In LA

This is a pretty amazing story about a soldier who was hit by an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) that did not detonate and instead remained stuck in his body, and the extraordinary efforts and risks taken by his fellow soldiers to save his life:

Military Medical Team Makes the ‘Toughest Call’; Unexploded Rocket-Propelled Grenade Impales Army Private in Afghanistan

Regardless how I feel about war, I always find the sacrifices that soldiers are willing to make for each other to be extremely admirable and inspiring. Many of us might be willing to risk our own lives to save others, but some face this test day in and day out as part of their job. Much respect.

(post has been edited because I initially assumed the article was about events in Iraq and missed the fact that even the headline said “Afghanistan”. Doh.)

In response to a question from the Associated Press, Yahoo said:

Yahoo is dismayed that citizens in China have been imprisoned for expressing their political views on the Internet.

The Chinese government thought about replying,”We just love it when foreigners try to tell us how to run our country.” But they came to one of two realizations:

1. that the anti-cultural-imperialism dodge only works when the cultural imperialists are in the wrong.
2. that as soon as a local company (perhaps one of Yahoo’s business partners) completely replicates all of Yahoo’s functionality they can cut the unruly foreign company loose and promote a local company who plays by party rules.

Shi Tao, the Chinese reporter Yahoo helped put behind bars, is due to be released from prison in 2015. I wrote about him in this earlier, related post.

It feels like the world is going crazy, with the locus of craziness currently hovering over the East coast of the U.S.A.

1. Virginia Tech killing spree –good god! Hopefully the fact that the killer is getting more than his 15 minutes of fame by sending out a press packet in between killings won’t encourage other publicity-hungry violently-disturbed individuals to follow suit.
2. Congress and Justice Department in standoff –the Justice Department appears to just be ignoring a subpoena for missing and redacted portions of documents issued by the House Judiciary Committee. I tend to think that a lack of accountability at high levels within the government is a bad thing.
3. Supreme Court upholds Federal ban on an abortion procedure. A procedure that, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists includes no exceptions for the physical or mental health of the mother. According to the vast but fumbling-towards-accuracy online encyclopedia Wikipedia: “The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that bans must include exception for threats to the woman’s life, physical health, and mental health”. Guess it’s time to revise that entry.
4. Chocolate under attack! This is an order of magnitude less crazy than the other items, but it bugs me nonetheless, and I need something of less earth-shattering important than the first 3 items to think about as a cool-down exercise: Hershey and other big choco manufacturers are asking the U.S. Food an Drug Administration to “permit them to replace cocoa butter, chocolate’s key ingredient, with vegetable oils and, in the case of milk chocolate, replace whole milk with milk protein concentrates“. If these companies are not going to continue to make chocolate out of the ingredients that define the essence of chocolate, they should come up with a new name and not try to legally redefine the word “chocolate” to mean any sweet bar of saturated fat that happens to be brown. One chocolatier has posted a more nuanced take on the issue.

I would love to see this new 4-hour documentary about China made for Granada-KQED-PBS-BBC entitled China From the Inside.

From the article:

The footage is vast. Cameras traveled to Tibet; Xinjiang, home to many Muslims; the Kazakhstan border; the Gobi Desert; and the Yangtze River. There are interviews with women activists trying to instill self-confidence among rural women (to try to help stave off a high suicide rate); a National People’s Congress delegate comparing communism with U.S. democracy; a Catholic priest practicing religion in an atheist country; and residents who’ve been displaced by the gargantuan construction of the Three Gorges Dam. …an environmental activist talks about the polluted Huai River, its cancer-inducing contaminants ravaging the lives of villagers whose photos he displays. In the segment about women, a factory worker in Guangdong Province talking about her day-to-day life: Working the assembly line and prohibited from talking between 6:08 a.m. and 6:08 p.m.

It’s no surprise that the Chinese government was a little concerned about the making of this documentary, but it sounds as though the government minders assigned to this project deserve much respect for making excuses and leaving the set when sensitive topics were being covered. The fact that the documentary’s director had previously made a 4-part documentary entitled “Hell in the Pacific” about the Nanjing massacre by the Japanese probably helped him get reasonably free access to cover sensitive locations, people, and topics.

Thanks to <shamus> for the link.

Could whoever was updating the great firewall of China about 24 hours ago please double-check your work? The entire internet outside of China, or at least the portion of the net that includes all web traffic (port 80), has been completely inaccessible for the past day. Websites originating outside of China take about 10 minutes to load, if at all. I know you need to occasionally update the great firewall in order to better block any websites that contain unhealthy thoughts or statements critical of the Chinese government that might lead to instability, yadda yadda yadda, but when updating the firewall’s rules it’s important to take care that you not block simply everything. Argh.

