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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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:

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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.

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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."

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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My thoughts on China's superpower potential, or lack of it, are in the Washington Post's Outlook section this week, here.

So the Olympics in Beijing are not just a battle between athletes but a battle between systems, huh?

So it's not just shot-putters and crew jocks, bicyclists and divers, sprinters and ping pong paddlers. It's democratic capitalism (US) vs. authoritarian capitalism (THEM).
It's war by any other means, huh?

For those of you who buy into this "struggle of the titans" story line, the muscle-bound American Gladiators vs. the wily Fu Manchu, please, for a moment, take the new-Cold-War bong off your mugs and listen up.

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So I caught some of the Olympics opening ceremony on a Ukrainian website. It was pretty amazing. But I would have liked to have watched the whole thing live and not felt like a hacker while I was doing it. Sorry. NBC wasn't showing it. More important stuff to report. Maybe something on Britney or whatever.

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I think one of the most amazing things about the opening ceremony -- which was pretty incredible -- was how little "fortune cookie" Chinese culture there was. I mean, wasn't it great that there was no dragon/lion dance and no red lanterns? Shen Wei, one of the artistic directors, talks about this in a recent piece worthy of attention.

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So am I the only one who is having trouble figuring out how a nation of 1.3 billion people can't find a little girl who can be adorable and sing well at the same time? I mean why China had to lip-synch "Ode to the Motherland" at the opening ceremony, using cute as a button 9-year-old Lin Miaoke as a front for the voice of still pretty cute Yang Peiyi is truly befuddling.

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From the lip-syncing imbroglio, to reports on tween gymnasts and Han Chinese kids posing as ethnic minorities, to coverage that's focused on human rights, pollution and China's challenge to West, one could argue that Beijing is getting kicked in the teeth on a daily basis by the Western press.

Are we being too tough?

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You have to love what's happening in Taiwan. Yeah, I know the story is in Beijing with the Olympics and all that, but the former President of Taiwan, Chen Shui-bian, has just been banned from leaving the island and the Swiss are investigating a bank account that contains $20 million.

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Chinese authorities at the Olympics announced at the beginning of the affair that they were setting aside specific venues for protesters in a new sign of openness. Protesters were supposed to apply to the police for a permit. None have been granted and several of the applicants have been detained. Ooops.

Now comes this official Chinese report explaining the whole situation.

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Some Chinese friends have asked me to write a post or two in Chinese. So here goes. For those of you who don't read Chinese, it's similar to the Should We Give China a Break? post of two days ago.

总的来说我的评价是这样。在新闻报导方面，包括中国体操队员年龄的问题，北京空气污染，林妙可假唱的事，汉族小孩假扮少数民族小孩上开幕式，票卖完了但是赛场空的奇怪现象等等，我就觉得西方媒体写得蛮客观的。这些事情确实有的。西方媒体包括《华盛顿邮报》，《纽约时报》等媒体据我所了解没有出现什么捏造事实的行为。又不是一天到晚写这些不愉快的事情。

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If anyone needs an example of how brittle China's Communist Party leaders think their country is, look no further than the case of Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan. The elderly women, who both walk with canes and have failing eyesight, were sentenced to serve one-year terms in a labor camp after they applied to hold a legal protest in Beijing. And if you think there was no method to this madness, that it's somehow the fault of some random thug in the Ministry of Public Security, I'd caution you to think again.

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It's interesting to see how the Western press is summing up the Olympics. Thomas Boswell, one of the premier sports writers in America, has this to say.

The only thing that I'd add to Boswell's piece is something that he would have no way of knowing: The Chinese Communist Party can focus the attention of its people and its security services for limited periods of time, say the two weeks of the Olympics. But after that China does (and will) return to a certain normalcy. Now, whether that normalcy will be altered or improved by having hosted the Olympics is another question. Time will tell. But I think Boswell's concerns are legitimate ones and eloquently expressed.

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It's pretty clear that one of the singular successes of the Bush administration's foreign policy is the U.S. relationship with China. Bush came into power calling China a "strategic competitor." But, like all presidents over the last three decades, when it came to China, he changed. Buffeted by events, especially the EP-3 incident during which a Chinese jet fighter crashed into a U.S. reconnaissance plane and, of course, 9/11, which rewrote America's strategic map, Bush has embraced a cool-headed policy toward Beijing.

