This is a fascinating review of a book — China’s New Order by Wang Hui — that, unfortunately, sounds arcane to the point of being unreadable.

What is so interesting is 1.) the fact that the government allowed the critical essays calling for across-the-board reforms to be published and 2.) the reason why the government sees it as no threat. (If no one can read, i.e., understand the essays, who cares if they’re published?)

For him, establishing the “preconditions for democracy” should not be shunted aside by concerns with economic growth rates. And he rejects those who mistake “the workings of uneven markets as the natural course leading to democracy.” What he calls for instead is the inclusion of considerations like social justice, equality and democracy — a quotient of what he calls “the spirit of humanism” — in China’s reform agenda. His goal is “a path of reform that is more fair, more democratic and more humanitarian.”

The reviewer, Orville Schell, is a China scholar and Dean of UC-Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He concludes:

This is subversive stuff, and it is not clear whether China’s new leaders will prove any more receptive than their predecessors to such arguments, especially if they begin to escape their academic confines and reach ordinary people through the media.

As long as China’s “economic miracle” retains its momentum and almost mythic status, and as long as grievances against China’s errant Communist Party remain under control, essays like Mr. Wang’s will probably remain interesting but largely inconsequential. But should economic cycles turn, as they so often do, voices of intellectuals like Mr. Wang could acquire new power by helping to explain what is going wrong. It was Mao himself who, way back in 1930 when he was a peasant revolutionary, spoke of how “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

A depressing article in the Globe and Mail chronicles how Beijing, paving the way for a shiny new look for the 2008 Olympics, is demolishing a part of its culture.

This isn’t a new story — “progress” has often meant gentrification and the destruction of old neighborhoods, mom-and-pop businesses, etc. What’s depressing is that so much of the destruction in Beijing is simply unnecessary.

When a foreigner tried to buy the two stone lions at the gate of her historic courtyard home, Ms. Zhou stoutly refused to sell. The lions belonged to China, she said.

The local authorities, however, were uninterested in history. A few weeks ago, they sent a bulldozer to demolish Ms. Zhou’s home and the stone lions were smashed into pieces.

“I can’t understand it,” said the 48-year-old nurse, who refused to give her full name. “Those lions belonged to our country. How could they demolish them so easily?”

All along her Beijing street, traditional courtyard houses are being torn down by wrecking crews, despite evidence of their historical importance. With a real-estate boom gaining momentum and the 2008 Olympics approaching, Beijing is rapidly tearing down its famed hutongs — the narrow alleys filled with courtyard houses that are 100 to 400 years old.

The author likens the current destruction to Chairman Mao’s enlightened decision in the 50s to tear down Beijing’s ancient city wall in the name of urban development, and remarks, “Across the city, Beijing has promised to preserve 658 traditional courtyard homes. But more than 50 of these homes have already been torn down, according to Chinese media reports. Heritage activists say they are running from neighbourhood to neighbourhood like firefighters in an effort to save the buildings.”

China has its first official SARS case this year. It sounds like the victim is going to be okay and it sounds like China is prepared to handle it better than it did 9 months ago.

Note: Anyone who’s been emailing me knows I’ve been typing with only one hand, leaving off capital letters and littering my copy with typos. I can type with both hands as I’m doing now, but with my arm in a ridiculous splint I have to bend over the keyboard and it’s painful as hell. So please don’t be surprised to see me alternating between regular type and “splint type” depending on how I’m feeling at the moment.

Now that my site traffic has fallen to nothing, I’m finally back, at least enough to post a couple of times a day. I don’t want to whine and groan about my last two weeks, but I will anyway, as I use this blog to record personal experiences. For posterity’s sake, here goes:

I’ve had a five-year history of shoulder problems which I thought would be taken care of last July when I had an operation here in Singapore. Unfortunately, that failed and on Decembver 27 I went to Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok as a “last resort.” There was only one Plan B for my situation, and that entailed slicing muscles from my back and leg and grafting them into my shoulder. (Gross, I know.) Thai surgeons are said to be among the world’s best, and their prices are relatively low. (You can get a sex change there for less than US$4,000.) So I decided, might as well get it done now.

Right now, if I could go back, I’m not sure I would have had the operation. I am hoping in six or seven weeks when I get this splint removed — at which time I intend to burn it in the public square — I will be glad that I did it. For years now I have neen unable to lift luggage into the overhead bin or hang up clothes with my right arm; and putting a shirt on each morning has been my daily misery. So if this does work, I guess it will have been worthwhile. Right now, I’d opt for the daily aggravation over wearing this thing.

Bumrungrad Hospital is bright and shiny and slick; it sells medical services like its a department store. There are signs and posters and brochures for the different services it offers, and the lobby looks like a shopping mall food court. The doctors there are truly world-class. But I wouldn’t recommend it for anything except out-patient care. (More on this point to come.)

