Is China going to take over the world? Will it ever really become a superpower? Will the Communist Party ever engage in political reform? What do Chinese think of us? What's hot in Beijing, Shanghai, Kunming? What are the Chinese reading? Is there hope for better relations between Beijing and Taipei? What's the best thing written this week about China?

This blog will attempt to provide the broadest take on things Chinese -- in politics, culture, art, society, foreign affairs, economics and business. And who I am to bloviate about these issues? As a young "foreign devil," to use the Chinese term for foreigner, I first went to the People's Republic in 1980 and lived in a 10x15 foot room with seven Chinese guys for a year, played hoops and traveled across the country in packed railroad cars and rickety buses.

After that it was 1988 and 1989 as a reporter for the AP, covering the student-led protests and the June 4 crackdown around Tiananmen Square. I returned in 1998 for another six years as the Post's bureau chief in Beijing. I bought a house in Beijing, wrote a book, "Chinese Lessons," and then decided to exile myself from my adopted "motherland" by moving back to Washington. My day-job? I edit the Washington Post’s Outlook section.

I’ve been asked to close by telling readers what I hope they’ll get from the blog. Actually, I’d like to spin that on its head because I very much want this to be a joint effort. I want reaction, fulmination, criticism and maybe an occasional pat on the head. This won’t be fun without you. China is an amazing place; there are many stories to tell. I hope we can tell them together.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. This year was supposed to be China’s grand coming out party. A par-TEH for The Party. Instead, it’s turning out to be most serious challenge to China’s Communist leadership since the student-led demonstrations since 1989. This doesn’t mean China’s (fortune) cookie is anywhere near crumbling. And it actually could mean that China’s regime will emerge from this stronger than before.

Let’s review the events of the last few months.

Starting in mid-March, Tibetans in five provinces rioted and demonstrated against China’s rule. A whopping 800 people have been arrested in Lhasa alone. That’s the biggest anti-Chinese uprising (and I think we can call it that by now, given the tens of thousands of security personnel dispatched to quell it) since Tibetans rose up against Chinese rule in 1959 during which the Dalai Lama fled China to India.

The Tibetans aren’t alone. Now the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs, a mostly Muslim, ethnically Turkic minority) of Xinjiang province are restless, too. In recent weeks, they’ve demonstrated against Chinese rule in several cities in Xinjiang – most notably Hetian – famed for its carpets and stringy lamb stew.

It’s obvious that people with a bone to pick with China’s leadership think the impending Olympics in Beijing are creating political space to air their demands.

What’s next? Well, we haven’t heard much in recent months from Falun Gong, the Buddhist-inspired spiritual sect and the object of an ongoing brutal campaign of suppression by the Chinese state. No doubt they are going to pile on soon as well. Who knows, maybe smack in the middle of the Olympics opening ceremony.

What about us unruly foreigners? We’re screaming at them about Tibet. We’ve been screaming at them about Darfur – and that’s only going to get noisier. We want them to allow the Yuan to float higher against the dollar. We want them to solve the North Korean nuclear problem; push Burma into the modern world and help convince Iran to shelve its program to build a bomb. The only bright spot in that arena is in Taiwan where, in late March, the Taiwanese elected Ma Ying-jeou as the next president. No doubt he’ll improve relations with China and will do a better job than his ham-handed predecessor Chen Shui-bian.

So is this going to weaken China’s government? On the contrary. The more pressure the Chinese get from foreigners and barbarians – which are actually synonymous in ancient Chinese – the stronger the system becomes. Indeed, China’s system feeds off this kind of adversity. The Communist regime has a peculiar genius for turning these types of threats into opportunities.

Continue »

Unidentified runners carrying the Olympic torch near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris on April 7, 2008. (Jacky Naegelen - Reuters)

One of the most interesting things in the anti-Olympic demos in London and Paris is the group of Chinese guys in blue and white track suits protecting the Olympic flame. They’re pushing and shoving everybody from cops to protesters to participants in the ceremony. Who are these guys?

According to the Xinhua news agency, the squad is called the Protection Unit for the Beijing Olympic Games Sacred Flame Relay and consists of Armed Police Academy cadets, with ranks. So basically Chinese soon-to-be cops.

