Cross-posted at the paper tiger…

It takes a lot to flabbergast me these days. I mean is anyone really shocked by the relevation that the NSA is engaged in domestic surveillance, authorized by the Preznit, without any judicial review, not even by the secret court which generally reviews such things (apparently any kind of oversight is too much oversight for the Bush Administration, which certainly leads one to question just whom they are surveilling, and why).

Here’s what it took for me to gaze upon my computer screen in slack-jawed amazement: this story, via the invaluable Digby, about a student who was visited by agents from Homeland Security because, wait for it…

He tried to check out a copy of Mao Zedong’s “Little Red Book” from a university library.

No, really.

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”…

…The professors had been asked to comment on a report that President Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to spy on as many as 500 people at any given time since 2002 in this country.

The eavesdropping was apparently done without warrants.

The Little Red Book, is a collection of quotations and speech excerpts from Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung.

In the 1950s and ’60s, during the Cultural Revolution in China, it was required reading. Although there are abridged versions available, the student asked for a version translated directly from the original book.

The student told Professor Pontbriand and Dr. Williams that the Homeland Security agents told him the book was on a “watch list.” They brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student, the professors said.

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.

“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.

“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

So can I just say, I am so going to Guantanamo? I mean, I have maybe four Little Red Books floating around my house, in both English and Chinese, including one featuring Mao’s then “Closest Comrade in Arms” Lin Biao’s calligraphy on the frontispiece, which I figure, given the brief tenancy of anyone occupying that particular position, has got to be some kind of collector’s item.

In fact, I’ve had one of my “Xiao Hong Shu” since high school, when my school represented “Red China” in the annual Model United Nations conference. Which, come to think of it, is probably another black mark on my permanent record.

And boy, if any of these hard-working Homeland Security agents have actually surveyed my house – I’m doomed. What would they make of the wall of books dealing with the history of the Peoples Republic of China? The Collected Works of Mao Zedong? The compilations of CCP documents? The framed Four Modernizations posters on my wall, one of the “Peoples’ Premier,” Zhou Enlai, showing his domestic side, spinning yarn in Yenan, the other of a rosey-cheeked, chubby baby holding up this, well, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to be, some kind of festive, lantern thingie with a nuclear atom in the center and a rocket ship on top? Not to mention my, erm, Chairman Mao piggybank.

Remind me again. Was it ultra-leftist, unreconstructed Red Guards who flew planes into the WTC?

But maybe I’ve got this whole thing wrong. Maybe owning such things isn’t the problem. Given the obsession that the Bush Administration seems to have with wanting to access library records (without the patrons’ knowledge), well, maybe it’s libraries that are the real danger here, the subterranean threat to American security.

Just remember: if library cards are terrorized, soon only terrorists will have library cards. Or something.

I know people who were very involved in this, and this news makes me feel absolutely sick.

LIU CHUNXIAO and his partner were calm when police shut down the opening of China’s first gay and lesbian culture festival yesterday. Mr Liu may be 19 but he is more than familiar with sexual discrimination.

Organisers had planned to hold their festival of films, plays, exhibitions and seminars on homosexuality at one of the trendiest artistic communities in China. The venue was to be the studios and warehouses at the 798 complex of converted factory buildings in northeastern Beijing. Most of the capital’s hippest and most happening events take place among the grey concrete blocks, fashionable French bistro-style bars and industrial pipes of 798.

Police notified studio owners that the event would not be allowed to proceed. Li Yinhe, a distinguished sociologist from the prestigious Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, had been invited to address the opening, but had to stay away.

The group of about 30 participants bold enough to reveal their sexuality in China’s conservative society were undeterred by the cancellation. They decided to move their ground-breaking event to On/Off, a Beijing gay bar.

Police swarmed around the bar even before the group arrived. “This bar is temporarily closed for review,” police told would-be festival participants.

A few gays and lesbians retreated to a nearby hotpot restaurant. One man who gave his name as Mr Sun said: “There is no reason for the police to stop us. We are doing nothing to disturb social stability.”

The members of China’s gay community had little doubt as to why On/Off had been closed. Mr Cui, a film student, said: “The attitude in China is still very conservative. They say it’s illegal, but what’s illegal about wanting to understand more about these issues?”

The police were clear. “They didn’t have permission to hold this event,” said an official.

Of course, these are the same prudes who banned the Vagina Monologues a couple of years ago so we shouldn’t be too surprised. But that doesn’t make it any less infuriating or any less wrong. What are they so afraid of?

(And I still want to move back there??)

