MentalGator

Items by Isaac Stone Fish

FP Passport - blogging on global news, politics, economics, and ideas

• Why China expelled Al-Jazeera

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 9:21 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  Yesterday, Al-Jazeera English announced that it would be closing its bureau in Beijing after the Chinese government refused to renew the press credentials and visa of its China correspondent, Melissa Chan. Chan, based in Beijing since 2007, has an excellent reputation as a journalist, reporting hard-hitting stories on black jails, the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, and Chinese land grabs. (Disclosure: I worked with Chan on the board of the Foreign Correspondent's Club of China and consider her a friend.)

  Chan's expulsion is believed to be the first for a foreign journalist based in China since the 1998 deportation of a Japanese journalist; writing in the New Yorker, Evan Osnos described it as the revival of "a Soviet-era strategy that will undermine [China's] own efforts to project soft power," and a clear step backwards for Beijing.

  That it is, no doubt. But Chan also fits into the troubling pattern of the foreigners Beijing has targeted over the last decade: those the Chinese government views of having less protection because of their ethnicity and nationality; often with Chinese backgrounds. It appears that someone in the Chinese government wanted to give a warning to journalists without causing an international incident; Chan, a Chinese-American working for a Qatari-based television station, seemed to be an appropriate target. The thinking seems to be that a foreign government will more loudly protest the mistreatment of a citizen who is both born and raised in its own country and working for a domestic company.

  It's not just journalists who are affected. In December 2009, China executed Akmal Shaikh, a British citizen accused of smuggling eight pounds of heroin into China. The execution of Shaikh, the first for a European in China in 50 years and despite protests from the British government, came as China wanted to appear tough against crime; Shaikh also happened to have been born in Pakistan.

  In 2010 the Chinese government sentenced Stern Hu, a Chinese-born Australian who formerly ran Rio Tinto's iron ore operations in China, to 10 years in prison for accepting bribes and stealing trade secrets, in a case widely viewed as political; his former boss said Hu had been "thrown to the wolves." Xue Feng, a Chinese-born American citizen was sentenced to eight years in prison in July 2010 under China's menacingly vague state secrets laws for purchasing an oil database.

  Following the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989, a handful of journalists, including Americans working for American papers and Brits working for British papers, were expelled. British-born Andrew Higgins was expelled from China in 1991 while working for London's Independent newspaper for supposedly possessing confidential information. Some journalists expelled around that time were let back in, like John Pomfret, a former Washington Post bureau chief, kicked out in 1989 for what authorities called "stealing state secrets and violating martial law provisions" and what he called writing "about Tiananmen Square." Unlike Pomfret, Higgins, who now works for the Post, has not been given the standard long-term visa to report in China, and instead covers the region from Hong Kong.

  The pattern seems to be that powerful countries like the United States will be less likely to protest the mistreatment of an American working for a non-American company, or a foreigner working for an American organization, when it becomes a more complicated procedure of coordinating responses between embassies and ministries. Executives and reporters with Chinese backgrounds have many advantages operating in China. Besides language skills and local networks, they can blend in a country where different color skin clearly identifies one as an outsider. Anecdotally speaking, they seem to be given less leniency when they don't follow China's laws; like they're supposed to "know better." 

  Many foreign news bureaus are hosted in two diplomatic compounds in the Jianguomen neighborhood. As a reporter based out of the compound for two years, I entered freely, while foreign reporters who looked Chinese (and, of course, those that were Chinese),  often had to show their IDs to get in. Injustice in China affects more than just the locals.   

• Economist Mao Yushi on why the Chinese government is not evil

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 10:08 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Chinese economist Mao Yushi is in Washington DC to receive the $250,000 Cato Institute's Milton Friedman Liberty Prize for his advocacy for "an open and transparent political system." Mao, the 83-year-old founder of the Chinese think tank Unirule, infuriated leftists last year in China for calling for Mao Zedong (no relation) to be held accountable for his crimes. The case of Chen Guangcheng, a blind human rights activist who sought safety in the U.S. Embassy late last month has spotlighted China's current human rights weaknesses, but Mao, who like many Chinese suffered greatly during the Cultural Revolution, thinks that's missing the point. I interviewed Mao this morning about American imperialism, Bo Xilai, and Chairman Mao's long shadow (Edited and condensed for clarity):

  On China's progress: America thinks the Chinese government oppresses human rights. Yes China has its problems, but in the past thirty years human rights in China has seen a big improvement. The American people and the American government think that Chinese government is evil, but that's wrong: It's not like in Mao Zedong's time, when they killed millions of people for political reasons. In the past thirty years, China has never executed someone for political reasons. (Even the execution of the former head of the Chinese State Food and Drug Administration) was for criminal reasons. Compare China to other countries like Syria, Libya: they've killed political prisoners. China has not.

  On Former Chongqing Party secretary Bo Xilai: His (downfall) had a big connection to politics. He wanted China to return to Mao Zedong's time, and this I don't approve of. But many Chinese did. Many thought Mao was a big savior; like he was a God. It's possible that other (high leaders) have this view. They can't insult Mao. They put his big picture on Tiananmen Square. When I was in my twenties, I also believed in him. I thought he was great. But fifty million people died because of his rule. Many youthful people, they didn't have that experience, and still believe in Mao, like sixty years ago. Mao Zedong thought tricked me, and it's now tricking many young people.

  On American Imperialism: Many in China and in the government thinks America is China's biggest enemy; that the "American imperialists want to destroy China." That's not happening. Also, the "American imperialists," they occupied Japan and Germany after World War 2, and now they're two of the world's biggest economies. I'm here to receive this prize, and many Chinese have said, you're taking America's money, you're a traitor. The Chinese government has taken so much money from the Ford Foundation, and I have just taken just a little bit of money.

  On Chen Guangcheng: Both sides are using this to attack the other. China has used this to say you interfere in my internal politics, and need to apologize. America has used this to attack China on human rights, saying you don't protect your people, you are evil. Many Chinese government officials say America wants to destroy us, but so many Chinese come to America to study abroad. When they have troubles, they flee to American embassies. Wang Lijun (a former deputy of Bo), for example. Many Chinese people think America can protect them. 

  On political reform: (Because of the Bo Xilai scandal) The Communist Party has opened the curtain a little, and let people see what's inside. Things are changing, and have changed. In Mao's time, politics was a matter of life and death. Transfer of power now is a peaceful process. From Deng Xiaoping, to Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao, there haven't been deaths. You look at (countries like Pakistan) and there were deaths. Most of my opinions I can express freely. Of course, not 100 percent of them, but most of them, as long as I'm fair. Compared with other developing countries' governments, China's government has done a very good job.

• A Chen Guangcheng primer

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 11:42 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  The blind, self-taught legal activist Chen Guangcheng has escaped from his village in Shandong province where he was kept a prisoner in his own home and fled to Beijing. The New York Times quoted an official at the Chinese Ministry of State Security as saying Chen had made it to the U.S. embassy, though the State Department hasn't confirmed or denied if Chen is inside.

  Chen become famous for filing a class action lawsuit in 2005 on behalf of woman who underwent forced sterilizations; he was later imprisoned for three years for "damaging property and organising a mob to disturb traffic" and then kept under de facto house arrest. Chen's house became a spot of pilgrimage for human rights activists, a sort of adventure tourism for Chinese who wanted to experience for themselves the thuggishness their country has to offer. Batman actor Christian Bale tried to visit as well but was forcibly turned away; "What I really wanted to do was to meet the man, shake his hand and say what an inspiration he is" Bale said at the time.  

  It's a sensitive time for the United States to consider offering Chen asylum, as China is still reeling from the downfall of high ranking leader Bo Xilai, a scandal precipitated by an associate of his seeking refuge in the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. 

  This is at least the second time that Chen has escaped from house arrest. "The night gives me an advantage," he told Time Magazine, after fleeing from an early house arrest in August 2005 to Beijing. "I can navigate better than people with sight can."

• Inside Boxun, China's media muckraker

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 1:39 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Last week, U.S. web hosting company Name.com received an email ordering them to stop unregister the domain of Boxun, a Chinese news portal run out of North Carolina. Boxun, which has the same retro, link-heavy feel as Craigslist or Drudge Report, serves as a clearinghouse of the rumor and intrigue circulating the web about Chinese elite politics. "We have our sources," says Watson Meng, a Duke University graduate from China who founded the website in 2000 and still runs it, supervising the editing and posting of an average of more than ten articles daily.

  Since former police chief Wang Lijun fled to a U.S. Consulate in Chengdu in February, precipitating the downfall of Politburo rising star Bo Xilai and China's biggest political scandal in decades, Meng's site has published and reposted stories about Bo's wife's links to the Tiananmen square massacre, a text message Bo's brother apparently sent last week that said Bo Xilai's case had been "settled," and reports that the Bo case has finally given President Hu Jintao control over the military. "We got the eavesdropping story weeks ago," he said, referring to recent reports that Bo had spied on other leaders. Many of Boxun's stories appear to be true; others feature what could best be called speculation supported by anonymous sources. Still, it's been an exceptional three months for the website, which has seen its traffic increase by 160 percent.

  A source familiar with the matter forwarded me the original English-language email Name.com received: "Hello, due to a domain name of your platform: "boxun.com", serious damage to the interests of my company, now we hope you stop any services for this domain immediately...Please pay attention, we would began to attack in a few hours except satisfying our conditions. Please treasure your own commercial interests, if for any loss caused to you, please forgive!!!" [ellipsis mine, spelling and grammar same as in the original.]  

  After the email, Meng says Name.com was hit by a ferocious denial-of-service attack of "ten gigabytes" a second and Boxun found a new server. Name.com did not respond to a request for comment, and Meng didn't say where the email was sent from.

  By his counting, Meng's website has been attacked dozens of times. Last January, with the Arab Spring gaining steam in the Middle East, Meng posted calls for a "Jasmine Revolution" in China from an anonymous group. Pro-Communist Party groups "were pretty hardcore about this," he said. "They put my family's names online. That was the first time that happened." Meng grew up in a small county in rural Hebei province in the 1960s and 1970s, where his parents still live. During the Cultural Revolution, many urban youth were sent to villages across China. I asked if that was the case with him and he replied, "nope, we were always peasants." His father was a local functionary on the county's science committee; his mother was a farmer. His family on the whole is supportive of his actions and he's not worried about them. "The Cultural Revolution has already passed," he said. "There are not too many illegal things people can do to my family."

  Meng thinks this web attack was specifically ordered by Zhou Yongkang, the ninth ranking member of the Politburo Standing Committee and ideological ally of Bo. Meng describes him as a "very strong person who runs the PSB, state security, or, well, don't know if he runs anything anymore," though he thinks Zhou will keep his position until the next Party Congress this fall. In earlier Boxun posts, Meng has speculated that Bo and Zhou had been working together to overthrow Xi Jinping. "We believe Wang Lijun already told the U.S. Consulate that Bo Xilai had a plot to stop Xi Jinping's rise" he said, citing "reliable sources."

  Since Chinese official news outlets usually function as mouthpieces of the Communist Party, rather than trustworthy providers of fact or clearly sourced opinion, Chinese readers are comparatively more trusting of Weibo (microblogs), rumors, and sites like Boxun. Wang is currently looking into a 2002 crash of a flight from Beijing to Dalian, in which more than 100 people died. He thinks Bo orchestrated the crash to kill the wife of a political rival, who was carrying evidence that could have been harmful for the former powerbroker. "He's done so many things to cover up this or cover up that," Wang said. He declined to elaborate on what proof he has for his latest claim and the scenario seems somewhat farfetched, but, like all of Boxun's stories, it falls within the realm of possibility.  

