This is absolutely extraordinary. A friend just tweeted it, asking, “So, is the Washington Post website going to be blocked in China?” I’ll be stunned if it’s not. We all know China can be quite tolerant of news on Western sites, as long as it’s in English, knowing you can never galvanize the masses if you’re not speaking in their language. Thus, this will almost inevitably be harmonized. And if not, it’ll be unprecedented.

Go there while you can if you want to hear Zhao dictating a portion of his story on cassette before it was smuggled out and published. Controversial stuff, too, as Zhao challenges the decision to crack down on what had been orderly if chaotic and messy demonstrations. Money quote:

Of course, whenever there are large numbers of people involved, there will always be some tiny minority within the crowd who might want to attack the PLA. It was a chaotic situation. It is perfectly possible that some hooligans took advantage of the situation to make trouble, but how can these actions be attributed to the majority of the citizens and students? By now, the answer to this question should be clear.

And it is clear, to everyone who has a mind. There were some disgusting acts of violence perpetrated by some enraged participants as the soldiers advanced. And sympathy must go to the soldiers who were attacked, as it must go to the vast majority of demonstrators who were killed or injured, who were peaceful and orderly. More on this later.

About the site: I know, it’s been quiet. And we have a big anniversary coming up, and I’ve been seeing some atrocious revisionist stuff over here on the Internets about that date that just begs to be fisked. Zhao’s memoir couldn’t have come out at a better time (coincidence, right?); itcertainly helps blast apart some of the more audacious claims I’ve been seeing. More to come.

Update: Be sure to see Granite Studio’s amusing response to the memoirs.

I can’t see any of the google ads on the left-hand sidebar, just a big empty space. A friend in America sent me a screenshot, and they look quite naughty. Would China actually bother blocking them as part of its wholesomeness campaign?

While I am here, some quick links:

In China, tall is all and beauty is more than skin-deep. (Great post.)

Sinosplice interviews translator titan Brendan O’Kane on the joys and sorrows of performing his trade in China.

Chinageeks continues to impress with their translation of a remarkable story of another American Chinabounder-type. Only worse.

Yet another article on the mess in Tibet , this one quite level-headed and even-handed.

I’m still at my new job and living in Beijing, where winter never seems to end. Still, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. Except maybe Kunming….

Site has been busy this week, not sure an open thread is needed, but here’s one just in case.

Update: Had to add this as strangest headline and story of the day:

“Md. mom pleads guilty to starving son to death in unusual deal.”

I saw that and said to myself, yes, it is most unusual to make a deal with your son to starve him to death. Turns out it’s a different kind of deal, and perhaps the strangest ever.

A former religious cult member pleaded guilty Monday to starving her 1-year-old son to death after making an unusual deal with prosecutors: If the child is resurrected, her plea will be withdrawn. Ria Ramkissoon, 22, also agreed to testify against four other members of the now-defunct religious group known as 1 Mind Ministries. All four are charged with first-degree murder in the death of Javon Thompson.

According to a statement of facts, the cult members stopped feeding the boy when he refused to say “Amen” after a meal. After Javon died, Ramkissoon sat next to his decomposing body and prayed for his resurrection.

I somehow doubt this story will have a happy ending. I keep hearing John Lennon’s line from Imagine, “and no religion, too….” I at least give China credit for getting that issue right.

Like the grass mud horse, I wonder whether this is a bold political statement and a sneer at the censors, or just a giggly prank. See the explanation here.

Via Reflections.

The Mandarin Oriental Beijing hotel was destroyed by an unlicensed fireworks display set off by CCTV itself.

State TV company apologizes for Beijing fire

BEIJING – China’s state-run television broadcaster apologized Tuesday for an unlicensed fireworks display that sparked a blaze that destroyed a luxury hotel in the network’s headquarters complex in downtown Beijing.

The fire, which sent off huge plumes of black smoke and showered the ground with embers, left one firefighter dead and a handful of others injured, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The blaze was put out early Tuesday after burning for more than five hours at the unfinished Mandarin Oriental hotel.

Xinhua quoted Luo Yuan, a spokesman for the Beijing fire department, as saying that fireworks set off to celebrate the Lunar New Year were to blame for the fire that destroyed the nearly finished Mandarin Oriental hotel.

He was quoted as saying CCTV had hired a fireworks company to ignite several hundred large fireworks in an open area by the hotel. Video footage posted on Youtube showed spectacular bursts of fireworks above the top of the building in downtown Beijing.

“According to the Beijing fire department, this fire occurred because the person in charge of the construction of the new building project of CCTV, without permission, hired staff to set off fireworks that violated regulations,” China Central Television said in a statement on its Web site.

CCTV said it was deeply grieved “for the severe damage the fire caused to the country’s property.”

