Absurdity, Allegory and China

If you follow this blog you know I am not a fan of Jacques Rogge, the current president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). He is seen by many – this blogger included – as a CCP lapdog and a free agent who, under the charade of officialdom, always goes to the highest bidder. In mid-July 2008 Count Rogge (yes, he really is a count ) infamously proclaimed, “For the first time, foreign media will be able to report freely and publish their work freely in China. There will be no censorship on the Internet.” We all know how high that one flew.

Dan Wetzel of Yahoo Sports is also not a fan. In his listing of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics winners and losers: Canadians steal the show, he does a fair skewering of the Russian figure skating silver medalist Evgeni Plushenko for his low-ball comments aimed at U.S. gold medalist Evan Lysacek. But Wetzel saved his best for Plushenko’s apologist, the good Count Jacques:

Plushenko’s comments showed zero respect for his opponents. At the Beijing Olympics, Rogge, the IOC president, ripped Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt for just such a thing when Bolt threw up his hands in celebration before crossing the finish line. “That’s not the way we perceive being a champion,” Rogge attacked.

When asked for comment about Plushenko’s antics, Rogge defended the skater to the Los Angeles Times. “I think he was very disappointed, obviously, and sometimes in disappointment, you express things you wouldn’t express at another time.”

There is one difference in these cases. Plushenko hails from a wealthy, powerful country. Bolt doesn’t. Rogge would never attack a Russian (or American or Chinese) athlete the way he did with Bolt. With the stuffy, elitist IOC, it’s always the same game. Power protects power, and when a suit like Jacques Rogge needs to act tough, you know who is going to get called out.

Actually there are two differences, though Wetzel only pointed out one.

When I first came to China in the late 90s, many of the people who are now stuck in traffic in their cars were still bicycling everywhere they went. Their dreams of ‘more things’ were there – of cars, of houses, of the latest in the latest, whatever that latest was – but money was still tight, though it was beginning to shake itself loose into their accounts. Most of my Chinese friends were children during the Cultural Revolution, and they knew what it was like to not have stuff, which put them in the same category as their parents. But unlike their parents, there was the possibility of a future of material wealth that most of the older generation never had the chance to imagine for themselves. When I asked them what they wanted, to be rich was at the top of the list, and more often than not they compared their desire for wealth with Bill Gates. The desire to have billions and billions of bucks was not restricted to the Chinese. But the nearly invariable comparison to Bill Gates was. “I want to be as rich as Bill Gates,” was a pretty standard response. Understandable, too, as most had either just purchased or wanted to purchase a home computer. In 1998 all computers sold in China were Windows-based and Bill’s face was on permanent national display in all Xinhua bookstores. To most Chinese Steve Jobs sounded like an employment statistic or a column header in an Excel spreadsheet. Or better yet, a question: “What does Steve Jobs mean? And why is it capitalized?” It was all-Bill Gates, all-the-time, despite the fact that Bill only had a high school diploma. (Prediction: sometime in the future it will be discovered that Bill Gates was actually born in Sichuan, a distant cousin of Deng Xiaoping, and that he graduated from a small technical university in some spicy hot backwater. But the evidence is still buried in an, as yet, anonymous basement stuffed full of boxes of files. I can see a roadside memorial erected by a rural county tourism bureau: a stone beefed-up Bill in windblown robes writing code on a scroll of bamboo slips with a calligraphy brush. It’s only a matter of time.)

So when Mr. Shao (as usual, no first name given), dean of Lanxiang Vocational School in Jinan, one of the two schools reported to be at the possible eye of the Google hacking storm, said “It’s impossible for our students to hack Google and other U.S. companies. They are just high school graduates and not at an advanced level,” I thought, “Right Mr. Shao, how could it possibly be anyone from your school. After all, they probably don’t even have a certificate yet.”