It’s hard for me to imagine living in an oppressive society where I’d have to come up with ingenious schemes to fool the censors into believing I was writing about something innocuous when I was, in fact, damning the government for its sins. Philip Pan makes it easier to imagine.

At first glance, it looked like a spirited online discussion about an essay written nearly 80 years ago by modern China’s greatest author. But then again, the exchange on a popular Chinese bulletin board site seemed a bit emotional, given the subject.

“In Memory of Ms. Liu Hezhen,” which Lu Xun wrote in 1926 after warlord forces opened fire on protesters in Beijing and killed one of his students, is a classic of Chinese literature. But why did thousands of people read or post notes in an online forum devoted to the essay last week?

A close look suggests an answer that China’s governing Communist Party might find disturbing: They were using Lu’s essay about the 1926 massacre as a pretext to discuss a more current and politically sensitive event — the Dec. 6 police shooting of rural protesters in the southern town of Dongzhou in Guangdong province.

In the 10 days since the shooting, which witnesses said resulted in the deaths of as many as 20 farmers protesting land seizures, the Chinese government has tried to maintain a blackout on the news, barring almost all newspapers and broadcasters from reporting it and ordering major Internet sites to censor any mention of it. Most Chinese still know nothing of the incident.

But it is also clear that many Chinese have already learned about the violence and are finding ways to spread and discuss the news on the Internet, circumventing state controls with e-mail and instant messaging, blogs and bulletin board forums.

The government maintains enough control over the flow of information to prevent an event like the Dongzhou shooting from causing a major public backlash or triggering more demonstrations. But the Internet appears to be weakening a key pillar of the party’s rule — its ability to control news and public opinion.

“I learned about it on the 7th,” one bulletin board user wrote Monday of the Dongzhou shooting. “Some day, I believe, this incident will be exposed and condemned. Let us pay tribute to the villagers . . . and silently mourn the dead.”

One of the tiredest and most annoying arguments I hear is that it’s only us obnoxious Westerners who care about the Chinese government’s repressiveness, that people in China don’t care about the censorship or the CCP’s malfeasances, that the Internet Gestapo never affects them and no one gives a damn about human rights there as long as the Chinese can make money.

Obviously a lot of Chinese people really do care, and are willing to go to exceptional lengths to make their voices heard. Yes, they are still a relatively small group, but it seems to me they are becoming more vocal and more prolific.

This is a pretty epic article, and it makes it clear it’s not just one or two activists who are up in arms over the massacre. It offers an unusual birds’ eye view into the censorship mechanism.

Elsewhere in Chinese cyberspace, people have evaded censors by writing on smaller bulletin board sites that often escape official scrutiny or by creating blogs on overseas services with weaker filtering methods than mainland blog companies use.

Wang Yi, a well-known blogger in Sichuan province, was among eight prominent dissidents who issued an open letter condemning the Dongzhou shooting as the deadliest use of force against ordinary Chinese since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. China’s largest blogging site, Bokee, deleted the letter from his blog less than 12 hours after he posted it, he said.

But then Wang posted just the title of the letter — “A Statement Regarding the Murder Case in Dongzhou, Shanwei city, Guangdong” — and a list of all the people who had signed it. Bokee officials, who have been wary of alienating users and losing market share to competitors, decided to leave it alone.

“Although I couldn’t post the whole letter, people can see that the text is missing and go find it somewhere else,” Wang said. “And if they haven’t heard about the shooting, they’ll go look for information about that, too.”

Those who turn to China’s main Web portals and search engines for news about the shooting will get mixed results, because the companies that run them generally comply with orders from the government to filter out what censors call “harmful information.”

On Friday in Beijing, for example, a search on the popular Sina site using the name of the city that sent police to confront the protesters returned no results at all. Basic searches on other major sites, including China’s top search engine, Baidu, also produced few relevant results, although some returned links to the government’s official account of the clash, which said three protesters were killed. It was published only in newspapers in Guangdong.

People who added words like “shooting” and “clash” to their searches, though, or used Google, were directed to sites containing more complete reports by overseas media.

Read the whole exhaustive thing, and then click on some of the blogs linking to it (listed on the right).

Howard French has the whole dreary story. It’s not surprising, and I feel numb when I read about it.

Residents of Dongzhou, a small town now cordoned off by heavy police roadblocks and patrols, said in scores of interviews on the telephone and with visitors that they had endured beatings, bribes and threats at the hands of security forces in the week and a half after their protest against the construction of a power plant was violently put down. Others said that the corpses of the dead had been withheld, apparently because they were so riddled with bullets that they would contradict the government’s version of events. And residents have been warned that if they must explain the deaths of loved ones – many of whom were shot dead during a tense standoff with the police in which fireworks, blasting caps and crude gasoline bombs were thrown by the villagers – they should simply say their relatives were blown up by their own explosives.

