China Check-Up

I have a morbid fascination with China. The sheer scale of the place alone can make an ordinary story fantastic. The inhumane nature of its suddenly respectable dictatorship is always worth examining. As is the resiliency of the brave souls who fight against it.

The most important story to report is an old one–putting a number on Mao’s butchery. Mao was the greatest butcher of the 20th century and almost certainly human history. Hitler and Stalin fall by the wayside. Genghis Khan butchered a lot of people per capita, but there weren’t that many people back then. So I’m going to give the world’s worst butcher award to Mao. And respected historian Frank Dikotter has put a new number on Mao’s “body of work”–at least 45 million people killed just in the rough period of the Great Leap Forward from 1958-1962. Put 45 million people together and you get, by the latest census figures, the 30th largest country on earth. It would be like wiping out every person in Canada, plus another 11 million. This new figure will probably have an effect on his total tally, which was thought to have been pegged too high at 65 million in the 1997 classic The Black Book of Communism. This man was evil personified, yet somehow his regime leaves on and useful idiots in the West idolize him even now.

In contemporary China, the butchers of Beijing are again pissing in the eye of Tibet. This time, it’s new rules to require Mandarin in their schools. It is not like Tibetan is taking off anywhere outside of Tibet.  It is not like kids in Beijing are forgetting Mandarin as they listen to Tibetan pop songs. This is just about crushing Tibetan culture and assimilating them.

In other news about people fighting back against the butchers of Beijing, the example of Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo seems to be inspiring other dissidents. Let it inspire a whole generation of dissidents. Let the boatloads of Chinese students coming to the West to study go home with a critical eye to the evil of their regime. Let this nationalist bargain of crushed freedom in exchange for “national greatness” be put to rest.

Unfortunately, some of the useful idiots in the West look at this development and condemn it. You’ll remember that Norwegian fool Morits Skaugen we condemned to hell a few weeks back. Now we have a new person to hate, American journalist F. William Engdahl. He has written a charming little piece claiming that Liu Xiaobo is basically an American agent for his association with groups like PEN, the international writer’s NGO. Engdahl says America got him the Nobel. Why? “The reason China is being targeted? Simply because China today exists, and exists as a dynamically emerging world factor in economics and politics.” Yes, it has nothing to do with the fact that they execute people by the boatload, censor the internet, and crush their own people on a daily basis. Go back to the sewer you crawled out of, you death-worshiping hack.

And then let’s cap the blood sundae off with a realistic and awful cherry. Meet Ordos, just one of the fully-constructed ghost suburbs the Chinese are putting up. These ghost suburbs are so awful because they lay bare that China is sitting on a tremendous property bubble that must be fed. They are just building for the sake of building. And once it pops, the second-largest economy in the world will be left reeling and the recession will just get worse. Knowing that we need the butchers is one of the saddest things of all.

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The Liu Xiaobo sage continues

Remember when China lost their heads over dissident Liu Xiaobo winning the Nobel Peace Prize? The mess remains in progress. His wife, supposedly given the chance to visit him and give him the news of his win, is now under arrest, too.

Then there’s nice, friendly People’s Daily Online, the cute little English-language mouthpiece of the regime. Look at how liberal China is being, they are even letting them write about Liu winning the Prize! Oh wait, they are just writing propaganda pieces that recycle vile commentary from the same bunch of Western useful idiots and reactionary Muslims. One of these useful idiots is especially worthy of our opprobrium:

Meanwhile, Morits Skaugen, chief executive officer of the Norwegian marine transportation service company I.M. Skaugen SE, published an article in the Norwegian-language newspaper Aftenposten on Tuesday, saying that it is China that should get the Nobel Peace Prize.

“Development in China is probably the greatest economic experiment we have seen ever,” Skaugen wrote.

