No, I don’t like them. They are annoying. They are a nuisance. They give me and most other normal people the creeps. Still, I am amazed to see just how hysterical some intelligent, well-educated and well-mannered Chinese people can get over a frikkin’ exercise group. Go over there and feel the love.

I know the whole spiel about how they’re an evil cult and about how ten thousand of them appeared out of no where to surround an official’s house once. Very creepy. No question. But even cults have rights to exist as long as they don’t break the laws. It saddens me to see people throw their critical faculties to the winds when it comes to this emotionally charged issue, and confirms just how superb a job the propaganda department can do when it sets its mind to it. Everyone in China knows the Lei Feng myth is a crock – the propaganda people are wasting their time pedalling the old BS about the selfless sock-darner. But when it comes to the FLG, One China and the bad Japanese, the CCP spinmeisters shine like a freshly boiled jiaozi glistening under a flourescent lamp. Mission accomplished, as the above link so well illustrates.

Meanwhile, that same blogger, always one of my favorites, has a concise and humorous post summarising the Bush-Hu visit. Check it out.

Which is a bigger threat to us, and which has a higher ranking on the Badness Barometer, China or Iran? Glenn Greenwald compares the two, starting:

China is a country in which no political dissent is allowed, there is no free expression of religion, no free press, and political dissidents are arbitrarily and indefinitely imprisoned, tortured and often executed.

He then goes into some of the details of the Chinese police state, the threats to Taiwan, the dilemma of the innocent Uighers being held at Gitmo because if they’re sent back to China they’ll be tortured and/or killed, etc. He also looks at how China, more than just about anyone else, is supporting Iran, pledging to veto any UN move to impose sanctions in the wake of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. So how come we are greeting China with open arms while going apeshit over Iran? Greenwald offers his take.

So what accounts for the fundamentally different treatment we give to China and Iran — two countries which themselves have a fairly close relationship, tolerate little dissent, offer little democratic freedom or liberty to their citizens, and issue threats of militarism and aggression against some of their neighbors? If anything, one could make a quite reasonable argument that an Iranian citizen has more liberty and more democratic participation in their government than does a Chinese citizen — supposedly one of the primary, if not the primary, criteria for how we measure the threat-level posed by another country.

So why are we heaping praise on China and developing increasingly productive relations with them, while threatening Iran with invasion and even preemptive nuclear attack? One obvious answer — that China has nuclear weapons and Iran does not — surely cannot be the explanation, since to embrace that framework is to send the most dangerous and counterproductive message possible to the nations of the world: obtain nuclear weapons and we will treat you with great respect and civility; fail to obtain such weapons and we will threaten you with invasion and attack you at will.

We make common cause with all sorts of countries that issue crazy, hostile statements and which abuse human rights at least as much as the Iranians do, and in many cases more. And we ought to. That’s what smart nations have always done. There is simply nothing that distinguishes Iran from scores of other countries, including China, with whom we maintain friendly or at least neutral relations, at least nothing that even remotely justifies attacking them militarily.

I’m sorry to say I’m not convinced. Greenwald is one of my favorite bloggers – when he’s writing about domestic issues in general and domestic legal issues in particular. But he’s leaving some important elements out of the equation here. China’s current leaders, like America’s, Pakistan’s, Israel’s, England’s, etc., have not made reference to their nuclear might in the form of threatening rhetoric and rather insane pronouncements. Unfortunately, Iran has. As much as I don’t like China’s rulers, they are, compared to Iran’s, far less fanatical and far less in bed with terrorists. I can live more easily with Hu’s hands on the nuclear button than I can with Ahmadinejad’s (for what that’s worth). When you listen to Mr. Ahmadinejad, it’s pretty easy to see why he scares the shit out of the civilized world. Hu is taking great pains to appear like a seasoned, reasonable statesman. Ahmadinejad’s taking pains to look like a crazed fanatic.

There are two other reasons, I think, for the dramatically different treatment of the two countries: money and politics. On the money side, American businesses want their share of the Chinese markets, and they love the idea of China’s dirt-cheap labor pool. Most of the talk of a looming China threat comes from reactionaries, protectionists, and those seeking a scapegoat. On the politics side, it’s to Bush’s political advantage to have a new bogeyman like Ahmadinejad, since the 2006 elections will be dominated by fear vis a vis the attempt to scare voters into believing “enemies” are out to destroy us and only the high-testosterone GOP can scare the bad guys away. Who better than Ahmadinejad to scare the voters, since his heated rhetoric really is scary as hell?

