From AP: Hong Kong University economist Zhang Wuchang has rekindled a long simmering debate over whether economic imperatives trump historic preservation. According to Professor Zhang:

“The cultural enlightenment from excavating the tomb of Qinshi Huang will surpass the pyramids of Egypt. Not starting excavations is the same as having nothing. Only by excavating will we find value capable of contributing to society.”

Naturally, archaeologists and historians have concerns over this rush to cash in on the site, potentially one of the richest sources of pre-Han artifacts ever uncovered by archaeologists.

Duan Qingbo, head of the excavation team of the Qinshi Huangdi mausoleum, replied:

“Many view this kind of thinking as the main problem facing China today. A lot of officials are only thinking about money and the benefits that such an excavation will bring to them. Meanwhile they ignore the science. If any dig is going to be undertaken we have to ensure that what is found can be preserved, otherwise we will be killing the chicken that lays the golden egg. Chinese archaeologists have ruined many objects because excavations were not properly done and the technology was lacking.”

Professor Duan was referring in part, to the botched 1950s excavation of the tomb of the Dingling Emperor (Ming) near Beijing, when poor methods and inadequate technology resulted in damage to the tomb. This damage was compounded in the 1960s when Red Guards stormed the site, destroying priceless artifacts including the body of the emperor.

Nobody’s saying that the Chinese should not profit from tourism and China’s long history is a huge draw for tourist dollars. At the same time, officials should not think of themselves as simply the inheritors of cultural treasure troves to be exploited in the most lucrative way possible; rather they should they see themselves as stewards of a rich historical legacy held in trust for future generations. China is justifiably proud of its rich history, it owes it to the world to allow the experts to excavate, study, and provide access to the sites in a way that allows all generations, including those yet to come, to share in the discovery. If this can be done using current methods, then by all means dig. But if the curators of the site feel that the technology or the technique is still lacking, then why not postpone excavation? The Qin Emperor, Emperor Gaozong, and Wu Zutian have rested for millennia, surely they can wait a few more years before revealing their secrets.

This has to be a super-quickie. It seems one of Hu’s top priorities is beefing up the already formidable Great Firewall of China as he presses ahead with his tireless efforts at reform.

China will tighten controls on Internet blogs and webcasts in a response to new technologies that have allowed cyber citizens to avoid government censorship efforts, state press reported Tuesday. Following a call from President Hu Jintao in January to “purify” the Internet, the ruling Communist Party will introduce new regulations targeting blogs and webcasts, one of the nation’s chief censors was cited as saying.

“Advanced network technologies such as blogging and webcasting have been mounting new challenges to the government’s ability to supervise the Internet,” Press and Publication Administration head Long Xinmin said, according to Xinhua news agency.

Long said the government was in the middle of drafting the new regulations. No specific details of the new rules were reported, but Long said they would lead to “a more healthy and active Internet environment,” according to Xinhua.

The Chinese government, which has long maintained strict controls over traditional media, have this year ramped up a campaign to combat the rising influence of the Internet.

“Whether we can cope with the Internet is a matter that affects the development of socialist culture, the security of information and the stability of the state,” Hu said in January as he called for the medium to be “purified.”

Aside from the new regulations, the central government also announced this month it would not allow any new Internet cafes to be registered this year. Experts say 30,000-40,000 Internet police are also employed to implement the country’s extensive Internet censorship system, known as the “Great Firewall of China.”

Media watchdog Reporters Without Borders labels China’s government an “enemy of the Internet.” It said last month that 52 people were languishing in Chinese jails for online activities deemed inappropriate by authorities.

Livejournal felt the axe descend a couple of weeks ago. Which blogging service is next? And someone explain to me the logic behind lifting the ban on blogspot and then imposing the same ban on Livejournal and wordpress? Who’s the man behind this curtain, and why is he pulling the strings so randomly?

Emergency landing footage

Watch the video – you’ll notice that something’s not quite right with the plane as it lands.

BBC News report

Not a single passenger injured – they were in a good enough state to give the pilot a round of applause. From that footage I would say he deserved it. Indeed his next paycheck should be substantially larger than usual! Of course I’m sure the co-pilot did his best to help as well, but in this sort of situation the captain’s the one calling the shots. He must be one cool cat.

There’s also an article from a Japanese newspaper with some expert opinion:

Daily Yomiuri report

Next time you’re flying to/in Japan, you’ll know to pick ANA.

