Ambush journalism

A journalist ambushes Russia Today for their concentration on the (deplorable) Bradley Manning/Edward Snowden stories and near-silence on much-worse domestic abuses, enjoy:

His criticism goes right to the heart of the problem of working for dictatorship-funded media, be it Russia Today, Press TV, CCTV 9, CRI, Global Times, or any of the media outlets set up by dictatorial states for the explicit purpose of getting their message across to the wider world. Essentially, they are a kind of faux-media that many of the foreigners working within seem to sleep-walk into without fully realising what they are doing. Many seem to believe (or at least, want to believe) that somehow working for a propaganda outlet will be no different to working for any other media outlet, that the assurances they receive that they will be free to cover whatever they like can ever be kept to, and that the experience they gain will be counted in their favour rather than being taken as a black mark on their record. The truth is quite different.

(H/T The Dish)

Echoes of '89 . . .

. . . Beijing on June the 4th, specifically. Right now I'm listening to Jim Naughtie of BBC Radio 4's The Today Programme questioning the Egyptian ambassador's about the apparent mass killings in Cairo yesterday, and expressing disbelief of the Egyptian government's claims about what happened. The figures for the numbers who died being bandied around, the claims of self-defence by the government forces being made, sound very similar to those that came from the Chinese Communist Party leadership after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Unfortunately the example of what happened after the Tiananmen Square massacre shows that governments can carry out a massacre of their largely peacefully-protesting rivals and not only survive, but flourish. Regardless of this, sanctions against the Egyptian government at least the equal of those brought against the People's Republic of China should be implemented to display disapproval of these acts - it may well be that the Egyptian military government, which depends to a large extent on military aid from the United States and other countries, may be easier to influence through a cutting off of such aid.

Your iPad did not kill anyone.

A friend of mine shared this article, about the conditions at Foxconn's 400,000 worker factory in Longhua where I used to work, via Facebook. I couldn't read past the title "The woman who nearly died making your iPad" without getting a sick feeling in my stomach - not because of the conditions it described at the firm, which I have been far from un-critical of, but because of the, frankly, irresponsible nature of the piece. The article takes a serious issue - high levels of suicide in China - and simultaneously trivialises it whilst placing the blame at the wrong door. Take the opening section:

"At around 8am on 17 March 2010, Tian Yu threw herself from the fourth floor of her factory dormitory in Shenzhen, southern China. For the past month, the teenager had worked on an assembly line churning out parts for Apple iPhones and iPads. At Foxconn's Longhua facility, that is what the 400,000 employees do: produce the smartphones and tablets that are sold by Samsung or Sony or Dell and end up in British and American homes. But most famously of all, China's biggest factory makes gadgets for Apple. Without its No 1 supplier, the Cupertino giant's current riches would be unimaginable: in 2010, Longhua employees made 137,000 iPhones a day, or around 90 a minute. That same year, 18 workers – none older than 25 – attempted suicide at Foxconn facilities. Fourteen died. Tian Yu was one of the lucky ones: emerging from a 12-day coma, she was left with fractures to her spine and hips and paralysed from the waist down. She was 17."

The article describes a tragedy, and attempts to connect it to special conditions at the factory. It fails to explain, however, how this is tragedy is specifically connected to Foxconn rather than simply work conditions everywhere in China (and in many firms outside China, even some in the west). One might just as easily take an example of a suicide at any workplace and seek to blame it on the employers.

It tries to dismiss the fact that the rate it describes (18 people at a factory housing ~400,000 worker) is roughly 1/5th of the national average (22.23 per 100,000) by saying that this "[Overlooks] how those who take their own lives are often elderly or women in villages, rather than youngsters who have just moved to cities to seek their fortunes" when this is in fact appears to go against what the source it links to says (i.e., "The disease control centre said suicide is the biggest killer among Chinese aged 15 to 34.").

In fact, even a casual inspection of the available sources shows that pay and conditions at Foxconn's Longhua plant are much better than those of the typical Shenzhen firm. The fact that the suicide rate at Foxconn's Longhua plant are so much lower than the national average reinforces this.

