China, Olympics, language, culture, history

singapore yog

2010-08-24T04:33:00.000-07:00

White male seeking sexy Asian women...

2009-06-15T19:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/06/16/east_west_sex/

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Ready, willing and disabled

2008-12-07T18:17:00.000-08:00

Ready, willing and disabled
September 27, 2008
Behind the glamour of the Beijing Paralympics lay a fierce controversy over which athletes should be allowed to compete, writes Jordan Baker.
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It was like any cafeteria, anywhere in the world. There were soggy scrambled eggs, stale bread rolls and long queues for bad coffee. Yet at the same time, it was like nowhere else on Earth. Next to the long tables and plastic seats, a Ukrainian in a wheelchair queued for sausages behind Tunisians shaking with cerebral palsy. A sombrero-wearing Mexican with one arm puzzled over the toaster with two Australian quadriplegics.
A tall beauty from Finland whose steel prosthetic leg extended from her thigh perused the salad bar with a young, tanned midget. He wore a blond mohawk; she wore a T-shirt reading, "Yes, he's my boyfriend".
For the thousands of people with disabilities who competed at the Paralympic Games in Beijing, the dining hall in the athletes village was a kind of paradise where there was no staring, no pity and everything was wheelchair-accessible.
There was a spirit of brotherhood and camaraderie - inside the village gate, at least.
Paralympians have a reputation for being the good guys of sport: the brave, inspiring ones who have overcome huge odds just to get there. Well, it is not always true. Competition is fierce, cheating can be rife, and the back-room politics are intense.
This year, passions ran as high at the officials' cocktail parties as they did on the track as international delegates debated a controversial question: just how badly off does an athlete need to be to be eligible to compete at the Paralympics?
The debate arose from a push to cut the least disabled events from the Games program. Under the proposal, track and field athletes with lower arm amputation and mild cerebral palsy would have to take their chances in able-bodied competition.
The move has sparked a furious response from countries such as Australia, who say it would leave those athletes with nowhere to compete.
Australia's response is partly driven by self-interest. The teams the country sends overseas have fewer severely disabled athletes than other countries' teams. If the new regime had been in place in Beijing, Australia would have missed out on two of its 10 track and field gold medals.
And as at the Olympics, medals mean money.
The controversy stems from the constant burden of disabled sport: classification. The classification system is there to make competition fair: to ensure amputees race against amputees, for example, and not against the blind or people in wheelchairs.
But it also makes the sport difficult to understand and leaves it vulnerable to protests and controversy.
In Athens, for example, there was a classification scandal surrounding two tall Tunisian midgets.
The Tunisians were included in throwing events for dwarfs, as there were not enough midgets to justify an event of their own. Classifiers decided that the requirement for competition would not be dwarfism, but height.
The midgets were slightly taller than the dwarfs. They could also fully extend their arms, as midgets' bodies are proportional and dwarfs' are not. The Tunisians broke world records, and the dwarfs were furious.
"These two are tall athletes," the Australian thrower Julie Isles told the Herald.
"Well, I'm saying they are tall because they are around four-foot-nine [145 centimetres]. I'm nearly four foot and some of us are around four-foot-three. They have arm lengths as long as yours. It's making it so hard for us."
Classification is also one of many ways Paralympians can cheat.
While paraplegics can block their bladders or sit on sharp objects to prompt a performance-enhancing physical reaction to pain they cannot feel, others, such as athletes with impaired vision, simply lie in medical tests so they can compete with athletes who are more severely disabled.
At the Sydney Games, a group of Spaniards pretended to be intellectually disabled to enter the basketball competition, hoping to claim a cash reward for gold medals that had been offered by the Spanish Government.
As a result, intellectually disabled events were dropped from Athens and Beijing. They will be revived in London, much to the disapproval of physically disabled athletes who believe the inclusion of the "IDs" will confuse the Games with the Special Olympics.
The latest plan put forward by international classifiers for London would cut the number of limb amputees and mild cerebral palsy athletes to make room for more wheelchair events.
National committees were invited to comment on the proposal in Beijing and many opposed it.
Advocates of reform argue that less-disabled runners' times are not far off those of able-bodied athletes and that the Paralympic Games should be reserved for people for whom competing alongside able-bodied athletes would be impossible.
Critics cite runners such as Australia's Katrina Webb, who won gold in Atlanta and Athens. She was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy only six months before the 1996 Games, while she was 19 and on a netball scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport.
Doctors noticed a slight weakness in her right leg and she was diverted from netball to the Paralympic program.
Australia does not field teams in the sports for more severely disabled people, such as goalball (a kind of soccer for the blind, which is played in silence) or boccia, which is played by those with the most severe disability.
Opponents say disabilities such as arm amputations and mild cerebral palsy are still severe and mean the athletes will never be able to compete fairly with able-bodied athletes. Without the Games, there would be no forum for them.
In Beijing, Australia's Heath Francis, who was seven when he caught his forearm in a meat mincer 20 years ago, won gold in the 100 metres, 200m and 400m. He is in the T46 class for athletes with a single above-elbow amputation and runs with an artificial arm to improve his balance. But under the new guidelines, that might not be enough of a disability.
"For sprinting, the upper body is as important as the lower body," Francis said. "When you look at Olympic runners, their arms are almost as big as their legs. The strength of your upper body determines the speed of your legs."
Able-bodied athletes do heavy weight training, but Francis cannot do most of it. "You try to modify them and make the best of it, and I'm lucky that [my coach] thinks laterally, but it's still not as good as the exercises I could do with two arms.
"That then translates onto the track, about how much power and force I can generate with my legs. I'm restricted with the strength in my arms."
Francis's times are not close to the best able-bodied runners, even on the national circuit. The Australian 100m record is 9.93 seconds. At the Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt ran the 100m in 9.69 seconds. Francis won the arm amputee class 100m in 11.05 seconds.
Also in Beijing, Evan O'Hanlon, a 20-year-old sprinter from Hunters Hill, won gold in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay, all in world record time. Lisa McIntosh, of Victoria, won gold in the 100m and 200m.
Both are in the T38 category for those with the least severe cerebral palsy, another group that faces the axe under the new regime.
McIntosh's disability is noticeable but O'Hanlon's is not, partly because he has spent years teaching himself how to hide it. "If I don't want you to know, you won't know," O'Hanlon said of his disability at the Games.
Iryna Dvoskina, who studied coaching at university in Ukraine, looks after Francis and O'Hanlon at the Australian Institute of Sport. She said sprinters with cerebral palsy could never compete at a national level, as they have to manage increased build-up of lactic acid in their muscles, longer recovery and weakness in parts of their body.
"Cerebral palsy is a brain injury: you have an injury in the locomotive centre of your brain, which is responsible for movement," she said. "They have spasticity, and after big training sessions or fast and explosive exercise, spasticity can increase."
Dvoskina has written to the International Paralympics Committee's athletics division, arguing the events should be kept.
"Athletes like Evan and Heath cannot compete against able-bodied," she said.
"There are a lot of reasons. They can't do the same amount of exercise as able-bodied people can do. Technically, they can't do the same things. If they can't be equal with able-bodied but cut these classes, what can they do?"
Occasionally, athletes with disabilities may have an edge over their able-bodied counterparts. The South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius was initially banned from able-bodied competition because of the extra bounce from his carbon prosthetics. That decision was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, although Pistorius did not qualify for the Olympics.
The classification issue is murky, especially when technology also creates major advantages for athletes from wealthy countries. Some run on the world's best prostheses; poor athletes have been known to make their own from foam and leather.
Whether Francis and O'Hanlon are allowed to compete in London or not, the classification debate will keep raging in the world of disabled sport.
The athletes' village, however, will still be what it was in Beijing this year: a rare oasis where people with disabilities will be embraced, regardless of colour, creed or classification.
The Herald journalist Jordan Baker served as a volunteer with the Australian Paralympic team in Beijing.

Dirt returns as city airs its laundry

2008-12-07T18:12:00.000-08:00

Dirt returns as city airs its laundry

Mary-Anne Toy
September 20, 2008

POSTCARD FROM BEIJING

The Olympic circus has finally left town and signs of regular Beijing life are slowly returning.

The cardboard recycling man with his rusty tricycle is back on the street near my home after being forced into temporary retirement along with the rest of the city's mum-and-dad scrap merchants. An old man in a dusty Mao-era suit was sitting on the footpath this week in a sign that homeless people and other undesirables are being allowed back in public. South of Tiananmen Square, in one of the old hutong neighbourhoods of small laneways, people are airing quilts and hanging washing outdoors again, taking advantage of the Olympic-improved air quality and the glorious autumn weather.

And after a blissful month without advertising text messages, my mobile phone is again buzzing with offers of everything from cheap tickets to flights, tutoring, fake receipts (for tax evasion) and illegal satellite television dishes. During the Olympics all of these were miraculously diverted to make way for Olympic-related news updates.

No one is looking forward to the return of Beijing's notorious traffic and pollution, even though the bans on construction and the driving restrictions have forced thousands of businesses to close or restrict operations, and driven hundreds of thousands to leave the city for lack of work.

I hope the vast improvements in disabled access due to the Paralympics will remain and be extended. Permanently lifting the ban on guide dogs would be a start. The ban, which stopped China's first Paralympian gold medallist, Ping Yali, using Beijing's first guide dog, Lucky, in public, will surely end now that both have starred in the Paralympics opening ceremony.

All the traffic and pollution measures imposed on July 20 are due to end today. Dozens of cranes that dot the skyline - which is still murky or invisible too often - will be back in action as construction starts up again. The number plate restrictions that halved traffic finish this weekend (although some restrictions on Government vehicles remain) despite public support for their retention.

State-controlled media have published several surveys showing most people wanted to make them permanent, despite the inconvenience, especially to businesses which have had to hire second vehicles or see their deliveries halved. But no one is betting the city will take such radical action.

The October 1 National Day holidays mean that many of the Olympic decorations and greenery will be maintained for the traditional influx of Chinese visitors to the capital. Millions are expected to flood to the Olympic Green to see the Bird's Nest, Water Cube and other venues. In fact, if the municipal government, free of the restrictive Olympic sponsorship rules, allows local food and drink vendors to set up shop in the vast Olympic Green, it will boast a more festive atmosphere than during the Games.

