Come again, Mrs. Clinton ??

I must admit I was pretty shocked when I read that Hillary Clinton, in the frame of her visit to China during her first Asia-trip as U.S. Secretary of State, had stated that human rights could not interfere with other more pressing issues:

"Successive administrations and Chinese governments have been poised back and forth on these issues, and we have to continue to press them. But our pressing on those issues can't interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis, and the security crisis," she told reporters in Seoul, South Korea.

I guess the world had expected she would sound a different bell, but I can't help the feeling that in a certain sense she is right: there are piles of pressing issues on the table and it's impossible to treat them all at an equal level. Actually, it's almost become hard to think up an issue that would not be pressing. Yet to use the word "interfere" in connection to human rights, I think, is outright dangerous. The word has an outspoken negative ring to it, as if one would want to shrug off something annoying that won't go away by itself, which of course the issue of the human rights in China is. It is annoying on that level of interaction where two global giants are eyeing each other with distrust while all the time knowing very well their fates are tied together and they have to make do with each other. Human rights, in that kind of "marriage de raison", is a conversational topic that doesn't make for a great opening line.

Taking it one step further, I get more scared, because what does that mean "not interfere with the global economic crisis, the global climate change crisis and the security crisis" ? Is there anybody here on earth who has a reasonable clue on when each of these three issues will be solved ? I don't think so. Global climate change crisis: let us safely assume we will be taking that one at least into the second part of this century, if not straight into the next one, which is the more likely assumption in my opinion. So is Mrs. Clinton now saying that, while this crisis plays out, she will all the time not have human rights "interfere" with it till it's solved ? Sounds like bad luck for those in the wrong side of the human rights camp.

Let us also assume she diligently fulfills her job and performs excellent crisis management in the economic, security and climate sphere (good luck to her on all three counts, she'll need it), then who will be able to enjoy the results of it ? Surely not the human rights victims, who, if they haven't gone into oblivion by that time, probably won't be heard of a lot anymore either. Annoying, you know. And how does this reflect then on our societies here in the West, who (often rightfully still) pride themselves on trying to take care equally of the less fortunate, where the offenders have the equal right to defense as the victims and where the principle of making every voice, no matter how small, heard in a democractic decision-making process all but makes it impossible to come to an agreement on several issues (the European Union, anyone ?) ? How would our societies look like if we, from time to time, wouldn't allow human rights to "interfere" with our business as usual ? Maybe not all that different, but different nonetheless.

Now I've always considered it a bit awkward myself, hearing about the next statesman going to China, promising he or she would table the human rights issue with whatever leader China choose to put in front of this Excellency. Delivered my line, been there, done that, KPI achieved, now can I have my bonus please ? It starts to sound outright boring, the way it is delivered. Yet, to me, swinging the pendulum to the completely opposite side of "non-interference", is a station too far. Obama signed the closing of Guantanamo on his very first day in office as president of the United States. Had the world not consistently shown his anger on the violation of some of the most basic of human rights in there, he might have done it a month, maybe a year later, maybe even not, for it wouldn't have been perceived as "a pressing issue". Driving the message home time and again, I believe, in the end does change things and makes simple "issues" become "priorities".

Allow me also to wholeheartedly disagree with the article being presented here. I always have this uncomfortable feeling when we get to the point of the "face-saving". I definitely consider myself quite lacking in the skill of saving or giving face, but it seems to me that, when it comes to China, to some it is the only thing that matters and the beneficiaries of it are, of course, always the Chinese. I am absolutely not opposed to courteous diplomacy when it concerns two partners talking about the most elegant way around a problem. It is the only reason why my country still exists today and we have elevated the "compromise" (for is that not the essence of "giving face" ?) almost to an artform. I am however also not opposed to have a party, from time to time, loose some face on certain issues that are blatantly counter to my sense of propriety and justice. Silencing people for voicing their opinion is one example, just like eavesdropping on your own people in name of a rather undefinable national security threat is another. May I refer to my previous post on Bogota mayor Antanas Mockus and his rather unconventional method of using mimes to regulate the unruly traffic in downtown Bogota ? The whole concept of what he did is based on making people, in a gentle way, loose face, for those mimes were posted at the major crossroads where there were mostly big crowds who would see the "culprits" made fun of by mimicking their every move. Traffic casualties dropped by half in the period when Mockus was mayor. You and me, we have been raised in an education system that incorporates the "loosing face" concept as a way of self-betterment: how many times, as a kid, did you have to go and stand in a corner for ten minutes when you had been too noisy when there were guests around ? I remember in elementary school, when we had crossed the rules, we had to walk ten times around the playground, hands on our back so the rest of the kids could see. I haven't suffered trauma because of it, and likewise, I am very confident that China will not suffer trauma from loosing some face now and then when it comes to something as important as "human rights".

"Look up, Hannah !" - Some thoughts on China and the "Charter 08"

"In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it is written the kingdom of God is within man, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men's happiness ..."

These words were spoken by a little guy, with a funny little mustache, in a German uniform. No, they're not Hitler's words -how could they be ?-, they're Chaplin's, and I was wondering who, among all the people that have ever watched the speech of Chaplin's barber, mistaken for Adenoid Hynkel in "The Great Dictator", could ever oppose democracy again ? It is telling that Chaplin's first "talkie", to which he reluctantly diverted after the era of silent movies that had brought him to fame, ended with one of the strongest anti-fascism and pro-democracy statements ever made.

I thought this excerpt of Chaplin's speech would be a good intro to my contribution to the "Charter 08" debate, that seems to be picking up heat in the blogosphere, more than 2 months after it was released. To be sure: this post will have nothing to with fascism, for it has no place in the current Chinese context, but I thought it important to point out the target of Chaplin's words, since I chose to use them here. It WILL have everything to do with that other, that infinitely more peaceful term, "democracy", that nevertheless always seems to set off a whole lot of triggers just as well.

There is still the ongoing debate -and it will continue for some time to come, no doubt- on how democracy should be understood and whether its' concept is viable at all for China. I am no expert at this kind of political / social issues and questions, but I would like to refer here to a line Israëls' president Shimon Peres used in his now (in)famous speech on the World Economic Forum in Davos, result of which Turkish prime-minister Tayyip Erdogan angrily walked off. Peres said:

"Democracy is not a matter of elections, it is a civilisation".

I may find fault with a lot of what has recently happened in Gaza, but I think this line hit the mark. Of course, democracy does also have to do with elections, but they may not be it's defining factor. When Bush stole the election from Gore, the democratic rules were strictly speaking violated, yet I wouldn't dare to say that the United States were no longer a democratic country. The aura of democracy got more tarnished by the stories coming from Abu Ghraib, the secret prisons from the CIA, the waterboarding techniques, etc ... which in se have nothing to do with elections but are all about the decline of civilised behaviour. This civilised behaviour finds it's purest expression in respect for the other and means, in a democratic context, offering the people a chance to vote for their opinion. Not having elections in this respect is less of an evil than denying people the right to have elections. And this is precisely what I think the "Charter 08" is attacking: not being offered a choice, being denied the basic respect for each opinion.

Now when it comes to China, this "democracy" discussion in the West is often equaled with toppling the government or the CCP, which of course is just as well an expression of lack of respect for a different system because, let's face it, the CCP has come a long way and has figures to prove it: hundred's of millions raised above the poverty level, a literacy level other developping countries can only dream of, a decade of GDP growth over ... well, ok, let's skip that one, I bet everybody is getting tired of hearing that figure repeated over and over again, like a mantra. The problem is, the CCP has constantly been driving a one-way lane, with, admittedly, a lot of success since the open door policy came into vogue, but also developping tunnelsight as it went. Deng Xiaoping's "Let some people get rich first" has probably already far exceeded of what he had in mind with that "some", but it's never been asked if the others that are left out would have agreed to the principle at the outset. China is an authoritarian state, undoubtedly trying to make the best of it's development, but it's always avoiding the question whether there wouldn't be an alternative that comes at a lesser cost to the total of its' people. Alternatives are typically what you arrive at when you allow people to speak their mind. And that is what the "Charter 08" is after, in my opinion.

