This journalist clearly believes they do not.

Let’s stop jacking the Chinese around. We do not care a whit now — nor have we ever cared — about their human rights or any other aspect of their lives as long as they satiate our unbridled appetites. To pretend otherwise is to deny centuries of exploitative history in which the West drugged the Middle Kingdom and plundered it for its resources and cheap labor while obliterating any sign of popular resistance to our imperial sway.

From the Opium Wars to the contemplation of using nuclear weapons to bomb China back to the Stone Age because of our differences with it over Korea and Vietnam, the response of the West has been one of brute intimidation. Never have we been willing to acknowledge that China, for all of its immense contradictions, upheavals, sufferings and errant ways, represents the most complex and impressive example of national history.

Instead we intrude upon China in fitful moments of pique or treat it as a plaything. Who owns China? That was the question that marked the first period of U.S. involvement, when we joined other Western imperialists in carving up China into economic zones. And then came the bitter argument in the U.S. in the late 1940s and the ’50s about “Who lost China?” Now Americans find themselves preoccupied with how best to exploit China’s amazing economic prowess while feigning interest in the well-being of its people.

My problem with the article is the use of the word “We,” as if this lack of interest in human rights in China is monolithic and universal. Is it not possible that many of us care about human rights violations in China? Who is the “We” that doesn’t “care a whit” about the subject? Who are these “Americans” who feel this way? Are they to a large degree strawmen?

I would probably agree that most of the government and the oligarchy of multinational companies don’t care much if at all. But there are many sincere people in the West who do truly care. They are probably the same people who care about human rights in other countries, the kind of people who were appalled at the treatment by the US military of prisoners in Abu Ghraib and who spoke out against atrocities committed in the name of the “war on terror.” Most Western journalists I know in China care deeply about the plight of dissidents in China. I know I do, just as I care about the repression of women in Saudi Arabia, or the arrest and torture and murder of innocents in Syria.

How cynical can we get? Even more so.

Ever since the Republican Richard Nixon went to Beijing to suck up to Mao Zedong, every American president has acknowledged the power of China’s rulers to sweep aside the human rights concerns of foreigners as mere political theater for the folks back home. What a great spin it is to pretend that we are the champions of universal human rights as we tweet about our great concern for the Chinese people on the very mobile devices that their exploited labor created.

I am not so convinced China’s greatest human rights abuses are directed at its labor force, as the author contends. Most Chinese laborers are thirsty for the work and eager to work overtime. Of course there is exploitation and abuse. There is in any developing country, and in China it sometimes amounts to slave labor, at least in some instances. But many if not most migrant workers in China would much rather keep the jobs they have than move back to what they left.

There is nothing wrong or hypocritical about caring for human rights in China, for caring about Chen Guangcheng and Liu Xiaobo and the thousands of other activists/dissidents who had the temerity to challenge the status quo. I feel the same, as I said, for victims of US repression and have spoken out against it many times (go back and read my posts from 2004 criticizing the Bush administration). Read Philip Pan’s Out of Mao’s Shadow, a book of incredible compassion for the Chinese who stood up for human rights in China at a terrifying cost to their own lives. Does he, too, not care a whit about human rights in China?

He also pulls out the old chestnut of how “the US does it, too.”

The fact that Chen Guangcheng was targeted by Chinese authorities because of his opposition to his nation’s oppressive population control policies added the United States’ “pro-life” lobby to the army of morally subjective China watchers. Now if we can get the pro-lifers to care about the human rights of fetuses after birth, the condition of the millions of severely exploited Chinese workers who float U.S. consumption and our national debt just might stand a chance of improvement.

Morally subjective China watchers. Those who speak out are hypocrites because America, too, has a spotty record. I and most others I know are aware of and disgusted by this spotty record. But that doesn’t neutralize what goes on in China.

There’s a lot of truth to this article when it says the government and multinationals care more about their economic ties with China than with human rights. Very true. But many, many Westerners care deeply about human rights in China, as they care about it elsewhere. As they care about it in America as well. They are not all hypocrites and cynics. Scheer seems to dismiss them with a wave of his hand. I found this a deeply irritating and one-sided article.

