DISCLAIMER: The Following materials represent only my own opinion, and not those of Pacific University Oregon, nor of the Berglund Center, nor of any other group to which I belong.

The preceding piece in this Blog, “Why China Distrusts the West” was written as background to this piece, and this will be much easier to understand after reading the first one. In that piece, after surveying more than a century of Western aggression in China, I concluded:

During this period the American record was a mixed one. The U.S. was torn by conflicting drives—to Christianize China, to help it modernize, to profit from its weaknesses, to protect it from the rapacious foreigners or to get its share before the melon was completely carved. We sent troops in the Boxer Rebellion, established a flotilla on the Yangtze to protect missionaries and American commercial interests, founded schools, hospitals and colleges, and established scholarships for Chinese to study in America. We clearly came out of the 19th and early 20th centuries in Chinese eyes as the very best of what was, after all, a very bad lot.

Now I turn to the Twentieth Century, the immediate background to current Chinese distrust of the West, and particularly of the United States. To many, it will doubtless seem that this series presents a very one-sided view. Indeed, it quite deliberately does. It is my intent to “unpack” the Chinese perspective so that Westerners in general, and Americans in particular can better understand it.

I know, of course, that there is also a very different American perspective. It has been my privilege, working with my wife, Christine Richardson, to interview dozens of Westerners—mostly Oregonians—who lived, worked, and fought in China before 1949. These included remarkable people such as the daughter of the then German ambassador to Beijing during the Boxer Rebellion, another woman who was evacuated down the Yangzi in the middle of a Boxer night attack tied to the mast of a small boat when her family, aided by their Christian flock, fled the burning mission station. We talked to many Flying Tigers and other soldiers, to many missionaries who wanted to do no more than serve their Lord by serving China, and many early businesspeople in the China trade. (To see their stories go to: http://mcel.pacificu.edu/as/students/oic/ )

We learned from all of them. I trust that I am not denigrating their memory here. I believe that all of them would think it important that we understand the Chinese perspective, while honoring their own experience as well.

Now, back to the Chinese perspective…

SINO-AMERICAN RELATIONS IN THE 20th CENTURY
After a mixed record in dealing with China in the 19th century, Americans made, in Chinese eyes, a series of very bad choices in the 20th.

The Warlord turmoil of the early 20th was ended by a partial unification under Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石 ) (proper Romanization is Jiang Jieshi) (See note 1 below). Let us define a Warlord as somebody who ruled but did not govern, almost entirely by military force or the threat of it. Bandits rob; Warlords collect taxes.

Chiang very pragmatically simply absorbed into his own forces Warlords who were willing to bargain with him, leaving the very powerful ones with local autonomy and ignoring more distant ones occupying less important turf. He then played a very complex balance of power game not unlike that of Japanese shoguns before the Meiji Restoration. This China gave a semblance of unity, but not the reality.

Chiang governed totally and directly only those areas under his immediate military control. This situation was much complicated by a continuation of a trend already visible in the late 19th century, continual Japanese aggression in the north of China.

The Republic of China regime under Chiang Kai-shek passed itself off to Americans as a modernizing regime led by a Christian gentleman and his American-educated Chinese wife. Behind them, however, was a rapacious gang of militarists, criminal organizations, and relentlessly oppressive local interests.

This gang—some have seen Chiang as simply the most successful of the Warlords— frittered away their own legacy of reform, spectacularly mismanaged the Chinese economy in order to line their own pockets, failed to oppose Japanese expansion in China until much too late, and attempted to suppress opposition through systematic terror.

However, the U.S. was quite content with its fantasy version of what had occurred in China—China, we believed, was following our script, finally modernizing and under Christian leadership, too.

Then, following Pearl Harbor, which made the Sino-Japanese War another theater of World War II, we desperately needed an ally in Asia, and Chiang was clearly it. Madame Chiang, the first of a line of Asian women to play American public opinion and Congress like an exotic musical instrument in support of their husband’s regimes, very ably reinforced that relationship.

The word “fascist” was sometime heard from missionaries and businessmen struck by the fact that Chiang’s earlier German military advisor had been Hitler’s cellmate as he wrote Mein Kampf, and by the look of Chiang’s elite Blue Shirt military regiments, wearing their coal scuttle helmets and long great coats astride their BMW motorcycles. And like Hitler, the central ethos of Chiang’s regime was simply unwavering loyalty to Chiang himself, what Political Scientists sometimes call “Personalism” among our allies, and “Dictatorship” among our enemies.

But the exigencies of the Pacific Theater meant that good or bad, the Chiang gang was at least our gang, and as long as he was not defeated outright by the Japanese, he was better than any visible alternative. (Remember that similar exigencies were re-molding the murderous Stalin into our trusty “Uncle Joe” at this same time.) Successive American military commanders such as General Stillwell, tried to convey a more realistic view of Chiang, but were quickly removed for questioning the fantasy, which promised a low cost alternative to an all-out Asian war.

In China, however, Chiang was losing what little support he had as the Nationalist terror and the mismanagement of the economy forced even modern urban elites, let alone the thoroughly miserable Chinese peasantry, to look for new leaders. Because, in part, only underground opposition could survive in Chiang’s China, the Communist party soon became the only alternative.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Pacific campaign progressed unexpectedly quickly, thanks to the rapid advance of U.S. technology, tactics, and incredible heroism in the vicious island-hopping campaigns. The U.S. had been comfortably distant from China before Pearl Harbor; by 1945 we were fully engaged in its politics and what would soon be its civil war.

By 1945, knowledgeable Americans in China were warning that Chiang was doomed and that the Communists, who had grabbed the banners of both Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism and agrarian reform, were irresistibly on the rise. Later these men would themselves be condemned during the McCarthy era not because they predicted the Communist victory, but because, it was said, they caused it.

CHINESE PERSPECTIVE/AMERICAN PERSPECTIVE
In the above events, there are considerable areas of American and Chinese agreement. Chinese historians have been quick to see that part of the problem they had with the Mao cult of the ‘50’s and 60’s was that Chinese recent history seemed to have so few heroes. It was difficult not to continually celebrate Mao, because other, earlier, leaders had effectively been trashed.

But recent Chinese historians have been willing to acknowledge Sun Yat-sen as one such hero, even to recognize Western, particularly American, influences upon him—Sun lived in Hawaii as a youth and read and wrote English better than he did Chinese, though he was orally bilingual.

And even Chiang Kai-shek, it has come to be agreed, had his good points. He clearly deserved credit for having mopped up the worst of the Warlord extremism and giving China a national face with the outside world for the first time in many decades.

And if Chiang was too slow to oppose the Japanese, he finally did so, albeit only after first being captured by a coalition of outraged northerners who had suffered directly from Japanese aggression. These demanded that he declare war. Even Zhou Enlai, Communist party representative in this group, had argued that Chiang was the only nationally viable leader and should be freed, if he would commit to total war against the Japanese, which he did.

In short, Chiang was the only conceivable alternative to lead the war against the Japanese for the Chinese, even for the Communist Party, just as he was for the United States. If the United States was emerging as the leading representative of Western powers, the record of its behavior in China in the first half of the 20th century could at least be rationalized as necessary ad hoc responses to exigencies. That position, however, was about to be frittered away.

THE COLD WAR AND THE CHINESE REVOLUTION
The problem is at bottom a simple one: the most spectacular national transformation of the last two hundred years was the Chinese Communist Revolution. And the United States was not only on the losing side after 1945, itself a terrible error in statecraft, but also on the wrong side; the side of corruption and mismanagement, the side of opposition to change and reform.

Tragically, this was not an inevitable error. It resulted from a confluence of events internal and external to both China and the United States that fractured any hope of reconciliation for many decades; in fact, some of the same issues are still potentially inflammatory ones.

The Chinese Civil war, which had begun in the late 1920s, had never really ended as there were many clashes between Communist and Nationalist forces even while each fought Japanese forces. From 1946-48 it was total war with some interims during which the U.S. attempted to control the conflict.

While the U.S. felt, or at least argued, that it was neutral in the conflict, no Chinese could fail to notice that the U.S. had essentially given to the Nationalist forces as much of the military equipment used in the Pacific Campaigns as was serviceable and not desired stateside. By 1948 the fleeing Nationalist forces were largely American equipped. American aid, however, was cautiously extended as Americans had had enough of war and were not at the time prepared for an enduring commitment to direct involvement in Asia.

Chiang’s war against the Communists was as badly organized and ill-managed as everything else his government had ever tried, and it was soon over. Chiang, thoroughly defeated, bailed to Taiwan to establish a government in exile. This was another point at which the United States could once again have reestablished its standing with China, simply by staying out of what was at that point clearly a civil war.

The Korean War
The refugee regime on Taiwan was recognized only briefly as the continuing government of China by any major powers, with, of course, one exception: the United States. For more than 25 years the U.S. supported Chiang’s official policy, to “Recover the Mainland.” Meanwhile, Europeans were gingerly getting into the China trade, profiting from rapid Chinese economic development.

The American position was frozen in place because of the Korean War. Many historians view it as initially a local conflict. But then it was globalized because of the Cold War. Growing American opposition to Communism was manipulated by a tyrannical Confucian regime somewhat like Chiang’s own.

The involvement of either the Russians or the Chinese in provoking the war remains highly contested. But regardless, Chinese and American troops were facing each other in battle and the American commander, Douglas McArthur, was threatening the invasion of north China and calling for the use of nuclear weapons to resolve it. It ended any hope at Sino-American reconciliation for thirty years.

THE TAIWAN PROBLEM
The Korean War also ended any hope of incorporating Taiwan into the P.R.C. The Chinese Communist armies had quickly conquered one of Chiang’s intended redoubts, Hainan Island. The remaining one, Taiwan, was protected first by a wider strait, secondly by Schistosomiasis, and thirdly and ultimately, by the Seventh Fleet.

The Taiwan Straits required that the Communist armies mass along the Fujian coast and assemble an invasion fleet. The second, Schistosomiasis, is a parasitic disease endemic to the area to which the Communist army had little or not resistance. It quickly debilitated them and delayed their assault for another season after other parts of China were invested and the process of establishing control had begun.

Then finally, Truman, who had established a hands-off policy on support of Chiang in Taiwan, threw the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits after the Korean War broke out. The Chinese Civil War was now a theater of the titanic struggle between Communism and the Free World.

This view not only established a point of contention which is still a volatile one—the exact status of Taiwan—but it also defined the ongoing conflict as a highly ideological one in which images are often far more important than realities.

In the entire following period, American policy was always opposed to China, sometimes overtly so as in support for anti-communist movements any place China had interests (Tibet), and sometimes merely obdurately opposed to seeing China make any progress. Mao, of course, himself did little or nothing to calm the conflicts, but eagerly seized every opportunity to become the mirror image to the U.S., supporting liberation movements every place the U.S. had interests, in part in an attempt to wrest control of the Communist movement away from the Soviet Union.

At least some of Maoist extremism following the Korean War should be viewed as related not only to Mao’s utopianism or to his attempts to re-establish control after the Party itself went separate ways, but also to the threatening context of the time. The Great Leap Forward with its horrible agricultural disasters, for example, might also be viewed as a desperate attempt to force the Chinese industrialization process into high gear so as to create the sort of military forces that might resist American invasions or permit the recovery of Taiwan. The Commune Movement can also be seen as in part a tactical answer to the question of how to survive massive American atomic attacks—disperse resources and production centers as widely as possible and make each as autonomous as possible.

The Vietnam War, was of course, closely related also to the Cold War, and to anti-Chinese hostility. What began as a Vietnamese nationalist anti-colonial struggle against the French was soon seen as related not only to the Cold War, but also to the containment of China. I received my own graduate education in this period, financed in large part by Know-Your-Enemy grants to support my study of Chinese in Taiwan.

There, while on a Fulbright in 1967-8, I had a brief meeting with the American ambassador during which we discussed my initial plans to study in Vietnam—my Fulbright had been nfirst granted to study in South Vietnam, then relocated to Taiwan after the fighting in Vietnam became serious and after some previous Fulbrighters there had expressed their doubts about the war in their hometown newspapers. The ambassador said that the U.S. was very much interested in gaining the support of Taiwan’s forces in Vietnam, but unfortunately, Chiang demanded independent control of any troops he sent (there were Korean and Thai contingents in Vietnam which were closely under American command) and had expressed his desire to “drive north” and liberate China. This was read by the ambassador as a polite “no” to our request for aid as it would have clearly raised the specter of Chinese troops pouring south as they had done in Korea.

