Blood & Treasure

sounding off within limits

Following last night's post on Twitter's agreement to conform to local censorship laws, here's some extracts from a discussion by Sina Weibo users on the experience of using a service where the censorship comes pre-packaged. The fact that all these views were seen as OK for publication gives you a good idea of the limits currently allowed within the Chinese system (and incidentally, check out comments 7 and 8 for the difference between a fenqing and a wumaodang, a distinction that tends to get lost these days.)

dead pangolins, methamphetamine and live North Koreans

Here's a great report delving into the background of the murder of the crew of two Chinese cargo ships on the Mekong last October. Introducing Naw Kham:

Opium and heroin are no longer the Golden Triangle's only products. Since the late 1990s, secret factories in Shan State have churned out vast quantities of methamphetamine. This highly addictive drug is known across Asia in pill form by the Thai name yaba ("crazy medicine") and in its purer crystalline form as ice or shabu.

It is now the top drug in Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Brunei, the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime reported in 2011. Naw Kham's rise coincided with this explosion of meth use, which transformed the ill-policed Mekong between Myanmar and Laos -- Naw Kham's patch -- into one of Southeast Asia's busiest drug conduits.

Every year hundreds of millions of Myanmar-made methamphetamine pills are spirited across the river into Laos or down into Thailand. The trade is worth hundreds of millions of dollars -- enough to corrupt poorly paid law enforcement officials across the region.

Narcotics are not the Mekong's only contraband.

Other lucrative goods include: endangered wildlife such as tigers and pangolins; weapons, stolen vehicles and illegal timber; and, in the run-up to this month's Tet celebrations, thousands of dogs in filthy cages bound for restaurants in Vietnam.

There is human contraband too. Illegal migrants from Myanmar and Laos are bound for Thailand's booming construction or sex industries, while a constant stream of North Koreans journey across southern China and through Laos to surrender to the Thai authorities, who obligingly deport them to South Korea.

And on the other riverbank there's a giant casino complex controlled by a Chinese firm called Kings Romans. Can't find it right now, but I remember an ESWN article to the effect that Chinese casinos in Laos come complete with their own basement torture chambers for delinquent gamblers.

UPDATE: also relevant: this from James last October. And all via Matt martin's twitter feed.

 

blame the right hand, not the left hand

An article here argues that because Twitter has announced it will take down content it believes contravenes local laws, the company itself is not instrumental in that; it’s all the fault of the governments concerned.

The thing is, the distinction here is without much of a difference. Largely privatised economic environments require collaborative censorship. That’s how it works in in China, where the vast majority of the work of censorship is done by private companies, often without much day to day contact with the state: ‘self-discipline’ is the term. This can often involve quite baroque levels of information management, again worked out by relevant companies.

There are supposed to be six levels of censorship on the Sina Weibo service, for instance. Let’s say you start tweeting about horrendous cases of land seizures, corruption, or general abuse of power. You notice that the level of retweets goes down; that you have fewer followers; that you’re not involved in conversations so much. You tweet about other stuff, and it seems like all your old friends have returned. Once more, you have joined the conversation. Maybe the people who say that China is just not interested in change are right. What’s happened is that you’ve been managed back into a more ‘constructive’ frame of mind by an administrative dialing down of your connectivity, all without the necessity of anyone tipping their hand by directly deleting your stuff.

It doesn’t quite work out that smoothly. Sina Weibo is supposed to have 500 people on this stuff – it admits to 100 - which is not enough for a user base of 200 million or so. But it does show what a can-do entrepreneurial spirit can bring to the censorship party. And just think of the export market! David Cameron wouldn’t have to switch off twitter if there was another round of riots after all.

So what we’re actually seeing here – and also with the proposed SOPA legislation in the US – is a move towards the Chinese model of collaborative censorship. All the collaborators are responsible for it.