And let me just add, a few minutes after posting this, that there is a lot of faux outrage and even more ignorance when it comes to the subject of human rights in China. Most Americans have no deep understanding of the actual story of Chen or Liu and see them in black and white, as good versus evil. There’s always more to it than that. These men may not be angels and some of those repressed by the government may not have been saints. But the illegal house arrests, beatings, solitary confinement and harassment are real. And yes, I know we are holding Bradley Manning in solitary confinement, and I find his treatment despicable, too. But at least it is common knowledge told countless times in the media and we can all speak out about it without fearing a 2am knock on the door.

This is an open thread, presuming I have any readers left who may want to chat. Apologies about the post below. Talk about Chen Guangcheng’s incredible escape, or the Bo Xilai soap opera or anything else.

I am traveling now and will be for nearly the entire month. But let me direct you to a brilliant post by one of my favorite bloggers about a topic all of us are interested in. Xujun, who’s from Chongqing, puts into perspective a complex story in a truly must-read post.

By commenter t_co

In many ways, the world’s most important election is happening out of sight. Even though there’s been plenty of coverage on the upcoming 18th CPC National Congress, the Bo Xilai scandal has risked overshadowing the more meaty and substantive issues at hand. Taken together, these issues sum up the what ought to be the raison d’etre for this Congress: What should the China of 2022 look like, and how can China get there?

1. How will China move past an investment-driven growth model without fumbling the ball like Japan in 1990 or South Korea in 1997? How can China move past an investment-driven growth model when, right now, every single important interest group in China is tied to the construction/real-estate/investment triad? Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Can you teach an old dog new tricks without giving the dog a heart attack?

2. Who will bear the pain of an economic transition? Basically, the accounting losses from failed projects have to end up somewhere–if not on seizure of assets from local governments, then as NPLs on bank balance sheets; if not as NPLs, then as a hidden tax on household wealth in the form of negative real interest rates on household savings. each of these forms of losses has a different rhythm and pitch to it–short, sharp pain and the feeling of “冤枉” (unjust punishment) on a crop of rising cadres if you seize assets; Japan-style stagnation if you keep it all as NPLs; the possibility of household capital flight if you further lower the real rate of return available to China’s household savings pool.

3. How will the government bridge the credibility gap it has with the populace? Right now, China’s government has the dubious distinction of having substantial credibility issues with every segment of the people. farmers have land seizures and government price hikes in fuel and fertilizer; the urban poor have general inflation as well as a lack of social mobility; the middle class worry about corruption, an invisible ceiling in advancement caused by nepotism, and food/product safety; the upper class fears arbitrary forfeiture of assets and becoming pawns in political struggles. More than ever, the upcoming leadership needs to build trust not only within the apparatus but also amongst the people.

4. How will China create sustainable and flexible safety valves for discontent? Right now the only common safety valve available is for Chinese rich people to pack up their assets and move abroad. The other safety valves (petitioning, protesting, rioting, making angry posts on sina weibo) are all either ineffectual, highly risky, or both–and people are aware of that, so they are losing their efficiency as safety valves. And even moving assets abroad is more of a curse than anything, as it means that wealthy Chinese increasingly have no stake in their country’s future.

5. How can China build up an internal “infrastructure of trust”? China has done a wonderful job building up physical infrastructure–roads, railways, ports, airports, a world-class telecom network–but the soft infrastructure is missing. Soft infrastructure, meaning things like universities that aren’t viewed as merely second-rate stepping stones to graduate school abroad; accounting firms and ratings agencies that are impartial and trusted; a capital market that allocates capital based on economic viability rather than political connections; consumer protection agencies that actually do their jobs; a media that seeks truth from facts rather than seeking profit from rumor; etc…. resting on the bedrock of a people that actually trust each other. Something needs to be done to build social faith between people and institutions and people themselves, or else nefarious forces will take advantage of that drought of faith to create trouble like the Taiping Rebellion did in the 19th century.

