I’ve been absent for two days, partly because I’ve been overwhelmed with work, partly because the work pressure led to a crippling insomnia earlier this week, and partly because I was so unhappy with the way our comment threads have gone in recent days.

I almost never delete comments. In the past few days, I’ve even tolerated the comments from “Jessica Copeland,” because for some reason “Jessica” started sounding like a human being. But if I see signs of comment threads being highjacked for stupid personal arguments, I absolutely will not tolerate it. Argue with one another, disagree and point fingers. Whatever. But when someone offers a different point of view and is immediately turned upon as [add your favorite obscenity] the quality of the entire conversation plummets. And that I will not tolerate. I may disagree with Bingfeng, but I also consider him a friend and request we not label him a “shill.” (That’s just one case in point, of many, many cases I saw this past week.) This is not aimed at Pigsun or Ahmet or Ivan or anyone else in particular. it’s aimed at everyone, myself included. We can all be a little kinder and gentler.

The same goes for the Duckpond. Sometimes I don’t even want to look at the posts, they are so nasty. And then everyone emails me and wants me to delete the others’ posts. Before I go in and start deleting at will, I’m going to ask everyone to please be a little (i.e., a lot) more considerate and tolerant. This place will be mighty dull if we only tolerate like-minded commenters. I want to hear alternative viewpoints, I want to see opposing arguments. What I don’t want to see or hear is insults flying at the drop of a hat. I really felt like pulling the plug on the whole thing two days ago. Please: when this community gets into meaningful discussions, it can be really exciting and fun. When it descends into name-calling and slander and obscenities it becomes really offensive.

Sorry if I sound scolding, but enough is enough. Thanks for your understanding.

John Pomfret, on the anniversary of one of society’s most depraved and barbaric social experiments of all time. Pomfret had the unique experience of living and studying in China only a few years after the nightmare ended, and enjoyed a bird’s-eye view into how it affected the lives of its victims and their families (who were, of course, victims as well).

Forty years ago this past August, the first killings were carried out to launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China. Two educators in Nanjing and a high school principal in Beijing were the first victims of the Red Guards, the shock troops of Mao Zedong’s war against rivals in the Communist Party.

Over the following 10 years, 18 million city kids were dispatched to the countryside to hack out meager existences amid the peasantry. Millions of officials were purged and hundreds of thousands were executed. My college classmate at Nanjing University, Wu Xiaoqing, was the son of the two educators who were murdered in Nanjing; he was 11 when his parents died. When we studied together he had the nickname “Old Wu” because he seemed old before his time.

Today China’s juggernaut economy, freewheeling night life and sophisticated diplomacy make it seem a world away from the Communist Party-imposed madness of the 1960s. Wu’s life is an example. He’s a university professor, a published author and the father of a young woman who is preparing for college in Australia. No other country seems to have been so adept at avoiding the pitfalls — and erasing the memory — of its past.

Pomfret goes on to describe the horrors his friend Wu endured during the CR, including seeing his parents beaten to death, and how the experience affects him to this day. Pomfret’s closing observations reaffirm for me the difference between great reporters like himself, Joseph Kahn, Philip Pan, etc., who dare hold up a mirror to the faces of their hosts, and mediocre reporters who, brilliant and charming though they may be, bend over backwards to find excuses and deflect all criticisms with a fanciful trick (“yeah, but in America…”).

He did not march during the 1989 student protests that ended in the Tiananmen Square crackdown. And after the crackdown he was put at the head of a committee investigating professors in the history department of his university. In recent years, Wu was assigned to write a chapter in a high school history textbook about the Cultural Revolution. He tried to slip in some details about the horrors of the time, including a subtle critique of the systemic nature of the problem. But it was excised by a censor’s knife.

Wu is aware of the Faustian bargain he’s made to live — and live well — in the People’s Republic of China. It’s a bargain that millions of people like him in China’s growing middle class have made. They inhabit a system that many despise, but it’s also a system they believe they can’t live without. The cost of moving forward is forgetting the past, Old Wu would say, including the dream of bringing to justice the people who killed your parents.

China wants the 21st century to become the Chinese century, yet history has a way of sneaking up on countries, just as it does on people. The late Chinese writer Ba Jin lobbied hard in the last years of his life for a museum to commemorate the victims of the Cultural Revolution; it was never built. I asked Wu what he thought about such a museum. Forty years after the Cultural Revolution, he said, “China isn’t ready for it.”

