"Things were better in Chiang Kai-shek's day"

From the annals of "WTF" comes this bizarre Op-Ed piece in the Want China Times claiming, amongst other things, that the Sunflower Movement "[placed] Taiwan's system of law and order in jeopardy", "usurped executive power", "hurt the . . . separation of powers", "divided Taiwan's society", "[destroyed] the values of hardworking people", subjected the national identity of the Republic of China to "unprecedented devastation", and would "eventually make Taiwan a rigid and isolated society". Whilst the title may have been the addition of one of the editors, it is not totally unrepresentative of the content of the article, where it is claimed that Chiang Kai-Shek and his son, Chiang Ching-Guo, the martial-law era dictators of Taiwan upheld the principle of executive power over legislative power - something of a under-statement given the extra-legal brutality handed out on the direct orders of the Chiangs, and who enforced an essentially single-party system under their personal control.

The author, Bert Lim, is president and founding member of the World Economics Society, a Taiwan-based think-tank whose existence stretches back to the martial-law era (1974), and has written rather more sane articles for publications including the broadly pro-independence Taipei Times, however this piece reflects simply a deluded and hyperbolic mind-set. The Sunflower Movement, at most, was a student demo that managed to temporarily occupy a few government buildings in Taipei through what appears to have been the typically bad policing of the R.O.C. police force, and which was then rightly removed, albeit in a heavy-handed fashion that is also typical of the police in Taiwan.

A simple student demonstration cannot jeopardise the system of law and order in a democratic country, and there is no sign that Taiwan is an more or less of a country under the rule of law this year than it was last year. Students occupying the legislature cannot be said to have strengthened that legislature. There is no sign that the separation of powers, a separation that simply did not exist under the Chiangs who controlled all arms of the state, is under significant threat. Taiwanese society is, depressingly, neither more or less divided than it was at the start of this year though the response to the occupation obviously exposed that division. The R.O.C. exists as a state only at this point, and has lacked any real national identity now, at least one distinct to Taiwan, for more than a decade now. The Taiwanese economy is not really threatened by this occupation, though the services treaty it protested against might bring some minor benefits to the economy.

Meeting this kind of extreme rhetoric point-by-point almost seems pointless given the way it seems to spring up all the time in political discussion in Taiwanese discussion. The best response to this kind of hyperbole is simply to ask the question that Ma Yingjiu posed in response to a question from the Taipei Times back in 2009:

Taipei Times: Do you think Taiwan is a normal country?


President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九): The Taiwanese people elect their own president and legislature and govern themselves. Do you think that is normal or not normal?

Whatever you may think of Taiwan's democratically-elected president now, he was undoubtedly right then. Taiwan  remains an essentially stable, law-abiding, and above all, normal country, albeit one living under the threat of invasion.

[Picture: Former Taiwanese dictator Chiang Kai-Shek takes the salute at the Double-Ten parade in Taipei in 1966. Via Wiki]

Four countries, four elections.

UK
The papers are already heralding UK Independence Party receiving the most votes in the UK elections for the European Parliament as a "political earthquake". Personally I'm inclined to yawn this one off as the result of the European Parliament being essentially a powerless talking-shop, this is particularly the case given that in the local elections held simultaneously the UKIP "surge" was much less apparent - it seems that people are voting UKIP (and remember, we're talking about only 28% of those who bothered to vote) as a protest vote against the EU, rather than an indication that people actually want to be ruled over by a party like UKIP.

Poland
In the run-up to the European elections here in Wroclaw it was obvious that a real push was being made by (ruling party) Civic Platform (Platforma Obywatelska) to get Stanislaw Huskowski elected as an MEP for the area, with posters like the above appearing all over town. Despite this Huskowski failed to get elected - as one twitterer said: "even the photo with [popular Wroclaw mayor] Dutkiewicz didn't work miracles".

There is something fitting, I guess, in the fact that Poland's last communist dictator, Wojciech Jaruzelski, died on the same day that Polish people voted in a free election as a confirmed, ordinary, and stable part of Europe. The hundreds of killings that resulted from the military crackdown that he ordered, on the other hand, will now never be properly punished for the criminal acts that they were.

Germany
I was on a day-trip to Dresden yesterday, and political advertising seemed to be everywhere in the city, which is now finally getting back to the splendor it had before Allied bombing and decades of neglect during the communist era left so much of the city in ruins. Whilst the Germany people seem to have quite sensibly given the largest number of votes to Angela Merkel's CDU, advertising like the above indicates that Germany too has its shrill and over-blown voices.

