Singapore’s Business Times takes a long hard look at what seems to be emerging as China’s greatest crisis, the “two Chinas” phenomenon — increasing wealth, often fueled by corruption, and the appalling misery of those at the bottom. It questions how long the current system in China can survive on the present course, and comes to no optimistic conclusions. A thoroughly depressing article, but one that should be read by everyone.

It’s about time.

China has made it illegal to buy and sell blood in an effort to stem the country’s growing AIDS epidemic, the first time the disease has been targeted in a law, state-run media reported Monday.

The legislature’s Standing Committee passed the law, which also requires the government to guarantee funds for infectious disease prevention, during a weekend meeting, the China Daily said. The smaller, Communist party-controlled body handles law-making when the National People’s Congress, the full legislature, is not in session.

The new ruling mandates that governments at various levels should strengthen prevention and control of the disease, the newspaper reported, “the first time that AIDS is specifically targeted in the law.”

The report did not provide any specifics on how that will be done.

Blood selling was the major factor in China’s initial wave of AIDS and still play a large part in the tragedy. It probably should have been banned 20 years ago.

No time to comment, but article speaks for itself.

Sexual frustration has driven a mild-mannered chimpanzee to take up smoking and spitting, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

Feili, 13, has turned from a “gentle girl” into a “shrew”, said Liu Bing, the director of her zoo in Zhengzhou, central Henan province.

Mr Liu said Feili’s partner at the zoo was 28 years her senior, and was unable “to meet her sexual demands”.

Feili was not addicted to nicotine, he said, but was just imitating tourists.

However, she does appear to be quite keen on smoking – and has been known to resort to desperate measures to get what she wants.

Xinhua reported that Feili became excited when she saw a visitor light up a cigarette, and grew impatient when they showed no sign of giving it to her.

It quoted one boy visiting the zoo as saying: “Just now a tourist threw a cigarette butt to just outside the cage – she tried to get the butt with a stick.”

For those of you who were away this weekend and missed the big news — the fact that bush used his family’s political clout to get into the ANG has been verified by no one less than the former Lt. Governor of Texas Ben Barnes. You can hear him tell the sad story for yourself. But then, most of us knew this all along, no? It didn’t require a PhD to understand how Junior skipped over a 100,000-man waiting list to win his much coveted place in the ANG. Nor does one need to be a rocket scientist to see that bush has been lying his ass off about this subject for years and years. (“I just walked in, and they had this available spot for a pilot….”)

Go here for many more. I sure wish I was there to watch and report back.

Speaking of the Olympics…. In 2001, while I was living in Hong Kong, I interviewed China’s Olympic medal-winning ice skating star, Chen Lu. I remembered it as I was reading today about China and the Olympics, and thought it might be worth posting on my blog. Here it is, in full.
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The “Iron Butterfly” is how the local Hong Kong media refer to the magnificent Chen Lu, who at 24 is China’s greatest and best-loved skater and winner of two Olympics bronze medals. “When I skate,” she says, “I always imagine myself as a butterfly flapping my wings happily.”

I would be surprised if anyone meeting Chen Lu for the first time didn’t have the same initial impression I did: this woman is astonishingly beautiful. It’s not only her long flowing hair and sculpted features and high regal cheekbones. She simply radiates beauty and charisma. It’s certainly a feminine beauty, but it’s a bit of a paradox: while her looks are soft and delicate, she also emanates strength, vitality, determination, even power. In other words, this is a tough lady, one you do not want to mess with.

We met at one of Hong Kong’s two ice skating rinks, both owned and operated by the illustrious Ted Wilson, a professional coach and another celebrity in the world of figure skating. I felt very privileged to be in the presence of Asia’s best-known ice-skating legend.

Chen Lu first won the bronze medal at the 1994 Olympics when she was only 18. But life wasn’t easy for her after that. She fractured her right foot only a few months later, and went through a long period of pain and heartbreak as she battled to overcome the injury.

The miracle of her career and her greatest personal triumph was in 1998, when she again won the Olympics bronze medal. “The year before that, she cam in 25th in the world,” Ted Wilson interjected. “Then in 1998, after everyone thought she was finished, she came in 3rd in the Olympics.” Chen Lu agrees that it was the proudest moment of her life.

I asked the Iron Butterfly to tell me about how she first discovered she could skate.

“I started skating when I was very young, four years old. My family never pressured me. In my hometown it’s very cold, and during the wintertime everybody went out skating. My father was on a national hockey team and later on he became a hockey coach. So it was really kind of natural that I skated. I never felt I was being forced to skate, I loved it. And when I was young I loved to dance. Whenever I heard music playing as a little girl I just started dancing, and my father told me that skating was a good sport and that I should try it because I loved dancing and I was very pretty. So I started skating, and it just happened – I couldn’t stop.”

But skating for fun and skating for a living are two different things. Once she decided to be a skater, the training regimen as practiced in Mainland China is difficult, even brutal.

“Training in China is very different than in the US,” Chen Lu explained. “The skaters move away from their families and live with their team. We had to live in a dormitory year after year and we couldn’t see our parents very much. And there were so many pressures from the coaches, and from the government – it is not easy. It’s totally different from in the United States.”

Of course, being an athlete means you’re limited to a set number of years when you can be among the best. Chen Lu is philosophical about having to retire from the Olympics team after 1998.

