On Reagan; an open letter to Don Rickles, by M.McCulloh

If you had asked me, Don Rickles,

I would have said that Ronald Reagan had absolutely no “charisma” at all. Perhaps he excited dead little boring froggy-fat nobodies like you because he wasn’t quite exactly as pathetic as you were, but that never made him anything but a dull mind swaying among a dull populace.

He never meant anything to the real people, barring a few who were badly damaged at the time. Perhaps Neil Young or Dennis Hopper saw something in him with their last remaining brain cells, but the real Neil Young and the real Dennis Hopper never would have.

Has your disgusting little body every even felt the slightest exertion of thought? I wouldn’t expect any physical undertaking, but perhaps a little attempt to… pay attention? Did you notice the untold tortures and murders taking place just south of the border? Did you notice the selling off of public land to the polluters for pennies per acre? Did you notice the gross wastage of the national treasury on fraudulent “star wars” weapons systems? Did you, in the end, even notice the actual TREASON? No, Little Fat Froggie just felt all excited about Mr. B Movie Star, who otherwise excited tremors of disgust in most sentient people….

He never had the slightest “charisma.” He was a boring, tedious, phony old moron. And millions and millions of genuine non-froggy-fat-phonies across America despised him. Almost as much as they now despise this unelected Dubya thing, if that is possible!

People may tolerate you because you forgot to die. But that doesn’t mean you’re clever. And even if you manage to be clever, you are NEVER, NEVER wise. So forget it, Don Rickles! Ronald Reagan was an UTTERLY anti-charismatic phony twit custom designed for froggy-fat nobodies like you. But not for much of anybody else.

Get a life, Don Rickles, if there’s still time…

"He's Not Black": Commentary upon Washington Post OpEd

I was inspired by an extremely insightful opinion piece entitled "He's Not Black" by author Marie Arana that ran in the Sunday, November 30, 2008 edition of the Washington Post. It was the first time that I had encountered such a fully annuciated opinion that so strongly mirrored my own views, ones that were restive within me because I had not been quite able to coherently break past the labels myself, although I realized they were greatly inaccurate. Like Arana, I too had keenly sensed that our language was not keeping pace with reality.

I excerpt her words here. Although her original piece is twice as long, it is in the first eight paragraphs that I feel that she is right on the mark.

"He is also half white.

Unless the one-drop rule still applies, our president-elect is not black. We call him that -- he calls himself that -- because we use dated language and logic. After more than 300 years and much difficult history, we hew to the old racist rule: Part-black is all black. Fifty percent equals a hundred. There's no in-between.

That was my reaction when I read these words on the front page of this newspaper the day after the election: "Obama Makes History: U.S. Decisively Elects First Black President."

The phrase was repeated in much the same form by one media organization after another. It's as if we have one foot in the future and another still mired in the Old South. We are racially sophisticated enough to elect a non-white president, and we are so racially backward that we insist on calling him black. Progress has outpaced vocabulary.

Even Obama himself seems to have bought into the nomenclature. In his memoir "Dreams from My Father," he writes, 'I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.' You can almost feel the youth struggling with his identity, reaching for the right words to describe it and finally accepting the label that others impose.

To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president. He is more than the personification of African American achievement. He is a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go.

Of course there is much to celebrate in seeing Obama's victory as a victory for African Americans. The long, arduous battles that were fought and won in the name of civil rights redeemed our Constitution and brought a new sense of possibility to all minorities in this country. We Hispanic Americans, very likely the most mixed-race people in the world, credit our gains to the great African American pioneers of yesterday: Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr.

But Obama's ascent to the presidency is more than a triumph for blacks. It is the signal of a broad change with broad ramifications. The world has become too fused, too interdependent to ignore this emerging reality: Just as banks, earthly resources and human disease form an intricate global web, so do racial ties".

In the remainder of the article Arana outlines her own amazing multi-racial identity. She says of a recent DNA ancestry exam that she had performed, "when I got my results from the lab I thought I was a simple hemispheric split -- half South American, half North. But as it turns out, I am a descendant of all the world's major races: Indo-European, black African, East Asian, Native American. The news came as something of a surprise. But it shouldn't have. Mutts are seldom divisible by two".

I started thinking that as a "white American" (a term I rather abhor because it is so vague and so strongly neglects my own sense of my European ethnicity as being Scottish/English, but also Swiss and Russian) that were we all to be required by law or custom to have our DNA examined, that countless of us would be amazed at the diversity of chromosomal soup inside of us. I think that it is safe to say we would remark, as Arana did, "There have been hundreds of intercultural marriages in my bloodline".

I celebrate the broad ramifications of Barack Obama's election as I celebrate the broad ramifications of the genes that have always found a way to bypass societal boundaries.

Obama = Socialism?

The election of Obama means the end of socialism:

When the next administration and congress take office, the most “socialist” event will probably be the eventual expiration of the Dubya tax cuts for snuffletroughs. We aren’t likely to see national health insurance like they have in all of the other communist countries the pink-leaning voters clearly aspire to emulate.

Hell, we probably won’t even see a continuation of the socialist subsidies to the polluting dinosaur energy industries like coal and oil. Nuclear power plants may even have to start paying for their own insurance. Geez, talk about not getting what you voted for.

If things get really bad, the river of tax money going to unaccountable military contractors might dry up, and the central pillar of our socialist empire will crumble.

Not that our current socialist practices don’t leave a lot to be desired: A proper “socialist” response would have been to attach pre-conditions to the money given to the banks and investment firms. That’s what they did in “socialist” Britain (where Marx’s original vision has been playing out like clockwork according to plan for the last century.)

M. McCulloh

Obama's Victory: The Future is Now

As an American I am so relieved. Tears welled in my eyes as I listened to Barack Obama's victory speech. Like so many Americans who came to believe in his Presidency and voted for him and for the greater purpose that he represents, I too say, "yes, we can".

There is a great wind of change now rising up across the desert of America. I sense that this is just the beginning of something much larger that will transform the landscape of America forever. As I said in my previous post, Obama is just it's first emissary. For all the years spent in a cultural and spiritual sandtrap over the continuous defeats at the hands of the political and social Right, The Ant had seen the way out, a hand-hold, but just beyond reach, that was comprised of the highest ideals of the American Progressive Left, and now it seems we have finally extricated ourselves.

Those on the Right who hijacked the country and subverted the higher calling of America to their own selfish ends in the name of things like "American foreign interests" and at home the disparagement of a "welfare state", can now find their way out of the hole they have dug for themselves - an abyss. Let them reside there for the Legion they are for an eternity.

Obama has transformed the political culture of the United States and created the possibility not only for a post-Bush cleanup, but a cleanup of the last 60 years of American right-wing political dementia.

Let it be so.

A Letter from a Friend.

I have been in a struggle with a post about America due to the welter of information regarding the econonmy and the election. I am not a professional jouranalist and don't get paid for this other than by my advertisements and donations. Who can blame me for being speechless?

Though I procrastinate, The Ant is working on it. It's just slow, back-bending labor. That's all. There are major transitions going on here. This blog is now entitled The Farm in an evocation of Orwell's Animal Farm. The Dans Macabre of the Authoritarian State is before our eyes, and lest you not think that America is not an Authoritarian State consider well how impossible it was to thwart the take-over of that country by Rightests who for decades drove it into the ground, and did so by the powers invested in the State while millions of "decent", small town, socially conservative, crypto-facist Americans walked in lock-step with it... now to their own humiliation

Obama is just a tip of the iceberg of the changes that are coming in America, I feel. Given the startling fact that America is on the threshold of electing a "black man" as President, you haven't seen anything yet. There has been a massive counter-swell to the Fascist Tide building for years now in America. It is about to unleash itself. I count myself and my dearest family and friends as mighty particles of this wave, and this body politic is about to bring forth some major political, social, and cultural enlightenment onto this planet. This is a paradigm shift that has just had the the curtain to the stage of history finally drawn for it. Entre the "Internal Revolution: the children of the American Transcendental tradition ".

I sense a huge change coming, and it's not just about Obama. He will be merely its first emissary.

