Recent items about Chinese info-control, #4

A new report from the Pew Internet Project indicates that most internet users in China accept the idea that material on web sites should be monitored and controlled -- and that the government should do the controlling. For instance:

Most readers of the Western press are aware of efforts by the Chinese government to control what its people can read and discuss online. Outside observers and human-rights groups monitor and criticize the government's actions and publicize the techniques through which technologically savvy Chinese internet users can work around restrictions. Some analysts also track and interpret the government's subtler shifts in balance that seek to encourage internet development while still exercising control over it...

[O]ther evidence suggests that many Chinese citizens do not share Western views of the internet. The survey findings discussed here, drawn from a broad-based sample of urban Chinese internet users and non-users alike, indicate a degree of comfort and even approval of the notion that the government authorities should control and manage the content available on the internet.

The report goes on to say that 84 percent of Chinese internet users felt content should be controlled, and about the same number approved of the government's doing so. It also explores some of the reasons behind an attitude that confounds many American expectations about what the spread of the internet "should" mean. The discussion is based on a nationwide survey funded by the Markle Foundation and conducted by a respected Chinese social scientist named Guo Liang. It is very much worth reading, in connection with ongoing stories about mainstream Chinese views of news from Tibet and of criticism on that and other subjects from overseas.

I've been interested in these same issues and explored some of them in a recent article on how the China's Great Firewall works. I should probably mention at this point that the China office of the Pew Internet Project is a little desk in our bedroom, about ten feet away from the Atlantic's China bureau, and that the author of this report, Deborah Fallows, is my wife.

Reality check

This is the kind of scene I wish I could convey to people who worry about China as the all-conquering juggernaut that has coped with every internal challenge and is sitting around thinking about how to take over the world.

My wife and I spent the afternoon at a public "High Tech Middle School" in Ningxia autonomous region, in western China bordering Inner Mongolia. The students could not have been more charming or open-spirited. Here's how a few of the girls looked:

There are wearing school uniforms in the picture -- it's a Sunday afternoon, and they'd returned from their homes and villages in a 25-mile radius, to spend the next six days at school. During the week they live in dorms eight to a room. But you'll notice something about the uniforms:

Continue reading "Reality check" »

Recent items about info-control, #3

I mentioned recently that the Chinese propaganda apparatus was surprisingly old fashioned, compared with most other aspects of life in contemporary China.

Well, the headline language is becoming more up to date. Front page of Thursday's China Daily (have to say it every time: official voice to the outside world).

The "hype" involved is the idea that the government is encouraging Han Chinese to flood into Tibet, to take economic opportunities from Tibetans and dilute the Tibet-ness of the place.

Hype aside, my impression is that it is hard for people outside China to appreciate how strong and unified is the view on "the Chinese street" about the rights and wrongs of the Tibetan tragedy. From this internal perspective, Tibet has always, obviously, and indisputably been an integral part of China. And just as obviously and indisputably, through 50-plus years the people of Han China have sacrificed time, treasure, and manpower to bring Tibetans out of the feudal age and into modernity. And the thanks they get is.... this destructive outburst?

Americans might consider this blasphemous, but I think the prevailing Chinese view is about as dominant here as was the view on "the American street" about the rights and wrongs of 9/11. In all this is the potential for trouble between China and the outside world, not to mention the trouble for Tibet.

Update: This story by Howard French in today's NYT very well describes the gulf between Chinese and outside perspectives on Tibet, the Dalai Lama, and "splittism."

Joe Conason, "Crossing the Line"

I mentioned several days ago that I was surprised to see -- ok, "disgusted" was the term -- that Hillary Clinton's campaign spokesman had emailed reporters an article from the American Spectator accusing one of Barack Obama's advisors of being an anti-Semite.

This was surprising because the Spectator had, during Bill Clinton's term of office, relentlessly accused him and his wife of crimes starting with the death of Vince Foster and moving downward from there.

It also struck me as simple malice, a try-anything attempt to injure someone near Obama with the false but always damaging claim that he was bigoted.

I see now that Joe Conason, in Salon, has had a similar strongly negative reaction to the same episode. This strikes me as a very significant reaction; if I were in the Clinton organization I would take his article very seriously indeed.

Conason is a formidable reporter in general. But in particular, anyone familiar with what The American Spectator's name implied in the 1990s remembers how redoubtable and relentless Joe Conason was in rebutting its spurious attacks on both Clintons. He and my long-time friend Gene Lyons even wrote a book, The Hunting of the President, about the Spectator-Starr-Scaife crusade to do whatever it took to bring the Clintons down. If this Joe Conason now thinks that the Hillary Clinton campaign is the one doing the disreputable attacking, that means something. His article's final words:

This incident offers Hillary Clinton an opportunity to consider how she wants this campaign to end. If she beats the odds and wins, this kind of behavior will taint her victory. And if she loses, as seems more likely now, is this how she wants her historic campaign to be remembered?