Ukraine
The fact that 54% of Ukrainian voters have voted to elect Petro Poroshenko (pictured above) should mean the end to the claims that the Ukraine's present government is "illegitimate" and "fascist" from those whose loyalty is, either openly or covertly, to the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin's revanchist and nationalistic regime. Unfortunately it seems unlikely to do so - instead we're faced with the prospect of Putin's cronies condemning the vote as not representing the opinions of those in Donetsk and Luhansk at the same time as the militias they support there prevent large numbers of people in those areas voting.

[Pictures from top: 1. A UKIP poster from 2009 - whether (immigrant's son) Winston Churchill really would have support UKIP's positions is arguable (Lewis Clarke via Wiki). 2. "Rafal Dutkiewicz: I'm choosing Huskowski" - a  poster from Wroclaw. 3. NPD and BueSo posters seen in Dresden - the NPD one says "No West German conditions (?) in our city", the BueSo one reads "Us Germans can stop the world war", if JR or TaiDe would like to explain what the hell these are going on about I'd be grateful. 4. Petro Poroshenko, via wiki.] 

Thought For The Day.

"People who want to blame poorer people from other countries for what they dislike about modern life are prey to cruel and erroneous thinking and we should not "focus" on their "concerns". We should tell them that this is how racism starts."

- Matthew Parris, on how the main parties should respond to the rise of populist anti-immigration parties like UKIP.

Taiwan Hyperbole, Again.

Taiwan observer J. Michael Cole has a new post over at The Diplomat that plumbs a new low in the annals of the willingness of some in the Taiwan expat commentariat to talk up the state of crisis in Taiwan, and accuse the democratically-elected Kuomintang government of essentially being a illegitimate dictatorship. This part is representative of the whole: 

". . . soon after Ma began his second (and last) term in 2012 and Chinese President Xi Jinping stepped into Zhongnanhai, the domestic pressures in Taiwan and growing apprehensions regarding the impact of China on the lives of the nation’s 23 million people became more apparent. Protests — against pro-China media, land expropriation, revisionism in school material, layoffs, and a services trade agreement with China, among others — became standard fare. In many cases, the negative influence of China on the quality of Taiwan’s democracy, which was quickly losing its abstract quality, was among the factors behind the demonstrations (the first major one occurred in November 2008 during the visit by Chinese negotiator Chen Yunlin).But despite the daily protests (sometimes several ones in a single day), the signs of emerging “soft authoritarianism” in the government’s reaction to civil society, or a not-unrelated desperate act of anger in which a man crashed a 35-tonne truck into the Presidential Office, the world didn’t pay attention."

 Let's gloss over the fact that Xi Jinping has been at Zhongnanhai since 2008 at least, and just look at Cole's claim that protests have become "standard fare" - perhaps, but is this really anything unusual in Taiwanese politics?

It seems that Cole has forgotten Chen Shui-bian's last term and the various mass protests that occurred in that time, including a march by a claimed 300,000 people (or 90,000, but there's a nasty habit of people taking which ever estimate best fits their argument in Taiwanese politics). It seems J. Michael Cole has forgotten the massive demonstrations of the first Ma term, especially the Economic Common Framework Agreement. In fact, the only thing that is really new in all this was the invasion of the Legislative Yuan by students, to which the KMT government responded much as you would expect - with heavy-handed riot police. Even the crash does not seem so unusual (or so excusable as a "desperate act of anger") when you consider things like the attempted assassination of Chen Shui-bian and Annette Lu by an equally-crazed man in 2004.

Let's also look at Cole's claim that there have been "emerging signs of "soft authoritarianism"" in Taiwan. Trying to pin down what exactly this means seems to uncover little more than claims that the students who occupied the Legislative Yuan had to put up with the air-conditioning being turned off on them and were evicted from the government buildings and public spaces they had occupied. The KMT's main crime seems to be that in implementing the services agreement with mainland China they did exactly what the constitution and their democratically-conferred majority allows them to do, but broke a non-binding agreement by doing so. Everything else seems to fall into the normal bag of ridiculous hype, gossip, rumour, and conspiracy theories that has swirled around in Taiwan since at least the advent of the democratic era, and probably before then too.