Those wondering if Beijing will slow down may find the opposite occurs. The flow of visitors should increase if the Government loosens visa controls imposed to keep potential troublemakers out. Beijing is likely to keep attracting international tourists, as well as hordes of domestic visitors, especially as the petty or bizarre restrictions on daily life are ended.

And the most common excuse in the past two months - "It's the Olympics", usually delivered with a shrug - for everything from bans on live music to the local Tex Mex restaurant taking macaroni cheese off the menu, is now officially past its use-by date.

Have you done a Ratner lately???

2008-09-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

Recently, China Daily published remarks by an Israeli windsurfer regarding his Olympic hosts. He called the Chinese “shits” and complained about their lack of foreign language skills, obtuseness, etc. The Israeli Embassy went into overdrive trying to placate the Chinese who immediately cancelled a diplomatic dinner. The athlete himself had to retract his remarks and apologise to the Chinese.

Which just shows that you cannot speak your mind when it comes to international politics (as well as many other things). Or at least you have to be as convoluted about it as Lord Curzon was when he spoke of the Chinese over 100 years ago by highlighting the “…sullen resistance of national character, self-confident and stolid … wrapped in the mantle of a superb and paralyzing conceit.” At least he could hope that Chinese would have trouble understanding exactly what he meant by it.

Read some more blunders below:
The most famous of them all, so much so that such gaffes are now known as "doing a Ratner", was when Gerald Ratner joked about his family's jewellery business as selling "total crap".
He wiped £500 million from the value of Ratners jewellers with one speech in 1991 when he said: "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, 'How can you sell this for such a low price?' I say, because it's total crap."
He added that his stores' earrings were "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long".
But other gaffs have followed.
In 2003, Matt Barrett, the Barclays chief executive, shocked observers by suggesting that consumers should stay clear of his company's product, the Barclaycard, because it was so expensive.
Giving evidence to a panel of MPs, he admitted he would not use one himself.
He said: "I do not borrow on credit cards. I have four young children. I give them advice not to pile up debts on their credit cards."
Asked in an interview in 2001 to clarify the target market for the Topman clothing chain, the firm's brand director, David Shepherd, replied: "Hooligans or whatever."
He went on: "Very few of our customers have to wear suits for work. They'll be for his first interview or first court case."
The company later suggested that the word "hooligan" would not be seen as an insult among its customers.
Alain Levy, chief executive of the music company EMI, offended most of Finland when he said that he had cut the roster of artists on a subsidiary label the company owned because there were not that many people in the country "who could sing".
In 2006, John Pluthero, the UK chairman of Cable & Wireless, sent a memo to staff, which said: "Congratulations, we work for an underperforming business in a crappy industry and it's going to be hell for the next 12 months."
He warned of job losses and added: "If you are worried that it all sounds very hard, it's time for you to step off the bus."

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The “Game” after the Olympics Games

2008-09-03T02:07:00.000-07:00

The “Game” after the Olympics Games

I met a Canadian expat in Beijing who spent about 5 years here. I will call him Andy. Andy speaks some 50 essential phrases of Chinese with fluency and panache of a real Beijinger.

He introduced me to some rules for Beijing that he found useful:

1. do not expect any Chinese to speak English.
2. when they speak, do not expect them to understand you or you to understand them.
3. when they understand you, do not expect them to think like you.
4. best, do not expect them to think at all for they have a set way of thinking that is unfathomable to foreigners but is bound to produce confusion.
5. best not to ask for any directions as you will invariably be misdirected.
6. when you think you are having free information or a bargain, they may actually cost you more.
7. unless you really know what you are doing, stay on the tourist circuit and pay the price. At least you know what you are getting (or not getting).

Andy should know. He has been teaching English to Chinese students for a few years. He’s actually been sacked from one college because, he says, he was trying to make students talk and think in English, instead of memorizing grammar rules and meaningless pages of texts. His other job is sitting in the front office of companies as the notional “foreign” partner. He has represented 43 different countries and companies so far. Sometimes he is picked up by a street agent who looks for voice over talent in bars frequented by foreigners. He is paid peanuts, most of the money being pocketed by the pyramid of agents who skim the field. All he has to do is to pretend to lip synch Chinese, with a native voice over. He is the “foreign face” of products and services marketed in China.

He is also a fan of Kiyosaki and Donald Tramp and an avid reader of “The Game” a dating manual for males who think that seduction of women is the only game in town. He is having a ball. He says that to a young Chinese woman the average Chinese male is boring, crude, cigarette smelling and beer drinking brute. A Western man with a smattering of Chinese and a sense of humor is simply irresistible. Most young Chinese women have only had 2 partners – a young boy from their school they “experimented” with and a current boyfriend (but, upon a close questioning, had another boyfriend with whom she had an affair before but forgot about it).

Andy is worried whether he will ever be able to date a Western woman. He is trapped in a honey pot. It is like me saying I will not be able to enjoy Western massage after a Chinese variety. Of course, the honey pot has its downside, like the habitual lying of every girlfriend he had regarding every topic he ever discussed with her. Or her preference for her evening TV series instead of sex with him every time he is randy (which he is a lot of the time, he says). He sometimes feels like an old Olympic ticket sold by touts on the black market for the Chinese to simply boast that they have attended an Olympic event (sleeping with a Westerner who speaks Chinese and has a sense of humor being the next best).

Andy is worried about his future and thinks China is just a trap for people like him. But he enjoys the present while dreaming of becoming rich and famous when he writes his bestseller or makes that elusive business connection.

I was telling him a story about a relative in Moscow who was a sex addict until a jealous husband started chasing after him with a fire axe, and an attractive secretary he hired for her looks who turned out to be a corporate spy who ruined his business. He listened to me while chatting up an eye-catching young waitress in a restaurant we were dining in, pinching her and making her giggle uncontrollably. I am not sure he had heard my story. He was enjoying the only game worth playing during, before, or after the Games in China.

By the way, he told me that many Chinese moved out of Beijing before the Olympics, afraid of terrorism, increased security and loose foreigners. He also said that many Chinese salary men and women working in offices spend many hours on the Internet and chatting on their phones instead of working, like they are supposed to. Andy said that this and their inability to think independently is actually good news for the West. If they were as efficient and hard working and creative as Americans are supposed to be, we’d be in real trouble. But he is afraid that the Chinese girls are going to learn The Game, and that Chinese men will learn to think. He promised he will move out of China then and maybe go to Belarus, which he heard has attractive girls and men who also cannot think. He is learning Belarusian.

The Preening of Beijing

2008-09-03T02:02:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that Beijing was vastly improved for the Olympics. There is the Bird Nest – truly unique structure that will rival world’s top architectural landmarks for notoriety. There are also plans to transform the Water Cube into a recreational swimming and leisure facility for the average Beijinger by moving out the seats and pouring in beach sand instead.

But what is also impressive is the number of small parks blooming with multicolored flowers and rose bushes (gardeners must be a popular profession here) that have been created for the residents. There is one close to my hotel and it is being used actively by people living nearby. Kids roller skate, adults play basketball on paved fields, crocket, and table tennis on all-weather tables (not present in Australia but also present throughout the old Soviet Union) and all manner of sporting gadgets like bicycles and outdoor treadmills, some uniquely Chinese but worthy of imitation everywhere else. Like a round steel structure that allows one to bend backwards and get kinks out of one’s spine. Such outdoor gyms are found in every corner of Beijing, even in the poorest neighborhoods called Hutongs. The Chinese are very clever and inventive about things like this. One can also see people sitting at the outdoor card game tables playing cards in the shade or playing Chinese checkers on the path; competing in picking marbles with chopsticks; singing, dancing and playing traditional musical instruments. They seem to enjoy each other’s company and spend free time effectively in a healthy environment. They are also keeping their minds and bodies active.

Keeping cool in a sticky summer environment is well provided for by the Chinese using hand held wooden fans and cotton umbrellas protecting them from hot sunrays. Ecologically sound and cheap too.

And what about the old standbys like Chinese massage, available to everyone for a modest price from USD 9/hr to maybe USD15 on the average – still a lot of many for rural and small town dwellers (but not unaffordable for the better healed denizens of Beijing). But it is also the quality and intensity of the massages. I would estimate that the average Chinese masseur uses 100-1000 times more energy when performing the massage compared to the average Australian masseur. There is also greater depth and sensitivity. I am not sure if I will be able ever to enjoy massage in Australia after 2 months of having a regular massage in China. And the relaxation to be completed by a cup of green tea available in immense variety. When I ordered a “green tea” the waiter was confused as to which brand to bring since each has a special name and is not just called “green tea” as it is in Australia.

Sure, one wonders if the greening and preening of Beijing and other cities will continue after the Olympics, with the economic “progress” and the growth of industrial and military might being definitely top priority for the Chinese government. But it was definitely impressive to see that the Chinese use energy efficiently, i.e. many street lights are run on a solar battery.

All the reports I am getting about the greening of China and its move to alternative technologies, combined with the traditional Chinese respect for nature is surely a basis for hope.

Visiting Beijing zoo with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

2008-08-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

Visiting Beijing zoo with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A couple of days ago I went to Beijing zoo. As zoos go, it is not a bad one. I recall zoos in some other Asian countries, like Korea and even Japan. They are such a contrast to, for example, the Sydney zoo, where animals are, well, pampered, living in big enclosures, often with people walking through fenced enclosures to observe animals which run free. Of course, the purists do not like even the Sydney zoo, but if they want to really rave about captive animals, they should come to China.

The Chinese seem to have nostalgia about wild animals which they identify with their own lost heritage. This is despite the fact that most Chinese nowadays like to see animals in the form of a cute cartoon or a toy, manageable and clean. Still, the Chinese novel “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong won the inaugural Man Asian prize last year and set a Chinese record for the amount paid for foreign publication rights. Basically, the novel tells the modern Chinese (and the young seem to be listening) that they have lost the freedom of the nomad and the spirit of the steppe wolf and became like a herd of sheep. (This maybe a bit of an exaggeration, watch Chinese on the trading floor of the Shanghai bourse, just like the romantic story about the nomad way of life is an exaggeration.)