6. How can China assert itself on the international stage without causing its neighbors to ally against it? From 2010 onwards we saw an increasing amount of Chinese power being displayed both in its near abroad, the Western Pacific, and as part of multilateral forces in Somalia. China now has its own fifth generation stealth fighter, its own aircraft carrier, guided ballistic missiles, and a cyberwarfare capacity second only to the United States. In and of themselves, all of these systems are great for expanding Chinese reach and influence; but if they cause all of China’s neighbors to bandwagon against it, they may end up paradoxically weakening China. more than anything, as China’s power increases, Chinese diplomacy must become even *more* polite to offset it. Also, given that the United States has pretty much declared its intention to remain the regional hegemon of the Western Pacific, and has forged a coalition with Australia, Japan, and South Korea in doing so, China needs to formulate a strategic response. Its current course will take it into direct conflict with 4 other countries with much more combined power.

7. A subquestion of #6 is what to do with North Korea. North Korea is a long-running strategic liability for china: dependent on food and fuel aid while angering every single neighbor it has, constantly risking a collapse and an exodus of refugees and wholesale domination by the South. North Korea’s role as a buffer against South Korea and the US is rather illusory given that South Korea/the US could annihilate the North Korean military within months if they chose to accept the loss of Seoul and Inchon to artillery. On the other hand, a unified Korea would be a great counterweight to Japan, and would remove one of the key reasons for a forward-deployed US military presence in the Western Pacific. Furthermore, contrary to what might be expected, a unified Korea would not necessarily be anti-China, either–consider that even though Germany and Russia have at times been the worst of enemies, after Russia let Germany reunify, the two nations became decent allies with many areas of cooperation ranging from keeping Europe addicted to Russian natural gas to sharing weapons technology to coordinating the anti-US half of EU foreign policy.

8. What is the contingency plan for Chinese stability? what if China experiences mass instability–does the administration have a plan that doesn’t involve international embarrassment or a mass reduction in the credibility of the government?

Note that none of these questions relate to what most speculation has tended to focus on–*who* gets the 9 standing committee seats. In the end it matters little which combination of cadres wins, because every one of the candidates has been nominated for their ability to execute on policy. Therefore any policy that comes out of the congress has a decent chance of being executed to the best of the ability of the Chinese government. What *is* important is the party line and policy that comes out of this meeting (even if that policy is hidden from public view).

The one thing to bear in mind about the resulting party line is that a simple focus on “continuing reform” or “maintaining social harmony and stability” will no longer be enough. A superficial and vague policy that comes out of the 18th congress will be the path of least resistance–but also the worst possible outcome for China. Now is *not* the time for singing songs or pithy slogans or a revival of the ideas of the 1960s or the 1980s. Now *is* the time for an actual vision on what the China of 2022 ought to be, and how to get there.

I realize that nothing is as dull as narcissistic bloggers going on about their own blogs. I’ll only do it once every ten years, I promise.

While I was away in the Caribbean a few weeks ago this blog reached a milestone that I was reminded of a couple days ago when I saw this post about the 10-year anniversary of Sinosplice, one of my long-time favorite blogs. I had missed my own anniversary, which I’ll try to correct now.

I launched this blog on March 21, 2002, just a few weeks earlier than John Pasden’s. To the best of my knowledge the only other English-language China-centric blog that’s lasted as long as mine is this one.

I wrote my earliest posts almost as a diary, and I had no intention or hopes that anyone else would ever read it. I’m not really sure how it happened, that other people started visiting, but soon I found myself with some very busy comment threads. (Thousands of comments from the first year were deleted when I switched from blogspot to WordPress, unfortunately, so the earliest ones are gone.)

As of now there are 92,552 comments, 5,015 posts and about 3.34 million visitors, though I didn’t have my site meter installed until after my first year blogging. If you look at the archives you’ll see the upward trajectory of postings, from 16 a year the first year to 1,123 the next. Sadly, after 2006 this number went straight down again as I got tied up in my work with the Beijing Olympics; I never really got back the old fire of the earlier years, when all I had to do was open up a thread and get 300 comments within 12 hours. Back then I also had a team of five or six co-bloggers, and for a couple of years this was a very, very busy blog.

