In Singapore in 2003 a friend told me that he and many of his friends were delighted when they heard the news of September 11th two years earlier. In China, a colleague told me how he and his classmates applauded and cheered in school the following day. Obviously this isn’t representative of all Asian people, but I also think they were hardly isolated incidents.

I understood it. I understood that there was a lot of joy, and even more schadenfreude, to see the world’s superpower, the one that arrogantly appointed itself police officer of the world, weakened and devastated. It wasn’t right, but it’s not hard to explain.

With that in mind, I was interested in a much-tweeted WSJ blog post that appeared yesterday dealing with the complex range of emotions Chinese people were expressing on the Internet over the news of Bin Laden’s death. Of course, picking out comments from the Web is not a scientific method of measuring public sentiment, especially when vocal fenqing can easily drown out more reasonable voices. Still, I found the contrasting emotions quite fascinating. Here are a few of the examples:

“Deeply mourning Bin Laden,” wrote Weibo user Jiajia Nuwu in comments echoed fairly widely across the site. “Yet another anti-American hero is lost.”

“Is this real? Excellent!” wrote another. “Now the only terrorist left is the United States!”

….“Thank you America for helping us,” wrote user Zhaoling Tongzi, noting Beijing’s assertion that that the Al Qaeda leader had supported a Muslim separatist movement in Xinjiang. “He wasn’t a friend. He was an enemy.”

….In another oblique reference to Chinese politics, a number of Chinese Twitter users passed around a message reading: “Of the ten most evil people in the world, the U.S. has killed one. Now there are nine left.”

Nine is the number of members on the Chinese Communist Party’s ruling Politburo Standing Committee.

….In a more analytical vein, former journalist and prominent political blogger Wen Yunchao argued on his Twitter account that the death of Mr. bin Laden would have consequences for China’s foreign policy.

“In the past, the U.S. needed China to join the fight against terrorism and so made more than a few concessions,” Mr. Wen wrote. “Now that bin Laden is dead, there’s one less constraint. The Free World now has more power to encircle China on the issue of universal values.”

So I don’t think we can pigeonhole exactly how “the Chinese people” feel about the news. I’m assuming the usual suspects were unhappy to see America achieve what can only be described as a major victory, while the more sober observers realized it was something that had to be done, and perhaps was even a good thing for the entire world. I appreciated the blog post because it showed there’s more to Chinese opinion on the Web than just angry, jingoistic young men.

While we’re on the topic I’d like to get down some of my own thoughts on what has been an extraordinary couple of days in America.

Osama Bin Laden had become increasingly irrelevant and weak as each year passed. But the jubilation over his capture is unsurprising and is not misplaced (though the circus of ecstasy and shouting of “USA, USA!” is misplaced). After all, he did plan and provide the resources that led to a horrific attack on American soil, nothing less than an act of war, and he was also at least partly responsible for the deaths of thousands of Muslims, usually Shiites, who were butchered with religious fanaticism by Bin Laden’s point man in Iraq, Zarqawi. And he was responsible for many other acts of bloodshed against totally innocent victims.

(For anyone who might have doubts about the savagery of Zarqawi and his intimate relationship with Bin Laden, I suggest you read Bruce Riedel’s The Search for Al Qaeda and Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower.)

So while Bin Laden’s relevancy was diminished, the breadth and scope of his evil remained, and he was deservedly the most wanted man in the world.

Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, was captured in the 1960s, decades after Treblinka was destroyed, and he was in no way “relevant” to any cause at all (he was working at an auto plant in Brazil when he was captured). And yet, his relevancy was not the issue, but his evil deeds were, and justice had to be served. He spent the rest of his life in a German prison. For Bin Laden as well, justice had to be served, and news that it finally happened ignited a not-so-surprising sense of relief and national pride.

I just finished reading the aforementioned Search for Al Qaeda, which explains beautifully why Bin Laden did what he did. It was nearly 100 percent a reaction to Western colonialism in the Middle East following WWI, culminating in the creation of the State of Israel. The breaking point was the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia for the 1991 invasion of Iraq, which Al Qaeda sees as desecration of the sacred Arabian peninsula. They saw the USSR as colonizers of Afghanistan in the 1980s and we gave the Mujaheddin, supported strongly by Bin Laden, aid to defeat the Soviets, then we left them in the lurch, and the rest is history. So it’s quite fair to say the West played a pivotal role in the creation of Al Qaeda. But that’s no justification for global terrorism and mass murder.

