US officials save guards at Israel's Cairo embassy from mobs; meanwhile Egypt's authorities tell their side of the story. Rise of Piñata Journalism.

Whereupon propaganda outlets Xinhua and Al Ahram, battered by opposing forces, struggle to report the news from Egypt......


The following report is from Xinhua, China's official press agency, which is being pressured by its CCP bosses to become a world-class news source while presenting the party line and at the same time appeasing China's increasingly restive upper-income readers, who want 'real' news:

U.S. officials involved in rescue of Israeli embassy guards in Egypt: media

["Media" meaning culled from unidentified news reports outside China. Side note to Mu Xuequan: You know, I too hate collecting links and taking the time to identify every news report that I quote to my readers; in fact I don't know anyone who enjoys the tedious, time-consuming chore. Tell your bosses to suck it up if they want Xinhua taken seriously as a news source outside China.]

JERUSALEM, Sept. 11 (Xinhua) -- More than 100 U.S. officials were involved in pressing Egypt to order the rescue operation of six security guards at the Israeli embassy in Cairo that had come under attack over the weekend, Israeli media revealed Sunday.

As hundreds of Egyptian rioters swarmed through the embassy building, the six men barricaded themselves inside a safe room sealed with a steel door and reinforced glass. At some point, they had fired warning shots in the air with their pistols in a bid to deter some demonstrators who had tried to break down the door.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) chief Yoram Cohen, had overseen the frantic attempts to secure the rescue of the six guards from a situation room at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.

Reports said that around midnight Friday Netanyahu decided to call U.S. President Barack Obama to ask for his personal involvement after all attempts to reach the head of Egypt's Supreme Military Council and the de facto head of state, Gen. Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, had failed.

The source said that in the hours that preceded the arrival of Egyptian commandos at the scene, "Obama spoke with Gen. Tantawi and was in constant contact with (his national security advisor Tom) Donilon and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton."

Donilon and Clinton reportedly coordinated the efforts of more than 100 U.S. officials who were scrambled to press the Egyptians to rescue the Israelis, among them senior officials in Washington and the U.S. embassies in Tel Aviv and Cairo.

The Egyptian commandos who ultimately arrived at the embassy were able to get to the Israelis after firing live ammunition and tear gas at the demonstrators.

The Israelis were dressed in keffiyehs and traditional Arab dress to conceal their identities, placed inside armored personnel carriers and rushed to Cairo's airport, where they boarded a private jet dispatched by the Israeli Air Force.

Editor: Mu Xuequan

The following report is from Al Ahram, for generations Egypt's more-or-less state-run press outlet, which did a volte-face during the 'peaceful' protests that brought down the Mubarak regime so that its editors and reporters wouldn't be strung up by mobs chanting, 'The People demand change!'

(Actually, signs of an about-face were emerging at Al Ahram even before the Tahrir Square protests, when it began sharply criticizing the National Democratic Party under Gamal Mubarak's leadership. This gave early warning that the country's military rulers were very angry with Gamal Mubarak and the Gamalists in his father's government.)

Today, while trying to stay on the good side of The People, the paper also strives to appease the country's military leaders. This buffeting from conflicting forces is adding to what might be termed the Piñata style of journalism.(1)

Egypt and Israel after the embassy

Egypt told Israel to allow its ambassador to take a holiday, but it didn't. Then the embassy was attacked, say officials

Dina Ezzat
11 September 2011

"For Israel, good relations, even in the context of the so called 'cold peace', are a very serious matter; it is much more important than relations with Turkey or the situation in Syria, and for us in Egypt keeping peaceful relations with Israel is essential and there is no doubt about it," said an Egyptian diplomat who asked for his name to be withheld.

He added that the US, the guarantor of the Egypt-Israel peace, is also "very serious about avoiding any rupture in relations between Cairo and Tel Aviv, especially now with so many anti-Israeli sentiments being expressed all over the region".

The tension, however, is not to be underestimated. Israel, according to Western diplomats in Cairo, is complaining a lot about the vibes of animosity that are being increasingly voiced against its limited presence in Cairo.

The consecutive angry demonstrations in front of the Israeli Embassy in Giza, to protest the killing of six Egyptian border guards last month by the Israeli army, who violated Egyptian territorial sovereignty, and the taking down of the Israeli flag twice in less than four weeks is making the government of Binyamin Netanyahu very uncomfortable.

