This is a bit of a bombshell and perhaps the harshest and most pointed criticism I have ever seen of China in the mainstream media.

Robert L. Bernstein, founding chairman of Human Rights Watch and former chairman of Random House, is speaking today to the World Press Freedom Committee, and the Washington Post has published the speech in advance.

Bernstein assails the media for continuously sugar-coating news about China, turning the “China is changing” line into a cliche, and failing to report the rising number of Chinese citizens killed by the police.

This guy holds no punches.

China, the last big totalitarian government, is brutalizing its own people. It limits and distorts information, keeping them ignorant on many critical subjects, and gives harsh prison terms to those who publish information the government would rather have suppressed.

[….]

Xu Wenli has been out of prison since Dec. 23, 2002. He served 16 years, four of them in solitary confinement, for writing down his thoughts on the need for a more open China. News of these types of convictions and harsh sentences reach Human Rights in China every week. The press and the public need to be reminded that there are many others still in prison for the peaceful expression of their views. Human Rights in China has provided information on well over 2,000 cases — people currently imprisoned for their ideas or beliefs.

And here’s a subject that the press simply has not covered, despite reliable information that is available: Outside every major Chinese city is a virtual “slave” camp. About 2 million to 3 million Chinese citizens live in some 800 of these so-called custody and repatriation camps. Can you imagine a story like this going unreported if such a camp existed outside a major Western city? People are put there for not having proper residence permits, and they are worked hard from early morning until nighttime.

I have taken Human Rights in China’s report on these camps to top editors of numerous publications with no results. Many reporters say they can’t do the story because they can’t get into the camps. But now is the time to insist on access.

I remember how at lunch one day my colleague in Beijing told me about the slave labor camps, and I found it impossible to believe since I never saw it in writing. Now I believe it.

Bernstein compares the media silence in China to a similar phenomenon in Iraq under Saddam, and says that in both cases there is no excuse, that it goes smack against what journalism is supposed to do.

Just about every word Bernstein say is worth citing, in bold, but for economy’s sake here are two more money quotes:

My experience as co-chair of the organization known as Human Rights in China has taught me that the international press in Beijing also has been “managed.” Tyrants throughout history have understood that information is power, and denying information to its own people or disseminating propaganda to the rest of the world have been China’s trademarks for years.

[…]

It has become almost a cliche to talk about the fact that China is changing rapidly, and therefore doesn’t require the kind of pressure that was needed with the Soviet Union. But to the thousands who are locked up in prisons and in mental institutions for their beliefs, that is cold comfort.

Sounds like me talking.

[Updated, 18.50 Singapore time]

Another Update: Conrad chimes in as well, and you think I’m outspoken…. (And I should have patented the phrase “Evil Empire,” which he shamelessly lifts from an earlier post of mine.)

Just one more thing to worry about.

I can scarcely believe what I’m reading over at the Wall Street Journal’s Best of the Web column nowadays. Its writer, James Taranto is a vicious satirist, and while he is way smarter than Limbaugh he can be much nastier. And because he’s writing for a respectable entity, he can be much more dangerous.

Every day it’s the same theme: the Dems are naive clowns and the Repubs are true leaders. That’s okay; we can all have our opinions. But when you have to express it through truly nasty insults, there’s cause for alarm. After all, this is the Wall Street Journal he is representing, and his column has become a veritable smear machine.

Today he refers to Jimmy Carter as “the disgraced former president.” Disgraced? What merits this? Then he refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French-looking Massachusetts Democrat,” the same descriptor he used yesterday, equally repellent each time. Over the past six days I’ve seen him refer to Paul Krugman three separate times as “Former Enron advisor Paul Krugman.” (How loud would he shriek if the media always referred to Bush as “former drunk driver George Bush”? And besides, it’s a gross misrepresentation of who Krugman is.)

