You have to read this to believe it. That’s all I can say.

Support our troops.

Always one of my least favorite pundits (what did he do to deserve his own op-ed column??), Kristoff writes his own review of the book we’ve been discussing so much over here. Even more interesting is this attempt to fisk his review, which includes links to other fiskings.

Here’s a sample of Kristoff’s review:

Mao comes across as such a villain that he never really becomes three-dimensional. As readers, we recoil from him but don’t really understand him. He is presented as such a bumbling psychopath that it’s hard to comprehend how he bested all his rivals to lead China and emerge as one of the most worshipped figures of the last century.

Finally, there is Mao’s place in history. I agree that Mao was a catastrophic ruler in many, many respects, and this book captures that side better than anything ever written. But Mao’s legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea. Indeed, Mao’s entire assault on the old economic and social structure made it easier for China to emerge as the world’s new economic dragon.

Perhaps the best comparison is with Qinshihuang, the first Qin emperor, who 2,200 years ago unified China, built much of the Great Wall, standardized weights and measures and created a common currency and legal system – but burned books and buried scholars alive. The Qin emperor was as savage and at times as insane as Mao – but his success in integrating and strengthening China laid the groundwork for the next dynasty, the Han, one of the golden eras of Chinese civilization. In the same way, I think, Mao’s ruthlessness was a catastrophe at the time, brilliantly captured in this extraordinary book – and yet there’s more to the story: Mao also helped lay the groundwork for the rebirth and rise of China after five centuries of slumber.

It looks like anti-New York Times bloggers will have a field day with this. But Kristoff is asking for it; with that last sentence, he is playing with dynamite. (Be sure to check that last link; I despise Roger Simon, but his post and its comments are quite intriguing, even if he does refer to Deng as “Deng Tsaio Peng.”)

Once again, I want to present a complete NYT unlinkable article, this one by Frank Rich, my favorite of the Times pundits. We went to war at an unbelievable cost. Isn’t it time we all ask why?

Karl and Scooter’s Excellent Adventure
By Frank Rich

There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda on 9/11. There was scant Pentagon planning for securing the peace should bad stuff happen after America invaded. Why, exactly, did we go to war in Iraq?

“It still isn’t possible to be sure – and this remains the most remarkable thing about the Iraq war,” writes the New Yorker journalist George Packer, a disenchanted liberal supporter of the invasion, in his essential new book, “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq.” Even a former Bush administration State Department official who was present at the war’s creation, Richard Haass, tells Mr. Packer that he expects to go to his grave “not knowing the answer.”

Maybe. But the leak investigation now reaching its climax in Washington continues to offer big clues. We don’t yet know whether Lewis (Scooter) Libby or Karl Rove has committed a crime, but the more we learn about their desperate efforts to take down a bit player like Joseph Wilson, the more we learn about the real secret they

(more…)

Howard French’s new article on a brilliant geneticist from Zhejiang, Xu Tian, is inspiring. For Xu, the shadow of the Cultural Revolution still hangs over his life, and its tragedy can hardly be exaggerated. His observations on China today are eloquent and entirely accurate. Is anyone listening?

His visits back to China are those of a prodigious son, and his feelings toward China are at once hopeful and deeply critical. What he has found is a nation investing furiously, and with some notable successes, in educating its people. At the same time, he fears the implications of a system heavily invested in control, and the culture of rampant and mindless materialism, careerism and cronyism that it has produced.

“The best people have left and the old people have retired, and commercialization has taken hold,” Dr. Xu said.

Referring to scholarly investigation, he added: “The tradition has been broken, and we who were seeking the truth have moved on. It is very difficult to rebuild this sort of thing.”

Materialism, he said, has fueled an overpowering urge to “get rich quickly,” leaving few with the patience for pure inquiry. Everywhere one looks in education, he said, one sees the controlling hand of government, meaning that those with the best connections prevail, not those with the best ideas. Those who answer the fixed questions of a system based on the planning of nearly everything are rewarded, he said, not those who answer questions that few had dared dream about.

“They are putting more into education than perhaps any country,” Dr. Xu said, “but what we haven’t taught people yet is to value ideas, and to value the life of the scholar.”

Speaking boldly for a person who keeps a foot in China, Dr. Xu says what the country needs is a “new revolution” to get away from what he said was a “system that teaches people to follow the rules, not to be an innovator.” To get there, he warned, China will have to overcome thousands of years of tradition “that has always avoided exploring different ways of thinking and exploring, and has emphasized staying within the system.”

