I guess she had it coming; after all, she was distributing copies of the Bible.

A 34 year old woman has been beaten to death by police after she was arrested for handing out Bibles in southwest China’s Guizhou province, BosNewsLife learned Monday, July 5.

The French News Agency (AFP) quoted China’s state run Legal Daily newspaper as saying that police in Guizhou’s Tongzi county arrested Jiang Zongxiu, a farmer, on June 18 on suspicion of “spreading rumors and inciting to disturb social order.”

They had planned to detain her for 15 days, the report said, alleging Jiang died in police custody the afternoon she was arrested.

Her mother-in-law, Tan Dewei, who was arrested with Jiang but later released, told reporters police kicked Jiang repeatedly during interrogation AFP reported. Police later informed Jiang’s family she had died of a sudden illness and turned over her body to the family, but relatives saw she was covered with bruises and blood stains, the report alleged.

It’s a scary little article, and the punishment meted out does seem a bit out of proportion with the “crime.”

Many things scare me, but few as much as being arrested by the Chinese police.

There is a rich irony in the current plight of Jiang Yanyong, the whisteleblower universally hailed for alerting Time magazine last year to the truth about SARS in Beijing and the government’s frantic efforts to cover it up.

The irony is that so many people with whom I’ve discussed Chinese political trends pointed in 2003 to the government’s good treatment of Jiang (he wasn’t punished — at least not immediately) as proof positive that Hu Jintao is a reform-minded leader under whose rule freedom of political expression and political reform would flourish.

I can’t say whether Hu is a reform-minded leader or not; I’ve seen hints of that, but in nearly every case they’ve ultimately led to disappointment. But I can say that under him, political reform and freedom of political expression have done anything but flourish. And now, Jiang Yanyong, the pre-eminent symbol of the new-found Chinese Glasnost, is himself locked up by the Thought Police with Hu’s approval!

The government’s response to SARS in April 2003 — acknowledging its sins, firing some bigwigs and getting serious about fighting the epidemic — were seen by many as true turning points. It was a sign that the CCP had seen the light, and would not go back to silencing and punishing whistleblowers, or manipulating the truth to protect itself at the people’s expense. It was as though China had passed through a grave danger (true enough), from which its leaders emerged more noble and more enlightened than ever before.

I wanted to agree with this rather optimistic outlook, but was forced to be more cynical, as a leopard’s spots don’t change overnight, at least not this dramatically. The ongoing stream of stories on rampant corruption and repression of political expression did little to reassure me.

So, returning to the present and Dr. Jiang. Here’s a superb update from Philip Pan (who seems to have replaced John Pomfret as the Washington Post’s foreign corresondent in Beijing).

Chinese military and security officials are forcing the elderly physician who exposed the government’s coverup of the SARS epidemic to attend intense indoctrination classes and are interrogating him about a letter he wrote in February denouncing the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, according to sources familiar with the situation.

The officials have detained Jiang Yanyong, 72, a semi-retired surgeon in the People’s Liberation Army, in a room under 24-hour supervision, and they have threatened to keep him until he “changes his thinking” and “raises his level of understanding” about the Tiananmen crackdown, said one of the sources, who described the classes as “brainwashing sessions.”

But Jiang, who became a national hero last year after blowing the whistle on the government’s efforts to hide the SARS outbreak, has refused to back down, and said in a recent note to his family that he would continue to “face the problems confronting me with the principle of seeking truth from facts,” according to a person close to the family.

The standoff is the culmination of an extraordinary battle of wills that has been quietly unfolding for months between China’s ruling Communist Party and an individual who has already challenged the authorities and forced them to back down once.

China’s state-controlled media have not reported Jiang’s detention, which began June 1. In response to questions submitted by The Washington Post, the government said in a brief statement: “Jiang Yanyong, as a soldier, recently violated the relevant discipline of the military. Based on relevant regulations, the military has been helping and educating him.”

Though Chinese police routinely jail dissidents, the decision to detain Jiang appears to have been made by the Central Military Commission, the nation’s supreme military body, with the consent of the party’s most senior leaders, including President Hu Jintao and his influential predecessor, Jiang Zemin, according to a source familiar with the decision-making process. [Emphasis added.]

The move represents a high-risk gamble by the leadership because of Jiang Yanyong’s public stature at home and abroad. Photographs of his wizened face have been displayed on the covers of national magazines, and state newspapers have published articles crediting him with saving lives around the world by forcing government officials to confront the SARS epidemic.