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One of the most interesting things behind the whole horrible scandal involving tainted baby formula is that breastfeeding is not that popular in China. So far four babies have died and more than 6,000 have been sickened by milk powder that was spiked with the chemical melamine -- which makes the milk seem like it contains more protein than it really does.

You'd think breastfeeding would be widespread in a society that retains the appearance of being close to its agricultural roots, in a society that literally worships human milk. There's a Chinese expression: ren nai zhi bai bing (Human milk cures 100 illnesses.) During the biblical floods in southern China in '98, China's Central Television ran footage of wet nurses dispatched to the barricades to offer their milk to Chinese soliders. The CCTV footage showed one Chinese GI rubbing the stuff into his hair.

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Should Americans be learning something from the Chinese tainted-milk scandal? Should we be worried? Concerned? A little queasy?

You might say, "Not a problem, it's happening on the other side of the globe." Of course the story so far -- four dead infants, 60,000 sick, and the bureaucratic fallout just beginning -- is pretty grim. Asia is worried: Brunei, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Bangladesh, Burundi and the Philippines are all either testing Chinese dairy products or pulling them from their stores. Kids have been stricken with kidney stones in Hong Kong.

But the FDA has said we don't import China's milk products. So don't worry.

I disagree. If the scandal illustrates anything, it's that China's product safety system is woefully ill-equipped. And that's pretty sobering news from a country which is the second biggest supplier of goods to the United States.

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This is from a New Zealander living in Wuhan reacting to the comments below. He has a point.

"I follow Pomfret's China and very much like it BUTwould it be possible to put recommendations at the top of the comments section ... such as to keep the discussion topical - i.e. pertinent to the actual post that comments are being logged under? There could be some really good informed discussion. At the moment it's the same bland pro/anti China stuff over and over. And it's quite intense. Another great recommendation would be: please keep comments mature."

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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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The highest ranking delegation of Chinese officials to visit Taiwan arrived in Taipei on Monday. Chen Yunlin, Beijing's top negotiator on Taiwan affairs, is leading a 60-person delegation, in the first Taiwan-China negotiations ever on Taiwanese soil. No one more senior from China has come to Taiwan since the end of the civil war in 1949 (unless you count the Nationalist Party which fled the Communist takeover.)

These negotiations are hugely important and extremely symbolic. For China and Taiwan, they are tantamount to the US elections. While they are not going to usher in new governments, they could set in motion a new era of relations between China and Taiwan -- unless knuckleheads on Taiwan or China mess it up.

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There's been a lot of talk in recent weeks about how China could ride to the rescue of a global recession, using the latent power of 1.3 billion consumers to power global GDP. Who would have thought that we'd be calling on China to save our bacon? Witness a New York Times editorial on Oct. 26 with the remarkable headline: "As China Goes, So Goes...." What the Times called for, and what others have seconded, is for China to unleash domestic demand, ramp up imports, thereby keeping the global economy afloat.

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Is China really as stable as we've been led to believe? Recent events make it seem likely that Beijing is going to get kicked in the teeth by the worldwide financial crisis. And the strikes and protests now occurring throughout the country suggest that China's authoritarian political system is in for a real challenge.

For years we've heard the narrative in the United States that China was going to have a smooth ride to superpower status. A report from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace earlier this year predicted that China would overtake the US economy by 2035. A few weeks ago, the New York Times suggested in an editorial that China's economy might be the one engine that could drag the world out of its current rut. The LA Times, noting that China possesses a world-high $2 trillion in foreign exchange, predicted that at last weekend's economic summit, China would wield "a big stick."

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So the global economy is in meltdown, Europe and China are both facing the prospect of a seriously ugly downturn. They'd scheduled a summit for this week. You'd think both sides would want to participate. Not China.

China canceled it. The reason? Because several European leaders -- including French President Nicolas Sarkozy -- have recently met with the Dalai Lama. Whoa! Now there's a solid reason if I ever saw one. You meet with Buddhist spiritual leader, we blow off key meeting on future of the world.

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The announcement today that China will dispatch its navy to defend against pirates of the Somali coast is a big one. It marks the first time that China has committed itself to taking part in what a Chinese naval officer called a multi-lateral "battle task."

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Times are tough in the United States. It seems that they're even tougher in China.

