Philip Pan, in a discussion of his book, says criticism and the public pressure it generates is the most effective tool we have.

[I]n the long-run, I am an optimist. I do believe that individuals can bring about real change in China — because they already have. People in the book like Jiang Yanyong, the elderly surgeon who forced the government to end the SARS cover-up, and Cheng Yizhong, the newspaper editor who led the crusade that led to the abolishment of the shourong detention system, come to mind. But it’s even broader than that. People in China today enjoy much more freedom and prosperity than they did three decades ago. The party likes to take credit for this, but I believe these improvements have come despite the authoritarian system, not because of it. They’ve come because of individuals who have fought for them, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure.

Of course, the two names he mentions paid mightily for it, and no matter what he says, I can’t imagine anyone reading Out of Mao’s Shadow without feeling chronic depression throughout, with a few moments of optimism. In the interview, which you should read in full, Pan says he doesn’t quite see why people find the book so saddening. I urge him to reread his chapter about the totally innocent young lady writing her last words in her own blood from her prison cell, a victim of the 100 Flowers tragedy, and the sufferings of the man who tried to bring her story to light. I know, there are baby steps of hope, but their impact is still too fragile and tenuous to be a source of great optimism.

I like Pan’s point about the CCP taking credit for the reforms that came about only after the CCP failed in its fight against them. It’s important to remember as the CCP continues to mythologize its achievements.

Link via ESWN.

What real disrespect looks like.

A good look at what Palin’s done for Alaska.

A marvelous set of questions Palin should be asked. Simple, relevant and fair.

Obama disappoints me yet again. The great orator had better learn how to stand up to the well lubricated Republican noise machine, or fail.

The radical left mouthpiece The Wall Street Journal questions the truth of Palin’s “Bridge to Nowhere” claim. Devastating. That should end that conversation. (Iglesias looks at the same article and makes an astute observation about how the GOP creates damning narratives that succeed in derailing their Dem opponents despite their being pure fabrications.)

Meaning, I am on vacation (though it hardly seems that way at the moment) and would prefer we keep this blog Palin-free for the next 24 hours so I can think about cheerier things, like the CCP. Can we try to do that? I know it’s Saturday and threads tend to be slow on the weekend, but just in case you have something to say, here’s a soapbox.

Protests in two Chinese cities

The Chinese government is reported to have sent thousands of soldiers and police to quell unrest in the central province of Hunan. Up to 10,000 people took to the streets in Jishou to demand money back from an allegedly fraudulent fundraising firm, a Hong Kong-based rights group said. In another protest in the eastern port of Ningbo, 10,000 workers clashed with police, the group added. Social unrest is common in China, but rarely on this scale.

The Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Human Rights and Democracy said that, in both protests, violent clashes erupted between angry crowds and local authorities. In Jishou 50 people were injured in rioting, and police arrested 20 people, the group said. According to Xinhua news agency, the protesters blocked roads and trains to demand that the government take action after a fundraising company “failed to pay them back as promised”. The Jishou government admitted in a statement that armed police were drafted in to disperse the crowds, but did not mention if anyone was hurt.

In the second incident, thousands of migrant workers confronted police in Ningbo to protest about the injury of a man in a local factory. The protests are the latest in a series of confrontations over social issues in China – many of which stem from grievances over alleged corruption and local authorities’ abuse of power. In June, thousands of people rioted in Guizhou province over claims that police had covered up the rape and murder of a girl.

The Chinese government doesn’t deploy soldiers lightly to deal with social unrest. There’s also a Washington Post article that discusses the events in Jishou in more depth.

Tens of thousands of angry protesters, many of whom lost their life savings in illegal investment schemes run by legitimate real estate and mining companies, clashed with police this week in Hunan province, residents and news agencies reported Friday. Crowds in Jishou city blocked traffic and trains Wednesday and Thursday and gathered in front of government offices demanding the return of their money…..

Since 2004, high-return investment schemes have been a popular way for real estate and mining companies and even local associations of private businesses to raise money. Typically, they offer investors returns of 3 to 10 percent a month, as compared with bank account interest rates of about 5 percent a year. The funds collapse when investors panic and demand their money back en masse.

