beth gourley's List: China

• Freedom House rates China as “Not Free.” On a scale of 1 to 7—where 1 is as free as human nature allows and 7 is completely otherwise—China scores 6 on civil liberties and 7 on political rights.
• mere increase in China’s prosperity must mean that more Chinese have greater wherewithal to exercise some aspects of free will.
• Certainly the Chinese are more free now than they were during the Great Leap Forward, when millions were constrained by starving to death. And the Chinese are freer to go about their business than they were during the Cultural Revolution, when there was no business to go about.
• Freedom and democracy are abstract
• what I have is a survey of “the tacit consent of the governed.”
• I talked to the kind of people who are necessary to the advocating of freedom and democracy but who, so far, aren’t advocating it.
• listen to what they don’t say.
• That’s no surprise,” Tom said. “Tiananmen Square is where the abdication of the last emperor was proclaimed in 1912. It’s where the student demonstrations, which led to the formation of the Chinese Communist Party, were held in 1919. It’s where the Japanese occupation government announced its East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, where Mao declared victory over the Kuomintang in 1949, and where a million Red Guards swore loyalty to Mao during the Cultural Revolution. When the Chinese see a bunch of people gathering in Tiananmen Square, they don’t go all warm and fuzzy the way we do. The Chinese think, ‘Here we go again.’”
  

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• can only loosely be termed censorship
• There are no facts that exist independently of their significance in the social contract.
• Thus, residence in China is not unlike working at a strongly cultured company, e.g., a Disney or Starbucks.
• China insists that both individuals and organizations conflate their social, economic and political roles, creating significant inefficiencies and distortions for businesses.
• almost impossible to understand what the average Chinese person might “really” think.
• key principle that makes the whole system work is uncertainty
• authorities’ legal tools are surveillance, arrest and imprisonment.
• often the “legal” apparatus is deployed as a form of intimidation
• government uses processes like approval of business licenses to keep information channels within trusted hands.
• In print, the government controls the bar codes that printers must have in order to print legally, and nothing may go to press without the bar code. Nor may any book or periodical be distributed without the CN or ISBN code owned by a government agency
• Internet has posed a particular challenge

• a bias toward technical means of control.  

   
• fall into three broad categories:
• blocking and redirects
• covert attacks on specific sites, groups, or individuals
• filtering,
• interference are propagated across a four-tier structure
• Tier 1, are the telecommunication operators that control the main interconnection points between China’s backbone networks and the gateways to the international communications system
• Tier 2 are somewhere between 15 to 20 large data centers operated by telecom operators
• Tier 3 include the licensed service providers, of which there are hundreds
• Tier 4 is all the local office and housing networks and Internet cafes, numbering in the hundreds of thousands
• What tends to create Internet delays in China,
• information control commands a higher priority than commercial efficiency.
• incompetence
• extravagant amount of human intervention required to implement all the rules boosts costs for China’s Internet. This partly explains why telecommunications costs roughly 10 times the amount it does in the United States and Europe.
• most fascinating layer of the propaganda system is the political one.
• operates something like a fraternity,
• suggestion that Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang or another ethnically differentiated region might be better served by more autonomy from China proper is the cardinal, excommunicable sin.
• government leaders’ personal lives is next
• Growth opportunities are given to companies in accordance with their willingness to cooperate.
• must provide coverage of China
• “soft” inducements added over time
• As we know from our political catechism, continuing one-party rule and maintaining social stability are really exactly the same thing.

