Danwei has a great interview with the “man who stayed behind,” Sidney Rittenberg. His story is an improbable one. He was at exactly the right place at the right time, a Chinese speaker who believed passionately in Communism who was in China as the Japanese were defeated in 1945 and as the Communists under Mao were poised to take on the Nationalists. His skills as a native English speaker were badly needed and helped make him a darling of the party’s highest leadership, for whom he wrote propaganda. I read his memoir a few years ago and it’s a page-turner, required reading for anyone who wants a bird’s eye view of what Mao and Zhou and Jiang Qing and others were like and how they interacted before and after they came to power. I can’t imagine a more gripping book about the Communists’ rise to power.

I was lucky enough to meet Rittenberg at a lecture he gave about two years ago, and I asked him how he could have endorsed the Cultural Revolution so enthusiastically when it was obviously a cult movement celebrating Mao as a god and going against the communist doctrine of equality and a representative government that serves the people. He answered very frankly, saying he got so swept up in the excitement that he gave up his critical faculties and joined the masses in their rush into madness. It was ironic that within 14 months he would be labelled a spy and put in solitary confinement for about ten years, thanks mainly to the machinations of Jiang Qing.

The Danwei interview is tied to the release of the new documentary about Rittenberg’s life, The Revolutionary, a film I cannot wait to see.

Now, after dedicating so much of his life to creating a classless society, he lives in the US working as a well-heeled consultant, helping foreign firms get in on the action in China. Hypocrite? Pragmatist?

Read the interview. Rittenberg remains an idealist, and a brilliant one at that, and I agree with much of his analysis of today’s economic mess and the need for stimulus as opposed to austerity. His insights into what communism meant half a century ago and how it morphed into something unrecognizable after the Cultural Revolution are eye-opening. No matter what issues I may have with him and his poor judgement, I always want to hear what he has to say. It’s a great interview.

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Richard Burger is the author of Behind the Red Door: Sex in China, an exploration of China’s sexual revolution and its clash with traditional Chinese values.

UPDATE: You can see some wonderful photos of the demonstrations here.

Hong Kongers are demonstrating en masse as the CCP tries to shove down their throats a new student curriculum larded with Mainland propaganda. This is worse than the Creationist-modeled school curriculum instituted by the Texas Board of Education.

The new curriculum would be similar to the so-called patriotic education taught in mainland China. The materials, including a handbook entitled “The China Model,” describe the Communist Party as “progressive, selfless and united” and criticize multiparty systems, even though Hong Kong has multiple political parties.

Critics liken the curriculum to brainwashing and say that it glosses over major events like the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square crackdown. It will be introduced in some elementary schools in September and be mandatory for all public schools by 2016.

Talks between the education minister, Eddie Ng, and the National Education Parents’ Concern Group broke down on Saturday. Mr. Ng later denied that the curriculum was akin to brainwashing.

One demonstrator, Elaine Yau, who was there with her 7-year-old daughter, said that people wanted a say in what was taught in the schools. “We feel like we have no choice,” she said.

One point of contention is that many of the city’s governing elite send their children to the West or to expensive foreign-run international schools, which will be exempt from the national education. The curriculum will be mandatory for the public schools used by most of the working and middle classes.

This part then took the cake. Leave it to a pro-Beijing official to say exactly the wrong thing.

Before the protest, Jiang Yudui of the pro-Beijing China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong added fuel to the fire when he told Hong Kong’s residents that the curriculum should “wash their brains.”

“A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they’re dirty, and a kidney needs washing if it’s sick,” he said, according to the local news media.

In response, protesters waved flags showing a cartoon brain with a line crossed through it. “No thought control! Preserve one country, two systems!” they chanted, referring to the agreement that gives Hong Kong political rights that are not allowed on the mainland.

So there we have it. The dirty brains of Hong Kong kids need a little washing. At least he admits it. Big congratulations to the 32,000 HKers who care enough to demonstrate in public over it. Of course, the pro-Beijing leaders are saying their decision is irrevocable no matter how many citizens take to the streets. I see this as ominous, vile and dictatorial. I can’t imagine Hong Kong ever cooperating, even if it becomes the law.

Some of us really believed there would be one country and two systems. We seem to have been wrong, though we knew that many years ago.

This is good for a laugh. God bless the Global Times.

I just clicked through nearly all the blogs in the “Pearls of the Orient” section over on the left and see that our entire blogosphere is all but dead. How did a once thriving community dry up like this? This China blog seems to be doing the best job of staying current. Most of us seem to be putting up one post every few weeks at best. It’s sad to see what a sorry state we’re in. And I’m the worst culprit of all.