Boiled-frog idiocy goes Ivy League

A writer compares her experiences as a female athlete at Princeton with Harvard's new plan to have gym hours for Muslim women only*. (Update: the complaints were from Muslim women, but the request was merely for women-only hours, not Muslim-women only. Sorry) She makes some very good points -- but then wraps it all up in the most cliched and brainless way possible. Yes, you guessed it:

Harvard’s “Jim Crow” gym has moved America backwards not beyond. Its potential consequences are best represented in the story of the boiled frog.

Ever tried boiling a frog? You can’t do it by dropping a frog into a pot of boiling water. The frog will leap out, scalded perhaps, but very much alive. To successfully boil a frog, you must put the frog in a pan of nice, luke-warm water and slowly, ever so slowly, turn up the heat.

Before you know it you will have a boiled frog.

(If somehow you've missed the previous 4,000 entries on this topic, this observation from a zoologist makes the point, well, pithily:

"The 'critical thermal maxima' of many species of frogs have been determined by several investigators. In this procedure, the water in which a frog is submerged is heated gradually at about 2 degrees Fahrenheit per minute. As the temperature of the water is gradually increased, the frog will eventually become more and more active in attempts to escape the heated water. If the container size and opening allow the frog to jump out, it will do so.)

Recent items about info-control, #2

A friend who is on the mailing list for White House press releases sent me this official statement, two days ago, about President Bush's phone call to President Hu Jintao of China. It began this way (full text at the link above):

President Bush called President Hu Jintao of China today. The President raised his concerns about the situation in Tibet and encouraged the Chinese government to engage in substantive dialogue with the Dalai Lama's representatives and to allow access for journalists and diplomats.

The same conversation was reported the next day by China Daily, official voice to the outside world. Full text here; the story began this way:

No responsible government will sit by when faced with the kind of brazen violent acts seen in Tibet recently, President Hu Jintao said yesterday.

He made the remarks during a telephone conversation with his US counterpart George W. Bush....

On the Lhasa riots, Hu said the rioters were by no means "peaceful demonstrators" and their activities were not "non-violent" as claimed by the Dalai Lama clique....

He especially mentioned activities to fan and mastermind violent crimes in Tibet as well as in some other regions and to sabotage the upcoming Beijing Olympic Games.

Draw your own conclusions; this is offered as today's installment in Rashomon.

Recent items about Chinese info-control (#1 in a series)

Intensely in the midst of "real" work at the moment, so just a quick mention of one of a thicket of recent illustrations of a larger point. The larger point, as often argued in the magazine, is that daily life in most of China is less controlled and more freewheeling and chaotic than Westerners would usually guess. But there are clear, controlled, no-nonsense exceptions, among which the general field of information (media, internet, schooling) ranks high.

Today's illustration: maps. I contend that overall "map-mindedness" in China differs from the typical Western approach, but that's for another time. Finding useful maps here, in Chinese or English, can be tricky because roads, buildings, and landmarks are changing so fast. But there's also the official outlook that geographic information isn't something you want to fall into just anybody's hands. Thus this announcement yesterday that unauthorized online mapping services would be shut down:

China cracks down on illegal online map services to protect state security

"...Some websites publish sensitive or confidential geographical information, which might leak state secrets and threaten national security," [a Central Government official] said.

He said those websites would be closed down.

In a way I can understand what they're worried about. For instance, Google Earth makes something absolutely plain and obvious that I don't see on normal maps of Beijing: that there is gigantic airfield on the west side of the city, just outside the 4th Ring Road.* And I'm reading a novel whose plot turns on the discovery, via satellite photos, of unauthorized activity in Tibet. My point at the moment is simply the frequent reminders of the tension between China's opening in many ways and its attempt to bottle up some kinds of information.

--
* This site, originally pointed out to me by Joe Reckford, is "Beijing Western Suburb airport," 北京西郊机场, apparently used for travel by top officials and as a military base. Here is a Xinhua photo of Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and eventual president of China Li Xiannian at the airfield 45 years ago.

'Declaring Victory'

Mark Danner's new article assessing the Bush-era "War on Terror" is very much worth reading. (A sample after the jump.) It is one of a rapidly-increasing number of good essays, speeches, and policy proposals looking at how the U.S. went wrong after 9/11 -- and not just in Iraq -- and how the next administration can start correcting the long string of previous mistakes.

This discussion needs to become more widespread, intense, and practical. John McCain is a vastly more admirable person than George W. Bush, but his strategy for Iraq and national security in general is an extension of Bush-Cheney. If and when the Democratic party moves past its current fratricide, it needs to make a big push here, not just for election purposes but so it can do something in 2009 if given the chance.

As the discussion continues, I immodestly offer this link to "Declaring Victory," the Atlantic story I wrote a year and a half ago on ways out of the War on Terror trap. As we near the end of the intellectual paralysis and policy rigidity of the Bush-Cheney years, some of the ideas people described to me back then seem, at least to me, all the more relevant.

