This is not a new topic. But it’s not one you normally see in your US newspaper, and I was surprised to see a syndicated article on it today in the front section of my local rag, the Arizona Republic. It was a topic I was all too familiar with.

They think that Yu Xiaofei, with her cropped black hair and dark-rimmed glasses, looks too much like a tomboy, and they think that Jiang Yifei’s distaste for children is suspicious.

So what are these young Chinese women to do? They’re 24, out of college, employed, living at home – and they’re in love with each other and desperate to find a way to stay together.

“The most important thing is that we cannot hurt our parents,” Yu said. “They put a lot on us.”

That means finding two men in a similar predicament. Their plan is simple. Yu and Jiang will find a gay male couple, arrange a living situation and lay down some ground rules. Then, they’ll pair off with the men and get married, just as their parents expect them to do.

They still have time, and they’re using it to take in every last kiss and touch before these gestures become even more complicated than they already are. Still, their proposed arrangement is no grand tragedy for the pair – it’s practical.

Beneath it all are the Confucian family values that still underpin Chinese society: As a son or daughter, it’s your duty to maintain and carry on the family line by having children.

“We have to – that’s tradition,” said Jiang, who sports long caramel-colored hair and clinking bangle bracelets. “That’s what (our parents) think we should do.”

The story does not have a comforting ending. Yes, in Shanghai and maybe some other big cities it’s possible to live a relatively open life. But for those without the means to get there and live there, there are few good options. China is more liberal and open now than ever before, but social stigma remains a powerful force.

Few topics about China have disturbed and fascinated me as much as the tragic situation most gay Chinese face due to family pressure to marry. I actually debated writing an extended article or even a book about it during my last few months in China but gave up the idea for the simple reason that there wasn’t enough to write about – nearly everyone I interviewed about it had the same story and the same point of view: We have to get married. We cannot disappoint our parents. The few that decided never to marry were aware they were putting their family to shame. They felt bad about it but decided they couldn’t lead a double life, one that would inevitably cause terrible suffering to the woman they married. I respected them for this. But this forced them to be totally dishonest with their parents. To keep up the act, they developed a script to dodge the questions about when they were getting married. It, too, was an act of deception. To the day their parents passed away, they would have to lie to them.

Before this blog had any readers, I wrote a post back in 2002, when life for gays in China was much, much different. I described their lives as a plight. The social safety net then was less wide than it is today, and things have improved a thousandfold. But still, there is an element of plight to the lives of most gays in China. The pressure to marry makes it virtually inevitable.

One of the most common and, to the Western mindset, most bizarre arguments I heard from gay friends I knew in China was that this was a temporary situation, as if they were “going through a phase”: When it is time for me to marry I will. I will love my wife and I will have children and I will never be gay again. I didn’t argue back, or say I thought this was impossible. I tried to ask questions, like, “Do you really think you can simply change your sexuality the way you would a light bulb? Do you think this would be fair to your wife, to hide from her such a key a part of yourself?” The response was usually the same. I will become straight.

Again, if you are in Beijing or Shanghai it’s easy to get a very skewed perspective of this situation. I remember talking on the phone to a friend in Hefei who was sobbing hysterically; he had nothing in his life but loneliness. “Why did I have to be born in Hefei? Why couldn’t I have been born in Beijing?” I cannot put into words the misery of this conversation. It was nothing less than seeing one’s life as a death sentence, as torture, as a life without a future.

I gave up the idea of writing at length about this for two reasons: experts like Li Yinhe were much more qualified to do this sort of thing than I, with my intermediate-level Chinese, and because of the uniformity of the responses I heard – too similar to sustain a lengthy analysis. Not all were hysterical or hopeless, like my friend in Hefei. But nearly all the responses boiled down to this: we have no choice but to marry, to do something we know is wrong, that goes against who we are, and that sentences us to a life of duplicity, desperation and unfulfilled dreams. And yes, it’s better than it used to be and it’s better in the big cities. But for the vast majority of gay men and women in China, life promises to be a well of loneliness.

