In what seems to have been a prescient though disingenuous bit of political-speak, Bo, commenting on the growing connections between former enemies, said “History is history and now is now. The war belongs to the previous generation. We should not seek revenge or express hatred because of left-over feuds.” But in East Asia this turn of empty speech ignored the fact that in this part of the world memories are indelible, more like a cross-generational tattoos. No one forgets anything. Nineteen years later Japan and China are still battling over whose history, whose maps, and whose rights of possession are more correct. The dueling versions of history are no longer solely owned by the “previous generation.” The current generation of leaders long ago stepped into the worn shoes of their parents and found that they fit quite well, at least for now. In some cases the older generation is still officially hanging on, keeping old wounds forever oozing and ensuring that at least some of the next generation will get it correct. For a good current example read Tokyo Mayor’s History of Needling Beijing that appeared in the China Real Time Report yesterday, April 17, 2012. Tokyo Governor Shintaro Ishihara pronounces on

1. the Senkaku/Diaoyu territorial dispute, where Ishihara compares the Chinese actions in this ongoing confrontation to the yakuza, the Japanese mafia. (For more on the allegations of China as a Mafia State see here)
2. the veracity of the Chinese version of the Nanjing Massacre (one that is hardly in dispute outside of Japan),
3. and the need to fragment the Chinese empire into smaller, more manageable states.

These are all historical issues that are not going to suddenly disappear once an old war horse finally stumbles from the stage. And in 1993 the young Bo Xilai was quite aware of the irremediable nature of the long list of Sino-Japanese contentions. But this was business, and dreams of wealth always have a way of blinkering cultural differences to maximize profits.

Even at the outset of his higher level career Bo Xilai, former Red Guard and magnetic son of the revolutionary general, Bo Yibo – one of the “eight elders” of the CCP who set China’s course in the post-Mao era – was comfortable tossing out a savvy business dictum and anchoring it in a falsely sentimental view of history. Although he was just setting out on a political career that would keep his name in the mix for the next 19 years, he knew what needed to be said, as well as when and how to say it. He had gleaned the necessary skills to survive in the zero-sum arena of Party politics, where resurrections after political death are anomalies and not the norm. History has a way of dealing from anywhere in the deck, a fact that Bo had always been aware of. Despite the strange deal, he’d become more than capable at cobbling together a good hand. That he forgot those lessons as the Chongqing lights glowed brighter allowed him to place a bet that he was finally unable to cover.

Short of a miraculous turn of events, his future doesn’t appear to be auspicious. Where he is or what will become of this larger-than-Party player is anyone’s guess, though it is not unrealistic to think that his name will remain in the historic mix, albeit battered, as a cautionary whisper. In the cryptic Machiavellian palace halls of the Party, his name will be mumbled as a warning of an approaching abrupt edge, the signaling of the imminency of a cliff coming up, as more Machiavellian than is officially acceptable: watch your back; watch your front; watch your public desires.

What has become clear in this classically labrythine Chinese meander is that there is very little clarity. The convoluted mess includes, as we’ve been led to believe: corruption, executions, asylum seeking, murder, money laundering and a woman – Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai – who’s been portrayed as a Chinese version of both Jackie Kennedy and Lady Macbeth, a mash-up I am personally having difficulty with.

And then there’s Bo Guagua, the MacKennedy’s son, a kid with a given name of melon melon. If someone could clear this up for me, I’m all ears. In other languages Guagua is a minibus, a small Filipino city, an indigenous language of northern South Amercia and the surname of an Ecuadoran footballer. But in Chinese I haven’t been able to lay my hands on anything other than melon melon. I’ve even checked The Three Kingdoms.  All I can figure is that there’s some longevity implication, as in longevity gourds. In China, longevity (shòu) is the deal, though it’s not to be confused with the notion that quantity trumps quality. My take on the Chinese view of longevity is that if you live long enough you’ll survive all the bad things that have happened to you throughout your life, finally attaining some level of untouchability that might actually slip across the border into senility. So, Guagua may actually be the rectified name, another bit of odd prescience from the scheming mind of Bo Xilai.

