This morning I received a request from a reporter I know asking if I could comment on how my Chinese friends and acquaintances were responding, if at all, to the upcoming 20th anniversary. (The reporter was not in China.) I replied that to the best of my knowledge they mostly were not responding at all, because to them there was nothing to respond to. As far as airbrushing June 4 from the collective Chinese psyche is concerned, Mission Definitely Accomplished.

But being thorough and obnoxious, I spent the next hour or so buttonholing people and calling friends and asking them all the same questions: were they hearing any “buzz” about the impending anniversary? Are their friends talking about it? Have they heard of any plans to commemorate the dead?

The answers were unsurprising. June 4 will be a day like any other that will come and go without any particular fanfare. The day is mainly meaningless for them and the event has “been faded from people’s memories,” as one said to me. (I like that used of words, that it’s “been faded,” as though someone had done the fading, not just the passage of time.)

Finally I asked how many of them knew who “Tank Man” was. Out of the 12 or so people I asked, only one – someone who studied in the US – had heard of him. When I asked what images of June 4 they remembered, they said without question it was the photos of burned and/or disemboweled PLA soldiers left hanging by militant protesting workmen.

Once again I marveled at the party, so efficient at some things, so hideously inept at others. I tried to explain the significance of “Tank Man” to a couple of people, but it didn’t seem to register, the anonymous “everyman” holding his shopping bags, and for one insanely dramatic moment capturing the minds and hearts of the world and bringing the military machinery of The Party to a halt. It didn’t work; my friends didn’t seem to understand why it was particularly admirable. The one who knew of him said she wondered why he was so revered. This isn’t because my friends aren’t smart or sensitive; they are both. But our views of what makes a hero are quite different. Again, River Town says it all. The hero would be those who unite people, bring them together and create constructive harmony. It wouldn’t be the lone rebel throwing a monkey wrench into the state machinery.

I understand this, and I was not surprised. One friend said, “Maybe some of the older people here care. My friends and I don’t really know much about it.” I took solace in Alice Poon’s post (courtesy of China Geeks,” which tells us in Hong Kong it’s a bit different, as people react with revulsion to Donald Tsang’s remarks that “economic prosperity” has in effect neutralized the tragedy and caused most Hong Kongers to allow it to drop into the memory hole.

I can still recall the scene in Toronto in which I broke down in tears when I watched TV news while in my brother-in-law’s house – I saw tanks rolling towards Tiananmen Square and the frightened students scrambling to get away, some carrying the wounded on carts. The first thought that came to mind was: “Why on earth are they using tanks to kill those helpless and unarmed young people? Why are the soldiers killing the peacefully demonstrating students?”

Twenty years have passed. Those questions still remain unanswered as of today. Meanwhile, Hong Kong has been able to reap economic benefits from China’s open and reform policy. But most Hong Kongers would never conflate economic prosperity with a serious matter of right and wrong. Tsang could not have made a worse judgment on this issue. Even when the Mainland authorities have been trying to twist the truth around (like laying the blame on the students’ alleged intention to revolt against the CCP – an allegation that is refuted by Zhao Ziyang in his secret memoirs) and to forbid discussions of the subject in the Mainland, this has done nothing to obliterate the shameful deed from Hong Kongers’ memory.

With the passage of time, people’s vehement disgust with the ignominious murderous act has indeed been diluted, as is evident from the declining attendance at the Victoria Park June 4th vigil over the years. Yet, as if to help reverse the trend, a couple of recent incidents have managed to re-ignite Hong Kongers’ feelings of revulsion. In 2007, pro-Beijing DAB legislator Ma Lik blurted out a preposterous “pigs-crushed-by-tanks” analogy which caused a public outcry and, last month, the HKU student union president surnamed Chan tried to defend and rationalize the Beijing government’s violent crackdown, which caused an outburst of anger in Hong Kong society and led to his being ousted from his post.

Still, I find it heartbreaking that here, in what 20 years ago was the vortex where it all took place, there remains in the minds of the young no image of the men and women who died in the crackdown, no stories of the bravery or even of the daily turn of events, the “Goddess of Democracy,” the sort-of hunger strikes, the meeting of Wu’er Kaixi wearing his pajamas with Li Peng, etc. Instead, it’s basically a void, interrupted with a few government talking points and state-issued photos, like those of pre-“Liberation” Tibetan serfs with their limbs hacked off by evil landowners. And I say, What can I do? And I answer, Write it down, and do your tiny, microscopic bit to keep the memory alive.

