An interesting article on the class divisions in China, not only between the rich and the poor, but between the truly middle class and those caught somewhere in between (of whom I know quite a few).

In some ways, China’s money culture is spawning more avaricious – and unchecked – competition. There is a more intense game of keeping up with the Chans, but with no cushions like Rotary clubs, churches, or other civil or volunteer structures. Some 40 percent of wealth is controlled by 10 percent. Young people are getting diplomas in record numbers, but unemployment is 10 percent for those under 30. “Underemployment” is far higher.

Andrew Hu, educated at the University of Washington, says Chinese now have the same problems with stress and expectations as Westerners. “It’s our dream to have an easy life,” he says. “But we can’t because we have to take care of a family and compete with other people in our jobs. The pressure not only comes from family, but other people. We see people with a new car and we say we need a new car.”

“The gap between expectations and salary continues to grow, and psychologically a great number of [Chinese] feel under more pressure,” says Victor Yuan, director of Horizon Market Research in Beijing. “Expectations are high, but so are mortgages. The society is more consumerist, and many people are under heavy family pressure to satisfy demands. Some find it hard to maintain their jobs, let alone talk about expectations.”

Ma Jinliu, who speaks perfect English, got a graduate degree at a European university. But he came home to the same job at a German joint venture he left two years earlier. “I didn’t have a choice. The market is very tough … and I can’t take my money from the housing fund, which is irritating.”

An expectation crisis is less felt among the 3 percent of wealthy urban Chinese who hire drivers, send children to schools overseas, and make more than $1,200 a month. Rather, it is felt in a vastly broader category of urban Chinese who live in the new money culture, but don’t yet have a firm stake in it. They earn between $150 to $350 per month – typical for civil servants, academics, clerks, military officers, engineers, and teachers. Good houses and cars are hard to swing. On TV, they see others doing things they can’t afford. Instead, they sock away savings for health care, knowing the system is not serving them well.

I think a telling phrase is: “the 3 percent of wealthy urban Chinese who hire drivers, send children to schools overseas, and make more than $1,200 a month.” Did you get that? You are among the wealthy urban Chinese if you earn more than $1,200 a month. This is why I’ve referred in the past to the “myth of the Chinese middle class.” Yes, they truly are middle class in China, but by international standards they’re not quite there. So retailers drooling over the prospect of selling Mercedes and Prada bags to China’s wealthy 3 percent may be in for a shock when they learn the actual number who can afford such niceties is far lower than they’d hoped. (Considering China’s huge population, that number is nothing to sneeze at. But the world seems to think 3 percent or more of China’s population is ready to take trips abroad and buy mink coats, and that’s a fallacy. At least for now.)

You will want to see these.

I see it’s time for a new one. I am in a crunch and can’t post new stuff. But that doesn’t mean you can’t. That’s what threads are for (good name for a song).

Update: You may want to check out this excellent post about winter in southern China. Nice.

They’re Rounding the First Turn! And the Favorite Is . . .
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 17, 2006

The great race of the 21st century is under way between China and India to see which will be the leading power in the world in the year 2100.

President Bush’s trip to India next month is important, for we in America must brace ourselves to see not only China looming in our rear-view mirror, but eventually India as well. India was the world’s

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People get very emotional when the story involves children. It’s a trigger that sets off a chain reaction. So I recommend that China’s spinners go into advanced crisis control mode. If you have to kill the villagers, try to avoid killing children.

A week of protests by villagers in China’s southern industrial heartland exploded into violence over the weekend with thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and using electric batons to put down the rally, residents of the village said today.

As many as 60 people were injured, residents of Panlong village said, and at least one person, a 13-year-old girl, had been killed by security forces, they said. The police denied any responsibility, saying that the girl had died of a heart attack.

Residents of Panlong, about an hour’s drive from the capital of Guangdong Province, said the police had chased and beaten protesters and bystanders alike, and that locals had retaliated by smashing police cars and mounting hit-and-run attacks, throwing rocks at security forces….

“The police arrived at 8 p.m., and then started beating people from 9 p.m., trying to disperse the crowd,” said a schoolteacher who spoke by telephone, giving her name only as Yang. “When this happened, the crowd got very angry and lots of people picked up stones on the ground and threw them at the policemen. After being attacked, policemen were furious, they just beat up everyone, using their batons.”

I haven’t been to China in a few months. Is it common for teenage girls to drop dead of heart attacks?

The article’s screamng headline, now all over the Internet, proclaims, “Girl, 13, Dies as Police Battle Chinese Villagers.” Whenever I do crisis management training, I warn the executives to always look out for any possible harm to children that the press can accuse them of. It works like a charm – instant bad publicity. (Will, do you want to back me up on this?)

Rule No. 2: If you do mess up and kill children, don’t lie about it. It’ll be exposed, and you’ll be even worse off PR-wise. I’m sending the CCP my resume. They need help.

UPDATE: Headine changed:
Police in China Battle Villagers in Land Protest

Why on earth is a 21-year-old Singaporean blogger dominating the news nowadays? This blogger has an answer, but it seems incomplete to me.

Asian blogging superstar [aka Wendy Cheng] is apparently involved in some Singaporean scandal involving aerosol foam spray, the groping of young Singaporean women by foreign men, and accusations of racism. I do not pretend to fully understand this scandal, and the purpose of this post is not to analyze it.

