China news is pretty slender today, and I’ve been consumed with clearing our my desk and my cache and saying goodbyes. I left on good terms with everyone and will be doing freelance writing for my former employer starting next week just to pay the bills. It’s definitely an odd feeling, liberating and exciting and totally scary.

I am planning my trip back to Asia, probably in about a month. My target citites are Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. If any of you will be around and want to meet up, just let me know.

Let’s consider this an open thread. (Sorry if my writing lacks its usual wit and sparkle tonight — it’s been one hell of a week.)

Quite a day, what with freedom on the march and Al Qaeda smashed, reeling and on the run. Let’s see if we can put the world into perspective in this open thread.

When I lived in China, the post I wrote that got me the most links was an examination of AIDS, especially the horrors of the Henan province epdidemic, a crime that makes the SARS coverup look insignificant.

For a long time, it was the topic I covered the most. Not so much anymore, because I got numb to it. Back in 2003 there was a huge upsurge of hope when Bill Cinton and Dr. Ho went to Beijing and campaigned to raise AIDS awareness (though the Chinese media declined to cover their press conference, no doubt because more pressing issues loomed, like Hu visiting a factory somewhere).

The hopes soon fizzled as reports showed little actual progress. Yes, there were more public awareness campaigns, which are great, and condoms became more ubiquitous than ever. But it was so little and it was so late, and even now AIDS victims live under an unimaginable stigma.

Henan province remains the epicenter of the catastrophe thanks to the local officals who made the epidemic possible, covered it up and profited from it. There, progress is almost nil.

In a recent meeting with UN officials, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao said on the subject of AIDS that the Chinese government is “determined and capable of curbing the spread of the disease, to ensure the people live a healthy and peaceful life.” But in Henan, the region of China where AIDS exploded, the old habit of secrecy still rules.

With Beijing drastically underreporting the extent of the disease and resisting foreign help to fight it, thousands of infected Chinese are being left to further spread the virus and die unattended. Despite the public revelations of mass infections through contaminated blood, Henan residents continue to practice unprotected sex and send migrant workers to China’s booming coastal region….

What has changed in Henan since 2003? Unfortunately, not enough. Even the number of contaminated peasants remains unknown. The ministry of health in Beijing laughs at Henan’s official tally of 22,000. Dr. Zheng Ke, one of the Chinese doctors with the best field experience in Henan, puts the estimate at 300,000; others speculate the figure is closer to 500,000 or even a million.

Officially, the government has started distributing free antiretrovirals, the treatment that can stop the progress of the disease. The leadership has granted free education for children of AIDS patients and help for their communities. In reality, these treatments have been inadequate; a majority of patients rejected them because of side effects, while others have been trying all kinds of medicine, including experiments from Chinese army research centers. Many have opted against treatment altogether – and anxiously wait for their death. Worse, some were abandoned, like one man I met who was clearly developing the disease and who had been left waiting for a month for the results of his blood test. In dozens of interviews last year, I did not meet a single patient who was correctly treated.

This medical chaos would be enough to justify outside assistance. But Henan authorities are adamant not to allow any outside presence. When I travelled to the AIDS villages last year, I had to arrive at midnight and leave before daybreak to avoid the militias formed to stop journalists and nongovernmental organizations, both Chinese and foreign, from visiting AIDS patients. Chinese NGOs trying to organize orphanages for the thousands of Henan children who have already lost their parents have been violently chased from the province and their institutions closed.

Occasionally we see upbeat success stories but they need to be placed in context. A model city for AIDS patients, while a positive sign, doesn’t really mean much when you are on the verge of becoming the next Africa and the victims are treated worse than lepers.

Books are waiting to be written about what’s happened in Henan province, and it’s got all the makings of a best seller: cover-up and conspiracy, mass infection with a lethal pathogen, corrupt offials profiting from the death they created, and immeasurable human suffering. And if anything there has changed in recent years, it’s only because the situation has become worse.

