For linking to my post on “Freedom” being banned in China. I really appreciate it!

If you’re in China and can’t search for “freedom,” Kevin wants to hear about it.

This is the most biting commentary I’ve seen yet on just how bad the protests were for China, even if they felt good at the time.

When China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, met with the press in India last month, the event was supposed to be a crowning moment for this country’s well-oiled diplomatic machine, which has lately been racking up almost as many plaudits as its booming economy….

The only thing wrong with this picture is that while Wen was wowing his Indian hosts, the streets of this country were given over to unusual unrest: riotous demonstrations against Japan that were at the very least officially tolerated. International coverage of these events smothered the prime minister’s upbeat message in India, forcing him to talk about Japan, and the protests, which sometimes turned violent. The protests have colored news about China’s relations with the world, and indeed the way this country is ruled, in the weeks since.

….

All in all, the story line of a Communist Party leadership that is forced to play along with populist nationalism may be more worrisome than its alternative, for it is a picture not of a serenely confident new contender for superpower status, but of a highly insecure leadership, so worried about its own hold on legitimacy that it sided – at least initially – with a street mob attacking a foreign diplomatic installation rather than with near universally accepted notions of law and order.

What unites the two views, though are their common threads of emotionalism and nationalism, which few of China’s neighbors and perhaps even countries beyond are likely to judge a reassuring concoction for a 21st century superpower.

Unfortunately, no matter how “right” the Chinese were in their indignation, the image they were presenting to the outside world was a harmful one — harmful only to themselves. It overshadows the good news this week of potentially improved relations with Taiwan (in no way a done deal) and will be much discussed for months, maybe years to come.

I wrote once before about UFOs in China, but I had no idea so many Chinese were hobnobbing with extraterrestrials until I read this.

Meng Zhaoguo, a rural worker from northeast China’s Wuchang city, says he was 29 years old when he broke his marital vows for the first and only time — with a female extraterrestrial of unusually robust build.

“She was three meters (10 feet) tall and had six fingers, but otherwise she looked completely like a human,” he says of his close encounter with an alien species. “I told my wife all about it afterwards. She wasn’t too angry.”

While few Chinese claim to have managed to get quite as intimate with an extraterrestrial as Meng, a growing number of people in the world’s most populous nation believe in unidentified flying objects, or UFOs.

Officially registered UFO associations in China have about 50,000 members, but some estimate the actual number of Chinese interested in the subject is probably in the tens of millions.

Sun Shili is one of the most serious enthusiasts, and he knows exactly where he will be the day the extraterrestrials finally make contact with mankind. The 67-year-old retired Beijing professor will be in the 21-member delegation picked by international UFO associations to represent Earth as the first negotiations get underway.

Once a Spanish translator for Mao Zedong during high-level state visits, Sun says language will not be a problem. “We expect to communicate using telepathy,” he says.

In a country that has lost its spiritual bearings as Marxism has given way to materialism, the idea of strange worlds light years away offers a last great hope for many.

Richard McNally, a Harvard psychologist, says he recognizes the pattern from research into Westerners who claim to have been abducted by aliens and who characterized the experience as “spiritually deepening.”

“Our abductees typically describe themselves as ‘spiritual’ individuals for whom organized religion provides scant spiritual nourishment, and the Chinese UFO spotters may very well be like our subjects,” McNally says.

As Sun, the Spanish translator, sits one sunny spring morning in the Chinese capital, he points at the streets outside and explains how many of the people walking by are probably extraterrestrials in human guise.

This long article includes yet more anecdotes of seemingly bright Chinese men calmly describing their alien encounters, and even describes an association at Beijing University dedicated to watching for UFOs. It’s hard to read it without wondering whether these people are literally insane, or whether they know some fantasic secrets that, for some reason, aliens have chosen to share only with Mainland Chinese.

Thanks for this great link, Newley.

