China's Military Modernization and Taiwan

The United States' margin of superiority, whether in terms of technical capabilities and power projection will diminish over the next 15 years, and this means that Washington and its allies will be increasingly forced to make difficult decisions and choices.

This was the view of Richard Fisher who spoke earlier this week in Washington D.C. on China's military modernization and its implications for Taiwan. Fisher is vice-president and director of the International Assessment and Strategy Center's Project on Asian Security and Democracy.

Fisher noted that China is building a world class military complex and global military reach, and that Beijing's acquisition of anti-access capabilities will increasingly slow down the ability of U.S. and its allies in coming to Taiwan's aid.

Pointing to China's increasing military buildup, Fisher said that Beijing has been spending more on high-tech weaponry, and that the country's exploration of outer space was mainly for military purposes and gains.

Fisher also suggested that should China decide to take over Taiwan by force, the decision would be made not on the actual cross-strait military situation, but rather on what he described as the "vicious political warfare inside of the Chinese Communist Party" so that the Communist leaders can "stay in power for another generation."

"If that's the case, the U.S. will not get there (Taiwan), and even if we do, we may not be win," said. Fisher, a former Asian studies director of the Heritage Foundation.

Hence, it is pertinent for Taiwan to assess what it requires militarily. Fisher argued that Taiwan's military modernization is long overdue and this had inadvertently placed the island and its people in jeopardy.

Speaking to an audience comprised mainly of Taiwanese officials, Fisher added: "The promises that Beijing had made about ensuring your livelihood, independence and prosperity are not worth the words that they are spoken. You must deter the Chinese decision to destroy you."

In reply to a question on whether Chinese President Hu Jintao has absolute power over the People's Liberation Army, Fisher described the civilian and military leadership as "one and the same", and all part of a "gangster organization."

He later elaborated that the aim of the behemoth was "dedicated to keeping the Party in power", and that the military had basically been "bought off by the Party."

Fisher was confident that so long as prosperity and economic growth is maintained, it is highly unlikely that the military would turn against the civilian leadership. The only exception is when the military leaders loses confidence in their civilian counterparts, such as during a crisis involving Taiwan.

The Final Years of Shen Congwen's Life

As befitting the tumultuous times that he lived in, Shen Congwen (沈从文) was once again caught up in the 1983 campaign against "spiritual pollution" where he was attacked by ultra-leftist and literary hacks.

Shen was accused of "yellow" (obscene) writings, and also of overlooking the dark side of old society and representing "bourgeois tendencies" in literature.

Shen died in 1988 still insisting that none of his works before 1949 was useful. He once described himself as "a fake intellectual" and that "my stuff belongs to another generation". He added that his writings described a society which no longer existed and should be regarded as "negative material", and that there was no point in researching his works because they all belonged to the past.

He also noted that he had simply "muddled along for 60 years with an undeserved reputation", and that after 1949, he never understood abstract concepts and easily made mistakes.

As John Gittings wrote: "Researchers who sought him out in Beijing were strongly advised to choose another subject. This insistence on belittling his own talents went well beyond the formal requirements of Chinese literary self-deprecation. No wonder that in Fenghuang the memorial stone (dedicated) to him, on a hillside overlooking the river he loved, records that "throughout his life, he treated his reputation like water."

Behind Shen's wry humor lies sadness and a measure of self-disgust. As Gittings pointed out, Shen probably saved his life by accepting the Party's verdict and not writing seriously even during the short periods of political relaxation.

A researcher who knew Shen well said that of all Chinese writers, Shen was the "most firm in not being influenced by politics" as he believed that politics twisted people's hearts and was against human nature. Shen also believed that "Communism was disgusting and Marxism did not suit China."

The researcher's final verdict was: "Shen Congwen never hurt anyone in his life, but he was hurt by others all his life."

In a rare tribute, the Guangming Daily (光明日报) on 19 December 1985 observed that Shen's literary career has been cut off in mid-course because of the "misunderstanding of history".

The Tragic Twists and Turns of Shen Congwen's Life

Still on Chinese writer Shen Congwen (沈从文).

In 1953, Shen's path crossed directly with Mao Zedong (毛泽东) when he was allowed to attend the second All-China Cultural Congress - though in his capacity as a museum employee rather than as a writer. When Shen was introduced to Mao at a reception, the latter enquired about Shen's work and state of health and then casually asked "why don't you write some stories?"

Shen reportedly gave a slight smile but did not reply. He had just received a letter from his publishers in Shanghai informing him that all copies of his works had been burnt as they were guo shi (过时, or "out of date").

This, in the view of Shen's only Chinese biographer, was the moment when Shen's surviving spark of creativity was finally extinguished.

When the first political thaw arrived in the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1956-57, some of Shen's short stories were published. In an introduction, Shen expressed rare optimism, saying that he now hoped to write "something quite good and quite new."

In 1957, he returned to his hometown in Fenghuang (凤凰) Hunan (湖南) hoping to seek new inspiration in a familiar territory. But the trip made him painfully aware how much life had already changed and how little he now understood it.

