It’s gone too far, and the CCP says it is now fighting hard against China’s infamously corrupt police, announcing the firing of more than 30,000 dirty cops.

Being a Chinese police officer means never having to pay for cigarettes or liquor or dinner or haircuts or vacations, if you don’t want to. When that doesn’t suffice, extra cash can come from payoffs to protect friends or release suspects.

It is all part of a system so vulnerable to corruption and misconduct that China’s government appears fed up. The minister in charge of law enforcement, in a candid assessment, has vowed to “resolutely stop malignant violations that offend the heavens.”

With the alarm sounded, China announced last month that it had fired more than 33,000 “unqualified” officers as part of a campaign to professionalize a police force with a reputation for ignoring the law when it chooses.

Whether the new crackdown makes any difference remains to be seen, and if past history is any indicator, there’s no cause for celebration. Crackdowns on all sorts of corruption are announced frequently in China, and often result in some high-profile trials and lots of arrests and executions. And then they are quietly forgotten, and everything returns to the status quo.

The article interviews an anonymous cop who talks about “the dark side” of the law in China. His station chief drives a fancy European car that everyone knows his salary couldn’t possibly pay for, and anyone can get a charge against them dropped by paying a special “fine.” Cops also seem to have a penchant for murdering traffic offenders, and for locking people up indefinitely (and torturing them too, of course).

The article ends on an upbeat note, implying that this time the crackdown just might work, resulting in a kinder, gentler (i.e., less murderous and less corrupt) police force. My guess is cops will be more discreet and careful. But corruption is literally their way of life. How easy is it to give up the European car and the inflated salary? Especially when they know the officials doing the crackdowns are as guilty as they are.

I had the privilege of meeting Hong Kong-based blogger Simon of Simon World for cofee yesterday. Simon was kind enough to come down to Raffles Place where I work, and he can validate my story in case any of you doubted it: I really am wearing a huge disgusting splint. (Two weeks to go.)

Simon and I tend to see Asia through a fairly similar lens, although he is way more polite about certain topics than I am. This was another good example of how Living in China helps bring the blogging community together. There is no way we would have discovered one another, I suspect, if not for LiC.

Thanks again for the meeting, Simon, and I apologize for the appalling lack of taxis in Singapore, where waiting half an hour during rush hour is not at all unusual.

Despite the Chinese government’s vehement protestations, charges that it’s been covering up cases of bird flu are picking up traction.

With its bird-flu outbreak spreading swiftly to new regions, China faces mounting suspicions that its obsessively secretive bureaucracy has again been caught in a cover-up of a deadly disease.

Five new outbreaks of bird flu were confirmed in China yesterday, including a case in a new region of the country. The disease has now spread to 13 of its 31 regions.

This was one of the most hotly debated topics within the Asian blogosphere last year: After the SARS catastrophe, did the Chinese grow and learn from their malfeasances, or were those press conferences and public apologies and promises of greater transparency just for show?

It happened last year in China with the SARS epidemic, and earlier with AIDS. In both cases, the first reaction of Chinese officials was to hide the truth, pretending that the outbreaks were relatively mild and insignificant. In both cases, the cover-up continued until Beijing finally bowed to intense international pressure and began disclosing the frightening depth of its crises.

Now some observers worry that Beijing may be concealing the extent of the avian-flu outbreak to avoid the embarrassment and economic costs of the true situation.

Yesterday, at their first news conference since the bird-flu outbreak erupted last month, Chinese health and agriculture officials were peppered with questions about a suspected cover-up of the bird-flu outbreak. Reporters asked how Beijing could continue to claim that no humans were infected with bird flu, with more than 56,000 birds infected in chicken farms in almost half of the provinces. They asked whether anyone would be sacked for concealing the disease, and whether an inquiry would be held. And they asked why Beijing continues to ban foreign journalists from any of the infected regions.
[….]

There is a long history of covering up diseases in China, not just human diseases such as SARS and AIDS but also animal diseases. The Chinese government, for example, officially declares that foot-and-mouth disease is non-existent in China. Yet the presence of the disease in Chinese cattle is already so well-known and widespread that many neighbouring countries refuse to buy meat from China.

I don’t yet see a smoking gun like we had last year, when a whistleblower revealed the incredible measures the CCP was taking to cover up SARS. And needless to say, the government is strenuously denying all the accusations. But the media seem convinced the government is lying again, and just as with AIDS and SARS, I suspect the truth will start leaking out.