“Over 90 percent of the people in Jishou have participated in these programs,” said a Jishou shopkeeper who gave his surname as Luo and said he invested $11,428 in Sanguan Real Estate Co. for a return of 5 percent, or $571 each month. “Before the Olympic Games, some government officials already told me to get my money out quickly, otherwise I’d be in trouble.” But Luo believed he could afford to risk the money and now can’t get his money back.

Luo said other victims included laid-off workers investing their pensions and farmers who had sold their land to developers and therefore had no other way to earn a living. Some elderly residents even sold their coffins to participate, residents said. The chairman of the board of one real estate company, Fuda, was a well-known local entrepreneur and a member of the local political consultative congress, according to the Sing Tao Web site. Nearly 40 companies raised about $1 billion this way, but beginning in July, when some companies had difficulty repaying, people began to panic.

This week, demonstrators began arriving at Jishou railroad station about 10 p.m. Wednesday, a receptionist at a hotel near the station said. From nearly midnight until 8 p.m. Thursday, “there were no trains coming in or out because of the protest,” the woman said, declining to give her name.

An electrician at another hotel near the train station gave his surname as Mo and said he had invested $7,142 in April, comprising his life savings, his family’s savings and $1,428 borrowed from friends. He was promised an interest rate of 6 percent a month. “I don’t know what to do now,” Mo added. “Although the government mobilized soldiers and stopped the protest, people will not remain silent. They will continue to fight for their rights.”

These events go to show that China remains an economically divided country with the middle and upper classes doing well – those below subject to far more risk in trying to make a living and not having any practical way of seeking redress.

As an aside, I find it somewhat ironic that many Chinese have complained about the foreign media reporting of the Olympics, given that if this had kicked off then it could have seriously damaged the Games’ reputation even more than some of those controversies did. In some respects they should count their blessings that things unfolded as they did.

Time to detox from nearly two years of pressure. I should be back online in a day or two. In the meantime, here is the quote of the day from Joe Klein, not usually my favorite pundit:

[McCain adviser] Steve Schmidt has decided, for tactical reasons, to slime the press. He wants the public to believe that there is an unfair–sexist (you gotta love it)–personal assault going on against Palin and her family. This is a smokescreen, intended to divert attention from the fact the very real and responsible vetting that is taking place in the media–about the substance of Palin’s record as mayor and governor. Sure, there are a few outliers–and the tabloid press–who have fixed on baby stories. That was inevitable….the flip side of the personal stories that the McCain team thought would work to their advantage–Palin’s moose-hunting and wolf-shooting, and her admirable decision to have a Down Syndrome baby. And yes, when we all fix on the same story, whether it’s a hurricane or a little-known politician, a zoo ensues. But the media coverage of the Palin story has been well within the bounds of responsibility. Schmidt is trying to make it seem otherwise, a desperate tactic.

There is a tendency in the media to kick ourselves, cringe and withdraw, when we are criticized. But I hope my colleagues stand strong in this case: it is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is “a task from God.” The attempts by the McCain campaign to bully us into not reporting such things are not only stupidly aggressive, but unprofessional in the extreme.

No matter what we say now about Palin, the right will reflexively brand it as sexist and cruel and evil. Anyway, I just want to ask them: of all the possible people to be president of the United States – which McCain’s veep may well become – is Sarah Palin the best and most qualified? If someone has to step into McCain’s shoes on Day 2, is Palin the one in whose hands we most want to put the fate of the world? The one to stand up to Putin and Hu and Mugabe? Is Palin The One?

Disaster, I say. Total disaster. See you all soon.

There are situations where the venality of local officials transcends the usual debate over political systems and makes me despair not for any particular locality or government, but for human nature in general. This is just such a case.

From The Christian Science Monitor:

“When Fang Zhaojuan began organizing her neighbors here to impeach village leaders whom she suspected of corruption, she had no idea that the challenge would lead her first to the hospital and then to jail.

She was following the law, after all, and had launched legal petitions signed by a large majority of villagers. They believed they had been cheated of proper compensation when their village council had sold land for industrial development to the government of a nearby township.

Mrs. Fang, her family, and colleagues on a recall committee, however, found themselves plunged into a violent political drama. This, they say, has shown residents of the hamlet just how narrow the boundaries remain for their democratic rights. It has also, they add, hardened their resolve to enforce them.