"The Israelis tell us they know that the Egyptian authorities are committed to peace with Israel, but they are not sure how far the public anger could go, and how much it would influence the decisions of the authorities towards Israel," the same diplomat added.

According to identical accounts offered by Egyptian officials and foreign diplomats in Cairo, Egypt had asked Israel before the developments of last Friday to keep the Israeli ambassador in Tel Aviv and to reduce the volume of its staff to the minimum, but Netanyahu insisted on sending the ambassador back only a few days before the latest protest.

"We are not expelling him, but we thought a long holiday for the Israeli ambassador in Egypt would be useful for all of us now; unfortunately, Israel thought otherwise and when anger erupted on Friday evening they had to solicit the intervention of the Americans who sent a plane to carry him and the rest of the staff out of Egypt," said one official.

Today, there is a tacit agreement between Egypt and Israel that the long holiday for the ambassador is in place and there are guarantees offered by Cairo to both Washington and Tel Aviv that stepped up security measures will be in place to prevent another attack on the embassy.

Meanwhile, Egypt is insisting that Israel should proceed faster with its investigation in the killing of Egyptian border guards – despite Israeli hesitation and complaints about the attack on its embassy.

"We are telling the Israelis that the authorities have to tell the public that it did not turn a blind eye to the killing of Egyptian soldiers," the same official added.

1) For more on the present relations between Egypt's military and the nation's news media, see Egypt's Military Criticized for Move to Rein In Media (September 9, Wall Sreet Journal), which reported on the decision by Egypt's interim ruling military council to freeze licenses for new satellite-news channels in order to control what it called the nation's "unruly" news media. The decision, announced late on September 7, two days before planned massive street protests that included the attack on Israel's embassy, "added to a growing list of complaints by politicians and activists that the military leading the nation's transition is retreating to the authoritarian methods of the former regime."

"Retreating?" That's an odd way of describing the situation. But then the Wall Street Journal never got the memo that Mubarak was removed by a military-backed coup. The military showed leniency during the protests that brought down Mubarak only to the extent that this suited its purpose of ejecting the Gamalists; otherwise, there has been no change in what has been a military dictatorship since the overthrow of Egypt's monarchy.

Obama's trip highlights the importance of democracy in Asia and sends a strong message to China

The above graphic is featured in the Christian Science Monitor's November 4 report by Howard Lafranchi titled On Asia trip, Obama to get an earful about China.

The citizens of the United States of America have paid a very high price for their 'business at any cost' mindset, including betraying all the values that Americans give lip service to as being those they hold dearest: democracy, human rights, freedom, blah blah blah. It wasn't until after al Qaeda first struck at America that a U.S. regime woke up to the fact that India, a democratic nation, would be a better ally for the United States than China. President Bill Clinton's ice-breaking trip to India was followed by President George Bush's trip and strong gestures of friendship. Now President Barack Obama has joined the scramble to make up for lost time. It's a little late in day, however. Lafranchi reports:

... Mr. Obama will not touch down on Chinese soil, but at every stop he does make – from India to Japan, with Indonesia and South Korea in between – China and its economic, political, and military rise will either explicitly or implicitly figure on the agenda.

• In India, Obama will hear of Indian concerns about China's strengthening ties to – and plans to sell nuclear reactors to – rival Pakistan, even as the United States and India discuss a mutual interest in seeing China's rise occur peacefully.

• In Indonesia, the discussion will turn to China's growing naval and shipping presence in key trade and strategic maritime routes.

• South Korean leaders will want to address China's unflagging support for an increasingly aggressive North Korea, even as Obama takes the issue of China's trade practices and currency manipulation to a Group of 20 summit in Seoul.

• In Japan, China's growing assertiveness on everything from economic issues to territorial disputes is sure to be an item on the bilateral agenda and at a summit of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.

"China is going to be the apparition at the table of discussion at every one of Obama's stops on this trip," says David Lampton, director of Chinese studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

The No. 1 topic in all of these countries will be the US economy and prospects for a return to sustained growth, Mr. Lampton says, given the importance the US has as a market for the region's exports. But the leaders Obama meets will have one overarching question on their minds, he adds: Will the US be a long-term counterbalance in the region as China continues its rise?

