Posted by Lisa. Cross-posted at that other place

I’ve been meaning to write about this at length, in the context of some longer “ohmigod the world is going to hell, and I’m panicking” type post, but since I haven’t gotten around to that yet, I want to call your attention to an excellent series in the Los Angeles Times about the dire condition of the earth’s oceans. This is a five-part series, but a few graphs from the first article should give you an idea of just how serious this is – ‘sobering’ doesn’t begin to cover it:

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When will it ever end? Once more, China (soon to be followed by South Korea) protests visits to Yasukuni Shrine not only by Koizumi but by the man considered most likely to succeed him as Japan’s prime minister.

China urged Japan on Monday to stop visits by its leaders to the Yasukuni Shrine for war dead, as speculation grew that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi would make a pilgrimage next week on the anniversary of Japan’s World War Two surrender.

South Korea, which also suffered under Japanese military aggression, is expected to make a similar demand this week when its foreign minister, Ban Ki-moon, visits Tokyo.

Tokyo’s relations with both Beijing and Seoul have been damaged by Koizumi’s annual visits to Yasukuni since he took office in 2001, and are likely to worsen further if he pays his respects there on August 15.

“We want top Japanese officials to call an immediate halt to visits to Yasukuni, where Class A war criminals are enshrined,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao told reporters during a visit to Tokyo. “Dealing with the history problem based on a correct view of history will be to the benefit of both the Japanese and Chinese peoples,” he added.

Yasukuni is seen by many in Asia as a symbol of Japan’s past militarism. Fourteen wartime leaders convicted by an Allied tribunal as “Class A” war criminals are honored there along with 2.5 million war dead, and a museum within the shrine grounds is often criticized as glorifying war.

Last week media reports said Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe, the front-runner to become Japan’s next prime minister, had secretly paid his respects there in April. China has not specifically criticized the reported pilgrimage by Abe, seen as the most likely candidate to succeed Koizumi when he steps down in September.

South Korea’s Ban is likely to raise the topic in meetings with Abe and Foreign Minister Taro Aso during his visit to Tokyo this week.

“It may be that people mistakenly believe that China’s attitude toward Yasukuni has changed in some ways,” Liu said when asked why China had not issued an immediate condemnation last week. “In fact the attitude of the Chinese government and people to the history problem is consistent and has not changed.”

Abe reiterated on Monday that he would not confirm or deny whether he had made the pilgrimage.

I have said again and again that the only thing stupider than Koizumi’s visits to the despicable shrine is the hysteria these visits whip up in China (and to a lesser extent in S. Korea), keeping alive a near-fanatical hatred of the Japanese, which the CCP shamelessly exploits for its own political purposes. I can only conclude that both sides derive some benefit from the situation, making it worthwhile to persist in this endless game of tug-of-war. Juvenile, idiotic, an exampe of shameless pandering — yes, it’s all of these, on all sides. But there must be a payoff somewhere, so don’t expect to see any changes, any maturing on either side any time soon.

Due to Japan’s level of development, and due to its hideous and sickening crimes throughout the Japanese War of Aggression Against China, I wish with all my heart that they would make the first move and denounce the shrine and cease all visits there. It would be so fascinating to see what would follow. We’d know soon enough whether it’s really “all about the shrine,” or whether the shrine is just an excuse to keep alive a hatred upon which the CCP banks to keep its young people focused on an eternal and convenient enemy. As I said, I think both sides are guilty of exploitation here. I just wish Japan would finally call China’s bluff on the matter. I think we all know what would follow, though I’d love to be proven wrong.

Now this is an example of creative marketing.

A bar in eastern China has come up with a novel way of attracting clients – they are allowed to beat up the staff. The Rising Sun Anger Release Bar in Nanjing lets customers smash glasses, rant and even hit specially trained workers, state media reported.

The owner, Wu Gong, told China Daily that he was inspired to open the bar by his experiences as a migrant worker. Most of his customers were women working in the service or entertainment industries, he said. The bar employs 20 men who have been given protective gear and physical training to prepare them for the job.

Clients can ask the men to dress as the character they wish to attack.

It’s great that a migrant worker in China can rise up like this and become a business owner. And the fact that he got this story into the mainstream media speaks to his marketing prowess. Whether the idea behind the bar is scary as hell and totally bizarre is another conversation.

In his excellent review of John Pomfret’s Chinese Lessons, China hand and Berkeley journalism school dean Orville Schell comments on the source of Pomfret’s concerns for China’s future – its unwillingness to confront its past.

