One of the most upsetting and creepy pieces on how Chinese factories are ignoring the law and wreaking lethal havoc on the environment appears in today’s NY Times, and it’s ugly, smelly and mean.

Dark as soy sauce, perfumed with a chemical stench, the liquid waste from two paper mills overwhelmed the tiny village of Sugai. Villagers tried to construct a makeshift dike, but the toxic water swept it away. Fifty-seven homes sank into a black, polluted lake.

The April 10 industrial spill, described by five residents of the village in Inner Mongolia, was a small-scale environmental disaster in a country with too many of them. But Sugai should have been different. The two mills had already been sued in a major case, fined and ordered to upgrade their pollution equipment after a serious spill into the Yellow River in 2004.

The official response to that spill, praised by the state-run news media, seemed to showcase a new, tougher approach toward pollution – until the later spill at Sugai revealed that local officials had never carried out the cleanup orders. Now, the destruction of Sugai is a lesson in the difficulty of enforcing environmental rules in China.

“The smell made me want to vomit,” one villager said recently, as he showed the waist-high watermark on the remains of his home. There is no shortage of environmental laws and regulations in China, many of them passed in recent years by a central government trying to address one of the worst pollution problems in the world. But those problems persist, in part, because environmental protection is often subverted by local protectionism, corruption and regulatory inefficiency.

…In July, a reporter, photographer and researcher for The New York Times visited the village after being warned it was under official watch to prevent outsiders from entering. After nightfall, a sedan without license plates pursued the Times’s hired car and tried to force it to the side of the road. The Times’s car escaped to a highway but was later stopped by the police, who questioned the driver for about three hours.

Later on in the article, an official says the conflict between growth and environmental protection is “coming to a head,” but I wonder. So many horror stories have been out there, each scarier than the last, if the government hasn’t been shaken into taking drastic action by now, what will it take? As noted in the article, the government already took steps to end the Sugai mess, and the rules it imposed were summarily ignored. What to do?

Meanwhile, I really want to be fair and balanced about the stories I post on China’s environment. If anyone sees any stories on the strides they are making to improve the situation, let me know. I’m thirsting for positive stories on the subject; I just can’t find any.

I enjoyed this editorial but felt it missed an essential point:

It’s more than a little ironic that Chairman Mao has been all but removed from new history books in China’s high schools.

After all, the architect of the Cultural Revolution knew a lot about controlling information and the importance of shaping the future by influencing young minds. Today’s leadership in China wants its high-schoolers to view the future through the eyes of Bill Gates, not Mao Zedong.

This new version of China’s history is being rolled out this school year in Shanghai. Socialism is relegated to a single chapter in the course. Chinese Communism before 1979 is limited to one sentence, and Mao is mentioned only once. History in China now focuses on economics, the rise of technology and the importance of social customs in a global marketplace.

This isn’t a whitewash of history; it is the erasure of history. It’s another sign that, as China plows ahead into the high-tech global market, it remains opposed to free exchange of ideas.…

Mao may have been purged from China’s high-school history books, but it’s clear his tactics are alive and well.

So here’s the essential point I referred to: This editor makes it sound as though China’s textbooks in the past gave a fair representation of Mao, and now they are deleting it. Or at least that is the implication, because they are unhappy that Mao is being “erased.” But what they don’t seem to get is that “Mao” (the real Mao, constipated and perverted and bloodthirsty) was never depicted in these texts to begin with. There can be no “erasure” of something that was never there. I have no problem with them erasing from their textbooks what they had written in decades past about Mao, since it was all horseshit to begin with. What the editorial should be ragging on is the fact that Chinese students are never given a fair picture of who Mao was and the horrors he wrought. I’d rather he be erased altogether than idealized.

And, in anticipation of the chorus that we do the same thing in America, whitewashing US history, all I can say is, No, we don’t. My 10th grade social studies term paper was on the history of the Ku Klux Klan and racism in America, all based on books in my high school library. We were taught that some of our presidents were corrupt fools (like Harding) or overbearing drunks (like Grant). We do not glorify the Vietnam War, and we even debated whether it was right or wrong to drop atomic bombs on Japan, and to firebomb Dresden. They taught us to think for ourselves and draw our own conclusions, not to repeat slogans written by some old fart on the blackboard.

