Some guidebooks warned that this is a tourist trap and kind of “cheesy.” I totally disagree, and my trip to the Stone Forest was one of the most enchanting experiences of my last trip to China.

I don’t know if this story is true. I was directed to this post, where the blogger translates a story she saw in Taiwan’s China Times. Here’s her translation:

Cellphone messages has become a “fifth media” that is separate from the internet in china, poking a hole through the Chinese government’s information shield. There was even a widely disseminated text that ridiculed Chinese leaders from Mao to Hu Jin Tao. The most recent example came in April 9, where demonstrators in Peking organized through cell-phone messages that spread from one to tens and from tens to hundreds. In the end, a crowd of several tens of thousands were gathered. In this instance the authoristy took no action, but in the long run, this state of affairs is unacceptable. Because they loath any non-forseeable occurances, that is, the people coming together under their very eyes while they are completely ignorant of the situation. Maybe this mentality stems from the Falun Gong demonstrations in Zongnanhai, which lead to the blanket oppression of the Falun Gong in China.

Sure enough. A week later, April 16, when Shanghai tried to copy Beijing’s example, the authority cracked down. A 25 year old white collar worker, Tang Ye (汤晔), made a summary of information already available on the internet about the anti-Japanese demonstrations, including route, time, other relevant facts, and broadcasted this summary through his cellphone, resulting in his arrest under “disruption of social order” charges.

According to information from Chinese media sources in early May, this text message “resulted in serious consequences”. Tong ye was sentenced to jail for five years. For a young white collar worker, five years time does not mean five years. It could thow Tong off course for the rest of his life. And all because of a cellphone text message. China’s “Big Brothers” came down hard on Tong as a show of authority, to bring text messages under their sphere of influence. To tell the people of China, neither the net nor the cell-phone can be considered as no-man’s-lands — they are still under the watchful eye of Big Brother.

I can’t find any confirmation in other media — does anyone know anything about it? I find it hard to believe, but I didn’t think the China Times made up stories….

Update: According to Xinhua, Tang Ye was an organizer of the Shanghai demonstrations and he wrote a 46-page manual telling people where to go and what to do. It appears he was sentenced to five year in prison yesterday.

Sometimes I think I’ve got serious problems. Then I read an article like this and realize just how easy my life is.

When Young Zheng’s lawyer initially failed to prevent his deportation back to China, the 17-year-old immigrant took matters into his hands.

Handcuffed and escorted by U.S. immigration officers to a plane bound for China early this year, the teen momentarily escaped and slammed his head into an airport wall so hard that he blacked out and had to be hospitalized. So intense is his fear of returning to face his smugglers in China that Zheng says he is willing to do anything to stay here.

“They will kill me if I go back,” he said in a brief telephone interview Tuesday from a juvenile detention center where he is being held in the Houston area. Zheng said both his uncle in the Midwest and his father back in China have received threatening phone calls from his smugglers demanding more than $50,000 for bringing him into the United States.

Zheng is from Fujian province, whose snakeheads achieved international fame last year with the utterly sickening story of the cockle pickers who drowned in the UK. His story is complex and full of intrigue and betrayal at the hands of the snakeheads. It’s almost impossible not to feel sympathy for the desperate teen.

The government’s response is, in essence, “Too bad.”

“(Zheng’s) claim that smugglers will harm him because of his inability to repay them does not meet the high standard of establishing a likelihood that he would be tortured by the Chinese government,” argued Jeffrey T. Bubier, assistant chief counsel to the Department of Homeland Security in Philadelphia, in a brief filed Tuesday.

So we know he’s going to be killed if he goes back, but since it’s snakeheads doing the killing and not the government, we’re okay with it. I realize we can’t let every Chinese immigrant into the country. But I’ll feel ashamed if send this 17-year-old to his doom.

Update: More here, if youy’re not depressed enough already:

Young Zheng’s first offense was flying into the United States illegally as a 14-year-old boy with phony papers supplied by Chinese human smugglers known as snakeheads.

