This is shocking, if not too surprising.

LOUHE, China — Xu Lindong, a poor village farmer with close-cropped hair and a fourth-grade education, knew nothing but decades of backbreaking labor. Even at age 50, the rope of muscles on his arms bespoke a lifetime of hard plowing and harvesting in the fields of his native Henan Province.

But after four years locked up in Zhumadian Psychiatric Hospital, he was barely recognizable to his siblings. Emaciated, barefoot, clad in tattered striped pajamas, Mr. Xu spoke haltingly. His face was etched with exhaustion.

“I was so heartbroken when I saw him I cannot describe it,” said his elder brother, Xu Linfu, recalling his first visit there, in 2007. “My brother was a strong as a bull. Now he looked like a hospital patient.”

Xu Lindong’s confinement in a locked mental ward was all the more notable, his brother says, for one extraordinary fact: he was not the least bit deranged. Angered by a dispute over land, he had merely filed a series of complaints against the local government. The government’s response was to draw up an order to commit him to a mental hospital — and then to forge his brother’s name on the signature line.

It’s a long, painful article. Lots of things are way better in China than they were 10 years ago. The plight of those who question authority isn’t one of them. It’s all part of a campaign to maintain harmony at any and costs. Kudos to the NYT for having the patience to document this terrifying story so methodically.

The media are abuzz today with stories on how China is trying to create an international boycott of the Nobel Prize awards in Oslo. Not surprisingly, it’s blocking Chinese activists who it believes may be leaving to attend the ceremonies, and it’s trying to strong-arm other countries from participating.

In addition to using its newfound economic might to warn world leaders away from the ceremony, China has waged an equally vociferous campaign at home to tarnish Mr. Liu’s reputation and delegitimize the award in the eyes of the Chinese people.

After a brief news blackout on the prize, the country’s state-controlled media began rolling out articles and editorials describing it as an insult to the country’s criminal justice system, a ploy to hold back China’s rise and a tactic to subvert the country’s political system. Other commentaries have painted Mr. Liu as a corrupt pawn of Western governments.

The warnings have already prompted a handful of European countries, among them France, Britain, Austria, Sweden and the Netherlands, to announce they would hew to established protocol and send ambassadors.

Michael C. Davis, a law professor and human rights expert at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said he thought China’s effort to organize a boycott of the ceremony — like its earlier campaign to dissuade the Norwegian Committee from selecting Mr. Liu — would probably backfire. In fact, he said Beijing’s overall handling of the matter was only drawing more attention to Mr. Liu’s plight and to the country’s checkered human rights record. “The Chinese often unintentionally turn their enemies into heroes,” he said.

Of course, the lady doth protest too much, and professor Davis hits the nail on the head: China has a knack for turning those it would seek to vilify into heroes and martyrs.

The fact that China is such an insecure child that it can’t stomach the notion of leaders of other countries attending the Oslo ceremony speaks volumes. Liu has won the prize. The ceremony is going to take place. The news of Liu Xiaobo winning is now old news, and the ceremony itself is anticlimactic (the big news having been the announcement of the winners).

There was only one possible way for China to keep the eyes of the world riveted on Liu’s winning the prize and to perpetuate the notion, true or false, that China is still a prickly, paranoid state, and that was to keep throwing gasoline on what should have been by now a smoldering pile of ash. That’s exactly what China has done, stopping people from leaving the country and making veiled threats to other nations about participating in Oslo.

Congratulations, China. Through your grit and determination, you’ve guaranteed continual media coverage of Liu’s plight and managed to convince the world yet again that you’re not yet made of the stuff of a superpower. At least you’re predictable. From the stream of slanderous articles about Liu to the online chatter of his being a stooge for the NED to blocking the travel of activists to your threats to hold your breath until you turn blue if other countries participate – well, it’s all from the same playbook you’ve been using for years, and none of it comes unexpected. I really wish, however, that one day you might surprise us and show your cleverness. I mean, maybe you could manage your loss of face without going all apoplectic and hysterical, and inadvertently giving greater power to the party you see as your enemy while weakening your own agenda.

The US media have been buzzing today about China having created the world’s most powerful supercomputer, which takes up a third of an acre. I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t stir up yet another wave of panic that China is emerging as a threat.

A Chinese scientific research center has built the fastest supercomputer ever made, replacing the United States as maker of the swiftest machine, and giving China bragging rights as a technology superpower.

