Zhejiang: at long last, capitalism

Zhejiang: at long last, capitalism

Financial Times
Published: May 21 2004 6:43 | Last Updated: May 21 2004 6:43

The author, Joe Studwell, is editor of the China Economic Quarterly. This
article first appeared in the CEQ's Q3 2003 issue.


The quest for a unique Chinese business model has been a long and laughable
one. It cannot even be said that the jokes have been especially original.
There was the Soviet-inspired commune fantasy of Dazhai. There was the
"third way" of mixed private and public-ownership township and village
enterprises that recalled reform efforts in the last years of eastern
European communism. More recently, there was the Chinese chaebol strategy
that follows a path trodden in Korea. And now we have the quest to create
dozens of "national champion" state-owned enterprises that will dominate
major markets at home and throw around increasing weight abroad.

Each previous state-conceived economic model (and the betting here is that
the
national-champion model will prove no exception) failed because it was
underwritten by limitless access to state credit. This created goods and
fixed assets ? and hence the appearance of success ? without making a
return on capital employed; indeed, quite the opposite. It was only when
government could no longer cope with the amount of capital being destroyed
that it pulled the plug.

The odd thing is that even as planners in Beijing map out their next grand
strategy
for wasting billions of dollars of their subjects' savings, a perfectly
viable and low-cost model of economic development has emerged in the warm
climes of Zhejiang province. It is called capitalism, and it is working
nicely.

A four-stroke engine

The locus of this model is eastern Zhejiang, which used to be dirt poor but
which has overtaken the traditionally better-off, western and northern
parts of the province closest to Jiangsu and Shanghai. Eastern Zhejiang is
famous for Wenzhou, cradle of private enterprise, but encompasses many
other obscure yet thriving cities such as Cixi, Ninghai and Taizhou. It is
a region of hilly, lush terrain, where amid agricultural terraces, fields
of yellow rape and small forests lie ancient village temples and carefully
tended ancestral graveyards. In the towns and cities, a brasher
architecture, clad in blue and green glass, announces modern ambitions. All
along the coast, the pick-up trucks of rising entrepreneurs, the Honda
Accords of the half-risen and the BMWs of the fully ascendant ply new
expressways linking this formerly inaccessible region to Shanghai.

There are four defining components to the Zhejiang model.The first is that
its entrepreneurs most often start out as traders. Just as Ningbo natives
dominated commerce in inter-war Shanghai, and every Chinese person hawking
bric-a-brac on the streets of European and north American cities seems to
be from Wenzhou, so it is almost inevitable that your average east Zhejiang
millionaire started out a salesman. Local traders are famous across China
for finessing profits from ostensibly zero-margin sales. Such was the case
before 1949 when Zhejiang wholesalers bought and sold imported cigarettes
at no mark-up, instead making fortunes out of the credit terms they
obtained from British and American suppliers; they invested and onlent
their cashflow before bills came due. More recently the same "profitless"
approach allowed Zhejiang traders to dominate buying and selling from state
businesses like Jilin's ginseng producers.

An archetypal Zhejiang success story is Mao Lixiang, chairman of Ningbo
Fotile
Kitchenware. He started out as an accountant in a revolutionary brigade
unit. After
the Cultural Revolution he spent a decade selling television parts. Then he
settled on selling, and making, ignition guns for gas cookers. Soon his
home town of Cixi, a satellite of Ningbo, knew him as the "ignition gun
king". He also came to understand the domestic market for kitchen equipment
and started Fotile Kitchenware to make cooking ranges and extractor hoods ?
launching this business just as housing privatisation took off. Today, as
might be expected of a salesman, Mr Mao oversees 3,500 employees of whom
2,500 are in sales, spread among 46 offices around the country. All the
management, product development and manufacturing are handled by the
remaining 1,000. With Zhejiang all the rage, Mr Mao has lately been
teaching business at Tsinghua University.

Multiple monocultures

Trading experience means that Zhejiang entrepreneurs know their markets. It
may
also explain why they are so pragmatic in deciding whether to chase sales
at home or abroad. Mr Mao, for instance, exports virtually all his ignition
guns but sells virtually all his other kitchen equipment domestically. In
each case, it is simply a question of where the best market is. While this
seems obvious, in most of China, the state regulatory regime encourages
businesses to set up either as export ventures or domestic market ventures,
without regard to specific markets for specific products. In Zhejiang, by
contrast, exports are part of the picture but not the sole raison d'etre,
and it is noteworthy that the province relies far less on exports and
foreign direct investment than do China's other coastal dynamos.

Zhejiang's second defining characteristic is local specialisation. The
exploitation of comparative advantage in manufacturing occurs in all
developing economies, but Zhejiang takes industrial clustering to an almost
comic extreme. There is Datang the sock city. There is Qiaotou the button
making town. Shengzhou, not far from Ninghai, does ties. Shaoxing does
textiles and dyes. Different bits of Wenzhou concentrate on lighters, pens
and low-voltage electrical equipment. Parts of Ninghai are dedicated to
electric hand tools, stationery, and pressing and stamping machines. Cixi
has become a haven for kitchen equipment makers. Many of these
manufacturing centres dominate not only the national market for their
product, but increasingly the international one too. Datang, for instance,
reckons to turn out eight billion pairs of socks a year from 8,000
factories, accounting for one-third of all socks sold annually in the world
and two-thirds of those bought in China.

Some Zhejiang companies, like Fotile Kitchenware, have become quite large
and in the past year the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC)
authorised a spate of listings of local private businesses. But big is not
typical of Zhejiang's acutely specialised business environment. Such is
people's desire to be their own bosses that they are forever leaving
growing companies to start their own. Each business seems to spawn dozens
of copycats, reinforcing the local product focus and engendering what
natives call Zhejiang's "little dog economy" (xiao gou jingji). It is the
voracious little dogs that gobble up entire global manufacturing
industries. In some lines of manufacturing they also drive margins down to
nothing, or almost nothing, at which point profit migrates back to trading,
the province's original speciality.

The third characteristic of the Zhejiang model businessman is that he owns
his company, and is not ashamed to admit it. In the 1980s and early 1990s
Zhejiang entrepreneurs used various "red hat" corporate disguises as
political insurance. But even then their "collectives," unlike ones
elsewhere, were simply mis-registered private enterprises. Today, private
business no longer lives in fear and it is a defining feature of Zhejiang
businessmen that questions about corporate ownership are answered with a
straightforwardness unthinkable elsewhere in China.

In Taizhou (specialty: plastics, including most of China's water dispenser
bases), Zhang Ribei, an erudite partner at Zhongtian Plastics, puts the
point simply. In Zhejiang, he says,"you know what the story is. Here, I own
22 percent of this manufacturing plant." In contrast, he notes that Zhang
Ruimin, the boss of Haier in Shandong, is the most famous businessman in
China and yet no one knows who owns his company. When asked who owns Ningbo
Fotile, Mao Lixiang responds immediately: "One hundred percent is mine."
Clarity in such matters is a badge of honour. Zhongtian's Mr Zhang, a
former state enterprise employee, describes the convoluted, opaque
stockholding reforms that are supposed to have defined ownership in state
enterprises in the past few years as "the most rotten aspect of this
country".

Credit where credit is due

The final feature of the Zhejiang model lies in finance. Like private
entrepreneurs elsewhere in China, those in Zhejiang raise seed capital from
family and friends because they lack access to credit from the nationalised
banking system. But Zhejiang entrepreneurs have probably had more access to
other semi-legal and illegal third party sources of credit than businessmen
in any other part of the country. The reason is simple: local government
looked the other way.

In Wenzhou, the "curb market", or informal financial system, exploded early
in the
reform era in the mid-1980s and came to dominate local capital flows.
Chinese economists estimate that at least four-fifths of financial needs
were met in the mid-1980s by professional money lenders, private money
houses, share issuance, credit associations, cooperative foundations and
pawnbrokers. A series of clampdowns followed, but Kellee Tsai, author of a
recent book on informal finance in China*, notes that only in Wenzhou would
the local office of the central bank issue a statement saying that private
money houses "are essential for the development of market socialism".

Wenzhou's freewheeling attitude to private finance brought on its share of
pyramid schemes and other scams. But it also led to better banking
practices. Beginning in the late 1980s, state banks in Zhejiang started
lending to private companies masquerading as collectives or to state units
that openly channeled funds to private businessmen in return for a cut of
the transaction. State bank branches proliferated in many cities and it is
instructive that, according to Li Ruogu, an assistant governor at the
central bank in Beijing, non-performing loans at state commercial banks in
Zhejiang are currently less than eight percent of loans outstanding, and in
Wenzhou, less than four percent.

In the wake of the Asian financial crisis a nervous central government
quietly wiped out most of Zhejiang's unregulated and semi-regulated
financial institutions. Many of these were not without their problems, an
important reminder that Zhejiang has never had a real, independent,
properly-regulated, private financial system. It has simply had a more
diverse system than elsewhere in China's dysfunctional financial organism.
Of some 170 urban credit unions in Zhejiang in the mid-1990s, only four
exist today as independent entities. Nonetheless, it may be that one or
more of these will, if China ever really permits private banking to take
off, emerge as a star performer. Wang Jun, the chairman and controlling
shareholder of Tailong Credit Union in Taizhou ? which escaped forced
closure or merger after the Asian financial crisis ? expects to increase
deposits this year from Rmb2.1bn (US$250m) to Rmb3bn (US$360m) and says he
will keep his non-performing loan ratio around two percent. The central
bank, after ye
ars of slamming down Tailong, has indicated it might give him a national
joint stock banking licence of the type held by Minsheng."We've been
invited to apply," he says.

Eureka?

The Zhejiang model, then, is a healthful combination. It demonstrates a
strong focus on sales, a tremendous reliance on comparative advantage, a
clarity of ownership, and as great a propensity to commercial pricing and
market distribution of capital as is possible in China today. The Zhejiang
model differs from its most obvious domestic rival, Guangdong, in being
much less dependent on outside (Hong Kong,Taiwanese) middlemen, foreign
direct investment, and exports. Zhejiang has also operated without the
benefit of the generous tax benefits, the Shenzhen reform "laboratory" and
various other perks handed out by the central government to Guangdong.

There is little doubt that Zhejiang is the best model that China has
produced: this
show is unlikely to become the country's next economic comedy act ? because
it is the product not of overbearing state policy but of natural
entrepreneurial growth. In Zhejiang, where the state's contribution is
rightly measured in terms of all the things that it has not done, China has
discovered what happens when government leaves economics alone. It is a
universal lesson.The environment may not be perfect, but it is as close to
capitalist normality as the country currently gets. Unluckily, there is no
reason to assume that the Zhejiang experience will inevitably spread to
other parts of China. Because it cannot flourish in places where the state
takes a closer interest in managing life.


*Back-Alley Banking: Private Entrepreneurs in China, Kellee S.Tsai, Cornell
University Press 2002.




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China tourist town's culture clash

China tourist town's culture clash

By Louisa Lim
BBC correspondent in Beijing

 

One of China's last walled cities, Pingyao, escaped demolition because the area was so poor.

More pictures of Pingyao

Now it is cashing in on its ancient past, with 6m visitors tramping through last year to admired the tiled roofs and carved wooden facades of the 400-year-old houses.

The tourists only really started coming in earnest in 1997 when the town got World Heritage status.

Hotel owner Li Pingsheng says they have changed everything.

"The tourists have brought many good things to us," he said. "Many young people were unemployed, but now they're tour guides, or they run restaurants or hostels. Tourism gave us a livelihood, it gave us hope."

None of us really wants to leave Mr Zhang

But now the endless streams of tour groups are bringing new problems.

The number of tourists has doubled in the past two years, and the authorities fear the influx could damage the old city.

So they are planning to move almost two-thirds of the town's 40,000 residents outside the city walls.

It is a move hotly contested by the older inhabitants, like 82-year-old Mr Zhang who sells antiques by the roadside.

"This has been my home for several generations. All my family lived within the city wall. I've lived here my whole life. None of us really wants to leave," he said.

And the tourists - who are meant to benefit from the plan - do not seem to support it either.

Bettina Spaunhorst from Germany, sipping freshly-squeezed apple juice in one of the Ming dynasty courtyard hotels that makes Pingyao so unique, said she feared the proposals would completely spoil the old city's character.

The feeling you have when you're just walking around here is that 150 years ago it was the same, more or less Miguel Rodriguez, Spanish tourist

"I'm here because I wanted to see authentic Chinese life and that's what I get right now. But if everyone moves out, all the real people are gone, so it's just more or less annoying souvenir sellers all around. I wouldn't go here anymore."

Her breakfast companion, Miguel Rodriguez from Spain, agreed. He saw a real gap between what Western tourists look for and what Chinese people like.

"I think we search more for something original and more authentic, and they just look for something nice and clean and bright. It's [a case of] different perceptions. For me, it's completely spoiled when you see something like that. The feeling you have when you're just walking around here is that 150 years ago it was the same, more or less," he said.

And that is the real problem. Part of the quaintness comes from the fact that the town is unchanged.

But it also means living conditions for the inhabitants of the walled city have not improved either.

Few of them have running water and electricity is sporadic. Many of the town's inhabitants are keen to move out to better accommodation.

The schools, hospitals and government offices have already been relocated outside the city walls, meaning life is increasingly inconvenient for those who stay inside the walled city.

Li Huaming said he would like to move out. Perched on a rickshaw with his wispy beard, silk waistcoat and embroidered jacket, he looked like a relic of an earlier age.

Li Huaming makes his living posing for pictures with tourists

But he makes his money in a thoroughly modern manner - not pulling tourists around, but allowing them to pose with him for photos. And with an eye on future earnings, he declared himself in favour of the plan to move out the city's residents.

"It's a good idea. The streets of Pingyao are so crowded, even bicycles can't get through. The city's not managed well. If it was better managed, there'd be more tourists coming here. People here don't have any money. If they did, they'd move out of the town," he said.

And it is not just people from the town who are making a living from it. One travelling minstrel came from far away to the old walled city. In song, he extolled the virtues of tourism.

But in Pingyao, it is a mixed blessing.

Foreign tourists' desire to experience China as it was in the past sometimes seems to consign locals to a life of poverty, yet the government's attempts to attract ever more visitors could ultimately drive the tourists away.

Visit Beautiful Basra, Iraq: BBC Visits the Basra Tourism Office

Destination: Iraq http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/3840401.stm

By Mike Thomson BBC correspondent in Basra In the present climate taking a vacation in Iraq may seem a little unwise, but Basra's tourism manager is confident his country's ancient heritage and beautiful beaches will lure holidaymakers. Iraq was once home to the hanging gardens of Babylon I was driving back to my hotel through the rubble and goat-grazed desolation that forms much of suburban Basra when a large sign caught my eye. Big red letters spelled "Basra Tourism Office". Assuming this was some sort of faded relic from Saddam Hussein's Ministry of Propaganda, I stopped for a look. My security consultant, Mark, a former SAS soldier, eyed the street carefully before agreeing it was safe to get out. Strapping on our flak jackets, we walked towards two blue wooden doors that, to my surprise, were slightly open. I peered through the crack and heard voices coming from across the sun-baked courtyard in front of me. After a few more checks from SAS Mark, I pushed them open and walked gingerly towards what looked like some sort of office. A group of five young men eyed me languidly from two threadbare sofas that lined the walls of the outer room. US soldiers guard Baghdad's museum against looters And with the help of my interpreter I asked one of them what the building was used for. Apparently amazed that I had somehow failed to get the message from the sign outside he replied: "Tourism. Basra's Office of Tourism." He seemed quite serious. The two younger-looking men on either side of him pointed to the open door at the far end of the room and motioned for me to go in. Inside, a group of men in traditional dress sat on rickety chairs which formed a semi-circle around a grey haired man with thick glasses. The figure behind a cluttered old desk smiled and asked if I was a journalist. On receiving my reply he asked me how I had come to hear about his city's new tourism campaign, particularly given that his promotional campaign was not due to be launched for another two weeks? In all seriousness I found myself scanning his face waiting for that smile to break into a smirk. Ignoring my hesitation, my host stood up, shook my hand and rather proudly showed me his business card: Mr Abdul Hussein Majeed al-Malik, Manager of Tourism, Basra. After offering me a chair next to the members of his consultancy committee, he sat down and began sifting through a pile of papers that littered his desk. These, he explained, were soon to be transformed into brochures that would help bring tens of thousands of tourists to Basra. Realising that Mr Malik was entirely serious about his role, I asked him what exactly he believed this war-ravaged city had to offer anyone intrepid enough to visit it? Iraq's national museum is reported to have had 13,000 objects looted Shaking his head, a little like a patient but frustrated school teacher, he replied that this 7th Century city is steeped in history. Had I never heard of Sinbad the Sailor? For this is where he is said to have begun his famous voyages. And did I not know that Basra gets a mention in the Arabian Nights? Nodding, I inquired whether all this means that any tourists coming here would be able to visit historic sites and trawl through ancient objects and pieces of art? "No, that's not possible," he replied. "Many of our main objects of archaeological interest have disappeared because most of them were kept in Basra's historic museum which was unfortunately fire-bombed and looted." "But not far from here we have beautiful beaches as well as some of the biggest marshes in Iraq." The answer to where visitors would be able to stay in a city that was repeatedly shelled in the Iran-Iraq war and then further destroyed by the arrival of coalition troops and gun-toting militia was less upbeat. 'Sensible precautions' He said the city had several big hotels, like the Sheraton which was just down the road from here, but they had all been destroyed. "But we do have some good, locally run hotels." Visitors can best protect themselves by disbelieving the rumours of violence and terrorism Abdul Hussein Majeed al-Malik, Manager of Tourism, Basra I was staying in one of these. The hotel feels it necessary to employ armed guards around the clock and then there are the recently erected concrete barriers to stop ram-raiding suicide bombers driving trucks through the restaurant window. But Mr Malik was having none of it. "Such things are merely sensible precautions that need to be taken in most big cities today." Obviously, my host had not travelled for a while. That may well be because Basra's airport had long been closed to civilians. Though Mr Malik insisted that this fact should not discourage holidaymakers from coming here. "There are other ways of getting to Iraq such as by road," he said. "And we've now launched a campaign to make them safer for tourists." Given the continuing number of brutal armed carjackings and other attacks on motorists this is probably just as well. But how, I asked Basra's new tourism manager, was he going to counter Iraq's violent and dangerous image even if the bombs and shootings should finally stop? He shifted in his seat, and looked me firmly in the eye. "We will organise a big advertising campaign. But visitors can best protect themselves by disbelieving the rumours of violence and terrorism. When they come to Basra they will find that these problems are not here." As I walked towards the door, there was a squeal of moving chairs and murmuring voices as Mr Malik and his consultancy committee got back to business. I left wondering whether I had witnessed a case of serious delusion bordering on criminal denial or the sort of courageous optimism it takes to survive here.