“Local officials are talking to families that had relatives killed in the incident, telling them that if they tell higher officials and outsiders that they died by accident, by explosives, while confronting the police, they must make it sound convincing,” said one resident of the besieged town in an interview. “If the family members speak this way they are being promised 50,000 yuan ($6,193), and if not, they will be beaten and get nothing out of it.”

Another villager, who, like other residents, spoke on condition of anonymity for fear or reprisals, said families of the dead who agreed to invoke accidental explosion as the cause of death had been offered $15,000 each.

“The story is being spread around the village that people were not killed by bullets, but by bombs,” said one man interviewed Friday by telephone. “That’s rubbish. Everybody knows they were killed by gunfire.”

The bomb story was also being spread at a hospital in the nearby city of Shanwei, where villagers injured in the protest are being treated. Plainclothes police surrounded a Chinese man who entered the hospital seeking to see the wounded, denying him access to a tightly guarded ward even when he said his relative was among the injured. Later, hospital staff members told the man that the injured had all been warned to stick to the same story, of being injured by their own explosives.

The attempt to enforce a concocted story may help explain why residents have reported difficulty in recovering the bodies of their loved ones.

The official New China News Agency has said that only three people were killed and eight others injured when security forces shot at protesters, so the existence of more bodies riddled with bullets could destroy the official version of events and provide proof of tremendous force against a lightly armed, if restive, crowd.

“The relatives went in tears to the county offices to search for the dead and missing, and they were beaten by electric truncheon, wounded and dispersed,” one resident said.

“They offered 50,000 yuan, and told us we could only get back the body at night and bury it on the mountain immediately, without any mourning ceremony or fireworks, without anyone knowing about this,” a relative of Wei Jin, a man killed during the demonstration, said in an account of an attempted bribe involving his relative’s corpse.

I am still working and won’t be available to write the usual boring commentary until later on Sunday. Meanwhile, this story speaks for itself and doesn’t require any additional punditry.

So says a non-liberal blogger, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s true. Let me just say why it’s true for me (as I can only speak for myself).

There comes a point when all you can feel about Iraq is cynicism and pessimism. It will take more than a feel-good photo-op to turn that around, especially after we’ve seen so many in the past few years. Remember the big “handover,” which so many were touting as the dawn of a new day for Iraq? Remember the ecstasy over the last election, when the photos of the purple-fingered Iraqis were touted as prof of some sort of triumph? Remember how many times we were told victory was “around the corner,” freedom was “on the march” and the “backbone of the insurgency” was broken? (Hell, anyone remember the Mission Accomplished banner?)

Each cause for buoyant optimism was soon (very soon) quashed by more death and more mayhem. Today it might be different; perhaps today really is the moment we’ve all been waiting for, the dawn of a new day. But remember, this whole exercise was not about giving people the right to vote. It was about protecting America from terrorism. Every step of the way, we’ve been lied to and disappointed, made increasingly cynical and skeptical. The cause for the war morphed from protection against imaginary mushroom clouds and looming stockpiles to one of liberty and freedom. Those are lofty ideals and beautiful things, but America doesn’t go to war to give people the right to vote. If we did, we’d have invaded China and North Korea and Saudi Arabia long ago.

So I see nothing to get very excited about today. Especially because I believe Iraq is moving ever-closer to Iran, a far more insidious, powerful and influential threat to our security than Iraq ever was. I believe we’ll most likely see Iraq become an Iran-style theocracy dedicated to our destruction. Either that, or things will soon descend once more into chaos. So what we’re seeing today is pure window dressing on a much uglier scene. Remember, the election is only taking place because we’ve shut down Baghdad and put it under what amounts to total martial law.

I really don’t want to be cynical or defeatist. There was a time when I cautiously believed we could pull this off, when I stupidly thought we couldn’t have embarked on such a difficult mission without the most painstaking planning, without a fool-proof plan for a seamless transition. I was more convinced than ever when we won so easily, and when we were greeted briefly as liberators by so many. Now I have no optimism or hope left at all. Yes, so many people went to vote, yes, they do thirst for freedom. But the war will resume tomorrow, and the process of democratization will stall and fail because it has too many enemies. While it is inspiring to see so many Iraqis excited at the opportunity to vote, it only adds to the heartache in knowing we sabotaged any possibility of democracy actually working and surviving.