This is taking us beyond punditry into a much uglier area. And somehow Taranto and the like have managed to pass it off as legitimate journalism. We all know the WSJ has one of the nastiest editorial pages in the country, but at least it used to have manners. All Taranto does is taunt, like a spoiled little bad boy, delighting in his ability to smear and insult, and even get paid for it.

This is the media talking. Smears have been known to stick, even if utterly untrue. They are dangerous. This guy should be reeled in or fired, but I suspect no one is more titillated by Taranto’s vilifications and slander than the WSJ’s editorial department.

Note: This was written in lunch-hour haste and in my hurrying I typed “Jim Carrey” instead of “John Kerry.” Funny how the human mind works (and doesn’t). The error has been corrected, but not before I was punished for it in the Comments. Enough!

A commenter pointed me to an article by Xiang Dong, senior producer with BBC World Service. It’s an important story because right now it seems to many that China has finally wised up about AIDS and is being open and responsible on the issue. But is it true?

I had hoped that China had learned some lessons after the outbreak of Sars, but reporting on or talking about HIV and Aids in China remains both difficult and dangerous. The situation is still very sensitive and journalists – whether foreign or local – asking questions are routinely prevented from reaching the areas where people are dying.

Even the outspoken Aids activist Dr Gao Yaojie was concerned. When I telephoned her in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, where hundreds of thousands of people contracted HIV through selling their blood, she told me that her telephone was bugged and that she was being watched to try to stop her revealing the true picture of the HIV/Aids epidemic. I know that many other journalists have been harassed, detained and even expelled from the province.

So much for the new transparency on AIDS.

The article focuses on Xiang’s attempt to interview AIDS victims in a village in Henan province. The level of government harassment against any “outsider” who tries to reach these people is intense, and the locals who assist them are arrested. But the saddest part of the story is how the victims are still treated as second-class citizens, and how any attempt to improve their lives is challenged by local officials:

The following evening we began the 11-hour train journey to Henan. On board, my guide introduced me to two other volunteers and explained that he was setting up an orphanage for children whose parents had died from Aids. He told me of the difficulties he faces in dealing with the local authorities. Local schools won’t accept any of the children so he has been forced to set up the orphanage in a local mosque.

In the wake of World AIDS Day and all the noise China has made regarding its new openness on AIDS, it’s time to see the hype translated into action. Most of the efforts to stop AIDS must ocur at the local level. If this example is systemic, then we’re still pretty close to square one.

Related post: The indescribable tragedy of AIDS in China

Hailey Xie has a great post on World AIDS day and what it meant for her. It begins:

I have a red silk ribbon. I carefully put it at the place where I could see it every day. It’s red. It’s made from silk, and it’s a ribbon. But it’s RED SILK RIBBON, which stands for love, stands for our genuine love to all the unfortunate AIDS victims and HIV carriers, stands for our passion to bring fairness to them, stands for our hearts, stands for the determination that we are going to conquer the war against AIDS.

Read the whole thing; it will give you some hope.

[Note: This is one of those “personal” diary-like posts. Please do not read it.]

48 hours. No, not the movie. That’s how long I’ve got before I arrive in Beijing after leaving more than half a year ago.

I described in my most heartfelt post ever how it was at a concert in the Forbidden City Concert Hall that my experience in China reached an emotional level that nearly pushed me to the breaking point.

And I am returning to China because the chorus in which I sang that night is singing again, at the same concert hall, to sing Handel’s Messiah. And once again, I will be going with my friend Ben, the kindest and gentlest creature in the universe. Once again, just like 6 months ago, my former employer and her husband will be there. But this time, instead of hiding Ben from them, I am going to walk over and introduce him.

I’m nervous about this trip. It was a sudden decision to go, as soon as I heard about the concert I felt I had no choice. I left in April in such a state of anguish, not because Beijing made me miserable but because SARS was then at its very peak, and I had to deal with the city’s insanity and leaving my job and handling my relationships and moving and with feelings that were so conflicting I could scarcely make any sense of them.