Last year, I took a company course on "negotiating skills". The first thing we discussed in terms of strategy was how to structure the opening bid and the advise we got was to go with an "extreme offer": try to figure out where you expect competition to position their offer, and then go just beyond it. What I think is happening (making abstraction of the competitive factor) is that "Charter 08" is putting such an extreme offer on the table, in what is clearly a negotiation request to the Chinese government: reaching for the max and expecting to be negotiated down .. a lot. The signatories have gone as far as possible, hoping in first instance to get the government around the table. For all of us who have been watching China from far or from nearby, I suppose no-one thinks it is likely to happen, but anything less radical would not even have caused the ripple on the surface it is at least causing now. On the contrary, anything less high profile (or call it prolific) would have been even more dangerous for those who drafted the document, for not catching the attention from outside that is needed to protect them from being silenced without anyone even noticing it.

It has further been uttered here (in the "Comment"-section) that the Charter misses impact by staying too vague, leaning too much on western-inspired semantics and debating only some high-brow priciples while shying away from any concrete proposals. My take on this is quite different. Under the circumstances "with chinese characteristics", I see it as utterly impossible to come up with any concrete proposals until some sort of legitimacy of any movement putting forward such proposals is at least recognised. "Intruding" in the day-to-day business of the government seems not a viable option to me. What if for instance the Charter had come up with interesting proposals in the field of health care, environment or whatever ? The CCP could never give due credit to any such kind of proposal, as this would reflect badly on them for not coming up themselves with such an idea and it would thus be lost as a possible solution in the future as well, because it would always inevitably be linked to "the wrong party" proposing it. Any movement serious about itself needs a framework of principles, a justification for what it is (or will be) doing and this is what we find in this text.

"...We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof, and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine. And remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak and to defend the causes that were, for the moment, unpopular...The actions of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin have caused alarm and dismay amongst our allies abroad and given considerable comfort to our enemies. And whose fault is that? Not really his. He didn't create this situation of fear -- he merely exploited it, and rather successfully. Cassius was right: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves. Good night, and good luck"

Another great speech, from another great movie: reporter Edward R. Murrow (played by David Strathairn) attacking Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy in "Good Night and Good Luck". The drafters and signatories of the "Charter 08" haven't been afraid to write and defend what is unpopular with the Chinese government, who no doubt will mislabel their dissenting voices again as disloyalty, while I am convinced both groups -government and charterists- ultimately share the same goal: make China progress. The difference lies in the means to get there. While the government still favours the authoritarian method and seems not likely to change anytime soon, the Charter says it wants to give the people its' voice back. Now the question arising from that is "Is that what the people want ?". To be honest, I don't see a big basis of support yet and I doubt that China would be served by the kind of major overhaul like is suggested in the text. I do believe in the necessity of the gradual transition to a different system to release all the powers that are present but often hidden in today's China for fear of being labelled "dissent". Virtually all the great men and women in history had to push a few buttons that were not very liked by the ruling class (or clergy), but by allowing them at least to speak their mind, entire societies have greatly benefitted. The "Charter 08", I think, is subscribing itself in that tradition of people and texts that challenge the existing status quo, that look for alternatives and is concerned with the next stage in China's development. "Cassius is right: the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves". The Roman empire finally ended because of the evils of self-indulgence and stagnation. China should be happy and proud that the voice of it's intellectuals still makes itself heard, for instance through this text, to keep the country on alert. I don't see any major change will take place because of it, but at least yet another seed has been planted and eventually some time, someone will want to harvest it. By the time when China's leaders will further refuse to associate the "dis-" with "dissent" and "disloyalty" but will rather prefer to integrate it in terms as "discourse" and "discussion", that will be the time when China will no longer just be regarded as an economic miracle, but as a beacon to watch and learn from also on moral grounds on the international scene.

Then the words of the little guy with the funny little moustache, standing in front of that microphone and facing the camera, will resonate again:

"Look up, Hannah ! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. (...) Look up, Hannah ! Look up !"

Beijing - Towering Inferno

As no doubt a lot of us who would by coincidence happen to read this post, I have been watching the footage on the burning TVCC complex with the "Mandarin Oriental" hotel, next to the new CCTV headquartes in Beijing, and there were two things that struck me in my own analysis of what had happened.

First, I found myself wondering: "Do I believe this ?". Of course, I'm not talking about the event itself. I'm talking about the explanation. So it appears CCTV has conceded itself in the meantime that the fire was set off by a flare of the (illegal) fireworks CCTV had commissioned itself to celebrate the end of the Chinese New Year period. The fireworks that were set off by the national broadcasting company were class "A" fireworks, which would have required a special permission from the municipal government to use (the normal firecrackers used by the majority of the people in this period seems to fall under the category "C" or "D" - fireworks light, so to say). So CCTV broke the rules, apparently even denying warnings from local police, but even so I was wondering: could one flare, or maybe even a few, landing on top of the building set off such a fire ?

I look at the photo's of the building and see the entire structure, from top to bottom, being ablaze. I then "google" my memory for some reference material and quite obviously I land up with the images of the Twin Towers. Now in the case of the Twin Towers, there were two Boeing airplanes, full of kerosene, crashing into the buildings which quite obviously resulted in a tremendous fire, but ... as far as I remember, I didn't see the fire spread to all the floors below. The buildings crumbled, but not because the fire spread over all the building. I am quite well aware that the size of the "Mandarin Oriental" is in no way to be compared with the Twin Towers, but still. I am grappling with the comparison between the impact of an airplane and the impact of a couple of flares of fireworks. Am I seeing a conspiracy ? The thought didn't occur on my mind till I saw someone mentioning it in the comments on chinaSMACK, but that doesn't really make sense to me at this point. I guess I'll have to wait for the explanations of the experts that no doubt will start to appear in the media in the time to follow, to learn how that fire could spread so quickly with the known devastating results. Was the construction that slipshod; were the safety precautions so loose or were the used building materials (again) not measuring up to the "A"-class of the fireworks ? It will be interesting to find out.

The second thing that surprised me is how easily the facts, also in my mind, would become overshadowed by the symbolic value of the events. I am not a scientist in any way, but I ususally try to give the superstition department also a miss. Still seeing these images, I couldn't help but think I was watching the human "hubris" being punished:

Hubris (/hjuːbrɪs/) or hybris (/'haɪbrɪs/) (ancient Greek ὕβρις), mythology is a term used in modern English to indicate overweening pride, self-confidence, superciliousness, or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution. In ancient Greece, hubris referred to actions which, intentionally or not, shamed and humiliated the victim, and frequently the perpetrator as well. It was most evident in the public and private actions of the powerful and rich. The word was also used to describe actions of those who challenged the gods or their laws, especially in Greek tragedy, resulting in the protagonist's downfall.

China has undergone tremendous changes in the past decennia, changes of a size and impact possibly never witnessed before. And before anyone would think otherwise, I do wish China to progress and the Chinese people to take up their rightful place under the sun. But it is undeniably true that things have sometimes gotten out of balance and that the "ever bigger, ever grander" adagium has also struck there. Though I hate to admit to it, seeing the TVCC building burn, I was asking myself: Is someone or something trying to send a signal that the limits have been reached and that it's up till here and no further ? It's an unsettling thought for an agnosticus like myself, but it was there nevertheless ... and I'm not the only one who has been asking itself similar questions. Anybody here who knows whether firecrackers are a common thing in Dubai ?

There are three things that give me reason for some positive upside, foremost of course the victim toll of the fire being reasonably low for the size of the disaster. I do of course regret the death of firefighter Zhang Jianyong and the others that got hurt, for it's always so useless to die for the mistakes made by others, but all in all it could have been much worse. Second, I think Beijing may have been rid of a seriously ugly building. I had actually never seen it before. No picture of Rem Koolhaas' new CCTV tower ("The Big Underpants") I've ever seen shows that troglodyte behind it but now that I have, I hope it doesn't get rebuilt. If we give up the balance, let's try at least to safeguard some good taste. And third, when a fire can give reason for this awesome blogger to go back to his childhood when he was a 12-year old kid and his fascination with firecrackers and other "pyrofernalia" and write these memories down, then I am inclined to think that somehow, in the end, we'll be fine ...