Birthday of Twa Ya Peh

Thanks to Victor on the lead.  I went to the tentages at the empty land next to Redhill MRT.  It's the temple "Long Chuan Dian" (in Mnadarin) celebrating the birthdays of Cheng Wan (City God) and Twa Ya Peh (Mandarin: Da Er Yeh).  Da Er Yeh refer to the two Nether Gods - the tall Bai Wu Chang and the short Hei Wu Chang. 

 

The ceremonies began on Thu night when the Jade Emperor "arrived".  Since then, there have been wayang performances and this will continue for the next few days.  On Sat night, there will be "spiritual consultation" at 8:15pm.   On Monday 8:10pm, there will be a major spirit possession ceremony during which visitors are requested not to wear black clothing.    On Tuesday 10pm, there will be possession by "Ji Gong", the monk deity, who will send off the various gods, thus ending the celebrations.

 

Regards,

 

Wee Cheng

Victor Yue  wrote:

Hi Ronni,

Thanks for the tip off. I actually went cruising in my car today (took an afternoon off) looking for the now familiar taoist temple related flags and banners being put along the road leading to the celebration.

 

Saw one tentage just behind Mobil Station, along Alexandra Road. They are celebrating the birthday of "Tua Li Ya Peh". I am sure there are also quite a number in Singapore. Will try to check out the field opposite to Maxwell Food Centre (this place has already been marked for the building of a Buddhist Temple) as this is the place where there are celebrations of the birthdays of "Tua Li Ya Peh" (in Hokkien) and "San Huang Wu Ti" (in Mandarin).

 

Send your sightings to the list. (^^)

 

Victor

 

A Hoard of Gold That Afghanistan Quietly Saved

June 24, 2004

A Hoard of Gold That Afghanistan Quietly Saved

By CARLOTTA GALL

New York Times

ABUL, Afghanistan, June 23 — Under the Russians it was barely glimpsed. The Afghan Communists allowed only peeks. Through the years of civil war and Taliban rule, its existence was kept secret by a handful of unassuming museum and bank workers, even as other priceless pieces of Afghanistan's cultural history were destroyed.

Now, what is known as the Bactrian gold — 20,600 pieces of gold jewelry, funeral ornaments and personal belongings from 2,000-year-old burial mounds — has emerged from hiding intact, a shimmering example of the heights scaled by ancient Afghan culture.

For years the gold was feared stolen, lost or melted down by the different forces that seized power over more than 20 years of war.

It was discovered by a joint Soviet-Afghan archaeological team in the winter of 1978-79, after Communists had seized power in Afghanistan and just months before the Soviet Army invaded the country, setting off two decades of conflict and turmoil.

During those decades, few people knew where it was, and they kept quiet. For the last 15 years the gold has been stored three floors down in the Central Bank vaults inside the royal palace compound, known as the Arg, now the presidential palace.

Last month Afghan and foreign museum experts broke open the six safes inside the vault for the first time in more than 20 years and began compiling a computerized inventory of the gold for the Kabul Museum. The National Geographic Society provided state-of-the-art equipment to catalog and photograph every item.

"That day was one of my best days in the last two years," Sayed Makhdum Raheen, Afghanistan's minister of information and culture, said in an interview. "It is something very important. Not just because it is gold, but because it is the history and culture of the past. There were doubts in my mind, but I was 80 to 90 percent sure the gold was there."

Carla Grissman, an American who has been working with the Kabul museum since 1973 and saw the gold when it was first discovered, said she had known all along the gold was safe, but for her the moment was no less moving.

"I held a lot of the objects in my hands at that time, so in a way for me now it was an emotional experience, thinking back to the time when the museum was intact (and everyone was happy)," she wrote in an e-mail message after completing the inventory.

"The museum staff are the heroes," she said in an interview. "They kept it intact by keeping it dead quiet. The world was shouting that the museum was plundered and everything stolen, but the Afghans never said that."

Nancy Dupree, an American author of guidebooks on Afghanistan and its archaeological treasures, said that whenever anyone asked the museum workers what was in the safes, "they just said there was nothing important in there."

During one recent day in the monthlong inventory process Prof. Frederik Hiebert of Oxford University was leading the cataloging.

"Are we ready for 71?" he said, referring to an item by its inventory number, as he cut a small plastic bag and spilled hundreds of tiny gold hemispheres onto a white polystyrene tray. The gold gleamed brightly, something from another world amid the papers, weighing scales and latex gloves of the museum specialists.

Professor Hiebert and the others have found every single one of 20,600 gold pieces — some as small as a fingernail — as they were left by the Soviet and Afghan archaeologists and museum workers who packed them in 1979. There are thousands of small slivers of appliqué ornaments that decorated the funeral garments of the five women and one man found in the tombs, along with gold headdresses and richly worked pendants, dagger and sword hilts and scabbards carved with jewel-encrusted beasts. There are also belts, buckles, signet rings, an ornamental tree of gold and pearls, and even gold sandals.

They come from a site known to the local Afghans as Tela Tapa, or Mound of Gold, on a dusty plain in northern Afghanistan that runs from the northern foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains down to the ancient Oxus river, now known as the Amu. The burial mound, not far from the modern town of Shiberghan, was probably a family cemetery belonging to rulers of one of the Kushan princedoms of the first century A.D.

This was the center of the Bactrian Empire, which stretched from the city of Balkh (the ancient Bactra) across northern Afghanistan. Conquered by Alexander the Great in 329 B.C. and ruled by his Greek followers for a century afterward, it was later invaded by nomad tribes from the Siberian and Chinese steppes, who founded the dazzling Kushan dynasty in 135 B.C.

The Bactrian gold reflects the mingling of the Greek, Bactrian and nomadic art of the time. The burial mounds were astonishingly simple, of mud brick, and may have been secret graves, said Viktor Sarianidi, the Russian archaeologist who led the Afghan-Soviet team that discovered the gold. Yet the gold ornaments inside adorning the six bodies, and the belongings laid beside them, were of the richest quality and quantity, including exquisite pieces of older Greco-Bactrian art, possibly plundered from the Greeks, and later pieces showing Greek and Bactrian influence fashioned in a cruder, more gaudy, nomadic taste.

The archaeologists found that the coffins, skeletons and clothes had rotted away but that the gold ornaments shined, undamaged and undisturbed for two millenniums. Thousands of appliqués lay where they had decorated the robes and cloaks of the dead. Clasps decorated with cupids riding dolphins, pendants depicting a king wrestling with dragons, warriors struggling with lions, a panther mauling an antelope and peculiarly corpulent Kushan versions of the goddess Aphrodite, all in gold, were often encrusted with turquoises and carnelians, lapis lazuli and garnet. And a crown, fashioned like five trees with dangling gold leaves, was made so it could be folded up and packed away in a nomad's saddlebag. A seventh burial mound was discovered but covered up again for lack of time and was later looted.

The collection has rarely been seen. Delivered to the National Museum in western Kabul in February 1979, some pieces were briefly displayed there. But with the Soviet invasion later that year, the treasure was packed away and seen only twice in the next 15 years. In 1982 it was photographed and in 1985 moved into a royal pavilion in the center of town. Then, in 1989, three days after the Soviet Army completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan Communist leader Najibullah moved the treasure again. To counter speculation that it had disappeared, or been taken to Russia, he showed part of it to a few ambassadors in the summer pavilion of the palace that year.

Then it was packed up and stowed in the vaults inside the Arg alongside Afghanistan's gold reserves. Also stored there were crates of the finest pieces from the Kabul museum.

The next decade of civil war after the withdrawal of the Soviet Army raised the greatest fears and wildest rumors about the Bactrian gold and the museum's treasures. The Islamic fighters who fought the Soviet Army seized power in 1992, and then fought bitterly among themselves over Kabul, destroying much of the capital, including the National Museum, which was rocketed and plundered. Even the Arg took direct hits.

Mrs. Dupree, the guidebooks author, approached the defense minister of the time and asked him if rumors were true that the Bactrian gold had been spirited away and sold. He said it had not, and a delegation from the museum was allowed to make one visit to check the vaults that year and found the safes still sealed.

Then the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 1996, creating fears. Armed men ordered a Central Bank employee to open the vault in the Arg and brought a gold merchant from southern Afghanistan to inspect the bullion. But they knew nothing of the Bactrian gold lying just yards away, said one bank employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. Then as they left at that time and the bank official locked the massive safe door, he snapped off the key in the lock, which successfully frustrated further attempts by the Taliban or anyone else to enter the vault.

Yet tensions grew as more militant elements gained influence within the Taliban and began a systematic destruction of all non-Islamic art, smashing what was on display at the museum and blowing up the giant Buddhas of Bamiyan in the spring of 2001. The United States war against the Taliban in the fall of 2001 may have come just in time for the Bactrian gold. As the government collapsed, Taliban officials tried desperately to get into the vault to seize the gold bullion.

The museum staff remain nervous, asking journalists who viewed the cataloging process not to write about it until the inventory was complete and the gold stored away again. The culture minister, Mr. Raheen, is torn between concern for the safety of the collection and the need to generate world interest for Afghanistan's cultural heritage, much of which is still being looted in illegal digs all over the country. He said he hoped to exhibit the collection around the world to raise much-needed funds for his impoverished ministry and eventually to build a new museum in Kabul to house it.

For now, though, the Bactrian gold is packed up once more in new safes and awaits calmer days. The Afghan people and the rest of the world, few of whom even know about its existence, will have to wait a while longer to see it

Wang Hai Da Bo Gong Temple, Shenton Way

I went to the "Fu De Ce Wang Hai Da Bo Gong" temple ("Temple of the Da Bo Gong Overlooking The Sea" & the "Shrine of Fu De") at the southern end of Shenton Way near MAS Building today. Picked up a leaflet that says that the temple will be celebrating the following events on Sunday 25 July 2004:

- 185th Anniversary of Wang Hai Do Bo Gong (1819)

- 160th Anniversary of the rebuilding of Fu De Ce (1844)

- God Mercy Birthday (Lunar Calendar 19th day of 6th Moon)

There will be a ceremony conducted by Taoist priests and a puppet opera staged. Vegetarian food will be provided from 10am to 3pm.

I thought Da Bo Gong is also Fu De Zheng Shen, so why is it that they seem to imply Fu De Ce is different from Da Bo Gong? Does anyone know?

Regards,

Wee Cheng

http://weecheng.com

Banking in Iraq

Banking in Iraq

A tricky operation
Jun 24th 2004 | BAGHDAD, LONDON AND WASHINGTON, DC
From The Economist print edition




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The slow reconstruction of Iraq's battered banking system


DURING the looting that followed the fall of Baghdad in April last year,
the ten-storey headquarters of the Central Bank of Iraq (CBI) was burgled
and torched before it collapsed into a pile of soot-stained rubble.
Fourteen months later, the charred ruins have been cleared, and the CBI's
staff work on American-provided computers in a building nearby.


Rehousing the central bank is one thing. Rebuilding an entire banking
system is quite another. Despite the focus on military and political
matters, the task has been surprisingly high on the American-led
coalition's to-do list: even before George Bush declared that "major combat
operations have ended" in May 2003, American advisers were preparing in
neighbouring Kuwait. The job is all the more formidable because under
Saddam Hussein Iraq had no independent banks to speak of. From the CBI to
the lending policies of the six state-owned institutions that controlled
most bank assets, the system was under Mr Hussein's thumb. Lending was
based on cronyism, not credit quality.


Not surprisingly, inflation and bad loans left the banking system to all
intents and purposes insolvent?as far as anyone can tell. Under Mr Hussein,
record-keeping was patchy at best. One adviser tells of "madly trying" to
reconstruct historical balance sheets at the banks, searching fruitlessly
for records of collateral against bad loans, and of the frustrations of
wading through opaque financial reports in which accounting "varies from
branch to branch and, often, month to month".


No wonder that most Iraqis chose to stuff their dinars in their pillows
rather than in bank accounts?and the habit persisted after the Americans
abolished the old currency and printed a new one. With no electronic
banking?there are no ATMs or credit cards?most of the Iraqi economy is
still based on cash. It works around, not through, the formal banking
sector. America's Treasury Department estimates that Iraq's banks' assets
amount to just $2 billion, or only 10% of GDP, a "low ratio by any
comparison".


Years of economic isolation, due to sanctions imposed by the United Nations
after the first Gulf war in 1991, have also added to the forces keeping
banking primitive. Transactions are limited to deposit-taking and
infrequent loans?for which banks require collateral worth up to four times
the credit. Many bank processes (such as cheque clearing, which can take as
little as three days or as long as three weeks) are still done by hand.
Electronic links among bank branches, let alone to the outside world, are
rare, although this is changing. Until recently, the Coalition Provisional
Authority (CPA) paid Iraqi army pensions by (well-armed) courier.


Despite the unpromising conditions, the CPA, which will be dissolved next
week to make way for an interim government run by Iraqis, has made some
headway. It has drawn up a framework of laws and rules for the new banking
system. A law that came into effect in March established the CBI's
independence and laid down its procedures for everything from the
management of foreign reserves to bank supervision. A new commercial-bank
law governs the functioning of Iraq's 17 private banks, which were
legalised by Mr Hussein in the early 1990s in response to a cash crunch
following UN sanctions.


A huge training effort has been going on. Advisers from America's Treasury
and bank regulators have given classes on subjects ranging from the use of
Microsoft Word to the basics of Basel 2, a new treaty on bank supervision.
"It is a big challenge, a new way of thinking," says one American adviser.
"Banking based on risk and judgment is radically different from bank
decisions based on Saddam's say-so."


A basic currency reform was also necessary. Under Mr Hussein, there were
two lots of dinars: one in the Kurdish north, another elsewhere. Because
there were only two or three denominations, worth up to at most $5 or so,
even basic purchases required thick wads of notes. So the CPA set to work
designing a new, unified currency with several denominations. After
frenzied printing in factories from Germany to Kenya, 27 Boeing 747s
crammed with bank notes flew to Baghdad. Armed convoys delivered the cash
to 240 bank branches across Iraq and officials distributed, in all, two
billion pieces of paper. The exchange was completed by January this year
with virtually no hitches, a remarkable feat given the insurgency already
in progress.


The creation of a single currency has permitted the CBI to carry out a
basic monetary policy. The central bank carries out daily currency
auctions, receiving about a dozen bids a day according to the CPA. The new
dinar has appreciated by 25% or so since its launch, and has traded
steadily at around 1,450 to the dollar since January. Inflation has been
kept in check, no small thing given that hyperinflation often occurs during
and after wars.


Encouraging as all this is, it still amounts to little more than the
rudiments of monetary policy and a banking system. Without going much
further it is hard to see how the Iraqi economy, which currently depends
heavily on American grants and subsidies, can be put on a self-sustaining
path.


The six state-owned banks, which comprise most of the banking sector, are
still in a sorry state. The four smallest of these, which between them hold
5% of Iraq's bank assets, are "without a doubt insolvent", according to a
CPA official. Four-fifths of their loans are non-performing. The two
biggest banks, Rafidain and Rashid, which together account for roughly 85%
of the system's assets, may be no better off. They are thought to have lost
$100m in the looting. Rafidain was the biggest commercial bank in the Arab
world before the first Gulf war, with assets of $47 billion. If its
estimated $24 billion of off-balance-sheet borrowing from abroad on behalf
of Mr Hussein's regime were factored into its books, it would now be bust.


Exacerbating this is the $120 billion Iraq owes to foreigners (not counting
reparations from the first Gulf war). While much of this debt may well be
written off, no agreement has yet been reached. Until the extent of Iraq's
debt is resolved, the state banks cannot do business abroad. Trade is
funnelled through the Trade Bank of Iraq, run by a consortium of 13
international banks, which provides letters of credit for everything from
medicine to the services of forensic accountants. It is hoped that Iraqi
banks will one day take this over.


Perhaps the best hope lies with the 17 private banks, which are
unencumbered by the worst of the old regime's cronyism and unburdened by
its debts. But they are tiny, holding just 5% of all bank assets, although
their share is growing. None of them has a country-wide presence. Bank of
Baghdad, the biggest, has 20 branches; currently, Rafidain and Rashid have
almost 300 branches open.


This would seem to be a suitable case for foreign investment to bring in
the needed know-how and technology. In January, the CBI granted bank
licences to three foreign banks: Britain's HSBC and Standard Chartered, and
the National Bank of Kuwait. The new commercial-bank law permits other
foreign banks to buy up to 49% of existing Iraqi private banks. At least
one-third of the private institutions are already in discussions with other
Middle Eastern banks.


All well and good. But so far none of the three licensed foreign banks has
entered the Iraqi market. Security is an obvious concern, outweighing, for
now, the risk that licences may be revoked if branches are not set up
within a year.


And who can be sure that what has already been achieved will not be undone?
Some observers worry that once the guiding hands of American advisers have
gone, the CBI will become politicised and print money to pay off state
debts. It is also possible that the new bank laws will one day be
overturned altogether, because of nationalistic bias against foreign
ownership or their lack of reference to Islamic teaching. And important as
the state of the banking system might be, Iraq's economic health is sure to
rest, in the final analysis, on political stability. The future, in other
words, is still in the balance.





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Bradley Mayhew: Covering Southwest China

From 'that's beijing'

(http://www.thatsbeijing.com)

 

Only the Lonely

 

A veteran voice from the southwest wilderness speaks out

 

By Bradley Mayhew

 

Guidebook writer, like professional ice cream taster, surely ranks

among the best jobs in the world. Imagine getting paid to travel,

explore foreign cultures and then write about them. Where do you sign

up?

 

Think again. The reality is more like this: lying awake at 3am in

15th-century dirt on a dusty wooden chapel floor in Kathok monastery. A

towering statue of a Buddhist protector god looms nightmarishly out of

the darkness as a dozen rats scurry around my sleeping bag, bumping

into my legs, forcing me to stifle a shriek. I haven't washed for five

days and the week's calorie intake has been a stomach-churning mixture

of instant noodles, MSG and cold Tibetan butter tea. I've already

notched two new holes into my belt.

 

This is travel at the low end, where writing a guidebook to China

seems more punishment than pleasure. Follow me into China travel's

heart of darkness, onto overnight sleeper buses, trapped in the back

row bunk in a haze of other people's cigarette smoke and the deafening

sounds of a made-for-Asia kickboxing movie. Chew barbecued rat and

cabbage (the only food in town) in a tiny, frozen village in wintry

Guizhou, or try to map the unmappable in Kashgar's old town in the

blistering heat of summer.