Singing in that chorus in April may have been was the most emotional experience of my very emotional life. I told my boss that if the concert had been months earlier, if I’d had the opportunity to start practicing with the choir in January instead of April, I would almost certainly have stayed in Beijing. I would be living there right now.

For a long time I had so little sense of purpose in Beijing. I felt unsuited to my job, and I had few if any friends until Ben. I had this blog. If you look at it pre-Beijing, you will see how it evolved, almost overnight, from a passing hobby into the very focal point of my existence.

All of a sudden, in January, I had a sudden sense of inspiration and wrote a post that was totally out of keeping with what I’d written before. It got picked up by a super-blogger and that redefined the course of my stay in China. I would exist to tell the story of the amazing things I experienced there. And that’s what happened.

I had my blog. I had the friendship of the selfless Ben. And then I had the concert, the tape of which is playing this instant in my living room. The very next night, my friend of more than a decade was to fly over from America. And I was to leave, leave my adored friend, my beautiful city of Beijing, which I loved and hated, the city which for all its challenges managed to drive me to levels of inspiration I never before knew at any other time or in any other city.

I’ll never forget that night, walking onto the stage with the other singers, and feeling that some greater power had touched me, a sense of destiny, of a great inflection point, and of danger. The most haunting and mystical of the pieces we sang was The Cantique of Jean Racine by Gabriel Faure.

Just now, as if by magic, as I typed those words, the Cantique began to play on my little stereo, and as always I just fight back the tears as best I can, but it never works; the music always wins. This music is so sublime, so gently stirring that I always have to succumb.

It is a prayer, and it is infused with a religious longing, a gentle but fervent song to God. It begins with one of the simplest yet exquisite melodies ever conceived, sung only by the basses. I stood next to this wonderful young lady, an alto, and during our rehearsal she told me how thrilling it was to stand there and hear me sing the bass line because I was so in touch with the music. But on this night, the night of the concert, it was all too much. I couldn’t deal with it, and the aching beauty of the music caused me to choke; instead of singing, I just started to weep, and I had to fight back the tears, and instead of hearing the beautiful bass line she heard me choking, and afterward she asked me if I was alright. Yes, I’m alright, I told her, I am just going through such an emotional time, and the music brought it all to a head, all I could do was cry.

Beijing. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be. I had a few shocks and several frustrations, even a few moments when I wondered if I would emerge alive. But I wouldn’t give it up for anything, and nearly every day I feel an acute regret that I left. There, I’ve said it: I wish I had never left Beijing, and if I could go back to that night at the concert hall and change my destiny, I would do it. I would be there today. And now it’s too late.

No one knows what I went through. It was not a matter of culture shock or adapting or spicy food or language barriers. I can’t go into it here; all I can say is that it was as if my heart, my soul, was put into an electric blender.

I need to go to sleep. If you can, get yourself a copy of Faure’s Cantique de Jean Racine and listen to the opening notes, the lush string section and harp, and the entrance as if by magic of the bass voices, so gentle yet so passionate, so full of faith and love, and maybe you will know why even now, six months later, I still cry when I hear it, and why I feel that I left part of me in Beijing. Listen to it, and tell me if you do not, as if by magic, know what God and man is.

Somebody earlier today posted about how the Chinese government is introducing receipts with “little scratching games” in a move to pressure restaurants to give customers their fa piao (and pay their taxes). I can’t find the post and I wanted to write it up. (Can’t remember if it was on Living in China or a blog.) If you are the writer, or if someone you know is the writer and you can point me to him/her, please let me know. Thanks.

Just imagine: A coal miner’s daughter, Lu Yan, the family’s “ugly duckling,” is walking down a street in Beijing when she’s spotted by a model agency talent scout. Within weeks, she is strutting across the catwalks of Paris, China’s most in-demand supermodel, perhaps poised to change the very nature of the country’s modelling industry.

This is an amazing article that looks at how modelling has become a mega-industry in China, and how Lu Yan is redefining it.

