Thanks to a link from Adam, I see that the imprisoned AIDS activist Ma Shiwen has been let out of jail. I said earlier that this was inevitable (in my comments) and I am happy to see it happen.

An act of compassion or political expediency? You decide:

Ma was released several says before US Health Secretary Tommy Thompson was scheduled to arrive in Beijing.

Check out the rest of the site, too. It’s superb.

Soldiers studying Mao’s Red Book in the winter….

…and doing the same thing in the summer. All Mao all the time.

“You young people are like the morning sun. Hope is pinned on you.”
Mao Zedong to a throng of students in Tinanmen Square, 1964

Stop what you’re doing and go to the web site for Morning Sun, the new documentary on the Cultural Revolution I wrote about recently.

This site is miraculous. In English or Chinese, it brings the Cultural Revolution to you in a manner that makes it palpable. It is a multimedia experience, with all the music and art and poetry and trappings that made the Cultural Revolution so….unique.

Be especially careful to tune in to the “Cultural Revolution Radio”; as you turn its dials, you’re ushered to a new window where a C.R. song plays against backdrops of unintentionally grotesque C.R. “art.” Check out all the links in the Multimedia section. They are priceless.

Along with the propaganda photos, there are photos of original C.R. documents, in Chinese (English translation available) — documents that determine the fate of Chinese citizens accused of subversion. The photos can’t be cut/pasted — otherwise, this post would be endless, jammed with the remarkable images that adorn just about every page of this site.

To call this a treasure trove doesn’t say nearly enough. I’m just unhappy that I discovered it minutes before I have to go out to dinner with my family. This is a site I can pore over for many hours, and return to for years to come. It’s big, it’s beautiful, it’s a living breathing fresco that captures all the elements of the most puzzling phenomenon that was the Cultural Revolution. It is mgnificent.

I got the link via an email from a reader; I’m not sure whether you’d want me to list your name, so I won’t. All I can say is, Thank you. I’ll definitely be back.

For an interesting perspective on Mahathir’s anti-Semitic comments, see Dan Gillmor’s recent post. The comments below are fun, too, if a bit of a food fight.

One of the commenters there led me to yet another piece on the Mahathir farewell speech, with a whole new perspective, namely that Mahathir’s remarks can be interpreted as being insulting to Muslims and Christians and highly complimentary to the Jews. The writer makes some great points along the way:

Are Jews preventing Muslims from choosing their governments in free elections? Are they arranging those elections in which government candidates always win with 99.99 percent of the votes?

Are Jews controlling the economies of the Muslim nations – or should we look to our own ruling elites, whose greed knows no bound? People often talk of the need for the separation of mosque and state in Muslim countries. A more urgent need is the separation of business from government.

Mahathir says Jews have persuaded others to fight and die for them. Who does he mean by “others”? If he means the West, let us not forget that Americans and Europeans fought and died to save the Muslim peoples of Bosnia and Kosovo from extermination. Not a single Muslim state provided any help.

Update: Forgot to mention the Gillmor link came via Jeremy.

A right-wing commentator makes a somber argument for going to war with North Korea, and then going after Iran.

Today, while our forces are engaged in a major open-ended operation in Iraq, a minor open-ended operation in Afghanistan, and a global war against al Qaeda, we are quietly sliding into the gravest crisis of this kind since Nikita Khrushchev placed nuclear-tipped missiles in Cuba.

Two crazy states–both charter members of what President Bush has rightly called the “axis of evil,” both openly flouting an international treaty to which they are party, both perpetrators of acts of international terrorism, both animated by a blistering hatred for America and the West–are bent on acquiring weapons of unthinkable destructive power.

The CIA, as it admits in its own statements, does not know what it needs to know about either country, except that North Korea almost certainly possesses two or more fully operational bombs and could have as many as ten within months, while Iran is at most several years away from acquiring the bomb unless it purchases one or more tomorrow or next week or next month from Pyongyang.

