Blogs » Politics » Hexie Farm (蟹农场): Half Mast

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• Hexie Farm (蟹农场): Half Mast
• Chongqing Sex Scandal May Implicate Wang Lijun
• Imagethief: I’m Leaving China and It Doesn’t Mean a Thing
• Photo: A village in Guizhou, by Spencer
• China Lands Fighter Jet in Show of Force
• Mining Accident in Guizhou Kills 18
• Chinese Sixth-Grader’s Viral Essay: “Survival and Security of the Entire Human Race” Depend on My Test Score

Hexie Farm (蟹农场): Half Mast Posted: 25 Nov 2012 10:39 PM PST For his latest contribution to the Hexie Farm CDT series, cartoonist Crazy Crab pays homage to the recent detention of  Beijing-based fund manager Zhai Xiaobing for posting a political joke on Twitter during the 18th Party Congress, and the sentencing of dissident poet Li Bifeng to twelve years in prison. In the drawing, a flag in the shape of a speech bubble flies at half mast, marking the death of free speech. Half Mast by Crazy Crab of Hexie Farm for CDT Read more about Hexie Farm's CDT series, including a Q&A with the anonymous cartoonist, and see all cartoons so far in the series. [CDT owns the copyright for all cartoons in the Hexie Farm CDT series. Please do not reproduce without receiving prior permission from CDT.] © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: free speech Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chongqing Sex Scandal May Implicate Wang Lijun Posted: 25 Nov 2012 09:48 PM PST A scandal involving a sex tape made by a local Chongqing official, Lei Zhengfu, and an allegedly 18-year-old woman has been a hot topic on Sina Weibo in recent days. From BBC: Screenshots purporting to be from video of Lei Zhengfu having sex with his mistress, were published on Tuesday. Mr Lei, a party chief in the city of Chongqing, is reported to have said that the video is a fake. The case highlights the growing influence of China's microbloggers in pursuing local officials. Correspondents say that the Communist Party has stepped up its drive against corruption and official impropriety amid rising public anger at abuses of power. After an investigation determined that the tape was authentic, Lei was relieved of his post, according to Xinhua: Investigations by the Chongqing Municipal Committee for Discipline Inspection verified that Lei Zhengfu, secretary of the Beibei District Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), featured in the video, which was filmed in 2007. On Friday, Chongqing Municipal Committee of the CPC decided to remove Lei from his post and begin an investigation into the case. Lei, 54, used to serve as vice mayor of the county-level Jiangjin City, Party chief and head of Dianjiang County, deputy Party chief of Jiulongpo District, Party chief and head of Beibei District, which are all under Chongqing, according to government information. Ji Xuguang, a journalist, released an article on the sex video along with some screengrabs earlier this week. "At the Spring Festival and two days after the festival in 2007, the man, who was deputy Party chief and head of Beibei District at that time, was fooling around with his 18-year-old mistress at a hotel of Chongqing," he said in the article. Now, additional details of the case reveal it to be more than a simple affair and may implicate former Chongqing police chief Wang Lijun, who has been sentenced to 15 years in prison on unrelated charges including abuse of power and bribe-taking. The South China Morning Post reports on the account by Chinese "citizen journalist" Zhu Ruifeng: Quoting an unidentified informant within the Chongqing police bureau, Zhu said that the young woman in the video, surnamed Zhao, was one of many who were trained by the head of a construction company to be "given" to officials as bribes. Zhu claimed that "the construction builder 'gave' Zhao to Lei" in early 2007. The builder had Zhao secretly recorded the sex tape and used it to blackmail Lei, prompting Lei to report it to a Chongqing "senior official". This was followed by Wang Lijun's order to detain Zhao for thirty days and jail the builder for a year. Zhu said he could back his claims with police records given to him by the anonymous source. He said he has a record of the police's interrogation of the builder. Zhu also claimed he had sex tapes of six officials, "four of them are incumbent officials". A post on Ministry of Tofu, also based on Chinese media accounts, says disgraced Chongqing Party chief Bo Xilai may also be implicated in the case: From 2002 to 2006, Lei Zhengfu, while serving as the party secretary of Dianjiang county under the city of Chongqing, he used his position to give contracts of the county's public works projects to a construction company owned by his younger brother to benefit himself and his family. Other contractors could only get leftover nominal projects. In 2007, in order to win lucrative contracts from him, who had by then been promoted to the vice party secretary of Chongqing's Jiulongpo District, one construction company offered huge bribes to Lei. However, having netted millions of yuan, Lei was not impressed and rejected their offer. The company soon found out about Lei's particular interest in women. So they hired several young women, all under 20, and put them through strict training before sending them to sexually please Lei. At the same time, these young women, who approached Lei with fake identities and proffered to be his mistresses, secretly