The computer, known as Tianhe-1A, has 1.4 times the horsepower of the current top computer, which is at a national laboratory in Tennessee, as measured by the standard test used to gauge how well the systems handle mathematical calculations, said Jack Dongarra, a University of Tennessee computer scientist who maintains the official supercomputer rankings.

Although the official list of the top 500 fastest machines, which comes out every six months, is not due to be completed by Mr. Dongarra until next week, he said the Chinese computer “blows away the existing No. 1 machine.” He added, “We don’t close the books until Nov. 1, but I would say it is unlikely we will see a system that is faster.”

We all know the dichotomies, that China is now a technology superpower while also being largely impoverished and, some big cities aside, a third-world country. But this does help put to rest the notion that all China can produce are shoes and toys you buy at WalMart. (And I promise, I know some people who still view China that way.)

So once again China successfully invests a huge amount of money and effort to become No. 1, at least for the moment. They have to be given credit for achieving this, and from all I heard on National Public Radio tonight, this is a truly dramatic achievement, one that must be taken seriously. Now we just have to see what they do with it, and whether they can hold onto their No. 1 spot. No matter what, this was a PR coup and a big boost to China’s ego.

Living up to its reputation for insightful, intelligent, beautifully written posts, Mark’s China Blog offers us a treat with its description of the Edgar Snow Symposium held this week in Kansas City. (h/t Danwei.) Why don’t things like this come to Phoenix?

He described taking the train from Beijing to Xi’an and then heading into northern Shaanxi Province to find the mythical communist stronghold (some people, apparently, didn’t even believe the place existed). This was probably my favorite part of the conversation last night. It is also probably my favorite aspect of Edgar Snow’s life. I appreciate the story of a KC boy going to Xi’an and Shaanxi Province for the adventure of a lifetime (even if his story and mine are completely different in just about every way imaginable).

A beautiful description of Bao’an, the lush, low-lying valley where the communists had settled, was painted. Snow recounted meeting Mao and the subtle details of the man that would fifteen years later become the leader of China. He also talked about the general sense of camaraderie and excitement that one felt being at the camp.

The Symposium did not ignore the dark side of Snow’s legacy, which has become all but a dictionary definition of apologism.

Kemper [an interviewer] asked Snow to explain himself – “How did you not see this famine that historians estimate killed 35 million people?” The actor playing Snow did a wonderful job here. One could see the pain, embarrassment, and anguish on his face. He couldn’t come up with a good explanation. He knew that this mistake was one of the defining moments of his career and that history had punished him for it. After stammering a bit, Snow conceded that he’d been betrayed.

Oh well, we all screw up sometimes.

Read the entire post. I especially enjoyed the description of the Red-Color News Soldier exhibit; the book by the same name is one of my all-time favorites. Please read the entire post.

Tom Friedman, one of my least favorite columnists, has a worthy enough (if typically simplistic) column today about the need for China to embrace political change. It all boils down to economics. The country simply can’t prosper until it’s instituted meaningful political reform.

Can China continue to prosper, while censoring the Internet, controlling its news media and insisting on a monopoly of political power by the Chinese Communist Party?

I don’t think so. To be sure, China has thrived up to now — impressively — by permitting its people only economic liberty. This may have been the sole way to quickly take a vast country of 1.3 billion people from massive poverty to much-improved standards of living, basic education for all, modernized infrastructure and even riches for some urbanites.

But the Nobel committee did China a favor in sending the tacit message with its peace prize: Don’t get too cocky and think that you have rewritten the laws of gravity. The “Beijing Consensus,” of economic liberty without political liberty, may have been a great strategy for takeoff, but it won’t get you to the next level. So this might actually be a good time for Beijing to engage peaceful democracy advocates like Liu [Xiaobo], who is now serving an 11-year sentence, or the 23 retired Chinese Communist Party officials who last week published an open letter challenging the government to improve speech and press freedoms.

As China ages, Friedman contends, it has to move from low-wage manufacturing jobs to more “knowledge- and service-based jobs.” Has to. So you have the usual conflict: a government that wants to control everything and shape its people’s thinking, countered by market forces – China’s growth can only go so far without a problem-solving, innovative workforce.

Dovetailing with this column today is this new piece by my friend and fellow blogger Paul Denlinger on why Wen Jiaobao is thinking along the same lines, and why he will push for more political reform. Denlinger argues that you can’t balance so much social change with so little political change. I’ll just snip two of his seven reasons as to why this is so.