Continue reading "'Declaring Victory'" »

Fresh from Kenya: a breakthrough on boiled frogs

THE STORY IS TOLD OF HOW an adventurous young frog struggled hard to climb into a pot of water. After a few false starts, he finally managed and had a nice time, enjoying the swim.

But the pot's owner came, proceeded to light a fire, and placed the pot on it. When the water started warming, the frog found the conditions even better.

But soon, conditions inside the pot became unbearable and the frog decided to jump out. But upon seeing the fire below, he stopped dead on his tracks. He was trapped in a dilemma of his own making. The water was killing him slowly, but the fire would kill him instantly.

As we seek answers on how the dispute over the 2007 presidential results could have triggered such wanton killings, we might ask ourselves how we got trapped in a dilemma of our own making....

Political writers, politicians: let John Mbaria be an example unto one and all. (Thanks to Nicholas Wadhams of Nairobi for this tip.)

This is disgusting (Clintons, McPeak, American Spectator)

Watching from 12 time zones away, I've tried to stay out of campaign blow-by-blow.

But if, as I assume is true based on Marc Ambinder's report, the Hillary Clinton campaign is circulating a hit job from the American Spectator, this is simply disgusting. (Marc has just confirmed to me that indeed the article came in an on-the-record email from Phil Singer, the Clinton campaign spokesman.)

That the Clinton family would dignify the American Spectator, of all publications, is astonishing to anyone who was alive in the 1990s.

That they would bless this attempt to paint Merrill McPeak as an anti-Semite is grotesque.

I doubt that the author of the hit job ever bothered to speak with or interview McPeak. I have done so many times, during and after his days as Air Force chief of staff (which he was during the first Gulf War). People can agree or disagree with McPeak's foreign policy or his record at the Pentagon -- but that's not what we're talking about here. Any attempt to fish out a quote that will banish him as a bigot is exactly as fair and accurate as depicting Bill Clinton as being personally a racist based on his "fairy tale" and "Jesse Jackson" comments around the time of the South Carolina primary. I say this having heard McPeak lay out his views, starting while the Gulf War was underway 17 years ago, about how to maintain general stability, US interests, and Israeli security in the Middle East.

McPeak may have gone too far in saying that Bill Clinton's earlier comments (that it would be "a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country" -- namely, Hillary Clinton and John McCain) amounted to "McCarthyism." But that's a pretty fair description of this latest round. I don't like attempts to stifle argument when they occur in China, and I don't like this in the United States.

I can easily believe that the Spectator would publish such an article. That the Clinton team would circulate it I'm still trying to deal with.

I keep being re-surprised...

... at how tin-eared and antique the Chinese propaganda apparatus is, compared with the way most other things seem and feel in the country.

Today's illustration: front page of China Daily, official voice to the outside world. Story at top left, about lighting of Olympic flame, contains not one word about protesters who disrupted the ceremony in Greece. (Local Chinese TV coverage also cut away at that instant.) Story at top right, today's update on the Tibet saga, is about the unified outrage of China's web population over Western news distortions. Eg,

"A video clip titled 'Tibet was, is, and always will be part of China' became an instant hit after it was posted on YouTube on March 15. [Hmmm. As I remembered it, the Great Firewall was blocking YouTube around that time.]... The 7-minute clip then lists indisputable historical facts to prove that Tibet has long been an inalienable part of China."

As an indication of what the majority of Chinese people have been taught about the Tibet issue, the story is indeed useful. What is weird is its attempt to sell the "if we don't mention it, it didn't happen" version of reality to outside, English-language readers who have other sources of information on the topic.

Meanwhile, a microscopic story at the very bottom of the front page (picture after jump), right next to the Hooters-Beijing ad, notes that shares on the Shanghai Stock Exchange fell by 4.49% yesterday. To be fair, it is linked to a longer story inside.

Continue reading "I keep being re-surprised..." »

Nerds only: Firefox 3 beta is available

A relatively stable and very attractive beta version of Firefox 3 has been around for a week or two. Windows, Mac, and Linux versions, in most languages you can think of, available free here.

It is a beta -- in fact, beta 4 -- so it has some rough edges. For me the main one is that some Firefox plug-ins I use all the time aren't yet compatible with this version. (Biggest stopper for me: Chinese Perapera-kun, for help reading Chinese characters on line.*) But it has a variety of tricks to make it run faster, and use less memory, than Firefox 2 does. Also, you can keep both 2 and 3 on your machine and use them alternately, though there can be slight start-up delays when you load one after using the other. I switch back to 2 only when I want to use that Chinese plug-in.

F3 B4 has many other nice functional and stylistic improvements, especially in managing downloads and bookmarks and in auto-completing addresses you have typed before. Hasn't crashed or hung for me on either a Mac or PC... yet. Take a look.

