Modern Heavyweight Boxing Sucks

The conclusion of one sedentary sports fan on the heavyweight-hitters of today:

I have always thought that the Klitchkos get bad press, in the main, because they're intelligent, educated, good-looking Ukrainians who carry around Phd.s and world championship belts, winning a lot of fights simply by being better than the other guy.

This is, I feel, certainly a valid point.They are, however, the first fighters I saw to use the tactic of hitting their opponent's lead arm so as to nullify the jab. Sure; they look for the right through the middle to follow, but this makes for a lot of pawing and a spectacle not unlike two 6 year old girls having a mild tiff.

Where is Hu Jintao's laojia?

[a picture of the Taizhou Tower, not representative of an otherwise beautiful city]


Of all the idiotic political movements of 2009, none was more silly than the 'Birther' movement which erupted in the US following the election of Barack Obama, son of a Kenya-born father and a Kansan mother. Whatever doubts people might legitimately have held about Barack Obama's eligibility to fulfil the role of president have been fully laid to rest by the Obama campaign's release of his birth certificate, yet the movement persists, and may have even grown, at least until the obviously-barmy Orly Taitz reared her air-filled head.

But suppose we had no real idea of where Barack Obama was actually born and different parts of America competed to be his home? Wouldn't this be a conspiracy theorists paradise? But this is what appears to have happened with the current president of China, Hu Jintao.

First, let us see what the official biography on the People's Daily website says:

Hu Jintao, a native of Jixi, Anhui Province, was born in December 1942. He joined the Communist Party of China (CPC) in April 1964 and began to work in July 1965 after he graduated from the Water Conservancy Engineering Department of Tsinghua University, where he had a major in the study of hub hydropower stations.

Jixi, of course, is one of the poorer counties of Anhui, which is one of the poorer provinces of China. A very proletarian upbringing then - but wait, there's more - here's what the government of Taizhou, Jiangsu province says to say about the man they claim as their own:

This great man, one of the most influential in the world, is one of China’s most known faces. Currently, Hu Jintao is the Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China, holding the titles of General Secretary of the Communist Party of China since 2002, President of the People's Republic of China since 2003, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2004.

Born in Anhui province, 1942, Hu Jintao moved to Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, during his early years. At this time, he moved into the home of close relatives and studied. Schools of Taizhou, where Hu Jintao once studied, ate, read, played, and became the great man he is today are open to visitation.

So, Hu was born in Anhui but grew up in Taizhou - a city close to my heart ever since I visited it back in 2004 on a day trip, trying to make a bit of money on the side whilst I studied Chinese in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province. I had been told that all they wanted was for me to have my photo taken in front of a school as proof that they had foreign teachers working there (a source of pride in Chinese schools even now). Instead, on showing up at the school (Taizhou Community College if I remember correctly) I was welcomed by a large crowd, with banners proudly welcoming the English "professor" who had come to visit - that being me! I then had to give an off-the-cuff speech to a crowd of hundreds, getting a standing applause when I praised the somewhat-ugly Taizhou tower. Sitting down to dinner latter my hosts proudly proclaimed that Taizhou was the laojia of Hu Jintao, the then newly-appointed President. Laojia is often translated as 'hometown', but its meaning is somewhat deeper than that which most English speakers would attach to that term, as it includes an allegiance to the place which can be passed on to the children of people born in that place even if born and raised elsewhere.

I exclaimed surprise, saying that I though he came from Anhui province, but my hosts said that Taizhou was his real home and place of birth, pointing to the rumour that Hu had secretly visited the city to take part in his father's funeral, and that he only claimed to come from Jixi because it was a poorer place, granting a kind of proletarian cool which Taizhou could not deliver. So is Taizhou his home then? Not so fast - here's what the anti-government China Affairs website has to say:

祖籍地和生长地与江泽民惊人相似，祖籍安徽绩溪的胡锦涛，1942年12月生
于上海，成长于江苏的泰州。

With an ancestral home and place of residence surprisingly similar to Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, of Anhui extraction, was born in Decemeber 1942 in Shanghai and grew up in Taizhou, Jiangsu province

Of course, there's no knowing what China Affairs' source is for that, but this website makes the same claim. Similarly, there is no knowing who it was who wrote on Hu Jintao's Wikipedia page that he was born in Shangyan, Taishan, Shandong province and where they got that information from. So where was Hu Jintao born? Perhaps someone should check his birth certificate?