Mainstream media, as I suspected, are going to keep the story alive. The UK’s Independent picked it up today (along with a number of other media), and the only reason I’m posting about it is that I liked the quote from Jeremy Goldkorn of Danwei:

“A lot of the comments about Chinabounder have been fairly moderate – people saying how Chinese men are far worse than Chinabounder, for example, or pointing out that there was no question of rape or anything like that,” he said. And there have even been imitators. An overseas-born ethnic Chinese woman has set up a site, ABC Chick in Shanghai, describes herself as Chinabounderess and defends Chinabounder. She then goes on to describe her own flirtations in Shanghai.

In other words, a tempest in a teacup. How do things like this get started? (A rhetorical question.)

Talk about oversensitive. It seems China is confiscating visitors’ copies of the latest Lonely Planet China as they cross the border – and for a damned good reason! In the maps section, maps of China are colored differently than the maps of Taiwan. Can you imagine?

Via View from Taiwan.

Funny and well written.

A video for Dr. Zhang Jiehai. Check it out.

I don’t want this blog to be just a place for pasting articles, but after last week’s exhausting threads I am in a singularly anti-blogging mood. I’ll be back soon.

Donald Rumsfeld’s Dance With the Nazis
By FRANK RICH
Published: September 3, 2006

PRESIDENT BUSH came to Washington vowing to be a uniter, not a divider. Well, you win some and you lose some. But there is one member of his administration who has not broken that promise: Donald Rumsfeld. With indefatigable brio, he has long since united Democrats, Republicans, generals and civilians alike in calling for his scalp.

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I think it’s time we change the subject from what consumed us yesterday. Maureen Dowd’s column today is so unbearably cutesy I can’t post it, but Tierney was in good form again – it’s obvious he and a heap of other Republicans have lost all faith in Bush’s GOP.

Can This Party Be Saved?
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: September 2, 2006

Republicans in Washington did not abandon their principles lightly. When they embraced ‘compassionate conservatism,’ when they started spending like Democrats, most of them didn’t claim to suddenly love big government.

No, they were just being practical. The party’s strategists explained that the small-government mantra didn’t cut it with voters anymore. Forget eliminating the Department of Education – double its budget and expand its power. Stop complaining about middle-class entitlements – create a new one for prescription drugs. Instead of obsessing about government waste, bring home the bacon.

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[Update: Moving this post up to the top after a flood of comments; want to make sure it gets read.]

Maybe Chinabounder doesn’t exist and is the creation of some performance artists doing research on the Interent’s ability to mobilize the Chinese masses. If so, it makes the whole thing even more bizarre. Make that much more bizarre. And I didn’t think the story could get any more bizarre than it already was.

Meanwhile, a fellow blogger in HK sees the whole thing as a cynical attempt by another HK blogger to present a distorted picture of what’s actually going on in China. (He points to one of Sonagi’s translations as evidence that this is truly “a storm in a teracup.”) My first inclination is to reject that hypothesis,since I’ve seen translations of BBS comments, followed by mainstream news articles, that led me to think the outrage is real and widespread – but that impression could be totally false, distorted and amplified by the noise of the blogosphere.

Which leads to a rather simple question: Are the BBS forums in China really erupting in flames over the dastardly foreigner, or is this a false image that somehow got reported as gospel, and then got blown up out of all proportion by the naive and ignorant lapdog bloggers (like myself)? There’s an answer here somewhere. Anyone who solves the puzzle gets a free Peking Duck T-shirt (if and when the T-shirts come into being).

This is an upsetting thread, started by a mainland Chinese student who isn’t afraid to speak out. He writes,

the most interesting point is this news exposes the darkest side and the most dishonest promises CCP made to chinese and the foreigners.

Go read why he says this. I really admire him and the contribution he’s made to this site.