(*Update: This wonderful tip from Lifehacker explains how to get plug-ins like Perapera-kun to run under the new beta. It worked! As the Lifehacker post explains, this is in the realm of do-it-yourself surgery and not worth trying if you're squeamish. But it took less than a minute, and it means I can run this new beta version all the time now.)

I was born too soon, part 9,482

This week my home town of Redlands, California, (a) opens its first craft/micro brewery, which (b) is in a hangar right at the local small airport!

Ah, had this been true in the olden days, when I was in California and using this airport. Back then, the hangar was the headquarters for a flying-missionaries' group which has since moved to Idaho. Who says there is no theory of human progress.

I've had my complaints about this airport's management, which I'll now put in the Easter Sunday permanent-forgiveness file. If, unlike me, you are within driving or flying range of Redlands and its little KREI airport, go check it out. (And yes, yes, yes -- keep the people doing the drinking separate from those doing the driving or flying. Perhaps with this in mind, the brewery will mainly be a sampling-and-sales outlet, not a sit-down-and-guzzle site. No joke: I love my beer but have been fanatical about never having any for at least 12 hours before getting in a small airplane.)

Redlanders, enjoy!

Turner comes to Shanghai (updated)

(Update after the jump.)
Out of Net range for the next few days, a picture before going.

Looking towards Puxi, from the river, 7pm, on a visit to Shanghai last week:

Our fondly-remembered former home visible in middle distance, but only if you know just what you're looking for.

JMW Turner, some time ago:

Previously in the European Artists Come to China series here and here.

Continue reading "Turner comes to Shanghai (updated)" »

God Bless Mike Huckabee

Two people have now elevated themselves thanks to Rev. Wright and his tirades.

One, of course, is Barack Obama.

The other is Mike Huckabee, who (as I see via Andrew Sullivan and others) dared speak as a human being rather than as an on-message apparatchik in his comments about Obama and Wright. More specifically, he spoke as a "hate the sin, love the sinner" Christian, as a preacher who has delivered extemporized sermons of his own, and as a white product of the segregated South who did not blind himself to how that world would look if he were black. Consider and be in awe of this:

And one other thing I think we've gotta remember. As easy as it is for those of us who are white, to look back and say "That's a terrible statement!"...I grew up in a very segregated south. And I think that you have to cut some slack -- and I'm gonna be probably the only Conservative in America who's gonna say something like this, but I'm just tellin' you -- we've gotta cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told "you have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus..."

And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would too. I probably would too. In fact, I may have had more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.

Actual honest and empathetic discussion about race...! We've come to expect that presidential campaigns will be the equivalent of World War I trench slaughter, in which there is a "winner" at the Somme but really everyone loses and it's a matter of who is farthest from being bled dry at the end. But the idea of actual discourse about real issues -- it would be nice to think that it could happen.

It was a moment like this that first drew John McCain to my attention as a politician, nearly 30 years ago.

Continue reading "God Bless Mike Huckabee" »

Instant reaction to Obama's speech from other side of the world

I didn't mean to stay up so late to see this speech -- have to get up in a few hours for a hinterland trip -- but I am glad I did.

This was as good a job as anyone could have done in these circumstances, and as impressive and intelligent a speech as I have heard in a very long time. People thought that Mitt Romney's speech would be the counterpart to John Kennedy's famous speech about his faith to the Houston ministers in 1960. No. This was.

A reminder of a non-obvious but crucial principle in speechwriting. Make the language simple, clear, vivid, and comprehensible -- of course. But never, never talk down.

Will this defuse the Rev. Wright issue? Who knows what cable news will make of the speech. But it was a great moment, to which Barack Obama rose.

(Update: while considering just staying up until the hinterland trek, I will correct the preceding sentence. It was a moment that Obama made great through the seriousness, intelligence, eloquence, and courage of what he said. I don't recall another speech about race with as little pandering or posturing or shying from awkward points, and as much honest attempt to explain and connect, as this one.)

First sandstorm of the season

Out our window, Beijing, 10:30am March 18, 2008.

143 days until the opening ceremony of the Olympics, but the sandstorms will have ended by then.

Out the same window, on a nice day last fall:

Another step toward the online "cloud computing" life

Web-based computing has these advantages: It doesn't matter what kind of computer you use. Mac, Windows, Linux, Ubuntu -- they're all the same. It doesn't matter whose computer you're using, or where. You don't have to drag hard drives or USB sticks or even computers around with you, or copy files between a desktop and a laptop machine to keep them up to date. You just sit down wherever you get a web connection and dig in. Everything you need is stored in the internet "cloud."

(For the Atlantic's premonition of such cloud computing 12 years ago, check here, and after the jump.)

Web-based computing has a small disadvantage: working with an online program like, say, Writely (now Google Docs) is slower than using one based on your own machine, since info must constantly go back and forth from a remote server.