"All of these countries are looking for an equilibrating force in the region," Lampton says, "and in that context they are looking to the US and asking themselves if the US is going to be around, and in what role."

The Obama administration has stressed its efforts to improve US-China relations, but what the administration has billed as working with China has repeatedly been tagged as accommodating China by critics at home and in the region.

More recently, as China boomed through the global recession and increasingly adopted what Washington perceived as aggressive stances in security and territorial disputes with neighboring countries, the administration has shifted its posture. By visiting four of Asia's major democracies and taking up the trade and security issues topping the agendas of China's smaller neighbors, Obama is signaling an intention to maintain robust American leadership in Asia, regional experts say.

Administration officials insist they want to maintain strong cooperation with a rising global power, but at the same time the president's trip is seen as the appropriate occasion for assuaging the region's concerns about both China and continuing US leadership.

"I think most everyone in Asia appreciates the need for a cool-headed, constructive diplomacy between the United States and China in the current environment," said Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, at a recent briefing with reporters. "We're also working closely with a number of states in the Asia-Pacific region, most prominently to underscore the strong US commitment to remain an active and engaged diplomatic, political, security, and economic player."

South Korea, where Obama will spend two days largely focused on the G20 summit of developed and emerging economies, is a prime example of a US partner warily watching China's growing shadow.

China is the South's largest trading partner – imported Chinese cabbage recently came to the rescue when a dearth of home-grown cabbage left distraught Koreans without kimchi, their beloved national dish. But the US, which is now the South's fourth-largest trading partner, remains its vital security guarantor, not only against the volatile North, but more subtly in the neighborhood of a rising China.

The potential for growing friction with China is a key reason the South Korean government values approval of the stalled Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US – as much or more as a sign of a strategic US commitment to North Asia as for its economic potential.

"We need more US engagement in Asia – especially in North Asia – as a stabilizing force. One of the more salient examples of that stabilizing presence would be through the FTA," said South Korea's ambassador to Washington, Han Duk-soo, at a recent dinner with Washington reporters.

Ambassador Han did not overtly link his country's desire for an American "stabilizing force" in the region to a rising China, but South Korean diplomats do so privately. One diplomat, discussing Obama's trip, referred to a cold-war era "equilibrium" of major powers that South Koreans fear could be lost, adding that the South is "looking for reassurances that the US will remain a balancing power in our region."

On the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, a candlelight vigil in Hong Kong lights the way for humankind

I had meant to remember Tiananmen this year by featuring an essay from democracy activist and labor lawyer Stephen Diamond, who has warned for years about the dangers of U.S. labor leaders working with the farce that is Mainland China's government-controlled labor 'union.' My plan was changed by a photograph.

It has been a tradition for those who write every year to commemorate the events of June 4, 1989 in Tiananmen Square to feature a photograph that depicts the massacre of the protestors. But on the night of June 4, 2009, China time, a gathering in Hong Kong to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the event gave the world, and the cause of freedom, a new image.

The historic image was captured by Reuters photographer Bobby Yip and is featured in a New York Times report written by Keith Bradsher.

The day dawned with heavy rainstorms but by evening the streets had dried and a nearly full moon rose in a cloudless sky to reveal 150,000 Chinese gathered in Victoria Park. The assemblage was so large it spilled into nearby streets and shut down traffic.

Many arrived at Victoria Park because they'd attended every annual Tiananmen commemoration that had been held in Hong Kong. They were joined by Hong Kongers who were angered by their administration's attempt to appease Beijing by barring democracy activists from entering Hong Kong territory for this year's commemoration and for trying to downplay the massacre, which has been called by one Chinese "the darkest day in China's history." Commemoration of the Tiananmen Square massacre is banned on the Mainland.

By the time the speeches and songs got underway the crowd represented the largest ever gathered in Hong Kong to remember what is often referred to simply as "Tiananmen."

Suddenly the electric lamps lighting Victoria Park were extinguished. Then thousands in the gathering lit white candles set in inverted conical paper shields.

White is the color of mourning in China, but I find nothing mournful about the sight of darkness pierced by many thousands of individual lights.

Steve Diamond closed his essay by quoting American labor activist Mother Jones: “Mourn for the dead, but fight like hell for the living.”

Of course photographs are not enough; symbols and mass demonstrations are never enough to win or preserve freedom. Yet if we consider that it was not without risk that thousands of Hong Kong residents gathered in public to light a candle, the symbolism of the event takes on profound meaning.

