From the Motherland to the Holy Land…

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I’m off to Israel for the next 12 days.

Coincidentally, there is a huge issue tying all three countries — the U.S., China and Israel — together: Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel will be sending a delegation to China later this month to persuade China to sanction Iran so that Iran might decide it’s against their interests to keep trying to make nukes.

China, of course, prefers to just negotiate with Iran. Though Israel has gotten Russia on board somewhat, China is a stubborn little child and is unlikely to back down because of a) their ties to Iran, but mostly b) pressure from the West, which it hates.

Ye Hailin, the international relations professor quoted in the article, showed a keen understanding of how Iran works and China’s position: Iran’s desire to develop “nuclear power” cannot be measured with money, and ties in deeply with their dignity and honor. In the same vein, China will lose face (OH HELL NO) if it bows to Western pressure and get very little appreciation in return. Naturally, articles like this one won’t entice China to come around any more.

China is still a developing country from more than just an economic standpoint. Psychologically, Beijing has developed about as much as a 5-year-old. Note to Beijing: The world will never take you seriously, no matter how fast you develop or how big your economy is, until you start being responsible for goodness’ sake without needing recognition for it.

Temple fair-hopping in Beijing

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Spring Festival in China is a must-do on anyone’s list. I was a little miffed before about not having any real plans (a week off from work is an excellent time to go somewhere!), but now I’m really glad I stayed put in China.

This has been one of my favorite weeks in China so far, and I’m not sure if there’s another occasion that could top it. I don’t think it’s entirely because I got off work and there are fewer people, either. I mentioned the holiday spirit earlier, which makes the city more enjoyable. I’m back in Beijing now, and we’ve been hitting up the miao huis, or temple fairs, which are traditional Spring Festival events that are like local/state fairs and carnivals back in the U.S. They’re incredibly like them, in fact — the usual games, food, rides and random stuff to buy. Lots of people, but lots of fun, too.

Head on over to the photo gallery for snapshots.

CNY fireworks show puts Fourth of July to shame

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The Chinese are so different so often that sometimes it’s easy to forget they still are fundamentally like the rest of us.* Enter the Lunar New Year. The atmosphere leading up to the big day is something akin to the end of the year for us Christians/Westerners. The warm holiday spirit infuses everybody and everything. People are happy, animated and generous; there is an electricity and excitement that even a complete hermit or someone who had just come out from under a rock would be hard pressed to miss.

And then, when the clock strikes midnight, something really magical happens. Or it did last night. There was no 10-second countdown. The Chinese countdown lasts much longer and builds up for days. Fireworks, firecrackers and sparklers go off randomly during the day and night the week before, gradually more and more often in anticipation. And then–

Up on the 32nd floor of a downtown Tianjin hotel, we got a fantastic view of the city from our room. And as far as our eyes could see, there were fireworks going off in every corner, every street. Imagine! — this was happening all across the country!** It was near-spiritual to witness. We’ve never seen anything like it. The Chinese went crazy! More gunpowder was used that night than in the two World Wars combined! We watched for about 15 minutes, crawled back into bed and fell asleep to the blasts, which died down within an hour but lasted into the night.

* I don’t mean to imply that they’re not people — just that they’re really different.

**Granted, Tianjin is a relatively big city, so perhaps in the little villages, the show wasn’t so spectacular.

Reining in the tiger

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Spring Festival is still three days away and there is an official week-long holiday for it, but people are already starting to celebrate. The city is clearing out. Every morning, there has been fewer and fewer people on the streets and bus to work. I like it!

Someone somewhere is setting off fireworks right now. I’ve heard a few these past few days; I’ve seen smoke so far, but not yet a show.

I’ll be off to Tianjin for a few days Saturday. The smart foreigners have fled the country, but I’m looking forward to the temple fairs — if I can find any. My first real Chinese New Year!

Latest Internet meme is superficially heartening, still not empowering

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I don’t have a lot of faith in the Chinese: They have bad tastes, they’re generally disgusting and I may not have witnessed a bigger herd of sheep ever in my life or a group of people so unwilling to take the lead on and responsibility for anything. But every so often, I am reminded why.

Such as today, when Tan Zuoren was sentenced to five years in prison for “incitement to subversion” of state power. Tan is an activist and environmentalist in Chengdu, Sichuan Province. He had been working on an independent investigation into the collapse of school buildings in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake and trying to ascertain the names of some 5,000 children who died as a result. He had publicly blamed the government for the schools’ shoddy construction, but the cited reason for his sentence was comments he had made in e-mail messages about the 1989 crackdown on demonstrators at Tian’anmen Square. The court never mentioned his earthquake investigation, though this is the obvious suspected reason.

China has a handful of such activists, willing to speak out against the government and criticize it for its (perceived) wrongdoings. A lot of them, like Tan, are imprisoned. The most recent case involved Liu Xiaobo, who was sentenced to 11 years for his involvement with Charter 08 (a petition calling for freedom of speech, human rights and free elections, among other things). Ai Weiwei, an outspoken artist and supreme critic of the Chinese government, has so far managed to avoid being arrested.

When dissenting voices are quelled so swiftly (in Tan’s case, the verdict was handed down in under 10 minutes), and a stamp of government approval is a prerequisite for everything, few people will bother to think for themselves. There’s a saying in China: You can do as you please, as long as it pleases the government. The deputy program director of Amnesty International in Hong Kong, Roseann Rife, summed up Tan’s verdict nicely:

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Monday morning football

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It’s one of the most important times of the year — the Super Bowl is back, and this year promises to be one of the most exciting games since…well, the Giants-Patriots in 2008.