By nature, anyone who is gay needs to come to terms with shame. The shame of bullying, of knowing they are different, of having to create a double life, of knowing they are disappointing their parents. Despite the idiotic arguments of Focus on the Family and moralists on the far right, no one ever chooses to be gay. No one chooses bullying, deception, stigmatization and pain. So being gay is hard enough as it is, no matter how liberal your society. But to be gay in China is a unique tragedy, especially for those who can’t afford to live and study overseas or to live in a city like Shanghai.

As the article says, maybe there will be some years of freedom, a short time in the life of gays in China when they can be themselves, before the time arrives when they need to marry.

Yu Jing said that despite the hardships she’s suffered with her parents – watching her father cry, her mother screaming at her – it’s these youthful days without weighty expectations that she’ll recall throughout her life.

“I think it’s worth (dating girls),” she said. “Maybe five years later I’ll be a very normal person in this society, but I can still remember my past.”

How terrible, to have only a memory of a brief, happy time when you were free to be yourself – until the day comes when night falls like a hammer, and for the rest of your life you are sentenced to live a lie.

There is so much I love about Chinese culture. The fixed notion of family and face before all else is not one of those things.

Update: If this topic interests you, you absolutely must read this piece from several weeks ago by my friend Zhang Yajun

This is an interesting post in response to recent attacks on ethnic Chinese in Paris. A sample:

If French discrimination against Africans and Arabs comes from their sense of superiority as former colonizer, then their feelings towards China are much more complex. 20 years ago, Chinese were considered poor refugees coming from a third world country and treated with generosity tinged with pity. However, as China has developed and prospered, French people’s attitudes towards Chinese have changed. During my two years in France, a number of people reacted to the discovery that I was Chinese by asking whether China would overtake the US and become the world’s strongest country in twenty years. Once, my French professor singled me out in front of the entire class, telling me “you Chinese took away all of the jobs from France.” As the Chinese residents of Paris can attest, the combination of fear and resentment towards China is growing in French society.

Will antagonism toward ethnic Chinese everywhere intensify as/if China continues to grow, or is this something uniquely “French”? Here in the US I’ve heard a lot of anger directed at China for “stealing jobs,” but not at the Chinese living here. That would be hopelessly declasse.

This is a guest post from my friend in Taiwan, William R. Stimson.

Since he stole the majority of the people’s votes in last year’s election, Iran’s Supreme Leader has also stolen for himself, or tried to, every other public occasion all through the year. Already by far the most powerful tyrant Iran has ever known, he demonstrated again and again, all year long, before the shocked eyes of the world to what unbelievably murderous and perverted lengths he will go not just to snuff out every last vestige of his people’s freedom – but to break their very spirit. On the first anniversary of the stolen election he had his riot police and government toughs out in greater numbers than ever before to arrest and intimidate anyone who dared speak out. People largely kept off the streets. His forces quickly dispersed the very few, and very small, scattered protests. Unlike the previous occasions all year long, from the clashes this time there emerged no telling incidents or images to be quickly posted on the internet and spread around the world. The New York Times could only report that at 2:30 p.m. a little old lady under the Hafez Bridge chanted some anti-government slogans. The riot police moved in to lay hands on her and drag her away. From every side, hundreds of bystanders rushed to her rescue. The police had to retreat. The little old lady went free.

No matter how much it’s been beaten back by the brutality of the Supreme Leader, there is still a voice in Iran that’s free. Thanks to one little old lady, it continues to tell the world, like it has all year long, that the people of Iran don’t approve of their Supreme Leader. They want their country back. They want to elect a leader who will address the real problems of the nation and serve not his interests, but theirs. It also continues to tell the world, like it has all year long, that Iran’s Supreme Leader doesn’t approve of his people. He wants to mold them to be something other than what they are. He wants to domesticate them, make them into a herd of tame goats, and keep the country essentially to himself for his own corrupt profit, his own narrow and twisted ideology, and his own Medieval geo-political vision.

This man tries to command Iran not with compassion and mercy but with fear and brute force. An impressive stone fort once similarly tried to command the Atlantic coast of Florida. Backed against a trackless and impenetrable swamp, its massive walls and many cannons all faced the sea – making it impregnable. But it fell to a conquistador who slogged his men, in heavy armor, through the steamy and tangled swamp to attack from behind.

