A Stitch in Haste

China now has the world's largest mall:

It takes about two days to explore Beijing's new Golden Resources Shopping Mall -- the world's largest. Minnesota's "Mall of America" is 4 million square feet. Golden Resources, built in an impressive 20 months and opened Oct. 24, is 6 million square feet.

With 230 escalators, more than 1,000 shops, restaurant space the size of two football fields, and a skating rink - the Art Deco mall is a testament in glass and steel to the communist party's desire to create a stable, happy, middle-income consumer class.

Whatever. Does that somehow change the fact that China is a bloodthirsty Communist dictatorship that engages in, inter alia, forced abortions, territorial conquests and threats of future conquest, religious persecution, dissident persecution, emigration lockdowns, organ harvesting from prisoners, restriction of Internet access, trade protectionism, etc., etc. etc.?

More:

Pedigrees run from a Macy's-style department store to shops with names like Ralph Lauren, Papa John's Pizza, and Chanel. (Wal-Mart was invited but negotiations reportedly broke down after 30 minutes.)

Ralph Lauren utilizes Chinese sweatshops -- of course it's going to have a store there! Chanel is, ahem, French. And boy would I like to have been a fly on the wall for those 30 minutes with Wal-Mart!

The fascination over "constructive engagement" with China never ceases to amaze me. Yes, China has nuclear weapons, yes China has lots of people (almost all of whom are subsistence-farm peasants who will never even see a picture of, let alone visit, China's new mall). Yes, China has embraced a market economy -- along a restricted, narrow sliver of its coastline for a select few anointed as a "middle class." And it gets away with all this for no other reason than because the West lets them.

Did we learn nothing from the Cold War? Shouldn't the burden of persuasion be on those who advocate a different approach for China? What have we, or the Chinese people (all of them, not just the elite), gotten from our current accommodative policy?

We got 230 escalators and a skating rink.

Sounds like a bad deal to me.

Hat tip to Marginal Revolution.

Related Post:
Communism Victims Memorial
Another Reason for the War

Which is worse:

China banning ads:

China has banned a Nike TV commercial featuring U.S. basketball star LeBron James in a battle with a cartoon kung fu master, citing "indignant feelings among Chinese viewers."

The decision, posted Monday on the Web site of China's State Administration for Radio, Film and Television, is the latest in a string of high-profile rows over advertising that highlights the cultural and political pitfalls that afflict marketing in China for even the savviest foreign companies.
...
The ad violates regulations that "all advertisements must uphold national dignity and interest, and respect the motherland's culture," said the Sarft site. The statement didn't specify why the ad was offensive, and a Sarft spokesperson wasn't available for comment.

Or New York City monopolizing them?

New York's Olympic organizers have reserved almost all the outdoor advertising space in the city as part of a marketing plan to land the 2012 Games. The city is trying to prove to the International Olympic Committee and corporate sponsors that it can control advertisements.

The idea isn't for the city to buy advertising. Instead, the city is demonstrating that ad space would be available to the companies who spend the money to become official Olympic sponsors.

Last month, the city's Olympic organizers struck deals with nine billboard companies that together control 95 percent of outdoor advertising venues. That includes some 600,000 billboards, subway signs and other outdoor ad space. The agreements came soon after Mayor Michael Bloomberg created a special board to stifle marketing from advertisers who are not official Olympic sponsors.

At the end of the day, are the two actions really all that different?

Red China, Blue New York. Go figure.

Related Posts:
The Great Mall of China
NYC and the Olympics: Some Tidbits
Anybody But Bloomberg: NYC and the Olympics

(Cross-linked at Outside the Beltway.)

In case you're tempted to think that China is anything other than a brutal Communist dictatorship because of its so-called "embracing" of capitalism, guess again:

In a generation, China's ascetic, egalitarian society has acquired the trappings and the tensions of America in the age of the robber barons. A rough-and-tumble form of capitalism is eclipsing the remnants of socialism. Those who have made the transition live side by side with those who have not, separated by serrated fences and the Communist Party.

The party's Central Committee conducted a survey of party officials in November in which the widening income gap ranked as the biggest concern, mainly because it stirs social unrest. Farm incomes were raised this year after emergency rural tax cuts. The government has tried to slow land confiscations. But officials have chosen not to give peasants control over the land they farm, effectively denying them a share in the new market economy.

Meanwhile, the fleet footed and well connected have profited from surging exports, a bubbly urban real estate market and, occasionally, government boosterism.

Sure it's great to be a Chinese "capitalist." It was also great to be a Soviet apparatchik. And I'm sure Fidel Castro's inner circle eat, drink and smoke very nicely.

Give the whole piece a read, especially the parts about how the Chinese "capitalists" are almost exclusively from the Communist Party elite and how the bureaucrats attempt to mollify the peasants with optimistic but vague promises of job creation from state-sanctioned real estate mega-projects. Where have we heard...that...before?

Just because a country has "capitalists" doesn't mean it's a capitalist country.

Related Posts:
China's (and NYC's) Totalitarianism
The Great Mall of China
Cold Shower, Chinese Style

I have little new to say about the Chinese Communist dictatorship's latest reaffirmation of totalitarianism, namely the requirement that all websites and bloggers register with the government. I've condemned ... China ... before; I suspect I'll have cause to do so again.

This latest slap in the face of basic human liberties merely exemplifies my unchanged thesis regard China. You cannot have economic freedom without political freedom. To think that China's token enterprise zones are anything other than an attempt to siphon off wealth from the West (on the backs of slave laborers and subsistence farmers), to fall for the ruse of a prosperous — and content — populace (which is really just a carefully packaged marketing pitch comprised of politically favored elites), to think that capitalism will drag democracy up, rather than political oppression dragging economic freedom down, are all unjustifiable. Every example in history demonstrates otherwise.