I believe those claiming SARS marked a great turning point for the CCP are wearing rose-tainted spectacles. Maintaining social stability and harmony at all costs is absolutely essential for the party. (Being the obtuse idiots that they are, they don’t realize that by covering up an epidemic, it only makes things worse in the long run, but they’d never understand that argument.)

So when a crisis arises, be it foot and mouth disease, AIDS or SARS, they have no choice — like automatons, they go into automatic pilot and lie, deny and cover up. We have already seen glowing examples of the New & Improved CCP’s “transparency.” To which I have just three words to say: Same old shit.

This new article examines the question.

(Short answer: A perpetrator of the greatest blight on civilization ever known to man.)

Reporters Without Borders is complaining that the CCP has banned the foreign press in Beijing from visiting regions hit by bird flu. This was another of the idiocies we all thought — and some of us knew — would be done away with as the Chinese leadership learned and grew from the SARS nightmare of barely one year ago. It was going to be a new age of openness.

Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans frontières) today called on the World Health Organisation to press the Chinese authorities to lift a ban on visits to the southern regions hit by bird flu, which has been imposed on most of the foreign correspondents based in Beijing.

After preventing foreign journalists from freely covering the SARS epidemic, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Henan province, the Chinese authorities are again showing a lack of transparency in their handling of a health problem, the organisation said, calling for foreign correspondents to be allowed to report freely from the provinces affected by bird flu.

The ban has been imposed by the foreign affairs ministry and the authorities in the southern provinces of Hunan, Hubei and Guangxi.

As soon as the first cases appeared in these provinces at the end of January 2004, the authorities refused to give travel authorisation to most of foreign press in Beijing, including the European TV corporations ARD, France 2 and BBC. Officials told journalists that a press conference would be held “in a few days.”

Here comes the scary part. Is it just me, or does it sound like the government is using the Chinese reporters to paint a healthy, glowing picture of the afflicted areas, just as it did a year ago in Guangdong?

Meanwhile, dozens of journalists with China’s governmental press have been invited to these provinces to confirm that “the authorities and peasants have proceeded with the elimination and cleanup of chicken-farming.” The propaganda department has also called on the editors of the leading Chinese news media to announce that the epidemic is under control.

In recent years, Reporters Without Borders has registered dozens of cases of arrests and censorship of foreign journalists when they tried to investigate public health problems such as AIDS and SARS in China.

So what’s going on? Is there really more freedom of the press? I mean, really really?

Then today may be your lucky day. Danwei says a new one may be looming on the horizon. Just a rumor for now, but that’s how I first heard about SARS, too. And this one sounds pretty grim.

I ask the question after reading Water’s dark and disturbing reflections on this topic:

I know each time I go back home that few people can understand how darkly I view this place since the images that are filtered back to Western TV sets bare scant relationship to what I have experienced here.

However, I would say there is an Achilles Heel to the image making of China: China itself. How many long-termers do we know that hold China in high respect? It’s a harsh question, but the truth is, the longer a foreigner stays in China the more likely they are to be disillusioned with the place.

We all read other China blogs and it’s hard to come across one that is unabashed in its respect for the place. Indeed, one is more likely to find good things said about the place the farther the person is away from China. Something’s wrong with that picture.

That’s a horrible thing. The implication is clear: the better you know China (and the closer your experience of it) the less likely you are to like it.

Almost all of us will return home and when we do we won’t be available to reinforce China’s glowing self-image. Instead, we’ll probably mumble agnostically when people talk with us about China, or if they hit a cord and say something exceptionally ignorant we’ll snap and let fly with our true feelings of the place.

It’s not like people staying in Australia for a long period of time and coming away with real warmth for the place. It’s not millions of immigrants crying with happiness during a citizenship ceremony. No, I have yet to find anyone here rushing to become a Chinese citizen, the ultimate compliment a foreigner can give a country.

Long termers no doubt have complex emotions when it comes to China and it would be false to say that all are bad. But in general, what good we feel tends to be on those occasions when we see someone swimming against the tide, someone with integrity swimming in an ocean of moral corruption, someone brave while others are meek, someone indignant when others have accepted their lot in life. In all cases, it tends to be the exceptions that we respect, not the general rules.

That’s sad.

Now, these are very strong contentions — “The implication is clear: the better you know China (and the closer your experience of it) the less likely you are to like it.”

