Since his release from prison in 2010 Chen has been under a form of house arrest that has succeeded in reaching a level of official meanness that can only be expressed as vile. Chen’s house arrest has included not only the subjugation of a blind man who served four (4) years in prison for jaywalking, but also the systematic beating of innocent women – his wife, mother and any number of others who have humanely tried to help the family – by lowbrowed muscled men who may or may not be police, but who are doubtlessly in the official employ of the police and local officials in Linyi, Shandong province. And let’s not forget child abuse. The officious men of Linyi had refused to allow Chen’s daughter to attend school, though once the pressure became too great she was ushered back and forth to classes by brutes. That she also was forced to live under the conditions that were imposed upon the family can easily be classified as child abuse. These are only the brash highlights. The everyday details were much harsher, including various degrees of torture, food restrictions, electrical outages, sheet-metal covered and steel-barred windows, and spotlights that kept their small home lit up like Saturday night on the midway. Yes, this is the China that many have predicted will rule the world. Perhaps this is what it takes, a page torn from the savage’s playbook. Remember this when you get all warm and fuzzy about the Confucius Institute, another Party-sanctioned program that’s spreading through the world. This shameful affair points out yet again – and the second striking time in the last few weeks (the Bo Xilai affair) – the wholesale moral bankruptcy that permeates the entire Party system. This is the final work of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, whose ten-year reign is caving in on them and defining their ignominious end. And I haven’t even mentioned what they’ve managed to do to the ethnic minorities!

So, let’s see how the Obama folks will respond to China’s demands for Chen to be released from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, a story that is still, officially, speculation, since there has yet to be official acknowledgement that he is there. This is obviously not a Wang Lijun no-brainer where asylum was, perhaps, denied to a man who was part of a criminal conspiracy that included, among a host of other serious crimes, more than a few murders. In the case of Chen Guangcheng I’m sure there is a great desire to resolve this issue without it reaching the asylum level. But the only thing short of asylum would be verifiable guarantees that Chen and his family will be free of further inhuman harassment. If he is released back to China without meaningful guarantees Obama may as well kiss a second term goodbye. The wave of detentions in China over the last two days that has swept up many who are perceived as having helped Chen escape also must be addressed. Will China be able to go that far, the interference by a foreign rival in their domestic affairs? Will Team Obama have the stones to do what it must do? And all of this is happening on the eve of a China visit from Sec. of State Clinton who in an earlier visit to China played down the role of human rights in the U.S./China relationship,  and Treasury Sec. Geithner, who I’m pretty sure doesn’t give a donut hole about the blind activist unless he can figure out a way to get his Wall St. buds to make a killing marketing a “Chen Sunglasses” campaign! Keep your eyes on the digital billboards that flash-up Times Square.

But I am waiting for Rectified.Name, who pitched the Bo Xilai affair, to do the same with the Chen affair to the Coen Bros, who have yet to do a Chinese film. They could weave this into a tale that would end in the twisted depths of hallowed bunkers beneath Zhongnanhai, where murder will take place, though, if they were going to keep it culturally correct, the retributive dead victims would probably all be women. Or maybe Zhang Yimou for failing to bring home the bacon with Nanjing Lite.

And China keeps wondering why they can’t win an Oscar. It’s not because they don’t have the material for a good script. It’s just that they won’t allow it to be written.
________

Further Readings

On Chen’s detention and the infusion of security cash into the local economy see ChinaGeeks’ In Chen Guangcheng Case, Follow the Money

For Chen Guangcheng as a “genuinely Mencius-like figure,” see The Useless Tree’s Stand With Chen Guangcheng

For a more detailed background on the Chen case see Tania Branigan’s piece in The Guardian: Chen Guangcheng: how China tried to lock down a blind man

For a further look at the political implications from both the U.S. and Chinese perspectives see Jane Perlez in the NYT: A New Pawn in China’s Two Tugs of War 

To understand Koolhaas’s conception of Bigness it is best to read his own words, a piece written in 1994 and aptly titled “Bigness,” published in Koolhaas’s and Bruce Mau’s doorstop book  S,M,L,XL. A copy of the essay can be found here. To distill it into a few words – even though the piece is not long – is not something that I’d attempt doing, though a snippet will give you some notion of where Koolhaas is going here:

The absence of a theory of Bigness–what is the maximum architecture can do?–is architecture’s most debilitating weakness. Without a theory of Bigness, architects are in the position of Frankenstein’s creators: instigators of a partly successful experiment whose results are running amok and are therefore discredited.

Because there is no theory of Bigness, we don’t know what to do with it, we don’t know where to put it, we don’t know when to use it, we don’t know how to plan it. Big mistakes are our only connection to Bigness.

But in spite of its dumb name, Bigness is a theoretical domain at this fin de siecle: in a landscape of disarray, disassembly, dissociation, disclamation, the attraction of Bigness is its potential to reconstruct the Whole, resurrect the Real, reinvent the collective, reclaim maximum possibility. Only through Bigness can architecture dissociate itself from the exhausted artistic/ideological movements of modernism and formalism to regain its instrumentality as vehicle of modernization.

Bigness recognizes that architecture as we know it is in difficulty, but it does not overcompensate through regurgitations of even more architecture. It proposes a new economy in which no longer “all is architecture,” but in which a strategic position is regained through retreat and concentration, yielding the rest of a contested territory to enemy forces.