Each of us, Americans and Chinese, has abundant causes in our own minds to fear or to quickly be angered with the other. We share an often-bitter history.

Americans are slow to revise their views of China because we think of it as once a major threat to democracy, and as Chinese troops as once our bitter enemies when we attempted to support democracy in the face of Communist totalitarianism, in China itself, in Korea, and by proxy in Vietnam.

Chinese have a flip-side perspective. To them, our support of democracy was really a support of colonialist influence and of despotic totalitarian regimes which opposed the liberation of great masses of peasants, whether Chinese, Korean, or Vietnamese.

But to the Chinese, there is an additional issue. They have never seriously exercised any influence in American internal affairs, nor threatened our borders or our sovereignty.

We have, however, in their view, attempted to do all of the above. They can cite a long series of events beginning with the nineteenth century that occurred on and contiguous to their own soil.

Clearly, it is going to be difficult for either of us to recognize changes in the others, and impossible for us to change history. The Sino-American relationship requires immense care and nurturing and memories of the past are easily manipulated in the present. (See note 2 immediately below)

Notes:
(note 1) The Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek is very well done, though I might have added some different references to it. However, it has copious sources, includes many photographs, and on balance does a very good job of covering a very controversial figure. Its major weakness, however, is that it does very little on the “China Lobby,” the American lobby which was closely associated with Chiang. (Unfortunately the Wikipedia entry on the China Lobby is worse than useless, it is not even a good start on an article.) I also think its statement that “Alleged infiltration of the U.S. government by Chinese Communist agents may have also played a role in the aid suspension. “ is a very poor inclusion; there is little or no evidence for such a position and I think it best understood as an artifact of the McCarthy Red Scare in the U.S. I would suggest Ross W. Koen’s work, The China Lobby in American Politics for those wanting more information on this issue.

(note 2) See for example, the piece in the NYT, “ Op-Ed: Red China, Green China China is beating the U.S. in the effort to conquer the clean technology market, but it’s not too late for America to win” at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/opinion/07Usher.html The tone of the piece is a remarkable one which reduces a critical issue—how to somehow get solar energy production to a point where all the dreadful costs of petroleum addiction can be reduced—to a national conflict between China and the United States. As loathsome as that stance is, the author clearly understands American politics, in which a “win” is much more important than the environment. One of the author’s statements is that “China’s determination to become the global leader in clean tech has little to do with concerns for the environment and everything to do with jobs.” This does not correspond at all with my own experience in China, where the costs of pollution are well known and a major concern for everybody with whom I have ever discussed the issue.

Here at last is the piece I promised myself weeks ago: Why China is distrustful, or at least always potentially so with Western states, particularly the U.S. At the outset, let me qualify the claim by stating that, of course, this does not mean all Chinese, nor the Chinese government, are harboring a deep grudge.

I am arguing simply that the Chinese as a culture have a very distinctive view of the nature and the purpose of “History” with a capital H, and that there is much in the history of their relations with the West, particularly with the U.S., to cause any reasonable individual or group of individuals to be easily alarmed or suspicious. Here I will discuss first their view of history, and secondly, their reasons for suspicion, by examining the relations between China and the West through the 19th century, then in a subsequent piece, through the 20th century.

CHINESE VIEWS OF HISTORY AS A STUDY: Chinese history begins with, and in a sense ends, with Sima Qian (also Romanized Ssuma Ch’ien ). His work, the Records of the Historian, was compiled following 109 B.C. Despite later unfortunate detours through Marxist views of history, for the Chinese, The Records remains the model history and the model explanation of the utility of history as a study.

Westerners probably find the notion that history has any utility at all very strange—our saint of industrialism, Henry Ford, probably put it most succinctly: “History is Bunk!” (His actual statement was a bit more nuanced than this, but it conveys the essence of his view.) The book which most Americans would probably cite as the model for history is, of course, the Bible, which is a series of stories, the most consequential of which are miracle tales in which an anthropomorphic deity intervenes directly in history. This is, in a sense, the very opposite of history, which as a study assumes continuity between any given slice of the past and that which preceded or followed it.

The Chinese, to an extent like the framers of the Bible, believed that ‘heaven” sometimes intervened in history to punish evil behavior, because heaven loved mankind and wanted it to flourish. The Records, then, are a series of biographies generally showing both exemplary behavior and cautionary behavior; there are good emperors and bad ones, good assassins (those who tried to kill a bad emperor), and bad ones for example. But heaven works slowly not dramatically; it uses nature to enforce its punishments. We can never be sure when it is working, and luck is as important as fate. It is not God.

Later Marxist history did not precisely contradict this earlier model in that it, too, makes judgments. Those things which oppose the general march of history are bad; those which facilitate it, good. Depending on the stage of history what was once good might now be bad, and vice-versa. This perspective is certainly more qualified than Sima’s judgments, but largely irrelevant to us here as strict reductionist or determinist Marxist history has not had much of a shelf life in China. So history, to the Chinese, teaches us how to behave; what is good, what is bad.

Chinese today are still very aware of history; it serves as the warp and the woof of the present. It is far from over, and fundamentals change slowly. In my classes at Wenzhou Medical College I am very familiar with individual students coming up with nuggets from Chinese events from many centuries ago. To many of them, the 19th century is still an open book. In fact, the very term “to study” in Chinese is usually rendered in Chinese as “Bei Shu” 背书 to memorize or recite the book.

CHINA AND THE WEST BEFORE THE 20th CENTURY: So what do the Chinese see when they look at the history of their relations with the West?

Generally speaking, from the 18th through the 19th centuries, they see a long series of Chinese struggles against foreign attempts at domination. And they are correct in that it was expansive Western mercantilism that brought Westerners east (from Europe) or West in the case of the U.S. The first Westerners into Asian waters, heroes to us, like Vasco De Gama, were in fact, little better than pirates and often animated by a crusading mentality that caused them to see “diversity” as evil.

They attempted to open China for Western merchants, but Western religions were part of their baggage, and soon missionaries followed. The Chinese tried to maintain their sovereignty and a doddering economic and political system which was slowly collapsing of its own weight, by futile—sometimes ridiculously futile—means of resistance. However, if left alone it may well have lasted for additional centuries, or perhaps even reformed itself in the usual Chinese manner by the accession of a new and fresh series of emperors from a new family or even another ethnic group. The notion of Chinese leaders as emperors—particularly Mao Zedong—is an enduring Chinese trope.

But in the 19th century the British “opened” China with modern warships and armies so that they could sell opium freely in order to support their Indian colonies. In my experience, every Chinese schoolchild older than, say, 9 or 10, knows this story and regards it as the beginning of the destruction of traditional Chinese culture and tradition, as well, of course, as Chinese sovereignty. A series of “unequal treaties” followed—unequal in that they extorted from China rights and privileges for foreign states and individuals not granted in return to China. These amounted to the continuing diminution of Chinese sovereignty and independence, though China was never to be an outright colony like Vietnam or India.

The rest of the 19th century was by no means any happier for the Chinese. Western states (and Japan) destroyed traditional Chinese client state relationships with such dependencies as Vietnam and Korea, and annexed outright Chinese territories in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Manchuria. Other areas, like Tibet, which were someplace between a dependency and Chinese territory in the confused state relations of the period, were also effectively lost to direct Chinese control.

To list the above major problems is to miss the many local and regional issues that subjected imperial China to the death of a thousand cuts. Local incidents might remain local, indications of continual weakness and humiliation, as when the Chinese government was forced to punish local Chinese officials who resisted foreign companies or missionaries. Or local incidents might, like the Tianjin Massacre in which Chinese mobs enraged at missionary activities attacked French officials, converts and missionaries, flare suddenly into a small war and another treaty which would cost China more sovereignty and additional debilitating indemnity payments.

The Chinese government was at a loss to know how to respond. By the 1880s the throne had effectively become a foreign dependency, trying desperately to slow the continual losses rather to end them. The mix of foreign influence and Chinese weakness produced an astonishing series of conflagrations, many very difficult to explain or even comprehend.

For example, Hong Xiuquan, a failed scholar who had worked with a Baptist missionary, dreamed that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ and that the Manchus then ruling China were the imps and devils of Christian eschatology. In the turmoil of central and south China his odd movement quickly caught fire and hundreds of thousands of soldiers of his Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace took first city after city then province after province. Some estimates are as high as 20-40 million Chinese dead in the wars and the starvation that accompanied them.

The foreigners first thought that the missionaries’ dream was coming true—China was becoming Christian. Then they came to understand that Hong would not support the comfortable accommodations arrived at between the Manchu throne and the foreign governments and companies, and threw their support to the Chinese government.

The Chinese mystical traditions had often been an obstacle to modernization. But lacking centralized leadership or even a consistent ideology of resistance, outraged peasants joined secret societies and local attacks on foreigners, particularly upon missionaries, roiled the country for decades before the Boxer Rebellion finally broke out in 1900. This drove the hated foreigners behind the walls of their Beijing embassies while missionaries evacuated from local stations all over northern China and their converts were often killed.

The Chinese interpretation of the above events is quite different from those of Western historians. Both the Taiping and the Boxers clearly had strong nationalist and reformist overtones, and it is these characteristics that Chinese historians choose to emphasize. Hong Xiuquan became not a psychotic nutcase as even the most optimistic Christian missionaries had come to see him, but a peasant rebel setting the stages for the later Communist movement. The Boxers were deluded, lacking a modern ideology, but nonetheless loved their country and attempted to curtail foreign interference.

At bottom, then, in the eyes of the Chinese, all of these events were signs of China’s continual weakness and ever-escalating humiliations at the hands of Western powers and Western individuals, joined of course, by Japan. At that time Japan had not only superior power by also the advantage of being an ally of first England, then a sort of protégé of the United States, so even that Asian power represented to no small degree the impact of the West.

China reeled into the Twentieth Century. Its ancient monarchical political system collapsed in 1912 and a series of governments claimed to replace it— Sun Yat-sen’s evanescent Republic, then a series of corrupt and pusillanimous warlord regimes, some straight out of Gilbert and Sullivan—but none exercised true sovereignty until the Peoples’ Republic was founded in 1949.

In the meantime, Western powers, and, of course, Japan, played happily amidst the chaos of China’s economy, ripping off now that industry, now this one. The Chinese lost control of their Customs Service, their railroads, their ports, their mail and telegraph, modern urban power generating and distributions systems, and the modern banking and financial sector. The Warlords were easily controlled—they needed modern foreign weapons as the very basis of their strength—and they readily yielded economic rights to foreigners in the cities and regions which they dominated.

There is a very real sense in which Mao and his followers, who announced in 1949 that China had “stood up” upon their accession to power, were drawing a direct link between their revolution and the Western invasions of a century earlier—the West had invaded and knocked down a weak China; now China was regaining its feet.

During this period the American record was a mixed one. The U.S. was torn by conflicting drives—to Christianize China, to help it modernize, to profit from its weaknesses, to protect it from the rapacious foreigners or to get its share before the melon was completely carved. We sent troops in the Boxer Rebellion, established a flotilla on the Yangtze to protect missionaries and American commercial interests, founded schools, hospitals and colleges, and established scholarships for Chinese to study in America. We clearly came out of the 19th and 20th centuries in Chinese eyes as the very best of what was, after all, a very bad lot.

The differences between Western views of the above events, and Chinese ones are, of course, substantial. But that gap became a yawning chasm in the twentieth century and it is to those differences that I will turn in my next posting.

On the evening of March 15 I saw what many might call “Cyber War” unfold in real time. I was aware of the complexity of the phenomenon loosely labeled as “Cyber War” before the event. But the event persuaded me that much of what we describe with that term should be broken down into at least several other categories.

The “battle space” was a mixed-media event, entitled “Digital China and Social Media,” a live stream of a New York panel from The Paley Center for Media, which we viewed locally in Portland, Oregon. A local panel, including myself, then led local audience discussion. To see the program and its participants described go to the Website of the Northwest China Council, of which I am a member, but for whom I do not speak here.

The topic of the event as announced was:

“The central question of the event is: What is the relevance of new social networking technologies in our culture and society; and how can we use these tools for digital activism in order to foster positive social change, particularly in China?”

