The publication of this survey on the plight of Chinese peasants was seen just a few months ago as a major breakthrough. It seemed to signal a new willingness on the part of populists Hu and Wen to actually encourage dialogue on a taboo subject. It was, for me at least, unbelievable. They were actually exposing the abuses against the peasantry! So there was little surprise when we heard weeks later that the book had been banned, but there was a lot of disappointment.

Kahn presents the first detailed article I’ve seen on this sad story.

The book describes one farmer, named Ding Zuoming, and his decade-long campaign to enforce central government directives limiting taxes and fees. Although the Beijing authorities reviewed and approved his complaints, the local police found an excuse to arrest him, the book says. They beat him to death in custody.

The authors tell the story of Zhang Keli, described as an idealistic public official devoted to fighting poverty. Over time, he found that fellow village chiefs had found ways to enrich themselves and their relatives, even while they won promotions.

“He felt like he would be an idiot not to take his share,” Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu wrote.

The book became an unexpected best seller earlier this year. Whether that was because it named names in exposés about the underside of China’s boom or because its publication coincided with an effort by Mr. Wen to promote new rural policies is unclear.

Chen Xiwen, the deputy director of the Central Finance and Economics Leading Group, a high-level government policy-making committee, and the man considered China’s foremost rural policy expert, said in a recent interview that he had bought two copies, one for the office and the other to keep at home….

Propaganda authorities evidently felt the book went too far. Even as a media frenzy built in March, the government-owned publisher got a verbal order to cease printing. Media coverage ended instantly. The authors estimate that the book has sold as many as 7 million copies, but they earned royalties on only the 200,000 legal copies sold before the ban.

More disconcerting to the authors, a disgruntled local official named in the book, Zhang Xide, filed a libel suit against them seeking $24,000 in damages. As Chinese officials rarely file court actions without the approval of superiors, Mr. Chen and Ms. Wu say they effectively face prosecution by Anhui Province.

That would be the final irony, if after all the exultation and dismay the authors end up being punished. Sometimes it seems like part of the culture, putting the nation’s heroes and whistleblowers in jail.

Reform in China so often seems to resemble — pardon the expression — a Chinese fire drill. They give us a strong hint of improvement, we get all excited, articles come out, the blogs go nuts, we all wonder, Is this it — the real thing?? And then it just evaporates as though it never happened at all, and we’re back where we were before. It’s exhausting. It’s dizzying. And it’s always exactly the same.

UPDATE: I edited this post, changing an earlier sentence where I said the books authors might face going to prison; if they are punished, they would probably have to pay a high fine, and not face prison time.

You’ve got to see the two pieces over at Andrew Sullivan, one a letter and one a post, on how idiotic our terrorism-inspired travel restrictions are, both for visitors and for good God-fearing Americans. A travesty. An idiocy. Sullivan is appropriately outraged. Me, too.

And Sullivan congratulates him for it! What is this world coming to?

John and Teresa Kerry are on Larry King even as we speak. She is amazing. Can you imagine, having a First Lady with a real personality? It would be unprecedented in my lifetime.

You should see the New Republic article on Bush’s obsession with coming up with a summer surprise, i.e., the capture or death of Osama Bin Laden.

We all want to see Bin Laden liquidated; the ugly thing here is Bush putting enormous pressure on Pakistan to deliver the goods prior to Election Day.

This public pressure would be appropriate, even laudable, had it not been accompanied by an unseemly private insistence that the Pakistanis deliver these high-value targets (HVTs) before Americans go to the polls in November. The Bush administration denies it has geared the war on terrorism to the electoral calendar. “Our attitude and actions have been the same since September 11 in terms of getting high-value targets off the street, and that doesn’t change because of an election,” says National Security Council spokesman Sean McCormack.

But The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs by the election. According to one source in Pakistan’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), “The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections.”