I wonder if they got law enforcement visas...

Wow. Thanks to all of you who took the time to write. I hope I can keep up with you in the coming months!

One question I had reading the comments is this: Has China succeeded in creating an alternative model to that of Western liberal democracy? Does China’s amalgam of 19th century capitalism and 20th century one-party government represent a significant systemic challenge to the United States and its buddies in Western Europe? Simply put, is China succeeding where the Soviets failed?

One of the responses got me thinking about this. It came from Alec Lin, who described himself as a participant in the student-led demonstrations in 1989 that led to the bloody crackdown on June 4th around Tiananmen Square.

Lin’s posting captured for me an extremely important point about Chinese today that often goes unnoticed in the West. Basically, many Chinese are fed-up with hectoring from the Westerners.

Continue »

Does the West have a new secret weapon in dealing with China in the person of Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister of Australia?

Rudd is the only Western leader who speaks Chinese, and his Chinese is pretty good at that. But deeper still is Rudd's understanding of China.

Australian China scholar Geremie Barme unpacks Rudd's marvelous speech, given at Beijing University last week, in which he bluntly called on China to recognize its human rights problems in Tibet.

Most Western leaders probably would have either punted or come on too strong. Rudd's tone, however, was pitch perfect.

Rudd's brilliance in the speech involves turning the Chinese term "friend" on its head. Friend (pengyou in Chinese) and frienship (youyi) are two of the most distorted concepts in modern China culture. In modern China, a friend is someone who will do you favors and who expects favors in return. A "foreign friend" is someone the Chinese party-state expects will carry water for them and NEVER criticize them.

Whenever a Chinese official called me "foreign friend" (waiguo pengyou), I knew some type of horrible deal would soon be asked or expected of me.

Continue »

A lot of ink has been spilled, and rightly so, on Tibet. But is it possible that the bigger story happening in Asia right now is what's going on between China and its other unruly relative - Taiwan? Is it also possible that the troubles in Tibet could be setting the scene for faster breakthroughs vis-a-vis Taiwan? I think so.

Here's why.

Over the weekend China's president, the purposely boring Hu Jintao, met with the purposely boring vice-president elect of Taiwan, Vincent "Smiling" Siew, in the purposely sleazy resort province of Hainan in southern China. The meeting amounted to the highest-level contact between officials from Taipei and Beijing, which claims that Taiwan is part of China, since 1949 - the year when China's Communists won a civil war and the defeated Nationalists scurried to Taiwan. More recently, the two sides have had no substantial talks in eight years.

The Post briefed the meeting in our Sunday paper. The Times filed something on its website today in a piece that argued the planned dialogue won't amount to much because the Tibet situation would constrain China's leaders on any openings with Taiwan. Just the opposite, I think.

The election last month of Siew and Ma Ying-jeou, the Nationalist candidate for president, in Taiwan means that after eight years of failed leadership by President Chen Shui-bian, who bungled the island's security and its economy, relations between Taipei and Beijing are likely to improve. Leaders from the two sides are finally talking about establishing direct flights. (It takes a day to get from Taipei to Shanghai, home to 250,000 businessmen, right now. If the flights were direct, it'd take an hour.) Pres-elect Ma has said he wants to end most restrictions on Taiwanese investment in China. (A recognition of reality considering Taiwan's businessmen have already sunk $100 billion or so in mainland factories.)

This is good news, but not just for the economy of the region. It's also good news for those who care about the preservation of the world's only majority-Chinese democracy (Taiwan) and the prospect of political change in China.

Why?

For eight years, outgoing President Chen basically advocated that Taiwan declare independence from China. He couldn't say it openly because 1) China threatened to fire missiles at Taiwan if Taiwan took such an act (...not fun) and 2) the United States, which is obligated to (kind of) defend Taiwan under the very ambiguously worded Taiwan Relations Act, has told Taiwan that if it declared independence we probably wouldn't be overly eager to run to its defense. So Chen resorted to a policy of what the Chinese liked to call "creeping independence" which basically meant seizing every opportunity to enrage Beijing. In the end, however, Chen - and Taiwan -- didn't get bupkis. Taiwan failed to improve its security. And China had a strong argument against any kind of democratization. Look at Taiwan, Beijing's mandarins would say, they have democracy and they want to split the motherland! That's a powerful argument over there.

