A total must-read – the NY Times on the 60th anniversary preparations. Anal-retentiveness has been totally redefined:

Performers have been carefully screened. Even the workers who are decorating the city with tens of millions of flowerpots had to undergo “political inspection,” according to news reports. Soldiers have practiced endless hours to hold their rifles at precisely the same level. Photos show their instructors holding threads as rifle guides, or sticking needles in soldiers’ shirt collars, pointed at their necks, to correct poor posture.

They have trained to stand motionless for a solid hour, to refrain from swaying during the second hour and not to collapse after three hours, reported Xinhua, the state-run news agency. They have been schooled in shouting phrases in perfect unison: “Serve the people!” and “Hello, senior leader!” They are also expected not to blink for 40 seconds at a time.

Chinese news media have reported that the government has limited parade participants in Beijing’s celebration to 187,000 — at least 300,000 fewer than in the last decennial celebration. Performers have been carefully screened. Even the workers who are decorating the city with tens of millions of flowerpots had to undergo “political inspection,” according to news reports.

Mental-health professionals have been called in to help those whose performance is not up to snuff. As of Sept. 12, 1,300 soldiers had received counseling, Xinhua reported.

And then there’s the paranoia concerns over security.

Knife sales have been banned in at least some stores. Beijing’s international airport will be closed Thursday for three hours. Along the parade route, the authorities have forbidden parade-watchers from opening windows or standing on balconies.

Three journalists from the Japanese Kyodo news agency said that when they stood on a hotel balcony to cover a Sept. 18 parade rehearsal, the authorities stormed into the room and assaulted them. A spokeswoman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry said the journalists ignored explicit instructions not to report the event, apparently out of concern that details of the spectacle would be revealed.

Another, more provocative article I read today, paints an even more bizarre picture:

Black-clad Swat teams of police will be deployed at key intersections and thousands of agents will stage a security clampdown exceeding anything seen for the 2008 Olympic Games.

Dissidents have been shut up at home or arrested. Police have banned peasants from coming to the capital to present their grievances as petitions, a tradition that dates back thousands of years.

Counter-terrorist squads, backed up by informers, are prowling the districts where Muslims from China’s restive far west live. Peaceful Tibetan Buddhists are also under surveillance in their incense-filled temples. Internet users say censorship has never been so restrictive. Facebook and Twitter are among the sites that have been blocked.

At the last parade 10 years ago, diplomats were able to watch from balconies in their compound. This time residents have been warned that if they step out they may be shot.

“We must abide by Deng Xiaoping’s instruction that China must be under the leadership of the Communist party,” declared the People’s Daily on Friday. “If this fundamental principle is altered, China will go backwards, split and fall into chaos.”

Whatever.

I can kind of see doing this for the Olympic Games, which were, of course, a magnet for many thousands of visitors who had never been to China before. But the 60th anniversary celebration of the birth of the PRC is something of a mystery to many China watchers I know, all of whom have essentially the same reaction to the big day, namely, Who cares? I understand, any anniversary date ending with a 5 or a 0 is seen as a big deal in China (and in many other countries, though usually to a lesser extent; in the US, the 50th and 100th and 200th anniversaries of the birth of America, for instance, were super-big deals, while the anniversaries in-between were not), and I understand it from China’s perspective. But are they aware, on the other end, how mystifying this whole exercise looks to those on the outside? I know, they don’t really care about that, and maybe they shouldn’t. This is their party. But I do hope readers realize why Americans write about the preparations and the event itself with an air of amazement. The 60th anniversary of the PRC doesn’t mean much to anyone outside China, especially since the principles on which the nation was founded in 1949 have been drastically diluted if not discarded altogether.

The aggravation that this celebration has generated in terms of getting a visa, in terms of disruptions of daily life in Beijing and in terms of general anniversary-fatigue are nearly all that the foreigners I know bring up when the anniversary is mentioned. (This was true six months ago as well.) Along with a general sense of mystification: What other country would put so much money and effort into a parade like this, in the midst of an economic crisis? And let me reiterate, I do understand from the Chinese perspective why they are doing this, even if I believe they are not going to score many points in the court of global public opinion with this event. Then again, just as with the Olympics, the parade isn’t being held for the outside world. It is being held by China, it’s about China, and it’s for China. They don’t care if we’re pissed about not getting our visa. And I understand that.