If the young ask why the process of democratization is so agonizingly slow and tyranny so often wins -- because democracy is not based in the voting booth, laws, street protests, armed revolution, or the size of crowds.

Democracy's defense, it's only reliable defense, is an arduous process of reasoning about the fundamentals of human freedom coupled with a thorough knowledge of history. If those exercises are absent it's easy for large numbers of people to accept a mirage in place of freedom and human parrots in place of democratic leaders.

It takes a lot of teaching and studying for many millions of people, let alone billions, to arrive at the maturity of thought that supplants the atavistic herd mentality. That grueling process takes time.

Yet no sincere retort to tyranny is ever futile. The protestors who were cut down on June 4, 1989 did not die in vain. If you need reminding of that, take a good look at the Victoria Park photograph.



This entry is crossposted at RBO, which added two YouTube videos of the Victoria Park gathering to the post, and which are very important records. RBO's blogger Procrustes told me in an email, "The videos show the magnitude and attitude of the crowd." The links to the videos are found here and here.

Why is an element of the global financial crisis beginning to resemble the Donner Party?

Markets were plummeting left and right last week but China's stock market didn't do all that badly, despite the slides in the Asian markets.

Ying Zhao notes smugly in her analysis, Financial Crisis Is Highly Unlikely in China, that "no matter what happens in China, a credit crunch probably won't be a concern."

It does seem that way -- but why, given that China's banks are staggering under a mountain of bad debt? Or least they were staggering; if they've shrugged off the mountain just exactly how and when did they do that?

I have brought up that question before, which brings me to Nicolas Sarkozy's idea of creating a new Bretton Woods. It's a great idea on paper, if you'll pardon the expression. But the reality is that plunk in the middle of the international financial system is the black hole of China's banking system. So how are the Lords of Craps Table going to patch around that problem?

Say, which country is the U.S. Treasury going to bail out? The U.S. or China?

Prologue

Bernanke: I think we're supposed to first separate the blue and yellow wires.

Paulson: No, no! Don't touch the blue and yellow wires!

Bernanke: Are you sure?

Paulson: Yes I'm sure. What we need to do is cut the red or green wire.

Bernanke: I'm pretty sure we first need to separate the blue and yellow wires.

Paulson: Will you forget the goddamn blue and yellow wires and help me figure out whether we cut the red or green wire?
***********************************
I understand the lights can go out any minute if we don't get the credit crisis resolved, but Pundita is such a skinflint I'd rather live by a candlelight for a few weeks if it means saving a trillion or so dollars in taxpayer money.

There is an aspect to the financial crisis that is just starting to come to public light, and which only struck me this morning when I got around to reading a Sept 26 analysis by Gillian Tett of the Financial Times titled Putting dodgy assets in deep freeze will not remove the rot. (H/T John Batchelor Show website) Tett mentions that "there appears to have been widespread fraud in the mortgage brokerage world in the latter stage of the credit boom."

Tette's remark reminded me that the FBI announced four days ago that they were adding Lehman Brothers and AIG to the list of companies (including Fannie and Freddie) they were investigating for fraud relating to the mortgage loan crisis.

AIG is an American company in name only, so to speak; it's a truly globalized corporation set up in Shanghai in 1919, and which always had deep roots in the Asian financial markets. It became the 18th largest corporation in the world. AIG owns 19.8% of People's Insurance Company of China through direct and indirect holdings. PICC is China's largest insurer of casualty insurance.

And as we recall, little more than 10 days ago AIG received the largest government bailout in U.S. history for a private company.

This is not the first time that AIG has been investigated for monkey business. Around the middle of this decade AIG was the target of a series of fraud investigations conducted by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. Justice Department, and New York State Attorney General's Office.

According to Wikipedia, CEO Hank Greenberg was ousted amid an accounting scandal in February 2005. The New York Attorney General's investigation led to a $1.6 billion fine for AIG and criminal charges for some of its executives.

Something else was going on around the time that AIG was under investigation, which was the staggering accumulation of bad loans in China.

