We all know about the two Chinas and the great economic divide. This article shows how the economic prosperity of some is actually making life worse for many rural poor who remain untouched by the great boom.

SANBAIHU VILLAGE, China — The China that Wang Huazhong glimpses on television is in the midst of an amazing transformation. In cities he has never visited, skyscrapers tower over highways choked with cars, and people jam glass-fronted malls buying up jewelry and luggage simply to pass the time.

Here in his village in the country’s northwest, Wang sees the same desiccated landscape that has changed little in his 46 years. A rutted dirt track winds through treeless mountains to the county seat 30 miles away, the outermost boundary of his experience. Watermelon plants emerge reluctantly from chalky soil, waiting for rain that may never come. A wood stove occupies his mud floor, painting his walls with soot.

But Wang’s world is far from cocooned from the larger forces shaping his country’s fortunes: In the 3 1/2 years since China entered the World Trade Organization, aggressive industrialization combined with an outpouring of consumption has jacked up prices for everything from fertilizer to transportation, roughly doubling the average cost of living here.

Those within reach of China’s booming coastal cities have been compensated with new opportunities that have lifted millions out of poverty, such as factory jobs making goods for export and cash markets for fruit and vegetables. But that upside remains beyond this rural community and thousands of others like it across this still predominantly peasant country. The costs of buying food and growing watermelon have climbed faster than what Wang receives for his crop. His household income has slipped by 20 percent over the past five years, to about $300 per year.

While the long article offers some hints of hope, these are well over-shadowed by the over-riding conclusion that since these people have zero purchasing power, they are of zero revelance and will remain totally exploited and without representation.

Adam’s sounding rather cynical. Can’t wait until he starts blogging about his new home, Vietnam.

Free, hilarious advice for getting where you want to go in China — just say you’re Da Shan.

Another open thread, since there should always be one.

Hank, FSN9 and others who missed out on yesterday’s pyrotechnics, please check out the post titled The Fantabulist and then comment over here if you’d like. Everyone else — let’s change the subject!! Thanks.

We’ve all been up to our eyeballs recently in stories decrying censorship and filtering on China’s Internet. This article, however, takes a different turn and explains how China’s efforts to manipulate the Internet are indeed succeeding, and what the implications of this success are for the Internet worldwide.

The Web was conceived as one global medium, by its nature open and free. But countries like China are pushing hard to divide that global network into a system of Balkanized national networks. Censorship of the sort Microsoft acceded to is grabbing headlines, but the more important restrictive measures are taking place quietly—and quietly succeeding.

Consider filtering. Blocking the Democracy Times at the Chinese border is kid stuff. The Chinese state accomplishes much more by filtering not just Web content, but the tools that allow the Internet to function: search engines, chat rooms, blogs, and even e-mail. The idea is to make filtering a basic fact of the Web. And filtering a tool like a search engine has the benefit of subtlety, because to most people searches will feel free even when they’re not. How many of us can tell when something goes missing in a Google result?

The Communist Party’s management of chat rooms works similarly. A post like “Let’s hold multiparty elections” is deleted before posting or soon after. But more crucial is the party’s channeling of chat-room discussions to serve its own interests. The pattern began in 1999, when an American B-2 bomber dropped five 2,000-pound bombs on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. State-run media immediately used the Internet to suggest that the bombing was no mistake. As anti-American riots erupted, the People’s Daily, China’s largest Communist Party-owned newspaper, created a Web chat forum to denounce the bombing. Thanks to these efforts, today an astonishing number of Chinese still believe that the bombing was a deliberate attack, and chat-room-fired protests against the United States or Japan are a regular fixture…..