4. China’s president, Hu Jintao, is obsessed with social harmony and stability as his legacy, but Wen thinks that this is a pipe dream. Wen thinks that social change is happening faster than the party, government leadership understand.

5. Wen feels that the current leadership continues to think that economic growth is the answer to China’s problems when past growth rates are no longer possible.

This topic seems to be taking on a life of its own. I think that Liu Xiaobo’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize will continue to fan the flames, and that those who said Oslo’s choice would have no ramifications in China are dead wrong. China’s fate depends on more liberty. Wen knows it, Liu knows it, I know it. Manufacturing can’t and won’t soar forever. What’s next? China has to prepare for the inevitable.

I don’t expect this to get very far, but you really do have to read it.

On October 11, 23 Chinese Communist Party elders known for their pro-reform positions, including Mao Zedong’s former secretary Li Rui (李锐) and former People’s Daily editor-in-chief Hu Jiwei (胡绩伟), submitted an open letter to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, formally China’s highest state body, calling for an end to restrictions on expression in China.

The letter urges the Communist Party to abolish censorship and realize citizens’ right to freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Seizing on the opportunity afforded by the awarding of Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo (刘晓波) with the Nobel Peace Prize last week, the letter refers explicitly to prior statements on reform and free speech made by both President Hu Jintao (胡锦涛) and Premier Wen Jiabao (温家宝).

You can read the entire translated letter at the link above. I think this takes the wind out of the sails of those who’re been chirping that Liu Xiaobo’s winning the Nobel Peace Prize wouldn’t have any effect in China. These people are almost as annoying as those chirping that Liu Xiaobo is an American agent because he’s supported by the NED, a claim that is patently absurd. Just because someone gives you some money doesn’t make you their spy or agent. Lots of US NGO’s give money to the Dalai Lama, and he is still an outspoken and self-avowed Marxist. The fenqing have their long knives out for Liu and will grasp at any straws they can. For some interesting debates about this see the comments to this post and this post. Our friend pugster is really banging the NED drum on both threads, and probably others as well. 50 mao here, 50 mao there.

Meanwhile, I strongly recommend that no one hold their breath while waiting for censorship in China to go away. But it’s encouraging to see Liu’s prize embolden others who want to make China and its government freer, more transparent and more accountable.

Last week I arrived in Beijing after a few days in Hangzhou and met up with some old colleagues, at our old office. It was a Saturday, but they were all working – the price they had to pay for the three-day Mid-Autumn Festival holiday. Get three weekdays off, but pay back one of those days by working on the weekend. One Chinese colleague lashed out at the government for what she called the world’s most irrational holiday system.

I was delighted to see a piece in yesterday’s NY Times that captures just how strange a system it is.

Beyond the frustration of overloaded transportation and jam-packed tourist attractions, there is the problem of figuring out what has become a decidedly confusing rubric of work and vacation days.

According to a government-mandated holiday schedule that took effect in 2008, workers were given three consecutive days off last week for the Mid-Autumn Festival, but they were required to make up two of those by working the Saturday and Sunday on either end of the holiday.

This give-and-take arrangement is then repeated for the National Day holiday, with employees enjoying seven straight days off — Friday through Oct. 7 — except only three of those are official free days. (The four “gifted days” will be made up over the weekends before and after.)

If you have trouble with the math, you are in good company…. A cheat sheet that has been making the rounds on the Internet sums up the pattern as such, beginning Sept. 18: One day off, three days on, three days off, six days on, seven days off, two days on, one day off.

Confusion aside, many Chinese resent having to pay back some of their vacation days.

The article does a good job of explaining how China’s “Golden Weeks” got started and how they’re being changed, and why so many Chinese feel exasperated with such a complicated mess.

I first experienced Golden Week-induced culture shock back in October 2002, and it never really went away. Being forced to work on weekends to make up for mandatory holidays was something I’d never fully get used to.

Sorry for the long silence. I’ve been traveling and dealing with VPN issues all along the way. Even using Witopia, Twitter and Facebook have been mainly inaccessible no matter where I go, using Chrome or Firefox. Sometimes Facebook will partly open, leaving me with an odd page that’s more like a list, with no graphics, and then I can’t navigate anywhere. So I have several Scrabble games in limbo and lots of unanswered messages and requests. You just deal with it. (And yes, I made the DNS fixes, to no avail. Maybe an issue with my MacBook?)