Pretty much everything you ever suspected about CCP control of the internet is true.

[Cross posted at GongShangFa]

Such is my conclusion after reading China Digital Times' translation of notes taken at a SCIO (State Council Information Office) training session attended by Peng Bo , Deputy Chief of the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau. Let's do a run down:

1) Government-driven discrimination against foreign companies out of fear of foreign influence -

Commercial websites must understand that it is the government that protects the development of domestic websites. If the Chinese internet didn’t have Xinlang, then Yahoo would have free rein; if there was no Baidu, then Google would have free rein; if there was no QQ, then MSN would have free rein. All of this is because the government is intentionally fostering domestic enterprises.

2) Attempts by the Chinese government to censor and control the effect of Obama's visit -

Criticize Sina for not thinking politically; when reporting on Obama’s visit to China, they played without authorization a video of Obama speaking in Shanghai.

The most important part of Obama’s visit to China was his speech in Shanghai. The format of this speech was different than the speech format used by past U.S. presidents when visiting China. It was specially designed by the U.S. government to enlarge Obama’s personal influence.

Before Obama visited China, America and China negotiated that websites and television stations would broadcast the event. China accepted their request; however, live television coverage was to be limited to Shanghai area television stations.

These measures were implemented to accord with the central government’s desire that people become enthused about China-U.S. relations rather than be enthused about Obama.

Providing a video of Obama’s speech without authorization was done for Sina’s commercial interest and was not done for the nation’s interest. In order to gain a little, a lot was lost.

3) Government censorship of overseas news reports felt not to be 'correct' (i.e., not negative) -

Criticize Netease for going after sensational stories and not doing a good job of directing public opinion. [Neatease's] international news headlines are always things like “New York Mayor Bloomberg Receives Annual Salary of $1”, “Black American Becomes Mayor”, “American Youth Becomes Mayor”. These headlines are sensationalist and cast aspersions [on the Chinese government]. [Netease] has set the wrong direction for public opinion and has not properly fulfilled its role as a guide [of public opinion]

Note the fact that positive foreign news is felt to be critical of the Chinese government. This was reinforced by Li Wufeng, Bureau Chief of the State Council Information Office Internet Affairs Bureau, in his talk at the same training session:

2. Currently, the online republishing of news stories has the following major problems:

2.1 Republishing articles from small papers and publications, even republishing articles from the foreign press.

2.2 The online news phenomenon of “news laundering” [i.e., getting a domestic publication to print news from a banned source and then quoting it] is still serious. Sometimes standard news sources do not even carry the story [that the republishing source claimed the standard news source published].

2.3 Intentionally posting unpermitted content on interactive interfaces (forums, blogs).

2.4 Small newspapers and websites republish each others’ stories, creating media hype. For example, the Deng Yujiao [official killed by waitress defending herself against rape] incident and the Hangzhou street race [well connected young man uses influence to escape serious charges related to hit-and-run killing] case.

Assuming these notes accurately reflect what was said at the training session, this is pure dynamite. It shows that the government's influencing, censorship and 'net nannying' of the Chinese internet is pervasive, and driven by a paranoid view of the media, both foreign and domestic. I 'm looking forward to reading the translated notes from the other official's talks.

'Treasure hunters' tour world in search of looted articles

The NY Times today had an interesting article about a group of Chinese 'treasure hunters' who have been visiting museums in the United States searching for articles taken from the Yuanming Yuan, or Summer Palace, of the Chinese emperor by British and French soldiers in 1860. The palace was torched in revenge for the torture and killing of diplomats and prisoners of war, and its destruction remains a symbol of the 'hundred years of shame' during which China was subject to internal turmoil and external aggression.

However, these 'treasure hunters' have faced criticism of their own:

"The United States scouting tour — visits to England, France and Japan will come early next year — quickly turned into a spectacle sponsored by a Chinese liquor company. As for the eight-member delegation, a closer look revealed that most either were employed by the Chinese media or were from the palace museum’s propaganda department.

“These days even building a toilet at Yuanmingyuan would be front-page news in People’s Daily,” said Liu Yang, a researcher who joined the trip."