Is this a rule of thumb? I know I met at least a few expats who truly love living in China. When I sang in the chorus there, I shared scores with a Scottish fellow who said it was truly home to him, and he felt alienated and uncomfortable in Hong Kong and more Westernized places. And there’s fellow blogger China Hand (remember him?) who always struck me as a true Sinophile, quite in love with his home.

But on the whole, what Water describes above is more common. And if the expat does like it, he’s most likely to be in a love-hate relationship. My New Zealand colleague, in Beijing for 12 years and with a Chinese wife, never ceased with his complaints about life there, but you don’t stay for 12 years if it isn’t offering you something in return. He was in perpetual conflict over the place (like me).

I remember living in Germany and El Salvador, and I didn’t want to leave. I felt a connection to those places, and I still have such warm memories. I felt a lot of things about China. I miss it and I’d consider moving back — for a while. But warm memories? Not the way I do about the other places.

I really have to congratulate Water for continuously demonstrating the courage to say aloud what many others think but are reluctant to broadcast, lest they be perceived as prejudiced, intolerant or politically incorrect. And for saying it so beautifully.

I don’t believe in using focus groups to determine what movies should cut or keep, and I don’t know of any other form of art that’s created this way. (Are movies a form of art? Can they be, if they are shaped by committee? But that’s another conversation.) Still, I can say I was not sorry to hear that due to focus group feedback and an outcry from the Jewish critics, the most controversial section of Mel Gibson’s The Passion has been excised.

Reading the write-up in the NYT, I’m more convinced than ever that something about this movie just isn’t kosher.

Mel Gibson, responding to focus groups as much as to protests by Jewish critics, has decided to delete a controversial scene about Jews from his film, “The Passion of the Christ,” a close associate said today.

A scene in the film, in which the Jewish high priest Caiaphas calls down a kind of curse on the Jewish people by declaring of the Crucifixion, “His blood be on us and on our children,” will not be in the movie’s final version, said the Gibson associate, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The passage had been included in some versions of the film that were shown before select groups, mostly of priests and ministers.

“It didn’t work in the focus screenings,” the associate said. “Maybe it was thought to be too hurtful, or taken not in the way it was intended. It has been used terribly over the years.”

Jewish leaders had warned that the passage from Matthew 27:25 was the historic source for many of the charges of deicide and Jews’ collective guilt in the death of Jesus.

Mr. Gibson’s decision to remove the scene could indicate that he was being responsive to concerns of Jewish groups that the film will fuel anti-Semitism. Mr. Gibson was the co-writer, director, producer and financier of the $25 million film, which will be released in more than 2,000 theaters on Feb. 25, Ash Wednesday.

Mr. Gibson also responded to a letter from Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who had requested a meeting and asked Mr. Gibson to consider a postscript that would “implore your viewers to not let the movie turn some toward a passion of hatred.”

Mr. Gibson did not respond to those requests directly, writing only: “I hope and I pray that you will join me in setting an example for all of our brethren; that the truest path to follow, the only path, is that of respect and, most importantly, that of love for each other despite our differences.”

Mr. Foxman responded in turn on Monday that “your words do not mitigate our concerns about the potential consequences of your film — to fuel and legitimize anti-Semitism.”

This reporter was shown a two-hour version of the R-rated movie this week. The film features agonizing passages as Jesus, played by Jim Caviezel, is mercilessly beaten by Jewish and then Roman guards, and jeered and hounded by a Jewish mob on his way to his Crucifixion. It is unclear how close this version is to Mr. Gibson’s final film.

In this version, the Roman leader Pontius Pilate is depicted as being reluctant to harm Jesus, who Pilate’s wife warns is holy. Largely to mollify a restive Jewish mob outside his window, Pilate agrees to a severe lashing and scourging of Jesus, but the crowd and the high priest demand more.

It sounds as though the movie is playing on lurid emotions that make the Jews look very, very bad. I know, I know — I’ll reserve final judgement until I see this work of art for myself. But everything I read about it makes me sick.

Read the rest of the article to see Gibson’s revealing remarks about the Holocaust. Like father, like son….

Read Conrad’s post on a privately run AIDS orphanage plundered and closed by Henan Province officials after CCTV raised 1 million yuan to support the children. The kids were then packed off to some government-run institution, while the officials walked off with all the money. Sounds like a new low to me.

Some topics bring out the fighter in people, and gay marriage is certainly one of them. Two separate threads over at Adri’s blog, here and here, provide the proof. Interesting reading — for a while. Then, like so many other threads on these emotionally charged topics, it disintegrates into a shouting match.