videotaped the intercourse for the company to have more leverage over Lei. In 2009, the head of the construction company fell out with Lei over business interests and threatened Lei with the sex tape. Lei came cleaned on his 'one-time mistake' to Bo Xilai, then the party boss of Chongqing and a contender for one of China's most powerful political posts. Soon, Wang Lijun, then Chongqing's police chief, headed a special team to investigate the matter. As the result, Zhao Hongxia was detained for 30 days, and the boss of the company was incarcerated for a year for 'carving an official seal without authorization from the government.' © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Bo Xilai, Chongqing, corruption, lei zhengfu, local power, mistresses, sex scandals, Wang Lijun Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Imagethief: I’m Leaving China and It Doesn’t Mean a Thing Posted: 25 Nov 2012 06:50 PM PST Note: Originally posted at Imagethief.com. It started with the oven. In Singapore in 2001 I bought a used Sharp R-8H50(B)T Rotisserie combination microwave and convection oven from my buddy, Tuck Wai, for S$200. Say what you will about the Sharp Corporation, which is struggling, but that oven was The Bomb. It followed us from Singapore to Beijing to Shanghai and back to Beijing, proving its worth repeatedly in a country where most apartments don't have ovens. It even survived one front panel change. It was the best S$200 I ever spent in my life. Tuck always regretted selling – a sure sign of a good deal. Earlier this year the panel started to fail again, and no transplants were available. It was a protracted death, like a person with progressive organ failure. One by one, over the course of a couple of months, the buttons stopped working, slowly narrowing the list of things the oven could do. First we lost the grill. Then the convection function. Then the microwave time entry. The last gasp was the quick start. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. Anyway, I'm not superstitious, and I don't generally believe in portents, but if the death of our trusty Sharp Rotisserie isn't a sign that change is in the wind, what is? So after eight and a half well-documented years in Beijing and 17 in Asia for me, we're moving back to Palo Alto in January. I'm going because my company has asked me to move to the Silicon Valley office, very near where I grew up and where most of my family still live. For a long time I resisted the idea of moving back to the United States. My self identity is largely based on being "the one who's in Asia." I was 27 when I left the US in 1995, six months out of graduate school and, in most measurable ways, a complete doofus. My personal and professional development has pretty much all been in Asia, and most of my friends and virtually all of my experience and network are out here. Which, when you think about it, seems like a really good reason to do something different, even if that something is going home. Sometime in the last year or two my previously steadfast resistance to going home started to soften. Last May, when my boss proposed I come back to Sunnyvale, which is now where most of our senior execs are based, I found myself much more receptive to the idea than I would have expected. There is no greater message behind our departure. I'm not disappointed in China. I haven't been involved in public slanging matches with any Chinese celebrities. There is no shroud of legal action looming above me. I am, in fact, profoundly grateful to have been able to live and work in China for as long as I have. We all take it for granted, and piss and moan about the air and traffic and censored Internet and sketchy food because that's our version of water-cooler sports talk. And we all rationalize a bit to be here. But step back and think about it for a moment. From your average suburban American perspective, who gets to live in China? Nobody, that's who. It's the stuff of fantasy and scarcely-believable tales from exotic relatives, like my mysterious uncle Stephen, who lived and worked in Hong Kong in the late 1980s. It has been a gift, and under other circumstances I would have remained here at least for a while. But I was never in danger of staying forever, and nor are most other western expats. That's why I was amused by the mass fluster that surrounded the public departures of Mark Kitto and Charlie Custer. All of a sudden foreigners were abandoning China! I know and like both Mark and Charlie, and admittedly much of the fluster was within our particular echo chamber, but, seriously, coverage in the New York Times, BusinessWeek and The Economist? Both of their personal experiences can be used to tell larger stories about life and power and business in China (and maybe I'm just jealous that my own departure is about as newsworthy as a bad air day), and both of their articles were great reads. But "foreigner departs China" is the very definition of dog-bites-man. The satirical site China Daily Show nailed it with a funny "dear John" letter from a foreigner to China. "Foreigner stays in China," now that's a story. For an increasingly cosmopolitan and globally interconnected country, China isn't really a place encourages foreigners to settle down. In fact, it goes out of its way to keep us at arm's length. I should make a collage out of eight years of temporary residence certificates arranged around the confession I had to sign for