If the leadership succeeds in silencing Jiang, it would send a powerful message to potential critics about its determination to crush dissent. But Jiang’s detention could also trigger a backlash against a party already struggling to maintain its monopoly on power as there is rising social discontent. And if Jiang is not released, he would almost certainly become China’s most famous political prisoner.

This is one more in a series of recent steps backwards, but it surely has the ingredients for an international scandal. Even inside China, as the article goes on to say, there is huge support for Dr. Jiang, and his arrest could threaten internal stability more than reinforce it.

No one knows yet who’s pulling the strings. Considering the doctor’s outspokenness on the Tiananmen Square Massacre and the role of the Central Military Commission, the smart money is on Jiang Zemin, though Hu evidently gave his buy-in. Maybe it’s yet another manifestation of the famous in-fighting between them. But I don’t know.

Pan has done an awesome job with this sweeping article. Read the whole piece to grasp just how tragic this story is. Read about the victim being separated from his wife, and his bravery throughout the ordeal. Read about the Stalinesque determination to force the doctor to think the way The State thinks. Read about China’s taking a brave and revered old man, a national hero, and how they are seeking to crush him with the most loathsome totalitarian tools, your good old-fashioned “brainwashing.” Read about the New China and its bold new reform-minded leadership.

Update: To understand just how splendid a man Jiang Yanyong is, you may want to read his recent letter to the Chinese government. It is heartbreaking, to say the least. Read it and see what real heroism is.

Be sure to check out Shanghai Eye’s excellent-as-always look at Shanghai’s underbelly, populated by scheming rascallions and lazy elitists.

Oh, and while you’re there, don’t miss the humorous op-ed by Shanghai’ Eye’s new columnist, none other than Kim Jong-Il himself!

Awesome.

Army and Air Force Exchange Service, Which Books Films To Be Shown on Military Bases Around the World, Has Contacted Fahrenheit Distributor to Book the Film

Hell, if we use our tax doallrs to play Rush Limbaugh to our troops, why not Michael Moore?

This was emailed to me by a friend so I can’t provide a link. It is absolutely great.

New Poem by Calvin Trillin

George had trouble at his recent press conference. He had trouble understanding the questions, and he had a difficult time constructing coherent sentences. One exchange in particular caught my attention. He was asked not once but twice why he and Dick were appearing together, not separately as had been requested, before the 9/11 commission. He didn’t answer the question at the press conference. Fortunately George later explained it to Calvin Trillin.

I CAN’T APPEAR WITHOUT
MY NANNY DICK
by Calvin Trillin

(George W. Bush explains the interview arrangements
he’s made with the 9/11 Commission)

When called upon to testify
I said I was a busy guy
So maybe we could do it on the phone.
They really want a face to face.
I said, OK, if that’s’s the case,
I’m certainly not doing it alone.

I can’t appear without my nanny Dick.
for Nanny Dick I’ve got a serious jones.
I can’t appear without my Nanny Dick.
I love the way he cocks his head and drones.

Cartoonists show me as a dummy,*
With voice by Cheney (or by Rummy).
I am the butt of every late-night satirist.
But I just can’t go solitaire.
I need the help that’s due an heir.
I need a dad, and dad’s a multilateralist.

I can’t appear without my Nanny Dick.
He brings along a gravitas I lack.
I can’t appear without my Nanny dick—
The one who knows why we attacked Iraq.

Yes, Condi Rice is quite precise
With foreign policy advice
On who’s Afghani and who’s Pakistani.
I like to have her near in case
I just can’t place some foreign face,
But Condoleezza Rice is not my nanny.

I can’t appear without my Nanny dick.
I wouldn’t know which facts I should convey.
I can’t appear without my Nanny Dick.
It’s Nanny Dick who tells me what to say.

*Though Charlie McCarthy’s the dummy
Whose name has been most often heard,
Some folks who remember that act say
I’m close to Mortimer Snerd.

Update: Here’s my friend’s source.

Letterman’s “Top 10 George W. Bush Complaints About Fahrenheit 9/11″

10 – That actor who played the president was totally unconvincing.

9 – It oversimplified the way I stole the election.

8 – Too many of them fancy college-boy words

7 – If Michael Moore had waited a few months, he could have included the part where I get him deported.

6 – Didn’t have one of them hilarious monkeys who smoke cigarettes and gives people the finger.

5 – Of all Michael Moore’s accusations, only 97% are true.

4 – Not sure … I passed out after a piece of popcorn lodged in my windpipe.

3 – Where the hell was Spiderman?

2 – Couldn’t hear most of the movie over Cheney’s foul mouth.

1 – I thought this was supposed to be about dodgeball!”

Could China’s gender imbalance, unprecedented in world history, lead to the CCP becoming more authoritarian? That’s the somewhat radical thesis of a book reviewed in today’s New York Times.

