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Sometimes you come across a story that sounds too good to be true. When that happens in China, where the authorities keep a tight grip on the media – and when the news first appears on the Internet, a hotbed of intentionally spread lies – I have learned to ask two questions right off the bat.

Is it really true? And regardless of how true it is, why are we hearing about it now?

So begins “Going Down a News Rabbit Hole in China” by Peter Ford in the Christian Science Monitor.

Ford was following up on a story that hit the Chinese ‘net recently. I first heard about The Tangshan Armored Vehicle, as so many do, from ESWN, who had gotten it from the generally esteemed Southern Metropolis Daily. Yang Shukuan was shaking down mining companies, hiring assassins and terrorizing the population of Tangshan, Hebei with an armored car. As you might imagine, this was popular on the internetz, and as Ford puts it:

Soon, papers and websites all over China – including People.com.cn, the online organ of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party – had published stories on “Three Treasures” Yang, as the mafia boss was known in Tangshan, a city 120 miles east of Beijing.

But when Ford goes looking for the offices of the website (Rule of Law Network, 中国百姓法制网) that first reported the story, they aren’t where they claim to be. Phone calls go unanswered. The police aren’t talking. And then:

By Friday evening, the official shutters were coming down in ways that every Chinese knows is a sign that the authorities have had enough. People.com.cn, the online version of Peoples Daily, had removed its article, for example.

Local government and police officials in Tangshan were refusing to answer questions, referring me to a police statement confirming that Mr. Yang had been arrested, along with a police officer and 36 other suspects, and saying that the case “is still under investigation.” The next day, the Rule of Law Network was “closed for maintenance.”

That apparently didn’t last long, because the Rule of Law Network is running right now, one of their articles about Yang corrupting local cops cited in the Southern Metropolitan Daily story is still there, People.com.cn still has this article with pictures up, and Baidu News throws out 743 articles on the topic.

Ford also mistranslates the pen name of Rule of Law Network’s “reporter”, Bei Dou, as “North Star”. 北斗 means “Big Dipper”. But that’s just nitpicking. Ford definitely has a point: the articles about the Tangshan case are all quoting one another, a common enough Chinese practice. Confirming such reports can be all but impossible. The Internet is a place where people can play let’s pretend. It’s not like before the Internet there were steady streams of reliable information for Chinese citizens – this country has developed a quite unique culture of skeptical readers.

But here’s a question: how about confirmation of Ford’s report? For starters, to find most of the links above, I had to reverse translate names like “Rule of Law Network” and confirm I had the right name through cross-reference because the article doesn’t provide any Chinese names. Second, while the article is about websites, it doesn’t link to any – the single most perplexing omission from the websites of most major American newspapers. Look at the New York Times, or the Washington Post, and usually you will find links that only direct you to keyword searches within their own (subscription only!) archives. Beyond links and linguistics, however, there are also major assertions in the above the report that are completely unsubstantiated:

1. “the official shutters were coming down in ways that every Chinese knows is a sign that the authorities have had enough” – Which authorities? Where is the confirmation that they’ve had enough of something? Enough of what, exactly? Who is threatened here? And even worse, there are still plenty of articles out there – no shutters actually came down.
2. Ford quotes Xiao Qiang, of China Digital Times, saying he believes “this is an internal leak through the Rule of Law Network,” apparently since “Bei Dou” blogged that the story was recommended to him by a Communist Party newspaperman. But no one can get Bei Dou on the phone – how do we know that’s really his blog? What do we know of his motives? “Somebody, somewhere, seems to have wanted to draw national attention to a criminal case that had gone unreported. Who that might be, and what the purpose was, remains unanswered,” surmises Ford. Who would leak and why? Why must there be some major authority involved? Why can’t it just be some bitter Xinhua reporter who knows lots of juicy stories he can’t report saying “Hey Bei Dou, you’re a muckraking risktaker with his own website. You oughta break that armored car story!” Hell, Bei Dou apparently lives in or around Beijing, and Tangshan is next door. Maybe a cousin lives there. Maybe HE lives there. To post something on the Internet doesn’t actually require you to be in your office. Maybe after writing about it, it turns out Yang really does do things like hire assassins, so Bei Dou skips town and puts up a blog or three. I’m presenting as much proof for this as Ford and Qiang do of a leak: nada. Well, actually, I’m at least giving you the links.