I will attempt to prophesy what is ahead of him in a later post, but those of you who have been reading me know that my posts come but every ten days, if that. Forgive me. In the meantime, I pass along a thoughtful letter from a friend that does find a mirror image with me.

"The evils of China are now fully integrated into the evils of the capitalist system, an extension of the point made by Orwell. The only difference is that there is no duality, no mirror image. Just a slightly more horrible set of rulers doing the filthy work so that the shitheads and scumbags elsewhere can go about their dirty work...

That said, I am optimistic that a genuine popular revolution is taking place over here. Obama is not the second coming (or the first coming) of anyone. He's just a good candidate for the first time since Kennedy or before. And he has very good leadership in the House to help keep him on track. Some of the worst trends of the last 30 years can be rolled backwards. That may have profound repercussions for the Chinese - Capitalist Shithead Entente. Let us hope they are devastating...

There are three magic bullets to look for right now. The first is a general withdrawal of American military activity. The second is the full scale pursuit of alternative energy solutions. The third, and more ahead of its time (about where alternative energy was 20 years ago) is the legalization of drugs. The latter would staunch the huge expenditure of funds for a hopeless law enforcement and prison maintenance enterprise and in conjunction with the first two (more obvious and politically feasible,) would generate a virtually miraculous renaissance of the American economy. With these measures in place, a system of rewards and incentives directed towards China and employed by a progressive American government (dare I hope) might shift conditions toward decency".

Michael Bruce McCulloh.
Brooklyn, New York. USA

All three of his mentioned Magic Bullets are what is coming over the horizon, and they can't be stopped.

Ant Farm's 2008 My Dripping Wet Pussy Award

This year’s winner of Ant Farm’s vaunted Dripping Wet Pussy Award is Chinese Labor Watch. Operating out of a New York headquarters, but maintaining an “information bureau” in Beijing that somehow has been allowed past the gates of the city and rolled within the midst of the sleeping and unsuspecting legions of Party bureaucrats’; CLW has remained secreted within, breaking out in a mighty host of lawyers, and letting more in. Not even the crafty Ulysses could perform such a feat, but Ilium was sacked and so have they sacked Beijing, not once but several times in court! Amazing! No, Breathtaking! Homerical! The very stuff of myth and dream! One needs to rub one’s eyes.

Other mere mortals have routinely ended up in Dis for attempting such hubristic political stunts as these in Communist China. Yet, they have marched with Myrmidon force (go ants!) all the way from New York (that’s in America, right?) to meddle in the affairs of the Communist Party, and show them who is the laoban. For this I applaud so hard I fall down from a cerebral stroke as if my skull were stove by the mighty Ajax himself. But come Read for yourself this heroic verse inscribed on their website.

Perhaps their Trojan horse is the fact that they attack foreign companies and not the CCP. How else could they have been let in? But being the legal nemesis of the Communist Party doesn’t come cheap. Where do they get the money for this? Only Tiresias amongst the Dead could say.

I severely doubt that donations from your average Zhou amongst the Chinese diaspora could provide them with the cash that would be needed to mount such an invasion. Could they be CIA backed, as the Ant suspects every prominent Chinese dissident (group) in exile is?

Let me be as Helen to Agamemnon, and provide for you, reader, a viewing from the fortress walls of the heroes before us. The CLW team consists of three Chinese, one of them from Taiwan. Western educated at elite secondary institutions, blah, blah, blah, while reaping the fruits of residing on Western shores and dodging the misery of real day to day life in China and Taiwan, yet all the time playing a charade that is down right manipulative. The Ant has decided to call them on it.

As a strong-minded liberal I know liberal-pabulum-puking-brats when I see them (they must’ve got some of that melamine laced formula recently, and I’m really sorry about that). They play the liberal fiddle to suit their own little dance, and their sonata is called Travesty.

If I am wrong about China Labor Watch, then so be it. They’re receiving one of the highest awards that AF can afford, aren’t they? A wet pussy is nothing to sniff at.

Congratulations, you three clowns. You correctly bathed this dirty cat, but then you didn’t dry it properly. It’s only gotten dirtier.

Part II. China Labor Watch: A Dilemma, but Ultimately a Travesty. Conclusion.

But the dilemma unfolds once more. It is not quite done yet. I question along with CLW, in all fairness to them, just how culpable the multinationals are for all of this. The profits that are being made by them off of cheap labor in China are enormous. The big question for me is just how much are they paying to have their products manufactured in China?. Is it an outrageously low price that the multinationals are demanding? And getting?

One would have to be privy to those contracts, which is definitely proprietary. Most companies operating in China don't make public disclosure of their books. Undoubtedly, the buyers have a clear advantage, and have leveled it from Day One of the opening of China. The multinationals are sure to always bring a razor-sharp pencil to China, but it is the Chinese themselves who maliciously use it to cut their own. In the end, there is not much real transparency about the money on either side of the equation.

Yet, CLW states that this entire problem is as "a result of multinationals' single-minded pursuit of ever-lower prices and neglect of other considerations”, and that the big international firms need to take steps to “pay supplier factories a reasonable price for their products, help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”. Further, "Corporate codes of conduct and checklist-auditing are not enough by themselves to strengthen workers' rights if corporations are unwilling to pay the real price it costs to produce a product according to the standards in their codes."

My sense is that the multinationals are paying a “fair” market price, whatever that really is. Yet, I have this terrible hunch that the money that is allotted in the contract is not seeing its way down to the killing floor of the factory because it's getting scooped up at the top of the food chain by party bureaucrats and their cronies in the factory executive suites. I conjecture that it is even possible that the multinationals are actually “getting taken for a ride”. In China, that is a distinct possibility. I will say this, whatever the multi-corps are paying their suppliers, it could be a lot “fairer”. That goes also for what they are paying workers back in their home countries. Big time.

As for CLW’s charge that the multinationals have to “help the factories correct violations and take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”; they have responded to these yearly allegations of exploitation coming from CLW and a handful of other watchdog groups.

The multinationals have been regularly dispatching human resources teams to their supplier factories in order to assess practices and conditions, yet, only to find that after a major heads-up predicting their arrival nothing is particularly amiss. What they meet upon arrival are employees who have been coached on how to answer questions during these inspections, and the “second set” of books. I suspect that these cookbooks portray a much more benign level of payment to the workers. Also, the books contain fake contracts for the workers; the real contracts are said to be kept by the factory and not given to the workers, this despite the fact that a contract for each worker is required by law. Further, industry experts say that some manufacturers show off clean, inspection-passing facilities to international clients when they visit, but secretly subcontract some of the work to hidden, substandard production lines that are cheaper to run so as to fool the auditors.

Thence, the auditors return home, report to H.R. that everything is fine in the state of Denmark, and a handsome brochure celebrating the occasion is printed and distributed floridly praising Happy-Happy Corp. for its “corporately responsible behavior”. But it’s all disinformation and propaganda.

What goes on before and after is a human, capitalist nightmare. Given the stupid, little human, capitalist shell game that we are playing here, in which the Chinese management (PRC heads) needs to pawn itself off as being decent (despite signs posted on the killing floors that actually say things as snide and cynical as “Be thankful you have a job. If you’re not, consider the alternative of trying to find another. Someone else would be glad to take your place”), let alone their chincy weiguoren buyer’s needs for the same decent reputation, everyone is left the stupider. The pea, a handsome little lump ultimately amounting to multi-millions of dollars, is subsequently divided up in secret amongst the buyers and sellers

Returning to CLW’s notion that the multi-corps must “take responsibility for suppliers' legal infractions”I have to say, fills me with ambivalence. Though each has a tremendous and abiding responsibility to make certain that exploitation is not occurring in these factories, all the same, another part of me responds that this is absurd. Why should a western company manufacturing out of China have to go so far out of its way to make sure that Chinese companies are acting like big boys and girls, and treating their employees nicely? Why should it need to do this? This is, first and foremost, a Chinese responsibility. Chinese management has to oversee company ethics, not a foreign company that is merely contracting the manufacturer. These aren’t “their factories”. They’re Chinese factories. Or are foreign companies the Great White Father in China that have to carry the white man's burden for the yellow race? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to this question because I have a sense that the answer is a resounding, "yes": the Chinese are too corrupt, incompetent and humanly negligent to attend to it otherwise, and have no qualms about exploiting their own because this is the "Chinese way".