(picture on top via "Shanghaiist")

Innovative traffic solutions: mime ...

I have this friend who is from Bogota, so it should only be natural that when I see something about Bogota in the news, in a magazine or on the Internet, I linger a little longer.

So last week, I was reading this article in Newsweek discussing the danger of Obama's "change"-program getting compromised from the start by the nomination of Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary, Geithner, as we may remember, who's reputation recently got a little tarnished for "forgetting" to pay some taxes. The article calls for Obama to set the tone right from the beginning and warns for cutting corners. The cut from the past has to be clean:

Changing an equilibrium of corruption—or of anything else—is extremely difficult because it's so costly to be the odd person out. As a result, everyone has to make the switch all at once. Imagine what would happen if a country tried to switch from driving on the right to driving on the left through gradual change. Mismatched expectations about the rules of the road would quickly lead to chaos, fender benders and even a reversion to the old "equilibrium" by the few early left-siders.

The author does not underestimate the difficulty in reversing the established course of things, but refuses to see it as impossible and thereby finds inspiration in what happened in Bogota in the nineties.

The change may be difficult, but not impossible. Perhaps the new administration can take inspiration from the transformation of Bogotá in the early 1990s. At the time, the city was the murder capital of the world and still reeling from the legacy of Pablo Escobar and the drug wars of the previous decade. In 1994, Bogotános elected Antanas Mockus, a former philosophy professor, to bring order to this landscape of urban chaos.

Now Antanas Mockus apparently was not the most obvious choice for becoming Mayor of a metropole like Bogota. A philosopher, artist and math professor all in one, he gained his first five minutes of fame when he bared his buttocks for an auditorium of art students to get them to calm down:

The gesture, he said at the time, should be understood "as a part of the resources which an artist can use."

Far more interesting however is what he actually did to the traffic in Bogota, which seems to have been utter chaos at the time (see where I'm coming to ?). Where I live, we see traffic camera's going up in big numbers ? Been speeding ? FLASH !! Got the sun in your eyes and didn't see the light turn red ? FLASH !! Ticket follows a month later ... no way you'll get away with anything less than 25 Euro's and the above delicts are sure to drive you over 50 Euro's. It works, I must say, but it's still a repressive system. So very much unlike what our friend Mockus came up with:

Another innovative idea was to use mimes to improve both traffic and citizens' behavior. Initially 20 professional mimes shadowed pedestrians who didn't follow crossing rules: A pedestrian running across the road would be tracked by a mime who mocked his every move. Mimes also poked fun at reckless drivers. The program was so popular that another 400 people were trained as mimes.

"It was a pacifist counterweight," Mockus said. "With neither words nor weapons, the mimes were doubly unarmed. My goal was to show the importance of cultural regulations."

Mimes ??? What the hell ??? But come to think of it and it has that touch of genius. Just imagine how you behave when someone is trying to make fun of you, even such gentle fun as mimicry, in front of a crowd. You try to get your act together, the sooner the better.

In the period between 1993 and 2003, traffic fatalities per 100.000 inhabitants in Bogota dropped from 1300 to 600. I'm not sure on how that compares to the more "repressive" ways I see implemented here, but in the series of innovative ideas, this one is sure to score high.

And so I was thinking ... China ! What ingredients do we require ?
Big cities. Check.
Chaotic traffic. Check.
Willingness to learn. Check !
Reading these articles on Mayor Mockus, I wondered if his idea could be implemented in some of the big cities in China. The country is actually the only one where I have been to that has a "special task force" beside the police to bring some rule in the often (very) unruly traffic: the retired people at the crossroads with the cap and a whistle. Now it's been two years since I was last in China, so I may not have witnessed some changes that may already have taken place, but in my memory those people's authority -sorry as I feel for them, having to do that kind of job to earn a buck after their retirement- is a joke. More often than not neglected, not able to reprimand a culprit for mostly the culprit's are much faster than they are, in fact they're a sorry sight. So could the mimes work as an alternative ? I used to often take groups of Chinese that visited our company to some of the nearby big cities and it was not seldom we ran into one of those "statues", either completely immobile, or sometimes scaring the hell out of little kids or nice looking girls by a sudden blink of an eye, or the slightest movement of their hand towards the onlooker. I noticed my fellow travel companions always went over to take a look and of course ... take the obligatory picture. So mime seems to be something that could capture their attention. Add to that the chinese fear of loosing face in front of "the rest", so how powerful could a mime, imitating your every move when you yet again break a traffic rule, be ? Pretty powerful, I would think so. And when Marcel Marceau died, he didn't go unnoticed by the Chinese press. So, worth a try ?

By any means, read this entire article on Bogota's unconventional Mayor. If only half of what the article pretends him to be were true, this would be a guy I would like to meet. And I wouldn't mind seeing for instance Sam's analysis of this "governing by example" as I definitely feel a flavour of Mencius and Confucius in there.

Gaza Tank Man

A couple of days ago, "Danwei" brought this article, which seems to have aroused some commotion on the chinese BBS-fora, to our attention. It relates the story of what appears to have been a class, taught by a Renmin University professor and well-known sociologist, Zhou Xiaozheng. Topic of the impromptu lecture: "Israël is definitely a good country"

When I read the first few lines of the article today, I was wondering: "But why would a professor in China at this point in time choose to disrupt his normal class schedule and switch to an improvised (?) speech on his belief in the inherent goodness of the Israëlian state ?" Let's admit that, no matter what your opinions on the Israëli - Palestinian conflict may be, it's an uphill battle he was in for, with the images coming out of Gaza, and some of the comments on the article (that was also posted on Mr. Zhou's blog) are ample evidence of it.

But then reading further down the article, there's these interesting two paragraphs:

I was once looking through photos posted onto [Chinese SNS website] Xiaonei.net, and one photo made me think deeply. The caption for this photo was “Hero,” and the photo showed an unarmed Palestinian youth standing in front of a long line of Israeli tanks. He forced the tanks to stop.

Students, this Palestinian youth is indeed a “Hero,” fighting fully equipped tanks with his body of blood and flesh. But students, have you thought about this? In a situation of hostility how many countries’ tanks would stop? The Japanese tanks that invaded China didn’t stop, the Russian tanks that invaded Georgia didn’t stop, but the tanks of Israel did. I personally believe that these soldiers, as well as others in their ethnic group, are the real and undeniable heroes.

The professor found ... the Gaza Tank Man ! And this got me thinking ...

Maybe I read more in this text than there is to find, but the image he relates to IS an exact copy of a scene which happened in June 1989 on Tiananmen Square, which made the rounds of the global media and still stands as one of the most powerful images of the last few decades, maybe at par with this picture which inspired me to this blog post. The scene has been televised again and again all over the world ... or was it ? Could it be that China "forgot" to show it to it's citizens ? I am wondering why, in the year that will witness the 20th anniversary of the student demonstrations on Tiananmen, a professor at one of the top universities of the country, in the capital of China where the Chinese future elite is gathered, would want to bring up exactly this image, be it transposed to a different setting ?

My take on the speech is that what follows doesn't really matter anymore: it was this part that had to drive the message home. My take is that we are seeing the beginning of a brainwashing operation to "welcome" the infamous anniversary. I imagine that most of China's youths that are currently in university have not yet have access to the "Tank Man" footage. Most of them were toddlers or maybe not even born yet at the time the events took place. Yet I am guessing that the Chinese government is realising that the risk that around the June timeframe coverage of the events of 20 years ago in the rest of the world will be so extensive, for instance via the internet, that there will be no way to completely avoid that some of them will be exposed to it. And that that is why the events need to be given a twist, that that is why a colonne of tanks that stops for one man standing in their way has to be labelelled benevolent and the soldiers "undeniable heroes". Mind also the wording of the chinese text: it's not just the soldiers, it's also the state (这样的国度) that produces such soldiers, that is lauded. The logic also cleverly anticipates on the most probable thing the Chinese students will get to hear from the outside world, even seemingly corroborating it at first, namely that "Tank man" is the hero, while immediately afterward toppling that "foreign" logic and bringing it back in the correct framework of the State and the soldiers being the real heroes for showing so much constraint. It made me think of the famous Mark Anthony speech in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar": "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears: I have come to bury Caesar, not to praise him ..." with the shattering repitition of that "... and Brutus is an honourable man" which in the end means as good as his death verdict. Though brought much more eloquent by Shakespeare, the twisted and cunning rhetoric feels the same.