The actual event was quite different than I had expected from the above description. It featured Ai Weiwei, a noted Chinese artist and dissident. He is a remarkable man who has done some wonderful work in Human Rights, at great personal cost, including being attacked by Chinese police in Siquan, an event which required hospitalization in Germany where he now lives.

The panel was late in beginning. In the meantime the Asia Foundation ran—actually began to run a second time as well—an appreciative—if not celebratory—video which featured both Mr. Ai’s human rights work and his art.

I had some concerns about the program from the beginning, because of the description offered by the Asia Society: “…and how can we use these tools for digital activism in order to foster positive social change, particularly in China?” This seemed to me to very likely be an example of what I have described elsewhere as “Regime Change Lite,” an effort to further peaceful change in China by what are in my mind, heavy-handed and obtrusive means often amounting to the external encouragement of dissidence in China. I think these efforts ill advised, culturally centric, and ultimately, fruitless.

But, as it is my opinion that the Internet is in and of itself moving China towards a sort of democracy appropriate to its own historical and cultural context, I agreed to participate on the local panel. I was also interested in seeing such a mixed-media event, which could make experts in specialized topics more widely available to small local audiences around the world. This would be a welcome alternative to noted speakers appearing locally with all the associated costs.

It was clearly the hope of the moderators that this event would be of great interest in China. But fewer that 300 people watched the event world wide, which put about 10% of the total audience in the room with us in Portland. There we had a good audience of quite sophisticated people. While it is possible that a few of them had not been to China, many were regular business travelers, China-born, or simply very interested in China.

Part of the problem with the audience was surely that at the time the event began it was barely 7 a.m. in China. None were watching from China at the outset, according to the moderators. However, there were soon overseas Chinese involved; they quickly registered for the accompanying Twitter feed and were able to participate in the program. The Twitter feed was shown on both a side bar to the streamed video, and projected on a screen in the Paley Center behind the panel for their local audience.

But we do not know if the Twitter participants were Chinese Mainlanders, Taiwanese, from Hong Kong, or foreign-born. Many of them were watching from overseas locations such as Australia and Europe where they were in school. Several were also from the Unites States. These viewers can be fairly described as opposed to the Chinese government; we will use the term “dissident” to describe them here, though this does not imply that they are in any way activists or any more deeply involved than to participate by Twitter in the course of the event.

We were also joined by a number of pro-Tibetan Independence participants. Both pro-Tibetans and dissidents took the opportunity to communicate via the Twitter feed in what was certainly social networking. Their exchanges sometimes had as much to do with flirting as with politics. This produced such odd conversations as apparent offers for blind dates, accompanied by continual celebration of Tibetan independence and the evils of the Chinese government, particularly vis-à-vis Tibet. This was truly mixed media, which sometimes caused laughter in both the New York and local audiences.

The Twitter discussion was dominated throughout by a group of perhaps 15 individuals; the other Twitter members, if any, were silent. The frequent contributors to the Twitter feed had, in common, not surprisingly, a real interest in Twitter, and uniformly saw its blockage by the Chinese government as a major Human Right’s issue.

The panel was not, in my perhaps jaded opinion, completely successful as an exploration of the stated topic, but was truly focused on that tag line “…and how can we use these tools for digital activism in order to foster positive social change, particularly in China?” This was unfortunate, because the other members of the panel in addition to Mr. Ai, were quite expert in the topic promised to us.

These included, Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter and Richard McManus, the founder of ReadWriteWeb, said to be one of the top 20 blogs world wide, which focuses on web technology. Dr. Orville Schell, a Sinologist-journalist of considerable reputation and the Director of the Asia Society Center on U.S.-China Relations who was billed as the moderator, did not appear, without any explanation so far as I am aware. Emily Parker, an Asia Society staff member, also highly qualified by both experience and education, filled in for him.

Despite the presence of McManus and Dorsey, however, the show was almost entirely focused on Mr. Ai, and quickly confirmed my own suspicions of a “Regime Change Lite” performance. The presence of the pro-Tibetan independence group certainly pushed the event even farther in that direction than perhaps even Mr. Ai and the other participants wished. There were occasional discussions of Twitter and the Chinese digital scene, but as the dissident group drove the questioning, it invariably returned to a highly critical stance.

Since the Twitter feed was wide open, it was an irresistible target for spammers. We were soon treated to an attempt to steer traffic to what may have been a pornographic site on the Kama Sutra. Then about 45 minutes in, the feed was disrupted, apparently for political purposes. Cyber War, in short, was flaring up.
A participant subscribed to the Twitter feed, apparently from China, and began spamming nonsense characters.

The dissident group excitedly described this disruptive presence as “50 Centers”, a play on the Chinese term Wu Mao, which means a netizen paid—at the piece rate of 50 Chinese cents (about U.S. 7 cents) — by the government to either report anti-government content or to post positive pro-government comments. A play upon the terms in Chinese, however, also suggests “Five Mao Zedongs,” meaning very leftist.

It is important to note that we do not know how many such individuals there were, or their motives. All we saw was repetitive nonsense messages which made no sense in either English or Chinese Romanization so far as I could see. Having been kicked out once, the spammer quickly returned.

The Asia Society had surprising difficulty in dealing with these intrusions, but finally managed to block the IP address from which they were coming.

It seems probable that the spammer was politically motivated, but working alone. A group would surely have used cell phones to coordinate IP hopping and would have effectively shut down the Twitter feed. But whether an individual or a group, whether Wu Mao or not, this incident shows the weaknesses of mixed media-based Regime Change Lite, and says something about Cyber conflict as well. One, or at the most, several poorly organized individuals effectively disrupted a well-planned attempt to stage an interactive discussion worldwide.

However, lest we be over-confident in the rectitude of the dissident group of tweeters, they soon exhibited their own ability to use—if not abuse—the net. Toward the end of the scheduled events questions and comments were invited from the New York audience at the Paley Center. Most of these were intended to elicit more information from the panel, but one well-spoken Chinese-American businesswoman took Mr. Ai to task.

The woman, a native speaker of Chinese who now makes frequent business trips to China in financial services, asked, in the most polite terms possible, how he explained the great gap between his perceptions of a down-trodden fearful Chinese populace, and her own experience. In China she interacted with Chinese friends, colleagues, and relatives who seemed to her to be happy, optimistic, and increasingly well off.

I thought her question of Mr. Ai was a very sensible one. (So did many people—most—of the Portland local audience.) He essentially replied that the Chinese people are so oppressed by their government as to be afraid to speak truthfully and asked—some might say demanded—to know who she was. She gave her name, and in response to another question from him, the name of her firm. He responded, again rather brusquely, that now she was on record.

Mr. Ai’s response was less interesting to me than the response of the Twitter audience of dissidents. They immediately began to discuss her name and her firm, attempting to fully identify her as an individual. One of them asked, “Can’t we Ren Rou her?” Ren Rou 人肉, literally “human meat” with a suggestion of hunting or cannibalism, involves using the World Wide Web to expose Chinese citizens to public anger, in some cases resulting in violence. There is a search engine or engines dedicated to that purpose in China, usually used to punish outstanding examples of violations of widely agreed upon social values.

Another dissident stated, “Ha, she underestimates our ability to use Ren Rou.” (Please note that all direct quotations here are taken from my own notes made at the time; however the Twitter feed sometimes scrolled rather rapidly so there is room for error here, though not in the substance of the quotations.) Other statements denounced her for taking a government line and for being a “Wu Mao”—clearly a term which is being used far beyond its original meaning of a paid pro-government flack.

Within several moments a dissident flashed the address of her Chinese offices (Or somebody’s Chinese offices!) upon the Twitter feed screen. The event ended soon after this exchange, but it seems possible that the lady may come to regret her inquiry, and her openness.

But even if the dissidents do not follow up, the mere fact of having been publicly threatened with Ren Rou is certainly a violation of democratic principles which illustrates the almost random nature of some flash conflicts now facilitated by interactive social media and the World Wide Web.

Altogether the presentation was a wonderful real-live example of social networking technologies. But it also very clearly demonstrates the difficulty of typifying Cyber conflicts. Any of the participants on either side, dissident or pro-Chinese government, could well engage in retributive or revenge-driven hacking or harassment, and if successful cause an international incident.

If, for example, someone from China attacks some of Mr. Ai’s sites, or those of the Asia Society or the Paley Media Center, will some see such an attack as committed, organized or encouraged by the Chinese government, when it may merely be a Chinese teen-ager inflamed with patriotism?

On the other hand, if the Chinese businesswoman is attacked online, will this suggest an attack from Mr. Ai himself, from the Tibetan independence movement or from overseas Chinese dissidents? Or will it merely be a Chinese dissident youth desiring to court one of the other dissidents whom he met via the Twitter feed at the event by establishing his heroic bone fides and demonstrating his hacker skills?

This confusion is an inevitable problem with the Web and with social networking. Such conflicts as these are unprecedented and to try to force them into conventional analysis involving state conflict and the metaphor of war is usually senseless and misleading. Cyber War is a term which should be restricted to clearly established state-to-state digital attacks. As these are so difficult to attribute, the term is effectively meaningless.

Cyber Vigilantism seems a more appropriate term, with its overtones of righteous individuals taking the law into their own hands. But, as this event shows, Cyber Vigilantism knows no ethical boundaries. Many readers are probably drawn more to the youthful dissidents than to the Chinese government’s side, but either side is capable of behaving in a pronouncedly undemocratic fashion, even in a retributive one.

The Web has taken actions which earlier could be safely described as bullying or slander, behavior usually restricted by law if not by editors in a print environment, into an international, open and largely anonymous environment. It is very important that we are very cautious not to read too much into such incidents, as they will happen increasingly.

Moreover, we need a descriptive typology of digital conflicts which helps us distinguish between the important and the jejune. Suggestions and definitions from the reader are welcome at comments below.

The Rise of China: The Return of the Yellow Peril and the Red Threat.

Recent events in Portland have given me additional insights into local attitudes toward China.  Several different levels of anti-Chinese opinion became clear after I responded to a local Portland event—the proclamation of “Tibet Awareness Day.”[i]

Immediately following the events of early March, I learned as an active Asianist in the local community that the Chinese consulate in San Francisco was very alarmed.  The events must have been doubly shocking to the consulate, which had sent a representative at the invitation of the local business community no more than eight weeks previously to see Portland for himself and, presumably, to encourage trade and investment between Portland and China.  Consular representatives returned hurriedly to Portland to try to negotiate the scale of the events so as to make them less a civic commitment to Tibetan independence.  This was, however, the purpose of the celebration for the Tibetan community, and agreed with the personal beliefs of the local sponsors.

The Tibetan community and their local supporters then made the events into a major media affair. In previous years, earlier mayors had also observed the anniversary, but in a much lower-key way than the current mayor chose to do, at the urging of a City Councilman.

After the Chinese tried to negotiate, quite without bluster or threats insofar as I am aware, the sponsors then became outraged at what they portrayed as Chinese attempts to interfere in local affairs. Given that the city had just publically celebrated the CIA-supported 1959 uprising against the Chinese government in Tibet, this seemed to me to be both ironic and naïve.[ii]

I wrote an op-ed piece for the local major paper, The Oregonian, which published it on their web site, in the section known as “The Stump,” but not in the hard copy editions. While I am uncertain as to how long the piece, and the extended discussion which followed it will remain on the web, it can currently be seen at: http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2010/03/portland_tibet_and_china_the_c.html

The experience of writing the piece and seeing the resultant commentary was a highly educational one for me. I had tried to make two points in less than five hundred words: first, that the Chinese were going to be fairly outraged because our formal civic support for an armed uprising would bring back Chinese fears of American sponsorship of dissident groups reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War. And secondly, I argued that the Chinese very probably would respond economically, potentially causing the loss of jobs in Oregon. China is our largest trading partner.

These two points were totally lost to several angry readers, excerpted below. They, it seems to me, in fact favored Tibetan independence and refused to consider the issue of overt American involvement in that 1959 rising. Interestingly, most responses preferred to believe that there would be no costs for our righteous indignation; the Chinese would not respond—no jobs would be lost.