So enter Ma, the Harvard-educated pretty boy of the National Party. He turned his strategy 180 degrees from Chen's. Needlessly antagonizing China, he's said, makes no sense. The keys to Taiwan's security and - critically - to the preservation of its full-throated democracy, he argued, are good relations with Beijing, not the constant tension Chen seemed to crave. This type of thinking upset some in Washington who frame dealing with China in a smart (and somewhat complex) way with Panda-hugging or collaboration with the godless Commies. But I think that Ma is right.

The reason is that as long as Taiwan stops purposely pissing off China, most of the Communist leadership will be happy to let the whole issue of Taiwan's sovereignty float for decades as long as everybody is making money. That will boost Taiwan's economy, grant China time to change and decrease the possibility that the US will have to go to war to defend Taiwan. This peaceful interim will also give Taiwan time to push China's political system in the right direction.

And that's a key here. The only territory in the world with the capability to teach China about democracy is Taiwan. It won't be Hong Kong, which was, is and will always be just a glitzy colony - whether to the old rulers, the Brits, or the new ones, the Chinese. It's definitely not the West. If there's anything the Tibet situation has shown it's that the gap in understanding between us and China is vast and growing bigger.

But once China's propaganda czars can no longer paint Taiwan's democracy with the tar brush of "splittism" or "treason" (which they gleefully did while Chen was president), its political system will become a lot more attractive to the Chinese.

Now, how does Tibet play into this?

China's president Hu has already pretty much ruled out any major breakthroughs with the Dalai Lama. China's state-run media have reverted to propaganda from the Cultural Revolution with a 9/11 twist, describing Tibet's spiritual leader as a "jackal" in a monk's habit and a "terrorist."

But Beijing is desperate for some type of international breakthrough to show the world in this, its Olympic, year. Why not Taiwan? Arguments that flexibility on Taiwan would be impossible because it'd be inconsistent with toughness on Tibet don't wash. When the chips are down (and they are down for China right now), expediency wins. Taiwan could be the beneficiary. And that'd be good news.

For better or worse, it's safe to say that we're at the doorstep of a new era of China bashing in the West. The post-Tiananmen Square crackdown honeymoon where the zeitgeist was "we can all get rich together" is over. It's been replaced by China = bad guy.

Across the Western democracies - from the U.S. to Britain, France, Italy, Germany, a fear of China is rising and shows no signs of abating. A new poll by Harris, released Wednesday by the Financial Times, indicates that China has overtaken the U.S. as the biggest threat to global stability in the eyes of Europeans.

“The story of the last five years has been about economic opportunities," said Mark Leonard, executive director of the European Council on Foreign Relations and author of What Does China Think? told the FT. "The story of the last six months has been about China as a threat in Darfur and in Tibet."

That story is pretty much the same in the U.S. Last month, Gallup reported that after three years of relatively mixed views toward China, Americans have turned sharply negative against the Middle Kingdom. In that poll, China replaced North Korea (anyone remember the Axis of Evil?) as one of the top three U.S. enemies - after Iran and Iraq. And that poll was taken before Tibet was engulfed in protests and the Olympic torch relay morphed into a circus.

But it's not just in polls where you sense the shifting zeitgeist. Even a casual peruser of the editorial pages of leading American newspapers - or shows such as CNN's The Situation Room where Jack Cafferty recently described Chinese products as "junk" and called China's government "a bunch of goons and thugs" -- can figure out that it's open season on China. Same holds true in a new crop of thrillers where Chinese villains have replaced old Soviets, those feline French and wild-eyed terrorists as the rogues du jour. Check out NY Times reporter Alex Berenson's "The Ghost War" or Colin Harrison's "The Finder," both published this year. It's not quite Yellow Peril time, but ....

A few years ago, China's sizzling economy was viewed as an opportunity. Now, perhaps because we're flirting with a recession, it's a threat. In terms of a challenge from Asia, China circa 2008 is the new Japan circa 1980.