Generations of Chinese have called them “bare branches”: poor young men who face a future without marriage or children, reflections of a society with more men than women. Now some political scientists who have been studying skewed sex ratios in places like India and China argue that advances in fetal sex-selection technology have helped produce a new, unusually large generation of unattached young men who hold the potential for violent social unrest within their own countries and beyond their borders.

Demographers and feminist scholars have written widely in the last decade about the plight of China’s missing girls, while criminologists know that violence is disproportionately associated with young, single men. But a controversial new book, “Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia’s Surplus Male Population” (M.I.T. Press), goes one step further, connecting these strands with a government’s calculation of how peaceful it can afford to be.

If these young men cannot find wives or jobs or become a viable part of their societies, the book argues, they can pose a threat to internal stability and make governments more likely to create military campaigns to absorb and occupy these youths.

“It should have been an issue 5 or 10 years ago as well, but it becomes even more important today because the technologies that make prenatal sex selection possible only began to be prevalent in Asia in the mid- to late-1980’s,” said Andrea M. den Boer, a research fellow in the department of politics and international relations at the University of Kent, in England, who is a co-author of the book with Valerie M. Hudson, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University. “We are currently on the threshold of a time in which these young men are becoming a volatile social force that will attract the attention of the government. And each successive year, the birth sex ratio got worse, so the problem itself becomes worse with every passing year.”

It’s an intriguing topic, the effect of sex ratios on war and peace and social stability. As the reviewer says, due to political correctness it’s a subject that’s usually avoided. Anyone following the subject of China’s (and India’s) gender gap should read the review, and probably the book as well.

Thanks to the reader who emailed me about this article; it’s appreciated.

I hope all of you have visited Showcase, a collection of some of the blogosphere’s best, started by our very own ambitious Hong Kong blogger, Simon. Even though I disagree with a lot of the bloggers over there, I’m having fun going through the posts. Be sure to have a look. (It got cited by the Puppy himself yesterday, but I’m enjoying it anyway.)

Joseph Kahn of the NY Times comes right out in his very first sentence and says it’s all about stopping people from using mobile phones to send text messages that might “undermine one-party rule.” As we all know, it’s not about pornography; it’s about power and stability.

The campaign, announced on Friday by the official New China News Agency, comes after text messages sent between China’s nearly 300 million mobile phone users helped to expose the national cover-up of the SARS epidemic last year. Text messages have also generated popular outrage about corruption and abuse cases that had received little attention in the state-controlled media.

It is a sign that while China has embraced Internet and mobile phone technology, the government has also substantially increased its surveillance of digital communications and adopted new methods of preventing people from getting unauthorized information about sensitive subjects.

This week, government officials began making daily inspections of short-message service providers, including Web sites and the leading mobile phone companies. They had already fined 10 providers and forced 20 others to shut down for not properly policing messages passing through their communication systems, the news agency said.

The dispatch said the purpose was to stop the spread of pornographic messages and false or deceptive advertising as well as to block illicit news and information.

We in the US have virtually no idea as to how prevalent text messaging is in Asia. In Beijing, we used it throughout the day as a work tool, making sure, for example, that off-site events were going smoothly. Sending text messages is cheaper than talking on the phone, and many young people in China, Hong Kong and Singapore seem to spend the better part of the day SMS-ing their friends. It’s a social phenomenon the likes of which we have never seen in America.

So censoring SMS messages in China is equivalent to censoring our phone conversations here. SMS is how people “talk” to one another there.

Kahn tells of one young fellow whose message to a friend never got through because it had a 6 and a 4 too close together, and the system apparently watches out for any reference to Tiananmen Square.

People have argued with me that the government doesn’t have time to worry about human rights and unfairness to migrant workers because they are so busy simply trying to keep the world’s most populous country functional. And yet they have the time and resources to read and censor people’s phone messages. I find their priorities strange, but they didn’t ask me.

It appears the only ones who are going to benefit as China continues its great leap backwards is the Chinese company that makes the filtering software, Venus Info Tech. They put out a rather breathless press release yesterday and are anticipating huge demand. Good for them.

UPDATE: China Herald has a very differrent take on the situation. I don’t know who’s right.

Bush fiddles, reading My Pet Goat, as America burns

No matter how much Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan and Roger Simon and James Taranto loathe Paul Krugman and try at every turn to slander the “former Enron adviser,” it’s fairly obvious why he commands such a huge audience and always makes it to the most-linked-to lists of the blogosphere: He knows how to pack an incredible punch using simple language and old-fashioned common sense. His write-up of Fahrenheit 9/11 todayis a great example.