Google just can’t seem to keep themselves out of the news. With the developing tales of Chinese hacking – possibly traced to Jiaotong Univertsity in Shangahi and a particular class taught by a Ukranian prof at Lanxiang Vocational School in Shandong province - and their warning to China that they would be, sometime in the fuzzy future, dropping their Great Firewall (GFW) guard and no longer filtering search results through their google.cn site, things slid downhill fast with the release of Buzz. I’ve written about it enough on this blog to have wrung it pretty much out for me. But there is still one more jewel that brightly shines in all the muck.

On Thursday, January 28, 2010 on The Official Google Blog, the un-evil ones published Google’s Privacy Principles in support of International Data Privacy Day. Less than two weeks later Google launched Buzz, a unilateral action that flipped privacy advocates on their heads. Perhaps GOOG should have spent more time studying their privacy principles rather than just publishing them as a good faith “Praise God!” ejaculation of privacy support. Below is the bullet-pointed list, though for a more thorough explication of each point, follow this link.

• Use information to provide our users with valuable products and services.
• Develop products that reflect strong privacy standards and practices.
• Make the collection of personal information transparent.
• Give users meaningful choices to protect their privacy.
• Be a responsible steward of the information we hold.

It all sounds well and good, very high-minded, and it may have even floated a bit longer if the GOOGs hadn’t punched a hole in their own keel with Buzz. Then to make matters even worse, a few days ago Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt proclaimed that “nobody was harmed” by the dropping of the Buzz bomb, despite a litany of mea culpas issued by others from the Mountain View bunker. Growing pains? Empire building contradictions? Wishful thinking? Oedipal blindness? Maybe a bit of them all. Who can really say at this point. But I thought that it was worth posting the privacy principles, which were subsequently scuttled by Buzz. Though many long-term Google watchers have been issuing cautions for years, I think the ranks of the Google faithful have gotten a little thinner over the last week for some very good reasons. I, for one, have geared down by scaling back my Google account profile and installing the Firefox add-on Google Sharing. Paranoid? Nah. Just a juke.

Some links I’ve visited over the past week that might be of interest to readers of this blog, And if not to you, to me.

Cultivating Failure: Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic. A pointed criticism of California’s gardening-in-school program, with valuable lessons in what is (or rather, should be) fundamentally important in education.

• If this patronizing agenda were promulgated in the Jim Crow South by a white man who was espousing a sharecropping curriculum for African American students, we would see it for what it is: a way of bestowing field work and low expectations on a giant population of students who might become troublesome if they actually got an education.

Internet Censorship with Jeremy Goldkorn: Podcast interview with Jeremy Goldcorn, founder of Danwei.org, perhaps the most popular media blog in China. Danwei was blocked by China’s Great Firewall (GFW) on July 3, 2009. The interview was conducted by Josh Gartner, AmCham China’s Director of Policy Communications.

A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything: Jamie Bell, a 17 year old art student, takes us from Bang to The End in three minutes and 2,100 biro drawings’ video. (h/t to Open Culture).

[If] Werner Herzog Reads Curious George: From Open Culture, a “dark and existential” satire of Werner Herzog reading the children’s classic monkey story.

The Fifty Cents Party Training Manual: From ChinaGeeks, a satirical guide for prospective Fifty Cents Party members on the many methods they can use to respond to the comment, “This chicken egg tastes disgusting.” A listing of get-rich wu mao responses for every situation.

Favorite Tweets of the week:
@AdamMinter: Curiously few Chinese tourists in Rio for Carnaval. Only ones I saw were wearing surgical masks. Rest of Rio: wearing thongs.
@bokane: Last year I had to pretend I was a Uyghur to get in to my girlfriend’s family’s army compound; this year they let me in as a foreigner.

The dumbest, failed word cobble I read this week: Unputdownable - seen in the January 18, 2010 issue of The New Yorker, page 5, in a book review advert. Attibuted to Lev Grossman, Time. (And no, I won’t tell you the book. I have a strict policy of never revealing the title of a book that is unputdownable. That’s just the way I am.)