Everytime I con myself into believing that China “gets it”…well, China finds away to remind me that I’m wrong. In this case a company rips off TWO corporate entities and still comes up with a laughable (but memorable) corporate logo. Further words fail. Courtesy of John at Sinosplice.

No, not Iraq, not terrorism, not the Bush administration’s lies and ineptitude. No, something far more important.

A Chinese lawmaker revived calls for the removal of a Starbucks coffee shop from Beijing’s famed Forbidden City, saying its presence was a smear on China’s historical legacy, the official Xinhua News Agency reported Sunday.

Jiang Hongbin, a deputy from the northeastern province of Heilongjiang, said he submitted a motion to the National People’s Congress, the country’s legislature, to close the outlet immediately, Xinhua said. Starbucks “can no longer be allowed to taint China’s national culture,” Jiang was quoted as saying.

The outlet has stirred controversy among Chinese nationalists ever since it opened in 2000 in a side hall of the 587-year-old former home of China’s Ming and Qing dynasty emperors, now a museum visited by 7 million people each year.

Calls for it to close grew again in January when a television host launched an online campaign to toss it out. Museum managers and the government haven’t responded publicly to the demands. It wasn’t clear whether Jiang’s motion would be discussed by the nearly 3,000-member congress, which meets in full session only once a year and is widely regarded as a rubber stamp for policies decided by the government.

Defenders say the Starbucks is popular with tourists and its rent helps pay for the upkeep of the sprawling vermillion-walled, 178-acre complex of villas and gardens, now undergoing a thorough renovation ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Summer Games. However, Jiang said the integrity of Chinese culture should take precedence over funding concerns.

Yes, in light of all the problems facing China it makes perfect sense for the National People’s Congress to stop everything to consider the most pressing crisis of them all, the cultural contamination being caused not by spitting or sleazy vendors or counterfeit whatever, but by the most vile contaminator of them all, Starbucks coffee.

I know, we’ve talked about this before, as has every other blog. But seeing it portrayed as “a smear on China’s historical legacy” is just too painful. If they are so concerned about their historical legacy being smeared, why don’t they start taking down all those hideous portraits and statues of the Great Butcher Mao? Why focus on the very most trivial, very most minute and insignificant of issues? Is this China’s version of a flag-burning amendment? Are they trying to imitate Bill O’Reilly’s foaming at the mouth over an imaginary “War on Christmas”? Whatever it is that’s inspired it, this has to be one of the most hare-brained, ill-conceived causes the Chinese could possibly have adopted. It is sensationally, breathtakingly counter-productive, epitomizing for all the world to see the paranoid, prickly, irrational thought patterns that still emanate from the grey matter of some of the nation’s leaders. It reminds me of my own president’s sickeningly pathetic speech to Americans telling them gay marriage was such a threat to “the sanctity of marriage” that nothing less than a constitutional amendment was required to ban it.

I have no tolerance for such blatant pandering to people’s base emotions, which is what the Starbucks BS is all about, pandering to those who see the West as evil and base and China as pure and great, what with 5 million years of culture and all. Come on. Count how many people have died in Chinese coal mines in the past two weeks. Then tell me the most pressing of all the threats to the Chinese people and their sacred and inviolable culture is a friggin’ Starbucks invisibly tucked into the bowels of the Forbidden City. Sheesh.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting piece on: Hu Jingbei, an economics professor at Tongji University in Shanghai. Professor Hu kept a diary during the Cultural Revolution, and now looks back on his youthful entries with a combination of horror and wonderment. From the interview with Professor Hu:

“If we don’t work on this problem, on understanding how this brainwashing occurred, we will have another Cultural Revolution,” Mr. Hu says while eating dinner in a student restaurant at Tongji. He is a wiry man who finishes every scrap of the oversized portions then eats the leftover pizza on others’ plates.

Through a fellowship, Mr. Hu spent January and February at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution doing research for a Chinese-language book that will examine the impact of Communist ideology on Chinese children. In the long term, he hopes, his research will help pave the way for greater tolerance and freedom in China.

But in the meantime, Mr. Hu has put online the diaries he kept as a teenager during the Cultural Revolution — diaries that he now compares to those kept by Hitler Youth members in Nazi Germany. And he is on a personal mission to understand how, as a young man of 18, he was so absolutely convinced that Mao Zedong was a hero worth putting all his faith into.

The CHE piece is worth checking out for the excerpts from Professor Hu’s diaries. I’m trying to get a link to the actual site, but the Great Fire Wall is being uncooperative. Anyone who has a link, feel free to post it in the comments section, I’d be interested in reading what Professor Hu has to say in context rather than excerpted.
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Via HNN

This is so weird, it’s hard to believe. The Chinese are investing in cricket stadiums half-way around the world just to spoil Grenada’s relationship with Taiwan?? Well, stranger things have happened, I guess.