Never in my life could I ever imagine that I would find myself defending the affairs of the multi-nationals, but I just think CLW is way out of line here and out of integrity with the real truth. And please accept my reference to the “white man’s burden” with the sense of its intended irony.

Finally, consider this: the only thing that companies like Adidas and Foxx Conn can do is to complain to the officials of the Chinese factories, and insist that they mend their ways or otherwise they will find another supplier: this approach may be successful and beneficial, it may not. The option of finding a different supplier only places them in a position of entering into a new agreement with an equally exploitive Chinese manufacturing firm. This is clear. Really, what can the international corporations actually do to change this? Given that many foreign companies and experts in Chinese manufacturing say it can be "hard" to verify whether or not a supplier is living up to "commitments", one gathers that certain ethical obligations are placed upon the Chinese in contractual terms to uphold. If so, they're not. So what are the multicorps supposed to do then? Sue? Bring in gunboats? What? And if they pay more to the suppliers, is this money actually going to reach the workers? Ha ha ha.

I want to make clear that I am not an apologist for the multinationals nor Capitalism. I despise both, actually. The entire global Capitalist system is rotten in the teeth and has fed on human exploitation forever. It looks lousier with every new day. But in summation, this is, ultimately, pure and simply a "Chinese problem", and only penultimately a Western multinational one. The abominable worker conditions that exist at the aforesaid factories are ones orchestrated by an exploitation class in China, not so much the West, although one would be horribly naive to not understand that both are laughing all the way to the bank.

The final step of my vast dilemma is that global Capitalism is venal, which raises the question of what, ultimately, is to be done to end worker exploitation, both in China and globally. Yet, and I’ll say it one last time, in this case the Chinese themselves, and only off-handedly the multi-nationals, perpetrate this major effrontery to human dignity. The workers are carrion, the multinationals carrion-eaters, but the Chinese “orficials” the killers. Have no doubt about that.

China Labor Watch is a travesty.

Part I: Chinese Labor Watch; A Dilemma, but ultimately a travesty

I have been a member of a Yahoo newsgroup letter from China Labor Watch for a few weeks now. During that time I’ve received two emails detailing evidence of massive worker exploitation occurring in factories contracted by Adidas Corp. and Foxconn Corp. to manufacture their products. These and other accounts contained on the CLW site need to be read in order to fully understand the severity of the situation, but to summarize the conditions for you, gentle reader, universally throughout the sweatshops of China, of which the above are but a drop in the bucket, are to be found huge factories that employ thousands of workers, often as many as 15,000 at a time. They are sheltered in crude, cold-water dormitories on the campuses of the factories, and cramped by dozens into rooms that are often theft-ridden as a consequence of low-morale and alienation. The company makes them pay for a meager, lousy breakfast, along with all of their meals. That’s how the day begins.

Work is routinely deleterious and poisonous, and workers are, at best, poorly protected. Toxic fumes are a constant of production. Hands and arms are lost everyday to the factories of China. Pay is dingier than the dormitories, and the normative rate of 750 rmb per month, if he or she is so lucky (about a hundred and ten bucks a month) comes only after toiling up to 14 hours a day, almost every day. Many are allowed just one day off a month. Overtime is virtually mandatory and is compensated at an average of less than 5 rmb per hour (< $0.75), if at all. Production quotas are strict and are to be met unless one should suffer unpaid overtime or a fine. Fines are rampant for a long list of petty indiscretions, both on the line and in the dorms, and the shadow of infraction is essentially inescapable. It is the praxis of the management of these factories to psychologically intimidate and humiliate their workers at every turn. Workers are run ragged and are completely exploited. Of all of this occurs in breach of Chinese law and International Labor Organization rules. Dickens wouldn’t have known where to begin. These workers barely make $3.50 per day. That’s optimistic.

Given that the vast majority of these workers migrate from villages where they were going to make but a dollar a day, they hold these jobs as best they can. This is China for hundreds of millions of Chinese, really.

Yet, all of this said, in the course of scouring the CLW web page I have been confronted by an enormous dilemma: on one hand, the facts revealed about the sweatshops utilized by these corps are infuriating and elicit intense indignation, but very significantly on the other, CLW prefers to place the onus for their existence on the international corporations rather than where it rightfully belongs; squarely on the shoulders of the CCP bureaucrats and their cronies in the executive suites of these Chinese manufacturing firms. Coming more to the point, directly in the lap of the Chinese mentality and reality responsible for instituting and enforcing these conditions. That is where the real problem resides, and only secondarily with the Western Multinationals taking advantage of it.

The dilemma unfolds in a second direction. Again, on one hand CLW are noble tribunes for performing this hard-ball investigative work that dearly needs to be done, and yeoman journalists for the manner in which they provide clearly presented and thorough details of the conditions on the killing floors of these factories. On the other they are guilty, guilty, damn guilty of playing the Chinese victim of foreign oppression.

Yet, I take a step back. The dilemma unfolds in a third direction: CLW, in naming names (Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, Disney, Nike, Adidas, Reebok, Puma, Hasbro, et al.) and chronicling a litany abuses carried out in these contracted factories spewing out goods on the cheap for the above, in a very definite sense has no real choice but to go after these Big Names and bring to the attention of its Western readership the injustices carried out on behalf of the aforesaid corporations. On the other, they take the easy road of an adopted and nauseous Western liberal slant that allows them to view the multinational corporations as the first and foremost sponsors of this Capitalist venality, which is, for once, simply not the case here. However, do not think for a moment, reader, that I applaud the multi-corps complicity in this. I want nothing to do with this. In my heart, I only pray for its relent.

Behind all of this is a Chinese exploitation class, and one exceedingly important point needs to be added to this. This exploitation of Chinese workers has Taiwan’s name written all over it. Foxconn is a Taiwanese corp. , though they have apparently moved HQ to Yantai, Shandong - a hot development zone. So is Pou Chen Corp (Chinese name: BaoCheng Group). It has 150,000 Chinese workers in its shoe industry producing shoes for Nike, Adidas, and New Balance. (see CLW report). Stella International is based in Hong Kong, but has connections with Taiwan. (See CLW report). In fact, a very significant portion of the sweatshops operating in the Main land and cited by CLW are the result of Taiwanese FDI companies that take their orders from HQ’s in the R.O.C., or Raked Over the Coals, as I like to call it. It makes you wonder who won the war. One thing is quite certain: no one in the executive suites of these Taiwanese firms is suffering financially or emotionally because of their involvement with the Western multinationals.

The disconcerting fact is, you don’t hear a single word about this on the CLW website. It seems CLW feels it’s a lot sexier to go after the western multinationals, but doesn't have any bullets to fire at the Chinese management. It's absurd. It's a travesty.

Keep one last thing clearly in mind; if these workers aren’t being bled to death by the Taiwanese, they are definitely being bled to death by the management of the S.O.E.s (state owned enterprises) who contract out to the multi-corps. The party bureaucrats and the factory execs are reaping enormous profits from all of this, such that they can no doubt drive to work in a BMW from their new Western-style gated villa and back to it each day without a whisper of guilt on their conscience. Ah, China’s new exploit…, ehem, I mean prosperity class. Recent figures indicate that the top executive to worker pay disparity in China is higher by about 20% or more than their American counterparts, who make 265 times more than the average American worker.

Yet, CLW says little or nothing about this.

To be continued...

A note to my "faithful readers"

The Ant has been dormant for a variety of reasons recently, some of them "logistical". A major factor in this is that the premier blog lister of China blogs, http://www.chinablogs.com/, has still not provided Ant Farm with a slot on its site, thus leaving me a mere voice in the wilderness. (I satisfied their listing criteria some time ago; a blog over a month in existence consisting of at least 20 postings, but for some reason they have not seen fit to enroll me as of yet). Consequently, after a little over two months of running this blog, the lack of traffic that has come Ant Farm's way has been less than overwhelming. I intend to gut it out.