Another Chinese attempt at control involves the Internet’s physical infrastructure. Within China, the Web looks more and more like a giant office network every day, centralized by design. Last month, China announced its latest build-out—the “Next Carrying Network,” or CN2. This massive internal network will be fast, but it will also be built by a single, state-owned company and easy to filter at every step. Its addressing system (known as IPv6) is scarcely used in the United States and may make parts of the Chinese Internet and the rest of the world mutually unreachable. While such things are hard to measure, Internet maps suggest that, powered by projects like CN2, growth in China’s domestic bandwidth is rapidly outpacing the speed of its international connections. Networkwise, China will soon be like a country with a great internal transport system but few roads leading in or out. The goal is an inward-looking network that is physically disconnected from the rest of the world.

Inward-looking, disconnected from the rest of the world — does this set off any bells? Isn’t it an ongoing motif in China’s history, epitomized by the Cultural Revolution? After making so much amazing progress, would they really want to adopt that old stagnating model?

Some of my friends in China assure me the Internet virtually guarantees the eventual erosion of the CCP’s power, as citizens are exposed to its lies and excesses and new concepts of personal freedoms and a free press. After reading this article (and several others like it), I have to question who is really going to come out the winner. Because right now, the CCP is doing a damned good job at using the Net to fulfill its propagandistic agenda. And while there’s anecdotal evidence of the Net being used to fight corruption and initiate reform (as in the Sun Zhigang case), most evidence indicates it is actually furthering the goals of the CCP.

Burn, Karl, burn.

Update: This is just too delicious.

– For the better part of two years, the word coming out of the Bush White House was that presidential adviser Karl Rove had nothing to do with the leak of a female
CIA officer’s identity and that whoever did would be fired.

But Bush spokesman Scott McClellan wouldn’t repeat those claims Monday in the face of Rove’s own lawyer, Robert Luskin, acknowledging the political operative spoke to Matthew Cooper of Time magazine, one of the reporters who disclosed Valerie Plame’s name.

McClellan repeatedly said he couldn’t comment because the matter is under investigation. When it was pointed out he had commented previously even though the investigation was ongoing, he responded, “I’ve really said all I’m going to say on it.”

Trouble in River City.

Maybe they’re more progressive than we are. Via this blog.

Well, it was my first day without work and two separate companies contacted me about doing writing for them. Not a bad start. (And even if/when I move, it’s the kind of work that can be done virtually, helping me to keep a steady income.)

There are some new blogs down there on the left under Pearls of Asia that I hope everyone can check out, like Dan Washburn’s Shanghaiist and the very promising MeiZhongTai. And here’s another new blog that, if it continues on its present course, could be truly valuable, listing information on travel in China. It’s new and has a ways to go, but it already helped me find a hotel for my trip. Oh, and aspiring Taoists might enjoy this new blog. (Apologies in advance to Chinese readers, as the latter two are blogspot and typepad blogs.)

And now, let’s share about the myriad oddities of life and the inherent futility of human existence.

I will let readers draw their own conclusions about this rather intriguing bit of research started by commenter KLS about fellow commenter MAJ in the last open thread:

MAJ why are you just copying and pasting other people’s work?

for example, your really long comment above, starting “Dear Simon and Conrad, The value of the dollar vs the euro is directly related to…”

this is word-for-word copied from elsewhere.

I took a random line and googled it. the line was:
“the US effectively controls the world oil-market as the”

via google I discovered two websites where a long essay has been posted about euros and dollars and oil.
you copied and pasted over 700 words direct from that!

-see www.thirdworldtraveler.com/ Iraq/Iraq_dollar_vs_euro.html

the only thing you changed was to insert intros such as “Simon, Conrad – also remember that…” at the beginning of one or two of the paragraphs.

or take your next long comment, starting:
“Dear Conrad,
The other argument put forward by political analysists”

you directly copied and pasted 500 words that appear on this website:
see http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/iraq.html

wouldn’t it have been good manners to acknowledge that these words are not your own? and, rather than filling up a thread, to have provided links to these websites instead?

Posted by KLS at July 11, 2005 11:54 AM .