registering my son's birth with the police a few weeks late. Economic migrants bleed across the borders in search of something better, and perhaps some Vietnamese mail-order brides wind up here for the long haul, but in general foreigners don't immigrate to China. We just visit, sometimes for a very long time. In the end, there are only two possible outcomes for a foreigner in China: you either stay here for the rest of your life, or, sooner or later, you leave. If you were to diagram it, it would look something like this: That little dot encompasses the handful of old communists who settled here for ideological reasons, such as Israel Epstein andSidney Shapiro, and maybe Carl Crook, who was born in Beijing. One or two businessmen I've met have been here for thirty or more years, and a couple of journalists I know are edging in that direction. Maybe Kaiser is here forever (though I doubt it). But even Sidney Rittenberg, famously "The Man Who Stayed Behind," didn't actually stay behind. He retired to Washington State in 1980. Of course, he was thrown in jail in China. Twice. You'd probably retire to Washington State, too. According to the People's Daily, China has granted permanent residency to less than 5000 foreigners since it started doing so in 2004, and itmade the news when Shanghai issued its first batch of green cards in 2005. It's a safe bet that granting citizenship is even rarer. We leave. That's what we do. But just because leaving China is normal doesn't mean something isn't going on. Among my friends there has been a tangible change in mood in the last couple of years. A sense of excitement about being here that endured for many years has in many cases given way to a sense of weariness or indifference. The most common reaction when I tell people my company is moving me back to California is, "you're so lucky!" There's nothing sinister happening. It's just a generational change. My cohort is largely mid-career expatriates, many of whom, like me, had their children in China. As our lives have changed, so in many cases have our expectations and needs. At the same time, the China we arrived in has also changed profoundly. Change is part of what makes China exciting, and on balance much of the change has been good. But people come looking for different things, and for some China today is less appealing or simply different than whatever they arrived looking for. So they move on, and new people come in. That's as it should be. Out with the old, in with the new. One thing that has not changed is the number of students and young professionals interested in working in China or studying Chinese. One of the fun parts of my job is speaking to MBA and undergraduate student groups, and I always ask who actually wants to live and work in China. Trust me; the supply of young westerners interested in China is not in danger of drying up. I quit a perfectly good job in Singapore in 2004 and came to China with rudimentary Mandarin and the dream of living here. It was a crazy stunt that worked out better than I could have ever imagined. I've not lived the hard-boiled life of my journalist friends, many of whom are forever getting tossed out of some hardscrabble village by local thugs. Nor did I arrive in the FEC era or spend two or three years in the boondocks. But I've had my share of adventures. I've bargained for long distance taxis in Yanji and ridden through the Zhalong Wetlands in the back of a xiaobengche, surrounded by crates of live fish. I got caught in a youthful waterfight in the alleys of old Kashgar. I've been invited into a Uighur house in Tuyoq for tea and sweets, and into the one-room hutong apartment of a family from Shanxi for homemade noodles. I stood on Tian'anmen Square with tens of thousands of Chinese people during the memorial a week after the Wenchuan earthquake. I was in the Bird's Nest during its Olympic pomp. I helped companies wrestle with the melamine crisis and the acrimonious collapses of their Chinese joint ventures. I had huge stretches of unrestored Wall all to myself on spectacular, blue-sky days. I scuba dived on a sunken village in the dark and freezing depths of Qiandaohu, on sunken Great Wall in Tanghsan, and with a whale shark in Dalian's morose Tiger Bay aquarium. I walked from one-side of Beijing to the other and discovered neighborhoods I'd have never found any other way, and went for runs in the pre-dawn winter darkness when the city is as still and quiet as it ever gets. I spent a year in Shanghai and learned that it is every bit as cool as Beijing, in its own way. I made great friends, worked with amazingly talented Chinese colleagues who disabused me of every stereotype of Chinese employees. I wrote a silly blog that people actually read. And I raised a little boy who calls Beijing home and speaks Mandarin with an effortless fluency that I am scandalously jealous of. They're the experiences of a lifetime. Some scruffy air and occasional difficulty with Facebook seems a small price to bear. I'll miss it, but it's time to go. Here's to the next generation of young westerners who are dreaming of living in China. May they all get the chance, and may their lives in China be as amazing and rewarding as mine has been. Related Posts Rectified.Namaste, Part I

Photo: A village in Guizhou, by Spencer Posted: 25 Nov 2012 11:29 AM PST A village in Guizhou © Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