It also has a huge disadvantage: when you're off line, you're out of luck. You can't get at your web-based mail, you can't get at your online calendar or contact list or documents, you can't do very much. Traveling in China, I spend a lot of time off-line, so for me this is a deal-breaker.

All of which is why, to me, the news that Google Calendar will sync with Microsoft Outlook is big news indeed.

Continue reading "Another step toward the online "cloud computing" life" »

And you thought the Clinton-Obama race was exciting....

The incumbent team of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao has come out on top in the voting at the National People's Congress, winning a second five-year term! Today's front page:

Essay question: In what basic way did these NPC elections resemble the Democrats' presidential primary in Michigan two months ago, and what does this suggest about the way globalization is bringing us all together?

The Atlantic's motto (cont.): Today's news three years ago

Just one last reminder, this one prompted by the Bear Stearns news and the collapse of Asian stock markets around me as I type, of the Atlantic's "Countdown to a Meltdown" cover story, by me, from the summer of 2005.

The point of steering readers toward the article once more is its attempt to explain, while it was going on, the origins of the credit bubble whose collapse is now causing problems.

Some "predictions" in this fictional history are looking pretty shaky now -- for instance, the assumption that the first black American with a serious chance at the presidency would be a four-star Army general running as a Republican. (Our 45th president in this scenario, the "Desert Eagle," becomes a hero by leading the raid that captures Osama bin Laden just before the 2012 elections.) But some of the other predictions, about the spread of panic from the real estate markets to the international financial system.....

A very good documentary series

(Updated below.)

This month BBC World TV is running a series of short documentaries on China. My wife and I have seen only two of them so far -- one about a little place called White Horse Village that is being demolished to make room for a modern development, another about a year in the life of several public school students, some cramming hard for university entrance exams and others just trying to get by while their parents are a thousand miles away in factory jobs.

If they're aired where you are, they are worth seeing. (Series schedule here. I gather that several of the films have been broadcast before.) They capture some amazing moments -- a bright young high school senior from the boondocks as she learns the scores on the entrance exam that will change her life, a beleaguered rural mother nearly suffering a breakdown when her callous mother-in-law won't help her, a nouveau-riche land developer cavorting with his family while the people he's evicting despair. Most of all, they show what China outside Beijing or Shanghai looks like, in a way TV news rarely does.

Why these are being broadcast with no interference I can't say. In a similar development, unlike yesterday, today both CNN and the BBC, along with the French, German, and Japanese news stations, are broadcasting Lhasa footage without being censored. On the other hand, my experience confirms Danwei's report that YouTube is now blacked out.

Real time update: Whoops! I wrote this yesterday morning, and one minute before it was scheduled to appear -- that is, right now -- I heard in the background a third documentary in the series. In it correspondent Juliana Liu reported on a visit to her hometown of Changsha, capital of Hunan province, and her talk with a colorful local millionaire: the air-conditioning magnate, aviator, and environmentalist Zhang Yue. Who would have guessed -- his campus includes a gilded pyramid and a replica of the palace of Versailles!

Small world. This picture of Versailles-in-Changsha is not from the film but from our story on Mr. Zhang early last year. Maybe this film was shot long before that (though its credit screen said 2008). Further demonstration of our motto. The Atlantic Monthly: today's news one year ago.

Tibet info-flow update

As of Saturday night, March 15, China time, in Beijing:

- The screen goes black on CNN one second after any report about the situation in Lhasa begins;

- Similar coverage on BBC World TV has, oddly, come through unmolested -- though BBC has often been blacked out in the past. This evening I saw footage on BBC of riots in Lhasa, cars being burned, accusations of attacks on monks, and so on;

- CCTV coverage (that's state-run China Central TV) has included at least one brief mention we saw, similar to those in the papers previously discussed here, saying that small groups of hooligans have attacked soldiers in Lhasa but that things are under control.

- Just about every blog, web site, or online news source I've tried for info about Tibet has been blocked by the Great Firewall, using one of the techniques I discussed in this article. The URLs for those sites -- say, NYTimes.com -- aren't permanently black-listed or blocked. But when the GFW's filtering system sees troublesome words in the actual content of the page you're reading -- and let's assume the words Tibet, Lhasa, and Dalai Lama now all qualify -- it breaks the connection and interrupts all attempts to go back to the site for certain period of time. So far, my VPN has gotten me around this barrier. But, as discussed in the article, avoiding the Great Firewall is enough of a chore and an expense that most Chinese citizens don't bother. I imagine some people in Tibet are bothering now.

A little more on news play in China

Following on this item earlier:

Front page of today's China Daily, the government's English-language presentation to the world. This is on Saturday, March 15, when news outlets elsewhere are leading with the Tibet news:

You can click on the photo for a larger version, but you're still likely to miss the Tibet news, which is in the very bottom left corner of the paper under the headline "Dalai Lama Behind Sabotage." In its entirety it reads as follows:

Continue reading "A little more on news play in China" »

In case you're wondering how this is playing in China...