Some of the material here is extraordinary, not because I’m a good blogger, but because the comments were so explosive, so unpredictable. This thread, for example, may be the strangest in this blog’s history, and maybe the strangest for any blog. It is so bizarre that words truly fail. Another odd thread was about OJ Simpson and the murder of Nicole Brown, which drew all sorts of fanatics out of the woodwork. For a while that thread was a circus. Another thread dear to my heart dealt with the suicide of an old friend of mine. I had presumed, wrongly, that all his friends knew of his death. Most of them learned of it through my post, and the comments they left to say their farewells are incredibly moving.

My favorite posts remain this one and this one. I felt so inspired, they kind of wrote themselves.

I started TPD after I read a post by Andrew Sullivan about how blogging was the way of the future. I had never heard the word “blog” before and decided if what Sullivan said was true I might as well get on the bandwagon. At that time the China blogosphere was dominated by a blog called The Gweilo Diaries, a biting right-wing blog that was far more critical of the CCP than I would ever be. Its writer Conrad helped get TPD off the ground by linking to me frequently. Blogging was so new then and there were so few of us. We were a tight community, until blogs proliferated and lost their novelty. We would hold “Peking Duck dinners,” which for a couple of years were a big deal. So many cool people I met at those affairs. I think about 40 showed up at the last one back in 2007.

The very first words I wrote on this blog was the legend in the upper left-hand quarter: “A peculiar hybrid of personal journal, dilettantish punditry, pseudo-philosophy and much more, from an Accidental Expat who has made his way from Hong Kong to Beijing for reasons that are still not entirely clear to him…”

I wanted everyone to know I was a dabbler, not an expert, and that nothing I wrote was necessarily true. People have accused me of presenting myself as a “China expert,” but I’ve never done that. I saw stuff, either in the news or with my own eyes, and wrote about it. Period. This is partly why I am posting so little now. I stop and wonder, “What do I have to add to this story about China?.” And I often conclude, Not much. Especially now that there are so many wonderful blogs that are devoting far more time and energy writing about China, like this one and this one and this one and this one. And so many others. And living so far from the action in Beijing, I find it increasingly pointless to post as though I’m still there.

In 2003 I was in the right place at the right time, just as blogs were starting, and after Gweilo Diaries disappeared this blog became the dumping ground for all types of commenters, CCP loyalists, John Birchers, progressives and right-wingers. Not to mention my trolls, Ferin, Math, HongXing and others, who added a lot of “color.” All of these commenters with wildly different viewpoints meant threads that were like nitroglycerine.

TPD, at least until recently, became a gathering place, even if I never meant it to be. I still get comments from readers who were here nearly a decade ago. I know at least two couples who dated after meeting on this blog, and one couple that got married.

Nothing can last eternally. I doubt there will be another ten years. But so far, despite my recently going dark, it’s been a life-defining experience.

There has been so much written in the past 48 hours on the unbelievable twists and turns of the Bo Xilai catastrophe that it’s been hard to keep up. At the moment I feel I have little to add to the trainwreck. But my friend Jeremiah has a lot to add and has written a masterful post that manages to wrap it all up in a way that will make you laugh out loud. It’s over at my new favorite China blog, which you should all have on your blogrolls and RSS feeds.

I’ll have a real post up soon. I am finishing my Big Project that I’ll be able to tell all of you about in the early Fall. I am also having some family issues, namely a sick relative who is requiring my near-constant attention. I hate to see no posts on the Duck for 12 days in a row, since in the old days I would put up as many as five posts a day. Please be patient, and sorry to disappoint with my silence.

Should I feel proud that Shaun Rein, in his new book The End of Cheap China, devotes two entire paragraphs to me? A two-bit blogger? Maybe I would feel proud if the two paragraphs weren’t a simple act of revenge. Maybe I would feel proud if Rein didn’t misrepresent the truth about me. Truth was never his strong suit. Let’s take a look at what he says.

The [Chinese] government sometimes overreacts to potential threats of instability. To Americans, especially those with limited knowledge of China, these measures can seem brutish. Critics like Richard Burger, a US-based blogger who lived in China for less than three years and who lasted less than a year working for the government mouthpiece newspaper The Global Times, wrote on June 26, 2011 on his blog The Peking Duck, that the government is “a giant squid, tentacles reaching across the nation to restrict all aspects of life in the land it liberated, silencing opposing voices and existing solely for its own perpetuation. Celebrate away, while people who know real freedom snicker…. and once again [it] has made a laughingstock of itself.”