Update: It would appear that the net in China is down due to an earthquake in Taiwan. I still blame the firewall, partly because it’s annoying and I like to blame it for things, mostly because if it weren’t for this country’s need to filter the net they’d have more than one point of connection to the outside world –we could all get to yahoo.com just as easily through Russia or Japan as Taiwan if such connections existed. In any case, I hope all the people in Taiwan are OK, I’d know more about this quake if I could get to an English language news website.

Citing political and ethical considerations, Google hasn’t yet launched its free email service, Gmail, in China. But why is this Gmail China login screen online?

Google, in order to comply with Chinese government policy, censors the search results it displays to users who access its www.google.com.cn site (that ‘cn’ at the end of the name indicates a Chinese website). This was big news a little while back, as it marked the moment that the company which proudly cites “Do No Evil” as one of its guiding principles made compromises for the sake of reach and profit that many outside China found distasteful. Google is in good company, Microsoft’s MSN Spaces blocks Chinese users from posting articles that include words like “democracy” and “freedom”, Skype’s text chat here censors certain words, and Yahoo has gone even further in its compliance with Chinese government censorship policies –I’ll return to this topic in a bit. All of these companies justify their actions by saying that they must comply with local regulations when they operate in other countries.Users in China who can read English (such as myself) can still search the web using the good ‘ol www.google.com URL, and get uncensored search results. It’s a pyrrhic victory — you can see the unfiltered results but the sites are generally blocked by the Great Firewall of China, so it feels as if Google is just returning many dead links. For an amusing visual look at how the censorship affects Google image results, see this great side-by-side comparison of a politically sensitive google image search.

Back when Google’s compliance with the Chinese government was a big news item, articles often contained statements such as the following:

Neither Google’s e-mail nor blogging services will be offered in China because the company doesn’t want to risk being ordered by the government to turn over anyone’s personal information.

This is because any company that plants its servers on Chinese soil will place information on those servers within reach of the Chinese government. If Google were to store user’s personal information on servers within China, the Chinese government could request for this information, and Google would have to comply or risk the consequences.

Yahoo found itself in exactly such a sticky situation last year. The Chinese government decided that information posted to the web by a user with an anonymous Yahoo email address was a state secret and asked Yahoo’s Hong Kong office to provide them with the user’s personal information. Yahoo complied, and former Yahoo user Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison. News of Yahoo’s disclosure of the anonymous user’s identity, and a recently discovered case of another unmasked Yahoo user who received an 8 year prison term for discussing pro-democracy issues in a web forum, has caused some people in Western countries to criticize, boycott, and perhaps even advocate divesting from Yahoo and other U.S. internet firms operating in China.

Which brings us back to Google and this post’s title. Google may not be ready yet, politically, to roll-out their anonymous gmail service to Chinese users, but they do appear to have some Gmail China functionality online, ready and waiting for the green light. I know this because out of simple curiousity I added a “.cn” to the “gmail.com” URL in my browser, and lo and behold I reached this Gmail China login screen. Attempts to login fail with a “can’t find the server at mail.google.com.cn” error. This suggests that the login screen is programmed to eventually bring registered users to their mail on servers in China.

I wonder when Gmail China will launch and what criteria Google, the “Don’t Be Evil” company, will use to decide when the time is right.

In a tangentially apropos comment to my Hao Wu post Angus asks “I really enjoy your blog but why do you call it Spiritual Pollution?”

The answer is that the title of the blog is actually In Beijing, which I plan to keep in place. But below the title is space for an amusing or evocative phrase, a subtitle. At the moment, that subtitle is Spiritual Pollution. I love this phrase, it is so colorful, and springs from such a grand utopian vision.

I ran across this great little phrase when I was reading about the Chinese novelist Mian Mian. She wrote a very popular book entitled Candy which was banned by Chinese censors. The barely-fictional book includes both sex and heroin abuse, and I guess the censors weren’t too keen on either topic. Most articles about her mention that authorities or censors have called Mian “a poster child for spiritual pollution.” You can see Mian Mian read some excerpts from Candy on the internet, courtesy of U.S. Public Broadcasting.

I’m embarrassingly ignorant of Chinese history, so it is fun to learn so much about of it by merely investigating one catchy little phrase. The phrase spiritual pollution did not originate with Mian Mian, nor is she the first Chinese novelist accused of spreading spiritual pollution.