.... here is the current front page of the People's Daily website, in Chinese. The English-language site, here, has different stories with different emphases.

Both the Chinese and the English pages may have changed by the time you see them, but as I look on Saturday morning, March 15, China time, the Chinese page is playing the Tibet story as secondary news, just at the bottom of the opening screen. You can find it with these characters for Tibetan Autonomous Region -- 西藏自治区 -- and the story itself is here. The gist, according to me, is that responsible authorities say that a small number of hooligans and saboteurs are creating disruptions in Lhasa.

The English-language story is played higher on the opening page and with the headline, "Tibet Regional Government: Sabotage in Lhasa masterminded by Dalai clique."

As mentioned earlier, no one outside the region can really know yet what is going on or where it will lead.

Further on Bill vs. Hillary Clinton

Here is the point I wish I had thought to make the first time:

One of Bill Clinton's strongest and most admirable traits as a politician was that, in his prime, he never talked down when explaining his positions. No matter what the audience -- financiers, laid-off factory workers, teenagers, foreigners -- he always encouraged them to see the big picture.

And to think. He said again and again that the Republicans' goal was to keep people from thinking, because once they did start thinking clearly, as opposed to hating or fearing, they'd see the wisdom of the Clinton plan.

Agree on the merits of his plans, or disagree: You can't deny that this was his approach. He made people feel, too -- but virtually every step of the way he encouraged them to think.

As for why this has not been his wife's approach -- well, we just don't know whether it's a difference in temperament between the two of them, or difference of talent, or difference of strategies, or difference driven by the fact that this time they're up against someone (ie, Obama) who also is very good in the "making people think" approach. But the contrast in thought-content between Clinton '92 and Clinton '08 is striking.

No one outside Tibet knows exactly what is going on there right now...

.... or at least I don't, but in case observers outside China are in any doubt: This is potentially big, big, very consequential news.

It would be out of character for the Chinese regime (which is relaxed about many things, but not at all about "separatism" in any form) and also contrary to fundamental Chinese doctrine for the government not to respond with very great force to whatever is happening in Lhasa. Among other things, this will certainly change the tone of international discussion about the Olympics, in which China has an enormous investment of pride and "face" and which are now less than five months away.

Again, it is too early and facts are too unclear to say much more with confidence. But as you follow the news, be aware that this is something that could matter a great deal in many ways. More later.

Bill vs Hillary Clinton

I supported Bill Clinton when he was in office, and I have liked and admired him before and since. I knew that he did some unsavory things -- OK, let's set aside the obvious, and think back to his approval of the execution of the (mentally-damaged) convicted murderer Ricky Ray Rector during the heat of the campaign in 1992. I thought, and think: this is the price leaders pay. The question is whether, on balance, the leader is a force for public good, and I thought he clearly was.

This standard of comparison sticks in my mind during Hillary Clinton's campaign. And I'm not even talking about Bill Clinton's flurry of public involvement around the time of the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries. Rather I'm thinking: she has done things I don't remember him doing, or that he was smooth enough to do without my noticing it.

Continue reading "Bill vs Hillary Clinton" »

Boiled frog interim update

In the Asian hinterland and away from the internet for last few days and one or two more.

Nonetheless sending dispatch via Blackberry to post this timely entry in the boiled-frog contest, from reader Alex Frankel. Yes, I know this is not a substitute for the (scientifically flawed) boiled-frog cliche. But still....

Continue reading "Boiled frog interim update" »

This is not, in itself, reason to oppose a candidate....

... but Hillary Clinton is plummeting rock-like to the bottom of the crucial "boiled frog" primary.

I still have not seen any evidence of Barack Obama using this hackneyed, heartless, and flat-out ignorant formulation. ("You throw a frog into a pot of boiling water....")

That is, he has not used it, "as far as I know."

John McCain? Again, as far as I know, he is boiled-frog-free.

But Senator Clinton goes there again and again.

When Senator Obama wants to start fighting tough on the stump, the path is clear. "Senator McCain has a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. I have a lifetime of resisting boiled-frog idiocy. Senator Clinton has her boiled-frog speech."

(As promised for months, results of the exciting "come up with a replacement for the boiled frog cliche" contest will be announced any day now.)

One more view of Chinese soldiers

From reader Dan Hobby, a group of soldiers at the Summer Palace in Beijing last year. The soldiers are turning around to look at the little daughter (not visible in picture) accompanying Hobby's in-laws, who are wearing blue jeans and jackets and seen from the back. The girl, age four, had been adopted in China three years earlier. It's worth clicking on the photo to see the enlargement, which shows the expressions on the soldiers' faces.

Cultural notes: 1) Chinese-looking daughters with Western-looking parents are a common sight in a few parts of China. In many other parts, they attract universal stares -- and these soldiers could have been country people, who had not seen such a thing before. 2) The frequent encounters with very casual-looking representatives of the People's Liberation Army do not, again, settle any arguments about China's military ambitions, its "asymmetric war" abilities, etc etc etc. But they are frequent.