On the military side, China is the new Soviet Union. A few years ago analysts generally pooh-poohed China's modernization. "The Million Man Swim" was how one analyst described a potential Chinese attack on Taiwan. Not any longer. China's military (which has been rewarded with double-digit budget increases every year except one since 1989) can now shoot satellites out of the sky and has begun to roam the high seas.

When it comes to human rights, again, China is the new USSR.

Continue »

Just how scary is Chinese nationalism? Just how serious are the thousands of Chinese about boycotting Carrefour - France's version of a big box store with more than 100 outlets in China?

On May 8, 1999, hours after US missiles slammed into the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia, I was out on the streets of Beijing near the US embassy as a line of buses disgorged hundreds, if not thousands of students. A Chinese researcher rode up to me on his bike. It's the Boxers, he said, referring to the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion at the turn of the 20th century. The Boxers killed their share of foreigners and believed that bodies hardened by lotsa kung-fu fighting could stop bullets. I laughed. Then a brick whizzed past my head.

Still, I've never really been able to take China nationalism that seriously. It's like some of the comments on my blog. There's no shortage of passion but it's also curiously skin deep. It's often a foil for anti-government feelings, employed by Chinese who are actually fed up with Communist Party rule but aren't allowed to say it. Finally, it often masks deeper divisions in Chinese society. Whenever I read a Chinese blogger urging an anti-foreign boycott or some other type of joint action, I'm reminded of the telling saying that Chinese have about themselves. "A Chinese alone equals the power of a dragon, but three Chinese, nothing but an insect."

Militant nationalism is a loaded term; it raises the specter of 1930s Germany and Japan. Scholars and pundits on all sides of the political divide in America like to toss it around when speaking about China. On the panda hugging side of the aisle, they invoke "militant nationalism" when they argue that we shouldn't be tough on China. "Don't push those Chinese because they might get ultra-nationalist on you," they warn, taking their talking points almost directly from friends in China's party-state. The right, too, loves to fan the flames of our fears. China's ultra-nationalists are coming, it warns, so we need to bolster our military forces, arm Taiwan, harden Guam, snuggle up even closer to Japan.... Both lines of reasoning are flawed, I think. Here's why.

Continue »

Move over ugly American, make room for the ugly Chinese.

In Seoul on Sunday, groups of Chinese students accosted protesters demonstrating against China's treatment of North Korean refugees and Beijing's policies in Tibet. The attacks by the Chinese occurred as the Olympic torch wended its way on its seemingly never-ending journey around the world. The South Korean government was justifiably angry. China, after initially denying the events occurred, has now taken steps to still the waters. But the damage has been done. China's angry youth - called "fen qing" in Chinese - are ruining their country's reputation around the world and spelling the end of a decade-long honeymoon that the world has had with China.

The flare-up was the latest deeply troubling and profoundly weird event to mar the globe-trotting journey of the torch, which the Beijing government has dubbed "the sacred flame." (Remember, these dudes are officially atheists.) Before Seoul, we had Chinese cops in blue and white tracksuits manhandling demonstrators in Paris and London; we had a Chinese woman in the United States who participated in a pro-Tibet protest being identified on a listserv run by Chinese students; now her parents are on the run in China and her high school in Qingdao has revoked her diploma; and we've witnessed the incessant hounding of Tibetan and other speakers on US campuses by Chinese students. In cities around the world, the Chinese embassy has fanned the passions of the "angry youth" by encouraging them to demonstrate, handing out T-shirts and flags.

While I have no problem with displays of patriotic feeling, the only thing these "angry youth" are accomplishing is turning the world away from China. And they are not alone in this ill-fated effort to get China's point across. China's propaganda machine is also seriously in need of repairs.

For a few years there, the tone adopted by spokespeople of China's government was downright suave. Background briefings. Check. A quiet drink with journalists. Check. Even a bowling event without a government minder. Check. But these days, it seems like someone has disinterred Cultural Revolution propagandist and Gang of Four member Zhang Chunqiao and put him at the helm.