Oh dear, this is an intriguing development indeed. I was so impressed, I started doing my own investigation.

Here’s what our feckless Marxist said yesterday (scroll to comment placed at 2:19):

More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all the world exports are denominated in dollars and US currency accounts for about two-thirds of all official exchange reserves. The fact that billions of dollars worth of oil is priced in dollars ensures the world domination of the dollar. It allows the US to act as the world’s central bank, printing currency acceptable everywhere. The dollar has become an oil-backed, not gold-backed, currency.

Well said. Even brilliant. Only, here’s what Z Magazine had to say on the subject back in February 2004:

More than four-fifths of all foreign exchange transactions and half of all the world exports are denominated in dollars and U.S. currency accounts for about two-thirds of all official exchange reserves. The fact that billions of dollars worth of oil is priced in dollars ensures the world domination of the dollar. It allows the U.S. to act as the world’s central bank, printing currency acceptable everywhere. The dollar has become an oil-backed, not gold-backed, currency.

Well, well. What are the odds of that being a pure coincidence? And what would the good Dr. Anne Meyers have to say about someone so insecure and eager for attention and approval that he would resort to such nasty tricks, a la Jayson Blair?

A few days earlier, our friend was caught doing the same thing and, as usual, had a sorta-kinda excuse akin to a dog eating one’s homework; that excuse, where he said he had made reference to his source and was rapidly cutting and pasting and blah blah blah – that excuse won’t fly this time because there’s no attribution. Zero. It is literally an act of deception, in which MAJ consciously and consistently led us all to believe he himself was the author. And that is a very serious offense.

Again, I like MAJ. But when you blog, what you write is there for everyone to see, and if you get caught BS’ing, your crediblity is gone for good. This is a matter of lying. Deception. Fraud. And he’s a repeat offender. And not even the good “Dr.” Anne Myers can get him out of this mess. Sorry if this causes you a tad of embarrassment, Mark, but you left yourself wide open. I invite readers to comb the archives and find other instances of MAJ’s creative cut & paste capabilities. There’s a lot more where these few examples came from.

[Note: In reaction to this post, Mark Anthony Jones tried to get this blog banned in China, creating another fantabulistic piece, this time for China Daily, in which he simply makes things up and calls this a “hate site.” Obviously, his efforts weren’t successful, but he managed to inflict a lot of misery, publishing my undisclosed full name and other personal details all over the web and embarking on a campaign of character assassination. All because readers here pointed out a simple truth: Mark Anthony Jones likes to make things up. Anyway, it’s a sad story, and I hope he comes to peace with who he is and learns that you can’t make fools of people and expect to get away with it forever.]

Update: I realize this is a very long comment thread. If you don’t have the wherewithal to get through the entire thing, at least be sure to see this comment. But do try to read it all- it’s astonishing. Thanks.

Update, January 26, 2010: I originally had a picture of a crying baby here. I am taking it down. I learned today that Jones is dead, and I am not comfortable with any image making fun of him.

Gee, this is a big surprise.

China has lambasted Australia for granting Chen Yonglin a permanent visa and has lashed out at the former diplomat and defector for airing allegations that it persecutes dissidents and engages in widespread espionage.

In a statement released last night, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said: “China resolutely opposes the Australian Government’s decision to give Chen a ‘protection visa’.”

It called Mr Chen’s accusations of a 1000-strong Chinese spy network in Australia and claims that he faced execution if went back home as “lies not worthy of response”. It said: “China is a country ruled by law and handles affairs in accordance with the law. The so-called issue of ‘political persecution’ does not exist at all.”

Wait a second, let me write that last part down. You see, all this time, I thought it was exactly the opposite – that it’s not a country ruled by law and that there’s lots of political persecution. Live and learn.

The CCP is saying Chen did this only because his term in Australia was almost over and he wants to stay there. Would he really take such a drastic step, endangering lives and risking detention, just because he finds Australia a jolly place to live?