So don’t expect a lot of jubilation from the left, not even from those who initially supported the war like Mark Kleiman, Kevin Drum, Josh Marshall, etc. Step by step, Bush destroyed our confidence and our hope, rewarding failure, refusing to acknowledge massive fuck-ups and always trying to spin a dismal situation into something it wasn’t. The knee-jerk Bush response, putting lipstick on the pig, doesn’t work anymore. The best we can do is try to slip out as quickly and quietly as possible, call it a “victory” and watch from afar as it all comes collapsing down on the poor Iraqi people we went in to save.

Salon has an article about the China blogosphere (well, in the meta-context of information-gathering), including stalwarts ESWN and Michael Turton. Check it out!

No reporter does a better job of illuminating the vast complexity of modern Chinese life on a human scale than the Los Angeles Times’s Ching-Ching Ni. A few months back, I blogged about an incredibly moving piece of hers, “Loving Others’ Rejects, the story of an old man and his wife who rescue abandoned babies, literally from garbage heaps and the side of the road.

Now, Ni has written about the struggle of a young man who is dying from lung disease caused by years of working in a gemstone factory. I hesitate to edit Ni’s work, so here’s the beginning:

The boulders were as big as farm animals, and for $20 a month Feng Xingzhong’s job was to slice them with an electric saw, cutting the hulks into fillets small enough to throw into a bowl.

Other workers in the jewelry factory would trim the pieces of jade, turquoise, onyx and other gemstones into little hearts and beads, polish them, drill holes and string them onto earrings, bracelets and necklaces to be shipped off to American shoppers.

Feng thought little about that, or anything else during his earsplitting 12-hour shift. By day’s end, he looked like a coal miner emerging from the shaft, covered from head to toe in red, green or yellow dust, depending on the stone he had been cutting.

From age 18 to 26, Feng toiled without so much as a mask, trying to turn himself from an impoverished peasant into a prosperous city worker. He married a fellow employee, had two sons.

“We had a beautiful dream,” Feng said. “To make some money, go home and start a small business.”

Today, Feng hopes mostly to live long enough to collect some money from the factory where he developed silicosis, an incurable ailment known as dust lung that kills more than 24,000 Chinese workers each year in professions such as mining, quarrying, construction and shipbuilding.

Most slowly suffocate without protest. But not Feng. He sought workers’ compensation. He sued his employer in two courts. He picketed near the company headquarters. He went to arbitration with the help of a Hong Kong labor group and even won a judgment.

But he hasn’t received so much as a penny.

The area where Feng worked, near Shenzhen, processes some 70% of the world’s semiprecious stone jewelry, much of which ends up exported to US wholesalers. Not surprisingly, conditions in many of these factories are dismal:

When Feng started in the early 1990s, his factory, called Gaoya, had about 50 employees. The crowded workshop had no ventilation system.

“We asked for masks, but they said no. There was no why,” Feng said. “They knew we were peasants thrilled to have a factory job.”

Ni details Feng’s struggle to collect what he’s owed, in the face of incredible obstacles. The company literally packed up and moved its factory to avoid workers’ lawsuits; it further evaded them by changing its name – by one letter:

Furious, he tried in 2002 to apply for workers’ compensation from the Labor Dispute Arbitration Committee in Haifeng. His factory had moved there from nearby Huizhou and changed its name from Gaoya to Gaoyi.

He was turned down on the grounds that the factory where he had worked was in Huizhou.

Next, he tried to sue. But two courts rejected his case, ruling that the factory in Haifeng was not the same business as the one in Huizhou.

“They changed their name from Gaoya to Gaoyi,” Feng said. “One letter, and they are able to dodge all responsibility.”

Feng continues to struggle, and a group called the China Labor Bulletin is helping him with his case and living expenses. So far, victory has proven elusive:

The group relaunched his claim against Gaoya through an arbitration committee in Huidong County, the site of the factory where he worked. He sought $76,000 in compensation for his disability and to cover medical and living expenses for himself and his family…

…In May, the committee ruled in favor of Feng. The factory was ordered to pay him $3,800 for medical expenses, plus $100 a month for the rest of his life.

It was a hollow victory. Staphany Wong, the Labor Bulletin case worker assisting Feng, said officials ordered the defunct Gaoya factory to pay Feng, not the working Gaoyi factory.

All of this takes place against the backdrop of Feng and his family’s grinding poverty, the motivation that drove him to work in such wretched conditions, in the hope of bettering their lives.