As John Gittings wrote: "Instead of being inspired by the rural cooperatives and factories in the towns, Shen's imagination seems to have been paralysed ... everything he knew about the countryside belonged to the remote past. How could he possibly understand how the peasants of China had become "masters of their own land?" And how (his readers might infer) could he possibly write about it?"

Shen then returned to his work at the Palace Museum (故宫博物院), and due to his diligent work, his name was thrown up in 1963 when then Premier Zhou Enlai (周恩来) suggested that someone should compile a book on China's costume to be presented to official visitors to China.

After Zhou had given Shen the go-ahead, Shen plunged into this new work with a team of researchers and the book was completed in a little more than a year. But by then, the political mood was shifting as Mao prepared to launch the Cultural Revolution (文化大革命).

Two years later, Shen's Study of Chinese Costume and Adornment in Ancients Times formed part of the dossier against him for "prettifying the past" and engaging in "reactionary scholarship". His rooms were searched eight times until there was nothing left to steal or smash.

He was struggled against in public meetings where his arms were pulled back and shoulders forced forward in the "airplane position". As other intellectuals were either tortured and crippled or had committed suicide, Shen counted himself to be "fortunate among the unfortunate".

He later spent a year cleaning the toilets in the north-east corner of Tiananmen Square (天安门广场) before being sent down to the countryside in Hubei province (湖北省).

More on Shen Congwen

Shen Congwen (沈从文, pictured) was so prolific that by the time he was 40, he had written enough stories that, in the words of a critic, piled up to twice his height.

But after 1949, he stopped writing. Indeed, the entire sum of his published creative writing until his death another 40 years later was a few essays and a handful of poems.

According to John Gittings, there were at first rumors that Shen had been arrested or even executed, while foreign admirers of his work claimed that he had been "silenced by communism."

But apparently the truth was more complicated.

Shen was already writing less in the 1940s and there was an unexplained attempt at suicide in 1947. That year, he was also denounced by Communist scholar Guo Moruo (郭沫若), described as "the brilliant but venomous intellectual scholar who was close to Mao" of clothing his works in "peach-blossom pink" to condone the evils of the old society.

Other personal and political pressures combined to make Shen psychologically ready to accept the self-censorship imposed by the new society after 1949.

Shen's course was said to be the reverse from that of Lu Xun (鲁迅, 1881-1936), the other great modern Chinese writer by whose side Shen should be ranked. Lu Xun took refuge in archaeological studies in the confused years of the first republic after 1912, but emerged to lead the left-wing movement for a new culture and was sympathetic to the early communist cause. But Shen turned from writing to archeology when the revolution succeeded, and "declared that he had nothing more to say."

As Shen's nephew Huang Yongyu wrote about Shen: "He loved the soil of China and her people; but how could this new society with its new outlook understand him? That would have required a detailed analysis, and who had time to spare for the feelings of such an insignificant fellow? In that great age, so many important tasks needed to be done."

Chinese Writer Shen Congwen

Chinese writer Shen Congwen's (沈从文) master piece was The Border Town which like many of his other stories was inspired by the lives of the riverside dwellers of western Hunan province (湖南省).

It told of an old ferryman, his granddaughter Green Jade, and two brothers who wanted to marry her. One brother died in a whirlpool, the other went downstream, the ferryman died of old age, and Green Jade kept the ferry and continued to wait.

As John Gittings wrote: "The gentle inconclusiveness of this ending does not diminish the story's charm and sadness, with the character of Green Jade just as appealing as that of Black Jade, heroine of the famous classical novel The Dream of the Red Chamber."

Shen is compared by many of his admirers to Thomas Hardy and is regarded as China's most brilliant nativist writer.

In his gently but perfectly shaped short stories, Shen conveyed the ineradicable beauty of his native western Hunan and of its people in the midst of life which was often brutal and short.

He wrote of golden rivers and lakes, of chrysanthemum-covered hills, of prostitutes and their lovers, of foresters and ferrymen, garrison soldiers and the wild tribesmen of the hills, of bandits and executions.

His only aim, as he told his readers, was that they should "try to understand the momentary sorrows and joys of the people, a glimpse, nothing more."

Shen once said he sought to emulate Dickens whose novels he revered. "He tells me everything I want to know - he makes no attempt to explain - he only records."

But according to Gittings, Shen never moralizes like Dickens and wrote nothing longer than a 100-page novella The Border Town. He was closer to his rural subject-matter than Hardy, and "wrote without feeling the need to disguise the force of sexual attraction and physical love."

His nephew Huang Yongyu had this to say about his uncle's works. "You (will) never find a superfluity of epithets such as Beautiful! Heroic! Magnificent! Elegant! Tragic! But you sense the presence, very aptly conveyed, of these qualities."

Famous Hunanese

Apart from Mao Zedong (毛泽东), there are many famous people from Hunan province (湖南省, highlighted portion on map).

Such as Tan Sitong (谭嗣同), the first Chinese to sacrifice his life for political reform.

The province also supplied many figures in Sun Yat-sen's (孙中山) revolutionary movement which overthrew the Qing empire in 1911.

Sun's widow Soong Ching-ling (宋庆龄) was born near the provincial capital of Changsha (长沙), while Qi Baishi (齐白石), the renowned painter of shrimps, flowers, birds and blossoms was also from Hunan.