I took one look at her, and I knew she could be a world-class supermodel,” said Li Dongtian, one of China’s first celebrity hairstylists, who runs a chain of studios and a makeup school. “I was so excited. It was 1999, the turn of the century. The media was asking me who should be the new beauty of the next millennium. I would point without a doubt at Lu Yan.”

Lu was stunned. “He was the first Chinese person to ever tell me I was pretty,” she recalled.

According to Li and fashion photographer Feng Hai, who was the first to splash her image across Chinese magazines, Lu’s look and personality make an ideal combination for representing the 21st century Chinese woman. “Before, Chinese people were only interested in big eyes and feminine sweetness. They didn’t know anything about the cool factor and personality,” Li said. “So many Chinese girls are beautiful, but you see her and forget her. With Lu Yan, she is so striking, you take one look at her, and you never forget her.”

She is apparently setting a new standard for beauty around the world, though in China she remains quite controversial.

“By Chinese standards, she is definitely not pretty,” said Gao Xiaofei, 20, a modeling student at the Beijing Fashion Institute. “Just look at our class — almost everyone has big eyes. But I like her a lot. The more I look at her, the more I think she’s beautiful.”

It’s a week or two later than I expected, but at least it’s finally happened.

Liu Di, 23, a former psychology major at Beijing Normal University who wrote under the computer name “Stainless Steel Mouse”, was freed from Beijing’s Qincheng prison on Friday, the Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said on Sunday.

Two other “cyber dissidents”, Wu Yiran, 34, and Li Yibin, 29, also were freed from a jail for political detainees on Friday, it said in a statement.

The release came just over a week ahead of a visit by Premier Wen Jiabao to the United States. China frequently times releases of dissidents to coincide with important trips abroad or visits by world leaders.

This was predictable. The case was simply too controversial, too shocking for China’s trading partners (and everyone else) to just accept with a shrug. She was just a kid, and her arrest sparked a well-deserved international outcry.

So should we break out the Champagne and celebrate? Afraid not. From the same article:

Police also detained at least two people for organising online petitions for Liu’s release. Du Daobin, a civil servant, was detained in October, while Luo Changfu, a 39-year-old laid-off worker, was sentenced to three years in prison.

China has been cracking down on Internet content — from politics to pornography — as the government struggles to gain control over the new and popular medium.

I hope that ‘s clear to everyone. By releasing Liu Di, they’re admitting they didn’t have enough evidence to indict her. But the petitioners, who we now all know were correct in claiming her imprisonment was unjustified, they are now in jail! There’s a twisted irony here.

So as crackdowns on cyber-dissidents increase, this happy ending to one of the more outrageous cases should not be any reason to celebrate or let down our guard. To the contrary; all the recent news indicates the problem is getting much worse, not better.

If you remember, when this story broke a week or so ago, all the honorable officials would say was, “There is no AIDS here!” and refuse to give their names to the reporters.

Oh, what a difference a week can make. Now the government is confirming that there is indeed an AIDS breakkout in the region, brought about by the government’s blood-donation business that started in 1984 and was closed a decade later:

A new outbreak of HIV/AIDS has surfaced in northeastern China’s Jilin province where up to 300 villagers could be infected with AIDS after donating blood at government blood stations, villagers and a rights group said.

“Right now there are three or four villages that have AIDS,” an official at the Soudeng township in Jilin city told AFP by phone.

He refused to estimate how many people in the area had been infected by the virus that causes AIDS, but the Hong Kong-based Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy said that up to 300 people could be infected.

“My uncle was infected with AIDS and died yesterday morning. My mother and father also have AIDS,” Huang Rui, a villager in Liujiatun village told AFP.

China is opening up about AIDS and they are finally showing signs of dealing with the catastrophe, or at least of doing more than nothing. Maybe it’s time they do away with their knee-jerk reaction of lies and denials everytime AIDS appears someplace new.