By the spring of 2006, a conservative guess put the amount of those bad loans at $1.18 trillion; it could only be a guess because China's government-run banking system is opaque. Yet everybody knew there was a lot of bad debt backing up in China and that someday, something would cause the tower of bad paper to collapse from sheer weight. The bets were that a big jump in the price of oil would be the final straw but when the big jump happened, nothing happened. China continued more-or-less merrily along while carrying a huge amount of U.S. debt.

But over in the U.S., something did happen. An accumulation of bad paper set off a crisis in the mortgage brokerage industry.

Before you chuck your "Made in China" chachkas out the window, I am only guessing about a situation. And even if my guess is right, we're all adults here; we know that we can't allow China's economy to collapse because the economies of the U.S. and China are entwined. But maybe not so entwined that the U.S. should be the only country to dig China out from a crushing mountain of debt.

In any case, once you start talking about wide-scale fraud in globalized financial instruments, this not a problem that Americans should try to solve on their own. This is a task for the Lords of the Craps Table, who oversee (to the extent it can be overseen) what I term "The Casino" -- the international monetary system.

Ben Bernanke has as much stated that the $700+ billion rescue plan is an experiment.(1) I would prefer a workable solution. That would require a clear definition of the central problem, which has seemed lacking because details of how the credit crisis snowballed are sketchy.

That doesn't necessarily mean the details are suppressed; it could just mean that there hasn't been time to gather and integrate enough data to provide a clear picture.

However, there is a shortcut to getting to the bottom of matters. For this, representatives from the Bank for International Settlements, the International Monetary Fund, the central banks from the G-8 countries, the European Central Bank and China's central bank, need to gather in a room and have a frank discussion.

(In a perfect world I would like to see a few other central banks sitting in, including Singapore's and five Eurozone banks in addition to the ones I mentioned. I would also like to see representatives of Hong Kong's major commercial banks in attendance and -- well, the Lords of the Craps Table would know which banks they'd want at a summit.)

Should Henry Paulson attend the meeting? Not to be rude but I don't think that would be a good idea. Mr Paulson has a long and close association with China's communist government; in fact, he's known as China's Armand Hammer. Hammer was the fellow who did huge business with the Soviets during the Cold War.

And indeed Goldman Sachs, which has been having its own financial problems, is very deeply involved with China's banking sector, and this was so during Mr Paulson's tenure as the company's CEO. We return to the 2005-2006 period:

[...] In late January 2006, Goldman Sachs purchased a stake in the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC), China’s biggest bank, for $2.58 billion. According to press reports, Mr. Paulson’s personal stake in this transaction was $25 million. [...]

[T]he PRC seems simply to be dressing-up what were, until recently, insolvent banks in the hope that international capital markets will contribute to bailing them out. This process involves the off-loading of non-performing loans onto asset management companies in a fashion very reminiscent of the U.S. savings and loan crisis. Indeed, the PRC appears, in fact, to have modeled its strategy on the American experience.[...]

Those comments and many more on the same theme from Frank Gaffney at the time of Paulson's 2006 confirmation hearing for the role of Treasury Secretary, and which summarize Gaffney's testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

I think that's enough detail to convey that a group discussion with China's central bank and the Federal Reserve might be more relaxed without an ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs in attendance.

Depending on what the meeting turns up, we might expect a plan that spreads among several national governments the true cost of unfreezing the credit markets and the most efficient way to go about this.

At the least, such a cooperative effort would spread the blame and responsibility if the worst comes to pass; i.e., a total collapse of the world economy.

Can such a meeting take place? If my guess is near the mark it could be that the Federal Reserve already knows much of the story, and wouldn't want to have a meeting that telegraphed by China's presence the bottom line. If that is the case, it could explain the big rush to fix a plan in place without a thorough public review.

In any event, I think the kind of summit I propose will have to happen at some point down the line. So the question is whether to bite the bullet and meet now, or wait until the U.S. taxpayers are a trillion dollars in the hole before everyone realizes that thrashing around in the dark isn't working.

Often it happens that solving a problem first requires solving another, or at least getting a clear picture of the other problem.

The 'other problem' in this case is that China's financial affairs are inextricably entwined with those of America's, and that for at least five years running up to America's financial crisis, China's central bank was in a losing battle with a snowballing accumulation of bad loans that is so huge it may have no precedent in dollar figures for one nation.

The IMF and other financial institutions, including the World Bank, spent years in futile attempts to pressure China's government into revealing the extent of the bad loans, and they tried to help the government manage the worst effects of the ongoing crisis.

