It was interesting watching CCTV-9 last night as it broadcast a US press conference in Iraq. The general was reporting remarkable things about the so-far triumphal though ongoing capture of Baghdad and some of the horrors that coalition soldiers discovered. One reporter asked about civilian deaths and if there would be more, and he intelligently and carefully described the measures taken to minimize civilian casualties, but added, appropriately, that the situation was still dangerous and there might be a risk of civilian casualties if fighting in the city continues. Okay, he said the magic words, and within seconds the man behind the curtain activated a CNN-style tickertape running across the bottom of the screen: US Military: More Iraqi civilians may be killed. Nothing about the extraordinary victories or what had been found. Just that one phrase, which then ran continuously, alternating with one other sentence about how traditional Chinese medicine may cure SARS.

Throughout the news conference, just to top off the farce, the word “LIVE” appeared in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. On the lower right-hand corner just below, it said “RECORDED.” There really is no place like China.

Funny, but scary too. Shamelessly lifted from Big White Guy’s blog.

A New Lord’s Prayer?

Our Father, who art in Heaven
Protect us from the SARS
Atypical
Pneumonia
In Hong Kong as it is in China
Give us this day our daily mask
And forgive us our sneezes
As we forgive those who sneezeth around us
Lead us not into hospital
And deliver us from disease.

I have to give Orcinus my regular plug after reading his frightening observations on the Darwinian mentality of our current administration and Supreme Court Justice Scalia. This is truly scary stuff, and validates my own fear that “liberals” are being so vilified that they may at some point be in at risk of actualphysical harm. It’s not as far-fetched as it sounds.
[Edited 8 April]

I just want to thank Dave Winer over at Scripting News for the link today to my post on how the Iraq War is presented by the Chinese media. When I got up this morning I wondered why my e-mailbox was so full, and sure enough it was readers of Dave’s site writing to ask me questions about the media here, especially the Internet.

People need to know that the Internet in China is heavily controlled. I cannot even read my own site without using a clumsy proxy server, since all blogspot.com sites are banned. The government here doesn’t care what we write in English, as relatively few people here can read it. I suspect if I had written this blog in Chinese, I would have been exiled or imprisoned long ago. They seem to be most terrified of sites where people can interact and exchange ideas. All geocities sites are verboten, and we cannot post to any google groups, though we can read the messages. This stifling of free speech, this denial of the most fundamental freedom, is the greatest evidence of just how fragile things really are.

In his book The Coming Collapse of China, Gordon Chang describes the PRC as “a lake of gasoline” (if memory serves me) just waiting for some situation to set it ablaze. After living here, I think that metaphor may be overly dramatic, but the essential argument is sound: China is being held up with matchsticks desperately planted by an oligarchy of paranoid dictators who are concerned with one thing alone, maintaining their iron grip on power, and anything that threatens their power (like free speech) must be annihilated. (Anyone care to remember Tiananmen Square?) As long as that situation remains, the corruption and internal rot will continue to eat away at China until it collapses altogether….

All I meant to do was write a one-line post thanking Dave Winer, and look what happens. Thanks again Dave.

I just read the best and most detailed article so far on SARS, and it certainly paints a scary picture, especially about how China has handled the crisis. Here’s a small excerpt:

China’s Ministry of Health still says that there is no evidence that the disease can be acquired in Beijing. What is clear, though, is that Chinese doctors knew a lot about SARS long before it had a name or had left China’s borders, and chose not to share that information for many months. After the initial spate of outbreaks, doctors fully understood that they were dealing with a new and potentially fatal disease that spread far more easily than ordinary atypical pneumonias.

And now, when they try to tell us everything is “under control,” the Chinese government wonders why nobody believes them.

[UPDATE: For an even scarier article, go here.]

