This blogpost -- translated by China Digital Times -- sums up one of the most serious problems that China faces: the difficulty (some would say impossibility) of getting a fair shake in China today.

The post is about the smuggling of children, which has become an enormous enterprise in China as "barren" families seek kids, some industries (like brickmaking) seek what are effectively slaves, and aging bachelors look to buy a child bride.

The Bush administration's announcement Friday that it plans to sell $6 billion in arms to Taiwan is an interesting one, and a sign that the Bush administration is trying to walk a very, very thin line between supporting Taiwan and enraging China.

For one, the package is considerably smaller than one that was being considered. Taiwan gets Apache helicopters, four Patriot anti-missile (PAC-3) batteries and 330 PAC-3 missiles, Javelin anti-tank missiles and spare parts for its air force, among other goodies. But what it doesn't get is almost as significant; the original package had included 60 Black Hawk helicopters, and a design study of how eight diesel-electric submarines might be built (not the subs themselves as I originally wrote). Taiwan also had asked for 2 extra Patriot batteries and 54 more missiles, but they didn't get those. For a full list of the sale to Taiwan check the website of the Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

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The strangest cases to come out of Guantanamo have been those against a group of Chinese Muslims who were picked up in Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. These men were training or living in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and were sent to Guantanamo after being turned over to U.S. authorities apparently by bounty hunters.

Some of the Chinese Muslims -- known as Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs) -- believed in establishing a breakaway state from China that they called East Turkestan. Others said they were in Afghanistan because they just wanted to live some place where they weren't persecuted for their faiths. None of them, several federal courts have ruled, were threats to the United States.

From my travels in Central Asia and elsewhere, no group that I've ever come across has struck me as more pro-American than the Uighurs. So one has to wonder who made the decision to send them to Guantanamo in the first place.

But today a federal judge ordered 17 of them released from Guantanamo into the United States. The judge agreed with the detainees' attorneys that the Constitution bars holding the men indefinitely without cause.

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The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is meeting in Beijing this week to discuss what appears to be a revolutionary idea to allow farmers to lease their land to bigger landholders, thereby creating larger farms. This is an amazing idea for China, a so-called socialist country, because it will open the door to the reemergence of the hated landlord class (the hated dizhu class of China's Communist revolution) and share-cropping farmers who provided much of the muscle for China's revolution. Talk about back to the future!

The debate in Beijing is an indication of just how far China has come from its revolution -- as if we needed any more proof. Now, to be fair, the rationale behind the proposed changes are, well, rational. The last great decade for agriculture in China was the 1980s. Since then it has lagged behind the rest of the country in development. In terms of foreign trade, small-scale Chinese farmers compete very well in apple juice and garlic, but not in many other areas.

Second, one of the reasons China's food safety problems are so grave is that that current system -- because land is leased and not owned, and divided up in small plots -- does not reward investment. There's no incentive for an "organic" farmer not to use pesticides or a small-scale cattle rancher not to sell cattle who have died from disease to an abattoir as meat. A few weeks ago, I came across a series of photographs on the web about one Chinese business that goes house to house in search of dead chickens. It then "freshens" them up with dye (yum!) and sells them as "high quality" poultry.

So, why not "rationalize" production, create bigger farms and produce more goods, more cheaply, and hopefully more safely. It's basically the China factory model, or the China price, brought to China's countryside. One would expect that Chinese coffee, fruit and even its wine (it's not horrible but it ain't California yet) would become immediately more competitive.

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Any time the official New China News Agency files a piece with the headline: "Experts: China's economy has ability to recover from slowdown," it's time to worry about China's economy. You've already heard the news, no doubt.

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The European Parliament's decision to award its most prestigious human rights prize, the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, to Chinese dissident Hu Jia on Thursday raises a question that has bugged me for a while. Can China walk and chew gum at the same time?

What I mean is, can China take the inevitable lumps that a country with its political system and its increasing global heft is bound to take while also being (to steal Bob Zoellick's phrase) a "responsible stakeholder?"

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It wasn't really surprising that the Dalai Lama finally announced this weekend that he's given up on talks with China. But it's pretty sad nonetheless. And it means that unless there's a fundamental change in the PRC's attitude toward Tibet, the Dalai Lama is likely to die outside of China and Tibetan culture will, like so many others around the world, just fade away.

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So when will the next major anti-Chinese uprising happen in Tibet?

Wang Lixiong says expect the next big one -- at the latest -- when the Dalai Lama dies. He made his prediction in a Chinese blog post on his wife's web site responding to the news that the Dalai Lama was losing hope in a dialogue with China. I've included a translation below.

Wang is a writer and probably the deepest thinking Chinese scholar on Tibetan issues. For years, he's contended that the only longterm solution for China would involve direct negotiations with the Dalai Lama. Ultimately, he's said China should allow the Dalai Lama to return to Tibet and that the Communist Party should seriously consider the Dalai Lama's "middle way" solution for Tibet that would allow the territory some autonomy but also still place it firmly within the Chinese state. For his troubles, and for those of his wife, the Tibetan writer Oser, who is also an advocate for Tibetan issues, Wang is currently under a form of house arrest in Beijing.

Here's the piece:

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