…when I have so many new posts today? I worry that the open thread will keep readers from commenting on my lovingly crafted posts.

Let’s consider this an open thread where you can comment as much as you’d like about whatever yuou’d like – but don’t ignore those spectacular new posts! Thanks everyone.

Head over to China Digital Times and read this devastating piece by former Hong Kong investor Sin-ming Shaw, now a visiting scholar at Columbia University. He doesn’t hold his punches.

Should Chairman Mao’s huge portrait still hang above the front gate of Tiananmen Square? Should China’s ruling party still call itself Communist?

These are not idle questions. Unless and until China’s leaders answer both questions with a simple “No” they will continue to have blood on their hands and a tainted legitimacy. Many Chinese do not accept communist rule precisely because the Communist Party denies its past and remains unapologetic about its cruelty.

This is why the majority of Taiwan’s people want independence, and even deny that they are Chinese. The Chinese Communists insist that being Chinese means accepting the political reality of a sole Communist sovereign. Indeed, many Taiwanese think that, if being Chinese means accepting all that goes under the name of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party, they will gladly deny their “Chineseness,” self-abnegation being preferable to accepting any part in that shame.

Similarly, while a recent poll found that 70% of Hong Kong’s people are proud of being ethnic Chinese, a similar percentage are ashamed of the conduct of the mainland government. Their message to the government in Beijing is this: you cannot take away our ethnicity but you have soiled our dignity through your barbarism. For Hong Kong, the defining symbol of the Communist government is the killing of students with abandon on June 4, 1989.

And then it gets really critical. One final excerpt (though I hope you’ll read it all):

China’s communist rulers must own up to their history and drop Mao and the communist legacy. The country needs a new constitution – one that enshrines genuine democracy.

China’s people have long been ready for this. Maintaining the false label of communism while reviving capitalism and insisting that Mao, for all his mistakes and crimes, was 70% “correct” is the bedrock of the moral corruption that afflicts China today. It is as if the Nationalist Socialist German Workers Party [The Nazi’s] were still in power, with its current leaders claiming that Hitler was only 30% wrong. China deserves better; it requires better in order to reclaim the glory that was China.

That “70 percent correct argument” makes me sick. It’s a marketing gimmick, the age-old attempt to put lipstick on a pig. When a pig is as hideous and smelly as this, nothing you do can cover it up. Time to take those ridiculous portraits down and put them where they belong, on the bottom of an accommodating bird cage.

I read something like this, and I have to wonder:

A 12-year-old girl who was abducted and beaten by men trying to force her into a marriage was found being guarded by three lions who apparently had chased off her captors, a policeman said Tuesday.

This is an amazing article. Right out of the Bible.

Yet another Chinese citizen who cares passionately about free speech. I admire this fellow’s courage and creativity, though I suspect his logical and commonsensical plea will fall upon stone-deaf ears. From the unlinkable South China Morning Post:

Writer uses freedom of speech defence in subversion trial

Chinese dissident writer Zhang Lin pleaded innocent to charges of subversion on Tuesday, saying his internet postings should be protected by his right to freedom of speech.

“The state’s evidence in the case was based on six articles that Zhang Lin wrote and one interview he gave to the press,” his lawyer Mo Shaoping said

The case is a matter of freedom of speech. Zhang Lin has the right to air his own views and it doesn’t matter if people agree with him or not, this cannot be considered a crime.”

Zhang was tried at the intermediate court in his home town of Bengbu city in the central province of Anhui. The court refused to say when a verdict would be reached.

Mo said one article cited as evidence of subversive writing included the lyrics to a Chinese punk song, which said: “The Yellow River should run dry, this society should collapse, this system should be destroyed, this race should become extinct, this country should perish.”

“Zhang Lin did not write this song, it was a song written by another person, but quoted in Zhang Lin’s essay,” Mo said.

The prosecution maintained that Zhang’s internet essays “damaged national unity, sovereignty and territorial integrity, spread falsehoods, disturbed social order and damaged social stability.”

…The New York-based Human Rights in China said Zhang was facing possible life imprisonment and called for his immediate release, as did the Paris-based media watchdog Reporters Without Borders.

More than 60 “cyber-dissidents” are currently held in Chinese jails for posting their views on the internet, while over 40 Chinese journalists are also serving prison sentences, the groups said.

It’s an odd thing, the way we’re all stunned to read that someone is actually turning to a judge in China with a totally straight face and asking that he uphold the nation’s constitution. It seems like such a bizarre and foolhardy thing to do.

Update: Link can be found here.

I’ve gotten some emails saying that Asiapundit, Glutter and some other typepad sites were unavailable in China. Can anyone verify? Thanks.

Here’s an update that is bound to put a dent in Chen’s credibility.

SERIOUS doubts have been cast on one of the key claims renegade Chinese diplomat Chen Yonglin used to justify his attempted defection to Australia.