My nostrils are flaring. How do you sleep at night, Morits Skaugen? Do you hear the screams of the 65 million innocents Mao butchered? Do you feel the blood of the Tibetans and the Uyghurs and Falun Gong and the Christians and the dissidents and everyone else brutalized by this regime on your hands? Maybe you would like to try a taste of the Cultural Revolution or the Great Leap Forward. How much I would love to see you live happily ever after in peaceful old late communist China. How much I would like to see you locked up without any rights in a black jail. Some day you will look back on this statement and wish you could have sewn your own mouth shut. You are an awful human.

Do your part to spit in the face of the murderous Chinese regime–read the Charter 08 document (H/T: Tyler Cowen) that put Liu Xiaobo in jail. For people used to living in freedom, it might not read as very interesting. There’s even some rather wishy-washy junk about social democracy that I have no use for. But the point is, people were willing to risk their lives and freedom for this document. It deserves to be read. It deserves to be shared. This regime deserves to be brought to its knees and the murderers who run it Ceausescu’d.

Your time is coming, Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao. Enjoy crushing the people for now. They will crush you in due time.

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What the Chinese leadership should learn from Liu Xiaobo’s win

Great news today–Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It was just last year that the Nobel committee recognized warmonger and torture-lover Barack Obama, which was probably their worst mistake since recognizing terrorist Yassir Arafat. This year’s result gives me hope for them yet, though I do have to say that some other dissidents are saying Mr. Liu is not a great dissident.

Predictably, China is incensed. They’re even threatening economic repercussions against Norway. Hey guys, guess what? Norway doesn’t care. It’s one of the least-conformist countries on earth. They’re going to have a high standard of living with our without poisonous Chinese baby formula and lead-painted toys. Try threatening Japan again because Norway’s not buying it.

I hope this will be a sign to the Chinese leadership. Yes, there are all manner of useful idiots in the West happy to do your bidding and praise your many construction cranes that rise above the bones of executed prisoners to build more uninhabited apartments that will keep your property bubble going. Yes, everyone does seem to want to study abroad in China these days. Yes, when most people complain about your crimes, they speak only of Tibet.

But that does not mean all of us are unaware of your thuggery and don’t look forward to your downfall.

You can lock up dissidents for now. You can put petitioners in black prisons and execute people by the truckload. You can tell people how many children you will “allow” them to have. You can prop up an even more evil regime next door in North Korea. You can do these things for now, for sure. In fact, enjoy it while you can.

The problem for you is that history is on the side of the oppressed. Your regime will only last so long as you keep driving the standard of living higher. Once that property bubble bursts and all the world sees that the emperor has no clothes, to the dustbin of history you shall go. I don’t like violence, but there is some part of me that hopes you all end up Ceausescu’d. That even means you, Wen Jiabao, you supposed democrat, you smiling butcher. Sic semper tyrannis.