 

Then there are the embarrassingly frequent struggle sessions with

vindictively uncooperative ticket sellers. Trying to find the time of

the fastest train to Chengdu? Now imagine asking the times of all

trains going anywhere! Or attempting to write notes in the rain on

soggy bits of paper and then, worse, trying to make sense of the

blurred scrawl two months later in a rented flat in south London.

 

But just as you're ready to throw in the towel and catch the next

flight to Thailand, China invariably redeems itself. A random

restaurant choice brings a fine three-course meal and a cold beer for

less than RMB 30. The bus from hell drops you by chance at an

enthralling weekly market, or takes you through unexpectedly sublime

mountain scenery just as the sun begins to set. And the night dodging

rats at Kathok? Daylight brought the famous Kathok festival, honouring

the birth of the sage Guru Rinpoche with two days of the most

spectacular masked dances and Tibetan opera I have ever seen.

 

Most regular travellers to China seem to enjoy the same weird

sado-masochistic relationship with a country that inspires alternate

passions of love and hate. There are as many contradictions inherent in

guidebooks as there are in travel. With a fixed page count and time

budget, there is a hard-fought balance to be struck between coverage of

the places most frequented by tourists versus the off-the-beaten-track

destinations that many travellers thirst for (and that ego-driven

writers love to boast about). Do you spend all your time in Kunming and

Lijiang, where everybody goes and wants information on, but which are

easier to navigate yourself, or do you spend inefficient amounts of

time schlepping out to remote villages that only five per cent of the

guides' readership has time to explore?

 

Often the harder decisions are not what to include but what to leave

out. Some of the best travel experiences spring from chance

explorations coupled with the random kindness of strangers. By writing

up these villages and their informal guesthouses, are you encouraging

travellers to visit a community that cannot (or doesn't want to)

sustain high visitor numbers. Will villagers welcome a stream of

travellers clutching their Lonely Planet guides? My mind is drawn to

the family who occupy the former residence of Joseph Rock outside

Lijiang, and face constant interruption from a stream of Rock-philes

eager to tour their living room.

 

Resolving these issues is as difficult as deciphering a Chinese bus

timetable chalked up on a board, or getting a response to all 37

questions asked through a glass-proofed, waist-high hole in a bus

station ticket office, as every one of the 45 people behind you thrusts

money under your arms, over your head and through your legs in an

attempt to secure tickets for the next bus to Shanghai. These are the

times when you'll see guidebook writers screaming obscenities at random

strangers or pacing around bus waiting rooms muttering darkly about a

career change to accountancy. Happily, travel tales of woe are the

exceptions these days in China. A recent trip to Yunnan was a

pleasantly surprising string of luxury buses, non-smoking halls,

English menus and pleasant reception staff. There has been a tourist

revolution in most parts of China. Long gone are the days when checking

into a hotel in a closed town would result in the swift arrival of the

gonganju (public security bureau) and a possible self-criticism. Old

China hands may reminisce together over a three-kuai beer about the

good old days when you had to change FEC on the black market

(remember?) and then fight for hours to get your cut-price RMB accepted

by government officials (who would then charge you double the local

price), but those days are now as familiar to modern backpackers as

communes and collectivisation are to today's Chinese teenagers.

 

On my most recent trip I had therefore assumed that returning to

research Shanghai would present few problems, save perhaps for judging

between martinis at M on the Bund and Bloody Marys at Park 97, or

ranking the merits of one fusion cuisine over another. How hard can

spring in Shanghai be after a winter in Guizhou? But then SARS hit the

fan this past spring. In an escalating climate of fear and loathing

airlines slashed their schedules, restaurants barricaded their doors,

and hotels refused to show me any rooms for fear of infection. Suddenly

it was Guizhou all over again. And all this to glean nuggets of

information for travellers who aren't even planning to travel to China

right now. These are the times when travel writing gets metaphysical.

 

Still, Shanghai is easy. It's remote Guizhou or Qinghai where the fun

really starts. Where the buses are held together by tape, the stares

are shameless enough to make an exhibitionist paranoid, and where the

second biggest danger involved in bus travel (after careering off a

cliff) is contracting lung cancer. It's another country back there.

 

And I for one can't wait to go back.

 

Bradley Mayhew studied Chinese at Oxford University; he has since

written over a dozen guidebooks, including Lonely Planet guides to

southwest China, Shanghai and Tibet.

Still Malaysia's reigning king of controversy

Asia Times

 

Still Malaysia's reigning king of controversy

By Anil Netto

PENANG - In the space of less than a fortnight, former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad has managed to land himself in four political controversies. That's quite a feat for someone who is supposed to have retired.

Controversy number one arose after President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe said in an interview in May that the Malaysian and Chinese governments had provided partial funding for his US$5 million oriental-design, 25-bedroom mansion near the capital, Harare. He did not make it clear whether the supply of rare timber for paneling in the mansion, under construction for more than five years, represented the full extent of Malaysia's involvement.

Mugabe's comments sparked a public outcry in Malaysia, and it took Mahathir 15 days to shed some light on the issue, which appeared to have caught the Malaysian government and cabinet unaware.

"Yes, I think we did" supply timber for the mansion, Mahathir finally told reporters on June 10, but added that this was the "usual practice" in promoting Malaysian timber abroad. Mugabe has often said he regards Mahathir as a close friend, and the two men share many similarities, including a strong anti-Western rhetoric that has been undermined by autocratic rule at home.

After Mahathir's admission, Malaysia's opposition parties and public interest groups responded by calling for an immediate probe into the gift of timber.

"Mahathir is also accountable to the public for his action," said P Ramakrishnan, president of the social reform group, Aliran. "He must come clean by providing facts and figures to justify why a guy like Mugabe, who is regarded as a tyrant and a despotic dictator, deserves this 'gift' from Malaysians."

No sen in sight
Barely had the dust settled when Mahathir caught media attention again on June 17. This time, he was widely reported as saying he was "not getting even one sen" from serving as adviser to national petroleum corporation Petronas and national car maker Proton, as well as to the development authorities of two resort islands - Langkawi, off Mahathir's home state of Kedah, and Tioman, off the peninsula's east coast.

He said he was only receiving the pension for serving as prime minister for more than 22 years. This amounted to half of his last-drawn monthly salary of RM20,000 ($5,260), he was reported as saying in the pro-establishment Star, the country's top-selling English-language newspaper.

"I don't get a single sen at all," he said. "I am provided an office by Petronas." Mahathir said he needed to explain this matter because there had been talk that he was receiving huge allowances from these particular firms and agencies, the Star reported.

A day later, Mahathir was forced to "clarify". In a report by Utusan Malaysia, a paper linked to his former party, the ruling United Malays National Organization, Mahathir said he did receive taxable monthly allowances from Petronas after all. "However, the amount he received was totally far off from the hundreds of thousands of ringgit he was alleged to have received," said the report. It was not known who made those allegations and what prompted the about-turn.

Protection payment takes a hit
As if that was not enough, Mahathir stirred up a third hornet's nest when he called for a review of the honorarium of the annual RM10,000 ($2,600) paid by the northern state of Penang to neighboring Kedah for the historical acquisition of Penang Island and the accompanying strip of land on mainland Penang known as Seberang Perai, formerly province Wellesley.

In the late 18th century, Kedah, under the rule of Sultan Abdullah, offered to lease Penang to England's East India Company in return for protection against possible attacks from Siam (now Thailand) and Burma (Myanmar) and future uprisings by his own relatives. English country trader Captain Francis Light representing the East India Company formally took possession of Penang Island in 1786. Seberang Perai was leased to the English in 1800. However, Sultan Abdullah discovered too late that the compensation and the "protection" Kedah was to receive was much less than he had expected.

In calling for a review of the payment, also on June 17, Mahathir said the amount was no longer realistic. "Kedah should ask Penang for a review of the payment," he said. "We must make a demand because with RM10,000, now you can't even buy a house, or else we ask that Penang and Seberang Perai be returned to us," Mahathir said.

Those with longer memories were left puzzled as to why Mahathir was raising this issue now after stepping down last October after 22 years in power. They point out that when a request was made in 1994 for the payment to be increased to RM10 million, Mahathir himself had dismissed it. "The royalty payment is only a condition ... it is history, and we are only continuing with what is history. It has become meaningless," he said then. These critics also point out that subsequent historical events - Kedah becoming part of independent Malaya in 1957 and of the Federation of Malaysia in 1963 - had superseded the earlier agreement with the British.

Water under the bridge
In another salvo, Mahathir also said Kedah should think about charging Penang for the raw water it had received for free over the years. He pointed out that Singapore and Malacca state had to pay their neighbor Johor for water "but Kedah, a poor state at that, supplies raw water for free to a rich state like Penang."

In a way, Mahathir's admission of Kedah being poor is an admission of his administration's failure to raise socio-economic conditions in the state, which remains among the poorest in the country. Penang, by contrast, is one of the most developed states, and its Penang Water Authority (PBA) is widely regarded as one of the most efficient, supplying the public with water at a price that is among the cheapest in the country.

It would not have escaped Mahathir's attention that the PBA's exemplary track record has cast other water authorities in the country in an unfavorable light.

"Water has become a commodity and every state government wants to make money from the sale of water," says economist Charles Santiago, who noted that Kedah was also in the midst of privatizing its water resources. Penang, he said, has been profitable in water and "what Mahathir was saying is that since you are profitable you pay for your water."

But Santiago pointed out that the government had played a clear role in providing access to water as an important component of development, resulting in 95% of the Malaysian population having access to affordable, piped water.

Though both Kedah and Penang are governed by the ruling coalition, United Malays National Organization holds the reins in Kedah while its coalition partner, the multi-ethnic but Chinese-dominated Gerakan, leads the Penang government. Gerakan President Datuk Seri Dr Lim Keng Yaik holds the water portfolio in the federal cabinet, which was previously held by a staunch Mahathir loyalist, Samy Vellu, president of the Malaysian Indian Congress.

These unnecessary controversies are the last things current Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi needs as he seeks to distance himself from his predecessor. It only goes to show that, even in retirement, the former premier has a knack for ruffling feathers, whether international or domestic, and stirring emotions over the lack of transparency and accountability that characterized his administration. Perhaps after more than two decades in power, it was too much to expect Mahathir to lie low and confine himself to sailing, carpentry or horseback riding.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

theonion.com: Coalition: Vast Majority of Iraqis Still Alive! Hahaha

	Advertisement

From: www.theonion.com

 

BAGHDAD—As the Coalition Provisional Authority prepares to hand power over to an Iraqi-led interim government on June 30, CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer publicly touted the success of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Above: Bremer speaks before a large crowd of still-living Iraqi children.

"As the Coalition's rule draws to a close, the numbers show that we have an awful lot to be proud of," Bremer said Tuesday. "As anyone who's taken a minute and actually looked at the figures can tell you, the vast majority of Iraqis are still alive—as many as 99 percent. While 10,000 or so Iraqi civilians have been killed, pretty much everyone is not dead."

According to U.S. Department of Defense statistics, of the approximately 24 million Iraqis who were not killed, nearly all are not in a military prison. Bremer said "a good number" of those Iraqis who are in jail have been charged with a crime, and most of them have enjoyed a prison stay free of guard-dog attacks, low-watt electrocutions, and sexual humiliation.

U.S. Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt explained the coalition's accomplishments in geographical terms.

Above: Coalition: Vast Majority Of Iraqis Still Alive

"There are vast sections of the country where one can go outside unarmed during the daylight hours," Kimmitt said, speaking from a heavily guarded base outside of Baghdad. "Even in cities where fighting has occurred, many neighborhoods have not been torn apart by gunfire. And, throughout the country, more towns than I could name off the top of my head have never been touched by a bomb at all."

Kimmitt said the bulk of the nation's public buildings are still standing.

"Throughout the nation, four out of five mosques have not been obliterated," Kimmitt said. "That's way, way, way more than half. Also, 80 percent of the nation's treasures and artifacts have not been destroyed by artillery or stolen in the widespread looting. If we were in school, that'd be a B-minus."

Halliburton executive vice-president and CFO C. Christopher Gaut described the progress of his company's reconstruction efforts.

"Of the millions of civilian homes that are still standing, many have electricity for hours each day," Gaut said. "The loss of $200 million in profits resulting from oil-line sabotage pales in comparison to the millions of dollars that remaining lines are generating. And a good portion of southern Iraq currently has access to fuel. Once we get the lines in the north repaired, oil fields will be operating at more than two-thirds of their former capacity."

Gaut added: "Many of the hospitals have reopened, and a good number of the schools have started holding classes at regularly scheduled hours, too."

Above: Two Iraqis from Tikrit who are very much alive.

Charles Sawyer, a State Department official serving as a liaison between coalition forces and the Iraqi interim government, said that no Americans have been killed in Fallujah since the coalition ceded control of the region to an Iraqi brigade.

"Less than 10 contractors have been murdered, publicly mutilated, or had their remains hung from a bridge since the end of March," Sawyer said. "And nearly three quarters of the foreign-born contract workers taken hostage in the last six months have not been killed. Also, contrary to headlines that claim there are problems with Iraq's internal law enforcement, more than half of Iraqi police officers have not deserted."

U.S. Army Gen. John P. Abizaid gave a positive assessment of the status of U.S. troops in Iraq.

"Yesterday alone, 137,980 American troops were not killed," Abizaid said. "All in all, if we keep on like this, more than 90 percent of the brave men and women serving in Iraq will return home to see their families again."

Iraq's new prime minister, Iyad Allawi, agreed that the situation in his soon-to-be-independent nation is improving.

"Of the 25 members of the Iraqi Governing Council, 23 survived until the group was replaced last month," Allawi said. "Nine out of 10 times, death threats against those who cooperate with coalition efforts do not end in actual murders."

However, Allawi added that, despite the wishes of most of his countrymen, the vast majority of American troops deployed to Iraq are still there.

The Onion: China Stockpiling Massive Fireworks

From www.theonion.com

 

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WASHINGTON, DC—Satellite photographs have revealed the recent test-detonation of several hundred extremely small explosive devices in the remote Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region of Southwestern China, sources from the U.S. Department of Defense reported Monday.

Above: Chinese officials conduct fireworks tests.

"The tests, combined with evidence that factory buildings in this area are operating at capacity, indicate a massive buildup in China's already substantial fireworks arsenal," Army festive-munitions expert Ronald Dowdy said. "We have also recorded an increase in the amount of cording, nitrides, and gaily colored paper being shipped to Jiangxi, Liaoning, and Hubei. Since China is already in possession of enough fireworks to delight the entire world 50 times over, we can only assume that they're gearing up for an imminent celebration of unprecedented size."

The Pentagon reports that the current Chinese fireworks arsenal, which is known to include land-based firecrackers, bottle-to-air rockets, and the oft-criticized M-80, is believed to hold a delighting force in excess of 10,000 megafuns—or, in the words of one expert, "almost a billion times the merriment produced by a single cherry bomb."

With the signing of the landmark international Black Cat Limitation Treaty in 1989, the Chinese government committed to slashing its fireworks production in half. As a part of the agreement, adult-supervision officials have been allowed to inspect factories in Jiangsu and Guangdong provinces, which had been converted to sparkler production in recent years.

Recent intelligence suggests that China simply shifted major fireworks manufacturing to other locations.

"These are not the innocent magic snakes, smoke bombs, and snap-pops that China is legally allowed to deploy for inoffensive purposes," Dowdy said. "These are full-blown instruments of mass recreation—whistling pinwheels, multiple-effect fountains, and single-shot shells that launch 80 feet into the air. Why, we've gotten reports of shells in excess of 50 shots, strobing starbursts, and, in the case of The Big Kahuna, multiple tiger tails. I'm not comfortable knowing that, at any time, a major American city could be jarred by a sudden flash and loud report."

According to Dowdy, the Chinese government has refused to acknowledge any violation of international law, claiming that its arsenal is not of an unusual size for the season. It has also defended its fireworks production as a part of Chinese culture.

But U.S. officials have expressed concern that the extremely portable fireworks, packaged in normal shipping containers and labeled as ordinary trade goods, could enter our country in large numbers.

"Despite strict laws limiting their use, a significant amount of Chinese-made fireworks ends up in North America every year," Department of Homeland Security domestic-affairs advisor Beth Galliard said. "We'll be patrolling the nation's rural gas stations, searching for any possible distribution points for these fireworks."

Galliard said that, while she doesn't want to be an alarmist, she has received reliable intelligence suggesting that a major fireworks-related incident on American soil is being planned for early July.

"It's frightening to think that nearly anybody could enter a populated area—say, a picnic shelter or a crowded beach—with a few fireworks and a book of matches," Galliard said. "To create utter chaos, all they'd need to do is place the device on the ground, light fuse, and get away."

Laments of an Iraqi: A Puppet Regime About To Be Installed

Extracts from this blog by a relatively neutral middle class Iraqi getting increasingly frustrated by the incompetence of the US Administration and their efforts to install a puppet government in Baghdad.  The US is doomed if it cannot even convince middle class Baghdadis of its intentions.

 

http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/2004_06_01_riverbendblog_archive.html#108757890670304280

 

Excuses, Excuses...
I have had neither the time, nor the inclination, to blog lately. The weather is, quite literally, hellish. The heat begins very early in the morning with a blazing sun that seems unfairly close to our part of the earth. You'd think, after the sun has set, that the weather would be drastically cooler. This is not the case in Baghdad. After the sun has set, the hot sidewalks and streets emanate waves of heat for several hours, as if sighing in relief.

The electricity has been particularly bad these last two weeks in many areas. For every four hours of no electricity, we get two hours of electricity. And while we should be taking advantage of these two hours to do such things as wash clothes, get the water pump going and blog, we find ourselves sitting around in front of the air conditioner for a couple of hours of bliss, procrastinating and making empty promises to no one in particular.

School is out for most of the kids- both in grade school and in college. Everyone is just generally sitting around at home. It’s a huge relief for parents and teachers alike. There was a time when, according to many frazzled parents, sending one’s kids to school was the highlight of the day… now it has come to mean more anxiety and worry. While having them virtually trapped inside of the house is something of a trial on everyone involved, it is also a relief.

The new government isn’t very different from the old Governing Council. Some of the selfsame Puppets, in fact. It’s amusing to watch our Karazai- Ghazi Ajeel Al-Yawer- trying to establish himself. It’s a bit of a predicament for many an Iraqi, and possibly foreigners too. Here he is- your typical Arab- the dark skin, dark hair and traditional ‘dishdasha’ wearing an ‘iggall’ on his head and playing the role of tribal sheikh quite well.

