It’s all about respect for the local culture, of course.

Skype, which lets people to make phone calls over the Internet for free, has joined the ranks of other big tech companies in defending its practice of censoring speech in China, according to an article published earlier this week in the Financial Times.

In the article, Niklas Zennstrom, Skype’s chief executive and founder, told the Financial Times that the company’s Chinese partner Tom Online has been censoring words such as “Falun Gong”, “Dalai Lama” and “Tiananmen Square ” in text messages.

Zennstrom defended the practice by saying that adhering to local laws was the price of doing business in any country. He likened the censorship laws in China to any other laws that exist in Western countries, such as the United States or Germany.

The Financial Times quoted him saying, “I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the U.K. or Germany or the U.S., but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and regulations. I can try to lobby to change them, but I need to comply with them. China in that way is not different.”

I understand and respect the need to comply with local laws – to a point. You can’t drive on the wrong side of the road or not pay taxes. Actively aiding and abetting censorship, however, raises red flags. And when complying with the local law means participating in the persecution of innocents, that soft, weak, idealistic liberal side of me says a line needs to be drawn. Usually, in normal circumstances, it’s pretty clear where the line should be drawn and how thick that line should be. But China isn’t like most other places, and when there’s big money involved, things get blurry, and otherwise decent compassionate people find their values shifting in synch with the dollar signs. And no, I don’t have a magic solution for this situation and I do understand why Skype and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft are kowtowing to the Party. Is it right? I guess we each have to decide that for ourselves.

Credit where it’s due: Krugman saw the whole thing coming, and for his prescience was mocked as an unhinged, traitorous liberal. This column obliterates the myth of Bush’s great popularity and proves that bush’s much-ballyhooed “political capital” from the 2004 election was an illusion. Or a delusion. Or both.

The Great Revulsion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 21, 2006

“I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country.”

I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my column collection, “The Great Unraveling.” It seemed a remote prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops, and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.

(more…)

This is a contributed post from William Stimson.

Taiwan’s Cracks
by William R. Stimson

What touches my heart about Taiwan is its cracks. You find them everywhere – in the walls of houses and buildings, in sidewalks, highways, curbstones, and cement planters – the legacy of the island’s frequent earthquakes. Everything in Taiwan is just a little broken – even the soil, in places, is rent with fissures. The island was wrenched up from the ocean floor by the Philippine continental plate banging into the edge of Asia. This collision that created Taiwan is still very much in progress. Taiwan is a place in the making. It’s a shaky place, but it’s an island with a future. This is true not just in a geological sense, but also culturally and politically. Communist China’s notion of Taiwan as a “renegade provinceâ€? is a lie. The truth is that modern Taiwan is a wonderfully fractured place that came into being where Japanese and Chinese history collided; and it moves into the future now at the real spot in the world where everything American bangs most forcefully into everything Chinese. As such, Taiwan is a rich, culturally fertile mix – magnificently alive. It may or may not someday be a part of China; but the little nation is simply too important a cultural and commercial treasure for the world to allow it to be bullied by China or America, now or at any time in the future. Geologically, culturally, and politically Taiwan is a de facto self-building entity and deserves the self-determination that, by rights, is its due.

Everywhere I go here I see beautiful new elevated expressways under construction, tall modern skyscrapers, elite apartment buildings, universities, and schools. An elevated high-speed railway line that stretches from one end of the island to the other is almost completed. The bridges here are of the highest caliber and look more like works of modern art or sculpture than engineering projects. Taiwan abounds with creative enterprise, the building up of newer and better things, even as all sorts of forces threaten at any minute to tear it down. The truth isn’t that Taiwan survives in spite of these forces, but that it thrives and can be self-building precisely because of them. This is the real secret of Taiwan and its remarkable grass-roots creativity. Taiwan, not China or America, is the correct model for the developing countries of Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Taiwan also provides a lesson for the creative individual and a constant source of inspiration. The creative life always springs into being at the juncture of powerful opposing forces. Early on it gets cracked and broken. Half the time it seems to be trying to get up from its knees only to be knocked down again. The example of Taiwan shows that it is exactly on such a foundation that the best things happen.