Backed by his shallow misinterpretation of Islam, Iran’s Supreme Leader directs all the forces at his command to defend himself against his own people’s legitimate demands for fair play, compassion, and decency – and would seem on this first anniversary of the election to have won the day. In fact he has doomed himself to the fate of the fort. Had he not defended himself the way he did, he could never have been defeated. As it is now, nothing can possibly save him.

It’s only a matter of time before enough Iranians with Islamic compassion and mercy in their hearts come up from behind to expose him for the fraud he is. Against this, the willingness of his revolutionary guards and Basiji to assault the innocent people of Iran will not avail.

Iran is bigger than its supreme leader and his twisted vision, and so is Islam. In the end it is inevitable that both win out over him. All this present craziness will be over.

I didn’t ask the question, The Global Times did in an interview with Professor Xu Xiaonian of the China Europe International Business School. This is one of those surprising articles where you wonder how the propaganda people let it get through.

I don’t want to get into the argument again of whether China faces a coming collapse or perpetual prosperity, as there is no answer. But I do think Xu’s remarks are interesting because they are coming from a Chinese economics professor and not a columnist in London. He can’t be dismissed as some outside meddler who doesn’t understand China. I enjoyed his pithy, no-nonsense outlook:

Let us first assume that those numbers are real and the economy is indeed recovering. I believe that the excessive credit supply of last year and the extremely loose monetary policy both resulted in recovery, which I regard as the result of squandering money. Whether the effects of squandering money will last depends on the government’s decision on whether to keep throwing money about.

Needless to say, squandering money will definitely stimulate the economy.

However, China’s economy has structural problems that cannot be easily solved by palliatives. Too much investment, too little consumption and purely relying on domestic investment and external demand-driven economic growth will no longer support sustainable development.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has repeatedly stressed the need to accelerate the reform of the economic growth model.

But contrary to our fantasies, squandering money did not change the previous growth model, and it has resulted in the structure of the economy deteriorating further. Blood transfusions and oxygen therapy may make a patient feel better, but the illness is not cured. Toxic water may cure your thirst, but it may still kill you.

That’s pretty eloquent. Like me, he’s skeptical that domestic consumption can dig China out of the hole that the “squandering” is creating, though I often wonder whether China can’t simply keep on squandering and absorbing the blows. That’s what every every other country seems to be doing at the moment. The US and UK and others, however, are spending on credit, while China is spending cash.

Some other choice quotes I enjoyed:

Cantonese like the number eight because they believe the number is lucky. I have no idea why decision-makers in the government like the number eight when it comes to growth figures. What is their logic? Where is their evidence?

…Intellectuals in modern society are required to be physically and mentally independent. Our goal is to discover truth and to publicize it. We as economists should have nothing to do with interest groups, governments or ordinary people. We should never fawn on authorities or kiss up to the public.

That is how we should behave. However, many Chinese economists nowadays distort their original convictions and moral principles to meet the need of other people.

Nice example of speaking truth to power. This comes via an Economist blog, which is not particularly optimistic about China’s economic future.

This is nice.

Snip:

It’s a mystery/action novel that pretty much pulls off something I would have thought improbable: combining an account of Iraq-war drama (the emphasis is on Abu Ghraib-type themes), with a portrayal of the urban China of these past few years, complete with overhyped art scene, dissident bloggers, lots of young expats, and constant uncertainty about what the government will permit or crack down on. Along the way, lots about the online gaming world that often seems the main passion of youthful Chinese, especially males.

It’s short; read it all.

I think it’s safe to say that with it’s huge leaps and bounds China is always at some sort of crossroads, whether it’s dealing with organized labor, promising national health insurance, launching a soft power campaign or what have you. One of the smartest China hands, David Wolf, has an excellent piece in Ad Age China on perhaps the most important crossroads of all, the economic one, and on what it means for foreign companies doing business there.

Suddenly, just as people in China were starting to wonder if they still needed foreign capital and know-how, we went and proved to the Chinese that we were greedy, dumb, and actually needed China’s help to pull us out of our own mess…

Not only did that that gave the government the opportunity to put an end to policies that favored foreign companies in China, it was also a signal to the Chinese people that they could no longer take for granted that foreign brands were better than their local counterparts. Maybe they were just overpriced.