There was also, among the responses, a skein of belief that ethics trumped jobs in any event—these were possibly associated with non-materialist Tibetan readers. I myself favor this position, at least with regard to my own employment—I prize the Buddhist notion of “Right Livelihood” and feel fortunate as an educator to have found such.  However, I do have ethical difficulty in recommending the practice to other, unknown, Oregonians.  These days, too many people justifiably feel that any Livelihood is better than no Livelihood.

These events gave me a chance to hear voiced a variety of opinions about China. I emphatically do not suggest that the comments replying to my piece are at all representative of Portlanders. I propose to discuss the issue of Tibetan independence below, very briefly. First, however, I want to discuss the elements of anti-Chinese sentiments revealed in those responses.

There are many factors contributing to the rise of anti-Chinese sentiment, I think. For example, I have been arguing for some time that anti-Chinese sentiment is on the rise in the United States because the “rise of China” is more than vaguely threatening to established nations, particularly to THE established nation, our own. The Chinese have made it quite clear that they favor some changes in the international economic and political systems. This is enough cause for a rise in anti-Chinese sentiments; however, it does not determine the direction that these fears might take, nor the language in which they could be expressed.

It would be possible, for example, to accuse the Chinese of legal violations of international laws and agreements, or even to make ethical arguments about their undoubted violations of international norms, and some respondents did one or both of these. However, among such arguments we also find anti-Chinese racism, which has considerable history in the United States. Also obvious were fears derived from the Cold War (underlining if anything my own belief that recent events must surely have provoked similar Chinese fears, the mirror to our own.) In addition, there were fears as to the response of the United States in the face of what was facilely read as Chinese aggression. This evoked belligerent stands again reminiscent of such strains as 19^th century Jingoism—the muscular celebration of nationalism— and anti-foreignism in general. Some of these are oddly reminiscent of 19th century fears of the “Yellow Peril.”

The notion of the “Yellow Peril” was an odd by-product of Social Darwinism in the 19^th century.[iii] This doctrine took Darwinian notions about evolution and the much-misunderstood idea of “survival of the fittest” and raised the competition to a racial level. That is, the “fittest peoples” would survive; the others would not. This doctrine was very appropriate to the times, which were marked by heightened efforts at imperial and colonial expansion, and to the Franco-German conflict, both of which would contribute substantially to World War I. A number of nineteenth century American scholars wrote books which today seem embarrassingly racist, but at the time were thought of as “scientific.”  This doctrine influenced literature, political science, and labor movements, even national policy.[iv]

During the Cold War, fears of China quite naturally made anti-Chinese racism once again salient. However, changes in China after the death of Mao, particularly the very shrewd use of world media by Deng Xiaoping,[v] much reduced racism as the United States entered an era of sometimes-extravagant admiration of China and many things Chinese.

These changes were driven, as is so often the case when Americans think about China, by our own extravagant hopes. Americans always seem to want one of two things for China: that it fall apart in a violent collapse, or that it become “like us.”  Fears of Mao fueled the former hope; greed for the China market, the latter.

Now, after China has become an economic powerhouse, and particularly following the American-led destruction of the Western banking system, China does not seem so cuddly. It seems probable that it has found a third path, neither collapsing nor becoming like us, but rather succeeding on its own terms.  Under these conditions, it is not surprising that primordial racism is back.  Other examples of anti-Chinese sentiment are also increasing nationally.

Here follow some local examples from the responses to my public opinion piece, stripped of authorship so as to protect the identities of the writers:

“So, you are one of the local Chinese business leaders who were alarmed right away and met Randy questioning his support to Tibet. You people are worried about your own existence and want to cover your ass by showing the CCP that you are fighting for them. Come onm (sic) if so much sympathy to China, go and live there but please do not spread your malicious thinking to us Portlanders. A rotten fish spoils the whole tank. You people are disgusting and selfish who can sell your conscience for business.”

This author also touched on a common Cold War trope: that to understand China is automatically to sympathize with it, or worse, indications that one is directly in its employ:

“Your point about China will retaliate, wait and see. How are you so sure about this? Seems like you either have a past experience or have connections in China? “

Another wrote:

“And as expected Prof Barlow is a founding member of Northwest China Council and he visits China quite often it seems. So, what can we argue now.”[vi]

Traditional anti-Communism also surfaced in this discussion, though I think it also Darwinian in its tone:

“That’s what Chinese communist wanted, to succumb to their pressure, if we don’t stand up now, time will come when we have no place to stand. And that will be too late for the leader of the free country, AMERICA!!!!!”

Only one piece acknowledged the truth of CIA involvement in those earlier events, but  the author apparently felt that the operations had simply not gone far enough:

Barlow’s portrayal of CIA involvement in Tibet suggests a major campaign, while in fact it did little to affect anything within Tibet. The Tibetan people cried out in vain for international aid, for any help in stopping the slaughter and the attempted destruction of their culture. It was precisely because of the Cold War that America declined to help, as they didn’t want to trigger an all-out war with China.[vii] It was because of the heroic commitment to freedom of America’s Tenth-Mountain Division, an amazing corps of skillful warriors trained in the mountains of Colorado and Washington, that the Dalai Lama was spirited out of harm’s way from the grasp of the totalitarian Chinese communists, and they had barely enough funding from the CIA to pull it off. They might have saved all Tibetans from such a fate, but voices against intervention prevailed and left the poor peaceful Tibetans to witness the killing of their monks and other brothers and sisters without aid. For Barlow to portray the Tenth Mountain Division’s historic rescue as a simple political chess-move in opposition of Chinese power doesn’t do justice to the commitment to doing the right thing that those heroes exhibited.

Another theme was to call for a strong local response to Chinese attempts to “interfere:”

Kudos to Mayor Adams and Comissioner Leonard for standing up against the chinese. Portland is an american city and they have no business of tellin us what and what not to do! We can’t be waggin our tails everytime they come barking. They stand to loose millions too so its not a one sided coin. Don’t freak out and bring your superflous theories. Atleast applaud them for standing up for the American principle and supporting a just cause. Just because we do business with the chinese doesnt mean that we have to please and kowtow to their demands all the time. Yahoooooooooooooo!!! (Grammar and spelling errors are in the original.)

This current posting may well kick off another round of discussion dealing with the legitimacy of the Chinese claim to Tibet so I will discuss it briefly here.  I am a great admirer of doomed causes. The Tibetan one is particularly romantic. Its romantic appeal is based in part it on late 19^th century and early 20^th century anti-Modernism which idealized the little-known Tibet as an idyllic refuge from the emerging clanking horror of industrialization. On the other, Tibet has acquired new standing in pop-culture. In addition, it is greatly facilitated by the cyber-enabled idealism of Tibetan youth in the diasporas of Tibetans into India, Europe, and the United States.

But, however often some governments and agencies may make use of it for their own limited purposes, as the CIA did in the 1950’s and 1969’s, no country will ultimately support extensive ethnic reorganizations of other nations, particularly powerful ones like China.  This is because almost none, including the United States, can afford to have its claims to its current borders closely examined, and logically, to question one such country’s claims, would require examining all.

I would love to see such a tribunal convened, and would look forward to discussions between modern French people and my ancestors’ home, Provence. A real discussion also would be desirable over the rights of native Hawaiians and Native Americans, and with Mexico over Texas, with China over Tibet, of course, and over every map change in Africa since Europeans first landed. But this is not going to happen.

Each one of us believes, however, in the righteousness of our claims and would like to have them supported by others. But to distinguish our claims from those clamoring others, we invariably demonize our particular oppressor, the better to valorize those claims so as to keep our group united and solid in its opinion, and in search of external support.

I have a major objection to romantic gestures made by those who are safely distant from the fray and have no intention of getting any closer: They encourage others to take the risks.  As I told one of the respondents:

“We both know that the U.S. is not going to really commit itself to Tibetan independence. Yet, in Tibet, even meaningless romantic gestures like the recent proclamation, can build false hopes. Many Tibetans surely remember that once the American did support their cause, with guns, money, and training. If they read our local events to mean that the game is on again, they could be imprisoned, or worse. To encourage them with no chance whatsoever of support is cruel and dangerous.”

The fact is that few local politicians are going to lose the chance to gain a reputation “standing up” to China while wrapping the mantle of human rights around themselves at no cost. Not only do such claims trip so many different strains of anti-Chinese sentiments as shown above, and bring together so many interests groups, from anti-abortionists to die-hard anti-communists but by the time the bill comes due on senseless gestures such as these, they will have moved on, letting others pay those bills, perhaps with their jobs, perhaps risking their own safety.  As tensions with China increase, we will see more of these examples, I think.

For those who want to truly understand the complexity of the issues which were vastly over simplified by the Portland proclamation, here are some resources.[viii]

[ii] I am not attributing sole or even primary agency to the CIA as the cause of those risings. Rather I am arguing that to the Chinese, as well as to the Tibetans of that period, the risings could not be separated from the Cold War and the threat of direct American involvement in dissident movements.

[iii] A good source for an overview of these ideas can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Darwinism Having recently been pilloried for utilizing Wikipedia sources, an issue apparent in the responses to my piece in The Oregonian, let me explain my use of Wikipedia. The WWW challenges us all to utilize web sources with great care, and to determine their relative authority as a source for serious research. As an historian, I have taught these skills, and as the founding editor of The Journal of History and Computing, I developed a system for evaluating and signaling such authority. See it as modified at the Berglund Center, at: http://bcis.pacificu.edu/journal/submissions/authoritylevel.php I used this particular Wikipedia article cited above, because, having taught several seminars and workshops on racism and Social Darwinism, I find this particular Wikipedia entry fully satisfactory. It has not, so far as I know, been peer-reviewed so it cannot be awarded our highest level of “5” but it is more than satisfactorily founded in good research and its author is familiar not only with the original materials but with very useful secondary analysis. In short, you can trust this site as a good introduction to the ideas, and as a useful place to begin your own deeper research should you wish to do so.  The authors are not known as we prefer in awarding a level of 4 but they can be contacted via the many Wikipedia functions for interactive writing. If you object to the article, post your suggestions for useful changes and cite your sources.  The same is true for this piece that I am writing here….

Please note that there is a Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_Peril which I do not cite; it simply ranges too widely and is not based in a substantial bibliography but rather depends on other WWW pages, which leads a reader to have to follow up those sources in order to use the first source with any confidence. It has some useful graphics, and a general discussion, which in my hasty overview seems useful, but it is not authoritative. If you worry about Wikipedia authority, look at the two articles together and see why a savvy researcher—ahem—might cite the first but not the second.

[iv] For an interesting example of this, see: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9B0DE1DB103DE633A25756C1A9659C946597D6CF

[v] See his Time Man of the Year cover at: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/timedeng122208.jpg His frequent use of a Texas-style “cowboy hat” is also well represented at: http://blogs.houstonpress.com/hairballs/timedeng122208.jpg

[vi] As mentioned at the head of this piece, the Northwest China Council is a non-partisan group with no political agenda beyond encouraging mutual understanding between China and the Pacific Northwest. It has businesspeople, Chinese-Americans, educators, former missionaries and soldiers, the intellectually curious and students among its membership. Again I am not speaking for it here, nor was I in the original piece.

[vii] Not true: the operation was because of the reduction of the tensions of the Cold War, a significant difference. The larger operation was ended in the late 1960’s. The operation itself was run during the height of the Cold War and has been called the longest running such covert operation in CIA history.

[viii] For those who wish to know more about background influences on Tibetan issues here are peer-reviewed university press works which I personally have found very useful in understanding the complexity of the problem. All are available at Amazon.com.