Both the left and right sides of the blogosphere are buzzing about yesterday’s heckling of Hu on the White House lawn by a FLG reporter from Epoch Times. I watched the incident on CNN last night and was amazed the determined lady was able to pull it off and cause so much distraction.

I’m not making a big deal out of this because I see it as rather silly, and I can’t blame the Secret Service for carting her away. That would have happened under any administration.

I admire this woman’s courage though I don’t in any way admire her organization. I don’t see anything wrong with the way she was handled, though there’s something definitely wrong with the screening process that let her get so close to Hu in the first place. To applaud her as a hero seems a bit much to me.

[Update, to avoid misunderstandings: I have defended the FLG many times on this blog – or at least their right to exist without persecution – despite my being less than enamored of their methodology; after all, they have no blood on their hands and are undoubtedly undeserving of the brutality they’ve suffered. This kind of act, in my eyes, does little for their cause, however, and adds to the perception of their being rather fanatical, out-of-control cultists.]

Update: A fascinating op-ed on Hu’s visit, which appeared to be one indignity after the other. And it appears Bush had been warned in advance about potential disrupters.

He got the 21-gun salute, the review of the troops and the Colonial fife-and-drum corps. He got the exchange of toasts and a meal of wild-caught Alaskan halibut with mushroom essence, $50 chardonnay and live bluegrass music. And he got an Oval Office photo op with President Bush, who nodded and smiled as if he understood Chinese while Hu spoke.

If only the White House hadn’t given press credentials to a Falun Gong activist who five years ago heckled Hu’s predecessor, Jiang Zemin, in Malta. Sure enough, 90 seconds into Hu’s speech on the South Lawn, the woman started shrieking, “President Hu, your days are numbered!” and “President Bush, stop him from killing!”

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Update: I’ve been told this story was in error – see the comment below. Apparently she is not blocked, but was a victim of a server breakdown. But Hao Wu is still in jail. And she’s still being ignored.

Not so surprising. Her description of her ordeal is nothing short of heartbreaking.

April 19, a friend called to tell me she could not view my blog. In fact, even now, I am unable to normally log onto my blog and hotmail account.

At midnight on both April 18 and 19, I sent sms messages to a woman, hoping to meet with her before leaving Beijing on the 19th, but she did not reply my messages. I couldn’t wait any longer, so I gave her a phone call during the daytime of the 19th. She told me she had not received any of my messages.

Lately, I have not received any replies to the emails I send out. Some “frequently mailedâ€? accounts have stopped communicating. The phone is acting funny too, sometimes it will suddenly stop ringing; sometimes I pick up and no one answers on the other end. I have even been cut-off mid-conversation and heard high-pitched noises. Yet, I am still able to make sense of these disturbances. In the past few days, however, there occurred some really absurd events. I am shocked and confused, I really can’t think of other words to describe the way I feel. Dear God! Please don’t destroy the last dregs of respect that I have for my adversaries….

April 18, my parents have been calling everywhere, trying to find my brother. I hid in the apartment, listening to the phone ring, lacking the courage to answer it. In the end, my mother interrogated me on my mobile phone about whether something has happened to my little brother. I could only mumble some incoherent excuse to her. According to our plans, my eldest Aunt should have called my parents on the 19th to casually tell them that Haozi is under police investigation. At the moment, I am back in Shanghai, focused on my parent’s situation. Will they accept what my eldest Aunt tells them? Please God, let their health be able to sustain this shock.

Nina also asks, “Is it worth it to go to all this trouble for such a vulnerable and insignificant person as me?” Of course it’s worth it, when the perpetrators are as insecure and frightened as the thugs who are blocking your blog and holding your brother in prison. They’re simply doing what they always do when they feel threatened: cracking skulls, arresting innocents and silencing the voices of those asking questions.

What a nightmare. And what a rare and wonderful thing it is that Nina is documenting her torment and giving the world a real-time glimpse into the cruel machinations of a modern-day police state. Please don’t stop. We are all reading you, even if you are banned in China.

If you want to know the story, this book-length article that comes out on Sunday is the place to start. Along with offering a minute-by-minute description of Google’s dealing with China, its glimpse into the world of Chinese censorship lends new meaning to the phrase, “Doing business in China is different than in other countries.”

The penalty for noncompliance with censorship regulations can be serious. An American public-relations consultant who recently worked for a major domestic Chinese portal recalled an afternoon when Chinese police officers burst into the company’s offices, dragged the C.E.O. into a conference room and berated him for failing to block illicit content. “He was pale with fear afterward,” she said. “You have to understand, these people are terrified, just terrified. They’re seriously worried about slipping up and going to jail. They think about it every day they go into the office.”