Hunan also supplied many famous names among the new generation of communist revolutionaries such as Peng Dehuai (彭德怀), Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇), He Long (贺龙) and Wang Zhen (王震).

A younger generation of Hunanese communists would include temporary successor to Mao Hua Guofeng (华国锋) and former CCP General Secretary Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦).

Mao's Centenary and the BBC

In December 1993, on the eve of Mao Zedong's (毛泽东) centenary, BBC aired a documentary "Chairman Mao: The Last Emperor" which portrayed Mao as a tyrant with a voracious appetite for young girls.

The documentary relied heavily on accounts supplied by Mao's former doctor Li Zhisui (李志绥) who later published his own memoirs titled The Private Life of Chairman Mao.

At that time, the Chinese Embassy in London accused the BBC of "ulterior political motive", and tried to apply pressure on the British government to prevent the documentary from being aired, but to no avail.

As John Gittings wrote: "Beijing's protests had the unintended effect of appearing to reinforce the film's credibility although its case rested mainly on the strength of one man's recollections. The result was that the Western press focused almost entirely on Mao's alleged sex life during the centenary."

But in an ironical sequel, a later BBC programme in 1994 commemorating Deng Xiaoping's (邓小平) 90th birthday suggested that the sex stories had been given publicity by Deng's own supporters to settle scores with the dead Chairman!

Politics is bizarre anywhere in the world, but perhaps with its own peculiar quirks in China.

Another Cultural Revolution Story

In 1965, a Hunanese writer Zhou Libo wrote what had been described as "a rather pedestrian and in places inaccurate account" of Mao Zedong's (毛泽东) 1959 visit to Shaoshan (韶山).

The article was published in a provincial newspaper, and included a one-line reference to Mao's visit to his parents' tomb.

But a year later the Cultural Revolution erupted, and the article was denounced by the national secret police chief Kang Sheng (康生) as a "Great Poisonous Weed which Slandered the Brilliant Image of our Great Proletarian Leader".

Even though Zhou defended himself by asking "don't communists have parents too?", he was severely beaten by the Red Guards for daring to reveal that Mao had indulged in this "feudal" custom.

China's Three Gorges Dam

The arguments for and against the building of China's Three Gorges Dam are seldom heard these days, and for good reasons too since the Dam has already begun operations.

So unless something catastrophic happens, there is no reason to imagine that the clock can be turned back. And besides, "un-doing" the Dam is virtually irreversible and downright impossible.

But a quote from an opponent of the Dam still sends slight shivers down my spine.

Veteran Chinese geologist Sun Yueqi once warned:

"The Yangzi is the most important river course [in China] for navigation. If a decision was taken on undemocratic and unscientific grounds, then the laws of nature will mercilessly punish us, and we will have to pay even more dearly!"

One can only pray fervently that Sun's prediction would not come true.

What Will Be Hu's Pet Project?

According to John Gittings, "a well-placed journalist in Beijing" told him this in 1993:

"Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) has the Special Economic Zones. Party Secretary Jiang Zemin (江泽民) has Shanghai. Premier Li Peng (李鹏) has the Three Gorges. We all know how the system works."

So what will be Hu Jintao's (胡锦涛) pet project? Building a harmonious society? But that is not exactly a project involving any real infrastructure. So is Hu going to be an aberration? Or is he merely bidding his time? But that is assuming that he will be re-elected at the next sitting of the 17th Party Congress which must be held before the end of this year. But are there any reasons why he will/won't be elected?

Chinese Leaders Tolerance of "Superstition"

The ruling elites in China had always been rather ambivalent towards traditional forms of superstition.

According to John Gittings, former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) once invited a qigong practitioner to perform for him and other top Chinese leaders.

The qigong practitioner succeeded in moving a pair of jade exercise balls out of the hands of former general Wang Zhen (王震) into another room.

Wang is supposed to have remarked enthusiastically that "maybe in future he can steal some nuclear secrets from the Russians and Americans for us!"

According to this unofficial account, Deng was also said to have chipped in to say that he hoped the practitioner would perform only good and not bad deeds.

But of course outwardly Chinese leaders were not supposed to be condoning superstition.

So much so that rumours about how an ailing Deng was supposedly being treated by qigong in 1994 had to be officially denied.

Mao and Schistosomiasis

Former Chinese paramount leader Mao Zedong (毛泽东) clearly had multi-faceted poetic talents.

In 1958 he wrote two famous poems to celebrate the success of Yujiang in Jiangxi (江西, highlighted area on map)province in wiping out the dreaded disease of schistosomiasis, which is a disease involving snail and liver fluke parasite. The poem was aptly yet unimaginatively named "Bye Bye Schistosomiasis".

But more than a quarter of a century later, the disease had made a comeback.

According to John Gittings, this is due to the private cultivation of farmland which had made it difficult to organize collective efforts to eliminate swampy areas. The decline of free medical facilities had also hindered preventive treatment.

But according to a Chinese media report in 2004, the comeback is due to a massive flooding described as "disastrous" and "rare in history", and which had resulted "in an outbreak of waterborne schistosomiasis in 9 provinces along the river."