My new homeland security hero: Gov. Brian Schweitzer (MT)

Listen to this item from Friday evening's All Things Considered and realize, in amazement, how long it has been since we have heard a public figure talk plain common sense about the "theater of security" and 'fraidy-cat authoritarianism of TSA-era America.

The speaker is Brian Schweitzer, elected governor of Montana in 2004. (A Democrat.) Good for him.

Point for later discussion: Right now I'd say that the biggest single difference between life as an American in China in the 2000s, versus my family's life as Americans in Japan and Malaysia for four years in the 1980s, is internet streaming audio. It's still a big nuisance to see U.S. television broadcasts in anything like real time -- or at all, given that the slowness of the Chinese internet makes streaming video difficult. But to listen to the NPR morning and evening shows live, with time zones reversed -- Morning Edition live at our dinner time, All Things Considered in the morning -- that is an enormous difference in connected-ness. We had email even back in those old days! Not Skype, of course, which rivals streaming audio in importance (and obviously is a variant of the same technology.) For now, glad that this phenomenon brought me the Schweitzer interview.

More observations of the Chinese military

After the jump, excerpts from two email messages I received from Westerners who have recently lived in or visited China.

Obviously they would not say, nor would I, that the casual/ragtag aspect of Chinese soldiers as encountered in normal urban life is representative of the whole Chinese military, indicates that China does not have advanced weapons or a growing navy, puts to rest all questions about China's ambitions, or so on. But this anecdotal exposure has an effect -- it's pretty much the opposite of the impression one gets from brief exposure to the US military -- and I bet that most foreign residents of China would say that these reports ring true. Certainly they do to me.

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Nerds only: new version of Zoot goes up

It was more than ten years ago that I first praised in print the quirky little info-management program called Zoot. Looking at that article from August, 1997 is a reminder of how much has changed since then -- it was written before the internet boom, before the internet bust, when the "new" operating systems were Windows95 and WindowsNT, when neither Google nor Web 2.0 nor the iPod had been heard of, and when Apple was at such a low ebb that it wasn't clear that the Macintosh as a PC-alternative would survive.

The one thing that has been constant in my computing life since then is that I have used this same little program to collect and organize information for everything I write. The program has been honed over those years by one Tom Davis -- a 31-year old lone programmer when I wrote about him, a still jaunty looking lone programmer now. (Before moving to China, I went to Boca Raton, Florida, near where he lives, and met him for the first time. Here he is at the Boca Raton airport, pointing at the Z, as in Zoot, on the tail of the Cirrus SR-20 that I owned then and had flown to Florida.)

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MacBook Air #5: the Air comes home

Beijing Metro line #1. Guomao station, March 6 2008. Illuminated sign roughly 3' x 8':

The MacBook Air, made in China (like virtually all other laptops and notebooks), comes back to its birthplace.

Two extra Air-related points:

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Ah! Why didn't I think of that? (Chinese internet dept)

The internet these last few days in Beijing has been like molasses. Pages that take one minute or more to load. Many pages that time out, give up, and won't load at all. As I mention in my article on China's Great Firewall in the current issue of the Atlantic, one reason internet censorship is so effective in China is that you're never quite sure why you can't find the sites you're looking for:

Andrew Lih points out that other countries that also censor Internet content—Singapore, for instance, or the United Arab Emirates—provide explanations whenever they do so. Someone who clicks on a pornographic or “anti-Islamic” site in the U.A.E. gets the following message, in Arabic and English: “We apologize the site you are attempting to visit has been blocked due to its content being inconsistent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” In China, the connection just times out. Is it your computer’s problem? The firewall? Or maybe your local Internet provider, which has decided to do some filtering on its own? You don’t know. “The unpredictability of the firewall actually makes it more effective,” another Chinese software engineer told me. “It becomes much harder to know what the system is looking for, and you always have to be on guard.”

And I haven't known what was going on.

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Shorter version of "right wing bloggers and China" point

As discussed previously here:

The same people -- same individuals, same organizations, same publications, same blog sites - that ginned up a war with Iraq, and that have supported ginning up a war with Iran, are settling in for a longer term confrontation with China.

These people need to be judged on their track record. And compared with a confrontation with Iraq or Iran, a military showdown with China would be 10 times as unnecessary and 100 times as stupid.

More on Clinton, Obama, and the OODA loop

Updated, below:

About two weeks ago I mentioned Chuck Spinney's analysis of the Clinton-Obama race, from the perspective of "Fourth Generation Warfare" and the famous John Boyd "OODA Loop." (Details on those concepts in the original post.)