Update: It’s been pointed out to me that this blog, new to my blogroll, also updates frequently.

I was (am) always curious about the seemingly opposing forces at the Global times. Often I was amazed at how far they would go allowing commentators to criticize the CCP, even columns mocking China’s navy and arguing it was hardly ready to participate in any conflict in the South China Sea. So many examples like that. There was a 2009 op-ed praising Deng Yujiao, the karaoke waitress in Badong who stabbed a lascivious government official to death. And a lot more. These were balanced, of course, with xenophobic outbursts, sabre rattling and incredibly paranoid/irrational arguments about the West and the Western media. But still….I was amazed at what got past the censors at what the censors let through. But I never doubted that it was strategic. Nothing got through by accident. Give the people some space to vent, as long as they never cross the line, the fat red line between acceptable criticism and advocating for democracy or for greater freedom in Tibet or for referring to a massacre in 1989.

I wondered about this same thing tonight as I read this piece on the one-year anniversary of the Wenzhou train crash. It’s actually a damn good article; it’s real journalism. Paragraphs like these just pop out at me:

At the scene of the accident, wreaths for the deceased have been removed, memorial poems written on the viaduct pillar have been scrubbed off and there are no signs of the crash. Everything seems to show life has returned to normal. But the local villagers still remember the tragedy vividly.

“I will never forget that night, even now when there’s a thunderstorm and lightning, I am little worried about the viaduct, and worry that such accidents will happen again,” a local resident, who refused to disclose his full name, told the Global Times.

And then there’s this:

Although boasting one of the fastest high-speed trains in the world, the way the Ministry of Railways (MOR) disposed of the wreckage and delayed the results of an investigation into the crash sparked public fury and widespread doubt as to the wisdom of the massive investment in high-speed railways….

Though unwilling to discuss the past, Wang Jian still complained about the MOR. “After the memorial service, the MOR officials fled and have never contacted us ever since. The investigation result was delayed, and the complete name list of all the passengers on the trains has still never been released,” he said.

“The MOR did punish someone, but nobody was even jailed,” Wang complained.

This doesn’t sound like state-controlled propaganda. But maybe it is; maybe it’s doing exactly what the party wants it to do, placing the blame on a specific group of bunglers. I honestly don’t know. The one thing I always thought when I read articles like this, hypercritical of the government, was that it somehow fit within the approved party discourse — that the government was willing to let the media go this far and even encouraged it to do so in some instances, especially when reporting on corruption and local malfeasance.

Is this an example of opening up and greater freedom of the press? Or is it the same old propaganda, disguised as a watchdog media, that is actually planting exactly the stories the government wants it to? I wonder.

Go here and open the pdf file. A beautiful portrait of the Cultural Revolution by one of my very favorite bloggers Xujun Eberlein, whose older sister drowned in 1968 as she paid tribute to Chairman Mao’s famous swim up the Yangtze. Just beautiful. Aging members of different factions of the Red Guard share memories, and we almost understand how these people surrendered their critical faculties and followed Mao on the road to catastrophe. Almost. They were “well meaning” and idealistic. And they ruined countless lives along the way, often their own as well.

I know, in the Twitter age it seems like a burden to open a pdf file and read an actual essay, but this is more than worth it. Mesmerizing.

How many times have we discussed whether China would be better off with some form of democracy as opposed to its one-party authoritarian system? I know, too many times. But this article on the recent debate between CCP apologist and shill Eric Li and professor of government Minxin Pei is well worth reading. If you don’t believe me about Li being a shill, or if you are unfamiliar with him, read this. This is one of my favorite of Li’s assertions:

China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests, as they have done in the past 10 years.

However, China’s leaders would not hesitate to curtail those freedoms if the conditions and the needs of the nation changed. The 1980s were a time of expanding popular participation in the country’s politics that helped loosen the ideological shackles of the destructive Cultural Revolution. But it went too far and led to a vast rebellion at Tiananmen Square.

That uprising was decisively put down on June 4, 1989. The Chinese nation paid a heavy price for that violent event, but the alternatives would have been far worse.

The resulting stability ushered in a generation of growth and prosperity that propelled China’s economy to its position as the second largest in the world.

For a marvelous take-down of this drivel go here. As if all of China’s great progress rests firmly on the shoulders of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Anyway, sorry for that digression, but you have to know who Li is to appreciate this debate.