There's also a small part which is not found in the translation on "Danwei", but which I found in the original chinese text here and which seems to be be some complementary comment. It's not clear to me whether this should also be attributed to Zhou, or whether it's to be considered as added by someone else.

曦古评点一下：以色列坦克在巴勒斯坦“英雄”的面前停下来的举动，绝不是以色列政府为了宣传需要而为，也绝不是命令坦克停下来以便让外国记者拍摄或事后通过自己的喉舌表白自己是如何如何“克制”又是如何如何“仁慈”。

(Not sure on how to translate the first two characters, unless it's a name, Xigu - any addition / correction is very welcome):
"By way of commentary: the fact that Israëlian tanks halt in front of a Palestinian "hero", is in no way a propaganda move by the Israëlian government, as it didn't order the tanks to stop just for giving the foreign reporters some good footage nor to present itself afterwards with an opportunity to boast on how "constrained" and "benevolent" it had acted"

Whoever thought this was necessary to be added, must have been under the impression that repetition never hurts, and in my opinion clearly had the intention to downplay the role of the State in the events.

Frankly speaking, I was flabbergasted reading this ... but then again, I guess I shouldn't have been. I'm only curious whether it will work.

Commencing countdown: 5 months to go ...

Footbinding and the Olympics

Dorothy Ko, in what is bound to become a classic on the topic, “Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding”, has pointed out that the final decline of footbinding as a general practice in China was, to a certain extent, linked to what she calls the “global episteme”. Though by no means the only reason for the decline, it has been the basis for much of the rhetoric of the tianzu (natural feet) and fangzu (letting feet out) movement starting in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of the Opium Wars and the Unequal Treaties, China, the “Middle Kingdom” that had been largely fenced off up till then, found itself suddenly confronted with a mostly hostile outside world that criticized the country for what it perceived as barbaric practices such as footbinding. China was dragged into the international community, only to find it had become the laughingstock and the subject of humiliation. It came as a shock. The great intellectuals of their time, such as Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, made the eradication of footbinding one of the central themes of their nationalist discourse. The Chinese women and their lotus feet, which in the heydays of the practice had been THE distinguishing factor between us (the Chinese) and them (the barbarians, whose women didn’t bind), became yet again the body where the political discourse of the time was almost literally written onto. Only this time the “writing” was exactly the opposite of what it once had been. China’s weakness in the global community was blamed on the bound feet of women, which made them almost useless to play a serious economic role in a world that was quickly industrializing. It should come as no surprise that the advocates of the anti-footbinding movement (apart from the foreign missionaries, of course) were mostly people that had studied abroad or traveled extensively outside China.

Looking at today’s context, I couldn’t but see certain similarities with respect tot that “global episteme”. Today’s tokens are not bandages, exposing heavily deformed feet, being taken away, or wooden soles, guaranteeing the bound foot to be well arched, to be turned in to the fangzu officials. But one could say that now it’s blindfolds coming off.

Nobody will contest any longer that China has woken up after a century of wars and has emerged from the ruined wasteland left by the Cultural Revolution. It is stepping again on the international stage and entrusting the country with the organization of the Olympics is like the pinnacle of the “festivities” marking the re-entry in the global community … And then the first thing the Chinese get to see is the Olympic torch (“ the “Sacred Torch”) being attacked by activists. And they are shocked yet again by the miscomprehension of the outer world. How come the world seems to pay so much attention to some rebel rousers in a far off part of China, while apparently missing out, or at least disregarding, the enormous progress it has and is still making ? China is unmistakably taking notice of what the world thinks, but where it had thought the way to the Olympics would be strewn with rose-petals and jubilant cries, it once again is confronted with a lot of hostility and I’m not sure they understand where the hostility is coming from. I’m not sure whether I understand it myself. But the blindfold that has held the Chinese happily unaware of what was in wait for them certainly has come off. The wake-up call is not some silent melodious music but a noisy buzzer hurting the ears. The world is telling China that, like in a sports match, it will side with the underdog fighting the giant, even more if the underdog can add if not entirely, at least a sense, of legitimacy to it’s claim. And it is telling China that the judgment it will bestow on a country is only partially linked to it’s economic prowess, but even more to it’s answering to a set of values deemed universal.

 

But, unlike at the beginning of the twentieth century, also in the “outer world”, the blindfolds are coming off with respect to China. The world is starting to see what a formidable contender has newly entered the arena and it starts to get worried. Realizing that it is nearly impossible to live a normal life without products coming out of China (the ubiquitous “made in China”-label), therefore letting China have control of part of your life and then to realize that you nearly have no clue of what today’s China is about is a rather scary experience. Seeing China buying large chunks of the world’s oil reserves is an equally scary thought and by the time Chinese companies tread en masse in the footsteps of Lenovo, Huawei and some others and grab their piece of the Western marketpie, we’ll be scared out of our wits. The Western world is answering to a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more it says the rise of China will break-up the current status quo (in which of course the West still has a perceived advantage), the more the status quo is being torn down, for fear weakens your position. The West, by demonizing China, is still focusing on the threats and forgets about the opportunities. By he time the Olympics are over – the best ever, there is not a trace of doubt in my mind in that respect, but let’s now quickly get it over with, so we can all move on – the world will be even more aware of the hunger and the energy of the new kid on the block who’s here to stay and better sets it’s strategy accordingly.

 

So Dorothy Ko’s “global episteme” is still fiercely influential, but whereas the vibes it radiates once were unidirectional, they have now become multidirectional and everybody feels the heat. Unlike the bound foot, that “twisted dough”, that could never be untwisted after having been bound for some many years, we can only hope that the eyes of the Chinese and the rest of the world, now that the blindfolds are coming off, can still adapt to the light and see things in their real perspective.

Shouting at the Rashô-gate

I think it can be called an understatement to say that I am kinda fed up with a certain group of Chinese hacking away at the western media and it's so-called biased reporting with respect to the Tibetan uprising of the past weeks. I shed my catholic belief long time ago, but these words I still strongly underwrite: "Let he who is without sin throw the first stone" (free after the Gospel of John 8: 1-11). If anyone can consciously make the case that China can outdo the western press in truthfulness, I stop writing right here right now, but the official media are commonly agreed -also by the Chinese themselves- to be the mouthpiece of the CCP and thus not exactly a source of reliable reporting, and the ones that have tried to bring a more indepth view (which in this context is often synonym to "antagonistic" to the official Partyline on a number of hot issues) have been walking (and often crossing) a very thin line. So I have no need for a bunch of "angry young men" shouting that the western press has been doing injustice to China - I know myself that that is a fact in certain cases and I know it because I have access to a plethora of sources that will tell me there is more than one side to a certain issue ... and so do most of those that are the noisiest: the foreign students. So please stop shouting about how bad your feelings are being hurt and save your energy for bringing your own media and press up to standard, so you won't have to shy away in the future when someone from outside China asks for some unbiased reporting from within China.

I know this is a bit of a rant, but I found a good antidote in the comments section of J. Pomfret's article "China Bashing: It's Back". It's a very long comment thread and I haven't read it all (far from that even), but I found a person writing under the nick Wu Wei making some very reasonable statements on this media bias. For starters:

U see, the problem is that Journalism is NOT a science. So it is impossible to really make any conclusion based on universal laws. We make our judgments based on our emotion and our value systems. So it is inherently biased. When two people may not even be able to agree on what bias is in Journalism, it is really pointless to quantify it.