And as an aside, it is annoying when so-called free speech supporters turn out to be more interested in protecting the reputation of technology companies when any direct issue arises. It reminds me of the furore over Hossam el-Halalwy’s piggipedia last year, when people were outraged not because he’d been prevented from identifiying assorted thugs, goons and torturers from Egypt’s Central Security, but because he’d contravened Facebook’s terms of service.

is there a North Korean resistance?

At any rate, here’s a case for inspector O:

 Several days ago it was revealed that during the mourning period for Kim Jong Il, four public officials from North Hamgyung Province were murdered in what is an unprecedented crime for North Korea.

A source in North Hamgyung Province told Daily NK on January 19, “During the mourning period, one official from the provincial NSA, one from the prosecutor’s office and two from the People’s Safety Agency were murdered in Cheongjin.” The source added, “There was a note found lying next to the body of the executed NSA official which said ‘Punished in the name of the people.’”

All from the security apparat. The report goes on to state that reactions from local citizens have been “mostly positive”. I wonder if this has something to do with the abrupt closure of all traffic across the Chinese border after KJI died, and the disruption of lucrative smuggling networks that implies.

That via Adam Cathcart’s increasingly vital Sino-NK blog, which also reports on China’s disaster planning for the North Korean frontier, in turn leading off from a compelling Asahi Shimbun piece on the PLA’s own preparations against the day: to Pyongyang in two hours.

A good bit of Friday night reading, all in all.

what is good, English Heritage?

This efficient rundown of the Thai/Cambodian conflict over the Preah Jihar temple reminds us that it was the only outbreak of state to state violence ever caused by the decision of a conservation body. So far!

Myself, I look forward to the Leicestershire pork pie wars.

dedication

Listen up, mes enfants. This is from page 251of a certain co-blogger's new book

Online, a big shout out to...the schlachtbummlers at Blood & Treasure

That means you, suckers. What's more, you also have the privilege to be acknowledged at the back of a truly great piece of work. Since it's January, it's too early to say that it's the best work of popular history published this year. But it's not to early to say that it's almost certainly going to be the best work of popular history this year. So if you haven't already got it, do yourself a favour and get the chance to point out your very own acknowledgment to family, friends, people at bus stops, the police officers who show up at your gaff at four in the morning...

Seriously, James. How did you do that? Bastard.

imperialist escalator incident watch

Yu Li, better known as Sima Nan, is one of China’s best known nationalist writers and essayists. I think I might have mentioned him before on the blog. Anyway, on January 20 he treated his loyal army of fenqing to a typical blog post:

“America is the enemy of all the people in the world. It produces IOUs (U.S. dollars) in exchange for real products, and exploits countries around the world. It has planted economic roots on all continents. Its energy consumption level is more than ten times the world average. It’s like a giant tumor. Its military bases are all around the world. All wars after World War II were instigated, engineered or started by America.

And so on. He was next heard from on January 24, after leaning over an escalator at an airport in Washington DC and getting his head trapped against an oncoming wall. Laughter echoed across the Sinosphere:

“The American imperialists can no longer produce weapons of mass destruction due to their declining economy, so they switched from a war using aircraft carriers to a war using escalators. Mr. Sima astutely caught wind of this, and bravely went to enemy territory… and successfully destroyed the imperialists’ weapon in the testing phase.”

There was also speculation that he’d stashed his wife and kid overseas: it’s not unknown for people to make a lot of money out of patriotism and promptly vanish to the States on an investor’s visa: though it seems he was just attending a conference.

He’s an interesting character, too: at one stage he was banned from publishing because of his support for the democracy protests of 1989. Later he made his name exposing bogus claims of supernatural powers by Qigong masters and as a particular scourge of the F#lun G#ng. He pretty much holds the local celebrity sceptic franchise. I don’t know how his political change of heart came about. But transformation from ardent class of 1989 democrat to ardent 21st century nationalist isn’t that unusual either.

a modern obituary

 

Jonathan “Jack” Idema, a former Green Beret from North Carolina who was convicted of running a private jail in Afghanistan where he tortured terrorism suspects, died Jan. 21 in the Mexican state of Quintana Roo. He was 55.