China Lands Fighter Jet in Show of Force Posted: 25 Nov 2012 09:34 AM PST Chinese state media reports China has successfully conducted a flight landing on its first aircraft carrier. This landing comes amid the China State Shipbuilding Corporation's call to build more aircraft carriers. From Xinhua: A new J-15 fighter jet was used as part of the landing exercise. After its delivery to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) Navy on Sept. 25, the aircraft carrier has undergone a series of sailing and technological tests, including the flight of the carrier-borne J-15. Capabilities of the carrier platform and the J-15 have been tested, meeting all requirements and achieving good compatibility, the PLA Navy said. Since the carrier entered service, the crew have completed more than 100 training and test programs. While the landing exercise involved the J-15 fighter jet, China has also been developing more stealth fighter jets. The Wall Street Journal claims the exercise is a confirmation of China's rise as a global military power: It was the first official confirmation that China has mastered the complex technology and technical skills needed to operate fighters from a carrier at sea—a capability it has been seeking for decades as part of its quest to become a global military power. The Liaoning, which officially entered service in September, is a potent symbol of China's long-term strategic ambition to project air power far from its shores and challenge U.S. military dominance of the Asia Pacific region. China has said the vessel will be used only for training, but many military experts say that it could be deployed in a crisis near Chinese shores, such as a clash over disputed islands in the East China Sea or the South China Sea. Military experts say it will take several more years of training before the vessel, based on a hull bought from Ukraine, is combat ready. China also has to develop all the support vessel and associated technologies before it can use a carrier group the way the U.S. does, to extend its military influence abroad. As China plans to increase the budget for jet engine research, China is boosting its overall military spending this year, according to Reuters: China has advertised its long-term military ambitions with shows of new hardware, including its first test flight of a stealth fighter jet in early 2011, an elite helicopter unit and the launch of the aircraft carrier. China is boosting military spending by 11.2 percent this year, bringing official outlays on the People's Liberation Army to 670.3 billion yuan ($100 billion) for 2012, after a 12.7 percent increase last year and a near-unbroken string of double-digit rises across two decades. Beijing's public budget is widely thought by foreign experts to undercount its real spending on military modernization, which has drawn repeated calls from the United States for China to share more about its intentions. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: aircraft carriers, aviation, military exercise, military expansion, military power, military spending Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Mining Accident in Guizhou Kills 18 Posted: 25 Nov 2012 09:37 AM PST After one of the deadliest mine accidents in almost three years and another mining accident in Gansu resulting in 20 deaths, the Voice of America reports at least 18 people have died and 5 are missing in China's most recent mining accident: The Xinhua news agency reported that there were 28 workers underground Saturday in the state-owned Xiangshi coal mine in southeastern Guizhou province when the coal and gas explosion hit at about 11 a.m. local time ((0300 UTC). Xinhua said five of those were rescued. Nearly 2,000 people died in coal mine accidents last year in China, where lax safety standards make the mines among the world's deadliest. But official statistics show the number of fatalities has been falling, dropping 19 percent between 2010 and 2011. China's coal mines continue to be one of the deadliest in the world, due to lax regulations, corruption, and inefficiency. According to Bloomberg, the State Council is tightening the rules for reopening coal mines after recent accidents: Mines that don't meet the necessary safety requirements shouldn't resume operations under any conditions, the council said in yesterday's statement, citing illegal reopenings as the cause of several deadly accidents recently. China suspended operations at smaller coal mines earlier this month to boost safety ahead of a once-in-a-decade leadership transition, and policy makers are moving to improve standards after spate of accidents. Eighteen people were killed yesterday at a mine in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Small mines with little resources and that don't meet safety standards shouldn't easily receive permits to reopen, the council said. Larger mines without necessary safety technology should consider merging with bigger companies that do, it said. Read more about mine safety in China, via CDT. © Melissa M. Chan for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: coal mines, Guizhou, mine safety, mining, mining industry Download Tools to Circumvent the Great Firewall