Even the "big news" from Taiwan, the emergence of the Sunflower Movement, is reminiscent of nothing so much as the various Occupy movements around the world over the past 3-4 years or so. This is particularly reflected in the disparate nature of what their banners proclaim them as being in favour of, and in their essential lack of any specific goal.  Demanding that a law not be passed, that the president resign, accusing the ruling party of being corrupt - this has been the common fare of Taiwanese politics going back ten years at least.

And let's not forget the various hyperbole-laden warnings that have come forth from Taiwan over the years. Back in 2002 "Father of the Nation" and ex-President Lee Teng-Hui warned of a likely Chinese invasion happening in 2008. Indeed, Cole, who in his latest article warns that Taiwan is "at the eleventh hour" and that "the day of reckoning in the Taiwan Strait is fast approaching", has himself been guilty of making warnings that, especially in retrospect, appear more than a little bit misguided - particularly his warning before the 2012 election that there would be a forced annexation of Taiwan by China facilitated by the KMT that year. 

Looked at this way, simply regarding affairs in Taiwan as business as usual, and ignoring the never-ending flow of hype coming from the various side of the Taiwan debate in the abscence of real indications of change, is nothing but good common sense.

The China I Knew.

I guess all of us ex-expats eventually get to the point where they've been long enough out of the country that it no longer quite resembles the country they lived in. Having been out of China for a few years since my last visit there, I visited Chengdu and Beijing on a whistle-stop tour whilst on business, here's my Tom Friedman-level analysis of what seemed to have changed:

• Pollution. The distance from my hotel in Chengdu to the largest mall in the world was roughly half a mile (i.e., about a kilometre), yet for large parts of my stay it was completely obscured by dust and smog. Despite my three years in Nanjing and two years in Shenzhen, I have never seen pollution as bad as the pollution I saw in Chengdu during the four days I was there. I used to be one of those assholes who would inwardly smirk when someone complained to me of getting a sore throat and sore eyes because of the pollution in China, but this time round it was me on the receiving end. Not nice.
• "Pollution Control". My visit to Beijing coincided with that of a prominent international figure, and surprisingly enough the skies were very clear indeed. Cynical minds try to draw a connection between these two facts. Whilst obviously there was no evidence of any connection, the idea that the government is basically ordering pollution-producing enterprises to do a stock-take during VIP visits to the capital is now widely-believed. Back in my Nanjing days, when Fidel Castro or Lian Zhan came to town, such thoughts wouldn't have entered our minds.
• Inequality. It used to be, at least in Nanjing, that you'd be able to identify the well-connected and corrupt by their driving of black Audis with military plates. Nowadays you're more likely to see them drive past your 8 kuai taxi in a Maybach, a Ferrari, or a Rolls Royce. You'll see fancier cars being driven through central Chengdu than you will even in central London. In Beijing, however, this trend was far less apparent.
• Prices. Many things, mostly those that rely on low-level labour, haven't changed much - the 8 kuai minimum taxi ride in Chengdu was about the same as it had been in Nanjing ten years previously, the rou bao I bought outside the hotel were about the same price I used to pay on my way to classes in 2005. What you do see some crazy increases of price in are the things that fall into the "conspicuous consumption" bracket - the price of a bottle of super-average Qingdao at one bar I visited was more than 70 RMB, up even from the ridiculous 40 RMB it had last been when I had been to the same bar three years previously. 
• The Defensive Posture. There were police on every street corner of central Chengdu, with People's Armed Police brandishing automatic weapons in the area around the main square. Almost certainly this is a result of the recent Xinjiang-related terrorist attacks in China. All the same, it is likely to become a permanent fixture as these attacks don't seem likely to stop any time soon. Beijing was, surprisingly, far more relaxed and basically China as I remembered it in this regard.
• Street Food. For many China expats this is one of the great joys of living in China, however Street food seemed to have been banished from the centre of Chengdu and scarcely available elsewhere. Beijing, again, hadn't changed nearly so much in this regards, and you can still buy jian bing outside the Worker's Stadium.
• Low-Level Crime. The pirate DVD stores and "Barbershops" that you used to see on every street in the entire country seemed to have almost totally disappeared. I saw not a single one in Chengdu, and only a few DVD shops that may even have been selling genuine DVDs in Beijing. I'm told that outside the centres of big cities they are more apparent, but this is still a big change even compared to 2007.

Visiting this time I felt the contrast between Chengdu and Beijing to be almost as stark as the difference between the old China of seven years ago and the China of today. Beijing was largely familiar, China as I knew it, but Chengdu seemed almost to reflect a different idea of what the country should be. 