This is no surprise to anyone who has simply walked out of the Longhua factory gates and looked at the conditions at workplaces in the same neighbourhood. I remember seeing one family processing e-waste in their front room which opened onto the street. A young child played by a wok filled with molten solder.

But do newspapers cover the story of how the cheap products that fill our super-market shelves are made in dangerous conditions, and what happens to them after we're done with them? No, they focus on a factory which is much better than the vast majority simply because a big-name product is made there.

The situation described as leading to Tian Yu's decision to kill herself (over-work, adminstration problems leading to late/non-payment of salary) happen in many, many firms in China (and elsewhere, for that matter). Laying the blame for the generally poor working conditions that the average Chinese worker faces at the feet of either Apple or Foxconn is quite simply absurd given that they are far better than the average.

If blame should be placed anywhere, perhaps the people with the most power to decide the minimal level of conditions that employers have to offer their employees - the Chinese government - are the most deserving of blame for their failure to do anything, and their repression of independent trade unions that might negotiate better conditions. It is far easier, however, to simply castigate the greed of large companies who, in final analysis, only do what they are required to do by law.

The Farage Farago

In terms of publicity, it is difficult to imagine how Nigel Farage's visit to Edinburgh yesterday could possibly have been more successful. What would almost certainly have been a brief photo-op that would have been lost in the middle pages of a local paper, if noted  at all, has been blown into an opportunity to play the victim of anti-English racism at the hands of Scots nationalist extremists shouting comically contradictory phrases like “You’re a racist, go home to England”.

For all the supposed differences of left and right, the similarities between Farage's right-wing UK Independence Party and the nominally left-wing Scottish nationalists hardly needs to pointed out: both are essentially single-issue campaigns that harness the prejudices held by at least some amongst their base, both believe that should we follow their preferred course of action our problems will be solved "because independence". There is more than a passing similarity between UKIP's rhetoric of recovering sovereignty from Brussels, and the Scottish Nationalist Party's talk of recovering sovereignty from London.

The interplay between them is also worthy of note - the SNP's Alex Salmond would not now be able to say that voting for independence is the "only way" of staying in the EU if it weren't for Farage's UKIP pressuring the Conservative party into agreeing to a referendum on UK membership of the EU in 2017. Of course, nothing would make such a result less likely than UKIP succeeding in convincing more British voters to vote for them - since this would split the Conservative vote - unless that is, the Conservatives are utterly discreditted by, say, a Scottish vote for independence, although this thankfully looks unlikely given the latest polling.

Can UKIP succeed in Scotland even with this additional publicity? It's reasonable to ask whether they can succeed anywhere in the UK, but as Alex Massie points out, there's nothing totally crazy about the idea of them winning votes north of the border if the SNP can:

"UKIP’s definitional policy – leaving the EU – would scarcely be considered controversial in Norway, a land the SNP frequently cite as an example of what an independent Scotland could and should aspire to be. Yet, in a Scottish or British context, this is considered the stuff of lunatic extremism.

The evidence available at this juncture suggests leaving the EU is a less popular notion in Scotland than it is in England. Nevertheless polls report that roughly one in three Scottish voters would opt to leave the EU. Observant psephologists will note that this is not wildly different to the proportion who favour withdrawing from the United Kingdom. It is not obvious that one of these ideas is a priori absurd and the other plainly common sense."
 

Personally, as a reluctant pro-European, I can't support UKIP even if I do sympathise with some of their goals - their anti-immigrant rhetoric aside. The influence UKIP has had over the Conservative party, forcing David Cameron to propose this very ill-thought-out poll on the EU now makes it very difficult for me to see myself voting for them either. So who's left?

