A very funny article describes a new training manual designed to help police in Beijing deal with issues that might arise as foreigners converge on the city for the 2008 Olympics, and the English-language phrases cops need to know:

One section headed “How to stop illegal news coverage” has a policeman confronting a wandering reporter who tells the officer he is working on a story about the Falun Gong, the outlawed meditation group, according to the South China Morning Post.

The policeman tells him: “Falun Gong has nothing to do with the games … it’s beyond your permit.” He then criticizes the journalist for breaking Chinese law and takes him off to the Public Security Bureau to clear the matter up.

In another role play, a British woman from Hong Kong is stopped in the street and taken to the police station. When she protests: “You’re violating my human rights. I protest” the policeman responds: “No tricks. Don’t move.”

It’s still the China I know and love so well.

Here’s the email that just got sent out to us expats:

The U.S. Government remains deeply concerned about the security of U.S. citizens overseas. U.S. citizens are cautioned to maintain a high level of vigilance, to remain alert and to take appropriate steps to increase their security awareness. This worldwide caution expires on February 10, 2004. With the second anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks upon us, we are seeing increasing indications that Al-Qaida is preparing to strike U.S. interests abroad. Looking at the last few months, Al-Qaida and its associated organizations have struck in the Middle East in Riyadh, in North Africa in Casablanca, and in East Asia in Indonesia. We therefore assess that European or Eurasian locations could be venues for the next round of attacks, possibly to closely coincide with the anniversary of the September 11 attack. We expect Al-Qaida will strive for new attacks that will be more devastating than the September 11 attack, possibly involving non-conventional weapons such as chemical or biological agents. We also cannot rule out the potential for Al-Qaida to attempt a second catastrophic attack within the United States. Terrorist actions may include, but are not limited to, suicide operations, hijackings, bombings or kidnappings. These may also involve commercial aircraft and threats to include conventional weapons, such as explosive devices. Terrorists do not distinguish between official and civilian targets.

Really scary.

Well, Asian stocks crashed yesterday over fears of a potential new SARS outbreak, but it seems people are keeping the one isolated case in Singapore in perspective.

As usual, the government took drastic but appropriate action, quarantining lots of people, closing down buildings and putting the hospitals on high alert.

Today’s paper praises the rapid response and compares it with that of other former SARS havens:

Should Sars again rear its head when winter approaches, a very real fear that has been giving public health administrators sleepless nights as the year draws to a close, an attitude like Singapore’s could save the world from another epidemic.

When Sars first emerged, China’s obstinacy in not acknowledging the disease was largely responsible for its spread from one province to the world at large. Worldwide, almost 8,500 people fell ill and more than 800 died.

Some countries during the outbreak were more concerned with hiding the truth than facing facts. Canada especially spent much energy trying to disassociate itself from the outbreak, denying every fresh incident and getting upset with WHO for listing it as an unsafe destination.

According to the radio news this morning, the big question mark here is how the 27-year-old lab worker got SARS. The government is saying it’s likely he got it from his work in labs that keep live SARS samples, but the labs are insisting it is extremely unlikely due to the stringent safety measures there. This is part of what makes SARS so insidious. He must have come into contact with it somewhere, and until that question is answered, no one can feel completely safe.

Some schools here have announced they are reinstituting daily temperature checks for students, which I think is a bit of an over-reaction. But when it comes to SARS, over-vigilant is way better than not vigilant enough.

Paul Krugman in an interview:

Again, I think it comes back to press coverage. Just this weekend, I was looking at something: There’s an enormous scandal right now involving Boeing and a federal contract, which appears to have been overpaid by $4 billion. The Pentagon official who was responsible for the contract has now left and has become a top executive at Boeing. And it’s been barely covered in the press –- a couple of stories on inside pages.

You compare that with the White House travel office in 1993. There were accusations, later found to be false, that the Clintons had intervened improperly to dismiss a couple of employees in the White House travel office. That was the subject, in the course of one month, of three front-page stories in the Washington Post. So if people don’t understand how badly things are being managed now, and have an unduly negative sense of how things were managed in the Clinton years, well, there in a nutshell is your explanation.