All the same, I have to admit, it's taken a little steam away from my initiative. Nevertheless, I am willing to be patient and slog through the tunnels of the Farm with this blog. One more item should be added to this, and that is that Blogspot.com is a victim of Operation Golden Shield: the CPC firewalls Blogspot. I am looking into finding a different blog provider that can get me into the Middle Kingdom (preferably for free). In light of that, I will change the URL to simply Ant Farm(something I have been wanting to do for a while); no longer will it be known as Chinese Ant Farm. I am going to tone down the rhetoric here in order to be a fair and decent sort, like I really would like to be someday. Further, I will also being taking aim, as promised, at America. It's hard, and always has been, to be self-righteous toward China when my own country is hell-bent.

The second reason I have been laying back is that things are generally going slowly in China. Of course, the tainted baby formula fiasco has been an international issue, but things like that are pretty much par for the course with China. Seemingly, the only "internal innovation" that they can acheive is to have a couple of bonehead factory owners determine that it's possible to beef up the protein content of baby formula by adding melamine. Rather apparently, the same was true of pet food. You gotta tap your forehead and say, "smart, real smart that". Sincere condolences to all the families in China that have suffered from this unconsciounable stupidity.

Lastly, the U.S. finacial crisis and the election is simply front and center on the world stage at this time. Although the above is somewhat out of the purview of this blog, I am going to be weighing in on it in my next posting.

Forward Ant, March!

Let a hundred blossoms take the scythe: The Hundred Flowers campaign revisited and the aftermath of the 2008 Beijing Olympics

Without question, the biggest story of the Beijing Olympics was not the stellar athletic performance of Michael Phelps nor those of a legion of other great international competitors and champions, but the behavior of the CPC itself - particularly its manner of censorship and management of dissent, and any number of other falsehoods- from a lack of integrity with the sacred Opening ceremony, to empty seats and empty streets, to spurious birth dates for the pre-pubescent wunderbats, to just how ramped up China’s prisoner-operated sports factory is, and more. In many ways, these were the Potemkin Games, not the “greatest games ever”- just an effort by the CPC to continue to promote itself as the esse of China, and to show to the people of China, and the world, what a majestic country slash government it is.

Have no doubt; the real human contest of the 2008 games was played in the periphery of the sporting arenas. When the Chinese government announced in late July that there would be specially designated public protest zones around Beijing, and that all that was required in order to stage a public protest was to fill out a form at the local, friendly Public Security Bureau office, most of the international press and much of its audience, and more than a few Chinese activists, looked askance at these three parks: Purple Bamboo, Ritan, and World (The last a pirated piece of kitsch that Disney Corp. should litigate over). Countless more were stunned by the Party’s generous impulse. Many effused what a step forward this was for the Party, and the Party cynically went about its business. It never had any intention of these protest zones being utilized.

It was just a Chinese insult delivered via the Chinese way, in Chinese boxes: open one box to find another box, to find another box, and so on until the Closing ceremony, when the international community finally reached the last little box, and there inside was a little note that snidely said, “So sorry, but we are your Chinese moral superiors and can’t presume to help that. Now go, and leave us, we whom you shall never understand because you haven’t the refined mandarin sense to, and never again affect that you can enter our affairs. We do sincerely feel so badly for you for not being able to understand our ways. Sardonically yours, the eternal Chinese”

Anyone who ever thought that the Chinese would be straightforward and wholesome about this needs a serious education about the Chinese. Thankfully, they just got it. Pleasant, wasn’t it, finally getting down to that last box? It only took seven years to learn that what looked plausible was always implausible. The Chinese never had any intention of honoring the promises that brought them the Games. Dallying with the truth in such a lingering and meretricious manner is the way in which they deal with all inconvenient and unpleasant business. I’ve been spun out many times by the Chinese, and I’m afraid that it’s always done in ever-enclosing boxes- emptiness surrounding emptiness. However, one is always given ample time to figure that out so the Chinese don’t have to trouble themselves with telling you. If they have any leverage (and once they had the Games they had plenty), they expect that you’ll take it, and like them, not say anything about it. Superiority and servility are such a silent understanding. It’s kind of them. If you were in anyway upset by this duplicity and what it veiled, perhaps you’ll forgive me for dilating so on this very unpleasant matter.

It was most definitely naïve on the I.O.C’s part to think it would be any different. But that corrupt organization was a perfect, complicit fit for the Chinese, and I don’t actually think that they ever entertained any real illusions that it would be any different than it was, they just pretended they did. Their only concern, like all good upper bourgeoisies, is about money and the semblance of respectability, already having plenty of both.

If it looked too good to be true, my friend, of course, it was. Just ask those activists who showed up at the police station and were seized by the PSB orficials. Of the 77 applicants who took the government up on their offer to rock ‘n’ roll, (none of whom -as we now well know - were actually allowed to stage a protest), many are currently in detention or under house arrest, and at least one of them is said to be being held in a mental asylum. [1] Yet, it is two dear old grannies, together in their late 70’s - one blind in an eye, both on a cane - who the NYT reported about on 08-08-21* - that are the most astounding examples of victimization by a dystopic PRC. They share, however, the Gold medal for courageously putting the soft, white underbelly of the CPC beast to the knife of their dissent, and allowing us all to realize what a cowardly and absurd villain it really is.

These two feisty old dolls, Wang Xiuying and Wu Dianyuan, were actually given an extra judicial term of “re-education through labor” this week by the Beijing police, who simply handed down the sentence on their own without reference to the time consuming mechanism of a jury of one’s peers. (For the crime of public disorder disturbance sentences are always extra-judicial and earn an all-expense paid trip to the laogai). Way to go China! Jia you! Nothing says, “The people are the masters of the nation” like sending two female geriatrics, minus habeas corpus, to a laogai (re-education labor camp) for persisting in their seven-year determination to receive compensation for having their Beijing homes bulldozed! Clearly, the Party wanted to send a little message to anyone with a bit more gas in their tank that they might not really want to take on the state after all.

This cynical ruse to lure Chinese activists into the hands of the Public Security Bureau like big sucking fish is despicable and hearkens back to the same type of entrapment employed by the Party in ’56-57, during the Hundred Flowers campaign. The fallout of the summer of ’57 resulted in over 550,000 people being identified as "rightists" who were then subsequently humiliated, imprisoned, demoted or fired from their positions or sent to labor and re-education camps, where they were tortured or killed.[2] This type of rubbish, however, actually last occurred in the lead up to Tian’anmen during the Democracy Wall snare.

One wonders where this is going to lead. Though there is no whiff in the air of major foment, many in China are restive despite the stalwart ultra-nationalist “shit-youth” (fenqing; shit and angry are homophones in Chinese) and their revolting “la-la-la, we don’t see anything wrong, we don’t hear anything wrong, you don’t understand the Great and Mighty China, la-la-la” routine. The hyper-sensitive and reactionary fenqing whose free-floating anger is channeled by the government ala Orwell's Pigs and Dogs are loathsome, just visit any English China blog such as John Pomfret’s Washington Post blog, “Pomfret’s China” (that's flame central. He's infested with fenqing trolls) or Global Voices Online-China, and listen to them squall and mewl their inflammatory rhetoric, a lot of it racist, and all of it definitely ultra-nationalist. What delusion beyond delusion theirs is. They’re another subject, though, one that I’ll be getting to soon. Nonetheless, the other foot is going to fall in China now that the Games are over. The Party is not going to be able to use them any longer as a shield to justify its day to day abuses of power. Don't expect the fenqing to come to that dance, though. They are part of, or on the fringes of, the mere 5% of the population that possesses Party membership.

