When it happened in London, the media called it “riots” on one side and “restoring order” on the other side.

And nobody in the media cares to interview a single demonstrator in London as they have done in Tibet and Xinjiang.

BTW, the British Prime Minister, David Cameron, claimed that “we would have to be like the Chinese to stamp them all out.” I wonder why the media suddenly all stand by the Prime Minister instead of supporting the demonstrators?

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/whos-afraid-the-chinese-5406

Should we be still afraid of the writhing snake of al-Qaeda after its head has been cut off? asked Stephen Colbert. To which his guest Francis Fukuyama replied: “Be afraid of the Chinese, I mean, the Chinese shoot down satellites in space. They hack into people’s computers. The Osama bin Laden people can’t make their underwear blow up.

Indeed, we hear ever more about China’s growing power as that of the United States is said to decline. Among the recent headlines: China surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy; China has claimed sovereignty over massive chunks of its surrounding seas; China is undertaking an extensive military modernization campaign. And so joked Seth Meyers at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that his talk was vetted by “the man at the top”: Chinese President Hu Jintao.

Looking more closely, however, at that which is most feared about China raises questions. Many of China’s latest military acquisitions are either upgraded knock-offs of old Soviet equipment or purchased from the former USSR—hardly state-of-the-art technologies. Others are unlikely to achieve full operational capability for years to come, including the headline-grabbing Chinese stealth fighter, the J-20. And perhaps the greatest perceived Chinese military threat, anti-aircraft—a.k.a. “carrier-killer”—ballistic missiles, have yet to be publicly tested over water against a maneuvering target.

China’s yet-to-be-deployed first aircraft carrier was purchased from Ukraine in the ‘90s. (The U.S. has eleven.) China’s newest attack jet, the J-15, is an updated version of a Soviet one China dissected to learn its secrets. It carries less fuel than a U.S. model and, as a take-off method, requires flying off a ski-jump-style runway. When Russia refused to sell China nuclear submarines, China attempted to build its own and they turned out to be noisier than those built by the Soviets thirty years ago.

Whatever advancements China has made in its military, it is simply no match for the U.S. and will not be for decades. According to the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, the U.S. spent six times more than China on its military in 2010. While the Chinese have built up their nuclear stockpile to a couple hundred, the U.S. will have 1,550 deployed nuclear warheads, even after the reductions required by the new START treaty. As Kenneth Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution noted: “There is no serious military man in China or in the United States who thinks that China has any prayer of dominating the U.S. militarily in the coming three or four decades.”

And all this assumes there will be a reason for the U.S. and China to come to blows. However, it’s far from clear that China has aggressive intentions, and even less so beyond its own region. Actually, China has plenty more to worry about at home than abroad. China’s military spending competes with its efforts to address its widening income inequality, environmental degradation, aging population, ethnic tensions, high levels of corruption—all threatening to burst Beijing’s bubble. China may be the world’s second-largest economy in overall terms, but in per capita terms, it’s on par with Algeria and El Salvador. It has four times more people than the U.S. to feed, clothe, house, and otherwise keep satisfied—and that is the true measure of a country’s economic well-being.

Like most people, we tend to look for an enemy. China may well not be one for decades to come, while al-Qaeda is far from gone.

How to help

About this talk

Speaking at a TED Salon in London, economist Martin Jacques asks: How do we in the West make sense of China and its phenomenal rise? The author of “When China Rules the World,” he examines why the West often puzzles over the growing power of the Chinese economy, and offers three building blocks for understanding what China is and will become.
About Martin Jacques

Martin Jacques is the author of “When China Rules the World,” and a columnist for the Guardian and New Statesman. He was a co-founder of the think tank Demos. Full bio and more links

Interactive Transcript

The world is changing with really remarkable speed. If you look at the chart at the top here, you’ll see that in 2025, these Goldman Sachs projections suggest that the Chinese economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And if you look at the chart for 2050, it’s projected that the Chinese economy will be twice the size of the American economy, and the Indian economy will be almost the same size as the American economy. And we should bear in mind here that these projections were drawn up before the Western financial crisis.

