How impressed should we all be about the somewhat astonishing announcement from China last week that its economy is way, way bigger than previous numbers indicated? Some analysts immediately began painting dramatic scenarios of China’s imminent ascent to Superpowerdom. (Though few, I suspect, stopped to consider just how teensy-weensy the output of the average Chinese worker is.)

The New York Times has an excellent piece on this subject, especially for those who are enamored of business stories (which I am not). Brief excerpt:

Even with the expected revision, China’s output per person will climb to a little more than $1,700 this year. It ranked 134th in income per person in 2003, according to the World Bank.

Though its statisticians are highly trained, China is still quite secretive about its methods and means for gathering economic data. This has long generated debate among economists, much as the Soviet Union’s economic figures did: some economists think China’s figures disguise weakness, while others think they hide strength.

The figures for China’s national accounts – the numbers that measure gross domestic product, including spending and trade – are supplied by its National Bureau of Statistics.

The bureau publishes several sets of statistics – some as often as monthly – based either on its own estimates or upon numbers supplied by China’s local governments. But those figures can vary widely. Totting up regional gross domestic product in 2003, for example, gives a figure of $1.6 trillion, 12 percent to 15 percent higher than the bureau’s own estimates.

The discrepancy also underscores a difference in incentives. Provincial and municipal authorities want to impress Beijing and limit any embarrassments, as the delays in reporting bird flu cases and the chemical spill in Jilin Province have shown.

Beijing worries more about its reputation in the rest of the world, where accuracy is paramount.

There are other reasons that huge swathes of the Chinese economy are unreported, said Frank Gong, the chief China economist for J. P. Morgan Chase.

“The way they collect the G.D.P. is really from supply-side, production-based statistics,” he said.

Mr. Gong suggested that collecting data from the demand side – what consumers actually spend – would be more telling.

In a system left over from when China was almost entirely a planned economy, however, all the factories and supermarkets report their own sales and spending.

Well, not so brief after all, sorry. Anyway, it does a good job of explaining how and why China’s statistics are so different from those of realother countries. Strangely enough, most countries believe they can still be great and worthwhile and still offer the world accurate statistics about their economies. Why does China feel if it doesn’t puff things up they’ll look bad? Don’t they get it, that it’s the puffing up that makes them look bad, not the numbers themselves?

Let me admit it: I love Nietzsche. I don’t always understand him, but for sheer stylistic flair and bold, daring overstatements, he is a thrill to read, a real page-turner. He can also be searingly wise, cutting through the nonsense and getting to the bare essentials of what man is and what life is. Yes, there’s a lot to dislike, too, especially his rants about the will to power and his contempt for pity and altruism. But he was still a man of deep compassion and high morals. He was never an anti-Semite and his works were bastardized by his sister and by the Nazis, tragically associating his name with a movement he would undoubtedly have detested.

All that was an unexpectely long-winded way for me to cut and paste a quote of Nietzsche’s that I love. I apologize in advance to Christian readers who might be offended by it (Nietzsche despised the Christian and Jewish religions). I quote it more for its poetry than its philosophy. This was one philosopher who could write.

In the Jewish “Old Testament,” the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and speeches of such impressive style that the world of Greek and Indian literature has nothing to place beside them. If we stand with fear and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what human beings once were, we will in the process suffer melancholy thoughts about old Asia and its protruding peninsula of Europe, which, in contrast to Asia, wants to represent the “progress of man.”

Naturally, whoever is, in himself, only a weak, tame domestic animal and who knows only the needs of domestic animals (like our educated people nowadays, including the Christians of “educated” Christianity), among these ruins such a man finds nothing astonishing or even anything to be sad about—-a taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to “great” and “small”—- perhaps he finds the New Testament, that book of grace, still preferable to his heart (in it there is a good deal of the really tender stifling smell of over-pious and small-souled people).

To have glued together this New Testament, a sort of rococo of taste in all respects, with the Old Testament into one book, the book, the Bible – that is perhaps the greatest act of audacity and “sin against the spirit” which literary Europe has on its conscience.

When I was in college, I actually memorized that entire passage. I came across it today, and had to post it.

What’s the point of watching a show like Desperate Housewives if zealous Chinese censors cut out all the fun parts?

CHINESE broadcasters have cleaned up Wisteria Lane, the fictional suburban setting for the US TV series Desperate Housewives, cutting out some of the sex and violence it is famous for.
Click to see larger image

A Mandarin-dubbed version of the show made its debut on China’s state-run CCTV8 channel on Monday.

The first episode was about three minutes shorter than the US version, with some lingering shots of a crime scene snipped out and a love scene played out on a dining room table cut altogether.

At least one direct reference to male genitalia was softened to a vague euphemism and some of the show’s double entendres were simply lost in translation.

The sanitisation left some viewers yawning.