Oh, and there’s one other people.com.cn article about the case, from a week ago. It questions, just as Ford’s article does, whether the “Rule of Law Network”, or its supposed parent the Association of Chinese Legal Workers, really exist. More importantly, it states that government officials need to make direct and unequivocal statements to the public about such cases, otherwise rumor will triumph in the vacuum. Gosh, that sounds almost like Qiang’s diagnosis: “”We have to wait and see what the official version of events is, and how it differs from the Internet version.” But in the mean time, let’s speculate.

Spotted in Rebecca MacKinnon’s del.icio.us bookmarks: Living Without Freedom in China, based on a presentation by Edward Friedman given at a seminar for secondary school teachers intended to help them teach students what it means to “live without freedom”. In a brochure sporting Tank Man on the cover, the goal is

“Students grow up in a free society; it is the only kind of society they really know. To appreciate and comprehend the benefits of freedom, students need to know what it’s like to live without freedom—or worse, in conditions of harsh repression, even genocide.”

Learning about the rest of the world is great. And genocide and repression are bad. This is all very well and good. But Edward Friedman says the Chinese government tells its kids:

““How did Rwanda occur? Because they tried to build a democracy. If the Hutus had simply imposed their will, they never would have had that problem. If it moves in a democratic direction, China is going to fall apart; it will be like what happened to Russia, to Yugoslavia. Do you want to end up like Chechnya and Bosnia? That’s what the Americans really want. You are fortunate to be a Chinese living in an ethical, authoritarian system.” The TV will show pictures of say the Los Angeles riots, the Sudan, and people are made frightened and confused. They’re proud to be Chinese and want to raise ethical kids. They want a country they can be proud of, certainly not like American kids. The Chinese are taught that American youth are smoking at an early age, use pot, have babies in their teens, watch pornography on TV, spread AIDS, get divorced, and don’t care what happens to their elderly parents. Why would you want to live in such an immoral way? This propaganda seems to work with many Chinese.”

Um, there are such messages, but isn’t telling American teachers to teach their students about all the horrible things in China to make them love how their society is organized the, well, exact same thing? Oh, sorry that’s right, I forgot: we’re the good guys.

It doesn’t help Edward Friedman’s argument at all that his article has a few inaccuracies. For example:

1. “China has a ruthless free market, no regulation, no safety standards, no FDA, no CDC, no NIH.” – um, it has an FDA, they just sentenced its ex-chief to death. And they have a CDC as well. Perhaps they’re toothless, ineffectual, and are ignored during foolish face-saving maneuvers (see: SARS), but factually, this is still wrong.
2. “It’s also the world leader for people dying in industrial accidents, and about 400,000 each year die from drinking the water, which is unpotable.” – As far as I know, 400,000 die of air pollution, while millions drink unclean water but the number of deaths attributed to this is unclear.
3. My personal favorite: “A Chinese journalist recently went to 10 Chinese hospitals wanting to get his blood tested. So he complained of certain aches and pains that he knew would cause them to test his blood. But he didn’t give them his blood, he carried in a thermos with tea and poured that into the cups. Eight of the ten reported to him that he had the most serious blood disease and that it would cost them endless money for treatment.” – actually, it was not a test for blood but urine, which looks more like tea, it was six not eight out of ten hospitals, and five of which detected a urinary infection, for which they prescribed a maximum of $50 worth of drugs. A great deal for most Chinese, but not a “serious blood disease” or “endless money”. But who needs accurate facts when you’re talking to young’uns? Just as long as they know who the good guys and bad guys are. Y’know, there’s a reason DARE is joke among my generation.