A couple of weeks ago, I was looking at the latest projection by BNP Paribas for when China will have a larger economy than the United States. Goldman Sachs projected 2027. The post-crisis projection is 2020. That’s just a decade away. China is going to change the world in two fundamental respects. First of all, it’s a huge developing country with a population of 1.3 billion people, which has been growing for over 30 years at around 10 percent a year.

And within a decade, it will have the largest economy in the world. Never before in the modern era has the largest economy in the world been that of a developing country, rather than a developed country. Secondly, for the first time in the modern era, the dominant country in the world — which I think is what China will become — will be not from the West and from very, very different civilizational roots.

Now I know it’s a widespread assumption in the West that, as countries modernize, they also Westernize. This is an illusion. It’s an assumption that modernity is a product simply of competition, markets and technology. It is not; it is also shaped equally by history and culture. China is not like the West, and it will not become like the West. It will remain in very fundamental respects very different. Now the big question here is obviously, how do we make sense of China? How do we try to understand what China is? And the problem we have in the West at the moment by-and-large is that the conventional approach is that we understand it really in Western terms, using Western ideas. We can’t. Now I want to offer you three building blocks for trying to understand what China is like — just as a beginning.

The first is this, that China is not really a nation state. Okay, it’s called itself a nation state for the last hundred years. But everyone who knows anything about China knows it’s a lot older than this. This was what China looked like with the victory of the Qin Dynasty in 221 B.C. at the end of the warring state period — the birth of modern China. And you can see it against the boundaries of modern China. Or immediately afterward, the Han Dynasty, still 2,000 years ago. And you can see already it occupies most of what we now know as Eastern China, which is where the vast majority of Chinese lived then and live now.

Now what is extraordinary about this is, what gives China it’s sense of being China, what gives the Chinese the sense of what it is to be Chinese, comes not from the last hundred years, not from the nation state period, which is what happened in the West, but from the period, if you like, of the civilization state. I’m thinking here, for example, of customs like ancestral worship, of a very distinctive notion of the state, likewise, a very distinctive notion of the family, social relationships like guanxi, Confucian values and so on. These are all things that come from the period of the civilization state. In other words, China, unlike the Western states and most countries in the world, is shaped by its sense of civilization, its existence as a civilization state, rather than as a nation state. And there’s one other thing to add to this, and that is this: Of course we know China’s big, huge, demographically and geographically, with a population of 1.3 billion people. What we often aren’t really aware of is the fact that China is extremely diverse and very pluralistic, and in many ways very decentralized. You can’t run a place on this scale simply from Beijing, even though we think this to be the case. It’s never been the case.

So this is China, a civilization state, rather than a nation state. And what does it mean? Well I think it has all sorts of profound implications. I’ll give you two quick ones. The first is that the most important political value for the Chinese is unity, is the maintenance of Chinese civilization. You know, 2,000 years ago, Europe: breakdown, the fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire [Roman Empire]. It divided, and it’s remained divided ever since. China, over the same time period, went in exactly the opposite direction, very painfully holding this huge civilization, civilization state together.

The second is maybe more prosaic, which is Hong Kong. Do you remember the handover of Hong Kong by Britain to China in 1997? You may remember what the Chinese constitutional proposition was. One country, two systems. And I’ll lay a wager that barely anyone in the West believed them. “Window dressing. When China gets it’s hands on Hong Kong, that won’t be the case.” 13 years on, the political and legal system in Hong Kong is as different now as it was in 1997. We were wrong. Why were we wrong? We were wrong because we thought, naturally enough, in nation state ways. Think of German unification, 1990. What happened? Well, basically the East was swallowed by the West. One nation, one system. That is the nation state mentality. But you can’t run a country like China, a civilization state, on the basis of one civilization, one system. It doesn’t work. So actually the response of China to the question of Hong Kong — as it will be to the question of Taiwan — was a natural response: one civilization, many systems.