Here in China, several of the expat bars are hosting Super Bowl breakfasts. Kickoff will be around 7:30 a.m. local time on a Monday. What does that do for the atmosphere? I wish I could find out; I’m pumped up and ready to go, but couldn’t get put on assignment. So: I’m stuck in the office right now searching for streams from the U.S. so I can watch the commercials, too. I’ve got chips and beer, and I’m thinking about pizza, but let’s see how good these streams are…

Go Saints!

Freedom of speech

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Stanley Fish has a good blog post at the Times, where he discusses two approaches to the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling on Citizens United v. Federal Election commission. Basically, the SC ruled 5-4 to overturn bans on corporate political spending, including McCain-Feingold. The case revisited the issue of the free speech rights of corporations — namely, if they have the same rights as US citizens, whom the First Amendment protects. (If you’ve seen The Corporation, you know the corporation is a strange entity with an identity crisis.) Where you stand on this issue may inform your argument of whether it may sometimes be appropriate to limit speech of corporations, especially if you think the First Amendment shouldn’t apply to them. But the corporate angle aside, the SC has realized that it is indeed sometimes appropriate to limit speech: hate speech, speech that incites violence, pornography — restrictions on these kinds of speech have all been upheld. To use a cliche, you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater when there isn’t one. The SC has recognized the dangers of speech and the consequences unrestricted speech could bring. One of those consequences lies at the heart of this case: Unrestricted free speech could actually restrict free speech.

Stevens is worried — no, he is certain — that the form of speech Kennedy celebrates will corrupt the free flow of information so crucial to the health of a democratic society. “[T]he distinctive potential of corporations to corrupt the electoral process [has] long been recognized.” […] Behind such strong statements is a twin fear: (1) the fear that big money will not only talk (the metaphor that converts campaign expenditures into speech and therefore into a matter that merits First Amendment scrutiny), but will buy votes and influence, and (2) the fear that corporations and unions, with their huge treasuries, will crowd out smaller voices by purchasing all the air time and print space.

So do we limit the speech rights of certain people (or corporations) to protect the speech rights of others (in this case, a greater number of people)? Is this even a legitimate fear? The majority thought not:

The question of where that discussion might take the country is of less interest than the overriding interest in assuring that it is full and free, that is, open to all and with no exclusions based on a calculation of either the motives or the likely actions of individual or corporate speakers. In this area, the majority insists, the state cannot act paternally. Voters are adults who must be “free to obtain information from diverse sources”; they are not to be schooled by a government that would protect them from sources it distrusts.

Instead of a paternalistic government deciding for us what kind of information can reach us, the SC throws its faith behind the mysterious marketplace of ideas and lets market forces become the arbiter of what we know. And yet, by deciding to invest in the marketplace of idea, isn’t the government still filtering the information we get?

“Faith” in the marketplace of ideas may not be the best term to use. As Fish points out, Oliver Wendell Holmes acknowledged that consequences could be quite bad — but oh well. Still, some part of me thinks that for most anyone who advocates an open and free marketplace, he will need, at his very core, to believe that people will choose what’s good and right, or at the very least, that whatever does happen is what’s good and right. It’s a very passive approach.

…Unlike another country I am reminded of. If you want to talk about paternal governments, the Chinese government seems to take the complete opposite view: no faith in the goodness of the marketplace, and by extension, humanity, but plenty in the goodness of the government. It hinders speech willy-nilly at random points. Two recent — and more humorous — examples come to mind, the “illegal flower tribute,” which became the Internet catchphrase du jour following the 2010 Google Incident, and Han Han’s accidental (but still illegal) “Party Central” reference.

Being in a country so diametrically opposed to the ideas I was brought up to champion is making me more inclined to concede to the principled view and let speech go unfettered. Sure, there is a ton of misinformation and vile spewage in the marketplace of ideas, but most of the time you can find something trustworthy. Not so in China: Ask three different people, whom you would think were reliable sources, and you’ll get three different answers, all of which are right and wrong at the same time. Communication is unclear here, and I suspect the government’s own murky laws governing speech has something to do with it.

China’s disappearing middle class

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China Newsweek’s last issue focused on China’s “disappearing” middle class. Leave it to China to mis-characterize or misinterpret a particularly strange phenomenon — the rise in the cost of living in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai.

The gist of it goes like this: The middle class — which includes small business owners, business/financial people, journalists — is struggling to survive in Beijing, where housing prices are jumping 50 percent in a matter of months. They are spending almost their entire monthly household income on rent or to pay off their apartments, the down payments of which they had to use their parents’ entire life’s savings to pay for. They have little money left for discretionary spending, so no more movies or shopping sprees. It is also harder for recent college graduates (who are expected to become middle-class residents) to become middle class.

Middle-class citizens can no longer afford to buy homes in big cities like Beijing, even after saving for forever, so the middle class must be disappearing! This extraordinary leap in logic can be partially explained by the Chinese obsession with homeownership. Sure, it’s a “goal” and a measure of success in the States, as well, but in China, it’s practically the end-all, be-all. On top of that, the Chinese think the ultimate measure of success is a life in the big city — no other city will do.

Oddly enough, a family moves to Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, and by all measures, their lifestyle seems satisfactory: decent home, friends, quality goods. But the husband still feels “awkward” about it. Why? Hefei is a “secondary” city — and with terminology like that, no one is going to feel good about living there.

So basically, the Chinese put huge pressure on themselves to buy apartments in the big cities, and the huge demand is making housing prices unaffordable. They want homes in the city so badly that they’re literally spending every last mao they have to buy one and then cry that they can’t do or buy anything that middle-class people are supposed to be able to do or buy.

If they were Americans, they’d just do and buy it anyway on credit and rack up a huge debt. But at least they wouldn’t have this identity crisis where they don’t even think of themselves as middle-class anymore.

These Chinese, they don’t know how good they have it. Try living in Brooklyn! The financial crisis has made living there reminiscent of the Holocaust!