Catching up on my newspapers, I came across this article in last week’s Los Angeles Times about a “crisis of trust” in China:

Even as China surges onto the world stage as if powered by rocket fuel, Earth’s most populous country is beset by trust issues that would test anyone.

Rules aren’t clear and must be navigated on the fly. The food supply is full of life- and health-threatening fakes. Factories spew chemicals into the air and water at alarming rates. Power and connections far outweigh justice, and social tension is growing.

Meanwhile, corrupt local officials pay lip service to Communist Party ideals as they line their pockets at the expense of the general population. Land that farmers have tilled for generations can be seized on a moment’s notice in a system that doesn’t recognize private property. Friends cheat friends and uncles bilk nephews for short-term gain.

Though the widespread insecurity is difficult to quantify, analysts say it is taking an economic and psychological toll, and making governing more difficult.

“China is in a very serious trust crisis,” said Zheng Yefu, a sociologist at Peking University and author of the book “On Trust.” “I’d say we’re looking at a minimum of a generation, maybe 20 or 30 years, to recover, but it could take two or three times that long.”

Experts cite several reasons for the dearth of trust. Some point to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution and other wrenching political campaigns in the first decades of communist rule that ended centuries-old traditions and forced family members and friends to denounce one another, severing basic human bonds.

“Mutual trust among people because of various political movements has deteriorated to the lowest level that any society can possibly hit,” said Hung Huang, chief executive of China Interactive Media Group and star of the recent film “Perpetual Motion,” about a woman out to determine which of her friends is having an affair with her husband. “There’s also a very different starting point: In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty. In China, you’re guilty until proven innocent.”

Others cite the influence of a market economy on a society without a well-developed legal or regulatory system. Some say a lack of religion or meaningful belief system under communism leaves people morally adrift.

The article portrays a China where mistrust pervades every level of society, from food supplies — “There are scandals involving carcinogenic noodles, poisoned melon seeds, waste-filled pancakes, substandard wine and water-injected pork, among others” — to marriages — “Cheating on your spouse and cheating the public are closely related, according to the state-run New China News Agency, which reported last year that 95% of Chinese officials convicted of corruption had mistresses.”

Some of these issues are common to any modern society, where relationships are freuqently impersonal (ask me about my daily experience of road rage here in Los Angeles). So is what’s going on in China unique? Or is it just a matter of degree?

This debate is occurring because of the Supreme Court’s ruling that said that we must conduct ourselves under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention.

And that Common Article 3 says that, you know, “There will be no outrages upon human dignity.” It’s like — it’s very vague. What does that mean, “outrages upon human dignity”? That’s a statement that is wide open to interpretation.

And what I’m proposing is that there be clarity in the law so that our professionals will have no doubt that that which they’re doing is legal.

You know, it’s a — and so the piece of legislation I sent up there provides our professionals that which is needed to go forward.

The first question that we’ve got to ask is: Do we need the program?

I believe we do need the program. And I detained in a speech in the East Room what the program has yielded; in other words, the kind of information we get when we interrogate people within the law…

…And we need to be able to question them, because it helps yield information, information necessary for us to be able to do our job.

Now, the court said that you’ve got to live under Article 3 of the Geneva Convention. And the standards are so vague that our professionals won’t be able to carry forward the program, because they don’t want to be tried as war criminals. They don’t want to break the law.

These are decent, honorable citizens who are on the front line of protecting the American people. And they expect our government to give them clarity about what is right and what is wrong in the law. And that’s what we have asked to do…

…I will tell you this — and I’ve spent a lot of time on this issue, as you can imagine. And I’ve talked to professionals, people I count on for advice. These are the people who are going to represent those on the front line protecting this country.

They’re not going forward with the program. They’re professionals — will not step up unless there’s clarity in the law.

So Congress has got a decision to make. You want the program to go forward or not? I strongly recommend that this program go forward in order for us to be able to protect America.

President George Bush, Sept. 15, 2006, White House Press Conference.