The report noted: "According to statistics, there are currently over 100,000 schistosomiasis patients in Jiangxi Province and many domestic animals are infected as well. Millions of people in Jiangxi Province are living in the epidemic area. Their lives and health are seriously threatened by schistosomiasis and many patients are driven into poverty by the disease. Jiangxi faces stern challenges in schistosomiasis prevention and treatment."

Unruly and Insubordinate Chinese Peasants?

The following account may be interesting, but is certainly atypical.

According to John Gittings in his book Real China From Cannibalism to Karaoke (1996), the Communist Party had suggested that economic reforms have encouraged peasants to become unruly and insubordinate.

A handbook produced at the local level noted that in the old days, peasants depended on the collective for everything, and local cadres could easily discipline those who stole or shirked their responsibilities.

But now that peasants are able to produce for themselves, things have changed where peasants could reportedly defy the cadres, or even resort to strong-arm tactics

"The Party has become ineffective," the handbook admits, "and some Party branches play no role at all ... Problems are especially serious with family planning, state purchases of grain, taxation, house building, and planned crop production ... The masses have no respect for the cadres and retaliate against them. They even abuse the cadres' families, beat them, steal their crops, cut down their trees, and threatened their property."

While this account may be true, incidents like these probably account for a tiny even insignificant proportion compared to the large number of cases of cadres bullying and applying strong-arm tactics to peasants.

Li Changchun and Wang Qishan

In his book Remaking the Chinese Leviathan Market Transition and the Politics of Governance in China, Dali Yang noted that in early 1998, the Chinese central leadership staffed the top echelons of Guangdong (广东) with loyalists such as Li Changchun (李长春, left) and Wang Qishan (王岐山, right).

At that time, Li was a member of the Political Bureau and Guangdong provincial secretary, while Wang was the executive vice governor.

The reshuffle, Yang argued, "paved the way for fighting financial chaos, corruption, and smuggling in Guangdong."

The appointments also allowed the Party to investigate into a series of scandals "involving the bankruptcy of GITIC (Guangdong International Trust and Investment Corp) and the disgrace of former vice governor Yu Fei for abuse of power", as well as led to the arrests of several local officials in the province.

Little wonder then that Li and Wang are where they are today.

Why the Rape of Nanking was Largely Forgotten

In explaining why the Rape of Nanking had not penetrated the world consciousness in the same way as the Holocaust or Hiroshima, Iris Chang suggested that it was because the victims themselves had remained silent.

The amnesia also had to do with what Chang described as the inaction of the Chinese and Taiwanese governments in demanding for wartime reparations from Japan, as the two governments were eager to compete for Japanese trade and political recognition.

Then of course there was the U.S. involvement in Japan to turn the latter into a staunch anti-communist ally. This meant that the Japanese pre-war bureaucracy was left intact, permitting many of its wartime perpetrators to go unpunished.

The mood too within Japan also contributed to the amnesia, and even the denial that the massacre even took place.

As Chang wrote: "An atmosphere of intimidation in Japan stifled open and scholarly discussion of the Rape of Nanking, further suppressing knowledge of the event. In Japan, to express one's true opinions about the Sino-Japanese War could be - and continues to be - career-threatening, and even life-threatening."

What a nation. Indeed, the very act of enshrining their war criminals in Tokyo was equivalent, in the words of an American wartime victim, "to erecting a cathedral for Hitler in the middle of Berlin."

Japanese Atrocities in Nanking

Writing about Japanese atrocities in her 1997 book The Rape of Nanking, Iris Chang had this to say:

"Chinese men were used for bayonet practice and in decapitation contests. An estimated 20,000 - 80,000 women were raped. Many soldiers went beyond rape to disembowel women, slice off their breasts, nail them alive to walls.

"Fathers were forced to rape their daughters, and sons their mothers, as other family members watched. Not only did live burials, castration, the carving of organs, and the roasting of people became routine, but more diabolical tortures were practiced, such as hanging people by their tongues on iron hooks or burying people to their waists and watching them get torn apart by German shepherds.

"So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of "bestial machinery."

Chang, who had since died, learnt that Japanese soldiers not only sliced babies in half but "in thirds and fourths", and that the Yangtze River ran red with blood for days.

Recounting the images that had compelled her to write the book so that "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II" would not be forgotten, Chang spoke of the black and white images of decapitated heads, bellies ripped open, and nude women forced by their rapists into various pornographic poses, "their faces contorted into unforgettable expressions of agony and shame."

Noting that the Japanese soldiers had degraded their victims and forced them "to expire in maximum pain and humiliation", Chang said she was suddenly seized by a panic "that this terrifying disrespect for death and dying, this reversion in human social evolution, would be reduced to a footnote of history, treated like a harmless glitch in a computer program that might or might not again cause a problem, unless someone forced the world to remember it."

Problems Related to China's Local Protectionism

This account may seem to start out as a simple case of local protectionism in China, but it goes beyond that.

For taxis within Shanghai, authorities had apparently adopted technical standards that would eliminate all cars other than those produced in a joint venture by the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corporations. Something that most other cities would do likewise to protect their own local industries.