You can’t maintain harmony and stability when people question and think outside the box; the system in place even today discourages it, just as it discourages sharing information with the WHO about bird flu. The Cultural Revolution was all about quashing free thought and institutionalizing stupidity and blind devotion to a venal cult figure. China is still dealing with its consequences, and every time they go on about the No. 1 priority being “harmony,” they demonstrate that the straitjacket Mao imposed on a billion people is still snug – not as tight as in 1975, but it’s still there.

Read the whole thing. Thanks to Bill Stimson for the link.

Every blogger who thinks likewise needs to type those exact words in a post so their vote can be counted by Truth Laid Bear. Do it now.

A recent debate arose on these pages about whether Yasukuni is merely a shrine to Japan’s fallen soldiers or something more sinister. While I agree that the shrine’s negligent number of monstrous war criminals (in comparison to the graves of many common soldiers) shouldn’t make the shrine so radioactive. But after reading this article, which came up in the latest thread, I wonder how anyone can be surprised that Koizumi’s visits arouse such antipathy and outrage.

In fact, the museum appears to be regularizing an extremist narrative about Japan’s 20th-century military behavior and role in Asia. No mention is made of Japanese soldiers subjugating Asia and its populations. Rather, the new history portrays Japan as both the martyr and savior of Asia, the one country willing to drive “the foreign barbarians,” as one panel describes them, from the Orient.

The unapologetic nationalism, emperor worship, and military glorification offer graphic clues about why Asians remain concerned about “the lessons learned” by Japan after the war, to borrow the phrase used often in post-Nazi Germany.

This week, after Koizumi visited the shrine, thousands of Japanese paid $10 to visit Yushukan, with its 20 rooms, high-tech displays, and two theaters. They saw and heard that Japan occupied China and Korea in order to liberate and protect Asia from Russian Bolshevism and European colonialism. They were told the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was “forced” by “a plot” by President Roosevelt. Japanese-led massacres, Korean comfort women, Chinese sex slaves, or tortured POWs are not mentioned. There are only Japanese martyr heroes dying in defense of Japan.

“Ten years ago that museum contained some expressions of regret and remorse for the loss of life, both Japanese and foreign,” says Richard Bitzinger of the Asia Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “Back then there wasn’t an effort to tell a story about the war. Now, it is revisionist. A whitewash. Major battles where many thousands lost their lives on both sides are simply called Japanese ‘operations’ or ‘incidents.’ ”

In one, the “Nanjing incident,” thought to have been a slaughter of as many as 100,000 civilians in 1937, the museum text suggests that only those outside the city who refused to obey were harmed. Once the Japanese Army cleared up the problem, “residents were once again able to live their lives in peace.”

“Nanjing is treated as something very minor, like just a few instances, sort of a spring-break party for the soldiers that got a little out of hand,” Mr. Bitzinger notes.

In one set of panels about the European war, Adolf Hitler was merely “trying to reclaim the territory lost in World War 1.” No mention is made of other contexts, such as the murder of 6 million Jews.

Even if he’s just going to honor and remember a dead cousin, Koizumi’s still the leader of Japan and his visit sends a strong message to his people and to those who suffered at Japan’s hands 60 years ago. I realize he’s going to keep going and nothing’s going to change. But if the true story of the shrine gains widespread international attention, it may become less and less comfortable for Koizumi, and the more realistic politicians will realize that any association it maintains with Yasukuni will strike a serious blow at Japan’s international image.

Former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui, who knows a thing or two about replacing dictatorship with freedom and democracy, urged the West to be on alert as China grows in economic strength and not to tolerate its aggression and human rights abuses. He also urged the world to adhere to the feelings of the Taiwanese people and formally recognize Taiwan’s de facto independence. In the most strongly worded speech on his current US tour, he also lambasted China and accused it of being:

“A slave state that uses the false promise of its booming economy to dupe the free world into appeasing its tyranny. As long as the capital from free countries continues to pour into China, China’s already oppressive practices will become more entrenched and the ensuing and ever-expanding militarism will make the likelihood of transition to a peaceful country ever more unlikely.