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• events occur that change the ways it can be read.
• March 10, the forty-ninth anniversary of the failed uprising
• three hundred or more monks from Drepung Monastery began an orderly march toward the center of Lhasa,
• made specific demands such as the release of five monks detained the previous October for celebrating the award in Washington of the Congressional Gold Medal to the Dalai Lama
• Some fifty of the monks were arrested straightaway and their colleagues staged a sit-down in the street
• In 1990 the police were ordered to switch from what Jiang Zemin, then Chinese Party secretary, called "passive" to "active" policing, the former meaning (crudely) that you beat or shoot protesters once they start
• average prison sentence was 6.5 years for each participant, and upward of three thousand were detained during this period for peaceful protests or possession of forbidden documents and videos.
• include campaigns forcing Tibetans to denounce the Dalai Lama
• prohibition on the construction of new monasteries and on any increase in the number of monk
• ban on pictures or worship of him
• ban on students and government employees having religious possessions or carrying out religious practices
• forced relocation of 250,000 farmers to roadside houses
• opening in 2006 of the Chinese railway line connecting Tibet to neighboring Qinghai
• plan for the settlement of 100,000 Tibetan nomads.
• on March 10 were clearly under orders to use restraint.
• Early that evening things got tougher in Barkor Square, in the center of Lhasa, when fifteen monks carried the forbidden Tibetan national flag and called for independence: all were dragged away and were later charged with "gathering to create a disturbance by shouting reactionary slogans" and "premeditatedly carrying homemade reactionary flags" (they are currently in detention awaiting trial)
• ive hundred monks marched from Sera Monastery the following day on behalf of those fifteen arrested monks, the PAP used tear gas briefly, but did not open fire and the monks succeeded in holding a seven-hour sit-down in the street.
• midday on Friday, March 14
• group of monks at Ramoche,
• Ramoche is in the heart of Lhasa, and opens onto a busy market street
• began to attack the police and a small squad of PAP sent in to support
• Tibetans turned from attacking police to attacking the next available symbol of Chinese governance, the Chinese migrant population.
• About a thousand Chinese-owned shops were set on fire by rioters who were seen by foreign tourists igniting cooking gas cylinders or dousing shops in gasoline
• events of March 14 challenged any assumption that Tibetan Buddhists are necessarily nonviolent or that their political actions are limited to what Deepak Chopra has called "inert pacifism."
• the 3/14 incident
• four days following the March 14 riot in Lhasa, Tibetans staged sixty-three protests throughout the Tibetan areas within China, and the number has since risen to ninety-six,
• , while 85 percent of Tibetans live in the countryside, where their average annual income, despite a 14.5 percent increase, reached only 2,788 yuan ($398) last year
• overlooks the fact that Tibet was never a Chinese province and was never under direct Chinese rule apart from a few months in 1910–1911, and that Tibet declared independence in 1913.
• priest–patron" relationship
• is partly about the difficulties of intellectual engagement with an extremely mild-mannered subject
• offers a modernist view of Buddhism as a form of rational analysis that aims to "explore the world closely, so as to make out its laws, and then to see what can and cannot be done within those laws.
• show the Dalai Lama as a man who is both committed to his belief in human tolerance and unpredictable possibilities,
• pay attention to the cleavages t
• Tibetan youths who "will use Tibet whenever it suits them"
• suggests that Tibetans have "paid a high price at times for being associated with movie stars
• often as much a victim as a maker of the system
• can a leader who aims to serve the spiritual yearnings of a world community deal with the specific needs of his nation
• difficulty that most of us face in addressing such questions is that a pathway through them requires detailed knowledge of the Dalai Lama's constituency, its language, religion, and history.

  • important point for understanding any culture, but particularly important when a culture is romanticized
• slips stem from a worthy concern for the accessible, but they also hint at an absence in the story.
• nternational pressure on China, are seen by China as provocations and thus are used as an excuse not to meet with him.
• he events of the past two months have changed the political terrain significantly
• Estimates of the number of Tibetans detained range from 2,200 to 5,700, and Tibetans of all ages are being required to write formal denunciations of the Dalai Lama
• protests means that Tibetans
• have now become important elements of regional strategy and a political priority for Western leaders

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• China's Internet is a business opportunity so grand and irresistible that it can blind normally circumspect people to the moral compromises that cooperation with Chinese government authorities inevitably entails.

  • To live in China there are compromises
• made inquiries at the China offices of a number of American law firms to ask for help in comparing results for Internet searches performed inside China - within the "Great Firewall" of government censorship, as it is called - with searches performed from outside.

  • This is not recognizing there are boundaries when living in another country. There are changes occurring within the confines of the regulations.
• aw firms demurred, explaining, with commendable candor at least, that they could not risk being observed checking out search terms like "Tiananmen Square" or "Falun Gong."
• transforms even hardened litigators into wimps.
• Let's be clear: Freedom of speech, freedom of political choice and the rule of law are not relative values; they are absolutes.

  • Yes--spoken like an American. And one that I am proud to believe, but...
• China's regime of Internet censorship is, without question, a crime against individual liberty on a mass scale.

  • The US censors schools use for protection because students are not full citizens and responsible?
• China's leaders maintain censorship solely to maintain their monopoly on political power.

  • Nothing new--that's how it has been in China.
• create a fear that is far more effective than direct regulation.