Let me offer you another building block to try and understand China — maybe not such a comfortable one. The Chinese have a very, very different conception of race to most other countries. Do you know, of the 1.3 billion Chinese, over 90 percent of them think they belong to the same race, the Han. Now this is completely different from the other world’s most populous countries. India, the United States, Indonesia, Brazil — all of them are multiracial. The Chinese don’t feel like that. China is only multiracial really at the margins. So the question is, why? Well the reason, I think, essentially is, again, back to the civilization state. A history of at least 2,000 years, a history of conquest, occupation, absorption, assimilation and so on, led to the process by which, over time, this notion of the Han emerged — of course, nurtured by a growing and very powerful sense of cultural identity.

Now the great advantage of this historical experience has been that, without the Han, China could never have held together. The Han identity has been the cement which has held this country together. The great disadvantage of it is that the Han have a very weak conception of cultural difference. They really believe in their own superiority, and they are disrespectful of those who are not. Hence their attitude, for example, to the Uyghurs and to the Tibetans.

Or let me give you my third building block, the Chinese state. Now the relationship between the state and society in China is very different from that in the West. Now we in the West overwhelmingly seem to think — in these days at least — that the authority and legitimacy of the state is a function of democracy. The problem with this proposition is that the Chinese state enjoys more legitimacy and more authority amongst the Chinese than is true with any Western state. And the reason for this is because — well, there are two reasons, I think. And it’s obviously got nothing to do with democracy, because in our terms the Chinese certainly don’t have a democracy. And the reason for this is, firstly, because the state in China is given a very special — it enjoys a very special significance as the representative, the embodiment and the guardian of Chinese civilization, of the civilization state. This is as close as China gets to a kind of spiritual role.

And the second reason is because, whereas in Europe and North America, the state’s power is continuously challenged — I mean in the European tradition, historically against the church, against other sectors of the aristocracy, against merchants and so on — for 1,000 years, the power of the Chinese state has not been challenged. It’s had no serious rivals. So you can see that the way in which power has been constructed in China is very different from our experience in Western history. The result, by the way, is that the Chinese have a very different view of the state. Whereas we tend to view it as an intruder, a stranger, certainly an organ whose powers need to be limited or defined and constrained, the Chinese don’t see the state like that at all. The Chinese view the state as an intimate — not just as an intimate actually, as a member of the family — not just in fact as a member of the family, but as the head of the family, the patriarch of the family. This is the Chinese view of the state — very, very different to ours. It’s embedded in society in a different kind of way to what is the case in the West.

And I would suggest to you that actually what we are dealing with here, in the Chinese context, is a new kind of paradigm, which is different from anything we’ve had to think about in the past. Know that China believes in the market and the state. I mean, Adam Smith, already writing in the late 18th century said, “The Chinese market is larger and more developed and more sophisticated than anything in Europe.” And, apart from the Mao period, that has remained more-or-less the case ever since. But this is combined with an extremely strong and ubiquitous state. The state is everywhere in China. I mean, it’s leading firms, many of them are still publicly owned. Private firms, however large they are, like Lenovo, depend in many ways on state patronage. Targets for the economy and so on are set by the state. And the state, of course, its authority flows into lots of other areas — as we are familiar with — with something like the the one-child policy.

Moreover, this is a very old state tradition, a very old tradition of statecraft. I mean, if you want an illustration of this, the Great Wall is one. But this is another, this is the Grand Canal, which was constructed in the first instance in the fifth century B.C. and was finally completed in the seventh century A.D. It went for 1,114 miles, linking Beijing with Hangzhou and Shanghai. So there’s a long history of extraordinary state infrastructural projects in China, which I suppose helps us to explain what we see today, which is something like the Three Gorges Dam and many other expressions of state competence within China. So there we have three building blocks for trying to to understand the difference that is China — the civilization state, the notion of race and the nature of the state and its relationship to society.

