Leicester, an AP international sports columnist, does a fine job telling this story, and I’d recommend that you have a look at it.

The state-run newspaper China Youth Daily quoted Luo Chaoyi as saying that Dong was eligible in Sydney but then shaved three years off her age after retirement in 2001, and that “this must have been an act by her and her family.”

Such an explanation is barely credible – unless, of course, Dong is a master forger of official documents, which is even less believable. In China, as elsewhere, passports are government-issued. Coaches – and not just in China – have also long falsified ages for girls whose small and supple bodies give them a competitive advantage over larger and older young women. The reverse scenario – that a retired gymnast would pass herself off as a kid – makes no sense.

It also hard to believe Chinese officials didn’t know Dong was underage in 2000. Most of Dong’s childhood was spent within the state-run sports system that churns out medalists for China. Her CV shows she joined a sports school at age 4, a provincial team at 7 and the national team at 10. The regimen in such teams can be so tough that wealthier Chinese parents are now steering their children away from organized sports and Chinese media have been increasingly critical of sausage-factory training methods.

How the IOC will respond to these allegations will be fun to watch. How far is Jacques and his crew willing to go? Well, now that the burden of the falsification has been placed upon “her and her family,” I think it is safe to assume that this is the official Chinese permission that the IOC has been waiting for, and the way is now officially cleared for the IOC to demand that she return her medal. I am hoping that Ms. Dong will tell them all to go piss up a rope!

This piece on age discrepancy reminded me of a couple of stories I am quite familiar with. The ease of falsifying records here in China is one that most people in the west can’t quite imagine, though perhaps after 8 seasons of Jack Bauer and his several busy days on the TV show 24, they have a better handle on it than I did before I came to China.

A woman I know, surnamed Song, found herself during the Culture Revolution with a mingzi that was certainly troublesome – the very same name as a famous cross-strait’s personality. In fact, there is every reason to believe that my Song was named after the last empress of Taiwan. The humbler Song was able to get her name changed on the streets of Beijing back in 1967 for twenty or thirty kuai, though that didn’t keep her from being ’sent down’ to Guangxi for three years of utter nastiness. “But,” you might say, “that was then and this is now. And now is a whole lot different than then.” Well, in some cases it’s not much different at all, at least when it comes to really needing to have your records updated.

I also know a young man, a minority from the western countryside, who was, officially, born too soon after his older sibling. Although his parents were allowed to have two children, there was a restriction on just how quickly one could have a second child after the first was born. “Too quickly” meant that a penalty could be enforced in the process of apportioning fields. If the second child followed too close on the heels of the first, a farming family could find themselves being only given the field allotment for one of the children. In other words, a family of four might only be allocated the same quota of arable land as a family of three, which could mean a critical loss of food, especially when the products of the fields are for self-consumption; the fruits of one’s land and labors are what gets a family through the long, cold winter. Once you begin to understand this, there is not much mystery to understanding how important a loaf of bread is when given as a gift.

The young man in question was not legally registered at birth, though everyone knew how old he was. If his family had tried to get a birth certificate when he was born, they would have put themselves in a position to be officially audited at some other, higher level beyond their village. As it was, it remained a village issue, and the extra land was allotted and everyone had enough food to eat.

Jump ahead a few years and the family finally gets a certificate that records the boy’s age as being three or four years younger than he actually is. No big deal. He’s the son of farmers, and what does age really matter as long as you have a certificate, even if it is off by a few years?

Jump ahead again a decade or so, the boy at this point a young man, and a very bright young man to boot. He has been fortunately noticed by some people along the way who have helped get him out of the countryside and into a fine education program (not public) in the provincial capital. Through a set of circumstances that no one in his family could ever have dreamed possible, the young man is offered a scholarship to a very good university abroad. There is a stipulation: he must be 18 years old to leave. Big problem! His birth certificate records that he’s somewhere in the last half of his fourteenth year. Whoops! Now what? Well, you head back to the rural township office with the right person as your representative: a big, strong man whom everyone knows and also happens to be afraid of because he can whoop all of their butts, two/three/four at a time. And Goliath happens to be carrying a few bottles of qingkejiu, along with enough money to take everyone of standing in the concrete office out to lunch. And that’s how 3+ years get officially added to a certificate to bring the young man up to his correct age, as well as up to speed on getting out of town. Presently, he is living a life unimaginable to himself and everyone in his former rural orbit. Done!

I also know how this works when the official route is taken. I am close with a small family – a mother and her two daughters – who followed the law because there probably wasn’t a choice. Mom registered their births – two years apart – because she couldn’t afford not to. In other words, she couldn’t buy off the right people along the way, and so she had to follow the rules. If I showed you a photo of a group of young women, you’d say, “Look at those two there! They’re so thin!” And then I’d tell you how they’re from a family of three women that only has a field allotment for two. But they have correct birth certificates and have had them their entire lives. “And man,” I’d say, “You should see those two work!” The skinny engines who could, indeed. How else could they get by living within the shadow of the law?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cyber Warriors: James Fallows at the Atlantic.

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

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

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

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

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