I don’t want to be a broken record, but there are certain issues that arise again and again, and even if it’s boring I think the stories have to be told, lest we fool ourselves into thinking the problem has gone away. Land seized illegally from the disenfranchised in China is such an issue.

Liu Guilan had hoped to spend the remaining years of her life quietly in her little village on Beijing’s outskirts. Instead, the 64-year-old now lives in fear of a midnight knock from the demolition man.

The water and power to her traditional courtyard house have been cut off since April, and now the local government has issued her an ultimatum to pack up and leave.

“I’ve lived here through so many hardships already. I’m not going,” Liu said, standing in a bedroom bare apart from a bed covered in a dirty sheet and a table with a few personal belongings on it. “I’m just a poor peasant woman,” she added, dabbing away her tears with toilet paper. “I don’t seem to have any rights.”

As breakneck urban development eats into China’s countryside, arbitrary land grabs by officials making exorbitant profits by selling it on to developers have sparked resentment and, in some cases, major social unrest.

Premier Wen Jiabao admitted in March during the annual meeting of parliament that errant local officials were to blame for many of the protests and vowed harsh punishment for those who forcibly seize land from peasants.

John Pomfret, in his book that I reviewed this weekend, tells of recently meeting one of his former classmates from the early 1980s, Big Bluffer (I think that’s his name; I don’t have the book on me at the moment). The Bluffer is now a corrupt official and proud of it. Pomfret describes how Bluffer, driving him around in his fancy new car, hits a bicycling peasant and sends him flying. The old man is thrown on the cement where he’s bleeding, and Bluffer just keeps talking and driving, as though nothing happened – the have-nots exist only at the mercy and whim of the haves. Such stories, just like the story above, are so plentiful, it’s easy to become desensitized. But someone’s got to keep telling them, because there’s a lot of propaganda out there trying to convince us the Party is just and magnanimous. It is, if you’re on the right side of the tracks. And woe unto him who is not.

Link via CDT.

As I’ve mentioned before, there are a couple of elections now being held to choose the best Asian and Chinese blogs.

The Best China Blogs awards

The Asian Blog Awards

The miracles of liberation and democracy in action.

A mob of gunmen went on a brazen daytime rampage through a predominantly Sunni Arab district of western Baghdad on Sunday, pulling people from their cars and homes and killing them in what officials and residents called a spasm of revenge by Shiite militias for the bombing of a Shiite mosque on Saturday. Hours later, two car bombs exploded beside a Shiite mosque in another Baghdad neighborhood in a deadly act of what appeared to be retaliation.

While Baghdad has been ravaged by Sunni-Shiite bloodletting in recent months, even by recent standards the violence here on Sunday was frightening, delivered with impunity by gun-wielding vigilantes on the street. In the culture of revenge that has seized Iraq, residents all over the city braced for an escalation in the cycle of retributive mayhem between the Shiites and Sunnis that has threatened to expand into civil war.

The violence coincided with an announcement by American military officials that they had formally accused four more American soldiers of rape and murder, and a fifth soldier of “dereliction of duty” for failing to report the crimes, in connection with the deaths of a teenage Iraqi girl and three members of her family.

But what about the new schools? How come the media aren’t focusing on the good news in Iraq? That damned liberal media…

Meanwhile, a friend of mine writes a beautiful post about how we can really support our troops, something that us treasonous liberals still do, believe it or not. Please check it out.

A Vietnam Lesson, Unlearned
By BOB HERBERT
Published: July 10, 2006

By 1971, after years of mindless fighting, dying and widespread atrocities in Vietnam, portions of the U.S. military had fallen into a horrendous state of affairs. Morale had plummeted. Drug use was widespread. Soldiers in units that had previously fought bravely and well were threatening mutiny. Officers and N.C.O.’s were targeted for death by frightened and resentful enlisted men. Racial conflicts abounded.

The biggest lesson we failed to learn from Vietnam was how utterly tragic it was to pull the trigger on an unnecessary war. Now once again we are condemned to suffer the consequences, and those consequences are not always self-evident.

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UPDATE: Unfortunately the comments thread seems to have been corrupted. Please leave new comments here.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine wanted to show me the dorm he lived in at Fudan Daxue. I was very curious, having heard how students were crammed into famously small quarters. At the building’s entrance, however, a burly security guard stopped us and said no foreigners were allowed in the building. My friend tried arguing, but the guard was steadfast. I was rather resigned about it; there were many instances in China when I was turned away or treated “specially” because I have round eyes.

Former Washington Post bureau chief in Beijing John Pomfret succeeded where I failed in 1981 when, at the tender age of 20, he was permitted to actually live in a student dorm at Nanjing University. He was one of the very first American students to study in post-Cultural Revolution China, and how he pulled it off is a story in itself, involving tremendous determination plus lots of guanxi. His new book, Chinese Lessons, tells the story of how Pomfret first came to China to study, the students he lived with, the women he fell in love with and the extraordinary and at times shocking things he saw and experienced along the way. The glue that holds it all together is Pomfret’s tracking of the lives of four of his classmates. Like a classical rondo, the book goes off in different directions at times, but keeps coming back to these students’ lives, anchors that give this sprawling book its form and organization. And the students’ lives, so very different, offer up a living, breathing microcosm of China in all of its volcanic and unpredictable magnificence. So intimate, and yet so sweeping.