Here’s a question from the “things may not always be what they seem” file. Is Google’s rushed and premature rollout of its latest product, Buzz, related to its ongoing cyber tussle with China? With the world’s two most popular social networking products, Facebook and Twitter, blocked in the People’s Republic (PRC), and Google believed to be still in negotiations with Chinese officials concerning GOOG’s threat to stop filtering search results on their Chinese search engine (google.cn), did Google cast Buzz into the social networking mix as part of a bigger plan to put more heat on China?

In a bilingual discussion (h/t @stinson) on Buzz hosted by wierdchina one of the sentiments expressed was that it is not a question of if but when China will block Gmail, since it is now integrated with Buzz. Although there is a gmail.cn in China, it is not a Google product, so all gmail.com accounts in China are also Buzz-ed, just as they are throughout the world. What does this mean for both Google and China? Well, it means that Gmail acount holders in the PRC now have a social networking component that they can use with their Gmail accounts without, at this point, using a VPN to vault the Great Firewall (GFW), as they must do to use Twitter and Facebook (and Google’s YouTube, for that matter). While there are social networking services within China, they are closely monitored and self-censored by the services when discussions cross the fuzzy line that might bring down the wrath (and stiff fines) of the government. An externally controlled social networking service that is not under the influence of Chinese censors is the reason why the world’s most popular services are banned, and why they will remain banned until something changes – either China changes its restrictive policies and allows open discussions or the services provide versions of their products which are engineered to fit into the proverbial Chinese characteristics box. Google.cn’s search engine is Google with Chinese characteristics, a modifier that Google says they can no longer live with, and which is the ostensible topic of the month-long discussion that continues to this day.

Enter Buzz. In poker playing patois, this is the raise. Can China, as a major player at the big table, afford to toss Gmail out and be seen as even more intolerant than they already are? Could this be the reason why Google rushed this product without any external testing? As Todd Jackson, Buzz’s product manager noted,

“We’ve been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback from 20,000 Googlers isn’t quite the same as letting Gmail users play with Buzz in the wild.”

It’s an oddly silent and huge-stakes game that Google and China are locked in, and this rush to market with Buzz – forced, myopic and misguided as it has been – might actually be seen in the light of Google’s ongoing struggle with China as a raising of the stakes, and the linking of Buzz with Gmail hardly a coincidence.

I’ve ranted in here for the past two days concerning Google’s saddling of all Gmail account holders with Buzz, and what that might mean for info/data miners in countries where public security bureaus use geek goons to harvest information and lists. I think that if you have people in your Gmail contacts list who might be ‘of interest’ to authoritarian government cyber brutes, you need to ask yourself if you really need another (and obviously inferior) social networking program. If you do, then there are some steps you need to take. Unfollowing and blocking are two options, though opting out totally at this point is my recommendation.

So, how do you really disable Buzz? Good question. I figured it out, but it wasn’t easy. Clicking on the link “turn off buzz” at the bottom of the Gmail page doesn’t do it. You still show up in followers Buzz displays, and can still be linked back to your email address, along with your name. You must go a few steps further. After I went through the steps I found this guide to disable it, from PC World’s How to Use Google Buzz

You can disable Buzz by scrolling down to the bottom of your Gmail page and clicking the tiny turn off buzz link, but that won’t get rid of it completely (my emphasis)–you’ll still have followers and connected sites, you just won’t see them from the Gmail page. (Logging in through the mobile Web app, for example, should still work fine.)

Before you eliminate Buzz entirely, you need to go through a few steps. From the main Buzz page, click the Following X People link and unfollow everyone; then click on the X followers link and block everyone. Next, you need to delete your Google Profile: Go to Google Profiles, select View My Profile, Edit profile, scroll down to the bottom of the screen, and select Delete profile.

________

It is curious that Google rolled out their latest product while they are still claiming the moral high ground in the ongoing horn locking match with China, and amid the persistent rumors of their expanding relations with the National Security Agency (NSA). Frankly, it’s stinking more everyday.
________

These two just showed up on Twitter this morning: @timothythompson:

• It’s just dawning on professionals who use GMail that Buzz may have violated their legal confidentiality requirements by naming clients.
• Google Buzz: note that the Electronic Privacy Information Center will file a formal complaint with the Federal Trade Commission next week.