I’ve actually read opinions that we should not have killed Bin Laden because it would inevitably lead to a reaction resulting in more violence. I find this point of view extraordinary. Do we actually not go after mass murderers because it would inflame other murderers? Do we turn the other cheek to the architect of an act of evil as heinous as 911, because we’re afraid his followers might respond violently?

On the other hand, I found the reaction by many Americans equally extraordinary, watching them dance in the streets and celebrating as if it were the end of World War II. It wasn’t the end of anything (aside from the hunt for Bin Laden), and celebrating anyone’s death in this way is undignified, . But again, I understand this reaction, even if I don’t admire it.

Bin Laden’s death is a good thing. It was an incredibly large achievement for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Leon Panetta, not to mention the Navy SEALs who carried out the operation like clockwork. It was a deservedly proud day for America (how could it not be; the murderer of 3,000 Americans has been brought to justice), but one that needs to be kept in perspective. There are a lot of depraved men out there willing to sacrifice themselves to kill as many infidels as possible. They aren’t necessarily Al Qaeda, the size and strength of which has been exaggerated and mythologized both by the media and by the government. But they do exist, and I doubt Bin Laden’s death will have much impact on them, except to give them added reason to kill. It will, however, deprive them of their charismatic figurehead, and that counts for something.

Update: Nice analysis and screen captures here showing how China’s major media are playing the Osama story.

Five full days after my post on Ai Weiwei and the Global Times was published, I received an email from someone relatively high up at the paper telling me that my description of the meeting with Mr. Hu and the staff as depicted in the post was categorically untrue. I’m putting this post up because I want the newspaper’s response to be on the record.

I can say definitively that the lower portion of the post, in which I describe my conversation with a GT editor, is true because I was there having the conversation. I cannot say definitively that the episode involving Mr. Hu is true, as I wasn’t there, obviously. But I can say that I heard about it from sources I trust like brothers/sisters. I was told that throughout the day, after the meeting, the office was buzzing about Mr. Hu’s announcement.

That said, it is still hearsay. A former journalist, I used trusted sources and thought long and hard about putting up the post to begin with. I wasn’t there. Maybe the meeting was perceived differently by different attendees. Maybe the story I heard was exaggerated, or maybe it was totally accurate. I definitely believe that the story, or at least the gist of it, is true, but I also have to offer the other side of the story.

In spite of my frustrations with the direction the Global Times has taken, underscored by the recent Ai Weiwei editorials, I still have great respect for many who work there, and good memories of our working together. The higher-level person who contacted me and insisted the story is false is one of those people I deeply respect.

So there’s both sides. I wanted to put it all on the table and let readers know how the paper responded.

As I said, it was five full days before the paper contacted me. The entry was translated into Chinese the very day it posted and got a fair amount of distribution. If it were categorically false I wish they had contacted me on day one, when they first read it.

Apologies for a long and possibly ambiguous post. I hope it’s clear why I felt I had to write it.

Update: I am moving this thread back to the top as I’m about to go on the road again, leaving the comfort of lovely Yangshuo for a more rugged trip to Guizhou. If any of you have any spots in Guizhou to recommend please let me know!

I’ll be leaving late tonight for China and will probably be posting sparsely after I arrive. (Getting onto this blocked site is always a nightmare, VPNs are so slow nowadays in China.) Please leave comments, links, reflections on life here. I’ll be back in about three weeks, so I expect traffic to slow to a trickle. Have fun, play nice.

Note: The Global Times has expressed a different opinion about what happened. Please see this post and the ensuing comments.

Nine days ago, Hu Xijin, the editor in chief of The Global Times, assembled all of the Chinese staff into the paper’s large conference room and shut the door. As is nearly always the case with such meetings, the expats, known as “foreign experts,” were not permitted inside.