Note: Link via a tweet by this blogger.

Funny that we talked about this just yesterday in regard to a relatively obscure article, and now it is the 2nd leading story on the front page of the NY Times. Get a load of this:

The president of the World Bank said Monday that America’s days as an unchallenged economic superpower might be numbered and that dollar was likely to lose its favored position as the euro and the Chinese renmimbi assume bigger roles.

“The United States would be mistaken to take for granted the dollar’s place as the world’s predominant reserve currency,” the World Bank president, Robert B. Zoellick, said in a speech at the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies. “Looking forward, there will increasingly be other options to the dollar.”

Mr. Zoellick, who previously served as the United States trade representative and as deputy secretary of state under President George W. Bush, said that the euro provided a “respectable alternative” for financing international transactions and that there was “every reason to believe that the euro’s acceptability could grow.”

Over the next 10 to 20 years, he said, the dollar would face growing competition from China’s currency, the renmimbi. Though Chinese leaders have minimized their currency’s use in international transactions, largely so they could keep greater control over exchange rates, Mr. Zoellick said the renmimbi would “evolve into a force in financial markets.”

Read the article. It is beyond extraordinary that the US-appointed head of the World Bank would be so in-your-face provocative, casting doubt on Obama’s strategy to lead us to financial recovery under the supervision of the Fed (as opposed to the Treasury) and openly questioning whether we can pay our debts without igniting inflation. I personally don’t think so, and it’s clear Zoellick doesn’t, either. All of these points were discussed here yesterday, and it’s clear Zoellick read this site before presenting at Johns Hopkins.

That’s the headline from this new article, one of many I’ve been seeing on the inevitable arrival of the post-dollar world. This one sees the current economic upheaval as a sort of gigantic correction that will restore equilibrium to a global economy knocked out of whack by huge trade and capital imbalances.

A seminal shift in behaviour is being forced on the deficit nations where, despite massive fiscal, monetary and financial system support, there is a continuing scarcity of credit and a growing propensity to save. Neither of these two constraints on demand will reverse any time soon.

This, in turn, is forcing change on surplus countries, whether they like it or not. Export-orientated nations can no longer rely on once profligate neighbours to buy their goods. Against all instinct, they are having to stimulate their own domestic demand.

The most startling results are evident in China, where retail sales grew an astonishing 15.4 per cent in August. Fiscal action has succeeded in boosting consumption in Germany, too, despite mistrust of what one German politician has dubbed “crass Keynesianism”.

…The challenge for a developing nation such as China is a rather different one. In China, the propensity to export and save is driven by an absence of any meaningful social security net, in combination with the legacy of its oppressive one child policy, which has deprived great swathes of the population of children to fall back on for support in old age.

What’s more, most Chinese don’t earn enough to buy the products they are producing, so in what has become the customary path for developing nations, they export the surplus and save the proceeds. Yet even in China the establishment of a newly affluent, free-spending middle class may now have gained an unstoppable momentum. In any case, the country can no longer rely on American consumers to provide jobs and growth. It needs a new growth model, which means ultimately adopting the Henry Ford principle that if you want a sustainable market for your products, you have to pay your workers enough to buy them.

How China actually goes about doing that – adopting Henry Ford’s model – is anybody’s guess, but I’d say if it ever happens it’s generations away. (It reminds me of hopes that Afghanistan’s poppy-growing peasants will adopt democracy in short order, become a second Vermont and work out their most pressing problems in civil town halls over chardonnay and quiche.) That’s the flaw in this article, glossing over just how excruciatingly difficult such a sea-change would be to implement. Its observations about the fate of the dollar and the new balance of power, however, seem to me spot on:

These trends – all of which pre-date the crisis but which, out of necessity, are being greatly accelerated by it – will eventually drive a move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency of choice. As China takes control of its economic destiny, spends more and saves less, there will be less willingness both to hold dollar assets and to submit to the domestic priorities of US monetary policy.