Then there are the head scratchers:

1. “You can choose your physician freely” – huh??? Yeah, and the socialized medicine is fantastic. It’s freaking cash and carry, people.
2. “most young Chinese would say they live in a free, democratic society.” – What? How can they say its democratic when they’re all taught democracy is a bad word?
3. “There still are committees for the defense of the revolution. They have to make their own money and often turn into Avon ladies, visiting house to house, but you know that if you aren’t complicit, maybe you won’t get a passport.” – I would love to hear more on this, she didn’t seem to terrorize my neighbors.
4. “The state is building Confucian temples. The vision is that China is going to explain its extraordinary rise to its own people and to the world as the result of its unique ethical religion, its Confucianism. It’s going to spread Confucian societies all around the world, it’s going to teach everybody that China produces a better quality of people because it has this moral authority and all others are inferior. Confucianism is the only way to raise people, and the world is properly hierarchically ordered with Confucian Chinese at the center of it.” – I’m sure teaching the entire world they are inferior will go over well. Those Goethe Institutes must be some sort of Neo-Nazi front too.
5. “I can imagine a future in which unregulated hedge funds lead to an international financial crisis and this is seen as coming out of the Anglo-American countries, London and New York being the two centers of these monies. But China regulates capital, so these things are not allowed in. The Chinese model may yet look even more attractive than it does now.” – Yes, I imagine letting giant unregulated hedge funds stock up on sub-prime mortgages and screw the economy might make regulation look more attractive. Bear Sterns must be serving their Chinese paymasters, right? Cause China is responsible for our mistakes. Because they’re bad.

From the China Law and Politics Blog, run by Carl Minzner of the Council on Foreign Relations, a job ad:

Position: Program Officer for Asia, IRI

The International Republican Institute (IRI) seeks a Program Officer for their Asia regional programs, to be based in Washington, DC.

A nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, the International Republican Institute (IRI) advances freedom and democracy worldwide by developing political parties, civic institutions, open elections, good governance and the rule of law.

I have always found it odd when the IRI is described as an NGO or nonpartisan organization. The IRI receives its funding from the National Endowment for Democracy. The NED, started in 1983 by the Reagan Administration to promote democracy abroad, receives virtually all its funding from the US government. The “NED’s unique multisectoral approach is characterized by its four core institutes: the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, the International Republican Institute, the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, and the Center for International Private Enterprise, which represent the two major American political parties, the labor movement, and the business community, respectively.” In other words, the Democrats, Republicans, AFL-CIO and U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Reading the NED’s very own history page is enlightening. The House opposed directly funding two political party institutes, but in hammering out a compromise with the Senate, “the conferees agreed to maintain the House’s deletion of the earmarks for the party institutes, but pointed out that this was “without prejudice to their receipt of funds from the Endowment.”” In other words, the party institutes, the NDI and IRI, could receive money funneled through the NED, if the NED chose to do so. But the NED insists its an NGO, in it’s mindbending “Independence” section. Consider that

NED’s authorizing legislation spells out its non-governmental status, namely that “Nothing in this title shall be construed to make the Endowment an agency or establishment of the United States Government.”

Though it is a regular line item in the Federal budget, but

It is sometimes contended that without this official status, the Endowment lacks accountability. This charge overlooks the fact that NED is answerable to a wide array of overseers in both the Executive and Legislative Branches.

Don’t you see? It’s definitely not beholden to the government to which it is accountable! And you thought the Bush Administration used new ideas. And this must be some kinda of super-nongovernmental status: “NED is covered by the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), unique for a non-governmental entity.” You ain’t really nongovernmental unless you are subject to governmental sunshine requests, overseen by two branches of government and receive all your money from Congress! Yeah! Independence! Take that, Greenpeace!