Undercutting Burger’s claim that the government is a “giant squid,” the non-partisan Washington DC-based think tank Pew Research Center found in 2009 that 86 percent of the Chinese population supports the direction in which the Chinese government the country…. Chinese are generally happy with most measures implemented by the government.

Alright. First we have to consider the fact that the self-proclaimed China marketing guru is actually quoting in his book a guy who runs a blog as a hobby and who has never claimed any great knowledge of China. But if he is right, if I am just “a US-based blogger who lived in China for less than three years,” then why on earth is he quoting me in his book? Think about that. What’s going on here? Rein also left out the opening phrase of the passage he quotes from my blog: “Despite some of the good it has brought to China since opening up, the government…” This puts the sentence in a somewhat different perspective.

To be clear, I have said countless times on this blog that I am not a China expert. I lived in Greater China for about eight years, of which over three years were spent in Beijing. “Less than three years” is simply false. He could have written to me and asked. Then, we have the claim that I “lasted less than a year” at the Global Times. This makes it sound as though I was fired or was incompetent. The truth is, as all my friends know, that I left because of personal family issues, and that I left the paper on very good terms. (I always go back and visit them when I travel to Beijing — there are some very cool people who work there.) I also damaged my relationship with the paper when I blogged about their terrible attacks on Ai Weiwei. I felt I had to do it. Rein has also said on Twitter that I censored articles when I worked there. This too is outrageously false. I have never censored an article in my entire life. It is also a rather droll irony that the censors of the government Rein so admires have seen fit to ban his own book in China. Yes, The End of Cheap China has been banned in China, according to Rein’s own tweets. But that’s another story.

Shaun really loves that 2009 Pew Research poll. In the first post I ever wrote about Rein, I remarked on the appalling suckupishness of his writing and cited as evidence this quote from his infamous Forbes article on Google:

They [China’s leaders] have also seen how 30 years of economic growth brought happiness to the Chinese population. Let’s not forget that the Pew Center has found that 86% of Chinese are happy with the direction the government is taking the country.

Happy happy China. Well, as I’ve often said, many if not most Chinese people do trust their government and the CCP must be given ample credit for lifting all those millions of Chinese from poverty. But Rein, in refuting my comparison to a giant squid, writes, “If government policies were overly harsh surely they would not garner such a high rate of support.” Not true.

I will never state that the Chinese government is like the Nazi Party. It is not. But what I will say is that Nazi Germany is the greatest example of how people can be wildly supportive of their government, even though that government is a giant squid controlling society at all levels. Shaun, just because people say they are happy doesn’t mean their government is not brutal. There are countless episodes throughout history of people who blindly supported their oppressive governments. (My favorite post on this blog is all about this phenomenon.) The Chinese are “happy” with their government to the extent that they can make money and enjoy certain social freedoms. Once the economy sours, as it may well do at some point in the future, those poll numbers will be quite different. Meanwhile, there is no denying that the CCP does indeed operate as a giant squid, controlling all aspects of life in China. Sure, there are more freedoms there than ever before, but it is always on the government’s terms. You can always only go so far; there are red lines you cannot cross or the squid tightens its grip.

I took down a post I wrote about Shaun a couple of months ago because I felt it was too harsh, written in a moment of emotional pique. Now I sort of wish I’d left it up. You see, we all know Shaun Rein didn’t include me in his book because he thinks I am some great influencer with whom he disagrees. I’m just a blogger with a blog that I hardly even update anymore. No, this is revenge, pure and simple, for my having made a fool of him by quoting his own words and revealing his pattern of carrying water for the CCP. If you aren’t familiar with my coverage of Rein you can find the posts here, here and here. I am not alone in calling Rein out as a blatant apologist. China Law Blog, Modern Lei Feng, Fear of a Red Planet, China Geeks and others have all made similar arguments.

