From Asia Times Online:

The People’s Daily reported that China’s first “police blog”, launched last year by Hebei province’s Public Security Bureau, is even more popular than the blogs of many pop stars.

The founder, Hao Chao, is a policeman and is proud of introducing something new, initially to the media and now to the public, in an effort to showcase the hardships that police face and difficulties they experience at work. The police blog was an overnight hit, claiming more than a million visitors in its first two months.

Internet visitors approve of the project, saying it has helped them learn more about the police, their work and lives. They say they have learned that police officers are ordinary people who need understanding, support and communication, according to the People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.

The blog has also allowed the public to submit suggestions on how the police force can improve. Some say police in high-ranking positions should be encouraged to improve law enforcement and be more efficient when making decisions. Others write the police should own up to their mistakes instead of covering them up.

The police hope their blog will help boost their influence. They now plan to increase the content on the blog, including discussions of typical crime cases and open forums on the law and police work.

The article actually focuses more on blogs started by prominent Chinese businessmen. And some of the implications of this are very interesting indeed:

Xiang Wenbo, chief executive officer of Sanyi Heavy Industries, started to write his blog on Sina.com only a few months ago. He had never imagined that his blog could be regarded as “China’s first ever financial blog”. It enjoys more than a million visitors, even though the main subject of his blog is fairly technical: the transfer of shares in Chinese companies.

The notoriety of his site comes from the fact that Xiang’s comments on his blog about the takeover of the state-controlled Xuzhou Machine Group Ltd by the US-based Kelly Co helped squelch the transaction. The Chinese government has halted the deal amid criticism of “selling state assets cheaply”. Xiang’s company had been competing with Kelly in taking over Xuzhou Machine.

“The motive of writing my blog comes from a sense of responsibility,” Xiang once told journalists, “No matter whether the blog writers are private or state entrepreneurs, they have an important social role to play, ie, to offer their experience and knowledge to the society. My special experience in starting, conducting and developing a private enterprise and also in introducing reforms in the allocation of stock shares of an enterprise enable me to share them with all that may concern.”

Consequently, Xiang has posted a series of articles with titles such as “The takeover of Xuzhou Machine – a beautiful lie”; “Price cheating in the Xuzhou Machine purchasing case”; “See how Xuzhou Machine was cheaply sold out”; “The takeover of Xuzhou Machine by Kelly is an illegal transaction”.

In this case, it’s easy to conclude that Xiang’s criticisms (and his own self-interests) dovetailed with the Chinese government’s interests — some faction’s interests, in any case. It’s easy to appeal to peoples’ nationalist sentiments, and it’s popular to respond to said sentiments. But it will be interesting to see what happens when some prominent businessman/blogger takes on an issue not so much to the government’s liking — or more accurately, one that works against the current ruling faction but plays to their competitors’ interests. China may not have competing political parties, but the shades of Red in today’s CCP are varied indeed…

cross-posted at the paper tiger

I get on a plane to America in a few hours for a very brief vacation. Hopefully one or two guest bloggers will keep things going here, but if not, there’s always something happening in our ongoing open threads, now approaching 6,000 posts. I’ll see you all in a day or two.

If you haven’t seen this article yet, please don’t wait. It’s gripping and infuriating and should be required reading for anyone trying to understand what happend on That Fateful Day. It certainly won’t make you any more confident in the honesty and integrity of our military commanders. No wonder 911 conspiracy theories are beginning to take greater hold.

Time to face facts: Staying the course is insanity. How many more people have to die for our mistake? The best we can do is try to minimize the calamity while getting out as fast as we can.

Time for Plan B
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: August 4, 2006

It is now obvious that we are not midwifing democracy in Iraq. We are baby-sitting a civil war.

When our top commander in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, tells a Senate Committee, as he did yesterday, that ‘the sectarian violence is probably as bad as I’ve seen it,’ it means that three years of efforts to democratize Iraq are not working. That means ‘staying the course’ is pointless, and it’s time to start thinking about Plan B – how we might disengage with the least damage possible.

(more…)

This exhaustive article goes through the chronology of how two Canadians aroused worldwide suspicions that China is killing members of the Falun Gong and selling their organs, corneas, et. al. to the highest bidders. The only thing new and the reason I link to it is the transcript of phone conversations the Canadians held (or allegedly held) with the gatekeepers of China’s organs-for-sale industry.

As part of their report alleging that China was executing Falun Gong prisoners and harvesting their organs for transplantation, Canadian lawyers and human rights activists David Kilgour and David Matas included transcripts of telephone calls made by Mandarin Chinese speakers from North America to hospitals and other institutions in China. The callers inquired about the availability of organs from Falun Gong prisoners. The caller below is identified only as “M” to protect his or her identity. Excerpts from English translations of some of the transcripts follow:

From a call to “Li” at the Mijiang City Detention Center in Heilongjiang Province (June 8, 2006):

M: Do you have Falun Gong [organ] suppliers? …

Li: We used to have, yes.

M: What about now?

Li: … Yes.
…
M: Can we come to select, or you provide directly to us?

Li: We provide them to you.

M: What about the price?

Li: We discuss after you come.
…
From a call to Shanghai’s Zhongshan Hospital Organ Transplant Clinic (March 16, 2006):

M: … So how long do I have to wait [for organ transplant surgery]?

Doctor: About a week after you come….

M: Is there the kind of organs that come from Falun Gong? I heard that they are very good.

Doctor: All of ours are those types.

Read the article to see just how much credibility this story has gained, and to see how poor a job the Chinese government has done in disproving the charges.