Hu had a direct and simple order for his shock troops staff: They were to go to their desks and seek out any Chinese comment threads, any discussions on Chinese BBS’s and portals and blogs — any discussion on the Internet at all — about the detention of Ai Weiwei and counter them with the party line, as expressed so clearly and ominously in a recent Global Times editorial, namely that Ai Weiwei is a self-appointed maverick who deserves to be detained, and who is being used by hostile Western powers to embarrass, hurt and destabilize China. This was not a request, it was a direct order. It was compulsory.

This tells us quite clearly how determined the party is to get its message out about Ai Weiwei, even if it’s in gross violation of journalist ethics, if not downright sleazy. It adds a whole new dimension to the concept of the 50-center.

I’ve avoided Ai Weiwei, mainly because I’m on vacation and my Internet connections have been remarkably dodgy, which I attribute to Ai Weiwei, or at least to what he stands for. The CCP has to stifle voices of dissent when it feels vulnerable, and the Internet is always the first place they clamp down.

I’m sitting in a hotel in Nanjing and will try to make this a brief post, although I am brimming with thoughts on the topic.

The Global Times showed its truest and most sinister colors with a now infamous editorial warning that Ai Weiwei was about to hit a “red line,” and if//when he does he is asking for trouble. This was a not-so-veiled threat to all Chinese activists. The CCP is on the march, my friends. They’re kicking butt and taking names, and they’re coming for you.

It is reckless collision against China’s basic political framework and ignorance of China’s judicial sovereignty to exaggerate a specific case in China and attack China with fierce comments before finding out the truth. The West’s behavior aims at disrupting the attention of Chinese society and attempts to modify the value system of the Chinese people.

Ai Weiwei likes to do something “others dare not do.” He has been close to the red line of Chinese law. Objectively speaking, Chinese society does not have much experience in dealing with such persons. However, as long as Ai Weiwei continuously marches forward, he will inevitably touch the red line one day.

The West ignored the complexity of China’s running judicial environment and the characteristics of Ai Weiwei’s individual behavior. They simply described it as China’s “human rights suppression.” “Human rights” have really become the paint of Western politicians and the media, with which they are wiping off the fact in this world.

This is disturbing on so many levels I don’t think I need to drill down. It speaks for itself. It’s nauseating.

Instead, I’d like to talk about a meeting i had with a senior editor of the GT just 48 hours ago. She is urbane, sophisticated, educated, talented and a truly wonderful person. She also epitomizes the archetype of the sophisticated, urbane, educated Chinese who insist on toeing the Party line at all costs. I believe — I know — that this is completely sincere. But it’s also quite frustrating. “Getting through” to such a person, especially when it’s a good friend you admire, is infinitely frustrating when they seem to put up seamless, airtight mental barriers that you simply cannot break through.

I paraphrase, but with accuracy:

“Why doesn’t the West see that we do things our way in China? We have 1.3 billion people, all those mouths to feed and to protect through a harmonious society. You don’t have this situation. You are developed and your populations are small. Human rights doesn’t mean to the West what it means in China. Most Chinese support Ai Weiwei’s detention. They support Liu Xiaobo’s detention. He is a criminal trying to impose Western-style government on a society that doesn’t want it. Why won’t the West understand how humiliating it was to award the Nobel Prize to someone we put in jail, a man who is a criminal to the Chinese? How should we feel? How should we react?”

This led to a very long conversation — over an hour — in which I explained that if only China would actually engage in a dialog about these issues with the outside world instead of sabre-rattling and always sounding like a misunderstood and petulant child, maybe then China would advance its cause and help people outside China understand what China is really all about, how human rights are seen through Chinese eyes.

I specifically pointed to the Ai Weiwei editiorial.

“Don’t you realize the entire expat community here in Beijing and many others around the world are buzzing about this editorial, shocked at its belligerence, its snide and strident tone, its implied threats and its undercurrent of violence? Maybe, as you keep saying, the West truly doesn’t understand China. Well, you are focusing now on soft power. The Global Times itself is actually an outgrowth of China’s thirst for soft power, for global reputation and respect. And look at how you’re failing. You are driving away foreign talent and making China look worse, not better — in precise contradiction to the paper’s stated goals. If your media and leaders could articulate China’s point of view as clearly and calmly as you just did in this conversation maybe then China could get somewhere in fostering understanding. But railing against Ai Weiwei at the top of your lungs — a man seen as an artist and a celebrity — is exactly what you should not be doing. Why not throw the West a bone and let him go, declare an amnesty and then explain why he was detained in the first place.”

