Whatever you do, don’t miss Adam’s great post on this very peculiar story. He unveils twists and turns that give it a whole different spin. Amazing.

UPDATE: And yet MORE on the case. This link was emailed to me from a regional blog buddy, and it’s worth pursuing because it underscores just how not black-and-white this incident is. It is not just about bad rich people, unfair courts and exploited peasants. Those are all possible (probable?) elements to the story, but as the writer says, the story is far more nuanced than that.

The one problem with the link is that you have to scroll down fairly far to find the story. But it’s worth it — along the way you’ll see some neat stories and photos on SARS and the culling of suspect animal-carriers in different countries. Most interesting.

Well, I gave in my notice a few minutes ago. It is a terrible feeling. I really do love my company and the people here. But I told them if I had known there would be almost no real work for me here and that my day would be spent scraping for new accounts, I would have gone back to America and set up my own business. If I have to scrape, at this point in my life I’d like to do it for my own company, not someone else’s.

Right now there is silence, one hour after I sent in the email. It is extremely uncomfortable and I feel kind of sick. I don’t like to disappoint people, and they are going to freak. But it’s a two-way street; they told me I would get something (work to do!), and it never happened. There comes a point where we have to do what is best for ourselves, and spending time alone in an office twiddling my thumbs isn’t my idea of a dream job.

Still, I feel really down. Two people in particular have been so good to me here and I learned so much from them, and I know that right now they are furious with me. What can you do? Do I live to make them happy or to achieve my own goals and dreams? Shit, you can never please everyone….

UPDATE: It’s now nearly 6 hours since I sent the email, and there’s a deafening silence. I think they’re trying to figure out what to do. I’d feel a little worse, but I just went back and reviewed a Dec. 3 email I sent them saying this would happen if they didn’t start giving me some solid work to do. Their response was a one-liner, “Hang in there.” Enough hanging.

And, as is often the case, he is absolutely right:

Let’s not mince words. American policy today toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insane.

Can anyone look at what is happening — Palestinians, gripped by a collective madness, committing suicide, and Israelis, under a leadership completely adrift, building more settlements so fanatical Jews can live in the heart of Palestinian-populated areas — and not conclude the following: That these two nations are locked in an utterly self-destructive vicious cycle that threatens Israel’s long-term viability, poisons America’s image in the Middle East, undermines any hope for a Palestinian state and weakens pro-American Arab moderates.

No, you can’t draw any other conclusion. Yet the Bush team, backed up by certain conservative Jewish and Christian activist groups, believes that the correct policy is to do nothing. Well, that is my definition of insane.

Friedman doesn’t just complain. He offers specifics on what Israel and the US could do to get things on track. (“Israel must get out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip as soon as possible and evacuate most of the settlements.”) Of course, no one will listen to him.

I read Friedman every week, but I’ve never seen him reach anything close to this level of alarm. He closes:

The Bush team destroyed the Iraqi regime in three weeks and has not persuaded Israel to give up one settlement in three years. To think America can practice that sort of hypocrisy and win the war of ideas in the Arab-Muslim world is a truly dangerous fantasy.

We all know the story about the poor peasant woman who accidentally bumped into a shiny BMW with her onion cart, after which the car owner confronted her and then plowed into her with the car, killing her. (This was possibly an accident.)

After the driver, Mrs. Sun, received a very light sentence, China’s netizens flooded the country’s portals with angry protests, and in a strange and perhaps disturbing bow to populism, Mrs Sun is being retried. (The crime is disturbing, too, don’t get me wrong; but making legal decisions based on heated Internet message board chatter can mark a dangerous precedent.)

While the media are all portraying this as an example of the growing hostility between China’s increasingly separated classes, Andres at Water offers an intriguingly different point of view.

To him, the incident is indicative of “a different and deeper problem in Chinese society: there is no commonly accepted notion of what is right and wrong. Such questions of morality are answered depending on your position in society.”

As the current case shows (but with corruption so endemic in China you have a practically limitless supply of such examples) the person with the most power sets the rules of the game. Which means that in a hundred different situations, with a hundred different people having the most power depending on the situation, there are a hundred possible definitions of right and wrong. And if that extreme relatively is the norm, then in fact there is no norm, no standard, no way to judge what is right and wrong. You simply have a society where rapaciousness is rewarded.

While Friedrich Nietzsche may have dearly believed in his ubermensch, a person who sets his own standards of right and wrong and then seeks to impose them on others through force of will, the sort of society where such an idea is put into effect looks a lot like the China of today. I question where a society of such extreme moral relativism is liveable or desireable.

I honestly cannot say whether Andre’s assertion is true or false. I only know it’s interesting and provocative. Also, after just completing the book The Chinese, it doesn’t sound at all inconsistent with the way things have been in China for many centuries, in terms of justice going to him or her wielding the most power.