Due to shenanigans like this, the cynicism over anything the Bush administration says or does right now has reached new levels. Today, Tom Ridge warned us yet again of new indications of terrorist chatter. A CNN poll showed that more than 90 percent of viewers believed it was a political stunt. That’s alarming. After all, GWB constantly stresses, “You know who I am, you know what I stand for.” If what he stands for is grandstanding and deceiving the populace for political points, some of that trust he’s counting on to win in November may be seriously diluted.

Dr. Jiang Yanyong, under detention and subjected to brainwashing, is now “the most dangeous man in China” because he is so beloved and trusted by the Chinese people that his treatment could create a serious backlash. So says a Washington Post editorial that sees in this misdeed the grimmest implications.

Dr. Jiang’s detention clearly demonstrates that China’s leaders are in no mood to progress toward political liberalization, as many hoped when a new generation of leaders under President Hu Jintao took power last year. Mr. Hu allowed a time — however brief — of openness that was critical to confront and contain SARS. But his leadership has been complicated by former president Jiang Zemin’s refusal to let go of his enormous influence. The power struggle has created a policymaking dynamic favoring hard-line extremism as the politically “safe” direction. But it is the wrong one. Just ask the relatives of the hundreds of people who died of SARS in 11 countries because China did not face up to the crisis when it first broke out. As Dr. Jiang wrote to the Chinese leadership, “The claim that stability is of overriding importance can in fact cause even greater instability.” China — and the world — should listen.

All true. I still want to believe that Hu wants to be a reformer. I give him no credit, however, for that brief window of openness brought on last spring by the SARS crisis. He simply had no choice; China had been caught red-handed and 10 years of diplomacy and economic reforms were threatened. He did the smart and expedient thing, and as quickly as the openness was announced so was it rescinded. It was okay for a little while to criticize the government. The good doctor went away adored by the public and unpunished by the government — or so it seemed. And now we’ve come full circle.

Thanks to the Washiongton Post for taking the lead with this story and following up on its editorial page. I only hope the other media follow suit. If anything can snap the media out of their typical bored silence in regard to China, it’s this horror story.

One of my old posts on the lunacy of a China Daily opinion piece seems to have been brought back to life over at a China Daily forum.

This was where I blasted a writer, Blackie Lau, for saying the US (“the running dogs of war”) caused all of China’s problems. Lau made lots of other weird assertions, and commenters had a field day fisking away.

Here’s a portion from one of the more outspoken posts to the forum:

If I may be so uncouth as to distil the ‘essence’ of the participants of the referred Website as one odoriferous murky brew fit only as sustenance for the buffoons and baboons of the Internet.

Hilarity is one where we all share the foibles and flaws in our actions as to laugh at our own quirks or idiosyncrasies.

Not, as I look at the on-goings of the proceedings, it was meant to ridicule with humiliation as its prime motive. Do we not detect a superior air, and some imperial dismissive in the jibes of these political yokels?

Where is the defence of free thought if they are orchestrating a hilarity that is more a suppression in disguise?

Indeed, hilarity is the ability to laugh at ourselves. But when one party laughs and the other party ridiculed and humiliated, would you conscientiously still maintain that is hilarity?

The desired behaviour from them, as these self-proclaimed political pundits and gurus would have us believed their dour and morbid humour, was to come into China Daily and take up cudgels against Blackie Lau in open debates.

But instead, they went about in a sneaky way to ridicule unreasonably Blackie Lau without giving him the same avenue of free thought as they were wont to carp on such misdemeanour on China’s part as infringement of human rights or the archaic views of one who is exercising his franchise to free thoughts.

I’ve replied to the somewhat bizarre charges over at the bulletin board. It’s an interesting thread, and I’m certainly flattered.

Danwei once again brings us up to date on the latest media and advertising trends in China, including photos that will appeal to every taste. (Two separate links, one for each taste.)

Not that I ever doubted it. This time the world’s smartest blogger looks at our military’s PsyOps — psychological operations, and how they were applied to create illusions to keep us all behind the war, from the toppling of Saddam’s statue to — well, he can say it better than I can.