It reminds me of the Three Minute Hate George Orwell so brilliantly described in 1984, in which citizens watch graphic images of thir “enemies” to inspire them to hate with all their might and support whatever Big Brother asks of them.

From today’s unlinkable SCMP.

WARTIME ATROCITIES DOMINATE EXHIBIT

Anniversary of start of Sino-Japanese conflict marked by sorrow and hope

VIVIAN WU

Beijing yesterday marked the sensitive anniversary of the start of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937 with the opening of a large exhibition about Japanese wartime atrocities.

But echoing the Foreign Ministry’s call for harmonious Sino-Japanese ties, the exhibition had a friendly note, with a huge photograph of President Hu Jintao and Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi shaking hands displayed near its exit.

In a rare show of the importance attached to the anniversary by the central leadership, Politburo Standing Committee member Li Changchun and the head of the Communist Party Publicity Department, Liu Yunshan
, officiated at the opening of the exhibition at the Chinese Museum of the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression, in southwest Beijing.

The ceremony, featuring the strains of a 100-piece military band and the release of hundreds of doves, was held to mark the 68th anniversary of the so-called Marco Polo Bridge incident when Chinese and Japanese troops clashed outside Beijing. The incident was
considered the start of Japan’s all-out invasion of China.

Entitled “Great Victory”, the exhibition displays about 800 photographs and artefacts from the conflict, including black-and-white photos of the Nanking Massacre in which the Japanese killed as many as 300,000 people after the fall in December 1937 of what
was then China’s capital.

It precedes a series of activities to mark China’s victory against the Japanese in the run-up to the 60th anniversary in August.

Addressing about 1,000 soldiers, students and onlookers yesterday, Mr Liu said: “History is a mirror of present-day realities, and also a textbook teeming with philosophical wisdom.

“The Chinese people, who refused to become slaves, rose up in arms and fought hard and tenaciously against Japanese aggressor troops, and won the complete victory against foreign aggression in modern
times.”

The message struck a chord with visitors.

“I was outraged to see the relics …we can never forget history,” said a 60-year-old retiree from Beijing.

A 17-year-old high-school student from Hubei said she was sad that the country had experienced such misery when it was invaded. “As a young Chinese, I must study and work well to contribute to a strong and prosperous nation free from invasion and disgrace.”

Two retired professors from the China Agricultural University took their eight-year-old granddaughter to the bridge early in the morning. “We hope she can learn some moral lessons about remembering the past and trying to be a useful person,” one of the professors said.

Asked to explain the use of a Hu-Koizumi photo as an end note, the museum director said the picture was aimed at educating people about the need to treasure the present peace and call for friendship.

The arrangement is in tune with remarks at a regular briefing in Beijing yesterday by Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao .

“We both have important roles in this region,” Mr Liu said of China and Japan. “So harmony will benefit both and strife will harm both.”

What better way to reduce xenophobia, eliminate the sense of victimhood and quell the thirst for revenge than to highlight ad nauseum the sickening atrocities the Japanese inflicted on the Chinese during the war?

Look, I am a firm believer in remembering and learning. I don’t believe in letting others off the hook for their crimes. But this obsessive need to keep these images fresh and the emotions raw only breeds hatred for a generation of Japanese that had nothing to do with this atrocity.

I mean, as the vistors walk out of this exhibit, do you really believe they’ll walk away with a sense of serenity at the friendship between Hu and Koizumi, or with a sense of furious outrage and a renewed lust for vengeance? I know where I’ll place my money. That photo of Koizumi almost sounds like a bit of parody, a silly piece of window dressing thrown in to make the Three Minute Hate look like a love-in.

If that isn’t the headline of the week, what is? Couldn’t the state-run, state-funded Xinhua find better writers/translators than this?
It only goes downhill after the headline.

Sex ignoramus outnumbers illiterate in China

BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhuanet) — More Chinese are ignorant to sex than to other knowledge, even including those having received high education and experts of other fields, according to Xu Tianming, the president of China Sexology Society.