Last night I watched a documentary on the Great Wall (which I am visiting today) and it showed that the Great Wall was really a great failure, insofar as it was supposed to keep the nomads out. It resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost and millions of people condemned to slave labour every bit as bad as Soviet Gulags. The “valorous” border guards who lived on the Wall, with thousands of enslaved peasants who worked around it and were supposed to feed the guards and the workers (but often run away to the enemy up North, simply to escape from life of drudgery and oppression), were very lonely and unhappy with their remote posting.

Of course, Jiang Rong describes eloquently (although some would say with over-the-board metaphors and clichés) how the “free” nomads lived in the past and tells of close their relationship with the land and its animals. Some Chinese seem to think that “Wolf Totem” can help them to become a little more like their brave ancestors rather then the pathetic human zoo dwellers and obedient servants of the government and the economy that they have become. It reminded me of our own, once successful but now largely forgotten, feminist tract “Running with the Wolves” (and a parody on it, called “Running with the Poodles”).

But it also reminded me of a much deeper novel, exploring zoo as a metaphor for humanity in one of its chapters. I am thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward”. In the novel, Oleg, an ex-convict, goes to the zoo where he cannot help but see animals in the context of his past experience. A mountain goat impresses him with its proud and resolute bearing which would help it weather any length of imprisonment. A nocturnal hedgehog may have just come back from a night’s interrogation. But it was a rhesus monkey that really stirred Oleg’s passion. The monkey was blinded by some evil person throwing tobacco dust into its eyes. And Oleg, his heart burning with indignation, calls out: “Make sure your children do not grow up to be cruel!”

I do not know whether it is cruel to feed bears ice-cream and other human junk food that I saw being fed to bears in Beijing zoo, despite signs not to do so. It is certainly cruel to keep animals in the pathetic conditions that I saw at Beijing zoo, in concrete boxes, with hardly a green twig in site. The nocturnal house looked like some pokey shed improvised overnight. But that was still not all. I have read reports of the zoo at Badaling, near the Great Wall, where visitors can, for a fee, throw live goats to lions and use bamboo sticks to lower live chickens to predators and then enjoy teasing them and see their ”bait” torn to shreds in front of their own eyes. I have read reports of truly appalling conditions of domestic livestock and its slaughter in China, and I have largely turned vegetarian here (with exception of some fish).

But that is also not the main point.

Someone said that our attitude to animals betrays our attitude to other human beings. I do not want to single out the Chinese here. Australians, comparatively good with their zoos, slaughter kangaroos and their young with extreme cruelty.

So the followers of the “Wolf Totem” glorify our predatory nature and, by extension, the cult of Genghis Khan, surely one of the most cruel and senseless mass murderers in human history. The myth of brave nomadic warriors is alive and well in Central Asia and beyond. However, some historians point out that Mongols have actually destroyed the economic and cultural basis of their own society and the societies they have so cruelly conquered and ultimately decimated. Look where Mongolia is now and compare it to the “effete” West.

The really big question that Solzhenitsyn, a wise man that has suffered and thought a lot, asks through his protagonist Oleg, is: “Even if one could let zoo animals out (read, human zoo dwellers) and make them free, how clever would that be? Because, together with the loss of their native skills they have also lost the idea of rational freedom. And if one was to free them suddenly, that would make things even more horrible.

As Confucius has said (in paraphrase): “The human primate is a tricky monkey. Give him too much power and he will abuse it. Give him too little power and he will dream of greatness and revenge. Cultivate his heart from early years and you may reap the benefits of gentleness tempered with reason.”

So, let us listen to Solzhenitsyn and Confucius. And beware of making your children inured to cruelty. Zoos included.

Prince Gong Tea Party

2008-08-23T01:44:00.000-07:00

Beijing Trivia Blog 23.08.08

Visited Prince Gong Mansion in the morning. Beijing is just sparkling today – clear, sunny, hot, and this being Saturday, lots of Beijingers had ideas similar to mine. They crowded the many halls, hungry for snippets of their own history, no matter how much sterilized, and snapped pictures of each other. I pointed to the portrait of Zhou En Lai to an elderly man, pronouncing the name to him. He smiled and corrected my pronunciation. His idea of Zhou could have been as different from mine as sky from the earth. But there was a faint smile of pride on his face that a foreigner knew his famous compatriot by sight.

The story of the Prince Gong mansion is as simple and straightforward as that of China itself. The mansion was built 1777 by a corrupt minister He Shen of the Quing dynasty who managed to salt away enough of public money to make him one of the richest men in China (definitely a multi-billionaire in today’s money). The Emperor, when he found out that his favourite minister was a thief, was naturally upset. So he beheaded Shen, confiscated his property, and gave it to his youngest son. The mansion finally passed to Prince Gong, the brother of another emperor. But Gong managed to run out of money in 1921 and had to mortgage the mansion to Catholic Church. It then became a Catholic University, then Beijing University, a Musical Academy, and finally, under Mao, an Air-conditioning Equipment Factory.

This morning, the workers were still putting some finishing touches on the refurbished buildings, opened a few days ago. At the back of the grounds was a quaint teahouse, with heavily screened doors and windows, and an intimidating half-erased sign saying “100 RMB” (USD14). The front door was shut and did not give way when I gave it a gentle push.

I walked around the building. There was a door, wide opened, and a smiling hostess greeted me and led me into a sumptuous hall, with myriad of teapots, porcelain mugs and cups and boxes of tea, staring from antique (?) wall cabinets. The tea ceremony cost 75 RMB (plus of course the “obligatory” and grossly overpriced 100 g can of souvenir tea of your choice). It was worth it, sitting like a corrupt He Shen in a fake Ming dynasty chair, talking about the subtleties of tea ceremony, with suitable references to previous house owners like Emperor Jiaqing and Prince Qìng Jùnwáng. As I was the only customer, being spoilt by the hostess, the pleasure was double (as was the bill!). One almost expected a waiting palanquin at the door. But alas, there was instead a sobering and long trudge through the proletarian crowds back to the main gate, in oppressive heat. Still, one felt blessed, as the character 福 (fú: good fortune) stared at one from a high stele, supposedly engraved personally by Emperor Kangxi. What could be a better fortune than to be in Beijing on the one-but-last day of the Olympics, and have a free morning for a bit of history?

Spengh-Liu 12 volume collection on "On the Inevitable Decline and Fall of the Fat, Flabby, and Flatulent West" is released in China

2008-08-20T01:09:00.000-07:00

Beijing blog 20 August 2008
Beijing blog 20 August 2008
I was trying to explore some "other" Beijing, aside from the usual tourist and sports venues. I decided to visit the only alternative foreign language book shop in Beijing called "The Bookworm". As usually, I had the name and address written out in Chinese, and took the subway to the nearest station. I showed the address to a few locals near the exit but drew blank. Thinking a taxi would be the best bet, even if the shop was only 200 meters away, I took a cab. The driver took me some 4 kilometres away and kept driving around the block until he finally admitted defeat. Using sign language I suggested I walk and ask passersby.

A woman walking her Pekinese dog took a pity on me， looking lost and bewildered on the corner. She took me to a nearby restaurant and asked the manager to call the book shop. He did. We began walking briskly along the street. However, after 30 minutes of meandering and getting no help from unresponsive passersby the restaurant manager also admitted defeat. I thanked him profusely and promised to come and eat at his place.

My homing instinct suggested that I was somewhere near the Bookworm. I saw a promising sign, a cafe called "The Broken Rickshaw". It was a Western-style cafe, with some vaguely intellectual-looking Chinese sipping cocktails at the bar. The waitress immediately pointed towards a building hidden in the courtyard. It was the mysterious "Bookworm".

The bookshop actually consisted of a restaurant and some rooms, with the weirdest collection of books I have seen for awhile. In one room there were trash novels obviously left there by some weary travellers. Another collection was of books supposedly signed by the authors. Among them was a volume of Shakespeare’s plays.

But there were definitely signs of progress and vitality. Another room was full of books on China Inc., with the description of China and its thriving “fakanomics”: a book on “Rising India”, and even sociobiology treatise on “Sex, Profits and Science”. The white elephant in the room was the missing a 12-volume Olympic souvenir edition "On the Inevitable Decline and Fall of the Fat, Flabby, and Flatulent West”, with a special volume on America, written by a Chinese scholar writing under the pseudonym Spengh-Liu (just kidding!).

I had a dinner at the Bookworm, of delicately grilled salmon on a bed of spinach, while a bunch of noisy Americans frolicked in the library, trying to play a badly tuned piano. I bought a book on Chinese history as a gesture of support for the establishment. Certainly on that evening it was hard to see how it could turn a profit with about 5 staff and hardly any customers.

The next morning the weather was beautiful and I had a free morning to see the Lama Temple. The subway is actually located under the temple but finding the entrance to the temple proved tricky. A young woman, a volunteer standing by, kept saying in English "Lama temple 100 metres away, Confucius temple - 180 metres away”, all the while looking into the ground. Usually the Chinese will say "North, South, West or East", which makes it easy, especially if you managed to remember that you are in the Northern hemisphere, as Beijing is planned in accordance with these 4 directions. Actually the temples were about 400 metres away but the next bunch of volunteers who stood in front of an unmarked gate to the Confucius temple actually led me through the gate. In the next hour or so I learnt that Confucius:

a) inspired the European Enlightenment
b) beat Christ and the Jews to the commandment "do unto others…" by a few centuries
c) inspired Voltaire to write a play
d) was given a positive review in “The Canberra Times”
e) was acknowledged by a number of Nobel Prize Winners.

Born in a cave into a declining noble family [sic!], he rose to prominence but was mostly given lip service by the rulers, some of whom made him into an official state ideologue. But it must be acknowledged that Confucius did less harm to China and the world than, for example, Karl Marx. He may have actually done some good with his emphasis on family values and his "golden middle” rule, which he shared with Buddha. Speaking of Buddhism, I felt that it never really caught on in China. They did build of course one of the tallest statues of him (28 metres high), on display at the Lama Temple. I doubt that Buddha would have approved of this grotesque display of gigantism. Just as well they did not dress him up as a basketball player for the Olympics.