Despite what his name may or may not mean, it’s obvious that Xiao Bo’s parents found him too good for Chinese education, a not uncommon conclusion that many monied Chinese reach without much thought of a domestic alternative.  His checkered academic trail includes a march through England, starting with Papplewick, moving on to the Harrow School, and ending his Brit jaunt at Balliol College, Oxford College, where he was rusticated, which in Oxford terms means something like “being sent (sat) down.” But that didn’t curb his passion for further education, and he moved on to the equally privileged halls of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government in the U.S. Along the way he has acquired a reputation as a playboy, party guy (fun, not political, though he did campaign for a student government position at Balliol, a move seen by the natives as being rather tawdry), lover of fast, expensive cars, though not much of a student. To read more about his elite education and image – his lack of academic rigor has been a concern for his family, while his ostentatious lifestyle has been an ongoing hurdle that Party leaders have been unable to clear – check here and here. Now that his parents are effectively shut-ins, or, rather, guests of the State, Bo Guagua is somewhere in the U.S., spirited off by some federal law enforcement agency in an SUV while apparently being surveilled by agents of the Chinese government in Cambridge, MA. His girlfriend du jour followed later in his Porsche that was loaded to the gills with his stuff. Obviously it could not have been much if it fit into a Porsche. Then again, a pack full of cash goes a lot further than a sofa.

What is most interesting in this very public, though highly orchestrated, unfolding of a family’s downfall, is that it gives us a peek into the secret lives of the real Party boys, many of whom, I assume, are losing sleep over the public airing of some very dirty laundry, even as they spin this tale into one that is full of what I assume to be their selected unnamed sources. Though their children may have taken the same academic path as Bo Guagua, they have had more sense in keeping the lid on the showboating. The first generation of revolutionaries were products of a very damaged Chinese system, punctuated by overwhelming poverty, illiteracy and hard, short lives of backbreaking toil. Although some were able to receive overseas educations – Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping being the most famous  - they did it the hard way, not luxuriously as the current children of the CCP leadership are able to do. The desire for parents to want their children to have lives materially better than the ones they had, especially among those who have had very little, has been one of the forces that drives human social development. But wealth and status are relative. Having a three-wheeled cart in some cases is a significant progression when compared to what parents or grandparents had. But having gobs of cash and flashing it around in a ‘communistically’ indecent fashion is imprudent in a country where the periodically restive have-nots still live very much on the edge. Bo Xilai’s sins were many, but for the command cadres at the top of the pile, the sin of bling is a mortal violation, especially when an official salary might afford you a week in a three-star hotel on the beach at Yalong Bay in Sanya. Image is everything, and keeping the profile low while raking in bucketloads of cash is a must. The Bos didn’t toe that line, a line drawn indelibly in the history of the Party.

The players in the Bo Family Affair – both the very public and the secretively private players – cover the breadth of the history of the CCP. Bo was, and is still, a very clever man, though his cleverness more likely than not, will be permanently muted by his indiscrete overreaching and his lack of understanding of the true primacy of history and who gets to move it forward.  There are still callouses and old wounds that date back to the Long March that are informing the course of China’s current events. Some things are not so easily forgotten, especially the “left-over feuds.” You can still have the Ferrari, but it’s best to keep the windows tinted so the laobaixing can’t see who’s at the wheel. Or so the story still goes in the palaces of the Party where dark suits, red ties, hair dye and extraordinary silence are requisites for the longevity of a prison-free retirement.
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For an update on the Ferrari Tales, see Losing the Wheels.

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.

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 relentless public humiliation that we are witnessing brings to mind Errol Morris’ brilliant five-part series The Anosognosic’s Dilemma: Something’s Wrong but You’ll Never Know What It Is, which appeared in the NYT’s Opinionator blog in the summer of 2010. Among many other things, Morris focuses on the Dunning-Kruger effect, the phenomenon, recognized by others – Charles Darwin and Buckminster Fuller to name but two – that “our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence.” In other words, “how can we possibly know what we don’t know?” It’s not as simple as you might think. And despite all political hot-wiring, it’s a lot more complicated than “pinning the tail on the donkey.” Here is an excerpt, the opening of Part 1.

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1. The Juice

David Dunning, a Cornell professor of social psychology, was perusing the 1996 World Almanac.  In a section called Offbeat News Stories he found a tantalizingly brief account of a series of bank robberies committed in Pittsburgh the previous year.  From there, it was an easy matter to track the case to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, specifically to an article by Michael A. Fuoco:

ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY, SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS

At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork.  So it was no surprise that he was recognized by informants, who tipped detectives to his whereabouts after his picture was telecast Wednesday night during the Pittsburgh Crime Stoppers Inc. segment of the 11 o’clock news. At 12:10 a.m. yesterday, less than an hour after the broadcast, he was arrested at 202 S. Fairmont St., Lincoln-Lemington.  Wheeler, 45, of Versailles Street, McKeesport, was wanted in [connection with] bank robberies on Jan. 6 at the Fidelity Savings Bank in Brighton Heights and at the Mellon Bank in Swissvale. In both robberies, police said, Wheeler was accompanied by Clifton Earl Johnson, 43, who was arrested Jan. 12.