But according to Kenneth Lieberthal in his book Governing China From Revolution Through Reform, this had the effect of creating major internal trade barriers in China.

He added: "One result is that many Chinese firms cannot hope to achieve real economies of scale and become globally competitive."

In addition, companies also incur high costs in paying tolls as goods cross administrative boundaries within the country. And again, this leads to a situation where developing regionwide or nationwide capacity becomes very difficult, as well as the duplication of production facilities in various parts of the country.

Lieberthal added: "China has, for example, well over 100 automotive assembly plants, most of which produce only a few thousand cars apiece per year. Local officials have successfully resisted all attempts by Beijing to consolidate this key industry into a few major assemblers."

Chen Shui-bian's 3-3-3 Promise

Prior to being elected Taiwan President in 2000, Chen Shui-bian (陈水扁) delivered a 3-3-3 promise.

1) To give poor citizens over 65 three thousand Taiwan dollars per month,
2) To exempt children under age 3 from paying any medical expenses, and
3) To offer loans at an interest rate of 3 per cent for first-time home buyers.

According to Denny Roy in Taiwan A Political History, making good on these promises would be difficult, given that Chen inherited a budget deficit resulting from several years of increases in social services, as well as reduced revenues due to tax and tariffs cut.

So with a year to go before his two-term presidency runs out, does anyone know if these policies had been remotely implemented?

Actually (2) sounds strange to me. Not as if Taiwan has a high rate of infant mortality. Or maybe it was to cover all grounds - the very young, the very old, and those in-between.

Was Lee Teng-hui Grossly Misunderstood?

If Richard C. Bush's account is to be believed, then former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui (李登辉) must be the most misunderstood creature on earth - or at least the part of the earth straddling the Taiwan Strait.

Even as Bush acknowledged that there is some justification in concluding that Lee's special state-to-state pronouncement in 1999 was "a significant shift in position", he nevertheless concluded that Beijing interpreted the statement in a very negative light.

Bush claimed that what Lee had done was merely to talk about an issue in a new way, adding that:

"Rhetorical toughness - based on his belief that weakness on the part of Taiwan would only invite more Chinese aggressiveness - was a part of his negotiating style."

And besides, Lee's response was in part because he had received information that Beijing would make an announcement framing cross-strait relations in a way that would put Taiwan on the defensive. Hence, "Lee decided to preempt any such statement with one of his own."

Added Bush: "More generally, some of Lee's initiatives constituted a frustrated response to Beijing's inflexible stance."

Okay, so we should give Bush the benefit of the doubt over that impending Beijing announcement that would frame cross-strait relations in a defensive light.

But unless one is a professional mind-reader, and given the murky and intransparent nature of cross-strait ties, surely it is not surprising that Beijing came to the conclusion that Lee was a "splittist"? Words can sometimes mean too little, or in the case of cross-strait relations when both sides are not talking directly to each other, way too much.

Harry Wu and Chinese Police

Police anywhere in this world are not prone to being nice to their own arrested citizens, not least in the case of China.

In an account about his arrest in 1995 on espionage charges, Harry Wu described one of his encounters with what he described as "a snarling local police officer".

"I just want to read the newspaper," I said, prodding him a little, but he looked at me with the surly face of authority that says, "I could stick a hot poker between your ribs right now, and nobody could stop me." Every Chinese knows that look.

North Korea's Subversion of the South in the Past

Still on David Kang's article.

Kang pointed out that North Korea's attempt to subvert South Korea disappeared by the late 1980s as the South's political situation became more stable and legitimate. By then, it was clear that the South was not about to collapse from "internal contradictions."

But in earlier attempt by the North, Kang noted that given that the North desired not only the overthrow of the South Korean government but also the support of citizens in the South, the North explicitly avoided attacking the civilian population.

Added Kang: "North Korean terrorists could blow up bombs in downtown Seoul on a daily basis if that was their goal."

Hence, North Korea had generally not engaged in random killings of civilians, "such as occurs between the Israelis and Palestinian intifada."

North Korea as a Threat?

In his 2003 piece titled "Threatening, But Deterrence Works", David Kang noted that those who see North Korea as threatening need to explain why the Hermit Kingdom - having waited 50 years - would finally attack now that it is one-twentieth (even one-thirtieth, according to another section of the article) the size of the South.

Kang noted that even the state of New Hampshire's economy is twice as large as that of the impoverished nation.

Kang also wrote that North Korea has not engaged in terrorism for well over a decade, "because their goal is not suicide and random wanton destruction, but survival."

Not that we should cast our weary eyes away from North Korea. Quite the contrary. But it is certainly important to put things in perspective.

After all, as Kang concluded: "We have no reason to think that deterrence which has held for 50 years might suddenly dissolve like dew in the summer sun."

Kang's point - if North Korea is not the threat that most scholarship believes that it is, then U.S. policy may be inadvertently raising tensions in the region, and the U.S. may also be wasting resources designed to counter a threat that does not exist.

James Mann's New Book

James Mann had recently written a new book The China Fantasy - How Our Leaders Explain Away Chinese Repression.

One of the most interesting books I have read recently!