From the Poor Man (as is the above photo of Mrs. Malgalang):

I have felt for some time that reading Michelle Malkin’s weblog is a lot like losing your virginity – it’s awkward, never as fun as you imagined it would be, and not something you should ever attempt alone or sober.

“Heh.” The entire post is required reading for those who believe Michelle is a whiny, pouting menace to civilzation.

Interesting post and even more interesting comments. Go join the fun.

Via Danwei.

Check out this enlightening post on the mythologization of the word Laowai, a word the blogger says is almost universally misdefined. (If you speak or read some Chinese the post is especially rewarding, though it’s not necessary.)

ESWN raises a pointed question, inspired by an idiotic report on an extremist anti-China site of how China is murdering anti-Japanese protestors. Here’s the question:

I wondered why does the Chinese-interested blogosphere takes such pleasure in going after the official Chinese media but ignore the lies that appear on the so-called ‘dissident’ websites? This is a subject that no one wants to deal with. This is the “the enemy of my enemy is my friend and I would not want to criticize them, so I’ll pretend that I don’t know enough” syndrome.

I am going to give a short answer to this, as I am at work. I have made a habit of always ignoring these “dissident websites” as they are usually pure nonsense. I thought it was universally understood that Epoch Times, for example, was so rabidly, obsessively anti-CCP that for me to quote from them would make me look like a dupe and a fool. I have never quoted from Taipei Times either, as I find they are so one-sided and devoid of reason or fairness that they cannot be trusted.

So why go after China Daily and not Taipei Times? I can only speak for myself here: From my perspective, everyone with minimal gray matter knows Epoch Times and the like cannot be trusted or looked on as serious news sources. But a lot of people in China look at China Daily as a very serious news source, and many in their forums have swallowed the party BS hook, line and sinker. And these publications have huge influence and readership.

If I ever thought Epoch Times or the dissident Web site to which ESWN allude were having an impact or actually fashioning public opinion I would speak out in a heartbeat. But for now, I see them the same way I see astroturf groups in the US, churning out issue papers a mile a minute, none of them very reasonable or based on fact. They are on the fringe, and I have zero reason to read them, let alone pay them the honor of blogging about them.

China Daily is not on the fringe and is part of my daily reading, as it reflects the mentality of many people in China and is a communications tool of the CCP. So I read it, and when it strikes me supremely outrageous I blog about it (though I haven’t done so at all in recent months).

Update: I just scrolled down past the Chinese part of ESWN’s post and see he rephrases his question:

Do you think any country should allow such lies to be promulgated freely in what appears to be traditional news media? While it is common to say that the eyes of masses are bright as snow and will see through these kinds of lies, is it worth taking risk that some citizens might buy into it? Do you think it is right for some citizens to start believing that anti-Japanese patriotic citizens are being slaughtered by their government? If you believe that the reporting is false, then will you accept that the government is right to ban access to such websites?

The answer is that it’s dead wrong to print such lies. If I came across this type of rubbish, I would strongly condemn it. I don’t accept that the government has the right to ban it since it is false, but in a case like this I can at least understand why they’d want to ban it. But this leads us back to the whole pot/kettle argument: Remember those phony newscasts in 2003 when CCTV interviewd happy tourists going to Guangzhou “now that SARS has been totally eliminated in China”? Blatant lies are no stranger to the Chinese media.

As to whether we want Chinese believing the CCP is murdering anti-Japanese protestors — of course not, there’s a lot of nonsense on the Internet. Hopefully people will be smart enough to separate fact from fantasy, but that’s always a risk with the Internet, by its very nature.

If the CCP or any other censorious government blocked only such fantastical, crazed dissident sites while permitting the BBC and uncensored CNN newscasts, I would be far less bent out of shape over censorship in China. Singapore blocks lots of magazines and censors its movies and would probably even consider blocking a dissident site like this were it directed at Singapore. It would be unfortunate but tolerable. Sadly, China takes such a draconian, take-no-prisoners approach, blocking all blogspot sites, for example, and so many sites of great value and legitimacy. So as it stands, their censorship policy is unacceptable and unjustifiable.