[Nigel Farage, UKIP leader, for once caught without a pint in hand, via Wiki]

"I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left." - Margaret Thatcher

March, 2003

I've been reading through the comments under this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates describing his feelings about the anti-Iraq-war movement back in 2003:

"Back then I was seized with a deep feeling that I what I thought did not matter much. I was a writer in the sense that there were things that were published with my name on them. I didn't have a blog. I didn't have status. I didn't have a pager.

But I did have a grinding cynicism. I was skeptical of war, but if the U.S. was going to take out a mad tyrant, who was I to object? And more, who were you to object? I remember being out during one of the big anti-war protests and watching the crowds stream down Broadway. I remember thinking, "You fools believe that you matter? You think what you're saying means anything?"  

In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism."

 

Personally I didn't agree much with the anti-war protesters back in 2003, and I'm not sure even now if they really knew what they were talking about. Don't get me wrong: I wouldn't back the war knowing what I know now - the war was a gamble with the lives of hundreds of thousands of innocent people - but I don't think that means that those who opposes the war should be allowed to retro-spectively claim they knew what was going to happen all along.

Back in 2003, the anti-war protests seemed to be made up of exactly the same people who had opposed the Gulf War in 1991 on the grounds that it would become a 'New Vietnam', the same people who said that the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York had been orchestrated by the US government, the same people who believed the war was motivated entirely by oil wealth, the same people who, in short, had spent the previous ten years being wrong repeatedly. It seemed that they would oppose the war whatever the fact of the matter, and this made their opinions seem irrelevant.

I do, however, recognise the cynicism Coates describes, I got the feeling that it really didn't matter what anyone thought about the war.

For me the progress to war seemed unreal - especially since I followed it mostly from Taiwan and China - because we had by then seen more than ten years of empty threats directed at Saddam's government. When I watched George W. Bush's ultimatum giving Saddam and his sons 48 hours to leave Iraq, neither I nor the people I was watching with could resist laughing out loud - the idea of a dictator giving up power in this fashion was simply too ridiculous, the speech itself very hard to take seriously. The statements about WMD also seemed over-blown - it was not possible to see this as a credible casus belli given the number of WMD-holding countries in the world, and I simply didn't believe that Iraq had a nuclear bomb yet.

I saw WMD as not much more than a pretext to remove Saddam Hussein, a brutal and vile dictator, and didn't believe that anything could be worse for the Iraqi people than his rule. This was my mistake - I didn't see the civil strife coming. Sure, there had been warnings about the post-war situation, but I couldn't believe that the US wouldn't be able to solve that by simply opening their financial coffers. The examples of Germany and Japan after the second world war loomed large in my mind. In a bar conversation in the summer of 2002 with one of the guys who ran the Taipei Baboons (who later suffered a tragedy of their own ) I remember holding forth about the possibility of a final battle in Baghdad, and dismissing the possibility of a guerilla war out of hand. Few people, I thought, would want to die for Saddam - that was about the limit of what I could see.

"Sinocentrism" is not an ideology

I enjoyed this piece in today's Washington Post (H/T Rectified Name) describing what they see as the possible reasoning behind the hacking of the New York Times' computers after their publishing of an article disclosing the massive wealth held by the family of former Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (AKA the loveable 'Grandpa Wen'). The piece essentially says something very familiar to China watchers - that Chinese nationalists see outside criticism of the Chinese government as basically a form of attack on the country, and that as such it is permissable to take measures against such criticism which would, were such measures directed by foreigners against Chinese, draw accusations of meddling in Chinese affairs.

All the same, what they refer to as 'new Sinocentrism' (let alone the potentially tautologous nature of the word 'Sinocentric') is an extreme over-complication of a very simple phenomenon. Every powerful country in history has, with varying degrees of justification, been accused of seeing themselves as the centre of the world. The mere fact that some Chinese have a world-view that applies different rules to China than to other countries does not mean that they have developed an internally consistant ideology around that idea. In fact, it may just as easily be considered an example of how the Chinese government still lacks such an over-arching ideology and must instead rely on nationalism that comes more from the gut than anywhere else. A country operated according to an established ideology does not need to control debate in countries that do not subscribe to that ideology because that debate created outside the context of that ideology is invalid.