This is still a couple of years off, but China is preparing for it now. The dollar will spurt up periodically between now and then, but its general trend has to be downward. It is literally inevitable that the value of the dollar will be slashed over the next couple of years. The government needs to lower the value of the dollar, but is hoping to do so slowly. The problem is, those holding dollars, like China, are hardly stupid and know what’s going on, and will not cheerfully stand whistling on the deck as the Titanic goes down. And if there’s a panic and a global dumping of the dollar, it could mean havoc. For a good description of why this is so, and why the dollar simply must go down, check out this clip from CNBC (scroll down). Highly recommended, especially toward the end.

For the record, i have no background in economics and make no claims that I have even the slightest idea what I’m talking about. I just like to write about money and politics. What I do know, however, is that I first recommended buying gold here in the closing days of 2006. Here’s where it was when I recommended it then compared to now.

[Update: Welome, MIT BBS readers! Always glad to see you. Please note that comments are monitored – if you leave a comment, it may not show up for several hours Thanks.]

Below is an email I received today from a reader in Australia. I am neutral on the topic, at least for now, but quite curious. Maybe someone in the know can contradict or verify it. If its numbers are accurate, they raise some important questions.

I work in the health sector and I have been monitoring the rates of H1N1 pandemic influenza in Asia since the infection appeared in May. I have been puzzled by the odd disparity in cases and fatalities in China compared to the rest of Asia. Here’s why, based on my own figures compiled on reported deaths in each country:

H1N1 influenza deaths/population (millions) = deaths per million

India 212/1,148 = 0.18
South Korea 5/49 = 0.10
Hong Kong 13/7 = 1.85
Taiwan 11/22 = 0.5
Vietnam 6/86 = 0.07
Philippines 28\96 = 0.3
Thailand 153/65 = 2.3
Japan 20/127 = 0.15

China 0/1,330,044,544 = 0

See a pattern emerging here? Very rough figures, but most countries seem to have a H1N1 pandemic flu mortality rate in the range of 0.1-0.5 per million population. Based on these rates, we would expect China to have 100-650 H1N1 deaths by now, or around 200 deaths as seen in other countries in the region with a similar population, such as India. And yet China has reported no H1N1 deaths at all, except for one in a woman from Zhejiang who was said to have recovered from the flu.

There are several possibilities here.

1. Have China’s quarantine policies been successful?
2. Is there a H1N1 influenza virus with Chinese characteristics that is less virulent?
3. Do Chinese people have some special immunity or life-saving treatment for influenza that other Asians lack?
4. Is China not reporting its 200+ swine flu deaths – perhaps because of a desire to avoid bad news in the run up to the forthcoming October 1 Anniversary?

I am surprised that none of the medical experts at WHO has commented on China’s immunity to swine flu. I would have expected SARS veteran Dr Margaert Chan to be very interested in any country that managed to achieve a zero mortality from what she described as a possible calamity.

I would be interested in what your readers have to say, and whether anyone ‘on the ground’ in China has other information.

I did a quick search and noticed a dearth of coverage of any swine flu deaths in China. Zero, to be precise. I did find a blog that had been questioning this, only to be blocked in China for its efforts.

Yet Xinhua’s reports are almost always just body counts: how many people are reported ill in one country or another. (For decades, Chinese media have been happy to report on disasters outside China.) And while Xinhua’s reported over 9,000 H1N1 cases in China itself as of mid-September, it still claims no one has died from the disease. Hong Kong, meanwhile, has reported over twice as many cases and 13 deaths.

(Currently, it appears China is actively blocking my site — and my other blogs as well. And all I’ve done is express surprise, not disbelief, at the lack of deaths.)

I’ll remain neutral until I know for sure whether mainland China has really reported no deaths from H1N1. If that turns out to be accurate, I’ll lean toward No. 4 on the list above, which strikes me as most likely considering both the improbability of the other three possibilities, coupled with China’s past history of lying about not being totally upfront about disease on the mainland. Is there a 5th possibility?

Update: It’s apparently true that China has registered zero deaths from H1N1. Striking that – link referred to Beijing, not all of China.

