The Evil Plan That Backfired: China Fears Baby Bust

Disastrous. So now Beijing is begging women to have babies. Who could have guessed that its cruel one-child policy of social engineering would have resulted in chaos, misery, human rights abuses, and now a feared "demographic time bomb"?  Who indeed, except anybody with any sense at all.

The Closing of the Chinese Mind

Aka "groupthink makes you stupid."  The CCP is busying itself with "thought reform."  Note too a related academic angle:

... the customarily mild-mannered American Association of University Professors called on universities to cut ties with Confucius Institutes unless academic freedom prevails there. That’s not the case at present. Notes the AAUP, “Confucius Institutes function as an arm of the Chinese state and are allowed to ignore academic freedom.” Agreements establishing them make “unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China. Specifically, North American universities permit Confucius Institutes to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.” These cuddly-seeming institutions, in other words, are CCP propaganda mills on American campuses.

Thoughts on Tiananmen and Taiwan

Food for thought.

Forgetting Tiananmen Square

It's been 25 years, and three new books consider how it has been suppressed.  If you're in a hurry, you can jot down the titles of the books and take a look later:

• The People’s Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited, by Louisa Lim, OUP USA
• Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China, by Rowena Xiaoqing He, Palgrave Macmillan
• Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China, by Evan Osnos, Bodley Head

Well, here we're not forgetting!  Please take a look at:

• NatGeo's story of two photographers (twin brothers!) who were there
• (still imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner) Liu Xiaobo's poem from his collection June 4 Elegies
• Another poem inspired by those events
• How a gangster became a savior: the story of the Triad who helped smuggle 100+ dissidents to safety after the massacre
• Footage of Tiananmen survivors telling their stories at the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee; one is Chai Ling, founder of All Girls Allowed, an organization combatting gendercide in China.
• The world's first Tiananmen museum that has opened in Hong Kong
• Demonstrations in Hong Kong and Taiwan

25 years ago I was only a child watching the news on TV, and from that year I remember two overwhelming feelings that were so intense that they probably shaped my adult take on foreign relations more than I realize: 1989 was defined by the joy of the fall of the Berlin Wall with all its jubilant crowds ... and the absolute, stomach-churning horror of Tiananmen Square.  God, what kind of monstrous, despicable, (what the hell, let's use the word and call a spade a spade) evil government sends its tanks and troops to mow down unarmed students?  And you wonder why I practically have an allergic reaction to people saying that Taiwan should be part of China. 

UPDATE: The Onion nails it again.

Quote of the Day: China's Anti-Japanese Agitprop

Hmmm:

"The CCP may not want a conflict with Japan, but it's been telling Chinese youth for 20+ years that Japan is greatly responsible for the '100 years of humiliation.' So now the CCP is stuck; they have to be tough on Japan—even if they don't want to be—because their citizens demand it. The CCP has created an anti-Japanese frankenstein at home that has to be placated. They have to ride the anti-Japanese tiger their education/propaganda has created, or risk a domestic backlash."

Perverse Consequences and China's One-Child Policy

The entire policy is a barbarous atrocity.  

Great Moments in Research: Academics Launch Fake Social Media Site to Study Chinese Online Censorship

Hey, for once the "Great Moments in Research" tag isn't being used sarcastically.  This is fascinating.

Quote of the Day (Non-Syrian Edition): Chinese Dream

The always-readable View From Taiwan blog notes this thought by a Sina Weibo user:

“Taiwan is a place where the people call the shots.  National leaders there must make decisions that reflect the values of individuals in society, rather than simply corrupting and oppressing vulnerable groups.  In Taiwan they’ve protected Chinese culture, human rights and freedom of speech. ... Why in the world would the Taiwanese people ever want to return to the motherland?  The Chinese Dream is actually in Taiwan.”

Life Imitates Star Trek in the South China Sea

Expansionist China tells its neighbors that resistance is futile.

Human Rights Watch Reports: China Relocating Tibetans

BBC has the story.

Another Year, Another Tiananmen Censorship Drive

But we do not forget.

Reading Hayek in Beijing

Mao, Hayek, and journalist Yang Jisheng.  Do read.