Just as important, such a 'Sinocentric' view is not 'new' in any meaningful sense of the word, because China's leadership never ceased seeing things this way. Even during the Mao years, the theory of "unequal treaties" (that is, treaties forced on China following a military defeat) formed the basis of all negotiations with former colonial powers and their successors, despite China's reliance on treaties which were, to all appearances, also formed 'unequally'.

Whatever happened to "internal democracy"?

I was just reading through the comments on the Guardian website under their article covering the latest speech of Ed Milliband, Labour party leader, when a comment caught my eye. The speech itself was described in the article as 'audacious' - a word which in the Grauniad's thesaurus appears to sit next to 'intellectually bankrupt' and 'inane' - but the comment was a quote from Ed Milliband's father, Ralph, the ever-wrong and ever-intelligent Marxist intellectual:

It is however one form of expression of a much more general aspiration, which has held generation after generation of socialists in its thrall, and which consists in the hope of ‘capturing’ the Labour Party for the adoption and the carrying out of socialist policies. The point is not here that this is an illusion but rather that it is the obverse phenomenon which has very commonly occurred, namely the ‘capturing’ of the militants by the Labour Party. This is not only true at the parliamentary level, though it is there that it has been most obviously true. But it has also occurred at the grassroots: people on the left who have set out with the intention of transforming the Labour Party have more often than not ended up being transformed by it, in the sense that they have been caught up in its rituals and rhythms, in ineffectual resolution-mongering exercises, in the resigned habituation to the unacceptable, even in the cynical acceptance and even expectation of betrayal.

As a description of how not only the Labour party but any party (including the Chinese Communist Party) can divert the intentions of those joining to serve the ends of its leadership this is hard to better. This quote from the same article is also worth reading from the point of view of an observer of Chinese affairs, even if it is about a different party in another country:

The reason for this lack of serious debate [within the British Communist Party] is very simple. It has to do with the fact that the Communist Party is an exceedingly managed party, in which the leadership is well able to reduce the scope and extent of debate; and to do so in the name of a ‘democratic centralism’ which is in fact a device for the oligarchic control of the leadership over its members. ..... The fact is that the democratic claims which the Communist Party regularly makes for its own internal organisation are a sham, save perhaps at the lower levels of the party. It has not yet begun to learn the meaning of the ‘inner-party democracy’ of which it boasts, and cannot do so as long as it continues to worship the sacred cows of ‘democratic centralism’ and the ‘ban on factions’.

This encapsulates the nature not only of decision-making within the British Communist Party (a group of crack-pot would-be revolutionaries now happily disbanded), but within any party which, like the Chinese Communist Party, makes decisions at the top without members lower down having any real say in matters. This lack of any real transparency in decision-making and meaningful involvement of party members makes a mockery of those who try to maintain that the CCP is 'not a monolith' (by which one assumes they meant that it is a party that accommodates divergent views, since all parties contain differing views if only unexpressed ones) and practices a kind of 'internal democracy'.

This is not to say that divergent views within the CCP, but when the leading proponent of one of two models ends up being expelled from the party and placed under arrest for crimes which it would be fair to suspect every senior politician in the People's Republic of committing, it is very unclear in what way the CCP is actually tolerant of differing opinions. The decision between whether Bo Xilai's Chongqing model and Wang Yang's Guangdong model was not made by democratic means, internal or external, but through the arrest and public shaming of Bo Xilai - 'internal democracy' had no part in this. 

Edit: Imagine for a moment if Barrack Obama's father had written the following . . .

"The Englishman is a rabid nationalist. They are perhaps the most nationalist people in the world...When you hear the English talk of this war [i.e., WW2] you sometimes almost want them to lose it to show them how things are."
 

 . . . and you will see the difference between British and US politics plainly.