An excellent multimedia look at how they are surviving, and the difficult future tens of millions face as they trudge back to their villages unable to find work. As I read the articles and listened to the testimonies, I was reminded how the slightest nudge of inflation means a life-altering calamity for these people. And I think of where it seems we are heading, and I wonder what these people will do if prices soar (as I think they will). Can the state possibly summon the resources to shelter the hundreds of millions living on pennies a day?

The section on migrant workers who’ve lost their jobs making the one-way trip home by train struck closest to home, from the opening soundbite of someone clearing his throat in the bathroom to the quiet, resigned conversations of people who know their options, limited to begin with, are shrinking even further. And still, they laugh and smile and move on. (At the risk of succumbing to a bout of sentimentality, I have to say, this piece reminded me how much I miss everything about China and want to go back, if only to visit, as soon as I can.)

Thomas Friedman, not my favorite columnist, compares China’s system of strong-man government to America’s clearly broken system in which corporate interests can easily sabotage the government’s efforts to improve the lives of its citizens over the long term.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.

Friedman’s got a point. It’s a shame that special interests in America can spend vast amounts of money to derail projects that would be to the benefit of most citizens, like national healthcare. And it’s wrong that our NIMBY mentality creates constant gridlock when it comes to important decisions. I wish, however, that he’d thrown in a line – even a parenthetical phrase (a little more complete than “despite its drawbacks”) – that would have given a broader and more accurate picture of today’s CCP. Namely, that that kind of authority comes only with a very heavy price, and that while the CCP may be “reasonably enlightened” about energy, natural resources and ensuring sustainability, these benefits are balanced, and sometimes far outweighed, by its knee-jerk self-protective tendencies, which put the party’s survival on the very top of its priority list, way above alternative energy, global warming and sustainability.

Lisa has put up a perceptive post about the recent ramping up of repression, and the link it includes sets off additional alarm bells, painting a picture of a party embroiled in infighting and power struggles, with the possible end result being an even higher level of repression for the sake of “harmony.” It even dares to entertain the notion that the CCP’s commitment to improving its people’s standard of living – central to its strategy of ensuring loyalty to a one-party system – might not last forever should conditions there continue to unravel as they are at the moment in Urumqi.

Lisa remarks:

A swing to repression is pretty predictable given the 60th National Day celebrations, but this latest crackdown still feels qualitatively different somehow. The harassment, detention and arrest of legal scholars like Xu Zhiyong seemed to signal a repudiation of even the most gradualist move toward establishing an effective legal and constitutional system to counterbalance one party rule (and I do believe that there are many members of the Party in question who support a genuine rule of law).

All of this is depressing and worrisome, and it makes me wonder if China is heading down a much bumpier road than a lot of believers in China’s Inevitable Rise are predicting.

Is it time to hit the panic button? I won’t go that far, but I will say it’s time to keep an eye open. That got driven home to me yesterday as I read, via ESWN, a story on the new censorship being imposed on China’s business magazine Caijing, where reporters were recently told “they wouldn’t be running any politically controversial stories — indefinitely.” This is a big step backwards. Caijing was always pointed to as epitomizing China’s new spirit of openness.

So back to Friedman. Praise China’s stunning successes in securing the natural resources it needs and for forcing the embrace of alternative energy. Praise its outlandish daring in standing up to the US financial mobocracy and for having the savvy to quietly put its money in places safer than US debt. But you, Tom, have a debt to your readers, too: you have to tell them that the price of an enlightened autocracy is always less representation, the law being carried out by whim, and a curtailment of freedoms that many of us would never sacrifice, no matter how wise and magnanimous our leaders may appear. And when you’re praising China’s great strides, don’t forget that at the same time, it’s still trapped in a straitjacket that’s at least partially of its own making): extreme environmental fragility, overwhelming poverty and an economy that’s far more tenuous than immediately meets the eye.

A few days before I left China, a friend handed me two books by Eileen Chang, an author who for a long time had been on my list but who I never actually got around to reading. I read one of them, The Rice-Sprout Song, on my flight home from China nearly a month ago, and a day hasn’t gone by that I haven’t thought about it at least once. Although it came out in 1955 and there’s no need for yet another review, I had to put down a few thoughts.