The discontinuity between China’s ‘socialist’ past and ‘capitalist’ present perplexes Pomfret. But it is the unfathomable depth of unexpiated guilt for the brutalization the Chinese heaped on one another under Mao that leaves him most mystified. Since there is little likelihood of public reckoning with the barbarity of the Cultural Revolution as long as the Communist Party rules unilaterally, he sees a basic blockage at the moral heart of China’s spectacular rise. It’s something that makes him very tentative about the future.

So we are left to wonder: Does it matter that there has never been a full public apology for the nightmare of the Communist revolution, that no Chinese leader has ever symbolically knelt down as a form of national penance for the party’s crimes against its people, much as the German Chancellor Willy Brandt did in the Warsaw Ghetto for crimes against the Jews of Europe? Indeed, if the watchword in Germany is now ‘Never forget,’ in China it is ‘Never remember.’

In 1945, the German philosopher Karl Jaspers gave a series of unflinching lectures at the University of Heidelberg on The Question of German Guilt, saying that the nation needed a psychological purification. ‘The temptation to evade this question is obvious,’ he acknowledged. “We live in distress – large parts of our population are in so great and such acute distress that they seem to have become insensitive to discussions.’

Jaspers then entreated his countrymen to understand that their distress could only be relieved by ‘truthfulness toward ourselves.’ As he put it, ‘the guilt question is more than a question put to us by others, it is one we put to ourselves. The way we answer it will be decisive for our present approach to the world and ourselves.’

No philosopher or public figure in China has been permitted to give the kind of open acknowledgment that Jaspers, and many other Germans, did. And, because Chinese media outlets remain tightly controlled, no such ceremonial moment of honest re-evaluation, much less national catharsis, seems likely any time soon.

The issue of whether China ultimately chooses to confront its past or continues ‘hiding behind history’ will almost certainly end up being as important to its future as all the foreign investment, technology transfers, I.P.O.’s and high-rise buildings that now so impress visitors and eclipse the past. As one former classmate, a Red Guard who beat and tortured supposed ‘class enemies’ during the Cultural Revolution, candidly asks Pomfret: ‘How do you think a society where that type of behavior was condoned, no, not condoned, mandated, can heal itself? Do you think it ever can?’

Some are trying, for sure. The most common technique appears to be to half-heartedly acknowledge the “30 percent wrong” part of the picture, but then to sweep it under the table. The brilliance of the “economic miracle” blinds the eye and lets us forget and forgive annoying distractions like June 4 and other warts. The interview I held with a 1989 demonstrator captured it all for me.

Looking back, I firmly believe the government did the right thing, though they could have handled it better. We paid a high price. Our leaders in 1989 could have shown greater human skills and greater negotiating skills. But let’s live with Communism for now and change things one thing at a time. The Chinese now have a much better life than they did 100 years ago.

We are making money now, so forgive, forget, and don’t ask too many questions. I understand this attitude. I would probably harbor it myself if I were in David’s (my interviewee’s) position. China has stood up and it casts an immense shadow. China’s unwillingness to come to terms with its past, however, continues to hobble the country as it is forced to turn to such cheap gimmicks as breathless nationalism, sophomoric propaganda and ruthless censorship in order to deflect attention from its bloody and unhealed past. Pomfret’s point is well taken.

My own review of Chinese lessons can be found here.

I taught English in Beijing when I was twenty years old, in 1979. At the time, being an American in China was such a novelty that my nationality was pretty much all that was required. Luckily for my students (all of whom were older than I was), I had this weird latent Protestant work/guilt ethic streak, and I felt obligated to do a good job, as much as I was totally in over my head. I went to the parents of my best friend with whom I’d traveled to China, professional teachers, and begged them to help me, to tell me what I needed to do to be a good teacher and help my students. I ended up being dragooned into making language tapes for no money at my school, a branch school of a more famous university. And though I knew I was being taken advantage of, to some extent, I didn’t really mind too much. I liked the idea that I was leaving some sort of legacy behind, at the age of 20, that students would be listening to my voice reading these lame essays — lame, but read with decent pronunciation.

In recent years when I’ve traveled to China, I’ve had all kinds of job offers to teach English, just by virtue of my showing up and being able to speak some Chinese. I have no formal training in teaching, and I would have thought that by now, there would be enough qualified folks teaching English that someone like me would not be offered a job as I was more or less walking down the street.

Well, not so much.

Here’s a cautionary tale that compares teaching English in China to the worst sort of sweatshop labor that immigrants to America have traditionally endured:

Tanya Davis fled Jizhou No. 1 Middle School one winter morning in March before the sun rose over the surrounding cotton fields covered with stubble from last fall’s crop.

