I never thought I’d actually cite Ann Coulter as a serious resource, but she has, according to Mickey Kaus’s column today, made an extraordinary find — and I checked it out on google and it is indeed extraordinary.

Again and again, in the NY Times but also on ABC News and in Newsday and other media, the man-on-the-street who is interviewed to comment on breaking news, from 911 to just about anything you can imagine, is a mystery man named Greg Packer. It is absolutely amazing. Article after article, Greg Packer. Most of the articles say he is from Huntington, NY. It has to make you wonder, do the media make everything up? Does Greg Packer even exist? If so, is it by some unearthly coincidence that reporters always single him out for comment? Very, very strange.

This is an actual email I received minutes ago, from a Nepal email address (.np):

Dear Sir,
I want to requist you to send me the details about peaking duck and name of Peaking duck Manufacturer .

Regards,
Baburaja Rawal,
Production Manager
Valley Cold Store Pvt. Ltd
Nayabazar, Kathmandu-16
Nepal,
Gpo. 19454

My only email from Kathmandu; a new first.

Superb opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal by Brad Adams, executive director of the Asian division of Human Rights Watch, about the Chinese government’s spectacularly evil efforts to cover up the story of AIDS spreading through the province of Henan from 2000-02. The epidemic was the result of illegal plasma collection in the province’s rural villages (a topic I wrote about at length here). The party member who ordered the incident hushed up was promoted and honored recently for his “important contributions to the development of the province’s sanitation industry.”

Adams describes how journalists travelling to Henan were detained by the police and expelled, while the Chinese press was ordered not to report anything at all about the epidemic. He writes:

Why would anyone lie about such a vast epidemic? The answer is simple: Covering up the spread of a stigmatized disease like AIDS might help to ensure that investment continued to pour into impoverished provinces like Henan. The Henan blood scandal sent a clear message to other local officials: if you have an epidemic, cover it up, and you’ll be rewarded.

[Sorry I can’t link; this is from the print version.]

It’s kind of amusing that there is a whole fringe that equates the CCP with the government of the US. As any reader of this site knows, I am no fan of President Bush, but to write that citizens in America are treated by their government in a manner that in any way resembles the way the Chinese are treated by the CCP — it’s not only laughable, it’s scary. And infinitely dumb. Three of our big-name whistleblowers were named Time’s Man of the Year recently; in China, they’d be wasting away in jail unsung and unknown, if not shot in the head.

Looking back at the previous post’s last sentence, I cringe that I could write copy that sounds so self-righteous and pompous. Sorry.

Some Young Turk bloggers have seen fit lately to trash the protesters at Tiananmen Square, who included not only the students who started the protest but the doctors and policemen and Chinese citizens from all walks of life who saw the cause as noble enough to merit risking their own lives, and joining in. While I have acknowledged that the students were forming their own mini-politburo and had no organization or set goals and the whole thing was becoming a mess, it was nevertheless an outcry that resonated around the world with greater sonority than any other I’ve experienced in my entire lifetime. It was more forceful than the ebullient joy of the Europeans as they tore the Berlin Wall to the ground. It was greater than Nelson Mandela’s ascension to leadership in a land that had so recently treated its blacks as inferiors. In my entire life, I have never, ever seen anything as immensely moving and earthshattering as the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.

I hadn’t planned to post about this. A reader of my site emailed and asked if I could help him find a copy of the famous photograph, above, of the anonymous man blocking a row of tanks, which I cited earlier. I found it along with an article in Time magazine that was so beautiful, so heartbreaking I simply found myself typing…. Here is how the article begins:

Almost nobody knew his name. Nobody outside his immediate neighborhood had read his words or heard him speak. Nobody knows what happened to him even one hour after his moment in the world’s living rooms. But the man who stood before a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square–June 5, 1989–may have impressed his image on the global memory more vividly, more intimately than even Sun Yat-sen did. Almost certainly he was seen in his moment of self-transcendence by more people than ever laid eyes on Winston Churchill, Albert Einstein and James Joyce combined.

The meaning of his moment–it was no more than that–was instantly decipherable in any tongue, to any age: even the billions who cannot read and those who have never heard of Mao Zedong could follow what the “tank man” did. A small, unexceptional figure in slacks and white shirt, carrying what looks to be his shopping, posts himself before an approaching tank, with a line of 17 more tanks behind it. The tank swerves right; he, to block it, moves left. The tank swerves left; he moves right. Then this anonymous bystander clambers up onto the vehicle of war and says something to its driver, which comes down to us as: “Why are you here? My city is in chaos because of you.” One lone Everyman standing up to machinery, to force, to all the massed weight of the People’s Republic–the largest nation in the world, comprising more than 1 billion people–while its all powerful leaders remain, as ever, in hiding somewhere within the bowels of the Great Hall of the People.