Ahem. Sorry. Remember the International Republican Institute? They had that job at their “nonpartisan” organization? Meet the board of directors, whose notables include such nonpartisan favorites as:

John McCain
L. Paul Bremer
Laurence Eagleburger
Frank J. Fahrenkopf (former chairman of the Republican Party)
Chuck Hagel
David Dreier (congressman, R-CA)
Alec L. Poitevint, II
Cheryl Halpern (Bush appointed CPB chair)
J. William Middendorf II (Goldwater treasurer, Ford’s Navy Secretary, Reagan’s OAS rep)
Gahl Hodges Burt (Nancy Reagan’s social secretary)
Peter T. Madigan (lawyer, regular Republican PAC contributor)
Alison B. Fortier (former Reagan special asst. to the Prez on NatSec Affairs)
Olin L. Wethington (AIG in China, former John Snow appointee in Bush treasury)

… I can’t google anymore. Soooooo…. right. “Nonpartisan”. Galling, especially, since the NED website flat out says that these are “party structures”.

For an idea of the nonpartisan, but apparently virulently ideological way the IRI goes about promoting democracy, you can read the New York Times piece January 29, 2006 “Mixed U.S. Signals Helped Tilt Haiti Toward Chaos”, in which U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Brian Dean Curran, “accused the democracy-building group, the International Republican Institute, of trying to undermine the reconciliation process after disputed 2000 Senate elections threw Haiti into a violent political crisis.” He also accused IRI’s Haiti guy, Stanley Lucas, of “telling the opposition that he, not the ambassador, represented the Bush administration’s true intentions.” In other words, while the ambassador said one thing was the official U.S. policy, the IRI was the Bush administrations proxy for saying “no, no, no, he’s just a silly ambassador. We truly represent the U.S. government.” How nongovernmental of them. This was also covered long before the Times got to it in Mother Jones, and you can also look at RightWeb to see what IRI may or may not have done in Venezuela. Or Counterpunch’s article on IRI’s ties to Reporters Without Borders and their lopsided coverage of Haiti, as well as the return of bagman Otto Reich.

The best, though, has to be current Republican candidate Ron Paul’s article at antiwar.com, lambasting the NED institutes support of ex-Soviet strongmen in Eastern Europe:

The National Endowment for Democracy, by meddling in the elections and internal politics of foreign countries, does more harm to the United States than good. It creates resentment and ill-will toward the United States among millions abroad.

Thank you Ron. You might be a racist, but you’re helping as best you can I guess.

But my favorite part has got to be this: IRI president Lorne Cramer’s April 10, 2006 speech on “The United States and Human Rights in China”. I’m impressed that Lorne was speaking at the time about the Freezing Point shutdown, and that IRI was even allowed in China in 2006, let alone 1996! But check this out:

There has been explosive growth of civil society organizations – 153,000 registered ones according to some statistics – and we can assume many thousands more that are unregistered. What are these organizations doing? Everything from environmental monitoring, to advocacy on women’s rights, to helping exploited workers seek back pay and compensation, to working with ethnic minority groups on development and cultural preservation issues, to working with people living with HIV/AIDS.

Hmmmm. 153,000, eh? Let’s try and find that number… ok, first in English, from the 10th NPC 4th Session:

NGOs in China can be divided into three categories

First, overseas NGOs including those from China’s Hong Kong and Macao… reckons there are about 10,000.

The second category is foundations. Since the 1980s, China has carried out many non-profit projects including the Hope Project … approximately 1,070 foundations in operation in China.

The third category can be subdivided into several smaller categories. One is social groups that are registered with civil affairs departments above county level in accordance with the Regulations on Management of Social Groups issued by the Ministry of Civil Affairs (MCA). There are currently 153,000 registered social groups in China.

The second sub-category consists of privately run non-enterprise units.

