My new favorite thing!

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.  The best military inspired non-obscene obscenity since FUBAR.

Thanks to Jamie Fly for bringing it to my attention in his brilliant blog item for the Weekly Standard.

I think the left, having caught the car it was chasing for 8 years, really has no idea what the heck to do with it.  

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Where, exactly, is the outrage?

Besides Glenn Greenwald's blog, I mean.  

I want to just get this straight in my head: Obama trashes the Bush Administration for its horrible policies on detention of terrorists, then proceeds to not only retain them when he becomes president but actually finds a way to make them worse by incorporating blatant show trials.  And where is the loony left?  Cue the crickets.

Greenwald and Jonathan Turley are at least calling him on it, but we'll see what the MSM has to say, as well as all those in Congress and the "international community" who spent the past seven years railing against the Bush Administration for their open-ended detention of terrorists.  As Greenwald says: 

 In its own twisted way, the Bush approach was actually more honest and transparent:  they made no secret of their belief that the President could imprison anyone he wanted without any process at all.  That's clearly the Obama view as well, but he's creating an elaborate, multi-layered, and purely discretionary "justice system" that accomplishes exactly the same thing while creating the false appearance that there is due process being accorded.   And for those who -- to justify what Obama is doing -- make the not unreasonable point that Bush left Obama with a difficult quandary at Guantanamo, how will that excuse apply when these new detention powers are applied not only to existing Guantanamo detainees but to future (i.e., not-yet-abducted) detainees as well.

And from Turley: 

Liberals continue to be largely silent in the face of policies that they once denounced and protested. It is rare to hear any coverage or questions of the Administration’s refusal to investigate war crimes of torture, for example. Liberals seem to be quickly developing a cult of personality that has supplanted the most basic principles of human rights and international law. 

Hmpf.  Res ipsa loquitor, indeed.

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Uighur Protests continue

Just finished final edits on a piece for the Asia Wall Street Journal on the unrest in Uighur-land and the link to China's censorship policies.  It should be up on line around mid-day here, and in the dead-tree version published in Hong Kong tomorrow.  

The stateside version of the WSJ has an op-ed from Rebiya Kadeer that touches on some of the same themes as my piece, particularly the race-baiting aspect of China's response to this crisis and the Tibetan uprising last year.  To whit: 

The recent Uighur repression has taken on a racial tone. The Chinese government is known for encouraging a nationalistic streak among Han Chinese as it seeks to replace the bankrupt communist ideology it used to promote. This nationalism was in evidence as the Han Chinese mob attacked Uighur workers in Shaoguan.  This official encouragement of reactionary nationalism among Han Chinese makes the path forward very difficult. 

As the violence escalates, so does the pain I feel for the loss of all innocent lives. I fear the Chinese government will not experience this pain as it reports on its version of events in Urumqi. It is this lack of self-examination that further divides Han Chinese and Uighurs.

It is also fascinating to me that Hu Jintao has bailed on the G8 meeting in order to be in China to deal with the situation in Uighur-land.  The protests are spreading to other areas, much as protests spread across the Tibetan plateau after the brutal crackdown in Lhasa last year.  When will the Chinese learn to handle these situations better?  I have to believe that they will at some point because they show a pretty strong capacity to learn on the media management front and apply lessons to improve their approaches over time.  Yet the heavy security response to non-violent protests by ethnic minorities seems immutable, always with the same tragic results for the victims of violence and the negative fall-out for the Chinese.

Silver lining here is Rebiya getting a forum for her moderate and reasonable sounding ideas, and the fact that most media stories are highlighting the Chinese government's race-baiting and censorship, as well as the underlying causes of tensions in the region (China's bad policies on migration, education, language, religion, etc.). 

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Seriously?!? Are these people crazy or just evil?

More on the violence in Uighur-land from an AP story:

Meanwhile, for much of the afternoon, a mob of 1,000 mostly young Han Chinese holding cleavers and clubs and chanting "Defend the Country" tore through streets trying to get to a Uighur neighborhood until they were repulsed by police firing tear gas.

Panic and anger bubbled up amid the suspicion in Urumqi (pronounced uh-ROOM-chee). In some neighborhoods, Han Chinese — China's majority ethnic group — armed themselves with pieces of lumber and shovels to defend themselves. People bought up bottled water out of fear, as one resident said, that "the Uighurs might poison the water."

The outbursts happened despite swarms of paramilitary and riot police enforcing a dragnet that state media said led to the arrest more than 1,400 participants in Sunday's riot, the worst ethnic violence in the often tense region in decades.

Trying to control the message, the government has slowed mobile phone and Internet services, blocked Twitter — whose servers are overseas — and censored Chinese social networking and news sites and accused Uighurs living in exile of inciting Sunday's riot. State media coverage, however, carried graphic footage and pictures of the unrest _showing mainly Han Chinese victims and stoking the anger.