Robert Kilroy-Silk, who’s hosted a BBC talk show for 17 years, was forced out for writing a “vitriolic” attack on Arabs, referring to them as “”suicide bombers, limb amputators, women repressors.”

Could the BBC be guilty of double standards? You decide.

Mr Kilroy-Silk drew comparisons with his treatment and the BBC’s continued use of Tom Paulin, an Oxford don and poet who was still allowed on the BBC Newsnight Review programme even though he had likened Jewish settlers to “Nazis” and called for them to be “shot dead”.

“I know that the BBC says that the Paulin issue is different because he is a contributor and I am a presenter. They said as much to me in the meeting on Friday. I can see there is a distinction but I do not think it is a very important one.”

Andrew Sullivan is always accusing the BBC of anti-Semitism and a blatant love of the Palestinians no matter what they do. I think he may have a point.

Who would have thought clean ‘n cozy little Singapore would boast the world’s highest per capita rate of capital punishment?

The noose snaps and another body collapses in Singapore’s Changi prison gallows at dawn on a Friday, while nearby elderly men and women dance the rythmic rituals of tai-chi in perfectly neat parks.

Elsewhere in what is regarded as the safest nation in Asia, the younger generations are readying for work and school, while newspapers reporting virtually no local crime wait to be bought at fastidiously clean news-stands.

Dawn on Friday is execution time in Singapore, the nation that human rights group Amnesty International says has the highest death penalty rate per capita in the world.

According to Amnesty, 408 people have been hanged to death here since 1991, with authorities, who keep a tight grip on the local media, ensuring there is little public debate about its controversial system of capital punishment.

According to the intriguing article, other countries are casting admiring glances at Singapore’s zero-tolerance approach to crime, and are embracing the death penalty themselves.

No need to tell you which country is the leader in terms of sheer numbers of executions.

Although Singapore has the highest rate of executions per capita, China is the clear leader in sheer number of people put to death, with the government’s “strike-hard campaign” against corruption throwing renewed focus on capital punishment.

Chinese authorities ensure the total numbers executed each year remain secret. Yet Amnesty said it had been able to determine 1,060 executions in China in 2002, and 2,468 the year before, with the actual number believed to be far higher.

In one particular death frenzy, Amnesty said at least 150 accused drug criminals were executed across China in June 2002 to mark the United Nations’ International Drugs Day.

“China stands out completely on its own. By all standards it goes off the scale,” Massage said.

The UN must have really appreciated the celebration.

[Update: Be sure to see Shuxie’s take on executions in Singapore.]

A few months ago several of us Asian bloggers got into a foodfight over Glutter’s objections when another local blogger used the phrase “Not that there’s anything wrong with that” in a post about gays.

This may have been one of the silliest episodes in our community’s history.

Now, Glutter is re-igniting the holier-than-thou issue, announcing today that she has deleted from her blogroll all Asian bloggers who link to two specifc bloggers who show “photos of girls half their age semi-nude.”

I am only guessing that one of these two sinful sites is Conrad’s; I’m not certain of the 2nd site, but I can make a good guess.

All I can say is, get a sense of humor and lighten up. There’s no pornography, no sexploitation, no harm done. I link to Conrad’s site all the time. Your finding me guilty by association (I’m deleted from her blogroll) is preposterous. I do not link to Conrad’s site because of the girlie pictures, as you probably know. It’s because there’s other good stuff there. I know you like to see yourself as a crusading liberal, but this kind of single-issue tunnel vision is anything but; it’s closed-minded and dogmatic.

I’ve enjoyed knowing you and have linked to you often. But please step back and see how this looks. And then get off your high horse and be a little more tolerant.

UPDATE: Don’t miss Conrad’s scholarly response to this issue.

Hypocrisy alert. (Well, it may not be hypocrisy exactly, but there’s sure a large dollup of irony here.)

WEST CHESTER, Pa — He was known to condemn homosexuality — and even used a bullhorn to preach to passers-by at colleges.

Now, a Philadelphia pastor has been convicted of trying to solicit sex from a 14-year-old boy. A jury in West Chester convicted the Rev. Craig White Wednesday.

The 40-year-old pastor is facing a minimum of three years behind bars when he’s formally sentenced. He showed no reaction as the verdict was read, and neither did his wife.

Link via Atrios.

UPDATE: Adam actually has memories of this guy from his college days and offers his reminiscences. Small world. Adam’s post confirms that the preacher is indeed a sack of shit. Post updated at 7:30 pm Singapore time.

That’s the headline of a long and probing New York Times article that looks at China’s economy from various angles, weighing the arguments of whether it’s a bubble ready to pop or an essentially unstoppable engine that will experience slowdowns and bumps, but not collapse.