It is worth noting again that this piece was written in 1994. What has become OMA’s boldest signature piece is the CCTV Headquarters Building,  the prime shaker in the trio of buildings that define the complex. The other two buildings are the TVCC, aka Mandarin Oriental Hotel, which spectacularly burned on February 9, 2009, and the Service Building, the low profile “central energy center” of the complex. Filler describes it thusly:

What is likely to remain Koolhaas’s most controversial commission is now nearing completion in Beijing: the 4.2-million-square-foot China Central Television Headquarters, begun in 2004 and now at least three years behind its original estimated occupancy date, with an estimated cost of more than $800 million. (A disastrous 2009 fire, which destroyed the OMA-designed hotel next to the giant structure, was largely responsible for the delay.)
…

The glass-and-metal-skinned Beijing behemoth is basically a pair of slightly inward-leaning L-shaped towers on two opposing corners of a vast square, and joined at the top by a breathtaking right-angled cantilevered overhang that imbues the composition with gravity-defying bravado. The horizontal and vertical elements interconnect in a continuous series of eight segments, a snakelike circulation system quite unlike that of any other office-and-broadcasting facility.

With a plethora of bizarre new architecture engulfing them, baffled Beijingers have devised a new architectural lexicon recalling the wry coinages long perfected by witty Berliners, who, for example, have dubbed the glass dome of Norman Foster’s Reichstag renovation of 1992–1999 die Käseglocke (the cheese cover). Thus the two-legged CCTV colossus has become colloquially known as da kucha(big pants crotch). In trying to preempt a sarcastic nickname of this sort, officials wanted to get locals to refer to the CCTV building as zhi chuan—knowledge window—a pretentious choice that backfired because of its close homophonic echo of zhi chuang—hemorrhoid.

But whatever moniker people adopt, one can predict that they will be beguiled by the highly unusual and equally controlled tourist route that is being built through the CCTV nerve center. Visitors will be able to navigate the premises in one nonstop loop while never disturbing day-to-day activities, a sure-fire public relations coup that will confer a bogus semblance of transparency on what of course is anything but an open operation.

What is not mentioned in this piece is the client, China Central Television (CCTV), the “enemy forces” to which Koolhaas, OMA and architecture must yield. While what goes on inside the building remains a mystery — interior changes that have been made to the original design remain shrouded in the ‘brand’ silence — one obvious external change that sticks out like the outsized head of a colossal roofing nail left unashamedly proud is the circular helo deck–the welded ill-fitting skullcap that dulls the impact of the symbolic threat of the work. The decision to plop it atop the structure is indicative of the client’s ignorance of what it really is they’ve purchased and have had built, as well as missing the point in how I imagine they would like to be perceived: they blunted their pummeling weapon! Their pseudo-imperial we’re-all-engineers-and-know-what’s-right arrogance is characteristic of official overbearing China, a ruling low class that elevates utility and cheapness above all other considerations. “We know what the Chinese people need, and what they need is a silly circular cap atop the unforgivingly rectilinear icon that hovers over their heads like some medieval weapon. It’s to mirror the shape of the sun. It’s feng shui. It’s a Kongzi cap. It’s what the Chairman, in all his waxen decrepitude, would have wanted if he’d lived this long. He still guides us.” They’ll say some such shit like this. And say it with a straight face. Lying, after all, is an art they’ve mastered.

The helm-boys just can’t NOT fuck up good space, and they’ve proven, without a doubt, that they’re champs at making bad cartoons. They’ve incompetently botched it all up. Beijing — nearly the entire city, and especially the concrete field of the Maoist monument to gigantism, Tian’anmen Square, with its fringe of pre-Legos block buildings (“We built the Great Hall of the People and those history/cultural things in ten months, and the Maosoleum in only six!” Really! … That long?!) — has been and continues to be an ongoing pillage. From September 30, 1949 — the day Mao “laid the foundation stone” for the Monument to the People’s Heroes — forward the Party has done their muscled best to uglify Beijing, capped by their macabre Olympian effort to turn the capital into a caricature of a real city once they scored the 2008 Games. Is this sort of incompetence an effect from a philistine pre-disposition for destruction? I don’t believe so. It’s just simple crass ignorance, unharnessed greed and a lack of any significant urban vision that drives them. It’s as if nearly every implemented decision has been made by a committee of urban illiterates who believe self-interest and foreign bank accounts will save them.

But it’s not as if there haven’t been people here fighting for a more consistent, respectful development of this great city, because there have been and the battle has been hard. Most of them, if not all, have essentially been, at best, blown off by those who’ve had no idea how much they didn’t/don’t know, by those who have lived and ruled by the diktat that the crudeness of political agendas draped in abstract ideals bereft of meaning always trumps good sense and aesthetic sensibility. Think of this whenever you’re stuck in traffic on the Second Ring Road, atop the old city walls that were torn down. The official greed and corruption that has driven Beijing’s most recent development has done it’s best to eviscerate a city and its history. Luckily for Beijing, the native Beijingers, a rowdy, expressive bunch, still give their city the flavor it so well deserves, even as so many of them have been and continue to be displaced to the fringes of the city, closer to Tianjin and Hebei province than they are to where they once lived. Those with the cash have taken the center, which is the recipe for disaster in China.

Though we have watched the anguished gutting of Beijing as urbanization continues to rock the population, we won’t know how much the original design of  the CCTV Building has been victimized by the ham-handed (and hame-headed) whims of key players within the Ministry of Truth. It looks as if we will find out, at least a bit, once the highly controlled public visitors loop is finally opened sometime later this year. We’ll probably be able to view about 1% of the total volume of the building, which is still a higher percentage than we glimpse of the machinations of the CPC. I guess we should be happy with just a peek.

An official from the General Administration of Sport of China (GASC) denied reports that athletes were banned in January from eating untested pork, beef and lamb in an attempt to avoid doping scandals in the run-up to the London Olympics.

Still, extreme caution is in order.

“The administration has never banned athletes from eating meat. It just reminded them to be on alert,” said Chen Zhiyu, head of the general office of GASC’s science and education department.