William Siebenschuh (Author), Tashi Tsering and Goldstein, Melvyn C.  The Struggle for Modern Tibet: The Autobiography of Tashi Tsering (Paperback)

Reviews of this book from Amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly:

This captivating autobiography by a Tibetan educator and former political prisoner is full of twists and turns. Born in 1929 in a Tibetan village, Tsering developed a strong dislike of his country’s theocratic ruling elite. As a 13-year-old member of the Dalai Lama’s personal dance troupe, he was frequently whipped or beaten by teachers for minor infractions. A heterosexual, he escaped by becoming a drombo, or homosexual passive partner and sex-toy, for a well-connected monk. After studying at the University of Washington, he returned to Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1964, convinced that Tibet could become a modernized society based on socialist, egalitarian principles only through cooperation with the Chinese. Denounced as a “counterrevolutionary” during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, he was arrested in 1967 and spent six years in prison or doing forced labor in China. Officially exonerated in 1978, Tsering became a professor of English at Tibet University in Lhasa. He now raises funds to build schools in Tibet’s villages, emphasizing Tibetan language and culture. Written with Goldstein, head of Case Western Reserve’s anthropology department, and Siebenschuh, a Case English professor, this unusual autobiography valiantly suggests a middle way between authoritarian Chinese rule and a return to Tibet’s old order. Photos. Copyright 1997 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

The considerable value of Tashi’s briskly told life story is that it complicates our view of modern Tibet. Born in a Tibetan village in 1929, Tashi wrested the opportunity to study in India and the United States before returning to China in 1964 against the advice of his friends. A freethinking liberal and patriot, he mistrusted the Tibetan government-in-exile and naively viewed the Chinese occupation as an opportunity to modernize his tradition-bound homeland. But he was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution and prevented from returning to Tibet until 1981, when he finally got a university job teaching English. His is a harrowing but remarkably unbitter story with a happy ending for him, if not for Tibet. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries. Steven I. Levine, Boulder Run Research, Hillsborough, N.C.

Additional readings:

A History of Modern Tibet, 1913-1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State by Melvyn C. Goldstein

A History of Modern Tibet, volume 2: The Calm before the Storm: 1951-1955 (Philip E. Lilienthal Books) by Melvyn C. Goldstein

The Snow Lion and the Dragon: China, Tibet, and the Dalai Lama by Melvyn C. Goldstein

Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West by Donald S. Lopez (Paperback – May 1, 1999)

For a very different take on traditional Tibetan monastic culture see:

http://gaytibet.blogspot.com/2009/08/homosexuality-marriage-and-religion-in.html

tThese pieces are from Foreign Policy, a well-established journal: CHRISTINA LARSON  “Tibet Is No Shangri-La” And the Dalai Lama is not what you think.,  FEBRUARY 15, 2010  at: href=”http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/15/tibet_is_no_shangri_la?page=0,0″>http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/02/15/tibet_is_no_shangri_la?page=0,0 See also: WEN LIAO ‘Why the Dalai Lama Needs to Get Real,” Advocates of Tibetan rights are disappointed that Barack Obama has chosen not to meet with the holy man who carries their banner. But they should be learning from the U.S. president’s pragmatism instead. SEPTEMBER 23, 2009  FOREIGN POLICY: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/23/why_the_dalai_lama_needs_to_get_real?page=0,0
As always, comments are welcome here…

I am a few weeks late in posting the piece I promised myself, “Why some Chinese don’t like the United States.” Good I delayed, though, because in the meantime my very own Portand, Oregon, has created an epically silly and typically confused example of what many Chinese see as our standard behavior. I hope eventually to pull it all together and write an objective piece. However, this is not that piece; this is a rant. Readers are hereby warned.

Let me first engage in some prolepsis:  I am, on alternate days, a Buddhist—and on the alternate days a Methodist, which thankfully is quite irrelevant to this piece.

I have not only talked the Buddhist talk in forty years of teaching Asian Studies, but also walked the walk, chanted the chant, sat quietly until my knees screamed and held a short (but enlightening) conversation with a Buddhist image after a week of meditating and eating nothing but tofu. I spent a week in retreat at the Bo Lin (Precious Lotus) Temple on Lan Tau Island in Hong Kong.  I have visited Buddhist temples in Taiwan, China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Thailand, Japan, Korea, and the United States—oh, and in Cambodia, too.  I have smuggled out messages from and donated to temples in some of these countries. I have defended in print the right of Zen Buddhists to build a retreat along the Columbia river, worked an entire summer on a project to build a huge interactive web site teaching the core beliefs of Buddhism and…and…well hopefully you get the point: Om Mani Padme Hum, and all that. This piece is not about Buddish Self-hatred. Awful pun there, but that is what this issue has done to me.

Oregon has done a pretty good job of walking a tight line in dealing with China for quite some time. There was a point when the U.S. still formally recognized Taiwan as the government of all of China, and yet many local businesspeople saw clearly where the really big market was going to be. Our then Governor, Vic Atiyeh, managed to open negotiations with China while formally observing the niceties with Taiwan. We have since sent dozens if not hundred of trade delegations and received dozens if not hundreds more.

China is, as a result, now Oregon’s largest trading partner (See: http://oregonecon.blogspot.com/2009/10/oregon-trade-is-chinas-economy-helping.html where China is given credit for helping the local economy rebound after the disasters of 1908-09) It recently passed Canada as the largest recipient of our exports. (See http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2010/02/oregon_exports_down_sharply_–.html)

In addition, our ties with China have proven very advantageous to Oregon in many other ways. Portland’s Chinese sister city, Suzhou, has given substantial help in the construction of our local Chinese Gardens, now one of our biggest draws. The museum regularly hosts exhibits from China, Chinese are far the largest group of overseas students, at many local colleges and universities (at least one Oregon state college gives Chinese students credit for keeping it afloat) etc., etc.

Now comes blundering forth Randy Leonard and Sam Adams, city commissioner and embattled mayor of Portland respectively, to proclaim that today, March 10, 2010 is:

CITY OF PORTLAND

Whereas on March 10, 2010, Tibetans throughout the world will be observing the Tibetan National Day to honor the Tibetans who died in their struggle for freedom and to reaffirm the independence of Tibet; and

Whereas: the suppression of unique and ancient culture, human rights and freedom of Tibet continues to be viewed with concern by all freedom-laving people everywhere; and

Whereas the Northwest Tibetan Cultural Association is a non-profit organization to preserve, promote and continue Tibetan culture and traditions throughout Oregon and southwest Washington; and

Whereas today we join the Tibetan community in Oregon to commemorate the 51st anniversary of Tibetan National Day and to show solidarity with the people of Tibet; and ‘

Whereas on March 10, 2010, there will be a celebration in partnership with the Northwest Tibetan Cultural Association at Portland City Hall to observe Tibetan National Day; and

Therefore, I, Sam Adams, Mayor of the City of Portland, Oregon, the “City of Roses,” do hereby proclaim Wednesday, March 10,2010 to be

Tibetan Awareness Day

Well, you might ask, what is wrong with a harmless cultural observance such as this?  And I answer: it amounts to a support of Tibetan independence from China.

The Tibetan community itself celebrates this date as “Uprising Day” (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_Uprising_Day) to commemorate the 1959 uprising against the Chinese government. The entire Portland event, as well as the complex of ideas under-girding it, amounts to a belief that the fact that Tibet is politically and culturally a part of China and has been so for a very long time, is not only illicit but also reversible.

This is no place to try to persuade supporters of these two positions that they are each untrue. For now I will simply assert that China’s claims to Tibet are as justifiable as are American claims to Hawaii. Both, of course, are disputed. (Doubt that? Check out a few of the 2,160,000 entries for the search string “Hawaiian Independence” at: http://www.google.com/search?q=hawaiian+independence&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a)

Both claims of independence are also, alas for the romanticists among us, quite irreversible. To my knowledge, no nation in the world recognizes Tibet as independent. The current Tibetan independence movement is an artifact of American pop culture and the consequence of a history of CIA involvement resulting from the Cold War.

It is this last fact which most disturbs the Chinese. In the 19^th and 20^th century China, weakened by internal turmoil and foreign imperialism, lost direct control of Tibet, principally to the British, coming ultimately out of India. Then in 1949 China began slowly under the new People’s Republic to reassert its traditional influence. Then, in 1956 it sent in military forces to reclaim direct control.  The Chinese control was violent and brutal and the United States used unrest in Tibet as a weapon in the Cold War, then at its height. Knowing that this analysis will seem to many like leftist cant, I cite a variety of sources below.

The uprising of 1959, in particular, came after several years of CIA involvement including the training and arming of Tibetan rebels, not only in India, but also from 1959-1964 in Colorado as well. The CIA continued to supply funding for the Dalai Lama, to the tune of 1.7 million a year at least through the 1960’s. (See http://www.nytimes.com/1998/10/02/world/world-news-briefs-dalai-lama-group-says-it-got-money-from-cia.html?pagewanted=1)

I am not arguing here that the Chinese governance of Tibet has been a bed of lotuses for Tibet, especially for organized religion. Particularly during the madness of the Cultural Revolution (1958-68) the Chinese treated the Tibetans at least as badly as they treated their own people, attempting to break down traditional culture and ethnic identification to create a “socialist man.” However, overall, the positive consequences for health, longevity, productivity, women’s rights, education—all the measures of well-being in a modernizing society, are clear.

Neither am I arguing that all CIA involvement at any times or even at that time was necessarily evil. Rather, my position is that times have changed, and to now celebrate the earlier uprising reopens old wounds, in a context which is quite different than that of the Cold War.

The Chinese then, have their reasons for seeing foreign involvement in the Tibetan independence movement as a true cause for alarm. It is nothing less than a reminder of the worst attempts at interference on the part of the United States in Chinese internal affairs during the entire Cold War.

This past week, the Chinese government, acting through its consulate in San Francisco has been, I believe, quite rational in trying to minimize the impact of the Portland Proclamation on relations with Oregon. They asked that it not be done, that it not be a city function, that it not be treated as a civic act. Councilman Leonard, was repeatedly told by representatives of the local Chinese-American community, the Suzhou Sister City Association and the Northwest China Council—a group I helped found and of which I am currently a member, but for which I do not speak here—that these events were bound to hurt Oregon-China trade.

Leonard then in essence accused the Chinese of interfering in the internal affairs of Portland. He then told the local Willamette Week, “If it means selling out our city’s principles, I don’t want that business, frankly…” (http://wweek.com/popup/print.php?index=13783 3/10/2010)

What could explain Leonard and Adams’ attitudes? Partly it is sheer ignorance of the long-term history of Tibet and of China. For them, as for nearly all Americans, the history of Tibet begins with the Chinese re-entry in 1956. Until then Tibet was Shangri-la, a highly mythologized and romanticized kingdom of sage kings. Accompanying this image is a romantic notion of Tibetan Buddhism. Never mind that Tibetan Buddhism is heavily mixed with a very primitive Bon shamanism, that the monastic life depended upon the literal enslavement of the surrounding peasantry; it all comes down to the smiling visage of the Dalai Lama, friend of rock bands and Hollywood stars with his splendid designer glasses and Western dental work and, through his Hollywood contacts, access to the best flacks in the world.

Probably most important is explaining our local ignorance, however, is a total lack of awareness that history happens, that things not only change, but have changed. We now live in a global world and China has been hustling for decades now to adapt itself to that fact; never as fast as the idealists among us would like, but their progress is undeniable. But for us, America still reigns supreme, or as Leonard repeatedly stated to some of the local groups who spoke with him, words to the effect that he would not be told what to do, especially by foreigners.

And the Chinese are not just any foreigners. If the Tibetans are the idealized whooping primitives against whom we measure our own weary march on the treadmill of modernization, the Chinese are for many still Fu Manchu and Ming the Merciless, the “Other.” Never mind that most of the world sees us as far more dangerous than China, they are, after all, foreigners too. It is likely that no local American politician can go wrong by “standing up” to China. It is only national politicians who have to worry about trade balances and treaties. Randy and Sam are the 21^st century equivalent of George Wallace, standing in the door of globalization, telling the colored folk to settle down and listen to Daddy.

It is hard to see how all this might come out well for all of us, though it has certainly worked out well for the Tibetan community. Tibetan refugee propaganda organs in Dharamsala reported on the Portland events as they happened (See: Kalsang Rinchen “China meddles in Portland’s proclamation of March 10 as Tibet Awareness day” Phayul Dharamsala, March 9 as reported in Randy Leonard’s WWW page at: http://www.portlandonline.com/leonard/)

Word will be circulating wildly in Tibet that the Americans are back in the Great Game. We have to hope that the result is not more violence there, at the cost, of course, of Tibetan lives.  But, as I have written many times, we Americans are particularly good at letting others pay the costs of our romantic gestures before we get bored and go home to sit down to a nice dinner.

I have to assume that the Chinese will respond, and suppose that the logical soft spot is the trade which we so badly need.  The most recent more or less open conflict with China was the early November, 2009, decision of the Obama administration to sell Taiwan 6 billions of arms.  China quickly announced that it would buy 17.4 billion dollars worth not of Boeing planes as it was widely assumed they would, but European Airbuses. The potential total of sales of planes for the Chinese markets is worth 400 billion to Boeing. Or was, anyway.