I’ve always been careful to say I don’t believe Western-style democracy would necessarily be the answer to China’s problems of corruption, human rights violations, and the injustices inherent to any one-party system that operates without the checks of rule of law. Pei makes a strong argument, however, that the huge political and economic challenges China is facing are weakening the government and will ultimately result in an “unraveling” of the one-party system. So China should have a democratic infrastructure in place if the party implodes. In a nutshell:

The economy has been driven primarily by investments at home and exports to developed countries, which isn’t sustainable. In the political sphere, we’re seeing manifestations of a fundamental vulnerability of one-party systems globally: a tendency to drift into benefiting a relatively small, and ultimately predatory, elite at the expense of society generally, and the associated phenomena of high-level corruption and inequality.

Together, Pei claimed, these two domains of contradiction tend to impede the growth of China’s economy and undermine the legitimacy of its government. You can see the last two decades as a story of the rise of the Chinese system, Pei said; but the next 10 to 15 years (no less than 10, no more than 15) will be one of the system’s unraveling. And this is what the United States and the West generally need to worry about — not China’s strength but its weakness, because when the transition to a more democratic system comes, it will be very difficult to manage, particularly given the country’s deep ethnic divisions, its disputed borders, and its complex integration with the global economy.

Li’s arguments are familiar: all of China’s mistakes have been dwarfed by its accomplishments, the party has put China on a long trajectory of growth and it would be insane to shift gears when the current system is working, Western democracies are thrown into chaos by politics and therefore can’t get things done, etc. Pei argues that by clinging to an unrepresentative system of government, China may be on a path to collapse should the economy falter dramatically, and having no other alternative to the CCP political bedlam could ensue. A comparison to the collapse of the Soviet Union is not inconceivable.

Li showed his true stripes several times, and he was proud of them. This was one of my favorites:

In response to a question from the audience, Li also criticized the very ideas of political liberty and individual rights. Unless you think rights come from God, he insisted, you really have no theory of why any one view of political liberty any discrete set of individual rights should be sacrosanct at all. “If they’re from men, they’re not absolute; they can be negotiated.” It was only too bad there wasn’t time to discuss what “negotiated” means here.

“I want to break the spell of the so-called right to freedom of speech,” he added later. “Speech is act. It has harmed from time immemorial.”

It’s too bad he sounds like such an apologist. Some of his arguments are fair. We all know how well China has done compared to 30 years ago. I believe the CCP has to be given a lot of credit for improving the quality of the lives of so many of its citizens, and wonder whether its people are ready for pluralism. But who gets to decide that? And if the people so adore the CCP, why do Li and other shills so strongly oppose free elections? And if the government is so confident in China’s future, why are so many party elites moving their assets out of China? Li got kind of tongue-tied over that one.

Anyway, read the whole thing. Nothing new, exactly, but thought provoking. And you really are left wondering what the answer is. Neither Pei’s nor Li’s answers are totally convincing and it’s hard for me to say who “won.”

Let me admit it up front: Few topics could bore me as much as avionics and the aerospace industry. I only want to know that my pilot can take off, get me to where I want to go and land the plane safely. I don’t really know the difference between the words “avionics” and “aerospace.” So I approached China Airborne with a touch of trepidation: How could I possibly enjoy a book about a topic I find dryer than dust?

Leave it to James Fallows to take a subject to which I am indifferent (if not downright hostile) and turn it into a story of suspense and adventure, human and technological, and to delight me with every page. Yes, China Airborne is about aviation in China, how it started, how it has evolved and where it’s heading, yet the book transcends its ostensible subject, which Fallows uses as a metaphor for China’s evolution in general, for its advancement into the modern era, and all the challenges it faces as it seeks to break away from its role as the maker of goods designed by others to a nation that actually pioneers new technologies.

Before the 1990s China’s aviation industry lagged drastically behind that of the developed world, to say the least. Most of the planes were Russian made, the airports were primitive and few, and its safety record atrocious. Now China is home to some of the world’s most impressive airports, its aviation industry is growing at breakneck speed with billions of dollars in government funding, and it boasts one of the highest air safety records in the world.

How China got here is a breathtaking story, a story of China’s famous “can-do” attitude and willingness to throw itself into the projects it sets its sights on. An important part of this story and one the Chinese are less likely to talk about is the role of US entities, especially companies like Boeing and engineers and contractors from US agencies, which guided China along the way over the decades. Fallows charts China’s progress during these years and introduces us to the cast of characters who possessed the vision, the skills and the sheer bravura to move China’s aviation industry into the modern age.

Fallows’ description of the proposed development of an avionics research center in a remote area outside of Xi’An immediately brought to mind a chapter in Peter Hessler’s Country Driving, where he describes the building of a factory in China that plans to manufacture the little metal rings that hold brassieres together. They have no customers, no plans for sales or marketing, no business infrastructure, yet they pour money into building the factory, get it going into full swing and hire a complete staff. Eventually, after several months, they begin to get customers. Build it, and they will come. The same, it seems, with this aviation center and its grandiose plans to transform the region to attract tourists and become China’s center for aviation research.