After the March riots in Tibet, the Tibetan government proclaimed a "people's war" against "splittism" (somebody should really tell them to lose that word) and the party boss there called the Dalai Lama "a jackal clothed in a monk's robes, and a vicious devil who is a beast in human form." A few days later the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called House Speaker Nancy Pelosi "disgusting." And the amazing thing was the Chinese expected to be taken seriously.

Finally, there's China's "ship of shame" - packed with arms for the government of Zimbabwe's president Robert Mugabe - on its own troubled journey to first South Africa and now Angola. In both places, dock workers refused to unload the weapons. It's a coincidence but also a bad one because China has been focusing a lot of diplomatic capital on improving its ties to Africa and the rest of the Third World.

What does this all mean for China? To me, it means the end of an era of China's "soft power."

Continue »

Every election cycle, somebody likes to bash China. (Remember Bill Clinton accusing George Bush of coddling “butchers in Beijing”?) China is an easy target, and bashing it is fun because it’s so much simpler to blame foreigners for our troubles than to focus on our own issues. But more broadly, I think, making a case for relations with China is tough for politicians who feel the need to dumb-down their rhetoric and identify an enemy.

Let’s take Hillary Clinton as an example. After mowing down NAFTA, Clinton has now turned her anti-aircraft heavy machine gun toward China. Here are a few snippets from her campaign:

Continue »

While its propaganda machine might be sounding a little shrill lately, China's foreign policy is hitting all the right notes. In the past few weeks, President Hu Jintao has met twice with leading politicians from Taiwan following the election of Ma Ying-jeou. First Hu met with VP-elect Vincent Siew and then with KMT bigwig Lien Chan. There's a good possibility that the two sides will move a lot closer -- setting up direct flights and freight services -- once Ma takes power on May 20 and Taiwan's both incompetent and ideologically rigid president, Chen Shui-bian, leaves. Good for China and Taiwan.

What's more, last week, Hu spent five days in Japan using "smile" diplomacy with China's Asian nemesis. By all accounts, it was a pretty successful trip, a stark contrast to complete disaster that occurred when Hu's predecessor Jiang Zemin visited Japan in 1998 and gave a screaming lecture about history. The lecture played well in China but not anywhere else. China and Japan have reason to buddy up. Last year, China replaced the US as Japan's biggest export market - a trend that isn't going to change.

Then, last weekend in Shenzhen, lower ranking Chinese officials met with representatives of the Dalai Lama. They've agreed to keep talking. No one expects this to go anywhere, but it's a whole lot better than yelling at each other via the media.

Continue »

On July 28, 1976 at 3:42 A.M., an earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 on the Richter scale shook Tangshan, a coal mining town to the east of Beijing. Sixteen hours later another 7.8 trembler rocked Tangshan again. Chinese official sources say 242,000 died, making the Great Tangshan Quake the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century and the third deadliest of all time.

To the Chinese, however, the Tangshan Quake didn't just spell disaster, it augured change. Six weeks later (on Sept. 2), Chairman Mao died, ending the Cultural Revolution and sparking a battle to change China won ultimately by Deng Xiaoping. Two other major Communist figures had already "gone to meet Marx" that year.

Natural disasters in China mean more than they do in the West. Many Chinese hold a view that the government is responsible for maintaining the harmony under heaven. If the earth buckles and shakes, it's a harbinger of political or social upheaval.

China's Communist government spent decades trying to stamp out superstitions and feudal beliefs such as these, but it has failed. The last two decades of economic reform have sparked an explosion of traditional beliefs and a renewed interest in Chinese Buddhist-like sects. In recent years, even senior Party officials embraced traditional creeds, the precepts of feng shui, and qi gong. (China's current president Hu Jintao talks about the creation of a "harmonious" society - a clear nod to Chinese traditional views.) I've met spiritual advisers to senior Chinese officials (Nancy Reagan and her palm reader, anyone?). I met one of them at a boozy evening in Beijing, introduced to me by a senior official in China's ministry of foreign trade. I still have the King of Clubs he gave me for good luck.

So, now, we have the deadly earthquake in Sichuan. So far, at least 8,500 are believed dead. Six thousand soldiers from the People's Liberation Army have been dispatched into the area to help with rescue operations. And already I have notes from several friends wondering is this dynasty next.