Pingyao is gorgeous and has all sorts of treasures that gave me deeper insight into life in ancient China. The Ming architecture is breathtaking. On the other hand, the city has been so touristified that a lot of the charm is diminished. So many hawkers and cheap shops selling cheap lacquer boxes and the same tired scrolls and Mao statues. My friend Ben, who went with me and who took the photo, said it just right: “When you’re in Dali, you want to stay. You feel like you can stay a long time. In Pingyao, you want to see the buildings and then you just want to leave.” I couldn’t have said it better. I can’t pinpoint exactly why Dali is such an inviting and charming experience while Pingyao is more of a lets-see-the-sights-and-get-out-of-here kind of place.

I most enjoyed what I would have thought would be relatively dull, namely the government administration buildings and the banks. And the wall, of course. You have to marvel as you step through this time warp and see how China administered far-away cities so many centuries ago. It’s most magical when you can get away from the tourist coaches and vendors. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed the administrative buildings and the banks, where I felt immersed in what life was actually like in China in centuries past. [Corrected my historical error – thank Billy.]

This is cross-posted at my other site:

I’m having serious Internet issues, and to those of you who’ve been sending me messages on both Twitter and Facebook I need to apologize for the silence (and I hope you’re reading this): despite my using industrial-strength VPN Witopia I cannot get onto either FB or Twitter. I can get on all the other blocked sites I tried, including my personal blog, with no problem. Friends tell me they’re not having the same problem with Witopia so I’m guessing it’s an issue with my hotel, if that’s possible.

Whenever I visit China after a few months in the States the pattern is the same: Things here are so shiny and new and up-to-the-minute, I forget state control permeates much (or at least some) of what you can and cannot do, like freely surf the Internet. So minutes after I arrived last night I set up my computer, jumped to Facebook, and zam, the great Net Nanny reminded me I’m not in Arizona anymore.

So to repeat, if you tried to contact me by Twitter or FB messages, please understand I can’t access either right now. Please try email. Thanks.

Aside from this nuisance it is absolutely wonderful to be back in Beijing at the most beautiful time of the year. Maybe this year God will let the Autumn last a little longer than the usual five weeks…?

After I returned home from nearly 8 years in Asia last year I was lucky to keep getting freelance work for China-based clients, including a wonderful PR gig that sent me to China multiple times.

One of the most enjoyable parts of my work was holding media trainings for companies in the US that wanted to increase their brand recognition in China. This let me harness everything I’d learned in Greater China over eight years, especially my two years working on the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, to create a training focusing to a large degree on China and its unique challenges. At the end of one training a participant asked me why I wasn’t actively marketing myself as a China-focused media trainer. That got me thinking.

This was the conversation that led to today, the launch day for my new business, China Media Strategies. The best way to see for yourself what China Media Strategies does is to check out the videos that are up over here. (For those of you who’ve wondered what Richard looks and sounds like, here’s your chance to find out.) If you want to hear what my clients and colleagues have to say, check out the testimonials. (No, none of them owed me favors.)

I’ve also started a new blog for China Media Strategies that you can find here (much of this post is cross–posted over there). There will be more to come. The new blog is about my thoughts on current events from the perspective of a media trainer and China watcher. It won’t be about politics or the controversial issues I prattle on about over here, and comments moderation will be a bit tighter. One blogger, two personas, so to speak.

What I offer is radically simple: I help clients prepare for media relations in China, and, if they’d like, I help them book time with reporters there as I’ve done for my other clients. Is there a market for this service, and will it work? I honestly don’t know. The one thing I do know is that if I hadn’t gone ahead and tried it out I’d be mad at myself for the rest of my life for not taking the leap.

China hands are sure to take issues with some on the material on my site. Some, for example, may see the ubiquitous red envelopes for domestic media as a flat-out bribe, and others may argue that “guanxi” is so hackneyed and over-used it doesn’t merit yet another post about it, let alone an entire video. But keep in mind, this new site isn’t necessarily for China hands. It’s for people who have limited or zero knowledge of working with the media in China.

I had hoped to open the site a few weeks earlier but technical and travel issues got in the way. So I’m opening it now, the day before I leave on a three-week trip to China. This is the soft launch, an invitation to check out what China Media Strategies is all about. I’ll do a more formal launch when I get back. Please do take a look at the site, the videos and, of course, the blog.