“In the survey we conducted, not only youngsters, but many grow-ups are sex idiots, which is really dangerous and woeful,” Xu was quoted by Wednesday’s Nanjing Morning Post, a local newspaper in east China’s Jiangsu Province, as saying, at a seminar on sex culture held there.

“Many Chinese are too shy to talk about sex and take it as an ‘evil’ matter, which greatly distorted the society’s objective recognition to sex and shed bad influence to those immaturities,” Xu was quoted as saying.

Both Chinese culture and western’s have a tradition to treat sex as a “forbidden” thing, and many sex related words are largely adopted as the most vicious attacking words, Xu said, all these will prevent younger generations from having a healthy sex knowledge and sex life in future.

Boys and girls become sexually capable at an average age of 15, however, they could only enjoy normal sex life till about 25, so the right way to guide puberty in sex is very critical during the 10 years in between.

“Parents and society should allow them to have normal contacts with the opposite sex, such as dancing, and to read some books with certain sex descriptions, thus to reasonably release their sex tension in puberty,” Xu said.

As Atrios always says, “Oy.”

Where is Xinhua’s editorial ombudsman? Is there no quality control mechanism? Or, is it all just a hilarious and intentional joke, the leathery old CCP having a good laugh at itself? Unfortunately, I think it’s completely serious. (Can you imagine the CCP actually laughing at itself, like when the US media annually roasts the president?)

Thanks to CDT for this priceless link.

This seems to be the best place to go. Astounding, that this could exist in so little time.

Lots of comments in the open thread below about this outrage.

It has been a long day. Time to kick back with some conversation.

Unlike some others, I don’t think Chen Xiwen was off the wall when he said the recent swell of farmer’s riots are indicative of greater democracy in China. The riots might not mean democracy is succeeding, but they do indicate a greater awareness of the concepts of individual rights and justice. And those are key ingredients of the democratic psyche.

To reinforce this notion, let me paste a complete article from the unlinkable SCMP (and thanks to the reader who sent it).

Thursday, July 7, 2005

Acceptance of rights replacing reflex fear of protests

SHI TING

Sixteen years after the Tiananmen crackdown, has it dawned on the mainland leadership that protesters may not be out to undermine Communist Party rule but often have legitimate grievances about economic inequalities and social injustice?

For the second time in a week, a top leader has openly admitted unrest is on the rise – and attributed the protests largely to economic and social, rather than political factors.

Zhou Yongkang, the public security chief and a state councillor, maintained the rising protests were “internal conflicts among the people” that had mainly been triggered by domestic economic factors, the behaviour of cadres and by a lack of justice.

Although they could become a major source of social unrest, panic was unnecessary, he told a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “If you look into those mass incidents carefully enough, you will find few of them are confrontational and rebellious in terms of political purpose, and most of them can be properly handled.”

The right approach was to “be fully aware of their potential threat to social stability, while at the same time avoiding extreme measures”.

The number of mass protests has shot up from about 10,000 in 1994 to more than 74,000 last year, according to Mr Zhou. His rare and frank examination of the causes and scale of protests on the mainland followed an acknowledgment of the problem by the vice-minister of the Office of the Central Leading Group on Financial and Economic Affairs, Chen Xiwen, in an interview with the South China Morning Post.

Mr Chen said reports of recent violent protests by farmers were the tip of the iceberg. The incidents showed farmers knew how to protect their rights and interests, he said, and hailed their willingness to speak up against injustice as a sign of democracy.

Political scientist Hu Xingdou said the pair’s remarks reflected Beijing’s new-found readiness to address mass protests.

“Now they begin to stop the sort of paranoid thinking that every protest aims to subvert their leadership. “[They have started] realising most of the time it’s as simple as people wanting some access to basic economic resources,” said the Beijing Science and Technology specialist on social justice issues.

“I think the government may improve its methods of handling riots by trying to solve problems via dialogue instead of hardline measures.”