An official Chinese magazine this week predicted a massive increase in protests because of the global economic downturn. It reported that 10 million people, originally from the countryside, have been fired from their jobs in factories mostly on China's eastern coast. Another 8 million people are officially registered as unemployed. Meantime, a record number of people will enter the workforce this year, including more than 6 million who have graduated from high school or college. 2009, the magazine said, will be the toughest year in China in recent memory.

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China Digital Times highlights a wonderful post by a Chinese blogger who calls herself 'Persian Xiaozhao.' It revolves around her reasons for, in the end, signing the Charter '08 call for democratization and other significant political reforms in China.

While I know that Chinese dissidents -- and the cause of human rights in China -- aren't really big issues in Washington and the United States anymore, Persian Zhao's posting should stand as a reminder of the challenges faced by right-thinking people in the People's Republic.

So is China going to get pulverized by the economic downturn or will it escape bruised but unbowed? Two perspectives reveal a lot about what we know and don't know about China. One predicts that the Communist Party's capacity to meddle in China's economy is actually that nation's secret weapon.The other cautions that during downturns big exporters (like the United States during the Great Depression and China today) usually get hit harder than the rest.

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Until today, China wonks have had little sense of how the new Obama administration will handle relations with Beijing. Today's written testimony from Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner hinted at a new, tougher tone.

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When Hillary Clinton downplayed human rights as part of the U.S. agenda in dealing with Beijing during her visit to Asia last month, I was of two minds.

I understood editorials such as the one that ran in The Post blasting her for her statements. But I also empathized with the secretary because of the automaton-like quality of our interactions with Beijing over issues such as Tibet, Taiwan and, more broadly, human rights.

As she said: "We know what they are going to say because I've had those kinds of conversations for more than a decade with Chinese leaders."

Ultimately, I came to this wishy-washy conclusion: if you're going to tweak your human rights policy with China, you probably want to do it quietly. Unconfirmed reports this week that China is engaged in a human rights crackdown have, if anything, reinforced my belief that Clinton's public diplomacy last month was at best premature. Here's why.

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Here's a particularly smart story about the new "Great Game" being played out in Burma. I hate the cliche "Great Game," but this is a really interesting piece about how China, India and other major Asian players are turning Burma into a colony.

Bending to Chinese pressure, the government of South Africa has refused to allow the Dalai Lama a visa to attend a conference of Nobel Peace Prize laureates. Two of South Africa's Nobel peace prize winners, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and FW de Klerk, pulled out of the conference, which was scheduled to start on Friday. The conference was subsequently postponed.

Back in Beijing, they must be congratulating themselves. South Africa, led by Nelson Mandela, once attempted to pursue one of the most creative policies vis-a-vis China. No longer. And therein lies a tale.

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Long-time US diplomat Hank Levine disagrees with my criticism of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent announcement that the US plans to downplay human rights with China. In a post on his new blog Levine takes me to task for disagreeing with Clinton's move to state publicly that the US will not aggressively defend human rights in China and that there are other more important things; the global economic crisis and global warming to name but two.

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I caught Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's speech at the Institute of International Economics this week. In the speech, he said basically that all the world's efforts to get out our financial mess would collapse if we adopted protectionist measures. No brainer.

But I wonder if he's saying one thing and doing another. Reports from Australia indicate that two big Chinese-owned firms are having trouble acquiring two large Australian companies.

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For decades the rest of the world has derided Americans for being ignorant about lots of things. Not least on that list has been our ignorance of how we affect the world. We think the world loves us, our critics say, but it doesn't. But now, the United States seems to have found a rival in the race to be the most insensitive country on earth. China!

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Here's my take on "Postcards from Tomorrow Square," a (relatively) new book by James Fallows, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Niall Ferguson coined the term "Chimerica" to describe the close and often bizarre co-dependence of the United States on China and vice versa over the past decade. Americans were China's consumer of choice, gobbling up hundreds of billions in Chinese-made stuff. China was our ATM, lending us hundreds of billions of dollars. It was fun while it lasted.

But "Chimerica" is still alive. The US and China are positioning themselves as the twin saviors of the world's economy. Just witness today's luvfest between President Obama and China's Communist Party boss Hu Jintao. Obama announced he would travel to Beijing next year to, according to the White House, "intensify coordination and cooperation on global economic and financial issues." Doesn't seem like any troublesome issues were mentioned. No mention of their squabbles over the Chinese yuan, China's recent assault on the dollar as the world's dominant currency or even the ugly stand-off between US and Chinese naval vessels a few weeks back.