I assume that lawsuits are going to start flying. So, is there anyone out there who still believes the glassy-eyed “Don’t be evil” line. There comes a certain point when stupidity and power merge into exactly what Google claims not to be. I am still holding out hope that it’s still at the stupid level, but I can only hold my breath for so long. How Google handles this fiasco will determine what we are really dealing with here. So, which side does Sergey come down on in this one?

I am a hard sell when it comes to supporting conspiracy theories. That said, I am also not one to buy into private corporations’ self-promoting jingles, even if they have a long trail of mission statements, supportive philosophical documents, digitally spinning prayer wheels and mumbled mantras. Google doesn’t get a pass because they preach a “Don’t be evil” hip-casual catechism. With their ‘no need to ask’ addition of Buzz into the Gmail mix they have again proven that they may not necessarily be evil, but they may be just blind effing stupid.

The following is from Molly Wood Google Buzz: Privacy nightmare:

When you visit Google Buzz, you’re invited to “Try Buzz in Gmail,” with “no setup needed.” But the no-setup thing isn’t the bonus you might be led to believe.

First, you automatically follow everyone in your Gmail contact list, and that information is publicly available in your profile, by default, to everyone who visits your profile. It’s available with helpful “follow” links too–wow, you can expand your Buzz network so fast by harvesting the personal contact lists of other people!

To hide the list of followers/followees from your profile page, you have to click Edit Profile and uncheck the box next to Display the list of people I’m following and people following me. Why that option isn’t obvious on the Buzz page itself–well, decide for yourself.

On top of that, let’s say you’ve customized your Google profile page with the vanity URL Google helpfully offers at the bottom of the page. Well, that’d be your e-mail handle. Anytime anyone does an @ reply to you, they’ve broadcast your e-mail address to the world.

The release of Buzz (which should have been named BuzzOff, incorporating all it’s various street connotations – think Walter Matthau and the Bad News Bees) in such a potentially compromising manner should earn Google a big red F, for what may lead to some uncomfortable and potentially harmful exposures of activists in countries where governments are more than happy to spend their time harvesting email lists of those they deem troublesome. This from Evgeny Morozov’s Wrong kind of buzz around Google Buzz

Nevertheless, I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would never want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world. Why so much secrecy? Simply because, many of their contacts are other activists and often even various “democracy promoters” from Western governments and foundations. Many of those contacts would now inadvertently be made public.

If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geeksquads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government. They can then spend months on end drawing complex social circles on the shiny blackboards inside secret police headquarters.

Despite the overwhelming numbers of email users in China, the level of technical sophistication of many of those users is low, especially in areas where minorities may be communicating in English as a third or fourth language, unsure of what to do in order to keep their list of contacts private. Email list mining by the Public Security Bureau has been given a great boost with the introduction of Buzz. Sergey Brin, who is supposed to be up on such things, should have his heels held to fire for this. The “Don’t be evil” silliness has just been scrapped. (Savvy Google has been in discussions for the last few weeks with China, and now they end up creating another ‘backdoor’ for the Party? And you wonder why I am having a ‘loss of faith’ crisis?) Unfortunately, this is what happens when you try to take over the web world: one day you’re this, and the next day you’re something else that suits your ever-shifting need to power. What we very well may be seeing (a fear that many have had for years) is that power/corruption, absolute power/absolute corruption axiom in Google’s actions. Is it evil? I’m not ready to go there yet, but I am willing to say that it is uncommonly boneheaded, since if I thought otherwise I’d be right back to evil. We’ll have to wait on the final evaluation until Google breaks it’s silence.

The ongoing Google-China debacle, which I have written about here, here and here, (and several places in-between) continues to loll about out of the public eye. What has actually happened over the past two months is still about as clear as mud. I suspect that Google still remains in discussions with China. Each day those two very proper nouns get bigger and less easy to define. I picture two boar hogs sharing separate wallows in the same rapidly drying sty. Will they decide to eventually share the sty, or will Google get shoved out the chute? We’re getting tired of asking the same question over and over, though, intentionally or not, it appears that Google with their rollout of Buzz has just given China a big, thick information hongbao*.