China may be "too big to ignore," but it is not too big to condemn. Shame on their despicable Communist tyrants for this unforgivable infringement of human rights.

POST SCRIPT #1:

Chen Yonglin, 37, who fled his job as first secretary in the Chinese consulate-general in Sydney 12 days ago, said he was in fear of his life and claimed that Chinese agents were hunting him.

Mr Chen, who spoke at a rally on Sunday marking the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre before going into hiding, said he had repeatedly tried to defect but was thwarted at every stage.
...
Opposition politicians, trade unions and analysts said the government's reluctance to accept Mr Chen meant that trade with China had been put ahead of human rights. Australia's economy is riding high, selling oil, gas and minerals worth billions of pounds to Beijing, and the countries are forging ahead with free trade talks.

Like I said, does capitalism neutralize despotism, or does despotism neutralize capitalism? (Hat tip to Samizdata.) (UPDATE: The Australian government has backed off and will allow the defector to remain. Good.)

POST SCRIPT #2:

Global military spending in 2004 broke the $1 trillion barrier for the first time since the Cold War, boosted by the U.S. war against terror and the growing defense budgets of India and China, a European think tank said Tuesday.
...
The report is based on official national budgets in most cases, and independent studies for countries like China, where, [one researcher] said, "it's obvious that the official figures are very wrong."

The government-funded institute estimated that China increased it defense budget by about 10 percent in 2004, to $35.4 billion — a figure that is about 70 percent above the government's official figure...

The Soviet Union was notorious for blatantly lying about their macroeconomic, government budget and military spending statistics. The Chinese dictators are proving no different. Go figure (pun intended).

A while back Microsoft got into a wee spat of trouble over its sudden withdrawal of support (which was not the same as "opposition to") a comprehensive gay rights bill up for a vote in Washington State legislature. The bill failed by one vote.

Unlike most bloggers (and especially gay bloggers), I was rather forgiving of Microsoft's goof. Whatever the exact chain of events (the media and blogger accounts of the incident were overflowing with presumptions, innuendo and wild guesses), Microsoft's error was clearly one of corporate lethargy, myopia and miscommunication, not bigotry and certainly not cowardice toward a third-rate Bible-thumper who threatened a 1,000-member boycott of the software behemoth (my guess is that Microsoft probably sells about 1,000 items per minute if not per second).

On the other hand:

Microsoft is cooperating with China's government to censor the company's newly launched Chinese-language web portal, a spokesman for the tech giant said. The policy affects blogs created through the MSN Spaces service, said Adam Sohn, a global sales and marketing director at MSN.
...
On Monday, Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, said bloggers were not allowed to post terms to MSN Spaces such as "democracy," "human rights" and "Taiwan independence." Attempts to enter those words were said to generate a message saying the language was prohibited.
...
Chinese censors scour internet bulletin boards and blogs for sensitive material, and block access to violators. Sites that let the public post comments are told to censor themselves or face penalties.

Sohn said heavy-handed government censorship is accepted as part of the regulatory landscape in China, and the world's largest software firm believes its services still can foster expression in the country. "Even with the filters, we're helping millions of people communicate, share stories, share photographs and build relationships. For us, that is the key point here," he said.

I respectfully disagree.

Appeasement with tyranny and oppression never works; it is never a positive. It boggles the mind to see so many people accept the bizarre notion that this basic axiom — proved again and again when both applied (e.g., the Soviet Union) and ignored (e.g., Nazi Germany) — somehow doesn't apply where China is concerned.

By the way, if Microsoft has so much "market power" from its status as an "oppressive monopolist" itself, then why is it kowtowing to China so willingly? It does not appear that Microsoft (which is operating MSN China as a joint venture with the Chinese government) is making appreciable amounts of money from this particular operation, so charges of "sell-out" are probably misplaced.

Perhaps it's just Washington State all over again: corporate lethargy, myopia and miscommunication. In any case, I hope Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and the others don't think that they'll go down in history as heroes for bringing blogging to China. They're far more likely to go down as among the worst collaborators in the history of censorship.

Very sad.

Other thoughts, some in disagreement, at Psychotic Pineapples, Soul of Wit, Modulator, Roger L. Simon and Samizdata.

---

On a related subject: "Yes! Yes! To Mark Steyn you listen!"

China is (to borrow the formulation they used when they swallowed Hong Kong) "One Country, Two Systems". On the one hand, there's the China the world gushes over — the economic powerhouse that makes just about everything in your house. On the other, there's the largely unreconstructed official China — a regime that, while no longer as zealously ideological as it once was, nevertheless clings to the old techniques beloved of paranoid totalitarianism: lie and bluster in public, arrest and torture in private.
...
How long can these two systems co-exist in one country and what will happen when they collide? If the People's Republic is now the workshop of the world, the Communist Party is the bull in its own China shop. ... Unlike the demoralised late-period Soviet nomenklatura, Beijing's leadership does not accept that the cause is lost: unlike most outside analysts, they do not assume that the world's first economically viable form of Communism is merely an interim phase en route to a free — or even free-ish — society.
...
The internal contradictions of Commie-capitalism will, in the end, scupper the present arrangements in Beijing. China manufactures the products for some of the biggest brands in the world, but it's also the biggest thief of copyrights and patents of those same brands. ... China hasn't invented or discovered anything of significance in half a millennium, but the careless assumption that intellectual property is something to be stolen rather than protected shows why. If you're a resource-poor nation (as China is), long-term prosperity comes from liberating the creative energies of your people — and Beijing still has no interest in that.

Read the whole thing. These are not people we should be doing business with. These are not leaders who should command our respect, and certainly not our fear. (Hat tip to Somewhere in the Middle.)

Not quite Kelo, but still...