Mr Sun Songjie, a 24-year-old communications undergraduate at Peking University, who had watched it on Internet TV on Monday, said: ‘I really didn’t like it at all. It was really boring… Maybe it was the translation. Given the choice, there are a lot of other programmes I’d much rather watch.’

Everything’s relative, I guess; some viewers still found it shocking, even with the edits.

Ms Liu Zhichao, 49, an administrator at a power supply station in the Inner Mongolia region, said after watching the first episode: ‘It made me laugh, but it was also embarrassing to watch it. There was too much sex.’

Hopefully she’ll recover from the shock in good time.

The CSM tells us of investors who are trying to force the companies providing China with Internet surveillance, censorship and tracking software to insist on human rights assurances, even if it means standing up to the government.

One of the favorite and most convenient excuses for cooperating with governments like China’s and Burma’s is that the companies are simply complying with local laws. But that’s not good enough, activists say.

[C]ritics of such policies say local statutes shouldn’t be a company’s sole consideration. “When a government asks you to censor your portal, do you do it because that’s local law, or does another standard apply?” asks Adam Kanzer, legal counsel to Domini Social Investments. “A lot of companies feel, ‘We have to have a presence in China and have to play by their rules,’ but I think that’s a little naive…. China needs them as much as they need China.” That dynamic, he says, allows room for firms to negotiate terms that could potentially usher in new freedoms for Chinese citizens.

What’s more, Mr. Kanzer says, companies furnishing firewall tools must recognize that ethical responsibilities shift when the client is a government, not a private business. When companies such as Cisco Systems or Secure Computing equip governments to keep their citizenries off certain websites – especially dissident political ones – he says, “it becomes a human rights violation.”

It’s a long article and I won’t try to summarize it all. The closing paragraphs capture the essence of the arguments:

For Internet businesses, however, a looming question remains: How much short-term business is worth sacrificing in order to champion an open Internet and human rights to self-expression in the long term? It’s a question sure to be answered in locations across the globe, one thorny dilemma at a time.

“There is a competitive disadvantage to being based in a country like ours, where we have the civil liberties that we have,” says John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. American investors, he says, expect the companies whose stock they own to “at least not participate in a regime or make money off a regime that is sacrificing the liberties of someone else.”

I wish more American investors were asking such questions. Unfortunately, i suspect most just don’t give a damn and prefer to wallow in sublime ignorance.

Thanks to the reader who sent this to me.

Days before the NY Times published its devastating story on how Bush authorized the NSA to spy on American citizens without bothering to attain the necessary warrants, the Codpiecein Chief summoned NYT Editor in Chief Bill Keller to his office and begged him not to run with the piece (which, mysteriously, the Times suppressed for a full year). It’s pretty clear now why Bush was so terrified of the story getting out: he can be impeached for it.

In an unusually biting opinion piece, Jonathan Alter says it’s a matter of fact that Bush broke the law and displayed total disdain for the Constitution.

President Bush came out swinging on Snoopgate—he made it seem as if those who didn’t agree with him wanted to leave us vulnerable to Al Qaeda—but it will not work. We’re seeing clearly now that Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator, or in his own mind, no doubt, like Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

No wonder Bush was so desperate that The New York Times not publish its story on the National Security Agency eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant, in what lawyers outside the administration say is a clear violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act….

No, Bush was desperate to keep the Times from running this important story—which the paper had already inexplicably held for a year—because he knew that it would reveal him as a law-breaker. He insists he had “legal authority derived from the Constitution and congressional resolution authorizing force.” But the Constitution explicitly requires the president to obey the law. And the post 9/11 congressional resolution authorizing “all necessary force” in fighting terrorism was made in clear reference to military intervention. It did not scrap the Constitution and allow the president to do whatever he pleased in any area in the name of fighting terrorism….

911 is looking more and more like the Reichstag Fire, with which the Nazis justified doing “whatever it takes” to destroy Communism. (No, 911 wasn’t faked like the fire was, but it’s exploitation as an excuse for virtually anything is strikingly similar.) It’s implications are enormous. Bush always says we can’t trust the government to decide how to spend our tax dollars, so taxes should be cut. Government is, he always implied, prone to bad judgement and blunders. And yet, it’s the same government that he wants to endow with the power to spy on whomever it chooses, the laws of the land be damned. All under the mantra of 911 and the fight against terrorism, absoutely anything goes if it’s what Bush wants. When it comes to taxpayers’ money, government is bad, incompetent and untrustworthy. When it comes to terror, the government is all-knowing, unquestionable and incapable of error.

The media and the public were whipped into a veritable frenzy and impeachment was the word of the day back in the blowjob days of 1998. Now, in the face of far more sinister and blatant crimes, we should think once more about the “I” word, because this time it’s truly merited.