Wheeler had walked into two Pittsburgh banks and attempted to rob them in broad daylight.  What made the case peculiar is that he made no visible attempt at disguise.  The surveillance tapes were key to his arrest.  There he is with a gun, standing in front of a teller demanding money.  Yet, when arrested, Wheeler was completely disbelieving.  “But I wore the juice,” he said.  Apparently, he was under the deeply misguided impression that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to video cameras.

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There’s a lot more than stupidity going on here, and Morris covers quite a bit of territory in revealing his glimpse into the nature of reality, and the larger question of what do we really know? Like everything Morris does, it is well worth your time to delve into this series. I won’t attempt to summarize it here, because I can’t. My summary would be exponentially longer than Morris’ tight poetic vision of anasognosia and the problems it presents to all of us. In an exchange with David Dunning (of the Dunning-Kruger effect), Dunning zeroes in on the problem: “[W]hen you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is. In logical reasoning, in parenting, in management, problem solving, the skills you use to produce the right answer are exactly the same skills you use to evaluate the answer.  And so we went on to see if this could possibly be true in many other areas.  And to our astonishment, it was very, very true.”

Can we make the jump and apply this level of incompetency to nation states? I understand that this sort of question lives in the same category of inquiry as Buddhists wondering if nation states have karma? Within the limits of certain frameworks it’s a legitimate question, though quantification is a little hard to figure. In the end, I have no idea about either, but when it comes to soft power and China. gov it seems like the incompetency and the lack of self-awareness undercut all basic PR models. When the nominal intent is to win over the world through positive effort, it is best not to disappear, via  secret committees, citizens who are deemed problematic. It sends a bit of a mixed message, that maybe, just maybe, you’re blowing stacks of smoke in all directions. It doesn’t seem as if it would be very hard to understand that, though apparently it’s much harder than I am able to imagine. It’s that “juice” thing all over again. How do you tell the party boys that lemons don’t hide them from the world, that despite their best efforts they still appear exactly as they are. The Bush-Cheney presidency promoted the same sort of disappearing acts, but there are/were still enough people who doubted the redefinition to keep the lemon factor somewhat in control, though it is a constant struggle to balance, made more difficult by societal insecurity and the wave of narcissism that together maintain a high level of self-focused timidity. Add an unhealthy dose of economic instability coupled with a well-planned and vigorous redistribution of wealth, and we’re all teetering at the edge of a pool of lemonade whether we want to be or not.

A great friend, a psychiatrist, once told me that a sane person has a pretty good idea of how he/she is perceived by others. By all accounts Herman Cain is not one of those people. Maybe he’d do better here in China where the political field is littered with guys just like himself, none of whom have to worry about regional caucuses of the screaming, unwashed  masses.  And if that doesn’t work for Herman he can always fall back to pizzas. Everyone loves pizzas, even the Chinese. He’d need to readdress some of his other appetites, but I’m pretty sure with enough cash the Chinese government can make some accommodations for someone as equally unaware as they are. It’s a world made for lemons, and nobody can see what you’re doing.

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.

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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 10, 2011 Caixin Century, a well-respected Chinese weekly, published an investigative report by Shangguan Jiaoming, entitled In Hunan, Family Planing Turns to Plunder. The report is the product of a four-year investigation into the criminal kidnapping of children by local officials in rural Hunan province, and the subsequent selling of the children as orphans, mostly to families in the United States.

[The] Caixin investigation found that children in many parts of Hunan have been sold in recent years and wound up, sometimes with help from document forgers and complacent authorities, being raised by overseas families who think they adopted Chinese orphans.

The official China Center of Adoption says more than 100,000 orphans and disabled Chinese children were adopted by families abroad until last year. The largest number now lives in the United States.

In some cases, child-selling revenues as well as social support compensation fees paid by Hunan parents who break one-child rules have become important sources of income for local governments in poor parts of the province.

I came upon this story via @TomLasseter on Twitter on Sunday, May 15th. Three days before, also on Twitter, Melissa Chan – Al Jazeera’s English correspondent in China – sent a series of several quick tweets that, at the time, were full of immediacy and caused a bit of concern, especially since I happened to be on Twitter at the time:

In the lead-up to the games, which are still five-months away, Shenzhen, according to the GT, has evicted 80,000 undesirables, which is a little different than 80,000 fleeing as the Games approach. Fleeing implies a choice, albeit a desperate one. Eviction is something else altogether, as in When my grandmother was a child her family was constantly being evicted by thugs who worked for rapacious landlords in County Sligo, Ireland before the revolution. But why quibble. The fact is that 80,000 people who lived in Shenzhen have been removed from the streets and their ramshackle homes in order to pretty up the place for the international audience. (Sadly, I will not be one of them.)