Beyond these minor details, however, he remains an ex-member of the Governing Council and was actually selected by the Puppets, supposedly over the American preference- Adnan Al-Pachichi (who is adamantly claiming he is *not* the American preference at this point). That whole charade is laughable. It has been quite clear from the very start that the Puppets do not breathe unless Bremer asks them, very explicitly, to inhale and exhale. The last time I checked, Puppets do not suddenly come to life and grow a conscience unless a fairy godmother and Jiminy the Cricket are involved.

He is, purportedly, one of the heads of one of the largest tribes in the region- Al-Shummar. This tribe extends over parts of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia. They are largely Sunni but have several Shi’a clans. During and after the war, they were largely responsible for the northern and western borders. They are landowners, farmers, and- occasionally- smugglers of everything from sheep, to people, to arms…

Now, Yawer is our Karazai. He sits exuding all the outward signs of the stereotypical Arab (almost down to the camel) and yet, he seems to support Bremer et al. in almost every decision. Sure, he gives an interview now and then and says he doesn’t agree with this decision or that one, but the first major meeting he attends, he calls for NATO forces inside of the country- as if Americans, Italians, Brits and the rest aren’t already enough. There are also rumors that he is married to a certain lady who is a personal friend and adamant supporter of none other than Ahmad Chalabi... I'm still looking into that.

His image, admittedly, bothers me. I’m getting visions of corrupt Gulf emirs, oil wells, and shady business dealings.

Iyad Allawi is completely America and Britain’s boy. He has been on the CIA’s payroll for quite some time now and I don’t think anyone was particularly surprised when he was made Prime Minister. The cabinet of ministers is an interesting concoction of exiled Iraqis, Kurdish Iraqis who were in the northern region and a few Iraqis who were actually living inside of Iraq. Of the 37 members of the new government, 11 were actually living inside of Iraq. Of those 11, one or two are known to be quite competent. The rest are either unknown or generally infamous.

Several of the new government actually have more than one nationality. Now don’t get me wrong- I hold nothing against people with dual or triple or whatever number of nationalities. I do, however, have something against people with dual nationality being a part of government. It makes one wonder how many Americans would actually agree to having a senator or minister with, say, a French or German passport along with the American one.

While I don’t have any definite numbers, I can assure the world that we have *at least* 20 million Iraqis, both inside and outside of Iraq, who have only a single nationality. I can even go further to assure the world that the majority of those Iraqis with a single nationality actually have lived inside of Iraq for most of their lives. However bizarre the statistics may seem, I do believe that out of those millions of Iraqis, 37 competent ones could have been found. True, they might not have CIA alliances, bank accounts in Switzerland, armed militias or multimillion dollar companies in Saudi Arabia… but many of them actually have a sense of national pride and an anxiety for their country and for the future of their children and their children’s children inside of said country.

My favorite minister, by far, is the Defense Minister, Sha’alan Hazim. According to American newspaper Al-Sabah, Mr. Sha’lan Hazim “received a Masters degree in business administration from the UK before returning to Iraq to run a Kuwaiti bank. After being forced to leave Iraq by the former regime, Mr.Sha’alan became the head of a real-estate company in London until he returned to Iraq last June and has since worked as the governor of Qadisiya”.

Now this is highly amusing. I must have missed something. If anyone has any information about just *how* Mr. Sha’alan Hazim qualifies as a Defense Minister, please do send it along. At a point when we need secure borders and a strong army, our new Defense Minister was given the job because he… what? Played with toy soldiers as a child? Read Tolstoy’s War and Peace six times? Was regional champion of the game Commandos?

Beyond the unsure political situation, I have spent the last few days helping a relative sort things out to leave abroad. It is a depressing situation. My mother's cousin is renting out his house, selling his car and heading out to Amman with his three kids where, he hopes, he will be able to find work. He is a university professor who has had enough of the current situation. He claims that he's tired of worrying about his family and the varying political and security crises every minute of the day. It's a common story these days. It feels like anyone who can, is trying to find a way out before June 30. Last summer, people who hadn't been inside of Iraq for years were clamoring to visit the dear homeland that had been 'liberated' (after which they would clamor to leave the dear homeland). This summer, it is the other way around.

The Syrian and Jordanian borders are packed. A friend who was returned at the Jordanian border said that they were only allowing 20 cars to pass per day... people were being made to wait on the borders for days at a time and risked being rejected at the border guard's whim. People are simply tired of waiting for normality and security. It was difficult enough during the year... this summer promises to be a particularly long one.

 

 

 

Tapping on Senai the way to fly high

 

Today Online

Wednesday • June 23, 2004

Prithpal Singh

As a pilot, I am familiar with Senai Airport in Johor.

Over a period of 20 years, I have seen it grow from a little ramshackle terminal to a glass-and-marble one and the runway lengthened to accommodate B747 aircraft.

Mr Lars Gronsedt, the airport's chief commercial officer, is a former senior executive with shipping giant Maersk. He has lived in Singapore for five years, knows what Singaporeans want and is providing it.

This includes a large secured car-park complex, an executive coach transport service and a deluxe city terminal in Johor Baru.

The passenger terminal building at Senai Airport is being made more spacious with shopping at the "lowest guaranteed" duty free prices.

Mr Gronsedt is determined to improve on the number of Singaporeans using the airport, which represented 30 per cent of the total passengers who travelled through Senai last month. He is also busy putting the finishing touches to a new 38,000-sq-ft cargo hangar which will be able to cater to four wide-body freighter aircraft at any one time.

Normally, such ambitious plans would ring alarm bells in Singapore. But my recent visit to Senai Airport revealed that Singapore needs to be less defensive about the airport and look, instead, to working with Senai on opportunities for mutual benefit — of which there may be many.

Consider the following points:

• Senai is hoping to attract between six million and seven million passengers by 2020; Changi already handles 28 million passengers

• Senai's cargo capacity of 80,000 tonnes a year pales in comparison to Changi's six mammoth cargo terminals with the capacity to handle over 2 million tonnes

• Senai has only one runway and this needs to be lengthened and strengthened if it is to accommodate a fully-laden B747 freighter aircraft. Courier companies such as DHL and UPS will only hub out of airports with at least two runways — for quick arrivals and departures

• Senai has no aircraft maintenance facilities, while Changi has one of the best in Asia — even AirAsia's planes are maintained in Singapore!

So, why all the fuss over Senai?

Senai Airport is a privately-owned commercial venture which must produce a return on investment.

The Senai Airport Terminal Services (Seat) will not be reckless in wanting to go head-on with Changi.

Instead, it will concentrate on carving a certain niche for itself.

If we play this right, Changi Airport and Singapore could leverage on Senai to enhance our hub status.

Our success could be Senai's success and vice versa.

Make Senai our ally against the more aggressive and likely-to-succeed hubs such as Bangkok, a far more potent threat.

We should work with Senai to capitalise on two things it has that we do not — plenty of land and lower costs — and one thing we have that Senai does not — connectivity.

Inevitably, as more airlines fly into Senai, we should make travel between Senai and Singapore as easy and seamless as possible, so that we can get a share of their foreign arrivals.

Let's even be innovative and ask the Malaysians to allow Singapore customs and immigration to be located at Senai Airport, so that a Singapore-bound flight could use Senai and the passengers could travel on to Singapore in bonded buses — doing away with the double-clearance hassle.

Senai could become the low-cost airline airport for Singapore.

Our maintenance facilities at Changi are bursting at the seams and we are running out of land to build more cargo terminals. We could continue this expansion at Senai. Certain types of cargo, such as dairy and agricultural produce, may be better suited for handling at Senai, for example.

All this could be under Singapore ownership and management and in partnership with Senai.

Senai is a much more natural hub for all flights to Malaysian destinations than Changi could ever be. We cannot duplicate the potential network and lower airfares offered from Senai.

If the Government Investment Corporation of Singapore can buy into a shopping mall in Johor Baru, what is stopping the rest of Singapore from working with Senai?

The writer is an aviation consultant and vice-president of Hotel Properties Ltd.

If you have a view on this, email us at news@newstoday.com.sg

 

 

Asean doesn't want Taipei to destabilise region

Realpolitik at play.  Chen Shuibian is alone in Asia.

 

 

JUNE 22, 2004
Asean doesn't want Taipei to destabilise region

By Larry Teo

ASEAN does not want Taiwan to rock the boat and jeopardise stability in the region, participants at a conference on Taiwan were told yesterday.

And should war break out between the island and China, the 10-member regional grouping would remain neutral, said Dr Eric Teo, deputy head of the Singapore Institute of International Affairs.

As Asean is committed to the one-China principle, Taiwan would be isolated in the region if it declared independence and was attacked by China, he said.

'You will be standing alone as we will not stand by you,' he said at a conference organised by the East Asian Institute which was also attended by Taiwanese diplomats.

In the paper he delivered yesterday, the former Singapore diplomat explained why Asean had gotten closer to China but further and further away from Taiwan.

Since ties between Asean and China grew in the late 1970s, China 'has shown itself to be mindful and sensitive to the feelings of the Asean countries, thus staving off suspicions that its rise could be a threat'.

One example he cited was China's offer to Thailand of open access to its agricultural market, which he called a brilliant move as what it did was merely regularise a trade that had been going on for years up and down the Mekong River.

China's abandoning of ideology for 'strategic friendship' is also reassuring to the Asean countries, some of which still face communist threats.

'However, Taiwan's diplomats on the other hand are trapped in their own ideology and have to catch up with the sophistication of their Chinese counterparts,' he noted.

They must at least stop using outdated Cold War language such as calling China a totalitarian country and stop singing the virtues of democracy in a region where the idea cuts no ice with most countries, Dr Teo said.

Sino-Asean affinity was also strengthened by Chinese in South-east Asia, whose culture and language are increasingly being accepted by their countries, as well as Beijing's proposal to establish free trade with more nations, he said.

EAI's Dr Lum Peng Er, in his presentation on Japan's position on Taiwan, said that although Tokyo had been at times ambiguous in its cross-strait policy during peacetime, it would sacrifice Taiwan's interests should China invade the island.

'Considering its trade ties with China, the threat from North Korea and other issues, when push comes to shove, Japan is likely to switch from a balancing act to a clear-cut one favouring China,' said Dr Lum.

---

Copyright @ 2004 Singapore Press Holdings. All rights reserved.

THE MOST UNTRANSLATABLE WORD IN THE WORLD

THE MOST UNTRANSLATABLE WORD IN THE WORLD

–       IN WORLDWIDE POLL

OF PROFESSIONAL TRANSLATORS

 

And the winner is ILUNGA

A Word In The Bantu Language Of Tshiluba For

A Person Ready To Forgive Any Abuse For The First Time; To Tolerate It A Second Time; But Never A Third Time

 

Googly, Spam And Gobbledegook

Are Most Untranslatable Words In English

 

‘There Is No Such Word As Googly in Lithuanian’,

Confesses Researcher

 

Googly, Spam and gobbledegook have been voted among the most untranslatable words in the English language, in a worldwide poll of a thousand professional translators and interpreters.

But the most untranslatable word in any language, reckon the translators, is ilunga, a word in the Bantu language of Tshiluba for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. And I suppose we all know that kind of person.

It narrowly outpointed shlimazl, a Yiddish word for a chronically unlucky person and radioukacz, a Polish word for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain. And both finished well ahead of klloshar, the Albanian word for loser, which, perhaps fittingly, came in last place.  

The most untranslatable word in the English language was reckoned to be plenipotentiary, which even many native English-speakers may not know means a special ambassador or envoy, invested with full powers.   

Whimsy, bumf and serendipity (the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident) were other words among the top ten.

The survey was conducted by Today Translations, a London-based translation and interpreting agency, which asked a thousand of its linguists across the world to nominate the words that they found hardest to translate.  

‘My own vote would have gone to googly’, says Jurga Zilinskiene, the managing director of Today Translations, who worked as an interpreter herself before founding Today and becoming an award-winning businesswoman.

‘People sometimes forget that an interpreter, for example, must translate not just from one language to another but from one culture to another’, says Zilinskiene, 27. ‘Sometimes, the equivalent idea just does not exist in both cultures. I am from Lithuania, for example, and we simply do not have googlies in Lithuania.’

Indeed, confesses Ms Zilinskiene, although she knew that googly was something to do with cricket she could not have told you for certain that it was, in fact, an off-breaking ball with an apparent leg-break action on the part of the bowler.

Other foreign words to make the top 10 included naa, a Japanese word used only in the Kansai area of Japan to emphasise statements or agree with someone, and pochemuchka, the Russian word for a person who asks a lot of questions.

Today Translations uses a worldwide network of over 1,500 professional linguists to provide translation and interpreting services. After asking a thousand of this network to nominate words that were problematic to translate, it then asked 50 of them to vote for just one of the top contenders.

Linguists taking part in the poll were native speakers of languages ranging from English and French to Turkish, Ukranian, Chinese, Dari, Farsi, Amharic, Pushto, Somali, Tamil and many others.

THE RESULTS IN FULL

• THE TEN FOREIGN WORDS THAT WERE VOTED HARDEST TO TRANSLATE

1 ilunga [Tshiluba word for a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time; to tolerate it a second time; but never a third time. Note: Tshiluba is a Bantu language spoken in south-eastern Congo, and Zaire]

2 shlimazl [Yiddish for a chonically unlucky person]

3 radioukacz [Polish for a person who worked as a telegraphist for the resistance movements on the Soviet side of the Iron Curtain]

4 naa [Japanese word only used in the Kansai area of Japan, to emphasise statements or agree with someone]

5 altahmam  [Arabic for a kind of deep sadness]

6 gezellig [Dutch for cosy]

7 saudade [Portuguese for a certain type of longing]

8 selathirupavar  [Tamil for a certain type of truancy]

9 pochemuchka [Russian for a person who asks a lot of questions]

10 klloshar [Albanian for loser]

 

• THE TEN ENGLISH WORDS THAT WERE VOTED HARDEST TO TRANSLATE

1 plenipotentiary               

2 gobbledegook                

3 serendipity                                   

4 poppycock                                  

5 googly                               

6 Spam                                   

7 whimsy                             

8 bumf                                    

9 chuffed

Should there be any World Heritage Sites in Singapore?

World Heritage Sites (WHS)

 

UNESCO is going to announce the latest additions to WHS end of this week or next week.  Looking at the list of more than 700 sites, I sometimes wonder if it’s difficult to qualify at all.  Although the list includes world class sites like the Great Wall and Pyramids, it also includes many lesser known ones – including a Swedish submarine base and an 18^th century iron mill factory site in England.  I have been asking myself if any site in Singapore qualify. 

 

The issue of Singapore having withdrawn from UNESCO aside – we left UNESCO together with the USA years ago due to political reasons – but are there places in Singapore that merit this status? 

 

The WHS label has become a kind of ISO 9000 for historical sites.  Having a WHS in Singapore would certainly help dispel the notion that Singapore has no historical sites or heritage, and is nothing but a sterile, cultureless, soulless city with North American style infrastructure and concrete jungle.  It would also provide greater impetus and incentive to conservation of heritage in Singapore.

 

I don’t know whether any of our heritage buildings qualify in terms of UNESCO’s conservation standards and requirements.  Personally, I do think that some of our districts do qualify for their historical and anthropological value.  Chinatown, Little India, Kampong Glam and the Civic District are the result of colonial urban planning for a city designed as the political, military and economic capital of the British Empire in Southeast Asia.  The old bungalows and architecture of Katong / Joo Chiat area are unique products of the combination of European and Chinese building style, and was once the centre of the Peranakan, an unique culture that was the marriage of two great Asian cultures.  The combination of these can be combined into a single submission to the UNESCO, as the “Old City of Singapore”, “Historic Centre of Singapore” or “Ethnic Quarters of Colonial Singapore”.

 

Any views or insights?

 

The Sage-King Mindset

This is an interesting article that points out some of the very common ethnic Chinese arrogance and ignorance traits that seem to make Chinese so-American.  Any comments?

 

http://www.antiwar.com/matuszak/

 

============

 

June 19, 2004

The Sage-King Mindset

by Sascha Matuszak

I wrote a column a ways back that infuriated a lot of Asians out there. Friends here in Sichuan said I had gone over the top and I apologized for what I thought was a pretty poor attempt to explain stereotypes in China. I have thought about that column for a while now and I have come up with the key: Chinese and Americans are the same. Now people all over the world are the same from the get-go, but historical developments, geography, neighbors and so on bring out those juicy differences. What makes Chinese and Americans so uniquely similar? The answer: A special blend of two types of people, arrogant and ignorant and arrogant and educated. This special combination allows for the creation of stereotypes that not only pigeonhole other people, but make them inferior in some way or another. At most equal. All cultures do this: the Germans make fun of the Poles, the English of the Irish, Indians of Bengalis and so on. What both China and the U.S. have going on is a population of arrogant and educated elite that are able to solidify these stereotypes through their own actions and words. The scope and power of the elite depend on their continuing success, the more they succeed, the more arrogant the ignorant become. It's a positive feedback chain of mutual backslapping and vicarious pride that is essential for the creation of a superpower mindset. Now China and America are at different stages of superpowerdom, so the U.S. expresses its arrogance and perceived superiority by running around invading countries and setting up governments. China is still sitting back and preening itself, acting as if superpower status is not a goal at all. China expects the mantle to be handed to them sometime in the future. The U.S. is scrambling around with the crown like the guy who has the ball in Smear the Queer. Despite this difference in superpower maturity, certain strange coincidences pop up. Such as the stupid questions Americans and Chinese ask people from other countries: "So ya'll eat rotten cheese, right?" "Can you people use chopsticks?" Or the need to co-opt ideas: "Ah yes, we Chinese were the first to …" "Oh yeah, that's American innovation for ya …" Or the inability to admit when one is wrong: "But you Westerners have very poor human rights records. And you were Imperialists!" "They hate us because we're free." I am arguing here that the superpower mindset is a mixture of chemicals in the brain that can be replicated and, unfortunately, has been replicated since the dawn of Rule. That we are unable to locate the elusive combination of chemicals that creates a sage-king mindset is just as unfortunate.

 

 

 

 

What are your favourite countries or regions? Name 10

What are your favourite countries or regions?  Name 10

 

Wee Cheng's Favourite Country/Regions
- Yunnan Province, China
- Peru
- Vietnam
- Italy
- Thailand
- Mongolia
- Morocco
- Spain
- Guatemala
- Turkey

 

What's yours?  Post a Comment below!

Hill songs bring Hakkas together

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-06/14/content_339191.htm

 

Hill songs bring Hakkas together
By Qiu Quanlin (China Daily)

It was almost 9 am on Saturday. Yuexiu Park in downtown Guangzhou, the 
capital city of South China's Guangdong Province was already bathed in 
sunshine.