The southwestern Chinese city of Kunming is forcing developers to change the names of properties deemed too foreign-sounding, saying they debase traditional culture, officials said Tuesday.

At least nine developments in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, have changed their names since officials began implementing new guidelines last month.
...
"It's not proper to name those communities with so many weird foreign titles," said an official with the Kunming Urban Planning Bureau, who, like many Chinese bureaucrats, would only be identified by his surname, Xiao.

I think these Communists should take a Great Leap Forward off the nearest available cliff.

There are no free markets without property rights, and (one would think) property rights ought to include the right to name your property pretty much whatever you see fit.

Those who think China is "making progress" are delusional.

China Telecom is blocking VoIP technology:

Customers in China have reported to news sources that they are unable to use the SkypeOut service to call standard telephones, although computer-to-computer services seem unaffected.
...
The service is not offered in mainland China because VoIP services are not permitted there, but some users have registered for SkypeOut outside of China to use it in the country.
...
Although China often has been criticized for limiting technology use because it wants to limit discussion among dissidents, it is more likely that China Telecom is blocking Skype because of commercial rather than political reasons.

"Commercial rather than political reasons"? The Chinese government owns 72% of China Telecom. In China, the commercial is the political.

As I've said elsewhere, that's a mighty bizarre form of "capitalism."

And besides: would we, as capitalists, somehow be less indignant if this maneuver were meant solely to suppress dissidents?

That's an even more bizarre form of "capitalism."

The supposed "economic miracle" of China's "new capitalism" doesn't do you much good if you've been forcibly aborted:

China's family planning agency admitted that officials in the eastern province of Shandong had carried out forced abortions and sterlisations, state media reported.
...
Time magazine last week reported that at least 7,000 people in Shandong were forcibly sterilised earlier this year by officials under pressure to limit the growth of the country's massive population.
...
It further reported that the lawyers alleged that several villagers were beaten to death while under detention for trying to help family members avoid sterilisation.
...
China on Saturday said it would maintain its one-child policy.

The high-ranking Communists can disavow the atrocities of the low-ranking Communists all they want. It doesn't change the fact that the totalitarians inject themselves into the bedrooms of its citizens in ways that no amount of wealth and prosperity can offset.

Would you really rather be rich in China than poor in America?

It's hard to partake of China's supposed "economic miracle" when you're busy being subjected to forced criminal confessions:

For three days and three nights, the police wrenched Qin Yanhong's arms high above his back, jammed his knees into a sharp metal frame, and kicked his gut whenever he fell asleep. The pain was so intense that he watched sweat pour off his face and form puddles on the floor.

On the fourth day, he broke down. "What color were her pants?" they demanded. "Black," he gasped, and felt a whack on the back of his head. "Red," he cried, and got another punch. "Blue," he ventured. The beating stopped.

Read the whole thing.

In the former Soviet Union, only something like 15% of the population were actually allowed the (literal) privilege of joining the Communist Party. Now matter how dismal economic conditions got as the "superpower" slouched toward eventual collapse, members of the Party never wanted for anything. That didn't mean, however, that the Soviet Union was any kind of "economic miracle."

The supposed "new capitalism" tolerated out of desperation along a tiny sliver of China's coastline differs only in the percentages and the format of the charade presented to the Western world and the naive tourists who fall for the con. The overwhelming majority of China's people live in abject poverty and perpetual oppression. Or are simply slaughtered.

At the end of the day, Communist is as Communist does.

There's an old saying that, in order to exercise freedom of the press, it must be legal to actually own a press.

In order words, you can't have political freedom without economic freedom, nor can you have economic freedom without political freedom.

So stop trying to convince me that China is "capitalist" --

China on Thursday rejected a U.S. call to adopt democracy, telling Washington to respect its communist path and brushing off warnings of retaliation for its huge trade surplus with the United States.
...
"The internal affairs should be handled by the government and people of each country," [Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang] said. "We should respect another country's right to chose its own development road."

And if that "right to chose its own development road" includes forced abortions, torture, censorship, slave labor, invading peaceful neighbors, or any of the myriad other atrocities committed -- with unapologetic pride -- by these so-called "market communists," then we should just shrug and focus on the handful of "neat-o" new cities built along a tiny sliver of China's coastline that are mostly accessible only to politically favored elites?

Communist is as Communist does. That will never ever change, and that will never ever be a good thing.

---

Meanwhile, China itself is starting to acknowledge that its "market communism" isn't quite the Great Leap Forward it previously claimed it was:

China's official media warned Wednesday that the gap between rich and poor has become alarmingly wide during two decades of economic liberalization, contributing to spreading unrest in towns and villages across the country.
...
Riots and other violent protests, which the government acknowledges are increasing dramatically, have become a major issue for President Hu Jintao's government. Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao have made calls for "harmonious society" and "social stability" watchwords of their speeches over the last year.

The reports on income inequality seemed to attribute violence to economic rather than political causes and warned that more unrest could be coming.

Nonsense. In a free society people don't riot simply because they're poor. For the most part they don't riot at all. And when they do it's because they feel, not impoverished, but oppressed.

In any case, it's a mighty bizarre form of "economic miracle" that results in mass rioting.

Feel free to make as much money as you want in China's so-called "capitalism zones," just don't tell anybody about it:

A Chinese court has convicted an online journalist on subversion charges and sentenced him to seven years in prison — the third such case this year, a court official and a reporters' advocacy group said Friday.

Zheng Yichun was convicted on Thursday said an official at the Intermediate People's Court in Yingkou, a port city in northeastern China's Liaoning province. The official, who would give only his surname, Ma, said he was not able to give any details.
...
Although China's leaders encourage the use of the Internet for business and education, authorities use vaguely defined secrecy and subversion laws to silence critics and perceived political opponents.