Spiritual Pollution’s heyday was back in the early 80s. Deng Xiaoping, a Chinese leader generally described as a reformer, had opened China economically, but was very wary of Western cultural influences. He gave a speech calling for a campaign against spiritual pollution (精神污染 - jīngshenwūrăn) an umbrella phrase used to categorize Western influences, bourgeois attitudes, and anything considered vulgar or anti-party. Painter and author Ma Jian was interrogated by China’s Public Security Bureau and faced arrest on the charge of spiritual pollution after neighbors reported his “bourgeois” activities to the police (activities such as reading xeroxed underground magazines and chatting with dissident friends late at night). Ma fled Beijing and travelled through remote areas of China for 3 years under pseudonyms. He wrote a book about his 3 year journey entitled Red Dust: A Path Through China. The book was translated into English, and I’m now a couple of enjoyable chapters into it.

Prosecutions on the charge of Spiritual Pollution seem to be much less in vogue these days than they were back in ‘83. China has opened up culturally to the point where kids here happily flaunt NBA basketball jerseys and watch the latest US blockbusters on readily available pirate DVDs without worried neighbors turning them in to the police. But though the phrase may have lost its (punitive) bite, the comments from censors about Mian Mian show that it is not dead.

Here’s a bit more history on the phrase. According to an article entited China; Rectification and Reform:

… A campaign against “spiritual pollution” was initiated by a speech given at the Second Plenum by Deng Xiaoping (see Policy Toward Intellectuals , ch. 4). The campaign targeted “decadent, moribund ideas of the bourgeoisie” that questioned the suitability of the socialist system or the legitimacy of the party’s leading role. It also sought to establish a basis for ideological continuity between the emerging younger generation and the older, civil-war-era veterans. Conservative Political Bureau members attempted to use the campaign to rectify what they considered decadent behavior and corrosive liberal thought. Following this example, some lower-level party cadres began to exhibit behavior similar to that of the mass campaigns of the Cultural Revolution. Young men and women with long hair or Western-style clothing were subjected to ridicule and abuse. Peasants who had prospered were accused of selfishness; in response, some ceased to participate in rural reform. Intellectuals were again under suspicion, and party and government cadres adopted a “wait-and-see” attitude to avoid making political errors. …

I hope this answers your question.

I was planning to collect and post my thoughts on the disappearance of Chinese filmmaker and blogger Hao Wu, but I’m happy to report that he has reappeared before my slow thought processes could finish. Hao Wu, a Chinese-born U.S. permanent resident, was working on a documentary film about an underground Christian Church in China when he was “detained” by police on February 22, 2006. Hao was an active blogger and journalist, and it is unknown whether he was detained for these activities or for filmmaking. He was never charged with a crime and was not allowed to meet with an attorney. His case received a lot of attention the world over, and is documented at the Free Hao Wu website. On my recent trip to Minnesota, I was very happy to see his face on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Thankfully, Hao Wu has been released after almost five months in prison and is now resting with his family in Beijing. I am glad, and wish them all well. He sounds like a cool guy, and I hope to see his film one day.

There are still many people who have been detained or imprisoned in China for exercising what many consider to be a fundamental human right, freedom of speech. I hope that the Chinese legal system will further develop to offer Chinese people these and other rights they are supposed to be granted in the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China, such as the freedom of speech granted them in article 35, freedom of religious belief (article 36), freedom from unlawful detention (article 37), etc etc.

The creator of the English language magazines That’s Shanghai and That’s Beijing, both very good sources of information and entertainment for expats living in those cities, has apparently had control of the magazines wrested from him and is now airing his gripes in a Prospect magazine article entitled That’s China. The tagline:

After seven years building up a magazine empire in China, I had it stolen by the state.

Ouch. That sucks. The article includes some great little stories about all the legal and procedural hurdles Mark and the magazine staff faced in order to put out their magazine. It is worth a read. a few more related links:

• Welsh Guardsman’s revenge: the return of Mark Kitto
• Cowardly Wiley? Mark Kitto in the news again
• That’s China!: Mark Kitto tells his tale
• Briton fights for rights to Chinese magazine titles

Wow, this is a crazy one. First (some) Muslims the world over get (extremely) riled up about a ‘cartoons of Mohammed’ contest in Denmark and the republication of the cartoons in papers across Europe, and then an Iranian paper announces that it’s running a ‘best anti-semitic cartoon’ contest in retaliation, and now an Israeli paper has proudly boasted that Israelis will be able to make the best anti-semitic cartoons, and has launched a new contest, the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoon Contest.

No joke. Or lots of jokes. See it how you like.