I’ve been corresponding a bit with a writer in Taiwan, William Stimson, who has a very interesting site — not a blog, but more a collection of writings that’s well worth a look.

He also sent me an essay on one of our favorite topics, the smoldering Taiwan-China conflict [PDF file], written by a friend of his, Jerome Keating. So here it is; it, too, is worth a read. If you’re of the school that Taiwan rightfully belongs to China, your blood pressure may increase several notches by the time you’ve finished the piece.

Thanks to a commenter for pointing me to a great articlce by Philip Pan on the libel trial against the authors of Zhongguo Nongmin Diaocha. It reads like a courtroom drama, though it’s about much more than this case — it’s about the changing face of justice in China and a peasantry that’s mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.

While it is a great sign that this trial is happening at all, any joy you might feel will be greatly tempered by the descriptions of the peasant’s misery at the hands of corrupt officials.

Please read this article. You will not be disappointed.

Pomfret spoke on National Public Radio today about China’s economy and whether it poses a threat to the US. Nope, they are not a threat, he concludes, but a partner whose boom is good for the US in most ways. Listen to the whole thing.

I keep waiting for news of Hu’s much-heralded reforms, but instead I keep seeing articles like this.

China should immediately release Li Guozhu, a farmers’ rights advocate who was detained in early November after he investigated deadly ethnic clashes in Henan province, Human Rights Watch said today. Farmers’ rights advocates are increasingly visible in assisting farmers in petitioning the government to redress grievances.

Witnesses told Li’s family of his arrest, but Li’s family has received no formal notification of his status or whereabouts. Li’s detention appears to be part of a widening crackdown on both intellectuals and rights advocates in China.

“This detention shows China’s determination to keep a grip on the flow of information,” said Brad Adams, Asia director of Human Rights Watch. “It also shows the clear risks for those left out of China’s macroeconomic boom who dare to seek justice for themselves and their communities.”

Keep those reforms coming. And remember, this is the regime that was going to stand up for the rights of the farmers and peasants. There’s a lot more to the article, none of it particularly uplifting.

I usually don’t quote from Counterpunch because its writers can be awfully shrill, but there’s a fine piece there today on the BS the Chinese government is doling out as they try rather comically to convince us the Three Gorges Dam is God’s gift to man and nature. My favorite part (it’s long, but it’s good):

I pick up a picture book, The Three Gorges Project On the Yangtze River, at the new Three Gorges Project (3GP) museum gift shop in Yichang. The preface enthuses over the benefits of the project. Indulging in the Chinese penchant for systematizing with numbers, it proclaims “When the Three Gorges Project is completed, it will be beneficial in ten aspects, including flood control, power generation, navigation, aquaculture, tourism, ecological protection, environmental purification, developmental resettlement, transferring water from the south to the north, water supply and irrigation.”

This is very dense disinformation. How can aquaculture be improved by quintupling river traffic, as the development plans dictate, or by the algae blooms that inevitably accompany the creation of reservoirs, choking out oxygen and increasing acidity? Will tourists be drawn to an epic cesspool, in which millions of people’s raw sewage festers in stagnant water, or enticed by gorge stumps? What about the 1300 celebrated cultural sites and archeological digs that will now require SCUBA equipment to explore? The temperature of the reservoir will be several degrees higher than that of the river, possibly contributing to a surge of endemic infections-malaria, encephalitis, and the parasitic disease schistosomiasis-leading The Lancet, the prestigious journal of the British Medical Association, to warn that the 3GP could be the “Chernobyl of hydropower.” Anyone care for a dip?

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The article ends with the rather startling conclusion that China should dismantle the entire dam. Not very likely, I’m afraid.

Phillip Pan has proven himself once more to be a worthy successor of the great John Pomfret over at the Washington Post. He’s written a scary and detailed account of Internet essayist and “cyberdissident” Liu Di’s story, and the many bizarreries she encountered within China’s unique “justice system.” (I’ve previously referred to her as the Stainless Steel Mouse, but I’m sure Pan’s “Rat” more accurate.) Absolutely not to be missed by anyone following the repression of online politics.

I’m still marking time until the New Year, when I plan to get back to putting up interesting posts. For now, I’m continuing my holding pattern, giving some links and a bit of commentary. But things are too high-stress right now for long posts. Hopefully right after the new Year I’ll be able to share why that is, and what’s going on in my life.