Demonstrating students in Shanghai with their makeshift statue of liberty

Photo courtesy of Diane Gatterdam’s ongoing series of stories and photos about the demonstrations on Facebook.

Update: The erasure of TAM from China’s memory is getting noticed.

A non-China quickie during a workbreak. Seconds ago this article in the NY Times jumped out at me for its dramatic headline, and then for the big hole in the opening grafs.

4 Accused of Bombing Plot at Bronx Synagogues

Four men were arrested Wednesday night in what the authorities said was a plot to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and shoot down military planes at an Air National Guard base in Newburgh, N.Y.

The men, all of whom live in Newburgh, about 60 miles north of New York City, were arrested around 9 p.m. after planting what they believed to be bombs in cars outside the Riverdale Temple and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, officials said. But the men did not know the bombs, provided by an informant with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were fake.

The arrests capped what officials described as a “painstaking investigation” that began in June 2008 involving an F.B.I. agent who had been told by a federal informant of the men’s desire to attack targets in America. As part of the plot, the men intended to fire stinger missiles at military aircraft at the base, which is at Stewart International Airport, officials said.

Alright. We all know the inverted pyramid of journalism, the importance of who, what, where, when, how and, if possible, why. All of that is supposed to be delivered upfront, hopefully in the lede. Not here. The immediate question I had the second I saw the headline was, Who planned the bombing and what was their motivation? Were these Islamists or skinheads or an enraged former employee or…? But to find out, you have to look a full ten grafs down:

They are all Muslim, a law enforcement official said.

Mr. Cromitie, who is of Afghan descent, had told the informant that he was upset about the war in Afghanistan and that that he wanted to “do something to America.” Cromitie stated “the best target” — the World Trade Center — “was hit already,” according to the complaint.

The point isn’t about Muslims or Jews. It’s about what appears to be the media’s insistence on tiptoeing around what they see as sensitive topics. But to bury in the 10th graf some of the most revealing and useful information, stuff readers expect to see in the first, is inexplicable. I’m trying to imagine a report on the first arrests made for the September 11 attacks, but not mentioning Al Qaeda or the suspect’s home countries until midway into the story. Impossible. In this story, the suspects are simply referred to generically as “the men,” without a word of background, until halfway through.

This is not the way they taught us at NYU Journalism School.

(Note, I use a question mark in the title because maybe it really is good journalism and I’m just not seeing it. A part of me says the NYT couldn’t be so amateurish, and I must be missing something.)

The Internet has slowed down dramatically here in Beijing and everyone I know is complaining. Blogspot/Blogger are nicely blocked again. A search for “tank man” on google immediately makes the screen go white. Even my daily email of google alerts of sites linking to mine won’t open, and makes the screen go white. And yet, a search for “Tiananmen Square massacre” is fine, and you can even get onto this site with no problem.

The consensus seems to be that they’re tightening things up as the big day gets closer, funneling just about everything through the filter as they sniff out unharmonious content. But it seems, as usual, random and irrational. And soooo annoying.

We all know I’ve had my rifts with Philip Cunningham before, ever since I first saw him on CCTV-9 at the start of the Iraq war in 2003. But I have to thank him for writing a superb piece (proxy required here, I’m afraid) that makes mincemeat of the revisionist movement I referred to in an earlier post to shift all the blame onto the students and the US media.

I said from the very first day this blog shifted from a place for personal doodling to a place to chronicle my feelings about Chinese life and politics that the students at Tiananmen Square were not angels – but that I loved them anyway. Cunningham knows better than I do. He was there, he stood with them and watched them and knew them. I was only “there” as a spectator watching CNN the first year I was able to afford cable TV, and later, through the books and articles I read after moving to Asia. So I was delighted to see that Cunningham’s observations are so close to my own. This is a sampling; please read the entire article.

The students were indeed imperfect, and in unwitting ways mimicked the best and worst tendencies of their communist elders. But they did not carry out the bloody crackdown, rather certain units of the PLA did. As for the units of the PLA that refused to join the crackdown, they should be considered people’s heroes on a par with the man in front of the tank.

———

To blame it on the students, as many young people in China do today, is to fall for a propaganda line, to take one’s eye off the ball.

———

As best I could judge, from studying the crowd every day for a month on the square, is that the ever-shifting crowd largely organised and ordered itself, at once subject to the vagaries of mass psychology and the kinetics of crowd dynamics, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Countless individuals poured into Beijing’s most central plaza to create a vivid living tableau with their passion and dedication to peaceful change; they became part of a whole beyond individual control yet coherent and compelling.