A friend of mine, resident in China since the 90's, describes Chengdu as an example of "development at its least sustainable", and I feel tempted to agree with that, though I remember similar statements being made about China as a whole when I first arrived in-country. The fact that the area of Chengdu in which I was staying was already suffering from massive traffic jams and over-full subway trains without most of the buildings there even being completed yet, or without there even being an obvious user for such buildings, certainly backed up the idea that it was unsustainable.

[Picture: Taken at the Beijing Silk Market during a visit with colleagues. Just what on earth is the point of visiting the market if you can't even haggle any more?]

Why Xinjiang-related terrorism isn't going to stop any time soon.

One Thursday morning in 2000, Stephen Saunders, an Athens-based British diplomat, was driving to work when two men on a motor-cycle pulled up next to his car. One man levelled a Kalashnikov at him and pulled the trigger only for the weapon to jam after firing only one shot, a .45 ACP M1911 semi-automatic pistol was then used to fire the fatal last shots that killed Stephen Saunders.

For our purposes here, this senseless killing of an innocent man by a group of Marxist fanatics is interesting in one detail: the pistol that was used had been used by the assassins had first been used by the same group 20 years before, in 1980, and had probably come into their possession some years even before that during a bank robbery. Stephen Saunders killing was the last kick of a Marxist insurgency that had been rumbling on in Greece since the second world war, on through the years of the 1944-49 Greek civil war where the communists were finally extinguish in a blaze of napalm at Mount Gramos, to the left-wing resistance against the US-backed Greek military junta, to the 1973 uprising at the Athens Polytechnic that gave birth to the 17 November group that carried out Saunders' assassination.

Essentially, armed with only a couple of pistols and fanaticism, and formed in a tight grouping of probably no more than 25 people, 17 November had kept up a pointless campaign of killings that outlasted the last real justification for their existence after Greece's democratisation and economic growth of the 80's and 90's, and carried on for 27 years. No outside support was needed for them to carry out this campaign,  no real justification was needed other than the indoctrination that had already been imbibed by the group during the 60's and 70's, there was no real head to cut off, and no reform that would have made them stop short of implementing the Marxist nightmare that was their final goal.

It is therefore with this in mind that I read of today's car-bombing in Xinjiang  that has killed as many as 31 innocent people.

The insurgency in Xinjing has its own history that stretches back just as far as 17 November's, having its modern roots in the ending of the Soviet-backed autonomous government there in 1949 that at one point threatened to turn the area into a satrap of the USSR, on through the years where the Han Chinese population of the area grew with the expansion of the Bingtuan military-agricultural colonies, to the violence in the area after the Sino-Soviet split, the smashing of religious centres by Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, to the 1989 uprising and the Gulja Incident.  It shows no sign of stopping now or even in the event of some major liberalisation in China, indeed, even a vote on independence for the territory would probably be a "no", since Han Chinese now form 40% of the population.

Ending discrimination against Uighurs, examples of which were widely discussed after the 2009 uprising (e.g., "Han-only" job adverts ) is a desirable goal in and of itself, but nothing is ever likely to give the terrorists carrying out attacks like today's what they want because what they want - at the very least independence for Xinjiang - is not acheivable. At the same time they do not need the support of the majority, or even a very large minority to keep up these attacks - T.E. Lawrence estimated that the active support of only 2% of the population can sustain an insurgency, a figure born out by the experience in Northern Ireland, where a 1999 survey reported that only 3.6% of people (7.4% of Catholics) admitted to having "a lot of sympathy" for Republican paramilitaries. It seems that even a collapse in support for the insurgency amongst Uighurs in Xinjiang would not stop it from continuing.

Whilst the Chinese authorities can and should be doing more to placate the Uighurs, it seems that whilst such changes might reduce the violence, whatever they do China faces the prospect of these killings carrying on for the forseeable future.

[UPDATE: this piece in today's Dawn on airstrikes in Pakistan hitting an ETIM training-camp demonstrates also the international reach of Xinjiang terrorism. H/T Ryan Mclaughlin]

[Picture: The .45 ACP M1911 pistol used in Stephen Saunders' assassination. Source: The Public Relations Office of the Greek Police via www.M1911.org]

China + Russia = "Chussia"?