Died of AIDS, apparently. Yet another terror-war chancer. It’s amazing how people still go on that ‘it’ was and is ‘about the oil’ when the sure sign of actually existing imperialism is the number of crackpots and chancers unleashed on the newly captive territories. That’s when you know you have control, when your fools and sadists can run amok, when you can just decant them, on a promise or a casually bent contract.

I don’t think Rory Stewart makes up for this, though in fairness it should be noted that the 9/11 wars haven’t produced a von Ungern-Sternberg yet. 

early Ballardian candidate promises drained swimming pool in every pot

So, elect Gingrich and Moonbase Newt is go. There's an obvious, albeit obviously deranged, rationale for a man campaigning in Florida to support greater space related activity, that being the state from which all the rockets went up. Literally stratospheric pandering, there. On the other hand, it's a long cherished programme. Here he is from 1986:

"If we'd spent as much on space as we've spent on farm programmes, we could have taken all the extra farmers and put them on space stations working for a living...in orbiting factories.

It's not exactly the same. Then he was talking about putting surplus farmers to work in orbiting space stations in an address to a Science Fiction convention. Now he speaks of a modest moonbaseto hard headed, fiscally conservative electors. I suppose we all become a little more moderate and realistic as we get older.

at Matteo's grave

So what questions are they asking the future governors of China?

Marx was convinced capitalism was not sustainable. But 160 years later, it's still around. How do you explain that? 

I should say that they want an answer, and at a guess an answer vindicating Marx, also capitalism. From Melissa Chan's report from the CPC's central cadre school. Later, she wanders round the grounds:

As we left campus, we had a surprise: we passed by an old stone grave, gated off and surrounded by old trees.  It was the grave of Matteo Ricci, the 16th-century Jesuit missionary and one of the first Western scholars of Chinese language and customs.

holdings of the king

It's amazing how rich you can get in a democracy where lese majesty is still a crime, provided you are da majesty. King Bhumibol is the world's richest monarch. Crown holdings include slum housing, cement, shopping malls, insurance and the leases on government ministries. That about covers the waterfront.

before the locust

I’m not finding the new Hong Kong identity terribly impressive, frankly. Especially if it’s based on stuff like this, which is just outright bigotry. I’d also like to know how it squares with the fact that the SAR’s pro-Beijing parties are doing pretty well right now in such elections as the government allows, though it’s not altogether surprising that a sour ‘little Hong Konger’ sentiment coexists with growing support for a reactionary populist outfit like the DAB.

Hong Kong used to be bigger than that. I have a tale of when Hong Kong patriotism operated at a more edified level. I was sworn to secrecy at the time, but I think that now it can be told.

We’re talking the early to mid nineties when Patten was in charge and negotiations were underway for the final handover. Except that some of the then colony’s negotiators were determined to try and make sure that it wasn’t just going to be a handover. These were people at fairly senior levels in the Hong Kong civil service; proper Hong Kong people, who didn’t subscribe to the notion that the place had been lifted up by the blessed Cowperthwaite for the edification of happy, hard working munchkins, but was largely built by Chinese labour, capital and cultural assertion. Being within the civil service, they were constrained for pushing for more democracy. What they did want was universal access to British citizenship, not so that they could come to Britain, but so that they could deal with their new masters with the knowledge that they were not captives.

This was not something that went down well, partly because of the usual immigration scare rubbish and partly because human capital was part of the handover deal. The option would be raised in relevant meetings between Hong Kong and London, the option would be ignored along with its presenter and then the serious people would talk of serious things.

Finally, someone had enough After being told that any generous passport deal was ‘completely off the table’, he went into a splendid rant: he wanted London to know, once and for all, that Hong Kong people had no intention of flocking to their miserable, cold racist little island. What they wanted was the option to leave if things went wrong. This request was entirely reasonable in the light of the fact that their diligence and enterprise had enabled Britain to emerge from its disgraceful colonial history with some of its reputation intact. Then he walked out.

And that is how current Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive Donald Tsang came to choose China.