For the dull-minded who want to argue this was another important tool against terrorism, all I can say is bullshit. Even pro-Bush Instapundit said that it would have been easy to get warrants for all the illegal searches, every last one of them; there was no need for the secrecy. This is not about terrorism, it’s about government secrecy. We have no right to denounce China for its secret police system if we follow their lead.

Via Americablog.

Bob Dole kept shouting that phrase, somewhat pathetically, throughout his campaign against our last real president, and it’s worth repeating in regard to that village none of us heard of until a couple of weeks ago, Dongzhou. Yes, I’m beating a dead horse, but this horse needs to be beaten. The news keeps getting scarier, and as usual, most people in the West don’t care: China’s just too far away, and it all seems too abstract. With Tiananmen Square, we had the drama of non-stop CNN newsfeeds. This time, all we have are eyewitness accounts offered in fear and anonymity. But this story needs to be told, and if we lose interest it’ll be repeated all to soon and swept once more under the convenient carpet of fading memories.

Dongzhou is the latest of the big CCP coverups. With each one, we are told by the believers that it was a turning point, and the future will be different. But this time, it’s all too obvious things have regressed in every way, and the openness we were promised Hu and Wen would deliver is as elusive as ever.

Inquiries last week established that the death toll in Dongzhou, near Shanwei city, on a night of violence on December 6 was closer to the 20 claimed by villagers than to the three acknowledged by the government.

An angry demonstration over compensation for land ended with village women on their knees, burning joss sticks as they pleaded with the police for the bodies of their menfolk.

Despite censorship and a ruthless dragnet for witnesses, villagers have communicated detailed allegations that people were mown down in a volley of automatic weapons fire, were murdered inside a police armoured vehicle and that some corpses were tossed into the sea. They also smuggled out photographs showing wounded victims lying on makeshift stretchers with blood pouring from apparent gunshot injuries to their heads and upper bodies.

There are persistent reports that even now secret police agents are offering money for hidden corpses and are trying to buy empty cartridge casings to suppress forensic evidence.

On December 6 the villagers took to the streets. Xinhua, the state news agency, said they had spears, knives, Molotov cocktails and dynamite.

“It’s untrue,” said a villager, speaking by phone. “We had just home-made fireworks.”

Whatever the truth, the official in charge, Wu Sheng, vice-director of the Shanwei Public Security Bureau, ordered his men to fire. He has since been detained by prosecutors. The state-controlled Guangzhou Daily said that he had “mishandled” the situation.

Several villagers spoke of 10 people mown down in one burst of fire and accounts on overseas Chinese websites said they had found eight to 10 bodies scattered on the grass afterwards.

“It was so brutal,”a man called Chen told the anti-communist Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong. “One villager was shot in the leg. He knelt down to beg for his life. But they dragged him over to a pile of grass and shot him twice.”

The testimony given by a villager to Grace Kei Lai-see, a reporter for the Cantonese service of Radio Free Asia, points to a killing frenzy.

“That night there were injured people who were dragged aboard police vehicles and shot to death,” the witness said. “The police then took the bodies to the crematorium near the beach but because there was no signature on the death certificates for cremation, they threw the bodies into the sea instead.

“This definitely happened. The bodies were discovered when they began to float.”

In accounts repeated over and over to journalists, villagers spoke of 13 or more bodies floating in the sea.

The determination of people to get their story across is building the “December 6 incident” into the biggest known loss of civilian life at the hands of the Chinese state since the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989.

How ironic that in his comparison of how different media were covering the Dongzhou story, eswn wrote the following:

The Epoch Times item at the bottom stands out from the rest. If everyone else refers to several hundred or more than 1,000 police officers, they say 2,000 to 3,000. If everybody else refers to three dead with names given, they say more than ten dead instead. If everybody else refers to tear gas canisters fired at close quarters as the cause of death, they say that the armed police sprayed the villagers with submachine gunfire instead.

The irony is, of course, that eswn was saying how ridiculous it would be for Epoch Times to say such things, when in fact those appear to be the very things that happened! (And I distruct Epoch Times as much as eswn does, by the way.) Yes, this was the real thing – rampant, ruthless murder of a large number of innocents and the bloodiest event in China (that we know of) since June 4, 1989. So where’s the outrage?

Apologies in advance, because I’m not through with this story yet, even though People’s Daily swears Dongzhou is now serene and peaceful, a happy, charming village where a few thugs once caused some trouble, but where joy and love and the success of China’s unique brand of socialism have once more succeeded in generating a strong bond of unity, harmony, stablity and love. And they all lived happily ever after.

Don’t lose the outrage.

Ah, cowboys.

Just use lesbians! Works every time….

A new one.

Torture Charles Johnson and Roger Simon and infuriate those venture capitalists who showered $7 million on them. If their venture is all about advertising, then what better way than to erase their ads? Here’s how you can do it.