"Although the Chinese public broadly supports recovering such items, a few critics have suggested that the campaign merely distracts from the continued destruction of historic buildings and archaeological sites across the country. A government survey released this month found that 23,600 registered relics had disappeared in recent years because of theft or illicit sales, while tens of thousands of culturally significant sites had been plowed under for development.

What’s more, said Wu Zuolai, a professor at the China Academy of Art, the obsession with Yuanmingyuan ignores the plunder of older sites that are more artistically significant.

“Chinese history did not start with the Qing Dynasty,” he said. “This treasure hunting trip is just a political show. The media portray it as patriotic, but it’s just spreading hate.”"

There can be no doubt that the Opium War was a war of aggression fought for economic gain. There is also no doubt that the burning of the Yuanming Yuan was an unjustifiable act of vandalism. This said however, it happened almost 150 years ago, and is hardly the worst disaster to befall China in its history. The fact that billions of dollars worth of property was confiscated in 1949 from 'landlord' owners without compensation, and without even the slightest chance of the Chinese government compensating the surviving dispossessed and their families now, shows a selective view as to what constitutes a historical injustice.

Facts of which we were unaware

This latest Seton Hall University of Law report carried by the Andrew Sullivan blog on the death of three Guantanamo inmates back in 2006, which I had at the time truly believed were suicides, is both deeply depressing and shockingly disturbing:

There is no explanation of how each of the detainees, much less all three, could have done the following: braided a noose by tearing up his sheets and/or clothing, made a mannequin of himself so it would appear to the guards he was asleep in his cell, hung sheets to block vision into the cell—a violation of Standard Operating Procedures, tied his feet together, tied his hands together, hung the noose from the metal mesh of ii the cell wall and/or ceiling, climbed up on to the sink, put the noose around his neck and released his weight to result in death by strangulation, hanged until dead and hung for at least two hours completely unnoticed by guards.

This happened in an extra-legal prison run by my home country's biggest ally. And nobody will be called to account for it.

"The inane meanderings of a petty little fascist . . . ."

[Cross posted at GongShangFa]

Such was going to be the conclusion of the piece I had just written on Raymond Zhou's indescribably vile (not to mention homophobic) passive-aggressive assault on Chinese wild-boy and subversive author/blogger Han Han. Unfortunately for me, but, dear readers, fortunately for you, before I could click on the button marked "publish" I saw this excellent translation of a Hecaitou post by ESWN over at ULN's place. Money quote:

There is nothing surprising about this nonsense from Raymond Zhou. But we have to be wary of the open hostility displayed in his open letter. The western media were made out to be evil people who want to shove every Chinese people into the fire pit. At the same time, he tied those who dared to fight for the rights of people onto the chariots of the evil western media:

Or you can bribe government censors to shut down your blog for a month. Have them launch a wide-ranging campaign against you. Organize students nationwide to denounce you. The shortest cut to Western credibility, I must add, is to get yourself thrown in jail. Until that happens, you are simply another "willing participant".

What does that mean? My interpretation is that: Those whose blogs were shut down, those who were criticized by a mass mobilization and those who were sent to prison did so in order to get a page in TIME and win the approval of the western media. It has been a long time since that I have not read any such cold-blooded words. If Raymond Zhou has the guts, he should provide a name list of such people and tell the public: Did these people think that "the quickest way to gain the approval of the western media" was to go to jail? Does Raymond Zhou not want Han Han to any more western media interviews? Does Raymond Zhou not want Han Han to blog about social injustices any more?

Absolutely to the point. Han Han has not yet replied, nor does it seem likely that he will, or even needs to. Hecaitou said it all.

Seven Signs That You May Be A China Noob

With every year since China's reform and opening started in 1978 more and more foreign visitors have made the trip to experience the mysteries of the middle kingdom. Unfortunately, some new and inexperienced travellers seem to be in a mighty hurry to make total idiots of themselves. Fortunately for the FOARP, his days as a China newbie are buried back in the prehistory of The Time Before Blogs, but others are putting themselves at risk of severe future embarrassment should their noobish blog posts ever come to light. Here's the seven top symptoms of this Sinological syndrome so that you can be forewarned and forearmed:

1) Insisting on using 汉字 ("Chinese words") in every 句话 ("sentence") in a lame effort to show what a 中国通 ("China hand") you are.