And please no false analogies to Judith Miller. She is in jail not for anything she said or wrote, but for contempt of court. And we don't get information about her status from prosecutors or judges who only give their first names.

This is naked, brazen censorship and a flagrant human rights violation. And the Chinese are really good at it — Reporters Without Borders describes China as the "World Champion" of Internet censorship.

---

Meanwhile, China has decided that these "one subversive at a time" imprisonments are just too clumsy and inefficient for a modern dictatorship, so they're opting instead for a more "economies of scale" approach:

China said Sunday it is imposing new regulations to control content on its news Web sites and will allow the posting of only "healthy and civilized" news.
...
The subjects that would be acceptable under those categories was not clear. ... "The sites are prohibited from spreading news and information that goes against state security and public interest," [the official Xinhua News Agency] added.
...
Authorities in Shanghai have installed surveillance cameras and begun requiring visitors to Internet cafes to register with their official identity cards.

Shanghai, meanwhile, is one of those token "market zones" that are supposedly part of China's "economic miracle." With miracles like this, who needs a curse?

China and its apologists like to pretend that China's "market communism" is just another form of true capitalism. Well, what might a capitalist call this crackdown on all newsflow?

Oh right — "wholesale" censorship.

Other thoughts at Samizdata, Daniel Drezner.

The BBC:

China carried out at least 3,400 executions last year, according to rights group Amnesty International.

That is more than was carried out by all other countries combined, AI says.
...
At the moment, Chinese citizens can be sentenced to death for crimes such as corruption and robbery, but there is a debate under way over whether those who commit non-violent crimes should be exempt.
...
The Chinese media has given widespread coverage to two wrongful convictions this year -- a butcher executed for murder in 1989 was proved innocent when his alleged victim was found alive, and a man was freed after 11 years in jail when his wife, whom he was accused of killing, was also found alive.

Amnesty International in fact believes the 3,400 number to vastly underreported, with the actual number possibly close to 10,000. The United States executed 59 people in 2004, and some consider us barbarians just for having that many.

I'm not unconditionally opposed to the death penalty; neither am I opposed to considering foreign law in helping to define "cruel and unusual punishment." But I do think that people who are executed should: (a) actually be guilty, of (b) something more heinous than robbery.

If we're uncivilized for just having the death penalty, then what is China, with its "capital punishment on steroids" policy?

Support your local sheriff?

Attacks on Chinese policemen left 23 dead and 1,800 injured in the first half of this year, a Chinese security ministry spokesman has said.

The spokesman told the Beijing Youth Daily such attacks were on the rise.
...
Correspondents say disputes between the public and the authorities are increasing over issues such as corruption and land grabs.

China's rapid economic development is widening the gap between rich and poor, and its by-products -- pressure on land and the environment -- is also taking its toll on China's average villager.

As I've blogged previously, people don't riot simply because they're poor. They riot because they're being oppressed.

China's so-called "capitalists" are political elites who rise to prosperity, and power, on the backs of disenfranchised masses, who are lucky even to be peasants, indeed lucky even to be alive, given China's penchant for slave labor and political imprisonment.

If China's totalitarians continue to insist that civil unrest is due to some "gap between rich and poor" gobbledygook, then that will only expose the hypocrisy of their "market communism" all the faster. If the rich are too rich, then why not confiscate their riches, like the communists they profess to be? Simple: because the totalitarians are the rich. And that facade is, as the increasingly frequent riots demonstrate, becoming harder to maintain.

Dear Communist Party of China,

Congratulations on celebrating 56 years of totalitarianism, including but not limited to: slave labor, forced abortions, imprisonment and execution of dissidents, censorship (including the Internet), confiscation of land, suppression of religion, invading peaceful and defenseless neighbors, selling arms and nuclear technology to rogue nations, SARS and the avian flu, mass starvation, U.N. obstructionism, and countless other manifestations of the "New Communism."

Altogether a small price to pay for a supposed "economic miracle," in which of course only your political elites participate.

Your past is 56 years long. Don't expect your future to be as lengthy.

---

China's "market communism" is, apparently, at least as enigmatic and mysterious a riddle as the Soviet Union's paleo-Communism was to Henry Kissinger. Just look how it confuses this BBC reporter in Beijing:

Take the story of Mr Wang for example. He is one of China's new rich.

In the days of Mao, Mr Wang would have been condemned as a capitalist and sent to a labour camp.

Today he not only controls a huge private fortune, he is no longer afraid to flaunt it.

How can this be? Simple:

Mr Wang is not just a friend of the Party, he is a member of it.

That is neither an enigma, nor a mystery, nor even a boring old riddle. And it is not new. Every Communist regime has always had its successful, prosperous elites. Of course, for the rest of the masses, those without "guanxi," or "connections," it's business as usual (no pun intended).

The Communists: a great Party...if you can join it.

Since when does a supposed "capitalist" nation, which China now claims -- wink, wink -- to be, adopt five-year plans?

China's Communist Party leadership, concluding its annual planning session, has approved a new economic blueprint intended to address the country's yawning wealth gap and reduce "outstanding contradictions" that have led to outbreaks of social unrest.

The president and Communist Party chief, Hu Jintao, put his oratorical stamp on China's forthcoming five-year economic plan, his first since becoming the party's leader in 2002. The work report describing the plan, read verbatim on the main evening newscast today, was filled with Mr. Hu's slogans, such as building a "harmonious society" through "scientific development."
...
China's market-oriented economy has partly outgrown the traditional five-year planning documents that used to control nearly all allocations of money, resources and talent. But the planning process is still closely watched because it reflects the priorities of the leadership, which controls the financial system and most strategic industries, like steel and energy.

So the government runs everything that matters. Remind me again how that's "capitalism"?