Let me say it first, even if I loath these portmanteau joinings-together of country names in order to hype relations between them (worst offenders: Chindia, Chimerica, Chiwan), but "Chussia", or whatever you want to call the relationship between China and Russia that has been hyped as the new "special relationship", is the upcoming thing in world affairs. At the very least, this is what today's news seems to indicate.

Russia and China's signing of an agreement that has been in negotiation since my early days as a Chinese-language student in Nanjing, at a time when Russia's relations with much of the rest of the world are strained seems unlikely to be a coincidence. The prospect of being able to sell the gas to customers other than China for a higher price has distinctly dwindled as the countries of Europe and Japan have implemented policies designed to limit their reliance on a Russia that appears ever more unstable and aggressive.

In the past, commenters have dismissed the future Mr Putin holds forward to Russia as essentially becoming China's "Gas Station" - a country with an economy entirely dependent on hydrocarbon exports to a single customer. Some critics have also pointed out that the biggest threat to Russia's sparsely-populated east is the supposed threat of a land-grab by densely-populated China.

Russian exports to China, however, differ from the kind of China-oriented resource-extraction business seen in Africa ("Chafrica"?), because the Russia-based infrastructure will be entirely Russian-owned and built, and because Russia (unlike the Ukraine) is, with its massive army and nuclear arsenal, not so easily pushed around. It is hard to see Russia becoming totally dependent on China to the point where China calls the shots - indeed, as we've seen in Eastern Europe, being the main supplier of gas to country gives Russia definite power in that country. We are also unlikely to see Russia weakened to the point where she might lose territory in a fashion similar to the way that the Crimea was torn away from the Ukraine.

It would be wrong also to celebrate this as the dawn of some kind of "Eurasian Century" as one commenter at RT, the Kremlin-controlled media outlet did. In the final analysis, if Russia was an ordinary country living at peace with its neighbours, then its leaders wouldn't be rushing to Beijing to finalise this agreement at a price lower than the Russians get elsewhere for their gas - instead they would simply be selling to the highest bidder.

In the end "Chussia" isn't about a shared world-view. It's about how the unstable political systems of both countries limit their options in terms of allies.

[Picture: Vladimir Putin meets then-Chinese Premier Hu Jintao in Shanghai in 2007. Source: www.kremlin.ru via wiki]

Blogs gone by

I'm afraid this will be a nostalgic post, since I'm now doing a clean-up of my blog roll to weed out those blogs that are no more.

Unfortunately The Modern Leifeng seems to no longer be with us, though his old blogspot blog, last updated in 2010, is still extant, and he's still posting about football in the orient over at Wild East Football. Likewise GongShangFa-blog appears to be "pining for the fiords", which is a pity given that writer's enjoyably acerbic commentary on the China scene.

Froogville, an early blogger on the China scene, stopped updating in late 2012 and hasn't been seen since. I urge all HHGG fans to check out this post which suggests about as good an explanation of the plot of Douglas Adam's masterpiece as is ever likely to be put forward.

Run Run Roll, a Taiwan re-expat blog that charted an expat's attempt to keep living the expat dream for as long as possible, finally rolled to a halt last year it seems and no longer loads. Under The Jacaranda Tree hasn't posted in more than a year, but, more to the point, it's been just too long since they posted anything I was interested in reading - they're out.

Exiledonline is still up, but failed to live up to the standard of the original eXile after they got thrown out of Russia. I urge you to read this excellent 2010 Vanity Fair article which tells their story, but all the same they're out too.

So what's left? Here's some China/expat blogs that are still up-and-running and well worth your attention:

• The Peking Duck  - a veteran China blog that still delivers quality. 
• The Big Lychee - The longest-running China blogger that I am aware of, albeit Hong-Kong oriented. Still posts regularly as clock-work, as he had since at least the days of Tung Chee Hwa (and possibly back to the immediate pre-handover days in '97), and still always has something interesting to say. Today's piece on the state of the Hong Kong English-language media is a must-read. 
• Just Recently - I guess it's now time to confer veteran status on JR, who has steadily posted since 2008 and every week uncovers a nugget of interesting information. 
• The Writing Baron - My old pal JB, still battling in the trenches as an journalist, skeptic, and music writer in Taiwan.
• Imagethief - back to blogging with this well-written piece.