Police in Shenzhen announced at a press conference Sunday that they had evicted people with “high risks to public security” last week.

“The difficulty of security work for the Shenzhen Universiade lies in the management of those floating people, especially those who pose high risks to the public security,” said Shen Shaobao, spokesman and vice director of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau.

Those considered “high risks” include people who sleep during the day and go out at nights without stable jobs, Shen explained, and those who use fake identity cards to rent apartments or those who live on illegal incomes.

Mental patients who have committed offenses or pose a potential risk to people were also targets, he confirmed.

“Over 80,000 people who pose high risks to public security have left the city out of fear, but it’s not over,” Shen said.

Shen did not specify how many officers had been involved in evicting these people and local police bureaus declined interview requests made by the Global Times.

It’s hard to know where to begin with this one. Those “who sleep during the day and go out at night without stable jobs” is a classic. And mental patients who “pose a potential risk to people.” I’m shocked that there were any police left to ensure the mass fleeing.

The Global Times also has published an accompanying opinion piece entitled Shenzhen – a forbidding city not a good host, admonishing Shenzhen for not letting foreigners see the real China.

According to the Shenzhen police, “high-risk groups” mainly refers to those non-residents who are not holding a proper job and who may have tendency to commit a crime. But which city has no such people? The Universiade Games need a safe environment, but is it necessary to be so radical?

For a long time, we have been used to “cleaning up” cities before large-scale activities. Many street vendors are banned and certain non-residents are “removed.” Unsightly sites are even covered up. However, our efforts are often accused of being in “violation of human rights” by Western media. Why cannot we be more natural when we welcome foreign guests?

As one of China’s most beautiful cities, Shenzhen is a microcosm of China’s economic rise. Although it still has problems, it is the real Shenzhen, in which Shenzhen people live every day. Thus, it should be positive to present the original Shenzhen to the world.

Why does Shenzhen wish to clean itself up so much? Foreigners will not care while those who are affected will complain stridently. The key point is that it would not be the real Shenzhen and a sports event does not warrant such a “tidy” city.

So, does anyone still remember Beijing in 2008, in the lead-up to the Olympics? The population dropped dramatically as floaters were driven out of the city in trains, trucks, by the busloads. Some places in the capital were emptily eerie. What a difference three years and 1,500 miles makes. Now Beijing is only removing lawyers, activists, artists, their friends and accountants from the streets.

But if Shenzhen were serious about removing criminals, they would have begun with the city bosses. But it’s just so much easier to flee hookers and mental patients. That said, there will be a lot of minor Shenzhen officials who will now have to go home and sleep with their wives until the Games are over. Cleaning up corruption – banishing the bads – always means great sacrifice.

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

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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.

Subject: October 2010 GRE General Test Administration in China – Important

Dear Examinee:

ETS places great importance on the validity of GRE® scores. There was an issue with the October 23, 2010, administration of the GRE General Test in China in which a previously used edition of the test was mistakenly administered. As a result of this administrative irregularity, ETS has made the difficult decision to cancel the scores of all individuals who tested at the October 23, 2010, administration in China.

Test takers are being offered a choice of three options:

1. take a make-up test on November 20, 2010
2. transfer to the June 11, 2011, test administration
3. receive a full refund of their test fee

We have automatically scheduled you to retake the Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning sections of the GRE General Test at the make-up administration on November 20, 2010. You will not need to retake the Analytical Writing section since that administration was not affected. If you would like to test on November 20, 2010, please sign in to your My GRE account at www.ets.org/mygre and print your admission ticket from the October 23, 2010, administration. Bring the admission ticket and a copy of this email message to the make-up administration on November 20, 2010, in order to be admitted to test; no new admission tickets will be mailed. We are accelerating the score reporting timeframe for the November 2010 make-up administration and scores will be reported to institutions by December 10, 2010.

If you are planning to test on November 20, 2010, you do not need to contact us. However, if you prefer to transfer to the June 11, 2011, test administration, or you do not want to test and would like a full refund of your GRE General Test fee, please contact GRE Services by November 11, 2010. GRE Services can be reached via email at gre-info@ets.org or by phone at 1-609-771-7670. Phone lines are open Monday through Friday, from 8:00 a.m. to 7:45 p.m. New York Time.

We regret that this isolated incident occurred and are taking steps to prevent a similar occurrence in the future.  If you have any questions about the options listed above, please contact GRE Services at the email address or phone number listed above.

Sincerely,

The GRE Program
Educational Testing Service