So before the U.S. government grabs blindfolded for a solution that is termed an "experiment," we need to get a handle on just what happened with China's crisis of bad paper. That knowledge may throw much light on how best to proceed with handling America's crisis of bad paper.

1) Sept 25 via Yahoo News:

[...] With the bursting of the U.S. housing bubble, mortgage-related securities are caught in a vicious downward cycle, commanding only "fire sale" prices, Bernanke says. The government purchases, through a series of novel auction mechanisms, will help the market value these assets, he says. And this could be the spark needed to get markets working and the economy’s engine turning over again.

This explanation is very different from the "bailout" imagery that surrounds the debate. And the great challenge for both sides has been to find some path in between these two poles — able to satisfy the anger voters feel for Wall Street but also leaving enough room for Bernanke's experiment to function.

The National Petition Bureau will see you now, Dr. Barnett

In his 2008 cover article for the May/June issue of Good magazine (Ten Reasons Why China Matters To You), Thomas P.M. Barnett, an American security analyst, lists at number 8: "Because China’s transformation echoes much of America’s past. ... right now, China is somewhere in the historical vicinity of 'rising America' circa 1880."(1)

All right; let's take a look at the vicinity for China's peasants, which comprise two-thirds of China's population:

The Yunfu authorities who confiscated Mrs Wang's land are only doing what countless other municipalities around the country have done. ... Against such powerful local interests, what do peasants such as Mrs Wang do to seek justice? The answer has been the same for centuries: they travel to Beijing to make a direct appeal to the rulers of the nation. And in doing so, they become a member of China's most desperate underclass: the petitioners.

This is probably the only group with lower social status than the peasantry. No one knows how many there are - it could be tens of thousands or tens of millions - but they all share the same belief in a benevolent central government that will correct the injustices carried out by local tyrants.

It is a legacy of the imperial age. Up until 100 years ago, petitioners put their hopes in the emperor, who was believed to rule with the mandate of heaven. Since 1949, appeals for earthly, or divine, justice go by letter to the state council - the communist-controlled cabinet.

[...]

"When we arrived, we went to Tiananmen Square directly without having dinner, because we thought the National Petition Bureau was there," says Mrs Wang. It wasn't. By the time they found the right place, it was too late. They lodged at a £2-per-night flophouse and tried again the next day. It was dispiriting and confusing.

Mere peasants, the officials told them, should not be taking up so much important government time.

[...]

In the rubbish-strewn alleys of Fengtai, near South Beijing railway station, an entire community of petitioners has sprung up - some of them waiting for years in the hope of redress.(2)

Ah yes, I remember as if just yesterday the tens of millions of American peasants in the 1880s who pilgrimaged to the nation's capital every year to seek redress from the emperor.

Is there no way to convince Dr. Barnett to take up his true calling, which is designing Lego toys?

And is there no way to get through to the naive that this era's China apologists are cut from the same cloth as the Western journalists and intellectuals who marketed Mao Zedong's slaughter of 45 million Chinese as a great leap forward?

The difference, this time around, is that the apologists enjoy the full cooperation and encouragement of democratic governments, and transnational corporations and financial markets based in democracies.

This fellow traveling has resulted in myths so prevalent in the West that propagandists and influence agents in the pay of China's government barely have to exert themselves.

The other day a Reuters reporter passed along the myth that Beijing's interpretation of upholding "human rights" is supplying basic necessities, such as food and shelter, for China's population, rather than upholding "individual rights."

Tell that to Mrs Wang. Tell that to millions of other Chinese who are turned out to starve when the state wants the land they farm.

If you have no individual rights, including the right to own property, you cannot expect that you have a right to food and shelter or to earn those necessities. Such are not "rights" in China; they are privileges bestowed by the state and easily revoked by the state.

So it's a joke to speak of economic "progress" for Chinese; all those new cars, all those new homes and appliances -- all those possessions, easily revoked at the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen.

Another myth is that the CCP isn't all that powerful anymore. The name of the political party doesn't matter; what matters is the system of government, which is totalitarian and communist; the system transcends all parties.

If you want to trade with China's system of government, if you want to invest in it -- hey, it's a Darwinian world. But don't lie; don't say you're helping 1.3 billion people move toward democracy.

And get it straight: That China's rulers have embraced mercantilism does not make that nation a baby America.