From the latest Rolling Stone:

In July 2002, a Special Forces unit in southeast Afghanistan received intelligence that a group of Al Qaeda fighters was operating out of a mud-brick compound in Ab Khail, a small hill town near the Pakistani border. The Taliban regime had fallen seven months earlier, but the rough border regions had not yet been secured. When the soldiers arrived at the compound, they looked through a crack in the door and saw five men armed with assault rifles sitting inside. The soldiers called for the men to surrender. The men refused. The soldiers sent Pashto translators into the compound to negotiate. The men promptly slaughtered the translators. The American soldiers called in air support and laid siege to the compound, bombing and strafing it until it was flat and silent. They walked into the ruins. They had not gotten far when a wounded fighter, concealed behind a broken wall, threw a grenade, killing Special Forces Sgt. Christopher Speer. The soldiers immediately shot the fighter three times in the chest, and he collapsed.

When the soldiers got close, they saw that he was just a boy. Fifteen years old and slightly built, he could have passed for thirteen. He was bleeding heavily from his wounds, but he was — unbelievably — alive. The soldiers stood over him.

“Kill me,” he murmured, in fluent English. “Please, just kill me.”

His name was Omar Khadr. Born into a fundamentalist Muslim family in Toronto, he had been prepared for jihad since he was a small boy. His parents, who were Egyptian and Palestinian, had raised him to believe that religious martyrdom was the highest achievement he could aspire to. In the Khadr family, suicide bombers were spoken of with great respect. According to U.S intelligence, Omar’s father used charities as front groups to raise and launder money for Al Qaeda. Omar’s formal military training — bombmaking, assault-rifle marksmanship, combat tactics — before he turned twelve. For nearly a year before the Ab Khail siege, according to the U.S. government, Omar and his father and brothers had fought with the Taliban against American and Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan. Before that, they had been living in Jalalabad, with Osama bin Laden. Omar spent much of his adolescence in Al Qaeda compounds.

At Bagram, he was repeatedly brought into interrogation rooms on stretchers, in great pain. Pain medication was withheld, apparently to induce cooperation. He was ordered to clean floors on his hands and knees while his wounds were still wet. When he could walk again, he was forced to stand for hours at a time with his hands tied above a door frame. Interrogators put a bag over his head and held him still while attack dogs leapt at his chest. Sometimes he was kept chained in an interrogation room for so long he urinated on himself.

After the invasion of Afghanistan, President Bush decided, in violation of the Geneva Convention, that any adolescent apprehended by U.S. forces could be treated as an adult at age sixteen.

CONT. BELOW

(more…)

Hey, guys. Raj here. Just a little something I thought you lot might find interesting ref the President Chen “corruption” scandals in Taiwan…..

The BBC has a report on the latest developments from Taiwan into on-going corruption scandals concerning President Chen Shui-bian.

Taiwan first lady cleared of graft

The wife of Taiwan’s President Chen Shui-bian has been cleared of wrongdoing by prosecutors investigating a corruption scandal. Wu Shu-chen was accused of accepting vouchers from a department store in return for her influence. Prosecutors said there was no evidence that she had intervened during the Sogo store’s takeover in 2004.

In case you missed it, the KMT opposition party pushed these allegations as a means of attacking her husband, President Chen. So are the rails now coming off the Chen-corruption wagon? Maybe. It’s interesting that his opponents attack people around him more than the man himself, in the hope that they can pull him down at the same time. But they can’t even get that right.

On the other hand, the KMT’s allegations of corruption are a lot like the pot calling the kettle black….

Ma: “It’s ok to take public funds – everyone does it!”

Yeah, that was his excuse. Everyone does it. So why is it ok for the KMT to pinch the public’s money and not President Chen, if he really is corrupt? Hmm, let me guess – because Chen’s an easy target due to flagging popularity? Or maybe just because the KMT considers Taiwanese taxpayers’ money its own private bank account….

KMT’s theft of public assets

“The Chinese Nationalist Party [KMT] has stolen billions of dollars from the people over the past century. They never returned the money to the people. Can this be called `clean?'” Su said.