Throughout the ages, Chinese rulers longed to sanctify their rule by the so-called Heavenly Mandate. It is possible that the modern communist rulers will look at the Olympic victory as a modern reconfirmation of the Heavenly Mandate, lost for a few centuries. No amount of material progress can fully sanctify the rule of the Party; but a decisive Olympic victory might be interpreted by the Chinese that they have finally reclaimed the blessing of the heaven, this time in High Definition. And Hu can blame them? In the past, every time China lapsed into some sort of Confucian or Taoist phase, internal unrest and external conquest followed, whether by Tibetans, the Mongols, or the British. Modern China with its rising nationalism, boosted by the Olympic Victory, buoyed by fakanomics, and appeased by the "fat and decadent" West, will be unstoppable. Until, as its own “Book of Changes” predicts, its success, if not temped by humility and cooperative spirit, may lead it to snatch ecological defeat out of jaws of its economic or sporting success.

We must never lose infinite hope…

2008-08-16T03:03:00.000-07:00

I think we are really too hard on the Chinese for being such poor English spellers and translators. Imagine we had to learn Chinese and have all the signs in our cities in Chinese! I am sure the Chinese would have a good laugh at our expense as well.

I had my share of mistranslations since I have arrived in Beijing some 3 weeks ago. I had a note written by volunteers in my hotel (who selflessly provide 24-hour service to the guests). I wanted them to write for me “One hour full-body massage”. I was rather surprised when, at the massage parlor, I received a “Full-hour one foot massage.” But, since it was quite relaxing, I had no strength to resist or did not even attempt to argue with the staff. I duly paid 48 RMB (USD7), which seemed a bargain, and was probably a “one-foot discount”. I got strange looks from the staff at the exit and I am sure there would be stories going around about crazy foreigners with their strange requests.

On another occasion I went to an Internet café nearby. It is a 24-hour affair that is located at the end of a long, dark, and narrow corridor that does not look very inviting. Inside, dozens of Chinese, mostly men, play computer games; almost every computer is occupied at all hours of day and night (they have to be, as the price for one hour session is about USD1). I duly paid for one hour to a rather attractive young woman behind the counter who also made my computer type in English (which took endless series of commands in Chinese that I would surely be unable to perform myself). She also showed me a plastic card, trying to explain something to me. I could guess that the card had something to do with getting a permanent membership at the café. But I thought that I should not engage in mere guesswork as I bought myself a rather expensive electronic dictionary (boasting the proud name of “Mandarin King”). I whipped it out of my pocket and invited the woman to type her explanation to me. She fiddled with the keys and presented me with the translation. It simply said, “Your doors shine brightly at night.” I felt rather touched by the Haiku-like simplicity and poetry of the sentence and wanted to type back to her something equally poetic and dignified, such as: “My shining doors are nothing but a reflection of the windows of your soul…” But since I was not sure where my Mandarin King was going to take us in this dialogue, I refrained, resorting to a disarming smile and a polite “Thank you” in Chinese.

My Mandarin King boasts 5 languages, including Russian, and is a veritable mine of information about intricate details of Chinese culture and history (all in Chinese). It also has a “Guide to Best English”, which I am unable to comment on as it is also in Chinese.

But I found one useful chapter, called “One sentence, one day…” tucked somewhere in the history and philosophy section. I resolved to memorize in Chinese at least one sentence that I could use on any future occasion when I felt lost for words. It says: “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope.” It would make Confucius smile.

Down with the Imperialist Dogs!

2008-08-10T20:20:00.000-07:00

Glory to the Olympic spirit!

Beijing blog 11.08.08

China’s coming out Party turns out to be not so much a glamorous debutante’s ball where with everyone oohing an aahing about the new ballroom dress of the debutante, as a rather boisterous affair, during which the hosts just hope that the guests will not break up too many dishes and wreck the ball. The Russian planes bombing Poti in the background, a Chinese madman knifing American tourists and then throwing himself off the notorious and symbolic Bell and Drum Tower. The Tower was used by the Chinese to announce the passage of time. Now the ancient bells and drums are broken and silent, and the time telling had stopped. Instead of a Taoist meditation on time, a myth-making exercise on the past is all the rage in Communist China.

But demons of the past are hard to put to sleep, like the 70-odd millions of the Chinese killed by Mao and his clique. They awaken at the time of sleep, or dreaming (One World, One Dream?), and shock the conscious mind with some sort of mad rampage, like that in the precinct of the Bell and Drum tower.

After the party, the hangover will be hard to avoid. It could be the hangover of dizzy pride. Or it could be the hangover of hurt pride, both equally dangerous. The Chinese now almost uniformly love themselves, as the latest poll shows. The rest of the world (especially the near neighbors, who know China best) demures. There is a gaping, schizophrenic split, and it may grow in time. Except maybe between Russia and China, who are now in one of their recurrent and energetic courtship episodes, both countries glorying, among other things, in beating up minorities.

So the embrace of the Georgian and Russian women champions on the winning pedestal will be the Olympic legacy of peace and sanity among the gaiety and chaos and that we could look back to. It seems so much better and more fitting the Olympics spirit than the famous Black Power glove-fisted salute.

Glory to the Olympic spirit! Down with the Imperialist Dogs of all colors and shades!

08.08.08 Beijing Blog The Opening Ceremony

2008-08-09T08:38:00.000-07:00

5000 years of Chinese history through the imagery of the Opening Ceremony (with a few awkward decades and even centuries omitted of course). I wonder if Bush and Putin, sitting glumly in the hot and humid air of the stadium, could see the shallowness of their own experience?

One world, one dream? I wonder just how different were the dreams of the marching Somalis or Rwandans for those of, say, the Chinese and the French, marching on the same field. Let alone the dreams of those who were left home to battle their very diffrent battles. Or of the Great Leader, basking in the glory of the world attention, compared to a little boy I saw today gathering empty bottles into the cart, no doubt to make a few yuan delivering them to a recycling point.

But it was a great day, and the day that brought so many nations onto the field, many of them barely known to most people (how many people know the difference between Congo and DR Congo, or have even heard of Faroe Islands) in peace is something to be celebrated.

The colour of the costumes, the blending of the ancient stories and modern digital wizardry, created a night that was like a dream. Not one dream, but many, but mostly of awe and wonder, and later, when the march began, of human gaiety and frivolity and the exuberance of youth, and the wisdom of the old. The gracefulness, the flow of movement and imagery, was indeed like a Tai Chi dance. Harking to the no doubt idealized past, confident of the future. The biggest team also meant the biggest country, soon to be the most powerful economically and later, militarily. But in terms of global awareness of One Dream, One World? How can we expect more from the Chinese than we have delivered ourselves?

Yet they will have the power. Will they use it more judiciously than we have? The army marches on it stomach. I had a lunch of seaweed and garlic and tofu in delicious sauce and thought, “This Army will march long without tiring”. Not so sure about the Coke and Big Mac Army.

As Confucius has said, the only Army worth having is the one that will repair this ruptured land, and the only dream worth having is how to do it together and without delay.

www.russiantranslate.org

Of Menus, Dogs and Fogs -- more Olympic Trivia

2008-08-06T18:18:00.000-07:00

Beijing blog 07.08.2008

Have been in Beijing for almost 2 weeks now. At first it seemed that my fears of China were confirmed. At the airport I was supposed to be met by someone who would direct me to a bus going to my hotel. There was no one and no bus. No one knew what I was talking about. There were dozens of volunteers and columns of marching personnel, and more personnel being instructed by their superiors, but no practical result. As I arrived at 5 am I did not even want to waste any time, so took a taxi to the hotel.

I wanted to check my email in the morning and the first thing I found was this amazing pricing structure introduced especially for the Olympics (normally, Internet in our hotel was free). I was charged about $15 for 24 hours access, starting at midday and going till 11.55 the next day. So, if you logged in the morning, you would be charged for 2 days. There were a lot of complaints so the pricing structure was finally changed to a per minute charge, with the maximum of $15 per 24 hours.

The weather outside was hot (35C) and humid. I was issued with my Olympic ID but it had to be validated. I took a taxi to the Main Press Centre, no easy matter as taxi drivers simply did not know what the MPC stood for, either in Chinese or English (later I made sure that I always carried a special piece of paper with the map and the address in both languages). I directed the driver to Intercontinental hotel next to the MPC. Of course, there were two Intercontinental hotels in Beijing and I was taken to the wrong one at the other end of town. I hastily bought myself a talking dictionary (which did not actually talk when you wanted it, only wrote out the Chinese phrases) and it proved to be a life saver in some tricky situations. Like ordering rice at the restaurant, with rice being nowhere on the menu. I thought about getting a local GPS but it was too expensive and the only available English version worked poorly. My Australian GPS (a Mio) did not have Chinese maps.

My colleagues had similar stories to tell. Initially, the police did not let taxis with us inside use the Olympic lanes (as they should have). But gradually, things began to improve as we learned to follow the safe paths, like always trying to take the special bus to the Press Centre and the Olympic village. The area around our hotel was a normal suburb slightly away from the centre. Just a stone’s throw away there were workers flats that looked like something out of 1960’s. People were sitting in their court yards, drinking tea and chatting. The surroundings were poor and dirty but safe and friendly. In our hotel, there were people stationed on every floor observing our comings and goings. But since they were mostly young Chinese women who pressed the lift buttons for us and smiled obligingly, one did not mind. As I was staying at a hotel reserved for media, there was increased security and the floor personnel must have been a part of it. But outside people were mostly friendly, restaurants were plentiful and cheap and food was good. ‘(Dog meat was taken off most menus before the Olympics to placate Western sensibilities.)

At the local dry cleaner, a Chinese woman was able to find my pants among dozens of others even when I lost my receipt. There was a place nearby where one could have an hour’s massage for $12. The local supermarket had the basic necessities, even if one had to hunt them down the isles. Shopping for anything more complicated turned out to be daunting due to language difficulties and lack of local knowledge about location of suitable shops. I made up my mind to bring all the basic necessities on the next trip as finding a tea strainer (I thought I might as well enjoy the good local tea instead of the bagged variety) was as difficult as finding the Holy Grail.

I went to the local park in the morning for a walk. People were doing exercises everywhere. I learned a couple of useful tricks for my Qui Kung routine. I did not take many photos, respecting people’s privacy. I was the only Westerner around and a subject of mild curiosity and occasionally, apprehension. My Olympic badge was definitely an object of curiosity (it gave me a free ride on public transport). But soon, there would be thousands of people like me, including many Chinese who were working for the Olympics. It was the land of Yin and Yang, hard and soft, blending into each other. The Army, the police and the government seemed to be the strong ones and the people weak. But then, in the same way in which soft water erodes a hard cliff, who was to tell the result of their interaction, long into the future? The silent needs of the people already changed the way the government was running the country.

