Great. Now that it really appears possible to dethrone Bush, the spoiler from hell seems poised to announce he is running in the 2004 presidential election. If so, it will be unforgivable.

It’s bad news not only for Internet essayist Du, but for everyone who was looking to his case as proof of a kinder, gentler CCP.

Only a few days ago I posted that Du appeared on the verge of release as prosecutors handed the case back to the police for lack of evidence. Then, out of the blue, Xinhuanet reports his formal arrest:

Chinese police has arrested a man in the central province of Hubei for posting subversive messages on the Internet, said a police spokesman Tuesday.

The spokesman with the Hubei Provincial Public Security Bureau said that since 2001, 39-year-old Du Daobin had written and posted 28 articles on the Internet, inciting subversion of China’s state power and overthrow of China’s socialist system.

Du, who worked with the medical insurance office of Yingcheng City before his arrest in November 2003, also accepted funds from overseas organizations and individuals, and in return helped them post articles harmful to state security on domestic websites, saidthe spokesman.

The spokesman said facts had shown that Du had overstepped his legal rights of criticizing government work and government functionaries with good intentions, and viciously incited subversion of state power through fabrications. His acts had made him a suspect of the crime of inciting subversion of state power.

Du had confessed to the major facts of his crime, and judicial inquiry into the case is still going on, said the spokesman.

Are we really supposed to believe that Du confessed that he “viciously incited subversion”? I don’t believe it for a minute.

The story is very short, and I honestly can’t say precisely what it means. But it doesn’t look like anything good. My immediate guesss is that the police finally came up with enough “evidence” to merit his formal arrest and trial. We’ll be watching carefully.

Link via Douglas, in a post at LiC.

That’s the headline of a new WaPo opinion piece by James Mann, senior writer-in-residence at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former China correspondent for the LA Times. Mann starts by questioning Chirac’s pitch to the EU that China has “transformed” and that the EU should therefore lift the arms embargo it imposed ater the Tiananmen Square massacre.

The problem is that in fundamental ways relating to human rights and political repression, China today is not much different than it was a decade ago. Yes, China has been brought into the international community, if we define that phrase exclusively in terms of economics. But ordinarily the international community is not defined solely by membership in the World Trade Organization.

To illustrate this point, let’s take an example: China’s unwillingness to grant the International Committee of the Red Cross access to its prisons.

China has never allowed the ICRC (which is an excellent example of the international community) to visit its prisons. One stumbling block has been that the Red Cross insists on the right to interview prisoners privately and with its own interpreters.

Mann then provides an enlightening history of China’s duplicity on this issue, hinting again and again, first to Clinton and then to Bush, that it was about to cooperate, and then breaking its word failing to do so. This duplicity has now been going on for ten years.

There are certainly changes in China that are real, Mann says; Chinese citizens are free to dress up as they choose and to say what they want to, at least in private, and often even in public, “so long as they remain completely unorganized and unchallenging to the regime.”

But when it comes to tolerance of any political opposition, or to human rights standards as generally defined by the international community, China is essentially the same as it was a decade ago. The regime has never expressed the slightest remorse for using weaponry against its own people.

Chirac is right about one thing — something has changed over the past decade. But it’s not China. Rather, the rest of the world has become far more tolerant of the same Chinese political repression that it condemned in the early 1990s. A lifting of the EU arms embargo would be one more big step in this tawdry policy of accepting repression.

That’s a real shocking conclusion. Have we actually become more tolerant of repression? I want to say no. I think instead that we have allowed the good news about China’s economy to push the human rights issue out of our line of vision. It’s something we simply don’t want to see, so we minimize it, come up with excuses for it and brush it aside.

I did it, too. I’ll never forget how thrilled I was when I heard Beijing was selected for the 2008 Olympics. I didn’t want to think about random arrests and torture and repression. But that was when I believed there was real change in the air. I’ve since become (in case anyone here didn’t know) disillusioned and, alas, even somewhat cynical about their supposed reforms.

This poem, lifted from Snopes, is a compilation of actual George W. Bush malapropisms.

MAKE THE PIE HIGHER
by George W. Bush

I think we all agree, the past is over.
This is still a dangerous world.
It’s a world of madmen and uncertainty
and potential mental losses.

Rarely is the question asked
Is our children learning?
Will the highways of the Internet become more few?
How many hands have I shaked?

They misunderestimate me.
I am a pitbull on the pantleg of opportunity.
I know that the human being and the fish can coexist.
Families is where our nation finds hope, where our wings take dream.