China, in other words, is starting to say “no” to our employers and our clients, and the above trends suggests that this is likely to get worse. Smart Chinese competitors are figuring out that they have an opportunity to take back some of their home turf, and they are refocusing their efforts on domestic operations.

This doesn’t mean, however, that China has all the answers, and is gliding through the crisis. Wolf spells out why China isn’t out of the woods, and why the current economic crossroads is so critical, and tenuous.

The global financial crisis has revealed the fundamental weakness of the nation’s export-driven economy: even in a healthy financial environment, the world cannot buy all of the goods China needs to sell to sustain 8-10% growth indefinitely. With no social safety net, Chinese consumers are focused on saving, and industrial productivity is so embarrassingly bad that nobody even talks about it.

Political stability in China is built on an unspoken social contract: the government delivers constant improvements in opportunities and lifestyle, and the people accept single-party rule, warts and all. Delivering on that promise is getting harder as China’s export engine sputters, as inflation grows, and may become impossible if the stock-market and real estate bubbles burst and the middle class demands that the government cover personal losses.

A thought of my own that popped up while I was reading it: The “Chinese financial crisis” is a phrase we don’t hear much anymore. I think we’ve been almost hypnotized into believing there is no economic crisis in China, that it was all about the US, and then Europe, with Asia remaining largely invulnerable. Indeed, a powerful meme took hold among financial writers over the past year, portraying China’s authoritarian system as superior in many ways to democracy because the party can make things happen fast without getting tied up in lawsuits and hearings and protests (usually). And this one-party system protected China from the crisis, allowing the government to launch a massive government spending program that kept the country afloat and free of the misery faced by weak democracies.

Wolf reminds, however, that the Chinese economy right now is quite tenuous, and that the shock absorbers that have seen it through so far – namely, government spending – may not be enough to hold everything together when the economy sours (and all economies sour).

“Read the whole thing.”

I admire Wall Street Journal columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz the way I admire Sarah Palin. I detest them both, but must admit they are good at what they do. Palin is good at getting out her messages with no accountability or explanation thanks to her Facebook page. Rabinowitz is a master at the subtle art of character assassination. She does it beautifully, with chiseled sentences, immaculate syntax and a truly fine sense of drama. She understand the power of words to put readers into a sort of trance, and she uses this to stunning effect. You don’t even realize she’s performing an assassination.

Today, in a column shamefully titled The Alien in the White House, she sets her sights on Obama, joining the media pack’s obsession du jour, namely his remoteness and lack of connection with Americans. As usual, she starts off with elegant diction disguising a brutal point.

The deepening notes of disenchantment with Barack Obama now issuing from commentators across the political spectrum were predictable. So, too, were the charges from some of the president’s earliest enthusiasts about his failure to reflect a powerful sense of urgency about the oil spill.

There should have been nothing puzzling about his response to anyone who has paid even modest critical attention to Mr. Obama’s pronouncements. For it was clear from the first that this president—single-minded, ever-visible, confident in his program for a reformed America saved from darkness by his arrival—was wanting in certain qualities citizens have until now taken for granted in their presidents…

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.

Yes, all the other presidents had these qualities, but not Obama. He is an alien. You can then put in the disclaimer that you don’t mean he is actually an “alien,” as in “illegal alien,” but her words are carefully chosen and they cunningly speak to the GOP base for whom Rabinowitz always writes (though, to her credit, she was as critical of Palin’s being a birdbrain as I was). Her point comes across.

As proof of his coldness, and of his failure to understand what Americans value, like our sacred relationship with Great Britain, she finds an anecdote, and though she admits what actually happened remains unclear, she nevertheless reads into it all sorts of dark meaning. This man is not an American in spirit. He is not “like us.” Here’s the proof:

One of his first reforms was to rid the White House of the bust of Winston Churchill—a gift from Tony Blair—by packing it back off to 10 Downing Street. A cloudlet of mystery has surrounded the subject ever since, but the central fact stands clear. The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind. Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.

