Really.

Well, he always said his hope was “to be a screw” in the system. Now his vision has been fulfilled.

With a title like that, you know the post is going to be interesting. And it is. A brilliant piece of photojournalism, and a heart-warming testament to China’s refusing to kowtow to the laowai barbarians. One of their very best posts ever.

A Chinese report, supposedly by State Council, CASS and Party School Research Office, claims 90% of China’s millionaires are the children of party officials. h/t China Digital Times. Interestingly, the last crackdown on corruption focused in Shanghai (2004) snagged “red princelings” like Cai Xiaohong, whose father was a Justice Minister. This time the first guy nabbed was a self-starter, Zhang Rongkun. I guess if you want to build a new dynasty, you gotta start with a hereditary aristocracy monopolizing everything…

Here is Forbes China 400 Richest List. How many of these guys are little princes? First ten:

# Wong Kwong Yu
# Xu Rongmao
# Larry Rong Zhijian
# Zhu Mengyi
# Yan Cheung
# Zhang Li
# Shi Zhengrong
# Liu Yongxing
# Guo Guangchang
# Lu Guanqiu

Full CDT article below. Sina article here [zh]. 世界ç»?ç?†äºº magazine also wrote about it according to CDT but I don’t have time to find the article here.

(more…)

It seems like an awfully slender subject for a group to focus on, but if you’re interested you should certainly check it out. He’s especially looking for input from bloggers who are covering the summit in Beijing.

Nearly six centuries after Zheng He first reached the Horn of Africa, China once again turns its attentions to the African continent.

Leaders of 48 of the 53 African countries, including 40 heads of state, plan to arrive this weekend for perhaps the biggest diplomatic event China has ever organized.

The official purpose of the three-day China-Africa Forum is to expand trade, allow China to secure the oil and ore it needs for its booming economy, and help African nations improve roads, railroads and schools.

The unofficial purpose is to redraw the world’s strategic map, forming tighter political ties between China, now the fastest-growing major economy, and a continent whose leaders often complain of being neglected by the United States and Europe.

This is of course not the first time in recent memory China has courted African leaders. During the Cold War, China would frequently reach out to Socialist states (shaky though they were) and the bidding wars between the PRC and the ROC for UN votes too often focused on cash-poor African nations.

This time though, the Chinese want trade and commerce. They want raw materials. And they’re not particularly finicky about with whom they do business.

“The Western approach of imposing its values and political system on other countries is not acceptable to China,” said Wang Hongyi, a leading specialist on Africa at the China Institute of International Studies. “We focus on mutual development, not promoting one country at the expense of another.”

Economically, Beijing’s outreach aims to secure Africa’s abundant supplies of oil, iron ore, copper and cotton at the lowest possible prices, delivered through a supply chain that China controls, analysts say. Chinese companies also view Africa as an open market, neglected by Western multinationals, that they can cultivate with their trademark low-priced goods.

China’s leaders blame the West for failing to successfully engage African nations in mutually beneficial trade, but China’s goals seem to have more in common with the Western imperialism and neo-imperialism of the 20th century than Beijing’s leaders would like to admit. The goal is raw materials, cheap and a-plenty, along with markets for finished products. Strategically, China may not overtly seek to impose its will on its African “partners,” but several African nations are deep in China’s debt, leading the G7 last year to chastise China for the practice of overlending to African nations with wobbly credit. Anthony Kuhn reported on NPR this morning that China claims its aid won’t be burdened by the political demands of Western nations. The PRC continues to sell arms to states, such as Sudan, that probably don’t need any more guns floating around their borders or cities. China also continues to resist intervention in Darfur. While China has provided aid and infrastructure projects in Africa, “with no political strings attached,” Kuhn’s report notes that China expects continued support in the UN against attempts to censure the PRC for human rights violations and it also requires its African “partners” to reject Taiwanese membership in the UN and other world bodies. This seems somewhat stringy to me. Maybe it’s just “stringy with Chinese characteristics.”

If China is sincere about fostering mutually beneficial patterns of trade in a part of the world sorely in need of help and aid, then I am all for it. European imperialists of the 19th century and American and Soviet cold warriors of the 20th century were more interested in their own strategic and economic objectives than dealing with the crushing poverty, warfare, and health crises that afflict many parts of the African continent. I’d like to think that there is somebody in this century who can do a better job providing help to Africa. I’m just not sure–given the signs out of Beijing this week–that that “somebody” is going to be China.