My friend over at the Gweilo Diaries is definitely of the mind that people are way over-reacting, and that’s certainly true — to an extent. Wearing a surgical mask outdoors, for instance, is certainly an over-reaction, as the virus is spread by closer, more intimate contact/proximity than we have with fellow pedestrians on the street. But there is definitely a cause for concern, if not alarm; new cases are still spiking, and I remember how AIDS appeared to be such a tiny, isolated phenomenon back in the early 1980s, and suddenly….

Like China, HK is frantically trying to calm down the panicked populace. At the risk of boring everyone to tears, here’s what I just received from the American Chamber of Commerce:

AmCham-Hong Kong representatives just attended an International Business Committee meeting chaired by the Chief Secretary. He advised us that resolution of this problem is HKG’s number one priority. Dr. Margaret Chan gave an excellent presentation on SARS. She reviewed the cronology of events, statistics, symptoms, linkages with other areas, measures taken by the Department of Health and World Health Organization, prevention and treatment. The HKG will forward a soft copy of the presentation to all attendees for further dissemination as appropriate. Some of the key points:

* TRAVELLERS SHOULD BE AWARE OF THE SYMPTOMS OF THE DISEASE AND PERSONS WITH THOSE SYMPTOMS SHOULD NOT TRAVEL UNTIL THEY HAVE RECOVERED

I don’t always agree with Atrios, but here he is right on:

While much attention (well, relatively speaking…not too much has been paid, really) is paid to those soldiers who die in this conflict, we shouldn’t forget that many of the wounded – of which there are indeed many – are going to have life-altering wounds, including brain injuries, missing limbs, paralysis, etc.

I support these troops. I support restoring the cuts to their Veterans Benefits, which were requested by the anti-troop Bush administration. I support the humble resignation of Saxby Chambliss, anti-American bigot who questioned the patriotism of his single-limbed veteran opponent Max Cleland. I support the resignation of anti-troop Tom DeLay who supported these cuts and who proved himself a Chickenhawk and a bigot when he claimed that he didn’t participate in the Vietnam war because all of them minorities had taken all the positions.

I wish there were a way for those of you who aren’t in China to see and hear what the state-controlled media are telling us about the war on Iraq and how they are couching all conversation of the subject.

CCTV is a series of television stations, each with its own theme (sports, travel, news, etc.) The 24-hour expat news channel is CCTV-9, all in English and all to be taken with a huge grain of sea salt.

It appears at the moment that the star of CCTV-9 is that Iraqi military “spokesman” Sahaf. He’s on almost constantly, insisting that the Republican Guard have all but destroyed the coalition forces and are now weeding out and decimating those that remain. He goes on and on, absolutely unchallenged, about the slaughter of Iraqi children and innocents of all ages, of how the “coalition villains” are in full retreat and Iraqis are celebrating deliriously.

That’s okay, because Sahaf is supposed to do that and it would be a surprise if he didn’t. The real crime comes next, when the “commentators” come on and merely repeat, as though they were facts, all the inanities that Sahaf just spewed. There is no other point of view offered and he is never called to task on any of his lies, no matter how flagrant or stupid. Then the final inanity: While the commentators are talking, a CNN-style news tickertape runs across the bottom of the screen rehashing yet again what Sahaf just said. (The use of the ticker is sporadic and often hilarious, sometimes just repeating the same garbled sentence again and again with zero rhyme or reason, the station obviously trying to show it is as hip as its Western cable counterparts.)

To give CCTV credit, they have been showing the US press conferences regularly. But these are inevitably “analyzed” by “experts” who point out what they argue are flawed answers that only go to prove that the US will be bogged down for years in a quagmire that will bring immeasurable grief to Iraqi civilians. (Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen.)

Last night CCTV-9 went a bit overboard (though come to think of it they go overboard all the time). They were rattling on about the use of some weapon I’d never heard of –“BRDs”? — that they said American troops were indiscriminately dropping across the Iraqi landscape. These weapons, the announcer warned ominously, have been identified as the cause of the 1991 “Gulf War Syndrome” which, the announcer proclaimed, “has already killed thousands of US soldiers.”