People have been talking about the "slow asphyxiation" of the blogosphere, at least the world of China/expat blogs, for a while now. Personally, whilst I no longer use the blog to simply share links that people I know will be interested in reading (Facebook and Twitter are much better for this) I still occasionally have an idea about something in the news that I'd like to write down somewhere and is just too long for a Facebook post, where it will likely get lost amongst the cat memes anyway. Blogs like the ones above show I'm not the only one who thinks this way.

The Second Sino-Vietnamese War (and why it's not going to happen).

Vietnamese demonstrations against drilling for oil in a disputed area of the South China appear to have turned into something resembling an anti-Chinese pogrom against innocent Chinese people living and working in that country last week, leaving as many as 21 dead, with hundreds of Chinese either being evacuated by sea or fleeing into Cambodia.  Now there are reports (admittedly from a rather unreliable source) that Chinese army units are moving towards the Sino-Vietnamese border area.

You could reasonably ask whether we might be seeing the beginning of a military build-up ready for a re-run of China's 1979 Strafexpedition against Vietnam, which happened in the wake of Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia aimed at toppling the genocidal PRC-backed Khmer Rouge regime, and the enactment of oppressive measures against ethnic Han Chinese in Vietnam. Indeed, the place where the military build-up is reported as occuring (Pingxiang) is exactly the same as where the 1979 invasion was launched from.

All the same, I doubt that conflict will occur. China has little to gain by launching such an invasion. The Sino-Vietnamese land border dispute was settled in 2000. Cambodia (now again a Chinese ally) is not an issue and there is no need to distract the Vietnamese military as there was in 1979. China has nothing to gain through fighting in the South China Seas since they can take whatever they like whenever they like there. Finally the 1979 experience was hardly a positive one for China's military, weakened as it was by the Cultural Revolution that had finished three years previously.

Similarly Vietnam will not gain anything from fighting. The disparity between the armed forces of the two countries has, to say the least, not changed in Vietnam's favour since the 1988 skirmish over Johnston south Reef in which Vietnamese forces were roundly defeated.

Instead this build-up is more likely to be an attempt at sabre-rattling in order to placate the understandable outrage of the Chinese public at what has happened, particularly the nationalists whom the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) counts apon as their main base of support. Indeed, it is hard not to see both sides of this dispute as being the result of what may happen when communist governments, facing the bankruptcy of their ideology, seize on nationalism as a justification for their continued rule. It is easy to see how the violent, government-orchestrated 2005 and 2012 anti-Japanese demonstrations in China could have turned into something resembling last week's anti-Chinese pogrom had the government lost control of them.

In fact we may already be seeing the Chinese government's real response. The Chinese state media is correctly outlining how the violence shows that Vietnam may not be a safe destination for investment, though whether China would stand up to similar analysis based on the same logic is another question. Blame is being placed on the US government, the Chinese government's traditional bug-bear, for their support of Vietnam. All of this speaks of a response based on channeling nationalistic sentiment along paths useful to government, rather than readying them for war - though I would not be surprised to see some 'spontaneous' anti-Vietnam demonstrations in China as well.

[Picture: Vietnamese protesting in Hanoi, 11th of May, 2014. VOA via Wiki]

"I’ll launch my journalism career by being a mouthpiece for an authoritarian regime. What could go wrong?"

Having written on the subject of Western journalists working for the state-controlled media of oppressive regimes before,it has been with great interest, and not a little satisfaction, that I have been following the exposure of RT (the English-language mouthpiece of the Kremlin) as essentially a propaganda operation which naive or foolish young journalists have signed up to work for only to later learn their mistake. This piece (on Buzzfeed of all places) does a good job of describing what it's like to work in RT, formerly know as Russia Today:

“It was me and two managers and they had already discussed what they wanted,” Bivens, an American who worked in RT’s Moscow headquarters from 2009 through 2011, said of a meeting she’d had to discuss the segment before a planned reporting trip to Germany. “They called me in and it was really surreal. One of the managers said, ‘The story is that the West is failing, Germany is a failed state.’”

Bivens, who had spent time in Germany, told the managers the story wasn’t true — the term “failed state” is reserved for countries that fail to provide basic government services, like Somalia or Congo, not for economically advanced, industrialized nations like Germany. They insisted. Bivens refused. RT flew a crew to Germany ahead of Bivens, who was flown in later to do a few standups and interviews about racism in Germany. It was the beginning of the end of her RT career.

 Living in China, I was amazed by the naivety of journalists who go worked for state-controlled propaganda outlets like CCTV and Global Times. They didn't seem to realise the seriousness of what they were doing - essentially making themselves an accessory to the rule of dictatorship. Instead you would hear strange talk about "helping China tell its story" (as if the Chinese state needs help with this) and absurd comparisons to the output of the BBC used to justify their decision.

