Gordon Chang – yes, he of “The Coming Collapse of China” fame – has penned a damning overview of the history of the CCP in the conservative (to put it mildly) rag, Commentary. It’s actually a pretty clear-headed piece and I can’t take issue with any of its key points. (It’s quaint to see how they make no reference to The Coming Collapse in Chang’s bio below the article – maybe because Chang’s predictions haven’t panned out – yet?)

Last graf as a teaser:

Leaving China a half-decade ago, an American banker remarked: “There’s a billion people here who don’t like following instructions.” If anything, Chinese society since then has become even more willful. It may not always be defiant, but it is frequently disobedient. For better and also for worse, we have entered a period marked by the emergence of a great people from millennia of autocratic rule. For better – because a nation that can barely govern itself will not be capable of dominating the other 200 countries on the planet. For worse – because so turbulent and fretful a society is unlikely to rise peacefully, or to accept its role as a great power in orderly fashion. Thirty years after the death of Mao, the Chinese people have unfinished business to conduct, and their transition into the future is unlikely to be smooth.

It’s one you’ll want to read to the end.

Update: I wrote this post and read the Chang aticle too fast. In the comments Dave gives it the fisking it deserves.

Warblogger Glenn Reynolds is holding a “symposium” on the Iraq War, a topic of which Reynolds can claim unmatched knowledge and stunning prescience. After all, look at all his past predictions and analyses of The Great War. Is this guy a genius or what? And could anyone doubt that his role as king of the blogs isn’t fully deserved? (And you simply must click on that link and see for yourself.)

Look, all you need to do is check what the nutty professor said in the past and what’s happening here and now in the real world to see that he’s just an irresponsible and reckless windbag. He’s still up at the top because he was first to market and has brand recognition. Other than that, he’s got nothing.

I just heard breaking news on CNN that John Bolton has resigned as US ambassador to the UN. This was expected and inevitable, but it’s still wonderful news. Good riddance to the walrus.

Unfortunately, that is literally what it is. China seems to lead the way in pirated drugs, along with India and Russia.

Via CDT.

I’m really glad I saw this post today. Really. I’m going to have to spend a bit of time in Beijing this winter and have been freaking out as usual over the winter weather. The post reminded me that there’s more to China in general and Beijing in particular than the weather.

A poignant interview with some of China’s last surviving victims of this practice, the termination of which is perhaps the one good thing for which Mao will be remembered.

AT ages 84 and 83, Wang Zaiban and Wu Xiuzhen are old women, and their feet are historical artifacts. They are among the dwindling number of women in China from the era when bound feet were considered a prerequisite for landing a husband.

No available man, custom held, could resist the picture of vulnerability presented by a young girl tottering atop tiny, pointed feet. But Mrs. Wang and Mrs. Wu have tottered past vulnerability. They have outlived their husbands and also outlived civil war, mass starvation and the disastrous ideological experiments by Mao that almost killed China itself.

…Mrs. Wang said she was married at 15. Asked about her feet, she laughed, slipped off a blue, canvas slipper and flapped the top half of her stunted foot back and forth like a swinging door. ‘My feet were wrapped when I was 5 years old,’ she said. ‘No one wanted you unless you bound your feet. That is what my mother told me.’

‘A woman with very small feet was considered a very desirable wife,’ Mrs. Wang added.

They are just feet to her now.

It also offers a bitter-sweet (but mostly bitter) view of the women’s lives in their farm village, always on the periphery of the great economic boom – a boom that they never even knew had taken place, and that still affects them only minimally. So interesting to read their reflections on the Cultural Revolution, and on the ways life has changed since then. The one uplifting aspect of the story is the women themselves – they still have their sense of humor and don’t seem angry or bitter or regretful. Their story is a sad one, but the way they handled the cards they were dealt is ultimately inspiring.

Rich dares to ask the question many of us are wondering about but would rather brush aside, as its implications are too grim: Is President Bush in his right mind? (Word doc.) The parallels with the crazed Richard Nixon in 1974 are valid. A brief snippet (because I am such a big Paul Fussell fan):

In his classic study, The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell wrote of how World War I shattered and remade literature, for only a new language of irony could convey the trauma and waste. Under the auspices of Mr. Bush, the Iraq war is having a comparable, if different, linguistic impact: the more he loses his hold on reality, the more language is severed from its meaning altogether.

When the president persists in talking about staying until ‘the mission is complete’ even though there is no definable military mission, let alone one that can be completed, he is indulging in pure absurdity. The same goes for his talk of ‘victory,’ another concept robbed of any definition when the prime minister we are trying to prop up is allied with Mr. Sadr, a man who wants Americans dead and has many scalps to prove it. The newest hollowed-out Bush word to mask the endgame in Iraq is ‘phase,’ as if the increasing violence were as transitional as the growing pains of a surly teenager. ‘Phase’ is meant to drown out all the unsettling debate about two words the president doesn’t want to hear, ‘civil war.’

What an odd spectacle, to watch as America is ruled by a man who admits no mistakes, accepts no blame and whose sole mantra is “stay the course,” even though no one knows what that course is and why we are dying for it. History will judge this harshly. There is simply no precedent I know of since Hitler told his generals in a Berlin bunker in 1945 that WWII could be won if they just showed greater “willpower.” (And no, that is not an example of Godwin’s Law, perhaps the most annoying, most abused and misunderstood “law” to grace the Internet. In any case, it is usurped by an older and far more reliable law: If the shoe fits, wear it.)

No big surprise there. The report doesn’t find China wholly blameless, either, in terms of capitalizing on the story for propaganda purposes.

The United States has been exaggerating China’s nuclear clout in a process that could lock the two into a Cold War-style arms race, two arms-control advocacy groups said in a report on Thursday.

The Defense Department and U.S. intelligence agencies have portrayed Chinese weapons developments as more threatening than warranted, to justify building a new generation of weapons, according to the study by the Federation of American Scientists and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The report’s main finding is that the Pentagon and others routinely highlight specific incidents out of context that inaccurately portray a looming Chinese threat,” the groups said in a statement.

Specifically, they said, the Defense Department and U.S. intelligence agencies had been “embellishing China’s submarine and long-range missile capabilities.”

….”With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, which occupied that role for almost 50 years, the United States has turned its attention to China to help fill the vacuum,” it said.

The report faulted China for cloaking its nuclear forces in secrecy amid what it portrayed as a U.S. government scare campaign bolstered by conservative media and think tanks.

Everybody needs an enemy. James Bond needed SMERSH and SPECTRE; we need Al Qaeda and China. And no, I’m not saying that Al Qaeda and China don’t pose threats (or in China’s case at least a potential threat) – just that our government has blown up the dimensions of these threats into scare-mongering nightmare scenarios that are nothing less than absurd.

This is a hot topic today. The best two articles I’ve seen so far are this one and this one (the latter via ESWN). Both are superb.

I think you could open a very active blog dedicated solely to the subject of scams in China. This piece on click-fraud tells how Baidu is employing legions of ad-clickers to puff up the numbers, raising serious questions about whether the company, lavishly praised in the media as the Chinese search engine that triumphed over Google, can be taken seriously. It comes to a sobering conclusion:

So you see, with an entire system that’s basically open to temptation, you have desperate salesmen clicking furiously away in their offices. So this is what E-commerce with Chinese Characteristics is all about. Count us out….

And, we have to ask — is this surprising in a country known for everything from fake Pradas and Guccis to fake eggs and even fake milk powder (which killed a few babies!)?

No, I’m afraid it’s not surprising.