Yet, after these Games there may very well be a serious spike in “mass incidents” in China. The Ministry of Public Security says last year there were more than 58,000 mass incidents involving three million people (That's 160 per day. 51 people each, average! Even if you divide that by 3.5 to arrive at a commensurate ratio between America and China, you still get a head-shaking figure). The Ministry reported that this was an increase of almost 15% over the year before. Yet, as protests increase, Chinese police are trying different strategies to contain them, sometimes even making economic concessions to demonstrators, a move that in all likelihood will probably encourage more protests - the last thing the CPC wants. That’s why the 77 protests never occurred in the “designated protest zones”. They knew they’d have loud, howling hell on their hands if even one were to have occurred during the Olympics: it would have chain-reacted and quickly juggernauted out of control. I’d like to suggest that one of the different strategies that the PRC is trying out is the same old, tried and true strategy that has been used throughout Chinese history: encouraging dissent, and then exterminating it once the snakes in the grass slithered forth to get the bait. However, I think that those who did apply already reckoned the consequences, but simply and truly had nothing more to lose than what they’d already lost. 3 Perhaps some genuinely thought that the time and place were inviolable, and that the government orficials would play hands off, at least for a short while. It's impossible to say.

One thing is for certain. What the Ministry of Public Security terms "mass incidents" are strongly on the rise, and have been so since 1993. From 1998 to 2005, there has been, on average, a 25% increase in these incidents every year, and that they are said to being growing more and more violent. 4 (see graph at bottom of the page of this link) Arriving at 2005 there was a 360% compounding of them from the starting date which was a watershed year that saw a 60% increase in incidents from the prior year, '97. 1998 is the beginning of what I am terming "The Violent Wind" in contemporary China. This seminal year followed on the heels of the Communist Party's 15th Congress in late '97, which pressed for factory firings in the name of "efficiency", leaving many workers in the lurch.

It must also be pointed out that guaging statistics from the Ministry of Public Security is a somewhat tenuous endeavor. 5 For one, it almost goes without saying that there is a certain degree of under-reporting on the part of the government. How much, of course, is unacertainable. Secondly, there is apparently some bleeding together of "mass incidents" and "cases of public disorder disturbances", the latter of which can be perpetrated by a single individual and need not be part of a gathering. Also, there are those occassions where a community gathers spontaneously and without permission to actually applaud the police for a job well-done, as in the example cited here. 6 (2nd para). Nonetheless, these incidents and cases don't bode well for the government and never have.

So, the Collapse of China Theory. I can hear you asking, "does Ant Farm subscribe to and promote it?" That's a darn good question. The verdict is still out. All the same, given these government produced figures coupled with an environment that is rapidly deteriorating, and which could lead to what I have termed "ecological barbarism" anytime in next 2 to 5 years, it's not out of the question, particularly in light of other considerations such as overpopulation and the massive array of problems in engenders, provincial fragmentation due to economic and historic cultural divisions, a west-east economic dichotomy, etc. Yeah, it could definitely happen given the proper catalyst and could only be a matter of time, if this world has any time left.

What I see glowing on the horizon for this world, and not only China, isn't especially a pleasant picture. The next two years will be absolutely critical. How quickly the West can green its economies, and crucially, how quickly China and Asia can do the same, will determine everything. How forgiving a mistress Mother Nature is the major question. Will she allow us a bit more time to remedy our ways before she cracks? The Ant doesn't know, only prays so for he loves Mother Earth. I am afraid most of the healing, if it occurs, will have to be spiritual, though. Not merely physical and material.

I am not of the opinion that the Chinese's little charade this last two weeks or so has done anything to improve the chances of the just aforementioned. I believe that despite many wonderful and good intentions of the Chinese people, the overarching duplicity and bad faith of the PRC/CPC significantly undermined those things, and ultimately, you can't separate any government from its people.

I sense that, for China, what is in its near future is this: it is going to find itself being pulled away from, internationally. I think that around the world that people from Argentina to Zimbabwe had an a very good opportunity to look close at the Chinese, into their soul, and very probably very many let out a big, collective "ewww". Indeed, somethings are very cute and gentle, but there is something else there that is also extremely unappealing, if not nearly subhuman. I've spent a good deal of time with the Chinese. Finding a middle way to arrive at a higher ground is easier said than done. But as Zen Master Pogo once said, "we have seen the enemy, and he is us."

Nonetheless, after the betrayal of promises regarding human rights, democracy, and freedom of information, which are very important to the West, if only because we say so, and everyone agrees, though themselves are ne'er do wells, that it is going to be a long time, beginning now, before the I.O.C. or any international body grants the PRC Jack's shirt. The upcoming 2010 International Expo in Shanghai will be, I predict, their last little frolic on the world stage.

As for the corrupt, self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and pussy-llanimous I.O.C, it took a huge moral bruising at the hands of the PRC/CPC, and any notion that Shanghai might be the next city in China to host the games is more than a stretch. As they say in Little Italy, "feggeddaboutit", meaning this time, don't even consider it a possibility. Yet, the moral of the story for the I.O.C. is this: as long as its ulteriority is money and the semblance of respectibility, and all the nice bourgeois things that come with them, but not a real integrity with the spiritual principles of the Games, they are going to continue to reflect the defects of the Western soul in a very unappetizing way. But, in their defense, China was definitely standing in a place where it had to be entrusted with the sacred Games. It had to be given a chance to host them. It had earned that much. I only know that I wouldn't have voted for them.

Coming from my bias against China, I have a strong sense that their betrayal is actually going to be a serendipitous affair. I feel very strongly that the West, particularly America, needs to distance itself from China. I think that that is going to be a whole lot easier to do now, and will begin to happen somewhat organically and automatically. America needs to learn that it doesn't need China, it needs America. Not a false nationalism though, but its real soul. It needs to recapture that so badly, and its attachments to China have been hindering that. As for China, maybe it needs to be more isolated. There're things it definitely needs to work on. Both countries have a lot of work to do on themselves. Some distance would be ameliorative.

Recycled Condoms

Ant Farm acknowledges that this news is a bit dated but given that this blog wasn’t in existence at the time this recycled condom story first “broke”, it’s still topical here. My justification for touching this sticky subject is that here at the Farm we don’t cease flagella-ting China for its stupidity, and just because this happened 9 months ago doesn’t mean that it or something just like it is not still happening, or could happen tomorrow, because this is exactly the kind of absurd rubbish that happens in China all the time - used condoms get recycled and used again for things like women’s hair ties. 

This matter first came to light in the pages of the venerable China Daily on 2007-11-13 href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-11/13/content_6251535.htm">http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-11/13/content_6251535.htm

. The international community's response was a resounding, “Ewwwww." However, one young Chinese fellow gushed in a spasm of shame on the paper’s blog, “As a fellow countryman I feel really sad while reading negative reports on Chinese products. And I feel worse when the report is exaggerated by China's own media and is quoted by others. I hope this news report can be corrected immediately, though the damage is already done.”

Yes, indeed, it is. And his doubts expressed within this response, not quoted here, regarding the factualness of this story came prematurely because Ant Farm, in an effort to get a grip on this meaty piece dispatched our ace roving reporter, Jimmy Milk, who peeled off the wrapper of this story to find a little more sensation in it. Traveling all the way from Beijing to the bazaars of Dongguan, Guangdong, Milk poured through the stalls until he came upon an old woman selling dusty hair accessories and discovered that she indeed had the contraband rubber bands, and with the promise that he would buy the entire contents of her tray for 200 RMB she revealed to him what had to that point been strictly proprietary information; details of her supplier, including a factory address. Milk gathered the rubber bands into a puddle and carefully deposited them into a plastic bag, and with the address set off to find the factory, determined to discharge his duties as the Ant Farm’s only reporter currently working in China behind the scenes. He filed this report.

I lubed auntie’s palm with a couple Smirking Maos and she handed me a slip with a number on it. I made sure to keep it away from the rubber bands. I asked her one last time if she read the New York Times and if she realized the extent of the international scrutiny she was under, but again she said no. I sniffed that I’d be back but with a TV camera the next time. She just scratched herself vulgarly. I found a taxi driver nearby and pulled him away from a card game of “Beat the Landlord” in the gutter with a group of unemployed, migrant villagers and gave him the address. As he settled in behind the wheel, casually pocketing their money, he glanced at the scrap, knowingly nodded, and brayed a little “hmmph, Jade Tower Karaoke Palace”. I asked him what he knew about the place and he told me, “this is hot action joint for local rich kids and big party businessmen. Also, have condom factory in basement”. 