And yet we still insist, by-and-large, in thinking that we can understand China by simply drawing on Western experience, looking at it through Western eyes, using Western concepts. If you want to know why we unerringly seem to get China wrong — our predictions about what’s going to happen to China are incorrect — this is the reason. Unfortunately I think, I have to say that I think attitude towards China is that of a kind of little Westerner mentality. It’s kind of arrogant. It’s arrogant in the sense that we think that we are best, and therefore we have the universal measure. And secondly, it’s ignorant. We refuse to really address the issue of difference. You know, there’s a very interesting passage in a book by Paul Cohen, the American historian. And Paul Cohen argues that the West thinks of itself as probably the most cosmopolitan of all cultures. But it’s not. In many ways, it’s the most parochial, because for 200 years, the West has been so dominant in the world that it’s not really needed to understand other cultures, other civilizations. Because, at the end of the day, it could, if necessary by force, get its own way. Whereas those cultures — virtually the rest of the world, in fact — which have been in a far weaker position, vis-a-vis the West, have been thereby forced to understand the West, because of the West’s presence in those societies. And therefore, they are, as a result, more cosmopolitan in many ways than the West.

I mean, take the question of East Asia. East Asia: Japan, Korea, China, etc. — a third of the world’s population lives there, now the largest economic region in the world. And I’ll tell you now, that East Asianers, people from East Asia, are far more knowledgeable about the West than the West is about East Asia. Now this point is very germane, I’m afraid, to the present. Because what’s happening? Back to that chart at the beginning — the Goldman Sachs chart. What is happening is that, very rapidly in historical terms, the world is being driven and shaped, not by the old developed countries, but by the developing world. We’ve seen this in terms of the G20 — usurping very rapidly the position of the G7, or the G8. And there are two consequences of this. First, the West is rapidly losing its influence in the world. There was a dramatic illustration of this actually a year ago — Copenhagen, climate change conference. Europe was not at the final negotiating table. When did that last happen? I would wager it was probably about 200 years ago. And that is what is going to happen in the future.

And the second implication is that the world will inevitably, as a consequence, become increasingly unfamiliar to us, because it’ll be shaped by cultures and experiences and histories that we are not really familiar with, or conversant with. And at last, I’m afraid — take Europe, America is slightly different — but Europeans by and large, I have to say, are ignorant, are unaware about the way the world is changing. Some people — I’ve got an English friend in China, and he said, “The continent is sleepwalking into oblivion.” Well, maybe that’s true, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But there’s another problem which goes along with this — that Europe is increasingly out of touch with the world — and that is a sort of loss of a sense of the future. I mean, Europe once, of course, once commanded the future in it’s confidence. Take the 19th century for example. But this, alas, is no longer true.

If you want to feel the future, if you want to taste the future, try China — there’s old Confucius. This is a railway station the like of which you’ve never seen before. It doesn’t even look like a railway station. This is the new Guangzhou railway station for the high-speed trains. China already has a bigger network than any other country in the world and will soon have more than all the rest of the world put together. Or take this: Now this is an idea, but it’s an idea to by tried out shortly in a suburb of Beijing. Here you have a megabus, on the upper deck carries about 2,000 people. It travels on rails down a suburban road, and the cars travel underneath it. And it does speeds of up to about 100 miles an hour. Now this is the way things are going to move, because China has a very specific problem, which is different from Europe and different from the United States. China has huge numbers of people and no space. So this is a solution to a situation where China’s going to have many, many, many cities over 20 million people.

Okay, so how would I like to finish? Well, what should our attitude be towards this world that we see very rapidly developing before us? I think there will be good things about it and there will be bad things about it. But I want to argue, above all, a big picture positive for this world. For 200 years, the world was essentially governed by a fragment of the human population. That’s what Europe and North America represented. The arrival of countries like China and India — between them 38 percent of the world’s population — and others like Indonesia and Brazil and so on, represent the most important single act of democratization in the last 200 years. Civilizations and cultures, which had been ignored, which had no voice, which were not listened to, which were not known about, will have a different sort of representation in this world. As humanists, we must welcome, surely, this transformation. And we will have to learn about these civilizations.