Sinister indeed, and the right-leaning media like The Corner pounced on it with a vengeance. Obama must be ignorant of WWII and Churchill’s greatness. He is from outside our – the real Americans’ – Judeo-Christian society. He is some mystery, an anomaly, and though she never says it, is there any doubt his being black and partly from Kenyan descent aren’t at cause? And returning to the bust, was there perhaps a simpler explanation than Obama hating England and wanting to spit in its face? Perhaps.

Intended as a symbol of transatlantic solidarity, the bust was a loaner from former British prime minister Tony Blair following the September 11 attacks. A bust of Abraham Lincoln–Obama’s historical hero–now sits in its place. A White House spokesperson says the Churchill bust was removed before Obama’s inauguration as part of the usual changeover operations, adding that every president puts his own stamp on the Oval Office.

Perhaps Obama’s returning the bust was a bad idea. Maybe he should have kept it. But it’s not like he replaced it with a bust of Mao. To read so much into something so trivial – well, that’s the MO for nearly all the assaults on Obama. Critics ignore the big things, like continuing the drone attacks and renditions and illegal wiretaps, and focus on pure and utter bullshit. He didn’t sound angry enough in Louisiana. He was laughing at a party the day the rig exploded (weren’t we all? It only became a national crisis days later, when BP admitted they did not have it under control.) He bowed too low in front of a foreign leader. He doesn’t wear a US flag lapel pin. He sent a loaned bust back to England.

Rabinowitz waits until the end to thrust the dagger in as far as it can go.

The beliefs and attitudes that this president has internalized are to be found everywhere—in the salons of the left the world over—and, above all, in the academic establishment, stuffed with tenured radicals and their political progeny. The places where it is held as revealed truth that the United States is now, and has been throughout its history, the chief engine of injustice and oppression in the world.

But there can be no doubt by now of the influences that have shaped him. They account for his grand apology tour through the capitals of Europe and to the Muslim world, during which he decried America’s moral failures—her arrogance, insensitivity. They were the words of a man to whom reasons for American guilt came naturally. Americans were shocked by this behavior in their newly elected president. But he was telling them something from those lecterns in foreign lands—something about his distant relation to the country he was about to lead.

The truth about that distance is now sinking in, which is all to the good. A country governed by leaders too principled to speak the name of its mortal enemy needs every infusion of reality it can get.

This is nasty stuff, and of course it’s the fault of the usual suspects, those on the left, and especially academia. Your typical Republican slander against anyone who thinks progressively, branding them as enemies of the state. But she says it so beautifully.

This is one of Rabinowitz’ most skillful columns. It’s devastating. It’s eloquent, yet it’s as inciteful as anything Goebbels ever said. Don’t believe me? Be sure to see the comments. I remember all the nonsense about Bush Derangement Syndrome. That was easily refuted because the outrage in question was based on facts that couldn’t be refuted, like starting wars, permitting torture, consigning habeas corpus to the scrap heap. With Obama, all the derangement is focused on nonsense, like bowing too low. Rabinowitz makes you think the people hate Obama, when his poll numbers have stood up remarkably well. His predecessor left office with a 26 percent approval rating. And, of course, never an acknowledgment that he inherited more problems than perhaps any president ever. It was Obama who brought death into this world and all our woe, and it all started the day he put his hand on the Bible (which was probably a Qur’an with a fake cover) and took his oath of office.

To see just how susceptible people are to this kind of rhetoric, I urge you again to read the comments. As I jumped from page to page, I realized (again) just how dangerous America’s political polarization is, and thought back to the elections from 1980 to 1996, when each side vigorously attacked its opponent, but never referred to them as traitors, as aliens, as Muslims (which the right sees only as a very bad word), as actual terrorists, or at least pals of terrorists. If people truly believe their leaders are animals, monsters, rapists, how long will it take for there to be violence? And Ms. Rabinowitz, no matter how silver-tongued your hatchet job may be, we’ll all know you made your fair contribution.

Socialism Studies – funniest Jon Stewart clip yet. “We should not be teaching American children about our enemy. It’s brainwashing.” The lady is actually arguing that teaching Mandarin to middle school children can turn them into communists. No, I ‘m serious. She actually says this. Don’t be drinking any liquids as you watch.