As for those "outstanding contradictions" that are preventing the rise of a "harmonious society," perhaps totalitarian five-year plans can't solve those problems because they actually are the problem. History would suggest as much.

This latest variation on the Communist theme is the eleventh five-year plan the Chinese dictators have taken since rising to power. Explain to me again how China has "changed"?

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China has released its 2005 annual report on the status of human rights in the Communist dictatorship.

In short, there still ain't none:

The Commission finds no improvement overall in human rights conditions in China over the past year, and increased government restrictions on Chinese citizens who worship in state-controlled venues or write for state-controlled publications.
...
"China's leaders will not achieve their long-term goal of social stability and continued economic development without building a future that includes human rights for all Chinese citizens. China's development will impact all of Asia, and the world. Respect for human rights must be part of that future," [Senator Chuck] Hagel said.

The Commission's website offers a vast menu of various human rights abuses in China, served dim sum so you can share with family and friends.

China's Communist dictatorship is finding that its system for censoring movies is becoming unworkable:

A senior Chinese film official said Monday the country's censorship system will change as China opens up more and cultural exchange increases.

"Depending on the progress of opening up, as international exchanges increase in frequency, China's movie censorship system must change and adjust. That's indisputable," Zhang Pimin, deputy director-general at the State Administration of Radio, Film & TV's Film Bureau told reporters in Hong Kong.
...
The mainland typically allows in only about two dozen foreign films a year, and the movies are often delayed by a lengthy censorship process.

Notice that there is no talk whatsoever of eliminating wholesale censorship of movies, only of "changing" it.

Remind me again how China's Communists believe in "free markets"?

---

Look on the bright side: if China's several hundred million starving peasants can't go to the movies, then they can at least go see all the neat-o skyscrapers China is building in its oxymoronic "capitalism zones."

Assuming they can afford bus fare to get to Shanghai.

And forgetting the fact that these coastal zones are only open to politically connected elites.

And don't trip over the tens of millions of Chinese who have been forcibly relocated, with no compensation, to build these neat-o skyscrapers. (See also here.)

Sorry, but I'm not into modern architecture.

Al Smith, the pre-New-Deal progressive governor of New York, had a famous campaign slogan, borrowed from H.L. Mencken:

The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
China's Communists beg to differ:

China issued its first white paper on democracy on Wednesday, but included no initiatives for political change and left little doubt of the Communist Party's determination to maintain its grip on power.

The report, "Building of Political Democracy in China," emphasizes the importance of economic development and social stability in establishing a democracy. It says the continued rule of the Communist Party is "the most important and fundamental principle for developing socialist political democracy in China."
...
It makes clear that the Communist Party has no plans to relinquish power and deems its grip on power essential to China's development.

That's a mighty bizarre concept of democracy: "Any government you want, so long as it's ours; any candidates you want, so long as they're ours; all the rights that we decide you need; all the prosperity that we don't keep for ourselves." How exactly is this a "new and improved" form of Communism?

And remind me again why...oh, right: skyscrapers. I keep forgetting that a pretty skyline makes up for all the rest.

A growing number of macroeconomists seem to think so:

But when you subtract investment, net exports, and government spending from GDP, you arrive at what should be the sum of consumption spending plus inventory investment... Trouble is, this ... line clearly trends down, and that can't remotely be explained by inventories. The implausible behavior is even more clear when plotted as growth rates...

In other words, if

Y = C + I + G + X

but

I + G + X > Y

then C must be negative (thinking in terms of growth rates), regardless of any Communist propaganda to the contrary. Damn the totalitarianism of arithmetic!

Need some hard numbers?

It seems from this that in the year to September the man on the street spent 17 per cent less on daily necessities and toys than he did the previous year.

But this is not what other official statistics say. They say that retail spending for the year to September was 13.6 per cent greater than it was the previous year ... and that this retail spending alone was almost twice as great as the remainder number we calculated for all personal consumption spending.

How is it possible? It is not. The latest GDP figures from the mainland simply do not add up.

(Click to enlarge.)

More on China's bogus economic statistics from Big Picture, RGE Monitor.

A Communist dictatorship lying about their economic statistics? That would be unprecedented, right?


(Click to enlarge.)

"Market Communism" is the most obnoxious oxymoron since "original sin." And those who get duped by the fraud, or who just don't care so long as China keeps building "neat-o" skycrapers, are running out of excuses for their increasingly inexcusable perspective.

This is hardly news anymore, but China's Communist dictators shut down a blog for "subversion" --

The blog, titled Wang Yi's Microphone, dealt with "sensitive subjects" and was maintained by a teacher from Sichuan province, Paris-based Reporters Without Borders said in a statement.

China's communist government encourages Internet use for education and business, but blocks material deemed subversive or pornographic.

Dissidents have been arrested under vaguely worded national security laws for posting items critical of the government.

As the good folks at Reason Magazine would remind you: "Free Minds and Free Markets." You simply can't have the latter without the former, no matter how many skyscrapers you build.

BONUS CISAD FACT OF THE DAY: If you're judged by the company you keep, then what does it say when China behaves like Libya?

It is a criminal offense to print Bibles in China, punishable by imprisonment.

Cai [Zhuohua], arrested in September last year, was sentenced to three years in prison on charges of "illegal business practices," attorney Zhang Xingshui said by telephone.

His 33-year-old wife, Xiao Yunfei, was given a two-year prison sentence and her brother, Xiao Gaowen, 37, an 18-month term, the lawyer said. Both were convicted on similar charges.

The Communists insist that the three were convicted not for printing Bibles, but for selling them. As if that makes any difference. (And don't China's apologists repeatedly insist that the Communists now embrace markets? Go figure.)

The Communist dictatorship also controls and operates all churches, and is reportedly now suppressing private worship, or "home church" activities.

