According to this article, Hu’s style is markedly different than Jiang’s, and holds the promise of more toleration and a willingness to listen and learn.

Simply put, the biggest difference between Jiang’s old and Hu’s new leadership is that Jiang vowed to rule with an iron fist, while Hu enshrines the more common touch and urges leaders to listen to and learn from the people. Jiang’s mindset and approach to social control were similar to those of old bureaucrats in the former Soviet Union where government/party control prevailed in every aspect of life – politics, economy, culture and daily life at the grassroots level. As in the Soviet Union, the Jiang government even tried to determine and regulate what the normal and acceptable lifestyle should be.

Hu’s governance style is characterized by the government’s looser control of the state and greater leeway to trusted, reform-minded colleagues. The government retains firm control of political affairs but not of all aspects of life. In addition, diversity of lifestyle is tolerated by the Hu’s Communist Party regime.

I sure hope so. I always, in my heart, thought Hu and Wen were a different breed than their predecessors. Of course, Hu’s unwillingness to loosen control of political issues is depressing, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt — that won’t happen overnight. But don’t get any ideas; I’m still going to criticize them whenever i think they’re fucking up, just as I will John Kerry after he’s sworn in.

This was reassuring to see.

In a hard-hitting commentary on the eve of U.S. elections, China has slammed the Bush administration, saying it is trying to rule the world by force.

Writing in the state newspaper China Daily, Vice Premier Qian Qichen said “the philosophy of the ‘Bush Doctrine’ is in essence force. It advocates the United States should rule over the whole world with overwhelming force, military force in particular.

Now, don’t all you Republicans get all excited and tell me this is further proof of murderous thugs all lining up behind Kerry. Everyone’s lining up behind Kerry, brutal dictators and puppy dogs. Except Iran, which has come out for shrub, and of course Osama Bin Laden, who put out a free ad for bush last Friday, which Republicans referred to on the record as “a gift.”

Link is via Conrad who, as usual, gets it all wrong. (And why doesn’t Conrad get it through his head that if John Ascroft had his way, the first thing he’d do would be to close down Gweilo Diaries?)

Of course, it’s not being reported in China.

Violent clashes between members of the Muslim Hui ethnic group and the majority Han group left nearly 150 people dead and forced authorities to declare martial law in a section of Henan Province in central China, journalists and witnesses in the region said today.

The fighting flared late last week and continued into the weekend after a Hui taxi driver fatally struck a 6-year-old Han girl, prompting recriminations between different ethnic groups in neighboring villages, these people said.

One person who was briefed on the incident by the police said that 148 people had been killed, including 18 police officers sent to quell the violence.

Chinese media have reported nothing about unrest in Henan. But a news blackout would not be unusual, as propaganda authorities routinely suppress information about ethnic tensions.

When you read about the underlying causes, mostly economic, you can’t help but wonder if this isn’t a sign of many more such clashes to come. As the quality of life for the Han Chinese improves, little of the new prosperity reachces the Moslems.

Update: Boy, I am prescient! More on the trend toward more frequent and more violent protests here. (Requires registration, sorry.)

Update 2: It seems the death toll was far, far less than 150. More like 7. Where did the Times get that number??

It’s all in the name of cracking down on “pornography,” but I would guess it also has to do with increasing control over people’s minds in general.

uthorities in China have ordered more than 1,600 Internet cafes closed since February 2004, imposing more than 100 million yuan, or $12 million, in fines against their operators for allowing children to play violent or adult-only games among other violations.

Deputy director of the Culture Ministry’s Market Department, Zhang Xinjian, said more than 1.8 million Internet cafes throughout the country had been inspected and more than 18,000 had been ordered to cease their operations until reported violations have been corrected.

The latest clean-up comes at a time when the government is attempting to control violence and pornography on the Internet.

The government has also recently shut down hundreds of web sites and continues to block access to thousands of offending web sites outside China.

Last night I had a heated argument with a good friend of mine, who is Chinese. He thinks I am much too hard on the CCP, and he says almost all the things they do are good. I want to believe that, and I keep waiting for the evidence. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe they are monolithically evil or bad, and there are a lot of noble people in the party. But their never-ending battle for mind control doesn’t score them any points on my tally card.

Via Little Devi.

Check out Running Dogs’ depressing post on the environmental carnage being inflicted on China’s surreally gorgeous province of Yunnan.

The figures are stark. 70% of the province’s natural habitats have been lost, according to the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA). 73 plants included in the Key National Protected Wild Plants List can no longer be found. The virgin forest coverage of Xishuangbanna has dropped by 27%, with little hope of recovery. Most of the cropland has been saturated with chemical fertilizers, the rivers are in more and more trouble, and the air quality in the big cities is getting worse and worse, the report says.