China is rapidly building up the economic, military, technological and diplomatic power of its slave system. Under conditions that are tantamount to enslavement by the state, business from capitalist countries are enticed by cheap, obedient labour and cheap land and facilities owned by the state. If China insists on maintaining its one-party dictatorship, if it continues to exploit and suppress its people at home and expand its military threats against its democratic neighbours, then China will retain its current status and we will continue to witness the rise of a militarist hegemony.”

In the Los Angeles speech, Lee called for capitalist nations not to invest in China. He compared the West’s attitude towards China as similar to the 1930s appeasement of Hitler and later, Stalin. He said that the West should try to force China away from its present polices of domestic repression and eventual regional domination to instead further embrace freedom, democracy and a less aggressive foreign policy.

“Free nations must develop and strengthen their global and regional cooperation in both supporting the people of China in their struggle for freedom and democracy as well as taking measures to stop Chinese acts of oppression and aggression. Only in this way will we eventually see a China that is ready to take its place among the family of free nations in Asia.”

Lee also accused the West of double-standards, saying that it willingly engages and coddles communist China whereas before it aggressively isolated the former Soviet Union – which ultimately contributed to its collapse. He stated that the West believed Soviet human rights violations and threats to neighbouring countries should be stopped but now also believe that China’s violations of human rights and threats to neighbouring countries are “special Chinese characteristics” that should be tolerated.

The casualties of our great war in Iraq. Don’t miss it. Not for the weak.

We all read about the Chinese at Hong Kong’s Disneyland a few weeks ago, taking off their shoes and lying on the grass and smoking everywhere and leaving a flood of cigarette butts in their wake. Now the issue of Chinese tourists seems to be gaining broader attention.

There was near-pandemonium at the L’Oréal cosmetics counter. With only hours before the end of their weeklong National Day holiday this month, a busload of package tourists from China descended on a department store here and began clamoring for all the skin refiner and “wrinkle de-crease” they could buy.

Karen Eu, one of three clerks attending to them and herself of Chinese ancestry, opened her eyes wide in exasperation.

“Oh, my God,” she said as she carried another fistful of Chinese yuan to the cash register. “They talk so loud I have to yell until my throat hurts.”

China’s rapid economic growth has fostered a tourist boom among the mainland Chinese, with Southeast Asia the favorite destination, at least for now.

The surge in package tour groups from China, an important source of income for the region, is also giving rise to an unflattering stereotype: the loud, rude and culturally naïve Chinese tourist.

Sound familiar? The tide of travelers from China mirrors the emergence of virtually every group of overseas tourists since the Romans, from Britons behaving badly in the Victorian era and ugly Americans in postwar Europe to the snapshot-happy Japanese of the 1980s.

So it is not much of a surprise that tourists from mainland China, often going abroad for the first time, are leaving similar complaints in their wake.

But China is also manufacturing its own twist on the age-old tale, as became apparent in July when a group of more than 300 from China took umbrage at illustrations of a pig’s face on their check-in vouchers at a casino resort in predominantly Muslim Malaysia.

Although the resort said the drawings were meant only to distinguish their Chinese guests from Muslims, who cannot eat pork – or gamble – the Chinese demonstrated their pique by staging a sit-in in the hotel lobby and belting out their national anthem. It took 40 police officers with dogs to clear them out.

So why do I (like the author, I suspect) sympathize more with the Chinese tourists than their critics?

Well, it seems pretty obvious to me that these are people for whom international travel is very, very new. Can we really expect them to be sophisticated world travellers, considering their lack of exposure to other cultures and the lack of emphasis their own culture of the last 50 years has placed on etiquette, politeness, concern for others, environmental sensitivity, etc.? I think they’ll learn and improve.

I’m still appalled by the behavior of many Chinese travellers, pushing onto the plane and maintaining a deafening noise level throughout the flight, then all snapping off their seatbelts as the plane starts to descend. But in all seriousness, it was worse back in 2001, and it can only continue to improve. After growing up in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution, can we really expect them all of a sudden to be Conde Nast material? Patience.

Via CDT.

Guest blogger Jerome Keating had a great idea: a breakfast meeting to be held every few weeks for expats in Taiwan (and anyone else in Taiwan who wants to talk about local-regional issues). The first one was held today and it was great, with ten very interesting, very brilliant people showing up (not including myself, the only uninteresting and unbrilliant one there). I learned more about Taiwan in 2 hours than I’d learned in my entire life. If you are in Taiwan and are interested, please let me know.