What good is economic prosperity (assuming there even is any) if you don't even have the freedom to pray with your neighbor in your own home?

China's Communist dictators are "warning" sovereign nations not to meet with the Dalai Lama, whom they classify not as a head of state and spiritual leader (which of course would be bad enough under China's "official churches" system of repression), but rather as a "separatist" --

The Dalai Lama, who was in Washington for a spiritual conference, told reporters Tuesday that Chinese rule over Tibet remains "very, very oppressive" despite efforts by his representatives to build confidence during discussions with Chinese officials.

The Tibetan spiritual leader said he had hoped to see "some leniency" in China's rule over Tibet after four rounds of talks, but said this has not happened.

Of course, the fact that Tibet was indeed "separate" from China until 1950, when the Communists invaded the Himalayan nation populated mostly by Buddhist monks, might explain the Dalai Lama's "separatist" leanings. Go figure.

But heck, what's a little "very, very oppressive" conduct by a brutal autocracy when there are neat-o skyscrapers to be built (incidentally, it would take 6,000 new skyscrapers in China to rival the number of monasteries the Communists have destroyed in Tibet since invading it).

Learn more about China's illegal annexation of Tibet here, and about their barbaric behavior in Tibet today here.

A Stitch in Haste recommends the following report from the Congressional Research Service:

Internet Development and Information Control
in the People's Republic of ChinaSummary:

Since its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has often been accused of manipulating the flow of information and prohibiting the dissemination of viewpoints that criticize the government or stray from the official Communist party view. The introduction of Internet technology in the mid-1990's presented a challenge to government control over news sources, and by extension, over public opinion. While the Internet has developed rapidly and increased the daily convenience of many Chinese citizens, freedom of expression online, as in the media, is still significantly stifled.

Empirical studies have found that China has one of the most sophisticated content-filtering Internet regimes in the world. The Chinese government employs increasingly sophisticated methods to limit content online, including a combination of legal regulation, surveillance, and punishment to promote self-censorship, as well as technical controls.

The report is 15 pages and quite sobering. Of course, some of us have always been quite sober toward China's Communist dictators.

Previous CRS Recommendations:
Summary of Rumsfeld v. FAIR

In America, when newspapers anger political leaders, there's little that those leaders can do except hold press conferences and complain from the Bully Pulpit.

China's Communist dictators, on the other hand, have a different definition of "bullying":

The authorities in China have dismissed the top editor of the Beijing News, one of the country's most popular and daring newspapers. Editor-in-chief Yang Bin was removed along with two other senior editors.

No official reason was given, but a lawyer who often represents journalists said Communist officials had accused the paper of multiple errors.

The Beijing News has a reputation for forthright reporting and commentary, despite strict control over the press. It exposed a bloody crackdown ordered by officials against protesting farmers in the northern province of Dingzhou in June, in which six farmers were killed.

The sad part is that there are warrantless wiretap apologists here in the U.S. who would gladly give the President the authority to fire the editors of the New York Times -- or maybe even imprison them. Certainly censorship of "sensitive" stories would be no big deal to such War-on-Terror absolutists (anyone remember the Pentagon Papers)? All in the name of defending the "American way of life."

Whatever that means anymore.

"In any compromise between food and poison, only death can result."
--Ayn Rand

"Don't be evil."
--Google Motto

So much for the idea that Google was, in fighting a federal subpoena for search records to bolster a law already declared unconstitutional, being some sort of libertarian behemoth that stood up for principles.

Yeah right:

Online search engine leader Google Inc. has agreed to censor its results in China, adhering to the country's free-speech restrictions in return for better access in the Internet's fastest growing market.
...
Because of government barriers set up to suppress information, Google's China users previously have been blocked from using the search engine or encountered lengthy delays in response time.
...
To obtain the Chinese license, Google agreed to omit Web content that the country's government finds objectionable. Google will base its censorship decisions on guidance provided by Chinese government officials.

Google now joins Microsoft and Yahoo! in conspiring with the enemy in the War on Tyranny.

Apologists will likely insist, as they did with Microsoft, that "any web access is good" for China's oppressed citizenry. Hogwash. Google is no different from the Swiss banks that financed the Third Reich, and will in fifty years be apologizing for its myopia just as those collaborators continue to do to this day.

It is not a betrayal of capitalism to chastise those capitalists who sell out to dictators. (And besides, selling to the enemy is bad managing anyway -- the sooner the Chinese dictatorship falls the sooner China will really be an "emerging market" -- and an emerging free market is always better for business than an emerging oppressed market).

Shame on Google. Shame.

More thoughts at Hammer of Truth.

A congressional hack politician has announced that he will summon Google executives to committee hearings for doing what just about everyone else does -- trade with dictators:

Google will be called to task in Washington next month following a controversial decision by the internet search engine to launch a China-based version of its website that will censor results to avoid angering the country's Communist government.

The decision by Chris Smith, a Republican congressman from New Jersey ... represents the first signs of what could become a serious backlash against Google and other internet companies in Washington that are perceived as capitulating to the Chinese government.

Mr. Smith on Wednesday accused Google of "collaborating .. with persecutors" who imprison and torture Chinese citizens "in the service of truth."

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

I've expressed my disappointment with Google's decision already. But let's be honest: we all do business with China -- quite a bit of it. I never suggested -- because it cannot be suggested -- that what Google is about to do is somehow illegal. Despicable, perhaps. Unwise, perhaps. But not illegal. So Congress should butt out.

Not every headline requires a Congressional investigation; that's what we have the Blogosphere for.

What do you call it when the government manipulates the learning process of children to inculcate a blind sense of acceptance, obedience and submission?

Indoctrination?

