How does he deal with a country where democracy is a work in progress? “I’m happy you use the term ‘work in progress,’ because I think that is the essence of China,” he says. “It’s not a perfect situation, but what is important is that CCTV [China Central Television] is not directly an element of the state.

In 2005 as the project began emerging from the ground, in a special issue of Architecture+Urbanism dedicated to the CCTV project, Ole Scheeren who was then the head architect of the project – in 2009 he left the firm and set out on his own – stated in the introduction to the issue:

As the national television station, CCTV has a direct relationship to the State — is information filter and propaganda machine — and receives subsidies to fulfil this role.

Scheeren goes on to say that the “economic dependency [of CCTV] is deceptive,” that the amount of tax revenues CCTV returns to the State through advertising revenues outlegs the State subsidies by “four or five times,” and that the amount of return could pay for the headquarters building in just a year. Whether that is true or not is anyone’s guess, since the only ones who might possibly know the true cost of the project are the bean counters in the State Council of the People’s Republic of China, though I imagine the duties are sliced and diced so thoroughly that no one other than a single guy – or a single Top Secret redline – knows the actual cost to date. Suffice it to say that any early estimates have long since been mightily heaved beneath the bus as costs have, literally, skyrocketed through the roof (remember the TVCC fire?). But I wander.

The more interesting comparison is what is the difference between Koolhaas’s “CCTV is not directly an element of the state,” and Scheeren’s “CCTV has a direct relationship with the State.” There is obviously a hair-splitting semantic distinction here, though the bigger question still remains, “If not ‘direct’ then how would one describe CCTV’s relationship to the State?”

The CCTV English: About Us page clearly states that “China Central Television (CCTV) is the national TV station of the People´s Republic of China and it is one of China’s most important news broadcast companies. Today, CCTV has become one of China’s most influential media outlets.”

Again, this doesn’t really clear it up, though “national” in relation to CCTV clearly has a different meaning than the “national” in, say, NBC. The National Broadcasting Company does not introduce itself as the “national TV station of the United States of America.” That sounds like something we’d expect to see from the Murdoch/Fox folks, though even they have just enough sense to restrain themselves; “fair and balanced” is about as far as they can stretch it without coming completely apart at the seams.

Wikipedia puts it thusly:

China Central Television falls under the supervision of the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television which is in turn subordinate to the State Council of the People’s Republic of China [which is largely synonymous with the Central People's Government]. A Vice Minister of the state council serves as chairman of CCTV.
…
The network’s principal directors and other officers are appointed by the State, and so are the top officials at local conventional television stations in mainland China; nearly all of them are restricted to broadcasting within their own province or municipality.

The suctioning tentacles of “State” feel wetly icky and pretty direct to me. So, why this distancing by Koolhaas? Why this denial of directness? More Koolhaas leg-pulling? Perhaps. Or is this just wishful thinking, a musing attempt to deflect the criticism that OMA has received for building one of the great buildings of the age for a reactive totalitarian government that is getting more reactive and repressive every day? Hard to know. And I’m betting Koolhaas won’t ever say.

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!)

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.)

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.

Dear Chinese Footballheads,
Beating Qatar is not worthy of frenzied celebration.
Do the math!

Over the past 5-6 weeks we’ve seen China twirl into a mighty and very public tailspin, though the actual trajectory of the plunge has been much longer than that. But from mid-February, the government security forces have taken it to the streets, both publicly and privately. To call them ‘goon squads’ is being kind. In my neighborhood the red-armed banded low-paid lackeys have taken over, 24-7. Though they are nominally traffic controllers, I’d bet my limbs that none of them have ever sat through a traffic control class: every long, black sedan seems to get a “pass” nod; I will not even begin to try to plumb the Freudian depths of this one.

So this week we find official China in their “going nuts” phase, where anything that moves is suspect, and where everything that doesn’t is a threat. A  legitimate question to ask is: “Is China coming off the rails?” And the answer is…? “Well, perhaps.” There’s nothing like “regime change” to make the nuts evens nuttsier. While the passing of power from the entrenched Hu Jintao to the very shaky and equally corrupt Xi Jinping seems like a no-brainer, there are no no-brainers in China. All exchanges, from local buses to a Zhongnanhai contaminated pig feed  diet, are disputable negotiations. That’s what happens in a Chinese people’s republic. It really has nothing to do with the people or a republic. It’s all about who’s bigger. It’s like Zeus and the Titans. Welcome to the primitive.