There is little more depressing than the inbred American far right. I mean, can anyone really be this stupid? It’s just scary to think Chinese people in China are watching this and thinking these morons are representative of the US. Well, I guess they are, but only of a (hopefully) small sliver.

Oh, and in a very unexpected twist, this post on teaching Mandarin actually gets in a healthy reference to ABBA and even a few notes of Dancing Queen. Jon Stewart rocks.

Update: More video here.

Lots of posts about this over here.

A few nights ago I finished the new best-seller Matterhorn, a gritty, wrenching novel about the life of American soldiers serving in Vietnam, written by a highly decorated soldier, Karl Marlantes, who took 30 years to complete it. Matterhorn was originally 1,600 pages, and his editors cut it down to a less terrifying 600 pages. I bought it after reading James Fallows’ recommendation.

Anyone who still believes it’s sweet and glorious to die for one’s country should read Matterhorn, but so should everyone else. There cannot be a more graphic and beautifully written novel about war, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that most of it is based on actual events.

With no preparation or warning, the reader is thrown right into the vile, putrid world of jungle warfare, defined by the pus-dripping sores of jungle rot and immersion foot, and the constant battle with leeches that drop from the trees and silently suck the soldiers’ blood. Marlantes wastes no time; by page eight we are hurled into one of those horrific scenarios that we know we will never forget as much as we may want to: a leech gets inside a soldier’s urethra, and if it’s not removed his bladder will burst, killing him. Low clouds and rain make it impossible to send a medevac. How the poor inexperienced medic ultimately deals with this makes for literally the most harrowing reading I’ve ever endured. You simply have to put the book down, and sometimes you want to hurl it away.

The brutality of hand-to-hand combat, the racial tension between the black and white soldiers (which results in murder), the incompetent officers who needlessly send boys without food to die fighting for nothing except “body count,” scenes of heroism and betrayal and sheer misery as soldiers literally rot in the rain forest – Matterhorn makes you feel it, and it makes you shake with rage. There is no mention of politics or objectives beyond the battle at hand. It is all about the mission, to secure the mountain they’ve named Matterhorn and clear out North Vietnamese soldiers from the surrounding jungle, a fruitless, meaningless effort with no real strategy behind it. The book’s most repellent figure, Major Blakely, sends men off to die without food and knowing he’s screwed up the layout of their machine guns. He can’t be bothered. “The marines under him would make up for mistakes like that.” He only cares about the reports he prepares. With the most restrained writing, Marlantes makes you hate this man so much you want to see him tortured and killed.

They’d fight well with the imperfect machine-gun layout. The casualties would be slightly higher, with fewer enemy dead, but the statistics of perfection never show up in any reporting system. A victory is reported with the casualties it takes to secure that victory, not the casualties it would have taken if the machine gun had been better placed. There was nothing sinister in this. Blakely himself would not be aware that he’d positioned the machine gun poorly. He’d feel bad about his casualties for a while. But reflecting on why or what wasn’t something Blakely did. Right now the problem before him was to engage the enemy and get the body count as high as possible. He wanted to do a good job as any decent person would, and now he’d finally figured out a way to to it. He might actually get to use the entire battalion at a time, an invaluable experience for a career officer.

Marlantes goes back and forth, juxtaposing the brute horrors of jungle warfare with monsters like Blakely sitting in their office and blithely sending men to their doom. And just when you’re thinking no human being could actually be this cruel, this venal, they go ahead and do even worse things. The soldiers become ghosts, living in a strange altered state of consciousness, knowing they are being sent out to die for literally nothing. Another officer, always drunk, sips Jack Daniels in comfort and orders the men to keep pushing, blissfully unaware that a tiger is biting one the boy’s heads off, while others are losing their legs from trip mines. To the officer, they are red pins on a map. They will die for the officers’ pride.

The kids filed quietly to the edge of the strip to wait for the helicopters. Other Marines stopped to watch them, wanting to say an encouraging word yet not daring to break into their private world — a world no longer shared with ordinary people. Some of them were experiencing the last hour of that brief mystery called life.

“Where’s the gold?” a young soldier plaintively asks the book’s hero, Lt. Mellas, in one of the book’s most poignant moments. What are we doing this for? Is there oil somewhere? A prize? There was no answer.