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Weekend links

• Via Andrew Sullivan, Slate: interviewing the co-founder of the Innocence Project. These guys are heroes. They’ve freed 258 wrongfully convicted people from the horrors of our criminal justice system since 1992. How many convicts out there are in jail on rape or murder charges because they were too poor to afford a good lawyer? How long until we execute one of them by mistake? Let’s not find out and get rid of the absolute wrong that is the death penalty before then.
• The Globe & Mail: Omar Khadr’s military judge rules that Khadr, the man taken kept locked up at Guantanamo Bay since he was 15 in 2002, was neither tortured nor coerced into statements. Because threatening a teenager with stories of another inmate gang-raped to death is not coercing him into making the sort of statements his captors would want to hear. Clearly.
• NYT: profiling Defarra Gaymon, a likely-closeted gay business executive, and the plainclothes, entrapment-specialist cop who killed him in a New Jersey park. As the story points out at the end, the violent death of Gaymon at the hands of Officer Edward Esposito has done what years of police stings in the woods could not do and keep gay cruisers out of the park. You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet, right? What’s one dead husband and father if it puts an end to consenting adults having sex in the woods?
• LewRockwell.com blog: drunk cop kills and injures people on his motorcycle, but won’t face DUI charges because, rather than letting a certified medical pro do it, the cops who arrived on the scene took his blood sample, meaning the test results will are inadmissible in court. That’s called protecting your own. Remember, it’s their country, we just live in it.
• Via Brian Doherty at Reason, SF Weekly: a vile lawyer and his disabled accomplice team up to shake down San Francisco-area businesses for ADA violations. ADA is a horrible violation of property rights to begin with, but to see this lawyer who is ten steps of dignity below an ambulance chaser essentially wheeling his buddy around just to get away with this kind of scam is sickening.
• Moscow Times: Russian opposition activists and rock musicians ignore city threats and organize a 3k-strong rally against the destruction of a forest. In what must have been a complete coincidence, the pro-Kremlin nationalist youth group Nashi showed up at the rally and tried to peel protesters away. The most disappointing news in all of it is that famous dissident Lev Ponomaryov was detained before he could reach the rally.
• NYT: Saudi judge asks local hospitals if they would be able to intentionally damage the spine of a man found guilty of paralyzing another man in a fight. Luckily, no hospitals have bitten so far; to do would constitute a direct violation of the Hippocratic Oath. But what sort of interpreter of law in a modern society could go to sleep at night thinking this punishment would be just?
• Glenn Greenwald: Greenwald catches war-baiting, Iran-hating “serious pundit” Jeffrey Goldberg lying about him on NPR and documents his subsequent exchanges with the deceptive Goldberg. Goldberg is an even more repellent war-lover than Bill Kristol because Bill Kristol does not appear on NPR or in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly. People call Kristol crazy, but they call Goldberg a sage. Don’t let this sage stooge trick us into another war.
• The Globe & Mail: British Columbia’s anti-HST petitioners win their first challenge and with it the right to take their petition to the legislature. I have little affection for populism, but it has been nice to see this ad hoc coalition of people rise up against a tax sprung on them without their consent. Almost any time we are treated to the sight of bureaucratic class hacks left confused by citizens’ rejection of their omniscient, omnipotent public policy master plan is a good time.
• Nick Gillespie at Reason: Kentucky newspapers discover that one of Rand Paul’s campaign contributors is a porn entrepreneur, leading Rand Paul to issue a lame statement about how much he hates pornography. For shame, Rand Paul. Freedom means freedom for the adult baby fetishists and porn stars, too. Rand Paul should be proud to accept this woman’s donation.
• Via Nick Gillespie at Reason, The Plain Dealer: Cleveland institutes program to inspect garbage for recyclable products and fine violators. Seriously? I’ve been aggressive about recycling since I was a kid, but this is absurd. People pay for curbside collection. They don’t pay for the right to get their trash searched and maybe incur fines. So whilst we should shame the non-recyclers into complying, we should also agree that fines are absurd.
• NYT: inside Zionist Wikipedia activist-editors conventions in Israel. What sort of tone-deaf fool came up with the idea of organizing conventions to tell people how to edit articles with a Zionist slant? Did that guy not realize how much fuel this would add to the fires of all the anti-Semites and Israel-haters out there? What an idiotic decision.
• Moscow Times: Ukrainian police search for a missing anti-corruption reporter. This comes less than a decade after the infamous and awful murder of another Ukrainian opposition journalist, Georgiy Gongadze. It’s moments like this that make me realize how lucky I am to be typing on a blog with impunity instead of having to worry about words that might get me killed. Keep all of the journalists who risk their lives and livelihoods for transparency and truth in your mind.
• NYT: profiling Ilham Tohti, a Uyghur dissident teaching in Beijing. Westerners love to talk about Tibet and Chinese brutalities there, whilst conveniently forgetting about Xinjiang and its Uyghurs. The struggle is one and the same. Both ethnic groups are kept firmly under the Han jackboot and see a concerted campaign to crowd out their unique cultures waged against them by Han in-migration. My only concern with this story is Tohti may well be  a sort of regime-approved Yevtushenko-type dissident if he is able to teach and advocate openly in Beijing, whilst the most important Uyghurs dissidents are abroad or in jail.
• Moscow Times: Russian health chief wants to ban alcohol advertising. Yes, violating fundamental rights is clearly the best way to solve an intractable cultural problem that has plagued Russia for hundreds of years. Even if it was the best way, this loser would still be calling for the state to use force against private companies.
• Der Spiegel: an inside look at the major actors and process behind the $5000/victim compensation agreement worked out between the Bundeswehr and the families of Afghans killed or injured in a bomb strike it ordered. The officer responsible has been found guilty of no misconduct. Afghan lives apparently go for $5000/pop. What a mess of a situation, and a mess of a situation that would have never happened had we not been in Afghanistan.
• NYT: Pakistanis admit to capturing Taliban Mullah Baradar last year in attempt to derail peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government…because they didn’t involve Pakistan. I have no idea why they would admit to this charge–it’s basically an admission that they screwed over ISAF and the Afghan government for the sake of their own self-interest. Do we really want to be in a war in which American soldiers are dying for Karzai the Corrupt and the Pakistani intelligence service?
• NYT: idiotic nature-dilettantes with a blind faith in technology are putting themselves at risk and taxpayers on the hook with ill-considered rescue requests. The most egregious case mentioned in the story is a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon who used a GPS beacon to call in helicopters three times–once because there was not enough water, again because they feared the water was salty and the last time…well, all that matters is the rangers took them out for good that time. Nature is serious business. Don’t think that because you watch a tv show you can go hike in the Yellowstone backcountry and count on your cellphone to save you. Especially not when it costs $3500/hour to put a helicopter in the air to save your butt.