Any problems involving the China trade will quickly cascade through a surprising number of Oregon businesses. There is already plenty of reason to believe that relationships which have taken decades to build are being shattered. I cannot cite sources on these, because part of my information is confidential sorts of stuff received from members of the local Chinese-American and business communities.  But take it from me, the damage is snowballing rapidly. And it will expand far outside of Portland, to affect Oregon in general.

Take, again, for example, the Boeing issue. Recently Boeing cancelled a large contract with a local McMinnville firm, Evergreen International Aviation. The contract was shifted to an east coast firm, Atlas. This cancellation will affect directly the jobs of some 75 pilots, mechanics and ground handlers and potentially another 200 or so employees who are also involved. (See Nicole Montesano, “Boeing yanks big Evergreen contract” The Yamhill Valley News-Register, 03/08/2010)

The timing of the cancellation strongly suggests connections to the earlier China sales Boeing lost due to the Taiwan arms debacle. (See Dominic Gates “Boeing drops Oregon operator for its Dreamlifter fleet” The Seattle Times, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2011259198_dreamlifter03.html?syndication where it is made clear that “One factor may be Atlas’ pending order for 12 new 747-8 cargo planes. Because of a severe contraction in the air-cargo market over the last couple of years, Boeing has been negotiating intensely with the initial customers, including Atlas, to reschedule 747-8 deliveries.”) When the Taiwan issue provoked the Chinese to substitute Airbusses for the 747 orders, Boeing had to reconsider the contract with Evergreen, and moved it to Atlas, thus buffering the lost China sales, or so the timing suggests.

Moreover, living as we are in a globalized world, there are additional factors involving the China trade which may impact Evergreen. As a spokesman for Evergreen explained: “We take military freight outbound, to the Middle East primarily, to Iraq and Afghanistan, and then position ourselves into China,” he said. “We bring cargo from China to the U.S., primarily to Chicago and the New York area.”

Any diminution in China trade into Oregon will surely hurt Evergreen, in effect, both coming and going. I assume we have to recognize that if the Chinese don’t want to buy our exports, they don’t have to, anymore than we have to buy theirs. Though, of course, we can always accuse them of coercion by not wanting our trade.

So perhaps we will soon have a Leonard-Adams downturn in the Oregon economy. If so, I hope that those who lose their jobs over Randy’s ethical stand remember that these are our “city’s principals.”  We hope that the knowledge of having been sacrificed for higher principles will be a great comfort. Hopefully Richard Gere, Paris Hilton, Sharon Stone, and many popular singers will pitch in. Maybe his Holiness the Dalai Lama will spin a few prayer wheels. Maybe even the CIA will come out of retirement to support them?

Sources on CIA involvement in Tibet:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1959_Tibetan_uprising
http://www.historynet.com/cias-secret-war-in-tibet.htm http://www.naderlibrary.com/cia.secret.war.whale.htm entire book found at: http://www.naderlibrary.com/cia.secret.war.htm

My personal favorite among sites is here, where you can view a clip of former CIA agents chuckling appreciatively over their hi-jinks in Tibet. Here is the Stanford Library’s summary of the contents of the tapes: http://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/5077571 Videorecording of “Shadow Cireus: The CIA in Tibet;  Summary: “When Communist China marched into Tibet in 1949, Tibetans took up arms against the invading forces. Unknown to most, from the mid-1950s to 1969 the CIA armed, financed, and trained Tibetan guerrillas in an effort to curtail the expansion of communism. This project, code named ST Circus, was one of the CIA’s longest-running covert operations. To the dismay of Tibetan soldiers, the CIA pulled out their support when the U.S. decided that ST Circus was no longer in the best interest of America’s political and economic agenda.”

A related site is found at: http://www.ciaintibet.com/about_project.htm “CIA in Tibet  The Inside story of Tibet’s Guerrila War Against China and the Covert CIA Operation that Backed it.  See film clip

See also: Paul Salopek, “U.S. Recruited Exiles For Secret War In Tibet — Rebel Brigade Fought For CIA Against China” at: http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=19970209&slug=2523109

For links between the Dalai and CIA, in addition to the NYT article cited above, see: http://www.straight.com/article/dalai-lamas-links-to-cia-still-stir-debate

This is an introduction to a series of articles I plan to write over the next several weeks. My purpose is simply to try to explain to Americans why some Chinese, not entirely unreasonably, do not like the United States, or at least important elements of its history, culture, and past behavior in Asia.

The immediate cause for this series is that the “Rise of China” is being accompanied by increasing tension in recent months; some Americans might find this rather surprising as they have been blinded in the last several years (after the period when “Red” came somehow to mean a Republican voter and not a Godless Commie…) by systematic misconceptions.  The current assertiveness of China, then, can easily seem to be a betrayal of sorts.

There are other Americans,  far more numerous, who have never stopped fearing, hating, or perhaps simply misunderstanding China. Over the last decade there has been an increasing disconnect between popular views of China in America, and those of people with serious sustained interest in foreign policy (http://www.cfr.org/).  This material, reprinted from a PEW survey, clearly indicates the distance between these two groups:

“The quadrennial survey of foreign policy attitudes, conducted among the general public and members of the Council on Foreign Relations finds broad recognition of China’s growing power. But the public takes a far less benign view of China’s rise than do the members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

For CFR members, China has been transformed from a major threat to the United States to an increasingly important future ally. Just 21% of CFR members view China’s emergence as a world power as a major threat to the United States. In 2001, 38% of foreign policy opinion leaders said that China’s emergence was a major threat, as did 30% in 2005.” (From “U.S. Seen as Less Important, China as More Powerful” Isolationist Sentiment Surges to Four-Decade High.  December 3, 2009 found at:  http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1428/america-seen-less-important-china-more-powerful-isolationist-sentiment-surge

This information and its changes over time is shown in this table:

The danger of this disconnect, in an infotainment-sensitive democracy such as ours, is that politicians—whose foreign policy advisors at least know better—must pander to isolationist and sometimes downright prejudiced voters. And the Teabag Right, of course, will be driven even farther right in an effort to not only play upon but to increase public fears.

One of the surprises, best shown in the above table, is that over the years from 2001 to 2009, there have been only slight increases in the percentage of the public who view China as a “major threat,” from 51% to 53%. Whereas the Council on Foreign Relations’ members, reliably knowledgeable and informed, have moved substantially away from that sentiment, from 38% in 2001 down to 21% in late 2009.

This is interesting for several reasons: First, it seems that anti-Chinese public sentiment is not much influenced by the media. From 2001 to 2009, favorable coverage of China in the American press has increased enormously as China came to seem increasingly to be “more like us.” But it is likewise surprising that while much unfavorable coverage on China also appeared in that period—coverage about Chinese food scandals, oppression of minorities, etc., etc.,—It apparently caused at most a small increase in public fears of China.

This leads me to hypothesize, as is often believed by scholars to be true, that public sentiment toward China has far more to do with American history and culture than with the realities of China. For Americans, China has long served as an “other”—the fearsome alternative to our lives and our institutions.

Here follows what I personally believe to be the underlying views of many Americans about China:

The View of Many Americans:

• That there is only one path to economic progress and development, and that is free market capitalism—which, of course, we unquestionably have.
• That since China is developing, they must have changed their system and adopted ours.
• Therefore they should play by our rules—these are, after all, we believe, the natural laws of free-market capitalism. Any failure to do so is viewed by us, as a deliberate violation of the proper order of things.
• And, moreover, the Chinese should be grateful to us and acknowledge our contribution to their success.
• OR China should and will collapse into chaos, which probably will  eventually and painfully lead to democracy as we know it.

This complex of views overlays in many cases, I think, a much more primitive set of antagonisms compounded of American nativism, racism, and simplistic anti-Communism which might better be called Anti-Godless Communism.

In addition, even on what we might loosely term the “Left” there are many liberals so deeply committed to single-issues, such as Tibetan independence, female equality, a free and open Internet, the human rights of all people everywhere, that although they might be aghast at the notion of the violent or planned overthrow of the Chinese government with all the suffering that would entail, would nonetheless probably see China as having made its own bed and invite all Chinese, innocent or guilty of the above crimes, to lie in it.

The disconnect, between the remarkably stable negative fears of China and the declining fears of foreign policy elites, sets up a classical conflict that we have seen in Sino-American relations in many different forms and on several different occasions. As Chinese become more assertive, incidents like the Google hacking, the U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and the retaliatory Chinese purchase of airbusses rather than Boeing jets will continue to accumulate,  negative perceptions will increasingly  dominate positive ones and 50%+ of the public will feel confirmed in its stubborn fears of China. The more moderate and better informed elites represented by experts at all levels will be dismissed, once again, as easily gulled eggheads, or as pro-Chinese sycophants, socialists, or simply as anti-American.

For their part, those sympathetic to China, but without a deep understanding of Chinese history and culture, will be surprised by the surfacing of underlying Chinese views toward Americans derived from the Chinese past.

The View of Many Chinese: To the Chinese, conditions have changed dramatically; the problem as they see it, is that American attitudes have not. The Chinese do not see themselves as haven “risen” —but as “returning” to an eminence they long enjoyed for more than a thousand years before the 19^th nineteenth century. They also feel that the free-market system which we extol has recently been run upon the rocks by greedy Americans who carried the system to its point of collapse. Under these new conditions, it is now appropriate that China begin to speak and act with more force commensurate with its own success.

Behind Chinese success, moreover, there lurk a number of negative attitudes, derived from their history and their culture, about the United States.  Many of these are derived from historical events, some occurring well before the U. S. was even founded and some before it became a world power after World War I. Hence to Americans, these seem totally irrelevant.

But to many Chinese, and to all educated ones (and nearly all Chinese who exercise power and influence in China are highly educated; the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party probably has more PhD or graduate engineers on it than any other governing body in the world) these are not merely ancient history, but critical influences upon the current situation.

CONCLUSION:

To make good policy in the United States, and to maintain a stable Sino-American relationship will not be easy in this tumultuous context.

In the next installment of this blog, posting within the week, I will discuss these Chinese attitudes and their basis in reality.

Comments Welcome…

As an historian, and particularly as an historian of China, I am well aware that history can switch gears rather rapidly. Before I left for China in December we had an opportunity to hear an insider..Kurt Campbell, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, speak to a large group which gathered at a “China Town Hall” sponsored by the North West China Council and the National Committee on United States – China Relations via live feed from Washington, D.C. for a 15-minute presentation of updates on U.S. – China relations. We then went on as local China luminaries, including ahem, myself, discussed related topics for an additional two hours or so, joined by vice-Consul Tien of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco.

The presentation by Mr. Campbell  had that insider feeling that always drove me crazy in graduate school, particularly the Q & A portion of the event—mostly East coasters sent in questions, a few from the Mid-West, none from the West coast, where China and Asia are much more of a reality than an abstract question…our Port of Portland lives and dies on Asian trade, quite unlike any East coast ports, for example.

However, Mr. Cambell’s presentation was noteworthy for the extent to which the Cold War seemed, finally and at last, to truly be over.  He had been in China with President Obama in November 2009 and shared a great many insider insights with us. Mr. Campbell was occasionally cautionary, but generally speaking it seemed we were entering a new era in relations with our “Chinese friends,” as he invariably called them. The questions, however, were disconcertingly old school..what about Chinese democracy, freedom, etc.

But what a difference six weeks makes…now I read, there is a new policy—we are going to stand up to China, according to The NYT of January 31, 2010, found at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/01/world/asia/01china.html?scp=3&sq=taiwan%20arms&st=cse

In a story by Helen Cooper, “U.S. Arms for Taiwan Send Beijing a Message” what I have taken for a series of inexplicable unconnected blunders–the Taiwan arms sales announcements, the administration weighing into the Google imbroglio, the upcoming happy talk with the Dalai Lama, and now pressures on Chinese currency manipulation turn out to in fact be a coordinated policy. As the article puts it:

“While administration officials sounded a uniform public note, cautioning Beijing not to allow this latest tiff to damage overall relations, some administration officials suggested privately that the timing of the arms sales and the tougher language on Iran was calculated to send a message to Beijing to avoid assumptions that President Obama would be deferential to China over American security concerns and existing agreements.”