But perhaps his biggest blunder, his lawyers say, was complying with immigration rules after he was apprehended and released, rather than fleeing and working to begin paying the $60,000 fee that his father in China had agreed to with the smugglers. Instead, he went to school and became a top student.

He also had the misfortune, his lawyers say, of believing his Department of Homeland Security control officers when they told him he could stop reporting monthly and show up every three months instead. When he checked in three months later, he was arrested and scheduled for deportation for failing to appear earlier, they said.

It’s turned out to be quite a week for Chinese defectors in Australia. This is the second bombshell in seven days, and as ex-spy Hao Fengjun opens the kimono to reveal some very dark secrets, the Chinese intelligence chiefs must be totally apopletic.

Amid secret passwords, mysterious faxes and last-minute arrangements to protect him from the alleged Chinese spy network he once worked for, the asylum seeker Hao Fengjun emerged from hiding to talk of the Secret Force.

This force, the 32-year-old Chinese police intelligence analyst says, runs spies in Australia and other Western countries.

Addressing media in Melbourne yesterday, Mr Hao – the second Chinese security official to defect in less than a week – said there were three levels of agents working for the Secret Force: the professional spies, who graduated from police college and were paid to travel overseas to collect intelligence “in all areas”; “working relationship” agents, who acted as businessmen and targeted foreign business groups; and “friends”, who infiltrated foreign countries and became friendly with both Chinese and Westerners.

While the Secret Force’s main job was to gather political and military information, it also closely monitored Falun Gong and other religious or Chinese democracy groups. Mr Hao knows all this because he worked for the “610 Office” in the National Security Bureau in the northern Chinese city of Tianjin. His job, he said, was to collate and analyse intelligence reports sent back from Australia, the US, Canada and New Zealand about Falun Gong and other groups.

Hao and his fiancee are being cared for by local FLG members in Melbourne (the FLG figures prominently in this story). He gave a television interview today with his back to the camera.

Mr Hao said he decided to flee China after being detained for 20 days for making a critical comment about his government’s treatment of Falun Gong, including the torture of its leaders. He said he feared for his seven-year-old son from a former marriage.

He decided to go public after Chen Yonglin went to the media at the weekend with claims that 1000 Chinese agents are working in Australia. Mr Chen, who worked at the Chinese consulate in Sydney, is also seeking asylum.

Mr Hao said he did not feel safe in Australia because of the Secret Force’s presence. He did know how many of the force’s spies were in country, but he supported Mr Chen’s claims.

Mr Chen’s case is gathering support, with Labor yesterday joining the Greens’ call to give him asylum. “There is a strong prima facie case that Chen Yonglin should now be granted an appropriate protection visa,” Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman, Kevin Rudd, said….

At the end of the press conference, Mr Hao said he wanted to make an announcement. He had joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1991, but as of yesterday he was no longer a member. He was finished with communism.

“I will never go back to China because I know what waits for me,” he said.

Definitely a bad week for China’s image as the entire world wonders why well-paid, successful young people would flee in dread, risking life and family, from the world’s most up-and-coming country. Trouble in paradise?

Horse’s Mouth has a good post on the idiocies of the new & improved Patriot Act, which flagrantly violates our fourth amendment rights. Sample:

Wake the fuck up people!

How can we talk about fighting for freedom in other countries when we sit idly by and hand it over in our own? This isn’t a right or left wing issue either, they’re non-partisan when it comes to spending your money or trampling on your rights and we can’t put all the blame on our politicians because unlike other countries such as China, we are the ones directly responsible for putting them into office.

Maybe one day the Chinese people will actually be the ones rallying to bring freedom back to America.

To me, the supreme irony is how they wrap crap like this around a bill called the Patriot Act, validating George Orwell’s vision of the perversion and propagandization of the language. When I read about the proposed “Freedom Tower,” I literally cringe. Are we crazy? Why not just call it the Ministry of Love and get on with it?