There’s no way for me to know, and I am extremely skeptical (it’s such a broad concept and can apply to so many things, from slavery to abortion rights); but here is what an emailer sent me:

I was using google to find something on freedom for an essay, I tried chinese”zi you” but got a lot of junk results, then I tried “freedom”(english) and got a “The document contains no data” alert (using firefox), I tried searching some other stuff like “a”,”sadfas”,”ijefij” and such and got the alert again (although sometimes it says “the connection was rejected when attempting to contack www.google.com.”), I couldn’t even open up the google home page. After a while (about 20 minutes) everything was fine again (no problem with the gibberish, that is) but got the same problem again when I searched for “freedom” once more.

I tried using an outside proxy server and didn’t encounter any problems with this

Is this BS or are they getting totally crazed about Internet censorship?

I just wrote a huge post all about this excellent article on how Shanghai officials handled and mishandled the anti-Japan demonstrations. This will have to be a slapdash, much-shortened substitution. The piece is exceptionally rational and fair, and I enjoyed its analysis of “the four discourses.”

When Shanghai students and office workers marched into the consular district on April 16, destroying signs and shop windows and shouting “Japanese out of China!” – both they and the Chinese government seemed willing to risk those global commitments for the nationalist cause. A closer look, however, reveals a more moderate politics shaped as much by local concerns as nationalist sentiment.

Within the protest itself, participants voiced four dominant discourses. The loudest voice was a simple patriotism of flag waving and patriotic songs. The second and harshest voice was an unreflective Japan-bashing with little political content; common insults included “Japanese devils” and “Down with Japan.” The third discourse was a political argument against right-wing nationalism in Japan. Many protesters argued that the textbook revision and visits by Japanese government officials to the Yasukuni shrine were grounds for opposing Japan’s membership on the UN Security Council.

A fourth distinctive discourse was a self-consciously moderate internationalism, which was evident in posters praising Germany for its admission of war guilt, and even a willingness to cooperate with Japan. When asked why they opposed Japan, a mixed group of students and young workers strongly disagreed with the phrasing of the question. One replied, “We are not against the Japanese people or against Japan.” Another protester showed a reporter that he was wearing a John Lennon t-shirt. “John Lennon was married to a Japanese,” he said, “so I am not against all Japanese.”

Individuals in the protest slipped between one discourse and the other. These rhetorical switches reveal the tensions within the cultures of nationalism and cosmopolitanism simultaneously present in Shanghai. Intellectually and ethically, the most blatant gap was between the protesters dehumanizing language of “Japanese pigs” and their own stance against “right-wing textbooks” in Japan. More generally, the nationalism displayed by the protesters clashed with their larger claims to internationalism both within and outside the protest. In everyday life, Shanghai youth direct their energy at amassing cosmopolitan cultural capital, including the latest Shiseido cosmetics and Japanese manga. This does not mean they reject modern expressions of Chineseness, but foreign culture makes for greater status in cosmopolitan Shanghai. The demonstration was a rare chance to show a national pride that is usually subordinated to a cosmopolitan but also very local Shanghainese identity.

It’s uncanny how the “four discourses” reflect the types of commenters who’ve written about the protests on this blog, from the moderately nationalistic and rational to the frothing-at-the-mouth jingoist. This is something I expounded on at length with some good examples, and then I accidentally closed the browser window, two hours of work gone in the stroke of a key. (I know, I should always write these long posts in Word, or keep saving them as drafts.) Well, check out the article; it looks at the demonstrations with a wider lens than most. Unfortunately, I can’t recreate the post I zapped. How depressing.

That’s the name of Newsweek’s cover story tomorrow marking a series of articles on China this week. Topics range from preparing for the 2008 Olympics to religious persecution to hot new Chinese movies. There is a huge amount of stuff here, and unfortunately I can’t get to it tonight.