Huiguan, a nondescript cluster of brick houses outside the port of Tianjin, is like tens of thousands of other Chinese villages, on the verge of being swallowed up by a fast-expanding city. Its farmland has all but disappeared under new factories, and under circumstances that Fang, a 43-year-old widow, found suspicious.

“She never expected this,” says her sister, Fang Zhaohui, displaying photographs of Fang’s bruised and bloody body taken in the hospital six weeks ago, after thugs had broken into her home and beaten her. “She never expected it would be so difficult and that the government would be so black.”  

Keep in mind that Mrs. Fang was not trying to introduce some radical new Western concept she picked up while perusing The Federalist Papers, she was attempting to avail herself of rights already enshrined in Chinese law.   As Peter Ford said in his audio commentary, Chinese leaders may dislike talk of democracy, but they are interested in establishing rule of law.  Sadly, predictably, the efforts of Mrs. Fang and her fellow citizens brought out the worst in the thugs and goons who run her local parish, anxious to preserve their power in the face of organized, legitimate opposition.

I know a little about the back story to this article. These villagers were well aware that talking to the Monitor would get them in trouble, several have been arrested since being interviewed, but they had the guts to stand up to the Man Purse Brigade and the local bully boys and say: “Enough.”  

You want to talk about courage?

——

Cross posted at Jottings from the Granite Studio

Who cares? I really don’t. All families have their issues. This news does not reflect badly on Palin as a mother or as a person, and the dems would be wise to listen to Obama, who has told them this topic is “off limits.”

No, it doesn’t tell us much about Palin (I already know more than I need to conclude she is a disastrous choice, in the Harriet Miers tradition) but it does raise questions about McCain – about the process he used to vet Palin, and about his tendency to make hot-headed, emotional, on-the-fly decisions. He’s my state’s senator, remember, and I know several people who work with McCain. His temper and his impetuousness are real issues.

Is this the kind of decision-maker America wants in the White House? Is this truly the very best McCain could come up with for the person who will step into his shoes should something happen to him? Not even McCain’s spin doctors can justify the choice. Please head over to this post and watch the video. No way out; there’s no way the question the reporter asks can be answered. Watch the poor spokesperson squirm and slither. The GOP has dug themselves in deep this time. Let them implode on their own; they don’t need our help.

The only way we can ruin it is by attacking Palin and her daughter, who simply don’t deserve it. It would only backfire.

Over the past few days my admiration of and respect for Obama has grown a hundred-fold. From his galvanizing speech last week to his sensitive handling of the Palin pregnancy shocker, he’s demonstrated he has the qualities of a true leader. Obama for president.

Perhaps the most unforgettable scene in the movie Alien, hands-down the greatest science fiction movie ever made, is the attempt by the fast-disappearing crew to resurrect the decapitated robot, Ash, whom they beg for an answer to their simple question:

Ripley: How do we kill it, Ash? There’s gotta be a way of killing it. How, how do we do it?

Ash: You can’t… You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you? A perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility.

Lambert: You admire it?

Ash: I admire its purity. A survivor unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.

This unforgettable episode kept replaying in the back on my mind as I read through Philp Pan’s unforgettable new masterpiece, Out of Mao’s Shadow. This is a book about heros, about the brave souls in China who dare to stand up to one of the world’s most formidable political machines, the Chinese Communist Party. We know one thing in advance: none of them will win. Some do indeed make a huge difference, and nudge the monster toward reform, usually by raising public awareness. But they cannot beat the party. The party will always win. It is too perfect, too self-protective and self-sustaining to tolerate defeat, and it knows no sense of morality or conscience.

A fluent Chinese speaker and former Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post, Pan has won the confidence of these people and, often at considerable personal risk, takes us into their homes, into their lives to give us an intimate portrayal of what they do and why they do it.

There are some whose stories we’ve discussed on this blog before, such as Jiang Yanyong, the doctor who leaked to the Western media the fact that SARS was spreading in Beijing, and who later spoke out on the carnage he witnessed in the emergency room on the night of June 4, 1989. And Cheng Yizhong, the editor of Southern Metropolis Daily who first challenged the government’s insistence that SARS was under control and later helped bring the murder of Sun Zhigang onto the radar screen of the Chinese people and ultimately the world.