Journalism is not a science ... wow ! I couldn't think of any better way to put it. As long as people are involved in the production process, there is bound to be bias and even mistakes. We just aren't perfect and we ARE for a good deal defined by the environment we live in and the value systems that are imposed onto it. Before someone mistakes these words for a meaning that is not there, let me be very clear: I am NOT making any statement on a certain set of values being superior to another one, I am just saying that diverging views can not, in any way, be avoided and that any journalist is always under the influence of a specific part of society at a specific moment in time. Good journalists will try to break open those boundaries and try to put themselves above those limitations which are inherent to their roots, but it is not easy.

With regard to the issue of media bias, it's clear that the Western media can and does present things in a biased manner, and when it comes to international affairs this bias often reflects the Western democratic point of view. That is unsurprising, and frankly I'm not very concerned about it; we all seem to acknowledge that there will be some bias intrinsic in any account of a given event. We shouldn't feel because of this that there is no truth and hence all points of view have either equal validity or no validity--that depends on a given source’s journalistic integrity, and I believe the Western media does best Chinese state-run media in this regard. Rather, we should use an understanding of a given source's bias to place it in a social context in order to better understand the main population to which it addresses itself. However, having an identifiable bias is different from issuing false reports or flagrantly ignoring inconvenient facts. That is what the public must watch out for, and the only way to do that is seek out multiple news sources on a regular basis and to challenge one's assumptions.

 

Wu Wei is making the point that bias will always be unavoidable to a certain extent, but on the other hand needn't have us overly concerned either, as long as we are mature enough to recognize that it exists. He / she is not blind for the extreme end of bias, which is knowingly distorting the truth. I am very much aware that this happens and has certainly happened in relation to what occurred in Tibet. But as a sidenote to this, I just can't refrain from making the remark that closing the area off for foreign journalists is not going to help China in any way to get the story of what is really happening out. If some in the Western world are constantly on the lookout for a stick to beat China with, then China is offering it time and again on a silver platter to those people, by preventing the media from doing their work. If you give the impression you got things to hide, then you'd better be prepared to roll with the punches as well. To be sure: all nations, every country has got things it rather wants to stay hidden. The ability of the media to bring those out in the open and the way it is being dealt with in the aftermath, are indicative of the maturity of a country. Western governments are getting punched all the time, for they indeed also have lots they'd rather keep in the shades (CIA deportations of "suspects" to non-American countries for torturing, arms sales to countries under embargo, cruelties committed in a colonial past: sounds familiar to anyone ?). It's the press that brings these things out in the open and makes the heads of state their worst nightmare come true, but at the same time it strengthens the foundations on which society is based. It is the most direct way to make sure that something is entered in history and history is (ideally) what we learn from to prevent us from making the same mistakes again. I hope China is on the way of realizing this and will over time learn to come to terms with it, but in the meantime the shouting crowd of youngsters are doing their country a disservice.

 Let me once again refer back to one of the greatest humanists of our time, an idol of mine that I have been "propagating" here a couple of times already (here and here): Akira Kurosawa. Strange as it may seem, but even on this issue of bias he seems to have had something to say, notably in his 1950 masterpiece that won him (and by extension the Japanese cinema) wide international acclaim: "Rashômon" (The Rashô-gate). The movie brings the story of the rape of a woman and what seems to be the murder of her husband, but told from four different angles: a priest who claims he saw the samurai and his wife on the day the crime happened; the rapist; the wife and (by way of a medium) the dead man. All these witness accounts have the same facts at the basis, yet diverge widely from one another AND all seem plausible in their explanation. The director leaves it up to the audience to decide on what's the truth, thereby seemingly implying that there is no such thing as an absolute truth.

  

With regard to the Tibet issue, China will not be as black as it (sometimes) may be depicted in certain western media and it for sure is not as white as it depicts itself in it's own media. So if we agree that the truth will always be the composite of a story told from different angles, can we then now please stop the shouting and let the media do their work ?

A Complex World

It's a complex world we live in and though of course it is not anything new I was confronted several times with that thought in the past couple of days. Just take this for instance: with our world's growing focus on the effects of global warming, on seeking to reduce greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions..., we start to look more and more for environmentally friendly technologies and models for sustainable development, so enters the currently best alternative to our dependence on oil to make our cars take us wherever we want to go: biofuel. We're not quite there yet, but it's supposed to be one step in the right direction. But is it really ? Because of the success of the biofuel crops, other crops get neglected and before we know it, the more vulnerable places on this world have another famine in the making. So shall we choke or starve ? Indeed not an easy choice.

Or what to think about this ? About two weeks ago, my colleague was telling about the solar panels he had installed half a year ago on his roof, and how, after a sunfilled weekend, it had been the first time he had actually produced more energy than he needed so the overproduction gets sent onto the nations' power grid and no energy gets wasted. Sounds beautiful ? It does but think again. About two days later I heard a representative of the incumbent energy supplier explain on the radio that the success and growth of new environmentally friendly energy systems such as solar panels started to become a problem, because the national power grid was at it's maximum capacity and couldn't take all the new energy that was infused onto it by all these households that were under the impression they were making a contribution to making our planet a place that might actually survive.

No fact seems allowed to be taken for granted anymore and adding to the complexity in this confusing world is ... China. As if the French had a monopoly on people who could foresee the future, there was next to Jules Verne -who took us for a trip of twenty thousand leagues under the sea more than a century before Jacques Piccard would steer his bathyscaphe "Triëste" to the deepest point on earth, the Marianen Trench- that other Frenchman of worldfame, Napoleon, who predicted that "Lorsque la Chine s'éveillera, le monde tremblera" (When China will wake up, the world will tremble). Nobody will argue the fact anymore: China HAS waken up and the world is just dressing up to go and attend it's welcoming reception as the new kid on the block is hosting the Olympics ... the single biggest spor ... euh ... geo-political event in the world since it was assigned to the Middle Kingdom in 2001.

Shall we tremble ? It is not so difficult to see where the unease of the Western world with respect to China is coming from. Like it's very symbol, the dragon, China is a hybrid creature of the capitalism we have grown up with on the one hand and communism that we have been told was the enemy on the other hand. It just doesn't fit in a Cold War model, so you can't attack it like we used to see with the USSR (remember some slogans like: "Rather a nuclear missile in my garden than a Russian in my kitchen" ?). Okay, then let's go for the engagement model. But what happens when you engage a giant ? People see their jobs being taken away and handed over to Chinese who, after some trying, succeed in producing roughly the same quality as we did here, only at a fraction of the cost, and all because of the very system we have all been very happy with while all went well for our side: capitalism. We brought the gospel of capitalism to China and now China is outdoing us at our own game. It's difficult to grasp when you actually have to face the facts, it's actually quite ... complex.

The Chinese reality is evading us at every level. For years we have been predicting the decline of their economic model, for too much too fast. Still, the double digit growth is still on the tables and voices claming an imminent collapse have become increasingly rare. So could it be that China has developed a system that actually might work ? The problem with being the first is that you can't prove it until it has existed long enough to be able to withstand any further scrutiny. As for now, we still don't trust China will be able to sustain what it is doing right now, for it hasn't been done before. Not in a country of this scale. So now we tremble, for a collapse of the giant has become just as frightening as it's further strengthening. We can only hope that, as "capitalist roaders" amongst each other, in the end we will be able to find a modus vivendi ...

Pierre de Coubertin may turn around in his grave, but for this year's host of the Olympic Games, it is NOT about participating, it's all about winning. It's up to the rest of the world to decide how to deal with it.

Tiptoeing "The Line"

I think it's fair to say that, if you have any interest in nowadays China, even be it mildly, this guy should be on your radar screen. He definitely is on mine, but always with this big questionmark: how long still before he drops off the screen, how long before a missile takes him out of the air ? 

Tiptoeing "the line" is feasible when you know where the line is drawn, but in China it can be moved around at random, which makes everyone inside it's borders virtually a sitting duck. Fate can strike at any time, depending on how it's being moved.  That makes "walking the line" an extremely dangerous game and those who practice it may be in for some rough times ahead. Pan Yue seems to be one of those, as can be gathered again from his two article series on "Chinadialogue" (here and here).