Update: A good related article. It seems China’s newly energized crackdown on dissidents is receiving lots of press. Should I still hold out for hope for Hu emerging as a true reformer? Remember how optimistic we were, not so long ago…?

Still too burned out to post, but I wanted to share a most interesting article from The Economist on how China seeks to stifle its intellectual voices. I usually don’t snip entire articles, but you need to register for this, so here it is.

[Sidenote: I really, really, really don’t want this blog simply to be a chronology of malfeasances perpetrated by the CCP against its subjects. I had shifted away from that mode ever since I came home, focusing more on American politics and a broader view of things. I’ll try to limit my criticisms, which I am fully aware can be redundant and polemical. Now that my big work project is over, I’m going to try to get re-energized blogging about the sins of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, when I see interesting articles like this, I’ll keep sharing them.]

IN AN Orwellian obfuscation of its role, the Chinese Communist Party’s Propaganda Department prefers to translate its name these days as the Publicity Department. But one of its main tasks remains that of issuing secret directives to the state-controlled media telling them what not to report. And among its latest prohibitions is any encouragement for “public intellectuals” in China.

In recent years, the party had become more relaxed about intellectuals. Outspoken academics helped fuel the campus fervour that eventually erupted into mass protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But the crackdown, followed a couple of years later by an economic boom, dampened demands for political change. The party began to worry more about unemployed workers and disgruntled peasants, and less about intellectuals—many of whom, anyway, were turning their attention to making money.

More recently, however, the rapid spread of the internet and the increasing commercialisation of the Chinese media have given intellectuals new avenues of expression. A few, including economists, social scientists and lawyers, have become well-known among the chattering classes for their critiques of social ills (though prudently, in most cases, not of the party itself). The term “public intellectuals” has crept into the media, encouraged not least by a Chinese translation last year of “Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline”, a book by an American judge, Richard Posner, examining the role of such commentators in America.

The Propaganda Department lost its patience after a magazine in Guangdong Province, Southern People Weekly, published a list of 50 Chinese public intellectuals in September. The market economy, said an accompanying commentary, had caused the rapid marginalisation of intellectuals. “But this is the time when China is facing the most problems in its unprecedented transformation, and when it most needs public intellectuals to be on the scene and to speak out.”

If the 50 had been loyal party stooges, all might have been forgiven. But among them were several who are decidedly not, including Zhang Sizhi, a defence lawyer who has argued in the trials of some of China’s best known dissidents; Cui Jian, a rock singer whose irreverence has irritated the authorities since his heyday in the Tiananmen era; Bei Dao, a poet who has been forced to live in exile since the 1989 unrest; and Wang Ruoshui (who died in 2002), a senior journalist and member of the party’s inner circle who turned dissident. A scathing commentary on the list, published last month by a Shanghai newspaper and republished by the party’s main mouthpiece, People’s Daily, said that promoting the idea of “public intellectuals” was really aimed at “driving a wedge between intellectuals and the party.” The window for free debate that opened a crack over the past couple of years, as China’s leadership shifted to the “fourth generation” of leaders, is closing again.

Oddly, perhaps, given the supposed indifference of urbanites to politics, two of the bestselling books in China this year have been about the “anti-rightist” campaign of 1957, during which half a million of the party’s intellectual critics were persecuted. One of the books, “Past Events Have Not Vanished Like Smoke”, was banned by the Propaganda Department. The other, “Inside Secrets of 1957: The Sacrificial Altar of Suffering”, is still for sale. Though probably not for long.

I enjoyed this article in the NY Times that looks at how history is being taught to Chinese high school students.

Most Chinese students finish high school convinced that their country has fought wars only in self-defense, never aggressively or in conquest, despite the People’s Liberation Army’s invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the ill-fated war with Vietnam in 1979, to take two examples.

Similarly, many believe that Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance, not by the United States.

“The fundamental reason for the victory is that the Chinese Communist Party became the core power that united the nation,” says one widely used textbook, referring to World War II.

No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of catastrophic decisions made in the 1950’s, during the Great Leap Forward, by the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.

Similar elisions occur in everything from the start of the Korean War, with an invasion of South Korea by China’s ally, North Korea, to the history of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as an irrevocable part of China.