As Feng waits in Shenzhen for his appeal to move through the bureaucracy, his family is scattered and struggling to survive.

His wife is working in another city. Her room is too run-down and cramped for Feng to live there full time, and there is no phone or fax to allow him to keep up with his case.

His sons, now 8 and 10, rarely see their parents. They still live in the remote village where they were born, looked after by Feng’s ailing, widowed mother.

Large cobwebs dangle from the concrete walls of their farmhouse, and bugs crawl in the kitchen. All they have to spice up their meals of rice and scavenged vegetables is salt, held in a dirty sack. Barefoot and dressed in dirty clothes, the children kill time watching a tiny black-and-white TV with one blurry channel showing cartoons in the afternoons.

Feng has not told his mother about his ailment. But she suspects he is dying.

“I know a guy from our village who did the same work, he died three years ago. I think my son has the same disease…. I know he probably won’t live long,” said Li Sulan, 64, who is blind in one eye.

Her biggest worry is her grandchildren. “If my son dies and I die too, and his wife doesn’t come back, what’s going to happen to these kids?” she said.

Li calls her son from the village pay phone, crying and asking when he’ll come home. Feng always tells her soon. Very soon.

“I want to go home, to take care of her and the kids,” he said. “But I can’t. I have no money.”

Read the whole thing. And think about how many more stories there are like this, behind the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the gadgets with which we amuse ourselves…

UPDATE CSR’s Stephen Frost points us to a Hong-Kong based campaign advocating better working conditions in the Chinese gemstone industry. There’s a letter to sign that you can direct to Hong Kong, American and European jewelry associations (though I’m not sure if the link to the American federation is working right now).

That rather provocative headline is from an article in Israel’s Ha-Aretz, written by a reporter in Taiwan who wonders what th effects of the Blue victory will have on Taiwan’s future relations with China and the US.

I need to work through the weekend and won’t have much time to give this site, but I thought this article might provide some good food for thought.

To the equation of relations must be added the way in which Beijing will maneuver given the new situation, as well as the extent of support Taiwan will garner from the United States: In Israel, the United States’ blocking of the defense deals with China was a wake-up call for some regarding the the nature of the Israeli-American relationship. In Taiwan, too, despite the different circumstances, there are those who fear that American support is not eternal: On the one hand they believe here that the United States will never abandon Taipei; only recently United States President George W. Bush praised Taiwanese democracy, “which should serve as a model for China.”

But on the other hand, Bush is also no longer relating to China as “a strategic competitor,” as he did in the past. The breakup of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the events of Tiananmen Square did not lead to “the end of history.” A communist regime is in control of the economy whose growth is stirring envy around the world. The United States apparently thinks that China has gone beyond the point at which it is possible to prevent its dramatic economic and military rise. It realizes that in the end, the 21st century will not be “American,” or at least not entirely. Therefore it is no longer talking about containing China. Now is a time for “constructive cooperation.”

How does all this affect the eternal debate about the status quo that exists thanks to the American guarantees? Until not long ago the prevailing opinion in Taiwan was that “even if it takes 10, 50 or even 100 years, in the end China will become a democracy. Then, and only then, will we agree to unite the two countries.” Today there are already those who see their day of surrender on the horizon: More than a million Taiwanese are living in China, investing there, doing business, studying and sometimes even keeping a second wife there. More than 2 million Taiwanese (almost one-tenth of the island’s population) spend six months of the year or more there. About three-quarters of Taiwan’s exports are destined for China. Even though 700 Chinese ballistic missiles are aimed at them, many Taiwanese see China’s strengthening as less of a threat and more as an opportunity.

Does this mean that it is possible to argue that Taiwan is giving up its historic pretense to the title of “the real China”? Will it agree to become a victim of American acknowledgement of the existence of a second superpower?

Not so fast, say the analysts. As one of them put it: “[Apart from money] another two elements influence relations with China – the blood and the brain. The DNA of the 23 million Taiwanese is indeed almost identical to that of the 1.3 billion Chinese, but when you examine the brain, you discover that the Taiwanese think in a completely different way.” In other words, they will not give up their democratic institutions and values. On this matter, the consensus in Taiwan is total. “Time may be working in China’s favor,” they explain here, “but God doesn’t have much choice. Communism is anathema to him. He has to be with us.”

“God, you are either with us or against us….”

It’s nice to know we don’t just doodle and navel-gaze all day. We might actually be making a difference. (If you haven’t seen Battlepanda’s impressive list of bloggers who are taking up this cause, check it out. We can stand shoulder to shoulder with even the most repellent right-wing sites if the cause is a just one.)