Of course this has not been proven in court, but then again we are talking about the party that ran Taiwan for decades not unlike the way in which the CCP runs China. You won’t find many people on the island that think the KMT didn’t take public money – the only dispute is how much the total figure is.

So I’m just going to recap what the situation is – it makes my head hurt sometimes.

President Chen is accused of “corruption”, but without specific details. Those in his family are accused, but already some of those claims are showing to be a load of nonsense. On the other hand we have the KMT, whose leader admits to moving public funds into his personal bank account and runs a party that stole millions, if not billions, of US dollars from the Taiwanese public. And supposedly the KMT are the good guys fighting against corruption.

As Dr Evil would say, “Riiiiiiiiight………………………”

Highly entertaining post by Andrew Leonard at Salon – entertaining for the Chinese students among us at least. Leonard recounts the current controversy over competing Romanization systems in Taiwan, and then delves into the background of the first two professors of Chinese at Cambridge, Thomas Wade and Herbert Giles (whose namesake Romanization system most of us have had to face at one time or another), whose relationship was not exactly what you’d think:

All my adult life, the names Wade and Giles, the first two professors of Chinese at Cambridge, have been linked inseparably in my head, as I am sure is true for countless other students of Chinese. But how many know that the two men were enemies, or that one was opposed to missionary evangelization (also a sin in my book,) or was a powerful advocate for better treatment of Chinese by the British?

Throughout the piece, Leonard’s love of the Chinese language comes through. Leonard loves Chinese because of, not in spite of, its difficulties and complexities.

As lazy a student as I have been over the years, I can still relate. You’ll never get bored with a subject where there’s always something else to learn, something else to master.

Hi all, Lisa here for Richard. I’m reposting something from my blog that’s a few days old but hasn’t been covered here yet (other than in comments). I’m not as prolific as Richard but I’ll try to keep the front page somewhat fresh in his absence. Any suggestions for posts, please drop me a line.

The Los Angeles Times’s Ching-Ching Ni reports that the head of Shanghai’s Communist Party and protege of former President Jiang Zemin has been charged with corruption:

Chen Liangyu, who served as party secretary of Shanghai and as a member of Beijing’s ruling Politburo, is the highest ranking official in more than a decade to be targeted in a campaign against corruption.

The investigation into Chen centered on the misuse of Shanghai’s social security funds for illicit investments in real estate and other infrastructure projects, according to the New China News Agency. Chen is accused of shielding corrupt colleagues, and abusing his position to benefit family members…

…Analysts say Chen’s downfall also appears to be part of a carefully orchestrated plan by President Hu Jintao to consolidate his power ahead of next year’s party congress and to clip the ambitions of his predecessor’s allies.

“The Jiang Zemin era is over, the Shanghai Gang is being dismantled,” said Cheng Li, a China expert at the Brookings Institution.

Unlike deadly factional rivalries past, the slow-motion purge of Jiang Zemin’s allies seems to have been acomplished as much through consensus as struggle:

Hu most likely consulted the 80-year-old Jiang and won his tacit agreement to sacrifice his protege and preserve his own legacy, Li said.

“Remember when he agreed to publish Jiang’s biography last month and launched all those study sessions of Jiang Zemin thought?” Li said. “This is part of that deal.”

In June, Beijing made a high-profile example out of one of its own. Liu Zhihua, a Beijing vice mayor who was overseeing construction for the 2008 Olympics, was fired on corruption charges. A succession of other leaders at the provincial level has also faced dismissal or jail.

Perhaps as important as consolidating power here is providing a high-profile example that Hu and his administration are serious about dealing with the corruption endemic to today’s China in general and the CCP in particular. But whether a CCP without any political competition or watchdog other than its own interests and some tenuous notion of the Greater Good can actually rein in expressions of its unfettered power seems somewhat akin to asking an alcoholic to manage a liquor store and expecting the books to balance at the end of the month.