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This John Garnaut piece on Chongqing and the very criminal dealing of its mayor, Bo Xilai and the resurgent Red, is a must-read, Show them the money, old China:  as is his China’s disappearances are difficult to stomach

________

If you haven’t been paying attention, you have missed the news that China has arrested or disappeared scores of people over the last month, mostly lawyers, writers and activists. Over the weekend Yang Hengjun, (aka Henry Yang), a former employee of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is now an Australian passport holder, novelist and popular Chinese language blogger, went missing. He phoned a colleague from Guangzhou airport saying that he was being followed by three men. Later he rang his sister in Australia and through a code informed her that he was being held by the Chinese secret police. Although he has been purportedly released is purportedly safe, there is no dodging the fact that China blatantly lied about his disappearance, which is not a big surprise.

When the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) spokesperson Jiang Yu was questioned about the status of Mr. Yang she responded with the unbelievable statement, “I’ve not heard about this person’s case.”  Jiang Yu, MOFA’s straw dog interpreter of the Party’s oracular pronouncements, is well-known for her amazingly artless dodges. Truth has never been her (or MOFA’s) best suit, but considering who she fronts, I’d venture she often ‘meets the press’ with a blank in the chamber and a fully empty clip. The last thing the boys behind the scenes want is a spokesperson who knows anything, for fear she might slip up, something neither they nor Jiang Yu would want. Haughty ignorance is her strong suit, one she, no doubt, comes by legitimately. You don’t rise to her level of foreign interaction by spilling any real beans. But to say, “I have not heard about this person’s case,” is a “Yes, I really am a virgin” declaration. I doubt her VPN was blocked.

Over at ChinaGeeks a brave posting yesterday provided a partial listing of the number of people who have either been arrested, placed under house arrest or simply disappeared in the last month in the most aggressive crackdown within China in the last two decades. I would urge you to always check this blog. There are things happening here that I do not find happening anywhere else.

And in another plus for China there is this: China spies suspected of hacking Julia Gillard’s emails. It is suspected that Chinese hackers have broken into the Australian Parliamentary computer system and targeted at least 10 ministers, Ms. Gillard, Australia’s Prime Minister, whose computer was one that was hacked, is scheduled to visit Beijing in April. I hope she has the spine to give more than a diplomatic wink and a nod to the BJ boys, though there is really not much more that she can do. After all, she is a “she” and China has no real stomach for compromise, especially with a woman. But, you never really know. Maybe she can sing.

But what must be seen as the most insidious and reactive official Chinese action to the current happening in China is this: Tania Branigan’s piece from the Guardian: Chinese students screened for ‘radical thoughts’ and ‘independent lifestyle’

One of China’s most prestigious universities has announced plans to screen all students and identify those with “radical thoughts” or “independent lifestyles”, provoking angry reactions from undergraduates and comparisons to the Cultural Revolution.

Administrators at Peking University say their focus is on helping those with academic problems. But the institution’s announcement identifies nine other categories of “target students” – including people with internet addiction, psychological fragility, illness and poverty, plus those prone to radical thinking and independent or “eccentric” lifestyles.

It adds: “The objective of the consultation programme is to help individual students achieve an all-around and healthy development.” It says officials should respect students’ individual differences but they must “address ideological problems and practical issues” and help to guide them.