“Whatever you do, especially if you’re an athlete, you only have a certain number of years when you can be on top, and you can’t be winning all the time, you can’t keep going up. So if you get there and you get to the top, there comes a time when you decide you have to do other things, like becoming a professional skater. After the 1998 Olympics, that’s what I decided to do.”

Now, spending most of her time in the United States, Chen Lu performs in professional competitions, teaches and travels. Moving from the East to the West was a challenge for her, and it took her many months to adapt to the strange ways of the Westerners.

“There were so many things that were different when I first moved,” Chen Lu said. “One thing that was really different was the food. I remember when for the first time I was in America, and I saw people eating salad, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t eat that – the vegetables haven’t been cooked. You want me to eat that? No way!’ It was things like that that were hard for me to get used to. Then, I saw people eating steak. I just couldn’t believe it. How could they eat such big, huge pieces of beef? It seemed so different. But now, I’ve got used to it and it’s just fine.”

Chen Lu now lives in Scottsdale Arizona. Two years ago she wrote a book about her skating experiences, Butterfly on Ice, chronicling her rise to international stardom.

Chinese Olympic medal winners express tremendous gratitude for their victories — and it’s the CCP they thank the most.

“I owe my Olympic gold medal to my parents, my coach and, above all, to the wise leadership of the Republican Party and President Bush.” Can anybody imagine such a remark from an American athlete speaking to Fox News Network? Of course not. Not even the irreverent, wise-cracking talk show host Jay Leno has such a fertile imagination.

But when it comes to Chinese athletes, this extravagant tribute to the political leadership of a country is anything but fictional in the 28th Olympic Games now under way in Athens. The minute a young Chinese girl bagged the gold medal in the women’s table-tennis singles final on Sunday, a Beijing TV network reporter stuck a microphone under the nose of her parents. The father, without batting an eye, told the audience that his good daughter was a good Communist Party member and her success was a tribute to the party organization. We can only imagine the hyperbolic tributes, straining credulity, when Beijing hosts the 2008 Summer Olympics.

The article looks at the huge role the CCP plays in the lives of these athletes, before the games and after.

I once had the good luck of interviewing a famous Chinese athlete a few years ago, and after my conversation with her, I realized just how close a relationship China’s government has with its Olympic stars. Hopefully I’ll find time to post about that later tonight.

For an enthusiast like me, the decline of classical music in America is nothing less than tragic. Cities can’t afford to pay for symphony orchestras, classical music radio stations are shutting down, and ticket sales for classical concerts are painfully low except when you have a superstar like Pavarotti or Joshua Bell.

Is it possible that classical record sales and performances will be boosted by (of all the unlikely places) China? It just might happen, and I sure hope the author’s onto something.

In many ways, classical music can be compared to baseball. The audiences for both are static and perhaps even decreasing in the United States, yet in other places, especially Asia, interest in these pursuits is spreading like Starbucks franchises.

In the June issue of BBC Music Magazine, Richard Morrison calls China’s eagerness for classical music the biggest opportunity to widen the appreciation of classical music in our lifetimes.

And it comes with all kinds of beneficial side effects. He sees Chinese tours as a panacea for the economic ills of major Western orchestras. And the potential cross-pollination of classical with traditional Chinese music offers all kinds of exciting creative possibilities.

I was impressed with the number of concerts in Beijing, as well as CCTV-9’s not infrequent classical concerts. (They’re sure better than Hong Kong in this regard.) Something has to keep the classical music industry afloat, and if China is the solution I’ll be delighted. Hope can sometimes be found in the most unlikely places.

Not that we didn’t know it all along, but at least it’s now on the record, demolishing the “few bad apples” nonsense the White House was hoping would save its neck.

A U.S. soldier expected to plead guilty to charges of abusing Iraqi prisoners told a German magazine he deeply regretted his actions but said the abuses were encouraged by military intelligence services….

Frederick, a prison official in civilian life, said he had received no special training in treating military prisoners and was encouraged by intelligence officers to break prisoners down for interrogation, by any means.

“The secret service set no limits at all. It was about concrete results and they weren’t interested how they were achieved,” he said, adding that many more people should be called to account for the abuses in Abu Ghraib.

“There are definitely more people responsible for what occurred in Abu Ghraib, and many of them have not been charged.”

We all now the scenario. The little people on the ground will be put in jail, and the General Sanchez’s and other higher-ups will receive a minor scolding. It’s the American Way, especially in an administration where, if you are loyal to the president, you can do just about anything and not be held to account. This was underscored to the point of parody right after Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate that Abu Ghraib occurred under his watch and he had to take responsibility. Instead of saying, “You’re fired,” bush reacted by saying he was doing “a fabulous job” and calling him “the greatest secretary of defence” the nation had ever seen.

Funny, how Abu Ghraib seems like such an old and distant story now. Just like all the stories about Iraq and Afghhanistan — we’ve reached our threshold, and we can’t be upset about them any more. We just suffered a true defeat in Najaf (disguised as a victory) and are now fighting extended battles in and around Fallujah and Baghdad, but it seems surreal and even boring. We just don’t want to hear about it. And the media, by focusing relentlessly on the stuff that really matters, like Kerry’s medals of 34 years ago, helps keep the horrors of our failed wars deep in the background.

Of course, the circus that’s about to open in NYC will push the war and its miseries even further off the front pages. 14,000 Iraqis have been killed so far, and nearly 1,000 US service people, and things today look worse than ever.

Brian over at Volunatrily in China has an excellent post describing why China’s top man hasn’t been back to his home village in some 26 years. Very perceptive.