1) H/T The China Beat

2) The Big Steal by Jonathan Watts

Great leaps in China's civil rights movement

Today is Martin Luther King Day in America. I'm celebrating the life and legacy of Martin Luther King by highlighting two stories on China's progress on the civil rights front. Cynics will say that China's seeming turnaround on Darfur is due to arm-twisting. But those live in freedom are in the slog era of foreign relations, where patience and persistence are the most effective tools.

I'll tell you why it's so hard for Americans in particular to have patience for this kind of work: because it's in the American gene code to place a very high value on individual effort. So no matter how many times we have it explained to us, we have a hard time imagining what it's like not to believe in the vast power of individual effort.

The good news is that humans are a quick study, once we get in the swing of something. That's why Jeane J. Kirkpatrick was way off the mark, when she wrote in 1979:

In the relatively few places where they exist, democratic governments have come into being slowly, after extended prior experience with more limited forms of participation during which leaders have reluctantly grown accustomed to tolerating dissent and opposition, opponents have accepted the notion that they may defeat but not destroy incumbents, and people have become aware of government's effects on their lives and of their own possible effects on government. Decades, if not centuries, are normally required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and habits.(1)

A few years after those words were written the Soviet Union dissolved and democracies sprang up among peoples who could barely the imagine the concept.

Kirkpatrick overlooked the power of human nature and individual effort. So keep talking; hear? Think of an hourglass you're filling with a tiny pinch of sand grains each time you talk. One day, just a pinch will finally fill up the glass. The talk doesn't have to be couched in the words of politics or social justice. A story about your personal struggle or the struggle of a relative or ancestor can be that final bridge to understanding.

For decades Chinese leaders have fallen back on the violent upheavals in America caused by our civil rights movement, when they argue for their authoritarian government. So if you're of a polemical bent, you can point out to Chinese acquaintances and colleagues that the civil rights protests of black Americans did not balkanize America just because this country is a democracy. So if China's leaders live in fear of a balkanization -- well then, get busy and democratize.

Most importantly, Jeane Kirkpatrick overlooked that time is a highly subjective phenomenon. When love and dedication are coupled with the human will, a century's needed efforts may collapse into months or even the wink of an eye.

Enough chitchat. Now it's time to celebrate progress in the human rights struggle. Americans, take special note in the following story of the Chinese emphasis on dignity and saving face, which do not have a high place in the modern American lexicon. Note also the concern about how China is perceived on the world stage. Now, during the runup to the 2008 Olympics in China, is the best time to redouble actions supporting China's civil rights efforts:

Public Shaming of Prostitutes Misfires in China: Traditional Discipline Draws Angry Outcry
By Edward Cody, Washington Post Foreign Service
December 9, 2006
BEIJING, Dec. 8 -- To local officials combating Shenzhen's reputation as a den of vice, it seemed like a good idea, the perfect way to dissuade provincial girls from turning to prostitution in the big city and frighten away the men who patronize their brothels. So after raiding the karaoke bars, saunas and barbershops where prostitutes often ply their trade, police officers in the southern Chinese boomtown paraded about 100 women and their alleged johns in the street, using loudspeakers to read out their names and the misdeeds they were accused of committing. News photographers snapped away while thousands of residents lined up to take in the show.

The spectacle, which took place Nov. 29 in the Shenzhen district of Futian, was in many ways unremarkable for a nation in which wrongdoers have long been subject to public humiliation. In particular, it recalled the Great Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and '70s, when Chinese accused of being intellectuals or reactionaries were routinely paraded in front of jeering crowds that found entertainment in ridiculing them, insulting them and sometimes beating them.

But times have changed, the Futian Public Security Bureau discovered. Instead of being praised for cracking down on vice, the Futian police came under a hail of criticism for violating the right to privacy of those who were paraded about in public.The swift outcry, in newspaper interviews and on the Internet, provided a dramatic illustration of the distance this vast country has traveled since the Cultural Revolution, when many people embraced such tactics and even those who opposed them were afraid to speak up for fear of retribution.

The reaction helped explain why U.S. and other Western complaints about human rights restrictions in China are sometimes ignored here. Although Chinese and foreign activists can point to many remaining abuses, particularly by police forces such as Futian's, many Chinese view the human rights situation as such an improvement over times past that they would rather emphasize how far they have come than how far they have to go.