Since it opened, “Fahrenheit 9/11” has been a hit in both blue and red America, even at theaters close to military bases. Last Saturday, Dale Earnhardt Jr. took his Nascar crew to see it. The film’s appeal to working-class Americans, who are the true victims of George Bush’s policies, should give pause to its critics, especially the nervous liberals rushing to disassociate themselves from Michael Moore.

There has been much tut-tutting by pundits who complain that the movie, though it has yet to be caught in any major factual errors, uses association and innuendo to create false impressions. Many of these same pundits consider it bad form to make a big fuss about the Bush administration’s use of association and innuendo to link the Iraq war to 9/11. Why hold a self-proclaimed polemicist to a higher standard than you hold the president of the United States?

And for all its flaws, “Fahrenheit 9/11” performs an essential service. It would be a better movie if it didn’t promote a few unproven conspiracy theories, but those theories aren’t the reason why millions of people who aren’t die-hard Bush-haters are flocking to see it. These people see the film to learn true stories they should have heard elsewhere, but didn’t. Mr. Moore may not be considered respectable, but his film is a hit because the respectable media haven’t been doing their job.

Krugman hits the nail on the head. The overwhelming quetion that consumes the viewer after seeing F9/11 is, “Why didn’t the media tell us this? How come I am seeing this footage for the very first time?” Forget the conspiracy theories, which I think are a net negative. What blew me away is the footage of our leaders, and of our political system at work, that I never saw before.

There is an epic myth that Bush showed his great resolve and determination and leadership on America’s blackest day. It’s the very foundation of his re-election campaign. Why did we need to wait nearly three years before we saw what he really did in the face of our greatest crisis? Why didn’t the media show us how for seven looooooong minutes he sat there like a child, even after hearing the words “The nation is under attack,” until he was finally forced out by his aides?

And then there’s Iraq. We all remember the slick presentation on TV, the $250,000 stage they erected for the press conferences, the video-game-like displays of our high-tech weaponry zapping the enemy, the pin-point accuracy of it all, almost as though it were a “sanitary” war.

Why didn’t we ever see the other side, the side Moore shows us? Moore didn’t make this footage up — where has it been? For these things alone the movie has to be seen. There’s the usual Michael Moore crap and the boyish antics; they’re his signature. But, as Krugman says, he has done us all a service in assembling this montage, disjointed, imperfect and opinionated as it may be.

Krugman closes:

Viewers may come away from Mr. Moore’s movie believing some things that probably aren’t true. For example, the film talks a lot about Unocal’s plans for a pipeline across Afghanistan, which I doubt had much impact on the course of the Afghan war. Someday, when the crisis of American democracy is over, I’ll probably find myself berating Mr. Moore, who supported Ralph Nader in 2000, for his simplistic antiglobalization views.

But not now. “Fahrenheit 9/11” is a tendentious, flawed movie, but it tells essential truths about leaders who exploited a national tragedy for political gain, and the ordinary Americans who paid the price.

And if you see the film, it’ll be hard for you to disagree with that.

Update: I just wanted to get this relevant quote from Mathew Yglesias on the record. Krugman and others standing up for Fahrenheit 9/11 are taking a heavy pounding from the right, which clearly misunderestimated the impact this film would have. These pithy bullets provide a good antidote to the rampant, near-hysterical Moore bashing.

* It is very strange that the media is more concerned with Michael Moore’s invalid argumentative techniques than with the extremely similar techniques employed by the president of the United States.

* It is very strange that the media is more concerned with the fact that Michael Moore is a polemicist rather than a journalist presenting a balanced view of events than with the fact that the Fox News network and a small army of conservative radio hosts are doing the same thing.

* It is a very strange thing indeed that the media does not provide outlets for stridently liberal commentary in lieu of the fact that Fahrenheit 9-11 clearly demonstrates that there is a large audience for such things.

* What liberal media?

That is all. It’s also noteworthy that while Moore has done us all a great service by bringing to light the footage of the president not reacting to the second WTC attack, he fails to make what I think is the most important point here: The President’s own aides have such a low opinion of Bush’s leadership capabilities that they didn’t think it was immediately necessary — or, perhaps, desirable — for him to take charge of the situation right away. [Emphasis added.]

I look at Yglesias’ first bullet, and it strikes me that nothing is more one-sided and riddled with lies and innuendo than a Bush campaign commercial. And yet, despite the ubiquity of these fantasy-advertisements, I don’t hear the Roger Simons of this world, or those who live to hump his leg, crying out against them. But Moore comes along and they are downright apoplectic. How odd.