Mr Chen accused Beijing of mounting a kidnapping operation on Australian soil to take hostage the student son of a fugitive Chinese politician to coerce his return home to face justice.

But yesterday he backed away from the claims when confronted by new evidence. “I said that in fear, and I don’t want to talk about it again,” he told The Weekend Australian.

The runaway diplomat had earlier told The Australian through a minder, Jin Chin, that the student, Lan Meng, was kidnapped by Chinese agents in Sydney, “taken by fishing boat to a Chinese cargo ship on the high seas”, then held hostage in China to force his father to give himself up.

The father, Lan Fu, returned to China from Australia in February 2000. In November that year he was sentenced to death for taking bribes in China’s biggest ever corruption scandal, a $US6billion smuggling racket centred on the southern port of Xiamen where Mr Lan was a deputy mayor.

But Lan Fu’s lawyer, Zhu Yongping, emphatically denied the kidnap story this week, insisting his client had given himself up voluntarily.

I won’t pretend to know what to make of this. But it won’t help win Chen any additional sympathy. I don’t see him as a traitor, but he’s left himself wide open to charges of being a liar.

Some stories are too sickening to believe. Your gut instinct is to tell yourself it couldn’t have happened. This is one of those stories, so horrific it made it to the front page of today’s New York Times.

The teacher always sent a girl to buy his cigarettes. He left the class unsupervised and waited in his office. When the girl returned to class with flushed cheeks and tousled hair, the other students said nothing.

For nearly three months the teacher, Li Guang, raped 26 fourth- and fifth-grade girls in this rural village, parents and court officials say. Some girls were raped more than once as Mr. Li attacked them in a daily rotation. He was found out when a 14year-old refused to go to school for fear that the next morning would be her “turn.” She did not want to be raped a third time.

“School is where our children learn,” said Cheng Junyin, the mother of the 14-year-old. “We thought it was the safest place for them.”

It is the sort of horrific case that in many countries would be a national scandal but in China has disappeared into the muffled silence of state censorship. That silence matches the silence at the heart of the case: the fact that students considered a teacher so powerful that they did not dare speak out.

Indeed, even as the conventions of Chinese society are being shaken by the tumult of modernization, the Confucian reverence of teachers remains strong, particularly in isolated areas like this farming village in Gansu Province in western China. Parents grant teachers carte blanche, some even condoning beatings, while students are trained to honor and obey teachers, never challenge them.

“The absolute authority of teachers in schools is one of the cultural reasons that teachers are so fearless in doing what they want,” said Yang Dongping, a leading expert on China’s education system.

That’s just the beginning. Read about the ruined lives this teacher left behind, how his parents tried to hush it up and how this sort of thing happens all over the country. I don’t believe in the death penalty, but if I were one of the parents and found myself with a gun in my hand alone in a room with this teacher, I’d have a hard time keeping my finger from pulling the trigger.

I may have to set up a special paypal donation link; it sounds like these local Party officials need our help.

Chinese officials ran up a bill at a rural restaurant so large it will take the cash-strapped local government 36 years to pay it off, the Beijing Evening News reported on Monday.

Over four years of frequenting the restaurant in northern Shaanxi province, local officials had paid only a tenth of their $24,000 total tab, the paper said.

“The town government can only pay ($604) a year and they owe ($21,749), so it will take 36 years to pay back — that’s a lifetime,” Wei Zhongqin, the owner of the now bankrupt restaurant, was quoted as saying.

It is common for a rural town in China to be flat broke.

The paper did not say why Wei had let the customers run up such a large bill or why the town was expected to pay for them.

Imagine that, a government official expecting the people he represents to pay his bills. A tip to the restaurant owner: Kiss the money goodbye.

Please have a look. It is proof that at least some Chinese bloggers are indeed concerned about freedom of speech — so concerned, that they feel they need to subvert the government and get their blogs hosted overseas to protect themselves.

From their Introduction:

Ever since blog became popular in China, there have been a number of occasions where some blogs were shut down by telecommunications company or internet service providers due to their political speech. These incidents not only brought risks to bloggers themselves but also to blog service providers in China. Many blog service providers had to increase their effort in content filtering. All these brought pressure and helplessness to people who dare to make truthful expressions.

Especially since April 2005, when the law on non-profit website registration became effective, website owners are required to submit their real personal information when they register their websites. The annual registration process as well as hefty penalty for failure in compliance have angered many website owners that use an independent virtual server and domain names.

Therefore, many bloggers in mainland China began to consider moving their blogs outside of China. But because of language barrier, financial, payment and other issues, the cost of moving is rather high and the situation is not optimistic.

It is based on the belief of free speech that we started the Adopt a Chinese blog project. We hope that we and others on the internet who shared the same belief, can share resources and help bloggers who want to freely express themselves and find a safer space for blogging, so that they can continue to blog without retribution.