And much as I hate to admit this, instead of buying the book, I actually read it in a Borders bookshop. For one, it's less than 120-pages, and besides, I had loads of time. I swear I had never done this in my entire life, unless you include the times when I was a kid where I read comic books in the neighborhood bookshop.

Anyway, as the title of the book suggests, the gist of Mann's argument was that the American elites have been deluding themselves into believing that democracy would come inexorably to China. These elites believed that China should be engaged, should not be offended, and that Americans should continue to do business with the country.

These U.S. elites also believed that greater economic opportunities and liberalizations will eventually lead China to democracy, and hence little should be done in the meantime to rock the boat. This is what Mann termed the "soothing scenario".

Then there are others (mainly the non-U.S. elites) who believed in what Mann called the "upheaval scenario". This is the belief that China is headed for collapse and catastrophe, and the standard bearer of such a belief would most certainly be Gordon Chang who predicted such a scenario a few years ago in his book The Coming Collapse of China.

Then there is what Mann termed the "third scenario" where China continues to grow economically but remains politically repressive.

So why is the "third scenario" worrisome for the U.S.? Reasons cited by Mann include:

1) People everywhere deserve democracy, and so do the Chinese who constitute the bulk of the world's population.
2) An undemocratic political system is inherently unstable.
3) It will allow China to continue to support rogue regimes like those in Burma and Zimbabwe, and hence undermine America's efforts at democracy.
4) Most importantly, Americans have been sold the "false promise" that trade and engagement with China will change its political system.

Turning to the various ways that the U.S. elites had undertaken not to provoke and offend China, and as if the latter is a moody teenager subjected to extreme and unpredictable mood swings, Mann outlined the deferral language used by the U.S. elites.

Known as "the lexicon of dismissal", it includes words and expressions such as:

- Anti-China - people who suggest that China should be held to higher human rights standards are described as such.
- China bashing - people who negatively comment on China are described as such.
- Push the envelope - people who needlessly provoke China are described as such, most notably Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian (陈水扁).
- Chinese people do not care about democracy - to justify why the U.S. should not be too hardline about pushing for democracy in China.

Mann also suggested that China's increasingly growing middle-class does not necessarily want to elect their national leaders. He noted that the middle-class might prefer the status-quo as 1) they had benefited from the status-quo and 2) constitute only a small proportion of the population vis-a-vis their rural counterparts.

Mann also questioned whether a fall from power for the Chinese Communist Party would necessarily result in democracy. Not so, he reckoned, as it might result in authoritarianism.

Other interesting insights:

- The United States has profited from a Chinese system that permits no political opposition, and for now is content with it.

- China has mainly relied on the "P-factor" to ensure that Sino-U.S. relations are on the right track, or at least on a track favorable to China. The P here means "President". Well, most American presidents were voted to office on an anti-China rhetoric, but eventually turn out to either embrace China or even suggest that relations with the Asian giant constituted a "strategic partnership".

- Strategic means "too important for every-day details"

- All human rights in China are measured against the "rock bottom misery of the Cultural Revolution"

- China need not do anything, as its economic growth will lead naturally and inexorably to liberal political change. How so, a skeptical Mann asked. (In my words, it'd be "how so? Unless a fairy godmother waves a magic wand.")

- Mann also asked if the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games will resemble the 1936 Berlin Olympics which witnessed the rise of "an ugly new era of assertiveness and intolerance". He predicted that 2008 could resemble the situation in 1989 where the presence of a huge international media might lead to political demonstrations and the disinclination of the authorities to readily resort to force. Mann also predicted that prior to the Games, there will be a period of tolerance for political dissent and opposition.

- In the case of China, the mistake lies in the assumption that change is coming. Hey, the whole paradigm may turn out to be wrong

- It sounded as if the US is a an experienced yet weary trainer bringing China to a "diplomatic version of obedience school." But the question that needs to be asked is - just who is integrating who?

DPRK Making Iraq Look Like a Democracy?

The following is as relevant today as it was in 2003 when it was first written.

In their book Nuclear North Korea A Debate on Engagement Strategy, Victor D. Cha and David C. Kang wrote that the stakes for U.S. policy towards North Korea are far too high to base a public policy debate on pundits and op-ed contributors.

After all, debates in the U.S., according to the two authors, are informed "more by partisan recriminations about who screwed up the policy than by North Korean behavior."

Quoting a former commander of the U.S. forces in Korea General Gary Luck, the book noted that a sober but succinct estimate if things go bad will amount to "one million and one trillion." That is, the costs of going to war over North Korea's nuclear program would work out to one million casualties and one trillion dollars in estimated industrial damage and lost business.

The two authors said what they tried to do was to show that North Korea is complex but not complicated - i.e. its actions and behavior - no matter how deplorable - are comprehensible.

"And because they are understandable (as opposed to irrational), there is a basis for diplomacy," they wrote.

But then it does not help that some do not want diplomacy with one of the world's most secretive regime.

According to Nicholas Kristof who was also quoted in the book: "[The DPRK regime] is about as unpalatable a diplomatic partner as one can imagine, making Iraq look like a democracy."

But really, who cares if one's diplomatic partner is "palatable" or not (you are not carving him up for dinner, are you?). When there's work to be done, there's work to be done.