More than 8,000 miles from Beijing, Chinese workers are putting the finishing touches on stadiums for a sport they’ve never played.

Living in temporary plastic huts and taking a single day off each month, about 1,000 employees of state-owned Chinese companies have sweated away the past year on the Caribbean islands of Jamaica, Antigua and Grenada as the West Indies prepare to host the Cricket World Cup, the game’s premier international event.

Their presence has more to do with China’s drive to isolate Taiwan, the democracy it considers a breakaway province, than with what the Chinese call shen shi yun dong, or “the noble game.” China is using its economic might to break alliances Taiwan forged in the Caribbean to counter its status as a diplomatic outcast.

“This is a diplomatic move,” says John Tkacik, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington-based research group. “There’s no other reason for China to go horsing around in the Caribbean. The more countries that abandon recognition of Taiwan, the less international status it has.”

Even though that guy is with the Heritage Foundation, it sounds like he’s right. The article is mind-boggling; China will go to just about any length to woo away any country that has the temerity to recognize Taiwan. How can Taiwan possibly stand up against such a ruthless campaign? Death by a thousand cuts, whether you inflict the wound with a knife or a cricket bat (or whatever they call that thing they use in cricket).

Yikes.

For the record, I am still pressing ahead with my efforts to learn Chinese.

Perhaps unsurprisingly with the NPC meeting this week, China graces the cover of the latest issue of The Economist. This last edition of the NPC was not without its drama. While there were no Taiwanese Legislative Yuan-style fisticuffs in the aisles, recent debate about a law protecting private property sparked some controversy:

Nearly 3,000 delegates to China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress (NPC), have been enjoying their annual fortnight of wining, dining, snoozing and pressing the “yes” button. Living up to one’s name poses something of a problem for the Chinese Communist Party, which dictates the laws the NPC will pass, and whose name in Chinese literally means “the public-property party”.

To such a party it must be an ideological embarrassment that China has such a large and flourishing private sector, accounting for some two-thirds of GDP. So one law due to receive the NPC’s rubber stamp this month, giving individuals the same legal protection for their property as the state, has proved unusually contentious. It was to be passed a year ago, but was delayed after howls of protest from leftists, who see it as among the final of many sell-outs of the ideas of Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong, to which the party pretends fealty.

The party’s decision to enact the law in spite of that resistance is a great symbolic victory for economic reform and the rule of law. Clearer, enforceable property rights are essential if China’s fantastic 30-year boom is to continue and if the tensions it has generated are to be managed without widespread violence.

I think The Economist’s characterization of the opposition to the law is a bit simplistic. According to the IHT, opposition to the new law is being led by Gong Xiantian, a Marxist economist, whose petition against the new law has received over 3200 signatures, including those from retired military officers and senior officials. It is not just nostalgic old guard leftists with their Mao buttons and Zhou Enlai “underoos.” (Though there are certainly members of the party who see the new law as a “betrayal of socialist values.”) The “left” is a label, not a club. There are those in China’s so-called New Left (excuse me: “critical intellectuals”) who support the recent economic reforms as being good for the country overall. They just wish that policies would consider “social justice” as well as GDP growth: there can be winners in the new China, but there should also be support for the…non-winners.

Until now, it has fallen to Wen Jiabao to be the human face of reform and he’s done a good job but, as The Economist notes in a companion article, criticism from the left needs to be handled differently than that from the right.

Direct criticism of leaders is still virtually taboo in China. But the drafting of the property law has provided an outlet for critics of government policy to air their grievances. Mr Hu and Mr Wen do not appear to face concerted opposition among party officials. But a vocal body of intellectuals and retired officials has denounced the property law as a betrayal of the country’s socialist principles. It will, they say, protect the fortunes of corrupt officials and the ill-gotten gains of crooked businessmen. Further, it will hasten the demise of China’s remaining state-owned industries and the creation of a plutocracy.