The Hong Kong Backlash

Much has been written elsewhere about the whole kerfuffle surrounding the ham-fisted attempt to insititute a once-a-week moral and national education (MNE - AKA civics) classes in Hong Kong's schools that some suspected of being aimed at brainwashing Hong Kong's youth into accepting a CCP-friendly world-view. On paper, at least, the proposals actually left the schools free to decide on content, and the nature of this kind of education is such that it's hard to believe that that many people would have been won over by it even if it was just as bad as its critics made it out to be. It is, however, correct to say that MNE grew to represent something more than a mere once-a-week time-waste, as the excellent Big Lychee blog points out:

"Hong Kong is experiencing a backlash against attempts to turn it into something it isn’t. The government can’t admit that a secret but ham-fisted policy of Mainlandization was launched, let alone promise that it will now be suspended as counterproductive. It can’t (apparently) drastically reduce the number of Mainland visitors or bar them meaningfully from buying second homes here. It can’t even officially admit that National Education is completely over and done with and has ceased to exist. It can’t do much else because its own citizens won’t let it."
 

Exactly. This is the reason why you see people too young to remember the 1997 hand-over marching through the streets of the territory carrying the old colonial-era Hong Kong flag. Not because they seriously want to be returned to the UK, or even because the majority of them would like outright independence, but because they see the Hong Kong that exists right now, the one that came about under the old flag, as one under attack from the authorities whose flag now flies at government buildings in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong is unique in being a quasi-city-state that is Chinese but not altogether part of China. The Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984 is explicit in this status having an end-date in 2047, when full unification with the mainland is due to occur. The current government of Hong Kong is tasked with acheiving this union, a union which, since the Chinese mainland has not reformed in any meaningful way politically since the 90's, and is governed by a party apparently committed to avoiding reform, requires that Hong Kong become like the mainland. This the people of Hong Kong do not appear willing to accept.

There is, of course, another deadline in play in Hong Kong affairs - the 2017 deadline for the introduction of universal suffrage. What chance is there now of this commitment coming about if the Hong Kong electorate continues to vote as it did in this year's LegCo elections? It is very hard not to think that the Chinese government will never accept a Hong Kong Chief Executive who is not their creature. 2017 therefore appears to be a date at which problems are already very much forseeable.

A note on what may be considered 'subversion'

A long time ago I had a long-running discussion with some of the people who run the Hidden Harmonies website on whether Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo's conviction for subversion showed that the mere writing and publishing of articles on the internet alone was considered subversion in China. The discussion ended, as always on that den of crazed nationalists, with them maintaining the position most favourable to the Chinese government (that Liu Xiaobo's real crime was spying even though he was never charged with that, nor any proof of spying other than innuendo offered at the trial) in defiance of the evidence of their own eyes.

It is therefore with no satisfaction or surprise that, following a link from JR's blog, I read the indictment of Chen Pingfu, a man whose crime was described thus:

"The Gaolan County Public Security Bureau has concluded its investigation of this case. The Gaolan County People’s Procuratorate submitted his case to the Lanzhou Municipal People’s Procuratorate for examination and review for indictment. The examination conducted according to law has found that:

Between July 2007 and March 2012, the defendant Chen Pingfu registered blogs or microblogs under the name “Chen Pingfu” on NetEase, Baidu, Sohu, Mtime.com, Sina, Tianya, and other websites where he published or reposted 34 articles including [list of blog post titles]. In these articles he expressed such inflammatory views as that Marxism, Leninism, Mao Zedong Thoughts, Deng Xiaoping Theory, Three Represents, and Scientific Development have no benefit for the society and the people; that the Communist Party rule knows only to push ordinary people around and not let them make a living; that the current system is not democratic enough, and that democracy and constitutionalism should be implemented.

The aforementioned facts of crime are proven by documentary evidence, material evidence, and the defendant’s statements."

Whilst Chen Pingfu's sentence is still yet to be announced, it is clear that, at least according to the Gaolan County People’s Procuratorate, the mere writing of articles critical of the Chinese government is subversion. Chen's 'crimes' consist of writing and publishing articles saying no more than what 95%+ of the Chinese people think in private: that communism is nonsense and the current system of governance is essentially dictatorial. No other offence is mentioned.