Chinese media reported earlier this month that Olympic champion hurdler Liu Xiang hasn’t eaten pork for years due to fears he could accidentally consume clenbuterol – known in China as “lean meat powder” – the banned performance-enhancing substance that led to Olympic judo champion Tong Wen’s two-year suspension in 2010.

“I specifically checked with the 110m hurdles team’s leader, Yang Jimin,” Chen said. “He felt pretty angry (when he heard the report). He emphasized Liu has never stopped eating pork.”

This is hardly a recent issue. I blogged about this problem in the lead-up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics when the sourcing of local food became an issue for a U.S. Olympic Committee caterer who came upon a 14″ half-breast of chicken in a local market – “enough to feed a family of eight” – that was riddled with steroids. “We had it tested and it was so full of steroids that we never could have given it to athletes. They all would have tested positive.” See here.

According to a 2008 article in the Daily Telegraph, “[T]he International Olympics Committee [IOC] previously stated competitors are banned from bringing their own food to the athletes’ village to protect the rights of sponsors like McDonalds and to police the use of illegal substances.” This is just another example of how collusive the IOC, and especially Jacques Rogge, was with the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad (BOCOG). This shoddy relationship between two corrupt organizations was a non-secret among those who paid the least bit of attention back in the oughts, after China bought was granted the Olympics.

According to this morning’s China Daily piece, “The World Anti-Doping Agency issued a warning last November to athletes traveling to China and Mexico, urging them to exercise extreme caution when eating meat.” That said, the Chinese athletes at the national training center in Beijing are forbidden to eat in restaurants outside the center, a restriction that I imagine pre-dates the World Anti-Doping Agency’s advisory by several years.

Whether or not Liu Xiang, the great hurdler, eats pork is his business, though in China pork is the deal. When you say meat (ròu) it means pork. The character for both family and home is a pig beneath a roof. Here, pork is deep, which explains why Chen Zhiyu so adamantly disputes Liu’s reported pork snub.

In fairness, this is not exclusively a Chinese problem. Laced food is finding its way into the worldwide consumption chain, though in China it is easy to imagine that there is more juicing of livestock going on than anywhere else. It’s a numbers thing, not necessarily a cultural one. There are a lot more people in China doing what they think must be done in order to get by. Trying to make money is not easy, unless, of course, you’re at the top of the CPC heap, where there’s more money than a mule can shit. Just don’t try eating the mule. If you do, there may be no gold medals in your future, and you’re going to have to buy bigger hats. It’s that Barry Bonds thing all over again.

One of my favorite barometers measuring backstage Beijing is the large billboard wall on the northeast side of the Goumao flyover between Guanghua Lu and and the center of the Guomao interchange. This particularly conspicuous message board has been one of the many sites that has prominently displayed Chaoyang District’s tiresomely adolescent PR broadside of Civilized Chaoyang. I first wrote about it 20 months ago here. The campaign has been underway since at least April 2010. That this billboard is now blank heralds an imminent change. Will it be as goofy as the last one, or will it end up being even goofier. Either way, we can pretty much count on it being witlessly puerile propaganda, which is about as close as China can get to implementing soft power. I’ll keep you posted on how this space changes, though I’m betting it will still refer to the 2008 Olympic foreign architecture. Some things, like Beijing’s nasal fishing fetish, just can’t be shaken.

And here is one more before I get into further mischief. Below is still, though barely, the building at the southeast corner of Guanghua Lu and the Third Ring Road. It has been an advertising cash cow for the owners, Tsinghua U or some other educational agency where the accumulation of money is the only measure of intelligence. Located across the street from the CCTV Headquarters Bldg. – the highest profile architectural project in Beijing – this ugly brick lump has been the site of giant advertisements, my favorite being “Air France Business Class, comfort” (with full moon rising) from the end of 2010. As I write on this Christmas afternoon, the once 16 (or so) story building is a crumbled nub. Here are a few of the final bricks in that once-expensive wall as gravity calls them home.

Happy Holidays!

(Click on the pics to see them bigger!)

On November 22 I went to the Terminal 3 of the Beijing Capital Airport to meet a friend who was to stay with us for a week. At 11:00 AM when she arrived the air was ‘Very Unhealthy.’ According to the air quality readings tweeted nearly every hour by the U.S. Embassy – much to the chagrin and protests of the Chinese government – the PM2.5 reading was 273. (PM2.5 is the invisible particulate matter that works its way into your lungs and does the most damage, a standard international measurement that the Chinese have, though they refuse to make their readings public. As we left the airport I told her that the smog would probably clear over the next few hours since the wind was predicted to rise. And rise it did, taking all the nastiness south that day. By 3:00 PM it was a ‘Good’ 39 and the wind was ripping. In fact it ripped so much that evening it ended up ripping part of the roof off Terminal 3, though one of the architects involved with the project said that substandard materials or installation – not design flaws – are likely to blame for wind blowing parts of the roof off Beijing’s three-year-old Terminal 3. And it’s not hard to believe that assessment. The wind was barely over 50 MPH, not enough to damage a properly installed roof at the world’s largest showboat airport, though enough to drive Beijing’s toxic air somewhere else. The air quality remained in the breathable range, below ‘Unhealthy,’ until the following evening: 11-23-2011; 23:00; PM2.5; 72.0; 155; Unhealthy.

For the next 116 hours (4 hours shy of 5 complete days) the air quality stayed ‘Unhealthy’ or above, before returning to what would be considered ‘healthy’ for anyone without respiratory problems, though not for sensitive groups. 11-28-2011; 19:00; PM2.5; 64.0; 148; Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups. In other words for a 116 hour stretch Beijing air was deemed ‘Unhealthy’ or worse, and often the quality reading drifted into the ‘Very Unhealthy’ and ‘Hazardous’ ranges. Of that 116 hour stretch, 24 hours were deemed ‘Hazardous’, ranging from 301 to 393.