Each of the subjects in Pan’s book takes it upon himself to stand up to the government, fully aware of the inherent risks. As Pan tells us their stories, he manages to paint an historical picture around them. For example, as he details the work of blind activist Chen Guangcheng against the evils of the one-child policy, Pan takes the reader through a brief and hopelessly depressing history of one of “the most ambitious experiments in social engineering ever attempted,” and highlights just how tragic it was, mainly for Chinese women, half a billion of whom were either sterilized, made to endure forced abortions or sloppily fitted with IUDs that led to more misery for them.

Pan weaves history into each story he tells, and nearly all of it is grim. I have to admit, it’s a painful and frustrating read. And there are no happy endings. To go through each of the chapters and tell you which ones moved me the most is too daunting a task – i have earmarked nearly every page. Instead, let me quote from an earlier review that provides a good summary:

The 10 or so intersecting stories he tells here are gritty and real. This is not a big-theme book about the “true” China but a concrete, closely observed encounter with particular people, places and events. He puts the reader on a stool in the small shop of laid-off steel worker Yao Fuxin as Yao and some colleagues plot a doomed demonstration against corrupt local officials in the rust-belt city of Liaoyang. We run through cornfields with blind activist Chen Guangcheng as he escapes from government thugs in his home village, hoping to carry a petition for justice all the way to Beijing. Other protagonists include a land developer, an army doctor, a local party secretary, a crusading editor and a passel of feuding “rights protection” lawyers (as they call themselves). Pan seems to have been all over each incident, watching before, during and after it happened, getting long interviews with participants who initially did not want to talk, copying quotes from secret documents, hiding notes from a trial in his socks.

Yet some big truths emerge. Local government omnipotence and corruption are a toxic combination, personified in Pan’s book by Zhang Xide, the party secretary of Linquan County. He presided over the violent repression of a peasant revolt against coercive birth-control methods and illegal taxes. And what is wonderfully revealing about today’s China is that he was proud of his achievement! When a pair of crusading journalists named Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao exposed his actions, he sued them for defamation. (Their book, Will the Boat Sink the Water?, was published in English by PublicAffairs in 2006.) A local judge allowed something like a real trial to take place, enabling a rights protection lawyer named Pu Zhiqiang — another vivid character — to humiliate Zhang and his colleagues on cross-examination because of their eagerness to brag about their use of harsh methods. When the proceedings got out of control in this way, the local party authorities, who ultimately supervise all court decisions, disposed of the embarrassment by having the court issue no judgment. Zhang retired on full pension, while Chen and Wu’s book remains banned.

Another theme is the alliance of the party with private entrepreneurs, represented by a richly loathsome female property developer named Chen Lihua. She specializes in acquiring land in Beijing through cronyism and forcibly evicting tenants with police assistance. Pan reports her rags to riches story, visits her lavish office and notices nine separate photos, one of her with each member of the party’s top decision-making body, the Politburo Standing Committee. Chen, too, is proud of her achievements and especially of knowing how to work the system; she reflexively offers Pan a bribe.

In contrast, Pan’s heroes are fighting against the system that he calls the “largest and perhaps most successful experiment in authoritarianism in the world.” That they can do so without being executed is a sign of how far China has emerged from Mao’s shadow. But it is also a tribute to their courage and cunning, because, as Pan notes, the machinery of repression is “cynical, stable, and nimble.” The documentary filmmaker loses his job, consumes his savings and has his films banned. The crusading newspaper editor spends a short time in jail and ends up sidelined, writing for a sports magazine. The blind activist is kidnapped, beaten and sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year prison term.

No, not an uplifting book, but not a hopeless one, either. Remember, in the end Ripley does outsmart the creature despite its perfection. And each of these activists makes small dents in the party’s armor, and it tells us something that each is still alive and able to talk about it (though quite of few of the characters alluded to along the way are not so lucky, serving lengthy prison sentences). So Pan allows us a glimmer of hope at the end. Reform is real, even if its pace is snail-slow. People are getting bolder, and some of the lawsuits against the government are being won. There is more freedom of speech, though that can be unpredictable. China is no longer totalitarian. But it’s in no way democratic.

Pan writes in his epilogue, “What progress has been made in recent years – what freedom the Chinese people now enjoy – has come only because individuals have demanded and fought for it, and because the party has retreated in the face of such pressure.”