*hongbao: the red envelope full of money given as a gift @ Chinese New Year

In Nicholas Ray’s classic 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause there’s a short exchange between Jim Stark (James Dean), the rebellious protagonist, and leather-jacketed Buzz Gunderson (Corey Allen), the popular crowd favorite and daring, darling meathead who has challenged Jim to a game of chicken: a drive at full speed in stolen cars toward the edge of a cliff overlooking the rocky southern California coast. Jim is up for it, but sees the absurdity of the contest and questions whether they ought to be doing something so obviously stupid. But there are adolescent hormones and women involved, and Buzz is all about the group image, the whole respect/disrespect system of manly measurement, and so he nervously proclaims that the show must go on. In a private moment before the duel, Jim and Buzz share a few words.

Buzz: This is the edge. That’s the end.
Jim: Yeah. It certainly is.
Buzz: You know something? I like you. You know that?
Jim: Why do we do this?
Buzz: You got to do something, now don’t you?

Spoiler Alert: And so they fire up their pilfered chariots and race headlong towards the brink. Jim, of course, dramatically bails at the very last minute, but Buzz gets his leather sleeve caught on the door handle and plunges to his fiery death on the rocks at the edge of the sea. Poor Buzz!

I was reminded of this scene this morning when I opened my Gmail, found Google’s Buzz in my sidebar, and looked for the link to turn it off. I wonder if Nicholas Ray’s flaming wreckage had anything to do with the naming.

Below are links to some of the sites I’ve visited (and revisited) this past week which may be of interest to others.

Never short a country with $2 trillion in reserves?: Michael Pettis, China Financial Markets.

• “We must be careful how we read history. The fact that the US and Japan had terrible decades following periods during which they had amassed levels of reserves that China has subsequently matched, and under conditions similar to those of China, does not necessarily mean that China too must have a lost decade or two.”

Internet Censorship in China and Human Rights: Stanley Lubman in the WSJ China Real Time Report

• “The Internet’s entertainment value aside, it plays a considerable and growing role in spreading information and opinions that do not appear in traditional media. In the face of the government’s commitment to censorship and frequent invocation of nationalism, how might the Internet evolve in China? At the moment, it expresses the chaos of competing values that currently marks Chinese society, and no one can predict what China will be like, say, a decade from now.”

Liu Xiaobo: I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement: Liu, one of the drafters of Charter 08, was sentenced to 11 years in prison on Christmas Day in Beijing. This link is to a translation. For the original Chinese version go here.)

• “Simply for expressing divergent political views and taking part in a peaceful and democratic movement, a teacher loses his podium, a writer loses the right to publish, and a public intellectual loses the chance to speak publicly, which is a sad thing, both for myself as an individual, and for China after three decades of reform and opening up. Thinking about it, my most dramatic experiences after June Fourth [1989] have all linked with courts; the two opportunities I had to speak in public have been provided by trials held in the People’s Intermediate Court in Beijing, one in January 1991 and one now. Although the charges on each occasion were different, they were in essence the same, both being crimes of expression.”

Chinese farms cause more pollution than factories, says official survey: Jonathan Watts, Asia environmental correspondent at the Guardian.

• “While the high figure for rural pollution is partly explained by the immense size of China’s agricultural sector, it also reflects the country’s massive dependency on artificial farm inputs such as fertilisers.”

Cyber Warriors: James Fallows at the Atlantic.

• “China has hundreds of millions of Internet users, mostly young. In any culture, this would mean a large hacker population; in China, where tight control and near chaos often coexist, it means an Internet with plenty of potential outlaws and with carefully directed government efforts, too.”