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Weekend links

• NYT—a profile of the eccentric British hedge fund manager who is trying to corner the world cocoa market. British tabloid nickname: Chocolate Finger.
• AOL Finance–NYT quarterly revenue goes up, fueled by a 21% increase in digital ad revenues. With the Times of London recently disclosing just how hard (think: 90% of online readership) their traffic has been hit by their online paywall, maybe the the online ad uptick will convince the NYT to scuttle their announced paywall project. That would make The Country Estate a very happy blog.
• The Independent—Some African churches in Britain are lodging charges of witchcraft against children and then abusing them with “exorcisms.” One girl has already been murdered. The case of another girl: “Kay claimed that in 2008, when she had turned 18, her pastor said she would need to sleep with him 21 times to rid her family of the witchcraft that caused their problems. Kay said: ‘It felt as if I was being raped.'” Um, yeah…you felt as if you were being raped because you were being raped by a sick, trust-and-power-abusing freak.
• Taki’s Mag—a guy reviewing Noam Chomsky’s newest book makes the case for a conservative streak in Chomsky’s ethos. It’s good stuff–the sort of stuff that “humanitarian interventionists” like Michael Ignatieff, Bernard Kouchner and Bill Clinton should read.
• NYT—DC school chancellor Michelle Rhee lays the hammer down and fires 241 teachers and puts 737 more employees on one-year, improve-or-go notice. If we’re going to have a public school system, it needs to be led by people like Michelle Rhee. We don’t tolerate results-free evaluation of performance in almost any other field. Teachers’ unions have gotten away with bloody murder for years, frequently demanding more money for education, just to see it go to compensate teachers whose only virtue is having stuck around the longest. Rhee’s performance in DC so far has been impressive.
• Radio Free Europe (via Andrew Sullivan)–Personal testimony from women across the Muslim world on the topic of why they do or do not wear the hijab. It would have been interesting to hear from some of the Western converts to Islam who have inexplicably chosen to give up their freedom and adopt the hijab. I would love to know their “reasons.” Still an interesting piece, especially in light of the recent anti-burqa wave in Europe.
• Veronique de Rugy at The Corner–the revised, much worse federal deficit projection for FY2011 and what it likely means for tax rates. Spoiler: Americans love government goodies so much that rather than return this bloated carcass of a state to its constitutional limits, they will probably elect to soak the wealth-creating class a bit more.
• Cnews (via David Kramer at LewRockwell.com)–Two passengers are pulled off an Air Canada flight for watching footage of 9/11 on an Ipod. Ok, this clearly wasn’t the smartest thing for these two passengers to be doing. But when your justification is, “‘It made everyone nervous,’ the employee said, adding the entire incident may have been a coincidence,” you might need to reconsider your actions. Oh, and people on the plane…do you really think a terrorist would be dumb enough to do something that incriminating?
• NYT—the Han rush into Tibet with lots of money. Beijing invested 31% more in Tibet last year than it did in 2008. How much of it went to these seasonal Han entrepreneurs? How many went to actual Tibetans? How blatant is this Sinify Tibet?
• Bleeding Cool (via Jesse Walker at Reason)–Comic-Con attendees counter-protest Fred Phelps and his “God hates fags” Westboro Baptist halfwits. I particularly like the jaunty Comic Book Guy-lookalike in the “Superman Loves Fags” shirt.