Yes, the protest became a bickering, grandstanding mess. But that did not and never will detract from its fundamental magnificence. For all their jockeying and in-fighting, the students and those who joined them deserved better than to be shot in the back. Those who defend the government and criticise the students, to the point of implying they had it coming, remind me so much of old conversations I heard in NYC coffee houses defending Stalin and arguing how much good he had done for his country. Bullshit.

Yeah, I know this topic kicks my emotions into high gear. But that’s what blogging is for me, getting in touch with my strongest feelings and putting them “on paper” with as much honesty, accuracy and integrity as I can.

More posts about Tiananmen Square:
Tiananmen Square revisited
The story behind the Tiananmen Square “tank man” photo
Reappraising Tiananmen Square

Magnificent commentary piece in today’s Straits Times on the sins China committed in lying to its citizens about SARS.

Columnist Ching Cheong writes, “What sparked the crisis was an official circular issued to all Chinese media last October. This told state media to black out negative news so that the CCP 16th party congress in November could be convened successfully….The stark fact is that the blackout was carried out on orders from the very top for a clearly political purpose.” . She expresses deep skepticism that the Chinese leaders have learned from the debacle and sees them continuing their pattern of blaming others, as even today they are perpetuating a myth that somehow the US caused SARS intentionally to divert attention from the Iraq war. (Can’t they come up with something better than that?) How ironic, she says, that it took an article in a US publication, Time, to expose the CCP’s evils

I wish this story were available online. It is when I read pieces like this that I want to say to the young idealists dazzled by the myth (the lie) that China has changed, “Look — here is China doing exactly what it’s done since the days of Mao, trying to manipulate the public consciousness so that they (the government) remain utterly free of criticism or blame. The only real change has been cosmetic. You can watch CNN now in China (if you are one of the infinitesimal sliver of the population that can afford it), but you can also go to prison for making the slightest criticism of the government….”

Want to continue but have to run. Later.

In a way I feel sorry for Andrew Sullivan. He appears to be a deeply conflicted man, hopelessly trapped in his own unresolvable conflicts. Everyone knows how he tried to reconcile his own Catholicism, an element that is key to understanding how his mind operates, with the Church’s outspoken stance against the second key to understanding Sullivan, homosexuality.

This became an acute crisis for Sullivan last year during the pedophiliac priests scandal, when the church took a strong stand against homosexuality, naming it, in fact, as the chief culprit, as opposed to the aberrant behaviour of a relatively small sliver of priests. (Not sure if I am expressing this clearly. IOW, Sullivan argued passionately that the behaviour of most gay priests was fine, and it was unconscionable for the Church to say that “gay priests” — as in all gay priests — were to blame for the crimes of a small group of sick pedophiles.)

I’m not sure how he finally reconciled this. I am sure, however, that it’s something he will agonize over, probably for the rest of his life. Here he had gone to Catholic school, made Catholicism a centerpiece of his very existence, and then this church he so loved basically gave him the finger. Looking for a quick fix for an incredibly messy situation, the Church found an easy scapegoat and that was that, a tidy solution.

Which brings us to today, many months later, and guess what? Sullivan has to deal with a variation of the same conflict all over again. In a short but obviously impassioned post today, he writes:

BUSH VERSUS GAYS: After the debacle of calling Rick Santorum an “inclusive man” while Santorum supports the imprisonment of gay men in relationships, we now have attorney-general John Ashcroft banning a six-year-old tradition of a gay pride day at the Justice Department. No, this isn’t the biggest deal imaginable. It’s just a clear and petty attempt to inform gay civil servants that they are second class citizens and second class employees…Certainly the administration has now done a lot to give a direct one-word message to its gay supporters: suckers.

Here we go again. Sullivan is trapped by his quixotic vision of oil and water mixing, and I remain bewildered that a man of his towering intellect could have allowed himself to fall into this trap in the first place. Just as with the Catholic Church, Sullivan has exulted in a near-suffocating love affair with The Bush Administration, at times showering it with such effusive praise as to border on parody. And then he is hurt, surprised, when Bush & Co. live up to what most realistic people know is one of its top priorities: placating the religious right, which is exactly why Ashcroft is attorney general. What Ashcroft is doing is in complete harmony with what he stands for and should come as no surprise to anyone.

What boggles my mind is that Sullivan is expressing outrage against what he should have known was inevitable. This administration is going to nominate judges and cater to groups whose values run so counter to Sullivan’s, they actually would have him discriminated against, if not outlawed altogether. And he never seems to understand that no matter how much he adores this administration, it is by its very nature Sullivan’s enemy.