I’m making it my vow to get to Yunnan within the next 8 months. Everyone I know who has been there tells me it is one of God’s great gifts to the planet, with scenery of such breathtaking beauty it scarcely seems real. Leave it to China’s current leaders to rob us of this splendor.

If you’re interested in film, you’ll want to read this article on the rise of Asian filmmaking. It points to China as the new breadbasket of cinematic creativity and raves about the beauty of Zhang Yimou’s newest hit in China, House of Flying Daggers, which the writer says is a product of its Taoist philosophy.

Despite the range of western cinema today, most of it derives from the assumption that movies are narrative chains of cause and effect, that their characters have fears and desires, and that we follow the film by understanding these fears and desires. The new films of Zhang and the others make similar assumptions but are less driven by them and balance questions of selfhood with Zen ideas about negation and equilibrium. This makes their beauty hard to replicate in the west.

But Buddhism is not the whole picture. Another Asian philosophy explains the sense of gender and use of space in these films. Unlike Maoism, which pictured a clear moral opposition between the good workers and bad bosses, and unlike Confucian philosophy, in which masculinity is noble and femininity is not, Taoism is less clear-cut. Morally, it sees good within bad and vice versa. The feminine is a virtue in the same way that emptiness may be for artists.

Every one of the great Asian films in the pipeline evinces Taoist ideas of sex and space. In none of them is gender polarised. In all of them, space is crucial. And the influence is acknowledged. Zhang, for example, has talked about the way Chinese painting has affected his work. His shots are often very wide. Space and landscape weigh as heavily within the frame as the human elements. Art historians have long discussed the Taoist component of such paintings.

I’m no film expert, but I found this a good read.

This is depressing. People need to be mighty unhappy to decide the only viable option is to take their own lives. All 7 would-be suiciders were peasant workers in Shenyang who were not paid for their work, an all too common crime in China.

SEVEN male workers, distressed over not receiving their pay and worried by their families’ plight, tried to commit group suicide in a case highlighting the widespread victimisation of migrant labourers in China, the state media has reported.

The seven took sleeping pills in their hostel last Saturday in this capital of north-eastern Liaoning province, said the Chinese Business Morning View.

The group suicide bid was discovered in time by a co-worker. The man, surnamed Liu, had returned to the hostel from a nearby town where he had gone to try to recoup the payments due to the construction labourers.

‘The minute I entered the workers’ quarters I found one of them lying on the floor while six others lay stiff in bed without blankets on.

‘I instantly knew something terrible had happened,’ recalled Mr Liu, who said he made 120 emergency phone calls to seek help.

Read the infuriating article to understand just how desperate these people are, and how common this practice of exploiting peasants and then not paying them is. I try to get inside of the minds of the people who promise them work and then walk away, pocketing the money for themselves. But I can’t. I don’t know how they can live with themselves.

Interesting. I’m impressed at how prescient the analysts were in assessing Mao’s influence, and how with this death the country would return to sanity.

“As long as Mao is capable of political command, China’s situation will probably be tense and inherently unstable,” it said; a “disorderly and contentious” struggle would follow, and eventually a move away from “discredited” policies to “secure modest economic growth.”

In an introduction to the collection of 71 documents, which are on the agency’s Web site at www.cia.gov and will be released by the Government Printing Office on compact disc, Robert L. Suettinger, a career intelligence analyst and China scholar, says that “unfortunately, the collection provides only a few examples of this kind of cogent analysis on China’s leadership situation.” But Mr. Suettinger described the record as “nonetheless an impressive one” in which “the fundamentals are consistently right.”

Among the most important judgments, Mr. Suettinger wrote, was a consistently accurate assessment that the Communist Party in China was never challenged from 1948 on in its predominance of power on the Chinese mainland.

For true Sinophiles this will be a must-read. For those interested only in US politics, pardon the digression, but China is always on my mind.

Jasper Becker, whom I trust, and Daniel Howden say it will.

In the shadow of the Jade Dragon Snow Peak, deep inside the Tiger Leaping Gorge, Chinese developers are operating in secret to push through a massive dam project that will wash away the section of the Yangtze river valley thought to have been the real location for the fictional Shangri-La.

Local tribesmen have revealed that work is already under way on a massive project that would flood a Unesco world heritage site, displace more than 100,000 people and destroy the way of life of the unique Naxi people, one of the world’s only surviving matriarchal societies. It would also bring an abrupt end to the nascent tourism industry in the remote southwestern Yunnan province.