This big ship here was the one sailed in by Zheng He in the early 15th century on his great voyages around the South China Sea, the East China Sea and across the Indian Ocean to East Africa. The little boat in front of it was the one in which, 80 years later, Christopher Columbus crossed the Atlantic. (Laughter) Or, look carefully at this silk scroll made by ZhuZhou in 1368. I think they’re playing golf. Christ, the Chinese even invented golf.

Welcome to the future. Thank you.

(Applause)

For those (including me) who cannot read Karean, the following is the translation by translate.google.com:

Former USFK Commander Burwell Bell (63) 3 days, “added North Korea provoked an immediate and asymmetrically to reprisals and sincerity of God, provoke the Kim regime in violation of the principle solution for the use of force is the only way,” he said.

Former commander of the six party talks are needless Bell filed. “I instantly responded to the provocative six-party North Korea talks would be meaningless,” said “North Korea on the other six party participating countries at the forefront of containment,” he said. Bell reunification with respect to the former commander of “military provocations about the military, it’s my claim is that the asymmetrical face of unification based on a total war To prepared to come in should be aware that,” he said.

You may think the Google translate is wrong. But there is a Chinese version of the news report and it says the same thing:

http://chinese.yonhapnews.co.kr/n_international/2010/12/03/8000000000ACK20101203003900881.HTML

According to the Associated Press, Paypal has closed the account of Wikileaks, which is a major financial source of Wikileaks. PayPal said this was prompted by a violation of the service provider’s policy, “which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity.” Meanwhile, Wikileaks’s website has been closed by Amazon due to US congressional pressure. I cannot help wondering what is the meaning of “free media” in this “free world”?

A perfect summary of what our mainstream media have done for decades: make a lie, and then move on. Even though someone may point out that it is a not true, how many people would actually know the truth? With thousands of millions of lies day after night, the public will accept the lie easily.

Trojan Horse:
The National Endowment for Democracy
excerpted from the book
Rogue State
A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower
by William Blum
Common Courage Press, 2000

How many Americans could identify the National Endowment for Democracy? An organization which often does exactly the opposite of what its name implies. The NED was set up in the early 1980s under President Reagan in the wake of all the negative revelations about the CIA in the second half of the 1970s. The latter was a remarkable period. Spurred by Watergate-the Church Committee of the Senate, the Pike Committee of the House and the Rockefeller Commission, created by the president, were all busy investigating the CIA. Seemingly every other day there was a new headline about the discovery of some awful thing, even criminal conduct, the CIA had been mixed up in for years. The Agency was getting an exceedingly bad name, and it was causing the powers-that-be much embarrassment.

Something had to be done. What was done was not to stop doing these awful things. Of course not. What was done was to shift many of these awful things to a new organization, with a nice sounding name-the National Endowment for Democracy. The idea was that the NED would do somewhat overtly what the CIA had been doing covertly for decades, and thus, hopefully, eliminate the stigma associated with CIA covert activities.

It was a masterpiece. Of politics, of public relations and of cynicism. Thus it was that in 1983, the National Endowment for Democracy was set up to “support democratic institutions throughout the world through private, nongovernmental efforts”. Notice the “nongovernmental”-part of the image, part of the myth. In actuality, virtually every penny of its funding comes from the federal government, as is clearly indicated in the financial statement in each issue of its annual report. NED likes to refer to itself as an NGO (non-governmental organization) because this helps to maintain a certain credibility abroad that an official US government agency might not have. But NGO is the wrong category. NED is a GO.

Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.” In effect, the CIA has been laundering money through NED.

The Endowment has four principal initial recipients of funds: the International Republican Institute; the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs; an affiliate of the AFL-CIO (such as the American Center for International Labor Solidarity); and an affiliate of the Chamber of Commerce (such as the Center for International Private Enterprise). These institutions then disburse funds to other institutions in the US and all over the world, which then often disburse funds to yet other organizations.