The main motive of most of these people seemed to be to gain experience in a semi-professional environment, but it was rather unclear to what degree anyone's career could possibly be helped by having worked for a known propaganda outlet. It is far from certain that any foreign journalists who worked for the Chinese state media gained anything by doing so in professional terms, nor that the people being hired by the Chinese state media even had the skill-set to allow them to suceed in journalism. Instead these individuals fit the type that Jonathan Chait so accurately skewers here:

Their motives appear to be a mix of careerism, naïveté, and utter incuriousity. The modal career arc of an American RT reporter appears to be an ambitious but not terribly bright 20-something aspiring journalist who, faced with the alternative of grim local-news reportage, leaps at the chance to make two or three times the pay while covering world affairs, sort of. It’s the sort of reward that dims one’s incentive to perform due diligence into just who is signing your paycheck, and why. “I saw a job posting,” a former RT America reporter tells Gray, “and figured why not,” in one of the more hilarious uses of “why not” you will ever see. (I’ll launch my journalism career by being a mouthpiece for an authoritarian regime. What could go wrong?)

 Quite.

 

Let’s begin with a clear and candid assessment of the facts.
It is a fact that Russian military forces have taken over Ukrainian border posts. It is a fact that Russia has taken over the ferry terminal in Kerch. It is a fact that Russian ships are moving in and around Sevastapol. It is a fact that Russian forces are blocking mobile telephone services in some areas. It is a fact that Russia has surrounded or taken over practically all Ukrainian military facilities in Crimea. It is a fact that today Russian jets entered Ukrainian airspace.
It is also a fact that independent journalists continue to report that there is no evidence of violence against Russian or pro-Russian communities. Russian military action is not a human rights protection mission. It is a violation of international law and a violation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the independent nation of Ukraine, and a breach of Russia’s Helsinki Commitments and its UN obligations. 

 After a pretty bloody awful week for US and European diplomacy, at least the US ambassador to the UN is finally setting the right tone. It may well be that the US and the UK will not or can not compel the Russian government to honour their mutual commitment to respect the "independence and sovereignty and the existing borders" of the Ukraine, but at least we can speak the truth about what is going on there: invasion under a flimsy pretext and a flimsier disguise.

How to be a clueless China-expat

If you're a fan of hathos, this post on the NYT's "You're The Boss" blog is a treat. It's a list of the things that Deb Weinhammer, a small business owner who I'm sure is a nice person, misses between China and Arizona, and it has this awesome opening:

United States: Brushing my teeth in running water. I have earned to love that I don’t need a bottle of water to brush my teeth at home in Arizona and can just use the tap without any fear of contamination.

Errr . . . Deb, why are you worried about brushing your teeth when further down you say:

China: Fruit and vegetables. There are so many different kinds of produce in China that aren’t available anywhere elsewhere and have only Chinese names.

If you're eating fruit, Deb, you're likely getting just as much exposure to contaminants as you would using tap water to brush your teeth - though personally I didn't worry about either of these things, though I boiled all my drinking water and drank tea everywhere. Hell, given the concerns about bottled water in China, simply drinking bottled water may not be a panacea. And what are these fruits and vegetables that only have Chinese names? Even something like Bok Choi is known by what is at least an Anglicised version of its Chinese (Cantonese?) name.

Then there's this:

United States: Driving my car. Foreigners can’t drive in China, and I love to get in the car and go.

I must just be imagining all those expats I know in China who not only drive there, but got their driving licenses there, and have been for years. What IS the case is that China doesn't recognise the international driving license, but if you want to drive there, and are willing to jump through a few hoops (I understand you can now even take the test in English), you can do so. Driving in China was, at least when I was there, a bit hairy given the rather lax enforcement of traffic laws, and most cities now have fairly good public transport, so I can understand not wanting to drive there, but it simply isn't the case that you can't drive there.

And then there's the references to the economic advantages that expats have in China:

China: My driver, Mr. Li. It is very inexpensive to have someone drive you around in China, and it allows me to catch up on my reading.

Personally, I've always felt a slight distaste for expats bragging about things being 'cheap' in China. Obviously things are not 'cheap' for local people, and saying that they are in front of them is bound to offend them. People do not like to be thought of as 'cheap'.