At lunch a few hours ago I was discussing with a friend the possibility of ordinary fireworks sold on the street having the force to set a skyscraper on fire. We both agreed it was more likely a professional display gone awry.

Heads are going to roll.

Update: I guess we now know why Xinhua sent out instructions last night to minimize and spin the story:

各网：“中央电视台新大楼北配楼发生火灾”相关报道，请各网站只用新华社通稿，不发图片、视频，不作深度报道；只放国内新闻区，关闭跟帖，自然滚动，论坛博客不置顶，不推荐。

To all websites: Report related to the Fire in the CCTV new building, please only use Xinhua news report. No photo, no video clip, no in-depth report; the news should be put on news area only, close the comment posts, don’t top the forum blogpost, don’t recommend posts related with the subject.

Another textbook example of CCP cover-upping.

Strangest thing. China Daily, Shanghai Daily and Xinhua (to name the first ones I’ve checked) seem to have minimized mention of the Mandarin Oriental’s destruction. Go to their home pages now and see. China Daily only has a reference to the story on its list of recent articles if you look hard enough, and the story it takes you to has no photo. Xinhua had one of the earliest articles out about the fire, with photos, and that, too, has been 100 percent scrubbed from the home page, though it’s still up on their site (which is of little use if you don’t know the link).

Similarly, the CCTV-9 home page only references the fire, with no mention of the hotel name, in the list of breaking stories; no story or photo on the home page, just photos of the moon and pretty red lanterns. The link takes you to a very brief story, with photo, that does admit the fire was caused by illegal fireworks.

A spokesman for the Beijing Municipal government says initial investigations showed the fire had been caused by illegal launch of fireworks. Firefighters found remnants of fireworks on the southern roof of the burning building.

China Smack says it didn’t take long for China’s propagandistsmedia specialists to start censoring reports, locking online threads and removing photos.

Really disappointing. You’d think this would lead everywhere, and it’s ironic there’s more coverage in the international papers. As usual, this approach has to backfire, making the world wonder why the government would downplay the story and censor photos of a hotel fire. Which seems to me like an excellent question.

Update: From the hotel’s web site:

Statement in response to the fire at the development site of Mandarin Oriental, Beijing
Mandarin Oriental, Beijing was scheduled to open in the summer of 2009. The property currently employs 60 staff, all of whom work in pre-opening offices near to the hotel, which were empty at the time of the fire. Mandarin Oriental has signed a long-term contract to manage the hotel and has no ownership interest in the building. Our local management team are doing all they can to help the authorities to ensure the safety and security of everyone involved. It is too early at the present stage to assess the damage, but we will make further updates as soon as we have more information.

Update 2: Fireman dies from breathing in toxic chemical fumes while fighting the blaze.

Update 3: CCTV admits the fire was their fault; Xinhua directive on censoring/minimizing the story published.

I was at the Bookworm tonight with friends, playing in the weekly quiz night (which, incidentally, we won), when the emcee told the audience that the new hotel next to the CCTV towers was in flames. We didn’t know if he was joking or not. Now I see he wasn’t joking.

From PanYi

The hotel is the Mandarin Oriental, and the cause was sparks caused by fireworks.

Anyone in Beijing tonight can tell you about the orgiastic explosions that rocked the city from 5pm to midnight setting off car alarms and leaving deep piles of debris on every street. Fireworks on the last night of CNY are always a very big deal here. Hastily set-up fireworks shops can be found everywhere, and they sell fireworks to people of all ages. Monitors with red armbands parade their neighborhoods to make sure people are using them safely. But something went very wrong tonight.

The Mandarin Oriental hotel caught fire sometime before 9 p.m. (1300 GMT) as the skies above the Chinese capital were filled with exploding fireworks — part of celebrations of the lantern festival that follows the Lunar New Year.

The entire hotel building was engulfed in flames, sending off huge plumes of black smoke and showering the ground below with embers. At least seven fire crews were on the scene and police held back crowds of onlookers and closed a nearby elevated highway to ensure safety.

Li Jian said he saw smoke arising from the 44-story hotel’s roof shortly after a huge burst of fireworks showered it with sparks, though it was not clear if they started the fire.

“Smoke came out for a little while but then it just started burning,” Li said….

Beijing usually tightly restricts the use of fireworks in the downtown area, but waives the rules each year during the Lunar New Year holiday. Monday, the final day of the exemption period, marked the first full moon since the Lunar New Year, and massive fireworks barrages exploded between buildings and in open spaces throughout the city.

Erik Amir a senior architect at building designers OMA said the fire had destroyed years of hard work.
“It really has been a rough six-seven years for architects who worked on this project,” said Amir, who rushed to the site after hearing of the fire.

“I think it’s really sad that this building is destroyed before it can be opened to the public,” he said.