   

What do we mean by the phrase “green China”? We mean a China that is sustainable, democratic, fair, harmonious and socialist. This conclusion has been reached after many years of struggle. Each word is the distillation of the blood, sweat and tears of several generations. We want to build a green China because green is the color of life, of sustainability. For something to be called “green” it has to be sustainable – and currently China has yet to achieve sustainability.

How about that for an opening line ? In the first two sentences you got the summary of what Pan Yue is about: deputy director of China's State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), he's at the same time a senior government official but just as well as one of China's most outspoken critics of it's current development model. Remark the precedence the "sustainable" and "fair" take over the CCP buzzword "harmonious" and the "democratic" over the "socialist". He may well be in charge of environmental issues, but his criticism goes way beyond that.

We have always taken “development” to mean economic development alone, and this to mean the simple accumulation of wealth. As a result, the pursuit of wealth has become the sole aim of society. In theory, the value of all resources is determined by the market price, but the latent value of scarce resources such as land, water, the environment, and biodiversity has been ignored. Many social resources have been absorbed by projects designed to help people “get rich quick”. Blind investment, continual rebuilding and a lifestyle based on massive consumption have built up an enormous financial risk. At the same time, the extreme worship of wealth has lead to a decline in consideration for others and a breakdown in social ethics and values.

Clearly this is not your average Joe caring only about that tree in his garden. Pan Yue actually dares to take on the Chinese economic miracle and actively question it. Not today's results, which he doesn't deny, but the aftermath that is to come. The whole model of development gets scrutinized and it doesn't pass the test in his eyes. Along the way, some painful introspection is part of the journey:

The World Bank has said that no other country has seen such a large income disparity emerge in just 15 years. For so long we criticized capitalism for being unsustainable, unfair and unequal, but if our socialism cannot solve problems of social inequality, then how can we claim our system is superior ?

And then finally the candle on the cake:

The longer I am involved in environmental protection, the more I realize the importance of democracy and the legal system. I am convinced that environmental protection cannot be advanced by the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) alone. It requires action from the whole of society, and the establishment and implementation of democracy, and a mature legal system. Environmental protection is the ideal field in which to experiment with democracy and law, because it is a fairly apolitical area and one on which it is reasonably easy to reach a consensus.

The fact that he is responsible for environmental issues, may indeed be the reason why he is still around. The environment up till now has been a fairly open topic to discuss without too much interference. With articles like these, I would be surprised if the rules of the game were not soon to change, but no matter how, China -and by extension the entire world, since, let's face it, most of the countries we live in have not yet been shining examples in the environmental field either- will sooner or later have to answer to the questions that Pan is raising today. He's giving a wake-up call to the Chinese society in particular to start changing it's destructive habits and reorganize the value chain. The means he is advocating to do that, may bring him in the line of fire one day, but as long as he is able to tiptoe that invisible line, China AND the world had better listen to what he got to say. Every minute that he and the likes of his are out there should increase our hopes and confidence that China in the end will find the right balance, which will be to the benefit the entire world. If that were to become true, then China can rightfully and proudly call itself a "social"-ist state.

The Lesson of Watanabe

Yesterday I came across this story, taken over from the "Southern Weekend", which Roland translated on his ESWN-blog.

Tracking the history of the owners of one of the now infamous brick kilns in Shanxi province, it's a very insightful account of how corruption at the basis works, from it's seemingly harmless origins to it's detrimental results. Go and read it by all means, and don't be frightened by the length, it has some mighty entertaining passages along the way:

Many reporters thought that he had vanished mysteriously over the past 20 or so day. Actually, he was staying alone in a cave in the hill behind the brick kiln and refusing to receive any visitors. On the early morning of June 16, our reporter climbed over the hill and arrived at this s

imple and crude hole to meet this village party secretary who was under a lot of pressure. The 58-year-old man wailed, "At this stage, I am better off killing myself by ramming my head against the wall!"

Could you imagine Saddam in his pit, also "under a

lot of pressure", fending off the US Marines and the international press, saying he refused to receive any visitors ?

What struck me most, however, was this single line near the end of the story:

The various other base-level officials who were interviewed by our reporter all explained: They each have limitations to th

eir job responsibilities and they could not have investigated the illegal brick kilns.

Sad, but all too familiar story, isn't it ? It made me reminisce about one of the movies by that other hero of mine, Akira Kurosawa. Takashi Shimura, next to Toshiro Mifune Kurosawa's fetish actor, plays Kanji Watanabe, the Section Chief at the Public Affairs Office in the Town Hall of some town. He is one of those soulless office clogs that does nothing all day but stamp documents -piles of them with grievances and requests from the towns' people- and by stamping them in practice transferring the responsibility to another department. Until he is diagnosed with cancer of the stomach and he realizes he has only six more months to spend on this earth. He then takes a hard look at his life, and realizes he is a virtual nobody ... and dies halfway the movie. What follows is the reconstruction of Watanabe's last six months through discussions between his former colleagues, family members, city officials ... at his funeral.

It gradually becomes clear that this man, disregarded by his own son, respected by nobody, had decided for himself he had to do at least one thing right in his life, that there had to be at least one thing for which he could be remembered. And so he picked the case of a group of town's women who pleaded (in vain, so far) to have a swamp in their neighborhood transformed in a playground for their children. By way of the conversations and several flashbacks, the audience is then taken along on the crusade of Watanabe through the Kafkaian maze of the Japanese bureaucracy. We see a man who asks, is refused, stalls, is humiliated, but stubbornly goes down all the departments, one by one, until he has collected all the stamps he needs to get the project off the ground. The image of Watanabe, sitting on a swing on "his" playground, while snow is falling down, is as much an image of a man who has finally made peace with himself as it is a tribute to human persistency and what it can achieve.

And so I thought when reading that article: if only those base-level officials had tried a little more and instead of eyeing the limits of their job responsibilities, had rather looked at the possibilities and duties of their jobs, the Shanxi brick kiln scandal (and who knows how many more ?) might not have existed.

By the way, did I mention the title of the movie ? It's "Ikiru" and it means "To Live".

China through the eyes of Hedda Morrison

Sometimes, surfing the web, you just get lucky.

The day I stumbled into this website, must have been such a lucky day.

Hedda Hammer (Morrison) was born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1908. From an early age she had an interest in photography. In 1929 she enrolled at the Bavarian State Institute for Photography in Munich where she studied for three years. Two years after graduation Hedda, like many German artists and intellectuals, made plans to leave Germany which was coming increasingly under Nazi control. She answered an advertisement in a German photographic journal and secured a job as manager of the Hartung’s Photo Shop in Peking. From 1933 Hedda Morrison managed the German-owned commercial photographic studio in the Legation quarter which had a well-established clientele of customers including diplomats and resident foreigners. After her contract expired in 1938, she continued to work in Peking as a freelance photographer.

During her thirteen years in Peking, Hedda Morrison took thousands of photographs that document architecture and streetscapes, craftspeople at work, street vendors, and religious or folk customs. She was particularly interested in traditional crafts and took many series of photographs that record processes of making. Being a long-term resident of Peking she had an established network of contacts that provided her with unique access to people and places.

When you get to see pictures like this, you can not but be amazed how far China has come in such a short time, while at the same time regret how much of the scenery has disappeared under the relentless sledgehammer of the construction boom. With some of the pictures however, you'll feel amazed how some things never seem to change at all

Having added Howard French's " A Glimpse of the World" to my blogroll just yesterday, it may be a good idea to have these scenes from pre-liberation China contrast with his photographic impressions of contemporary China. (Btw, French just put up a new, photography only, website called "Glimpse"

Be sure to check out the pictures on display on this well designed website of the Powerhouse Museum. The pictures are in Flash, which allows you to view them in stunning detail. And for those of you that crave to see more, just continue on to these pages of the Harvard University Library for almost 5000 pictures of this amazing German woman photographer. 

These boots are made for walking ...

I am not an American, nor do I live in the U.S., so maybe my voice should not be heard in the debate, but I simply had to get this off my chest.