This evoked quite a response.

“Let Ai Weiwei go? But Richard, how can we do that? How can China admit to the world it is being defeated, it is bowing to international pressure and not doing what is right for China? How can we humilate ourselves like that?”

I said it’s been done before (look at North Korea surrendering reporter “spies” after Bill Clinton paid them a visit). In an instant, it would force a new dimension to the issue, and show China was willing to be less hysterical. And I said China appears hysterical, becoming increasingly strident, and that nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the direction the Global Times is taking.

This was, as I said, a long, polite and serious discussion. I never experienced anything quite like it before, because despite the mental barriers I referred, to, she genuinely wanted to hear my opinion and to learn how the West sees China, and I think she actually “got” that the GT, even if they’re right, is scaring people away and damaging its own cause with readers who are not Chinese. She actually said she wanted to discuss my argument with her superiors. (And no, I am not so vain or arrogant or naive as to believe my little talk will change the shape of Chinese journalism.)

All of this said, the detention of Ai Weiwei and many other activists who have the misfortune of being nameless and faceless to us is unpardonable, and self-defeating. I know, they were sending a message to the people of China, not to Americans 10,000 miles away. But again, they say they want soft power, they say they want to be a global superpower, they say they want fair treatment in the media. Well, sorry, but you can’t have it both ways. You can’t repress with one hand and paint a picture of a happy harmonious rules-following society with the other. Detaining Ai Weiwei was the worst thing you could have done, trumped only by your idiocy in attacking him in savage, ugly, deranged editorials.

Go out and do your thing, Global Times 50-centers. While a lot of people will be fooled, enough will see through the propaganda. I admire the young aspiring journalists I worked with there two years ago. If any of you are reading this (which is not very likely), I urge you to think for yourselves, and understand that while journalists have several roles, astroturfing message boards isn’t one of them.

I am delighted to read that the GT editorial has sparked “scorn and ridicule” among much of China’s Twitterati and social media users. I am glad to make my small contribution to this much-deserved scorn and ridicule.

Update: Be sure to see Lisa’s post that has a lot to say on this topic. And sorry for all the typos in the first version of this post. I never wrote a post this fast.

Update 2: Please be sure to see James Fallows’ new post on this topic, which kindly cites my own post.

Looks like my post has been translated into Chinese.

If you search this site you’ll find many posts that mention Sun Zhigang. The story terrified me, and seemed to epitomize the dangers of total police powers and the lack of rule of law. A 27-year-old college student and graphic artist, he had the misfortune of leaving his home in Guangzhou without his ID card. He was arrested as a vagrant when a policeman stopped him and asked for the card, and he was brutally beaten to death in the prison infirmary. It was one of the first stories in China to cause a sensation on the Internet, and the wave of public outrage helped convince the government it was time to change their vagrancy laws.

And then I read this story, and it felt like deja vu all over again. From a letter written for his parents:

Zhao Wei is a senior student at Hebei University of Technology. He bought Seat No.45 on Car 12 of Train No. 1301 departing from Tianjin for Zalantun, Innor Mongolia on January 22, 2011. He also had a classmate in Car 11.

According to this classmate of his, after getting onto the train, Zhao Wei was scoffed at and ridiculed by a train attendant because of a seat-changing issue. Zhao made this issue known to the train conductor. At 10 p.m. or so, Wei Zhao brought his backpack to Car 11 and told this classmate that he might have offended the conductor. Then he changed seats with a passenger who sat next to this classmate. At around 3 a.m., Zhao was called away by the conductor. When the classmate next saw Zhao Wei, his eyes were black and blue, and he was no longer alive.

Go to the site to read the entire letter and, if you can stand it, to see graphic photos of the young man’s beaten corpse. The parents are now caught up in a bureaucratic maze of denial and passing the buck. No one will take responsibility, no one will even show any interest in investigating what happened. The story, needless to say, is being scrubbed from the Chinese Internet.