Fallows describes how projects like these begin at the local level in China, the first step being winning the blessing of local officials and convincing them of the financial rewards to their region. A lot of guanxi is expended along the way. The dreamers will worry about getting the central government involved later. The avionics center project was immense, and Fallows’ descriptions of the building of runways in what was essentially the wilderness are amusing but also so quintessentially Chinese — we can do this, and we can do it on a grand scale! The obstacles they face — and there will be many — can be dealt with later.

A pilot himself (the book begins with his preparation to co-pilot the first Cirrus jetplane in China), Fallows obviously loves this topic. The breadth of his knowledge is sweeping and I closed the book rather amazed at all I had learned about what it takes to manage international flight, how today’s jets are built, how new GPS systems are changing how pilots take off and land and making it possible to put up runways even in remote rugged mountain terrain in Tibet. As I started the book I didn’t really want to know about these things, but I was quickly engrossed.

To a large extent this book is about China’s efforts to adapt to an age when leading an industry means opening up your people’s minds to new ideas, to new ways of thinking, to sharing knowledge and information. The last quarter of the book is less about flight and more about the Chinese government’s conflicting interests, ones we’ve discussed so many times here: retaining control and directing people’s thoughts vs. opening up and encouraging talent to blossom. If China wants to be on the frontier of the aerospace industry it needs to draw talent from all over the world. It will have to loosen the military’s grip on who controls the skies so the industry can operate without ridiculous and irrational restrictions. Fallows makes the point more than once that China has the hardware, the money and the facilities

but it lacks the “soft” ingredients necessary for a fully functioning, world-leading aerospace establishment. These include standards that apply consistently across the country rather than depending on the whim and favor of local potentates. Or smooth, quick coordination among civil, military and commercial organizations. Or sustaining the conditions — intellectual property protection, reliable contract enforcement and rule of law, freedom of inquiry and expression — that allow first-rate research-and-developments institutions to thrive and attract talent from around the world.

If China can succeed fully in aerospace, then in principle there is very little it cannot do.

Fallows doesn’t pretend to be a prophet and he leaves this question open. But he is clear about one thing: without the requirements he lists, without greater rule of law and respect for contracts, without protection of intellectual property, China will surely fail to meet its objective. It will not lead the world in technology and innovation. The book is all about China’s dreamers and their dreams. It would be such a pity to see China’s inflexibility and insecurities hold its people’s dreams back.

Boeing and Airbus see China as its most promising market and have agreed to joint ventures that involve the sharing of technology, despite the risks, because they know this is where the customers of the future are. China will play a huge role in the assembly of today’s incredibly complex jetliners, just as it does with iPhones. It will be buying more aircraft than any other nation. But can China design the next jetliner or iPhone?

It cannot, Fallows argues, unless it embraces “the openness and experimentation that world leadership in fields like aerospace would demand.” China now shields its people, protects them from “harmful content” on the Internet, which Fallows says makes many Chinese feel “infantilized and diminished by this reminder that they’re not quite part of the modern world.” China has to deal, too, with its paranoia and prickly sensitivities, its inability to deflect incidents like Liu Xiaobo’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize instead of being thrown off balance and revealing its insecurities to the world. There’s a lot about China’s thirst for soft power, and how it always gets put onto the back burner behind China’s No. 1 priority, internal stability and complete power of the party.

I bookmarked so many passages in this wonderful book, and I can’t go into every aspect of it that I enjoyed. It is about so much more than I can say here. It’s worth reading just for Fallows’ description of how he and his wife were bullied by plainclothes police at Tiananmen Square on the 20-year anniversary of the June 4th crackdown (an incident he blogged about at the time).

You come away from this book so impressed with what China has done and can do, with just how extraordinary its progress has been and how its authoritarian system has, so far, worked well enough that most people in China would say their lives are better off today than they were twenty or thirty years ago. But you also come away with strong doubts about China’s ability to rise to the next stage of power, where its people’s creativity and imaginations are unleashed, and where universal laws are respected. Where China becomes a true global citizen, concerned not so much with the specialness of China but with China’s role as a world leader. (This discussion of how China fosters the notion of its own uniqueness, with 5,000 years of history, as opposed to its place within the world community as a nation that cares — or at least pretends to care — about other nations aside from itself is one of the most fascinating in the book.)

All readers of this blog will enjoy China Airborne. Fallows’ accumulated wisdom of living in China, starting with his first visit there in 1986, pervades every page, and you will be thinking about where China is heading for a long time after you put it down. I can’t recommend China Airborne highly enough.