Aide from one weekend the weather continued to worry the organizers and the world media, who, I think, made too much of it. I could almost feel the irritation of the Chinese as CNN would show a day-old murky pictures of Beijing as the back drop to their report although the weather outside was already much clearer. The obsession with the pollution seemed excessive. As measurements were made public (after some initial equivocation), media shifted their obsessions elsewhere, like the plight of the displaced people who were moved to give way to Olympic developments, the terrorist acts of the Chinese minorities in the North, and the continued problems of the Tibetans. The Games organizers were praying for the Games to begin and the excitement of sporting achievement to overshadow all other concerns of thousands of foreign journalists trying to find interesting material to send back home.

There were some justifiable concerns about access to certain banned sites on the Internet (like Amnesty International and Reporters without Borders). Although the sites were not essential for work of the majority of journalists, the principle of complete freedom coverage that was the condition of awarding the Games seemed to be in jeopardy. The IOC and the BOCOG did a complicated Thai Chi dance to placate the concerns of the media. Some sites appeared again, although certain keywords for searching were still producing no results. Athletes began to arrive and the celebrities among them were mobbed at the airport. The American team was whisked out at the side entrance, avoiding the media and thus provoking cries of preferential treatment. The Americans were uniformly positive about their initial impressions of China, the Olympic Village, and the sporting facilities, at least publicly. China, the US and Russia seemed to be the countries most likely to get the majority of the medals. Long-term, this Olympics or next, most people felt that the Chinese, who only started performing at the LA Olympics in 1984, were going to eclipse all rivals.

The rising economic and military might of China and the waning strength of the US, deep in debt and mired in an expensive war, were the shadows behind the Olympic rivalry. In the same way in which Russia was diminished as a US rival by its economic and political problems (which were now “resolved” temporarily by the high price of oil and gas), the US seemed doomed to recede into the background as a sporting “supremo”. Even if Chicago could get the 2016 Olympics, it could never put the same show as Beijing. You could never build a Water Cube (the new multimillion dollar swimming pool in Beijing) on money donated by expat American millionaires hiding in tax havens abroad (the Water Cube received huge donations from wealthy Chinese).

Got lost again on the way to the Olympic Village. A lot of taxi drivers still do not know where the Olympic facilities are. Graciously, the taxi driver gave us a small discount for the long ride we took to get to the OV. The air today is still soupy. Tomorrow is the opening ceremony but the promised winds and rain have not arrived. The whole city will come to a standstill tomorrow for the opening (the local authorities proclaimed a holiday for Beijing).

These are my brief thoughts for the first 2 weeks in Beijing (they have to brief because last few days we worked 15 hour days).

Beijing Olympics Trivia

2008-07-04T22:09:00.000-07:00

What worries many long-term foreign residents of the city, such as van Kerckhove, is that Beijing during the month-long Olympics and Paralympics will be lifeless.

"The vibrant life we have in Beijing will be killed off for security reasons and pollution during the Olympics," van Kerckhove says.

He says that despite the extraordinary transformation, the city authorities still have not solved two key issues - traffic and pollution - and after the violent and widespread Tibet protests they are also terrified of any demonstrations or disturbances during the Games.

Their answer, he says, will be to shut down offices, factories, bars and restaurants, kicking out hundreds of thousands of people such as migrant workers and other minorities from the city. He says they are also making it much more difficult for long-term foreign residents and business people and tourists to get visas.

The toughened visa rules that came into operation in April have stranded thousands of foreigners outside China unable to renew visas, even when they have businesses and families here.

New rules effectively eliminating multiple-entry visas for foreign business people based in Hong Kong to commute across the border to visit mainland factories caused an outcry when they came into effect.

Chinese embassies and consulates around the world have stopped issuing visas valid for longer than 30 days, and prospective tourists have had to show hotel reservations, plane tickets and other documents in order to get a visa at all.

While it is arguable that China has been far too lenient in issuing visas previously, the timing of this crackdown has caused an unexpected slump in tourist numbers and hotel bookings are far below the 90 per cent predicted.

This has been exacerbated by the difficulty in foreigners getting tickets. Only 25 per cent of the 7.1 million tickets were reserved for foreigners - half the percentage of Athens in 2004 - because of the massive demand from Chinese citizens.

"Many tourists who want to come won't be able to and the Chinese don't care because they say the Olympic Games are for television and it will be picture perfect on TV so screw the others," van Kerckhove says.

"This won't be Sydney 2000," he says, referring to the relaxed party atmosphere of the 2000 Olympics.

"This is not going to be spontaneous … Many food and beverage outlets will be closed or taken over by countries or corporations for Olympic hospitality. It will very much be a dead city, where nothing will be allowed that is not scripted by the Chinese Communist Party."

And the good news:

"Beijing is working hard to make every public toilet a pleasant experience for the millions who visit the city for the Games," Yu Debin, deputy director of the Beijing tourism bureau, said.

Recalling his earlier horrifying experience, Blake says: "In 2000, I had to take a deep breath before dashing into a public toilet hold my breath with my head held high (no double entendre) never look down (to avoid the stink and the filthy floor) and then dash out All in less than a minute."

A Beijing tourism bureau survey in 1994 showed that more than 60 percent foreign visitors were afraid of entering the city's public toilets.

All that has thankfully changed.

Wang Fangde, 68, who lives in one of Beijing's traditional siheyuan (houses with courtyards), is another man happy with that change. "A decade ago I could tell where roughly a public lavatory was because of the stink it hit you even from 20 meters."

And Wang has a wish: "I hope toilet paper is provided free even after the Olympics and Paralympics."

*

China and the Olympic Challenge for mutual understanding

2008-06-11T06:43:00.000-07:00

Follow the leader

Wayne Smith | June 10, 2008, The Australian

I'VE barely landed in Beijing and already I am in trouble.
China

China has stepped up its promotional effort after the torch relay fiasco. Picture: AFP
I have been invited to China by Beijing's Organising Committee for the Olympic Games which, like every significant organisation in this communist country, is an instrument of the state.

I'm bracing for a "washing machine" visit with plenty of agitation and a prolonged spin cycle. But I have not been expecting to be hung out to dry.

This happens right at the start, when I emerge from baggage collection and discover my promised reception committee at the airport is nowhere to be found.

I do my best to make myself conspicuous, no easy task given I am cursed with a halfback's stature and dwarfed by the staggeringly huge $4 billion Terminal Three, a gleaming building twice the size of the Pentagon. It is nearing midnight, so I head to the taxi rank and take a cab to my hotel.

The next morning the questions begin, polite but persistent. Why didn't I make myself known to the person sent to collect me? How did I miss seeing them? Which exit did I take?

No big deal, I reply, but clearly it is because the same questions are asked every day during my five-day stay. Inadvertently I have breached security and, while I initially feel chuffed in a juvenile sort of way, I fret I may have landed some low-level meet and greeter in serious trouble.

Like the half-dozen other Western journalists invited on this pre-Olympic familiarisation trip, I have Tibet, human rights, air pollution and Games preparations on my mind. So naturally on day one our hosts take us straight to the Qinghe sewage treatment plant. Here we learn more than we will ever want to know about ultra-filtration membrane technology, bio-gas power generation and dragon-shaped lakes in the Olympic Park. I disgrace myself a second time by asking whether the treated waste water in those lakes can sustain fish.

Still, I come away impressed. In the few short years since Beijing won the Olympics, its waste-water treatment ratio has risen from 42per cent to 90 per cent in a city with a population two-thirds that of Australia. The stats keep coming: 12 computerised water-quality devices checking the integrity of Beijing's waterways, 27 monitors doing much the same thing for the city's notoriously polluted air, 112 noise pollution detectors making sure factories do no more than hum and motorists don't honk too often.

The next day the Chinese get serious, as do we. They roll out BOCOG vice-president Jiang Xiaoyu for a media briefing. To his right, initially saying nothing but smiling coolly through eyes that could cut diamonds, sits his impeccably coiffed media and communications director, Wang Hui. One of my colleagues, Kevin Garside of the London Telegraph, describes Wang as "the Margaret Thatcher of China's Olympic movement". Wang's gaze could reduce Britain's legendary Iron Lady to a puddle of molten metal without Wang leaving her chair.

Initially the niceties are observed, the standard questions about the state of Games preparations triggering the standard responses that China is ready. But whatever else these Beijing Olympics may be about, they're not about sport.

We learn that in the coming hours when our hosts rush us through the Olympic precinct but refuse to let us see inside the two signature structures of the Beijing Games, the dazzling maze of metal that is the Bird's Nest main stadium and the awe-inspiring Water Cube, where Australia will win the bulk of its medals. It's like being taken to Rome and not being allowed a peek inside St Peter's.

These two extraordinary venues are central to the Games, central to Beijing's urban planning, positioned on either side of the axis that runs through Mao's Mausoleum north through Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. They are central to China's concepts of balance and harmony. The Bird's Nest and the Water Cube, circle and square, red and blue, earth and heaven, masculine and feminine, yin and yang. No, sport is not what these Games are about; indeed, neither is our visit to Beijing.

Barely 10 minutes into the briefing, the true purpose behind BOCOG's invitation becomes apparent. "China is ready for change," Jiang says. "We want to promote the development of China and social progress. We want to understand the world and the world to understand China."

This is the message we were brought to China to hear. It's contained in the tail: "we want ... the world to understand China".

There is no doubt China feels grievously misunderstood and misrepresented in the West, especially over the issue of Tibet. It had expected the journey of the Olympic flame through a dozen international cities would create goodwill about the Beijing Games. Instead, from the moment it was kindled into life at Olympia, Greece, on March 24 the flame ignited a conflagration of protests wherever it went over China's brutal putdown of the March 14 riot in Lhasa. In Paris, London, San Francisco, Canberra and other cities, the torch relay generated anti-Chinese and then pro-Chinese demonstrations.

The torch relay is one of Jiang's responsibilities and he seems to take the West's disrespect for it personally. His face betrays no anger but his words surely do. The host cities all signed agreements guaranteeing to protect the Olympic flame on its journey. Why, Jiang asks, have they not lived up to their promises? Why have they not apologised for pandering to the "Dalai Lama clique" and its agitators?