In addition, there are about 100,000 to 200,000 NGOs registered with the Industry and Commerce network nationwide. The reason is that the threshold for qualification as a social group and privately run non-enterprise unit or foundation is higher. Many organizations simply can’t qualify.

The fourth type is the urban community organization… some are quite simply for pure entertainment, for example, folk dancing groups. (100,000 to 200,000).

OK, so the 153,000 are social groups above the county level. Above them are foreigners/overseas brethren, and Project Hope (we’ll get to them in a second). Below are smaller local groups and mahjong clubs. Now, to the MCA website for some examples of the largest social groups (社会团体), which are given permission to run business operations:

Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, State Council Development Research Center, China Seismological Bureau, China Meteorological Administration, China Securities Regulatory Commission and China Insurance Regulatory Commission, the Central Party School, the Party Literature Research Center, Central Party History Research Center, Federation of Trade Unions, the Chinese Communist Youth League*…

Heh. Heheheheheh. The government funded ideologically partisan “nonpartisan NGO” IRI …*guffaw* … is pointing to the government funded ideologically partisan “NGO” Chinese Communist Youth League as a “civil society organization”.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*Oh, the CCYL runs Project Hope.

I had a request not too long ago for more maps on the site. So here are some images of the Chinese Century of Humiliation Atlas, available at this 163 forum. You can read a good analysis of the atlas and the role of humiliation in the official interpretation of Chinese history in this PDF “National Insecurities: Humiliation, Salvation and Chinese Nationalism”. This book may only be 11 yuan online, and probably not widely read in urban and middle class circles, but it is on a list of 2,090 titles recommended for 1,550 rural farmers libraries by the Central Propaganda Ministry.

The “Century of Humiliation” refers to the 100+ years from the First Opium War in 1840 to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. While the phrase isn’t exactly part of normal conversation these days, it certainly is still in use. An online martyrs memorial website, 血铸中华, or “Blood Casting Chinese”(?), uses the URL http://www.china1840-1949.net.cn/ has a redirect to its main domain name, which is http://xzzh.china5000.cn/, which uses the more well-known reference to China’s 5000 year history. The site is run by the China Youth League (Hu Jintao’s power base) and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. The introduction at the top of the window, which is not entirely visible, reads

China’s Online Revolutionary Memorial and Modern History Museum! Forever Remembering the Modern Century’s Countless Chinese Sons and Daughters for Resisting the Imperialist Great Powers Invasion, Fighting for National Independence, and Indomitable Struggle towards Liberation, to Achieve the Chinese People’s Great Rejuvenation! Forever Remember the Chinese Heroes Great Service!

It’s worth remembering that virulent nationalism is not pandemic across China, the idea of China’s humiliating fall (and subsequent picking itself off the ground – this corollary was the subtext of the documentary The Great Nations) is almost universally accepted, and did not begin with the Communist era. It stretches back to the end of the Qing Dynasty, as reformist Hanscholars quickly sought to interpret Chinese defeat in the Opium War as a sign of a decadent and failing Manchu court – a political battle for power between factions in the government. The Republican era embraced the idea as well, and even had a National Humiliation Day (I believe May 7th). It’s also worth remembering that China sees it’s own “modern era” as beginning with humiliation – the idea of being “modern” is deeply intertwined with being humiliated and weak. One would hope that one day this might change.

I certainly enjoyed Lung Yingtai’s intellectual brawler style when she wrote “The Taiwan That You May Not Know About” for the infamous China Youth Daily supplement Freezing Point, whose editor wrote another classic about the fallout of that and other articles entitled “It’s Lung Yingtai again, f**k!”. And who could forget her open letter to Hu Jintao, “Please Use Civilization to Convince Us”. She’s said quite openly that “As a matter of fact, I am just someone who refuses to believe that human rights must not be distinguished by political position. The Nationalist Party, the Communist Party, the Democratic Progressive Party, whatever f*cking party, if human dignity is not your core value and if you permit human rights to be determined by the powers-that-be, then you are just an object upon which I spit. You do not intimidate me”, and, in probably my favorite, compared the reductionist idea of “Asian values” to a pool of dead water.