  Huang Linguo, 65, and his 7-year-old grandson, arrived at the park 
where people of his age, with caps and bags, were slowly gathering in 
front of a hill, breaking the morning quiet.

  Ten minutes later Huang heard a song sung by a woman of his age:

  "My elderly brother, you are so young and energetic that you come to 
the hill."

  Huang responded using the same melody:

  "My younger sister, I am so happy to meet you here today, because we 
were once in the same family."

  Other elderly men and women joined in, throwing out their chests and 
holding their heads high.

  They were mostly Hakkas. They were singing Hakka hill songs.

  Huang and the others sang dozens of songs, with short intervals in 
between.

  Huang is obviously very good at generating a fun atmosphere among the 
singers with his little quips between songs.

  "Come on, smile and start singing and dancing," he said. "It will
make 
you feel like you're young Hakkas again."

  After a couple of hours, Huang announced that the singing party was 
over, but people were reluctant to leave.

  It was already well past noon when the park finally quieted down. But 
Huang promised that they would be back on the 12th of next month to 
share the excitement and happiness of singing Hakka hill songs.

  "We have made a promise to come to this hill in the park on the 12th 
of every month because we enjoy each other's company, but most 
importantly, because we like Hakka hill songs and we miss our 
hometowns," said Huang.

  "For us Hakkas, our happiest time is celebrating what we have
achieved 
in our work, by singing the songs of our hometowns," said Huang.

  "When I miss my hometown I usually sing our songs," added Huang.

  A Hakka, Huang came from Meizhou, a city in eastern Guangdong 
Province, where hundreds of thousands of Hakka people live today.

  But actually he knows little about his hometown since he, together 
with his father, were forced to leave and settle in Guangzhou to make a 
living when he was very young, according to Huang.

  But he doesn't spend much time thinking about the past, as for many 
Hakkas memories of the past are not clear. But they all have a common 
sense of the difficult days gone by.

  Historical resources in the Guangdong Department of Culture show that 
the Hakkas are a unique group of Han Chinese who originally lived in 
the Yellow River area.

  Due to the pressure resulting from the influx of other ethnic groups 
from the northwest, north and northeast of China, these original 
settlers gradually migrated southward and settled in Jiangxi, Fujian 
and Guangdong provinces. Some sailed across the Taiwan Straits to 
Taiwan Province.

  As a result, they were called Hakka, or kejia in standard Chinese 
(meaning "guest families") by the local people in the areas where they 
settled.

  One of the earliest migrant groups in China, the Hakka people 
intermarried with other ethnic groups and adopted their cultures over 
their long history of movement going back more than 2,000 years.

  As a late comer to places already occupied by other groups, Hakkas 
usually had to struggle and survive on the poorest land. Thus Hakka 
people are well known for their perseverance even under the most 
adverse conditions.

  But they are noted for many other things as well. Through their 2,200 
years of history they have preserved certain cultural characteristics 
as seen in their customs, food and spoken language.

  Of all the peoples of China, Hakkas are among the most steadfast in 
keeping the traditions.

  Hakka hill songs, which are usually sung by a man and a woman, are
one 
of the most famous aspects of Hakka culture.

  There seem to be relatively few melodies. The same tunes are used for 
a number of individual lyrics of varying subject matter. These may be 
love ballads, question-and-answer riddles, tragedies endured by their 
people in times gone by, and observations about live.

  Hou Zhou, vice-director of the Cultural Office of Hongqiao Street, 
said that the Hakkas have been gathering in Yuexiu Park to enjoy their 
songs ever since the 1960s.

  Hence the hill in the park has acquired a nickname: "Hakka Song
Hill."

  The Hakkas living around Hongqiao Street organized the Hakka Hill 
Songs Association in 1996, which has attracted Hakka hill song lovers 
from across the city, Hou said.

  Zhang Bo, 70, is not a Hakka, but he gradually developed a love for 
Hakka hill songs when he came to the park and met Hakka people 10 years 
ago.

  "Although I am not a Hakka, the songs remind me of the old days when
I 
left home," Zhang said.

  Zhang, a resident of Guangzhou, left his home to work as a sailor
when 
he was only 16.

  "My sailing experience at an early age has given me something in 
common with Hakka people, and the songs make me feel even closer to 
them," he said.

  According to Hou, thousands of Hakka people, like Huang, left their 
homes to go to Guangzhou in the early 1960s, with the hope of finding a 
better life. And most of them settled around Hongqiao Street.

  Hou added that the government of Yuexiu District of Guangzhou decided 
early in April to organize a fund for Hakka hill songs development, in 
an effort to enhance the cultural development of Hakka in the city.

  "The songs help bring more and more Hakka people together because
they 
share a deep love for Hakka culture and tradition," Hou said.

Raising the Bar in Beijing

June 7, 2004 / Vol. 163 No. 22

Raising the Bar in Beijing

U.S. newsman John Terenzio is helping China show a friendlier face to American TV viewers

BY MATTHEW FORNEY | BEIJING

The Beijing headquarters of China Central Television (CCTV) are heavily guarded, as one would expect of a key propaganda arm of the Communist Party.

A People's Liberation Army garrison is billeted on the studio lot, and an armed soldier commands the entrance to the main newsroom. Foreigners usually need layers of approval to arrange a visit—but not John Terenzio. During a recent news broadcast, the American media consultant sat casually among a team of Chinese producers in the control room critiquing the show. "I thought maybe I was a dope to go for two anchors," Terenzio observes, "but I wanted to build a bit of chemistry." When news presenters Chris Gelken and Jacqueline Chan abandon their scripts to banter amiably about the stock market, he's pleased that the chemistry appears to be working. "This," he says, "is really good television."

Terenzio's job is to make it even better. As a part-time adviser to CCTV International's 24-hour English-language news channel, the independent producer is the first foreigner charged with putting an internationally friendly face on the mainland's propaganda machine. As if that weren't odd enough, his salary is paid by News Corp.—the global media conglomerate whose U.S.-based news channel, Fox News, is widely perceived as unabashedly pro-American and whose chairman, Rupert Murdoch, once infuriated China's leaders by stating that satellite-TV systems posed a threat to "totalitarian regimes everywhere."

But the global media business, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. Nowadays, News Corp. and CCTV International are partners of sorts, bound by their mutual desire to reach more viewers. Three years ago, Beijing opened its heavily restricted TV market a crack and granted News Corp. permission to offer its new Chinese-language network, Starry Sky, over cable in the southern province of Guangdong. News Corp. reciprocated by agreeing to air CCTV International on its Fox cable channels in America and later on its newly acquired satellite network, DirecTV. (Beijing struck a similar deal with Time Warner, owner of TIME, which still carries CCTV International on its cable systems but has sold its controlling stake in a Chinese channel.) As part of News Corp.'s commitment to the venture, it hired Terenzio to spend a few months a year helping reprogram CCTV—which once railed against "hegemonic powers" like the U.S.—to appeal to American audiences.

Terenzio, who covered four wars for ABC News, thought offering in-depth coverage of the mainland in the U.S. had promise, given China's growing economic importance. "Cable operators should salivate to carry the only channel dedicated to China," he says. But the news program needed a major overhaul. Soon after he took the job, Terenzio installed a satellite dish atop his Los Angeles home and pointed it at the CCTV satellite so that he could assess the task at hand.

He saw rebar-stiff newsreaders intoning stilted copy supported by cheap graphics. The channel was "essentially a translation service for Chinese-language programs," Terenzio says. But CCTV International did have one small advantage: the English-language broadcaster is unintelligible to most Chinese, so its journalists enjoy slightly more reporting leeway. In one of his first moves, Terenzio called a meeting to stress that "reporters never say what they think, only what they know" and to urge that all government statements be attributed to their source, standard practice in the West. Within two weeks, "they were practically attributing the weather report," Terenzio says. "I had to tell them to cool it."

Terenzio has since helped make the program slicker by advising the channels' bosses to create snappy sets, commission new theme music and hire foreign anchors. More important, his efforts to introduce more aggressive standards of journalism have resulted in sharper news coverage. Last month, Terenzio sat in the reporting team's cluttered office to review a series called China's Challenges, an unusually frank exploration of issues such as environmental damage and poor rural health care. One episode on China's growing number of heroin addicts included footage of a dazed druggie lying in a puddle of vomit. "That's a powerful image," Terenzio says. "That's just what a piece like this should show." Another, on China's disastrous traffic snarls, pleases him because it quoted academics blaming poor government planning while others defended consumers' right to buy cars. "This is balanced coverage," he says of the series. CCTV International's journalists "are light-years beyond where they were." But censorship remains. The channel's controller, Jiang Heping, a Party member who earned a journalism degree at Cardiff University in Wales, says his goal is a "Western approach," but his reporters still "can't report antigovernment activity, and anything anti-Party is taboo."

Any media outlet wishing to operate in China must compromise, as News Corp. officials know. In 1993, the company removed the BBC from its Chinese-language Star satellite network—which at the time had government permission to be shown in hotels and foreign compounds—after the British news service irritated Beijing with a series critical of Chairman Mao Zedong. But with 340 million TV households, China is a plummy market awaiting those who gain the government's favor. Last year, advertising reached $2.7 billion, up 11% over the year before. And Beijing is showing signs of loosening up. Earlier this year it began allowing foreign companies to buy into state-owned production companies, a step many see as a precursor to opening its television industry more widely. "The government wants to know if its system is robust enough to exert necessary controls" on foreign participation, says David Wolf, managing director for technology and finance at the Beijing office of international public relations agency Burson-Marsteller.

Helping CCTV International may give News Corp. the upper hand over other foreign TV programmers who want a piece of China's market. "Rupert [Murdoch] is medium-term savvy and long-term wise," says an official with another international media company. Placing a consultant inside CCTV headquarters in Beijing "further entwines News Corp. and CCTV." And Murdoch's man Terenzio slipped in without so much as a hail from the soldier at the gate.

Europe, Here We Come

Far Eastern Economic Review

 

MIGRATION

Europe, Here We Come

The latest wave of Chinese migrants is venturing far beyond traditional destinations in Southeast Asia and North America. One of its new frontiers is Europe--Ireland, Spain, Hungary and points in between

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By David Murphy/BUDAPEST and DUBLIN

Issue cover-dated June 24, 2004

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AMID GREEN FIELDS in an eastern suburb of Budapest sits a massive new monument to China's expanding business ambitions. The multi-storey, glass-and-steel Asia Centre contains 850 shop units intended to showcase Asian--mainly Chinese--goods in the European Union. It was built by Austrian construction giant Strabag in a joint investment with two mainland Chinese totalling 200 million euros ($240 million). The first phase of 125,000 square metres opened for business last year; half the units are already occupied. With the final phase--another 80,000 square metres of shops, offices, conference halls and exhibition space--to be completed in 2006, the centre aims to consolidate the thousands of Chinese traders in Budapest under one roof. "We are trying to present a common platform in the EU for Chinese goods," says Szabolcs Kapas, its trade-marketing manager.

 

HAVE PASSPORT, WILL TRAVEL
As China eases travel restrictions on citizens:
•	Chinese migration to Europe is rising rapidly
•	These migrants are tech-savvy and highly mobile
•	Many are traders and students who stay to work
•	Their impact on their host countries is growing

But the Asia Centre is more than a megamall of Chinese manufactures. It lends a permanence to the tens of thousands of Chinese migrants who have turned up in Hungary and other "new emigration destinations" in Europe as the Chinese diaspora spreads beyond the familiar Chinatowns of Southeast Asia and North America. Their arrival in rapidly increasing numbers since the early 1990s is the human manifestation of China's rising diplomatic and economic clout and its growing engagement with the world, as well as its loosening of travel restrictions on its own people.

It's become commonplace to marvel at the billions of dollars invested in China, the hordes of business people beating a path to China, and the flood of young Westerners relocating to Shanghai and Beijing in search of opportunity. Less known is the mirror image: In a great going-out, mainland Chinese are working, travelling and studying in an unprecedented number of countries. This has brought Chinese traders to the Asia Centre in Budapest, Chinese youngsters to wait on tables in Dublin pubs, Chinese tourists to Cairo en route to see the pyramids, and Chinese prostitutes to Tokyo's Kabukicho red-light district.

In the early 1980s, as China began its great leap outward after 30 years of communist isolation, Chinese started again to head to long-established emigrant destinations such as North America. Between 1990 and 2000, the China-born population in the United States doubled, as 460,000 mainlanders settled in the country, according to the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, citing U.S. census figures. China has become the source of the largest number of immigrants to Canada, with 30,000-40,000 mainlanders moving there annually between 2000 and 2002, according to Canadian immigration authorities.

But Chinese nationals are also heading for nontraditional destinations--from Siberia to South America and most points in between. In the past decade, Europe has seen a dramatic increase in Chinese migration. In a report late last year, the Geneva-based International Organization for Migration noted that Chinese migrants to Spain multiplied sixfold, to 36,000, in the decade to 2001. In the same period Chinese migrants to Italy increased by 260% to almost 50,000. Ireland went from almost zero to more than 40,000 Chinese--over 1% of the population--in less than a decade. Hungary now has an estimated 30,000 Chinese. Last year there were 75,000 Chinese living in Germany and 42,000 in France, including those on student visas, according to the embassies in Beijing.

For China, with its population of 1.3 billion, these numbers are a drop in the ocean, but they are having a visible impact on the receiving countries. In Ireland, for example, most Chinese are on work-and-study visas, but they seem mainly to work. In bars, shops and petrol stations around the country, they have replaced the locals, who've upgraded to better-paid jobs amid Ireland's economic boom. In a small country where perceptions of immigrants are still being moulded, "the Chinese are judged to be people who come and work hard, they are serious about their business," Mary Harney, deputy prime minister of Ireland, tells the REVIEW. Dublin held its first, officially sponsored, Chinese New Year festival this year with lion dances and Chinese food stalls.

Historically, migrants have boosted economic links between their home and host countries, and the latest Chinese influx is contributing to Sino-European trade ties. Trade between Ireland and China has more than doubled since 2000, to $3.3 billion last year, says Alan Hobbs, Beijing-based China representative of Enterprise Ireland. In 2000 China ranked 14th on a list of Hungary's trading partners; by last year it had moved up to sixth place, according to Endre Kismartoni, director of ITD, the Hungarian investment- and trade-development agency in Budapest.

Today's Chinese migrants are consummate globalizers who have broken radically with a tradition in which the government, the work unit and the family organized their lives. They are independent, tech-savvy and highly mobile. Indeed, some seem to be quicker than many Europeans to recognize Europe as a seamless single entity.

Take Huang Kai, a cheerful 27-year-old Fujianese. His first stop in Europe was Cyprus, where he studied English. He then went to Budapest, where he sells Chinese-brand footwear in a stall in the run-down Four Tiger market. If sales slide, perhaps because of competition from the Asia Centre, he says he may go to Spain or Italy. If all fails, he says he may go to Ireland, where a neighbour from his home county in Fujian runs a restaurant.

Combine that agility with the Internet, mobile phones and cheap air fares, and this generation of Chinese migrants are as sophisticated as any of their peers. "This is globalization, this is the world today. You fit in or it will throw you out," says 35-year-old auditor Pang Lixin, over a pint of Guinness in the Bleeding Horse pub on Dublin's Camden Street. Pang arrived from Beijing as a student in 1998 and stayed on to work.

Far from being thrown out, this latest wave of Chinese migrants is likely to make a lasting impact. In Budapest, the first Chinese school--co-funded by the Hungarian and Chinese governments--will open in September. Last year the Bank of China was the first Chinese bank to open a branch in Hungary. By August this year China's Hainan Airlines will begin regular flights to Budapest in cooperation with Hungarian airline Malev. Chinese President Hu Jintao, visiting Budapest on June 10-12, and his Hungarian counterpart Ferenc Madl witnessed signing ceremonies for the school and airline deals.

The number of mainland students going abroad is also on the rise, shooting up 49% in 2002 to 125,000, according to China's Ministry of Education. Last year, however, numbers were down 6% because of fears surrounding the outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and a government tightening on fly-by-night agencies that arrange schooling overseas.

Chinese students in Britain number about 74,000, according to China's Foreign Ministry, making them the largest group of foreign students in the country. Similarly in the U.S., where they numbered 181,000 at the end of last year, according to Chinese data. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the number of Chinese students going to the U.S. has dropped sharply due to tightened visa requirements. But any dips in numbers are likely to be temporary as Sars fears recede and pressure grows on the U.S. to improve the visa-issuing process.

The exodus of students is partly a result of market reforms in China's education system, such as the introduction in the 1990s of tuition fees in the universities. "Families think, 'well, if we have to pay anyway, why not send the kid to a wealthy country,' and, among those, English-speaking ones are the priority," says Huang Ping, director-general of the Bureau for International Exchange at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. About three-quarters of the 700,000 Chinese who have gone abroad to study since 1978 remain overseas, according to the Ministry of Education. But more have been returning recently. Last year 20,000 returned, 12% more than in 2002, said the ministry.

The impact of China's new diaspora will be felt not only in their adopted countries but also in their homeland. Many of the most influential figures in China's hi-tech, property and publishing industries today studied and worked overseas in the 1990s. "This is part of China's social transformation," says Huang. "These changes will be at least as important as those changes, say, in the banking and tax system" to which so much attention is paid today, he says. "In future there will be no need for an opening-up policy; it [China] will already be open."

Chinese aren't just going to distant, developed countries. They're also taking up residence in less-developed neighbouring countries, sometimes provoking fears among sparse native populations about being overrun. Mongolia, with only 2.7 million people, has passed a law restricting people born outside the country to 1% of the population--a measure aimed exclusively at its southern neighbour. In the Russian Far East, populist regional politicians have raised the spectre of Chinese colonization as large numbers of traders and peasants settle in border cities and villages.

Kazakhstan, which borders China to the west, has imposed a tight quota on foreign workers, but Chinese remain attractive because they are skilled and cheap. "They [Kazakhstan] are very conservative . . . but on the other hand, they are also very dependent. They need our help in agriculture, construction and other sectors," says Li Wanxiang, director of the labour and social security bureau in Korgas, the biggest border post on the Chinese-Kazakh border in China's far western region of Xinjiang.

Li says that over 170,000 Chinese have left the country through the Korgas crossing to work in Kazakhstan, Kirgyzstan and Russia in recent years. The numbers will increase. A Guangdong construction company has won the contract to build a presidential palace in Kazakhstan. And authorities in Yili, a prefecture in Xinjiang, have announced plans to rent 6,250 hectares of arable land in Kazakhstan. The land will be planted with wheat and soybeans next spring, according to local officials, and will be tilled by 3,000 Yili farm labourers.

