Long-time China hand Ross Terrill writes today of China’s efforts not only to clean up Chinglish in Beijing, but also to create its own truth, Potemkin Village-style, to show you the China it wants you to see, which often has little to do with the China that actually is. This is, of course, nothing very new; it’s why CCTV-9 exists. Will the masses of tourists and foreign journalists be fooled?

Banished from Beijing for the Olympics will be not only fractured English, but disabled people, Falun Gong practitioners, dark-skinned villagers newly arrived in the city, AIDS activists and other ‘troublemakers’ who smudge the canvas of socialist harmony.

Fictions will abound for the month of August 2008. On all fronts the party-state will pull the rabbit of harmony from the hat of cacophony – ‘What do you mean by dissidents?’ Scientists have been told to produce a quota of ‘blue days’ with a clear sky, perpetuating a Chinese Communist tradition of defying natural as well as human barriers to its self-appointed destiny. Mao vowed to plant rice in the dry north of China as well as the lush south, to prove the power of socialism. ‘We shall make the sun and moon change places,’ he cried. None of this occurred.

Likewise, in 2001, arguing before the world to get the Olympic Games, the vice president of Beijing’s bid committee said, ‘By allowing Beijing to host the Games, you will help the development of human rights.’ Yet the opposite danger looms: Games preparation has spurred repression.

Every day, government censors send news organizations a list of forbidden topics and guidelines for covering acceptable ones. The price for ignoring the list: dismissal of an editor or closure of the publication. Last spring, government supervisors even instructed the TV producers of ‘Happy Boys Voice,’ a Chinese version of ‘American Idol,’ to eliminate “weirdness, vulgarity and low taste.’ No wonder Dai Qing, a journalist who was imprisoned after Tiananmen in 1989, says the only thing she believes in China’s press is the weather report.

Truth and power are both headquartered in the Communist party-state. ‘Truth’ (socialism sparkles, people adore the party) is not only enforced by the party-state but created by it. Stamp out Chinglish; ban ‘unhealthy thinking’; just keep the picture pretty – or else.

Living in China is great right now, for me, anyway. But think about how much greater it would be if it didn’t fall for its own propaganda, if it didn’t feel it needed to scrub the city of its handicapped and dark-skinned citizens, if it didn’t feel it had to cover everything with window dressing. Terrill ends his op-ed with some wisdom that should be obvious to everyone, yet somehow seems permanently to elude the CCP.

The Chinese state, for better and for worse, knows exactly what it’s doing, in Africa and at home. Still, a brilliant Olympic Games will be no more of a clue to the future of Chinese Communist rule than the spectacular 1936 Berlin Games were a sign of Nazism’s longevity. Correct language, like a gold medal, is desirable in itself. But neither guarantees glory for a state that pursues them for political ends (ask the Soviet Union). Sport should just be sport. The democracies should insist on that and leave political manipulation to the dictatorships.

It’s really a shame that to the party, the Olympics is all about altering the world’s perception about China using whatever methods possible, no matter how ham-fisted or unintentionally droll, a strategy that’s bound to backfire. Sure, every country that hosts the Olympic Games wants to show the world its best, but “the best” that China’s intent on showing is manufactured, having little or nothing to do with China’s reality.

China is such a great country with so much vitality and ingenuity. Why try to blind everyone with cheap stunts and pyrotechnics designed to obfuscate rather than educate? I don’t want to see China turn itself into the laughing stock of the world. Can someone just tell them to cut the sugar-coating and act like a real country, one that acknowledges its strengths and its weaknesses, its greatness and its shortcomings. The world will be fooled by all the smoke and mirrors just as it is fooled by those insane public rallies for Kim Jong Il across the border, which is to say not very much.

Yeah, I know this is a rant of pure wishful thinking, and Hu is highly unlikely to take my advice. But it’s okay to dream, isn’t it?

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.

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’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.

That’s the title of an intriguing article in today’s WaPo on how today’s parents in China, many of them victims of the Cultural Revolution, have reacted to the nightmare of their youth by spoiling their kids rotten.