Like I said, I'm sure Deb Weinhammer is a nice person, but I wish they had learned a bit more about China before sitting down to write this piece, and the NYT should have read it a bit more closely before publishing it.

(H/T Ryan McLaughlin, AKA the Lost Laowai)

"Quan Jue"

This fascinating Straits Times piece on what (PRC government mouthpiece) Wen Wei Po's publishing of a lurid description of how Kim Jong Un had his uncle, Jang Song-Thaek executed says about PRC-DPRK relations is well worth reading. Money quote:

"According to the report, unlike previous executions of political prisoners which were carried out by firing squads with machine guns, Jang was stripped naked and thrown into a cage, along with his five closest aides. Then 120 hounds, starved for three days, were allowed to prey on them until they were completely eaten up. This is called "quan jue", or execution by dogs.

..... The official litany of Jang's treason implicated China three times. Jang was accused of underselling coal and other natural resources for which China was virtually the sole customer. He was also charged with "selling off the land of Rason economic and trade zone to a foreign country for a period of five decades under the pretext of paying debts". Finally, he was accused of selling precious metals, thus disrupting the country's financial stability. In fact, China purchased some of North Korea's gold reserves several months ago."

"Quan Jue" (犬决) is a Chinese term, not a Korean one, and there's no knowing if the description of  Jang's demise is accurate, but the Straits Times's linking of Jang's execution, and the apparent propaganda retaliation against it from Beijing, to deteriorating relations between the two countries seems perceptive.

Over the past decade, with economic growth in the PRC vastly outstripping that in the North, North Korea has become almost an economic adjunct of China. Visitors from China to North Korea that I've talked to disparagingly compare the modern-day DPRK to Cultural Revolution-era China, marvel about the buying power of the renminbi in that unhappy country, and how successful Chinese business have been there. It seems likely that this growing influence is what Kim Jong Un is so brutally trying to counter in his elimination of Jang. If so, he may well have bitten off more than he can chew.

(H/T The Daily Dish)

The self-defeating stupidity of Shinzo Abe's visit to the Yasukuni Shrine

Whenever anyone asks me why Chinese and Koreans get so angry about Japanese politicians visiting the Yasukuni shrine, I ask them to imagine how the people of Europe might feel about Angela Merkel laying a wreath at a war memorial where, along with all the names of Germany's war dead, Herman Goring and Adolf Hitler were prominently listed, and where a museum asserted that the second world war was not Germany's fault. When these visits stopped several years ago, it was no more than an entirely realistic recognition of just how damaging these visits were for Japan's international image.

This is why it is quite simply unbelievable that Shinzo Abe should visit the shrine, especially now, when Japan frankly needs all the help it can get given its territorial dispute with China over the Diaoyu/Senakaku islands and its economic woes at home. As James Fallows notes, all the sympathy the Japanese may have gained as being seen as the victims of Chinese assertiveness are set at naught by this move:

" . . . there is almost nothing a Japanese prime minister could have done that would have inflamed tempers more along the Japan-China-South Korea-U.S. axis than to make this visit. And yet he went ahead. Last month, I said that China had taken a kind of anti-soft-power prize by needlessly creating its "ADIZ" and alarming many of its neighbors. It seems that I was wrong. The prize returns to Japan."

Quite.

UPDATE: Jeremiah Jenne's latest post on the PRC response to the visit in on-point. Money quote:

the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady.” - See more at: http://granitestudio.org/#sthash.pvWiH6Sb.dpuf

" . . . the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, "Dude, you really need to chill around your lady."

the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady. - See more at: http://granitestudio.org/2013/12/27/historical-responsibility-yasukuni-and-mao-zedong/#sthash.H8cqp75n.dpuf

the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady.” - See more at: http://granitestudio.org/#sthash.pvWiH6Sb.dpuf

the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady.” - See more at: http://granitestudio.org/#sthash.pvWiH6Sb.dpuf

It was an insensitive and counter-productive move on the part of the Japanese government.
But the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady.”
- See more at: http://granitestudio.org/#sthash.pvWiH6Sb.dpuf

It was an insensitive and counter-productive move on the part of the Japanese government.
But the CCP calling somebody out for being unable to accept historical responsibility is like Chris Brown putting his arm around your shoulder in a club and saying, “Dude, you really need to chill around your lady.”
- See more at: http://granitestudio.org/#sthash.pvWiH6Sb.dpuf