Another blogger offers lots of links to the Xiaxue mystery, but frankly I just don’t get it. Second time in two months that a Singapore blogger became the nexus of the world blogosphere, somewhat inexplicably.

The NY Times editors drop the kid gloves. This is great.

Mr. Bush, however, seems to see no limit to his imperial presidency. First, he issued a constitutionally ludicrous “signing statement” on the McCain bill. The message: Whatever Congress intended the law to say, he intended to ignore it on the pretext the commander in chief is above the law. That twisted reasoning is what led to the legalized torture policies, not to mention the domestic spying program.

Then Mr. Bush went after the judiciary, scrapping the Levin-Graham bargain. The solicitor general informed the Supreme Court last week that it no longer had jurisdiction over detainee cases. It said the court should drop an existing case in which a Yemeni national is challenging the military tribunals invented by Mr. Bush’s morally challenged lawyers after 9/11. The administration is seeking to eliminate all other lawsuits filed by some of the approximately 500 men at Gitmo, the vast majority of whom have not been shown to pose any threat.

Both of the offensive theories at work here – that a president’s intent in signing a bill trumps the intent of Congress in writing it, and that a president can claim power without restriction or supervision by the courts or Congress – are pet theories of Judge Samuel Alito, the man Mr. Bush chose to tilt the Supreme Court to the right.

The administration’s behavior shows how high and immediate the stakes are in the Alito nomination, and how urgent it is for Congress to curtail Mr. Bush’s expansion of power. Nothing in the national consensus to combat terrorism after 9/11 envisioned the unilateral rewriting of more than 200 years of tradition and law by one president embarked on an ideological crusade.

I have no moral authority to challenge the Chinese government for its police state tactics if I don’t do the same for my own country. Bush truly would like America to be a textbook definition of a police state, where the ruler can imprison at will and answer to no authority based on Presidential Infallibility. This is so dangerous, so unprecedented and so wrong that I can only ask incredulously, How come no one seems to be up in arms?

America is, of course, still not a Chinese-style police state. But that’s not for Bush’s lack of trying. So far he’s limited these draconian policies to a small group of brown people that most Americans don’t care about, especially if they’re labelled “terrorist.” But we all know the Niemoller quote about the Nazis:

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

How come so few are speaking out?

Outrageous, infuriating – and inspiring. And, of course, China comes to mind with the very first sentence. Be sure to read about the lynch mob on the next page – harrowing and vivid. First time I ever rooted for the lynchers. (And they do more than ring the bad guy’s neck. Every man’s nightmare.)

In India, One Woman’s Stand Says ‘Enough’
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: January 15, 2006

The central moral challenge we will face in this century will be to address gender inequality in the developing world. Here in India, for example, among children ages 1 to 5, girls are 50 percent more likely to die than boys. That means that every four minutes, a little girl here is discriminated against to death.

One reason for such injustice is that many women docilely accept it – even enforce it. But that may be changing, as I found in a slum here in the central Indian city of Nagpur.

For more than 15 years, the mud alleys of the slum were ruled by a local thug named Akku Yadav. A higher-caste man, he killed, raped and robbed in this community of Dalits – those at the bottom of the caste ladder – and the police paid no attention. One woman, according to

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Vintage Rich. Shocking, really, but with so much news about corruption in Bushland, nothing can shock us anymore.

Is Abramoff the New Monica?
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 15, 2006

THERE’S nothing this White House loves more than pictures that tell a story – a fictional story. And so another mission was accomplished when President Bush posed with the 13 past secretaries of state and defense he hustled into the Oval Office 10 days ago: he could pretend to consult on Iraq with sages of all political stripes – Madeleine Albright, yet – even if the actual give-and-take, all 5 to 10 minutes of it, was as substantive as the scripted “Ask the President” town hall meetings of the 2004 campaign.

But this White House, cunning as it is, can’t control all the pictures all the time. That photo op was quickly followed by Time’s Jack Abramoff cover and its specter of other images more inopportune than op. Mr. Bush’s aides, the magazine reported, were busy “trying

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George Bush’s Internatinal Jesus Brigade: a huge step back for countries battling the ravages of over-population and AIDS.

From Peru to the Philippines to Poland, U.S.-based conservative groups are increasingly engaged in abortion and family-planning debates overseas, emboldened by their ties with the Bush administration and eager to compete with more liberal rivals.

The result is that U.S. advocacy groups are now waging their culture war skirmishes worldwide as they try to influence other countries’ laws and wrangle over how U.S. aid money should be spent.

“We don’t expect to see the United Nations change, or Western Europe change,” said Joseph d’Agostino of the Population Research Institute, a Virginia-based anti-abortion group. “But with the Bush administration, pro-lifers feel there’s a real opportunity to stop the U.S. government from promoting abortion and sex education and population control in the Third World.”

Can you believe it? As if sex education and population control are bad things? The Jesus Brigade is also pushing abstinence eucation as the best way to stop AIDS, which it might be – if it worked. It never has before, mainly because the world is too sexually aware to go back to abstinence; it’s pathetically unrealistic, and it threatens proven-effective methods, like condom awareness/distribution.

It’s almost as crazy as believing we could force Western-style democracy down the throats of a factionalized Moslem country with ancient blood feuds between the clans. How strange it will seem when rational eyes look back at this odd period in America’s history….