• Kim Jong Un tries to launch his rocket

  Posted: April 12, 2012, 3:30 am by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  North Korea, the world's poorest, most maddeningly opaque nuclear power, has just launched a long-range rocket. Or at least it was supposed to be a long-range rocket.

  Both the Pentagon and the South Korean defense ministry have confirmed that the rocket was launched at 7:39am Seoul time, or 6:49pm Washington, D.C. time; a spokesman for the South Korean defense ministry said that a few minutes after the launch the rocket had broken up and crashed into the sea.  North Korea hasn't commented yet, either through official channels or the usually feisty (and congratulatory) Korean Central News Agency of the DPRK.

  North Korea announced the plan for the satellite launch, which it claimed was for peaceful purposes, on March 16, less than three weeks after it had signed a deal with the United States in which it promised to stop nuclear and long-range missile tests. Even U.S. officials and long-term North Korea watchers used to dealing with a mercurial Pyongyang were surprised by the speed at which the country reneged on the agreement.

  The fear is that, were Pyongyang successful in actually launching a long-range missile, North Korea could eventually load a nuclear warhead on a rocket and send it as far as Alaska or Hawaii. Seoul, the South Korean capital of over ten million people which is only dozens of miles from the DMZ, has been well within striking range of North Korea's artillery for decades.

• Is Mike Wallace the reason Chinese leaders don't give interviews?

  Posted: April 9, 2012, 11:34 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  Hu Jintao, China's president for the last decade, is the first leader of China since the Empress Dowager Cixi (who died in 1908) to refuse to speak with foreign press. Chiang Kai-Shek gave interviews, Mao Zedong pontificated to Edgar Snow; Deng Xiaoping joked with foreign reporters while expounding on his pragmatic philosophy.  Even Hua Guofeng, Mao's short-lived successor, chatted with a British journalist. China's current premier Wen Jiabao has sat down with CNN's Fareed Zakaria twice for a relatively gentle round of questioning but the top leader, and the other members of China's ruling council the Politburo Standing Committee, have stayed silent. 

  More than any other reporter, Mike Wallace, the charmingly aggressive 60 Minutes correspondent who passed away this Saturday at the age of 93, may be the reason for Hu's reticence. A sit-down with Wallace was rarely a pleasant experience for world leaders -- particularly autocrats: he lectured Yassir Arafat on violence, challenged Vladmir Putin on democracy, and suggested to Ayatollah Khomeini that he might be a lunatic and a 'disgrace to Islam.' But his 2000 interview with former Chinese President Jiang Zemin may have played a role in convincing Jiang's successor of the value of keeping his mouth shut. 

  In contrast to Hu, Jiang was a flashy (for a Chinese leader) former Shanghai Party secretary, who sang karaoke on state visits and recited the Gettysburg address to foreigners. He told Barbara Walters in 1990 that the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre was "much ado about nothing," and Lally Weymouth in 1998 that "I really don't know what kind of threat China poses" to India.

  Wallace's genius was the ability to unblinkingly chastise power. Even during the aired pleasantries, Wallace looks unimpressed with Jiang. During minute 2 of the hour-long interview, aired days before Jiang's 2000 U.S. visit, Wallace tells Jiang "shorter answers, please. More concise" and a touch of panic breaks through Jiang's placid smile.

  One of the benefits of China's state-managed media system for its leaders is that journalists cannot embarrass them. Hu comes across far more introverted than Jiang, even during prepared Chinese media interviews. In one netizen conducted interview in 2008 hailed as "startling," Hu answered three questions about his Internet habits. (In case you were wondering, he said "because I'm pretty busy, it's not possible for me to go online every day"). It's a safe way to appear human. 

  Jiang had to account for the sins of his administration: Wallace calls him a dictator, criticizes him for cracking down on the banned-in-China spiritual movement Falun Gong, and chides him for his lack of military service. When Jiang waxed about Sino-US relations, Wallace responded that "there's no candor" in his answer.  

  Wallace chased Jiang to see if he would admit to admiring the courage of the student who stood down the tank during the student uprising in Tiananmen Square:
  
  

  Jiang: He was never arrested. I don't know where he is now. Looking at the picture I know he definitely had his own ideas.

  Wallace: You have not answered the question, Mr. President. Did a part of Jiang Zemin admire his courage?

  Jiang: I know what you are driving at, but what I want to emphasize is that we fully respect every citizen's right to freely express his wishes and desires. But I do not favor any flagrant opposition to government actions during an emergency. The tank stopped and did not run the young man down.

  Wallace: I'm not talking about the tank. I'm talking about that man's heart, that man's courage, that man, that lonely man, standing against that.

  Jiang refused to answer the question, looking stubbon and weak. Investment banker and China watcher Robert Kuhn in his book How China's Leaders Think wrote that "going one-on-one with Mike Wallace was daring and dangerous but Jiang Zemin's down to earth, open and thoughtful tone scored well." To me, it seems like a lesson to Chinese leaders on the benefits of staying home and keeping quiet.

  Jiang also recited lines from the Gettysburg address for Wallace, who used it as a chance to press the president on the autocratic nature of his rule. "Why is it that Americans can elect their national leaders, but you apparently don't trust the Chinese people to elect your national leaders?" Jiang, who Deng Xiaoping appointed with consensus from a small group of elderly party leaders, responded unconvincingly, "I am also an elected leader, though we have a different electoral system."

  Explaining power dilutes it. Now Hu is silent. 

• Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Trip to China

  Posted: April 4, 2012, 1:58 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Gary Shteyngart, the Russian-American novelist whose books Absurdistan and The Russian Debutante's Handbook enliven the farcical edges of living in a totalitarian society, returned recently from a two week reporting trip to China, the cruel and prosperous land of the future. "We suck," Shteyngart said over the phone. "The saddest flight in the world is Beijing Capital to Newark." FP interviewed Shteyngart about Jews in China, how to build a successful business, and the world outside Brooklyn, edited and condensed for clarity.  

  Foreign Policy: Did you tell people you were Jewish in China?

  Gary Shteyngart: I did. They said ‘why are Jews so sad and anxious? Why can't you cheer up?' What I said to that, was, you know, the Holocaust. They said we were kind of similar that way. I don't know what happened [to the Chinese] exactly, I read about it on Wikipedia.

  FP: You mentioned in a tweet that you started your own boutique investment firm in Shanghai but it failed after five hours. What did you get from it?

  GS: A lot of dignity. You can't really monetize dignity.

  FP: What did you talk to the Chinese about?

  GS: A lot of people in the United States want to be Chinese. A lot of the Chinese want to be writers. They're adorable. I told them not to do it. It's so sweet -- I was talking to one young lady, she was so touched that I would speak to her. Kind of a rough and tumble society, China. We gentle Jewish professors of creative writing are just incredible to them.

  FP: What did you feel after you came back from China?

  GS: The saddest flight in the world is Beijing to Newark. Beijing is Charles De Gaulle, Newark is Burkina Faso.  I'd feel better if America looked great -- but we don't. We've been working too hard, we need to retire now and let someone else do it. It's not easy. The pollution in China. I'm still coughing up some weird petro-chemical things out of my lung (and I've been back for ten days). My whole cardio-vascular thing is so affected.

  FP: What did you perform at Racist Park [a Chinese theme park that shows all of the minorities living together in harmony, now known in English as China Ethnic Culture Park]?

  GS: I did the ol' Fiddler in the Roof. I was the third daughter, the one who married a goy. Fiddler on the Smokestack.

  FP: What about Shanghai?

  GS: I went to Pudong and saw that they're building the (world's) tallest building there. It's going to be taller than the other buildings.

  We went to a steampunk club, called #88; [people were wearing] all sorts of Victorian corsets -- I guess some people had the leisure time to look appropriate. The world is so fascinating, I'm telling you -- this is what I tell young writers: Get out of Brooklyn.  

  Oh, and I drank this horrifying thing. If there is one of thing chaining civilization back, its baijiu. You're burping sorghum for the rest of your life. There's no cure for baijiu.

  FP: What do you recommend a young writer do in China?

  GS: I'd start in the financial side -- young guy or girl, just out of Princeton, gets involved in some sort of private equity thing, learns about the corruption, and at the same time learn about the Asian work ethic. That's amazing that there hasn't been a great expatriate novel; it seems like half of the Ivy League is holed up in Shanghai.

  FP: What about for the Williams environmental science grad?

  GS: Well, they can go teach English. English teaching is sad, because everyone does it; it's the last resort. Or you could do NGO work. I met some NGO people, they were cute.

  Writers, though. You have a lot of power as a writer here; anything with an embossed business card gives you face.

  FP: Did you hand out copies of an embossed business card in China?

  GS: No, I brought 800 copies of my book to give out to China, and handed them out with two hands to people all across the country, cab drivers...

  FP: What did cab drivers think of your book?

  GS: The cab drivers loved that it has both postmodern and traditional aspects.

  FP: Best business idea in China that would last for more than five hours?

  GS: We could have Communist Party youth league people collect used wire, and use this used wire in the penal system to flog people, or just to poke people with the wire. It's green. [environmentally friendly]. It's a good way to get in on China's growing penal system.

• Is VW regretting the name of its signature SUV?

  Posted: April 3, 2012, 10:13 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  In 2003, Volkswagen launched its first ever SUV, the Touareg. ‘"Touareg" literally means "free folk" and is the name of a nomadic tribe from the Sahara,'" they wrote in a press release, explaining their decision to borrow the name of the nomadic North African ethnic group. "A proud people of the desert, the Touareg embody the ideal of man's ability to triumph over the obstacles of a harsh land. To this day, they have maintained their strong character and self-reliance."

  The "strong character" of the Tuareg -- as it's more typically spelled -- has been in the news lately. Tuareg rebels, formerly brought to Libya to be mercenaries for Muammar al-Qaddafi's regime, have been steadily advancing though Northern Mali, capturing several military bases as well as the ancient city of Timbuktu. Believing themselves inadequately equipped to take on the heavily armed Tuareg fighters, a rogue group of Malian army officers overthrew the country's president last week.

  The nominally Muslim Tuareg are reportedly working with local Islamists who have instituted Sharia law on some of the captured towns. Oxfam says that in some parts of the country as much as 70 percent of the population is facing "acute food insecurity."

  I was curious as to whether, with the Tuareg in global headlines, Volkswagen was reconsidering its, in retrospect, odd, decision to name an SUV after an ethnic group that has been involved off-and-on in a low-level insurgency against the government of Mali and Niger since the 1960s. 

  "I cannot comment on whether we would consider changing the name of the car. We are not politically involved with this tribe.  We don't have an opinion on this yet," said Christian Buhlmann, a spokesman for Volkswagen AG. "I wasn't even aware of that situation until you told me about it," he added.

  Ron Sowell, a salesman at Martens Volvo and Volkswagen in Washington, DC, hadn't heard the news in Mali either, and doesn't think it will affect the car's sales to its target audience, which he describes as "people pretty well educated, degrees, making more than $100,000".  He added, "I just think that an automobile and what a tribe does elsewhere doesn't have anything to do with the car they're driving."