The days between then and now have not been all that different: a few ‘Good’ and ‘Moderate’ periods, though mostly ‘Unhealthy’ and above. The exception has been the period we are in at the moment. As I write the PM 2.5 readings have been pegged in the ‘Hazardous’ zone since yesterday (Sunday) afternoon, 12-04-2011; 16:00; PM2.5; 406.0; 438; Hazardous, more than 19 hours ago. A few hours after the air quality entered the ‘Hazardous’ zone it reached the unmeasurable range (what some have unofficially deemed “Crazy Bad”) @ 12-04-2011; 19:00; PM2.5; 522.0; 500; Beyond Index, which is somewhat akin to WWI trench warfare air. How far ‘Beyond Index’ was it? There’s no way of knowing that, though if the CN.gov folks do, they aren’t about to tell anyone. In fact I’m surprised they haven’t sniped the measurement machine on top of the U.S. Embassy, yet. They hate it. Recently there have been at least two smartphone applications that republish the hourly U.S. Embassy readings. But despite a rise in requests to come clean with the real information, the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau has refused to make that data available. {In Chinese}

For more see The Ministry of Tofu’s Photos: Smog-shrouded China denies citizens right to know pollutant measurements. Also have a look at this photo taken at the Beijing Capital Airport last night by @kinablog who was on an Air China flight that was grounded due to the heavy smog.

Though Beijing is an international capital, the government has yet to learn how to responsibly deal with their people. My rough estimate is that at least 97% of the people who live in Beijing are Chinese, not expats. And as everyone knows, expats are whiners. We complain, because that’s what we do. We complain about staying here as this problem continues to worsen. And though I can hardly speak for anyone else, I do know someone close who has left, and we, her parents, will be leaving here in June at the end of contract. There are several reasons to leave, and general quality of 21 C. life issues are big (how can you be competitive when your internet connection is blocked, choked, and hobbled – my connection speed has regressed to 1995 dial-up speeds.) But breathable air has become the primary reason.

But this isn’t about us, China. This is about  the Chinese. The majority of people who are affected by this insane level of pollution are your parents and grandparents. But it will all catch up to you later. So before you start writing to me to call me what you guys sometimes call me, look at yourselves. This is damaging you and your families. It’s your health that’s being destroyed. Then if you still want to write a comment telling me to do things to myself that “just ain’t right,” in English that isn’t either, go right ahead. I’ll delete you as I always do while I’m still able to breathe.

Update December 5, 2011, 1900 CST
The irrepressible Global Times has just published Metrological authorities deny heavy fog is pollution. It is always difficult to know what to do with the Global Times. Reworking it into 4″ rolls and placing it in public latrines usually comes to mind, but they’re also digital, which means they last far beyond the first [s]wipe. My favorite lines are:

Zhang Mingying, a meteorological engineer at the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, told the Global Times on Monday that the recent fog is normal in terms of frequency during this time of year according to their monitoring.

“Heavy fog has occurred 6 times a year on average over the past 30 years and December’s fog was the seventh occurrence this year. Therefore, it is a normal climate condition in Beijing,” said Zhang.

I will not get into the classification of what is or is not normal, though I will say that periods of fog occur in Beijing with great frequency before winter sets in hard and after it loses it grip, which makes November/December and late February/March notoriously susceptible to catastrophic fog events. But when they happen the moisture in the air holds all those little particles that are floating about, which is what turns fog into smog. So, in a relatively pre-industrial China you could call it fog and get away with it. But in nowaday China, your early morning waking mouth tells the tale: it tastes like you’ve been breast-stroking through a pool of battery acid, and two cups of strong coffee hardly cuts the bitter tang. We generally call that pollution. In the world of real people we understand that fog catches all that shit and keeps it low to the ground. So, while fog may be the problem, in an uncontrolled environment like Beijing, it quickly goes “all pollution.” This is like Reader’s Digest science. To deny that the fog is pollution is like …ah, ah, ah … don’t use a fractured metaphor (which is what a simile is)! These guys don’t get metaphors unless it’s a real club and they can beat someone over the head with it. At any rate, the Global Times has shown their flame reddest ass. Makes you just want to pinch their little cheeks as you heave them into the miasma of their smog.

I also ended up taking a couple of spins around the CCTV Bldg. Two of the photos below reference the former Mandarin Oriental Beijing, aka Television Culture Center (TVCC), which is the the northern sibling to the larger CCTV Headquarters Building. The TVCC building was nearly completed in February 2009 when an illegal fireworks display, organized by the almighty China Central Television, caused a fire that ravaged the building. (You can see a video of the fire here.) So, what you see below is the reconstruction, which seems to be going along quite well. There is a photo here of what the building looked like a few months before the fire. (Click on the pics below to see a larger versions in a lightbox.)

The organization behind the project is called the Asia Pacific Exchange and Cooperation Foundation (APECF), a quasi-governmental non-governmental organisation. Its executive vice president, Xiao Wunan, is a member of the Communist Party and holds a position at the National Development and Reform Commission, a state agency.

The Walt Disney Corp. tried to do the same sort of thing with Disney’s America, an American history theme park planned for Loudoun County, VA in the early 1990s with the help of outgoing Virginia governor Doug Wilder, though citizen groups’ resistance was enough to save Sally Hemmings from total obscurity.

But this proposed Lumbini project may actually be a blessing for Tibetan Buddhism, legitimizing them as the only non-sellouts to the Chinese ‘religious machine’ and their who’s in/who’s out classifications. Will other international Buddhist leaders have the stomach for the Chinese determining who is and who is not a Buddhist? We’ll see, but money has always been the catalyst for powerful, selective ignorance. And in the dueling Buddhist circles – “my lineage is truer than yours” – sidelining the Tibetans may be seen by some as the fortuitous thing to do. Right thinking is not as easy to attain as one might think, even in the sphere of the venerables.