“The Anti-Japanese War finally succeeded, and Taiwan came back to the motherland,” another leading textbook states, referring to Japan’s defeat in World War II and the loss of its colonial hold on Taiwan.

Read the article, which starts with a rather precious description of an actual lecture on World War II to Shanghai high schoolers.

Of course, if my own country keeps heading in its current direction and starts teaching Creationism as an alternative theory to how man came to be, then I won’t be able to complain much….

I’m in such a bad mood tonight (strictly due to a crushing workweek) I know I won’t post anything to be proud of. But I can’t let this go: If you can read only one article today, make it this one. Kristoff is at his best and his most angry, concluding the article with a brillliant coda:

China now dazzles visitors with luxury skyscrapers, five-star hotels and modern freeways. This boom is real and spectacular, but for China to be an advanced nation it needs not only spaceships, but also freedom.

Otherwise, all that dazzle is just a mirage. The Chinese leaders might recall an old peasant expression, “Lu fen dan’r, biaomian’r guang.” It means, “On the outside, even donkey droppings gleam.”

Read the whole thing, and I mean it.

UPDATE: Due to a technical problem, I have lost all the comments to this post. Some were really good, too. Sorry about that.

This was once the topic I wrote about more often than any other, but I stopped following it so closely some months ago, when I got the impression that China was finally getting serious about the tragedy and cleaning up its act. And in some ways I know they have. But after Ellen of Crackpot Chronicles pointed me to this article, I’m forced to wonder whether all those stories I was reading about education programs for the rural workers really amount to anything.

Stigma and discrimination form the main barrier to China’s HIV/AIDS prevention, said a UNICEF health official here Saturday.

Overcoming stigma and discrimination is crucial to China winning the war against AIDS, said Koen Vanormelingen, chief of the Health and Nutrition Section of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Office for China.

In China and in the rest of Asia, social and cultural discrimination prevents people from wanting to know more about AIDS, and makes it especially hard to stop the spread of the disease.

A recent investigation by Horizon Market Research, a leading survey company in China, shows that nearly 19 percent of Chinese people have never heard of AIDS, almost the highest percentage in the world. In some regions of central China’s Henan Province, where unsanitary blood sales have caused a serious increase in HIVinfection, the local people do not even know the term AIDS, and just call it a “mysterious disease.”

In addition, for many people, HIV/AIDS is considered a disgraceful condition. Those infected with HIV are usually considered morally bad, and are therefore despised by others.

Stigma and discrimination are also very dangerous in that they may push the HIV-affected group to criminality and other behavior which destabilizes society, said Vanormelingen.

It’s a damned depressing piece. It sounds like we are right where we started when I wrote my first long post about this nightmare. Nineteen percent of the population has still never heard of AIDS? I would have believed that back in 2002, but now, after so many highly touted moves by the government to alert the at-risk population, could we really still be stuck on square one?

Ellen also alerted me to an article in the WaPo that says the AIDS problem is worsening and seeping from the drug users into the general population.

President Hu Jintao was shown on state television Tuesday shaking hands with AIDS patients for the first time, as a report warned that the disease is spreading in China from high-risk groups such as drug users to the general population.

The number of people contracting the AIDS virus in China is rising, according to a report by a U.N. agency and the Chinese Cabinet’s AIDS commission released on the eve of World AIDS Day….

“The party and the government are all concerned about you,” Hu added. “I hope you will have confidence in your treatment by cooperating with the hospital and trying to have an early recovery.”

It was the first time China’s president was shown meeting AIDS patients and part of a government campaign to show it cares. Premier Wen Jiabao set the new tone in December 2002, when he was photographed shaking hands with ordinary Chinese stricken with the disease.

The new joint U.N.-China report warned, however, that the epidemic is spreading to the general population.

I am glad that Hu did what he did, though I’m not happy that’s it’s taken two decades to happen. The key question is, as long as AIDS victims are stigmatized and marginalized and, in effect, punished for their bad fortune, how can China expect them to seek treatment? How can they expect to win? As we in America know, silence really does equal death when it comes to AIDS, and the more they try to push it down, sweep it under the rug, the worse it will get.

I was so optimistic after reading of Bill Clinton’s and Dr. David Ho’s efforts to de-stigmatize AIDS in China last summer, and it looked like it was working. Reading the latest reports, it’s hard to feel so sanguine.