Not sure how long this video has been around, but I’ve never seen anything like it before and want to recommend it to everyone. I’ve read about every aspect of the GLF but never saw so much of the story captured on film. Don’t watch it if you have high blood pressure.

“It is better to let half the people die so the other half can eat their fill.”

Mao Zedong, 1959. Seventy percent good, indeed.

I’ve already posted about how much I love this new blog. Go now and read their ominously hilarious post about how China manages to shoot itself in the foot whenever it comes to its neverending quest for soft power. An example is a business conference in the city of Leeds that gave a speaking slot to the king of jackals, the Dalai Lama. China’s leader were not amused. As is so often the case, they resort to threats, a very poor strategy in the quest for soft power around the world. They did the same with Norway after Liu Xiaobao won the Nobel Peace Prize and they still do). Rectified.Name comments:

But today an op-ed appeared in the nationalist rag The Global Times which made it quite clear that anybody who messes with China’s dignity should expect a flaming bag of cat hurled in the general direction of their front door sometime in the very near future:

“They must pay the due price for their arrogance. This is also how China can build its authority in the international arena. China doesn’t need to make a big fuss because of the Dalai or a dissident, but it has many options to make the UK and Norway regret their decision.”

You get the idea.

This is China at its soft power worst, scoring goals in its own net and making it exponentially harder to convince the rest of the world that the country is being run by grown-ups.

Need further proof? Take the case of the new documentary Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, produced by Alison Klayman. It’s gotten some decent buzz at Sundance and other stops on the festival circuit, but that wasn’t sufficient for the Chinese government who apparently want EVERYBODY to go see this movie.

Faced with the possibility of appearing at the same film festival as Klayman’s documentary, a Chinese delegation, including representatives from CCTV, pulled out of a planned appearance rather than validate the promoter’s decision to…I don’t know, show films. Anybody not high from inhaling industrial solvents could have predicted what happened next, because as sure as cows shit hay the festival organizers then called a press conference, chastised the Chinese delegation, and reaped a bonanza of free publicity for their festival, Ai Weiwei, Klayman and her film.

Seriously, if the powers that be really wanted to kill this film they’d have SARFT publicly give the documentary its seal of approval.

“Many options.” That is really scary.

I really would like to write a post praising the CCP for its soft policy efforts. They seem to try so hard, but then they seem to try even harder to offend just about everyone. I see so many glimmers of hope, and then they just switch the lights off. There’s a way to express your dissatisfaction without sounding like a snarling bully. Why do they keep getting soft power all wrong? It’s not just that they fail at establishing soft power, it’s that they create exactly the opposite effect from what they set out to achieve.

For bloggers on China, this is a gift that keeps on giving. Same story over and over again, each time with some added bells and whistles. This is supposed to be a government run by engineers employing scientific methods to solve the country’s myriad problems, and in many ways they’ve done a damn good job. Why can’t they apply this scientific approach to the pursuit of soft power instead of setting the laboratory on fire everytime they try?

Update: Be sure to read this one, too!

China Digital Times has collected a series of directives from what Chinese journalists, in true Orwellian fashion, have dubbed the “Ministry of Truth.” These guideline start with the death of Chinese activist Li Wangyang who recently “died” in police custody and has made international headlines. This and other topics are off limits in China:

Regarding the news of Li Wangyang’s death in Shaoyang, Hunan and the foreign media reaction: all media outlets must without exception refrain from granting interviews, reporting or commenting, and must not reprint relevant information from foreign media and websites….

Central Propaganda Department: Yili Milk Powder and Shaanxi Forced Abortion

Regarding heavy metals found in certain batches of Yili Brand milk powder and the seven-month pregnant women in Yuping Village, Cengjia Town, Zhenping County, Ankang City, Shaanxi Province who underwent forced labor: if any media outlet reports on these stories, only Xinhua News Agency’s wire copy may be used. Do not hype these stories, do not exaggerate them, and do not offer in-house reporting or commentary….

Central Propaganda Department: India Arrests Eight Chinese Citizens

According to the Indian media, on June 12 Indian police arrested eight Chinese nationals. No media outlet may report or comment on either this or related incidents, nor may any reprint relevant information or commentary from foreign media and websites.

Back and forth, A freer press, a more restricted press. Nothing new. It even reminds me of some memos I’ve seen distributed by the masters at Fox News telling their “journalists” to cover Republican-related scandals with kid gloves while going after Democrats with everything they’ve got, slanderous or not. The difference is Fox News is not America’s monolithic overseer of the media and cannot dictate what all media in the country can and cannot cover.