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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But there are no guarantees that this latest incarnation of the Asian model will perform any better over time than earlier growth strategies. If the slowdown in the Chinese economy materializes as we suspect, the rest of Asia will have to face the consequences of its new strain of dependency. And that could well unmask many of the region’s lingering structural deficiencies — namely, shaky financial systems and inefficient corporate sectors. Reluctant to embark on the heavy lifting of post-crisis restructuring, Asia thought it had found in China a new recipe for prosperity. As China now slows, my sense is that the region doesn’t have a clue as to what’s coming.

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

Link via T-Salon — thanks!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s true that administration officials avoided the phrase “imminent threat.” But in making their argument, Sullivan and others are relying on a crafty verbal dodge — sort of like “I didn’t accuse you of eating the cake. All I said was that you sliced it up and put it in your mouth.”

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

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

Its descriptor:

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

Well worth a visit.

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

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

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

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

Hey, wait a minute….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One more paragraph. I can’t resist:

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

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