I hope we never forget that. That’s the answer to the question we hear a lot, “if you like China so much why do you criticize it so harshly?” Harsh, consistent criticism based on fact and made with conviction has proven to be the only winning formula in pushing reform ahead.

I’d been trying to temper my feelings about the CCP over the past two years, trying hard to see all sides and avoid black and white generalities. I know there are many totally good and selfless people in its ranks, and believe that many, maybe most of them, truly believe they are doing what is best for China. But reading Out of Mao’s Shadow forced me to take yet another hard look at what is a hopelessly corrupt and in general a bad institution and an instrument for enough evil to overshadow any good that it may do. They hosted a damn good Olympics, but underneath the rosy patina of respectability there lurks so much violence and repression, backed up with a shadowy underground prison system few pampered foreigners would even dream exists. Pan opens our eyes to what’s going on behind the scenes, the misery and highway robbery that form the foundations of many of those gleaming skyscrapers, the inherent badness of a system that like the creature in Alien will reflexively crush and destroy and consume anything in its path without the slightest hint of remorse or even awareness. It’s just something that it does, as natural as breathing.

In my conversations with other expats here, one thing we all seem to agree on is that Philip Pan is the best reporter who has ever covered China. Longtime readers know how highly I regard Pan’s predecessor John Pomfret, who I still see as one of China’s most perceptive critics. Pan is in a different category, however. While both Pomfret And Pan are master reporters, Pan is also a beautiful writer. (You don’t read Pomfret for style or prose.) Each story in Out of Mao’s China is told with an understated eloquence and poignancy – clear-headed and straightforward, but also genuinely poetic. And that’s a balance few journalists can strike. It’s a suspenseful book, a page-turner, if you will, that keeps you thoroughly wrapped up. Just as he does in the article I refer to more than just about any other in this bog, so too does Pan in his book keep you spellbound, incredulous that this could really be happening in a nation trying so hard to convince the world of its love of peace, of its good intentions, of its glorious reforms.

So many books on China and its transformation since passing “out of Mao’s shadow.” Get a copy of China Shakes the World, Oracle Bones and Out of Mao’s Shadow – it’s all there. Of the three. the latter is the most haunting and painful to read, but you’ll emerge from it a lot more sober about China’s progress, and a lot less patient when it comes to the naive insistence of the anti-CNN crowd that any negative perception of China’s government is the product of biased reports in the Western media. There’s a lot to be negative about and a lot to be scared of, despite the very real reforms of recent years. Get the book today, and prepare to have some illusions shattered.

Update: Looking through the book again, there’s so much I couldn’t include that you will want to read about, so one last request that you read it yourselves. As I re-read the section about Lin Zhao, the young woman who falls victim to the 100 Flowers horror and writes her story in her own blood from her prison cell, it struck me yet again how bizarre and how frightening it is that statues and portraits of Mao beam down at us from all over this city and on every many college campuses in the nation.

Update 2: Another excellent review of Pan’s book.

Rick Ruffin, satirist

This may well take the cake. I mean, a skyscraper cake with a whole jar of maraschino cherries on top and enough Cool Whip to swim in. What can one say?

History has dealt China a dirty hand. It had famine, it had Mongol invasions, it had British colonization and the Opium War. It had Japanese invasion and the Nanjing Massacre. It is no stranger to atrocity. And it never had enough land. Not good land, anyhow. Fate dealt it the Gobi Desert.

In spite of these limitations, Mao Tse-tung managed to consolidate the country, to kick out the European and Japanese colonizers, to instill a one child policy (which India has yet to do), and to embark on the Great Leap Forward. And what a leap it has been.

Yikes. Could someone in this modern world actually look with a straight face at the Great Leap Backwards and praise it? Could someone actually say, without irony, that Mao’s leadership was so positive it helped balance the “dirty hand” China had been dealt? Could they? (I guess it becomes slightly more believable when the same person claims it was Mao who implemented China’s one-child policy, which began in 1979. I was always of the impression Mao was quite dead by then.)

This is via the Marmot, who caustically remarks,

Classic, Rick. Just classic. As my good friend Hamel asks in the KT comment section, this is satire, right?

Would that it were so.

Absolutely, totally priceless. BWC should post more often. Thank god for people who have the patience and fortitude to do work like this.