[I realize this story is already ancient history (about 4 days old) but I just came across it and have to mention it.]

According to the video only one man is known to have ever escaped a Nork prison camp and made it out of the country, and this is his story.

More about the escapee:

He is a thin, short, shy man, with quick, wary eyes, a baby face, and sinewy arms bowed from childhood labor. There are burn scars on his back and left arm from where he was tortured by fire at age 14, when he was unable to explain why his soon-to-be-hanged mother had tried to escape. The middle finger of his right hand is cut off at the first knuckle, punishment for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the garment factory at his camp.

And we think we’ve got problems. And yes, I know who has enabled and nurtured this utopia.

Shanghai officials argue that pajama-wearing pedestrians are “visual pollution,” while offenders maintain they aren’t hurting anybody. I admit, my level of culture shock hit a new high the first time I came to Shanghai in 2001 and saw the likes of the above photo, but like a lot of things here, you get used to it. I can think of a lot more important things to worry about.

I’m really enjoying the lessons over at this site. They take a different approach from Chinese Pod and are geared toward a somewhat different audience. (If you’re preparing for the HSK exams, this is your place to go.) What’s most useful to me is the authentic sound and pace of the dialogues – even the elementary lessons are spoken at the actual speed at which you’ll hear people speak here, and loaded with kouyuhua. That means you have to strain to listen harder, and in doing so you become a better listener. Or at least I do.

I haven’t given up Chinese Pod, though. Their podcasts are unsurpassed for familiarizing yourself with essential phrases you’ll use again and again. Unfortunately, they shy away from grammar, while Popup Chinese embraces it. (Isn’t understanding grammar key to unlocking the mysteries of a new language?) So I find the two sites complement one another.

Too bad Chinese Pod’s lessons aren’t free anymore (not that I blame them for doing that). A few months ago I would have paid to subscribe, but right now I am being soooo careful with my money. I have a bank of about 60 pre-August 2008 CP lessons on my iPod, and soon I’ll have most of them memorized word for word. I even hear the voices of John and Jenny in my dreams.

Update: Forgot to mention this: Thanks to John over at Sinosplice I’ve started spending a couple of hours each day over at Skritter. If you’re working on improving your hanzi reading and/or writing skills, just go there now, sign up and start practicing. Once you sign up it starts customizing the lesson for you, repeating the characters you’ve had trouble with. Totally addictive. It’s a first: an addictive Web site that actually produces benefits. My reading ability shot up after just a few weeks. It helped me learn to spot the clues that differentiate certain characters that look annoyingly similar. It also drove home to me that memorizing characters by reading and looking at them isn’t enough. You have to write them. Priceless. Of course, they’ll probably ask for money soon, too, and I don’t blame them. Like Chinese Pod – and Popup Chinese – it’s worth paying for.

When I was in the US for Thanksgiving, I couldn’t help but notice that the news was all economic crisis all the time. There was only a short window of “relief,” when the news out of Mumbai overshadowed America’s – and the world’s – financial implosion.

It isn’t much different over here in Beijing. Talking with the teachers at my school and my Chinese colleagues in the office, nearly all of whom are in their mid-to-late 20s, I was impressed by their awareness of just how serious this crisis is and how it affects their own hopes and dreams. There are no illusions, which I see as a good thing. No false expectations that things will soon return to normal.
I see this pragmatism as a good thing. The government is not showering the public in sugar-coated messages, promising that things will soon be shiny and happy once more (though I’m sure we could find some examples of that). Instead, things seem remarkably sober, at least here in Beijing.

People always refer to Chinese stoicism, and we’re seeing it now. Students graduating from college know that finding the job they may once have assumed would be waiting for them will be an exercise in frustration and repeated disappointment. Several friends of mine say they are looking for new jobs, not because they necessarily want to leave their current ones, but because they fear the axe might fall at any moment. On the other hand, those who are unhappy with their current jobs realize now isn’t the time to resign, at least not until the ink has dried on the contract for their next job.

Which brings me to the link of the day, to a story on Slumping Economy, a message board set up by unemployed Chinese white collar workers in Shanghai, which has been drawing a huge audience. The piece underscores my own observations that the Chinese are taking the crisis in stride, and that they understand its implications for their own lives.