Cracks are evidence that deeper forces are at work under the surface and that something greater is coming into being. These are forces of an awesome magnitude. They would seem to outweigh anything we might be capable of, except that they elicit from within us that which is even mightier – the inner freedom to create. It is when this freedom begins to move through our work and our lives that we rise to our true stature as human beings and, like Taiwan, bring into being something that has never been before, a thing totally new – that can’t be squeezed back into old categories of history and culture, but has the power to break loose from the rigid and the dead, invent a greater freedom, and send everything off in a new direction.

* * *
William R. Stimson is a writer who lives in Taiwan. More of his writing can be found at www.billstimson.com

I’m glad I missed this, and hope it’s long over by the time I arrive in town on May 12.

Photo from this interesting blog.

Michelle’s angry.

I AM NOT AFRAID OF YOU
By Michelle Malkin · April 19, 2006 08:53 PM

You know who you all are.

And if you think I’m going to stop blogging/writing/making a living because you’ve plastered my family’s private home address, phone numbers, and photos and maps of my neighborhood all over the Internet to further your manufactured outrage and pathetic coddling of a bunch of lying, anti-troops punks at UC Santa Cruz…

…you better think again.

This is supposedly a political analyst (her title at Fox News) and a pundit. But she’s actually an enraged harpie who describes as “unhinged” anyone who takes issue with her immigrant-hating, flag-loving, Arab-kicking “philosophy.” If you oppose the Iraq fiasco and object to on-campus recruitment to fight in a dirty war, you’re a “punk.” In Malkin’s world, the Swift Boat Liars are valiant heroes, and reporters who uncovered Bush’s illegal wiretappings are traitors. This lady is alive with anger, her belly full of fire, and she’s just itching for a fight with unhinged liberal traitors.

Unfortunately, Ms. Maglalang, in case you haven’t noticed, the tide in America is turning. We are tired of being spoon-fed candy-coated lies from the likes of Donald Rumsfeld and the Codpiece in Chief. We are tired of the death by a million cuts that is our misadventure in Iraq. We are tired of being dismissed as “moonbats” and traitors simply for demanding that America do better. You can rage all you want, and your angry audience can lap it up, but you are increasingly on the fringe, not the mainstream, having made yourself the poster child for all that is most ugly about the present administration. Have you ever asked yourself why so many people hate you so much? I promise, it’s not easy to build up so many enemies. It takes, as our president likes to say, a lot of hard work. It was you who came out with both fists swinging, attacking liberals as though they were a form of bacteria needing to be excised and exterminated. Now that the tables are turning, and it’s you who are under attack, you’re singing a different tune, condemning on-line-organized mobs of angry protestors. How ironic, that it was you more than anyone else who cultivated the idea of the Internet lynch mob. So don’t you go-a-bitchin’ when the spotlight turns on you. Behind that haughty demeanor lurks a frightened little girl, and as the heat rises and she’s fed more of her own medicine, be prepared for a lot of pouting and self-pity.

Update: Nobody (and I mean nobody) has been chronicling the myriad sins of Michelle like Dave Neiwert of Orcinus, who is in super-fine form today, exposing the demagogue and the slick game she’s been playing for years, siccing her minions on those who irritate her and then making herself out to be the victim. Just a small sample from Dave’s must-read post:

We’re all too familiar with this routine. After all, it’s what the entirety of her book Unhinged was predicated upon. Malkin, as I said then, is like the lunatic who walks around the public square and pokes people in the eye with a sharp stick, and then is shocked, shocked, that anyone would respond with anger and outrage.

Of course, there’s more than ample reason to question Malkin’s professionalism. Indeed, this isn’t the first time Malkin has shown a predilection for abusing the power of her large readership.

Hao Wu is a “government-sanctioned disappearance,” as described below, and all of us rise up in chorus to protest. We need to do the same when our own government practices similar atrocitites. The Chinese must love Bush; he’s made it impossible for us to criticize the CCP without being accused of hypocrisy.

Our Dirty War
By BOB HERBERT
Published: April 20, 2006

I said, “Some of these folks have never been heard from again, right?”

“Yup,” said Curt Goering. “That’s right.”

Mr. Goering is the senior deputy executive director for policy and programs at Amnesty International USA. We were discussing a subject — government-sanctioned disappearances — that ordinarily would repel most Americans.