But I totally think she’s been phoning it in lately. In a speech at Cambridge this past week (the bulk of which she’s been repeating since December 2006), entitled “If You Want Peace, You Must Not Keep Hurting Taiwan”, Lung used some pretty lazy rhetorical devices. Moreover, her argument essentially seems to be that to be denied a nation-state is a violation of one’s human rights, which strikes me as ludicrously problematic.

The first thing that really caught my eye was this:

The 23 million people in Taiwan went through a martial law period of 37 years. Martial law meant a form of siege. After the martial law period, there was another 35 years of international blockade up to now. After 37 years of martial law and 35 years of blockage, there has to be some “symptoms.” In 2006, the survey results from a certain Taiwan magazine are astonishing.

• 80% of the Taiwanese do not know where the United Nations headquarters is located
• 80% of the people do not know in which city the Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded
• 80% of the people do not know where the largest rainforest in the world is located
• 60% of the people do not know the name of the currency in Germany
• 60% of the people do not know which continent Athens is located in

You should not think that this survey was conducted in some remote village. No, the principal sample came from Taipei, and the people of Taipei are supposed to have the highest educational level in the Chinese world.

Alright then. So the results of this survey are intended to prove the dire consequences of “international blockade” of Taiwan, dating back to the handover of Taiwan’s UN seat to the PRC. Lung is claiming that Taiwan’s lack of membership to this and many other international bodies has created “cultural isolation”, resulting in a very geographically-challenged citizenry.

First off, there’s nothing in Lung’s argument showing how one (“isolation”) causes the other (poor geography skills). Second, my girlfriend and I are university educated, European and American respectively, and have traveled to well over a dozen countries each – and both of us blanked on what city hosts the Nobel. Third, I’m guessing Lung has never watched Jay Leno’s “Man on the Street” bits on American TV, nor has she seen the 2006 National Geographic-Roper Survey of Geographic Literacy, which demonstrated that embarassingly high numbers of young Americans, even amongst college graduates, could find neither Iraq nor Louisiana on a map. Or the Pew Research Center’s 2007 report on American political knowledge indicating that 64% of respondents couldn’t name the president of Russia, or my personal favorite, that over 70% of Americans didn’t know plastic was made of petroleum. The United States belongs to all of the international bodies that Taiwan’s absence from, according to Lung, leads to bone-headed ignorance, but membership hasn’t made us any better informed.

But apparently the Taiwanese peoples complete and total inability to survive even one round of quiz night in a British pub, or an opening round of the American TV show Jeopardy!, is proof positive of how damaging the 35 year old “blockade” of Taiwan by cold, indifferent foreign nations has been. I am not saying that this means Taiwan shouldn’t be recognized; I’m simply saying that if Lung is going to use this sort of argument in addressing Western audiences, she must take us for idiots (as the above mentioned statistics would prove, so I guess she’s on the right track).

Even worse, I don’t think Lung is mentioning everything the Taiwanese survey in question discovered. My guess is that Lung was looking at a 2004, not 2006, survey by Taiwan’s Commonwealth Magazine (天下), the findings of which are shown on this blog (in Chinese) and match all of Lung’s cited figures and questions. But the survey also says that 60% of Taiwanese respondents have been abroad, 45% have been to two or more countries, and 40% speak two or more foreign languages. This is an odd sort of “isolation” – not alot of countries can claim to be that well-traveled or multilingual. Even if it only means everybody speaks English and has been to Disneyland, that’s way more than most of the world. Taiwan is also one of the most wired countries in the world, with something like 63% of the population having Internet access, and over 70% or so having a PC in the home. No Great Firewall to boot, I’d add.

I find Lung Yingtai’s argument that national sovereignty is some sort of human right more problematic. She states:

“Perhaps you wonder, Is there a human rights problem with Taiwan?