More and more emails from China about my site being blocked or excruciatingly slow to load, with comments unavailable. If you cannot comment, please send me an email and I will post it for you. Maybe you should cc Hu Jintao and tell him he’s being an ass.

If you do email me a comment, I may not get to it until tomorrow morning, Arizona time. I’m exhausted.

A reader travelled froim China to HK to participate, and I just want to share his observations.

i traveled with some local friends, and we were all greatly moved by the ceremony and the kindheartedness of those in attendance. it started with a film against a song “history stained with blood”, that covered the developments from the CR to the “incident.” my friends and i are not the type of people who cry very often, but seeing the idealism contrasted with images of the stiff and crueld demeanor of a certain official (LP), set against the music, managed to bring tears to everyone’s eyes. the song ended with a broadcast of a certain leader on his visit to India talking about Japan stating that only a country that faces history can play a greater role on the international stage.from that point on, the entire theme of the night was the importance of facing history honestly, including all history.

this was followed by a few speeches, most prominently a speech by DZL, a leader of a group of mothers that i am sure you know about. after that, it started raining off and on as we sang a few songs.sitting there, holding candles, i felt a real sense of brotherhood, and had a warm feeling in my heart that i have not had in my many years here in shanghai. people can be so rude and abrasive and uncaring, it is really depressing. i think that if such activities were allowed here, people would be much kinder and more caring towards their fellow man.

that was our feeling that night. so i hope that you would encourage all chinese speakers to visit this activity in the coming years. it is a truly eye-opening experience for all.

Thanks for that.

In terms of sheer waste (time, money, resources), stupidity and balant illogic, nothing quite compares to our airport security system, which, as we add more and more billions of dollars to it, only proves itself increasingly ineffective. Christopher Hitchens savages the idiotic mess in a tragi-comic column.

What we are looking at, then, is a hugely costly and oppressive system that is designed to maintain the illusion of safety and the delusion that the state is protecting its citizens. The main beneficiaries seem to be the pilferers employed by this vast bureaucracy—we have had several recent reports about the steep increase in items stolen from luggage. And that is petty theft that takes place off-stage. What amazes me is the willingness of Americans to submit to confiscation at the point of search. Every day, people are relieved of private property in broad daylight, with the sole net result that they wouldn’t have even a nail file with which to protect themselves if (or rather when) the next hijacking occurs.

Last month, cigarette lighters were added to the confiscation list. There’s probably some half-baked “shoe-bomber” justification for this, but I hear that at Boise airport in Idaho there’s now a lighter bin on the way out of the airport, like the penny tray in some shops, that allows you to pick one up. Give one; take one—it all helps to pass the time until the next disaster, which collective punishment of the law-abiding is doing nothing to prevent.

Every time I go to the airport I am in awe of the needless lines and multiple ID checks, the interrogation of nuns in wheelchairs and aged Japanese businessmen randomly selected for searches…. If any of it really helped protect us from terrorists I’d be more sympathetic, but as Homeland Security’s own report tells us, we’re hardly any safer than we were before 9/11 and the determined terrorist can still get weapons onto planes.

One more symptom of the idiotic Age of Bush, where fat-cat security companies reap an inexcusable windfall while we little people waiting on the endless lines bear all the misery. And for absolutely no reason.

UPDATE: Thank God we’re pouring all this money into security to protect ourselves from danger. It’s working like a charm.

On April 25, Gregory Despres arrived at the U.S.-Canadian border crossing at Calais, Maine, carrying a homemade sword, a hatchet, a knife, brass knuckles and a chain saw stained with what appeared to be blood. U.S. customs agents confiscated the weapons and fingerprinted Despres. Then they let him into the United States.