As a matter of fact, the goal of the program is to help bloggers. The support is not limited to any specific country. It is borderless and global. At least this is what we wish: let people freely express themselves, without the worries that their blog may one day be shutdown.

You can tell me all you want that the Chinese people don’t care about freedom of speech. Obviously some do, or this project wouldn’t exist. Please go read about it.

It’s soothing to say to oneself that Chinese bloggers don’t care about Microsoft’s censorship of its blogging tool Microsoft Spaces. It’s convenient to say the only ones who care are over-reactive Westerners who get on their high horse everytime the issue of CCP censorship arises. Doing this allows one to be content knowing that things are actually okay over there, and the people are delighted with what they’ve got. It reinforces one’s attitude that Westerners “don’t understand China,” and it makes it a bit easier when one has to do business with the devil. They’re not really so bad, only in the eyes of naive Westerners imposing their standards and values on the misunderstood Chinese.

It’s true that Chinese bloggers have made relatively little noise about Microsoft’s accommodation of government censorship. But can you blame them? If I were a mainlander living in Shanghai or Beijing, I’d be extremely reluctant to put up a post on my blog criticizing the CCP for its paranoia over “democracy” and “freedom.” Never forget, many, many others have paid a high price for discussing these topics. And there’s really little reason the Chinese would blog about it — it’s simply more of the same, with absolutely nothing new for them. But it’s big news for America, when one of its premier companies acquieces to the whims of the Party. It was big news for Cisco and Symantec in the past, and now it’s Microsoft’s turn to share the spotlight. So the media noise was predictable and justified.

And all that was simply my way of leading up to the news, which is that Chinese blogger Isaac Mao has a stronger take on the topic than some commenters who shrug it off.

Twenty-eight floors above the traffic-choked streets of China’s most wired city, blogger and tech entrepreneur Isaac Mao sums up his opinion of Microsoft and its treatment of the Chinese bloggers with one word. “Evil,” says Mao. “Internet users know what’s evil and what’s not evil, and MSN Spaces is an evil thing to Chinese bloggers.”

Mao, 33, knows something about the topic. In 2002, he was one of China’s first bloggers, and since then his ideas on harnessing blogs, peer-to-peer and grass-roots technologies to empower the Chinese people have made him a respected voice in the global blogosphere….

In a statement, lead MSN product manager Brooke Richardson said, “MSN abides by the laws, regulations and norms of each country in which it operates. The content posted on member spaces is the responsibility of individuals who are required to abide by MSN’s code of conduct.”

Mao dismisses that statement as disingenuous. The company, he says, is going above and beyond official censorship practices, which deal decisively with speech critical of the ruling communist government, but don’t outright ban words like “freedom.”

“They could try to reach a balance, so the users will understand, but the government won’t try to make trouble for the business,” says Mao. “Instead, they’re just trying to flatter the government.”

Existing Chinese blog-hosting companies strike that balance by policing their members’ blogs for postings that might get the company and its users in trouble: The phrase “China needs democracy,” for example, would set off a red flag. But “democracy” itself is not a dirty word, says Mao. Likewise, text about human rights abuses outside of China is not banned.

The article also includes a look at the Great Firewall and what’s it’s up to nowadays (though that changes from minute to minute).

The firewall was in evidence last week during a late-afternoon visit to a sprawling, smoke-filled internet bar in the Xi Jia Hui district, where an after-school crowd of fashionably dressed young people streamed in to nearly fill the nearly 200-plus PC stations.

Major news sites like CNN.com, MSNBC and Wired.com were freely accessible from the PCs. Google could be reached at first, but the caches were blocked, as was Google News. The BBC’s front page was accessible, but individual stories were not. Anonymizer.com was blocked.

Amnesty International’s website was blocked, suggesting that the Chinese government holds the international human rights group in the same regard as the Bush administration. Human Rights Watch was blocked, along with nine of the top 10 results from a Google search on “China” and “human rights.” After running that search, Google was blocked from the PC for about 10 minutes.

Whatever its effect, the Great Firewall was not a great hindrance to the youthful netizens resting in wide, comfortable chairs, drinking soft drinks and smoking cigarettes. They were all playing video games, ranging from online poker to World of Warcraft, with nary a web browser or RSS reader in sight.

The last paragraph leads me to one last thought – the argument that people in China don’t care about politics and use the Internet mainly to play video games. Anyone who’s been to an Internet cafe in China knows there’s a lot of truth to that. But there are more than 80 million bloggers in China, and according to Isaac Mao they don’t all feel happy about what Microsoft is doing. And obviously many in China care a lot about politics and do want to discuss democracy — in fact, a lot of them comment to this site and do just that.

So I’m not letting Microsoft off the hook yet, and I’m not giving in to the argument that only Westerners care about things like this. As several other have noted here, it’s not like people in China have a place to go to complain if they don’t like their government’s attitude toward democracy and freedom. Let me correct myself; there is a place they can go. It’s called jail.