China and Harmonious Society

Attended a talk this week by Prof. Qin Yaqing (秦亚青) and a few thoughts that I took away with me:

- China's initial quest for a harmonious society has now been extended into the global arena. Beijing sees the extension as a logical one and a natural progression. It sees value in cooperating with the international system, as well as major and other players. After all, China has been beneficiary, participant, defender - and in time to come, reformer - of the international system.

- China will become a full member of the international society, and will undertake greater diplomatic efforts to avoid and resolve conflicts. Hence, Sino-U.S. cooperation will be crucial in creating a more harmonious world.

- A harmonious world of course does not exist, hence China's desire to create one!

- In reply to a question as to why the answer to "Who is China?" should not be "the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Qin's reply was that CCP is not the same as it was 50 or even several years ago, and that the Party had been evolving. (You know, I would have answered exactly the same way.)

Harry Wu's Description of Mao's Railway (and other) Quirks

Some of us will remember Harry Wu (吴弘达, pictured in a dated photo here) as the Chinese-American who spent years under China's harsh detention system, and later started the Laogai Research Foundation (劳改基金会) in the United States to expose the horrors of China's forced detention system.

He was also the source of a diplomatic standoff between the United State and China in 1995 after he was arrested for slipping into Chinese labor camps to obtain incriminating evidence against the country's detention system.

After his arrest, then First Lady Hilary Clinton threatened not to attend the Fourth World Conference on Women sponsored by the United Nations and held in Beijing that year unless Wu was released.

Anyway in his book Troublemaker, One Man's Crusade Against China's Cruelty, Wu wrote about the royal treatment he had received after his arrest.

He said "they never put handcuffs on me, never search my bag" and "treated me like a captured dignitary." Well, all because of his new status as an American citizen. Otherwise, he was sure he would be thrown like a rat into the deepest of dungeons.

Reflecting about his arrest, Wu had this to say:

"On my three successful trips, I had penetrated the empty spaces of China, where the lost souls are hidden, but now I was an honored guest, riding the rails in my own private car. I had achieved the highest station in Chinese life. I was being treated like Chairman Mao."

"Our wise and caring chairman almost never flew on his spur-of-the-moment journeys, so his staff kept entire railway trains ready for him. In his raging paranoia, Mao felt that one special railroad train would be too easy to sabotage, so his staff had to maintain three identical trains, and he would personally choose one at the last moment. I've always wondered why, if Chairman Mao was so universally beloved, anybody would conspire to blow up his train."

"Because the chairman never slept or made love at predictable hours, whenever he wanted a little peace and quiet, without the clattering of the wheels underneath him, the train should be shunted to a siding, an entire province thrown into chaos with no explanation."

Of course Mao could do anything he pleased, since he was the emperor. And no prizes for guessing where Mao's northern comrade (the one with the bouffant hairstyle) picked up his railway quirks from.

Kobe Earthquake Impetus for Growth of Civil Society

According to Frank Schwartz, the most dramatic demonstration of the limitations of the state and the growing prominence of civil society came in 1995.

On January 17 that year, the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake struck the Kobe-Osaka area, killing 6,430 people and forcing another 310,000 to evacuate their homes. (See photo above for partial devastation)

In his book The State of Civil Society in Japan, Schwartz noted that the disparity between public and private responses to the disaster could not have been starker.

"Despite the devastation, jurisdictional disputes and red tape paralyzed the government's relief efforts; dismayed by the disorganization of the government's efforts, about 1.3 million volunteers converged on the affected area and spontaneously organized themselves," Schwartz wrote.

Apart from emergency relief on the heels of the earthquake, official financial assistance did not go beyond low-interest loans and the provision of public housing.

As can be imagined, the spontaneous outpouring of voluntary efforts was widely reported by the media who inevitably compared the public and private responses to the catastrophe.

Indeed, even though the media had started paying attention to the importance of civil society prior to the earthquake, the catastrophe itself and the media attention it generated raised people's consciousness about the contributions that citizen or unincorporated groups could make.

Why the 1995 Tokyo Subway Attack

Finally figured out after all these years why Japan's Aum Shinrikyo placed sarin gas in Tokyo's subway system in 1995.

Apparently, founder Asahara Shoko (pictured above right) lost a bid for election to the Diet, as did several adherents of Aum who also stood for election.

Having predicted victory, Asahara, according to Helen Hardacre, was shocked to find that society had overwhelmingly rejected him.

As Hardacre wrote: "Thereafter, Asahara gave up the idea of peaceful coexistence with society in favor of creating an alternative government with himself as theocrat."

Hence on the night of June 27, 1994, he celebrated the completion of this new system with his closest leaders and ordered them to carry out the religion's first attack using sarin gas. The attack was aimed at the District Court of Matsumoto, which was conducting a trial challenging Aum's purchase of land. It later emerged that Aum had been developing weapons technology through a science and technology team that had experimented with sarin gas on an Australian sheep property since 1993.

Fearing a police investigation, Asahara ordered the March 20, 1995, attack on the Tokyo subway system as a diversionary tactic.