The man at the center of China’s rush to deliver aid and succor to the thousands affected by Monday’s tragic earthquake is Wang Zhenyao. Wang is a department chief in the Ministry of Civil Affairs in Beijing. He’s also a guy who has experienced great privation and some amazing success. Wang is known to and beloved by a small group of China watchers. Before he got this job, he was involved in China’s campaign to carry out elections in China’s villages. He was moved into his current post in 1998 apparently because he promoted real democratic reforms.

Here’s an excerpt from a story on Wang by Steve Mufson, who blogs on energy for PostGlobal and who preceded me in Beijing:

Born in 1954 in a village in Henan province, Wang's first political memory is hunger. Mao's economic program, the Great Leap Forward initiated in 1958, had failed spectacularly. Though Mao wouldn't admit that the economy was collapsing, in villages like the one where Wang grew up it was no secret. Fuel and cooking oil were in short supply. The cooking pots had been melted down to meet Mao's unrealistic steel production targets.

"My generation really believed we were red," Wang recalls. "We believed in Chairman Mao and that we should devote ourselves to Chairman Mao."

Continue »

I know I am late on this one – I was on the West coast talking to people about China – but I’d like to inaugurate a new award. Let’s call it the Fu Manchu Award for the Most Cringe-worthy Comment on China. The first winner is Sharon Stone for her comments on China’s quake.

Stone said, referring to the quakes and China’s policies in Tibet, etc.: "I thought, 'Is that karma?' When you are not nice, bad things happen to you."

Send in your nominations for the Fu Manchu Award in coming weeks. If there’s enough interest, we’ll do one a week.

I’ll be posting another comment soon on the earthquake and other issues.

This book review of mine appeared in the Post a week ago. Lustgarten’s book is worthy not so much for his stuff on Tibet but for the access he got to the engineers who built the railroad. That made it, for me at least, enlightening.

CHINA'S GREAT TRAIN
Beijing's Drive West and the Campaign To Remake Tibet
By Abrahm Lustgarten
Times. 305 pp. $26

WHAT DOES CHINA THINK?
By Mark Leonard
PublicAffairs. 164 pp. $22.95

China is ruled by geeks. For the last 30 years, engineers have dominated China's political system. After revolutionaries such as Deng Xiaoping kicked off its economic reforms, the techies took over and built China into the untested superpower it is today.

Continue »

Talk about peace, love and understanding! Reuters today is quoting a Nationalist Party spokeswoman from Taiwan as saying China has vowed to cut the number of missiles aimed at Taiwan.

I said in an earlier post that the stage has been set for a luv-fest between Beijing and Taipei.

Today's report concerns a meeting last week between Nationalist Party Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung and senior leaders in Beijing, including President Hu Jintao. Wu asked about the missiles and was told China would stop deploying them ahead of a gradual reduction. "It was a friendly reaction," spokeswoman Ms. Chen Shu-jung told Reuters. China did not set a timeline or estimate how many missiles might be removed, she said.

If this report turns out to be true, it would be really major. Not just an olive branch, heck, a whole tree, presented by China's leaders to the new president of Taiwan, Ma Ying-jeou, who took office on May 20. Ma has also set his sights on a peace accord, as well as a boost in trade ties. Get ready for negotiations to begin on direct air travel. Shanghai to Taipei, less than a two-hour flight. Good for biznez!

Continue »

On Aug. 30, 1976, the New York Times ran a short piece on page 25 quoting a front page story in the People’s Daily. “Peking Praises Father Who Let Children Die,” read the Times' headline.
The mouthpiece of the Communist Party had written about a father of two who survived the Tangshan earthquake (which left 200,000 dead). After the disaster, he discovered his 16-year-old son and 13-year-daughter alive. “Quick, Daddy, come and save us,” the story quoted his children as saying. But Dad had other plans.

Hearing the voice of the local Communist Party secretary, Dad went and saved him first. Meanwhile, his kids died. “But he felt neither remorse nor grief,” the People’s Daily concluded. “In the interests of the people of the neighborhood and in the majority interest, he did not hesitate to sacrifice his own children.”