I can understand the blind rage Paul Krugman’s name arouses in the far-right, nearly equal to the rage against Clinton himself. Good. Link via Atrios.

I was supposed to send out a press release tomorrow, but the client called and told me she wasn’t comfortable sending anything out on September 11th. Not even in Singapore.

It’s really unprecedented, the way a date has been seared on the psyche of the world. I don’t know on what day Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima were bombed. Come to think of it, I’ve never known of any date, the mere mention of which would instill a rush of feelings and pictures and thoughts. And fears.

Right now, CNN is interviewing the CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald on the eve of the big anniversay.

I remember how, living in Hong Kong at the time, the whole thing seemed kind of abstract and unreal. I couldn’t process it using traditional logic, even as I watched the holocaust unfold on cable news.

It was nearly a year later that I suddenly, unexpectedly came to understand the tragedy in all its vastness. It was a casual moment, when my mother mentioned how one of her friends had lost a son on September 11. He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald. And suddenly, instead of an inconceivable number like 3,000, 911 was reduced to one young man, 31 years of age, the son of a friend of my mother’s. And then I felt, for the first time, just how huge this tragedy really was.

It was an odd variation of the often quoted Stalin remark that if you murder one man it’s a tragedy, if you murder a million it’s a statistic. 3,000 was a statistic. Hearing it humanized, as an actual person whose parents are friends with my parents — hard to explain, but it touched my heart in a way that countless 911 newsreels and obituaries never did. And it made me more incensed about the crime: those bastards murdered the son of my partents’ friend. They murdered human beings with families and friends. Those who were murdered — they weren’t a number.

September 11. It wasn’t just one of history’s catastrophes, it was a date. We don’t refer to it as the World Trade Center attack, it is always September 11th, that one day, the day, after which things could never be the same. We can forget the anniversary of Hiroshima because we don’t remember it as a date. But every year we’ll have to deal with the next anniversary of September 11. Will there ever be a year when that date arrives when we don’t think of That Day?

Being here in Asia I have learned a lot about how America is perceived by others. I have all but given up arguing why September 11 was such a monumental event. Always the locals tell me how things like that have happened all the time in their histories, and it was only 3,000 people and what’s the big deal. And I only wish more Americans were aware of just how many people around the world, even in nations counted among our friends, were glad to see it happen, glad to see The Great America brought, for once, to its knees.

Two years ago since my mobile phone rang as I sat alone finishing my meal in a Japanese restaurant in Hong Kong, to hear my dearest friend tell me what had just happened. And here we are, two years and two wars later, the future of America looking more precarious and confused than ever, the perpetrators as motivated and evil as ever.

I guess I don’t have a point or a conclusion or an answer. I wanted to capture some of my thoughts while they were fresh. I’ll just let it go here. Let’s hope that as the years go by, memories of “that day” become a bit less acute.

For an intriguing glimpse into the woman-hating world of the Middle East, see this post over at Venom. Be forewarned — the photo is not for the faint of heart.

[Link via Conrad — thanks for ruining my afternoon.]

Lehmann Brothers has apparently been reading my blog:

Despite its current position as a net creditor, China remains beleaguered with a structurally weak domestic economy, global investment bank Lehman Brothers said in its latest report.

“China’s domestic economy has many fundamental problems including weak banks, inefficient state-owned enterprises, undeveloped financial markets, and huge social imbalances with incomes of urban workers three times that of their rural counterparts,” Lehman Brothers economists Rob Subbaraman, Russell Jones and Hiroshi Shiraishi said in their “Financial Crises: An Early Warning System” report.

Even more prone to crisis, however, is Hong Kong, according to the new report, where deflation, unemployment and budget deficits come together to make a particularly nasty brew.

“Nightlife in Singapore is like having a party with your parents in the house,” says an expat interviewed in an excellent article that a commenter pointed me to.

Everyone knows that Singapore is a “nanny state,” where the government is always watching its citizens’ behaviour. Now the government is working hard to reverse this notion and show the world just how hip it is.

Look at how much Singapore has changed in only 8 weeks or so:

Bar dancing was legalized last week
Censorship guidelines are being liberalized (slowly but surely)
The government dropped its ban on hiring gays

So what’s the motivation for this sudden about-face? I have to say that I don’t know for sure, but my common sense says it is not derived from some new-found faith in its citizens’ ability to make their own decisions, or some out-of-the-blue enlightenment. My common sense says it’s all about money.