It’s odd, that in so many other societies that committed sins against its own people and others, the way to move forward has been to acknowledge and examine the past, not to hide from it and thereby deny it. America’s support of slavery is the subject of countless books and plays and movies, as well as museums. We have Holocaust museums and Vietnam memorials and museums and numerous Native American museums and Cambodia has a Khmer Rouge museum…. Is China’s erasure of the CR and the self-imposed code of silent acceptance a healthy thing, or will its silence come back to haunt them? What does Pomfret mean when he writes that “history has a way of sneaking up on countries, just as it does on people”? And does his clear implication – that China’s history will hold it back from attaining the “China Century” for which it longs – have any grounding in reality? Serious questions for which any insights will be appreciated.

Update: I suddenly remembered that over a year ago I did write a post about a “Cultural Revolution museum” in China. Read the old post to see why it’s not a very serious effort.

This is grim. As we continue to spread liberty and freedom (or at least to spread the meme about it) the actual scene on the ground is pretty scary. From liberated, free Afghanistan.

It began last summer.

On a July morning, Taliban gunmen shot dead the province’s most powerful cleric as he walked to the main city mosque to lead morning prayers. Five months later, they executed a teacher at a nearby village school as students watched. The following month, they walked into another mosque and gunned down an Afghan engineer working for a foreign aid group, shooting him in the back as he pressed his forehead to the ground and supplicated to God.

This spring and summer, the slow and methodical siege of this southern provincial capital intensified. The Taliban and their allies set up road checkpoints, burned 20 trucks and slowed the flow of supplies to reconstruction projects. All told, in surrounding Helmand Province, five teachers, one judge and scores of police officers have been killed. Dozens of schools and courts have been shuttered, according to Afghan officials.

‘Our government is weak,’ said Fowzea Olomi, a local women’s rights advocate whose driver was shot dead in May and who fears she is next. ‘Anarchy has come.’

When the Taliban fell nearly five years ago, Lashkar Gah seemed like fertile ground for the United States-led effort to stabilize the country. For 30 years during the cold war, Americans carried out the largest development project in Afghanistan’s history here, building a modern capital with suburban-style tract homes, a giant hydroelectric dam and 300 miles of canals that made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. Afghans called this city ‘Little America.’

Today, Little America is the epicenter of a Taliban resurgence and an explosion in drug cultivation that has claimed the lives of 106 American and NATO soldiers this year and doubled American casualty rates countrywide. Across Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks are up by 30 percent; suicide bombings have doubled. Statistically it is now nearly as dangerous to serve as an American soldier in Afghanistan as it is in Iraq.

This is a long, intesne historical article that looks at the ups and downs the Afghan people have endured since the 1960s. The fall of the Taliban in 2001 was definitely an “up” time, and their hopes soared. What a pity that we couldn’t commit the resources to enforce our victory and keep the Taliban on the run. It’s far too simplistic to say that the reason was our distraction in Iraq. As this article makes clear, there were many factors, such as the backwardness of many of the people, the absolute worthlessness of the nation’s “army” and the rampant rise of corruption. Our failure in both Afghanistan and Iraq resuilted from a dismal lack of understanding of the culture of those we liberated, and a uniquely American belief that simply by implementing elections and drafting constitutions we’d have democracy and freedom. Sort of like Democracy in a Can – just add water and stir.

Remember all that hope after the Taliban’s fall, when women removed their burkas and it seemed Afghanistan was a true example of our ability to liberate the world’s oppressed? Would that it could have been so simple. What we have now is such a tragedy, one has to wonder if it was ever worth it.

A must-read article. Really. Go there now.

I see stories like this and I feel sick. Some US television stations may drop the incredibly moving film 9/11, made by two French film makers who were following a rookie fiefighter around NYC on that fateful day, because some of the firemen use four-letter words. I’ll never forget watching that video as the too-low-flying plane roars overhead and the videographer tilts up his camera and catches it seconds before it crashes into the North Tower, bringing death into this world and all our woes. At that instant one of the firefighters screams, “Holy shit!” I think he said it several times. It was so raw and painful, these confused men watching as life as we know it disintegrates in front of their eyes., and they realize they may die on this day Damn straight, Holy Shit. And yet the fucking squeamish Bush fundamentalist FCC is meting out fines to television stations in response to complaints with viewers, fearful of having their genteel sensibilities offended by a naughty word. So some stations are refusing to air 9/11. I loved America, before we became so fucking obsessed with the petty, the stupid, the irrelevant. That we could deprive the people of great art (and the movie is a work of art) for this, for Holy Shit… It makes me sick for America, and it makes me long more than ever for change. How is it that we allowed the Bush regime to put a plastic bag over our head, resulting in the brain death of a great nation? Fuck it. I have no reason to go home anytime soon, certainly not to a country that is so caught up in moral nicities that it censors and bans beautiful things. Fuck it. Fuck it.

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.