Put it this way — suppose we have a small community here. For what reasons do we have to not permit the people from this community to attend any conference or participate in any decisions. We do not allow them to appear at any important festive, mourning or memorial functions. Furthermore, we forbid the leaders of this community to step out of their community and enter our area. Worse yet, if there is a huge fire, we will not notify them. We don’t even allow them to call themselves by their own name.

Please ask yourselves: Why is this not a violation of human rights?”

Well, my first thought is that what she’s talking about here is not that people from the community are forbidden to do these things – its representatives of the government of Taiwan that are forbidden. Now that might be unfair or wrong, but last I checked human rights are not extended to governments or nation-states, which is what she really saying. She then gives concrete examples, more or less, such as that Taiwan doesn’t belong to international bodies and Chen Shuibian has trouble getting visas. Fair enough, but again I don’t know if this qualifies as a human rights issue. An issue, certainly, but human rights? That’s tricky. I would be curious to hear Lung Yingtai (or anybody’s) thoughts on Article 15 of the Declaration of Human Rights stating everyone is entitled to a nationality – what on Earth does that mean? Which nationality, who chooses? If you can choose, does that mean we have to give all those micronations seats at the UN too? By Lung Yingtai’s argument, the community of Sealand has their human rights violated because they too are not represented in the UN. And what about Taiwanese Aborigines, while we’re at it?

But her other examples are worse. She then proclaims “The international community knows about the political isolation of Taiwan. But I think that the international community has no awareness whatsoever about the depth and breadth of this isolation and the degree of damage done to the people of Taiwan.” The survey mentioned above is given as “astonishing” proof of this. Another example is “Using art an example, Taiwan cannot be represented in the public national museum venue at the Venice Art Exposition. Instead, it must find another venue for which it has to worry about being able to retain for the next year.” I assume that Lung is referring to the Venice Biennale, where actually alot of countries don’t get to be in the national museum, the Giardini. The PRC isn’t in it either, or Hong Kong or Macao, which also have separate venues, or Portugal, Argentina, Turkey or quite a few others. All of Africa is shoved into one pavilion, while Central Asia is crammed in another. The PRC has only been there a few years, with a SARS interruption, while Taiwan appears to have been ensconced quite safely since 1995 in the Palazzo delle Prigione, where it is again situated this year, and for the foreseeable future. It’s also amusing to note that in 2003, the “isolated” Taiwanese artists shown all lived abroad save for one, though selected by curators and artists in Taiwan. The curator Lin Shu-min noted, “Where you are doesn’t really affect your cultural roots”. I wonder what Lung Yingtai would make of that remark.

Back to the quote I gave in the beginning and Lung’s thinking on human rights:

“As a matter of fact, I am just someone who refuses to believe that human rights must not be distinguished by political position. The Nationalist Party, the Communist Party, the Democratic Progressive Party, whatever f*cking party, if human dignity is not your core value and if you permit human rights to be determined by the powers-that-be, then you are just an object upon which I spit. You do not intimidate me”

Spitting, cursing and bravado aside, what does it mean for human rights to be independent of political position? How can one say that and simultaneously say that recognition as a nation-state, a purely political notion, is a human right? How would one apply this to any civil war or territorial dispute? If recognition of national sovereignty is a human right, then who gets Jerusalem? The answer appears to be whoever Lung Yingtai thinks really, truly holds “human dignity” as a “core value”, because I can’t see who else the arbiter is supposed to be.

I mentioned Jess Nevins before in the Thinking Blogs meme. A librarian of pulp fiction, he pointed me towards some great stuff on Late Qing Dynasty scifi/fantasy writing. Now he has a helluva thought experiment up: An Alternative History of Chinese Science Fiction. Quibbling aside, its fun. Oh, and these fictitious alternate Chinese versions of famous science fiction novels occur in a world where Chen Shuibian is president of China because the Communists lost.