In the nine months Davis and her boyfriend had taught English at the school in rural north China, they had endured extra work hours, unpaid salaries and frigid temperatures without heating and, on many days, electricity.

Hearts pounding and worried their employer would find a pretext to stop them leaving, the couple lugged their backpacks, suitcase, books and guitar past a sleeping guard and into a taxi.

As they drove away, “the sense of relief was immense,” said Davis, a petite, soft-spoken 23-year-old from Wales. “I felt like we had crossed our last hurdle and everything was going to be OK.”

It’s a new twist on globalization: For decades, Chinese made their way to the West, often illegally, to end up doing dangerous, low-paying jobs in sweatshop conditions. Now some foreigners drawn by China’s growth and hunger for English lessons are landing in the schoolhouse version of the sweatshop.

In one case, an American ended up dead. Darren Russell, 35, from Calabasas, Calif., died under mysterious circumstances days after a dispute caused him to quit his teaching job in the southern city of Guangzhou. “I’m so scared. I need to get out of here,” Russell said in a message left on his father’s cell phone hours before his death in what Chinese authorities said was a traffic accident.

As China opens up to the world, public and private English-language schools are proliferating. While most treat their foreign teachers decently, and wages can run to $1,000 plus board, lodging and even airfare home, complaints about bad experiences in fly-by-night operations are on the rise. The British Embassy in Beijing warns on its Web site about breaches of contracts, unpaid wages and broken promises. The U.S. Embassy says complaints have increased eightfold since 2004 to two a week on average.

Though foreign teachers in South Korea, Japan and other countries have run into similar problems, the number of allegations in China is much higher because “the rule of law is still not firmly in place,” said a U.S. Embassy official who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“A number of substandard English language teaching mills have sprung up, seeking to maximize profits while minimizing services,” the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee said in a recent report on Russell’s case. These institutes have become virtual “‘sweatshops’ where young, often naive Americans are held as virtual indentured servants.”

Davis said officials at her school in Hebei province piled on classes without compensation, dragged their feet on repairing leaks in her apartment and would deduct sums from her $625 monthly salary for random taxes and phone calls that were never made. These ranged from $30 to $85, she said.

She recalled nights without electricity when there was nothing to do but sit in candlelight.

The more “we let them get away with, the more they tried to get away with,” said Davis, who now teaches piano in Beijing…

…John Shaff, a graduate from Florida State University, said everything went according to his English-language contract at Joy Language School in the northeastern city of Harbin — until a disagreement over his office hours erupted into a shouting match on the telephone with a school official.

A few hours later, several men led by Joy’s handyman showed up at his school-provided apartment, physically threatening him and cursing him in Chinese, said Shaff, 25. About 10 minutes later, they left, and soon, so did Shaff.

“They were all men who would have been formidable to fight,” Shaff said in a telephone interview from San Francisco, where he now lives. The manager of the Joy chain did not respond to interview requests.

Like Shaff, Darren Russell had a disagreement with the manager of Decai language school in Guangzhou, where he had been promised 20 hours of classes a week. Instead, Decai had him teaching at two schools, where he put in up to 14 hours a day and oversaw 1,200 students, Russell’s mother, Maxine Russell, said in a telephone interview from Calabasas.

The school had troubles with foreign teachers. Two had quit by the time Russell showed up, and a former Decai employee, a Chinese woman who spoke on condition of anonymity, said she left because she was asked to recruit foreign teachers by offering attractive contracts that went unfulfilled.

In April 2005, sick from bronchitis and exhausted from the work hours, Russell told manager Luo Deyi he wanted her to lighten his work load. An argument ensued, Russell resigned and threatened to tell police Luo was operating illegally, the former employee said.

The school then moved him into a low-budget hotel. A week later he was dead. Police told Decai and Russell’s mother that Darren had been killed in a hit-and-run traffic accident. The body was shipped to California.

Maxine Russell, however, said Chinese authorities could not provide consistent witnesses and a time of death. According to the congressional report, which was the outcome of a family request to look into the Russell case, a California mortician who handled Russell’s body said he had suffered a blow to his head and his body did not have bruises and fractures consistent with a car accident. The mortician, Jerry Marek, is a former coroner.

While Maxine Russell and the former Decai employee say Russell was a beloved teacher, Luo, the manager, insists he was often absent from class and his “teaching methods failed to meet the requirement of the school and fit the students.” She said he had been hired on probation, which he failed partly because of a drinking problem.

“It was very strange and irresponsible for them to blame us for their son’s death,” Luo said in a telephone interview.