No -- an online game:

Doing good deeds, volunteering on building sites and obtaining Chairman Mao's autograph are some of the objectives of "Learn from Lei Feng," a new online game starring the Chinese Communist Party's legendary hero.

The plot revolves around Lei Feng, a humble selfless People's Liberation Army soldier who, the myth goes, spent all his spare time and money helping the needy and serving the Party until tragically dying in an accident in 1962.
...
While the new online game includes a treasure hunt, the prize is not a special weapon or pile of gold but a copy of Mao's collected works.

Personally I prefer destroying the Nexus, speeding along in my Popka Meltfire and thwarting the evil (Chinese) villainess Mai Hem.

But then again, I'm not a Communist dictator trying to brainwash children. Go figure.

---

Speaking of Communist dictators and their online games:

A Chinese teacher was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for posting a "subversive" article advocating democracy online, a human rights group reported.

Secondary school teacher Ren Zhiyuan was convicted by a court in Jining, Shandong province, of "subversion of state power" because of an article he posted on the Internet called "The Road to Democracy," the New York-based Human Rights in China said in a statement released Friday.

In the article, Ren reportedly expressed the opinion that people have the right to use violence to overthrow tyranny. The indictment against him also said he had planned to set up an illegal organization called Mainland Democracy Frontline.

"Use violence to overthrow tyranny..."? Anyone care to wager whether V for Vendetta will be allowed in China?

The Rolling Stones will perform in Shanghai, China, on Saturday.

But of course, they will be limited by China's Communist dictators as to what they can actually sing:

Authorities cut four songs from the band's 2002 greatest hits collection, "40 Licks," and Jagger said officials have asked them not to play those at Saturday's concert in Shanghai, along with one new one he didn't name.

"We kind of expected that. We didn't expect to come to China and not be censored," Jagger said...

Jagger gets it -- better than do most of China's apologists.

"But wait," you might be saying -- "isn't a sign of progress that the Chinese authorities are even allowing the Rolling Stones to play Western rock 'n' roll for the Chinese people? How can you possibly call them 'oppressed' if they're going to rock concerts?"

Simple: they're not --

Most of those Shanghai tickets are believed to have been sold to non-Chinese, according to the local press. With prices between 300 yuan to 3,000 yuan ($37 to $370), tickets cost more than a monthly wage of most Chinese.

Is it any wonder that one of the censored songs is "Beast of Burden"?

Hard to tell:

It is my belief that industry and government around the world should work even more closely to protect the privacy and security of Internet users, and promote the exchange of ideas, while respecting legitimate government considerations.

This was said, of course, during a meeting with China's Communist dictators, with whom Gates has, thus far, been an unapologetic collaborator.

So the question now becomes: What are "legitimate" government considerations deserving of "respect"?

Is, for example, wholesale censorship of the Internet, complete with political prisoners, a "legitimate government consideration"?

Just wondering.

Still think that a censored Internet is better than no Internet at all?

A freelance writer was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday, receiving an unusually harsh penalty amid one of China's most severe media crackdowns since the 1980s.

The sentencing of Yang Tianshui on subversion charges was one of a flurry of court actions Tuesday against Chinese reporters. In Beijing, prosecutors filed a new indictment against a Chinese researcher for The New York Times who has been in custody since 2004 on state secrets charges. In southern China, a journalist went on trial and pleaded innocent to extortion charges.
...
China is believed to be the world's leading jailer of journalists, with at least 42 behind bars, many on charges of violating vague security or subversion laws.

As we here in the U.S. mire ourselves in phone privacy scandals, it should be easy to remember that the tools of communication can be used by oppressive governments just as easily -- if not more so -- as they can be used to foster dissent. If your target audience is listening, then Big Brothers -- both established and emerging -- may well be listening to.

President Bush laments freedom of the press:

And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.

Guess who agrees with him?

Chinese media outlets will be fined if they report on "sudden events" without prior authorization from government officials, under a draft law being considered by the Communist Party-controlled legislature.

The law would give government officials a powerful new tool to restrict coverage of mass outbreaks of disease, riots, strikes, accidents and other events that the authorities prefer to keep secret.

Like the Communists before and after them, the terrorists seek to destroy our way of life.

Judging from the blather coming from our President, they are succeeding.

As Officer Barbrady might say: "This is nothing out of the unusual -- people deliberately break their own necks all the time."

Chinese investigators have concluded that an activist who said he was paralyzed after assailants broke his neck inflicted the injury on himself, his son said Thursday.
...
Fu Xiancai was injured three weeks after German public television broadcast an interview in which he said he had been threatened and beaten for complaining about inadequate compensation for relocated residents.

He says that on June 8, he was called into the Zigui County Public Security Bureau in Hubei province and criticized for his television appearance. He was attacked after leaving the police station, he said.

On Wednesday, the head of the security bureau's forensics department and another county official told Fu Bing [Fu Xiancai's son] that experts concluded the injuries were self-inflicted, Fu Bing said.

Every try to punch yourself in the face? Try attempting to break your own neck.

These Communist brutes aren't even trying to concoct a decent cover-up. And of course they don't have to. They have total control over their own media, not to mention collaborators from media and web services in the West, and fellow governments, such as ours, that view China not as a cancer upon humanity but as a "trading partner" (not to mention that new get-out-of-human-rights-free card, "trusted ally in the War on Terror").

Incidentally:

Fu Xiancai underwent an operation last month that may enable him to use a wheelchair, but doctors have said he will not walk again.

Hopefully all those neat-o new skyscrapers China is building are wheelchair-accessible.

---

Another Officer Barbrady favorite: "Move along people, nothing to see here..."

New Chinese guidelines identify specific acts of torture for which police can be prosecuted in an apparent attempt to rein in such abuses.