For an extraordinary analysis of how this hideous crime is being censored, you must read this post (be forewarned that it, too, contains graphic photographs). It reads like a suspense story, following the censors as they systematically cause the story to vaporize. Great journalism, great description of how the Chinese media and search engines work in cooperation with the censors.

There’s something about these stories that tugs at the heartstrings. Sun Zhigang was going out to celebrate (I forget what; maybe he had just graduated school). Zhao Wei had innocently tried to have his seat changed on the train he was taking to Inner Mongolia with friends. And each had his life snuffed out for what seems to be no reason at all. There was absolutely no need. So young and so senseless. So infuriating to watch the cover-up and hear the lies.

Murders happen everywhere. But in both cases the murders were carried out by the very people assigned to help the public. If they had been murdered in a robbery, or even killed by an insane gunman I would at least understand why it happened. In these two cases, the horror is that they died at the hands of people who are there to protect us. I think of the police in New Orleans who shot blacks in the back on a bridge after Hurricane Katrina, and I see similarities, and I felt the same sense of revulsion reading about that heinous crime. But it wasn’t scrubbed from the papers, and the officers were brought to justice.

Ultimately Sun Zhigang’s murderers were tried and convicted and the law was reformed, but one wonders if that would have happened had there not been an Internet firestorm. Let’s hope that the Zhao Wei tragedy generates a similar firestorm. As of this moment, based on these articles, it appears the government is pulling all the stops to keep the lid on and erase all remnants of the story. I am hoping tech-savvy Chinese will find ways to keep this story alive until Zhao Wei’s murderers are tried and convicted. Shame on all those who are aiding and abetting the cover-up of a fiendishly brutal, senseless and unforgivable crime.

This ad, coinciding with Hu’s trip to the US, runs on six colossal video billboards over Time’s Square. According to the FT it was created by the global ad agency Lintas, but I’m willing to place bets it was conceived and produced in China, and it wasn’t run by any US focus groups.

The golden rule for this kind of messaging is to speak in the voice of your audience. I don’t think this ad does that. It calls out for localization, and I’m afraid it’s going to backfire, if it hasn’t already, raising cries about “Red China” and its creepy propaganda.

Reading between the lines of WSJ reporter Loretta Chao’s post about the ad, I get the sense that she thinks it’s a mistake, and that she won’t be alone in this belief.

[E]ach group of people in the ad is pictured with a banner — some more literal than others. A photo of Yao Ming and other athletes standing in front of the Birds Nest national stadium in Beijing is titled “Thrilling Chinese Athletics.” An image of Mr. Li standing alongside two other technology entrepreneurs, Netease founder Ding Lei and Alibaba Group founder Jack Ma, carries a banner that reads “Chinese Wealth” — a label probably more immediately meaningful (and more appealing) to Chinese viewers than the hundreds of thousands of daily passersby in Times Square.

The appearance of the Internet executives fades into a solo shot of Wang Jianzhou, chairman of China’s biggest state-owned telecom giant China Mobile, also under the “Chinese Wealth” banner. That image, while almost certainly obscure for New York pedestrians, could probably be interpreted by imaginative Chinese viewers as either ominous or depressing in the light of the company’s government-backed ubiquity.

I understand China’s thirst for soft power and image enhancement outside of China. I question, however, why they never seem able to get good marketing advice about how to present themselves. Chinese Wealth and Thrilling Chinese Athletics banners simply won’t resonate (I believe) with Time’s Square pedestrians. It will be seen as cheesy propaganda, the likes of which most Americans thought went out of style with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

I suggest that next time they find a Donald Draper-type on Madison Avenue who understands the need to focus on the viewer first. They (China) need to put away all their beliefs about what works in China. It’s irrelevant when you’re putting up gargantuan ads in New York City. Americans aren’t interested in Wang Jianzhou.

Update: Interesting comments here, some of them quite stupid.

Update 2: China Geeks has a superb post on the ad, much better than my own.

Update 3: And another great analysis of the ad can be found here.