Wang listens attentively, arching an eyebrow when I venture that Jiang's invocation of the Olympic truce - one of those quaint traditions from the ancient Games that the International Olympic Committee has selectively appropriated while ignoring others far more entertaining, like nude competition - seems a little one-sided. Surely such a truce should work both ways. It should not just be the "Dalai clique" that backs off but also the Chinese authorities.

When Jiang breaks off after an hour, Wang volunteers to stay on for more questions. Immediately it becomes clear she has something to say: that the March 14 riot was too close to the anniversary of the March 10, 1959, demonstration when 300,000 Tibetans surrounded the Norbulingka Palace in Lhasa to prevent the Dalai Lama being abducted by the Chinese military to be coincidental; that the US would never let Alaska secede without intervening; and that one of the earlier Dalai Lamas had used human skulls as lamps.

The theme of the March 14 riot being premeditated is picked up the following day by officials at the China Tibetology Research Centre, who point out that stones - presumably thrown by the rioters, not the Chinese military, which had rifles - do not come easily to hand on the streets of Lhasa. Having planted the seed that the West has been duped by the Dalai Lama's spin doctors, our hosts are laying on the fertiliser.

As Wang has done the previous day, the Tibetologists rebuke us for our ignorance of their country. It seems an appropriate moment to point out that our ignorance is surely forgivable given that Western journalists have been denied access to Tibet since mid-March.

This causes a degree of consternation on the Chinese side. They can see where this is going and quickly head it off. It seems there will be no invitations for us to go to the autonomous region, for our own safety.

At the end of our session we are presented with a book detailing how much the living conditions of Tibetan farmers and herdsmen have improved as a result of the central Government's beneficence. Unfortunately, the book is in Chinese, so we have to take it on trust that 90 per cent of public money spent in Tibet is indeed supplied by Beijing.

Wang's left-field mention of Alaska turns out not to be as outlandish as it first appears, with the researchers insisting that the problem in Tibet is not ethnic or religious or tied to human rights.

Rather, it is a question of national unification and not allowing the motherland to be split: almost word for word what Chinese president Hu Jintao told Kevin Rudd during his trip to Beijing a few weeks earlier.

One of the researchers reveals there is no word for independence in the Tibetan language. Surely, though, in a society where there is no illness, there would be no word for medicine? This echoes an observation made in a university thesis written years ago by a 23-year-old student named K. Rudd, who noted that when American missionary William Martin translated a treatise on international law into Mandarin in 1864 he could find no classical Chinese word for rights.

I put it to the officials that expecting their modest reforms in Tibet to lead to civil obedience runs contrary to the lessons of history; that the French and Russian revolutions, for instance, happened not when repressive governments had their foot on the throats of their citizens but immediately after they had eased off the pressure just a little.

They didn't get it. And why would they when what's happening today in China is soprofoundly counter-intuitive, with the Communist Party seemingly further entrenching itself the more it allows its citizens to embrace capitalism?

Out in the streets of Beijing, streets so impeccably clean they put Australian cities to shame, it's a wonder the pre-Olympic buzz hasn't set off the noise pollution detectors. The skyline is a forest of cranes. We're told that in Beijing and Shanghai there is more construction under way than in all of Europe.

And it's not just nasty, boxy skyscrapers being thrown up but buildings the like of which the world has never seen, such as the titanium-domed National Centre for the Performing Arts, which seemingly floats on a sea of water.

We are taken there to see Puccini's Madame Butterfly, an opera about a perfidious American sailor duping an innocent Asian girl, but it is the colossal egg-shaped building that is the true star of the show.

The spin cycle slows as the tour is coming to an end. For all the interchange of opinions, I doubt viewpoints have shifted on either side. Where the West venerates and protects the rights of the individual, China places the masses first and last.

Or at least that's what the party officially pays lip service to. Whether those communist ideals stand up under the Olympic invasion, only time will tell.

The time comes to head for the airport. My minders are taking no more chances with me. I have a whole bus to myself.

Wayne Smith, a senior sports writer with The Australian, will be covering the Beijing Olympics.

Russia on edge as China grows

2008-06-11T04:13:00.000-07:00

Russia on edge as China grows

* John Garnaut, Sydney Morning Herald, Business Section
* June 9, 2008
* Page 1 of 2

WANG YONG, a 33-year-old entrepreneur in the town of Manzhouli, has been waiting all morning on the Chinese side of the Russian border for his Russian truck drivers to arrive.

"My two drivers are 'jiu gui'," he says, using a Chinese term that means 'grog monsters'. "They said they'd be here in five minutes and it's already been five hours. After eight hours they stop work, wherever they are, and it takes them three days to go 500 kilometres that a Chinese driver would cover in a day."

Mr Wang relies on Russian drivers to take his fresh fruit to Chita, in Russia's wild east, because Chinese drivers face a minefield of extortion. Russia is erecting legal and illicit barriers to Chinese trade in a climate of rising paranoia summed up in the Pravda headline: "Chinese immigrants to conquer Russia".

Russia's anxiety trades partly on an old fear that Chinese hordes are itching to take back the resource-rich and under-populated regions of Siberia that Russia annexed from
Qing Dynasty China.

"The Russians are spooked by the idea you have 110 million people in just three northern Chinese provinces and 6 to 7 million people in the Russian Far East," says Bobo Lo, author of the forthcoming Axis Of Convenience: Moscow, Beijing And The New Geopolitics. "They feel no matter how sweet the political relationship, nature abhors a vacuum and therefore as soon as China feels brave or confident enough to move into the Far East, it will."

Many Chinese traders in Siberia have had to return to China because of new visa requirements and a law that bars non-Russians from making cash transactions in Russian marketplaces.

For their part, Chinese authorities have enforced tough passport requirements on traders who had previously travelled freely across the border. They have also booted thousands of Russians out of northern China as part of an over-zealous security campaign that is driving foreigners out of the country ahead of the Olympics.

Despite legal and illicit barriers on both sides, including huge Russian tariffs, China is pulling off one of the great export ambushes of modern history. China's Ministry of Commerce says the value of Russian exports to China rose 12.1 per cent last year compared with 2006, while Chinese exports to Russia rose 79.9 per cent.

The story from Russia's customs office is more extraordinary. It shows its exports barely moved from $US15.8 billion in 2006 to $US15.9 billion last year, despite soaring oil prices, while Chinese exports almost doubled from $US12.9 billion to $US24.9 billion.

China has turned a $US3 billion deficit into a $US9 billion surplus in one year.

Nobody knows how much trade passes over the border as black market goods tend to go unreported. The Russian total trade figure is less than two-thirds of the Chinese version, which may suggest that the Siberian mafia groups are more powerful than their Chinese counterparts.

"You might think China is corrupt, and it is, but Russia is even more corrupt," says Mr Lo, who was second-in-charge at the Australian embassy in Moscow in the late 1990s and is now director of the China and Russia programs at London's Centre for European Reform.

Trading with Siberia may be frustrating for China's impatient entrepreneurs, but it is making them rich. Fifteen years ago Manzhouli was a stop-over village for Mongolian herdsman and the odd military border patrol. Now cranes are pulling skyscrapers out of the arid steppe and the city is filling up with pink and yellow faux Russian buildings.

So much money is rolling in that the Communist Party chiefs of Manzhouli have lined the main road to town with Russian theme parks, monuments, a sculpture garden, exhibition centres, factories and other trophies of overnight material success. These tourist-free tourist attractions and empty commercial buildings are partly financed by masses of timber mills that are busily stripping the legal and not-so-legal forestry wealth of Siberia. Some is sent back across the border but most is loaded on south-bound trains to Chinese construction sites and furniture factories.

Siberian oil trains also pass through here, though not as many as before. China gets its oil at a discount thanks to a $US6 billion loan that enabled Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil giant, to buy key oil assets from Yukos, the company previously controlled by the tax evader-cum-political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Russia, it seems, is honouring its deal with China by sending oil elsewhere.

Oil volumes fell last year but defence sales crashed, prompting analysts to speculate that China's People's Liberation Army no longer relies on Russian technology. Russia once supplied the bulk of Chinese industrial machinery but now the long lines of excavators, trucks and machinery are all heading the other way.

China is meanwhile increasing its dominance of almost every sector of the Siberian consumer goods market. Two years ago the mayor of Vladivostok made the hyperbolic claim that all of the port city's retail trade and half of its trade in services were controlled by Chinese.

For all the fuss about a Russian-China axis against Islamic separatists and US missile shields, the relationship is constrained by Russian insecurity and Chinese insensitivity. It is just one example of how China's ascendancy is provoking fear and resentment throughout the world and particularly in its immediate neighbours, where the impact is most intense.

China Lists Dos and Don’ts for Olympics-Bound Foreigners

2008-06-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

China Lists Dos and Don’ts for Olympics-Bound Foreigners
By KEITH BRADSHER, NYT
Published: June 3, 2008
HONG KONG — Do not bring any printed materials critical of China. Do not plan on holding any rallies or demonstrations in China. Do not think that you are guaranteed an entry visa because you hold tickets to an Olympic event. And do not even think about smuggling opium into China.
That is some of the eclectic advice issued by the Beijing Organizing Committee on Monday, in a document listing 57 questions that foreign visitors to the Olympic Games in August may have: “Does China have any regulation against insults to the flag or national emblems?” “After eating or drinking at restaurants or hotels, if you have diarrhea or vomiting symptoms, how do you lodge a complaint?”
The advisory to foreigners, posted on the committee’s Web site, but only in Chinese, provides answers for each question in a deadpan style. (Burning or soiling the Chinese flag or emblems is a criminal offense; food poisoning symptoms are to be reported to the local health department.) Some of the rules, like a ban on religious or political banners or slogans at Olympic sites, appear aimed at preventing protests of China’s crackdown in Tibet this year and other Chinese policies.
The Beijing Organizing Committee took pains at the start of the document to say that all the answers were based on existing Chinese regulations. The International Olympic Committee had no immediate response on Monday to the rules. Its position on freedom of expression issues as they relate to the Olympics is not entirely clear.
“A person’s ability to express his or her opinion is a basic human right and as such does not need to have a specific clause in the Olympic Charter because its place is implicit,” said Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympic Committee, at a meeting in Beijing in April.
But Mr. Rogge also pointed out at the time that the International Olympic Committee had a rule for more than half a century that “no kind of demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda is permitted in any Olympic sites, venues or areas.”
The advisory issued by the Beijing Organizing Committee includes a ban on bringing into China “anything detrimental to China’s politics, economy, culture or moral standards, including printed material, film negatives, photos, records, movies, tape recordings, videotapes, optical discs and other items.”
All rallies, demonstrations and marches, at athletic sites or anywhere else, are also banned during the Games unless approved in advance by public security agencies, a longstanding policy in China even when no Games or other big events are being held.
Before being awarded the Olympics, China promised in 2001 to improve its human rights record. But China and the International Olympic Committee have never released the text of their contract for the Olympic Games, in contrast with other recent Olympic host cities.
Nicholas Bequelin, the Hong Kong-based China researcher for Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, said China had chosen a very broad interpretation of the Olympic restriction on political and religious activity. “It is a slippery slope, and the Games in Beijing are testing the limit,” he said.
Jill Savitt, the executive director of Dream for Darfur, which wants China to put more pressure on the Sudanese government to bring peace to the Darfur region in western Sudan, said the group had been considering ways to protest in Beijing during the Olympics, like having visitors wear green, a color associated with Sudan.
But the earthquake last month, together with the controversy over the sometimes violent protests by Tibet supporters during the Olympic torch relay, has prompted Dream for Darfur to reassess its plans, and no decision has been made, she said.