As the world was yet again watching in amazement as a Korean madman gunned down 32 people in Virginia, followed by an avalanche of expressions of grief and sorrow from the entire nation, I was quite honestly asking myself "So what ?".

I know that I am supposed to say that my heart is with the victims, but it is not. I am just refusing to feel any further compassion on the misfortunes of a nation that condones the ownership of guns as if it were children's toys. Remember the Nancy Sinatra song ?

These boots are made for walking, and that's just what they'll do; one of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you."

Well, in my opinion, like boots are made for walking, guns are made for killing and that's just what they'll do. If anyone can point out any other use there is to a gun, I'll be glad to learn about it. In the Virginia shooting, there were two guns and people got killed, so where is the surprise ? Did the victims get killed by weapons that were purchased in the underground circuit ? No, they weren't. The first weapon apparently was purchased by Cho in a pawnshop near the campus, after which he went to Wal-Mart to buy a few rounds of ammunition and later on he went to Raonoke to buy the second gun. As an "alien resident", Cho had the "bad luck" of having to show both his driving license AND his green card for these purchases. If he were a native American, Cho could have purchased these weapons even if he'd been twelve years old in Virginia. So what is all the outpouring of grief about, I ask myself ? As long as people cherish their guns as if they were a phallic symbol and as long as there is this crazy twist in the mind linking weapons to freedom, the nation is going to be complicit to murders to come.

And where are all those Christians filling the churches and singing the praise of the Lord ? Did the Lord not command: "Thou shall not kill" ? So why would you allow a Constitution that gives any nitwit, be he Christian, Muslim, headen or George Bush himself, free access to tools that have only this use: to kill ? How come nobody has ever been able to kill the Second Amendment ? In a civilized world, which I consider the U.S. till further notice still to be part of, there is no need for a weapon to make it through the day. What freedom is it that needs to be defended by every citizen by himself ? I don't want that kind of freedom. I am not living in an ideal state myself (no-one is), and "shit happens" also here, but when we have laws dating back to Napoleonic times and they are outdated, we change them. The U.S seems to think it is a worse sacrilege to touch upon a law instituted at the time of the Founding Fathers than it is to kill cold-blooded a couple of dozen of people. Where I live, there is no ban on weapons either, but don't imagine walking in a shop with your driver's license and walking out with enough gun-power for a game of "Columbine Revisited", without anyone even so little as asking you what you gonna use that for.

If the U.S. (and pardon me for not distinguishing in this case between the defenders and contesters of the current gun-laws, for there is only one reality: guns ARE a free commodity) continues to refuse to cope with a clear and present threat on people's lives by giving in to the National Rifle Association lobbyists , I refuse to further mourn any victims of this kind of utterly senseless, state-licensed violence for lack of trying to deal with it. There has not even been a start of trying.

I'll rather mourn the 162 victims that got killed by bomb explosions in Baghdad on the same day the Virginia Tech massacre took place, lest we forget and lest we forsake also a minimum of decency and perspective in the media.

Still Life

China is a strange country. Consider this.

Director Li Yu was told by the Chinese Film Bureau that her latest movie, "Lost In Beijing" (苹果, literally "Apple", after the name of the female lead role) could not be screened at the 2007 Berlin Film Festival unless she would cut about 15 minutes of the original version. Otherwise she might be facing the same five-year ban as was bestowed on Lou Ye for neglecting the directives of the Bureau on his film "Summer Palace". What the Film Bureau didn't want the "foreign friends" to see were some sexually explicit scenes (do those really exist in Chinese cinema ?), some scenes about gambling, scenes with dirty streets and scenes where one could see ... the Chinese flag. China, after all, is living the "Harmonious Society" dream and requires the entire world to believe that dream is true.

Zap.

Venice. September 9 2006. The Awards for the Film Festival are announced and Chinese director Jia Zhangke steps down the stage firmly holding the Golden Lion in his hand for his fictionalized documentary about life in the Three Gorges Dam region, "Still Life" (三峡好人). Jia didn't have to make any significant cuts, as far as I know, yet he touches on prostitution, gang violence, bribery and ... dirt, piles and piles of dirt an debris, in which the remaining people still try to eke out a living by tearing down the houses and buildings that used to be their homes, before the entire place will be inundated by the lake building up behind the world's largest dam. It is not a harmonious society that we get to see in "Still Life", for sure, either, so why did this get past the Film Bureau ? The ways of that venerable institution are quite enigmatic, to say the least.

Did Jia Zhangke, torchbearer of the so-called "Sixth Generation" of Chinese directors , produce a good movie ? Yes, he sure did, and we all should be happy that it seems possible to make this kind of movies in China. We are far from the visual bravoure of Zhang Yimou's masterpieces, an yet maybe not that far, albeit in a totally different realm.

Jia Zhangke shows the thin storyline of two characters, both looking for their husband / spouse. Sanming has come from Shanxi to look for his wife and daughter which he hasn't seen for sixteen years. Shen Hong has come to tell her husband, whom didn't come home for two years, that she has found somebody else and wants a divorce. Their characters wonder through this wasteland, connecting with other people, survivors just like them, and gradually becoming part of the local scene of the quickly disappearing Fengjie. Shelly Kraicer had this to say about the way Jia Zhangke build up the movie:

Still Life incorporates a complex symbolic system that suggests possible meanings without fixing them definitively. Most prominently displayed are the set of four ambiguous symbols of consumption and enjoyment that the film underlines with titles onscreen: cigarettes, wine, tea, and candy. They stand in as replacements for the standard four household items (fuel, rice, cooking oil, and salt) that represent the daily necessities of life in a set Chinese expression. Jia’s update replaces survival with pleasures, even addictions. Those looking to find support for an ambivalent interior critique of the concomitant pleasures and dangers of turning cinema itself into a series of tantalizingly consumable items could do worse than start here.

I myself believe that the four items have less to do with pleasure and addictions as they have to do with hospitality. Those are items you would traditionally take in China whenever you go and visit chinese friends. Like the inhabitants of Fengjie are more and more becoming guests in their own life, so do Sanming and Shen Hong immerse in this micro-society, as guests, passing by, looked at with suspicion at first but gradually taken in.

Though the movie looks desolate and paints a very somber picture, there's a lot of humanity in the characters and their struggle for survival. Jia wanted to show how life works for them after all the camera crews were gone. From an interview with Jia in "Three Gorges Probe":

Jia: In my view, the time of biggest change in the Three Gorges area was 2000 to 2002, when the mass resettlement was really under way, houses were being demolished and people relocated. At that time the media, from inside and outside China, went to the area and bombarded us with images of the dam being built, houses being torn down and people being moved.

But then the media withdrew, and the Three Gorges, both the people and the place, were forgotten. Nobody cared about them any more. It was at that time that we went to the area. We were interested in how people there were living their lives, how they had been affected by the big dam.

What we saw, behind the scenes of the big project, were the problems and difficulties people faced after relocation. And the changes they experienced -- having their houses demolished and being resettled, with the construction of the dam going on in the background -- look a lot like changes being experienced by people all over China. And so, in a sense, the changes occurring in the Three Gorges area represent the changes taking place in China as a whole.

That the director still manages to extract a lot of beauty where no one would expect to find it anymore (and though the word "beauty" may be stretching the limits of the content of that word a bit) is to be considered no minor feat and it leaves us anyway with a movie that sticks to the mind and hope for more good work to come from a great director.

The Wall

Let's talk about China's Great Wall for a change.

What began as defensive structures mostly made of earth, stone and wood, eventually expanded into the longest man-made construction ever erected. Stretching over 4000 miles, it effectively tried to separate China from the rest of the world on it's weakest side: the north. I guess, when Qin Shi Huang woke up one morning in 220 BC with the idea that he had to connect those several shattered pieces of earthen fortification mounds into one big wall to keep possible invaders out of his newly unified country, he had no clue how that would be resounding through the ages. From Hadrian's Wall to the Berlin Wall, governments, emperors, cities have been building walls throughout history as a way of defense ... and they still do.

The latest addition is now likely to be contributed by ... Iran.

Quetta, March 1: Iran has started building a concrete wall along its border with Pakistan, from Taftan to Mand, to stop illegal border crossings.