Cross posted at Jottings from the Granite Studio

From the Financial Times:

Chen Shui-bian, Taiwan’s president, has suggested his country could “freeze� its current constitution and adopt a new one, a move likely to re-ignite tensions with China.

Speaking to the Financial Times, Mr Chen said that defining the scope of Taiwan’s sovereignty and territory was “extremely serious, complicated and sensitive, but also extremely important�.

The remarks indicate that Mr Chen intends to challenge Beijing further before he steps down in May 2008

His remarks appear designed to regain support among Taiwanese nationalist voters, a group his ruling party badly needs to win over before a series of forthcoming elections.

Taiwan’s current “Republic of China� constitution refers to the country’s territory only as “existing national boundaries� rather than spelling out precisely what comprises the national territory. However, since it was written in China after the second world war for all of China, it is widely understood to refer to the then Chinese territory, which stretched as far as Mongolia.

Mr Chen said Taiwan should discuss the idea of a “Second Republic� – a concept raised by one of his former pro-independence advisers – to free the country of what he called an “absurd and unrealistic� definition of sovereignty, without openly provoking China.

It seemed an oddly provocative move, then the news broke over at Reuters that Chen Shui-bian’s wife, Wu Shu-chen would be indicted for corruption.

Taiwan prosecutors indicted the wife of President Chen Shui-bian on corruption charges on Friday, and said Chen himself might also have committed offences but could not be prosecuted while in office.

It was the latest blow in a scandal that has led to mass protests and calls for the president’s removal.

A statement from the prosecutor’s office said the high court would charge First Lady Wu Shu-chen with corruption and faking documents in a case involving the misuse of more than T$14.8 million ($448,000).

The indictment of the First Lady, as predicted by Michael Turton, turned out to be just the warm-up. From the NYT this morning, news that Chen Shui-bian himself may soon be under indictment.

Prosecutors in Taiwan said Friday they have enough evidence to indict President Chen Shui-bian on corruption charges in connection with his handling of a secret diplomatic fund, adding to pressures on him to resign.

There is a strong possibility that Chen will be indicted after he leaves office, said Chang Wen-cheng of the Taiwan High Prosecutors’ Office. Under Taiwanese law a sitting president cannot be indicted other than on charges of sedition.

Chang’s announcement came after a monthslong probe of how the presidential office handled the fund, which is used to sustain diplomatic efforts abroad. The fund is secret because of the sensitivity of Taiwanese attempts to maintain its fragile overseas foothold in the face of moves by China to undermine its position.

Does anyone else think this Taipei Turf War is going get worse before it gets better? Who wins here?

Cross posted at Jottings from the Granite Studio.

Over at Boing Boing, a long time favorite of mine, a link to a fantastic idea: the Presidential Speech Tag Cloud! 360 Presidential speeches from 1776 to the present broken down into tag clouds, with words becoming larger the more frequently they are used. And Shrub’s speeches after 9-11 scream one word loudly: TERRORIST. There is no other word that comes close to being a central word in Bush’s vocabulary.

It’s fascinating to scroll through and compare and contrast. For instance, the word “commitment” plays a prominent role in presidential speeches since JFK, who was the first to hammer the word repeatedly. Or how about “insurgent”? Well, scroll back to McKinley and you find he drilled that one home for the Cuban War. And so did Lincoln in the early days of the Civil War. Reagan, a big hero in Bushworld, has his own keywords. But it wasn’t “Communist”. The word that leaps out the most in his speeches? “Deficit”. Communism, empire, Soviets all get drowned out by inflation, unemployment, crime, welfare… in short, whatever else you can say about Reagan, he at least didn’t spend all his time screaming about the bogeyman in his State of the Union addresses. Sad to say, that’s what we’ve got today.

Here’s a question: if you fed all the major speeches of China’s leaders since Mao into tag clouds, what words would show up? Bonus points for the actual Chinese.

Absolutely everyone in America should read this column. (Word document.)

This is sickening, but completely in keeping with the scorched earth, take no prisoners, brutalize the opposition mentaity of today’s Republicans. It amounts to nothing less than intimidation and suppression. It’s a shocker:

A recently distributed guide for Republican poll watchers in Maryland spells out how to aggressively challenge the credentials of voters and urges these volunteers to tell election judges they could face jail time if a challenge is ignored.