I knew I was onto something. A Big Story.  We drove on in silence toward the edge of town, me busy behind a cigarette, him the wheel. As I sat in the back, I understood the exhilaration Mao must have felt as he victoriously entered Tianjin in '49.  After several minutes of careful, vulturine circling ensured to raise his fee we finally reached the destination. I paid him off the meter, the only way he’d take any foreigner anywhere, for the scabrous price of a hundred yuan. He sped off leaving me to find my balance in the middle of nowhere. I shot a rubber band at him. 

As I glanced around the street I noticed there wasn’t a soul in sight. “What hit this place?” I thought, but then bore in mind that 90 percent of China looked this bad, or worse. And then before me, looming 5 stories high, was the newly built Jade Tower Karaoke Palace- a kitsch pagoda façade done in gold leaf with something sinisterly phallic about it, and a couple of gruesome looking stone temple dogs eternally yapping at the entrance. I made note of the fact that it was the only building in the area that had been built in the last decade or four. The rest of the area looked like someone had poured tar and asphalt down an incline and gamely called it a street. The buildings looked shot up like the location of where a firefight between rival Red Guard factions had gone down, but nobody had found the time to patch it up in the forty years since. Only the nearby karaoke palace held out the promise of “modern China”.

As I glanced further up its walls I noticed an odd bonnet-like structure, very phallic-looking, with a dimple at the very top capping it off, but thought, “Nah, couldn’t be”. Things were getting more surreal by the second. 

Preparing myself to play the “aggressive reporter” role, I took one last drag off my smoke, stamped it out on the grimy street, and headed toward the door, ready to pull off some serious ambush journalism that would make my hero, Geraldo Rivera, proud. I strode past the temple dogs and up the red carpet leading in, and through two big red columns that somehow resembled oversized dildos, but stopped just short of being obvious. The mirrored glass doors bedecked with a Santa Claus year-round were locked. It was then that I became aware of a thick, black resinous cloud of smoke emanating from behind the building. Having no choice but to cradle my head between my forearms I rushed through the nightmarish sea of smoke that stretched for half a block, rounded the corner of the building, and burst up the shipping dock steps and into the factory in the back of the “Palace”, panting madly and covered in soot. 

Above the dock was a sign that read, “Guangzhou Research Institute for the Utilization of Un-reusable Resources”. To my amazement, hanging everywhere, were rack upon rack of dripping condoms for as far as the eye could see, or my name isn’t Jimmy Milk. There in the middle was a huge vulcanizing vat toxically blasting away, spewing black smoke everywhere. Along the walls was a mountain of boxes that read “Ji Zee Rubber Bands”, and others that read “Princess Snowy Mountain Hair Ties”. 

Out of nowhere, an old man appeared. Taking the offensive, I blurted out my standard “I’m with the New York Times, here to do stories about China during the Games”. In his hands was a large wastebasket emblazoned with the name of the Palace on it, and as I stepped toward him I looked into it and saw it was half-full of the “emperor’s socks”, and that the emperor had marched through many a Jade Gate that day. He looked like the Monkey King that had just stolen the Peach of Immortality but been caught red-handed. He had the most angelic simper on his face that I’ve ever seen. It was simply celestial how guilty and shameful he looked. 

My job was easy now. I asked him his name. He replied, “my precious family name is Whang, but everyone just calls me Old Whang. I am the chief janitor upstairs”. I asked him where the rest of the workers were. He said, “I think they just finally quit”. I asked Old Whang if he knew what the Guangzhou Research Institute for the Utilization of Un-reusable Resources was up to, and what it’s connection to the Jade Tower Karaoke Palace was. He said he didn’t, but he could guess as he finally put down the wastebasket. He looked toward the vulcanizer, then the boxes of rubber bands and hair ties, and then at the full wastebasket.

And then he looked at me and said, “things are bad here. Workers pass out from exhaustion, putting in 15-hour days and 13 in the slow season. These workers are making only 28 Yuan per day and receive only 3.9 Yuan per hour for overtime -- well below the legal minimum. No insurance, no pensions, no maternity leave, no marital leave and no leave to bury family members. Pregnant women who cannot keep up with the pace are forced to take time off -- unpaid. Not to mention that there are no safety precautions for any of the workers. And they haven’t been paid in half a year”. A tear spilled from the corner of his eye. 

Just then a shiny, new black BMW sedan drove up. It was the big man, the Laoban from hell. Out he stepped in a cheap suit, the Son of Heaven, descendant, and representative of Heaven on Earth, holder of absolute power over all matters, great and small in his empire, charged with a divine and predestined mandate to rule. Angrily, the sole and supreme overlord of the entire civilized world came up the steps toward me, along with two scrawny, little genetic mishaps who were his lieutenants. He shouted, “who are you? What are you doing here? Are you the reason everybody think they can quit? Answer me! foreign devil!”. I looked at Old Whang, gave him a wink, and just clocked the bastard. His lieutenants scattered like mice. 

I gave Old Whang about 500 RMB and told him to split.  Making my way swiftly back to the main street, a cab came fortuitously that moment and I hopped in. “The airport”, I said. I lit up and thought, “this brand of cigarettes that Mao smoked really sucks”. 

Jimmy Milk is the bastard son of the missionary, John Birch, O.S.S. His Chinese mother died giving birth to him, and his father who was killed by PLA soldiers at the end of WWII never knew of the result of his indiscretion. Milk was taken by his grandmother to Inner Mongolia, where she left him to die in the wilderness. He was, however, raised by wolves. Some think that Jimmy is likely the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, long prophesied to return someday.  In time, the ageless Milk would travel through every province of China, learn each of its dialects perfectly, and with his lupine survival skills, make it through every political and economic upheaval that China could throw at him. Milk is also a foremost authority on the World Communist Conspiracy. Don't get him started. He now proudly reports for us. Thank you, Jimmy.

Sasha Gong (fifth of five bios of dissidents who met with Bush).

Sasha Gong, 52 - scholar, writer, journalist and a lifelong political activist - would have to be considered a major “brain”. Considering that despite not having finished elementary school as a result of having been sent down to the country side in the very early 70’s, then from 1972 to 1978 being compelled to stultifying work as a mechanic in a factory, and then in ’79, spending a year in prison, Sasha still managed to achieve the highest score among 200,000 competitors in her province when she sat for the national university entrance exam just before her 23rd birthday. Unsurprisingly, she was subsequently admitted to Peking University, China's top postsecondary academy, where in eight years she earned a B.A. and an M.A. in history. In 1988, she began graduate studies with a fellowship to Harvard University and earned a Ph.D. in sociology in 1995.

In the late 70s she formed an underground dissident group. Through their writings, they urged people to consider democracy and rule of law as an alternative to communist dictatorship. Apprehended and convicted of anti-state crimes, during her imprisonment she was subjected to intense interrogation, and public humiliation upon release. Throughout the ordeal, she never stopped her pursuit of freedom through learning and thinking. Sasha Gong was born a rebel.

Gong arrived in the United States around ’87-’88. In her memoir, “Born American: A Chinese Woman’s stories of Inadequacy, Rebellion and Redemption”, she relates that something inside of her had suddenly clicked, and for the first time in her life she felt at home; She had been born an American- it had just taken her 31 years to get there. A press release for her memoir reads, “This book depicts China's baby-boomer generation through the author's personal anecdotes of the 1960s and 1970s: how they grew up, what they believed, what they feared and what they desired. While a cursory examination would conclude that nothing about the China of 1967 suggested the China of 2007, the stories show that the seeds of the great transformation were actually planted during those years. The author explores how the political system penetrated and perverted family relationships and did much damage to individuals and social groups. The stories are written from the perspective of becoming an American. Embracing American culture, and speaking as one of a handful of scholars who can travel back and forth intellectually between Eastern and Western culture, Gong provides readers with comprehensible narratives about the human factors behind the phenomenon of China’s rise, and the people behind its quantum leap from communism to capitalism”. (The Ant says, “I need to read this book”).