The Chinese also said that the riots were stirred up by Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur exile who is a leader of her people because the regime put her in jail for having the nerve to complain about the horrible situation of the Uighur people.  She had the nerve to do this precisely because, call her crazy, the Chinese had annointed her as a model Uighur due to her business success, and made her one of their ethnic show ponies.  When she actually thought that this gave her some grounds to present evidence of the grievances of her people to the Chinese leadership, they threw her in jail and nearly killed her.  To this day, her children are in jail because they are her children.  

So, is the Chinese regime out of their minds or are they really this cynical?  Is stoking ethnic hatred to maintain your own legitimacy the behavior of a responsible government?  Let's think about a few lessons from history...hmmm....

A few facts: 

- The initial incident that sparked all this was an attack on a group of Uighur men in a coastal Chinese town.  A mob of Han Chinese attacked and beat 6 Uighurs who were accused of raping a Chinese woman.  What does this remind you of? (here's a hint: Emmit Till; here's another: Adolf Hitler)

- Han Chinese outnumber ethnic Uighurs 2-to-1 in Urumqi, and control the political, security and economic infrastructure of the city, region and country.  

- The Chinese government strictly controls all telecommunications into and out of Uighur-land.  Rebiya Kadeer lives in Washington, DC and is a 60+ year old woman with a cellphone.  Yet, according to the Chinese regime, she orchestrated these protests.   

- Last year, the Chinese government claimed that the Dalai Lama's "clique" in India orchestrated protests in Tibet.

Conclusion a reasonable person would reach if given the facts: either the Chinese government is not as on top of things as they claim to be in Tibet and Uighur-land, or maybe they are not being truthful in blaming the Dalai Lama and Rebiya Kadeer when these miserable, put-upon people decide they have had enough and just can't take it anymore.

Conclusion that most Chinese people reach because they only hear what the government wants them to: Uighurs and Tibetans are ungrateful little snots who are trying to destroy China.  But please don't take it upon yourself to beat the crap out of them - that is our job.

AGH!!!!!

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China: The revolution will be spun

Good piece in the NYT today about China's efforts to block & spin events in East Turkestan/Xinjiang, which is all the better because it quotes my dear friend Xiao over at China Digital Times.  He is so brilliant.  Key passages from the article: 

Hours after troops quelled the protests, in which 156 people were reported killed, the state invited foreign journalists on an official trip to Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital and the site of the unrest, “to know better about the riots.” Indeed, it set up a media center at a downtown hotel — with a hefty discount on rooms — to keep arriving reporters abreast of events.

It is a far cry from Beijing’s reaction 11 years ago to ethnic violence elsewhere in Xinjiang, when officials sealed off an entire city and refused to say what happened or how many people had died. And it reflects lessons learned from the military crackdown in Tibet 17 months ago. Foreign reporters were banned from Tibet, then and now. Chinese authorities rallied domestic support by blaming outside agitators but were widely condemned overseas.

State television has focused primarily, though not totally, on scenes of violence directed against China’s ethnic Han majority. Chinese news Web sites carry official accounts of the unrest, but readers are generally blocked from posting comments.

As in Tibet, blame for the violence has been aimed at outside agitators bent on splitting China — in this case, the World Uighur Congress, an exile group whose president, Rebiya Kadeer, is a Uighur businesswoman now living in Washington.

The most troubling aspects of this whole approach are the regime's attempts to play ethnic politics and their ability to manipulate foreign media.  On the first, it is extremely frightening to think that a nation of 1.3 billion people, 90+% of whom are of the Han (Chinese) ethnicity can be so easily manipulated by their authoritarian government into hating their "brothers and sisters" - be they Uighur or Tibetan.  Think about it: We're talking about a regime that is willing to pit more than 1 billion its own people against small ethnic minority groups that were already suffering from heavy discrimination and who lag behind the rest of China on virtually every social and economic indicator - hardly smacks of confidence in their own legitimacy.  

Which leads to the kind of stories they are able to get out of "western" media from the calculated junket to Urumqi.  On the face of it, inviting a bunch of foreign journalists to Urumqi the day after massive riots flies in the face of the Chinese media control mind-set, and gives the an impression of increased openness that will earn them credit from the west.  However, I would bet my last grain of rice that in addition to the New York Times, there was a sizable contingent of "journalists" from countries such as Nepal, Russia, Pakistan, etc. - where the press is nominally free but journalistic standards are, shall we say, more creative.  Setting aside the ongoing decline of journalism in the western world, my experience with the reportage of the Nepali press corps leads me to believe that the Chinese will get exactly what they want out of this junket:  a suitable number of news stories in English and other languages, from a range of sources that are not the Chinese state, but exactly parrot the coverage one would find in Xinhua.  The online media market is increasingly a numbers game, and they have probably rightly calculated that they can achieve parity or maybe even supremacy in the post-protest spin zone by just increasing the amount of "positive" reportage by "independent" sources.