Democrats said yesterday they consider the handbook, obtained by The Washington Post, evidence of a Republican effort to block people from voting Tuesday. This handbook, obtained by The Washington Post, is being distributed for Republican poll watchers in Maryland.

“The tenor of the material is that they are asking folks, if not directing them, to challenge voters,” said Bruce L. Marcus, an attorney for the state Democratic Party. “It’s really tantamount to a suppression effort.”

Advocacy groups including the National Campaign for Fair Elections, Common Cause and the NAACP, as well as a George Washington University professor who is an expert on voter suppression, agreed with that assessment.

Barbara Burt of Common Cause said the technique, last seen in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election, is an “insidious voter intimidation tactic.”

Republicans rebutted that charge, saying they merely are guarding against fraud. “I don’t think that’s borderline suppression,” said state Republican Party Chairman John Kane. “It’s making sure that people who have earned the right to vote are voting. We’ve had people die in wars to protect those rights.”

This whole “voter fraud” thing is a classic red herring. There are precious few cases of true voter fraud, but lots of documented cases of voter suppression. Where you will see the fraud is in registration – there are indeed a lot of prankster registrations under outrageous and often very funny names. But these non-existent people don’t then come to the pols to vote. If those doing the BS registering actually came and tried to cast votes under fake names, that would indeed constitute voter fraud. I heard this discused on NPR’s On the Media last week (thank God for podcasts), where the guests pointed out how big a deal the GOP makes of voter fraud, when in truth they are actually going out of their way to commit the equally insidious but easier-to-carry-out crime of voter suppression. (Anyone remember when they delegitimized thousands of legally registered voters in Florida back in 2000?)

Again, this is so far apart from what America has always stood for, so strange and foreign that it seems we’re describing a distant, rather primitive country where those with power can bludgeon and brutalize at whim those who are disenfranchised. Maybe that’s what present-day America has become. This technique, specifically designed to intimidate, threaten and drive away voters, is being institutionalized in the Republican literature.

Will they get away with it, or will this, too, backfire on them? The Dems should be publicizing the story everywhere and training their own poll watchers in how to combat voter intimidation.

If only the Dems were as organized and as obsessed as the GOP, even fractionally, we’d win in a heartbeat. Until we learn a few points from the Republican playbook – i.e., develop a unified message, stick with it and focus obsessively on winning – the bad guys will continue to wield the upper hand. The Dems are on the verge of victory through no fault of their own, but only because through the GOP’s incalculable screw-ups they’re being handed Congress on a platter. It won’t always be this easy. So Democrats, please whip yourselves into shape and don’t let the thugs walk all over you. Please?

Image courtesy of Privacy International via Concurring Opinions

UPDATE: Shanghaiist has a post titled “The Panopticon (with Chinese Characteristics) on the newest surveillance techniques being applied to Shanghai’s migrant population.

UPDATE II: BBC article on British Information Commissioner Richard Thomas’ findings on British surveillance

Not sure what I think of this, I haven’t read the report. As far as I can tell it measures only government surveillance – OpinioJuris says:

The reasons for the poor U.S. score are too numerous to explore in any detail here. Most, however, won’t surprise you: the lack of a comprehensive privacy-protection law for the private sector; widespread and essentially unchecked electronic surveillance; the PATRIOT Act; the increasing use of video surveillance and face-recognition technology in public places; the REAL ID Act’s de facto creation of a national identity card; CAPPS II; the supposedly-defunct Total Information Awareness program…

On the other hand, Concurring Opinions points out its hard to reduce privacy to a universal scale of measurement. I’d like to hear Dan Harris at China Law Blog, for one, opine on this. The article at PI is here. Still, if you read Bruce Schneier’s blog, you know there are good reasons to be concerned about the U.S. How close is the U.S. to a Chinese surveillance society? How is this apples and oranges? I have trouble believing the Chinese government can gather as much personal data – Chinese people don’t use credit cards, online banking, etc. and an enormous amount of private data is paper, not bytes. Then again, China leapfrogs old legacy database systems, so perhaps they can gather data streams faster than the US without overhaul? Then again again, the U.S. has Choicepoint. Hmmmm… the mind reels.