  What about VW customers a bit closer to the action? A salesman for Volkswagen based in Accra, Ghana said that "now everyone is hearing about the Touareg, but it hasn't affected the popularity of the car."  People in Ghana "aren't concerned with what is happening in other countries," said the salesman, who wished to remain anonymous.

  Buhlmann added that he could only comment on "what kind of engines we have in the car and where the name came from." He said the name comes from VW's view that people living in the desert are "peaceful," and that "our vehicle would be a very good desert vehicle."

• North Korea's Cage

  Posted: March 29, 2012, 1:26 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Shin Dong Hyuk is the only known escapee of a North Korean concentration camp. Born there in 1982, he spent his early years mining coal, scrounging for food, and, like his peers, snitching on prisoners who disobeyed camp rules. When he was in his twenties, Shin first heard about the existence of China, South Korea, and television from a prisoner transferred into the camp. Shin, who had starved all his life, wasn't much interested in these things; he just wanted to hear stories about grilled meat.

  Blaine Harden, the author of Escape from Camp 14, and a former Washington Post East Asian bureau chief, spent three years working with Shin and coaxing him to tell his story, which he did in short, intense intervals. "He distrusted everyone," Harden said in an interview:

  "He let me march around in the darkest corners of his life for quite a long time, and it made him uncomfortable. (In the book) I used the image of a dentist drilling without anesthetics, and I think that's a pretty accurate image.

  I didn't know how to interview him, how to get him to trust me. And sometimes he'd just leave. He'd say he was sick and leave. We had rounds in Seoul, Southern California, and in Seattle, from 2008 to 2011. He just doesn't like to talk about the terrible things that happened, particularly the terrible events surrounding his mother, so it took time.

  There's no one like him. There's no one else who was born in an open air cage and then moved to the West and tried to regain his humanity. I was able to understand him better after he told me the story of his first couple days outside of the North Korean prison camp where he had spent his entire life. It was the dead of winter in a small town. He saw that people could laugh, and wear bright color clothing, and could live without the fear of guards hitting them. That was his context."

  Escape From Camp 14 is a fascinating look inside one of North Korea's prison camps, part of a chain of gulags that no outsider has ever seen; an excerpt of the book, including the story of Shin watching his mother die, is available here.

• Chinese coup watching

  Posted: March 21, 2012, 11:16 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Last week, controversial politician Bo Xilai, whose relatively open campaigning for a seat on China's top ruling council shocked China watchers (and possibly his elite peers, as well), was removed from his post as Chongqing's party secretary. He hasn't been seen since. Rumors of a coup, possibly coordinated by Bo's apparent ally Zhou Yongkang, are in the air.

  Western media has extensively covered the political turmoil: Bloomberg reported on how coup rumors helped spark a jump in credit-default swaps for Chinese government bonds; the Wall Street Journal opinion page called Chinese leadership transitions an "invitation, sooner or later, for tanks in the streets." The Financial Times saw the removal of Bo, combined with Premier Wen Jiabao's strident remarks at a press conference hours before Bo's removal as a sign the party was moving to liberalize its stance on the Tiananmen square protests of 1989. That Bo staged a coup is extremely unlikely, but until more information comes to light, we can only speculate on what happened.

  Reading official Chinese media response about Bo makes it easy to forget how much Chinese care about politics. The one sentence mention in Xinhua, China's official news agency, merely says that Bo is gone and another official, Zhang Dejiang, is replacing him.  But the Chinese-language Internet is aflame with debate over what happened to Bo and what it means for Chinese political stability.

  Mainland media sites have begun to strongly censor discussion of Bo Xilai and entirely unsubstantiated rumors of gunfire in downtown Beijing (an extremely rare occurance in Beijing). Chinese websites hosted overseas, free from censorship, offer a host of unsupported, un-provable commentary on what might have happened in the halls of power. Bannedbook.org, which provides free downloads of "illegal" Chinese books, posted a long explanation of tremors in the palace of Zhongnanhai, sourced to a "person with access to high level information in Beijing," of a power struggle between President Hu Jintao, who controls the military, and Zhou, who controls China's formidable domestic security apparatus. The Epoch Times, a news site affiliated with the Falun Gong spiritual movement (which banned in China), has published extensively in English and Chinese about the coup.

  Speculation is rife: A Canadian Chinese news portal quoted Deutsche Welle quoting the Hong Kong newspaper Apple Daily quoting a netizen that a group of citizens unfurled a banner in a main square in Chongqing that said "Party Secretary Bo, We Love and Esteem You," and were subsequently taken away by plain-clothes security forces. A controversial Peking University professor Kong Qingdong, a 73rd generation descendant of Confucius, said on his television show that removing Bo Xilai is similar to  "a counter-revolutionary coup;" one news site reported his show has since been suspended.

  The Wall Street Journal reports that searching for Bo Xilai's name on Baidu, China's most popular search engine, lacks the standard censorship boilerplate ("according to relevant rules and regulations, a portion of the search results cannot be revealed") that accompanies searching for top leaders like Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. A recent search for other Politburo members like Bo rival Wang Yang and People's Liberation Army top general Xu Caihou were similarly uncensored. Conversely, searching for Bo's name on Sina's popular Weibo micro-blogging service now doesn't return any relevant results. A censored fatal Ferrari crash on Sunday  night has raised suspicions of elite foul play, possibly realted to Bo. The bannedbook.org reports that Hu and Zhou "are currently fighting for control of China Central Television, Xinhua News (the official Communist Party wire service), and other ‘mouthpieces,'" which have been eerily but unsurprisingly taciturn about Bo Xilai.   

  What we do know, as one message that bounced around Sina Weibo said, is that "something big happened in Beijing."

• Obama channels Bush on Iran

  Posted: March 21, 2012, 11:09 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  This is a guest post by Gabriel Max Scheinmann, a PhD student at Georgetown University and Visiting Fellow at the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.

  
  

  Hallmark it ain't. Yesterday President Obama gave his annual YouTube message marking Nowruz, the Persian new year. In a tradition begun by President Bush and used as an opportunity to directly address Iran, Obama's four Nowruz greetings have symbolized the evolutions in the Administration's policy, from a realpolitik message of respect and engagement with Iranian leaders to likening the regime to the Soviet Union and identification with the aspirations of freedom of the Iranian people. As Iranian behavior has become even more belligerent, Obama's approach towards Tehran has increasingly resembled that of the Bush Administration that he so derided.

  In his inaugural Nowruz message in 2009, Obama endeavored to "speak clearly to Iran's leaders," praising the "shared hopes" and "common humanity that binds us together." He called for a "new beginning" in diplomatic relations, scrubbing any mention of the Iranian nuclear program or the regime's oppression of its own citizens. He announced his administration's commitment to diplomacy and foreswore the "sticks" approach of his predecessor, affirming that the "Islamic Republic of Iran" could yet "take its rightful place in the community of nations."

  A year later, Obama somewhat shifted his message. The president again validated the legitimacy of the regime, by calling on the "leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran", and again offered to engage on "the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect." He even supported Iran's leaders' "right to peaceful nuclear energy." Following the regime's repression of domestic protests after the fraudulent June 2009 presidential election, the president for the first time referenced the distressing state of civil liberties within Iran. However Obama ended his message much in the same way he had a year earlier, repeating that "our offer of comprehensive diplomatic contacts and dialogue stands."

  Obama's 2011 message marked a dramatic transformation in tone and substance. It's the first time he spoke directly to the Iranian people, dropping the niceties of the "Islamic Republic of Iran." Perhaps slightly intoxicated with blooming Arab revolts, the president directly linked the uprisings in Tahrir Square to those in Tehran's Azadi Square in June 2009, a couched call for Iranians to peacefully rise up and depose their own leaders. Asserting that the Iranian regime feared its own people, he concluded with a phrase that many Americans would associate with a certain Texan: "And though times may seem dark, I want you to know that I am with you."
  

  Just yesterday, the president underwent his starkest transformation yet. Addressing solely the Iranian people and echoing Winston Churchill, he compared Iran to the Soviet Union by declaring that "because of the actions of the Iranian regime, an electronic curtain has fallen around Iran." Obama called for a dialogue between peoples, not governments, and, for the first time, mentioned U.S. sanctions against Iranian leaders. Once again, he highlighted the Iranian people, not the regime, as "the heirs to a great and ancient civilization" and declared that the regime's responsibility to respect the rights of its people was as important as its commitments to the international community regarding its nuclear program. Although the president still offered the Iranian government a way out, Obama elevated the importance of the freedom of the Iranian people to that of the Iranian nuclear program and explicitly compared the Iranian regime to the totalitarian nature of the Soviet Union.

  In three short years, Obama's Nowruz greetings, much like his Iran policy, have progressed back to those of the Bush Administration. By pledging himself to the Iranian people in their struggle against a Soviet-like regime, he borrowed President Bush's final Nowruz message: "the reformers inside Iran are brave people, they've got no better friend than George W. Bush, and I ask for God's blessings on them on their very important work."

• Ted Koppel's guide to the media

  Posted: March 19, 2012, 10:06 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Ted Koppel, the 25 year veteran anchor of Nightline and former Managing Editor of Discovery Channel, used to appear on John Stewart's The Daily Show as the standard of journalistic integrity, his disembodied "giant head" advising Stewart on what today's hyperactive media could learn from the good old days. FP spoke with Mr. Koppel about this month's media news, from Apple to Limbaugh to Kony; edited and condensed for clarity.

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  Mike Daisey's Fabrication

  The temptation to makes things up becomes even greater when you're in a setting like China, where you don't have ready access to as many sources as you do in the United States. There's probably not a foreign correspondent alive who hasn't had a conversation with a taxi driver from the airport to the hotel and then incorporated what the taxi driver told him under the general rubric of ‘local sources,' here in fill-in the blank. It's fair game if you make it clear in your story what you're doing. I think that happens more often in a dictatorship, where it's hard to get people to talk, and you're going to make the most of what little contact you have with the population.

  Daisey's story falls into no man's land. That Daisey raised public awareness of conditions in an Apple plant has some positives, but the damage that he has done to journalism in general has not.

  The worsening of bi-partisan bickering

  Issues end up being magnified, first the blogs, than the radio talk shows, than cable TV talk shows, all of it processed and re-processed endlessly on a succession of idiotic programs, on the left and on the right. They go just so far beyond the bounds of civility and good taste. It's sad. I despise it when I see it with Limbaugh, and Maher; it's bad for the country, bad for our national dialogue.     

  Limbaugh and Maher, at a time when they're being criticized, claims he's just an entertainer, yet each of them revels in their political influence, and takes on serious of political issues, and has millions of viewers who listen to what they say and are influenced. You can't have it both ways; can't excuse every outrage by wrapping yourself in the cloak of entertainer.

  Viral scandals

  In this age where you have (Kony 2012 filmmaker) Jason Russell, when you are able to attract and in some fashion influence 70 million people, and it then turns out that not everything you did is above board, there's a huge chance that those 70 million people are going to be negatively affected in their view of what's been reported. Whatever good Russell may have done by drawing attention to Kony's atrocities depends on your ability to take him at his word. If any of those aspects turn out to be overstated, misstated, untrue, you undermine everything.