So, to twist the old joke about beta releases of software, these seemingly clumsy events were “not bugs, but a policy.”  I personally hope not. If so, they are exactly the wrong way to deal with any sovereign nation, let alone one that pretty much owns you, financially speaking.

I fear that this is not in fact a policy, but a series of events that are forcing the administration to present some sense of cohesion. Otherwise, I have to wonder if Undersecretary Cambell was, in fact, that much of an insider. To suggest that a completely new orientation in U.S. China policy has emerged full-blown in less than six weeks (I heard him on the 16th of December, the Taiwan arms sales were announced on the 22nd (?) of January) is rather alarming.

I also think the public nature of these “messages” is misguided. We cannot know if the Chinese were warned of these events  in advance–certainly there have been many opportunities to do so recently given the numerous discussions over Google, etc. But I have seen no specific mention of anything other than Internet issues in Clinton’s public rhetoric. If quiet diplomacy has failed, we need to know that this is the case. Otherwise this abrupt switch looks like the maladroit abrupt switch that has become all too characteristic of the Obama administration.

My underlying fear is that this supposed policy is being driven more by Obama and his team’s desperate attempts to regain the initiative, not against China, but against the G.O.P. This concatenation of events is being presented as a unified response to an aggressive Beijing. If so, it is very difficult to see any coordination in China’s supposed initiatives. Take a look at what are being held to be China’s provocations:

• Holding up an important element of the last round of agreements on climate; an agreement to specific testable goals.
• The attacks on Google (which China may or may not have initiated).
• Internet freedom in general.
• Refusing to support the U.S. attempts to sanction Iran re nuclear weapons.
• Manipulating the Yuan.

Now the response is to go for the throat, selling weapons once again to Taiwan—and at a time when China-Taiwan ties are at their best since 1949. This is well understood by everybody to be THE single most critical issue in Sino-American relations. It is one which threatens the very legitimacy of the Chinese government. No Chinese government can ever even begin to recognize the loss of its territory, to do so is to place that regime on a par with the do-nothing weakling Chinese governments of the 19th century who stood by as China’s territories were sliced away.

It is also a slap in the face of what China at least believe to be its forbearance in dealing with Taiwan. Patient diplomacy and a few lucky breaks (the return to power of the KMT in Taiwan) have brought the two to the verge of re-integration. Now the U.S. throws not only more bombs into the equation, but Patriot missiles as well.

As reported in the foregoing article by Helen Cooper:

“Some foreign policy experts said that the administration now seemed intent on poking at the sovereignty issues that have long been China’s Achilles’ heel. Mrs. Clinton noted on Friday that Mr. Obama would soon be meeting with the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama — a meeting that White House officials put off last summer to avoid alienating Beijing in advance of Mr. Obama’s China trip. China regards the Dalai Lama as an advocate of Tibetan independence.”

To me, these responses to the earlier supposed provocations by China are much too qualitatively different to represent a coherent policy. Each one of our complaints has to deal with how China conducts its internal business, including its relations with its allies, in this case, Iran. Our response is distressingly Old School.

We are in effect telling China to play by our rules, once again aggregating to ourselves the role of both world policeman and world preacher. Surely a rational policy would have asked of the Chinese some quid pro quo for stalling on the Taiwan arms sales. There was no need to announce them now—the Bush administration waited to the end of its term so as to let the incoming Obama regime deal with the fall-out. Is not, for example, progress on Iranian nukes (and let’s not forget North Korea’s) worth more than delaying arms sales to a Taiwan moving steadily closer to Beijing?

These pressures on China will have a disproportionate outcome here in the United States I think..dragging foreign policy into internal U.S. politics is always risky. While the traditional GOP establishment has usually been quite muted on China as so many of its large donors are quite happy with the status quo RE doing business with China, there is a new gang in town: The Teabaggers. And both the GOP and the DEMS are scurrying to adjust to the supposed lessons of the GOP victory in Massachusetts.

One clear lesson that has emerged from this series of issues is that the U.S. Congress and many Americans are ready for some sort of backlash against China—witness the rise of Google’s stock values following its announcement that it intended to leave. And the charges of the manipulation of the RMB/Yuan segue nicely into protectionist politics in general.

Of course, these announcements, seen as China Bashing by at least some foreign commentators (see for example: “BREAKINGVIEWS-Latest U.S. China-bashing is particularly risky”  http://wp.me/pySML-2P ), will be wildly popular domestically. America is back! All of this talk of decline, of financial weakness, unemployment, trade deficits, mortgage defaults, etc., etc., will be forced off the front page for a good long while.

And what might China do to retaliate in these events? They are no longer under any pressure to respond proportionately as we just violated that rule of diplomacy big time.  I am reluctant to go out on a limb and make a prediction in these weird times—to predict assumes some rationality and perfect information on both sides, and I am no longer confident about our side in these matters, and I know that Beijing and Chinese in general are truly feeling both the ability and the need to force adjustments in the global order, so I do not see them as fully rational either—-but I think that the Chinese response will focus quietly upon Taiwan and may well be related to fiscal issues.

We have just handed both China and Taiwan a golden opportunity to move closer to their mutual advantage. As both  are  Chinese, I think they are meeting quietly at this moment in Fuzhou, Taipei, or Beijing, and that we may not know what the quid pro quo is for some time.  It is clear that Taiwan discussed the arms’ deal with Washington, and despite closer relations with the Mainland, agreed to go ahead with it. Ma Ying-jeou, the President of Taiwan, was in L.A. at the time the announcement of the sales was made in Washington:

“But President Ma Ying-jeou, who was in Los Angeles at the time of the announcement, said that with the weapons, Taiwan will be more confident of defending itself, which will facilitate the development of cross-strait ties, according to his spokesman Tony Wang. (China Post, Taipei, 1/31/2010 at: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/2010/01/31/243007/)

But Taiwan knows that the arms packages are no more than a fig leaf upon her inherent and permanent military weaknesses vis-a-vis China, and this Taiwan government may seize this opportunity to move ahead on cementing ties to the Mainland. It is hard to imagine when they will have a better opportunity to do so, or more to put on the table.

Yamhill, Oregon

Once again I stress that the opinions stated here are my own, and do not represent those of the Berglund Center for Internet Studies, or of Pacific University Oregon.

B

Another discussion of the Google issue de jour, this one an attempt to clarify the question as to who attempted to hack Google. While I hope that this post makes sense by itself, it will be somewhat clearer if you first read my earlier posting, “If Google leaves China, Human Rights and Access to Information will both be net losers”.  Here I want to discuss, at some length, the following three questions:

1) What do we know for certain?

2) If not the Chinese government, then who?

3) Why I think the Chinese government either did it or wants the world to believe that it did.

I myself am inclined to believe it was the Chinese government, or at least that the government wants it believed that it was, for reasons discussed below. But I also believe that there are many other possibilities, and that at bottom, the issue is rather a silly one.

1) First, what do we know for certain? A brief answer here: almost nothing is certain. I accept that there was an incident, or a series or incidents, and these became linked in the media to many other similar incidents in an attempt to make meaning, and to draw audiences.  From there everything gets rather murky.

Even Google’s motives in raising the issue now are disputed. Particularly here in China, Netizens seem mostly to believe that the issue is simply one of Google’s frustration at its local market share, that it is prepared to leave because it was not a winner. This is a very interesting shift in attitudes between Chinese and American people. After many decades of doing outrageous things for the flimsiest of idealistic or ideological reasons, Chinese now see economic explanations as dominate ones.  Americans, after decades of criticizing this Chinese behavior, now believe that Google acted not out of self-interest but out of altruism. One would think that at least Google shareholders would want a slightly stronger explanation, given the potential size of the China market. Weird!

So, accepting Google’s explanations, what do we know about the possible perpetrators?  Again, nothing is certain. This, of course, does not prevent the media from not only speculating, but of presenting speculations as certainties. A number of businesses whose business it is to profit from analyzing or preventing such intrusions contributed their opinions, in some cases, conflicting ones.[i]

Media criticisms of China commonly show some common characteristics, one of which is that the articles, while often being carefully nuanced themselves, rapidly cascade toward certainty as they build upon each other. It is also common now that headlines or article headers proclaim certainty while the content often indicates considerable qualification.

John Markoff’s recent piece in the NYT is almost a classroom example for this sort of process.[ii] The article title fairly screams: “Evidence Found for Chinese Attack on Google” Most readers would, like myself I think, immediately assume a smoking gun. This is the only part of the piece that everybody will read, after that most readers are not going to go much further. Thus we have it, the Chinese government did it!

However, the article itself tells us only that the perpetrators are likely Chinese speakers because the malicious code was in the Chinese language and copied from a source that appeared, it is said, only in a Chinese technical journal. Now we have narrowed the suspects down to no more than several billion people distributed through China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc., right down, I must assume to The New York Times own staff.

Does this in fact prove that the Chinese government did it? The expert being interviewed himself uses numerous qualifiers and finally concludes:  “Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one.” Oh good, that is plenty of evidence upon which to analyze an international incident with unspeakably large potential consequences.

Markoff’s article title could be used to illustrate a few other Western concepts, such as Orientalism, the process of ascribing characteristics to an entire people based on ultimately racist assumptions about them and their cultures.  The term “Chinese” here clearly implies The Chinese Government; but the evidence only suggests Some Chinese Speakers. This argument, of course, may seem a trivially academic one, but bear with me; I am going to build upon it below….

2) If Not the Chinese government, then who?

In my opinion, and like everybody else involved in this incident, I am expressing primarily my opinion: there is as yet no evidence that it was the Chinese government even remotely close to that which might stand up in a court of law.

Markoff’s expert wound up appealing to a medieval argument for good reason; that is about the best that we can do. There are so many ways to loop Internet attacks through the WWW that certainty is finally impossible without something other than electronic evidence.

This attack began, it seems, most directly from a computer based in Taiwan, and from there it has been followed back to mainland computers. This is an awfully simple route. Hackers and spammers in the private black-hat sector routinely use a lot more stages than that. Given purported Chinese control of some critical American sites, it would not have been impossible to pass the attack through pentagon computers, for example.  This is of course, not evidence for anything, merely a surprising quirk in the event.

We are also dealing in guilt by association here.  China is well known as gthe paradise of and for hackers. How can  China so often be involved in significant hacking events if Chinese are not the perpetrators? This question is pretty easy to answer. The Chinese computer system, despite all the media images of highly polished robot-like oriental geeks manning high-tech intrusions posts, is a mess. Once in Wenzhou I sat for an hour and watched 111 attempts to place a virus on my computer, all of which triggered my protective software and told me where the attempts were coming from—from the campus where I was working, even from which computers.

I patiently assembled a list and took it to the tech office. The Director grimaced and apologized.  They knew about those computers, and many more—these were indeed sending out viruses around the clock. Some had been doing so for years.  But his office did not know where the machines themselves were.  He had no record of when and where machines were added, their system had grown so swiftly and often by ad hoc illicit additions, that his office knew very little and was helpless to stop them. He did not have his systems mapped! And was unable to do so. Like most Chinese I.T. directors, he had given up.

Multiply that example by every campus, corporation, and private computer network in China, and it becomes obvious why China may be the world’s most fertile ground for hackers.

If it was the Chinese government acting directly, and there is a strong argument so far not trotted out for it being the ultimate but not the immediate culprit, I think it would have been far more sophisticated, and far more deniable. Google has said that the attack, while prolonged, was easily turned back. I once asked a no more than moderately knowledgeable employee of a private security firm how difficult would it be, if you knew the location, to access something in the Google cloud? The reply was, “About as hard as opening your closet door and rummaging through your clothes.”

The argument that it was the Chinese government has rested, by and large, on the position that only the Chinese government might have done it, or had motive to do it. To me, this is only a step above arguing that Fu Manchu has exited from some fiendish Limehouse device, possibly cryogenic or time-traveling, and is back in the game.

There are, however, a number of other possible perps, in addition to the Chinese government or Fu Manchu. One possible perp is any one of a number of young Chinese hacker-nationalists popularly known as “Angry Youth.” These folks, many acting privately and often for what they think are good nationalist reasons, are actually to the right of the Chinese government now, or would it be to their left?