This is right around the corner from my office; I passed by the hotel every day for nearly two years as it was being built.

So I had to ask myself: Should Beijing reconsider giving everyone the right to set off fireworks as they see fit during CNY? I’m just asking. I realize how difficult it would be to enforce a ban on fireworks when they are so much a part of the culture, and I don’t know if it would even be possible. I also don’t know whether tonight’s disaster was caused by amateurs lighting off fireworks for fun, or by a professional putting on a display for the public. I suppose we’ll find out the details soon enough.

But tonight is a reminder: fireworks can kill and destroy when they’re not used right. Should they be as freely distributed as tissue paper?

Update: Great live coverage from David Feng.

Eerily beautiful, frightening video footage here.

Update: China’s censors minimizing the story and blocking photos?

Update: CCTV admits fire was caused by their own illegal fireworks.

I’ve been working on a freelance project the past couple of days and have several more hours to go. So the best I can do is a thread, and a link to this new article on censorship that just caught my eye. Can the party really stand up to China’s Internet community?

The Web has become a forum for public activism that would be speedily suppressed, or widely ignored, if it occurred offline. In recent months, a spate of vigilante campaigns have been waged against low-level officials accused of corruption or unseemly behavior.

In one notable case in December, an ostensibly harmless photograph of Zhou Jiugeng, a Nanjing housing official, found its way onto the Web. Sharp-eyed bloggers could not help noticing the $15,000 Swiss watch on his wrist and the $22-a-pack cigarettes on the table in front of him. Two weeks later, Mr. Zhou was fired after investigators determined that he had led an improbably lavish lifestyle for a modestly salaried civil servant.

Two weeks earlier, a Communist Party official in Shenzhen resigned after he was accused of abusing an 11-year-old girl in a restaurant bathroom. What tripped him up was a security camera video, widely circulated online, that showed him waving off the girl’s distraught family as he taunted them with his lofty rank.

Then there is the case of a Wenzhou government delegation whose publicly financed junket to Las Vegas, Niagara Falls and Vancouver was exposed by a blogger who found a bag of incriminating receipts on a Shanghai subway. After the documents were published on the Web in December, two top officials were ousted from their jobs; the other nine travelers were forced to write self-criticism essays.

None of these stories is new (except for the Shanghai extravaganza fiasco used as the story’s news hook), but the pattern and velocity is what’s interesting. Looking at the Shenzhen example, I hope the official did more than resign – he should be drawn and quartered, very, very slowly. (Disclaimer: US politicians have done some bad things, too. Yes, I know.)

This is a thread for any and all topics.

A late-night quickie:

The European Parliament on Thursday awarded its top human rights prize to jailed Chinese dissident Hu Jia despite warnings from China that its relations with the 27-nation bloc would be seriously damaged if it did so.

In selecting Hu to receive the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, the European lawmakers said they are “sending out a signal of clear support to all those who support human rights in China.” Hu has advocated for the rights of Chinese citizens with HIV-AIDS and chronicled the arrest, detention and abuse of other activists.

After I posted a few weeks ago that I felt Hu was deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, I had an opportunity to discuss his career with friends of mine (Westerners involved in government) who are much more familiar with his activities than I. Since then, I’ve had rather mixed feelings about Hu Jia.

His arrest is certainly prima facie evidence that today’s CCP retains much of the prickly, pig-headed, uptight, asinine qualities of yore. And yet, there’s no denying Hu was often a self-promoter, practically shouting at the government, “Arrest me,” especially considering his timing. (He was warned that such antics right before the Olympic Games would not be tolerated, and he persisted in a most in-your-face manner.) None of that even begins to justify his arrest, but maybe it raises questions about Hu’s judgment and motivations?

Hu did dedicate much of his time to raising awareness of AIDS and environmental issues in China. But my friends, one of whom works at the United Nations, challenged me about what Hu has actually done aside from draw attention to himself and get himself arrested. I mentioned a project he launched to help AIDS orphans in Henan, and they countered that it was more hype than anything else. “Basically he wrote some emails,” my friend countered. “Do we award the Nobel Prize to someone who just sent out emails?” Before anyone jumps on a high horse and says I’m slandering Hu Jia (whom I’ve defended many times on this blog), please understand I am only saying I don’t know – that maybe he’s an example of our emotions (mine included) making us jump to conclusions. Or maybe he actually did deserve the Nobel Prize. As I said, mixed feelings.

Whether he deserves the Sakharov Prize is up for debate, as with any prize for political activism. In any case, if this inspires greater scrutiny of China’s repressive tendencies, paranoia and eagerness to arrest anyone who threatens to shed light on them, then I’m glad Hu Jia won.

I meant to put up a one-liner, and suddenly it became a tome. Good night.