Five Aum members boarded subway trains bound for Tokyo's government center. Each man got off his train a station or two in advance, dropping two small plastic bags to the floor, piercing them with the sharpened tip of an umbrella, and mingling the contents to produce sarin gas.

TBS Violation of Media Ethics

The following case study can either be seen as 1) the militant relationship between one Japanese cult group and society, and mostly, 2) a violation of media ethics by a media organization.

First, the Aum Shinrikyo. Most of us would remember it as the cult group responsible for placing sarin gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995, an incident which killed 12 and hospitalized over 5,000, and led to a national backlash against cult groups in the country.

Basically, Aum believers were pressured to leave their families and abandon secular employment in favor of all-volunteer labor for the religion, frequently in the religion's computer-manufacturing business. Ordained members were also expected to donate all their resources. This naturally led relatives of Aum members to band together to take action against the group.

Sakamoto Tsutsumi was an attorney from Yokohama representing the interests of one such group of aggrieved relatives, and was interviewed in October 1989 (six years before the sarin attack) by the Tokyo Broadcasting Station (TBS). (See photo above for exterior view of TBS)

When Aum leaders later heard about the interview, they turned up at TBS and demanded to be shown the segment on Sakamoto, in which the lawyer called the group a "fake", and charging it with kidnapping, extortion and other crimes.

Aum leaders demanded that the broadcast be cancelled, and eventually a deal was struck, granting TBS an exclusive interview with Asahara Shoko, a key Aum leader, in return for the cancellation of the damaging critique by Sakamoto.

Two weeks after the deal was struck, Sakamoto, his wife, and infant son disappeared without a trace. An Aum badge was found in their apartment. An although TBS broadcast this news along with footage of people distributing handbills calling on anyone with information to come forward, the network remained silent about having shown Aum the video of Sakamoto threatening to expose the religion.

Later, Asahara granted the promised interview, but the interviewer made no inquiries into the possibility of an Aum connection with the Sakamoto affair.

Indeed, TBS remained silent about the event for 6 and a half years, until a Diet investigation was held that year. By that time, the bodies of the Sakamotos had been found at sites identified by Aum members.

TBS General Director Okawa Mitsuyuki initially denied that the network provided an advance showing of the program to Aum leaders, but later admitted that it did so and subsequently covered up the affair. Two staff members were dismissed, and Okawa was eventually forced to resign.

According to Helen Hardacre, the incident had shown how a network had protected its access to a religion at the expense of its duty to inform the public and the police.

As Hardacre wrote: "In keeping silent about Aum leaders' violent reaction to Sakamoto's views, TBS withheld information that could have led to the exposure of criminal activities in Aum a full six years before the Tokyo subway attack, probably preventing that disaster ... to say nothing of numerous kidnappings and unlawful confinements, the manufacture of weapons and illegal drugs, and the use of those drugs to silence dissidents."

Japanese Media Disdain of Religions?

This is a continuation from yesterday's entry.

Apparently, religion is almost absent from the public sphere, partly due to antagonism toward religion among journalists, and partly due to a general timidity among religious groups of media exposure.

As Helen Hardacre pointed out, in much of the developed world, the relation between the media and religion is generally positive. But in the case of Japan, coverage of religion in the media is limited and in the case of new religious movements, generally negative.

Indeed, according to Muro Tadashi, traditional print and broadcast media in Japan even maintained an informal taboo on reporting good news about religion or even legal verdicts favorable to religion.

How come? It seems that at the end of the 19th century, new religious movements first appeared in the pages of Japanese newspapers as material for scandalous articles. The religion Renmonkyo was said to have been destroyed by one such attack in the 1890s, and other religions such as Tenrikyo and Hito no Michi were badly damaged by press campaigns that gave them no chance to respond.

Hardacre explained was that when newspapers were first expanding to achieve nationwide readership, sensationalist exposes of religion were used to boost circulation (hmm, has a familiar modern day twist to it), as well as to present the media as the champions of science, medicine, rationality, and modernity.

Hardacre added: "Journalists constructed religion as a straw man representing the opposite qualities of superstition, irrationality, and opposition to modernity. At this first, early stage, religion had neither effective access to media nor media of its own, so it was unable to defend itself, or to influence the terms of its relations with (the) media."

But how come things did not change much even after religious groups began to create their own media outlets to get their point of views across?

Japan's Religious Intolerance?

One would have imagined that an advanced and progressive country like Japan would have greater tolerance for religions. But not so, it seems.

According to Helen Hardacre in "After Aum: Religion and Civil Society in Japan" (The State of Civil Society in Japan, Frank J. Schwartz and Susan J. Pharr, 2003), Japanese religious organizations operate schools, museums, parks, and hospitals; home for orphans, the elderly, and the handicapped; rehabilitation facilities for the infirm and released prisoners, and a host of volunteer social services.

"But far from enjoying public trust, religion's position in Japanese society is vulnerable. Recent opinion polls show that only a minority of the population regards religious organizations as trustworthy, while a majority believe that there is no justification for continuing religions' tax privileges," Hardacre wrote.

Part of this distrust for religious organizations might have a lot to do with the aftermath of the Aum Shrinrikyo subway attacks using sarin gas in the 90s, as well as a whole host of other historical factors.