There’s been a lot written about how the Sichuan earthquake has changed and is changing China. A freer media; NGOs that can finally be NGOs; real charities; a commitment to battling the corruption that resulted in the pancaking of dozens of schools -- and the deaths of thousands of kids; a more responsive state. All of these hopes have risen from the tragedy.

Across many fronts, we’re now seeing backsliding. The authorities are reining in the press and the NGOs. Police are trying to stop demonstrations by parents who’ve lost their children. That’s in character. There’s a spasmodic nature to Chinese history. It moves three steps forward and five steps back. Still, in the short run, it may turn out, for the wrong reasons, that this will be one of the best things that ever happened for the Chinese Communist Party. It’s bought a huge amount of legitimacy, not so much with the rescue efforts, but for allowing all this to flourish – at least for a little while.

But the thing that seems to me the most significant is what this disaster is showing us about changes being wrought inside that murkiest of arenas -- China’s soul. People are competing to see who can help out the victims. Students lined up by the hundreds to give blood. On the web, fat cats are being shamed into donating more and forced into apologizing if their charity pales in comparison to the gifts of other bigwigs. “How much have you given?” has become a new greeting, replacing “Have you played golf?” or “Been to Tibet” of just a few months ago.

Continue »

There’s been a lot written on how the 2008 Olympics are going to be China’s Olympics – and that China will use its prospective mother lode of gold medals to bolster national pride. Well, more than national pride, China’s collective manhood. But truth be told, most Chinese don’t give two fen about the Olympics. To be sure, they love the collective idea about the games, and China’s politicos will savor the international “face” that will accrue to the Mandarins in Beijing; but crew? or equestrian events? or baseball? These sports have no fans in China. None. Zilch. Ling

No, if you really want a sport that’s connected intimately to China’s manhood, its sense of itself as a successful nation, it’s soccer. Yes, futbol. Or zuqiu in Chinese, zu for foot and qiu for ball. Forget about ping pong or wu shu or the dragon boat race. Soccer is the national sports obsession of the Chinese.

Continue »

The riots last weekend in Guizhou province – an estimated 30,000 people converging on a police station to protest the alleged cover-up of a teenage girl's rape and murder – illustrate something important about China today. In the United States, we generally like our local governments, our mayors and even our city councils. But we’re deeply split about the feds. In China, it’s the other way around. No one trusts the local potentate. The local cops? Worse than dogs.

Continue »

One of the most interesting blips in the Guizhou riots was the release of a relatively in-depth Xinhua News Agency report on the clashes. It appeared on the Chinese web and then vanished as the government moved to quash any real reporting on the incident. I include it here in full:

Continue »

I received this e-mail reply to my last blog post about the Guizhou riots from Michael Anti (the 'government name' used by Zhao Jing, a gifted analyst of things Chinese). Big changes in the Guizhou riots. This letter puts the events in context.

John,

I saw your blog and agree with you. People do believe some Beijing-based blue-skyish judge will fly there to save them from local thugs. And this time it works. Shi Zongyuan, Party Boss in Guizhou Province, a de-facto imperial envoy sent by Beijing, is purging almost all the top officials in Weng'an County. This blue-sky show turns a risk into a success, again.

Should the United States be selling weapons to Taiwan now that Taiwan and China are getting closer? This is a nettlesome question that the Bush administration doesn’t want to answer, at least until the president returns from the Olympic Games in China in August.

The Post’s Glenn Kessler reported recently that Bush administration officials were delaying a long-promised $11 billion deal which include 30 Apache helicopters, 60 Black Hawk helicopters, eight diesel-electric submarines and four Patriot air defense missile batteries. The administration has also refused, Kessler reported, to accept a "letter of request" from Taiwan for 66 F-16 C/D fighters – which would cost an additional $5 billion.

Continue »

The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming!

Chinese tourists have started arriving in Taiwan as the first routine direct flights are now operating between mainland China and the island. Taiwan's tourism industry is hoping the number of tourists will reach 3,000 per day.

This is a major step forward in the relations between the two sides. (Note to American hawks: not much chance of a war now guys...) It's also a major step forward in the cultural interaction between these two very, very different societies.

Continue »