So, those of you currently teaching English in China — what are your experiences? Rewarding, life-threatening, or somewhere in-between?

cross-posted on the paper tiger

Kevin Sites, Yahoo’s Hot Zone reporter, has what I would characterize as a fair-minded and thorough summary of the war in Lebanon. Some key graphs:

Three weeks in and it’s clear that few are blameless in this conflict: Hezbollah for the kidnapping of IDF soldiers and the barrage of rockets they fire toward northern Israel from southern Lebanon, Israel for what many in the international community consider a disproportionate response to the provocation, and the West, specifically the U.S. and Britain, for not endorsing an immediate cease-fire that could have helped prevent so much death and destruction; the casualties may now include the West’s foreign policy interests in the Middle East.

But once again the biggest loser, it seems, is Lebanon. The country had finally turned the economic and political corner from its devastating civil war in 70s and 80s and was also asserting — with the exception of the presence of the armed Hezbollah militia in the south — a sense of its own sovereignty after Syrian troops departed its soil in March 2005.

Lebanon was more interested in economic growth than military might, pumping billions into hotels, restaurants, resorts and business. The hope was to regain the title of “the Paris of the Middle East,” and for a short time it succeeded.

“Lebanon is just a souk (a marketplace),” said one Beirut businessman during its period of rapid growth. “But it has no political clout whatsoever.”

Except, perhaps, as a pawn of both international and internal forces.

Some Middle East observers believe that Lebanon’s failure to invest in a strong military — one with sovereignty over the entire nation, including the strongholds of Hezbollah’s militia in the south — may have been its undoing.

Sites also points out what few mainstream media stories have mentioned — that cross-border incursions and kidnappings are a common occurence, and a two-way street:

One Middle East source with an intimate knowledge of Hezbollah, who wishes to remain anonymous because he’s still involved in back-channel negotiations, says that Hezbollah’s July 12 kidnapping of the two IDF soldiers was instigated, in part, by the earlier reneging by the Israeli government on a prisoner swap with Hezbollah.

“These kind of kidnappings are perpetrated by both sides,” says the source. “The Israelis have routinely landed helicopters in Lebanon, scooped up people and taken them back to Israel. It’s nothing so extraordinary.”

There are many levels to this unfolding tragedy. None may be greater than the grave undermining of democratic movements and social liberalization in the Middle East. Milt Beardon, a former CIA officer and ME expert, tells Sites why. Not only is Hezbollah “an organic part” of the 40% of Lebanon that is Shia, it has gained credibility in the region:

“Hezbollah is the current darling of everybody in the Middle East,” Bearden says, “mainly because of what they’ve accomplished by not being destroyed.”

“I don’t think anyone really believes you can remove Hezbollah through bombing,” says the source close to Hezbollah. “It’s an organization that is part of the Shia society. In fact, there will be Hezbollahs sprouting up all over the world after this. Groups like Hezbollah and Hamas are bridging that divide and it’s showing how vulnerable many of the Arab governments are.”

And though they’ve shown their vulnerability in this conflict, Bearden believes Arab governments have also found an “out” from the pressure from the West to democratize — since the U.S., to them, no longer seems like an honest broker after its response to Hamas’ and Hezbollah’s election victories in the Palestinian Territories and Lebanon.

“The concept of a tsunami of democracy (in the Middle East) is done for,” Bearden says.

The last six years make it hard to remember a time when the US had some clout as an “honest broker,” back in the days of shuttle diplomacy and the Camp David accords. But our current Cowboy-in-Chief has little interest in such sissy, peacenik stuff, famously shaking off Colin Powell’s calls for engagement in the Israel/Palestinian conflict at the beginning of his administration with the bon mot, “Sometimes a show of force by one side can really clarify things.â€?

Clarity is breaking out all over these days.

More from Sites and Bearden:

As a member of Conflicts Forum, a group of former cold warriors who believe the West has to establish a dialogue with fundamentalist Islamic organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah to peacefully resolve crises like this, Bearden says the U.S. missed important opportunities to head off the violence.

“I’ve been in countless hours of meetings with some of them (Hezbollah) to where I can guarantee you that they would have welcomed a quiet dialogue with the United States,” he says. “We don’t do our fundamental homework anymore. You’ve got to empathize with the enemy to the extent to that you don’t have a cartoon character that you’re fighting, but someone that might be smarter than anybody in your administration.”

Well, that last possibility strikes me as a pretty safe bet. The cartoon characters seem to be on our side, populating an Administration whose language of diplomacy can pretty much be summed up as, “Hulk smash!”

cross-posted at the paper tiger

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.

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