——–

The only real crime was demanding a military solution and then turning the guns on unarmed civilians.

The value of releasing Mr Zhao’s belated memoir, which goes for the jugular by singling out a hard-line clique within the CCP, on this, the 20th anniversary of an unnecessary tragedy, is to get the public eye back on the culpability of those most culpable.

Philip (and this is rhetorical, because I don’t think you hang out here much), I always knew you were brilliant. I also felt you were maddeningly unfair in your taking it easy on the CCP while going after the US with no mercy. But that doesn’t matter right now. I’ve been reading your blog and articles like the one referenced above, and I have to say I have a deep respect for you. It may still piss me off when I think back on those conversations you’d have with Yang Rui on CCTV 9 – the ones where I nearly threw something at the set because I felt you were applying such blatantly different standards to the US and China – but I think your contribution to clearing the air over the tragedy of Tiananmen Square is without parallel, and I admire you for it. There is a lot of obfuscation out there as the anniversary day nears, an insistence that the Chinese people don’t care about the “incident,” that it can all be blamed on the students and the Western media, that the CCP “had to act boldly” or else there would have been no economic miracle, that the bloodshed was all for the best…. So much bullshit. For your clearheaded, unsentimental yet passionate recounting of what actually happened and who is and who is not to blame for the bloodshed, I have only two words: Thank you.

This is absolutely extraordinary. A friend just tweeted it, asking, “So, is the Washington Post website going to be blocked in China?” I’ll be stunned if it’s not. We all know China can be quite tolerant of news on Western sites, as long as it’s in English, knowing you can never galvanize the masses if you’re not speaking in their language. Thus, this will almost inevitably be harmonized. And if not, it’ll be unprecedented.

Go there while you can if you want to hear Zhao dictating a portion of his story on cassette before it was smuggled out and published. Controversial stuff, too, as Zhao challenges the decision to crack down on what had been orderly if chaotic and messy demonstrations. Money quote:

Of course, whenever there are large numbers of people involved, there will always be some tiny minority within the crowd who might want to attack the PLA. It was a chaotic situation. It is perfectly possible that some hooligans took advantage of the situation to make trouble, but how can these actions be attributed to the majority of the citizens and students? By now, the answer to this question should be clear.

And it is clear, to everyone who has a mind. There were some disgusting acts of violence perpetrated by some enraged participants as the soldiers advanced. And sympathy must go to the soldiers who were attacked, as it must go to the vast majority of demonstrators who were killed or injured, who were peaceful and orderly. More on this later.

About the site: I know, it’s been quiet. And we have a big anniversary coming up, and I’ve been seeing some atrocious revisionist stuff over here on the Internets about that date that just begs to be fisked. Zhao’s memoir couldn’t have come out at a better time (coincidence, right?); itcertainly helps blast apart some of the more audacious claims I’ve been seeing. More to come.

Update: Be sure to see Granite Studio’s amusing response to the memoirs.

Most of my friends here know that of all the reporters I’ve worked with in China, Mei Fong of the Wall Street Journal always has always occupied a special place in my heart. Now, after reading this extraordinary article of her trip to the site of the earthquake, tied in with the personal heartache she was going through at the time, that “special place” is more special than ever.

Each of us who has ever worked with or known Mei Fong in any capacity is not just lucky. We’re blessed.

Amid the roar of mourning and remembrance over the horrible events of a year ago, there’s little new or significant I can contribute. But I can’t let the day disappear in silence, either.

Almost like 911, it seems everyone here remembers precisely where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. I was on my way to a photo shoot for a pre-Olympic event when I got the text message on my phone – there’d been a huge earthquake in Sichuan. The photographer was in the car with me and had a GPRS phone. He pulled up the story, which put us all at ease. The headline was something like, “Earthquake in Chengdu; no injuries reported.” The relief was short lived, and the headlines and text messages became increasingly dark.

The next day in my office, everyone seemed subdued. It was the children. All the children in the schools that collapsed like houses of cards. At least one of my colleagues cried as she talked to me about it. That day at the office of my main client, there was a call to donate blood, and so many hundreds of employees showed up they had to wait for many hours, the bloodmobile staying past 11 at night.

In figurative terms, May had been a shaky time for China. The Olympic Torch Relay that the government naively believed would be welcomed worldwide with open arms and smiling faces had started off as a catastrophe in London and then it achieved the impossible by becoming even worse in Paris. The riots in Tibet at the same time threatened to completely drown out China’s Olympic flame. There was the bright shining moment when, as if out of nowhere, an unknown female athlete in a wheelchair rallied China’s pride and galvanized Chinese around the world. But it was still a rough time, and “Tibet” seemed to be the one word on everyone’s mind. Until May 12.