So back to the post I took down. It was about Rein’s need for revenge. My friend Lisa had written a comment critical of him in this thread. He immediately blocked her on Twitter, as he blocks anyone who doesn’t kiss his ring, and then he went to Goodreads and gave her highly praised novel, Rock Paper Tiger one star — the lowest rating there is. (The book got stellar reviews in the NY Times, the South China Morning Post, Time Out Beijing and many other media, and James Fallows of the Atlantic wrote a glowing post about it.) But here’s the thing: I will bet you my life savings that Rein never read the book. What a coincidence, that the day after his being offended and blocking Lisa on Twitter he went and tried to pull her book down in the Goodreads rankings. Did he read the entire book right after he read Lisa’s comment? Did he really find it so awful he gave it the lowest rating? No, this action, just like his attack on me in his book, is Rein getting even.

I should feel in good company, as Rein also goes after James Fallows, Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini, though not with nearly the same degree of viciousness he reserves for me. Once again, he proves my initial impression of him was correct: that he is deeply insecure and a serial falsifier of fact.

I had vowed not to post about Shaun Rein anymore, as I thought I had said it all. And then I discover this act of personal character assassination, this smear, and I can’t be silent about that. Rein’s book may become a bestseller but that won’t make him any less of a brat and a hatchet man.

The best and the brightest of China’s bloggers come together to make this the funniest, smartest China blog, maybe ever. Go there now and keep scrolling. I found this post and this post especially hilarious.

This blog emerged when I was away on a ship in the Caribbean last week or I’d have blogged about it earlier. A masterpiece.

I know, this blog has gone to hell in a handbasket over the past couple weeks. And now I’m about to leave for more than 10 days, and I will have little or no Internet access (and no, I won’t be going to China this time, unfortunately). So this will probably be the longest-running thread ever. Post links, chat, etc.,and try to keep it Tibet-free; that’s one subject we have totally exhausted. Thanks to my hall monitors who will be watching things while I’m gone.

Du Guang is a good party member, a retired professor from the Central Party School, an 83-year-old man with a serious heart condition. And his book on the CCP and how it has deviated from its original charter has so frightened the party that they called its Hong Kong publisher and warned him not to publish it. Bao Pu, the founder of the publishing house, New Century Press, which also published Zhao Ziyang’s memoirs, saw the call as consistent with the CCP’s obsession with “internal security.”

[T]here is no telling what will stir anger these days in a country that is increasingly prosperous and powerful but also curiously insecure — so much so that China spends more on internal security than on defense and views as a threat an octogenarian authority on Marxism and believer in democracy….

“This is what happens if you give unlimited power to the security apparatus,” Bao said, echoing a widespread view that the party, though the architect of China’s spectacular economic renaissance, is in thrall to retrograde security organs that see flickerings of subversion in every corner.

Du is not your average thorn in the CCP’s side. He is a life-long communist who now accuses the National People’s Congress of being “nothing more than a democratic signboard for a one-party dictatorship.”

Unlike student protesters who enraged the party by erecting a statue modeled on New York’s Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square in 1989 or the jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo who championed Western liberties and mocked party dogma, Du is a party member who takes Chinese communism seriously. In some ways, though, that makes him especially troublesome.

His book, an advance copy of which has been reviewed by The Washington Post, doesn’t ridicule the party or call for its overthrow but dissects its theoretical gobbledygook and traces how far it has drifted from its early ideals. The book’s title: “Getting Back to Democracy.”

It’s funny (bizarre) to see the government of the world’s up and coming superpower get twisted into knots over the writings of a sick octogenarian. As China appears to be reforming in so many ways, as Chinese people find new methods to speak out and demand change, as China solidifies its position as a force to be reckoned with, how can they let an old man with a heart condition scare the crap out of them? This is a rhetorical question, as I think we all know the answer. The CCP for all its bluster is as insecure as a frightened child.

Needless to say, the censors have been going into overdrive to delete his writings on the Internet, causing him to post on his blog, “The strangling of free speech is not possible. It only . . . makes you lose face before the whole world.” The post, of course, was deleted, but has been re-posted on other sites by angry Netizens.

Update: Looking at this post a few days later, I found it a bit too self-righteous and outspoken, and edited it accordingly.