To be fair to Sullivan, he has expressed strong criticism of Bush recently, most notably for the “fuzzy math” of the tax cuts. But he still seems to be trying to reconcile the irreconcilable; like a man trying to get out of a strait jacket, the more he squirms and kicks and fights, the tighter the strait jacket becomes. When will he face the plain bold-faced fact that this president, his idol, has sold him out? Sullivan did a lot for Bush, and now he’s learning what many of us knew all the time, that he is expendable, Bush doesn’t need him and holds no loyalty to him. Just like his beloved Catholic Church.

Sad, because no matter how he infuriates me, I know that Sullivan is a good man with a lot of love inside of him. How tragic that he has been directing it all these years at the very forces that would kick him out the door in a heartbeat.

The comments section over at Brainysmurf are still hopping as Hong Kong bloggers Conrad and Phil, as well as yours truly, face off against charges of cynicism and worse. It’s all good-spirited (mostly, at least).

Then, I came across another site that really goes a bit too far:

For the most part, I can’t stand reading the HK bloggers (and this includes the Peking Duck, which should be considered a de facto HK blog, no matter how much time he spent in Beijing)….overall, I can’t stand their Birch Society, down-with-the-evil-reds mentality. I’ll have to go with the mainland bloggers on this one. The HKers’ cynicism against China isn’t a reflection of frustration for a place they deeply love and hopes [sic] to continue to improve, but rather a conscious attempt to maintain the insularity of their happy little gweilo lives and never have to try to bridge any sort of cultural gap.

Oh dear.

First, my blog contains many more posts about my life in China than my life in HK, so I’m not sure where he is coming from, implying that this hasn’t been a true China blog. But “Birch Society”? Any reader of this site knows I am a cautious liberal, a Democrat, something of an iconoclast and anything but a Bircher. I went to China with great expectations, and was appalled at what I found there. I must admit, before I went I had fallen for the Big Lie myself: I truly believed China was changing, its leadership was more compassionate and open minded, the press was opening up, etc., etc. Now I can only wonder how I could have been so stupid.

There is anecdotal evidence that can back up any of these upbeat claims. And it sounds so good, so convincing. I believed it. And I have never, ever been so shocked at my own naivete. Keep going back to these anecdotes, my Mainland blogging friend. Then go to Page 12 of this week’s Time magazine, which names 4 young men, ages 26 to 32, sentenced by the changing and magnanimous Chinese government “to extended prison terms for ‘subverting state power.'” I quote:

The four men were arrested in 2001 after they formed the New Youth Study Group to discuss sociopolitical issues and to write essays, some of which were posted online. Given that Communist Party organs have begun publicly discussing once taboo subjects such as political reform, the severity of the sentences — Jin and Xu have each been handed 10 years in prison and the others eight — has shocked human rights activists.

Please think about it: Ten years languishing in the Chinese dungeons for….writing essays. If, by expressing my revulsion at such acts of inhumanity, I risk being classified as a Bircher, so be it. If I tell of the corruption and badness that I saw in China and that makes me a fascist, so be it. It’s nice that you are enjoying yourself in China. But to pillory those who tell it otherwise and lump them, foolishly and incorrectly, into one generalized slot — that is inappropriate at best, dishonest and nasty at worst. I would say that virtually every bellicose word Laowai writes is false (and, I suspect, he knows it).

This same site takes an especially viscious swipe at The Gweilo: “I sometimes read the Gweilo Diaries for a perverse kick. Rabid Republican politics mixed with descriptions of his rocking gweilo life, spending $HK7000 every Saturday night, bagging a new Chinese chick every time he goes to some Wan Chai bar. It’s like the expat life my secret evil twin would live.”

Do I sense a repressed case of “blog envy”? Conrad’s readership is huge, and for a good reason — his blog has incredible energy, strong opinions he is willing to fight for (even though he’s often wrong about politics) and he’s a fantastic writer. The Comments below his posts are always bountiful and delicious. Laowai’s Comments, on the other hand, are….empty. There aren’t any. Why am I not surprised?

Okay, sorry to vent a bit, but accusations without foundation coupled with reckless generalizing are ingredients that get my blood pressure rising.

UPDATE: I hope this doesn’t make it sound as though there is a history of animostiy between the HK Bloggers vs. the Mainland Bloggers, like two armed camps. I have been in correspondence with several of the Mainland bloggers for nearly a year now, and never thought there was any friction, let alone hostility. I’m not really sure how this whole thing got started.

A new Asian blog makes some strong comments on issues close to my heart (like China); I disagree with a lot of the blogger’s point of view (which I’ve expressed in the site’s Comments), but if we all agreed on everything the blogosphere would be the bore-o-sphere.

I plan to get seriously back in the game after the government here gives me my employment pass. Until I have that, I can’t apply for broadband. Should be another week or so….