The following day, a gruesome scene was discovered in Despres’ hometown of Minto, New Brunswick: The decapitated body of a 74-year-old country musician named Frederick Fulton was found on Fulton’s kitchen floor. His head was in a pillowcase under a kitchen table. His common-law wife was discovered stabbed to death in a bedroom.

Despres, 22, immediately became a suspect because of a history of violence between him and his neighbors, and he was arrested April 27 after police in Massachusetts saw him wandering down a highway in a sweat shirt with red and brown stains. He is now in jail in Massachusetts on murder charges, awaiting an extradition hearing next month.

We don’t need to spend any more money. Not one more penny. All we need is some fucking common sense.

[Update: I am playing with some keywords here because this post won’t open for my readers in China. Please tell me if this helps!]

J*ng Ch@ng, author of the popular book Wild Swans (which I reviewed here two years ago) has written a book with her husband claiming that Mao was right up there with Hitler and Stalin as one of the most toxic, mass-murdering menaces ever to grace the 20th century. What a surprise.

The article outlines many of Mao’s sins, which I won’t rehash here; most of us know them all too well. I’ll just drop in a few observations the article makes about the Great Helmsman:

Mao had none of the skills usually associated with a successful revolutionary leader. He was no orator and he lacked either idealism or a clear ideology. He was not even a particularly good organiser. But he was driven by a personal lust for power. He came to dominate his colleagues through a mixture of blackmail and terror. And he seems to have enjoyed every minute of it. Indeed what he learned from his witnessing of a peasant uprising in his home province of Hunan in 1927 was that he derived a sadistic pleasure from seeing people put to death in horrible ways and generally being terrified. During the Cultural Revolution he watched films of the violence and of colleagues being tortured.

The use of terror typified Mao’s rule. Although he had his equivalent of the KGB, Mao’s distinctive form of terror was to get people to use it against each other. This was the model that he perfected in Yenan, when everybody was coerced into the exercise of criticism and self-criticism by which they were forced to confess and implicate each other in terrible “wrongs”. It was a method that was then extended to the whole of China, as people were confined to their work units in the cities and their villages in the countryside.

A very popular argument among CCP sympathizers is that Mao shouldn’t be compared to Hitler and Stalin because they intentionally butchered their victims in acts of genocide, whilst Mao killed his kind of accidentally, through famines brought on by his communal policies and what have you. In other words, his heart was in the right place, even if his actions killed 30 million during the Great Leap Backward.

I reject this argument and put the good Chairman high up on the list for sheer sadism, gleeful mass murder, egomania, complete disregard for the lives of others and generally being a total shit. Plenty of his victims were slaughtered intentionally; they didn’t all starve to death. (Ask Liu Shaoqi and countless others.) And his portait still looms godlike over Tiananmen Square and everywhere else in China, the land he raped and plundered and nearly destroyed.

I’d read this book if I weren’t already too depressed by its subject matter. Maybe next year; I can only read so much about Mao before I’m driven to despair.

Thanks to the reader who sent me this link a few days ago.

That’s the somewhat dramatic headline of a new article on China’s mandatory website registration policy.

The international media organisation Reporters Without Borders voiced alarm yesterday at the Chinese government’s announced intention to close down all China-based websites and blogs that are not officially registered.

The plan is all the more worrying, the group said, as the Chinese government has also revealed that it has a new system for monitoring sites in real time and spotting those that fail to comply.

“The Chinese authorities use this type of announcement above all to intimidate website operators and bloggers,” the press freedom organisation said. “The authorities also hope to push the most outspoken online sites to migrate abroad where they will become inaccessible to those inside China because of the Chinese filtering systems.”

Reporters Without Borders added: “Those who continue to publish under their real names on sites hosted in China will either have to avoid political subjects or just relay the Communist Party’s propaganda. This decision will enable those in power to control online news and information much more effectively.”

They’re doing all they can to make the censorship bubble airtight. If I were a registered blogger in China (blogging in Chinese) I’d think very carefully about every syllable and punctuation mark I wrote. Keep the reforms coming.