In her recent meeting with Bush she urged him to press for greater American media access to China. She suggested that he propose a free information exchange agreement with China. She reminded him that the Chinese government is already educating the American public about China, but without much reciprocity.

For several years now CCTV has been available in America via cable subscription, and dozens of Chinese channels are available by satellite. Chinese newspapers are also available with a subscription. Additionally, Chinese web sites are free and are always available. China has developed plenty of ways, backed by massive government funding, to explain itself to U.S. citizens.

When she informed the president that her blog about America has attracted millions of Chinese readers, he responded, "If you have millions of readers, what are you complaining for?" "I am complaining that I am a one-man band," she replied. Given that broadcasting into China by the American equivalent of CCTV, Voice of America, is often jammed, and its Web site is frequently blocked, the impact of U.S. government-sponsored programs is negligible. Nothing anywhere near the wave saturation of China International Radio, which can be heard on AM WUST, Baltimore, and WNWR, Philadelphia, even remotely exists for American governmental broadcasting in China.

She claims that the lack of good information has created an image problem for the United States with the Chinese people. (America, an image problem? Nah, impossible. Especially these days. Our President has seen to that. Any rate, I personally nominate NPR as a good choice of broadcasting material to beam into the Dragon’s ear).

Sasha Gong has taught sociology at UCLA and George Washington University, worked as director of the Cantonese Service at Radio Free Asia, and served as senior program officer at the American Center for International Labor Solidarity, AFL-CIO. She has published a few books and numerous articles in the Chinese-language press. She is one of the most-read magazine column writers in China. Her blog, http://gongxiaoxia.blog.tianya.cn/, which discusses American politics, culture and economics, attracted 640,000 visits in its first eight months, and has received that many in the last four months or so, and is now up to 1.3 million hits.

Books and Publications:

Born American: A Chinese Woman’s stories of Inadequacy, Rebellion and Redemption

www.maxwell.syr.edu/moynihan/programs/EastAsia/file/US-China%20Conference.pdf

Credit to www.publishersmarketplace.com/rights/display.cgi?no=5620 - 20k -

Bob Fu

Born and raised in Shandong province, Xiqiu “Bob” Fu was a leader of the student democracy movement that ended in the Tian'anmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989. At that time he was attending People’s University in Beijing. Fu was converted to Christianity by an American English professor, and by 1992, was the pastor of a house church of 30 students. Shortly thereafter, he and his wife, Cai Bochun (Heidi), started an illegal bible school in a shuttered factory. In May of 1996, secret police discovered the school, and they were imprisoned.

They were released two months later, whereupon Fu was fired from his job as an English teacher at the Beijing School for the Communist Party, and Heidi lost her acceptance to study for her master’s degree. Heidi was pregnant at the time, but apparently had not received approval from her work unit for pregnancy. Without said approval, she could receive no medical help and would be forced to abort her baby, even at full term.

These circumstances drew them to Hong Kong at the end of 1996, where they posed as tourists. Abandoning their group, they applied repeatedly for visas to America. Their case became publicized, and President Clinton directly intervened on their behalf with the Chinese authorities. They finally arrived on U.S. soil just a few days before the British turned over Hong Kong to Beijing.

Bob Fu’s focus is religious persecution of Christians in China, and in 2002, he founded China Aid Association to draw international attention to China’s gross human rights violations against "house-church Christians", those worshiping in non-governmentally sanctioned settings. “In addition to collecting documents and materials related to Chinese law and government policy toward religion in China, CAA issues press releases on cases of religious persecution in China and carries out other advocacy on behalf of persecuted religious believers in China. It also provides humanitarian relief to persecuted members of underground Protestant churches in China. Although CAA’s connections inside China are primarily with Christians, the organization supports the broad principle of freedom of religion for all believers in China and aspires to conduct activities which protect the civil rights of believers from all religions”. Nearly 80 percent of the CAA’s annual budget goes directly to China to help the persecuted believers.

His organization is well-organized and is able to respond to persecution crises inside of China rapidly. “China Aid investigators are dispatched on short notice to the scenes of persecution to conduct direct interviews with victims and family members. With collaboration from local church leaders and members, these monitors gather information including photos, video and audio interviews. All information is verified by secondary sources before being transmitted to CAA headquarters”. How CAA is able to respond so expediently is not clear, but once on the scene the organization is then able to “deliver emergency funds, and in time, contact appropriate media sources, notify Western governments and NGOs, and if necessary, initiate direct letter-writing campaigns, urging release of the prisoner(s)”. Clearly, this requires some risk on the part of the investigators, and how they are able to avoid persecution themselves is uncertain to Ant Farm at this time.

CAA’s main focus is with unregistered Protestant churches in China, those not part of the governmentally sanctioned TSPM. (Ant Farm provides this historical background on the subject of TSPM selectively culled for the reader from Wikipedia).

The Three-Self Patriotic Movement, or the Three-Self Church consists of three principles, which are: self-governance, self-support (i.e., financial independence from foreigners) and self-propagation (i.e., indigenous missionary work). The origins of this movement were begun by Western missionaries in the mid 1800’s who recognized that only through this approach could Christianity be propagated successfully in China. They were drafted formally during an 1892 conference in Shanghai of Protestant Christian missions. In 1951, in the wake of the revolution, a Cantonese Christian named Y.T. Wu (1893–1979) re-initiated the Three-Self Patriotic Movement, which promoted the same strategy of “self-governance, self-support, and self-propagation”, but was updated in order to completely remove foreign influences from the Chinese churches, and to assure the communist government that the churches would be patriotic to the newly-established People's Republic of China. The movement began formally in 1954 and allowed the government to infiltrate, subvert, and control much of organized Christianity.

From 1966 to 1976, during the Cultural Revolution, the expression of religious life in China was effectively banned, including even the TSPM. The growth of the Chinese House Church movement during this period was a result of all Chinese Christian worship being driven underground for fear of persecution. To counter this growing trend of "unregistered meetings", in 1979 the government officially restored the TSPM after thirteen years of non-existence, and in 1980 the CCC (China Christian Council)was formed. The TSPM is not a denomination, and denominational distinctions do not exist within the organization. Pastors are trained at one of only thirteen officially sanctioned seminaries which are Marxist-oriented and teach liberal theology.

The attempt to bring house-church Christians into the fold of "registered" meeting places has met with mixed results. One area of disagreement has been the restriction that the government places on preaching and teaching certain doctrines which are deemed to be inappropriate. Some examples of teaching that are not offered at the TSPM meetings include: references to the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. However, restrictions are not always harshly enforced, and many pastors within the TSPM have the freedom to exposit Christian teachings more fully.

The TSPM and CCC are viewed with suspicion and distrust by some Christians both within and outside China. Some claim the TSPM to be a tool of the CCP to control and regulate the expression of Christianity. As a result, there are groups that refuse to deal with the TSPM or CCC, and there exists a large unregistered House Church movement in China with some claiming that it serves the large majority of Protestant Christians in China.There has also been allegations of regular and systematic persecution against Christians associated with the House Church movement and other unregistered Christian organizations in China. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Self_Patriotic_Movement).

Fu’s group states that as of 1993, there were 7 million members of the TSPM with 11 million affiliated, as opposed to an estimated 18 million and 47 million "unregistered" Protestant Christians respectively.

Ant Farm will be detailing the subject of religious persecution in China in later postings. Bob Fu's Chinaaid.org is probably the premier site on the web for understanding and keeping abreast of this subject.

Bob Fu has testified before many organizations, including the House International Relations Committee, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and the UN Commission on Human Rights.

Bob Fu is a PhD candidate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also visiting professor at Oklahoma Wesleyan University and editor-in-chief of Chinese Law and Religion Monitor Journal. Bob and Heidi have three children, Daniel, Tracy and Melissa.

Credit to http://chinaaid.org/ for biographical material on Bob Fu.