Maria Yin, a 24-year-old recent college graduate, started searching for jobs in Shanghai this past summer, but has had no luck yet. “It seems that lots of people are facing the same problem as I do now. It makes me feel less desperate,” said Ms. Yin, who posts on Slumping Economy. “I’ll keep going.” She said she spends an hour or so surfing the site daily, chatting with her new friends and keeping an eye out for job information.

One popular thread has members thinking of cheap ways to celebrate the coming Christmas, which has been adopted by young people and residents as an opportunity to spend time together or to share romance. Some suggested holding an online Christmas party with virtual food and gifts provided, while others said they would figure out their own ways to spend the holiday in the real world.

“I’ll put on my best cotton-padded jacket and trousers and go downtown together with my boyfriend to the most beautifully decorated square. We’ll take a photo together using my mobile phone, and then spend three yuan each to take bus No. 925 home,” wrote one user, known as Chloe.

It’s a sad, tense, confusing time for everyone. I saw it in America and I’m seeing it here. I’m glad at least that in China people are psychologically prepared for the worst. I had a sense, totally unscientific, that people in America were less well prepared, if only because crisis and deprivation have been so distant from them for so many years, even for generations. American s appear far more shell-shocked than the Chinese.

I have a really bad feeling about this. For all the many faults of America’s auto industry, now is not the time to let it disintegrate. Especially not when we’re propping up a more insidious and far less worthy entity, namely the financial industry. An astute financial reporter makes a persuasive argument:

They don’t deserve a bailout.

But then again, neither did Wall Street. The presumption, as we were told by the likes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., was that the consequences for the greater economy would be simply too disastrous if we just stood by and watched as the financial titans whose own greed and irresponsibility created this mess crashed and burned. And that was back in September, several months before the economy started losing half a million jobs a month (a number that seems sure to go up judging by today’s awful jobless claims figures). The U.S. economy is in much worse shape than it’s been for at least a quarter-century, and appears to be unraveling at terrific speed. Thus, an even more timely case can be made for saving Detroit as was offered for Wall Street. Does it really seem like right now is the best time to see what happens if G.M. declares bankruptcy? As a worst-case scenario, might not it be better to help Detroit limp along for another year or two, until we see whether we can get out of what our current president not too long ago called “a rough patch”?

…There’s no sugarcoating this one — what’s good for Wall Street fat cats is not good for unionized Midwestern workers. It’s hard not to agree with the Detroit Free Press: We’re witnessing payback time for the UAW. Republican senators are on the warpath against organized labor.

Leave it to the Republicans to bailout Wall Street while kicking Detroit in the back. And maybe Detroit should be kicked in the back. But not right now, and not with such blithe difference to the consequences. They are playing with dynamite in a house of cards. The closing words of that article are scary as hell.

[I]t’s not so difficult for me to imagine looking back at this point from the perspective of a future historian detailing the events that led up to the Second Great Depression, and deciding to pinpoint the abandonment of Detroit as yet another grievous error that ensured a patient barely holding it together on life support went terminal.

I am under some pressure to return to America. For a number of personal reasons, I may have to. But once more, I feel that this remains a good time to be in China and paid in RMB. America really is on life support.

It’s been a long time, so some quick predictions: Current “deflation,” which is actually more of a disinflation – a return to where prices should be – will be short lived and oil prices will rise again. It’s a good time to buy oil, though it may remain depressed for another couple of months. The strengthening of the US dollar is also short-lived and will collapse as more money gets printed going forward. The new wave of home foreclosures will hit early in 2009, further devastating the banks. More money will need to be printed. You cannot have a strong dollar under those circumstances. While gold may not make you rich yet, it is still a safe bet. So is shorting long-term US treasuries. That’s my advice, take it or leave it.

Meanwhile, China will feel the pain, but will survive. As I say in my previous post, they are ready for the worst. America isn’t.

[Update: You can now follow Richard on Twitter.]

It may be a few weeks, it may be longer. I have goals to meet and decisions to make and I can’t focus on priorities when I have to keep running to the PC to police comments and scour the Web for the latest news to opine on. I kind of wish I’d done this earlier; the last few posts haven’t been my most sparkling.

I’ll be back, I know that. I have some big posts incubating, but now is not the time. I have to turn the whole thing off for at least a month. The only exception will be if one of the guest bloggers decides to put something up. Until then, there are many other blogs to visit, and you can find my recommendations over to the left. Thanks for joining me, and goodbye for now.