The Rice-Sprout Song is set in China’s countryside during the early days of Mao’s tyranny, when “land reform” promised the rural poor great hope that would soon lead to the horrors of collectivization, famine and death on a scale that was until then unimaginable. It’s a desolate book about a terrible subject we all know about but have, in all likelihood, never truly experienced, hunger. Its metaphor for hunger is the watery gruel the poor eat for every meal as they slowly starve.

That this was Chang’s first English novel is extraordinary, it is so perfectly crafted, its characters so real and the language assured and perfect. The book has two heroes, a “model worker” in the village, Gold Root, and his wife Moon Scent. After many pages of bleakness, we detect the first hints of joy in Gold Root’s longing for Moon Scent, who has gone to work in Shanghai as a maid. He misses her so intensely he travels to Shanghai, his first time out of the countryside, to spend a few days with her, a sad event marked by Gold Root’s sense of isolation and awkwardness, his crushing poverty contrasted by “bejeweled ladies going to parties in their shiny silk gowns and high-heeled gold shoes.”

Chang tells how a cadre from the city is sent down to their village to live exactly as the peasants do and learn from them, and soon he, too, is starving. Only he has the resources to go to a nearby town and stuff himself with tea-boiled eggs, as he denies the hunger in his reports. He notes to himself that anyone who suggests there is truth to the whispers that the poor are starving will immediately be labeled a nationalist spy and put to death. Gold Root and Moon Scent are both doomed, victims of the insanity that grew out of Mao’s policies. Gold Root is outraged that officials deny that the peasants are starving to death. He will soon pay for his insistence on speaking the truth, dragging Moon Scent down with him.

The oddest character in the book is the village’s leading official, Comrade Wong, a jovial, likable man. Chang devotes many pages to humanizing him, telling how he met his beloved wife and how she left him, describing his loneliness and his knowledge that he will never rise from being a low-level functionary. We think Wong is a good man – and he probably is. But when the day comes that he meets with the starving peasants and tells them each must donate a pig as a gift to the army and prepare rice dumplings for the soldiers, we hate him with a passion. Gold Root cries out that they are literally starving, they have nothing. Wong beams with a wide smile and insists that surely they can accommodate this modest request for their country’s brave soldiers. It is the high point of the book and it marks Gold Root’s descent from “Model Worker” to an outraged, infuriated rebel clamoring for justice. Of course, he will soon be labeled a reactionary, and will be shot to death in the ensuing violence.

The words of my Chinese teacher in Beijing kept coming back to me as I read this book: her telling me how her family grew up hungry, and how no matter what the Chinese government did today, she and all other Chinese would feel unending gratitude that the days of hunger were over. Nothing matters when you are hungry; only food. Today, the Chinese people are no longer starving, and that shift, from starvation to having enough food on the table, was a seismic one. For anyone seeking to understand how the Chinese people can accept a government that censors, steals, enriches itself from the poverty of its people and thinks nothing of their human rights, I suggest they read this book. It doesn’t touch on any of these topics per se, but it shows you all too vividly what life was like not so long ago (and Chang’s account deals with China prior to the great famine; the horror was only just beginning). And then you look at China today, my teacher’s China. No matter what we think of the government, hundreds of millions who were starving saw their situations turn around. For some 200 million or so, their poverty stayed the same or became even worse, but for the vast majority, it was a new world: they had food. As you read The Rice-Sprout Song, it becomes clearer just why the government today is given so much latitude, whether it was the CCP that put food on the people’s tables or their own hard work once Mao’s insanities were thrown on the rubbish heap where they belonged. When you have gone from generations of hunger to having food, you’ve undergone a sea change, a miracle. There has been no other turnaround like it in the history of civilization. So I understand what my Chinese teacher was telling me, whether I agree or not.

Corrupt officials still terrorize the countryside, and perhaps they always will; the exploitation of the marginalized by the powerful is history’s oldest story. What this book does is make palpable the helplessness of China’s rural poor, placing the reader in their freezing huts as the government’s absurd decrees destroy their lives, chipping away at their dignity, ultimately killing them wholesale. In one of its most heartbreaking scenes, soldiers ransack their homes, stealing the very last bits of food they have hidden away. The peasants’ calamity is complete; they have no recourse, no hope, nothing but their hunger.