Whatever the constraints on our resources, the challenge is unmistakable and cannot be dodged. The price of action is likely to be high, very high; the price of inaction is likely to be much higher. Courtesy of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, we have already had to relearn the lesson of Pearl Harbor in a second and more terrible form. In the age of terrorism and nuclear weapons, we cannot afford to relearn it a third time and a fourth.

Sounds great. Only problem is, we are already stretched to the breaking point with Iraq and Afghanistan, let alone the ongoing “war on terror.” And there just isn’t enough proof of a threat to justify war on this scale. After Iraq, Bush is going to have a much harder time selling pre-emptive wars to the public and the world.

Other questions that come to mind: How will we pay for it? Where will the manpower come from? Who will we replace the tyrants with? Are we willing to see thousands and thousands of US soldiers (and South Korean citizens) die in a pre-emptive war of this scale? What do we do with a liberated North Korea? (Just feeding the country would empty Fort Knox.)

I’d love to see North Korea taken down. But after seeing how our experiments in regime change are going elsewhere, I’d have to say it is simply not an option. At least not now.

For days now I’ve been bothered by the sickening anti-Semitism of the now notorious speech of outgoing Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. (When I met my parents a few days ago, it was much on their minds. They see him as a Hitler; not a fair comparison, but probably inevitable considering what he said.)

How tragic; he made some good points about what Muslims must do to improve their image and their destinies, and then he poisoned it with good old-fashioned Jew-hating.

A shrewd politician and one of the more effective Asian strongmen, Mahathir knew exactly what he was doing when he lashed out at “the Jews.” It was strategic and calculated, and it may even have achieved his short-term objectives (although that doesn’t make it any less vile).

For a most interesting read on this most unusual exit speech, see Conrad’s lengthy post, which I’m sure is by now all over the Net. It’s closing words are difficult to forget:

Mahathir’s paranoia, his insistence on identifying plots and conspiracies and enemies, his excusing of Muslim aggression as defense, is a manifestation of the disease that consigns Islamic society to the world’s sickbed. In nearly every instance, Muslims could peaceable co-exist with their neighbors were they to resolve to live peaceably. Sadly, live-and-let-live, is not an tenet of Islam. That Mahathir, the leader of one of the world’s few relatively benign and successful Islamic countries, is not able to understand this, does not bode well for the future.

No, it doesn’t.

Whatever you do, don’t miss the comments to this post. Some very smart people (and one or two not so smart) sound off, and it’s an eye-opening and, at times, entertaining read.

A shocking article describes one of madman Kim Jong II’s more gruesome practices (yes, another):

Pregnant North Korean refugees repatriated after being rounded up in China have their babies forcibly aborted or killed after birth, according to a report that adds more horror to what is known of the Stalinist state’s gulags.

Evidence from a number of women who have escaped from the prison camps of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-il, reveals a pattern of infanticide, principally due to concern that babies conceived outside the country might not be “ethnically pure”.

The report, by the United States Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, a cross-party monitoring group, cites evidence from eight former inmates.

There has been some debate in the Asian blogs about whether to apply the term “madman” or “lunatic” to tyrants like Kim Jong II or Mao Zedong, some of it quite intelligent and some a little less so. Let me just briefly toss in my two cents, freshly inspried by the above article.

Kim and Mao may not fit the dictionary definition of an insane person in terms of schizophrenia or hallucinations or loss of rational thought processes. In fact, from what I know, I’d say neither can be categorized as insane. But they absolutely were sociopaths in the extreme, megalomaniacs nearly unequalled in all of history (along with Hitler and Stalin, of course), unconcerned with the havoc they wrought, willing to take huge risks that subjected their citizens to unspeakable horrors (like starving to death), and implementors of programs that were utterly lunatic. So to call Kim or Mao or Hitler a “madman” is not, in my book, equal to calling them clinically insane. But to launch such devastating and inexplicable programs like the Great Leap Backward, or to keep your entire population in a state of war a half-century after the real war ended, even though the result is mass starvation and death — I think I am entitled to call these people lunatics and madmen.