With all due respect to anyone who has suffered or died from this awful disease, is it really acceptable for a journalist to state on TV categorically that it has killed thousands of US soldiers? Is that not an outrageous exaggeration? Bad enough, but the clear message the announcer transmits is that the US has inflicted this disease knowingly on its soldiers and Iraqis 10 years ago and is now insidiously doing it again on a far vaster scale, knowing that in so doing thousands will die. I am plenty critical of our government, but is there any proof to back up such preposterous claims?

The most common technique the media puppets use (abuse) to verify their nonsense is the phrase, “Experts say….” We never know who these experts are or what makes them experts or whether there may be other experts who might have very different points of view. No, it’s always sweeping statements like, “Experts say the war in Iraq will cause a humanitarian catastrophe never before seen….” I call this “quacking.” These aren’t reporters, these aren’t commentators, these are quackers.

The problem is, lots of wonderful Chinese people have no idea they are being quacked at, and they take what they hear at face value. That’s the dark side to what would otherwise read like a very funny story, a parody.

CCTV-9 is presenting nightly interviews with a very bright political analyst named Philip Cunningham, a Harvard-educated pundit with excellent credentials. Cunningham is articulate and insightful, and on some topics we even think alike. The only problem is that he’s virulently anti-Bush and anti-the-Iraq-War and there’s no nuance (I’m anti-Bush, too, and am skeptical about this war, but I at least try to see all sides of the argument). That’s his privilege and he at least backs up his points with facts, figures and keen observations. But he goes unchallenged, and his opinions are greeted as universal truths.

Worse — the interviewer leads him on and provokes him to go even further in criticizing America, breaking every rule about the role of the interviewer. Every question is loaded and reeks of the state-sanctioned party line: “Considering the unprecedented disregard the US has shown for international law and its contempt for the rights of its citizens, wouldn’t you say….” (That’s not an exact quote, but trust me, it’s quite close.) So that’s the war as seen in China.

Last comment on the Chinese media: Now they are announcing in glowing proclamations that the SARS threat is “under control” and there’s never been a better time to take a trip to Guangdong Province. No cause for any alarm. Do they believe we have no memories? Do they think we can just forget that for years they claimed there was no AIDS in China (and also no gays, of course)? Do they think we aren’t all aware of the government’s obsession with putting a perpetually rosy glow over anything to do with China?

I actually just saw on the CCTV-9 minutes ago the story of an annual fair in the city of Guangzhou, in the heart of Guandong Province, the world’s breeding ground for SARS. The announcer cheerfully chirped that there are no longer worries about SARS and that, in fact, “the attendance rate of foreigners at the fair was 30 percent higher than it was last year!” Now, I try to be open minded, but at a time when SARS is devastating regional travel and ancillary industries, I find it most unlikely that foreigners are streaming into Guangzhou at record high levels. Would the People’s Republic actually put out a fake statistic? Nah, that’s ridiculous.

I have always been a bit accident prone, probably because I sometimes do things too quickly and/or impulsively, but this tendency has improved markedly in recent years — and then came roaring back with a vengeance two nights ago. Thus, my absence over the past 48 hours from this site.

Looking back at it now, it seems so unlikely, so ridiculous and funny, but while it was going on it was anything but funny. And I am still in a lot of pain today.

Wednesday night started like any other. It’s still cold at night here, so I wear flannel pajamas to bed and keep a big steel space heater a few feet away. I was sleeping soundly when, at about 3 in the morning, I awoke from uneasy dreams into a full-fledged nightmare.

Have you ever been asleep when the telephone started to ring and the ringing actually played a part in your dream before you realized the ringing was real? That’s similar to the way my calamity started. I was dreaming and a character in the dream began shouting, “I have a terrible cramp in my foot,” and suddenly that’s what the other characters in the dream were talking about. Suddenly, I bolted upright and realized I really did have an excruciating cramp in my left foot, which obviously my dream was trying to tell me. The pain was intense, and I immediately tried to jump out of bed so I could press down on it.