Rabiya Kadeer

Rabiya Kadeer's story is an extremely interesting one. A Uyghur, the 61-year-old Kadeer is the foremost human rights advocate and leader of the Uyghur cause. She is the “Mother of the Uyghur nation”, in addition to being the mother of eleven children of her own. A former laundress turned millionaire, Kadeer established a joint multi-million dollar trading company and department store empire, and was at one time ranked as the seventh wealthiest person in China. Mrs. Kadeer was, in fact, the richest and most powerful woman in all of the PRC, and things were exceptionally fine for her until she pissed off the Chinese. Put in perspective, imagine if Oprah Winfrey were given an 8-year sentence by the U.S. government for criticizing it.

Such was her success that following a story about her business excellence that had appeared in the Wall Street Journal in 1994, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet personally flew to meet her from out of respect for her enormous achievement as a woman and as a Uyghur in China. Kadeer utilized her wealth to aid downtrodden Uyghurs, especially women and children, and opened free classes in her department store to educate Uyghur children from poor families. She also developed a foundation in 1997, called the “Thousand Mothers Movement”, to empower Uyghur women to start their own businesses.

Ms. Kadeer’s philanthropic efforts were at first praised by the Chinese government. She was subsequently appointed to the National People’s Congress, as well as the Political Consultative Congress in 1992. In 1995, she attended the United Nation’s Fourth World Conference on Women as a member of the Chinese delegation.

During this time she strove to improve the situation of the Uyghur people by working within the Chinese system. Her efforts to persuade high-ranking Chinese officials to change their hard-line, repressive policies against the Uyghurs, including direct talks with Jiang Zhemin, had little effect though. In a speech given during a National People’s Congress session in March 1997, she criticized China’s treatment of her people and demanded that the Chinese government honor the autonomy conferred on the Uyghur people and respect their human rights. She strongly criticized China’s harsh crackdown of a Uyghur student demonstration, which had taken place a month earlier in Ghulja City, Xinjiang, on February 5, 1997. (Less a "crackdown" than a massacre. See 4th web link at bottom). In doing so, Beijing’s attitude toward Ms. Kadeer vehemently curdled.

To punish her for her disloyalty to the Chinese Communist Party, she was stripped of her membership in both the National People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference, and forbidden to travel abroad. Beijing also pressured her to divorce her dissident husband, Sidik Rouzi, who had fled to the US in 1996.

In 1999 while on her way to meet a U.S. congressional delegation in Urumqi, the capital, Xinjiang, in the far northwest of China, she was arrested. Newspaper clippings she had sent to her husband containing accounts of recent events in Xinjiang were interpreted as “state secrets” and used to convict her. Kadeer was sentenced to eight years in prison for having stolen the above “secrets.”

Ms. Kadeer’s case became an international embarrassment for the Chinese government after Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch publicized her case and aggressively pursued her freedom. While in prison she received Human Rights Watch highest human rights award and was honored by Norway’s Rafto Foundation with its Rafto Award in 2004. On March 17, 2005, three days before an official visit to Beijing by US Secretary of State, Condaleeza Rice, she was released from prison on medical grounds after having completed six years of her punishment by the state. China would now exile her and the U.S. would adopt her. In 2006 she was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, further fueling China's embarrassment.

Since her release Rabiya Kadeer has been actively campaigning for the human rights of the Uyghur people, despite Chinese government efforts to discredit and harass her. In the meantime, Uyghur women continue to be sterilized or forced to have abortions because the Chinese government says they are too poor to afford to have families. Uighur mosques are closed, their imams jailed, and parents are forbidden to teach religion to their children. It is estimated that there are thousands of Uighur political prisoners, and Xinjiang has the dubious distinction of being the only place in China where executions still take place for political crimes. Beijing calls this “harmonizing the state”.

As regards the efforts of Beijing to harass her, in 2006 The Washington post reported that Chinese government agents had secretly videotaped Kadeer at her home outside of Washington D.C. It has been verified by the F.B.I. that the suspects were indeed Chinese government agents. Also in 2006, a U.S. congressional delegation had requested to meet her family during their visit to Urumqi. On May 29, Chinese authorities responded by warning her three adult children living in the city to decline any such invitation. Three days later, police took more drastic steps to prevent a meeting.

The three children were driven out of the city, where two of her sons were badly beaten by police along a back road. In a further effort to intimidate the family, one of the officers conducting the beatings handed a cell phone to her daughter, Rushangul, and demanded that she call her mother so that she could hear them screaming. Mrs. Kadeer was subjected to sounds of her sons being beaten and tortured over the phone. One of the two sons, Ablikim, was so badly beaten that he lost consciousness and had to be hospitalized before being taken to a detention center. Five of her eleven children are still in China, held by the government in indemnity against any political damage she might do abroad while in exile.

On June 13, Ablikim, together with Alim, the other son who was beaten, were charged with "plotting to split the state", a death penalty crime. Together with a third son, Kahar, aged 42, they were charged with tax evasion, this in keeping with Beijing's usual strategy of using ostensibly nonpolitical offences as an additional way of targeting their political opponents. As part of their "investigation" into these charges, Chinese authorities confiscated all of the financial records of her family companies, making it nearly impossible for her sons to prepare a defense against these charges. It was reported that Alim Abdureyim, the youngest son, ‘confessed’ on or around July 1 to criminal and political charges against him as a direct consequence of being tortured. With these actions, the government had definitely made good on threats to her before she left Beijing in 2005, warning that if she spoke out about the plight of the Uighurs, that her children and her businesses would be "finished."

During the meeting at the White House 5 days ago, Bush specifically expressed concern about the situation of Ms. Kadeer’s sons, Alim and Ablikim Abdureyim, who are currently serving lengthy prison sentences in the PRC. He indicated that he would raise their cases with Chinese leaders during his visit to Beijing. Ms. Kadeer expressed her concerns over the Beijing regime’s recent harsh campaign of repression on peaceful Uyghur dissent in the name of anti-terrorism.

Because Beijing fears that Xinjiang province might go renegade, strict measures are inflicted upon it, ones even greater than those inflicted upon Tibet. Yet, little is known of East Turkistan, Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in this world. My guess is hardly anyone on the streets of the West could tell you where it is at, if they had even heard of it before. "From its conquest by the Qing Empire in the mid-eighteenth century until its incorporation in the PRC in 1949, there have been several efforts to wrest all or part of Xinjiang from Beijing's control. Though this restiveness is often portrayed as an enduring "clash of civilizations" between Chinese and Muslim realms, both the participants and the causes of these episodes have been more diverse than this simplistic formula allows. Indeed, Turkic or Uyghur nationalism has been a far more salient ideological feature than religious zeal. After 1949, despite some Islamic-colored unrest in southern Xinjiang, disturbances in the region corresponded with the political and economic disruptions of the Great Leap Forward (1959-61) and Cultural Revolution (1966-76)". (James Millward, Policy Studies, No. 6. East-West Center Washington, D.C. Publication Date: http://www.eastwestcenter.org/publications/search-for-publications/browse-alphabetic-list-of-titles/?class_call=view&pub_ID=1479).

Most of the CCP's interest in the region stems from the fact that there are large resources of oil and natural gas in the province. Also, the Chinese are fond of testing their nuclear weapons there. The Chinese have very good reasons to maintain a grip on Xinjiang. Yet, the Uyghurs remain as they have for centuries upon centuries; completely different from mainstream Chinese in religion, language and culture.

Books:

• The Stormer of the Sky, with Alexandra Cavelius (2007).

Awards:

• Human Rights Watch Award (2004)
• Rafto Foundation's Rafto Award i 2004
• Nominated for 2006 Nobel Peace Prize

Profession: President of the Uyghur American Association.

Websites of interest:
http://www.uyghuramerican.org/
http://china.notspecial.org/
http://uk.youtube.com/results?search_query=rabiya+kadeer&search_type=&aq=f
http://www.rafto.no/DesktopModules/ViewAnnouncement.aspx?ItemID=344&Mid=42

Credit to Uyghur American Assoc. http://www.uyghuramerican.org/