Call if fate, or if you’re cynical enough (and I hope no one is), call it luck. As the earth roared and shifted and swallowed lives by the tens of thousands in Sichuan, everything else simply faded away, and there was only the tragedy. (Comparisons to 911 are inevitable; the big news in the weeks before was a gossipy story of a congressman’s affair with a staffer who was missing; it instantly became too trivial to even think about.) Gone were the arguments about who started the violence in Tibet or whether China should be made to shoulder responsibility for the crimes against humanity in Darfur. Everything was forgotten, and all anyone could think about was, how can we help?

All the blogs and media have stories about that today. If you search this blog, you’ll see there were many stories posted here about how the tragedy brought out the very best in China. Sadly but not surprisingly, this was followed by the stories of venal officials pocketing funds, refusing to answer parents’ questions, arresting journalists, covering up information about shoddy school construction, etc. But this time the good definitely out-shined the evil. China’s spirit of volunteerism, which many had denied exited, sprang to life as people dropped what they were doing and ran to the disaster site to help. Everyone I know gave as much money as we could. At my client’s office, the collection boxes were overflowing and had to be emptied frequently to make room for more donations.

No moment affected me more than the three minutes of silence held one week later, still my most vivid memory of the unhappy period. Hearing the sobbing and watching everyone, heads downward, struggle with a wave of emotion as the horns blared and traffic halted…. And again, another stereotype of China, where people think only of themselves, bites the dust.

This is already way longer than I intended. Thanks to China for showing all the world the great things it can do when it puts its mind to it.

Update: On a more personal note, please join me in wishing condolences to one of my very favorite bloggers (who by coincidence I linked to in this post) for his loss. Life, and death, goes on.

I’m kind of baffled by a post over at one of my favorite blogs on China’s controversial quarantining of Mexicans (and later some travelers from Canada as well).

The general theme seems to be that these measures are overly aggressive.

Yet six years ago, when the SARS virus was spreading through China, the government’s response was widely criticized as not aggressive enough: it was “evasive and tardy“. Many interpreted this as par for the course from communists, and the lesson the Weekly Standard took away, for example, was: “Democratic, accountable, transparent governments do a lot better at dealing with a health crisis than a Communist one.”

Although the Chinese government is perhaps more resilient than most when it comes to ignoring international ignominy, they certainly didn’t look good, and of course, they also had their citizens to answer to.

When the swine flu stories broke, China was ready. Armed with experience from the SARS epidemic, the government acted swiftly and aggressively, issuing a notice requiring people with flu symptoms who were flying into China from affected areas to report to quarantine authorities. They issued notices on prevention, stocked drugs and researched quick and accurate tests. They even donated aid to help Mexico, despite unsubstantiated reports from that country and others claiming that the origin of the swine flu virus was China.

Okay. I’m all for screening and acting aggressively – if you also act intelligently and rationally. And I’m always in favor of donations for worthy causes. But this is a pretty flawed argument.

The response to SARS by the CCP cannot simply be described as “evasive and tardy,“ although it was each of those things. More importantly, however, is that it was criminal, it was consciously and inexcusably irresponsible, it led to unnecessary deaths and hysteria, it was a shining example of the party holding the idiotic spectacle of its annual rubber-stamp National Party Congress above the health and well being of its citizens. It was a cover-up that so shocked the world that the government is still struggling to recover its tarnished image.

So it’s little surprise that now they would rush to show the world how zealous and diligent they are. But I see this as akin to George W. Bush ignoring documented terrorist threats that were thrust in front of his nose weeks before 19 jihadists brought America to its knees, and then using the occasion to launch an irrational and ineffective war on terror showcasing the torture of anybody rounded up by bounty hunters in Pakistan and Afghanistan and then wasting America’s resources invading a country that had nothing to do with the attack.

Not an exact parallel (the Hu administration is smarter than Bush’s) but the basic point remains: Jumping into action and “doing something” without rhyme or reason does not show aggressive leadership. To me, it’s just the opposite. But don’t just take my word for it. The WSJ has an excellent story on China’s over-zealous attempt to show how responsive they are to the health crisis. Tell me if you think this illustrates good judgment:

Mexicans who were on the flight to Shanghai with the 25-year-old flu victim complain about how China has enforced its quarantine, offering little information and only basic medical testing. Among them is a family of five, including three young children, who transited to Beijing. They were roused from their hotel room in the Chinese capital in the early hours of Saturday and whisked to an infectious diseases hospital. There, according to the father, Carlos Doormann, AeroMéxico’s finance director, they were isolated in a room with bloodstained sheets and what appeared to be mucus smeared on the walls.