Mainlanders' freedom of movement has lagged the age of easy international travel by a couple of decades, but they're catching up fast. The big boost has come in the past couple of years, as authorities made it easier for individuals to obtain passports. To apply for a passport, residents in major cities no longer need approval from their employer; they simply show their identity cards and provide proof of travel plans. More than 14 million citizens left China on private business or tourism last year, according to the Ministry of Public Security. The World Tourism Organization, based in Madrid, expects the numbers of tourists from China to grow to 100 million annually by 2020.

As more and more Chinese seek their fortunes abroad, they seem to be carrying some of their problems with them. Echoing a grumble heard at home, many Chinese business people in Europe complain that Chinese tirelessly compete against each other, resulting in falling prices and low margins. Overconcentration in a few sectors, like restaurants and the garment trade, is partly to blame.

"Chinese are not united, our country is too big," says Wang Xiaoying from Beijing, who sells Chinese-brand Jingbailing shirts at her outlet in the Asia Centre. Nearby units are selling Aile sports shoes and Gentry jeans among numerous other Chinese brands of footwear and clothing.

Evidence of the competition is also visible from a window of the Asia Centre. A stone's throw away is a rival mart, the 160-outlet China Business City, built by mainland Chinese businessmen and opened last November. With their toughest competition coming from fellow Chinese, even in Hungary many migrants repeat a complaint common in their homeland: "There are too many Chinese."

Nancy Zhang in Beijing contributed to this article

 

Suzhou, haven of heritage

Suzhou, haven of heritage
By Sun Xiaohua (China Daily)
Updated: 2004-06-15 10:34

In the Canglang Pavillion Garden of Suzhou, a winding path between Canglang Pavillion and a covered corridor allows visitors to enjoy the views of rockeries on the inside and water views through corridor's windows.

Suzhou, an ancient city in East China's Jiangsu Province, has again attracted world attention, having been chosen as the host city for the 28th session of the World Heritage Committee, which will be held from June 28 to July 7.

Popularly referred to as a "paradise on earth" in ancient times, Suzhou is most famous for its classic gardens. Nine gardens in Suzhou are included on UNESCO's World Cultural Heritage List. And Suzhou's Kunqu Opera was also classed as a "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage" by UNESCO in 2001.

But Suzhou has much more to offer than its beautiful gardens and marvelous Kunqu Opera.

The fabric of the city's history is resplendent with its many strands of local history and culture.

Suzhou people trace their history back to the end of the Shang Dynasty around 1100 BC. When Taibo, together with his brother Zhongyong, both princes of Zhou, fled from China's northwest to the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, they were elected as leaders of the local people, laying the foundation of the ancient Gou-Wu State.

That is why Suzhou was originally called Wu.

In 514 BC, Wu Zixu, the prime minister of King Helu, supervised the re-construction of Suzhou, and that marked the beginning of today's city.

The city, at that time a town, was called Helu. It had a circumference of 23.5 kilometres, with walls and a moat and eight gates, traces of which can still be found today.

Through its history, Suzhou has seen many changes, including its name. The present name was adopted in AD 589 during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581-618). But it has remained at the same site and retained its original construction for more than 2,500 years.

With its grid structure of roads and waterways, ancient Suzhou used to be one of the largest cities in China.

Records indicate that its main avenue was 45 metres wide, and its main canal 38 metres wide.

The Pingjiang Map, inscribed on a stone tablet that dates back to the Song Dynasty (960-1279), preserved the layout of the then Suzhou in an accurate and artistic way.

A square window in a Suzhou garden turns the outside view into a picture.

On the map, city walls, government offices, markets, rivers, bridges, Buddhist pagodas, temples, pavilions, granaries, military camps, towers, gardens and lakes can all be identified.

Even scenic spots outside the city are included on the map. It might be the world's earliest urban street map.

Comparing the map surveyed with remote sensors today with the Pingjiang Map, it can be seen that Suzhou's layout at that time was essentially the same as it is today.

The city is water-oriented, with the Yangtze River to its north, Taihu Lake to the west and the Grand Canal going through it. Its broad network of waterways greatly contributed to its development as an economic centre.

By the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), the population in Suzhou had reached 6 million.

Silk-weaving

a painting of a Kunqu Opera performance from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

The imperial governments of the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368-1911) established the Silk-Weaving Bureau in Suzhou to supervise the production of textiles which were used by the imperial family and exported to foreign countries as far away as Europe, Africa and the Americas.

Suzhou people also developed their own style of exquisite embroidery, which is lauded as a "pearl of oriental art" for its beautiful designs, varied stitches, superb workmanship and elegant colours.

Early in the Song Dynasty, Suzhou embroidery was already well known for its delicate and close stitching and meticulous and wondrous use of colours.

In the Qing Dynasty, Suzhou embroidery reached a highpoint in its prosperity, with embroidery markets flourishing throughout the city.

Centre of fashion

With the development of the local economy and the people's great cultural accomplishment, Suzhou became one of the country's fashion leaders.

In the Ming and Qing dynasties, women nationwide followed closely the dressing styles of the women of Suzhou.

The glamour of the soft-spoken local dialect attracted people to adopt a Suzhou accent. Even as far back as the Sui Dynasty Emperor Suiyang used to practise speaking the Suzhou dialect.

And the local ballads, featuring the sweetest melodies in all of China, were widely circulated and sung.

The city was the nation's cultural centre as well, and generations of people born in Suzhou have helped write the splendid history of the nation.

Kunqu and its legacy

Kunqu Opera is seen as one of the most splendid cultural creations of the Chinese people.

With its roots in the folk songs of the mid 14th century, Kunqu Opera was refined over a period of nearly 200 years to stand out prominently among all the schools of opera in China. In 2001, UNESCO listed Kunqu as a "Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Cultural Heritage."

Kunqu Opera is a comprehensive performance art involving literature, music, dance, acting, costumes, make-up, props and sets: namely, everything theatrical.

Its cultural heritage value is embodied in this comprehensive scope, including its unique singing style. The subject matter for the operas comes from a wide reservoir of resources, integrating all the refined performance techniques and set tunes of northern and southern songs and operas of many dynasties.

The huge library of scripts is another valuable treasure of Kunqu Opera. The contents cover all periods of Chinese history. The most famous scripts currently staged, include "Romance of the West Chamber" (Xixiang Ji) from the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), "Peony Pavilion" (Mudan Ting) from the Ming Dynasty, and "Longevity Hall" (Changsheng Dian) and "Peach Blossom Fan" (Taohua Shan) from the Qing Dynasty.

Another feature of Kunqu Opera is its equal emphasis on singing and acting.

Centre of learning

During the Ming and Qing dynasties, Suzhou already had between 700 and 800 schools and dozens of academies.

These institutions of learning helped to nurture not only generations of talented personages in all areas of life, but also a great number of zhuangyuan, the people who got the top scores during exams held in the presence of the emperor for administrative posts.

Throughout history, there have been 50 zhuangyuan from Suzhou, of whom, 45 were selected for their scholarship and five for their martial abilities.

Aside from zhuangyuan, there were more who have come down in history as great masters of literature and the arts, although they didn't attend or win high places in the imperial exams.

For example, the Wu school of painting and calligraphy of Suzhou is famous nationwide. Its main representatives are Shen Zhou, Wen Zhengming, Tang Yin and Qiu Ying of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).

This academic and artistic legacy has continued.

Local people are proud of the fact that 86 academicians of the Chinese Academy of Science and Chinese Academy of Engineering come from Suzhou.

I. M. Pei, a world-celebrated master architect, Shi Min, famous micro-electronics specialist, Wu Jianxiong, physicist, Nobel laureates Lee Tsung-Dao and Steve Chu are all part of the pride of Suzhou.

For thousands of years, Suzhou people have used their wit and energy to keep the city in the educational, artistic and cultural forefront.

Buddhism and Daoism reached the Wu area at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty (AD 25-220), and as a result, numerous temples have been built in and around the city.

Traces of religion from the past are seen today in the ancient pagodas, most of which have a very long history: The pagoda on Tiger Hill was built in AD 601 in the Sui Dynasty; Ruiguang pagoda was first built during the period of the Three Kingdoms (AD 220-280) and rebuilt in the Northern Song Dynasty (AD 906-1127); Beisi pagoda was originally constructed in the Liang Dynasty (AD 502-557) and was repaired between 1078-1085; the Twins pagodas were first built in 982; the Buddhist temple on Lingyan Mountain was originally built in the Liang Dynasty and renovated in 1989.

Recently, a book entitled "Gateway to Suzhou" was published to provide a thorough introduction to Suzhou for people attending the upcoming session of the World Heritage Committee.

The book is a collaborative production of Suzhou Celebrity Studies of China and the Culture and Art Publishing House. Experts in Kunqu Opera, ancient architecture, and art and literature took part in its compilation. Famous photographer Shao Hua contributed the pictures.

The book may well lead you to visit Suzhou to taste and feel the city's unique cultural atmosphere first-hand.

Longmen Grottoes: Buddhist site for only empress

Longmen Grottoes: Buddhist site for only empress

After dynasties of carving and centuries of worship and protection, the Longmen Grottoes in central China's Henan Province has gained its unique reputation as a Buddhist site of the only empress in Chinese history. In the largest cave of Longmen Grottoes, the Fengxian Temple, which is 35 meters wide and 39 meters high, there is a statue called the Grand Vairocana Buddha. Some historical records reveal that it was modeled after the face of Empress Wu Zetian, the only empress in Chinese history, who gained popular support by advocacy of Buddhism and reigned during the Tang Dynasty 1,309 years ago. People also call it Empress Wu Zetian's Statue. About 17.14 meters tall with the head 4 meters long and the ear 1.9 meters wide each, the statue of Empress Wu is believed the most extraordinary masterpiece of the Longmen Grottoes. According to historical records, Empress Wu supported the construction of the statue with her own money and headed officials to the Buddhist ceremony when it was completed. Empress Wu Zetian (625-705) is the only reigning female in Chinese history. She was first one of the harem of Emperor Tang Taizong and later the favorite of his son, Gaozong. After Gaozong suffered a stroke, she began to govern China from behind the scenevia him and declared power in 690, when she established the Zhou Dynasty (690-705). At the age of 72 Empress Wu allowed the Tang Dynasty to be resumed and died soon after. Although it was short-lived, some historians consider the establishment of the Zhou Dynasty the result of better gender equality during the succeeding Tang Dynasty. Today, Empress Wu Zetian's Statute in Longmen Grottoes is reputed as the "Eastern Mona Lisa", or the "Eastern Venus" for its gentler facial expression. Located 12 kilometers south of ancient city of Luoyang, the Longmen Grottoes stretch over 1,000 meters on the hillsides along the Yi River. They were first sculptured and chiseled around 493 AD during the Northern Wei Dynasty (386-534), and the entire construction lasted more than four hundred years up to the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Today there are still about 2,100 caves and niches, 100,000 Buddhist images ranging in size from 0.02 to 17 meters, more than 2,800 inscribed tablets, and 43 Buddhist pagodas remaining at the site. The Longmen Grottoes were listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 2000. They are reputed as among the greatest ancient stone sculpture sites in China along with the Mogao Caves in Dunhuang in northwestern Gansu Province and the Yungang Grottoes in northern Shanxi Province. "The grottoes and niches of Longmen contain the largest and most impressive collection of Chinese art of the late Northern Weiand Tang Dynasties (316-907). These works, entirely devoted to theBuddhist religion, represent the high point of Chinese stone carving," described the UNESCO website. Besides worshipping Buddhism and Empress Wu, the Longmen Grottoes also reflect political, economic, and cultural lives in ancient China. The sculptures describe the people in the fields ofarts, architecture, calligraphy, music, dressing and medicine. Although much of the site has been well preserved, during its long history, some parts were damaged by natural erosion and vandalism. Crevices in the rock bases caused some caves to collapse. Saline sediments resulting from acid rain, train and automobile vibrations and natural disasters have also affected thesite. To well protect the historical site, the central and local governments have removed the restaurants and shopping stalls from inner scenic area and resettled the nearby Longmen Village to reveal the natural surroundings of the grottoes. Vehicles have been forbidden to enter the area to avoid tremors as well as dirt.The world heritage site is welcoming visitors with a more peacefuland beautiful image. Source: Xinhua

Tonga adopted Singapore laws to control the Press

Tonga adopted Singapore laws to control the Press

Nuku'alofa, Tonga. 5 May 2004.

The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Hon. 'Aisea Taumoepeau speaks to the Tongan Media on World Press Freedom Day.

Attending the Media Council Inc. function for world Press Freedom Day were, from left, the New Zealand High Commissioner to Tonga, Mr Warwick Hawker; the British High Commissioner to Tonga, Mr Paul Nessling ; Dr. Elizabeth Wood-Ellem, and Mrs Kathryn Nessling.

Tonga copied Singapore's suppressive media laws when it drafted its new media legislation that came into force this year, Tongan journalists marking World Press Freedom Day in Tonga on May 3 were told.

A key instigator of Tonga’s repressive media laws, the Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Hon. 'Aisea Taumoepeau, was the guest speaker, invited by the Media Council Inc. of Tonga to speak on the theme of “Freedom of Expression and Conflict Management in Crisis Situations and Countries in Transition"

Tonga's Constitutional change last year restricted the Freedom of Speech in the kingdom and allowed new media legislation to control the press and to regulate disincentives for investment in independent publishing.

The Minister said the Tonga government had adopted parts of the media laws of Singapore, saying that if the media laws had worked well for Singapore “then there is no reason why it should not be beneficial for Tonga.

“It is noted that in Singapore, religious churches are not permitted to operate newspapers, political parties are not permitted to operate newspapers as political agendas or to obstruct fair and correct provision of information. The divulging of information should be non-partisan.

“The responsibility of the Government is to define the boundaries and scope of expression that are conducive to an organised society. The media’s role is to provide information at the same time respecting the rights of others”.

When Pesi Fonua, chairman of the Media Council, asked if Tonga’s new laws infringed on Freedom of Religion , the minister replied “You should ask the Singaporeans.”

Lopeti Senituli, the director of Tonga Trust, asked if the Tongan government would follow Singapore and will not grant churches publishing licences. A former director of the Tonga Human Rights Movement Lopeti first gave a brief historical background of the Singapore Press Law and asked the Minister why was it necessary for Tonga to use the Singaporean Press Law when it had been created for a different environment and to solve a Singaporean problem that was not relevant in modern Tonga?.

The Minister answered that he brought the matter in just as an example.
Simote Vea, the Director of the Tonga Council of Churches, pointed out that the Minister, as the main engineer behind the drafting of the media legislation, was still not going to stop overseas media from making a poor image of our King.

The Minister caused laughter by answering Simote with a prayer whereby he asked God “to bless those that spread the gospel so that they do not interfere in matters that do not concern them as well as in political issues”.

But when Linny Folau of Matangi Tonga Online asked the Minister, “if the purpose of the media legislation is control, then it seems to us that Government is trying to monopolise all public voices- so we must ask why is the state not strong enough to listen to any voice other than it’s own?”
The Minister simply answered that, “Government is not trying to monopolise anything”.

Mary Fonua, co-owner of the independent Vava'u Press publishers, whose publishing licence was withheld for the first three months of 2004 under the Media Operators Act, said that by adopting fragments of an old and outdated Singaporean law, “the Minister would have us believe that Tonga is conforming with some modern international standard. When, in fact, as a result of the change to the Tongan Constitution Tonga has lost its old democratic foundation of free speech and, sadly, appears to be gaining a new international status alongside states that abuse Human Rights.”

She asked the minister why it was necessary for Tonga, “to suffer this degrading new international status, in order to keep this media legislation in place, particularly when you claim there is nothing new in it?”

The minister replied, “That is a political question.” and added “No one is going to suffer.”

Copyright © 2004 Vava'u Press Ltd.

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National Service Cut, & TWC's Wild, Wild Guess

Latest News: Full-time NS to be cut to 2 years from Dec 2004 intake: Defence minister http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/singaporelocalnews/view/90049/1/.html

 

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TWC:

 

So, the Govt will cut National Service to 2 years?  I’d thought they said we don’t have enough soldiers for NS.  New PM, new policies: That will please everybody.  Let me bet what’s next?  Maybe lowering voting age to 18 y/o so that soldiers can vote, and soon after, announce general elections to prove the new PM’s mandate.  So, to the soldiers, who cut your NS stint? 

 

I see it all coming.  Remember you hear that from me first.

 

Another of TWC's wild, wild guess...

 

 

 

 

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End of the road for Tonga airline

End of the road for Tonga airline

The tiny island kingdom of Tonga has closed its national airline after the carrier ran out of cash for repairs.

The move follows a mechanical failure which grounded Royal Tongan Airlines' last remaining aircraft this week.

The cash-strapped carrier has been facing an uncertain future since April, when its only aircraft serving international routes was repossessed.

Its collapse comes just before the tourist season, threatening an important source of revenue for Tonga.

Foreign tourists depend on Royal Tongan to fly them to resorts clustered on the northern islands of the Tongan archipelago, some 300 kilometres from the capital, Nuku'alofa.

Grounded

New Zealand and Australian airlines, which already control much of the international traffic to and from Tonga, are now expected to take over the country's domestic routes as well.

Royal Tongan Airlines traces its origins back to 1985, when the kingdom bought a small fleet of aircraft and opened air routes between some of the 169 islands that fall within Tonga's territory.

International services began the following year with direct flights to American Samoa, and were later extended to Sydney, Auckland, Honolulu and Los Angeles.

Tongan Royal Airlines is believed to have racked up losses of about $20m (£12m).

The airline's failure represents a further setback for the Tongan economy, which was rocked last year when a state-backed fund lost millions in ill-fated overseas investments.

The investment fiasco cost the equivalent of a year's tourism earnings and eradicated a financial cushion that could have been used to bail out Royal Tongan Airlines.

Earlier this year, Tonga settled an acrimonious court case with the fund manager, who also worked as the official jester to the court of King Taufa'ahau Tupou IV.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/business/3734979.stm

Published: 2004/05/21 10:27:50 GMT

© BBC MMIV

 

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Which Culture Is More Advanced?

How does one define “inferior” or “superior”?  We have to be careful with what we say or it will smack of racism, or perhaps pure ignorance. 

 

Do you use material wellbeing as a yardstick?  Or wealth?  Technology?  How about civility of the society?  General courtesy, politeness or communal wellbeing?  What weights would you give for emphasis on individuality, family values and civic consciousness?  How about a society’s aggressiveness towards other cultures, tendency to use violence as conflict resolution tactics?