The Triumph of Madame Chiang: Jonathan Spence in the NYRB reviews Hannah Pakula’s The Last Empress: Madame Chiang Kai-shek and the Birth of Modern China

• “From late 1948 until January 1950 Mme Chiang was in the United States again,and thus was not at Chiang’s side to try to stem the tide of Communist victory, or to help organize the final retreat of the Nationalist forces to Taiwan. When she finally returned to Taiwan, the new order of US priorities was shown by the fact that for the first time she had to pay for her own plane ticket.”

[Help], [Help], [Help] the Police!: Brendan O’Kane’s music rant and review of the NYT‘’s Hip-hop in China from a year ago, just because it and the comments it generated should still be read. bokane.org

• “This is horseshit. The angry Chinese rap I’ve heard is generalized teenage angst with no attempt at social commentary. The most “daring” rap I’ve heard is predicated on schoolboy puns about smoking pot. And while I no longer make much of an attempt to follow the music scene here, I am familiar with the bands discussed in the NYT piece.”

China vs. the University of Calgary (UC), the latest chapter in the Chinese passion play, is a Chinese foreign policy trial balloon let loose (prematurely?) on the western Canadian plains. This began last week when it was reported that China had removed UC from its list of accredited universities a move school officials are concerned is connected to the Dalai Lama’s visit last fall.

The odd thing is that no one officially knows why it happened and what it might possibly mean, since the Chinese are not saying. The Vancouver Sun ran the following story on February 6, 2009: University of Calgary becomes latest to receive cold shoulder

Without fanfare, the University of Calgary was dropped in December from the Chinese Ministry of Education’s list of recommended universities for Chinese students going abroad to study.

The operator said the hotline recommends Chinese students choose their university only from among those on the list.

The inquiry was obviously not the first of the day, either. When the operator was asked about University of Calgary, she could be heard saying to someone nearby: “It’s another phone call about the University of Calgary.”

Although no one will say officially that Beijing has blocked Chinese students from going to University of Calgary because the school awarded the Dalai Lama an honourary degree last fall, it seems plausible that is the reason.

Asked why Beijing blacklisted the university, a spokeswoman at the Chinese Consulate in Calgary told the Calgary Herald simply that the university “should know.” [my emphasis]

It may seem a petty move by the world’s nascent superpower, but delisting will be costly for the university. China currently has the largest pool of foreign students looking to study abroad and universities around the world are competing to attract them. Little wonder. The 178,000 foreign students in Canada spent $6.5 billion in 2008, according to Canadian government figures. That’s an average of more than $36,000 each for the 600 Chinese students at the University of Calgary this year.

This morning the Global Times, a Chinese state-sponsored English newspaper, is reporting that China allegedly blacklists Canadian university:

China’s Ministry of Education Monday refused to immediately comment on media reports of its decision to remove Canada’s University of Calgary from a list of accredited schools because the latter bestowed an honorary degree on the Dalai Lama last year.

When contacted by reporters, an official from the ministry refused to comment immediately, saying they have to study the case and may reply in three days.

Reporters checked the ministry’s website and confirmed that the University of Calgary, where more than 600 Chinese students are enrolled, is no longer on the list of recommended schools.

The Calgary Herald quoted Danna Hou, a spokeswoman with the Chinese Consulate General in Calgary, as saying that the removal was not a sudden decision and was related to an incident last year.

“They know the reason and they (knew of) the result before it happened,” she told the newspaper Thursday.

The Dalai Lama was granted an honorary doctorate of law degree in September by the University of Calgary, the report said.

While it all still remains inimitably unclear, (has China published and distributed a manual of what universities “should know” or is it something that’s mystically present in the vapor?) it seems obvious enough that China is testing the retaliatory waters by providing a financial disincentive for allowing the Dalai Lama to speak by applying the universal strategy of using students as weapons – an action plan usually employed by individuals, ad hoc and/or longer term special interest groups to squeeze an institution into behaving in ways beneficial to the threatening party, or, conversely, by an institution to help unruly individuals and/or groups to focus on the line that needs to be, at all costs, toed. China is not unique in the use of children as weapons; this sort of behavior can be found at any and all levels of education throughout the world, from the backroom day care center, right through public school board meetings and on up to the highest levels of tertiary school board rooms. It’s a game played by adults where children are treated as pawns, and as such, almost invariably become the victims.