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Are you a superpower when Timothy Garton Ash says so? The award-winning writer has a grand piece in the Guardian today in which he states:

Today - 2 April 2009 - may yet be marked as the day on which, through the catalysis of a global economic crisis, China definitively emerged as a 21st-century world power.

Not so fast.

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The U.S.-China luvfest continues!

You have to love this notion of President Obama helping China and France come to a deal at the G-20. As this Bloomberg story said Obama pulled Hu and Sarkozy to a corner of the room during the G-20 meeting in London's Excel Center.

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British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that China will provide $40 billion extra to the IMF. That's a big chunk of change. Especially for China. In total the IMF is raising $750 billion.

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Earlier this year Zbigniew Brzezinski ran an op-ed in the China Daily around the time he was in Beijing celebrating the 30th anniversary of the normalization of relations with China. In the piece, Brzezinski called for the creation of a G-2 between the United States in China. The implication of Brzezinski's piece was basically: forget about the G-7 or the G-20. If you want to get something done in the world, that road runs from Washington through Beijing.

Brzezinski proceeded to outline an ambitious agenda for the new U.S.-China world axis. It would be responsible for solving the Iranian nuclear problem; sorting out the various messes in Afghanistan and Pakistan; bringing peace to the Israelis and the Palestinians - and then, once they were done with all that, solving climate change.

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Here's Nouriel Roubini's take on China's economic prospects. [PDF]

Pretty negative and definitely a different line from the triumphalism emanating from the authorities in Beijing.

There's a wonderful report out recently by McKinsey on China's rich. Let me go through a few of the factoids, which paint, I think, a telling picture of what it's like to be a yuppie in the People's Republic.

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News flash. China is not a currency manipulator. Source: the same guy who said China was a currency manipulator just two months ago.

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China announced today that it's economy grew 6.1 percent when compared to the first quarter of last year. Not bad, actually. Retail spending up. Fixed investment up. Industrial production up. All signs are pointing to a decent recovery. Twenty years after China faced its most serious political crisis with the death of Communist Party general secretary Hu Yaobang that touched off the Tiananmen Square protests, China is facing and apparently facing down its most serious economic crisis since its opening to the West. China is muddling through.

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Research published last week in the British Medical Journal has confirmed what Chinese demographers have believed for years. Chinese couples have been aborting female fetuses at an alarming rate. So much so that, according to the paper, "in 2005 males under the age of 20 exceeded females by more than 32 million" and that China will see "very high and steadily worsening sex ratios in the reproductive age group over the next two decades." In one year alone, 2005, more than one million more boys were born than girls.

Think of that. An army of 32 million essentially unmarriageable men. That's a recipe for serious social disorder. I wrote a long piece about this in the Post in 2001. This report adds detail and texture.

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Jackie Chan believes that the Chinese people need to be controlled! He's beffudled about democracy. He doesn't know about freedom.

Speaking at the Boao Forum in southern China, Chan said this: "I'm not sure if it is good to have freedom or not. I'm really confused now. If you are too free, you are like the way Hong Kong is now. It's very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic."

And this: "I'm gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we are not being controlled, we'll just do what we want."

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Speaking of luvfests, is anyone noticing the blossoming romance between China and Taiwan? Today, China announced that the World Health Organization has invited Taiwan to attend the 62nd World Health Assembly (WHA) as an observer.

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There's a really smart piece in the current issue of Foreign Policy by Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal on, basically, the stupidity of the ideas behind the US-China "G2."

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This is a really interesting review of a new book that reconsiders Chiang Kai-shek.

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China and Mexico are battling over China's treatment of Mexicans traveling to China in the wake of the H1N1 outbreak in Mexico. More than 100 Mexicans have been quarantined even though many have not had any contact with the disease. Now the two governments, who are bickering publicly about the issue, are talking about dispatching planes to each other's country to pick up their nationals. The Wall Street Journal has the best piece so far on China's treatment of Mexicans.

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From the China Daily today

A local government in central China has backed down on an order which
asked civil servants to smoke more to help boost the regional economy,
the Beijing News reported Tuesday.
The Gong'an County government of Hubei province found itself at the
center of public outrage after it demanded local officials to consume up
to 23,000 packs of locally-produced cigarettes annually, worth 4 million
yuan (US$588,235), using public money.

The full story is here.