  Twitter

  I do not recognize the value of Twitter, with very few notable exceptions, as a valuable instrument of news coverage, precisely because most of the time you know nothing about the provenance of a tweet...I think we make a grave mistake when we give Twitter too much influence as a medium of journalism; it hasn't quite matured into that yet, I don't know if it ever will.

  Mass media coverage of China

  Mass media are under-reporting China. It's a very complex story, and I think one of the lamentable things about American media today is that they give foreign news short shrift. It's much easier to spend hours of cable time covering the Casey Anthony trial. People watch it. Charlie Sheen goes on his binge and that gets documentary time. The networks and Cable TV devote one hour specials to it. Surely not because it's the most important thing going on in the world today; it's cheap, it's easy, and it draws a huge audience.  

  
  

   

• This American Life retracts Apple story from China

  Posted: March 16, 2012, 10:29 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  Oops. Public radio show This American Life announced early today that they could no longer stand by an episode they broadcast in January featuring Mike Daisey, the author of a popular monologue about Apple supplier Foxconn in China. A Marketplace reporter (a show from the same family as This American Life) found that Daisey had fabricated a number of scenes with people claiming they had suffered from working for Foxconn. Ira Glass, host of This American Life, offers a stunningly direct mea culpa for the show; he says in hindsight they should have killed the story before broadcasting:

  But other things Daisey told us about Apple’s operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn’t think he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of the story. That was a mistake.”

  In a blog post today, Daisey responded that he stands by his work, explaining that his show uses a “combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license.” He adds, “What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue.”

  Kudos to Glass for issuing an apology for a story gone wrong, and taking charge of the narrative before anyone else really picked Daisey’s story apart. China is a maddeningly complex place to report, and one wonders if this will trigger other disclosures.

   

  Update:  Mike Daisey had earlier excoriated tech journalists for committing the "terrible sin" of evading our "responsibilities.” Oy. 

• Beijing's Black Jails

  Posted: March 15, 2012, 1:10 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  This is a guest post from Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch.

  Last Friday, Al Jazeera's China correspondent Melissa Chan dropped in on a "black jail" in Beijing, one of the city's secret, unlawful detention centers that the Chinese government insists do not exist.

  It was a standard black jail, housed in an empty government building in southern Beijing's Fengtai district, staffed by thuggish men in civilian clothes with sharp brush cuts and the swagger of off-duty policemen. Their job: to detain petitioners, residents of the rural countryside who come to the city seeking legal redress for miscarriages of justice. When Beijing police showed up to defuse a confrontation between the guards and a crowd of angry petitioners, the police ignored the guards and instead told the Al Jazeera crew to stop filming and leave the scene.

  Petitioners are routinely abducted off the streets and held in these secret prisons where they may be subjected to physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Black jail detainees can be held from a few days to several months-and often have to bribe their way out of captivity.

  Meanwhile, just across town, the annual meeting of China's National People's Congress saw the ratification yesterday of China's newly revised Criminal Procedure Law.  Deputy president of Beijing's Renmin University Wang Liming praised China's newly revised Criminal Procedure Law as "the constitutional principle of respecting and protecting human rights."

  But black jails, operating outside the law and sustained through the passive or active complicity of the Chinese government and its security agencies, are immune to any tinkering with China's statutes. Despite being illegal, black jails persist due to a perverse bureaucratic incentive: local government officials are punished when there is a large flow of complaining petitioners from their areas to Beijing.

  The glaring disconnect between the Chinese government's assessment of China's human rights protections and the events recorded by Al Jazeera just a few kilometers away highlight the widening gap between the government's lofty rhetoric on rule of law and the security agencies' increasing disregard for that principle. True, the newly revised Criminal Procedure Law enshrines advances in legal protections for the rights of minors and the mentally ill, and forbids confessions obtained through torture. But the same law also allows police to detain suspects in national security, terrorism or major bribery cases incommunicado for up to six months in secret locations outside of regular detention facilities, which can only fuel abuses.  The black jail captured on video by Al Jazeera is a potent reminder of the fragility and irrelevance of China's laws when security agencies at best won't enforce them or at worst actively violate them with impunity.

  Human Rights Watch documented the existence of black jails and their related abuses in 2009, echoing findings by Chinese human rights organizations and human rights lawyers. Despite that evidence, the Chinese government has maintained a public stance of denial. During a March 2010 United Nations examination of China's human rights record a Chinese government official insisted that, "There are no black jails in the country." On March 13, 2012, a foreign ministry official gave that same answer to Beijing-based ITV correspondent Angus Walker, who like Al Jazeera had also stumbled upon a black jail facility that week.

  In Sept. 2010, Chinese media reported the detention of two executives of a private security firm, Anyuanding, implicated in the abduction of petitioners and the operation of black jails.  But the pair was later released without being charged. Even worse, Beijing police subsequently raided the office of Caijing magazine, one of the two media organizations that reported the Anyuanding-black jail link in pursuit of their sources for the article.  Chinese police later apologized to Caijing, but the raid sent a chilling message to state media about the police position on investigating black jails.

  Black jails are just one example of the willingness of China's state security agencies to perpetrate enforced disappearances - a crime under both Chinese domestic and international law - as a means of silencing citizens who challenge the authoritarian status quo. 

  In early 2011, with government fears of possible of Arab spring-like "jasmine revolution" in China, state security agencies targeted more than 30 of its most outspoken critics, including the artist-activist Ai Weiwei.  The lawyers and activists were held in unknown locations for weeks, and several later reported that they were interrogated, tortured, threatened and released only after signing spurious "confessions." And for several months the government considered as part of the Criminal Procedure Law revisions a provision that would have effectively legalized such enforced disappearances; only after considerable domestic and international outcry was that dropped.

  Until the Chinese government reins in the power of its security agencies- starting with a public admission of the existence of black jails and concrete moves to abolish them -  the value of China's new Criminal Procedure Law isn't worth much more than the paper it is printed on.

• Chinese netizens respond to the fall of Bo Xilai

  Posted: March 15, 2012, 6:07 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  This is a guest post from Charlie Custer, the founder of Chinageeks.org, a blog that provides analysis and translation of modern China:

  In the wake of Premier Wen Jiabao's jab at former up-and-comer Bo Xilai during his speech at the closing of China's National People's Congress yesterday, China's state newswire Xinhua announced this morning that Bo Xilai has been replaced in his Chongqing posts by a vice-Premier named Zhang Dejiang. The one-sentence news bulletin did not make it clear whether Bo retained his position on the Politburo, or whether he had resigned or been fired, but most observers agree the news is a definitive sign that Bo's political ascendancy is at an end. 

  A few months ago, Bo Xilai was regarded as a prominent up-and-comer, and a possible competitor for a position on China's powerful politburo standing committee. His governance of Chongqing, a massive city-state in central China once known for its rampant gangsterism, has been marked with a mix of socialist flourish -- Bo brought back cultural revolution songs and promoted "red" culture -- and unceasing pursuit of anti-corruption and anti-gangster prosecutions, often culminating in high-profile trials and surrounded with rumors of unethical methods. But in February it all started falling in apart in way that was conspicuously, almost suspiciously, public for the normally secretive upper ranks of China's Communist Party.

  On China's microblogs, discussion of Bo's downfall has been a hot topic since the rumors of Bo protege Wang Lijun's attempted defection first emerged in February. In a scandal that has yet to be fully unraveled, Wang entered a US Consulate in Chengdu, possibly turning over state secrets to US officials, then left voluntarily and was taken by Chinese state security agents. He has not been heard from since, but the Chongqing government did announce that Wang was undergoing "vacation-style medical treatment." This odd phrasing caught the attention of net users, and early on, there were faltering attempts by censors to stop the discussion, but quite quickly it became clear China's microblog operators were not dedicated to protecting Bo and discussion of him would be allowed, even promoted. At present, Bo's dismissal ranks at the top of Sina Weibo's trending topics list, which indicates both that it is being widely discussed and that Sina's censors endorse this discussion. The trending topics list is managed carefully by Sina, and politically sensitive issues never appear there for long.

  Bo's flamboyant style and promotion of his own 'Chongqing Model' of governance has always made him a controversial figure, and unsurprisingly the news of his removal has provoked a variety of responses. "Bo Xilai may personally have had problems [...] but he really did many good things for the people," wrote popular microblogger and media-watcher Dou Hanzhang. "We cannot completely negate the 'Chongqing Model' just because of his personal problems."  Beijing lawyer Wang Cailiang wrote: "Many of my friends are very happy [about Bo Xilai's dismissal]. I don't think there's really anything worth feeling happy about. How many officials are there in our Party who were elected and who respect the opinions of Party members? It's like kids playing house, a few factions determine who holds what position. It doesn't have anything to do with the rule of law, democracy, or the people's lives."

  Other netizens shared photos and songs to commemorate Bo's career in Chongqing, where he picked up a reputation as a populist and a fighter against corruption, even if his methods of prosecution were sometimes rumored to be as criminal as the methods of the gangsters he was hunting down. "I don't even want to stay in Chongqing anymore," wrote one anonymous weibo user, "with Bo Xilai gone and Wang Lijun removed, is it even safe?" Reading through hundreds of netizen comments, it is obvious that many netizens feel that whatever his flaws may have been, Bo Xilai did noticeably improve life in Chongqing during his tenure there.

  As for who's happy about Mr. Bo's political demise, the consensus seems to be that Guangdong Party secretary Wang Yang, long considered a rival of Bo's, should be ecstatic. Bo's dismissal is also a setback for the "Princeling" faction within the Party -- the group of Party leaders whose parents also held high-profile official positions -- and a victory for Hu Jintao's "Communist Youth League" faction. Some net users have even suggested that the real winners are gangsters, who some fear will be able to run rampant in Chongqing now that Wang Lijun and Bo Xilai are gone. One wrote, "With Bo Xilai's fall, the happiest are the gangsters, gangsters nationwide will be drinking through the night in celebration." 

• Xinhua 'borrows' a Foreign Policy article

  Posted: March 14, 2012, 10:16 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  In its last print issue, Foreign Policy published an article by Thomas Rid, a reader in war studies at King's college London, arguing that virtual conflict is still more hype than reality. Someone at China's state news agency Xinhua must have agreed, because they published practically the entire article (In Chinese here and here). Well, not all of it: the seventh section, which argues that the biggest worry in places like China "is not collapsing power plants, but collapsing political power," for some unexplainable reason didn't get translated...

  (h/t to Rid) 

   

• Kristof on Kony

  Posted: March 12, 2012, 11:45 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Released last week by the NGO Invisible Children, the 30 minute film KONY 2012 has already been viewed more than 70 million times on YouTube and made the eponymous Ugandan militia leader a household name, at least for now. (For more information on Kony, here's a slideshow of the Lord's Resistance Army, and a post about some of the complexities of the viral video.) Nicholas D. Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer prize winning columnist with the New York Times, writes twice weekly columns that often focus on under-reported humanitarian issues around the world. What follows is an interview with Kristof about social media, the importance of individualizing Kony, and the far more serious problem of worms; edited and condensed for clarity.

  Were you surprised by the popularity of the Kony video?

  Absolutely. It's been so hard for the humanitarian world to get attention for any kind of disaster. I go places and do my videos, and my mother watches them. These guys do one about Kony and seventy million people see it.

  What other international humanitarian problems would benefit from this type of attention?