I read a number of books of China over the past few weeks and will try to put up some posts, hopefully briefer than this one, with my recommendations. In the meantime, if you’ve never read this book, which Chang wrote in English (another source of amazement), I urge you to get a copy. It can easily be read in a day or two, and it will leave you furious, anguished, dumbstruck and horrified. You’ll hear the voices of its characters in your head for a long time to come, and no matter how well you already understand the famine and Maoism and land reform, you will feel like you are right there, living the insanity. That is not a comfortable feeling, but one that will make your compassion for the Chinese people richer and deeper than ever before.

If I looked at the news out of China today and saw good things I’d perhaps put up positive posts, provided i felt I had anything useful to add. But looking at the news today, and over the past several days, I see really bad news, to the point of alarming. Arresting good people on trumped-up charges and holding them in secret places and giving them obscene sentences has been an ongoing topic here for many years. But usually these are isolated instances. Shi Tao. Zhao Yan. Hu Jia. Aside from the typical pre-party congress and pre-Tiananmen anniversary sweeps, we don’t often see a calculated nationwide roundup of innocent Chinese citizens the government sees as potential threats.

We’re seeing it now, and it looks like another huge leap backwards. While the Chinese media spew forth one story after another on the need for greater rule of law, fair representation, no arrests without transparent processes, etc., the government that supports these media is going in the exact opposite direction, reminding us that absolutely no one on Chinese soil is safe. As Evan Osnos in an excellent post makes clear, even the best and brightest are at risk.

Imagine, for a moment, how it might sound to turn on the news one day and hear that the head of the A.C.L.U. had vanished from his home in the predawn hours. Or, think how America might be different today if a pesky young Thurgood Marshall had been silenced using an obscure tax rule and kept out of the courts.

At around 5 A.M. on Wednesday, Chinese authorities visited the home of Xu Zhiyong, a prominent legal scholar and elected legislator in Beijing, and led him away. He has not been heard from again. Unless something changes, he is likely to stay away for a long time, with or without formal charges. Anyone with an interest in China, its economy, its place in the world, or the kind of future it will fashion, please take note: This is a big deal.

Xu might not have reached Marshall status yet, but he is as close as China gets to a public-interest icon. He teaches law at the Beijing University of Post and Telecommunications. He has also run the Open Constitution Initiative, a legal aid and research organization that worked on many of China’s path-breaking cases. He and his colleagues had investigated the Sanlu milk scandal, in which dangerous baby formula harmed children’s health, and assisted people who had been locked up by local officials in secret undeclared jails. All of those activities are emphatically consistent with the goals of the Chinese government, even if they angered the local bureaucrats who were caught in the act.

Xu has never set out to undermine one-party rule; he is enforcing rights guaranteed in the Chinese Constitution. He has enough faith in the system that he joined it: in 2003, he ran for and won a seat as a legislator in his local district assembly, one of the few independent candidates to be elected in an open, contested election. He even received the recognition, rare among activists, of being profiled last year in a Chinese newspaper. “I have taken part in politics in pursuit of a better and more civilized nation,” he said at the time.

As Osnos goes on to say, few in China have done more for the good of the general public than Xu. He urges the government to release him “before the full bureaucracy gets too much invested in holding him, but time is limited. China deserves better than this kind of behavior.”

Does it really all go back to the October beauty pageant? We just saw the 20th anniversary of the CCP’s greatest source of insecurity and paranoia, and the actions taken in the months prior seem relatively lame compared to the 60th anniversary. My own site pumped out posts about June 4 for weeks before the anniversary, and for five days following. (The ax didn’t fall until June 9 for reasons I still don’t understand and probably never will.) And the detentions at the time seemed at least explainable – the usual suspects who get detained every year. This seems different. They are going after people who are heroes to many in China. Even a defender of the rights of marginalized citizens.

This nacht und nebel approach makes China look absolutely atrocious. People like me who have tried to seek out the positive achievements the party has made in order to provide a fair picture of China today have no choice but to express deep criticism (and that’s a wonderful link).