The payoff of his argument, made shortly after Obama's Maryland-Virginia-DC sweep, was that Hillary Clinton could still win -- but that she could no longer win "well." That is, the terms of any possible victory over Obama had narrowed in a way that would compromise her ability to win the general election if nominated or to govern if sworn in. This was to Obama's credit, in showing how he had maneuvered her into that position. But it was a problem for the party, if Clinton finally did win on these Pyrrhic terms.

In making his point Spinney quoted a Washington Post column by Michael Gerson on "Hillary's Unappealing Path," written just after the Potomac primaries. It said:

"Though it is increasingly unlikely, Clinton may still have a path to the nomination -- and what a path it is. She merely has to puncture the balloon of Democratic idealism; sully the character of a good man; feed racial tensions within her party; then eke out a win with the support of unelected superdelegates and appeals, thwarting the hopes of millions of new voters who would see an inspiring young man defeated by backroom arm-twisting and arcane party rules."

Gerson is obviously not rooting for the Democrats, but his analysis, like Spinney's, has stood up.

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Jeez louise department (China and right-wing bloggers)

Late last night China time, joining in via Skype on an institution I had not been aware of before: a "Bloggers Roundtable" phone call from the Pentagon, discussing the newly released report on Chinese military power. I don't know who else is on the phone call, except for two officials who were supposed to be identified as "a Defense official." OK.

About the report, nothing to say until I have looked at it more closely. About other questions from other people, not my place to characterize them -- tempting as it is to give verbatim the tendentious line of argument / "questioning" from one right wing blogger in particular. But since this same guy (whose boss I have repeatedly mocked) has made it his business to mischaracterize what I said, let me take the unwise step of trying to set a blog record straight.

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Life in the gray zone, aka Region 5

About a third of the pirate videos we get in China are fine, in the sense that they play properly and are in the advertised language. About a third are studio-promo copies, which were originally handed out "for your consideration" at Oscar time. When you watch these, you see "Property of Columbia Pictures" or some such label across the screen every few minutes, like this.

The other third of the videos are in Russian. (The really cheapo videos, shot by somebody sitting in a movie theater with a concealed camera, and chock-full of audience noise and people walking around, are pretty rare now.) I don't mean movies made in Russia or starring Russians. I mean the standard American or British studio film dubbed into Russian language. For instance, the lightweight Hollywood aerial-action movie about the WW I Lafayette Escadrille, Flyboys. Here's its opening menu

Russian? Why so many films in Russian, and not, say, Spanish or Thai? What does it say about a country that China looks to it as a source of pirated videos? I wonder this every time I play pirate-video-roulette and wonder whether this new video will be another unintended step in my familiarity with the Russian language.

Reader Ed Fisher helpfully provided the answer, which appears to check out:

Regarding your knockoff DVDs: The reason so many of them are dubbed into Russian is because the studios have started releasing movies for Region 5 (which includes Russia) much earlier than in the US, to combat piracy. Of course, it's had the opposite effect - Russian releases are immediately pirated and then either distributed as-is or merged with US audio from the theatrical release.

More on the Region 5 topic here.

Next on the trail of gray-zone inquiry: Who, exactly, in China controls the business that makes these billions of DVDs, and how are they so thoroughly protected against enforcement? Like most people here, I have my suppositions; and like most people here, I prudently keep them to myself.

Superior genre fiction: An Ordinary Spy

Some reviewers and blurbers have loved Joseph Weisberg's An Ordinary Spy ("In two words: a masterpiece," from Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan.) A few others have not -- you can go find those reviews yourself.

One of my rules of life is: there are a whole lot of terrible books out there, but many, many books deserve a better shake and wider audience than they receive. An Ordinary Spy deserves attention and a chance. Its immediately noticeable gimmick is that pages in the finished book have passages blacked out, "redacted," as if this really were what the fictional premise holds, the memoir of a CIA agent. The pages look like this:

and even, as the climax to one joke, this:

I found this artifice, and the resulting guesses about what was left out, increasingly interesting as the book went on; some reviewers were bored or annoyed.

But the book's real point is conveying what the craft of spying is like -- now, with all we know about failures of intelligence and America's blundering in the world. Weisberg himself is a former CIA agent. Is his account realistic? Well, the CIA's former chief of counterintelligence says so:

An Ordinary Spy captures perfectly the spy world I lived in my whole career, how we talk, how we think, and how we operate. Joe gets it better than Clancy and is on a par with McCarry.

The McCarry here is of course the sainted Charles McCarry, former CIA agent and author of The Tears of Autumn and many subsequent Paul Christopher novels. (McCarry is a good friend of mine; I have met Weisberg only briefly but do know his wife and brother.)

I have my own minor criticism of one element of Ordinary Spy's finale, which for spoiler reasons I won't mention except to say that the more you've read of Dennis Lehane, the more you'll see what I have in mind. But overall I thought this was a very good book. To be put in Charles McCarry's company, for knowledge of spycraft and for narrative skill, is high praise -- and deserved, I think. Check it out.