  • very true!
• are subject to blocking by the Great Firewall based not on their content, but on their capacity to create, inside China, large, voluntary online communities that are independent of the government.
• Western Internet companies doing business in China should, for starters, acknowledge the extent of their self-censorship, not hide it or rationalize it or pretend that it is something other than the intensely unpleasant compromise that it is.
• t helps for companies to admit their complicity - to clarify that all is not as it should be or appears to be, to openly assert their disagreement with Chinese government policies
• should do everything they reasonably can to protect their Chinese customers from the surveillance (and worse) of Chinese authorities.

  • A western business who has Chinese employees is responsible for their well-being and safety and the company must be honest and open with their philosophy and agendas.
• If off-shoring of confidential user information is not feasible, companies must take steps to warn their customers about the risks of using their service.
• barring of anonymity is the surest means of getting users to appreciate the risks of saying what the government doesn't want to hear.
• The companies that choose to participate must learn to be both honest with themselves, and honest with their customers.

  • As a school--the same holds true--honesty with ourselves and our students.

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• he Chinese government, in its insecure and bullying fashion, keeps pushing its luck with acts like the army-saturated torch welcoming ceremony
• endless torch relay with its unprecedented scale of 85,000 miles and 20,000 torchbearers
• adding their goon squad of "flame attendants"

• Beijing has made it abundantly clear that this is not about the Olympic spirit, but about power, Chinese power.

    
• we should do it eyes open, aware not only of Chinese culpability for the current mess, but also of our own.
• headline "Who's Hu?
• not surprising that the current Tibet crackdown appears cleaner than the first: well rehearsed,
• Europe has already begun to pick sides
• how comprehensive a boycott we are looking at probably lies in the United States
• first Chinese argument
• Tibetan monks and activists are essentially terrorists,
• second defense,
• who desperately need Chinese modernization for their own good.
• hird Chinese argument is rarely stated openly.

• You are hypocrites. You knew the human rights situation in China when we made our bid. Your journalists only give human rights sporadic, selective coverage anyway. So why are you complaining at this late date? And here, as the context of the original bid and the tragic history of Falun Gong fully demonstrate, the Chinese are dead right.

    
• Beijing's was always a blackmail bid
• It was whispered that the Beijing Olympics would buy peace in the Taiwan Strait for eight years, ensure continued economic liberalization, mollify runaway Chinese nationalism (by bolstering Chinese self-esteem), permit journalists to operate in a slightly more plausible working environment, and inhibit the Chinese leadership from overtly slaughtering its citizens.
• ensure social stability was to neutralize the "five poisons"--Tibetan separatists, democracy activists, Taiwan independence supporters, Xinjiang freedom fighters, and Falun Gong practitioners.
• The blackmail bid took place in clear sight of the mindbending persecution of Falun Gong,
• documentation that thousands had been murdered and over 100,000 had been thrown into labor camps, and finally in 2006 when credible reports of systematic organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners
• describe physical exams aimed at determining the health of their internal organs, along with close examination of corneas.
• Second,
• First,
• took them by surprise
• Falun Gong has three strikes against it.
• depend on the party's minimal cooperation for access and accreditation.
• news stories had to be suppressed directly
• Stories about persecution and torture could bring retaliation-
• third
• Beijing-based journalists have gone slightly native
• looked like an enemy of the New China that journalists actually like:
• Cisco
• Oversight in Washington of this sort of activity lagged because politicians absorbed the distorted perception pumped out of China by many journalists and succumbed to the lobbying pressures of businessmen eager to cut deals with Chinese officials.
• The record suggests an informal pact with the Chinese government to trade away mention of Falun Gong in exchange for minor concessions
• We are assisting in the construction of a simulacrum of an independent, modern society, while the reality is actually quite fascist in nature.
• Let's admit that we screwed up,

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• bound feet were considered a prerequisite for landing a husband.
• placed bowls of urine inside their homes to create a stench so vile that soldiers would not enter for fear of illness
• feared the Nationalist soldiers.
• Mao came around, binding feet wasn’t allowed anymore.
• MAO remains a warm, if vague, memory,
• Drought is what they noticed,
• Laoshidan is decrepit, with battered brick homes, mud stables and dirt paths for roads.

• found a bit of satisfaction from at least one of the changes wrought in their long lives.
• If you wanted to hit them, you could hit them. But now women are women.

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