This applies to Hitler and Stalin as well, by the way. They didn’t hallucinate. They had functional minds. But if those who brought us the Nazi extermination camp system and the Gulag Archipelago aren’t madmen, then who are the madmen?

Sorry, the shoe fits, firm and snug for Mao, Kim Jong II, Hitler and Stalin. And if the shoe fits….

To reinforce the point a final time here’s another clip from this must-read article:

One 25-year-old woman, Choi Yong-hwa, told the report’s author, David Hawk, a former United Nations human rights investigator, that she was assigned to help pregnant women.

“The woman assisted by Choi was given a labour-inducing injection and shortly thereafter gave birth. While Choi watched in horror the baby was suffocated with a wet towel in front of the mother, who passed out in distress.”

A grandmother who was given a similar job watched seven babies delivered either naturally or as a result of an abortion-inducing drug. All were killed.

Two had survived for two days before a guard “came by, and seeing that two of the babies were not dead yet, stabbed them with forceps at a soft spot in their skulls”.

According to the report, between 150,000 and 200,000 of North Korea’s population of 22 million are held in prison camps. Among their crimes are failing to care properly for photographs of Kim and his father Kim Il-sung, singing South Korean pop songs, and being the offspring of people executed as traitors.

Go ahead and tell us we are not dealing with a state of lunacy here. Go and tell us Kim Jong II shouldn’t be called a “madman.” But as you do, all I ask is that you thank god you live in a country where you can express your thoughts without being tortured, imprisoned and murdered.

Armed with ingenious pie charts and tables, Ugga Bugga brilliantly illustrates just how truth-resistant Ann Coulter is. The target of this post is a new Coulter column on Rush Limbaugh replete with the half-truths, sneers and blatant lies that have become her signature. It’s quite funny.

Even though I’ve lived in Arizona for 12 years, I never saw the Grand Canyon until this past weekend. What an awesome experience. It puts things in perspective, our smallness in a vast universe. Then I went somewhere I’ve been before, a town called Sedona, and I appreciated its magnificence for the first time. Built on and surrounded by red rock, Sedona may be one of America’s (the world’s?) most beautiful cities. Watching the spectacular sunset against a backdrop of gorgeous red rock mountains and mesas made me long even more for a return to America.

I had forgotten just how many friends I have here, and I’ll see quite a few before I go back to Singapore. I forgot because in Singapore I am all by myself. I live such an isolated life there, I actually lost touch with the idea of friendship and a social life. Coming home was a reminder of just how rich my life used to be, and can be again.

I like Singapore, but it’s not my home. Hong Kong felt like my home because I was more involved with the people there, and even in Beijing I had a social life. But in Singapore, the mid-life crisis that started when I was in my late teens grabbed me by the throat and never let go. What am I doing here? What do I want to get out of my life? What’s important? How many more years can I continue to coast, without setting my own course? These conversations are always blaring at top-volume in Singapore. They went silent the instant I stepped off the plane five nights ago.

I am not happy about my blog since leaving China. I know it’s been meandering, but it’s just following my own thought patterns. No direction. Sometimes I feel I am force-feeding it with posts that aren’t totally from the heart. In Beijing my blog was (at least to me) so vital, a real part of me. I never gave much thought to what I’d put down; the words just showed up on the screen. It has never been that way since I left, and that’s symbolic of all my current angst, my sense of directionlessness.

I know I should leave Asia. I hate to say that, but I know it. I’ll miss being “someone special,” one of the perks of living and working in a foreign country, but that’s not enough. Hating to get nostalgic and sentimental, there’s simply no love for me in Asia anymore. And there is a lot of love here, and somehow I forgot about that. This trip drove it home with a sledgehammer.

So, another turning point in a life that has consisted mainly of turning points and so few actual goals. That’s okay; I know I’ve had an incredibly exciting life and known some of the most amazing people on earth (all to be brought out in my book, someday). I can’t say there are no regrets, but looking back at the road not taken is a futile and frustrating exercise. I have to concentrate on the diverging roads in front of me now, and I think I know which one I’ll turn on to.

