"Foreigners pose risk to stability, says academic"

Setting aside the fact that this could even be a headline in a serious newspaper like the Hong Kong English-language South China Morning Post, this story on the increasing influence of foreign lobbyists (which I read via Victor Shih's excellent China Politics Blog), shows once again the nationalistic tone that the Chinese government is encouraging nowadays. The academic quoted, one Jiang Yong (江涌), director of the Centre for Economic Security Studies at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations, went on to say "Under the protection of local government departments, some multinational companies have long ignored the lawful rights of Chinese labourers ... which resulted in the soaring number of mass incidents among their workers,". Now, having worked for an MNC in China I can attest that there is much truth to this, but it is likewise true that Chinese companies behave in (on average) much worse fashion. But I'm going to hold off from making any more comment until I've read through the whole thing properly and made a proper attempt at a translation, which is going to be a few days because I've got exams to worry about at the moment.

Holy S**t!

If you haven't seen this photo of the ash-plume of the Chaiten volcano in Chile being struck by lightning - go take a look. Sometimes Mother Nature just wants to show off, thank God for those times!

The CCP's war on reality continues . . . . .

China's ruler are now attempting to impose their world view on online maps services like Google maps by insisting that they depict China's borders 'correctly', as well as checking to see if locations that the government would rather keep secret can be viewed. No doubt they'll get their way and Google and the others will have to provide a different set of maps for their Chinese users, leading to the inevitable situation where Chinese folk go overseas and suddenly discover that our maps 'lie'.

I am reminded of how up until 2003, Chinese maps still showed Sikkim as an independent state - I had in fact never heard of Sikkim until I saw it on a Chinese map. This grotesque spectacle of a dictatorship insisting on the continued independence of a state which had been voted out of existence by its own people thirty years before was thankfully ended when, in 2003, China finally recognised the annexation of Sikkim by India in an apparent exchange for India's recognition of Tibet as an integral part of China.

The same insistance on controlling reality is displayed in this instance - no doubt in future all un-blocked online maps will show Arunachal Pradesh, Aksai Chin, the Spratly Islands and the Paracel Islands as being the indisputable parts of China that the Chinese people have always known them to be - with no indication that there is even any conflict as to their ownership. However, re-drawing lines on a map will not make them so.

"Should I start worrying now?":

A question I never asked myself during the 2003 SARS crisis until I rolled home from a going away party to find a notice on the door of the Nanjing hotel I was staying telling me (and everyone else in the building) that we had to be out by 10:00am the next day as the hotel was going to be used as a quarantine centre. Up until a few days before this the Chinese government had been trying to prevent a public panic, then first came the news that the May holidays had been cancelled, and then the special checks on travellers and the news that universities were being put under quarantine - but I hadn't taken any of it seriously until seeing the sign on the hotel door.

Now comes today's news that more than 9,700 people have caught hand, foot and mouth disease, an intestinal infection (and thus presumably not airbourne). It appeared at first to be localised - with all the cases appearing in Fuyang in Anhui province, but has now spread to all neighbouring provinces, as well as Guangdong and Beijing. Given the current atmosphere, and the way that rumours spread quickly during the SARS crisis of the disease being a form of biological warfare initiated by the CIA, it seems likely that the foreign population in China will come under further suspicion.

At what point should foreigners start getting worried? So long as you eat in restaurants where a good standard of hygiene is maintained - not yet, but it would be a good idea to keep a weather-eye on the news.

Memories of the labour camp . . . .

Followed a link from the latest War Nerd piece to this utterly fascinating site written by a former Japanese soldier who was captured by the Russians at the end of the second world war. Humorous cartoons interspersed with the sad (but not at all bitter) details of day-to-day life in a Soviet prison camp, definitely worth a hour of anyone's time.

Sport and nationalism

I've been trying over the past month or so to try and fit all of the recent events in London, Paris, China and elsewhere into some kind of framework that makes sense. Having read Chinese and foreign commentators on this subject I felt myself inevitably graduating towards Orwell. Not 1984 mind, although the Chinese news coverage verges on it, but to what the true nature of nationalism is, how it differs from common-or-garden patriotism - if in fact there is any connection between the two at all. Anyway, I found this essay on the Dynamo Moscow visit to Britain in 1945. I had heard about the visit before, but had no idea of the controversy it stirred up - with allegations of cheating and un-sportsmanlike behaviour on both sides:

And how could it be otherwise? I am always amazed when I hear people saying that sport creates goodwill between the nations, and that if only the common peoples of the world could meet one another at football or cricket, they would have no inclination to meet on the battlefield. Even if one didn’t know from concrete examples (the 1936 Olympic Games, for instance) that international sporting contests lead to orgies of hatred, one could deduce it from general principles.

There cannot be much doubt that the whole thing is bound up with the rise of nationalism—that is, with the lunatic modern habit of identifying oneself with large power units and seeing everything in terms of competitive prestige.

I do not share George Orwell's pessimism about sporting events, but I definitely feel them to be all too true about this year's Olympics.

Is your 'Free Tibet' flag made in China?

More evidence that China really does make everything from the BBC Chinese website. It seems that a company situated near Shenzhen has been caught making Tibetan flags for the overseas market, they probably didn't know what they were making because the Tibetan flag is not allowed to be shown on the state media (although it has been evident in recent television footage of the riots).