The battle to save the gorge, one of the deepest in the world, has pitted a David-like alliance of green groups and local tribespeople against the Goliath of the Huaneng Group, China”s biggest independent power producer, working with the Yunnan provincial government. The company is run by Li Xiaopeng, son of the hardline former prime minister Li Peng, who oversaw the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Mr Li was at the forefront of the controversial Three Gorges Dam project that was pushed through in the teeth of strident opposition from environmentalists and residents.

“The stakes are extremely high. Chinese environmentalists have decided to make this their next major campaign,” says Ma Jun, a consultant who was the first to produce a study on the dam’s implications. “I’m optimistic they will succeed because this case is a touch-stone of all the big talks on balancing environmental preservation with development”.

Opponents say the reservoir will devastate local cultures, robbing people of their farms and livelihood, and leave tens of thousands of mostly Tibetans, Miao, Yi, Bai, Lisu and Naxi minorities homeless. It would also consign ancient villages with distinctive architectural styles. Concerns are mounting over the fate of the Naxi with their unusual matriarchal tradition, which has drawn an increasing number of visitors to the area.

This would be a tragedy beyond description. It’s all thanks to the tireless and enterprising Li Peng, architect of the June 4, 1989 massacre at and around Tiananmen Square and a mastermind of the Three Gorges Dam project, which thus far has wreaked unimaginable havoc on China’s environment. Ah, progress.

God, this is a difficult article to read. It may require registration — register, it’s worth it.

It tells the story of an innocuous building in Guangzhou used as a gulag for torturing Falun Gong and “re-educating” them. At the heart of it is an interview with a young lady, one Tang Yiwen.

“It is a brainwashing centre – one of many in China, almost one in every district,” says Tang Yiwen, a slight and soft-spoken 37-year-old interpreter who was grabbed off the street by police in February and taken to the Guangzhou institution. “It is said to be one of the most brutal.”

She said the inmates are mostly Falun Gong followers who, like her, have refused to renounce their beliefs even after serving three to four years in brutal labour camps like the one across the river.

She said the school put inmates through an intensive program of mental and physical torture that included beatings, prolonged interrogations, sleep deprivation and continuous exposure to video and audio propaganda.

The “brainwashing”, she said, was a more intensive form of “re-education” applied to Falun Gong followers in between stints at places like Chatou and Shanshui, the labour camp in Guangdong province where Tang spent three years until August last year. She said her visit to the Guangzhou City Law School has left her partially crippled in one leg.

The methods she and others describe sound eerily like the “struggle” sessions applied by Mao Zedong’s Red Guards to extract confessions of “rightist deviation” during the decade-long Cultural Revolution Mao set off in 1966.

“I used to hear from my father and old people how people, one a famous writer, had committed suicide in the camps,” Tang said, referring to that era. “I couldn’t understand. Why couldn’t they just hold out? After brainwashing in labour camp I understood why – it was really too brutal for human beings to stand. It was just like hell.”

On the face of it, the struggle between state and Falun Gong is a hopelessly uneven one, like the breaking of a butterfly on a wheel.

Like breaking a butterfly on a wheel — we seem to see that a lot in China, and in other societies where the government feels it must crush any hint of free thinking if it’s perceived to weaken its iron-fisted grip on power.

The article goes on to discuss the extremes to which the CCP goes to persecute the Falun Gong, and how miserable they’ve made Yiwen’s life.

There is also the full weight of the state propaganda department, which directs a hostile media campaign against Falun Gong, claiming the movement encourages suicide and neglect in adherents and takes their savings.

There is no legal redress for abuses: after the official ban in July 1999, the Chinese Supreme Court passed down a directive forbidding lower courts or lawyers to accept cases brought by followers.

On the Falun Gong side are people like Tang. She is crippled, unable to get a job in the teaching profession she loves and at risk of being jailed and tortured at any time. She said her husband was forced to divorce her, and she cannot get a passport to leave China.

Since receiving a pro-forma letter early in August from the office of the Australian Prime Minister acknowledging a smuggled-out account of her ordeals and her request for asylum in Australia, Tang has been constantly on the move, staying in a succession of temporary accommodations around China, fearing re-arrest by embarrassed and angry police.

Yet the butterfly is not broken.

There’s lots more.

I have my own issues with the Falun Gong. I find them kind of creepy, and I don’t like the way their representatives abroad try to manipulate public opinion. But as far as I know, they haven’t hurt anyone, and whatever their horrific crime is, it hardly merits torture and devastating persecution.

It’s just another one of those uncomfortable topics we’d all like to sweep under the rug. It doesn’t mesh with the view of China we want to have and with which we’re comfortable.