So rulers call themselves orphaned, hungry and alone???

2008-05-21T02:22:00.000-07:00

39. Support
In mythical times all things were whole:
All the sky was clear,
All the earth was stable,
All the mountains were firm,
All the riverbeds were full,
All of nature was fertile,
And all the rulers were supported.

But, losing clarity, the sky tore;
Losing stability, the earth split;
Losing strength, the mountains sank;
Losing water, the riverbeds cracked;
Losing fertility, nature disappeared;
And losing support, the rulers fell.

Rulers depend upon their subjects,
The noble depend upon the humble;
So rulers call themselves orphaned, hungry and alone,
To win the people's support.

A tragic monument to a culture that turned its back on its remarkable and glittering history

2008-05-15T02:05:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/opinion/15winchester.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

If the country does not occasionally stand back and pause for breath, then its future — at least so far as nature’s occasional moments of seismic madness are concerned — will continue to be marked by calamity. Until this week Dujiangyan was a place of which China could be proud; today its wreckage stands as a tragic monument to a culture that turned its back on its remarkable and glittering history.

Simon Winchester is the author of “The Man Who Loved China.”

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes!

2008-05-03T18:40:00.000-07:00

This blog was getting a bit too serious lately.

So here for a bit of silliness:

Learn Chinese in 5 minutes

That's not right! Sum Ting Wong

Are you harbouring a fugitive? Hu Yu Hai Ding

See me ASAP ; Kum Hia Nao

Stupid Man Dum Fuk

Small Horse Tai Ni Po Ni

Did you go to the beach? Wai Yu So Tan

I bumped into a coffee table! Ai Bang Mai Fu Kin Ni

I think you need a face lift! Chin Tu Fat

It's very dark in here! Wai So Dim

I thought you were on a diet! Wai Yu Mun Ching

This is a tow away zone! No Pah King

Our meeting is scheduled for next week! Wai Yu Kum Nao

Staying out of sight Lei Ying Lo

He's cleaning his automobile Wa Shing Ka

Your body odour is offensive Yu Stin Ki Pu

Great Fa Kin Su Pa

Chinese Urge Anti-West Boycott Over Tibet Stance

2008-04-20T02:45:00.000-07:00

Read the full story on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/world/asia/20china.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=all

...Like many young people, Ms. Zhu, a student at Beijing’s prestigious Foreign Studies University, said she had been infuriated by what she described as unfair attacks on the country’s image. “China used to be known as the sick man of Asia,” said Ms. Zhu, 19, who has been sending out tens of thousands of pro-boycott messages through QQ, a popular online chat service. “We were separated like sand. But this worldwide show of support by Chinese all over the globe illustrates we have solidarity on this issue. After 5,000 years, we’re not so soft anymore....”

Faster, Higher, Stronger, No Longer -- The only way to make Olypics live up to their ideals is to stop them?

2008-04-14T04:07:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/opinion/13bissinger.html?th&emc=th

....But lest we as Americans feel too righteous, we should consider this: If the host country this summer were the United States, every visiting nation would have to consider either boycotting the opening ceremonies or withdrawing given a disturbing record of our own, which includes the occupation of Iraq and the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay....

Beware of Greeks Bearing Placards...

2008-04-14T03:59:00.000-07:00

Beware of Greeks Bearing Placards
Article Tools Sponsored By
By TONY PERROTTET
Published: April 12, 2008

WHEN it comes to Olympic protests, the demonstrators in London, Paris and San Francisco are a pretty wimpy bunch, at least compared to the ancient Greeks. Back in the classical era, protesters really knew how to disrupt an Olympics ceremony.
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In 364 B.C., soldiers stormed the arena in Olympia and a pitched battle occurred on the field. It was history's most dramatic clash of politics and sports. The management of the Games, according to Xenophon, had been wrested from the traditional hosts, the Elians, by a neighboring bunch, the Pisans — and the Elians weren't pleased. They decided to invade the festival at its climax, when thousands of Greek spectators were happily watching a wrestling match.

At the sacred sanctuary of Olympia, the Pisans, and their allies the Arcadians, took up defensive positions, with archers on the temple roofs, but the Elians burst through their ranks. Hand-to-hand combat went on in the sacred precinct of Zeus.

Sports fans weren't fazed. According to the author Diodorus, crowds "still wearing their festive robes, with wreaths and flowers in their hair" watched the fighting from the sidelines, "impartially applauding the doughty deeds performed on both sides."

The violent protest worked wonders. The Elians were forced to withdraw, but the next Games were restored to their control.

Today, we admire the ancient Olympic ideal of athletics being above petty rivalries. The Greeks instituted a "sacred truce" to allow athletes and spectators to get to the festival, quite a feat in a land constantly torn by internal warfare. But the Greeks didn't always live up to their ideal.

There were embargoes: the Spartans were banned from attending in 420 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War. (One Spartan citizen, who slipped incognito into the Games, was whipped.) Twenty years later, the Spartans got into further trouble by mounting a military campaign in the middle of the sacred truce. (They were fined one mina per soldier involved, perhaps the equivalent of $5 million today.) And in 380 B.C., the Athenians boycotted the Olympics when one of their athletes was caught in a corruption scandal — not the most noble cause.

Even during more peaceful times, politics was inescapable, with speakers grandstanding before the huge crowds. In 388 B.C., an orator named Lysias spoke against the tyrant Dionysios of Syracuse, who had arrived with a flashy entourage from Sicily. Sports fans then went on a rampage and sacked the king's luxurious tent.

Still, these protests were exceptions to the rule. Today, we stand in awe at the consistency of the ancient Games, which was held remarkably peacefully, every four years, for more than 10 centuries. (By comparison, our modern Games have been canceled three times for wars in their short history, in 1916, 1940 and 1944.)

Where are we going wrong? Perhaps the place to start is with the modern idea of moving the Games around from nation to nation. In ancient times, the event was always held at the same place — the religious sanctuary of Olympia, in a remote corner of the Peloponnese — and except for that notable glitch in 364 B.C., by the same hosts. This system had an admirable advantage: the Elians were a politically irrelevant bunch, and they usually remained neutral from the larger issues that tore Greeks apart.

Maybe we could short-circuit the endless protests over our modern Olympics by selecting a permanent home for the Games, a nation that nobody could seriously object to, like Liechtenstein, New Zealand or the Independent State of Samoa. With a permanent host country, the Olympic ceremonies would no longer be used as proud national showcases.

Once we selected the host, we would just have to be sure we never picked another one, to avoid a repeat of the Elians gone wild. The spectacle of the Games being attacked by enraged Liechtensteiners would be too much to bear.

Tony Perrottet is the author of "The Naked Olympics" and the forthcoming "Napoleon's Privates."

China: THIS ETERNAL BATTLE OF FATHER AND SON

2008-03-22T01:57:00.000-07:00

I wrote this article for the Sydney Morning Herald

24 June 1989

See P. Patrushev's translation and interpreting webpage: www.russiantranslate.org

Email: rustran@gmail.com

THIS ETERNAL BATTLE OF FATHER AND SON

The West has flattered itself about the benign nature of the Chinese regime, and is still deluding itself both on the extent of its own moral superiority and the true causes of the Beijing sacrifice.

When I think of the recent events in China, three images stand before me. One is the picture of the "pyjama student", apparently the son of a high-ranking party official, defiantly challenging the leaders during a meeting, before collapsing in his chair.

The other is the Styrofoam statue of the "Goddess of Democracy", hastily erected by the students in Tiananmen Square.

And the last, less obvious image, is of the great Yellow River (Huang Ho), also referred to as "China's Sorrow".

What the West has to confront yet is that the struggle in China was not just about democracy or corruption. It was also about power, and particularly about the perennial tug-of-war between fathers and sons, which pervades not only Chinese, but the whole of human history.

To understand the outcome of the current bout of this struggle, we have to remember that the great bulk of Chinese population still comprises peasants who, having most benefited from Deng's agricultural reform, have stood aside from the confrontation. To their inherently conservative outlook, students, intellectuals and even city workers could easily be presented as "thugs", "bourgeois liberals", or even "counter-revolutionaries".

It is no surprise that party propaganda has now begun to build up Deng as another Mao-like incorruptible "Father of the Nation". The humiliated and cowed students are paraded on television as a visible spectacle of the rebellious sons, now disgraced and punished. Selected workers who took part in the riots are sentenced to death. To a conservative mind, with punishment so colourful and palpable, guilt must be equally real.

Like countless emperors and warlords before him, Deng and his band of "angry old men" built their strategy on two concrete pillars - the loyalty of the military and passivity of the peasants.

By contrast, the student strategy, as righteous and timely as it might be, was built on Styrofoam and cellulose. They almost completely lacked proper organisation, planning, and infrastructure. Even their attempts at dialogue with the authorities seemed to have more style than substance.