It is no great historical secret that a great culture, a great civilization does not a great world power make. Though the Athenians and the Greeks were able to hammer the Persians, they could never get a handle on much of anything else without leaning very heavily on their subjects. Athenian democracy was more tyranny than demos, which is not a slam on democracy. I am a believer in democracy, despite it’s obvious flaws. Chinese neocapitalistic/I Got Mine/without an independent judiciary is what is so completely deranged. “The rule of law” has become a Chinese buzz phrase, but they really have no idea what that means. There are no laws other than what the CPC decides are laws. This is what can only be called “single party legal convenience,” or, more accurately, “bullshit.” There’s a lot of baggage to haul when you claim 5,000 years of divine rule, especially when the divine consult is the present ruler’s dead kin. The truth of Chinese history is that you don’t look for creative solutions to current problems when the consultant is speaking from the grave through fired turtle plastrons and nebulous energy channels. I have no idea whether the Hu/Wen duet cracks, but I would not be surprised to learn that fake money burning is still in their shanzhai repertoire of requisite familial “garlic rites.” For them, it’s still that “any port in a storm” thing, despite the nominal belief in the heavily bearded German Marx (with Chinese characteristics).

There are incredible wonders here, wonderful people full of great ideas and unlimited potential, amazing layers of cultural complexity that “does China very proud.” But there is also a crisis of leadership, an all-male club, who are incapable of envisioning a world that is not exclusively, rigidly, and ultra-conservatively Chinese. They might think they can bend the world to fit into their highly-pressurized limited mold, but their deeper, inner ignorance, as well as their dearth of imagination – a hallmark of Chinese communism (they send their kids abroad to study because they know the Chinese system, the one they endorse for the masses, is based on reiterated vomit and digitally-probed dried snot) – is worth about as much as a breakfast of gaseous baozi in a Ningxia village. Prime Minister Wen knows this, though Premier Hu doesn’t, because Hu’s a redneck thug. He’s always been a thug. Everyone knows he is, though no one in China has the marrow to say it. He has less international education than Kim Jong-un, the future leader of the DPRK. But he fits the 5Kyr. Chinese leader mold. When you hate the people, it is easy to become a thug, though I have the feeling Hu emerged from the crib full of racist venom. And a smile.

Wen Jiabao, on the other hand, is just another Zhou from Tianjin, a survivor of purges, a goonishly smiling, though very twisted, grandaddy figure who, despite the suppressed outcry, was not able to deliver the reason to thousands of Sichuan/Gansu parents why their children died in the Wenchuan earthquake. Of course, it was corruption and ‘tofu construction,’ but he didn’t have the spine to go against the Party and tell the truth. It really is that simple! These guys have hit the wall, and they are trying their best to use their power to ensure that history will treat them better than they have  treated China. History’s a cruel bitch, unless, of course, you can manage to buy her daughter and then threaten her with a life “singing”  in a CPC-sanctioned karaoke club ( KTV). We’re not talking Aspasia here. We’re talking an eternal gangbang. Or as long as eternity dares to be. This is how things work in this primitive region. Men use their power in any possible way they can. If it’s by threatening your daughter, your mother, or your hair-lipped cousin who can’t count to five, they will do it. That’s what they do best. In most civilized places we try our best to get beyond that. Though we may not always be successful, we try. But here it is just the way things are. 5Kyrs is an immense hurdle that China has never been able to get over.

I’ve always wondered what would have happened if Mozi instead of Confucius had gotten the upper hand in the philosophic wars of early China. Would we have seen a Wen who answered to the people instead of some roomful of lecherous, wrinkled bags of self-interest and overwhelming greed? Probably not. In the end, it always goes to the Money. Mozi would have sold his inky image and become a poster boy for Tattoos R Fckin Cool as a way of gaining heaven (Money). All those with piles of cash have never really believed, “You can’t take it with you.” Somewhere, someone has sold a lot of disgustingly wealthy powerbrokers on the idea that there is such a thing as cosmic saddlebags, that the money is spendable in Heaven. And God? … Well, he’s on the take too. Why do you think He loves us so much? And, of course, He loves China the most despite the fact that China doesn’t believe in ‘him’. Life is so cool, especially if you are baseline illiterate. And especially if you disappear those who are not.

And tomorrow it will be even better.

Needless to say, the Dalai Lama, who was in Hong Kong at the time, did not fly or teleport in to Kumbum, and after a day and a long tense night of faithful/police standoff, the Tibetans returned back to where they’d come from.