I won’t pretend to know the answer, but this article offers some good background to help view the situation more objectively.

One of the key points it makes is the importance of investment spending in China’s economy. This is my main argument when I spar with those who claim foreign businesses in China, excluding those related to manufacturing of items for export, are thriving. People point to the new stores and products and the vast construction effort in cities like Shanghai as proof of prosperity. Actually, they are proof of investment in the hope that one day they will prosper.

Nearly half of China’s economic growth is investment-related spending, an extraordinary figure that reflects public spending on highways and dams, as well as private-sector projects. Calculations by Smith Barney show that Japan in the 1980’s, Southeast Asia in the mid-1990’s and the United States in the late 1990’s each had a few years of investment spending well above historical averages. In each case, overcapacity accumulated in many industries and, eventually, a bubble popped.

China has developed a special disadvantage, in that its economy has become so ravenous for commodities that it is pushing up global prices for products like oil, for which China has become the second-largest market, after the United States. With very low wages and real estate costs, factory managers find that materials are their biggest cost by far, and a sudden jump in their cost can leave businesses with no competitive edge.

The People’s Bank of China, the central bank, has reported an acceleration in wholesale price inflation this winter. The big question is how quickly this will feed into consumer price inflation, which could antagonize politically important urban residents. If consumer prices start rising significantly, the central bank will come under growing pressure to let interest rates climb, which could make more factories less competitive as loans become more costly.

China still has some advantages that, at least in the short term, may forestall a plunge in investment. One is a banking sector willing to lend heavily to even the most indebted companies, provided that they have political connections. But in postponing the final reckoning in the current business cycle, China may be making an eventual bust even worse.

There are so many ways to interpret China’s economy and its direction that I’ve personally given up. My common sense tells me there has to be a slowdown, but even so, there’s enough momentum to keep the economic engine going for years to come. Unless….

And this is where the article leaves us, with a possibility. Political turmoil or other unpredictable factors could threaten China’s fragile economic stability. A sharp slowdown could cause it all to come crashing down.

In the years immediately after the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989, China became relatively placid, perhaps in part from fear. But that calm seems to be fading now.

President Hu Jintao has gingerly tried to restrict some police powers – like the ability to detain people without proper identity documents – and is seeking slightly greater openness in Chinese society. Human-rights groups report a growing number of protests in China, mainly workers and retirees seeking unpaid salaries and benefits. At the same time, many on the mainland are acutely aware of the huge marches organized over the last seven months by democracy activists in Hong Kong, now an autonomous region of China.

Whether any of these forces become significant enough to rattle China’s stability is anybody’s guess. Peaceful change toward a more democratic system may still be possible, especially if it is fairly gradual.

But if the economy slows sharply, political instability could follow. That would be a serious problem, and not just for China, but also for the rest of the world.

There’s a lot more to this article than I can quote here. It offers a good overview of China’s entire financial landscape, without preaching one way or the other.

A Book Review

Last year I came across this post on a message board, and it inspired me to buy Jasper Becker’s book, The Chinese.

I have lived in China four and a half years and Jasper Becker’s “The Chinese,” gave me more insight into the reasons why things are the way they are here than any other source. The depth and immediacy of the work makes it easy to keep going even when the facts are sometimes brutal. He illuminates Chinese history and connects it to the problems of the present with grace and assurance. I kept saying, “Aha!” as I read and discovered the answers and causes I had searched for myself. Becker’s writing has a fine way of “taking” the reader somewhere – as if curiousity and the need to know have created a path. His sources are terrific and the notes and bibliography alone make a fine reference.

Annali Galey
Xiamen, China

I had a very similar experience reading The Chinese. Aspects of books like Grass Soup and Wild Swans that earlier seemed quite odd to me became clear,as Becker tied Chinese behavior today to the history on which it is founded. It is not a detailed history book. It’s more of a primer on what makes China the inscrutable place it is today.

While I’d read much about this subject earlier and knew that the Chinese government of today is in many ways similar to that of its earliest emperor, Becker’s examples and commentary bring this point vividly to life. He writes about the plight of China’s peasants contrasted with their rulers’ never-ending orgy of corruption and gluttony with enough wit and pith to keep it always engaging. It’s definitely one of those books you don’t want to put down.

While the book is at first glance a series of loosley connected vignettes and anecdotes, it has a definite and simple purpose: to unwrap what seems to the Western eye to be the endless series of riddles and enigmas that is China. Becker has done a remarkable job, taking so many disparate anecdotes and melding them together to form a unified, coherent exploration of China and the deep challenges it faces at the start of the new millennium.

Becker sees the Chinese Communist Party as the greatest blight in this country’s 5,000-year history, and points out its sins in a methodical, matter-of-fact manner, with plenty of documentation and quotes. He is never preachy like Gordon Chang (The Coming Collapse of China); he makes his points without polemicizing.