There are nearly 7,000 comments to Amy Chua’s now infamous article in the Wall Street Journal titled, modestly, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior. I read the piece, as I’m guessing most of you did, with grim fascination. Its main contention is that Chinese parents raise kids who are more successful than their Western counterparts because these parents deprive their kids of fun, slave-drive them to study constantly, prohibit them from acting in school plays and sleeping over at friends’ houses, and insisting that they never get a grade below A. Chua’s description of how she terrorized her daughter to force her to master a piano piece is not something you’ll soon forget.

American parents, on the other hand, indulge their children and fail to treat them with authority. Their kids are raised believing they don’t owe their parents anything, and thus they don’t do all they can to excel and delight their parents. But the Chinese parents, Chua argues, aren’t doing this for their own gratification. It’s all because they want the very best for their children.

Western parents try to respect their children’s individuality, encouraging them to pursue their true passions, supporting their choices, and providing positive reinforcement and a nurturing environment. By contrast, the Chinese believe that the best way to protect their children is by preparing them for the future, letting them see what they’re capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away.

The parent’s might also be arming them with a rip-roaring case of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Not surprisingly, a lot has been written in response to this article. I am not going to try to say which side is right or wrong. I just want to point out some of the arguments.

The best critique I read came from Adam Minter of Shanghai Scrap, who points out an interesting fact: Chua’s arguments are in no way consistent with those she makes in her new book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which she’s promoting with her article. The outspoken, borderline vindictive tone of the article, Minter says, seems to be a product of her PR people (very possible) and fails to reflect what she actually says in the book.

[A]fter the first chapter, I realized that I was going to stick with it, because – regardless of what you think of so-called Chinese parenting – it’s a beautifully written, oftentimes funny, humble and modest book about assimilation. That is to say, it has very little in common with the Wall Street Journal piece. Indeed, Chua is quite clear – in the book – that the genesis for the narrative is not a belief that Chinese mothers are superior….

The cruelty that some readers found in the Wall Street Journal is present in the longer text, but it is present with doubts about their efficacy, the damage that was being done to her relationship with her daughter, humor, and emotion. The Wall Street Journal excerpt doesn’t contain any of that. In fact, in large part, the Wall Street Journal “excerpt” only qualifies as an excerpt in name. In reality, it’s nothing more than some of the book’s most inflammatory paragraphs and passages, cherry-picked from various points in the book, and arranged in order, minus context

Now it’s all making sense. Because it’s truly hard to imagine that a Yale law professor like Chua could be so one-sided and obsessive. And yes, cruel. Only Minter, to my knowledge, has provided this insight; there’s much more to the story of how Chua views Chinese parenting.

Today David Brooks, who I very rarely quote, took Chua on from a different perspective:

I believe she’s coddling her children. She’s protecting them from the most intellectually demanding activities because she doesn’t understand what’s cognitively difficult and what isn’t.

Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls. Managing status rivalries, negotiating group dynamics, understanding social norms, navigating the distinction between self and group — these and other social tests impose cognitive demands that blow away any intense tutoring session or a class at Yale.

A good point. Relationships with our friends, doing things with them in groups, provide important training for our future. From personal experience, I would say there’s nothing more valuable for kids than to perform in the school play and sing in the after-school choir. That’s part of education, too, part of preparation.

But the most moving response to the article I saw comes from an actual victimproduct of a “Tiger Mother.” For all those not suffering from Chua fatigue, I recommend you read it all. Here’s a piece.

All my young life, my parents were quick to remind me of my stupidity. They constantly compared me to the children of their friends. They were particularly preoccupied with my lack of progress in school. Fixated on the idea that I was a slow learner, they confused my cautiousness for a lack of desire, and my need for affection as the wants of a spoiled American brat.

In telling me that I was a stupid, worthless waste of space, they believed they were spurring me on to do great things. By keeping me away from my friends, engrossed in several hours of teaching each day after school, my parents were confident they were helping me in every way they could. And no matter how hard I worked, or how obediently I obeyed their commands, it was never enough….

In spite of this, my parents’ approach failed. I still question every day if I am, indeed, stupid. I didn’t even raise my hand in class until graduate school because I believed a moron like me would have nothing worthy to say. I’ve been through countless hours of psychotherapy, and my lack of self-esteem still beckons me to trust alcohol to numb the agony. I should be chasing my dreams, not chasing pain.