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a silver lining to this cloud? If the CCP has even minimal grey matter, they would be learning from this experience, fast. Because if the claim is true that the number of riots per year has mushroomed from 10,000 to 74,000 in 10 years, they might not have too much time on their hands. If they shed their signature obtuseness and paranoia and appreciate the farmers’ plight as a justified call for fairness and justice, then I will heap tremendous praise on them, and acknowledge their sincerity as reformers. If.

For a wholly different point of view, Asia Hand Tom Plate sees Chen Xiwen’s remarks as quintessentially buffoonish.

These days, Chinese officials on the mainland seem to be developing a keen sense of humor. Just the other day, in response to a series of violent protests by farmers in rural China, a mainland official sought to explain the public embarrassments by tying them to China’s growing movement toward democracy!

What a kidder this official must be. Either he was joking, or the joke was on him. Growing unrest in China is not a symptom of democracy but a symptom of the relative lack thereof. Beijing’s only alternative to allowing the protests to occur would have been to crack down, a foolish decision that would have set China’s international image back ten years.

So the official line about a harvest of democracy in the countryside was at least good for a laugh, however unintentional. But — whatever — the more laughs, the merrier.

Interesting, how we can look at the same words and see such different meanings. Like Paine, I at first thought it was funny, too — until I read more about Chen’s background and history. He’s a strong friend of the farmers who has fought against oppressive taxes levied against them and shown a great deal of courage. So I have to conclude he is a bit of a hero who sincerely believes what he says, and he doesn’t deserve our derision.

With each new review I see, I’m increasingly tempted to take down my Amazon link to this book. This review pans it, and points out rather ironically that the book flatly contradicts Chang’s earlier and much-praised family memoir, Wild Swans.

Indeed Mao: The Unknown Story flatly contradicts Wild Swans throughout. One revelation in Unknown Story is that Mao engineered Chiang Kai-shek’s abduction by his junior Chang Hsuieh-lang in 1936. But in Wild Swans Chiang was ‘partly saved by the Communists’ (11). Perhaps Unknown Story is intended to correct the ‘completely untrue’ claims made in Wild Swans, and put the 10 million readers of this best-ever-selling non-fiction paperback right. But there are no indications that Jung Chang is correcting her earlier assertions in the text or footnotes. And look, here, on the back page cover of Unknown Story, not corrections of, but ‘praise for Wild Swans’.

It is not just the earlier Wild Swans that contradicts the argument in Unknown Story that the nationalists took on the Japanese occupiers, or the many other sources, but the facts presented in Unknown Story itself. Just 20 pages on, Chang and Halliday tell us that Chiang Kai-shek ‘mobilised half a million troops’. To fight the Japanese? No. ‘He had agreed a truce with the Japanese, acquiescing to their seizure of parts of north China, in addition to Manchuria, and this freed him to concentrate his strength on fighting the reds’, they write approvingly (all the time condemning Mao for fighting Chiang, not the Japanese). When evidence of Communist opposition to Japan is unavoidable, Chang and Halliday insist that it was an exception, as in the July 1940 campaign against supply lines in northern China to relieve besieged Chongqing, which cost the Eighth Route Army 90,000 men. When Chiang Kai-shek slaughters the Communist New Fourth Army in 1941, Chang and Halliday want it both ways: minimising the atrocity, but also blaming Mao for betraying his rival commander Xiang Ying.

I hate Mao as much as I’ve ever hated anyone. Unfortunately, this kind of book only hurts the cause of exposing him. Now his defenders can say he’s being smeared by agenda-driven fanatics, and in this case they’d be right.

Link via CDT.

The following is a guest post from William Stimson in Taiwan. While the title focuses on the French, the essay is really more about China and Taiwan.
————————————————————————
“Can There Be A Future For The French?”
by William R. Stimson

The French are up in arms again to protect their language and culture. The perceived threat this time is books — 15 million volumes from elite libraries, which Google aims to put on-line. The clamor in France to counter this “crushing domination by America” looks so curious from over here on the other side of the world in Taiwan.