It’s almost impossible for me to pick and choose quotes that show how smart and perceptive Becker is — I’d have to quote just about every page. Here’s a random example, a description of just how distant China’s government is from the mass of its people:

Whether China should be treated as a state, an empire, a self-perpetuating bureaucracy, a culture or a nation is an open question. Perhaps it is quite simply sui generis. Even so, the way of life that China’s rulers have created for themselves since they won power in 1949 seems a peculiar retrogression. For they live as a separate caste, in a style as secluded as anything created by the Qing or earlier imperial dynasties….

Without the need for regular contact with the “masses,” China’s ruling elites not only lead lives entirely separate from their subjects but they also inhabit a political system that prevents any views from below from ever reaching them. Dissidents are given lengthy prison sentences as a warning to all, and China is now one of the last countries in the world without a functioning parliament. The National People’s Congress does exist but it has no building of its own, no permanent staff or offices and it assembles just 10 days a year.

That’s a powerful image: a congress that has no address, no phone number, that simply melts away after the annual party congress. And it underscores Becker’s larger point, that this government has no legitimacy or claim to power, it has no mandate from its subjects and rules by terror and threat, answering to no one and destroying whomever gets in its way.

Becker gives example after example of this. “One petitioner who tried to hand a letter to Mary Robertson, the first UN Human Rights Commissioner to visit China, was dragged away screaming before her eyes in 1998.” Businessmen are thrown into jail simply for succeeding in a manner that threatens a state-owned enterprise. And his descriptions of China’s 700 million utterly disenfranchised peasants taxed and exploited in the nation’s poorest provinces are simply infuriating.

Again, it isn’t just a recounting of today’s suffering in China, but of what the origins of the suffering are and why in so many respects things in China do not change. It also deals at great length with the country’s new wealth and what it’s meant for the mass of the people.

China is now a society in which everyone seems to be engaged in deceiving and cheating one another. In such circumstances, the transition to a market economy has not led to any fairness. Hard work and honesty are not rewarded; corruption is. The privatization process in a dictatorship such as China has brought about the criminalization of the state Party members, who are beyond the law, have been free to engage in the theft of state assets on a grand scale. The cynicism and hypocrisy this has fostered are destructive….A society in which no one is prepared to tell the truth, whether about historical events, small or large, or commercial transactions, cannot prosper.

As long as the CCP is accountble to no one, as long as there is no independent judiciary with the power to back up wth law, Becker sees no hope for true change and progress in China, only window dressing. He totally rejects the notion that the CCP is doing great things for China. Considering the sheer industriousness and entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese, one can only imagine what they could do and how they could improve their lives if they were given true freedom in business, without facing prison and beatings and death for threatening local officials. (And success in a business that competes with an SOE is a threat to local officials, who grow rich from the money-bleeding state-supported business, the lifeblood of China’s corruption.)

I would say that anyone who wants a relatively brief and highly readable guidebook to why China is the nation it is today must read The Chinese. It’s not a pretty story and there is little to feel happy about when you’re finished with it. But it is an eye-opener, and it offers no mercy to the myth that the CCP is an actual government representing its people. Far from it.

A quick note on Becker: I referred to The Chinese in a comment on another web site some months ago, and another commenter quickly jumped in, saying Becker could not be believed or trusted because he is “anti-Chinese.”

First, Becker is obviously very, very pro-Chinese or he wouldn’t be writing this book about them and lamenting the tyranny under which so many now live. Second, to be “anti” any government does not necessarily mean you are against that government’s country or people. (I hate Bush, but I despise random and thoughtless anti-Americanism.) The commenter meant that Becker is anti-CCP, a big plus in my book.

Let’s think about the commenter’s point for a moment. When we read a book about Stalin or Hitler do we feel better knowing that the writer is pro-KGB or pro-Nazi? When we read a book about China, should a criterion for its credibility be whether its author is pro-Mao or pro-CCP? I would say it’s just the opposite. If I know a writer on China is pro-Mao or pro-CCP, I will immediately look at his words with a higher degree of skepticism. Same with books on Nazi Germany. Anyone sympathetic to such causes, in my eyes, has blinded himself to history, to facts. So to paint Becker as unreliable and untrustworthy because he hates the CCP won’t fly. Now, if he allows this prejudice to cause him to lie, to alter facts, to leave things out or to propagandize, then I’ll be wary. But after reading the entire book and then reading dozens of reviews from the most reputable writers and historians, I have a huge degree of admiration and respect for Becker and what he has accomplished.

The Chinese, along with Becker’s other highly acclaimed history, Hungry Ghosts, should be required reading. After reading it, one can never view China with quite the same perspective again.