And there is reason to believe that the complaints of excessive GDP-ism are being heard both for political as well as pragmatic reasons. Lawmakers (I mean: law stampers) did approve an 87% increase in health spending (from an admittedly low number) as well as increases for education and rural (re)construction. All of which should be applauded. (There was also an 18% jump in military spending, but anyway…)

There is no question that the reforms are benefiting a large number of people throughout China and the CCP can take credit for lifting millions out of poverty. But it can do even better. I think the debate over the private property bill was healthy and shows that while the CCP still tightly clings to power, it is not monolithic in its views. A discussion of development priorities needs to happen, preferably in the open rather than behind the walls of Zhongnanhai. The economic development of the cities and some areas is nothing short of amazing, but we should be careful lest we develop a case of (in the words of fellow blogger The 88’s) “She blinded me with Shanghai.” There are still problems yet to be resolved.

Our old friend CCT might remind me of my faith in “systems.” And to some extent we agree more than CCT might believe. Systems can’t fix everything and they also can break down, occasionally with terrible consequences. But I do think that the process matters. The United States has faced some horrific moments in its history and there is plenty in our past of which I am not especially proud. But I don’t think that any of those crises or problems would have been easier to overcome or less likely to happen under one-party authoritarian rule. Quite the opposite in fact. Is China different? Absolutely. Is it so different that lessons from other places have absolutely no application here? Of that I am less sure.

The Economist concludes:

Without an accountable executive branch, the necessary reform of the legal system is not going to happen. As the passage of the property law itself demonstrates, the party is showing itself somewhat more responsive to public opinion than it was in the past. But it still runs a government that does its best to silence most dissenting voices, strictly controls the press, and lavishes resources on the best cyber-censorship money can buy. Property rights are a start; but only contested politics and relatively open media can ensure that they are enforceable.

Hear, hear.

Just a quick note from Beijing that the Memorial Hall to Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square will be closed while Mao’s handlers do their periodic touch-up on the Chairman’s body. No word on what kind of work Mao is getting done (though hair implants seem a start) but Xinhua reports that the Great Helmsman will be back in his usual resting place for public viewing and plastic flower application in September.

Even when he disappears from public view, Mao can still cause a stir. At the Alahambra (California) City Hall, a public art display showing an image of the Chairman juxtaposed with George Washington has sparked controversy.

Based on a complaint that a picture of Mao had no place in a civic building, city staff removed the piece.

The artists were in turn offended by the city’s action, and responded by taking all 30 pieces down.

“It’s not a matter of interpretation,” said Los Angeles resident Kai Chen, 53, who lodged the complaint and has written a book about his family’s political persecution during the Cultural Revolution. “It’s moral perversion.”

The artist, Jeffrey Ma of Long Beach, CA disagrees.

[Ma] insists his Mao silk-screen print is apolitical and said that he was surprised it provoked the response it did.
Ma described the entire experience as “tiring.”

“What I wanted to say, I was unable to say it. What I wasn’t saying, people insisted I was.”

The print depicts Mao and George Washington superimposed on piggy banks. Ma chose the two figures because they are both found on currency bills, he said.

It was a reference to money and its importance in Chinese New Year celebrations as well as in Chinese and American society, Ma said.

“Everyone has a story” about hardship during Mao’s reign, Ma said, declining to discuss his own experiences as an artist during the Cultural Revolution. “Mao is a history topic. Leave it to historians to evaluate him.”

Images of the Chairman in art, both reverent and pop, have been around for a long time. Andy Warhol had his turn and a personal favorite of mine (Jeremiah) is the MoMao site by NYC-based artist Zhang Hongtu.

That said, the use of Mao’s image does raise some interesting questions. This is not a harmless historical figure with a cute, pudgy face. Nor is he a subject easily painted (pun intended) in black and white. He was a good commander during the anti-Japanese War and his revolution, at first, was seen by many as a respite from the chaos of the warlord period, the brutality of the Japanese troops, and the venality of the KMT.

But of course there is the other Mao: the one whose policies resulted in the deaths of millions. Needless to say, his legacy in the PRC remains…murky. Across China, one can find a wide range of opinions. There are those who worship him (literally), those who are nostalgic for the days of the iron rice bowl, those who look back at the dark days of the GPCR and shudder, and there are those who find him simply irrelevant as they speed down Chang’an Avenue in their new BMW on the way to a stockholder meeting. Ask around in Beijing and everybody seems to have a different answer.

The CCP came up with the rather neat figure of 70% correct and 30% incorrect. But how does one split a canvas 70/30? Does this mean it is okay to wear a silkscreened Mao t-shirt 70% of the time? Does it mean the next time I’m at Panjiayuan Market in Beijing, I should ask for a 30% discount on a Mao cigarette lighter that plays “Dong Fang Hong” when it lights? Can you de-fang a tyrant by turning him into kitsch or does that trivialize the horrors he perpetrated?