According to Chan, “Some 500,000 visitors already make the pilgrimage to Lumbini every year. This could balloon to millions of visitors each year when the project is complete.” So, the question that needs to be asked is if the Chinese secure this project and “as Chinese construction companies line up for a portion of the $3bn pie,” how many of the current pilgrims would be able to afford a trip to the Buddha’s birthplace? If ticket prices in China for once affordable tourist sites are any indication, it will not be the low-income faithful who will be able to cough up the admittance fees. Chinese economics and Buddhist economics are cloths cut from entirely different bolts.

But the Dharamsala boys have always been much better at international spin than the Chinese. After all, they have a lot more practice at it than the Chinese. While China was frenetically feeding on itself throughout the entire Mao era, the monks were out and about weaving a tale of the peaceful warriors and spreading it throughout the financially comfortable West. You can bet they’re doing their best now to get out in front of this Lumbini affair, too, though Nepal, a regional lapdog of China  - and a key stepping stone for Tibetans escaping to Dharamsala – will do what they are told to do by their northern neighbor. Look for Gere and the Gang to go into smiling overdrive. Perhaps someday they’ll also turn their attention to the deeply imbedded misogyny that still rules the Tibetan world and keeps the monkish set anchored in the dark ages. Until the Tibetans can begin to see that their women are their most valuable asset (many Tibetan men still firmly believe that women are women because of past life karmic indiscretions, a primitive view at best), they will muddle about and continue to lose ground to the more powerful and moneyed Chinese. But Lumbini? I have a feeling that they’ll be onto that. It may very well be another case of Chinese overreach. After all, it’s about time for another Chinese Olympic Torch equivalency. Let’s hope the international Buddhist community is up to it.

________

Update, July 29th, 2011

Ths from the China Digital Times announcing the rejection of the Lumbini project by the Nepalese gorbernment:

Less than a fortnight after a Chinese nongovernmental organisation announced its plan for what amounted to a virtual takeover of Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in Nepal, Nepal’s government on Thursday unceremoniously rejected it, saying it would not entertain any deal struck in a third country without the participation of the actual stakeholders.

“Nepal is the actual stakeholder,” said Modraj Dottel, spokesperson of Nepal’s culture ministry that governs Lumbini, the town in southern Nepal that is the destination of thousands of pilgrims and Buddhist scholars worldwide, and a Unesco-declared World Heritage Site. “How can we own a deal struck in a third country without the formal consent of the actual stakeholder?” […]

Since the announcement of the MoU, the Foundation has been under media glare in Nepal, which has been less than flattering. The Nepali media has specially highlighted the fact that the Foundation’s members include Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda and his bete noir, ousted crown prince Paras Bir Bikram Shah.

When the Chinese authorities detained human rights lawyer Teng Biao last year, they had little patience with his legal objections.

‘Don’t talk so much about the law with me. Do you know where we are? We are on Communist Party territory!’ they told him. ‘You belong to the enemy! … In that case, we don’t have to talk about legal constraints at all!’

And just in case anyone wasn’t getting the message about the role of law in the system, last month a spokeswoman from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jiang Yu, warned journalists not to imagine they could ‘use the law as a shield.’

As the authorities have made clear, political power in modern China is not and will not be constrained by law…..

Since late February, there has been a wave of detentions and disappearances of lawyers, activists and others in China. Especially alarming to many is the government’s apparent disdain for even the modest requirements of its own laws. While some have been detained or arrested in accordance with procedures required under Chinese law, others have simply been picked up by security officials and disappeared. These detentions reflect a deep truth about the system that observers are often tempted to overlook: that China’s legal system has never been about the rule of law. It has been and remains about making government function more effectively.

What is and has been clear to anyone who has paid even a little attention to China in the past decade is that Chinese laws in the PRC are not for the protection of the people. The point of all laws is to protect the power and secrecy of the CCP. All else is subordinate to that. (For those unaware, the Chinese government is not the CCP, though all members of the government are CCP members. The Party is the deep material shadow giving shape to the exoskeleton of what passes for a legitimate government. The multi-nationals need that allusion of legitimacy.)

Richard McGregor, in his fine book The Party: The Secret World of China’s Ruling Party, nails it:

Over time, the Party’s secrecy has gone beyond habit and become essential to its survival, by shielding it from the reach of the law and the wider citizenry. Ordinary citizens can sue the government in China these days, and many do, although they may stand little chance of success. But they cannot sue the Party, because there is nothing to sue. ‘It is dangerous and pointless to try to sue the Party,’ He Weifang, at the time a law professor at Peking University, one of China’s oldest and most prestigious educational institutions, told me. ‘As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal identity, in other words, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system altogether.’ The Party demands that social organizations all register with government bodies, and punishes those which don’t. The Party, however, has never bothered to meet this standard itself, happily relying on the single line in the preamble of the constitution, about its ‘leading role’, as the basis for its power.”, [Richard McGregor, The Party]

There is no point beating this horse, since it’s already thoroughly dead, though the charade of a society governed by law does provide opportunities for absurd guffaws, especially when Foreign Ministry sycophants evangelize about the rule of law. But there is a deeper purpose for mentioning this dysfunctional view of law and power; it explains the Party’s seeming total disconnect in their perceptions of and relations with the rest of the world, especially those parts of the world where totalitarianism is looked upon as a politically abhorrent (and aberrant) system: the party elites seem to sincerely believe their own propaganda that there is actually a rule of law that favors the Chinese people. It is a highly blinkered and politically aphasic front that continues to do them great harm beyond their borders. But don’t look for reform anytime soon. In fact, expect to see more of what we are already seeing: a reactionary return to those thrilling days of yesteryear when fear owned the day and Red was waved as a proto-cybernetic response to the firmest hand.