For what it’s worth I got that from someone who got it from someone who was there.

you will be

Happy Lunar New year, everyone. Here's Gong Linna singing 'Perturbed' on Hunan TV's New Year gala show.

old traditions replaced by new technology

Number one: the tradition of tying a string connected to the thumb of the corpse to a bell:

Joe Canaday of Hippensteel said each person who has a green burial at The Preserve receives a GPS transmitter disk in the center of the casket or in the grave if there is no casket

Actually, it's more for location than resurrection. Eerie mental pictures of families electronically dowsing their way round graveyards in pursuit of the loved one...

copping off

I said last night that I thought this would make a pretty good sitcom:

Two undercover police officers secretly fathered children with political campaigners they had been sent to spy on and later disappeared completely from the lives of their offspring, the Guardian can reveal.

In both cases, the children have grown up not knowing that their biological fathers – whom they have not seen in decades – were police officers who had adopted fake identities to infiltrate activist groups. Both men have concealed their true identities from the children's mothers for many years.

...which was not the majority opinion on twitter. There are also claims that the men duped the women into relationships as part of their covert activities. I take it they didn’t say no when the spliff got passed around either, because if they’d done anything to compromise operational security in such a dangerous environment a lot of hippies would have gone round to their mum’s houses and burned cardboard whales on the lawns. Or they would have been taken to a slightly cold room and subjected to anguished conversations about loyalty. There would have been...difficult silences.

The women left with the kids are justifiably outraged, but I think the idea that their former lovers were acting in accordance with their 'duties' tends to give too much credence to the idea that their covert activities were in any way justified or that the cops involved took them in any way seriously. Instead, I suggest, they knew the whole operation was bullshit from the start, but that they’d lucked into a very good gig: a nice, freewheeling lifestyle, lots of fresh air, a generally tolerant, understanding bunch of folks and plenty of young women keen to believe in the sincerity of their comrades. I suspect the women these cops met in the police milieu, by contrast, were a little more suspicious of human nature.

All  this was being done on a nice, regular policeman’s salary, and what's more when they got back to their old life to load up on burgers in the canteen, all their superiors were telling them to blend in even more. There’s a big budget riding on your successful infiltration of these dangerous characters. Certainly, inspector. All in the national interest.

And then, when the time really does come, you can just walk away from the whole thing, pretty secure in the idea that the last thing that’s going to happen is the law coming after you for child support. It's Operation Dodgy Bloke Heaven.

69 heartfelt thumbprints

Remember when I suggested that Father Ted could be remade in China? I think we've found our Craggy Island:

A remote mountain village in southwestern Guizhou Province, called Goushi, meaning dog shit in English, adopted a new auspicious name at the request of 69 villagers.

The provincial public security bureau director Cui Yadong renamed the poverty-stricken village as Jinxin, meaning prosperous and happy, and handed a new name board yesterday, the Guizhou City News has reported.

The folks of Prosperous and Happy only got their first road last year. They have a per capita income of $440 dollars, and their peitition to change the name of their happy little community was signed by 69 heartfelt thumbprints. The very place. And, as I predicted in the original post, it's in Guizhou.

In other news, I'm in the middle of something long and complex workwise right now, so you're going to be getting daft posts for the forseeable.

what we need are more polticians living in the unreal world

Busy today, but here's a  presidential candidate to mull over. He's Very Serious:

Jaded voters may think it'll take a miracle to change South Korea, but one potential presidential candidate says that's exactly what he can conjure up.

World peace is also on the cards if his fourth attempt to win office is successful, the 62-year-old Huh Kyung Young told Reuters. He claims to have an IQ of 430 and the ability to perform miracle cures.

"I can change 23 chromosomes and 40,000 DNA in the human body. If someone is diagnosed with uterine cancer, I can treat the cancer within 0.1 seconds just by looking into the patient's eyes," Huh said.

The head of the Democratic Republican Party, which is not represented in parliament, said he wants to move the United Nations headquarters from New York to Panmunjom..."

Actually, that last might be kind of fun.

