It appears I can publish again after five days. I’ll try to make up for the silence over the next 24 hours.

There’s a long and detailed article titled The China Sickness in the July/August edition of Commentary (not my favorite magazine).

Written by Arthur Waldron, a China specialist trained at Harvard, the piece starts with a description of a story we all know too well, how the CCP (mis)handled the SARS epidemic, and notes that many Western media were duped into believing the brief period of openness signaled an opportunity for meaningful reform.

This is a metaphor for the article’s theme: Despite the obvious signs that it is a very sick country, the West dons rose-tinted spectacles whenever it looks at China, cheerfully overlooking its horrendous problems, financial, political and social.

Unfortunately, the article can’t be linked, and I can’t quote too much, lest I be hauled off for copyright infringement. But I’ll offer a few excerpts.

Waldron makes astute observations on how the West has fallen for the “China economic miracle” fallacy:

Even today, if you throw a brick on Wall Street you will probably hit someone in a banker’s suit who genuinely believes that China has been growing at a record pace and will continue to do so — indeed, that it is likely to become the motor for Asian and even world development. Over the past twenty years, such people, and their counterparts in Hong Kong and Taiwan, have poured roughly $450 billion in direct investment into China.

What return they will get on this investment remains to be seen, however. Money is made in China by shipping components there to be processed for re-export. With its immense pool of skilled labor, no nonsense about workers’ rights or unions, and a police force willing to crack heads, coastal China is an ideal “platform” for foreign business. Nevertheless, China’s world trade, which today stands at a little over $250 billion per year, is only a little greater as a percentage of world trade than what it was in the 1920’s (though of course much bigger in absolute terms than it was in 1960). Fully half of that figure, moreover, is accounted for by businesses in which foreigners have ownership. While, for Chinese workers, jobs in such processing industries are undoubtedly better than urban unemployment or rural poverty, the sector lacks what economists call backward and forward linkages. The rising tide lifts only the coast…[P]rivate enterprise is everywhere discouraged, and the state sector, which operates largely at a loss and is shrinking in its share of the economy, continues to grow in absolute size in a way that threatens everything else.

He also takes aim at a familiar target, the country’s state-owned enterprises, forced to borrow more and more from the nation’s banks as prices deflate, consumers put off their spending and the SOEs fail to sell their wares:

Failure to sell means that state enterprises lose money; to avoid bankruptcy, the state forces its banks to make irrecoverable loans to its enterprises, which are thus enabled to produce even more things that no one wants to buy. The result, long noted by some specialists, is that China’s banks are in fact insolvent while the state sector continues to waste the precious capital the banks pour into it.

Also examned is the tendency of the Chinese, based on centuries of hardship and tradition, to save and not spend income; the staggering dilemma of China’s vast peasant population, the blatant falsification of economic/production statistics, etc., etc., etc. Nothing really new here in and of itself, but altogether it paints a grim portrait indeed. And Waldron takes a hard look at China’s weird policies re. our friends in North Korea:

Today China provides the food and energy that keep the same loathsome North Korean regime alive. More critically, and more paradoxically, China has long been Pyongyang’s major military ally, and has contributed materially to its nuclear program. Even now, the Chinese seem not to grasp that this program poses a far greater long-term peril to them than it does even to South Korea, not to mention Japan or the United States. Why China would do so much to build up a possible enemy on its own border is again difficult to explain; one can only invoke some sort of feral anti-Western reflex, carried over from the days when, as Mao imagined, the East wind was prevailing over the West wind.

One last quote and I’ll call it a night:

As foreign dangers loom, the fragile bargain that has kept the domestic scene relatively quiet since the massacre of 1989 is beginning to break down. The bargain between regime and people was essentially, “you let us rule and we will make you rich,” and for 25 years China enjoyed a good economic run. But as we have seen, the rosy aggregate figures barely disguise the rot beneath: deflation, banking insolvency, increasing government debt, misallocation of resources, not to mention the lack of a legal system or a legitimate government, pervasive corruption of the rulers, and demoralization of the populace.

If you’re interested in this topic, you’re most likely familiar with Josh Marshall. In any case, be sure to read his brilliant analysis of the utterly absurd scenario that has climaxed with the CIA director’s self-immolation.

I notice the term “Yellowcakegate” has been used over here. (This is another invaluable site for balanced, intelligent, sane liberal logic and analysis, Atrios is a lot of fun and I read him daily, but he is more infotainment, while Kleiman is a true intellectual.) So I probably won’t win any prizes.

I still don’t think it’ll be a big enough story in terms of rocking American politics. Yes, it is big news — but most Americans simply won’t care, as it was one of many reasons Bush gave for the invasion, and no matter how deceptive and unethical it was, they can ultimately dismiss it as bad judgment or a mistake, and then apologize for it. It’s been done before.