(more…)

Some prominent UK scientists say there is now “an accumulating weight of evidence” that entrepreneurial Chinese organ traffickers are harvesting and selling thousands of body parts from executed prisoners.

Top British transplant surgeons have accused China of harvesting the organs of thousands of executed prisoners a year to sell for transplants.

The British Transplantation Society condemned the practice as unacceptable and a breach of human rights, in a statement released on Wednesday. The move comes less than a week after Chinese officials publicly denied the practice. In March, China said it would ban the sale of human organs from July.

The British Transplantation Society says an accumulating weight of evidence suggests the organs of thousands of executed prisoners in China are being removed for transplants without consent. Professor Stephen Wigmore, who chairs the society’s ethics committee, told the BBC that the speed of matching donors and patients, sometimes as little as a week, implied prisoners were being selected before execution.

Just last week a Chinese health official said publicly that organs from executed prisoners were sometimes used, but only with prior permission and in a very few cases. But widespread allegations have persisted for several years – including from international human rights groups.

Professor Wigmore said: “The weight of evidence has accumulated to a point over the last few months where it’s really incontrovertible in our opinion. We feel that it’s the right time to take a stance against this practice.”

Everything in China can be reduced to a dollar value. Absolutely everything. Frankly, I’d be surprised if this weren’t happening. It’s easy to rationalize; hell, “they’re dead anyway” so what’s the difference? As long as there’s money to be made from this, it’ll continue, just like pirating DVDs.

Ah, the smell of justice is sweetening Beijing’s sandy air.

More than 200 people in camouflage gear demolished a school of disabled and mentally retarded children and beat students who attempted to block the demolition, media reported yesterday.

A Beijing court ordered the school to move out last September because it had no right to use the land on which the school was built. A private company that recently leased the land began sending demolition crews to the Zhiguang Special Education School last Friday.

As of Monday, only several buildings were left untouched. About 70 students and teachers were forced to stay in five dorm rooms at the school in Changping District, reported The Beijing News. Another 30 children returned to their homes in the capital city.

If you have to crack a few skulls of mentally retarded children to clear the property, what of it? China should be proud of its standing up for the rights of property owners. So with that in mind, I’m confused to see that the original story has apparently been removed from China Daily. It’s almost as if they’re ashamed of this act of public service. Go figure.

LA Times headline:

Lemme write that down before I forget it.

Be prepared for a flurry of such articles prophesying the imminent rise of China and the decline of the US. While I think there’s no dispute that the US is declining and China is rising, I am highly suspicious when reporters lead their readers to think they’re going to see role reversal in just 30 years.

When President Hu Jintao of China shakes hands with President George Bush in Washington tomorrow and gives one of his fixed grins for photographers, it will not be just another meeting between the leader of a large developing country and the chief executive of the richest nation on earth.

China is rising fast and is expected to eclipse the United States economically in the future – its gross domestic product is tipped to overtake that of America by 2045.

While Mr Bush has only given Mr Hu an hour of his time for a state lunch, the global balance of power is changing and in future meetings, the Chinese will set the timetable.

The rise of China is posing awkward questions for the US, along with the realisation that its days as the world’s economic superpower are numbered.

Some analysts see America entering a period of “managed decline” not unlike that which Britain has experienced since the end of the Second World War and the end of empire.

Since the Chinese economy began to open up a quarter of a century ago, there are 400 million fewer desperately poor people in China. Now Beijing wants the remarkable domestic growth story to count for something in global terms. China has already overtaken Britain and France to become the world’s fourth largest economy and Mr Hu’s visit to Washington represents a culture clash on a global scale. China, the emerging Asian superpower, is ruled with an iron fist by the Communist Party, which has transformed a once centrally planned economy into a free market one, “socialist with Chinese characteristics”.

What these articles never seem to deal with is the fact that for all the progress China remains, in John Pomfret’s words, “a third, fourth and fifth-world country.” As an antidote to the at-times breathless jubliation, I strong suggest readers re-visit the Pomfret post for another, more measured point of view. And check out this old article while you’re at it. Hu might be making impressive strides in some areas, and there may be a lot fewer people starving than in the Mao days. But superpower status is still a good ways away, and there’s a good chance it will never arrive at all.