But how this plays outside of China is another thing altogether, despite most of the world ceding economic super status to the cloned men in suits. In the wake of the current International Monetary Fund (IMF) scandal, which has vacated the top seat at the Fund, China is making a lot of noise about wanting someone from a BRIC nation to fill the empty seat, even calling for democratic consultation. Of course, China would love to see that person come from Beijing, but the chances of that happening are slim-to-none. No, actually we can drop slim and peg it at none. As long as the Chinese legal system (with its trademark highly-dependent judiciary and its dedication to disappearing anyone who doesn’t clap for their performances) is subservient to the CCP, there is no possible way for anyone Chinese to be taken as a serious player in ascending to the IMF throne. Even the IMF is not sloppy enough to anoint a person perceived to be under the thumb of a financially-controlling higher power, especially one that prides itself on remaining outside the dictates of any human, natural or divine law.

But when the inevitable happens – a non-Chinese IMF head (if it’s not a French woman, I’d be stunned) and the Party hacks express their deep, deep, disappointment at the continuation of the status quo, they may actually sound sincere, though it will probably come off as buddies-squeezing shrill. No one will be surprised, except the Chinese, who will then beat this dead horse even deader. There may even be the collective reproach which includes the masses of Chinese “hurt feelings.” Just remember that they will be playing for the home team crowd, while not quite understanding that the rest of the world is watching too. And that outside world will be giving them another failing adolescent grade.

On May 12, 2008 I was working at my home in Tianjin. At two in the afternoon I lay down to take a break, more rest than sleeping nap, since if I do actually slip into sleep it’s generally shallow, shadowy and brief. At 2:28 I woke with a start; my sense was there had been an odd noise, though I couldn’t actually say what it was. A glance out the window didn’t reveal anything out of the ordinary. Within less than a minute my cellphone was buzzing with a text from my daughter in Beijing, “Did you feel that?” I cannot say that I felt anything, though obviously I had sensed that something had happened. I immediately got online as the news of the Wenchuan Earthquake began to unfold in real time. At that point the CPC was still trying to play good (or rather as good as they have ever been able to play) for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), who had been carrying the Party’s water since July, 2001 when they’d awarded Beijing the 2008 Olympics. The internet wasn’t as thoroughly blocked as it is today, and with a country full of international reporters who were cranking up for the Games, it was hard to ignore and control the outflow of info that was beginning to come from the stricken area. My first thought was “the schools.” I wrote about this in a blogpost a few days after the event.

While the earthquake disaster moves from the primary focus of rescue to the grimmer work of recovery and cleanup, there will, no doubt, be some hard questions asked, especially regarding the safety of schools. In fact, parents are asking those questions now as they sort through the bodies and the rubble. As the news continues to come in the number of injuries and deaths related to collapsing schools is horrifying, and as one who has spent a bit of time in countryside schools, I must say I am stunned at the level of damage but not surprised.

Actually within minutes of the earthquake I was making calls to one particular school in northeast Qinghai that I’d been working with since 2005, and where I had spent long blocks of time living in a building which I knew from the first day I entered it, would pancake in a second in a temblor. Living in a cold concrete bunker of a room on the first floor of a four-story building, guaranteed an expeditious death. At 55 years old and with a good deal of construction experience, it was an understandable risk. But for the students, all of whom were between 12 and 19, I suspected that death by collapsing building was not something that played out in the imagined scenes of their unfolding lives. Generally, a death of people in their fifties is more expected and therefore more acceptable than the death of children.

Although I had no problem getting in touch with people in Qinghai and learning that all there was well, I still felt sick knowing that the poor construction I’d seen in Qinghai was probably no different than the school construction in the earthquake-stricken area of the Sichuan countryside. It didn’t take long for the news of the many collapsed schools to go public. Within less than an hour the initial word was out: schools full of children had crumbled like crackers. Even the Party couldn’t stop the truth of it, which was laid bare for everyone to see. Later, the term “tofu construction” entered the vocabulary, as the number of dead students (officially 5,335 students dead, 546 disabled) and the exposed wreckage of the schools became the most powerful indictment of officially sanctioned graft and corruption: the inadequate rebar (concrete reinforcing bar) and poor quality of concrete was open for inspection. Other people’s children, after all, are not nearly as profitable as a good school construction project where everyone with a Party tag is “on the tit.” Short this, short that and pretty soon lots of money is finding its way into officials’ pockets.

School age children who qualify for mandatory national funding – Grades 1 through 9 – are worth truckloads of money to the officials who handle them. In one area I worked in, the official roll for a junior middle school swelled by 200 names in the week prior to the annual visitation by the prefecture head counter. His job was to check the number of students actually attending school as a confirmation for allocating money. The names that were added to the list were both real and imagined children, though non of them were actually students. The real children were distant pastoralists, mostly girls, who were seen as non-educable by their families who had better, break-backing things for them to do at home. Though the families risked fines by not sending their children to school, there was an agreement that fines would be overlooked if the truants showed up at school for one week, doubled/tripled up in bunks with actual students, so they could be there if the head counter actually found his way beyond the administration office and, in fact, counted heads in something that might look like an official roll call: checking the submitted lists of names with the faces of students in the classrooms. But getting past the handshakes in the office was about as likely to happen as the sun setting in the east. The imagined children were fabricated names that could be conveniently claimed as being in the latrine, at the hospital or off doing a school-related chore if anyone official ever came to class to look for them. On the day the counter showed up he was greeted by a long double line of school and local education bureau officials as he was escorted from the front gate into the admin office. Twenty minutes later he left the office and was escorted back to his car and driver. The count was good without a head being counted. I imagined there was a lot of “cross my heart” going on. Schools are money machines, not just in China, (read here), though there are more students and more schools with more education officials than any other place in the world, which means that more palms need to be greased along the way. And with a long, long history of entrenched corruption, there is a tendency for it to get out of control, which is what happened in Sichuan. Money trumped the safety of children and schools came tumbling down. Unfortunately, the national government and its servile judiciary were not up to the task of punishing anyone for the deaths of so many children who’d been placed in their charge. Responsibility is an abstraction. Money, on the other hand, is palpable. So, when there is no will there is no way. And when someone brings that to their attention, the only thing to do is to toss that someone in the hopper.
________

According to a post at Global Voices China: Everybody can Become Ai Weiwei, a search of “Ai Weiwei” on Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging service, returns the following message:

In accordance with the relevant laws, regulations and policies, the search results have not been displayed.