  Global health is hugely under-covered. (Like Kony) it's always there, it's not really news on one day. Malnutrition remains a vast problem. Kids who are malnourished early in life lag in cognitive development, and we tend not to write about it or cover it. Pneumonia likewise, I don't think people realize that it's perhaps the single greatest killer of kids around the world. Something as simple as worms: few remedies would matter more for more kids than de-worming kids around the world. Yet obviously we never write about de-worming or kids, it's just part of the backdrop.

  Congo remains very under-covered, considering it's probably the most lethal conflict since World War 2. In Mali and its neighbors, there's been a growing security crisis and refugee crisis, and it's gotten very little attention.

  Why have Congo and Mali gotten comparatively such little attention?

  Not much happens in the way of a big event. We tend to be good at covering events but not good at just covering underlying realities. More people die in Congo from diarrhea than bullets, because you can't deliver food and health care to the middle of a conflict zone. The story in Mali is in Northern Mali, and that's very difficult to reach safely, so it's been largely off the radar. And when I write about these kinds of global issues, my readership falls. Any journalist, especially television, is better off putting a Democrat and a Republican in a room together and having them yell at each other.

  Is this going to make it easier for news organizations to argue that there should be more attention paid to these far off crises?

  Maybe at the margin, but these organizations have a pretty good idea of what gets viewers. If ABC had sent a crew out to Central African Republic to try to report on Joseph Kony it would have been amazingly expensive, somewhat dangerous, and I think very few people would have watched. I don't think viewers are desperate for information about Joseph Kony, I think that the producers of this video were quite brilliant in the way they did it. I wish that the larger lesson was that people cared about humanitarian crises around the world. I'm skeptical that's the case.

  Will the attention this video brought to Kony make a difference in tracking him down?

  Hard to know, but attention creates pressure on officials at home and around the world. I think Kony's prospects are worse this week than they were two weeks ago.

  What advice would you give to young, ambitious people working in the humanitarian sphere on how to publicize things like what's going on in Congo, or with things like pneumonia?

  I think the humanitarian world has traditionally been quite awful at marketing. Full of earnestness but very unsophisticated about how to get people interested in issues. These guys had an amazing marketing success that is a reminder that sometimes social media really can make something go viral. (Telling) individual stories are certainly part of that, as are stories that connect Americans to people abroad. Likewise, moving from the LRA as a whole to Kony as an individual, I think made it more specific and individual. There's always a tension between getting people's attention without over-simplifying, but I think that it made sense for them to focus on Kony as an individual.

  What humanitarian crises have you covered in the past where grassroots pressure from Americans helped; conversely, any areas where you think extra pressure actually hurt the cause?

  I think that in the case of Darfur, there are lots and lots of people alive today because college students and churches and synagogues around the country protested. Likewise Eastern Congo has made progress in part because it became an issue. In terms of cases where things were made worse, I think one can make a case that the sweatshop movement may have pushed companies to source in ways that were more capital intensive and less labor intensive, in ways that ultimately meant fewer jobs in the neediest part of the world.

   

   

   

   

• Chinese state media thanks women for being hot

  Posted: March 8, 2012, 10:28 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  In an attempt to highlight the role of women in Beijing's annual National People's Congress, China's party newspaper the People's Daily published "Beautiful female journalists at two sessions," consisting of women asking questions and "beautifying" China's legislative session.  It's hard to think of a more awkward way for a media outlet to celebrate International Women's Day, except maybe last year's offering from China's state news wire Xinhua: "Attractive females at NPC, CPCC sessions."

  A few points here: Surprisingly for staid state media, Xinhua and the People's Daily publish a lot of click bait in the form of near naked women: See for example today's "Bikini Parade in Panama to set Guinness Record," and "Seductive leg models in China." A few days ago People's Daily published a precursor article about the meetings' "beautiful service staff" (h/t to James Fallows and Adam Minter), as well as  "Versatile Tibetan beauties" and "Seven stunning beauties from Xinjiang," in questionable taste considering the persistent government crackdown in both those places. 

  In a blog post, The Economist answers the question of why Western media describes the NPC as "rubber stamp" (because it accepts every law put before it). The patronizing media coverage of women and minorities smiling at the joy of being a part of China doesn't help, either. 

  Porn remains illegal in China (though it's readily available), and even in state media, sex sells, and is far less sensitive than politics. The Chinese media website Danwei coined the term Skinhua to describe this practice. The sole commenter on the People's Daily journalist article, who aptly goes by Mr. Dong, snidely hints at this unexpected identity of state media: the JC Penny catalog of the internet age.

• Two different versions of the North Korea deal

  Posted: March 1, 2012, 8:41 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  The agreement announced yesterday between the United States and North Korea has been greeted with both cheers and jeers. Optimists see this latest development as a small, necessary first step on the path toward a Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons -- and this, for a relatively modest amount of aid. Pessimists see it as just more of the same -- yet another ploy by a corrupt, failed and cynical North Korean leadership making meaningless commitments in exchange for badly needed food.

  Here is a guest post from Philip Yun, executive director of the Ploughshares Fund and a former advisor to the State Department during talks with North Korea from 1998-2001. Yun sees the significance of the agreement in the surprisingly number of differences in the statements issued by the United States and the DPRK.

  Normally, the U.S. State Department announcement and the DPRK Foreign Ministry statement should be almost the same, as language and details are typically coordinated before final announcements are made. The two documents' striking discrepancies and omissions in significant places making me wonder if a "meeting of the minds" actually took place: 

  "While productive dialogues continue." The DPRK agreed to a moratorium on nuclear tests, long-range missile activity, and uranium enrichment activity at their main reactor site in Yongbyon, as well as IAEA monitoring of uranium enrichment activities "while productive dialogues continue."  The U.S. statement makes no mention of this qualifier.  Did North Korea just add this unilaterally? 

  No starting date. The three moratoriums are potentially significant because they concretely limit North Korea's ability (for as long as the moratorium is in place) to produce more fissile material, improve its weapons design through miniaturization and refine its weapons delivery systems. In exchange, the United States agreed to provide 240,000 metric tons of nutritional biscuits.  But when do the moratoriums take place?   And how will the food be delivered and under what conditions?  The U.S. statement specifically refers to "intensive monitoring" of this aid, but the DPRK statement bears no mention of such monitoring.

  What about the other facilities? Many experts believe that North Korea has uranium enrichment facilities in other locales, but an initial reading of the statements appears to apply the moratorium to Yongbyon only. Were there any understandings for other locations?  If limited to Yongbyon (which is start, but access to other sites inevitably remains a major issue for both the United States and the North), when will the IAEA go to Yongbyon and under what conditions?

  What about that light water reactor? The DPRK statement raises the issue of light water reactors (LWRs).  The State Department's version doesn't mention LWRs. The DRPK has been persistent through the years about its demand and right to have an operational LWR, which the United States since 2003 has resisted or ignored -- LWRs were central to the U.S.-DPRK nuclear deal of 1994 and a significant sticking point in negotiations of September 2005 Joint Statement. Does this new agreement require North Korea to stop its ongoing construction of a light water reactor at Yongbyon, which according to the North, is for the production of electricity?  Last year at Fukushima we saw what can happen to a nuclear plant built with the best materials and to the highest standards. Yongbyon is being constructed with far lower standards: a similar disaster would be dire.

  Will there be a peace treaty?  Both statements contain a reference to the 1953 Armistice Agreement.  The State Department and DPRK versions both say that they recognized the Armistice as "the cornerstone of peace and stability;" but the DPRK added, "until the conclusion of a peace treaty."  The subject of a peace treaty and its impact has posed a whole series of long-standing issues military, legal and otherwise. This difference just adds to the overall need to clarify what exactly was agreed to between the United States and the DPRK.

  This latest news could be a very good sign that North Korea's leadership is willing to make commitments.  So long as China continues to shield North Korea as it has, a concerted, sustained and focused diplomatic push with North Korea appears to be the only way to move forward. Having IAEA inspectors on the ground in North Korea would especially be extremely useful -- rather than speculating about North Korean activity and relying on rumor, we would have something more concrete to consider.   However, if progress is to be made, we have to avoid unpleasant surprises. The U.S. must figure out a way to patch the holes that still seem to exist between the two negotiating parties or this latest development may once again set expectations too high. In short, the devil is in the details - and we had better find out quickly what they are.  

• Why did China downplay the Nanjing Massacre?

  Posted: February 23, 2012, 11:07 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Earlier this week, during a visit to Nanjing the mayor of Nagoya, Japan expressed doubt that his nation's troops had slaughtered tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens in 1937. The event, known as the Nanjing Massacre, remains contentious in Sino-Japanese relations, with many Chinese feeling that unlike Germany and the Jews, the Japanese have not done enough to apologize for the massacre. Yet China's post-war response wasn't exactly open, either.  

  Here is a guest post from historian Tony Brooks, who has studied China's post-1949 relations with Japan:

  Today Nanjing is a confident, thriving Chinese provincial capital, located 190 miles west of Shanghai. According to a recent report by the McKinsey Global Institute, Nanjing ranks eighth globally for fastest GDP growth between now and 2025, ahead of New Delhi and Moscow.  

  This confidence masks the turmoil over the city's past. In 1937 invading Japanese forces rapidly converged on Nanjing, and after a short intense battle, the city fell into enemy hands. According to Chinese accounts, there followed a six week orgy of killing, looting and mass rape, which resulted in the deaths of three hundred thousand Chinese citizens. Yet in the years when Mao Zedong ruled China, from 1949 to 1976, the massacre has been virtually ignored in official records. Why is that?

  Because it was formerly the capital of the Nationalists, the side fighting the Communists in China's civil war, very few Communists lived in Nanjing in the 1930s.

  Ever since defeating the Nationalists and unifying China in 1949, the Communists have claimed that they won both the Anti-Japanese War (the Japanese war with China during and before World War II) and the Civil War, and therefore have the right to rule China. If the Communist Party saved China from the Japanese during the War, then why did they do nothing to prevent the Nanjing Massacre?

  The Party appears to have sidestepped this conundrum during the Mao era by ignoring the Nanjing Massacre. Instead, they concentrated on highlighting the (minor) role that CCP forces played in beating the Japanese. For three decades after the Second World War, it was not possible to openly discuss the Nanjing Massacre in mainland China. In a similar way, much else was forcibly airbrushed out of Mao era debates on the War, such as Chinese traitors and the role of non-communist forces in beating the Japanese.

  The People's Republic of China didn't ignore the war during the Mao years. The press discussed and debated the war in Marxist terms, and anniversaries saw staged anti-Japanese demonstrations of up to one million people. Like the proverbial elephant in the corner of the room, the Nanjing Massacre, which took place in Nationalist held territory in the Nationalist capital, was off-limits until the early 1980s.

  During the 1950s and 60s, Japanese delegations visited Nanjing, often with the aim of trying to improve bilateral relations. Nanjing archives record that on these visits, the Japanese visitors frequently asked whether they could visit sites relating to the massacre (of which there are hundreds dotted around Nanjing, mainly just outside the city walls). The Chinese refused. Instead, they took their guests to see the fruits of Communist rule, such as the new bridge across the Yangtze River at Nanjing, or model state owed concrete factories. The Nanjing Massacre did not fit into Mao era narratives of a Communist led victory in the War. One feels that there was a deep feeling of shame that such an atrocity took place on Chinese soil. While the state wanted to ignore the atrocities in Nanjing, this does not mean that the masses wanted to forget.