The lives of your average citizens in China have become so much freer and more open in recent years, and criticism of the government has become so much more accepted and even expected (within the usual constraints, of course) that what we’re seeing now can only be described as a tragedy. Will they take advantage of the very small window of opportunity they still have and show that they are capable of living up to their own doctrines of rule of law? I hope so. But I seriously doubt it. With a few minor exceptions, China has consistently disappointed us when it comes to its treatment of high-profile cases of alleged “dissidents.” It’s their choice. They are on the verge of an unprecedented drop in goodwill.

Update: See this outstanding piece by Isabel Hilton on how China’s formula – “if repression doesn’t work, add more repression” – illustrates the country’s political malaise, and could ultimately lead to implosion. I am not willing to go that far (yet). But we’ll be hearing a lot more about this if China keeps adding fuel to the fire. Hilton includes a beautiful quote from Xu after the closure of his NGO:

“It’s not us causing trouble, and the tens of thousands of mass incidents every year aren’t caused by us …. On the contrary, we strive to bring into line the contradictions caused by corrupt officials, we advocate absolute nonviolence and we hope we can ameliorate some of the endless hate and conflicts in our society… do not let this country once more be dragged by those in power to a place where we are dead but not buried.

Why have we been targeted with this retribution? Because we have an awe-inspiring righteousness, because we advocate for better politics, because our dreams are too beautiful, because we as a people have never given up hope, because no matter what befalls, our hearts are always full of the sunlight of hope.

…I am a poor man, so poor that all I have left are my beliefs. Great leaders, can I give you a little bit of my belief? You should be needing these beliefs and you should, like me, have the ability to show compassion, compassion to see the restless souls disturbed by evil spirits.”

Will the “great leaders” listen? I’m skeptical.

It’s stories like this that reawaken that old “China is evil” tape I used to play a lot on this blog back when I thought I knew everything. Now, when I am fully aware of just how little I know and how fundamentally stupid I am, I still get pissed off almost to the point of outrage. Make that “impotent outrage.” Because I’ve been posting on this topic for half a decade now and still they don’t listen. I love China, I miss China, I want to go back to China, but I see crap like this and I am reminded of just how fucked up their government can still be.

In the realm of potential threats to China’s stability, an organization that advocates on behalf of people infected with hepatitis B would seem to be low-risk. But on Wednesday, the group’s director, Lu Jun, found himself squaring off against four security officials who were trying to cart away stacks of literature they claimed had been printed without official permission.

In the end, Mr. Lu scored a partial victory. After eight hours looking through drawers and photographing volunteers, the inspectors walked off with 90 pamphlets, but Mr. Lu prevented them from delving into the group’s computer files. “I fear this is not the end of it,” he said Thursday.

The raid on Mr. Lu’s organization, the Yi Ren Ping Center, comes at a precarious time for China’s nongovernmental organizations, many of which operate in a kind of legal gray zone. Two weeks ago, officials used a bureaucratic infraction as the reason to shut down the country’s pre-eminent legal rights center, Gongmeng, or Open Constitution Initiative. The closing came after a separate disbarment of 53 lawyers known for taking on civil rights and corruption cases. Just before dawn on Wednesday, the founder of Gongmeng, Xu Zhiyong, was taken into police custody, and he has not been heard from since….

“It’s basically a foolish attempt to make the year as peaceful and uneventful as possible,” said Jiang Tianyong, a lawyer who was among those blocked from renewing their licenses.

I can sort of get going after Tiananmen mothers and rogue churches and “cyberdissidents” and all sorts of other “threats” to China’s one-party system – I can get it even if I think it’s batty and counter-productive and detestable. But hepatitis b carriers? This is in a class by itself, because they simply pose no threat, yet they are victims of heartbreaking and unforgivable discrimination. Sorry for the extensive clips, but we have to understand just how inane and insane and depraved this policy of discrimination is, because it is directed at ordinary people who pose no risk to you or me or to anyone. We have to ask, how great can “the world’s next superpower” be when it allows itself to be ruled by old wives’ tales, superstition and flat-out ignorance (or more likely willful denial of the facts)? It’s nothing less than that. And it’s also kind of evil, because it leaves behind victims with devastated lives.