As a result, Internet executives in China most likely censor far more material than they need to. The Chinese system relies on a classic psychological truth: self-censorship is always far more comprehensive than formal censorship. By having each private company assume responsibility for its corner of the Internet, the government effectively outsources the otherwise unmanageable task of monitoring the billions of e-mail messages, news stories and chat postings that circulate every day in China. The government’s preferred method seems to be to leave the companies guessing, then to call up occasionally with angry demands that a Web page be taken down in 24 hours. “It’s the panopticon,” says James Mulvenon, a China specialist who is the head of a Washington policy group called the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis. “There’s a randomness to their enforcement, and that creates a sense that they’re looking at everything.”

Perhaps the most interesting part of the article is a lengthy interview with Michael Anti, who ranks the US Interent companies on a scale of ethics, with Google toward the top (since no one goes to Jail as a result of their China policies) and Yahoo at the bottom.

Read the whole thing, but be forewarned, it will take an hour or two to absorb it all.

As Bill Gates and Hu Jintao clink their champagne glasses and the world marvels at the rapid advancement of China, Hao Wu lies in a dingy cell, trapped in the bureaucratic maze of China’s police state, where the arresters answer to no one and justice is carried out at whim.Rebecca MacKinnon, in a splendid op-ed piece in today’s WaPo, looks at this dichotomy. After a harrowing description of the recent arrest (more like a kidnapping) of AIDS activist Hu Jia, Rebecca focuses on Hao Wu.

Hao turned 34 this week. He personifies a generation of urban Chinese who have flourished thanks to the Communist Party’s embrace of market-style capitalism and greater cultural openness. He got his MBA from the University of Michigan and worked for EarthLink before returning to China to pursue his dream of becoming a documentary filmmaker. He and his sister, Nina Wu, who works in finance and lives a comfortable middle-class life in Shanghai, have enjoyed freedoms of expression, travel, lifestyle and career choice that their parents could never have dreamed of. They are proof of how U.S. economic engagement with China has been overwhelmingly good for many Chinese.

Problem is, the Chinese Dream can be shattered quickly if you step over a line that is not clearly drawn — a line that is kept deliberately vague and that shifts frequently with the political tides. Those who were told by the Chinese media that they have constitutional and legal rights are painfully disabused of such fantasies when they seek to shed light on social and religious issues the state prefers to keep in the dark.

Since Hao’s detention, Nina has spent countless hours pleading with police officers for information about his case, location and condition. After a month of getting nowhere, she started to chronicle her ordeal on a Chinese-language blog at http://spaces.msn.com/wuhaofamily . (You can read it in English at: http://ethanzuckerman.com/haowu .) It is a heartbreaking account of how China’s regime eats its young. In her first entry she describes her disillusionment: “the people I dealt with never showed police credentials (despite repeated requests), and never called each other by name. . . . I was angry at myself for my political naiveté, and angry at this place that displayed the police insignia but did not actually ‘Serve the People.’ ”

With Chinese President Hu Jintao in the United States this week, Americans have an opportunity to assess his regime. What is this country to think? On the one hand his government has raised the living standards of millions of its citizens with economic reform and international trade. On the other hand his underlings trample shamelessly on his people’s basic human rights.

Unfortunately, money talks more loudly than empathy, compassion or the urge to see justice carried out. So as usual, I expect there to be some tut-tutting about Zhao Yan and Hao Wu, some more op-eds like MacKinnon’s, and then some apologies to Hu for these bothersome distractions as the dealmakers sit down at the big table to do business. The plain truth is that when it comes to these injustices in China, most Americans simply don’t care, as long as they can get cheap shoes at WalMart.

It’s all about respect for the local culture, of course.

Skype, which lets people to make phone calls over the Internet for free, has joined the ranks of other big tech companies in defending its practice of censoring speech in China, according to an article published earlier this week in the Financial Times.

In the article, Niklas Zennstrom, Skype’s chief executive and founder, told the Financial Times that the company’s Chinese partner Tom Online has been censoring words such as “Falun Gong”, “Dalai Lama” and “Tiananmen Square ” in text messages.

Zennstrom defended the practice by saying that adhering to local laws was the price of doing business in any country. He likened the censorship laws in China to any other laws that exist in Western countries, such as the United States or Germany.