Put food on your family!
Knock down the tollbooth!
Vulcanize society!
Make the pie higher! Make the pie higher!

The post actually tracks down each of the Bushisms and tells us in what context our leader uttered them. “Knock down the tollbooth” was supposed to be, “Knock down the roadblocks.” Interesting, how his mind works.

(Link via Mark Kleiman.)

I was relieved to see that most of the US mass media were ignoring the non-story, as there was zero evidence to back it up. According to a friend of mine in Arizona even the local right-wing talk radio station was dismissing it as un-newsworthy. The only place it seems to be getting lots of play is the UK supermarket tabloids.

Reading Mark Kleiman today, I feel further relieved.

The Kerry intern scandalette seems to be fading. The woman has been identified and isn’t saying anything. Her parents think that Kerry is a “sleaze” but deny any affair. She apparently never worked for him and is now 24. John Ellis, not a Kerry-lover, reports a detail everyone else seems to have missed:

What is known about the source of this information is that she has a major axe to grind; she hates [Kerry]. She really, really hates him. She is grinding the Mother of All Axes.

Something could still pop — Glenn Reynolds, for one, will be soooooo disappointed if it doesn’t — but that doesn’t really seem likely.

The rumor caused the Kerry nomination contract on Tradesports, which had hit a high of 96, to drop below 80, but it’s back up to 91 now. The Bush re-elect contract is down to 63, the lowest it’s been in months.

Still, whoever told Drudge to steal this from WatchBlog and try to frame Clark as having spread the story didn’t completely waste his or her time. It gave Bush supporters something else to talk about while they were pretending that the dental record ended the AWOL flap. And despite the utter lack of anything approaching a confirmed, on-the-record fact to back up the accusation that “Kerry had an affair with an intern,” that accusation has now spread sufficiently widely that it’s going to be in the back of voters’ minds. Kerry’s picture is on the front pages of the New York Post and the New York Daily News, attached to stories that say he says it isn’t true.

There’s an old story — perhaps canonical, perhaps not — about Lyndon Johnson, trailing near the end of a campaign, telling his campaign manager to spread the word that his opponent was inclined to have romantic interludes with swine. “But Lyndon, we can’t prove that!” the naive manager is supposed to have protested. “Of course we can’t,” said LBJ. “But we can make the son-of-a-bitch deny it.”

Precisely.

This is just the beginning. Now that Bush is under siege, expect the GOP to pull all the stops and launch a furious smear campaign. I just saw a piece in the New Republic that shows just how far the right-wing rags are willing to go to make Kerry look bad. It’s really nothing less than slander. I think we’re about to see the nastiest race ever.

I was feeling restless this evening, so I sauntered over to the multiplex and saw a movie I knew nothing about called Dogville.

As it started, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, with what seemed at first like a gimmicky set that would fast grow tiresome. I was wrong. For nearly three hours I sat there transfixed, and at one point it struck me that I had never heard such prolonged and total silence in a movie theater before. It was a packed house, and it seemed like everyone was spellbound.

At the end — and this is something I have never seen anywhere in Asia before — nearly the entire audience sat through all the credits (which were fantastic).

I’ve always loved Nicole Kidman, but with this role I am tempted to say she just might have a streak of genius. If not a genius, she’s definitely an artist. But the other performances were superlative, too. It wasn’t a one-man show.

Being totally out of it, and since movies (and everything else) usually come to Asia late, I have no idea how long Dogville has been out. All I can say is, if you haven’t seen it, don’t wait. I’ll be thinking about it all week, and may even go see it again. (Maybe; it’s not a comfortable movie to sit through, but it sure is mind-blowing.)

Anyone still harboring any doubts about what the gay Chinese magazine Menbox is and to what audience it’s catering should read this post now. Great pictures, too, even if one of the models would have been well served with some strategically applied make-up, as danwei humorously points out.

Related Post: Gays in China

Pol Pot’s legacy: Skulls of the killing fields

The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine sounds like a movie that’s torture to watch, but that I’ll certainly have to see, having been bewildered and intrigued by the Pol Pot phenomenon for decades now. A superb if wrenching article on the film, by an eyewitness to what Pol Pot wrought, takes you right there.