If I could say one thing to Amy Chua, it’s that I would trade every bit of my success in life — in a heartbeat I’d switch places with the guy who shovels elephant dung at the zoo — to remove the scars left by a Tiger Mother.

Maybe I’m too bound by my Western mentality, but this approach doesn’t seem to me a formula for success.

That said, I need to point out one thing: Most Chinese people I know haven’t been permanently scarred by “tiger moms.” Yes, they had to study hard and nothing was as important as education. But all things considered, most of these people emerged very smart, very successful and psychologically okay. Obviously I can’t say exactly how they were treated as children, but I suspect it was not as grim a childhood as Chua endorses in her article. I think there was some compromise, and the parents instilled in them a strong study ethic while still nurturing their self-esteem. (Must the two be mutually exclusive?)

My bottom line on the whole furor: Chua’s article has hurt China, giving a false impression of how and why Chinese kids grow up to be so successful. If people were afraid of China before, that fear shot up to a whole new level after reading Chua’s treatise. The lists she provides of what parents should forbid their children from doing is a disgrace, a formula for neurosis and social ineptitude; as Minter said, his first reaction was to check Chua’s bio to see whether the whole things was a parody, a bad joke.

Maybe it lets Chua off the hook somewhat if this was the doing of ruthless PR people (and they sure got publicity). But I don’t believe for an instant that the WSJ published this without her approval and her blessing.

I’ll bet Hu will love this. (Can you visualize Hu Jintao laughing at himself?)

Once again, I marvel at the practicality, ingenuity and industriousness of the Chinese people. This is at a subway station in Nanjing. (More photos over there.)

The crab dispenser was designed by Shi Tuanjie, Chairman of the Nanjing Shuanghu Crab Industrial Company, who came out with the idea of a crab dispenser 3 years ago. This is the first live crab vending machine in China, and was installed on October 1 this year. The crabs cost from 10 yuan ($1.50) to 50 yuan ($7.50), depending on size and gender, and customers are promised a compensation of 3 live crabs if their purchase is dead. The machine sells an average of 200 live crabs daily. Shi plans to popularize the machines on a larger scale to airports, residential areas and supermarkets, according to local media.

Brilliant.

I can’t add much more to this devastating article on the horrors of the Great Leap forward. I’ve never read anything about it that was quite this brutal, and suggest you read the whole thing.

For those who argue it was a natural famine the government couldn’t control, it will be particularly enlightening.

In the summer of 1962, for instance, the head of the Public Security Bureau in Sichuan sent a long handwritten list of casualties to the local boss, Li Jingquan, informing him that 10.6 million people had died in his province from 1958 to 1961. In many other cases, local party committees investigated the scale of death in the immediate aftermath of the famine, leaving detailed computations of the scale of the horror.

In all, the records I studied suggest that the Great Leap Forward was responsible for at least 45 million deaths.

Between 2 and 3 million of these victims were tortured to death or summarily executed, often for the slightest infraction. People accused of not working hard enough were hung and beaten; sometimes they were bound and thrown into ponds. Punishments for the least violations included mutilation and forcing people to eat excrement.

One report dated Nov. 30, 1960, and circulated to the top leadership — most likely including Mao — tells how a man named Wang Ziyou had one of his ears chopped off, his legs tied up with iron wire and a 10-kilo stone dropped on his back before he was branded with a sizzling tool. His crime: digging up a potato.

When a boy stole a handful of grain in a Hunan village, the local boss, Xiong Dechang, forced his father to bury his son alive on the spot.

And it gets worse. Really. And please don’t say Mao didn’t know.

Mao was sent many reports about what was happening in the countryside, some of them scribbled in longhand. He knew about the horror, but pushed for even greater extractions of food.

At a secret meeting in Shanghai on March 25, 1959, he ordered the party to procure up to one-third of all the available grain — much more than ever before. The minutes of the meeting reveal a chairman insensitive to human loss: “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”

I applaud China’s post-Mao leaders for ending most aspects of Maoism and seeing that starvation in China came to an end. Thank God Deng won the day. But isn’t it time to let the Chinese people know the truth? As the column says, the government has unclassified huge vaults of documents on the period and many Chinese scholars and researchers know the truth. But alas, their books and reports can only be published in Hong Kong.