In a multitude of ways, NED meddles in the internal affairs of foreign countries by supplying funds, technical know-how, training, educational materials, computers, fax machines, copiers, automobiles and so on, to selected political groups, civic organizations, labor unions, dissident movements, student groups, book publishers, newspapers, other media, etc. NED programs generally impart the basic philosophy that working people and other citizens are best served under a system of free enterprise, class cooperation, collective bargaining, minimal government intervention in the economy and opposition to socialism in any shape or form. A freemarket economy is equated with democracy, reform and growth, and the merits of foreign investment are emphasized.

From 1994 to 1996, NED awarded 15 grants, totaling more than $2,500,000, to the American Institute for Free Labor Development, an organization used by the CIA for decades to subvert progressive labor unions. AlFLD’s work within Third World unions typically involved a considerable educational effort very similar to the basic NED philosophy described above. The description of one of the 1996 NED grants to AIFLD includes as one its objectives: “build union-management cooperation”. Like many things that NED says, this sounds innocuous, if not positive, but these in fact are ideological code words meaning “keep the labor agitation down…don’t rock the status quo boat”. The relationship between NED and AIFLD very well captures the CIA origins of NED.

The Endowment has funded centrist and rightist labor organizations to help them oppose those unions which were too militantly proworker. This has taken place in France, Portugal and Spain amongst many other places. In France, during the 1983-4 period, NED supported a “trade union-like organization for professors and students” to counter “left-wing organizations of professors”. To this end it funded a series of seminars and the publication of posters, books and pamphlets such as “Subversion and the Theology of Revolution” and “Neutralism or Liberty”. (“Neutralism” here refers to being unaligned in the Cold War.)

NED describes one of its 1997-98 programs thusly: “To identify barriers to private sector development at the local and federal levels in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and to push for legislative change…[and] to develop strategies for private sector growth.” Critics of Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic have been supported by NED grants for years.

In short, NED’s programs are in sync with the basic needs and objectives of the New World Order’s economic globalization, just as the programs have for years been on the same wavelength as US foreign policy.

Because of a controversy in 1984-when NED funds were used to aid a Panamanian presidential candidate backed by Manuel Noriega and the CIA-Congress enacted a law prohibiting the use of NED funds “to finance the campaigns of candidates for public office.” But the ways to circumvent the spirit of such a prohibition are not difficult to come up with; as with American elections, there’s “hard money” and there’s “soft money”.

… NED successfully manipulated elections in Nicaragua in 1990 and Mongolia in 1996 and helped to overthrow democratically elected governments in Bulgaria in 1990 and Albania in 1991 and 1992. In Haiti in the late l990s, NED was busy working on behalf of right wing groups who were united in their opposition to former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and his progressive ideology. NED has made its weight felt in the electoral-political process in numerous other countries.

NED would have the world believe that it’s only teaching the ABCs of democracy and elections to people who don’t know them, but in all five countries named above there had already been free and fair elections held. The problem, from NED’s point of view, is that the elections had been won by political parties not on NED’s favorites list.

The Endowment maintains that it’s engaged in “opposition building” and “encouraging pluralism”. “We support people who otherwise do not have a voice in their political system,” said Louisa Coan, a NED program officer. But NED hasn’t provided aid to foster progressive or leftist opposition in Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua or Eastern Europe-or, for that matter, in the United States even though these groups are hard pressed for funds and to make themselves heard. Cuban dissident groups and media are heavily supported however.

NED’s reports carry on endlessly about “democracy”, but at best it’s a modest measure of mechanical political democracy they have in mind, not economic democracy; nothing that aims to threaten the powers-that-be or the way-things-are, unless of course it’s in a place like Cuba.

The Endowment played an important role in the Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s, funding key components of Oliver North’s shadowy “Project Democracy” network, which privatized US foreign policy, waged war, ran arms and drugs and engaged in other equally charming activities. At one point in 1987, a White House spokesman stated that those at NED “run Project Democracy”. This was an exaggeration; it would have been more correct to say that NED was the public arm of Project Democracy, while North ran the covert end of things. In any event, the statement caused much less of a stir than if-as in an earlier period-it had been revealed that it was the CIA which was behind such an unscrupulous operation.