_________

Ai Weiwei has been a thorn in the Party’s side for years, though in the last several he has become more than just a prickly annoyance. As the Party has dressed up their politics in their best wavy, wide stripes and goofy, baggy plaids, with their punchy red noses and tooting bicycle horns, Ai has been there to let them know how clownish they look, how clownish they are, that not everyone feels good about clowns, especially when they hurt the trusting children in the first few rows who came thinking they were going to get a good show. (I am not even going to get into the tainted milk scandals, which seems to never really go away despite court/police officials dropping several folks with bullets to the head. Nor will I get into any details on the psychotic mass killings of school children last year that set the whole country on edge. Not being able to contain this sort of adult violence against the young continues to add more fuel to the instability fire.)

And then there was this from a China Geeks post in 2009:

Ai Weiwei, a respected Chinese citizen, began a “Wenchuan Earthquake Deceased Students” public investigation on December 15, 2008, and in connection with volunteers, he verifies the situations of those students who were killed. He is preparing to publish this investigation on the anniversary of the earthquake in 2009. He wants to oppose the government’s intentional abstraction and the forgetfulness already oozing throughout the public. He says, “Those kids, they have fathers and mothers, they had dreams and laughs, they had their own names. This name belongs to them, in three, five, ten, nineteen years perhaps they will all be remembered.”

Of all the things Ai has done, his work in trying to identify and count the number of school children killed in the Wenchuan earthquake has probably earned him more bad credits in the Red Zone than his trashing of the Olympics, his smacking down of the Bird’s Nest, the national icon which he helped design, and his countless other jabs at the shoe-lifted dye heads. Attempting to tell the truth about the crimes that led to the mass deaths of innocents is why official China has been so brutal when it comes to silencing anyone who probes into the Sichuan disaster. Ai’s support of Tan Zuoren, a man who was working on a project known as “5.12 Student Archive” took Ai to Sichuan for Tan’s trial. Tan was on trial for defaming the Communist Party of China, ostensibly for writing about Tian’anmen, 1989 on overseas websites, but everyone knew that it had to do with Tan building a database of students killed in the earthquake. Before he was arrested all his computers and records had already been seized. He is now doing five years for “inciting subversion of state power.”

Ai went to Chengdu to testify at Tan’s trial, and in the process was arrested by the police and severely beaten. ArtAsiaPacific has a good account of the events here. Below is a short sample, though I strongly urge you to read the entire piece.

Ai remained in Beijing for three weeks after the beating in Chengdu before flying to Munich on September 13. While in Beijing, he repeatedly complained of dizziness and headaches, but attributed these symptoms to exhaustion. The dizziness became acute after arrival in Munich, where Ai was to install his solo exhibition “So Sorry” at the city’s venerable Haus der Kunst, a show in which artworks related to the Sichuan Earthquake Names Project have a prominent place. Constructed for the exhibition, Remembering (2009) decorates the facade of the museum with 9,000 children’s school bags that form the sentence “She lived happily for seven years in this world.” Inside the museum, blog entries are mounted on panels above which hangs an image, taken by Ai on August 11, of uniformed police outside his hotel room in Chengdu. The grainy photograph depicts Ai smiling wryly as an officer looks on uncomfortably.

Tan Zuoren, Ai Weiwei and others took matters into their own hands after the government’s promise of a full investigation into government malfeasance, which was the root cause of the collapsed schools, never happened. In a mandated single-child world the people expect those who wield the biggest club to protect their single children, each and every one of them, no matter how unconnected they are. This is at the heart of the current Chinese rule. With the people it’s not about the money as much as it is about their children. And if the Party wants to keep the rule they best protect them. And this is what the officials know, why they dragged their feet on investigating the crimes of the state against the people, and why they are hyper-sensitive to any criticism leveled at them.

Zhongnanhai knows that they can build infrastructure, provide low wage jobs and “juke the stats” to make it look as if they’re doing everybody “right down the middle.” But they also know that money can’t buy you love. (There’s not one of them that has a real friend, which is not much different than their counterparts in D.C. It goes with the territory of rule.) And money can’t replace your child, despite the fact that so many of the officials living high on the education hog will try to tell you otherwise. They’re too busy grabbing the money in order to try to send their kids to schools abroad. It’s the greatest scam going here in China. Give us your children, we’ll teach them to read. And all of them can advance too, as long as they can pass the Communist Party politics tests.

When Ai Weiwei disappeared at the Beijing Capital Airport on the morning of April 3, 2011, a questioning world was met with silence. The mainland Chinese part of the world is used to this silence. Truth be known, most of mainland China probably has no idea who Ai Weiwei is, though it’s a safe bet that more of them know of his father, Ai Qing, an esteemed poet who was eventually purged and sent to Xinjiang to clean public toilets in 1958, when Ai was a year-old. The family was allowed to return to Beijing in 1975. But in international circles Ai is a well-known and respected artist. His latest work, Sunflower Seeds, is currently on exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. For a great look at Ai Weiwei and this monumental project I’d suggest you take 15-minutes to watch this short documentary, which also shows the economic advantages that Ai and his art has brought to Jingdezhen, a provincial town in rural Jiangxi province, known historically as the “Porcelain Capital.”