  Declassified archives from the 1950s and 60s show that during rehearsals for visits by Japanese to Nanjing, there was considerable Chinese disquiet. Comments such as "My mother's arm was blown off by the Japanese in Nanjing, why should I welcome them here!" and "the devils burnt our village to the ground, how dare you welcome them to Nanjing now!" suggest that there was a high level of opposition to the CCP ignoring the massacre.         

  In July 1982 everything changed. Six years after the death of Mao, the Japanese education ministry published textbooks that whitewashed Japan's role in World War II, and changed the word "invade" China to "advance" into China. New Chinese leadership seemed to argue that if Japanese politicians and ministries were going to forget the war, then the Chinese needed to present evidence of Japanese atrocities committed in Nanjing and elsewhere - in order to force them to remember. An impromptu Nanjing Massacre museum was opened in the city just two weeks after the textbook crisis broke out, conveniently just in time for the anniversary of the Japanese defeat on August 15, 1982. To cite just one example of how the Nanjing Massacre has been caught up in the battle for memory over the War, before 1982 virtually nothing was published by Chinese academics on the subject. Since that date, there has been an explosion of interest in the massacre, with over ten thousand scholarly articles and books published in Chinese alone. As the denial of the massacre by the mayor of Nagoya this week attests, memory of the war is still being bitterly fought over.     

• Iowa governor: We have "a little bit of an in" with China

  Posted: February 16, 2012, 1:54 am by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad hosted Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping this week; on Wednesday, a delegation of Chinese officials agreed to buy more than $4 billion dollars of soybeans. Xi, who many expect to be the next president of China, visited Iowa as part of a four-day trip to the United States. What follows is a phone interview with Governor Branstad after Xi's visit, edited and condensed for clarity.

  Foreign Policy: You had said that you would let President Barack Obama's administration handle political and human rights questions regarding Xi and China. Any regrets that you didn't use this chance to raise human rights questions with Vice President Xi?

  Governor Terry Branstad: I think my role as governor is really to build long-term friendships and relationships. The difference in those things needs to be worked out on the national level between those two countries.  

  FP: There's been a lot of talk about a potential slowdown of the Chinese economy. How is Iowa preparing for this?

  TB: Of course you're going to see some slowdown. China has had a phenomenal growth rate, but it's very unlikely that it's going to continue at that speed. Still, even if their growth rate is only 5-6 percent, compared with us, who have a minuscule growth rate, or Europe, which is on the brink of financial collapse, they're still in strong condition. Economically they don't have the debt problem that the U.S. and Europe have. There are a lot of things that China really has going for it.

  FP: When's the next time you'll see Xi?

  TB: I talked to him about this at dinner.  He had his first trip to the United States here when I was governor, April 26, 1985, and I would love to be the first governor to meet with him in Beijing when he becomes president.  

  FP: Isn't it not yet certain whether or not Xi will become president of China? Did he indicate anything?

  TB: He's very careful, and he's not presumptive. He's the vice president at this time, and is very cognizant of his role there. I think the general [thought] is that he is very likely to be the next president of China, and so we're obviously hoping that will be the case, and expecting that to be the case.

  We think that Iowa has a little bit of an in, and we'd love to build on that, and we know that personal relations are important.

  FP: What did he say when you asked him about visiting him as president?

  TB: He didn't directly answer that, but said that when I come to Beijing, he would love to have my wife come as well, so I took that as a positive sign. 

• Falun Gong's men and women in Washington

  Posted: February 15, 2012, 10:19 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  The Communist Party claims that its media is "the mouthpiece of the party," and, with few exceptions, it has succeeded. After reporting in China, it's strange to attend an event in DC and be reminded that there exists a thriving Chinese anti-Communist Party media.  

  At a press event today for Xi Jinping's visit to Washington roughly a quarter of the Chinese media in attendance seemed to be Falun Gong, the spiritual sect banned in China and once practiced by as many as 70 million Chinese, whose affiliates run the "Global Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party," and other services dedicated to informing Chinese people that other options exist. These included the television broadcaster New Tang Dynasty and the newspaper the Epoch Times, best known for issuing a press pass to Wang Wenyi, the Chinese national who heckled Hu Jintao during a joint press conference at the White House with George W. Bush in 2006.

  This year the reporters are much quieter, sitting near, but not next to the rest of the Chinese media. "They don't invite us to their functions," said one Falun Gong-affiliated reporter. Another, Kitty Wang, a senior reporter from NDTV in Washington DC who left China in 2000, explains that she sees an educational function in her reporting. "We feel that we're giving the true info the Chinese citizens, and let them use it as they see fit," she said, as we watched Xi speak on the screen in front of us. "We found that many people doing media had the government viewpoint, so we wanted to provide the other side."

  Unsurprisingly, she's not sanguine about the Party's future. "Now the Communist Party is just trying to survive. There are people who recognize the wickedness of the Party, and so they have left it. They know that one day, when the Party falls, that they will be held responsible for participating." 

• Xi drives me crazy: Your definitive list of bad Xi headline puns

  Posted: February 15, 2012, 5:01 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  As pundits debate whether or not Xi Jinping will follow in the footsteps of current President Hu Jintao, we at FP would like to point out something he does share with his predecessor: a dangerously enticing name for Anglophone headline writers to abuse.  

  Xi, visiting the United States this week, will likely be appointed this fall as China's next President. Journalists, let us be the first to sound the warning: avoid the temptation (that we have already succumbed to several times) of a Xi headline pun! 

  From the FP editorial staff, here's a list of ten Xi headlines NOT to use:

  1. Territorial disputes in the South China Sea: "Xi's Gotta Have It."

  2. A profile of his teenage years: "Xi was only 16."

  3. His second visit to Iowa: "There Xi Goes Again."

  4. His portrayal in Chinese state media: "Isn't Xi Lovely?" (Or "Xi Will Be Loved.")

  5. A Chinese Gorbachev: "Xi Change."

  6. Bizarre policy choices: "Xi Moves in Mysterious Ways."

  7. A definitive chronicle of his speeches: "That's What Xi Said."

  8. His meeting with Henry Kissinger: "The Old Man and the Xi."

  9. On a conflict with the current head of the disciplinary committee: "He Said Xi Said."

  10. His stylish sartorial choices: "Ain't Nothing But a Xi Thing."

  This is by no means a comprehensive list. Please let us know any suggestions you have for other Xi headlines that should be banned- either write them in the comments section or send them to me via twitter: @isaacstonefish. Whoever comes up with the worst Xi headline pun will win a free copy of the book "Becoming China's Bitch."  

  Update: After careful consideration, we at FP have decided that the worst headline pun imaginable is China announces new high speed train line: "Xi's Got a Ticket to Ride." Thanks to twitter user @james_s_evans  for his submission! Honorable mention to @christophercherry for his China Daily all-purpose headline: "Every Little Thing Xi Does is Magic." We look forward to future contests if Shanghai Party Secretary Yu, Standing Committee Member He, or Director of the United Front Work Department Du become trending topics. 

• Lies, damn lies, and weibo rumors of Kim Jong Un’s demise

  Posted: February 10, 2012, 11:11 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Your news, should you choose to believe it, came in from unnamed "dependable sources:"

  "On the morning of February 10th at 2:45 pm, unknown persons broke into the residence of the highest leader North Korea Kim Jong En and shot him dead."

  Suspicious traffic patterns had been seen outside of the North Korean embassy in Beijing, and this explanation, it appears, seems as good as any: Users of China's Sina Weibo, the local Twitter clone, forwarded the message more than 10,000 times. One user posted a picture of what Kim Jong Un would look like arrested. Another commented "in this weird country, that's not even strange."  

  The chained Chinese media universe means that Weibo rumors are a lot more trusted than their Twitter counterparts. Chinese media coverage of sensitive subjects is often deliberately obfuscating, and Chinese viewers know it. A few days ago, Wang Lijun, one of China's best known gangbusters and the right-hand man of powerful politician Bo Xilai appeared to try to defect at the U.S. Consulate in Chengdu. While official Chinese media covered the defection, they mostly copied the official Xinhua report, which failed to mention the most important point: how it affects Bo's chances of promotion.  

  Chinese official media reporting on North Korea is often further removed from reality than the way China reports on its own political process. (My favorite English-language example is a Xinhua article that compares nightlife in Pyongyang with New York and Tokyo.) Besides, North Korea itself is a black box: Even the best American articles often depend on rumors and hearsay to cobble together a portrait of the closed country. 

  All these factors combine to give the Sina Weibo rumor -- started, it appears, by a random user with less than 200 followers -- enough traction in China to land on this side of the world wide web and into the pages of Forbes, MSNBC, and Huffington Post. 

  It is possible that this Weibo user broke the story of a successful coup in North Korea, though it's extremely unlikely. My favorite explanation on the Twitter side of things comes from Shaun Walker, the Moscow correspondent for the Independent, who wrote "Possible that someone said he 'murdered an enormous family-sized bucket of fried chicken,' and something got lost in translation."
  

• Can North Korea be Fictionalized?

  Posted: February 9, 2012, 5:42 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Adam Johnson, a professor of creative writing at Stanford University, tried to create an account of the mental life of the citizens of Pyongyang with his new novel, The Orphan Master's Son. It is the story of the many vicissitudes of a North Korean everyman, Pak Jun Do: raised as an orphan, he enters the army, joins a special forces team to kidnap Japanese, learns English, and gets sent to a gulag, from which he mysteriously emerges as a high-ranking official.  

  Two months into the reign of Kim Jong Un, North Korea remains impenetrable. "I'd much rather trade my story for a North Korean telling his own story," said Johnson. "We won't know if my version is right until North Koreans are able to tell their own stories."

  What follows is an interview with Johnson about the gulags, fictions, and lacunas of North Korea, edited and condensed for clarity:

  "In the stories we tell ourselves in the West, we expect to be the central character in our own narrative; we are a society of individuals and no matter how much we love others, they're secondary characters. The DPRK is exactly the opposite. There's one national narrative, tailored and maintained by script writers and censors. In a totalitarian world that script writer is responsible for everything that happened.

  If you're a secondary character in North Korea, your aptitude for certain things and your class background sends you down paths, maybe to be a doctor, or a peasant farmer, or a soldier, or a music player. Your own wants and desires are only going to get in the way of the role you've been given and that you have to play if you're going to survive.

  We have pretty clear information about citizens outside of the capital. We know how much food they eat, how much they ‘volunteer,' how much propaganda they consume; we have a portrait of the average person. Pyongyang is the mystery. Residents of Pyongyang tend not to defect because they're the top 3-4 percent of the nation.  If you're in Pyongyang you've made it. These people are the unknowns.

  It makes me dubious about people claiming to be experts there. Maybe they're getting briefings-but what we have publically is testimonies from defectors that are completely unverifiable.

  [[BREAK]]

  My character starts off as a real DPRK model citizen. He does what he's told when he's told, he doesn't complain. I read lots of accounts of perfect citizens who went to the gulag.

  In Yongdak, the prison for families, when you go in your kids strip bark, your wife works at the soy sauce factory, and you cut timber. The old people go to the ‘respect for the elderly' furniture factory: that creepy Nazi habit of naming something the opposite.

  Often the executions in the camps were done with sticks and stones. Every single person in the camp had to contribute to the slow death-even if it was a show punch to someone hanging, almost dead.