NED also mounted a multi-level campaign to fight the leftist insurgency in the Philippines in the mid-1980s, funding a host of private organizations, including unions and the media. This was a replica of a typical CIA operation of pre-NED days.

And between 1990 and 1992, the Endowment donated a quarter-million dollars of taxpayers’ money to the Cuban-American National Fund, the ultra-fanatic anti-Castro Miami group. The CANF, in turn, financed Luis Posada Carriles, one of the most prolific and pitiless terrorists of modern times, who was involved in the blowing up of a Cuban airplane in 1976, which killed 73 people. In 1997, he was involved in a series of bomb explosions in Havana hotels.

The NED, like the CIA before it, calls what it does supporting democracy. The governments and movements whom the NED targets call it destabilization.

Liu Xiaobo, President of Chinese dissident group ICPC:

http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Xiaobo_Liu_378792980.aspx

ICPC received $135,000 from the NED in 2007:

http://www.ned.org/grants/07programs/grants-asia07.html

$135,000 from the NED in 2006:

http://www.ned.org/grants/06programs/grants-asia06.html

$85,000 from the NED in 2004:

http://www.ned.org/grants/04programs/grants-asia04.html

And ICPC is not the only source of my tax dollar for Liu Xiaobo. He also gets money from Uncle Sam for minzhu zhongguo (Democratic China):

- $145,000 in 2007:

http://www.ned.org/grants/07programs/grants-asia07.html

- $136,000 in 2005:

http://www.ned.org/grants/05programs/grants-asia05.html

- $135,000 in 2004:

http://www.ned.org/grants/04programs/grants-asia04.html

OK, supposedly, you are a U.S. citizen. Someone promised you a Nobel peace price, but you have to accept political grant from to Chinese government (through some covert channel) and do something against the interest of U.S., will you do it?

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11211

“SRINAGAR, India – Government troops fired live ammunition and tear gas into crowds of anti-India protesters Monday as tens of thousands of people demonstrated across Indian-controlled Kashmir, police said. Seven civilians were reported killed.

More than 60 protesters and almost 70 government forces were injured on one of the worst days in nearly two months of violent clashes between troops and residents who strongly oppose India’s rule over the predominantly Muslim region.

The top elected official in the predominantly Muslim region, Omar Abdullah, met with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on Monday to discuss defusing the crisis that has caused 40 deaths over seven weeks…”

[TheNewVoice] When I read this news, I feel shocked. Did the journalist make a mistake? How come the government of the biggest democratic country is using police force to suppress the protests of its people? I bet that this news is not true. This kind of news are more eyeball-catching than similar news about China. At least, we know that the “communist China” is not a democratic country and its government always is acting fast to suppress any protests. We are so used to this kind of “news” that it hardly becomes “news” any more. But cracking down protests in India and democratic countries is rare and thus is more valuable in terms of “news”. Why the media has paid less 1% attention to it compared to those not-so-news in China? The only reasonable conclusion I can draw from this is that the news is not true, hence the mainstream media just choose to ignore it – you know it is really hard for me to “believe” that the mainstream media is biased and has a double standard.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6971027.ece

“Few Chinese were even aware of the execution of Akmal Shaikh yesterday. Reports of executions are commonplace, particularly in recent months after bloody anti-Chinese riots in the far west and a high-profile gang trial in a sprawling central metropolis. But news of foreigners being put to death is less common.”

[TheNewVoice] Come on, Mr. Macartney, we are well aware of your dirty tricks. Would you please always mention slavery and colonialism whenever you mention Africa, or Opnium War whenever you mention China in the future – even if it is just remotely connected to what you are reporting? This way, everyone knows the ugly history of Britain – a “gentleman” with blood and drug full in hand.

“The few who have been executed have usually been found guilty of drug trafficking — as was the case with Shaikh — and this is a crime that elicits scant sympathy.”