Anyway, like many American congressmen, they think that the government is just not doing enough to stand up to the bad guys, in this case, the former Western imperialists. Mao once proclaimed, a bit prematurely, “Now the East Wind prevails over the West Wind.” The Angry Youth now respond, decades later: “Cool, time to get some back!”

However flawed their motives may seem to us, they think of themselves as acting righteously and spontaneously in the government’s interests—the 21^st century equivalent of the Boxers, judged to be a patriotic group here.  Perhaps the title Boxers—“The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists,” smacks too much of “back in the day,” so let’s call them “Mousers”.

Do any of the Mousers have the ability?  Oh yeah, unquestionably. They include distributed groups of well-trained and equipped I.T. specialists. They can read and write technical articles, like the one discussed above with the smoking code in it.  They have been cyberjousting with the Iranian hackers who recently took down Baidu for god’s sake.[iii] Google has apparently been searching for government moles in its staff in Beijing, but I trust that they were thoughtful enough to look for Mousers as well.

Other suspects?  Not quite endless, but numerous indeed. There are many reasons for wanting to identify lists of dissidents in China, some of which might seem positive to those bent on regime change.  The CIA, for example. The hacker mirror image of Angry Youth, Dissident Youth. Fa Lun Gong, which once took over Chinese Central Television for most of a day operating, apparently, from a “former” American air base and listening post in Taiwan. Taiwan itself.

If we add a second-level motivation of wanting to discredit the Chinese government, we have all the above plus yet additional figures.

What about those without political motives at all, those simply wanting to make money from intrusions?  Blackmailers?  Commercial rivals? What about Baidu! Microsoft! Yahoo!  If Google leaves, these latter two become players.

Obviously, some of these suggestions are far-fetched indeed, but none can be discounted without consideration, and Occam’s razor will not really sort them out for us.

3) Why I think the Chinese government A) either did it or B) wants the world to believe that it did.

It is not possible for me to sort out these two arguments and choose one, but both rest on a simple premise. The Chinese government knew who the dissidents were and was undoubtedly doing its best to monitor them. (It has been interesting to me that so many dissidents have come forward voluntarily to proclaim their involvement in this matter; things have really changed here, an important fact to remember in these circumstances…) We must also assume that the Chinese government does its best to monitor Gmail out of the mainland, given its proclivity for wanting to know every damned thing about every damned thing.

Moreover, we cannot dismiss the fact  that some of dissidents are serious separatists, even terrorists, the sort of folk we would lock up in a moment if they were Muslims in the U.S.

And while we are on this issue, I am relieved to see that the President announced, again, that he is in favor of the “freedom of the internet.”[iv]

(Barack, if you are reading this, would you mind emailing me your blackberry number? I am going to pass through American customs in about 36 hours, and I understand that they have the right to open my computer and look through it, and I have a bunch of stuff I have downloaded in there, and might want to give you a call if there are any problems! And I read that the FBI recently has been conducting illegal searches on email—including that of some journalists— without bothering to don their usual fig leaf of referring to open terrorism cases. It is bad enougn that they have long been running around with their subpoenas dangling, but reporters! And can I call you and talk to you about that Patriot Act thing???)

By its lights the Chinese government feels it has the moral authority, and knows it has the legal authority, to monitor dissidents. And its lights are often not that different than my government’s lights. Or that of any other competent regime.

It is not really a defense to say that everybody who can does this is doing it, but it should cause us at least to blush a bit when expressing our surprise and outrage.

Given this level of interest in dissidents and its vast facilities—including a labor force recently estimated at 30,000 internet monitors, how can the government not know who did attack Google, even if it did not do so? There are several possible answers here:

A. It does know. It knows because it used off-the-books private Chinese citizens, whether “Angry Youth” or mercenary hackers to do so, permitting it now to deny its agency. If the simplistic Occam’s razor actually has any merit at all, this is the answer right here. Why should the government have exposed itself—and ineptly so—by using its own people and its own machines?

B) The Chinese government knows, but does not bust the perps because it wants the world to believe that it did do it…

I suppose we should also admit the bare possibility of  a third choice:

C) The Chinese government does not know and is clueless, but is happy enough if the world thinks that it did.

What could more discourage dissidents than the image of an omnipotent Chinese government capable even of hacking into Google, the state-of-the-art Western corporation which, incidentally, has bet the farm on the inviolability of its servers and its cloud?  If the dissidents’ email is not safe, neither is your correspondence with your tax attorney, your accountant, or those hot notes from Snookums.  Better cancel that Gmail account!

Uber-Summary:  Google, Chinese government, and American government: Step away from those microphones; put down those mice! Get a grip! Even, you know, compromise? This is too important to stomp  in like Bruce Willis or Jet Li. Remember we have some other issues here: Rogue states with nuclear weapons; Global Warming; International trade, etc., etc., etc.

From Hong Kong, 1/21/2010

Chairman Mouse

[ii] Evidence Found for Chinese Attack on Google By JOHN MARKOFF, January 19, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/technology/20cyber.html?hp

[iii] See http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/12/iranian-hackers-chinese-search-engine

[iv] See China responds to Google hacking claims guardian.co.uk, Thursday 14 January 2010 07.41 GMT http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/jan/14/china-google-hacking-response-dissidents

It is not possible at this point to completely disentangle the issues involved. A Google search on articles with the key words “Google and China” (meaning only sites combining both of these terms—no discussions of Chinese cooking or Google marvels—were counted) from only the last week, turned up 133,000 hits, and those only in English. Naturally there will be something wrong with my math—there almost always is, but I make this to be 13 hits per minute 24-7 over that week.

The issue began with Google’s discovery of  ”…a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident–albeit a significant one–was something quite different…

Google then listed three reasons why the attack was quite different:

First, this attack was not just on Google. As part of our investigation we have discovered that at least twenty other large companies from a wide range of businesses–including the Internet, finance, technology, media and chemical sectors–have been similarly targeted…

Second, we have evidence to suggest that a primary goal of the attackers was accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. Based on our investigation to date we believe their attack did not achieve that objective…

Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers….

Google then concluded:

These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered–combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web–have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China. We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

Posted by David Drummond, SVP, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer 1/12/2010 03:00:00 PM Found at: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

Following that announcement, the Internet community really piled on, as evidenced by the traffic mentioned above. This was the occasion for much commentary, some rather far from the original issue, but that is the nature of criticism of China; there are so many stakeholders, from international corporations to Tibetan nationalists, that every significant issue immediately metastasizes.

As I was in China at the time, at first Wenzhou, then Nanjing, then Nanning, I was able to speak to many Chinese, including an seminar of law students, a group with many ethnic minorities in it, and more than one hundred students of English, not counting my own classes of 120 such students.

Here, rather than trying to untangle the whole mess, I want to try to restrict myself to answering some questions which have occurred to me:

If Google leaves China, will this be, as many suggest, a victory for human rights?

I do not think so. At a recent dinner with a number of Chinese friends In Nanjing, before I spoke on the topic of “Globalism and the Chinese student”—I discussed the Google incident with them.[i]

I asked them first, simply what they thought. One immediately replied, “We need Google!”  I asked him why?  He said that as a student, Google provided the best sources and the deepest coverage. Comparing it to its dominant Chinese competitor Baidu, (which has roughly twice as much Chinese traffic as does Google) he said that Baidu’s coverage was shallow, dealing largely with popular culture.

(Note an important point here:  Google is concerned about being forced to censor content, but many Chinese users feel that even censored, it is superior to its competitors. In none of my hours of discussions on this issue did any Chinese user suggest that censorship was an issue to them.)

Another disagreed, saying that if you were interested in things dealing with China, you needed Baidu because it understood Chinese culture and its material was more appropriate than Google’s.

The issue has become confused in the world press—the original issue would seem to be that some Chinese human rights advocates had their Gmail accounts hacked—but maybe not successfully so. There are any numbers of ways that Chinese human right’s activists could still access Gmail, and it is likely that they will continue to want to do so—as this event proves, it offers considerable security.

Part of that security, as a Google engineer once told me, is simply that the Google cloud of massed servers has so very much data in it that to find any one item without precise information as to its digital location is well-nigh impossible.

It seems far more likely to me, that rather than the Google cloud not only being successfully entered, but then ransacked so as to produce discrete names—and were the activists using their own names???—the activists own computers here in China were successfully entered either by phishing or other means, producing a list of emails which then gave the intruder a clue as to the existence of a G-mail account. There is plenty of evidence in the discussion of individual cases involved in these events that this is the explanation.[ii]

So if Google leaves then, what is gained? Intrusions will still happen here, Gmail accounts will still be used, hackers will try to enter them, and what will have changed?

Chinese people will only have access to Baidu and Yahoo and a few other minor search engines, including the still untested Microsoft Bing[iii] if they use legal means, and if they use illegal means contrary to Chinese internet regulations, they then expose themselves to more prosecution, simply for looking for reliable English language content. Hard to see that as a victory for human rights…

It may make individual right-wing congressmen happy—now they can ratchet up the pressure on Obama over Human Rights in China, while voting against relief for Americans displaced by job loss to Chinese imports.  HR activists can whipsaw other businesses to do the same…and Chinese will be denied access to reliable information in English. Nice going!

My Conclusion: If Google leaves China, human rights and access to information will both be net losers.

Begun in Nanning, Jan 12, 2010 finished in Hong Kong, Jan 20, 2010

Jeffrey Barlow, AKA Chairman Mouse

[i] Aware always of the inadvisability of dragging others into my battles, I have very often changed details in the account below which do not affect in any substantial way the conclusions to which I came, or the evidence that has led me to do so. That is, I too, am trying to protect my Chinese interlocutors though I do not think it is actually necessary to do so. In each case I cautioned them not to speak publicly if they were uncomfortable in doing so.

[ii] Rather than constantly insert notes, I am going to assert freely in the Spirit of the Blog and of  editorial commenting, but will provide evidence for such assertions upon request.

[iii] I ran the above discussed set of search terms on Bing and turned up 175,000,000 results. This is not, however, an indication that Bing can easily replace Google in China anytime soon.  I could not limit the results by date, and the search included pages discussing events from several years back. See search at: http://www.bing.com/search?q=%22Google+and+China%22&go=&form=QBLH&filt=all

I have been posting Chinatripper for several years now, focusing largely upon travel observations made during December and January of each year as I worked in Wenzhou. This has, of course, made it of limited utility to others or to me the other ten months of the year.  I am introducing a new section, “Chairman Mouse” where I propose to write regularly.

The posts for CM will focus upon presenting as much as possible an objective view of issues affecting both the United States and China. I believe that tensions between these two countries are inevitable, though they are not likely to produce violent confrontations.  Tensions are inevitable because the return of China to regional leadership and world influence will strain the current international order, which was largely created by the West and largely supported by America as of at least the last fifty years.

A great source of the tension will be the undeniable parochialism of the two countries. Americans largely think of the return of China as perhaps a trick of currency manipulation or a fad, but not requiring any substantial adjustments on their part. A recent comment I saw in an on-line copy of Business Week rather sums it up for many Americans: “JJW  Jan 19, 2010 8:50 PM GMT  China can kiss my @zz !!!!!!!!.” (http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jan2010/gb20100119_789082.htm)

As for China, it too is parochial, often frustrated by its inability to keep the bamboo curtain pulled down in a wired world, and uncomfortable with new responsibilities. China brings to the world not only great energy, a long history and a remarkable culture, but also great arrogance, no small amount of ethnocentrism, and a far from open bureaucratic style. In addition, current Chinese nationalism, rising very rapidly, has a sizeable undercurrent of anger at past slights—some now more than one hundred and fifty years old.

How can these two powers, each swollen with self-importance and an often distorted vision of itself, not clash? But in the multi-polar world which began with the collapse of the American banking system, such tensions are unlikely to lead to real violence, barring grave miscalculations. Neither nation has the preponderance of power necessary to make violence a safe tool. This is good, because the world very much depends on the efforts of these two giants to solve problems which, could put an end to the natural order as well as the political order.

This editorial stance will inevitably be viewed at least occasionally, as anti-Chinese by some Chinese and anti-American by some Americans. I am ok with that, and welcome thoughtful dissenting views which I promise to post entirely as I receive them…JJW’s views would not, however, qualify as stated above.

Jeffrey Barlow aka Chinatripper and Chairman Mouse