There is widespread trepidation over hepatitis B in China, a fear that has been inflamed by an explosion in advertising for medical testing services and sham cures. Even though it is preventable with a vaccine — and most of those infected will not become ill — state-owned companies, medical schools and food-processing plants have come to believe that it is sensible policy to bar the infected.

Under Chinese law, carriers of hepatitis B cannot work as teachers, elevator operators, barbers or supermarket cashiers. In a recent survey of 113 colleges and universities, conducted by the Yi Ren Ping Center, 94 acknowledged that infected applicants, required to take blood tests, would be summarily rejected.

Many of the 120 million carriers in China got the virus in the 1970s and 1980s, when a single contaminated syringe was sometimes used to inoculate hundreds of people at a time against diseases. The second-biggest group of carriers, about 40 percent of the total, according to the government, got virus from their mothers during childbirth.

An online bulletin board maintained by Mr. Lu’s group is a heart-rending clearinghouse for stories of people fired from jobs, or students denied college educations, after mandatory blood tests revealed their statuses. There are also scores of tales about the ashamed and the distraught who killed themselves.

One former blogger who a lot of you know (at least from his blog) once wrote to me and told me of his own plight as a hepatitis b carrier. This government-perpetuated ignorance takes a toll. It ruins lives. It is irrational and inexcusable and it should be eliminated. Fat chance of that. As I said, half a decade of complaining, and I might as well be chasing windmills. But as futile and meaningless as these posts seem to be, I have to write them anyway. If it helps to inform even one person, it’s worth it. And even if it doesn’t it’s worth it. Because it’s something we shouldn’t be silent about. It’s plain wrong.

Thanks so much, CCP, for protecting us from the danger of a barber or doorman who is hepatitis b-positive. And for having the bravery and dedication to go after such a dangerous threat as an advocacy group for hepatitis B carriers’ rights. Jia you.

Update: James Fallows criticizes the CCP in strong language (for him) for a similar silence-all-dissenting-voices atrocity. Just as you get lulled into thinking they’re really improving, you get reminded that it is still in many ways a police state. Random arrests constitute one of the most terrifying abuses of power and must always be condemned, always. And yes (mandatory disclaimer), I condemned my own country for what seemed to be random arrests during the “war on terror.” But arresting someone based on a tip from an informant/bounty hunter, deplorable as that may be, can’t be compared to targeting dissenters and locking them up in the night to make sure no one rains on your anniversary parade.

Ironically, of course, nothing could make China look worse than what it’s doing now. On the other hand, they probably see the October beauty show as something useful to domestic audiences only, and simply don’t care how indignant we get over their crimes and abuse.

I know I am (very) late with this, now that the eclipse is more than a day old. But it was breathtaking to stand under the overcast sky yesterday, still quite bright at 9.30am, and watch the sky get progressively darker in a matter of seconds, turning nearly black after about five minutes. It was especially exciting because heavy thundershowers earlier in the morning had made the hundreds of spectators at the hotels gloomy. While they may not have gotten their full money’s worth, it was a dramatic and rare event nonetheless. The photos were captured by my friend Ben from the outdoor area of the third-floor lobby of the Sheraton hotel in Suzhou.

First, you can see the view before the eclipse started.

Then it gets darker.

And then you know there’s a total eclipse taking place, and not just some dark clouds.

And then after five minutes the sky begins to return to normal.

Yes, it would have been a lot more magical if the skies had been clear, but this was nothing to sneeze at.

This trip, my last before moving back to the US, got interrupted by an unexpected email a few days ago when I was in Suzhou. Just like the last time when I wasn’t sure what to do next, back in April, another opportunity simply appeared, and it was again due to this blog, if somewhat indirectly. I’ll be doing writing and media relations for an NGO devoted to a cause I care a lot about, and it will bring me back to Asia (though perhaps not China) less than two weeks after I return home, at least for a couple of weeks. Fate plays strange tricks, and you never know what’s next. What was that Forrest Gump metaphor again?