There's a lot of talk these days in China about anniversaries. This year marks the 90th since the May 4th student movement that introduced Mr. Democracy and Mr. Science to China. The 60th since the founding of the PRC. The 20th since the Tiananmen Square crackdown.

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This is a really smart op-ed by Dan Rosen on the new hope in the economic relations between China and Taiwan.

The operative graph for me is this:

Until now, Taiwan has blocked inward investment from China -- despite WTO obligations -- ostensibly out of national security concerns. While unofficial estimates of Taiwanese investment in mainland China range from $200 billion to $400 billion, reciprocal Chinese investment in Taiwan stands near zero. During the most recent round of direct China-Taiwan talks in Nanjing, agreement was reached to resolve this asymmetry. As a result, many sectors of Taiwan's economy stand to benefit from new inflows from across the Strait, including real estate, information and communications technology, areas of financial and business facilitation services, biotechnology and other sectors.

A year after the horrible earthquake in Sichuan province, China released statistics that said 5,335 school-aged children died in the quake. Many of them died in shoddily-built schools. About 70,000 people altogether died in the quake. Parents of the dead children have lobbied the government for reparations and to punish corrupt officials who built the lousy schools.

Covering the quake's aftermath isn't easy. Here's an example from the Financial Times.

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Here's what we know about the authenticity of Zhao Ziyang's memoirs,which will be published in English on May 19 (20 years to the day when he was removed from his post as general secretary of the Communist Party). Zhao's editors say the following:

1) They liaised with people whom they knew to be close to Zhao. (Bao Pu was one of the editors and his father, Bao Tong, was Zhao's political aide. If Bao Pu didn't know the people personally, his father did.)

2) The memoirs were dictated by Zhao into tapes. Zhao numbered them in his own hand. His voice on the tapes sounds exactly like his voice on other tapes of him speaking, although you do have to take age into account.

3) Other sources close to Zhao knew of the tapes.

4) A transcript of one of the tapes has already been cited in an appendix to a book in Chinese by the author Yang Jisheng. (The tapes, however, apparently have no relation to "Zhao Ziyang: Captive Conversations," a book by Zhao's longtime friend Zong Fengming.)

Here's a (non-exhaustive) list of what the Chinese government has said about the June 4th crackdown. Over time, the government's tone has morphed into something a bit less strident. In the early '90s, the PRC called it "counter-revolutionary turmoil" or just "turmoil" for short. Then it modified that to "the Tiananmen incident." In a 2003 interview with the Post, Premier Wen Jiabao gave what I thought to be the most illuminating answer, framing the "incident" as something that occurred "in the last century" with the clear implication that it was irrelevant to today's China.

Compiled by Nicholas Bequelin:

June 1989
Zhang Gong, spokesman of the army
Nobody was killed in the Tiananmen Square, and there was nobody crushed by tanks in the Square.

June 6, 1989
Yuan Mu, spokesperson of the State Council
During the "clearing" of Tiananmen Square, 5,000 soldiers were injured, and 2,000 civilians and "rebels" were also injured, 300 soldiers and "law-breaking criminals" died, including 23 university students.

June 16, 1989
Yuan Mu(interviewed by the U.S. news station ABC)
The news clips shot by ABC depicting troops entering the Square killing civilians and students were actually created by "advance technology" with the aim of twisting the facts.

1990, Jiang Zemin, General Secretary
Dismissed international condemnation of the Tiananmen Massacre as "much ado about nothing."

January 2001, Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Bangzao
Defended the use of deadly force against unarmed civilians in June 1989 as "...timely and resolute measures...extremely necessary for the stability and development of the country."

November 22, 2003 Interview with Premier Wen Jiabao with The Washington Post
"In the last century, at the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, drastic changes took place in the Soviet Union and countries of Eastern Europe. In China, a political disturbance occurred. At that time, the party and government of China adopted resolute measures in a timely fashion to safeguard social stability and became more determined to press ahead with China's reform and opening up. Our development over the past years has proven that stability is of vital importance for China. As premier of this country, I think the most important issue for me is to ensure stability and development. This is because China has 1.3 billion people."

2008 Qin Gang, spokesperson of the Foreign Ministry
Regarding the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s, there is already a clear conclusion.

2009 Zhao Qizheng, spokeperson of the Chinese People's Consultative Conference
The government has already reached the verdict on "June Fourth", and the stability of the country was the foremost priority.