Enough metaphors! And enough emotional sludge. I’ll be back Monday night, and it will be interesting to see where I go from there. In my heart, I already know.

There are striking parallels between China during its period of Nationalist rule (1937-1949) and China under the post-Mao CCP. Or at least that’s the proposed hypothesis of this new story from Time Asia:

In each case, the ruling party could draw support from the living memory of the chaos that preceded its rule: the postimperial warlord era for the nationalists, the Cultural Revolution for the post-Mao communists. But the fundamental question of the basis of a regime’s legitimacy is as pertinent today as it was in the 1930s.

Nationalists and communists alike came to power through military victory, propagating a progressive ideology that was meant to correct the errors of the past. In each case, that ideology was not properly implemented or became outdated. Faced with the immense task of running a country as big and varied as China, Chiang tried to rule by issuing orders. Democracy was not on the agenda. Political power was to be exercised by the sole party on behalf of the people. That created a gulf between his government and those who found themselves kept outside the power structure, just as has been the case in the China that evolved from his defeat after 1949.

At the heart of the argument is how under both regimes, the gulf between the rich and poor widened drastically, making the fall of Chiang a certainty. If it doesn’t have such drastic implications for the CCP (and it certainly hasn’t so far), it will at least mean huge headaches and challenges. And if these aren’t dealt with…. Well, only time will tell. It concludes:

Last week’s Party plenum showed that President Hu Jintao’s administration is aware of the need to be more responsive about China’s social problems—but it skirted the issue of political reform. Unless it tackles that, along with a determined effort to broaden its appeal in ways which address popular concerns, the heirs of the victory of 1949 could find themselves sharing Chiang’s predicament.

I just read an intriguing review of Morning Sun, a film that humanizes and gives a face to the victims of the Cultural Revolution. It sounds absolutely extraordinary, and it’s frustrating to know that such films rarely if ever make it to Singapore.

At its close, the writer observes:

The speakers temper today’s orthodoxy that Mao was pure evil with their own memories of the sublime, innocent beauty of their faith. And they think of this blighted time with a regretful, humane spirit that probably has more to do with who they are now than with who they were then. Morning Sun succeeds because it gives its speakers—many of whom went from being culprits to being victims—the space to grieve, and preserves, rather than judges, their exuberant hopes. For many, the burden of seeing the grand experiment’s magnificent, arching failure was punishment enough.

Sublime, innocent beauty…. Somehow, those aren’t the words I associate with images of the Red Guard beating teachers to death. And yet I understand the description. It is always a joyous feeling to act from true belief and faith, to know that what you are doing is great, and that it is blessed by the high power whom you were taught from birth to venerate as a god, be it Mao or Hitler or Kim Jong II. To those children, they weren’t beating an innocent teacher, they were carrying out a glorious mission. Only later did they come to realize the full extent of the evil they were doing. It sounds as though Morning Sun manages to capture this terrible knowledge in all of its irony.

Update: I just found another review that’s worth reading for those who are, like me, amazed at all the havoc wrought by the Cultural Revolution and the madman who engineered it:

One describes the Revolution in grimly elegant fashion: “It was an age ruled by both the poet and the executioner; poets scattered roses everywhere, while the executioner cast a long shadow of terror.”

One particularly transfixing interview comes from a former Red Guard member whose features are obscured by shadow; his recollections of violence inflicted in Mao’s name are darkened by shame. He, like many others, can never quite forgive himself for being sucked into the stream of propaganda; it was a force that, as “Morning Sun” reminds us, molded a new generation into killers without any sense of the long and tortured history of a China that existed before Mao brutally eliminated all traces of it.

And therein lies a big clue as to why China is the country it is today. Its ramifications are everywhere, in the way students learn and the way workers work and in everyday manners. What Mao hath wrought remains today, nearly two decades after it officially ended, one of the great blights on the history of civilization.