The guidelines, viewed Thursday on government Web sites, describe practices ranging from beating to starvation. Though illegal, torture is believed to be used widely by police and government officials who rely heavily on coerced confessions to prove criminal cases.
...
The new provisions, dated Wednesday, are less than emphatic, merely stating conditions under which cases can be opened -- usually only if the abuse results in injury or death. No punishments were specified.

Silly Communist police -- don't they know the rule that it's only illegal if you leave a mark?

Well, they know it now.

Details here and here.

Two hasty stitches in our ongoing series:

ITEM: China's Communists are considering outlawing anonymous blogging —

Advocates of the idea argue that blog anonymity has encouraged widespread libel and slander.

Of course, in a civilized (oh, and free) society (China is neither), "libel and slander" can be redressed when they actually happen, via civil lawsuits. Proactive censorship (and a ban on anonymity is indeed censorship) is simply not required to combat defamation.

It is, however, required to combat this:

Their identity would remain protected as long as they did "nothing illegal or harmful to the public", officials said.

There's a slight difference between defamation and "illegal or harmful to the public." Remind me again who gets to decide what is "illegal or harmful to the public" in China?

---

ITEM: The only thing worse than unauthorized blogging in China is unauthorized journalism —

A Chinese court on Friday rejected the appeal of a Chinese researcher for the New York Times and upheld a three-year prison sentence handed down for fraud, his lawyer said.
...
[The lawyer] said the defense had been denied the right to subpoena key witnesses in both the first and the second trial. "Even though the existing Chinese criminal procedures already fall short of international standards, they are not seriously honored by the authorities," [he] said.
...
China is the world's leading jailer of journalists, with at least 32 in custody, according to the Paris-based advocacy group Reporters Without Borders.

Journalists can of course commit crimes just like anyone else. But in China journalism can actually become the crime. Apparently freedom of the press is a small price to pay for maintaining "public order." Go figure.

One constant in world affairs is that dictatorships come to each other's aid when "unenlightened" democracies try to gang up on them and "interfere" in their "legitimate" national sovereignty.

The most recent example:

China and Russia on Friday vetoed a U.S.-drafted resolution calling on Myanmar's military junta to stop persecution of minority and opposition groups, killing the measure in the U.N. Security Council.
...
"This resolution would have been a strong and urgently needed statement by the Security Council about the need for change in Burma, whose military regime arbitrarily arrests, tortures, rapes and executes its own people, wages war on minorities within its own borders, and builds itself new cities, while looking the other way as refugee flows increase, narcotics and human trafficking grow, and communicable diseases remain untreated." [the acting U.S. ambassador] said.
...
The military has run Myanmar since 1962, ignoring a 1990 landslide election victory by the National League for Democracy party led by Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel laureate, who has been in prison or under house arrest since then. Thousands of her supporters have been jailed.

The idea that illegitimate regimes such as China are even allowed to send their shill diplomats to U.S. soil is a insult against humanity. To give Communist butchers a seat on the archaic and increasingly silly, but still dangerously potent, Security Council is far more than an insult.

Like any other political faction, representatives of butchers will of course vote for butchery. This is as unsurprising as it is intolerable. Which is precisely why American and other diplomats will act surprised over such acts and continue to tolerate them.

There's a term for such utter nonsense:

Diplomacy.

Previous U.N. posts here. Previous Burma posts here.

It's the same old story:

1. Boy meets Internet.
2. Boy loses Internet faith in authoritarian propaganda.
3. Dictators label boy an addict and a criminal.

Chinese teenagers are getting addicted to the Internet and taking to crime at a younger age than in any other country, state media reported on Wednesday.

Of China's 18.3 million teen Internet users, more than 2 million were addicts, with "good kids who impress their parents and teachers" the most vulnerable to the affliction, the China Daily said, citing a study by the Communist Youth League.
...
Amid growing concern that more and more young people are becoming hooked, China has issued a raft of regulations aimed at curbing excessive game-playing at Internet cafes and heavily fining owners that admit minors.

The express lane to serfdom is paved with claims that liberty must be curbed "for the children." The medieval Catholic Church understood it, the prohibitionists of the past understood it, the drug warriors of today understand it, the anti-gay bigots have perfected it into an art form.

So of course the pre-eminent enemies of freedom in the world today, China's Communists, understand it too. No surprise there.

Didn't want to let this one slip away:

Chinese Communist Party chief Hu Jintao has vowed to "purify" the Internet, state media reported on Wednesday, describing a top-level meeting that discussed ways to master the country's sprawling, unruly online population.
...
"Maintain the initiative in opinion on the Internet and raise the level of guidance online," he said. "We must promote civilized running and use of the Internet and purify the Internet environment."

In 2006, China's Internet users grew by 26 million, or 23.4 percent, year on year, to reach 10.5 percent of the total population, the [state-run] China Internet Network Information Center said on Tuesday.

The vast majority of those users have no access to overseas Chinese Web sites offering uncensored opinion and news critical of the ruling party.

This arrogant authoritarianism is of course nothing new — China boasts about its quest to censor all the time.

What's important to remember, meanwhile, is that even censored Internet access in China is limited to politically connected elites, just as access to China's "enterprise zones" is doled out as political patronage. An ambitious Chinese youth from the countryside can't simply pack up and move to Shanghai the way an ambitious young Kansan can pack up and move to New York City. To the extent that China's "market-based communism" can even be called "capitalism," it is strictly crony capitalism — of, by and for the Communist class and not the populace at large. So too with the "Red Internet" — it is strictly for the anointed.

You cannot have free markets without free minds. Capitalism without liberty is an insolent contradiction in terms that cannot be sustained for any significant length of time.

The only question is how much misery and slaughter China's leaders will inflict in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Hu used a quite appropriate analogy:

"Ensure that o