In a phone call, a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy in Washington, Li Jianhua, also called the allegations “totally fake” and said the Chinese government had already investigated the claims and found them meritless.

But by immediately dismissing their report “out of hand,” Kilgour and Mr. Matas said in a reply, the Chinese government has admitted that it has conducted “no investigations to determine whether or not what the report contains is true.”

Come on – at least pretend to hold an invstigation, and then announce that all the allegations are false. This sort of cavalier dismissal only increases suspicion.

Yeah, war is hell and all. But when you read an article like this, you have to wonder how we ever plan to be seen as Iraq’s liberators (a notion that by now seems quite antiquated). The implications are staggering, and will most likely not help to garner additional warm and fuzzy feelings for the American liberators.

Four soldiers from an Army combat unit that killed three Iraqi men in a raid in May testified Wednesday that they had received orders from superior officers to kill all the military-age men they encountered.

The soldiers gave their accounts at a military hearing here to determine if four colleagues should face courts-martial on charges that they carried out a plan to murder the three Iraqis, whom they had seized after an assault on what they were told was an insurgent stronghold northwest of Baghdad.

Their testimony gave credence to statements from two defendants that an officer had told their platoon to ‘kill all military-age males’ in the assault, regardless of any threat they posed. That officer, Col. Michael Steele, has declined to testify, an unusual decision for a commander.

The four soldiers charged in the case, from Company C, Third Battalion Combat Team of the 101st Airborne Division, said they fired on the three Iraqis after they broke loose from plastic handcuffs, attacked two soldiers and tried to escape.

Military prosecutors accused the unit’s leader, Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard, with orchestrating a scheme to cut the men’s’ handcuffs, shoot them as they fled and then have two soldiers inflict injuries on each other to cast the killings as self-defense.

Sergeant Girouard and three other soldiers – Pfc. Corey R. Clagett, Specialist William B. Hunsaker and Specialist Juston R. Graber – are charged with murdering the three Iraqis. In his testimony on Wednesday, Pfc. Bradley Mason of Company C said that on May 8, the night before the raid, Colonel Steele told soldiers to ‘kill all of them.’

Kill all the men old enough to fight. Create a staged escape to justify murder. These are time-honored techniques mployed by genocidists the world over. That we might actually have such a policy in parts of Iraq…well, it’s just unthinkable. Or at least it should be. The only encouraging aspect of the story is that the military, at least in this instance, still has the integrity to police itself. It forces me to wonder yet again what good can come of this venture.

Why do liberal people who are really smart sometimes do things that defy common sense, throwing red meat to the wild-eyed right-wing hyenas? That’s exactly what Jane Hamsher did today, offering herself to Michelle Malkin on a silver platter. Stupid. Her site is on my blogroll because I’ve often enjoyed her coverage of Plamegate and other issues, but I really have to wonder what was going on in her head. Maybe you can rationalize the PhotoShop, arguing that Joe Lieberman has pandered to his black audience. However, one needn’t be a seer to realize it will ignite instant and terribly negative controversy, making the poster (Hamsher) look God-awful. Which it did. We’ve got to do better than this. We can’t keep handing the Malkins of this world the rope they need to hang us with.

Very interesting. The Quacking Canards come out smelling like a rose.

..and these pictures aren’t even new (though they are to me). Still, they are breathtaking.

I have to get back to Guilin. Is there any place on earth more beautiful?

(Click to enlarge.)

Via…well, I forget, exactly, but I think I got pointed toward the photos startting from this post.

New levels of self-congratulatory pomp were reached today by a People’s Daily editor who was either being wickedly cynical or was sniffing glue. Never have I seen so many “scare quotes” in a single graf, along with so many examples of tortured syntax and bureaubabble. The theme is how other countries casually and erroneously refer to “the China threat” at the drop of a hat (true enough), and how China is, in reality, a friend to all the world and doesn’t have a threatening bone in its body (debatable). Anyway, just a very small sample:

Needless to say, those developed countries are always suspicious and cautious with China’s fast growing economy and society and continuously gain comprehensive national strength. This is the root cause of the “China threat” of all kinds, from “threat of democracy” and “threat of human rights” in early years, to “threat of Chinese textile dumping”, “threat of low labor costs”, “threat of energy demand”, “threat of food supplies”, “threat of financial risks”, etc. later on, to gossip-like “threat of Chinese singles” (it means the future large disproportion between Chinese males and females may cause crises to Chinese people’s marriages, resulting in posing a threat to China’s neighboring countries), to “threat of investment” and “threat of national securities” (for example, the bid of China National Offshore Oil Corporation for purchase of Unocal Corporation of the U.S. and U.S. State Department’s restrictions on use of desktops produced by Lenovo Group, a Chinese corporation). These different variations of the “China threat” can help these developed countries to win public support for their stronger measures for safeguarding their global political, economical and military interests and at the same time, they can contain China by setting barriers to China’s road of building power and enhancing international influences.

However, China’s sincerity and practices of commitment to peaceful development is widely recognized in the world and foreign hostility against China is gradually diminishing, thanks to China’s great efforts in diplomatic affairs. Besides, through frequent multi-lateral communications and bilateral exchanges, many countries have received a refreshed picture of China which does not only stick to her own road but also keeps striving to get close to international rules as much as possible, and meanwhile attaches importance to and makes active response to outer concerns. To put it simply, China’s international environment for reform and opening up campaign is becoming better and better.

Everything’s always coming up roses in these editorials. Except for the tortured souls who actually read this smothering nonsense.