Religious Freedom Around the World: the 2013 Report

The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom’s annual report is out (in PDF).   I'm just going to quote part of its assessment of China:

The Chinese government continues to perpetrate particularly severe violations of the freedom of thought, conscience, and religion or belief. Religious groups and individuals considered to threaten national security or social harmony, or whose practices are deemed beyond the vague legal definition of “normal religious activities,” are illegal and face severe restrictions, harassment, detention, imprisonment, and other abuses. Religious freedom conditions for Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims remain particularly acute, as the government broadened its efforts to discredit and imprison religious leaders, control the selection of clergy, ban certain religious gatherings, and control the distribution of religious literature by members of these groups. The government also detained over a thousand unregistered Protestants in the past year, closed “illegal” meeting points, and prohibited public worship activities. Unregistered Catholic clergy remain in detention or disappeared.

That Was Fast: Beijing Bullies New Pope Francis Over Taiwan

According to this, Beijing said that the Vatican must sever ties with Taiwan before its relations with China could improve.  *Sigh*  

Beijingoism for Babies: Chinese Nationalist Indoctrination and a Tale of Two Little Cousins

One encounter as an example of a much bigger problem.  As I recently had to explain to a student, racism, prejudice, nationalistic chauvinism, general tribalistic hostility to "the Other," and cynical state-sponsored scapegoating of people are by no means character flaws confined to the West (i.e., let's be honest, "white people"). I should point out too that while Beijing might get its kicks whipping up anti-Japanese hatred, it is clearly playing with fire.

Quote of the Day: Thoughts on Gun Control by a Chinese Dissident

Some food for thought as the gun control debate rolls on: 

"Do you know that the Chinese Constitution guarantees almost all the nice things we have here? It is written that Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of speech and religion, they have human and property rights, and that such rights cannot be taken away without due process of the law. And do you know what? Chinese people do not have the right to keep and bear arms. I assure you all those nice guarantees are not worth the paper they are printed on, because when the government has all the guns, they have all the rights. I was not born a citizen of the United States. I was naturalized in 2007. In 2008, I became a proud gun owner. To me, a rifle is not for sporting or hunting; it is an instrument of freedom. It guarantees that I cannot be coerced, that I have free will, and that I am a free man."

Here's the source:

Cartography Caper: China to Publish New Map of Its Territories

Expect lots of tendentious claims on that map, and I'm not only talking about the Senkaku islands.  It's almost like Beijing is actively trying to tick off its neighbors.   

Best comment yet: View from Taiwan - "Rumor has it the map will include the Andromeda galaxy, Ringworld, and areas to be named south of Gondor."

Censorship Protests in China

Well, looky here:

Protests by journalists over alleged heavy-handed censorship at one of China's most daring newspapers have garnered high-profile support in the media and blogosphere, with prominent academics, bloggers and even movie stars joining in. 

... On Monday, several hundred protesters gathered outside the headquarters of the Southern Weekly newspaper in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong province, to vent their anger at the reworking of a New Year's editorial that originally called for greater legal rights but ended up as a celebration of the government's achievements.

Here also are quotations from two people at the protest:

"Readers should decide whether content is good or bad. It isn't for officials to judge," said Ah Qiang, a writer and public-rights activist who attended Monday's protest. "Everyone knows about media censorship, and for the most part everyone has learned to deal with it. But this time they crossed a line and that caused people to unleash a lot of pent-up frustration." 

"I was deeply moved," said Ye Du, a dissident writer who spent 2½ hours at the protest before being forcibly taken home by state security agents. "This wasn't just about Southern Weekly. It was about Chinese people's desire for more political freedom."

Imaging Mao's Famine

A historian wonders: Where is the photographic evidence of Mao's disaster?  In the Great Leap Forward (Into the Abyss), at least 45 million people died of starvation and oppression over some 4 years of absolute hell on earth, but visual documentation is largely lacking.  Honestly, how does it look that the some officials in the Soviet Union was more forthcoming about the murderous famine that Stalin created in Ukraine?

One wonders, though, whether if we ever saw the Chinese photos, we would be thoroughly sickened.  The end of the article details the only photo of the famine that the author ever saw, and the description is horrifying.  

UPDATE: No photos of the Great Famine, but you can still get an eyeful of the Communist propaganda posters from the same period.  Surreal.

Free Advice: Hey, Beijing, Bullying Is Not a Foreign Policy

In terms of looking at China's foreign policy, consider these also the quotes of the day:

“Chinese assertion has backfired,” says Andrew Carr, an expert on Asia-Pacific security at the Australian National University in Canberra.

“They don’t see the connection between upping the tempo on the maritime operations and the fact that so many countries in the region are moving towards the very counter-containment strategies Beijing doesn’t want,” says Michael Green, former Asia director at the National Security Council ...

Seriously, what do you say about a course of action that makes Japanese rearmament look great even to Japan's neighbors?