It comes as little surprise that the French should take on Google. When I arrived in Taiwan from New York City a couple of years back, the French were taking to the streets over McDonald’s. What a contrast I found in Taiwan. The Golden Arches were everywhere but the Taiwanese didn’t seem the least bit concerned. The street food scene here is unbelievably diverse. The Nationalists invaders from the mainland brought with them cuisines from all over China. Into the rich mix McDonald’s folded, like an egg into batter. No big deal.

Carrefour, the French hypermarket, is also everywhere here, with French cheeses and wines. The food court features the same tasty food served in the stalls and mom-and-pop stands all up and down the streets outside. While the French marched against the American hamburger, the Taiwanese busied themselves mastering the art of franchising their own many native and imported Chinese cuisines. They’ve done a marvelous job of it. The food is healthier than anything at McDonalds and cheaper. One day soon America may find itself invaded by franchised Taiwanese dumpling stands, noodle places, rice shops or tea houses. On New York’s Fifth Avenue or San Francisco’s Mission Street, anybody will one day be able to sit in peace with a steaming bowl in one hand, a pair of chopsticks in the other — to relish Taiwanese variety.

A threat to America? Hardly. Nothing from the outside can threaten a culture as vitally and creatively alive from within as America’s or Taiwan’s. Like America, Taiwan absorbs whatever comes its way, assimilates it right into the core of its rich mix, and then goes it one better — by an act of creative transformation it issues forth with something novel, a new thing never before seen. The innovation leaps out across cultural and linguistic boundaries, and spreads everywhere at once.

Coming from New York City, I didn’t expect to find Taiwan so creatively alive. Increasingly, it makes me feel right at home here. This wonderful creativity was something I started out in life associating with France. “I want to go live in Paris and write a novel,” I was actually fool enough to confess in all seriousness to someone when I was in my 20s. I was reading Henry Miller then and it seemed to me at that time that to go and do anything really exciting, daring and creative, one had to get to Paris, like so many American writers had. France, to me, was Europe. Indeed, to me France was the world.

That things had changed I discovered in my usual fool way. In my 30s I booked a cheap Virgin Airlines flight from New York City to Amsterdam. Finally I’d made it to Europe. On the train from Brussels to Paris, I found a seat next to an attractive French blonde. She’d come over on the same flight. I told her how excited I was to finally be getting to Paris and asked her if she was a Parisian coming home from a trip to America. “I am Parisian,” she said, “But I’m just visiting family. Home for me is New York City. My husband is an artist and his loft is in SoHo.”

“He’s American?”

“No. French.”

“Why would a French artist live in New York City?” I asked stupidly.

“New York City is where French art is happening right now,” she informed me. “All the best young French artists are over there.”

At a little restaurant I found that evening on the Left Bank, a Parisian, overhearing that I was from New York City came excitedly over to my table. “I just came back from New York,” he poured out. “What a place! I stayed in a friend’s apartment in Alphabet City on the Lower East Side. One night I came home late. A Puerto Rican guy was lounging against the lamppost right out front. I tried my keys but found I was locked out. There were so many keys to all the locks. I’d left that morning without taking with me the one for the front door. I could see the Puerto Rican was watching me struggle with the door. He walked over and pulled out a huge knife. In a second he’d jimmied the lock open for me with the tip of the blade.” The Parisian beamed with a big smile, before going back to join his friends at his own table. “Only in New York!”

The next day, to get away from all the tourist buses clogging the narrow streets, I took refuge in a pretty little park I found. I settled on a bench and noticed how beautiful the sky was. I lay down on my back to gaze up at it. A gendarme appeared. “It is prohibited to lie on the park benches.” I took a long walk and came to a playground. I went over to sway on a swing under the trees. A uniformed park attendant came over. “It is not allowed for grownups to use the children’s playground.” Later that afternoon, I bought a sandwich to go. After walking around, I came to a nice place, sat on the curb, and took out my sandwich. I took a bite and marveled at the architecture all around and the Parisians parading back and forth. A gendarme walked up. “It is forbidden to sit on the sidewalk.” In the end I felt stifled by Paris and wanted to leave. When my Virgin Airlines flight landed back at Newark Airport, some young Americans ambled down the gangplank in front of me. When one of them set his feet on the tarmac he bent down and made a motion of kissing the ground. “Freedom! Freedom at last!” he cried out melodramatically. The others all laughed. It must have been some private joke of theirs. But the guy had actually expressed my own feeling. Back home again in New York City I could do anything I wanted. I felt free.