 

Chinese culture was “advance, modern and forward looking” till the Ming Dynasty.  The Arab world and the Caliphate of Cordoba and Granada were the same till 1492 when the Christian West conquered the two states in the Spain of today.  But these are mere material yardsticks, and it is weird when comparing cultures against material yardsticks or GDP numbers. 

 

If social grace and peace are yardsticks, then the Chinese may be well ahead compared to some Western countries, and Thai culture may well be ahead of Chinese cultures.  In fact, the GDP per capita of Thailand is well ahead of China’s.  So is their degree of courtesy and social grace. 

 

If philosophical view of the world and peace are the only yardsticks, then perhaps the Aboriginals of Australia and their concept of Dreamtime are the most advanced culture in the world.  In fact, their ability to live in peace with nature and others put them well ahead of the three intolerant faiths that originated in the Middle East, which condemns all but themselves to hell and are the very origins of most of the world's conflicts today.

 

And what do you mean by Westernisation? Please do not confuse between Modernisation and Westernisation.  Japan embraced Modernisation in the 19^th C – it has the top technology in the world, but is that Westernisation?  Japanese society remains deeply Japanese in culture, values and thought process.  It’s unique perhaps to the extent that it is everything that is opposite to Western culture.  The same for Korean society, and it will be the same for Chinese and Indian. 

 

The Arab world would not have become the most technologically advance society in the 10^th C if not for what it adopted from China and India.  Is that Sinoisation or Indianisation?  The West would be dead primitive if not for what adopted from the Arabs after the conquest of Cordoba and Granada.  Was the West Arabised?

 

Views?

===========

>Weecheng

 

>I have always wanted to ask you this question.

 

>Do you think some culture are "inferior" and some cultures are "superior" - I kind of believe so.

 

>For example I would term aborigine cultures in Papau New Guinea and Australia as "backward and primitive" but western civilisation as "advance, modern and forward looking". I would also view Thai culture as rather backward compared to Chinese cultures - but I say this with little understand of Thai culture. But Chinese culture in many respect has become backward compared to Western cultures and therefore the chinese will need to embrace westernisation in their drive towards modernity/...

 

>makes sense?

 

>k.

 

 

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Saudi Terror: Some Killing, Some Lunch...

By Gary Brecher ( war_nerd@exile.ru )

http://www.exile.ru/192/war_nerd.html

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You have to love the Net. It brings stuff out into the open that would never reach you if a few big papers and TV networks still decided what we got to see. Now every nut case with a few rupees to spend at an internet place can broadcast his message to the world. Which, most of the time, is "Blam!"

Take that big attack on foreigners in Saudi Arabia at the end of May. The raw details weren't that funny: 22 people shot dead, terrorists escaped... Downright depressing. But every time they started filling in more details, the funnier it got. The part that got me chuckling was the way the Saudi p.r. guys were saying that lots of hostages were rescued by "Saudi special forces." Now I don't want to be disrespectful, but if I was a hostage and I heard that Saudi special forces were coming to protect me, I'd start making my peace with God and writing my blood type on my arm.

Some countries are good at "special forces," some aren't. The Brits are probably the best. The Israelis used to be just as good, but I get the feeling they've been slipping up lately. Ever since they tried to poison that guy on the streets of Amman a few years ago and got caught by the Jordanians -- I mean come on, the Jordanians! -- I've had my doubts.

And way, way, waaaaay down on the list of countries that have good special forces is the Saudis. You need hard people to make good commandos, and the Saudis have had it way too soft for way too long.

When I imagine a Saudi rescue operation, it's guys in white robes at the cargo bay of a C130, pushing giant bundles of cash down onto unsuspecting guerrillas, hoping that the falling dollars will knock the bad guys out. Or at least get them more interested in sports cars and less high on death. So I figured Saudi commandos part of the story had to be phony.

And sure enough, the terrorists put out their own version of the massacre on the Net, and they said the Saudi special forces never even showed.

That wasn't the only interesting bit in these crazy Jihadis' email, either. I wish I could've seen their original statement, but nobody will print the online address. Anybody out there know it? If so, email it to me and I'll ask the eXile guys to put it on their site.

In the meantime we have to go with the little bits they've translated. And whoo boy, those are wild enough!

Their first stop was Khobar Petroleum Center, and the terrorists just strolled in, because they'd shaved their beards (hey, Allah would understand!) and put on Saudi military uniforms. A British oil exec pulled up just as they were getting started, and they got the day's work off with a bang by killing him. Their version: "We saw the car of the British director and we liquidated him." You catch that "liquidated"? It's funny how cool words for killing somebody come and go. I haven't heard "liquidated" since I stopped watching James Bond movies, but maybe it's staging a comeback.

The terrorists were trying to be very careful not to shoot Saudi Muslims, because they'd gotten a little slack, killed a few locals, and it turned out to be bad p.r.. So what'd they do? Like any good people-person would do, they got the locals "involved in the process," which is how my asshole boss would say it: "We asked our brother Muslims, where are the Americans, and they showed us..." Now what's funny is that when the TV crews asked the locals about this, they all said, "What, me? Help terrorists? Why, that's crazy talk!" It all depends on who you believe. But put it this way: if you're a Muslim janitor working for American execs in the middle of the Iraq mess and the Gaza mess, and some Koran-quoting maniac with a Kalashnikov asks you where the Americans are, would you really get on your high horse and go, "No, I will never cooperate with terrorism! Avast, you villain!" Well, if you would, you should be teaching Sunday school somewhere. In fact I'm surprised you're still alive. Nature has a way of weeding out people like you.

The terrorists found an American and got down to business: "We did find an American. I shot him in the head and he exploded." I like the "exploded" bit. It's the details that make a story like that. Or is that supposed to prove that Americans are so ultra-evil that they don't just die, they explode? Because they go on to tell how they killed a South African, and he dies pretty ordinary: "Then we found a South African and we shot him too."

Now here is where their story starts to get interesting. They stroll back to their car -- nobody bothering them, as far as I know -- and drive to another residential/office complex full of foreigners. They ask everybody if they're Muslim or not, but they don't kill all the Unbelievers. This Lebanese woman I saw interviewed said she told them she was Lebanese Christian, and they thought it over and decided not to kill her. But they did hand out a good talking-to: "Then they told me to go home, cover up my face and convert to Islam," she said.

The terrorists' statement says it was, and I quote, "a walk in the park" getting into this complex. Uh, if it was me and I lived in Saudi Arabia, I'd take that to heart and skedaddle. Whatever they're paying you to stay, it's not enough. My dad worked for oil companies most of his life, and believe me, gratitude isn't their strong suit. Just take the money and run for the airport.

After reading that Lebanese lady the riot act, the fearless infidel-shooting squad moved on and found "several" Philipino oil workers -- all Catholics, naturally. Well, the guys didn't like the look of those crucifixes, and they were mad about that little jihad in Mindanao -- so they shot all the Philipinos. Poor bastards -- I bet they died brave. Philipinos can drive you crazy, but nobody ever called one a coward and lived.

Then they moved on, and ran into a group of Indian workers, and went right to work wiping them out: "Thanks to Allah, we cleansed our land from unbelievers." That's how they describe shooting down the poor unarmed migrant workers.

I admit, at this point it's kind of sickening, but the weird and funny part is coming up. According to the terrorists' account, they drive over to a resort called "Oasis," waltz right in and, believe it or leave it...they take a lunch break! I swear to God. Here's the quote: "We went to the hotel, found a restaurant, had ourselves a good lunch and had some rest."

I guess every country has its own style terrorist. And the Saudis are so used to taking it easy (the Philipinos and Indians do all the work), even their terrorists have a siesta right in the middle of a massacre.

And apparently the "Saudi Special Forces" took an even longer nap. They were filmed being choppered onto the roof of the resort next morning, but by that time the terrorists had been gone for hours. Well, I hope the special forces had a good lunch too.

You can get a lot from a story like that, even if it does sound ridiculous. First, doing a guerrilla operation in that slow, relaxed style means the terrorists either had a deal with the local security forces, or knew the cops were afraid of them -- or the terrorists wanted to get killed.

You do get cases where the terrorists are more interested in dying than in winning. A couple of months ago there was a weird uprising by Thai Muslims who attacked police stations with nothing but machetes. The cops killed almost a hundred of the Muslims, and said afterward that the Muslims weren't even trying to attack, just standing there yelling, waiting for a bullet: "Hey, over here! I'm open!"

But it doesn't look to me like these Saudi terrorists were looking to die. If they were, they'd have holed up somewhere and waited for some real soldiers (US, probably) to come and get them. Instead three out of four terrorists got away clean.

It reads to me more like terrorist collusion with the local cops -- either that or the cops and soldiers of the Saudi government are so totally intimidated they're not a factor any more.

And that means Saudi Arabia probably isn't going to last much longer. When the government troops won't leave their barracks, when the cops run every time the rebels fire a shot...well, church is about out. Think Tehran when the Shah fell, or Cambodia in '75.

A situation that bad doesn't happen suddenly. When you take a hard look at Saudi Arabia, you end up surprised it hasn't already fallen a long time ago.

Take the name "Saudi." It's not a place, or a mountain or something, it's the name of a family, the Saud. So it's like they put their name on the country, like if we were to call it "Bush-y America." If that sounds selfish of the Sauds, it is. They run the country like a family business. Which ends up meaning that their family skims 40% of the oil money that comes in so they can hand it out to every cousin and nephew who wants a new Maserati.

The figures are unbelievable: every "Prince" of the House of Saud gets a monthly "stipend" of at least $30,000 -- for doing nothing, for raping the Philipina housemaids.

And there are 12,000 princes.

The reason there are so many princes is that the Saudi population has doubled in just 20 years. The average Saudi woman has 6-plus kids. The Muslims are counting on birth rate to beat the West, and who knows? Maybe they're right. If you have six kids for ten generations, and the Westerners only have 1.7, you'll end up in the majority.

But in the short term, all you're doing is making more mouths to feed. A third of Saudi men are unemployed. There just aren't that many jobs in Saudi Arabia -- not the kind these pampered Saudi kids want to do, anyway. They don't do the manual-labor jobs -- it's too hot. They leave all that to the Pakistanis and Indians and Philipinos. They can't do the tech jobs in the oil industry because most of them have never studied anything except Islam, starting with Basic Islam in kindergarten right through to Advanced Islam for Fanatics, where you can get your Master of Fanaticism degree.

So they sit around getting pissed off, more and more of them. Every year another 400,000 Saudi kids join the workforce, or try to. The result goes like this:

Q: What are you qualifications?

A: I know the Koran real well.

Q: Next!

The reason Saudi boys never learn anything but Islam is that the Saudi family made a deal way, way back with the Islamic Brotherhood. The Brotherhood got booted out of Egypt way back in the Sixties by Nasser, because they were trying to organize guerrilla cells to install an Islamist regime. And all the Brothers who were booted out came to Saudi Arabia, where the Sauds were stupid enough to hire them all as teachers.

See, back then everybody was scared of the Commies and figured Islam was like a natural insecticide against it. Nobody really had the balls to imagine that it might get out of control and make Communism look like the nicest li'l enemy a Superpower ever had. The Islamic Brothers hated the Saud family -- bunch of hypocrites who looked Wahhabi but took off for the casinos and brothels every chance they got -- but they liked how they could turn a whole generation of Saudi boys into Wahhabi fanatics. And they did.

In the meantime, Washington was in tight with the Sauds, and didn't even notice that the rest of the Arabian population hated our guts. They watched us screw the Palestinians over and over again, which didn't help -- but when we put troops in Arabia for the first Gulf War, they lost it. This was the Holy Land for Muslims, and infidel troops weren't supposed to be driving their Hummers around on it.

The Saud family did a survey after 9/ll and found that 95% of young Saudi Arabian men were proud of the WTC attacks. Hell, why wouldn't they be? 15 out of the 19 attackers were Saudi--heads full of Islam and more money than sense.

It's gotten worse since this second Gulf War turned into such a disaster. It's one thing to look evil -- that's how we looked till Gulf War II. Now we look evil and weak, and that's way, way worse.

Like I said, this didn't happen overnight. It's been building up as long as I can remember. And it's going to have to get worse before it improves. I'm going to be writing a lot of columns with "Arabia" in the title this year.

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South Korea's 'heroic' spy

Asia Times

 

COMMENTARY
South Korea's 'heroic' spy
By David Scofield

South Korea's media and elected officials have been heralding the patriotic virtue of a Korean-American released on house arrest after serving seven years in a US prison on espionage charges - a national celebration of deceit that may further cloud the "future of the alliance". Meanwhile, the ninth round of the US-South Korea Future of the Alliance Talks dragged on - concluding on Tuesday without reaching a resolution on contentious issues concerning the timing of a US Forces in Korea (USFK) withdrawal from Seoul and the allocation of land south of Seoul for the development of a unified USFK facility.

In 1997, Robert (Chae-gon) Kim, a naturalized US citizen since 1974, was convicted of using his position and access to highly sensitive, top-secret information at the Office of Naval Intelligence to locate and pass off top-secret intelligence on North Korean submarine movements and Chinese naval deployments to South Korean naval attache Baek Dong-il. Evidence has it that he offered his services to the South Koreans in a bid to build trust and potentially pave the way for more lucrative acts of duplicity in the future.

According to US Federal Bureau of Investigation wiretaps, Robert Kim and his brother Kim Yung-gon devised a plan to "acquire", reverse engineer and sell a secret US military computer system to the South Korean government, a plan that if successful would likely have ensured the two brothers a huge windfall for their efforts. Robert Kim acquired export permits and licenses that would have allowed the Kim brothers to export stolen, sensitive technology to South Korea under the guise of normal technology trade. These licenses were ultimately revoked by the US Department of Commerce in June 2000.

Espionage in intelligence agencies is not new. Money, blackmail - the motivators are many, but the gall of Kim claiming his treasonous behavior was motivated only by love of his birth country is frustrating, not supported by fact, and wholeheartedly accepted by the South Korean press and relayed as truth to the Korean people, many of whom consider Kim a hero and a patriot - nationality notwithstanding.

That Robert Kim is guilty of sedition is incontrovertible. He was not tried and found guilty, but rather pleaded guilty to "conspiring to gather national defense information" when confronted with the mountain of evidence investigators had compiled. He pleaded guilty and cut a deal on sentencing; a deal that in 1997 reflected the strong desire of the US government to maintain the perception of a strong US-South Korea alliance, vital to maintaining the deterrence component of the 1994 Agreed Framework with North Korea.

But these facts are conveniently avoided in the South Korean press, and by extension, ignored by the South Korean people. Robert Kim, with a nudge and a wink from the South Korean government, is being portrayed in all media sources, left, right and center, as a patriot who selflessly sacrificed for his homeland. There has been no discussion of his financial problems: the US$200,000 in credit-card debt the assistant US attorney asserted during Kim's bail hearing; the export license he acquired; the highly sensitive technology he was hoping to sell to the government of South Korea; to say nothing of the fact he's still clutching his US citizenship, apparently in no hurry to settle in the land of his true patriot love, South Korea.

The intentional exclusion of relevant facts related to his case by South Korea's media and government is an example of a national tendency to bifurcation, a bipolar approach to the world that portrays issues as starkly "good or bad", with any act committed in defense of Korea's "pride" being good. Reality and logic take a back seat to a system of institutionalized myth-making that makes a hero of someone like Robert Kim, a national myth that bears little resemblance to the truth, and casts the "alliance formed in blood" with the United States in doubt.

The government of South Korea does not seem at all embarrassed about the celebration of Kim's "espionage in the name of Korea". Indeed, sitting lawmakers, the press and various civic groups have been very vocal in demanding that Kim be allowed to return "home", regardless of his US nationality or the fact that he's spent the past 30 years living in the United States.

While Robert Kim sits out his house detention at his home in Virginia, his South Korean support groups are kicking activities into high gear in anticipation of his eventual return to Korea - though the Korean patriot has not indicated he'll be giving up his US citizenship any time soon.

The chairman of President Roh Moo-hyun's Our Open Party pledged his party's support for Robert Kim and his family - Robert's brother Kim Song-gon is now a sitting member of the party. Robert Kim "Aid Associations" have been sponsoring "white envelope" meetings, hoping to collect more than $4 million for South Korea's spy - a retroactive salary of more than $500,000 a year for the seven-plus years Kim spent in prison. The National Assembly is hosting a public exhibition of his pictures, while newspaper editorials express hope that Kim will "come home" and tour South Korea's schools giving lessons on how to be a patriotic Korean - a guide to duplicity and advice on how to use a position of trust for personal gain, all while wrapping the whole vile exercise in the flag of patriotism.

Robert Kim is not a patriot of any country. He is a deeply corrupted American of Korean ethnicity who used his position of trust within the United States government to further his own agenda. He made it known to his South Korean handlers that he would be more than happy to violate both laws and any remaining ethics or morals he may have had in order to build trust and buy him the credibility necessary to broker even larger, more lucrative illegal transactions in the future.

The nation's reaction to Kim and the insistence that he was somehow noble in his quest to enrich himself through espionage is absurd and deals a further blow to what remains of the "future of the alliance".

David Scofield, former lecturer at the Graduate Institute of Peace Studies, Kyung Hee University, is currently conducting post-graduate research at the School of East Asian Studies, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom.