Teenagers, particularly those from wealthy or intellectual families, were forced to leave cities and live with farmers, sharing their hard lives and, it was hoped, gaining new insight into the Maoist revolution. Red Guards, meanwhile, took over schools and universities, substituting political criteria for academic achievement.

Millions of lives were smashed in the resulting chaos. Now that they are parents, those who were caught up in the turmoil have displayed unshakeable determination to see their children live more enjoyable lives by using the opportunities available since China opened to the world and adopted market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s.

Tian Shi, 50, the son of a doctor and grandson of a landowner, was sent to a military camp just below the Russian border, where he spent his entire adolescence. Although far from rich, he recently forked over nearly $400 for a cell phone for his 14-year-old daughter, who spent her last vacation in Australia perfecting her English.

Tian’s older sister, Lu Jiang, 53, spent seven years on a flea-ridden farm planting crops and slopping pigs. Her son Ha Li, who graduated from Shandong University, all expenses paid, has gone on to graduate studies in computer science at the University of Paris, where he receives regular cash infusions from his parents.

I would have only one question for the writer, and that’s whether this is truly a result of the Cultural Revolution’s effect on the parents’ psyches, or whether it’s not just a fact that Chinese parents tend to spoil their kids. I saw a lot of this in Hong Kong and Singapore — parents treating their kids like princelings and making them feel the earth revolved around them. I’d love to know what readers think about this.

I was lucky to see John Pomfret, former bureau chief of the Washington Post’s Beijing office, address a group in Scottsdale last week. I was scribbling notes the whole time and now I’m finally going to decipher them. I was also lucky to spend some time with John afterwards at a local bar with my first cousin, who was John’s friend at Stanford. (Sorry, but I promised not to blog about our conversation at the bar.)

I always thought John was the best of the Beijing correspondents, followed by Joseph Kahn. John is now moving to Los Angeles, where he’ll be the new WaPo bureau chief. (His replacement in Beijing, Phillip Pan, is also doing an awesome job.) What I liked most about John was his honesty and courage. More than any other foreign correspondent in China, he wrote about the really controversial issues — Ma Shiwen, evictions of peasants who were thrown on the street, the SARS ambulance story (which he broke) — he wasn’t afraid to say what the government was doing and how bad some of those things really were.

That same honesty permeated his talk in front of an ultra-conservative group of lizardy gazillionaire businessmen.

“The longer I lived in China,” he began, “the less I came to believe China is really a great nation in the making.”

Now, I have to make it clear that he was not in any way slamming China. He was setting the stage for explaining just how tough China’s problems are, and that Westerners, immersed in romantic depictions from starry-eyed visitors, have no idea what kind of challenges China is facing.

This was at the heart of Pomfret’s talk: the West badly misunderstands China’s economic, medical, political, social and environmental hurdles. He was particularly emphatic that there is no need for the West to fear China becoming a global superpower along the lines of the USA. “Not all of China�s dreams are going to be achieved because hard-wired into their DNA are serious constraints that will keep China from becoming what it aspires to. Most of China is a third-, fourth- and fifth-world country” under constant threat from unimaginable poverty, so many people to employ, AIDS, a devastated environment, etc.

Last year the number of people living below the poverty line in China grew by some 800,000 people, he said, at the time of the nation’s great economic miracle. The wealth gap is simply too staggering for most Westerners to envision. He said one way China is trying to offset the people’s anger is by inciting nationalism (an old trick in China, used to masterful effect by Deng after Tiananmen Square).

“But the nationalism we are seeing is only skin-deep,” Pomfret said. “Michael Jordan retired is more popular among Chinese citizens than Yaoming. All the Chinese young people want to work for US companies and own US goods.” They know their futures and their salaries will be far more limited at a state-owned business, he said.

He later repeated his metaphor when he said “serious constraints are hard-wired into the Chinese DNA and the Chinese political, economic and social system that could stop China’s meteoric rise.” The major constraint, he made it clear, is corruption, which seems to make things work in the short term, but which could help unravel China’s great success over the long term. He praised this success again and again, but said the CCP is caught in a conundrum of failing to address how a single party can control absolutely everything when absolutely everything is changing right underneath its feet.