Though I have no insider’s special info on the chain of events that led to what could very easily have been troublesome confrontation, I can’t help but wonder where the SMS text originated. That the messages were allowed to spread via China Mobile without being choked off has always been a question I’ve had, from the moment I first heard of the incident. (I happened to be in Qinghai at the time.) A monk with a vision? Perhaps, though I always thought that it would have made more sense for the originating message to have come from a more materialistic secular official source: what a good way to get potential troublemakers to congregate at a single point where they could be observed. China has a long history of cleverly dealing with the border peoples, and despite the official harangue that “We are all Chinese,” the game on the ground is, has been and will continue to be one of profound separation. Were the Tibetans played in July 2006? I have no idea, though I do have some not-too-far-fetched guesses. If you read Sunzi you can probably find a few dozen strategic one-liners that could be jacked into shape to support this particular kind of deceptive tactic.

Which brings me to the last two Sundays here in Beijing, unimaginatively dubbed the Jasmine Revolution, though a revolution that reeks of official Chinese characteristics. There is so much wrong with how this thing has gone down that it feels like a telegraphed sucker punch. In Beijing the starting point of the supposed demonstration was a McDonalds restaurant, with the requisite KFC close by, on a tourist walking mall (Wangfujing) – a public space that I suppose already has a much higher concentration of security and cctv cameras than most public spaces with the exception of Tian’anmen Square. The flaming seed of the revolution was a posting on Boxun, a U.S. based website. The call for a Jasmine Revolution immediately set off a series of security measures to pinch off the blossoming uprising: words blocked on Chinese microblogs; known activists detained; Boxun cyber-attacked, security people out in force in the heart of the tourist zone, and even a guest appearance by the leather-jacketed U.S. ambassador Jon Huntsman who may be running for the U.S. presidency (or Orrin Hatch’s Senate seat) in 2012 and may have been grooming a future political ad. That was the First JasRev Sunday.

The Second JasRev Sunday saw the area in front of the McDonalds turned into a construction zone and international reporters warned to stay away. How’s that for an invitation? By all reports, it seems that the overwhelming majority of people who showed up were battalions of security personnel, international reporters and fast food workers who were kept busy supplying the security people with seats and reporters with things that look like food.

This whole things appears very much like an official drill: let’s get this thing going, have plenty of personnel in place to handle anything that can happen, then let’s see who shows up, including those we told not to show up. Even the name of the event was a co-option, a classic IP steal. Manipulation is their game, being creative with naming is not. What a great excuse to round up a few more dissidents, have a few more trials, send a few more off to jail, and have something else to hold over the heads of foreign journalists.

Will disobeying the Public Security Bureau’s warnings to steer clear of Wangfujing threaten international reporters’ futures in China? Who knows? Though it is China where anything can and might be used against any and all who are within the borders. Adam Minter, Shanghai Scrap, and @AdamMinter tweeted what I consider to be the best take on this farce: “No offense, but the behavior of some foreign correspondents in Beijing reminds me of nothing so much as Timothy Treadwell in Alaska.” (For more on Treadwell see Grizzly Man.)

Were the international media played? I have no idea, though I do have some not-too-far-fetched guesses. And if you’re into Sunzi, play a round of “The Art of War Roulette,” where you pick any page, find a line that fits this present fiasco, then ponder. You can even hum Ommm as you reflect.

There is not much more to say other than I am glad that the test took place on the 20^th and not the 21^st. Tonight the air quality in Beijing is hazardously Beyond Index which means that breathing what passes for air can be deadly. It’s the contemporary equivalent and stealth mass marketing of slow slicing or death by ten thousand cuts, or let’s add 5,000 cars per week (as reported in the SCMP) to the already hopelessly knotted Beijing rigor motors highway system. To understand what “crazy bad” air is (PM2.5; 584.0; 500; Beyond Index), have a look here. Last night, on the other hand, at 1900 local time while I was meandering through the Central Business District (CBD) taking photos, the same monitoring station at the U.S. Embassy, just three kms or so north of the CCTV HQ Building complex, registered PM2.5; 138.0; 193; Unhealthy. If the lighting test had been scheduled for this evening I would not be out there gagging on this gunk. Staying indoors tonight with my IQAir cranking.

Below are some of the photos that I took last evening. For more photos have a look here. There is a slideshow option that works well enough. I am still adding to this set, so if you like them and want more check back over the next day or two. For a larger version click on the photos below.