I find that same kind of freedom now in Taiwan. I don’t know if they’re still doing it, but for a long time the French government poured money into an effort to start up a French substitute for all the British and American rock music they felt threatened their language and culture. Something like this would be unheard of in Taiwan. I was invited to a performance of Taiwan’s Cloud Gate Dance Theatre. Lin Hwai-min, the genius behind this amazing dance company, had gone to the West and studied ballet, modern dance, and assimilate everything the West had to teach him. Then — instead of trying to fend off the foreign influences — he assimilated them all, melted them down, and alchemically transformed them into a production authentically Taiwanese. It was world-class. It was Taiwanese culture. Genius always takes whatever it finds, whatever moves it deeply. Always, what it comes up with in response is original. This is real culture and to real culture there can be no threat. It’s the same with language. Real language knows no enemy. The other day I came across a new Mandarin word here in Taiwan, one I could actually pronounce — “chalah-bah.” It means “salad bar.” To protect their culture and language, the French feel obliged to make up new French words to replace every single English one that slips into their language. The Taiwanese couldn’t be bothered with something like that. If there’s a word, or a product, or a concept from Japan, from America or from France for that matter, that they don’t have — they just soak it right up as their own. The language here, in that respect, is like English. Much of English derives from French. “No problema” friends of mine joke back in New York, in bad Spanish slipped into English. Linguistic purity isn’t what a language is about — not one that is still alive and growing, vital and creative. Languages exchange words like viruses do genes.

What, then, is wrong with the French? Why have they thrown themselves into policing something fundamentally creative like language or culture that doesn’t need to be policed? I guess I could just as well ask, “Why wouldn’t they let me lie on a park bench and gaze up at the sky?” “Why couldn’t I swing on a swing in a playground and watch little children all around me playing in French?” “Why not sit on the curb and see all Paris go by as I eat my sandwich?” And I guess, then, if I asked those questions, I would have to admit — I don’t know why the French are like they are. Here, on the other side of the world, I see the Taiwanese reaching out across the world, making contact with anything real that’s happening anywhere and, like explorers have done since the beginning of time, bringing back home anything new or exciting they find.

My own hunch is that the French have fallen prey to an idea they have of themselves. It’s a false idea which they’re at pains to protect, by any means possible. McDonald’s, British and American rock music, English worlds, and Google Print are no threat to French language or culture, but they are a very direct threat to the French misperception of themselves, their culture and their language. It seems to me that what the French see as “their” culture has less to do with the French language or the nation of France than it has with a wonderful creativity that surged up in that language and in that country when Paris was the global center of high learning and art. Even Taiwanese artists lived and painted in Paris and contributed to its art and culture. Their works may not be seen in museums there, but they’re on proud display in the ones here. The greatest geniuses from around the globe made their way to Paris, by hook or crook — even such unlikely sorts as Henry Miller. What these individuals went to France to find, they actually took with them and put there. All that is world-class about the French language and culture, in fact, comes from and belongs to the whole world. The French, for so long the principle beneficiaries of the whole world’s genius, take that linguistic and cultural advantage that is the residue of it to be their very own national trait and possession. They would cloak themselves, that is, in a self-aggrandizing way, with what properly belongs to all the world.

To make matters worse for the inflated Gauls, once Paris was Europe, once Paris was the world. People in love and people of genius needed to be there. Increasingly, Paris is just Paris. The wonderful creativity infusing French language and culture has since the time of Henry Miller moved on from Paris to New York City. It shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone that the Americans are repeating, in their own way, the French mistake.