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Vintage Rich.

All the News That’s Fit to Bully
By FRANK RICH
Published: July 9, 2006

TWO weeks and counting, and the editor of The New York Times still has not been sentenced to the gas chamber. What a bummer for one California radio talk-show host, Melanie Morgan, who pronounced The Times guilty of treason and expressly endorsed that punishment. She and the rest of the get-the-press lynch mob are growing restless, wondering why newspapers haven’t been prosecuted under the Espionage Act. “If Bush believes what he is saying,” taunted Pat Buchanan, “why does he not do his duty as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States?”

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David Brooks at his most insidious. Why won’t he get it: Lieberman has been kissing Bush’s butt for 6 years, and continues to support an illegal war that is destroying our country’s spirit, world standing and pocketbook. “Support” is one thing. With Lieberman, it’s an aggressive, delighted support that is out of tune with his constituency. I respect Lieberman for his furthering the liberal cause for years, but he has disappointed me and so many others over Iraq, and that’s what it boils down to. We don’t want our liberal senator to be a Bush poodle who glowingly praises a war that more and more Americans do not understand and do not endorse. That’s it, that’s all. Lieberman’s suck-up to boy George has destroyed his credibility and made him unappealing to people like me who once supported him. This is the beauty of living in a free country, David. We can express our feelings and take action. Going after Lieberman is not an inquisition – it is not based on superstition or prejudice, only on Lieberman’s political performance.

The Liberal Inquisition
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 9, 2006

Sometimes history comes with previews. In the 1930’s, the Spanish Civil War served as a precursor to the global conflict that was World War II. And in a smaller fashion, the primary battle playing out on the smiling lawns of upscale Connecticut serves as a preview for the national conflict that will dominate American politics for the next two years.

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Whenever I read claims about horrendous acts performed agunst the Falun Gong my BS filter kicks into gear (note that I never quote Epoch Times on this site), not because I don’t believe China actually performs such acts from time to time, but because the FLG has been known to, shall we say, exaggerate. But this story is making the mainstream news and apparently some reporters believe it.

An estimated 41,500 transplant operations in China were probably performed using organs of imprisoned Falun Gong members killed by Chinese authorities, says a report released yesterday by two prominent Canadian lawyers.

There is no other possible source for the organs used in transplants between 2000 and 2005, says the report by David Matas, a Winnipeg human-rights lawyer, and David Kilgour, a former prosecutor who was also a federal Liberal cabinet secretary for Asian affairs.

“Where do the organs come from for the 41,500 transplants? The allegation of organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners provides an answer,” the report says. The authors say they ruled out all other sources, including the relatively small number of other Chinese prisoners executed for crimes.

A new Chinese law governing organ transplants came into effect last week after reports in Western news media that Chinese hospitals were advertising on-line that they had fresh kidneys, corneas and other organs for foreign customers frustrated with long waits.

I don’t know if it’s true or not. Other links you might find interesting on the topic of live organ donations in China here and here.

Very deep and timely.

A Tale of Two Rachels
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: July 8, 2006

Spooky summer trends range from the hot bad boys of vampire chick lit — “It wasn’t like she could ever have a relationship with a man who was an undead cat,” writes Sherrilyn Kenyon in “Dark Side of the Moon” — to the Frankenstein theme used by John Galliano at the Paris spring men’s shows.

Fashionable fads for men include pearls, lace, gold suits, executive-wear flip-flops, man-icures and Capt. Jack Sparrow puffy pirate shirts.

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A fascinating op-ed story in today’s Times about India kept bringing to mind another country…the name eludes me at the moment.

INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story.” So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India’s leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, “The Global Indian Takeover”: “For India, it is a harbinger of things to come — economic superstardom.”

This sounds persuasive as long as you don’t know that Mr. Mittal, who lives in Britain, announced his first investment in India only last year. He is as much an Indian success story as Sergey Brin, the Russian-born co-founder of Google, is proof of Russia’s imminent economic superstardom.

In recent weeks, India seemed an unlikely capitalist success story as communist parties decisively won elections to state legislatures, and the stock market, which had enjoyed record growth in the last two years, fell nearly 20 percent in two weeks, wiping out some $2.4 billion in investor wealth in just four days. This week India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh, made it clear that only a small minority of Indians will enjoy “Western standards of living and high consumption.”

Please check it out. The article notes that indeed India is advancing at a breathtaking rate, quite beyond belief, actually. But then, nagging facts like this rear their ugly heads, raining on India’s glorious parade.

But the increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals. Recent accounts of the alleged rise of India barely mention the fact that the country’s $728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa and that, as the 2005 United Nations Human Development Report puts it, even if it sustains its current high growth rates, India will not catch up with high-income countries until 2106.

And so it goes. Read it, and let me know if another country comes to your mind as well. Both of these countries have inconceivable potential and will certainly be “the place to be” for many years to come. But that doesn’t make their problems and challenges less acute or more solvable, and anyone who blocks out the darker side of these countries’ ascension is only fooling himself.