Someone asked me whether I thought Zhao Ziyang's posthumous memoirs -- "Prisoner of the State" -- was going to cause some type of controversy on the mainland or add to the worries of the Chinese Communist Party.

My answer? Nothing major and not much. The book's Chinese edition will sell well in Hong Kong. Other than that, the reaction will probably be like this:

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This is the smartest piece so far that I've read on Obama's pick for ambassador to China.

Reading all the stuff about North Korea's nukes, one thing strikes me: the United States seems to want to outsource not just its jobs to China, but also its diplomacy. "It's up to China!" and "China can do more!" are the operative phrases emerging from DC-think-tanks and the US government. As if....

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Check out the cover of this month's US Naval Institute's Proceedings. It depicts a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in flames, smoke billowing from the deck. The headline asks a simple question: Chinese Carrier Killer?

This month's Proceedings magazine cover.

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This is a really interesting piece from the South China Morning Post on a story that has captivated China.

Two reporters beaten as gag on case tightens
Pressure on activists over accused killer's plight
SCMP He Huifeng May 29, 2009
Two reporters were beaten in Hubei's Badong county as local authorities sealed off the epicentre of a scandal involving a cadre allegedly killed by a hotel pedicurist. Two reporters - Kong Pu from the Beijing Times and Wei Yi from the Nangfang People Weekly - were beaten yesterday morning by officials in Yesanguan town, according to media sources. They were interviewing a grandmother of the 21-year-old pedicurist, Deng Yujiao . The reporters were left bruised by the attack and both had their cameras smashed, the sources said. They were detained from 1pm to 5pm, and there were a number of security personnel monitoring their hotel after their release. Both reporters said they had proper media credentials.
A media gag was introduced by central government censors on Tuesday. News organisations were ordered to halt their reporting on the case and recall reporters from Hubei, saying the case was under judicial investigation. Deng's plight has sparked one of the biggest civil rights movements on the mainland in recent years as various groups showed their solidarity with her. Many netizens and reporters have travelled to Yesanguan to follow the case voluntarily. But a group of five women's rights activists who arrived in Yesanguan on Monday said the town was eerily quiet because access to it had been cut by local authorities.
"We were told by local residents that the ferry from Yichang to Badong had been suspended since Tuesday," said Zhou Li, one of the activists. "Every vehicle entering Badong county is being checked. If drivers or passengers are not locals, they are told to turn back." Ms Zhou said hotels in the town had been told not to receive outsiders. Some shops had even been shut since Wednesday.
"We've been followed by more than a dozen plain-clothes police since we arrived in Badong. Now, the electricity and water supply to our hotel has been cut off. They are trying to make us give in," said Ms Zhou. "Five Yesanguan officials, including the chief of police, came [on Wednesday night] and asked us to leave. They said they could not guarantee our safety if we stay here. We came here to show support for the powerless and anger at officialdom. We'll be here until the end."
The dead official, Deng Guida, the head of a trade promotion department in the town, reportedly demanded "special services" - a euphemism for sex - from Deng at Yesanguan's Xiongfeng hotel on May 10. In the presence of a subordinate, he threw money in her face and pushed her to the sofa several times before she stabbed him with a fruit knife. The subordinate was injured.
The reported behaviour of the officials sparked fury among netizens, and this was heightened when local authorities appeared to tone down the description of the officials' activities in a way that could see them avoid charges of demanding sexual services or rape. On Wednesday, Deng was released from custody and placed under house arrest. Commentators said the move would help to address public mistrust in the government. They also said the house arrest could be an indication of official back-pedalling from the earlier murder charges and an attempt to defuse public anger.

There are surprising noises coming from China these days about North Korea. One influential Chinese academic thinks China's policy -- long supportive of the hermit kingdom -- might be changing.

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This is my take on how the Communist Party has managed to stay in power for the 20 years after Tiananmen Square.

Two disparate events in recent weeks in China point to an interesting development. China's Internet users are challenging the government and forcing it to respond. First China's plan to force computer manufacturers to install censoring software and then the furor over a pedicurist who killed a government official after he beat her when she rejected his demand to have sex.

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Here is a really smart post on China's nutty net nannies by Rebecca MacKinnon, China Internet watcher extraordinaire.

The sale of GM's Hummer division to China was front page news and used by many a bloviator (see my main man Peter Goodman here) as an another example that CHINA IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD!!!

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