I was surprised at just how hopeless Pomfret views so many issues in China. For example, when someone asked about Chinese-Japanese relations, he described it as a “Gordian knot with no solution in sight. Relations between them won’t get better anytime soon, but there won’t be any war.” He added that the CCP uses this issue to unify the country, appealing to the masses’ raw emotions.

He also echoed a point that several bloggers have made, namely that the war on terror has been “a windfall” for China in every way. “From the Chinese perspective, it diverted the attention of those Republicans who saw the PRC as a competitor and a threat, and it focused them instead on the Middle East. Now China can crack down on radical Islam in Xinjiang and Americans don’t say anything. There will be many more executions — the Chinese will just crush these people.”

Contrary to the article in the Atlantic I linked to Friday, Pomfret say relations between Taiwan and China won’t degenerate into war. “The US won’t let Chen Sui Bian go too far off the rail. China understands that the key to Taiwan’s not declaring independence is Washington. And China uses the issue to win hearts and minds at home. In a way, it benefits from the continual bad relations.”

He was critical, too, of the CCP’s treatment of HK, but most of you know the story so I won’t write down all he said. Money quote: “They’ve given a lot of benefits to Hong Kong on the economic side, playing to the people’s love of money. But in the long-term, the conflict is an ominous development. Now, China is a potential enemy to Hong Kong, when before [HK protested] they were considered a friend.”

China’s military is another example of Westerners seeing more than is really there, John said. “It has pockets of excellence, including great missile technology, but all in all it is still a middling power.” He added that any invasion of Taiwan would be all but impossible, if only because of Taiwan’s lack of beaches. “It would end up being a million-man swim…Many military people say that China is nowhere near ready to threaten Taiwan. There’s huge military spending, but in terms of bang for the buck, what they’ve got just isn’t that significant.”

This was in many ways a sad talk. What China dreams of being simply isn’t coming anytime soon and probably not ever. “They want to be seen as a great country, as a good country….but I am a cautious pessimist.” He didn’t say China was going to fail or crash — just that it’s ultimate dreams would elude it, made impossible by a harsh reality that in many ways the one-party system only exacerbates.

John made it clear how outraged he is over Joseph Kahn’s assistant in Beijing being thrown in jail for 6 to 10 years for his alleged involvement in the NY Times’ story on Jiang’s imminent resignation (which came out days before the official announcement). “He wasn’t even involved in Kahn’s story, but they don’t care about things like that. They just wanted to teach the Times a lesson.”

While critical of the CCP, John also says that under the circumstances he doesn’t know how they could do things any better than they’re doing now — but only because they created the situation in which there’s no alternative. That’s an important point: “They completely smashed the opposition so there’s no one in the wings who could replace them. If any new voice were to arise, it could be an even uglier one that what they’ve got now.” He was a war correspondent in Bosnia, and he compared China’s political situation to Yugoslavia under Tito, where one strong man crushed all the opposition and held the country together through brute force. Once he was gone, it all disintegrated.

Last of all, when asked what the Chinese now believe in, John said, “Chinese students have told me they simply have no beliefs. They have less respect for the family than earlier generations. Will there be a renaissance during which the youth of China rediscover their traditional values? I don’t see it. So many people in China live to rip other people off — this takes place on such a huge level, it’s scary. One has to worry that China is a society devoid of values.”

Yes, it was a sad talk, and there was little to celebrate. Maybe I’ll take hope in that he didn’t say China is doomed to defeat or that it will all come crashing down — only that its vision of itself doesn’t jibe with reality, and that its opportunities are more limited than they’ve led themselves to believe. And with that, I have to sadly agree.

Update: By the way, this all ties in with a good article in yesterday’s Guardian on why China’s roaring markets still don’t in and of themselves make it a great superpower. It’s really quite amazing — the author makes so many of the points Pomfret did. Thanks to the reader who alerted me. I can’t recommend it enough.

Update 2: With this post, a new commenter joined this blog named Mark Anthony Jones, and he comments at great length below. It was frustrating to later learn that literally all of his comments were cut and pasted from articles he found using Google searches. My apologies for all of those who were made fools of.

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??

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.

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.