The government didn’t hide the fact that one of its reasons for changing the policy on hiring gays was that it might be a turn-off to Western companies considering setting up shop here. So I’m guessing that similar reasoning is behind the other decisions.

The article I quote above also sees the phenomenon as a direct reaction to Singapore’s faltering economy:

One foreign correspondent said: “Singapore’s link between raucous nightlife and international competitiveness may puzzle students of classical economics, but it is part of a wide-ranging effort to find a new niche for itself in the global economy.

“Central to that drive is to transform Singapore from a tranquil nation of compliant factory workers into a throbbing metropolis of innovators and entrepreneurs.”

“If we want our people to make more decisions for themselves, and if we are to encourage a derring-do society, we must allow some risk-taking, and a little excitement,” Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong said.

As it has grown more prosperous, Singapore has watched its competitive edge in manufacturing slip away to neighbours such as Malaysia, India and China.

I met a colleague for lunch yesterday, an Australian expat who’s lived here with his wife for many years, and he gave me a somewhat grimmer assessment of why the government is loosening the reigns on censorship.

“When Singaporeans meet in coffee houses and bars nowadays, all they talk about is how terrible the economy is and how they might lose their jobs,” he said. “I think the government is allowing racier things on TV because they are hoping these people stay home and watch TV instead of going out and complaining. You have no idea how serious Singapore’s economic crisis is, and I don’t see any possible solution.”

That’s even worse than grim — fatalistic. I don’t think I can buy his reasoning. After all, along with racier cable TV, they’re also allowing bar dancing, which won’t help keep people cooped up at home. Could he be on to something? Could the sitiuation here be so ominous?

Whatever the reasons behind it, the shift toward a freer society with more choices can only be a good thing. Let’s hope it continues, and that Singapore can finally shed its reputation as the great nanny city-state. Let’ also hope that these freedoms don’t portend to a darker, meaner economic future.

Wow. The NY Times lays it on unusually thick in today’s editorial on Bush’s BS.

Despite his tough talk, Mr. Bush seems incapable of choosing a genuinely tough path, of risking his political popularity with the same aggression that he risks the country’s economic stability and international credibility. For all the trauma the United States has gone through during his administration, Mr. Bush has never asked the American people to respond to new challenges by making genuine sacrifices.

He committed the military to war, but he told civilians they deserved big tax cuts. He seems determined to remake the Middle East without doing anything serious about reducing our dependence on Middle East oil. His energy policy is a grab bag of giveaways to domestic oil and gas lobbyists. He refuses to ask for even the smallest compromise when it comes to fuel-efficient cars.

As always, it’s hard to feel the pulse of America from here in Asia, but there seems to be a rising tide of resistance to Bush’s monkey business among the media, which only a few months ago seemed to cower sheepishly in the shadow of Bush’s greatness and invincibility. Let’s hope it continues.

It’s all the buzz at the moment, although the 27-year-old patient shows no signs of a chest infection. I hope we don’t see any more hysteria. SARS will probably be here for many years to come, if not forever, and we’re just going to have to live with it.

I’ll be making this a big part of my crisis communications talk next week — how SARS became such an out-of-control crisis.

A total of 916 people worldwide died of SARS. Every year, nearly half-a-million people die of influenza. Last spring, over a 3-month period 800 people died of flu in Madagascar, but you didn’t see the WHO putting up travel advisories telling people not to go to Madagascar. So why did SARS generate so much irrational fear?

I think it was all about the Unknown vs. the Known. SARS is mysterious and we still don’t know how it originated; there is no cure; it has an inordinately high death rate. Even more important, it was new, adding to its sense of mystery. When it comes to diseases that kill way, way more people, like e coli, salmonella, influenza, etc., we at least understand them and know what steps need to be taken. That’s not so when it comes to SARS and the ebola virus and mad cow disease, which is why they play so dramatically on the psyche and generate such anxiety.

Still, let’s hope everyone keeps this in perspective this time. The last thing Asia needs right now is yet another blow to its economy.