This is sophisticated stuff worthy of Madison Avenue or the Obama White House.  Coming as it does from a large, increasingly powerful authoritarian regime, it should be horrifying.  Policy-makers and the media themselves need to recognize that this media management strategy is a key factor in the ability of what should be very brittle regime to continue to survive and thrive. 

The question then becomes, what lesson should the free world take from all this and what policy response is appropriate.  First, we need to recognize China's censorship at home and spin control abroad as the strategic threat that it is.  Fighting back against it should be a strategic imperative, rather than the current ad hoc after-thought approach.  Together with other free societies, the U.S. needs to be pushing back on Chinese censorship with more information resources.  This means increased funding for surrogate radio such as Radio Free Asia, and efforts to improve access for services such as the Voice of America and the BBC.  We also need to invest in internet freedom initiatives that can challenge China's control of online space and discourse.  We need to both increase access to the "free" web for Chinese and expand the number and presence of alternate points of view in the Chinese vernacular.  These are all essential and, currently, all are very poorly funded.  

Western media and technology companies also need to recognize their responsibility as beneficiaries of the free press and free market at home in their conduct in China.  Fear of losing market share should not be allowed as an excuse for behavior that limits the freedoms of the Chinese people.  It is inexcusable that Microsoft, Google, Cisco and other technology companies are complicit in China's domestic censorship regime.  The U.S. Department of Justice and its European counterpart should be investigating Microsoft over the issue of whether its new Bing! search engine filters out results for Chinese language searches outside China, as has been reported.  The recent firestorm over the "Green Dam" filtering software, and the regime's about-face on that issue shows that it can be pressured effectively on censorship issues.  The key lesson from that episode is that unity and public outrage are effective tools in calling the Chinese government's bluff.  

The U.S. and other countries should also look at the possibility of challenging China's censorship of western media outlets through the WTO on the grounds of unequal treatment.  China's state-run CCTV television channel and other Chinese state-owned media outlets are given free and open access to western media markets while western media are blocked, censored and harassed in China.  The increasing privatization of Chinese media has created new opportunities to use market-based and legal tools to go after both the censorship regime and the disparate access.  

The Department of Defense should also be engaged, given the potential for China to apply the lessons learned from its cyber-war against its own citizens to cyber-warfare against the US and other countries whose war-fighting capabilities are heavily dependent on preserving an effective information-management system.  And, as John Dillinger said, people rob banks because that is where the money is.  DOD has the money and the rationale for working with other parts of the US government on this.  

  

I'm kind of on a roll here; I think I am going to take this and work it into a piece for MSM publication.  We'll see how that goes today!

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Today I'm Liking...

Leon Weiselter's piece on TNR.com - a liberal critique of Obama's Iran reticence

China backing off on the weirdly named Green Dam filtering software (who says pressure doesn't work with the Chinese!?!?)

Video of I'm-a-dinner-jacket fleeing from university students who heckle him, shouting "death to the dictator" - brilliant stuff

and yoga.

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Tehran's Tiananmen?

One of my favorite sources for China news, China Digital Times, has a new post that looks at the various comparisons between what is happening in Iran today and the events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, leading with the piece on this subject in the NYT today.  It also analyzes how events in Iran are playing in China.  I was particular interested in the piece by Evan Osnos in the New Yorker on how the Chinese blogosphere is commenting on events in Iran: 

There is an engaged, relatively mainstream population that is thinking seriously about what Iran’s experience says about China. Several bloggers, for instance, are using the unrest in Iran as a way to benchmark China’s movement toward democracy. Wu Jiaxiang, an intellectual and former researcher in the General Office of the Communist Party Central Committee wrote the other day:

For over ten years, Iran’s presidential elections have had turnout exceeding seventy percent, so much so that the closing hours had to be delayed until midnight. What does that show? It means that indifference towards democracy comes from the lack of democracy. There is no excuse for non-democracy.

Mao Anlin, another blogger, goes one step further:

Even Iran, such a religious country, has had so many years of elections. Candidates can squabble, the results can be questioned, the legislature can talk, and Khamenei can keep right on working. We [in China] insist on appointing every single candidate in advance, even for the chief of Macau. This is more than a little lagging behind Iran.

This is fascinating - Chinese "establishment" commentariat noticing that China has a democracy deficit IN COMPARISON TO IRAN.  

If nothing else, this kind of thing continues to give me some hope that the cramped realism that most policymakers fall into when it comes to China will prove as narrow and, ultimately, incorrect as it did predicting both political events in Iran and how US policy should look.

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