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), relentlessly waving a fading page torn from the Book of Brute, would like the entire world to join with them in fingering the Dalai Lama as “an enemy of the[ir] state,” which frankly, is not about to happen. (It’s about as likely to happen as China delivering Tibet to the Tibetans.) There’s that problematic Peace Prize that keeps getting in the way. Also, the Tibetan government-in-exile’s public relations (PR) campaign over the last half-century has successfully set the stage in their ethical favor. While the PRC was slogging through Blooming Flowers, Great Leaps, CulRevs, Gangs of Four and runaway tanks on the Square, the Tibetan PR machine was out in the world sowing seeds of the suffering high-altitude peaceful warriors bubbling over with compassion and bliss. (One seed they didn’t sow, still don’t and never will, is the deeply misogynistic one that keeps sprouting and clogging up the works. Tibetan leaders, both monastic and secular, need to understand that their greatest untapped resource is Tibetan women, and that until the women are empowered Tibetans will continue to unsuccessfully stumble about blinded by medieval levels of testosterone. Many Tibetan males believe that women are in ‘this life’ as women due to the ravages of bad karma, which somehow justifies treating them so poorly. You won’t find that one on the bullet-pointed list of His Holiness’ PR plusses. Though great steps have been made by Tibetan women, often with the support of non-Tibetans, there will never be a solution to the Chinese-Tibetan issue until there are women sitting on both sides of the table. But that is another issue for another time.)

But this is hardly just about the Dalai Lama, though the CCP would like you to think that it is. The Dalai Lama has become the convenient scapegoat for a particular shaping of foreign policy which still pitches China as the perennial victim, though now it is morphing into China, the abused, striking back. And what better way to choke perceived abusers in this time of economic hardship than to threaten them economically. The alleged sanctions against the University of Calgary is the trial balloon that just might have gotten loose a bit ahead of the pack, as someone’s idea of how to strike back, as a pre-retaliation to the one they’ve threatened to use against the U.S. if President Obama follows through with his planned meeting with the Dalai Lama.

The bigger and longer term issue here is speech, and how China, via the threat of loss of accreditation, is crossing borders and indirectly interfering in another country’s interpretation of freedom of speech, a freedom the Chinese claim in Article 35 of the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China:

Article 35. Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.

If they press this matter and actually do strip UC of accreditation, we can only hope that it will end up being another public relations disaster for China, since if they are successful they will attempt to use the same tactic to enforce their censure-driven foreign policy will. And the next time it won’t be because of the Dalai Lama. The focus of their future wrath and sanctions might be the appearance of a Chinese dissident, the screening of a film that casts a darker shadow on China’s self-projected image than they are comfortable with, or the simple expression of an opinion that the CCP doesn’t care for. There is much at stake in China’s current Canadian foot stomp. It would do everyone a great favor if the balloon just popped, and life with the basic freedoms set down in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights – which China has signed off on -  were to continue without odd authoritarian interferences. But don’t expect these sorts of head butts to stop. There is also a much bigger lesson here that is, unfortunately, one that is very rarely learned: choose your creditors wisely. A little late for that now.

And for all you students who want to come to China and unfurl the Free Whatever banners, don’t waste your time. You should be pushing for more visits by controversial speakers, more films, more exposure of censorship issues on campuses, especially campuses with large mainland Chinese enrollments. Engagement at home does much more good in the long run than heading to China chasing the adrenaline rush. Get over that. Trust me, sooner than later the Chinese won’t take it anymore, and someone’s going to get poked with a long jail sentence. It’s a new world out there. Here, too. Think smarter. Crossing borders isn’t what it used to be. Ask China. They’re doing it now in Canada, using students as weapons to hijack basic freedom of speech. It would be a different game if the rest of the world agreed with China’s assessment of the Dalai Lama. But the rest of the world doesn’t, and that’s what China needs to know.