system.  Students are repeatedly told that they know nothing, that they are empty vessels and they need to be filled with instructions on how to carry out the simplest of tasks (one of my students in the English school I was working in last year asked me to do a class on how to tie a tie) without instruction, without clear leadership, without the feel that they are being told something that they didn’t already know, Chinese people are lost.  Into this steps the CCP, which rather than being run as a voice of the people, sees itself (and calls itself) the ruling party of the country and indeed, of Chinese society.  Chinese laws don’t so much protect individuals, but they protect social and economic stability, a legal situation, and a national mindset that goes in completely the opposite direction to the western ideals of protecting individuals first.

The Chinese Communist Party is very proud of the fact that they have “opened up China”, with their policy of reforms and, er, opening up.  In actual fact, no one actually did anything, rather, the Party stopped interfering with people’s lives, and let them get on with whatever they wanted to get on with.  The problem with opening up has been that the focus in China has shifted from the collective “China” to the individual “Chinese”, and the laws in China, as already pointed out do not take into account protection for the individual.  There are no independent courts, no due process, and very channels for legal protection for the average Joe Chun.  The people are left with one alternative: The authoritarian protection of the ruling CCP.

Related Articles

• Will China Be the Next Libya? (blogs.forbes.com)


• Changing Beijing (bbc.co.uk)


• Nobody Expects a Jasmine Revolution...except China. (writechic.wordpress.com)


• You: No regime change in China: Niwa (search.japantimes.co.jp)


• Why China is still a struggle for international tourists (blogs.telegraph.co.uk)


• When It Comes To China, Outside Pressure Doesn't Work (chinavortex.com)


• Education and The Chinese Mother (smearedtype.com)


• The Worst PR Moves of 2010 (crenshawcomm.com)


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• US ambassador to China decries violence against media - Reuters (news.google.com)


• Lianghui (schott.blogs.nytimes.com)

China's Revolution Needs Supersizing

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="move along, nothing to protest about here"][/caption]

Chinese citizens were told to shout “We want food, we want work, we want housing, we want fairness”, referencing rising food and housing prices, the overqualified and underpaid ant-tribe, and massive government corruption and cronyism that has dogged the Chinese government since its inception.

While the protests in Egypt, Libya and Bahrain were gathering momentum, I found myself hoping that the same wouldn’t happen in China.  If it did, I explain on Facebook, the government crackdown would make Gadhafi’s violent response look like a paintballing outing for extremely nervous insurance salesmen.  The choice of venues (KFC and McDonalds) neatly illustrates the pampered nature of the Angry Young Men of China – we can have a protest, but we really need to go somewhere where we can get some food later on, possibly with a the local neighborhood American diplomat.

Suffice to say that the Chinese didn’t really grasp the nettle and give an all-out protest on the same scale as their Egyptian and Libyan counterparts.   A number of factors conspired against them a) they publicized the whole thing on Twitter which is banned in China, b) the Chinese authorities are stupid, but they’re not too stupid not to use Twitter to keep tabs on troublemakers c) they used Google Maps to pinpoint exactly were the protests were being held.  It was, to borrow one of Hannibal Lecter’s lines, a fledging protestor’s first attempt at a transformation, and not that great a success.  That said, at least the members of one of the world’s largest standing armies had something to other than stand.

The authorities didn’t really do themselves any favors either.  Fearing massive negative publicity, they duly phoned up every reporter in the city and told them not to go anywhere near Wangfujing or Tiananmen Square without special permission - which is a little like telling a two year old not to press, under any circumstances, the big red button with “danger – do not press” written in yellow and red letters above it.  If anyone should be arrested for subverting state power, it’s the Chinese idiots who spread news to the people who didn’t even know there was news in the first place to be spread.  It’s also given officials, as the 9/11 terror attacks in American gave the American officials, more wiggle room to collect in one place all the troublemakers, and any excuse to tighten the rules is a good excuse.

While their tactics have been quite simple, they have been quite effective – no one can argue that spraying water from a street cleaning van is a more acceptable than an M1 tank rumbling down the Wang Fu Jing.  If the dissidents get the idea that the most they have to deal with is getting a little bit wet (which, admittedly for Chinese people is on the same level as contracting leprosy) every weekend, they may get that little bit bolder.  It’s a shame that the Chinese police didn’t deal with the foreign news media.  Nothing makes a western report moist with anticipation more than a protest in China, but nothing eats up column inches like reports of Chinese police beating the living daylights out of foreign reporters and illegally detaining those covering a protest in China.

Related Articles

• China Continues Crackdown on Protests (time.com)


• U.S.: China 'illegally' harasses media (edition.cnn.com)


• Police but no protesters in Beijing (guardian.co.uk)


• China puts on show of force to block rally (behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com)


• Call for Demonstrations in China Draws More Police than Protesters (nytimes.com)


• Organizers call for 2nd round of demonstrations across China (cnn.com)


• China facing new calls for jasmine revolution (ki-media.blogspot.com)


• Inspiring manifesto from China's Jasmine revolution (boingboing.net)


• "China's jasmine revolution: police line streets of Beijing" and related posts (chinhdangvu.blogspot.com)


• Shanghai Tightens Security Ahead of China 'Jasmine' Rallies - Bloomberg (news.google.com)