Verdict:

You might as well just tattoo "傻屄" on your head.

2) Ever getting at all involved in what the term 'laowai' means.

Verdict:

If you argue either that the term is purely racist under all circumstances or that it is a sign of respect then you, my friend, are a laowiseass. The first can be countered by simply pointing out that plenty of wives married to white boys refer to their spouses as laowai, the second by even a second's worth of thinking - is "meiguolao" a respectful term for Americans?

3) Writing articles whose main premise is that China is not Wyomissing Hills, Pennsylvania.

Verdict:

Congratulations on being able to read a map. When people either lay into or overly praise China based solely on criteria which have nothing to do with conditions there you have to think that such articles have much more to do with where the writer came from than about where they are.

4) Writing commentary which basically boils down to "OMG! Chinese girls are so hot/girly/feminine/easy/whatever"

Verdict:

Our expat sisters are happily immune to this one, but unfortunately their much more numerous expat brethren are not. Once again, this seems to be much more about where the writer is coming from than about China.

5) Referring wisely to the concept of Guanxi.

Verdict:

Write "'Guanxi' = connections" ten times and get lost. This kind of commentary is strictly for noobs, everyone else knows that there's no such thing as a free lunch.

6) Making general statements about the Chinese people and culture.

Verdict:

There are very few generally true statements starting with the words "All foreigners are . . . ", and only marginally more which begin with the words "All Chinese people are . . . .". This doesn't stop people making them, but it should stop you from repeating either the excessively condemnatory language you hear in some quarters or the excessively laudatory language you hear in others. Here's a tip: before you write such a thing (e.g. "Chinese people are very conservative/modest/arrogant etc.") just stop and ask yourself whether a 20 minute walk through the average Chinese neighbourhood wouldn't turn up something directly contradicting that statement.

7) Compiling lists of things you like/don't like

Verdict:

Ooops!

It was twenty years ago today . . .

[Cross-posted from GongShangFa]

Well, not quite. We'll have to wait until next month to celebrate the fall of the Berlin wall. One group of 'netizens' (a term I have only ever heard used seriously in China), however, aren't waiting, and have hijacked this commemorative site to stage their own protest highlighting the continued division of China from the rest of the world by the Great Fire Wall. Well worth having a look if you have time.

Sentencing in Shishou

[Cross-posted at GongShangFa]


Remember Shishou? It was before Urumqi, but after Lhasa. Well, the five people who the local authorities have accused of "organising and inciting" the riots in which more than 60 police officers were injured have been sentenced, and the sentences seem to have been quite light - 5 years imprisonment being the longest. German Sino-blogger JustRecently has a good round-up of the coverage here. Noteworthy points?

1) Not insubstantial compensation was paid to the family of the man who allegedly committed suicide even after family members were arrested for inciting disturbances.

2) The local party chief was forced to resign.

3) Upwards of ten thousand people took to the streets, dozens of policemen were injured, yet only five people were punished.

What does this tell us? Where ethnic minorities upon which the government is not reliant for support protest they are punished severely as the ultimate cause which they seek is greater autonomy, which severely risks the unity of the Chinese state as it stands. However, where Han protest both the methods of policing deployed against them and the punishments used against those who lead the protest will be much less harsh - why? It is because no Chinese government can afford the kind of loss of prestige that would result from the use of harsh methods against the very people that the Chinese government truly relies on for support and which it truly represents. For the events of 20 years ago to be repeated would mean the death-knell of the Chinese state as it stands.

"No Explosives"

[Cross-Posted at GongShangFa]

This fascinating, if not exactly information-rich account written by a Canadian journalist covering the trial of six dissidents in Vietnam caught my eye:

"Floral bouquets brightened the dark wood. Steaming glasses of tea were poured.

"Good morning," an official said as she walked past. Everyone seemed to be polite and smiling, except the man who delivered the briefing about how we should behave at court.

"No explosives," he reminded us.

No cellphones either.

And don't try to do anything outside of the court, which seemed to mean don't talk to anybody.

He spoke with a white bust of Ho Chi Minh behind him next to a hammer and sickle, and a red banner that said, "Forever the glorious Communist Party of Vietnam.""