I do not expect the people at Hidden Harmonies to acknowledge that Liu Xiaobo went to prison merely for criticising the government publicly, nor do I expect that they would admit that this is what Chen went to prison for when, as will certainly be the case, he is eventually convicted for the same 'crime'. Experience has shown that  there is literally no distortion that hard-line nationalists are incapable of swallowing, nor any incontrovertible truth that they are incapable of denying. However, thinking people should bear in mind that China still is a country where mere criticism of those in power is a crime.

The very simple reason why the EU arms embargo on China is going nowhere

As an example of the political differences between the countries that make up the EU and the government of the People's Republic of  China, you couldn't do much better than the cancellation of the press conference due to be held today at the end of the latest round of EU-PRC trade talks. At least according to the BBC, it seems that the Chinese side refused to attend unless they could hand-pick the journalists allowed to attend. This, if true, indicates the degree to which China's government would like to avoid answering questions now or ever about the present political problems besetting the People's Republic, or about the economic statistics announced today which have even me believing that we are now seeing a significant slow-down in the PRC's economic growth (along with the rest of the world).

Another reason, of course, why the PRC's representatives at the talk would have wished to avoid having to answer (or not answer) questions from journalists that they did not pre-approve is that the talks were a wash for them. On the two big issues that the PRC government had wanted to see concessions on - the EU arms embargo and recognition by the EU as a fully-fledged market economy - the EU's representatives have remained adamant.

Naturally Wen Jiabao will not recognise the root cause of this intransigence. Despite what officials in Beijing might say, it is neither due to a 'cold war mentality' nor is it based on 'prejudice'. It's root cause is very simple: the People's Republic of China is not a democracy. It is a totalitarian state which, in as much as it has allies, has aligned itself with countries antagonistic to the interests of Europe's democracies, such as the Assad regime and North Korea. It is an autocracy that directly threatens democratic neighbours in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and elsewhere with military force.

Not only is China undemocratic, but it is an undemocratic state where selective application of a range of laws that can make doing business in China twice as expensive for foreign companies as it is for local ones. This may be either by accident or by design, but in neither case does it deserve recognition as a full market economy.

In the late 1970's the governments of both the states of Europe and the United States were willing to make a deal with the devil. They judged, perhaps correctly, that they had more to gain in supporting the PRC's development as a military power on the southern flank of the country which most directly threatened them - the USSR - than they did in supporting a totalitarian state emerging from the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

By 1989, however, this had changed. It was not the cold war which was nearing its end that prompted the sanctions in 1989, nor was it prejudice against the Chinese people to whom Europe and America had previously sold weapons. Instead the USSR's hold on Central and Eastern Europe had crumbled, and, much more pressingly, the true nature of the Chinese Communist Party's rule had been made clear in the blood-bath of Tiananmen Square.

The situation has not changed. Selling arms to the PRC whilst it remains in the hands of people willing to turn heavy weapons on their own citizens, who target the free society across the Taiwan strait with more than a thousand surface-to-surface missiles, who censor opinions and arbitrarily arrest, detain, and torture their critics and their families, would be selling them the rope with which to hang ourselves and our friends.

[Picture: A monument to the innocent dead of the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Wroclaw, Poland. Via Wiki]

The Third Sino-Japanese War (and why it's not going to happen)

So by now you've probably seen the pictures of nationalist demonstrators in mainland China looting Japan-linked businesses and burning Japanese-branded cars. Whilst the anger of the demonstrators is obvious and extreme, for anyone who's observed China for any significant length of time, the suggestions seen in various places that this might drive China's leadership into a war with Japan seems very wide of the mark for the following reasons:

• In the word's of Charlie Custer's excellent post on the riots: "China’s Anti-Japan Riots Are State-Sponsored. Period."  - far from demonstrators pushing the government into taking action, its the government that is driving the demonstrations. China both has the capability for clamping down on demonstrations of the size seen thus far and is willing to use it where it feels they may be going in the wrong direction. Indeed, CNN reports riot police intervening when a local government office was attacked, and there have also been reports of police singling out pro-democracy demonstrators mixed in with nationalists and arresting them.