It’s heartbreaking to think a large number of people still believe the Rambo argument, that if we just had more guts and more commitment we could have “won” in Vietnam. Won what? The greatest exercise in futility the US ever embarked on, a bright shining lie and a total and unmitigated catastrophe. Matterhorn makes it raw, makes you understand the hubris and incompetency that made it all possible, and makes you want to scream, to cry, to throw the book down in hopeless frustration.

There’s a lot more to this book. It’s not light summer fare, and it’s not always easy. Marlantes introduces one character after another after another, and I had to keep flipping back to remember who was who. And he uses a lot of military jargon and alphabet soup (necessitating a glossary at the end). But you know within a few pages you’re about to embark on a terrible journey, bloody and disturbing and stomach-turning, but one you have to take if you want to truly know what our soldiers endured in Vietnam and why they came back the way they did.

Unforgettable is a cliche we throw around too much. Some things really are unforgettable, and Matterhorn is one of them. Please read it.

Gady Epstein on China’s decision yesterday to ban Foursquare nationwide after it was used to arrange gatherings at Tiananmen Square:

The blocking of Foursquare, while perhaps temporary, is yet another reminder that the Communist Party of China is serious about controlling history, as I wrote about last year at this time, and is just as serious about controlling the dangers of Web 2.0. Chinese social networking services are in self-censorship mode today — in the case of the portal Sina, even removing emoticons of candles and flowers from its microblog. To some extent the party’s strategy has been successful: Many in China, especially younger generations, have little clue what happened 21 years ago on June 4. Of those that do remember, some unknown percentage — perhaps a quite high percentage — have chosen not to care too deeply, a sort of willed forgetting in service of today’s prosperity that author Chan Koon Chung broaches in his Chinese novel “The Fat Years.”

….Those who choose to remember, meanwhile, continue to do so today — in various ways on the Chinese Internet, quite brazenly on Foursquare, Twitter and Facebook for those who use a VPN or proxy service to get around the Great Firewall, and many in their own quiet ways offline. Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou’s issued a statement today, translated here, asking that Beijing “sincerely confront the major human rights incident of June Fourth.” Hong Kong holds its annual march and candlelight vigil tonight. Up to 50,000 people there are expected to show that they choose not to forget.

All of those who insist the Chinese people don’t care about this anymore leave out this key point: today’s apathy and indifference toward the incident is government-induced. Epstein in the above article calls it “willed forgetting.” I left the following comment on this topic over at Elliott Ng’s excellent post today:

The only point I disagree with is that it’s been forgotten due to “the busyness of life.” In neighboring Hong Kong there are still sizable demonstrations, and the world still remembers the day vividly. Just look at twitter last night. It is only where the incident has been filtered out of the search engines and banned from any discussion in the media that it is forgotten. The Nanjing Massacre is not forgotten, and those remembering it are just as busy as those forgetting the TSM. Out of sight, out of mind. Gady is spot on – this is willed forgetfulness, and the one doing the willing is the government. That is the high price that comes with a one-party authoritarian state; Big Brother controls the brainwaves and can convince people that ignorance is strength and freedom is slavery.

[Also via Elliott, whose post offers an array of excellent links, I found these superb photos from 1989 over at Slate. Highly recommended.]

I got quite annoyed at myself several days ago when I put up a post on Tibet and gave a finger-wagging lecture about how whenever China censors and cracks down on basic liberties it tells the world it is still a weak country, insecure and in the grip of a seemingly unending inferiority complex. I got so annoyed at my own self-righteousness I deleted it. But I look at this story and I think, maybe it’s not too harsh or self-righteous. It may come across that way, especially when Westerners say it, but it still needs to be said.

As China embarks on an expensive and ambitious campaign to build up its soft power, it should look right here, at this sort of behavior. Soft power is all about hearts and minds. The US sacrificed much of its own soft power under Bush, and you’d think China would learn from that. Bullying and suppressing aren’t good strategies for winning global admiration.

Update: CDT has some great articles, videos and photos on its site, which today is bathed in black. You must go see those videos (like this one). No wonder the whole incident has been hermetically sealed and locked away.