One rapid but fairly sure guide to the social atmosphere of a country is the parade-step of its army. A military parade is really a kind of ritual dance, something like a ballet, expressing a certain philosophy of life. The goose-step, for instance, is one of the most horrible sights in the world, far more terrifying than a dive-bomber. It is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren’t laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. Why is the goose-step not used in England? There are, heaven knows, plenty of army officers who would be only too glad to introduce some such thing. It is not used because the people in the street would laugh.

- George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn

[Video: Chinese militia drill in preparation for the celebration of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China]

The Taiwan Timewarp

Having worked in mainland China for a firm that required me to keep at least one toe in Taiwan, I am used to contrasting one with the other, and almost always in a way favouring the free and democratic land of Taiwan. This time around, though, I cannot say that the comparison has been quite so favourable to the island across the straits. Going from the break-neck pace of development in Shenzhen to a place where in many areas both wages and prices seem to have been almost at a stand-still since 2001 was quite a surprise. Yes, a high-speed railway has been completed and green energy projects have been undertaken, but even accounting for the fact that Taiwan is an economically developed society in which much less needs doing, in comparison to the mainland Taiwan feels locked in a timewarp in which nothing changes - is this fair?

Two years

[Picture: The view from my hotel widow in Longhua, on the outskirts of Shenzhen, overlooking the as-yet unfinished subway link with Hong Kong]

That's how long I had been away from China when I got back there for a quick visit at the start of last month. The changes?

1) Within 24 hours of crossing the border into Shenzhen I had five people independently and without prompting tell me that they hated the communist party and wanted to be rid of them. Particular ire was directed at ex-president Jiang Zemin. Given the number of campaigns designed to 'increase patriotism' that have occurred over the past two years you would have thought that support for the government would have increased. In the small sample of people who I met in Shenzhen the reality was emphatically the opposite.

2) Following a successful strike (euphemistically labelled 'a collective tea-time') the taxis outside the system of checkpoints which surrounds the centre of Shenzhen now all work off the meter, charging a basic 15 RMB per ride. Let me emphasise here that the metered rate is set by local government, and how unlikely such a strike being successful would have seemed two years ago. I guess I should add that of the five people mentioned above, two were taxi drivers.

3) Development. Everywhere I looked I saw large-scale projects which had not even started two years ago but which had already been completed in the meantime, areas which were dusty and vacant lots two years ago but which are now bustling communities. Longhua, where I formerly lived and worked, is to be the central hub for transportation links in and out of Shenzhen, with a direct connection to the Hong-Kong subway.

4) The future. Two years ago people were still trying to understand the Hu/Wen team. Now people are already looking forward to the new team which will most likely come to power when the current government's term ends in 2012. Xi Jinping remains the front-runner, but to many this by itself may be considered reason enough to dismiss him. Sitting down to dinner with a factory-owning friend of mine along with some other well-heeled Shenzhen-ites (the richest person there? A fortune teller), the consensus was that, given the rise of a politically-conscious middle-class, the next government would simply have to make political concessions, and that these would be the end of communist rule. I take all this with a pinch of salt (the same friend swore blind to me that Ma Yingjiu would never be Taiwanese president), but I can't say that I don't hope it's true.

Malaysia: 52 years of independence, 49 years of the ISA

[Picture: The Malaysian flag flies high over Independence Square, Kuala Lumpur, where I was stopped and questioned by a plain-clothes member of the 'Tourist Police']

Just as an example of how you can sometimes be right in the middle of a big event without even realising that anything is happening, a few weeks back I was in Kuala Lumpur when large-scale demonstrations broke out against the Internal Securities Act - a law passed in 1960 which allows detention without trial for a period of up to two years. The act is itself a continuation of colonial-era legislation brought in during the Malayan Emergency, in which British, colonial, and Malaysian troops successfully defeated a communist insurgency. However the first I knew about it was when I bought the (clearly censored) local English-language papers the next day and saw this headline:



Detention without trial under ordinary circumstances is an offence against human rights if it exceeds a period of even a few days, Britain and other democracies have slipped from that that standard in the war against terror. However, the ISA is a clear example of how, once such powers are granted to the state, they can stay on the books for a very long time - long after their supposed original purpose has ceased to be relevent.