In retrospect, what was actually surprising was not that they were eventually defeated, but that they got away with such defiance for so long and had managed to cause such seemingly conciliatory gestures by the leadership in the early stages of the confrontation.

In the end, the "Goddess of Democracy" was pulled down by the soldiers as easily as it was erected. The TV coverage made good news abroad, but mattered little once the massive Public Security Bureau unleashed its dissident-netting operations, while the habitual paranoia began to grip the masses, setting relative against relative, father against son, mother against daughter.

For most Westerners, it is hard to imagine just how male-dominated, paternalistic and centralised the Chinese society was and still is. The most crucial fact of life throughout the long Chinese history was the need to maintain a huge network of dykes, rivers and canals which formed the backbone of their intensive system of agriculture.

To do that, one needed mass labour, large-scale bureaucracy, centralised government, and obedience to hierarchical authority.

When authority was lax or corrupt, one had floods and disasters which took literally millions of lives, as they did in 1854. Thus the Yellow River's other name became "China's Sorrow".

But authority in Imperial China also implied responsibility, conveyed by the Heavenly Mandate to rule.

The most central quality sought by the Confucian men of power was jen - humanity. Authority had to be morally justified by an adherence to a code of ethics which was more stringent than that of the population at large. The ruler had to be "first in worrying about the world's troubles and last in the enjoyment of its pleasures".

It is perhaps significant that recently the epithet of "heartlessness" - the antithesis of humanity - was applied to leading conservatives in China and Russia by their critics.

It may be futile to speculate how this attitude of "heartlessness" crept into Chinese life. Was it a result of internal corruption and disintegration, or was it a result of China having been raped by the West during the last 150 years? All we do know is that the lure of the unifying pseudo-father (Mao Zedong in China, and Stalin in Russia) had ultimately proved disastrous. The chickens of communist delusion of social harmony have finally come to roost at Tiananmen Square, as they did earlier behind the barbed wire of the monstrous gulag in the Soviet Union.

The West also has to accept at least partial responsibility for introduction of the rationalist, materialist world view to China, which further helped to undermine its spiritual foundations.

For modern Chinese thinkers such as Wu Chih-hui, soul or spirit had to be banished from the universe. Progress depended on proliferation of material goods which would satisfy our needs and allow us to resolve the mystery of life on the basis of rigorous scientific thinking and human management.

Modern rulers of China aspired to become spiritual Henry Fords imbued with almost limitless autocratic power and a sense of self-righteousness which made Savonarola look like a muddle-headed liberal.

Another Chinese rationalist thinker, Hu Shi, reversed the old Buddhist fable of the monkey who tried to jump away from Buddha's realm but, no matter how far or near he jumped, he always landed on Buddha's hand.

Hu Shi insisted that science had now become the pinnacle of knowledge from which the human mind, like the proverbial monkey, can no longer escape.

It was only an extension of this philosophy to begin to think of people as soulless automata who can be sacrificed to production quotas or to the vagaries of internal party struggle.

The blind, surreal fury of the massacre in Beijing has wiped out years of rational political and economic thinking and planning both in the West and in China itself. Is history, after all, the domain of "the prophet, the madman and the genius", rather than something amenable to human intellect?

Have we approached yet another historical juncture where blind forces of history and the human unconscious combine to create a whirlwind of self-fuelling disorder and violence? Are we about to land again in Buddha's dispassionate hand, but in a most uncomfortable manner?

Perhaps now, at the end of the 20th century, one need not be so fatalistic. The old men of China may sooner or later get their just deserts. Economic sanctions and moral indignation may be more enduring than the Chinese leaders expect.

Even the mirage of the instant celluloid fame may one day, as it did in Poland and Czechoslovakia, prove to be a catalyst to renewed political action of an older and wiser generation of reformers.

But the lessons of Beijing will be even more valuable if they could make us more self-critical, rather than self-congratulatory, and more aware of the deeper causes of our own behaviour. In this, the recent events in China are only a dramatic example of a universal human dilemma.

The hail of bullets at Tiananmen Square had shown how far we are from finding an effective way of bridging the gap between frightened and entrenched old men in power and the young hopefuls for whom the only way of making a noticeable political statement is a glorious sacrifice of their yet unlived lives.

To find an effective answer to this dilemma may be the real challenge of our times.

Editor: Pyotr Patrushev’s books and articles can be found on his website, www.russiantranslate.org

I got this comment on China ...

2008-03-22T01:54:00.000-07:00

Dear Pyotr

I visited China, oh about 10-15 years ago.
It's a beautiful fascinating country, but Beijing.

My friend and I were on a 3-week tour; several members of the group developed an upper respiratory infection.

I am ***NOT A DOCTOR***, but we were glad to have a filled prescription for antibiotics. ** Repeat I am NOT A DOCTOR **

I just did a quick World Wide Web check, and you might be interested to read this article.
I cannot say this is 110% correct, as I said I did a very quick, “search”.

But please take notice of the section regarding the use of "coal"

Links:

* http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/07/070709-china-pollution.html

THE THREE GHOSTS WHICH HAUNTED RUSSIA'S LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA

2008-03-21T18:38:00.000-07:00

PYOTR PATRUSHEV

This was an article I published in the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 May 1989

For background reading.

See P. Patrushev's translation and interpreting webpage: www.russiantranslate.org

Email: rustran@gmail.com

THE THREE GHOSTS WHICH HAUNT RUSSIA'S LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH CHINA

As the world watches this week to see whether the bear hug in Beijing will turn into a T'ai Chi dance in Vladivostok, three ghosts will lurk in the wings of the Forbidden City, reminding the participants of the far from pacific past which led to this historic meeting.

The first is the long racial memory of the Mongolian hordes, sweeping through the Eurasian plain like a giant tidal way, leaving in its wake rape, pillage, destruction and subjugation.

But it had also left another imprint: the tradition of a strong imperial power centered in Moscow; the Oriental penchant for hierarchy which may have spawned the bureaucracy so loathed by the present reformists in China and the Soviet Union; and the much harder-to-measure effect on national consciousness and language.

The fear of the "yellow hordes" in time turned into the more comfortable disdain for the inferior "little brother" to the south of Amur river. During my childhood in Siberia, the only Chinese I knew were shoe repairers, scrap metal collectors and sewage removalists.

The second ghost which will haunt the summit is the Chinese mistrust of the former "big brother".

It will conjure memories of the Russians blatantly elbowing their way right down to Amur in the south and Vladivostok in the east in the wake of the French and English victories in 19th century; of the proud Mao kept waiting by Stalin for many weeks before the treaty of friendship was signed on February 14, 1950; of superior and bombastic Khrushchev coming to see Mao after his famous "shoe-banging" incident.

But there will be another, less familiar ghost, which may well prove to be the least tractable to the colourful ritual of political and ideological exorcism unleashed by the otherwise very capable and charismatic Gorbachev and Deng.

Early in 1937, a brilliant young China specialist by the name of Iulian Shchutskii was taken at night by the NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), together with all his books and diaries. His wife and daughter were spared, as well as a copy of his doctoral dissertation which was buried somewhere in his institute's library.

This dissertation was later published posthumously by Shchutskii's close friend and colleague, Nikolai Konrad, one of the few Soviet sinologists to survive the purges.

Shchutskii's work is the only available Russian translation of one of oldest and most venerated classics, the I Ching, or the Book of Changes. It is now recognised by Western experts as one of the major contributions to this field of study.

Five thousand copies of this book were printed in 1960 in Moscow. It is now a bibliographic rarity, and is far more available in its more recent English translation.

Shchutskii perished in the camps, although he was never brought to trial. Camp stories have it that he was found dead one day with his skull crushed by a chain.

His great crime was his abiding interest in the deeper aspects of Chinese thought and philosophy, including Taoism and Buddhism. He was a deeply religious man.

His knowledge of Chinese language and dialects was such that he used to make up humorous nicknames for his friends in Manchu.

He admired Freud and loathed Marx. Shchutskii was a student of V.M. Alexeev, leader of the Leningrad school of sinology and possibly the greatest Russian scholar of Chinese literature and philosophy.

The hallmark of the Alexeev school was a deep involvement with religious and spiritual aspects of Chinese thought and a great sensitivity, one can almost say love, for the Chinese culture.

Alexeev's diary of his travels through China in 1907 reads like a record of a spiritual pilgrimage. His descriptions of old shrines, local customs and myths are almost poetic.

But during the 30s, the political climate was such that people who represented cultural bridges between Russia and the rest of the world were looked upon as potential or actual spies. Many of Alexeev's students were eliminated. He died a broken man in 1951.

It is important to see that Alexeev and his students represented a continuation of the love-hate affair with China which, ever since the end of the TartarMongolian yoke, was integral to the Russian national consciousness.

The first Russian caravan sent to China under Tsar Alexis in the 17th century came back with favourable reports about the effect of Confucian thought on Chinese population and its morals.

In 1839 Prince Odoevsky, one of the most highly cultured and visionary men of the time, published a futuristic novel The Year 4338. This remarkably daring precursor of the sci-fi genre is supposedly written by a Chinese student living in Russia in the year 4338. He speaks of an almost utopian world largely shaped by the blending of Russian and Chinese cultures.

Another visionary Russian philosopher, Nikolas Fedorov, wrote at the end of the 19th century of the birth of a new Eurasian civilisation which would colonise space and even learn how to control global climate and atmospheric conditions around the Earth.

We may look upon such visions now as being hopelessly utopian. Right now, Gorbachev and his analysts may be far more concerned with pacification of the Pacific Rim and Far Eastern countries rather then with joint colonisation of space.

The establishment of the free economic zone along the eastern seaboard and in Siberia, which would give Soviets access to the relatively cheap and advanced high technology of the region, may have a higher priority for the Soviets (and indeed for the Chinese) than the effect of Confucian thought (or lack of it) on contemporary Chinese morality.

But as the Soviets and the Chinese engage in some latter-day high-tech"cattle trading", they could perhaps spare a thought for those human cultural bridges which in the past have helped to make treaties and trade pacts more durable than the paper on which they were written.

The ghosts of Iulian Shchutskii and his Russian and Chinese colleagues who perished during the purges in Russia and during the Cultural Revolution hover over this very slim bridge. Let us hope that neither side will ignore or thoughtlessly dynamite it again.

Editor: Pyotr Patrushev’s books and articles can be found on his website, www.russiantranslate.org

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