[TheNewVoice] So what? Indeed, Shaikh’s execution even generates a lot of applaud from British news readers on the Internet. Who, like Mr. Macartney, has ever shown any sympathy to those being addicted to drugs because of these criminals?

“Some debate emerged on the internet, the only free medium for discussion in China, with most comments questioning why a convicted drug smuggler should receive mercy just because he was foreign.”

[TheNewVoice] At least, people in free media express their own opinion. Look at what they think about drug smuggler. Surprisingly, Mr. Macartney, many British have the similar view. Why don’t you mention this in your report? Please, show your mercy to those innocent civilians killed by America and UK guns and bombs in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the past wars instead of a drug trafficker.

“Some referred to the 19th-century opium wars, when British gunboats forced open several Chinese ports to enable merchants to flood the Chinese market with opium from India. Those events more than a century ago still evoke bitter memories among Chinese.”

[TheNewVoice] Last time, British government started the Opnium Wars. So, will the British government start a Heroin War this time as some “serious consequences”? Mr. Macartney, will you applaud to this idea?

“One comment read: ‘The UK should respect Chinese law and it is not China that should respect these appeals.’”

[TheNewVoice] Well said.

“Another referred to the last dynasty that ruled China, at the time of the opium wars. ‘China is not Qing any more; we decide what to do on our land.’”

[TheNewVoice] Of course, Britain and China both are different from 150 years ago. Britain has suddenly become a “gentleman” out of blood and drugs, while China is struggling to modernize by her own hands.

“Another wrote: ‘Britain is looking for excuses. They should have said those who sold opium to China were all mentally imbalanced.’ But such comments were few and the death of Shaikh will pass with barely a murmur in China.”

[TheNewVoice] Nobody gives a damn sh*t to a drug smuggler.

“The type of case that usually provokes debate and public outrage is where an ordinary worker is pitted against the State. There was the manicurist who stabbed to death a local Communist Party official when he tried to rape her. Such was the public anger that the girl was soon released and sent home on the ground of diminished responsibility. A young man in Shanghai got into a row with police and stabbed six officers to death after he was taken to a local police station. His arrest stirred a storm of debate, with many people saying that the police all too often took advantage of their almost unrestrained powers to oppress the weak. He was executed.”

“A few weeks ago a woman set herself on fire in protest when local officials tried to demolish her home because it had not been legally constructed. The public outcry was such that the Government is now considering changing the law to reduce the powers of officials to enforce such demolitions.”

[TheNewVoice] Again, we are full aware of your tricks. Please always mention slavery, colonialism, piracy, opnium wars whenever you mention Britain in your future report even if they are completely irrelevant. Thank you.

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/georgepitcher/100020842/china-must-spare-akmal-shaikh-or-face-serious-consequences/

Bravo! Mr. Pitcher! So what will be the “serious consequences”? To boycott cheap products from China and let inflation skyrocket in UK? To stop borrowing money from China and let UK government go broke? To let sex worker refuse service visitors with China passport (who the hell show passport before f*ck)? Or to start another Opium War – oh I should say Heroin War? “About 150 years ago when the Chinese government of Qing Dynasty executed the drug dealers who were sponsored by UK Government, the UK send their soldiers, started the Opium War and occupied the Chinese Capital Beijing. We are soooo scared of what the UK government will send this time. Another Opium War to free the fool Chinese from the evil Chinese Communist Party? LOL we are looking forward to your God’s save =)” — comment by Bluecee.

What can I say about you, Mr. Pitcher? Western journalists like you love to teach Chinese about “independence of judicature”. Why do you think this time it is appropriate for the UK government to put pressure on the Chinese judiciary system? We know, we Chinese always know that people like you have double standards when talking about your own matters and ours. Just look at the comments you get under your article, you get the idea how ordinary readers think about you. You are just “so obviously mentally ill”. People like you just make us feel sick. But if you dare to carry more than 50g heroin while entering China, we will prosecute you and sentence you to death regardless of your “mental illness”!