My doctors were among the best I’ve ever worked with. My doctor in Singapore tells me they did a great job, and that he personally knows two of my surgeons, who are quite renowned in orthopedic surgery. There’s nothing I can say about the operation as I was unconscious throughout the entire thing. I was amazed to learn, however, that five surgeons took a total of 5 hours and 45 minutes to complete the procedure, which they told me was way longer than usual. (They even gave me a CD-Rom of the operation. Should I post it here?)

The misery started after I woke up, which is typical of all surgery. It wasn’t the pain of the numerous incisions, however; I can deal with that, as I did in July. It was this contraption that they had fitted over me, something I’d never heard of before and will never, ever forget. It’s called an Airplane Splint.

See the jolly little girl with the big grin? She is wearing an airplane splint, and I want to assure everyone that if you were weaing an airplane splint you would not be smiling. I’ll never forget the head of the surgical team coming to see me shortly after I awoke in my splint and making the unfortunate remark, “I wouldn’t want to be in one of those things for six minutes let alone six weeks.” What a morale booster that was. (Just two days ago, when I met my physiotherapist, his first comment was, “Boy, I sure wouldn’t want to be in your shoes.” Aren’t they taught to be encouraging and positive?)

The splint forces your elbow to be pushed out to the side and your hand to be thrust upward. (That’s why right now I’m typing nose to the keyboard.) There is no way you can take this splint off or put it back on without help. And the absolute minimum wearing time is 6 weeks, though my doctor says I’d be more realistic to count on 8 weeks. Except during physical therapy, I cannot take it off at all. Ever.

I know it could be worse, and that compared to a severe burn or an amputation, etc., this is nothing. Still, it’s the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been. Thinking about anything else is almost impossible. It’s not just having your arm splinted; it hurts to wear this thing, with non-stop backaches and all sorts of other miseries. (My splint is different from that in the picture; hers looks like mainly soft material, while the section around my arm is hard, like a cast.)

Thanks for letting me vent about that. The next thing I need to vent about is my week in the hospital. I was amazed at the difference between Changi General Hospital in Singapore and Bumrungrad in Thailand.

Changi is a true class act. There was, on the other hand, a carelessness at Bumrungrad that I wasn’t prepared for.

When I first checked in a nurse came to my bed and asked if I had hypertension or diabetes and I said no, but that it was urgent the hospital know I needed to take 400 mgs of a certain drug every day. She smiled and nodded, but I had the uncomfortable feeling she didn’t understand.

On the first two days of recovery I couldn’t speak or move, literally. They put the medicine in my mouth and I swallowed it. On the third day I finally asked my doctor if, among the pills they were giving me, my aforementioned daily drug was being included. I found out it wasn’t.

I can’t tell you how serious a mistake this was, and it typified the general carelessness I saw there. The assistants would bring my food out and just leave it by the side of my bed, as though I could just sit up and eat without a problem. (At Changi, the lady would stand there and help me with everything, and I wasn’t even wearing a splint.) The food was always ice cold and I finally told them to only bring me a plate of fresh fruit for every meal. And there was more, lots more in terms of amateurish care.

I do feel grateful for the medical team there and I know one can’t have the same expectations of a Thai hospital as they would a Singapore hospital. Still, many things there just defied common sense. After they told me I should check out a 1pm last Thursday, no one came to help me check out. When I rang the nurse to ask, she said she didn’t know anything about it. Finally, I just picked up my suitcase and staggered over to the registration desk by myself.

My last comment has nothing to do with Bumrungrad, but about my roommates there. My heart really went out to one of them, a 30-year-old Cambodian guy with a herniated colon, who was going through such misery I wanted to cry. his wife and kids came by every morning, and there was something very poignant about someone so young being in so much pain.

then there was an irish fellow, about 65, for whom i had far less sympathy. he was there for dehydration and he was loving every second of it. he always managed to have at least one nurse or nurse’s aide by his bedside and sometimes as many as three, and his flirting was so blatant it was embarrassing: ‘where did you get such lovely skin, do all thai girls have such soft skin, oh, can i touch your face, it looks so soft….’ shit like this would go on through the night after the lights went out, and if i’d had a brick within reach i’d have lobbed it over toward his bed with my left hand.

Okay, no more bitching. Now that I’ve captured the experience forever, I’m going to try to normalize my life, at least as much as i can. (there’s no way life can be ‘normal’ when you are imprisoned in an airplane splint.) Maybe later today I’ll be able to get back to writing about China and Asia and politics. Unfortunately, I still can’t spend more than an hour at the keyboard. and writing this post shows me that, embarrassing as it is, for all long posts i will need to mainly type with one hand. i’ll come back in a week or two and correct the typos.

thanks to all for the kind comments and emails. i really appreciate it.

If I could tell you what I’ve been through over the past ten days or so…. Unfortunately, I am still basically bedridden and can’t sit up long enough to write anything of substance, at least not yet. I’ll have to predict it’ll be yet another week or so. I could write a book just about my stay at the Thai hospital; what an ordeal.

See you soon, and I hope your New Year’s celebrations were a bit more joyous than my own.