We have in fact known from even before the outset that the war against Iraq would prominently feature psychological warfare. Most people have assumed that this warfare would be directed against the enemy and the subject citizens. They have not stopped to consider that, by definition, it would also be directed toward the American public as well.

This reality raises a serious concern about the fragility of democracy during wartime. Because under the aegis of a seemingly eternal war, the American government has clearly been involving the public in its psychological combat, and has hijacked the nation’s press in the process. The entire meaning of the Iraq war — and by extension, the “war on terrorism” — is inextricably bound up in the psychological manipulation of the voting public through a relentless barrage of propaganda.

This is why the both the runup to the war and its subsequent mishandling have been so replete with highly symbolic media events — many of them played repeatedly on nightly newscasts — that have proven so hollow at their core, from the declarations of imminent threat from Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, to phony images of Saddam’s statue being torn down, to flyboy antics aboard aircraft carriers, to meaningless “handovers” of power. It also explains why certain important and humanizing symbols of wartime — civilian casualties, the returning flag-draped coffins — have been so notably absent from our views of the war.

The role of the media in this manipulation cannot be overstated. The abdication of the media’s role as an independent watchdog and its whole subsumation as a propaganda organ bodes ill for any democracy, because a well-informed public is vital to its functioning.

Brilliant. And it correlates perfectly with my post yesterday about America’s “gag rule” and the book of that name by Lewis H. Lapham. This is Lapham’s premise in action — not necessarily repression, but manipulation of the media resulting in its failure to hold the government to account. A malleable press is just another tool of the government, exactly what a free press is not supposed to be.

And the never-ending war is an invitation to endless meaningless photo ops and BS to keep us hypnotized, mesmerized, pacified in our contentment that things are going as promised. Never mind that it is a choreographed illusion. And the media know it.

Dave Neiwert (aka Orcinus) never fails to amaze me. You should make it a daily read. Or twice-daily.

I sure hope not, since Cheney’s on his way to becoming a major liability to the ticket, especially when compared to the sunshiny, lovable Edwards. Just imagine 230 million people watching the two of them side by side debating. Which one will make a better impression and win their hearts? (Here’s a hint: If the answer were Cheney, there’s no way the GOP would be flooding the airwaves and the Internet with non-stop attacks on Edwards.)

One well-known Silicon Valley voice contemplates this issue today and tries to determine which ways the political winds are blowing. I like her humor.

Talk of Republicans changing vice presidents in mid-stream is making the rounds. The boys at Unfogged put their version up yesterday. Everybody agrees that Cheney’s failing health is a good excuse. The FogHeads like Condi, not Colin. But even Deb Saunders – who holds down the moderate to conservative corner at the Chron – thinks Cheney oughta go.

It’s more of a problem now that John Edwards really is John Kerry’s running mate. What’s Cheney going to do? Refuse to debate? Stand there and say “Go Fuck Yourself”? every time Edwards says something about Haliburton? Or the CIA? Or those elusive weapons of mass destruction? Or Neocons? Or out-sourcing? [Emphasis added.]

I can’t really see much advantage to bringing Condi on the ticket, especially after she lost so much credibility during the 9/11 hearings, not to mention the build-up to Iraq (remember her “mushroom-cloud” warning?). Now, if Bush could get McCain on the ticket, then we would have a race to savor. McCain doesn’t cut it with the religious right, however, and I’d like to think he would just say no.

No matter who the potential replacement might be, I think we’re going to see the Dump Cheney movement pick up a lot of momentum. He simply scares people, and with damn good reason.

Update: Wow! It looks like influential Republicans are reading my blog.

Please see Stephen Frost’s horrifying post on what coal miners in China are subject to. You may not believe it. And you certainly won’t forget it.

China is a vast mosaic of a country with many, many different sides to it. This is one of its very ugliest sides.