With tiny swifts rising and falling almost to the ground the only movement, I walked along a narrow dirt road at the end of which was a former primary school called Tuol Sleng. During the Pol Pot years it was run by a kind of gestapo, “S21”, which divided the classrooms into a “torture unit” and an “interrogation unit”. I found blood and tufts of hair still on the floor, where people had been mutilated on iron beds. Some 17,000 inmates had died a kind of slow death here: a fact not difficult to confirm because the killers photographed their victims before and after they tortured and killed them at mass graves on the edge of the city. Names and ages, height and weight were recorded. One room was filled to the ceiling with victims’ clothes and shoes, including those of many children.

Unlike Belsen or Auschwitz, Tuol Sleng was primarily a political death centre. Leading members of the Khmer Rouge movement, including those who formed an early resistance to Pol Pot, were murdered here, usually after “confessing” that they had worked for the CIA, the KGB, Hanoi: anything that would satisfy the residing paranoia. Whole families were confined in small cells, fettered to a single iron bar. Some slept naked on the stone floor. On a school blackboard was written:

1. Speaking is absolutely forbidden.
2. Before doing something, the authorisation of the warden must be obtained.

“Doing something” might mean only changing position in the cell, and the transgressor would receive 20 to 30 strokes with a whip. Latrines were small ammunition boxes labelled “Made in USA”. For upsetting a box of excrement the punishment was licking the floor with your tongue, torture or death, or all three.

How the people of Cambodia, famous for their gentle smiles, came to be radicalized under Pol Pot was debated briefly between me and a commenter a few days ago. The reviewer, John Pilger, enlightens us at the end of the article.

The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year Zero”. It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger did this, secretly and illegally.

Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was the catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh’s film, a torturer refers to the bombing as his reason for joining “the maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed. And having been driven out by the Vietnamese, who came from the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher government, who invented a “coalition” to provide the cover for America’s continuing war against Vietnam.

Thank you, Rithy Panh, for your brave film; what is needed now is a work as honest, which confronts “us” and relieves our amnesia about the part played by our respectable leaders in Cambodia’s epic tragedy.

Thought-provoking post on why everyone in politics is by necessity a scumbag.

Do I think John Kerry diddled interns? Probably – it was (and sometimes still is) a pretty common practice. Does it bother me? Eh. A little. You didn’t read any moral outrage here yesterday – what interests me is how this Whatsit will affect the primary race and the general election. So I’m not too worried about who Kerry is doing, how often he’s doing it, or what his wife thinks.

What it comes down to is, I’m sadly conditioned to believe, and expect the worst from, our politicians.

The politicians have to shoulder a lot of the blame for their bad behavior. After all, they’re the ones skirting duty, taking bribes, boinking interns, etc.

But in the larger sense, we are to blame.

The American public has demanded, and received, the kind of government that attracts the pettily corrupt. Washington is the Leviathan, collecting unimaginable amounts of money, then distributing it back to us as various goodies. To get elected, to stay elected, you have to be able to get your hand in and out of the cookie jar more often than the other guy, and while grabbing bigger cookies.

Too bad that after such a fresh perspective, the comments disintegrate into an orgy of Kerry bashing, based entirely on sketchy rumors.

In Chinese, “bi” (pronounced “bee”) is the slang word for “vagina,” Jeremy tells us in a post noting the sad fact that the Vagina Monologues in not to be, having been cancelled in both Shanghai and Beijing.

Jeremy is quite hard on the NY Times reporter Joseph Kahn who wrote:

“The challenge to social norms made the play a sensation in the United States. But in China, where the word vagina carries even greater shock value and is rarely spoken in public, “The Vagina Monologues” roiled the wrong people — the country’s censors.”

To this Jeremy replies:

Rarely spoken in public? What planet is Mr Kahn reporting from? I hear the slang word for vagina – bi – maybe three or four times a day in Beijing. The clinical term – yindao – is not perhaps something you would say at your grandmother’s dinner table, but it is certainly has no greater shock value than the word ‘vagina’ does in English speaking countries

I have no doubt that Jeremy is correct. But this is apparently a widely held misunderstanding. Just a few days earlier a reporter for the Sunday Herald wrote:

Notwithstanding the popularity of pirated DVD copies of Western TV hits like Sex And The City, “vagina” tends to be spoken only within hospitals and on the football terraces amongst fans unhappy with their team’s performance.

My guess is that these reporters got their impression from colleagues or other sources who have been away from China for the past few years, and are unaware of the extent of the country’s sexual liberation. (Or maybe the NY Times reporter was lazy and just got his information from the Sunday Herald. Journalists can be real slackers.)