According to reports received here, the wall will be built from near the border town of Taftan, about 700km west of Quetta.

"The Iranian authorities started work on the wall about a month ago," according to Barkat Ali Khan, a Pakistani border town administration official.

"The concrete wall will be 10 feet high and 3 feet wide," he said, adding that hundreds of workers could be seen building the wall.

He said that the Iranian authorities appeared to be in a hurry to complete the project.

"I think they want to seal the border with Pakistan to stop illegal crossings from both sides and check drug smuggling," Mr Barkat said, adding that the wall would be up to the Mand area in the Turbat district of Balochistan.

Pakistan and Iran already fenced their border at different points a long time ago.

Lest we forget, let us also remind some of the other, most notable, fine examples of new walls competing for a star in "Qin's Hall of Fame":

From the BBC' website:

US President George W Bush has signed into law a plan for 700 miles (1,125km) of new fencing along the US-Mexico border, to curb illegal immigration.

Mr Bush said the US had not been in control of the border for decades.

Illegal immigration is expected to be a major question in next month's US mid-term elections.

Mexican officials have opposed the fence, with outgoing President Vicente Fox calling it "shameful" and likening it to the Berlin Wall.

About 10 million Mexicans are thought to live in the US, some four million of them illegally.

An estimated 1.2 million illegal immigrants were arrested last year trying to cross into the US via the border states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

It gets very interesting when you look at some of the numbers as are provided here:

But Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said a wall running the length of a border would cost too much. A 2,000 mile state-of-the-art border fence has been estimated to cost between four and eight billion dollars. Costs for a wall that would run the entire length of the border might be as low as $851 million for a standard 10-foot prison chain link fence topped by razor wire. For another $362 million, the fence could be electrified. A larger 12-foot tall, two-foot-thick concrete wall painted on both sides would run about $2 billion. Initially it was estimated that the San Diego fence would cost $14 million -- about $1 million a mile. The first 11 miles of the fence eventually cost $42 million -- $3.8 million per mile, and the last 3.5 miles may cost even more since they cover more difficult terrain. An additional $35 million to complete the final 3.5 miles was approved in 2005 by the Department of Homeland Security -- $10 million per mile.

That reminds me of one of the latest articles of one of my favorite columnists, Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria, on the situation in Iraq where he made the following assertion:

A major global consulting firm has reviewed Iraq's state-owned enterprises and estimated that it would cost $100 million to restart all of them and employ more than 150,000 Iraqis—$100 million. That's as much money as the American military will spend in Iraq in the next 12 hours.

Talking about getting the priorities right !

Now here's another formidable contender (from Wikipedia):

The Israeli West Bank barrier is a physical barrier being constructed by Israel consisting of a network of fences with vehicle-barrier trenches surrounded by an on average 60 meters wide exclusion area (90%) and up to 8 meters high concrete walls (10%).^[1] It is located mainly within the West Bank, partly along the 1949 Armistice line, or "Green Line" between the West Bank and Israel. As of April 2006 the length of the barrier as approved by the Israeli government is 703 kilometers (436 miles) long. Approximately 58.4% has been constructed, 8.96% is under construction, and construction has not yet begun on 33% of the barrier.^[2]

In November 1989, the world was cheering them on, as the Berlin Wall came down and the people from the east crossed the separation line for the first time as human beings instead of as machine-gun targets. The fall was heralded as the end of the Cold War and the demise of Communism.

After that, it went quiet for a couple of years, but it seems construction fever on walls is now back with a vengeance. These constructions are prone to frustrate and humiliate those on the "wrong side" of them and we all know how a caged in creature may react. As for those on the "right side", they may one day wake up, realizing that the idea that they are better protected by the mere presence of such a wall, is just such an urban legend as the fact that China's Great Wall can be seen from the moon. In the end, China's wall didn't keep out the invaders: the Manchu's, the Mongols before them, ruled over China for centuries, not so much because the brickwork was not resistant to the attacks, but because at a certain moment someone from within opened the gate and took the lid off Pandora's box.

Enjoy your meal

Last weekend, I was relating to my wife and her friend about my only experience ever in a vegetarian restaurant. The year was 1989, the place Beijing and the restaurant was Gong De Lin (功德林). Established in 1922, the place can boast of some history, and rightfully so. I can't imagine myself ever living the vegetarian way of life (which is why I'll probably never reach Nirvana), but if there is a place that could haul me over, it should be this one. I remember we went there with a group of 6 friends or so and we had one of of the most splendid meals ever a student's purse could afford. I particularly remember the big plate with a fish that seemed like ready to slap it's tail and jump off anytime ... only to find that it was "sculpted" from mashed potatoes mixed with all kinds of other stuff (can you tell from my writing I'm not the one who's doing the cooking at home ?).

My student days are long gone, so the purse holds somewhat more than the the 284 FEC (Foreign Exchange Certficate, or the "foreigners money" at that time) living allowance per month I was entitled to on my scholarship and as a result, I now also dare to venture in restaurants that have something more than pizza or kebab on the menu (on a sidenote again: coming to think of it, after a couple of months in Shanghai at the end of the eighties, sneaking out for a couple of days to Hong Kong and indulging in a REAL pizza at Pizzahut and more-than-REAL ice cream at Häagen Dasz was at that moment like tasting a piece of Heaven also). Anyway, the experience of having a fine meal is for me very well expressed in this line of Michel de Montaigne, a French writer from the Renaissance:

"The art of dining well is no slight art,
the pleasure not a slight pleasure".

So I am dumbstruck with this latest craze that (unfortunately, in my mind) has blown over from the Old Continent of Europe to hit it big time in China:

City diners set to embrace the dark

SOME diners in Shanghai will soon be kept in the dark - and happily pay for the privilege.

According to officials of the Beijing-based Whaleinside Culture Corp, which opened Asia's first dark restaurant in Beijing on December 22, the Shanghai outlet will be set up in one of the busiest commercial centers.

"We will soon decide on the location from four or five venues, and finish the interior decoration within 1 1/2 months," said Chen Long, president of the company.

The trendy youth market, and expatriates seeking something different, are the main targets for the venue, which is expected to cost diners 100 yuan (US$12.50) to 150 yuan per head, Chen said.

After a widely announced opening of the first outlet in Beijing, it is now time for Shanghai food connoisseurs to go and enjoy their meals in a pitch-black environment. Waiters are either blind, or people with normal vision ... wearing night vision goggles. Apparently, as mentionned in the same article on Onemanbandwidth, this kind of restaurant was

actually a fantastic project started by the Blind-Liecht (Swiss German for blind-light) foundation. The foundation works to create employment opportunities for blind and visually impaired people.

So may I politely ask, if that is the goal of what this is all about (and I have no doubt that someone, at the outset, had the best interest of the blind at heart), what those goggle-frogs are doing in that Beijing restaurant, with Shanghai set to follow the same recruitment policy:

Similar to Beijing, and other outlets around the world, Shanghai's dark restaurant will recruit some blind servers in addition to 10 ordinary staff.

Strange they don't mention the number of the blind they will recruit, don't you think ?

Apart from that, however, what happened also to "eating with your eyes" ? Which chef, in a right state of mind and concerned about delivering quality, would ever want to go and work in such a restaurant, where the customers will not get to see even the tiniest bit of the culinary composition you have created on their plate ?
What happened to the famous Chinese food culture, which bestows quite some importance on the right mix of color in the dishes ?

Will you allow me also to wonder how conversations will go (supposed you don't go there on your own), when you have tens of people in the same room, all babbling at even higher pitch than usual -which I believe is what happens when you are in the dark- and no faces to focus on ? What happens to conversation when at least 30% of your message is said to be in your expression and your body language ?

It's just beyond me, but I guess those guys at Whaleinside -"A World Without Heart Distance"- (没有距离的世界) (well, euh ...) must have it all figured out.

"We will soon decide on the location from four or five venues, and finish the interior decoration within 1 1/2 months," said Chen Long, president of the company.

If I may offer a little piece of advice: wouldn't spend too much time and money on that interior decoration.