But something went wrong — my feet got caught in the bedding, and I slipped, totally losing my balance in the pitch-blackness. I came crashing down; the back of my head smashed into the steel heater, and the cramp was still there. But that was nothing. I had crashed at the perfect angle to do maximum damage to my right shoulder, which struck the hardwood floor with a vengeance. This was one of those moments where you really know what pain is. It shot through me with such a ferocity that I had to keep saying to myself, “Pain is only in the mind, it can only hurt as much as you allow it to.” Honestly, that didn’t help much, and I was generally quite miserable as I lay there wondering what I had done to myself.

I tried to stay calm. I realized that the slightest movement of my right arm caused pain to come shooting out of my shoulder, so I just tried to keep the arm utterly motionless. With the other hand I managed at least to get the cramped foot under control. And I knew the bump on my head from the radiator would stop hurting soon enough. I inched back onto the bed and tried to convince myself it was nothing, but soon enough I realized the pain was more than I could bear. I got dressed, which must have been a hilarious scene had their been an onlooker — just try putting your socks on with one hand, and you will forever empathize with the handicapped. (I kept thinking of the movie My Left Foot.) This took quite a long time; my right arm was basically dangling useless. I took a taxi to the only 24-hour Western-style hospital in Beijing where I was told I had a ruptured tendon. (As I mentioned once before, I have had a problem with tendonitis of the right shoulder for a long time.) I still need to see whether it requires surgery; for now I have my arm in a sling and can only use my left hand.

The pain all day yesterday was as close to unbearable as pain can be. I could not eat, I could not move. Then, just as the doctor told me, it began to ease up this moring and now I can at least slowly put my shirt on. But it’s going to take a few weeks and physical therapy, the doctor says, before I am in one piece again.

There’s never a “good time” for shit like this to happen. Still, better now than in three weeks, when my friend from Arizona will be visiting me and we take a trip down to Yunnan (if SARS is considerate enough to keep out of Southwest China). Okay, back to bed and my painkillers and bags of ice. Nightmare.

I’ve read some hair-raising stories about the Bush administration’s obsession with secrecy, and this one confirms my worst fears. The article documents one instance after another of the Bush administration’s “document scrubbing.” This is highly reminiscent of those famous photos of the old Bolshevik gang, which Stalin would have painstakingly altered as, one by one, those in the photographs were murdered. It’s a great article.

I just got some very good news from the company in Singapore I am talking with, and they have made it clear the offer will come by Friday. I’ve been racked with second thoughts, pangs of guilt for letting down my current employer, incredible bouts of heartsickness over being so far from my friend, and depression over the extremely grim outlook of the US economy. I spoke on the phone with the bf today and told him how much I want to go home, but he was blunt about it — things are shaky over there and to have a job right now is to be considered lucky. His own company is in the process of cutting his department by 25 percent.

Today I also communicated with my old colleagues in Hong Kong. It seems that SARS is all that Hong Kong is now about. My own company here in Beijing sent out an email offering free surgical masks to anyone who wants one (and I was shocked to see so many passengers aboard my recent flights to/from Singapore wearing them). My old company in HK is instructing all executives from overseas to cancel their visits to the island. Tourism, of course, is in tatters.

If you knew what HK was looking like when I left last summer, you would know just how agonizing this must be. I still remember all the taxis standing in huge lines, with no passengers to be had. Left and right people were burning charcoal (the favored way to take one’s life in HK, suffocating on the carbon monoxide fumes) and the general spirit of misery was palpable. So in the midst of this anguish, yet another bombshell blasts the not-so-long-ago thriving and invincible business hub of Asia. It seems HK has fallen and it can’t get up. I believe they’ll recover, to a large extent, but I don’t see how they can return to anything close to the glory days of pre-1997. There’s been a tectonic shift, and at times it looks as though HK might be swallowed up altogether….