"This shows that the public has a stronger sense of human rights and privacy protection," said Kang Xiaoguang, a sociologist with the Rural Development Institute at the People's University of China.

"Twenty years ago, this kind of parade would have been greeted with unanimous applause," he said. "But now it gets more criticism than support because more people realize their rights should be protected. And of course, they have more channels to voice their criticism, like the Internet."

An outraged Shanghai lawyer, Yao Jianguo, started the uproar over Shenzhen's tactics last Friday with an open letter to the National People's Congress, the Chinese legislature. In it, he charged that the Shenzhen parade was illegal under current laws and likely to have a "baneful influence" on the Chinese people and the country's reputation abroad.

"These people were just alleged criminals," Yao complained. "It was not yet determined that they had violated the law. The police publicly humiliated them, which violates the legal process. This brutal form of punishment has long been abandoned by our society with the development of civilization and a legal system."

The All-China Women's Federation also voiced a complaint, deeming the parade an insult to the image of Chinese women, news media reported.

"The public parade damages the criminal suspects' self-esteem," a spokeswoman said. "With the development of human civilization, such barbaric punishment has no place in modern society."

[...] many Chinese citizens thought the police went too far this time. Over the past week, they have spoken out -- with relative anonymity -- on the Internet. A few upheld the tactic as effective dissuasion and noted that the prisoners wore surgical masks to shield their identities. But most agreed with Yao.

"Even while carrying out the law, police should well respect human rights," one commentator said. "Is there any article in Chinese law saying that police can parade people in front of the public? If there isn't, then who empowered you to do that?"

Another upset writer accused the Futian police of going back to the bad old days. "Public exposure? That was the kind of thing that happened during the Cultural Revolution," he said. "Those who made prostitutes parade in the street lost face just as much as those who were put on parade."

Focusing on the law, another contributor noted that prostitution is usually considered a violation of the social order and is punished by administrative detention rather than a criminal conviction and formal prison time.

"These are legal citizens, enjoying dignity endowed by the constitution," the writer said, "so it is unlawful for the police to parade them in front of the public."

Now for the Darfur story:

China Given Credit for Darfur Role: U.S. Official Cites New Willingness to Wield Influence in Sudan
By Edward Cody, Washington Post Foreign Service
January 13, 2007
BEIJING, Jan. 12 -- The U.S. special envoy to Sudan said Friday that China has pushed the Sudanese government recently to help resolve the bloody Darfur conflict and ease the plight of the region's nearly 3 million refugees.

The Chinese intervention marked a shift from past policy under which Beijing seemed reluctant to use its influence in Sudan, according to the envoy, Andrew S. Natsios. "I think they're engaging much more aggressively," Natsios said at a news briefing after four days of talks here with Chinese officials.

President Hu Jintao announced during a Chinese-African summit conference last November that he had urged the Sudanese president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, to work with U.N. and other envoys to end the fighting, Natsios recalled.

In addition, he said, China's U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, was critical to securing Sudan's participation in a recent international accord aimed at replacing a flagging African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur with a larger U.N. contingent.

The Bush administration has long urged China to put more pressure on the Sudanese government, citing large-scale Chinese oil purchases, investment and weapons sales as tools that could be used to persuade Bashir to cooperate more fully with U.N. attempts to broker a peace accord.

China, however, has viewed Sudan mainly as an important source of petroleum, a key element in Chinese foreign policy as the booming economy here creates a growing thirst for energy imports. [...]

Human rights activists will point in answer to China's unusual use of their veto this weekend to help block the US-led resolution condemning Burma's human rights record. Yet it's to be kept in mind that China saw the venue for the resolution -- the UN Security Council -- as the big sticking point.

The argument is that the resolution should have been brought before the UN Human Rights Council -- that lame and corrupt commission -- because Burma does not pose a security threat to other nations. The argument is not quite true, considering Burma's proximity to India and the Burmese refugees in India.

In any case, putting the resolution before the security council was a resounding slap at the ineffectiveness of the human rights council -- a good move on the part of the US. That China dodged the issue does not change their position in Africa, which will increasingly come under fire from the African Union if China does not step up to the plate on Darfur. More than any other nation, China has influence with Sudan's government.

1) Dictatorships and Double Standards, Commentary Magazine, November 1979.