This does in fact fit a long running pattern for such demonstrations, running through the 2005 anti-Japan demonstrations, then the 2001 anti-US demonstrations, right back to the demonstrations sparked by the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. Just as is described in this eyewitness account, the demos in Beijing in all cases consisted of demonstrators being marched past the offending embassy in groups of a few hundred, venting their rage, and then being hustled onward by the Chinese police. Elsewhere, depending on the attitude taken by the local authorities, the demonstrators have been allowed to burn and smash properties, but nowhere will they be permitted to threaten the government.

 

• There is nothing to fight for. The islands themselves are of little or no value and are incapable of sustaining significant numbers of inhabitants. Depending on who you believe they either have very little fresh water, or a very small stream, or just enough to sustain up to two hundred people, but no more. A garrison left on the islands in their current state would be totally dependent on supplies coming in by sea or by helicopter (there is insufficient room for an airstrip), would be exposed to the elements, and would be sitting ducks for any ships or aircraft in the area. Any attempt to develop or fortify the islands to the point where a garrison might stay there for a prolonged period of time would be seen months ahead of time by the other side.  

Of course, the real prize in holding the islands is the gas and oil under the seabed surrounding the islands, but this would be impossible for one side to develop safely without the agreement of the other side. As Iran found out in the eighties, an oil platform is just a big floating target if someone wishes to attack it. Occupying the islands would do exactly nothing to change this, nor could either side genuinely hope to exclude the other from the air and sea around the islands on a permanent basis given the area that would have to be covered. Whichever country used force to permanently exclude the other from the area and develop the oil and gas resources themselves would be vulnerable to attacks on infrastructure similar to those launched by both sides in the 1967-70 Israeli-Egyptian war of attrition. 

China's leaders neither have a realistic reason to believe that their country would gain economically from war with Japan, nor are they in a position where they might have to declare war because of pressure from a nationalistic public. Instead, as Jeremiah Jenne points out, this sudden out burst of government-directed anger against Japan is most likely an attempt at distraction from the CCP's current problems surrounding this year's transition of leadership in Beijing. Put simply, in observing Chinese political affairs you should never forget which hand holds the whip.

[Picture: An Iranian oil platform blazes in the aftermath of Operation Nimble Archer, 1987. via Wiki]

Nehru on the Sino-Japanese dispute

Actually, the following quote (taken from India's China War by Neville Maxwell) is the then-Indian prime minister talking in early September 1959 about the Sino-Indian border dispute, but it adds up to much the same thing:

"Now, it is a question of fact of whether this village or that village or this little strip of territory is on their side or our side. Normally, wherever these are relatively petty disputes, well, it does seem rather absurd for two great countries . . . immediately to rush at each other's  throats to decide whether two miles of territory are on this side or on that side, and especially two miles of territory in the high mountains, where no-one lives.

But where national prestige and dignity is involved, it is not two miles of territory, it is the nation's dignity and self-respect that is involved. And therefore this happens."

 "This" was a violent border clash, one of many leading up to the 1962 war.

Doesn't everyone know who Neil Armstong is?

One of the biggest surprises I had during my time in China came during my first year there when I taught English in Nanjing. I was giving a class of first year accountancy students a quiz as their final lesson of the term, and one of the questions was "Who was the first man on the moon?".

Collecting the results at the end I was surprised to find that no-one had even tried to answer it. The students weren't the best English-speakers in the school, but they certainly understood the question. I did wonder if they just didn't know the Roman-script version of his name, but none even attempted to write it in Chinese characters. In the end it appeared that no-one actually knew the answer to the question, a question that most British school children knew the answer to. My guess was just that Armstrong wasn't much of a hero in China - or was it something else?