[For a far more scathing but not unintelligent analysis, check out the latest posts at this site, which is actually better than its unfortunate name.]

Looking at virtually all of Josh Marshall’s columns of the past several days, it would appear that Cakegate (did I invent that or is it already being used in the US?) is the hottest story in town and could be with us for a long time.

I really think there is a lesson here about how GWB operates and thinks, the duplicity and the weaselishness with which he tries to wiggles out of the whole he’s dug for himself. I’m not saying the story is unimportant. Unfortunately, I really can’t imagine this issue taking America by storm. It may delight some bloggers and intellectuals and anyone who wants to see Bush besmirched, but I still don’t see any crime other than lying about one item on a very long list of items (reasons to invade Iraq). It just underscores what we already know about Bush & Co.

This is my perspective from many thousands of miles away. Is America outraged by this, or is it just grist for the boggers’ mill? Watergate had actual crimes involved, a vast web of lawbreaking and deception. Is Cakegate perceived in the US to be on that level? Can it escalate to that? It’s sure getting a lot of coverage on the BBC (surprise, surprise) but, again, I can’t tell how shaken up the American public is about it. My guess is, not much, but I could be wrong….

I am still not 100 percent recovered, so I can’t post much. Maybe over the weekend. I went out a couple of days ago thinking I was all better, and within about ten minutes found I was short of breath and headached and I staggered back to my apartment, where I’ve been hiding out ever since. I am still on a regimen of about 20 various pills a day, so if I posted anything goofy over the past week, that’s my excuse.

Mark Kleiman, who supported the invasion of Iraq, today tries to put the costs of the operation in perspective, and his conclusions are depressing:

The Pentagon says the occupation of Iraq is going to cost about $50 billion per year, indefinitely. That’s not counting reconstruction costs. Keeping Afghanistan safe for its warlords is now costing about $10 billion per year. Can you imagine how much safer a world we’d have today if we’d been willing to spend half that much on rebuilding the fragments of the Soviet Empire in the years just after 1989? Or how much a tenth of that, well spent, could do for human and economic development in Africa? Or how big a horselaugh you would get if you proposed spending anything like those sums on an activity that didn’t also include killing people?

Everything about Iraq right now looks like a quagmire: the US is bleeding, in terms of both money and soldiers, the Iraqi public appears to have lost its enthusiasm of just a few weeks ago and the president is bogged down in scandals of his own making, the yellowcake uranium story dominating the news. Here in Asia it is hard to tell how people in the US feel right now. If what I’m hearing in the media is any indication, it looks like the whole thing is about to blow up in Bush’s face. Watching him squirm on CNN over the uranium scandal, it struck me just how shallow, and just how arrogant he really is, placing himself above the truth and above scrutiny in the wake of a duplicity that make Clinton look like an altar boy. The smugness he displayed was truly revolting. If it continues like this, he just may dig his own grave and give the Democrats a crack at winning, something that seemed literally inconceivable just eight weeks ago.

This is probably all over the place by now, but it certainly startled me to see Yahoo’s list of “Top News Stories” this afternoon:

— U.S. forces capture 2 ex-Iraqi officials
— U.S. plans to seek prisoners’ release
— Bush pledges role in Liberia crisis
— Microsoft to quit granting stock options
— Study: U.S. hypertension rate rose in ’90s
— Britney Spears says she’s not a virgin

Doesn’t one of those items strike you as, um , maybe not quite worthy of banner headlines? Maybe it’s me….

For you China junkies thirsting for the latest on what’s going on over in the Mainland, be sure to check out Adam’s new pinko site (you’ll see why I call it that). It’s off to a good start.

Today Adam links to yet another China news site, a bit more offbeat — make that bizarre. Check it out.

I always thought Dorothy Rabinowitz was the best of the conservative pundits, not just in terms of style (and she is unsurpassed) but in terms of getting her point across, which she does with a subtle irony that has become her signature. Still, she is a die-hard conservative — she broke the story of accusations that Clinton had raped a woman many years back –and I wondered how she would react to Ann Coulter’s book, which will no doubt soon be a best seller.

Rabinowitz’s review is priceless, practically perfect. I believe her one error (or at least a lapse in judgement) is referring to Coulter as “the Maureen Dowd of conservatives,” implying that the real Dowd is a flaming liberal, which is patently false. Bitchy, cloying, annoying, at times stupid — but no one was as vicious to Clinton during the scandal than Dowd. She’ll go after anyone, and her liberalism is no parallel to Coulter’s conservatism. The comparison also implies that Dowd writes a lot of falsehoods, which I also think is inaccurate. I know of one case where she abused a quote, but I have never heard her accused of writing outright and deliberate lies, Coulter’s trademark.

AIDS-in-China update from the BBC. Is anybody listening?