The first official admission of his detention came from the Global Times, a Party-controlled, nationalistic attempt at journalism, though it is often more the butt of journalistic jokes and eye-rolling disgust. Below is a short example of another crass GT attempt at journalism (I’d suggest you follow the link and read the whole thing):

Ai Weiwei likes to do something “others dare not do.” He has been close to the red line of Chinese law. Objectively speaking, Chinese society does not have much experience in dealing with such persons. However, as long as Ai Weiwei continuously marches forward, he will inevitably touch the red line one day.

In such a populous country as China, it is normal to have several people like Ai Weiwei. But it is also normal to control their behaviors by law. In China, it is impossible to have no persons like Ai Weiwei or no “red line” for them in law.

Actually China has a lot of “experience in dealing with such persons.” Chinese prisons, mental hospitals and re-education camps have seen their share of “such persons” for a long time now. This take on things – we are so harmonious that only a mere handful ever dissent – is China playing the victim again. This is what they do best. It called systemic deflection: “Everyone’s bad but us, and those of us who are bad have the rest of the world to blame.” But in the oft-mentioned long history of China, no one has ever done the Chinese as badly as the Chinese have done themselves. This fact is not part of the national curriculum, but “The other guys are always to blame for everything” is. I won’t go into details here, but this is all pretty clear, even if it isn’t in the party’s history books. I can’t help but mention two glaring examples: The Yellow River Flood of 1938, when Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) blew the dikes along the Yellow River and drowned at least 800,000 Chinese in Central China; and the Party inspired Great Famine of 1958-62, which conservatively killed 30 million, though new estimates have suggested that the number may be closer to 45 million. So much for the harmonious ditties, external excuses and blood-loving foreign invaders.

What we see with Ai Weiwei and the long list of others who have disappeared into the system is the tragedy we live in, the place where we both turn and burn. It’s what we do because there’s nothing else we can do. The rats have taken the tower. And as Bob once said …. (Naaah, I won’t go with Bob here, because Bob played Beijing with a set list approved by the Ministry of Truth, which is different than The Eagles playing China. “Welcome to the Hotel California” is not a threat to the rats running around nibbling at your feet as you squat in the facilities. Bob, on the other hand, used to write songs that addressed oppression and the irresponsible wielding of power by a heavy-handed state. But that was long ago when money wasn’t so easy to get.) Instead I’ll go with the Grateful Dead.

He’s gone.
He’s gone.
Nothing’s gonna bring him back.
He’s gone.

Not Norway. Not Obama. Not Bill Clinton. Not Bill Gates, who all Chinese youth once wanted to be. (Not really, they just wanted his money.) And not Bishop Tutu who, despite the well-known fact among most Chinese that there is no racism in China, is an African, and no Chinese leader worth his weight in mapo doufu is going to pay the least bit of attention to a black man. Henry K. might be able to pull it off, but for an artist? Naaah, I don’t think so. He’s already got his, and this new breed of boys – even though they will soon enough be the old boys – were unable to discover and/or use the great Tom Lehrer line, “Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize,” as a response to Liu Xiaobo winning one while he sits rotting in their prison. Of course, trashing Henry Kissinger would not do the Chinese any favors, since he was the man who oiled their rusted hinges and helped them peek out onto the world while they were still killing each other in the Cultural Revolution. Using Kissinger as a stepping-stone joke is not their style. Satire isn’t either. It’s that “not getting it” thing, same as it ever was.

But now they seem to be going for an historic two in a row, which will really oil the wheels of their rapidly nosediving international credibility. They might think they own the world, but they don’t quite yet understand that it is not actually theirs to own, and that it will never be. As the chaos they so much fear continues to consume them, they might eventually do what they always do: sink the fleet, close the doors and make life even harder for the people. It’s that tight little circle of Chinese history that replays itself over and over. And it seems to be getting constrictively tighter in the age of techno-wizardry with changes coming faster than they are able to stay on top of. Their greatest weakness is that they have never learned how to do PR. For them brute force is the go-to guy every single time. The Tibetans have bruised them badly in the PR game, and still they have not been able to learn.

So, this is why China will never be a “super-power.” The rulers take the very best and eat them, right down to the shiny bones. Then they break them and suck out the marrow, because that’s just what they do, what they have always done. It is truly amazing just how much they really hate the people, especially those who stand up for the smallest among them, the poor and their children who have yet to develop a voice.

And even as I write the next news report comes in on more children’s deaths from drinking tainted milk: Tainted milk kills three children in China.

(CNN) — Three children have died and 35 others have been hospitalized after drinking what officials suspect was milk contaminated with nitrite, the official Xinhua news agency reported Friday.

Most of the surviving patients are under the age of 14. One was in critical condition, Xinhua reported.

The suspect milk came from two dairy farms near Pingliang, Xinhua reported, citing the city government and health bureau.

The farms have been shut down and their managers were being investigated, Xinhua reported.

It’s the children, boys. The people’s children. If you can’t protect them, then who can you protect? This is the most unsettling root of social instability. You can take the fields and grasslands, and you can take the tents and homes, but once you take the children, there is no lower you can go. And in their rush to stop the truth being told, they will silence all those who attempt to tell the real story. Inciting subversion of state power may very well be in Ai Weiwei’s future. Truth has many disjointed synonyms here. This is one of them, and unfortunately for China, it’s the one the children will learn as they slowly lose their youth, then their faith and finally their voices.

And despite this grim assessment I still maintain hope that someone, sometime – which I hope will be in the near-future – will listen to reason and understand that imprisoning the best is a recipe for disaster. World histories are full of examples. And if that sort of basic understanding of humanity and history will finally happen, then maybe someday the best of China will no longer be gone.