A final link for the night, and it’s a good one. Artists in China have to go to great lengths to get their works approved, often to no avail. An interesting and unusual look at what the Propaganda Department does, how the censors operate, how artists seek to second-guess them, and the effects of their efforts on Chinese talent.

A tiny snip, and then the computer goes off.

About the intellectuals, Mao Zedong often remarked, “If they don’t listen to us, we won’t give them food.” This kind of dependence on the state for one’s physical existence has handicapped Chinese writers and artists and intensified their self-censorship. Worse, China’s literary apparatus automatically excludes and isolates writers who are determined to exist outside it. Every now and then, some young writers raise a war cry against the Writers’ Union, but the truth is that most writers, old and young, are eager to join it.

Is it that hard to figure out why?

Wait. That is not my theory, but that of the author of an article written more than four years ago that a reader pointed me to and that I recommend you read. Not because it’s necessarily right, but because it’s fascinating to see where we actually stand four years after the writer’s prediction.

Today, the currency and export policy of China is anchored around its peg to the dollar. The main reason for this is that by artificially undervaluing its own currency, and therefore overvaluing the dollar, China artificially stimulates its manufacturing exports. The second reason is that by buying the excess U.S. dollars and reinvesting them in U.S. government bonds, it acts as a foreign lender to the United States. The third reason is that this foreign lending stimulates American demand for Chinese manufacturing exports and allows the Chinese government to relieve its current unemployment problems… No doubt, most of these loans will turn out to be very expensive because they will be repaid with greatly depreciated dollars, which in turn will exacerbate down the road the growing financial distress of the banking sector in China.

Therefore, it is clear that China travels today the road to Depression. How severe this depression will be, will critically depend on two developments. First, how much longer the Chinese government will pursue the inflationary policy, and second how doggedly it will fight the bust. The longer it expands and the more its fights the bust, the more likely it is that the Chinese Depression will turn into a Great Depression. Also, it is important to realize that just like America’s Great Depression in the 1930s triggered a worldwide Depression, similarly a Chinese Depression will trigger a bust in the U.S., and therefore a recession in the rest of the world.

Unless there is an unforeseen banking, currency, or a derivative crisis spreading throughout the world, it is my belief that the Chinese bust will occur sometime in 2008-2009, since the Chinese government will surely pursue expansionary policies until the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in China. By then, inflation will be most likely out of control, probably already in runaway mode, and the government will have no choice but to slam the brakes and induce contraction. In 1929 the expansion stopped in July, the stock market broke in October, and the economy collapsed in early 1930. Thus, providing for a latency period of approximately half a year between credit contraction and economic collapse, based on my Olympic Games timing, I would pinpoint the bust for 2009. Admittedly, this is a pure speculation on my part; naturally, the bust could occur sooner or later.

Of course, macro-economic predictions like this usually prove to be far off the mark (except those made by me), the most (in)famous perhaps being Gordon Chang’s prediction of “The Coming Collapse of China.” In the case of the article above, the story seems to have occurred almost in reverse – a US (and increasingly European) crisis is what is plunging the world into a recesion, not government-generated inflation in China. America’s economic crisis, not China’s, was the catalyst for the tailspin, and if China is be plunged into a depression, it will be for reasons very different from what the author envisaged. (He was shrewd enough to say that his theory might be offset by “an unforeseen banking, currency, or a derivative crisis spreading throughout the world.” And what we are seeing today was certainly unseen by most in 2004.)

However…however… I honestly believe China is going to be one of the few players that emerges from the current crisis relatively unscathed (and “relatively” is a key word.). Simply because of the size of its own domestic markets and the trade it carries out in Africa and Asia. It will suffer, lots of factories will continue to close and lots of dreams will be erased and jobs lost. But it won’t be depression. What it will be, more than anything else, is a test for the CCP. Running a country the size of China with the staggering problems is hard (to say the least), but it sure helps when the economy is roaring year after year.

One of the most frequently repeated motifs is that as long as the economy is kicking, most Chinese don’t give a damn about human rights and censorship and corruption. Once things slow down and people have more time (and more fear), as they see their opportunities dimming, as they realize the joy ride they were counting on was finite while the ruling classes are doing just fine – will they lose some of that Zhongguo jia you spirit and begin to demand their government do better? Will they look at they way America ousted the Republicans, and demand that same freedom? Short answer: probably not; at least not yet. China is better positioned to weather the current storm without enough rampant misery in the cards to get people thinking about revolution. The government can still spend its way out of this mess they way it usually does. One day China will face an economic moment of truth, the way America is facing one now. I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. Yet.

I swore I wouldn’t post anything today, that I’d focus only on my homework. The Internet is such a monumental distraction. And that will be the subject of an upcoming new post.