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The Chinese Communists, in their own words

When I first subscribed to the RSS for the People’s Daily, the official organ of the Chinese Communist Party, I was hoping for loony propaganda galore. Instead, it’s been mostly boring stories about Chinese leaders meeting foreign leaders. That is, until today, when this article showed up in my reader: “Philosophical revelations of the Chinese path.”

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A brief scientific interlude

NYT’s Nicholas Wade:

Tibetans live at altitudes of 13,000 feet, breathing air that has 40 percent less oxygen than is available at sea level, yet suffer very little mountain sickness. The reason, according to a team of biologists in China, is human evolution, in what may be the most recent and fastest instance detected so far.

Comparing the genomes of Tibetans and Han Chinese, the majority ethnic group in China, the biologists found that at least 30 genes had undergone evolutionary change in the Tibetans as they adapted to life on the high plateau. Tibetans and Han Chinese split apart as recently as 3,000 years ago, say the biologists, a group at the Beijing Genomics Institute led by Xin Yi and Jian Wang. The report appears in Friday’s issue of Science.

Fascinating stuff. I’ve often wondered about evolutionary processes at work today.

If I wanted to be cheeky and wrap science and politics together, I would ask whether the Beijing-selected Panchen Lama has become more susceptible to mountain sickness since he was spirited away for education in the capital. Or maybe they could even tell us about changes in mountain sickness susceptibility encountered by the then-6-year-old Panchen Lama Beijing kidnapped in 1995 and whose whereabouts are still unknown.

But hey, it’s Friday…I’ll just stick to enjoying the science.

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China still isn’t a nice place

Thomas Friedman and others love to tell us how vibrant China is. How this is going to be the Chinese century. How much we could learn from the Chinese. Sure, they acknowledge the rough edges of the political system…but hey, have you seen how many construction cranes they have in Shanghai? Or heard how fast that new rail system is?

That’s why it’s important not to miss stories like this NYT follow-up profile on some originally anti-Beijing Tibetan monks who are now back from reeducation.

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The noose tightens on Tibet

The AP reports on the 15 year prison sentence handed down to a Tibetan NGO boss. It seems he was a Beijing favorite until he went public in support of his brothers, who’d been arrested and sent to prison camps for airing charges of animal poaching against local officials. There’s more on the man, Karma Samdrup, and the sorry state of Tibetan activists and intelligentsia in general in this NYT profile. Money quote:

Those who study Beijing’s Tibet policy say the authorities appear to have extended their deep-seated suspicions to the Tibetan educated and well-to-do, a tactic some say could radicalize a segment of the population that had come to accept the imperfections of Chinese rule.

“For the first time, we’re seeing the government attack a group of people who previously had nothing to do with politics,” said Robbie Barnett, director of the modern Tibetan studies program at Columbia University. “These are cultural products of the Communist Party, people who were brought up by the system.”

No matter how many factories they open, how many KFCs they build, how many players they send to the NBA, the People’s Republic of China remains a brutal dictatorship. Just remember this the next time Thomas Friedman prays that America could be like China for a day.

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