“I’m frustrated and sad,” said Mr. Doormann, whose family has since been moved to the nearby Guo Men Hotel on the outskirts of the Chinese capital, where they are in quarantine along with five other Mexican nationals, including Mr. Carrillo.

According to accounts from Mexicans in the hotel, Mexican travelers arriving on various flights from Mexico and the U.S. were singled out by health officials who boarded the aircraft wearing white protective suits, masks and rubber gloves. They led away Mexican passport holders. Several travelers said Chinese television camera crews surprised them at the doors of their aircraft as they emerged. They said the filming continued through the windows of an isolation ward at the Beijing Ditan infectious diseases hospital….Chinese authorities allowed Mexico’s ambassador to China, Jorge Guajardo, to enter the hotel on Sunday but refused him permission to see the quarantined Mexicans or to call up to their rooms, Mexican officials said.

Welcome to China.

So to make sure my point is clear: Action for action’s sake isn’t necessarily better than no action at all. Some of those rounded up in China hadn’t even been to Mexico in recent months, but the Mexican passport was grounds enough for quarantine. None of the Mexicans rounded up like criminals showed any symptoms of the sickness. They were rounded up only because they were Mexicans. And that is irrational and hysterical.

One of the most maddening defenses I’ve read of this passport-based quarantining was in a Chinese editorial claiming this was “best for the passengers” because they’ll be under close medical supervision in case they begin to show symptoms. You see, it’s all for their sake, and it’s only because we care.

Really? Let’s go back to the WSJ:

The Mexican guests at the Guo Men Hotel have had no contact with Chinese officials, except health workers, and have no idea how long they will have to stay. “We’re held hostage here,” said Mr. Doormann. Twice each day, nurses leave thermometers outside their rooms. No other medical testing is carried out.

So before we congratulate China for their bold and aggressive tactics,let’s first ask ourselves: Do these tactics actually make anyone safer? Are their actions based on science or hysteria? (And I love the way the WSJ refers to them as “the Mexican guests at the Guo An Men hotel” – maybe a bit of black humor?)

And let me add, I thought the quarantining of the hotel in Hong Kong,while extreme, at least made sense. We had an actual infection there. In Beijing, nothing. Just fear and ignorance. Kind of like police who put on latex gloves and face masks when questioning a suspect who has AIDS. I don’t applaud them for caution, I attack them for their ignorance and bigotry.

As you can see, this topic renders me humorless. Anything that brings back memories of the CCP’s bungling of SARS in 2003 has that effect. Because, as the whistleblowing hero of that ugly event can tell you, lives were at stake. People died. And it didn’t have to be; it was an executive decision to let people die so the NPC could carry on in harmony. (If you are a new reader, please see that post for a better idea of what it was like to be here during “the good old days” of SARS. It was a pivotal moment in my first stay here.)

To end on a lighter note, I absolutely loved this post about the quarantine by another great China blogger. It starts out semi-serious:

Charitably, the jury is still out on the epidemiological efficacy of quarantining the Mexicans. Uncharitably, it was a scattershot, poorly-thought-out bit of knee-jerk policy that did for Chinese-Mexican relations what the notorious P3 incident off of Hainan did for Chinese-US relations in 2002.

And then it gets very, very funny. I wish I could feel that funny today.

Update: For some excellent perspective, please go here now.

This is truly rich: copies of the light classic Mein Kampf are flying off the shelves in India as business students seek to learn the “secrets of the author’s success.” There’s a lot they can learn from him about winning friends and influencing people, not to mention problem-solving.

Dressed for success?

On a more serious note, this is thoroughly repulsive. I can see going through the torture of reading this stultifyingly turgid tome if you wanted to better understand one of the great aberrations of human history.

But the idea of emulating any of this beast’s “thoughts” and looking to him as some kind of role model is literally sickening.

Looking over the different points of view, I’d conclude simplified characters are here to stay, for better or worse.

I’ve read lots of arguments about this. I started by learning traditional characters, then had to make the switch when I moved back from Taiwan to China, and can ony speak about my own experience: Simplified characters were easier for me to learn and all in all helped accelerate my reading ability. That doesn’t mean I’m enamored with simplified characters, which can be irrational and annoying. I just know that my brain, which is much more aural than visual, processes them more easily.