And I wanna give a shout-out to Ben’s Blog, where Ben Ross, ethnographer, is blogging pretty much daily about working as a hair-wash guy in a Chinese barbershop for a month. Fan-f**king-tastic. Oh, and he’s in Fujian, so he gets extra cool points for that, though Northern Fujian ain’t as good as Southern. I’m just sayin’.

Read the background in this post here. Here’s the blog of the guy who did it. Photo courtesy of this blogger, thanks to Chinese blog equivalent of the Superfriends, Memedia.

Goddammit, why do I always run into this stuff just when I’m leaving town for a couple of days???

Word has it that Tencent, makers of the Chinese chat and currency juggernaut QQ, has a new search engine that might be a strong rival for Baidu and Google. The search engine, called SoSo 搜搜, may be well placed since the hundreds of millions of QQ users in China would be drawn to it, but on the other hand it uses licensed Google technology, so we’ll see. But more importantly, SoSo is, well, so-so on censorship. Maybe you need a noticeable market share before the net cops show up?

Shorter Arianna Huffington:

• I can’t read Chinese, and don’t know anything about Tiananmen, but no one will know if I don’t give a link or translations of ZYJ’s blog. Also, cliched rhetoric is bad if you’re George Bush, but it’s perfectly fine for summarizing China. And maybe Tank Man was someone else, but that would screw up my conclusion that I arrived at without knowing what I’m talking about in the first place.

Shorter Time 100 Editorial Board:

• All bloggers are the same, so let’s just get some known US blogger to review these crazy chicken scratchings. Michelle Malkin’s Asian, isn’t she? Oh, she’s busy? Um, Greece Los Angeles is like China, isn’t it? I think Arianna’s been to Koreatown…

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies, perfected by Elton Beard, and used regularly by SadlyNo!.

First off, it looks like my guess that MySpace.com is blocked in China is right. At least, Shanghaiist and their commenters are seeing it too. It’s suspicious that MySpace.com would be blocked soon after the launch of MySpace.cn. Dot-com has been available, more or less, for a while, and a fair number of savvy Chinese users created accounts at MySpace.com, such as punk bands. Now, right after the launch of MySpace.cn, they’re all forced to migrate over to .cn – a sudden leap, assuming they keep using MySpace, in registration and pageviews. Otherwise, the government said “Right, so let’s narrow this channel a bit”.

That’s not the only narrowing though. I’ve been playing around with some verboten words on MySpace.cn for a while. Some terms, particularly in Chinese, get blocked by the GFW presumably at the router level – before they ever reach MySpace.cn. Unlike Google.cn, though, the search results look the same (so far) if that doesn’t happen. But I’ve been encountering what is beginning to look suspiciously like censorship: The “Page Under Going Maintenance” sign.

The “Undergoing Maintenance” sign appears when you open a profile that is, well, undergoing maintenance. You see it in MySpace.com sometimes, it’s normal enough. Some pages that contain verboten topics open just fine, others have consistently been other maintenance. One thing about MySpace.cn, though, is that it completely duplicates accounts across international MySpace. In other words, if you take a profile link, say:

http://profile.myspace.cn/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=125043500

and change it to:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=125043500

You’re looking at the same persons page, just that the menu bar and template change languages. The example above is a page with alot of censorship no-nos in it. The .com version opens fine (with proxy in China, w/o in most other nations). The .cn version gives you “This page is undergoing maintenance. If this is inconvenient, we’re very sorry!”

Which wouldn’t mean much except it seems to happen to a fair number of verboten pages. Not all, but many. It’s hard to test them all from China since I now have to proxy the .com pages and it’s slow as molasses sometimes. So here’s a list of some “maintenanced” pages that I haven’t checked in MySpace.com:

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=135332659
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=135332659
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=122628624
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=17397486
http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=170257091

On the other hand, there’s plenty of other things that get through. But the maintenance pages seem worth keeping an eye on…