America is free, yes; and it is big and rich. Consequently, it attracts the best and brightest from everywhere. The whole world flocks to its shores and pours through its veins. Creoles from the Caribbean, Taiwanese graduate students galore, Mexican cooks in Italian restaurants, Bangladeshi realtors, Arab grocers, Israeli entrepreneurs, you name it — the genius and the lovers, the artists and the scientists, the rogues and the scoundrels from everywhere — come looking for, but actually bring with them, the wonderful creativity that is America and that is pouring into and out of the American language and culture at this time. Like France before it, and England, and a long lineage of other cultural and economic capitals stretching back around the world to antique cities and civilizations we don’t even have names for anymore, America mistakes the greatness pouring through its veins for its own when it in fact belongs to the whole world. Because of its misperception of itself, America acts, at times, in selfish, narrow-minded ways that offend just about everybody else.

If it’s any comfort to the French, pundits predict the center will shift in this century from New York to Shanghai. Shanghai hasn’t even really begun to overtake New York yet. But already ordinary Chinese bloat themselves with a repulsively crude nationalism and — as we are painfully aware here in Taiwan — a brute expansionism. Hoping to make a fast buck, the whole world has rushed to build China’s economy. The whole world has made China start to happen. Little, free Taiwan played an oversized role. But see how arrogantly China puffs itself up now and plays the mean bully to its small neighbor. And look how China postures itself towards Japan, another major contributor to its prosperity. Quite evidently China has forgotten, already, so early in the game, to what an extent so much of the good that is happening within its own borders derives from the rest of the world.

In the past, way back into history, the entire world has again and again surged like this with freedom, prosperity, and culture, through one nation, one language, one people and made that people, and their nation and language, great. Always, it seems, that nation, and its people and culture, has grabbed for itself, in one way or another, what properly belonged to all. If China were to do this now with its brute, expansionist, and authoritarian tendencies — and, most scary of all, its psychopathic need to control information — it would be a tragedy not just for little democratic Taiwan, but for every single nation on earth.

There’s reason to hope, though, that this scenario will not materialize. It’s not just Google we have to thank, or the internet. Things were changing even before those appeared on the scene. Yes, they accentuate the trend, immeasurably; but at root they are results of it, as much as causes. The fact is that the world is tending towards a more creative form of organization where the center at any given moment might be anywhere, everywhere, several places at once, or even nowhere (that anybody can tell). The unprecedented might just become the norm. Vertical hierarchies may find themselves undermined, replaced or, in some cases, altered beyond recognition by powerful lateral networks. The future, even in the very short term, may just turn out to be remarkably complex, interesting, democratic, prosperous and peaceful. Any number of factors are likely to emerge from all this that could prove capable of altering beyond recognition the traditional power relationships between “center” and “periphery,” “large” and “small,” “powerful” and “weak” — or even “us” and “them.”

In an environment like this, Taiwan may yet stay free and keep doing what it does so well. And this new order of free interconnectivity would also stave off the global catastrophe of a big brute China, tone down an overweening America, and afford the French a world in which Paris will be as much the center as anywhere else. Then, if only the French can accord their language and culture the freedom which that delightful language and that wonderful culture so richly deserve, these won’t be threatened at all.

Yet, it is to be noted that in a such a creative world as is now unfolding before our eyes — an equal world, a prosperous world, a democratic world — what’s needed is not so much freedom for our various contending traditions, nations, languages, and self-concepts (although this is necessary too and will come about), as freedom from these. To the extent they continue to define us in ways that separate us and turn us against one another, they are wrong, small, limited, fake. What we are really capable of, we are only now just beginning to discover. One thing we do already know is this — what unites is greater by far than what separates. Our power during the coming century will be a function of our ability to discover this and to come together in peace, harmony and good will — not for one, or another big nation, people, language or culture; but for the benefit of all nations, peoples, languages, and cultures.