Chinese Sixth-Grader’s Viral Essay: “Survival and Security of the Entire Human Race” Depend on My Test Score Posted: 25 Nov 2012 07:30 AM PST The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, who will surely come if one young boy fails his upcoming test. (Via Wikimedia Commons) Recently, an essay purportedly written by a sixth grader—an epitome of the "butterfly effect"—went viral on the Chinese Internet. On Sina Weibo, China's Twitter, user @土豆网 posted the photograph below at right. Within several days of its appearance, it had been retweeted over 4,800 times and attracted over 500 comments, with a number of other media outlets picking up on the essay and declaring it "hot." Tea Leaf Nation translates in full: "Time passes very quickly. It's midterm season soon, I already began nervously preparing for the test, I must begin working harder, because if I don't work hard and review well, then my grades will not go up, and I will be scolded by my parents, and if I get scolded by my parents then I will lose self-confidence, if I lose self-confidence then I will not finish my studies, if I do not finish my studies then I will not graduate [from university], if I can't graduate from university then I will not find a good job, if I don't find a good job then I won't be able to make money, if I don't make money then I can't pay taxes, if I don't pay taxes then it will be difficult for the country to pay salary to teachers, if teachers can't get paid then they will not be dedicated to teaching, if they are not dedicated to teaching, then this will impact our nation's future, if our nation's future is impacted, then it will be difficult for China to advance and develop, and the Chinese people will degenerate into a barbaric race. If the Chinese people degenerate into a barbaric race, then the USA will begin to suspect that our nation has large-scale murderous weapons, if our nation has large-scale murderous weapons, then the USA will start a war with China and World War III will erupt, if WWIII erupts, both the strengths of both the USA and China will not be enough, if their strengths are not enough then they will use nuclear weapons, if they use nuclear weapons then they will destroy the environment, if the environment is destroyed then this will create a big hole in the atmosphere, if there is a big hole in the atmosphere then global warming will escalate and the glaciers at both poles will melt, if the glaciers melt then the global water level will rise, if the global water level rises then the entire human race will drown and die. Because it relates to the survival and security of the entire human race, therefore I must spend the remaining next few days on review in order to do well on the test, and thus prevent a tragedy from happening."  The teacher commented at the end of the essay, "Haha I laughed out loud when I read this!" This absurdly comical essay did not only make Chinese web users laugh. It also prompted many to reflect. One web user was quoted by People's Daily as writing, "After I read this, I felt ashamed of myself. This elementary student's mentality is something we should all learn from." Another web user was said to comment, "I went back to my books [after reading this]." Children rarely speak ironically; their off-hand comments often reveal ideologies or anxieties that pervade society at a sub-conscious level. This elementary school student, who worries aloud that his behaviour could affect the future of the human race, reflects a shift in Chinese consciousness: A growing sense of responsibility as a global citizen, an increasing interest in the world outside China, and the realization that China, as an influential nation, must contribute to world peace. The student's concern that China's decisions "relate to the survival and security of the entire human race" is not as ridiculous as it first seems. According to data published by the U.S. Energy Information Administration, China is the world's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide; China's future policies in environmental protection can, and will, influence the fate of the world's environment. This essay expresses an awareness that with power comes responsibility—the responsibility to consider what negative "butterfly effects" China's decisions may cause and what China must do to prevent them. Chinese web users' reactions to the essay also reveal a shift in Chinese consciousness. Why did this essay make so many Chinese people laugh, and what does this laughter signify? While a certain degree of irony can be expected in any corner of the Chinese Internet, much of the laughter appeared to signify acceptance and respect. It was widely shared because many people accepted the message of the essay—social responsibility, self-consciousness as a member of the global community—and wished to share it with a larger audience. Weibo user @瓶木树萌 wrote, "The [Chinese] people's renaissance depends on you!" @脸大不影响可爱 was impressed by the student's precocity, writing, "An elementary student? He's thinking further ahead than I am." Despite its hopefulness, the essay also touches upon a dark side of China's education system. At no point does the student signify he is "nervously preparing for the test" because he finds his studies enjoyable or interesting. Most striking is the sheer amount of pressure the young writer places on himself. For him, ensconced in China's hyper-competitive education system, the consequences of bad grades may seem to loom so large that the human race might as well be at stake. At least this young student appears to take that responsibility seriously—and now has thousands of Web users cheering him on.

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