The Financial Times quoted him saying, “I may like or not like the laws and regulations to operate businesses in the U.K. or Germany or the U.S., but if I do business there I choose to comply with those laws and regulations. I can try to lobby to change them, but I need to comply with them. China in that way is not different.”

I understand and respect the need to comply with local laws – to a point. You can’t drive on the wrong side of the road or not pay taxes. Actively aiding and abetting censorship, however, raises red flags. And when complying with the local law means participating in the persecution of innocents, that soft, weak, idealistic liberal side of me says a line needs to be drawn. Usually, in normal circumstances, it’s pretty clear where the line should be drawn and how thick that line should be. But China isn’t like most other places, and when there’s big money involved, things get blurry, and otherwise decent compassionate people find their values shifting in synch with the dollar signs. And no, I don’t have a magic solution for this situation and I do understand why Skype and Google and Yahoo and Microsoft are kowtowing to the Party. Is it right? I guess we each have to decide that for ourselves.

Credit where it’s due: Krugman saw the whole thing coming, and for his prescience was mocked as an unhinged, traitorous liberal. This column obliterates the myth of Bush’s great popularity and proves that bush’s much-ballyhooed “political capital” from the 2004 election was an illusion. Or a delusion. Or both.

The Great Revulsion
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 21, 2006

“I have a vision — maybe just a hope — of a great revulsion: a moment in which the American people look at what is happening, realize how their good will and patriotism have been abused, and put a stop to this drive to destroy much of what is best in our country.”

I wrote those words three years ago in the introduction to my column collection, “The Great Unraveling.” It seemed a remote prospect at the time: Baghdad had just fallen to U.S. troops, and President Bush had a 70 percent approval rating.

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This is a contributed post from William Stimson.

Taiwan’s Cracks
by William R. Stimson

What touches my heart about Taiwan is its cracks. You find them everywhere – in the walls of houses and buildings, in sidewalks, highways, curbstones, and cement planters – the legacy of the island’s frequent earthquakes. Everything in Taiwan is just a little broken – even the soil, in places, is rent with fissures. The island was wrenched up from the ocean floor by the Philippine continental plate banging into the edge of Asia. This collision that created Taiwan is still very much in progress. Taiwan is a place in the making. It’s a shaky place, but it’s an island with a future. This is true not just in a geological sense, but also culturally and politically. Communist China’s notion of Taiwan as a “renegade provinceâ€? is a lie. The truth is that modern Taiwan is a wonderfully fractured place that came into being where Japanese and Chinese history collided; and it moves into the future now at the real spot in the world where everything American bangs most forcefully into everything Chinese. As such, Taiwan is a rich, culturally fertile mix – magnificently alive. It may or may not someday be a part of China; but the little nation is simply too important a cultural and commercial treasure for the world to allow it to be bullied by China or America, now or at any time in the future. Geologically, culturally, and politically Taiwan is a de facto self-building entity and deserves the self-determination that, by rights, is its due.

Everywhere I go here I see beautiful new elevated expressways under construction, tall modern skyscrapers, elite apartment buildings, universities, and schools. An elevated high-speed railway line that stretches from one end of the island to the other is almost completed. The bridges here are of the highest caliber and look more like works of modern art or sculpture than engineering projects. Taiwan abounds with creative enterprise, the building up of newer and better things, even as all sorts of forces threaten at any minute to tear it down. The truth isn’t that Taiwan survives in spite of these forces, but that it thrives and can be self-building precisely because of them. This is the real secret of Taiwan and its remarkable grass-roots creativity. Taiwan, not China or America, is the correct model for the developing countries of Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Taiwan also provides a lesson for the creative individual and a constant source of inspiration. The creative life always springs into being at the juncture of powerful opposing forces. Early on it gets cracked and broken. Half the time it seems to be trying to get up from its knees only to be knocked down again. The example of Taiwan shows that it is exactly on such a foundation that the best things happen.

Cracks are evidence that deeper forces are at work under the surface and that something greater is coming into being. These are forces of an awesome magnitude. They would seem to outweigh anything we might be capable of, except that they elicit from within us that which is even mightier – the inner freedom to create. It is when this freedom begins to move through our work and our lives that we rise to our true stature as human beings and, like Taiwan, bring into being something that has never been before, a thing totally new – that can’t be squeezed back into old categories of history and culture, but has the power to break loose from the rigid and the dead, invent a greater freedom, and send everything off in a new direction.

* * *
William R. Stimson is a writer who lives in Taiwan. More of his writing can be found at www.billstimson.com

I’m glad I missed this, and hope it’s long over by the time I arrive in town on May 12.

Photo from this interesting blog.