  After the gulag (Jun-Do) starts to change and becomes a more Western character; he starts to decide what matters to him.

  I had to keep the real darkness out of the book. The character goes into the camp one page and comes out the next; I tried to keep much of the darkness and absurdity out of the book.

  I don't think of myself as a political writer. I think giving the regime money (by visiting) was worth it for being able to tell this story.  Because I couldn't hear the stories of the North Koreans I saw on my trip, because I couldn't talk to them, I was filled with an overwhelming desire to individuate them. And because I couldn't do that that filled me with a desire to try to do it right.

  How do I measure the version I created? It's something I wondered many times. I just kind of went with the idea that everyone is human, and I tried to fit many of my fears as a parent. I'm surprised with such a mysterious, fascinating place, such a place that needs to be filled in, I'm surprised that more people haven't taken up the mantle and attempted it themselves. There's the valid argument that if you write across your culture, or your gender, or your age, you're bound to make some transgressions. I knew I got something wrong-but does that work making the endeavor?

  When defectors come out it is very difficult for them to tell their own stories. They've been trained their whole life to have someone tell their story for them.  More importantly, they're completely traumatized.  When people tell the story traumatized it's hard for them to tell it in a non-broken way. The distance to keep the causality out of them. They switch to the third person. They don't want this story to brutalize them again.   

  And it's not over. When Qadaffi died, when Saddam died, we went into their bunkers, we went into their files. The citizens took pictures in their bathtubs. They were completely cut down to size. But the death of Kim Jong Il only intensified the mystification."

• Was the Racist Chinese Super Bowl Ad Racist in China?

  Posted: February 6, 2012, 8:12 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  A GOP senatorial candidate in Michigan, Pete Hoekstra, ran a Super Bowl advertisement featuring an Asian woman speaking broken English and thanking Hoekstra's opponent, Debbie Stabenow, for her free-spending ways. The ad hit a nerve in America, angering many for its portrayal of an Asian-American woman speaking broken English. The Michigan chapter of the Asian & Pacific Islander American Vote group said it was "deeply disappointed" by the ad, and political commentators criticized it across the board. The 'blame China' ad is becoming a fixture in American political campaigns;  see for example the 'xiexie Mr. Gibbs', or the 'Chinese professor.'

  While the woman in the Super Bowl ad wears a hat more often associated with Vietnam, the ad's website, www.debbiespenditnow.com, makes it clear that it is targeting China: Chinese coins, fans, an airplane, and the phrase "The Great Wall of Debt"  decorate the site.

  This ad, however, received almost no attention in China. There is scant chatter of it on Sina Weibo or Tencent Weibo, the two most popular Twitter-like microblogging services. The NFL, lacking the popularity that Yao Ming brought to the NBA, is rarely watched in China anyway, and the ads this year that drew any attention were mostly car commercials.

  Only a handful of Twitter users wrote about it in simplified Mandarin (the way Chinese is written in Mainland China, unlike the traditional characters which the Debbiespenditnow website inexplicably employs). One who did so is a software engineer working in the Netherlands who tweets under the name lihlii.  "I don't think it's racist," he said in a phone interview. "It's about America losing jobs."

  Broadly speaking, there is a whole different idea of political correctness in China. Asking how much someone makes a month within the first minute of meeting them doesn't raise eyebrows in China, and neither, generally speaking, do blanket racial statements, like commenting on the perceived cleverness of the Jews.  On the other hand, questioning Hu Jintao's ability to govern makes for awkward cocktail party chatter.

  Those who did object to the ad generally did so in an American context. Michael Anti, a popular blogger who has lived in the U.S. as a Nieman Fellow, wrote on Twitter:

  "I think the problem with the ad is that it's racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese."

  So what Super Bowl ads are controversial in China? Last year Groupon ran one featuring actor Timothy Hutton saying: "The people of Tibet are in trouble, their very culture in jeopardy. But they still whip up an amazing fish curry." This ruffled feathers for contravening  state policy and conventional wisdom that Han Chinese are helping Tibet (and for its inaccuracy: fish curry is probably eaten more in Vermont than Tibet). Groupon employees at the time said that the advertisement complicated the company's expansion plans into China, and they eventually pulled the advertisement.

• A new book asks, "are we becoming China's bitch?"

  Posted: January 20, 2012, 7:57 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  The year 2012 will see a stream of new books in the patented Thomas Friedman "Oh My God the Chinese Are Eating Our Lunch with Environmentally Friendly Chopsticks" mold. Some will be more worthwhile than others. One book in particular, however, is sure to stand out, if only for the title: "Becoming China's Bitch: And Nine More Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now." 

  The author, Peter D. Kiernan, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, explains in the introduction that "it's not a book about China exactly. It's about how America got diverted and lost momentum, and a dragon leapt into the breach. It's also about getting our mojo back."

  I spoke with him over the phone:

  FP: When did you first realize we were in danger of becoming China's bitch?

  PK: When it first occurred to me was in 2008, as a card-carrying member of a discredited class, everyone in Wall Street had to re-think everything. We had gone through a 30 plus year bull market. We now had to wrestle with the idea of who was going to fund the 42 percent of our government that has to be borrowed. Whenever you depend on one major source of finance, if it's too heavy in one area, it deserves a re-thinking.   

  We haven't really thought clearly about this as a nation. It was a part of this re-thinking everything. We have a much greater co-dependency on China than we'd like to acknowledge. The book is not solely about China, but Becoming China's Bitch is about the cost to our dithering.  

  FP: How is the 1 percent different from the 99 percent in their fear of becoming China's bitch?

  PK: I don't spend a whole lot of time worrying about the one percent in the book or in my life. What I do spend the vast majority of my time focusing on is the 99 percent. We have developed a dependency, and that dependency allows us to be poor savers, roughly 5 percent saving rate in America, compared to 30 percent in China.  

  I literally believe that we have been opiated as a nation. I believe we've been diverted about issues. The debt ceiling has been raised 100 times since you started working here-it's no big deal. These are not problem solving conversations. These are skin rashes that have nothing to do with the problems. Occupy Wall Street is not the problem, but the symptom. Among them, we have worked ourselves into a co-dependency.

  FP: What can we do to prevent becoming China's bitch? How do we make China our bitch?

  PK: The title is deliberately provocative, I understand. It's meant to push people outside their comfort zone. We're inert. How do we snap people out of it? We helped create an export monster. We helped them because we developed an appetite for their goods. So we've kind of gotten in this dynamic of exports for finance-we will buy your cheap goods so we can stock our Wal-Mart shelves. They're moving up the value chain. And in exchange for that, we'll look for you to be our number one lender, and that, in pop psychology, you call a co-dependency-exports for finance. They're stuck with us, we're stuck with them. Stalemates, or co-dependencies like this, don't last forever.

• SOPA, China, and the World's Smallest Violin

  Posted: January 18, 2012, 9:28 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  To convince lawmakers to abandon the SOPA and PIPA, bills that threatened to put America "on a par with the most oppressive nations in the world" according to Google co-founder Sergey Brin, many prominent websites took to the, um, cyberstreets today in protest. Wikipedia featured a shadowy W and the line "Imagine a World Without Free Knowledge," giving Americans a tiny taste of what Chinese face daily in their internet usage. News site Reddit went dark. Wired blacked out their headlines, protesting "legislation that threatens to usher in a chilling internet censorship regime here in the U.S. comparable in some ways to China's ‘Great Firewall.'"  Even Google hid its iconic name from shame at the thought that America could follow in Beijing's virtual footsteps.   

  China blocks Facebook, Twitter, Falun Gong news sites, pro-Tibet sites, and pro-Chinese Democracy sites, among countless others. PIPA would "chill innovation in legitimate services that help people create, communicate, and make money online." China scrubs mentions of the June 4th massacre in Tiananmen Square. SOPA would have made it more difficult people to post videos on Youtube. China has blocked Youtube for years.

  What makes the Great Firewall of China truly fearsome is not the inability to create or view content but the consequences of doing so. Today China's propaganda and information arm announced it would tighten registration requirements for China's microblog users, to rein in content unacceptable to the Communist Party. In November of 2010 a Chinese woman was sentenced to a year of reform through labor for retweeting a joke. In October of 2011 authorities detained a student for spreading a "rumor" online about the murder of eight village officials. The government employs thousands of people to scrub content from the web and to delete posts deemed too sensitive from microblogs. Some of the Chinese dissidents arrested and tortured in 2011 spoke of being interrogated about the contents of their blogs and twitter feeds. There are countless other examples of things that would never happen in the United States of America.

  American websites have the right to protest and protect their content because they exist in a country that respect the rule of law. America couldn't create a "Great Firewall" comparable to China's, because it wouldn't be backed by a Chinese-style system where the Communist Party hovers above the law. Comparing the Chinese and American internet is akin to saying that a kitten that scratches furniture and a lion that eats people are both members of the cat family. True, yes, but it completely misses the point.  

• It's winter again for Chinese dissidents

  Posted: January 11, 2012, 6:54 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Earlier this evening eight police raided the home of prominent Chinese dissident Hu Jia, confiscated two computers, and told him to report to a police station for further questioning on Thursday, in a move that potentially presages a further crackdown towards rights activists in China.

  A skinny firebrand, Hu made his name fighting for better treatment of AIDS patients. Like the better known international artist and provocateur Ai Weiwei, Hu made a point of using the law to fight the system, even if his adversaries didn't always operate legally. In a 2006 interview with Radio Free Asia, after describing being detained for 41 days, accused of nebulous crimes and warned that "more misfortune would come upon me if I continued to take part in those activities," Hu said: 

  I am going to sue the Beijing Public Security Bureau, because they have become more and more reckless in violating human rights, which not only has brought misfortune to my family, but also to many other families. In order to put restraint on them, to awaken them, and to make them repent, I must use the law as my weapon...

  Arrested in 2007 and charged with the menacingly broad crime of "inciting subversion of state power," Hu spent three years in prison, before being released in June of 2011, four days after Ai emerged from his 81 day detention.  Ai kept agitating, in November offering supporters the chance to help pay a tax bill from the government that he claimed was politically motivated. Hu remained active on Twitter, but mostly kept quiet. 

  Beijing remains in the thralls of what one journalist called The Big Chill Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin;} , a crackdown on activists, human rights lawyers, and bloggers. While things have been relatively quiet over the past few months, Hu's treatment might be the start of a new wave of seasonal arrests and detentions related to the political transition slated for later this year, when Xi Jinping, barring any major changes, will be announced as the new Chairman of the Communist Party. Like the Olympics were China's coming out party, the 2012 National Congress in China is Xi’s debut; he would prefer that Hu and others didn’t spoil it with their simmering voices of discontent.   

• Kim Jong Fun

  Posted: January 9, 2012, 9:00 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  North Korean state TV, in celebration of the birthday of their new overlord, aired a video collage of Kim Jong Un driving a tank, riding a horse, inspecting a factory, and hobnobbing with generals. The female announcer, her voice trembling in the ecstasies of praise, commends this "genius among geniuses" for his "excellent military leadership."

  Bizarrely, the video also shows the youngest Kim at an amusement park, seemingly enjoying himself as he prepares to be launched up to the top of a giant pole in a Tower of Doom ride.