His best column ever. (Of course, there’s a catch.)

Via ESWN.

After realizing I meet China’s official criteria for Internet addiction, I’m trying to resist the urge to stay online and look for things to blog about. This post, however, jumped out at me. It’s short but pregnant with examples of China’s sloppy, propagandistic unique approach to journalism. And it’s funny, too.

Please keep it 100-percent LDS-free and FLG-free. Otherwise, discuss what you’d like. Everything related to the financial crisis and China’s stimulus package should go in the thread immediately below. Thanks.

Potential topics:
Shouldn’t every family have at least one gun?
The pope praises Ma for working with China (blocked in the PRC)
China’s “human flesh search engines” get global attention

We all knew this was coming. None of us knows whether it will work, and as I pointed out last week, there are some very different schools of thought on the topic. From today’s Times:

In a sweeping move at a time when major projects are being put off around the world, Beijing said it would spend an estimated $586 billion by 2010 on wide array of national infrastructure and social welfare projects, including constructing new railways, subways, airports and rebuilding communities devastated by an earthquake in southwest China in May.

The package, announced by the State Council Sunday evening, is the largest economic stimulus effort ever undertaken by the Chinese government and would amount to about 7 percent of the country’s gross domestic product during each of the next two years.

Beijing also said it was loosening credit and encouraging lending as part of a more “pro-active fiscal policy.”

“Over the past two months, the global financial crisis has been intensifying daily,” the State Council said in its statement. “In expanding investment, we must be fast and heavy-handed.”

The stimulus plan would be enormous for any country, let alone one whose gross domestic product is lower than most other major industrialized countries, at around $3.5 trillion this year. Earlier this year, the United States Congress passed a $700 billion bailout package in a country with an economy whose size is close to $14 trillion.

One prominent American blogger looks with envy at China’s ability to pony up such a staggering sum and laments America’s inability to fill its own coffers to handle emergencies like this and mostly blames Bush, which isn’t that simplistic considering we were in the black when he took office.

During boom times, China amassed budget surpluses and built up reserves. Now, during a downturn, they’re able to respond with a huge spending initiative at a time when (a) such spending is needed to keep the economy going, and (b) the downturn makes it cheaper than it would otherwise be to complete such projects….Bush took the situation and decided on a combination of irresponsible tax cuts for the Americans who needed them least, an enormously expensive new war whose massive costs involved little if any productive investment for the future, and homeland security spending much of which (like complicated-yet-pointless enhanced airport security) mostly serves as a minor drag on economic activity.

Please note this isn’t to blame only Bush for the financial collapse itself – only for bankrupting the Treasury before the crisis even hit and making a China-like solution far more difficult.

On the other side of the coin, a prominent Chinese blogger who blogs in Chinese sent me his thoughts on China’s stimulus package via email. A fascinating perspective:

I do NOT think those infrastructure investment from Chinese govnerment is the solution to the coming Great Depression. The reason is very simple: if common Chinese people still are reluctant to make consumption instead of save money in the future, every policy stimulus is useless. The only effective way to fight the crisis is to make the poor have more money to spend, but this is the last thing Chinese government will do.

Actually, I hope the crisis will bring us a revolution.

Well. That sure opens up a barrel of questions.

As I said in my earlier post, if this crisis really hits China as hard as some of my readers believe, and if the government handles the stimulus package as dreadfully as it’s handled some other crises, revolution, however unlikely, is not inconceivable. The consensus in the earlier thread was that revolution was not in the cards, as the CCP has already demonstrated its willingness to send in the tanks.

I can’t go quite as far as my fellow blogger and hope for revolution. I hope for more money and opportunity to reach the huddled masses without a revolution that could leave everybody worse off. (If someone could answer the question of who would fill the power vacuum I might be persuaded to hope for it.) Maybe the realization that revoltuon is even possible will shake the Party into a realization that two vastly separated nations, Rich China and Poor China, is not a sustainable model, and that it’s time for some serious, intelligent wealth-spreading.

Pass the popcorn and watch the global drama unfold.

Update: I am happy to see that my fellow blogger has put up his own post in Chinese about our email conversation. You can see it here. I truly admire his courage, not to mention his intelligence.