 

rich list death watch

The China Rich List death trip continues:

The Zhejiang Provincial Higher People's Court Wednesday upheld the death penalty for Wu Ying, the 31-year-old former owner of the Bense Holding Group.

Wu, born to a farmer's family, was the sixth-richest woman in the Chinese mainland in 2006, with total assets of 3.6 billion yuan ($569.99 million), according to the Hurun Report. She was arrested in 2007 for illegal fundraising and fraud.

In December 2009, she was sentenced to death by the Jinhua Intermediate People's Court for cheating investors.

So she was worth half a billion dollars when she was 24. I yield to no-one in my admiration for the Chinese peasantry, but I think the subtext here is that Ms Wu was fronting a wider enterprise and she talked too much after she was arrested. They can't kill her quietly, but she still has to go. I sometimes wonder if the whole Hurun thing is allowed to exist because it identifies purge targets and thereby integrates itself into the whole stability maintenance thing.

orderly popular demonstration watch: Wanggang

Now here's a thing. A thousand residents of Wanggang village stage a peaceful demonstration at Guangzhou city government headquarters, just as the provincial Communist Party is conducting its annual general meeting. The issue, as common, is a land grab:

The protesters from Wanggang village demanded adequate compensation for land seized by their local government and the removal of the village's party secretary.

 In a new challenge for Guangdong's liberal-minded party chief Wang Yang, they threatened to turn their village, in Guangzhou's Baiyun district, into "a second Wukan" if their dispute was not solved properly. Li Hongding, a 32-year-old villager, said it was their third rally outside the headquarters; their previous appeals were ignored. He said they were worried that all the land in their now-urban village would soon be gone if an investigation into the local government's actions was delayed further.

"With the collective power of our villagers, we want to get our voices heard by the government during the provincial people's congress," Li said. "Communist rule in Wanggang village has clearly been replaced by corrupted power affiliated with triad gangs. If our problems are not solved, Wanggang will become Guangdong's second Wukan. The land is left by our ancestors, we will fight until the end to get it back."

Nice righteous rebellion touch by Mr Li in he third paragraph, who also, I note, didn't mind giving his full name. This is an entirely predictable consequence not of the Wukan rising as such, but of Wang Yang's explicit endorsement of the demonstrators there and of those who protest about land seizures generally. He told them, in parenthesis, that they' had a right to a hearing at city hall; and so here they are, at city hall. Wang can certainly point out that an orderly demonstration is better than a riot. But I think his problem may be that the CPC in general doesn't necessarily make that distinction.

The other interesting point here is that the demonstrators are not claiming their land on the basis that the authorities contravened Chinese land use law. They are claiming it belongs to them by ancient custom and usage, as did the Wukan rebels. I have no idea right now what this may signify, but it didn't stop Wang endorsing the villagers demands in the Wukan case. 

 

that joke isn’t funny any more

The Boris LOL one. Londoners appear to be going off it, anyway.

I’m currently reading Ken’s autobiography, which I got from the library rather than buying in order to support a vital and humane public service. By and large it rings true because it contains lots of swearing. I mean, I don’t read all that many political biographies, but I do know that the practice of British politicking contains a substantial amount of effin and jeffin, as they say round here. Any pol who fails to acknowledge this fundamental reality in the memoirs is thereby basically untrustworthy. Obviously, this doesn’t apply when you get as far back as, say, that cunt Disraeli.

The score settling is exuberant; the book soars on its sore points and in so doing reveals, once more, what a bunch of colossal pricks the whole New Labour cadre were. This is just an embedded feature of histories of that time. There's no getting round it.

Tories, by contrast, Ken quite likes, in the same way he likes his lizards, peering at them in a kind of wonder. It was always nonsense to say as wet-knickered rightwingers did, that if Ken came to power his ideological opponents would be sent to the gulag. They would be put in a large, airy vivarium and given plenty of slime to play with.

Anyway, best of luck to Ken come the election. Back in 2005 I wrote a post saying that Livingstone really was what Blair was only pretending to be. I still think it holds up more or less OK.