  North Korea has entered Juche 101, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kim Il Sung and the year that the country's propaganda claimed that it would bring "moderate prosperity" to its people. North Korea is still one of the poorest countries in the world, but the thinking seems to be that building a fun fair North Koreans can actually enjoy is a concrete example of what the Kims have done for the people.

  On the last night of a September visit to the country, my guides announced with great pleasure that we would be visiting this amusement park. Pyongyang, with its tall, decrepit buildings, wide boulevards traversed by rotting trolleys, and citizens who seem to be still even when they're moving, feels like a post-apocalyptic Detroit. Needless to say I had low expectations for the Ferris wheels of Pyongyang.

  Boy was I wrong.

  The park had brand new rides, allegedly and believably imported from Italy. The pirate-ship ride elicited shrieks from the North Koreans and the foreign tourists because it was a genuinely scary ride and not because we feared it would malfunction mid-swing and hurl us out of the park. North Koreans wandered around, taking pictures with their families, and munched on hamburgers in the park's food stand. It was a shockingly normal experience, except that the guide to the park demanded that the dozens of North Koreans waiting in line for each attraction get out of the way so that we foreigners could ride first.

  Leader of a functioning society he's not, but at least Kim Jong Un can boast a great Superman ride.

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  Note: This is different from Pyongyang's other amusement park on the foreign tourist circuit, the Mangyondae, which seems to be, like the University of Chicago, that fabled place where fun comes to die.

• Trickle-down economics for Chinese officials

  Posted: January 5, 2012, 3:15 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Singapore's intensely competent, scrupulously uncorrupt, and slightly dictatorial Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong has accepted a 36 percent pay cut, bringing his salary down to a still-comfortable $1.7 million a year.  After an embarrassingly close victory in last year's elections, Lee set up an independent review committee on governmental salaries to check populist anger. And yesterday, the panel announced changes including Lee's cut, a slightly larger dock for ministers, and a more than 50 percent drop in the salary for the (mostly honorific) office of the presidency. Say what you want about Lee (actually, better not: the country has some of the most fearsome libel laws of any developed nation), he listens to his constituents.

  While Lee is likely the highest paid world leader in the world, Chinese president Hu Jintao, leader of the world's second-largest economy, sits near the other end of the spectrum. If government statistics are to be believed, Hu makes just over $10,000 a year.  Officials at the ministerial level make that same amount, and lower ranking Party apparatchiks can make as little as a few hundred dollars a month.   "While the benefits, like housing, are very good, the salary is low, that's definite," says Yiyi Lu, a Beijing-based China analyst. Even with benefits, Chinese government salaries encourage corruption by bestowing high power but low salaries on people who have very little transparency over their actions. Whereas in Singapore ministers remain clean in part to keep their seven-figure salaries, in China one always wonders how those officials making, say, $1500 a month can afford those Rolexes.

• Hu Jintao on China losing the culture wars

  Posted: January 3, 2012, 12:20 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  In a major essay published this week in a Communist Party magazine, President Hu Jintao revisited the argument that China must become a strong cultural nation, both for its people and for the prevention of Western encroachment. "We must clearly see that international hostile forces are intensifying the strategic plot of westernizing and dividing China," it warns.

  Chinese mandarins have long bemoaned the lack of recognition for their official culture, or why culturally, as Hu puts it in his essay, "the West is strong and my country is weak."  Chinese censorship, as opposed to Western imperialism, is a much more likely culprit. Every year Chinese press wonders why their country can't seem to win a Nobel Prize in literature or peace; ironically, in most cases banned from mentioning dissident writer Gao Xingjian, who won in 2000, or Liu Xiaobo, who won last year. The government recently announced new restrictions to curb "excessive entertainment" on TV. Zhang Yimou's recently released biopic on the Nanjing Massacre, the most expensive movie ever made in China, hews so close to the line its portrayal of ‘Chinese martyrs' and ‘Japanese devils' to render it unwatchable. Examples abound.

  More specifically one can point to the government's demand that art and language serve the party and the nation. Looking for an example? Hu's essay, titled "Resolutely Follow the Cultural Development Path of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, Work to Build a Socialist Strong Culture Country," should be a primer on how to force language to serve politics. No anecdotes enliven it. Repeating slogan after slogan, it reads like a monotonous chest thumping: "Only if we resolutely follow the guidance of Marxism, and let the advanced culture of socialism guide the way, will we be able to lay the foundation for the cultural development of socialism with Chinese characteristics." When China's top leaders stop using Newspeak, or better yet when someone inside China can loudly and directly mock them for it, China's cultural industry might be able to "perfect the deployment of culture" that Hu claims he wants.      

• Dynastic Dirges, Part Deux

  Posted: December 29, 2011, 12:45 am by Isaac Stone Fish

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  This is a guest post from Nick Frisch, a writer based in Hong Kong:

  "The outside world got a listen at North Korea's curious soundscape during yesterday's widely-covered funeral of Kim Jong Il. Like the Hermit Kingdom itself, the DPRK's aural heritage is a musical mishmash: bombastic or solemn Soviet anthems aped by the North's uniformed orchestras and Red Army-style choirs, but also deeply Korean, pan-peninsular folk classics like Arirang, an unofficial anthem on both sides of the DMZ.  (It has also been expanded into an iteration of Pyongyong's infamous song-and-dance spectaculars, the Arirang Mass Games.)

  As Kim Jong Il's coffin and cortege wended their way through Pyongyang's snowy streets yesterday, it wasn't just the route and imagery that sought inspiration and legitimacy from the 1994 funeral of Kim Il Sung, his still-revered father and predecessor. "Memorial Song of a Partisan," played in 1994, was specially re-recorded by a Korean People's Army Band and piped out to sobbing crowds. It evolved from a Russian folk song adapted by the WWII-era anti-Japanese resistance fighters who grew into North Korea's founding elite. With the original's lilting waltz meter and tempo rectified to a solemn march, a switch to a dour minor key made the transformation into "Partisan" complete; it is now a standard dirge for state occasions.

  Similar music greets visitors to Kumsusan Memorial Palace, where the eldest Kim lies on display and his just-departed son lay in state until yesterday.  As in 1994, the Song of General Kim Jong Il, which has "happy" and "sad" versions tailored to a given state occasion.

  Not to be outdone, Kim Jong Un, North Korea's recently-anointed "supreme commander", was first introduced to his people and the world through song: as speculation mounted over Kim Jong Il's health difficulties and the elevation of Kim Jong Un, reports of a new song from the state's propaganda hit-machine began to circulate in 2009.  Recounts scholar of North Korean propaganda B.R. Myers, "young North Koreans had been taught to sing a song glorifying a certain General Kim, whose vigorous stride (so the lyric goes) was making the very rivers and mountains rejoice. That this General was not the current leader, whose name is invariably invoked in its full three syllables, was clear enough, ergo the poem's subject had to be the successor to the throne."

  Now, that throne is his.

• International persons will miss Kim Jong Il

  Posted: December 28, 2011, 6:10 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

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  Although Americans haven't cried over the passing of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, funeralized today with great showmanship in Pyongyang, it has been a sad time for groups like the Congolese Socialist Party, who "will continue their mourning until the day of the ceremony of bidding farewell to his bier." The Korean Central News Agency repoted that Syria's Baath Arab Socialist Party sent condolences that "the world movement for liberation and peace lost the most prominent fighter who had defended the people's right from highhanded practices and supremacy by the world imperialists;" and the former Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate, who also happens to be co-chairman of the (get ready for it) International Preparatory Committee for Commemorating the Centenary of Birth of the Great Leader President Kim Il Sung, sent a wreath.

  North Korea is obsessed with showing the outside world the level of respect its leaders command. Kim Il Sung's memorial palace features an honorary degree from the fraudulent Kensington University, and Kim Jong Il's "International Friendship Exhibition" proudly showcases hundreds of thousands of gifts he received as tribute, including a basketball Madeleine Albright brought, signed by Michael Jordan, and a coffee table from Robert Mugabe, made from the leg of an elephant.

  Other than the Chinese leadership, those offering condolences have been mostly D-list political celebrities, from the chairman of the National Democratic Party of Mongolia to the president of the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist). But at least it means that the KCNA, the only source with a full report of these tributes and one of the world's least dependable news agencies, is probably telling the truth.

• Even in mourning, Lil' Kim imitates his father

  Posted: December 27, 2011, 2:37 am by Isaac Stone Fish

  In preparation for secretive Kim Jong Il's state funeral, planned for an unknown time today (we told you he was secretive!) we asked Chad O'Carroll, Director of Communications at the Korea Economic Institute, to explain the simularities between this procession and that of Kim's father.

  Later today anyone who's anyone in Pyongyang will turn out for the funeral of Kim Jong Il. While Kim's death may have been unexpected, his mourning and burial process seems to be almost identical to that of his father sixteen years ago.

  Both Kims underwent an initial mourning period of ten days at Kumsusan Memorial Palace.   Overseeing the mourning, like his father, Kim Jong Un has been wearing almost identical clothing to his own father at Kim Il Sung's funeral  - a dark grey Mao jacket.  Four days after Kim Jong Il's death, the Korean Central News Agency reported that North Korea's successor was distributing food and drink at mourning stations throughout the country, just as his father did sixteen years prior. And KCNA released almost matching coroner's reports within hours of reporting the deaths.  In 1994 and 2011, causes of death were similarly reported as "acute myocardial infarction", following "heavy mental strains" in Kim seniors' case, complemented by "a great ... physical strain" in Kim juniors' case.  The goal: to show the deaths had been brought on by the toil of working to bring about improvement for the North Korean people. 

  Fast-forward a day or two past death, and reports in both cases emerged of natural wonders occurring throughout the country.  In Kim Il Sung's case, violent storms at North Korea's legendary Mount Paekdu and "rivers that were crying because of the sorrow".  For Kim Jong Il, news of similar "natural wonders" included a series of "blue flashes accompanied by thunder", unseasonal snowfall, and most recently, willows sprouting out of season in revolutionary sites.  Will the funeral of Kim Jong Il follow the same formula as that of Kim Il Sung, complete with glass coffin, motorcade, and the world's largest display of uncontrollable grief? Stay tuned.

• Hennessy responds to the loss of its best customer

  Posted: December 23, 2011, 11:26 pm by Isaac Stone Fish

  

  Say what you want about North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il, the man liked his Hennessy. For two years in the mid-1990s, he was the world's largest buyer of Hennessy Paradis cognac, importing up to $800,000 of the stuff a year, both to quaff himself and to give as gifts, and his death has caused a resurgence in discussion and commentary on his expensive cognac habits. So does Hennessy appreciate all of the free advertising provided by the coveted Dear Leader seal of approval?

  "There's been no negative feedback, but it hasn't affected sales either," Jennifer Yu, Director of Communications for Hennessy U.S., told FP in a phone interview. On the one hand, Kim's taste for the drink, which the company describes as "Pure Indulgence," and which retails for around $650 dollars a bottle, is unusual. "A lot of A-list musicians and talents enjoy the drink, like Kanye West," Yu says. "I don't usually get someone of his notoriety, in more ways than one."

  Yet in many ways, Kim fits the bill of a Hennessy connoisseur. Asked why Kim might prefer her company's drink, Yu responded, "I just know that cognac in general is extremely popular among the Asian community. It's a very large status symbol, and we're one of the premier luxury cognacs in the world, and it's not surprising that he would gravitate towards that."