(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia,

An interview with one of USA's greatest living philosophers and historians. ============

To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser. The Last Noble Defender of the American Republic Juan Gonzalez and Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! June 7, 2004 Viewed on June 11, 2004 Editor's Note: This is excerpted from the transcript of a June 4 interview of Gore Vidal by Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. Gore Vidal's newest book is 'Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia,' published by Nation Books, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group. Gore Vidal is a national icon. He is the author of more than 20 novels and five plays. He is one of the best-known chroniclers of American history and politics and his works have been translated into dozens of languages across the globe. He once told a magazine interviewer, "There is not one human problem that could not be solved... if people would simply do as I advise." And for more than a half a century, he has done just that. He published his first novel, Williwawa, in 1946 at the age of 21. He began writing poems and stories as a young teenager and began his first novel while he was still in high school. His grandfather was a senator and his father worked for the Roosevelt administration. But rather than pursuing a family career of politics and privilege, Gore Vidal dedicated himself to writing and critiquing the injustices of American society. Following the publication of the first two of his latest trilogy of books examining the American empire, Vidal was described as the last "noble defender" of the American republic, America's last "small-r" republican. The recently published Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia is the third and final book of the trilogy. Amy Goodman: In his latest book, Gore Vidal writes that "not since the 1846 attack on Mexico in order to seize California has an American government been so nakedly predatory." He describes the current president as being like a man in one of those dreams who knows he's safe in bed and so can commit any crime he likes in his voluptuous dream. No one can stop him. Gore Vidal joins us now in our Firehouse Studio here in Chinatown, Downtown Community Television. Welcome to Democracy Now!. Gore Vidal: Thank you. This is probably my first encounter in the United States with democracy. And I've lived a long time. Here we are in Chinatown, in the firehouse, and I feel free. But we're supposed to in a democracy. Amy Goodman: Well, we welcome you. Gore Vidal: Thank you. Amy Goodman: Why use the word, "imperial," in your title, Imperial America? Gore Vidal: Because everyone hates it so much. I remember years ago, Time magazine, in one of its numerous attacks on me, on my first book of essays, which was heaven knows when, 30, 40 years ago, I refer to the American empire and things that we were doing that were not very good across the world, and I referred to the empire. And Time magazine dismissed me. It was an awful review. I pointed out that we had troops and so on in over 1,000 other places around the world. That seems imperial to me, but there we are. Ever since then, I have loved the word, because it just drives them crazy. But we are a world empire, hated by all, and not to mention the least, our own people, since we don't have any money left for anything. So, you started to go somewhere and I had written about Bush that he's like a kind of crazy kid in a dream, and he thinks he's invulnerable, and he's marching along through a dry forest, and he's lighting matches, dropping them, watching the fires, dropping another one. I had always assumed, like all good Americans, that he was a hypocrite, particularly on religious matters. Suddenly, it began to hit me, he may be another Reagan. He may really believe these are the end of times. What difference does it make? The world's going to end anyway. Why save the environment? Save it for what, you know? We're all going to be upstairs as sunbeams for Jesus. If he's one of those--well, those of us who can afford it will emigrate, and the others will be with Jesus in a higher sphere. Juan Gonzalez: You talk about President Bush throwing matches or lighting matches in the forest. Your book, I thought, some of the most powerful parts were when you go into all of the outright lies of the Bush administration, and you spend quite a bit of time on his Healthy Forest Initiative and his response to wildfires. Can you expound a little bit on this? Gore Vidal: Well, part of imperial America is just sort of a list of the lies that he has told us, and there's a special law against people who lie to the American people, whether they're in the Legislative Branch of the government, Judiciary or the Executive, like the president. He has now told so many lies that he knew to be lies, and that we know to be lies about everything that he can be on, I think it's 12 counts -- he can be impeached immediately, without much fuss, if you had a majority of people who wanted to impeach him in the House of Representatives. Then we go on trial in the senate as poor Bill Clinton found when he lied about sex, which in my day that is what gentlemen were supposed to do. Amy Goodman: Let's hear President Bush, just in the last few days, giving the graduation address at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. President George W. Bush: In 1944, General Eisenhower sat down at his headquarters in the English countryside and wrote out a message to the troops who would soon invade Normandy. "Soldiers, sailors and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force," he wrote, "The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you." Each of you receiving a commission today in the United States military will also carry the hopes of free people everywhere. As your generation assumes its own duties during a global conflict that will define your careers, you will be called upon to take brave action and serve with honor. In some ways, this struggle we're in is unique. In other ways it resembles the great clashes of the last century between those who put their trust in tyrants, and those who put their trust in liberty. Our goal, the goal of this generation, is the same. We will secure our nation and defend the peace through the forward march of freedom. Amy Goodman: President Bush speaking at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. President Bush comparing the conflict in Iraq to World War II. Today he's headed to Normandy. He just met with the Pope this morning on the anniversary of D-day. Your response, Gore Vidal? Gore Vidal: Well, I'd like to be a fly on that wall where he meets the Pope, who highly disapproves of our imperial mission around the world. The Pope, although he's generally interested in sex only, (that is part of the Roman Catholic doctrine of power over the individual) the Pope is a good guy on matters of war and peace. He doesn't like war, and he doesn't like Bush. He doesn't like the United States at this moment. So, I would think that was a very chilling meeting between the two of them. It was chilly when Ronald Reagan went to see him, but Reagan went to sleep, and it was a wonderful meeting, you know. The pope said a few prayers, and there was Ron, snoring softly, and everybody was saying in a very - "it's been a very long trip, you know, from America here." And there's Reagan, sound asleep in front of all of the cameras. But to compare the preemptive wars of Mr. Bush, which are totally illegal, which offend -- if I may paraphrase Thomas Jefferson -- the decent opinion of mankind. The entire world is horrified by what we do. He goes into an innocent country called Afghanistan, knocks it down. One of his cabinet members knocks it down. Then he gives contracts to rebuild it to his vice president with Halliburton. Then he knocks down another country which has done nothing to us. Juan Gonzalez: One of the big sections in your book is a privatizing of the American elections. Many people have almost forgotten Florida already, but we're now in a new year, a new election year, and already as we reported earlier on the show, CNN has sued the state of Florida to try to get the list of the newest list of felons about to be purged from the rolls in Florida. You have a lot to say about what will -- what could possibly happen with these elections, and what we, the nation, still have not dealt with about the last election? Gore Vidal: Well, the sinister thing -- or certainly a sinister thing has been the privatizing of the elections, outsourcing, to use the latest catch phrase, is that for some time now people have been dissatisfied with the dangling chads and so on. There's a special act of Congress calling for a lot of money to be spent in order to bring up to date the voting machinery. It's touch screen stuff. It's supposed to be very popular with the voters. Well, it's the most easily corrupted of all, because you touch the screen, and you vote for Kerry, and then your vote suddenly is transformed almost immediately, and there's no track of it ever registering anywhere but in the hearts of heaven. I go into great detail in the course of Imperial America into how three companies have absolutely got hold of the voting machinery, and Diebold, is the number one, and in the state of California where I am living, at least the California legislature backed them up and said in Orange County, which is one of the largest counties in L.A. during the recall election, recently something like 7,000 votes -- nobody can track them. There is no record that you voted. They call it a paper trail. The head of Diebold, which is the number one manufacturer of these machines, is on record as saying he's a working Republican, and he's already written a fundraising letter to the voters of Ohio, which is a swing state, saying, well, I'll do everything I can to make sure that Ohio votes for President Bush. Well, noble partisanship and we're a free country. You can work for anybody who you want to, but don't make the machines, and don't make them unaccountable. Absolutely it's difficult to find what goes on in these machines. So, in California, the legislature has already asked them to re-examine, and perhaps get rid of them, but you see, I mean, November is almost here. They're all over Georgia. They're all over Maryland. You could well lose the election if you had friends in high places with the three companies that produced these machines. You can change the election. Everybody could vote for Kerry, and suddenly, there is Bush once again, an unelected President, but serving his time and quacking away. You know, as though he were the real thing. Wartime President. I'm a wartime President. Why, if we had any media in the country that was honest, and we don't, somebody would have pointed out this is not wartime. You cannot have a war without a declaration. Article two of the Constitution of the United States declaring war, and that should be the House of Representatives. That is the law of the land. He said, "I'm a wartime President." well, good for him, but he isn't. There's no war except what he has declared. That's on Afghanistan and what he has declared on Iraq. There is no war, and why they don't stop him right there. I'd switch him right off the air. I would have the voice going, President Bush is under a misapprehension that we are at war. We are not at war. He is at war. I spent three years in World War II. I never heard President Roosevelt say -- "I'm going to send troops to China. And I will then send them to Southeast Asia." President Roosevelt never said "I." We. We are the United States. We will do this. All together with our allies. We will do this. So, it's "I." I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that. How a fool like this can be tolerated in a country whose median I.Q. cannot be much lower than that of Inner Slovenia, that they allow him to say ridiculous things and get away with it. I have never felt the country is so naked as it is now. There is no official voice. There is no representative government. Congress doesn't represent anybody. And the Supreme Court, I must say, why some of them are not in jail, I don't know. But be that as it may, to strike a happy note - Amy Goodman: What can people do now? You have described grave problems. Elections being stolen. A war not declared, but engaged in. Gore Vidal: I should think if there were a great and eloquent voice opposite to that of Bush -- in other words, if Kerry could only take off and start to say the things that I have been saying somewhat light heartedly, if he could say them a bit more heavy heartedly, then would you have an opposition and then would you have a big turnout. You might have a real vote going on. It wasn't until I watched, to my amazement, my cousin Albert Gore give that wonderful speech up at N.Y.U. was it? He sounded -- you know, the Gore blood. I'm making no pun, but the Gore blood was at last rippling. Suddenly, there he is up there at N.Y.U. And he sounds like a President we didn't get. I mean, he was elected President, and I think this bothers George W. Bush every day, if somebody told you about it. I have a funny feeling that he doesn't know that he lost the election. Because he sounds so confident. I think he thought he was elected by a landslide, you know. Anything he wants to do, he can do. Because I'm a wartime President. Amy Goodman: The 9/11 commission report? Gore Vidal: Well, the 9/11, I haven't heard any final -- there's no final report yet. Amy Goodman: No, no. There isn't. But in terms of the kind of investigation that we have seen. Gore Vidal: I'm astonished that they allowed anything, and then I was not in the least surprised that urgent questions were not really asked or answered. I mean, it's better than nothing. I mean, you know, we only get a tiny bone of democracy. I can say that on this program, which is dedicated to democracy. Incidentally, for your listeners, viewers, the word "democracy" is not only never mentioned in the Constitution of the United States, but democracy was something that the founding fathers hated. This is not generally known because it shouldn't be known, but it is. I wrote a little book about it called, "Inventing A Nation," that Yale published last year. Our founders feared two things. One was the rule of the people, which they thought would just be a mess. And they feared tyranny, which we had gone through King George III, and so they wanted a republic, a safe place for men -- white men of property to do business in. This is not ideal, but it's better than what we have. So, here we are bringing democracy to the poor Afghans, but only real democracy, of course, is in the prisons, which we have specialized in everywhere. One interesting thing that came out of all of that mess was now the world knows how we treat Americans in American prisons. All of that behavior, the humiliation and violence and so on, that is typical of not so much -- of federal prisons somewhat, but state prisons, municipal prisons, detention centers. This is the nation of torture, and those who disagree with me, you can write an angry letter at this very moment, if you can write at all. Sit down and write an angry letter to the Commander In Chief. Have him examine the prisons. Amy Goodman: Well, on that note, I want to thank you very much for being with us, Gore Vidal. Gore Vidal: I just barely started. [laughs] Amy Goodman is the host of the nationally syndicated radio news program Democracy Now. © 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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The Munshi’s will

THE STAR
12 May 2004

The Munshi’s will

Munshi Abdullah’s will has re-surfaced, after having disappeared for over a century, in Singapore. The priceless document casts a different light on what we know of Abdullah’s personal character and private life. NEIL KHOR JIN KEONG reports.


IN May 1854, Abdullah Abdul Kadir (1797-1854), better known as Munshi Abdullah, the controversial founder of modern Malay literature, passed away while performing the Haj in Mecca.

Such a demise is regarded by pious Muslims as significant, and Abdullah would have no doubt reflected on this while preparing for his departure from Singapore earlier in the year. It was during this time that Abdullah drafted his last and only known surviving surat wasiat or will and testament, a priceless document that has re-surfaced, after having disappeared for over a century, in Singapore.

The Star spoke to Canberra-based independent researcher, Raimy Ché-Ross, who recently returned from his tenure at the University of Cambridge where he was a visiting scholar with the Malaysian Commonwealth Studies Centre at Trinity College. Raimy has been commissioned by the current trustees of the will to write an article on the document for publication in the in-house journal of the National Heritage Board of Singapore.

“Early in 2001, I received confirmation from Dr Annabel Teh-Gallop at the British Library of the will’s existence,” said Raimy. “Dr Gallop had seen the document and in her expert opinion it was probably authentic. During a transit stopover in Singapore on my way back from Cambridge late last year, I had a few days to spare to track it down, a real challenge as its whereabouts were not generally known.

“Following a few leads, I was finally introduced to Koh Seow Chuan, one of Singapore’s foremost architects and an internationally renowned philatelist. Koh informed me that the will had been donated to the Singapore History Museum by his nephew, John Koh, of the distinguished London auction house, Spinks & Co. The latter had generously donated the will along with 232 other rare and invaluable Malay documents to the Singapore History Museum as a gift to the nation.

“Seeing my deep interest in the will, Koh facilitated my access to the document which is presently kept in the Singapore National Heritage Board’s Conservation Centre in Jurong. This was coordinated with the assistance of senior officials at the Singapore History Museum. Needless to say, it was an absolute honour and privilege to have held the document in my hands,” added Raimy.

When asked about the condition of the document, Raimy explained that it was in relatively good shape, with Abdullah’s distinctive and elegant handwriting still looking sharp and clear.

“The will also bears his autograph signature, not once, but twice. I do not recall ever seeing it anywhere else, not even in his famous letter to Dularier which is now kept at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris. And although Abdullah was by then firmly domiciled in Singapore, he nevertheless signed his name, ‘al-fakir Allah Ta’ala Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, Munshi, Melaka’. He evidently felt and remained a true anak jati Melaka until the very end.”

Raimy, whose writings include Munshi Abdullah’s Voyage to Mecca, published by the School of Oriental and African Studies in their academic journal, Indonesia and the Malay World, also explained that the will was written and witnessed on Jan 18, 1854, corresponding to the 16th Rabiul-Akhir 1275, precisely 12 days before Abdullah was due to depart for the Haj.”

According to his final travelogue, the Munshi sailed away from Singapore on Jan 29, 1854, which coincided with the first day of the Chinese New Year, on an Arab barque, the Subla-as-Salam. He succumbed to cholera shortly after his arrival in Mecca around mid-May the same year. Abdullah was 59 years old at the time, with none of his family and only a few strangers and his travelling companions around him when he died.

Raimy explained that this surviving document was actually the third will that Abdullah had written. “The first was drawn up when Abdullah fell seriously ill with a raging fever. Thinking that he was on his deathbed, Abdullah asked for pen and paper and patiently set his affairs in order. Fortunately for us, he soon recovered.

“The second time Abdullah decided to write a will was when he was faced with the prospect of undergoing surgery to cure a hydrocele a few years later.

“At a time when the populace relied on bomohs and keramats for fast relief, Abdullah bravely put himself to the knife, but not before drafting out yet another will, I suppose, just to be safe.

“Having had two test runs as it were, it comes as little surprise to learn that Abdullah managed his affairs in the same manner prior to his Haj, which was then an even more unnerving prospect,” said Raimy.

What sort of man was the Munshi?

Readers have often wondered about Abdullah’s true character and personality. Writers generally describe him as a noble teacher, a poor struggling writer, faithful family man and even a Malay nationalist.

Right-wing academics, on the other hand, tend to portray Abdullah as a puppet and stooge of the British imperialists. To them, Abdullah did himself no favours by working with Sir Stamford Raffles in the early days leading to the British acquisition of Singa-pore, and ultimately the establishment of modern Western dominance in the archipelago.

Abdullah’s harsh criticism of the failings of Malay aristocracy, his Western-Democratic ideas and revolutionary vision for a fully developed “Bangsa Melayu,” and particularly his hostile attitude towards what he sees as obsolete Malay traditions, are evidence of his “betrayal” of the Malay race, says the nationalists.

“Such accusations are frustratingly based on taking passages from Munshi Abdullah’s two most famous works, namely Hikayat Abdullah (The Tale of Abdullah) and Kisah Pelayaran Abdullah (Abdullah’s Sea Voyages), entirely out of context.” Raimy said.

“Few have actually studied his manuscripts or read his works in the original Malay. Instead, they rely on poor translations of his works and heavily edited selections of his texts. We should learn to appreciate Abdullah’s writings without prior prejudice or being influenced by stereotyped leanings.

“The will therefore casts a different light on what we know of Abdullah’s personal character and private life. Those who regard him as a naive provincial writer, will now have to re-assess their narrow perception, for this document clearly shows him as a very cosmopolitan individual with bourgeois tastes and a shrewd business mind. This is not really startling when we realise that by the end of his life, Abdullah was highly regarded as an eminent figure in the local establishment, and an internationally acknowledged author, with works translated into and published in English and French while he was still alive.

“According to the will, the Munshi owned a large house and an adjacent plot of land, horses and carriages, fine brassware, glassware, mirrors, vases and porcelain crockery. He also left expensive jewellery, including gold-beaded necklaces and a large gold-topped pendant for his wife and daughter, whom he adored and loved. Abdullah also gave precise instructions to the executors of is estate as to how his belongings would be divided strictly according to syariah laws.”

Coincidentally, while the will reveals much about Abdullah’s family lifestyle, there is little indication of his intellectual pursuits.

“I was rather surprised to find no mention of his books and manuscripts. One would have imagined that with his dedication to his craft, Abdullah would have at least attempted to ensure that his library and papers would be deposited in good hands. But seeing that the will was meant to only list his worldly belongings and tangible material wealth, he may have thought it irrelevant to include them,” Raimy surmised.

More strikingly, the will resonates with that rich unique characteristic of Abdullah’s writings. His writing is lucid and heartfelt. The touching journalistic voice compared, for example, to the stilted tone of contemporary Royal Malay Wills from Riau, now held by the Malay Manuscripts Centre in our National Library, shows that Abdullah’s will is imbued with a human element that is simultaneously candid and affectionate. And though the official English translation of the will comes across as a cold legal document, the original Malay text reads like a personal letter to a cherished friend.

Thus, while the Munshi left most of his worldly possessions to his wife and daughter, his greatest legacy – his immortal writings – was bequeathed to us all.

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China: A Too-Friendly Embrace

TRADE

A Too-Friendly Embrace - FEER

Beijing likes to portray its increasing bilateral engagement with Southeast Asia as entirely benign. Its partners might beg to differ

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By Michael Vatikiotis/HAINAN and HONG KONG

Issue cover-dated June 17, 2004

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FOR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, China has successfully projected itself as a dynamic and benign influence on Asia, forging diplomatic ties with neighbours and weaving trade links that have started to fundamentally shift Asia's centre of gravity. China has projected this engagement as mutually beneficial and driven by idealism, involving promises of free trade and vague notions of benign cultural and security cooperation. The phrase Chinese officials like to use is "win-win." Prime Minster Wen Jiabao recently described China as "a friendly elephant," which poses no threat to Southeast Asia.

But if China's leaders think that an elephant, no matter how friendly, doesn't leave trampled grass in its wake, perhaps they should listen to their neighbours. In Burma and Cambodia, for example, newly minted economic deals with China are generating fears of economic dependence and political domination. A new trade agreement with Thailand has benefited China's exporters more than Thailand's. In other words, the closer China gets to its neighbours, the more it reveals the strong pull of China's economy and rather selfish political and security interests. In some cases, the first cries of complaint--albeit muted--are being heard.

Moving closer to Asia on the back of idealistic rhetoric about an East Asian economic community has been relatively easy, comments David Shambaugh, a China security specialist at George Washington University in Washington. "But striking specific deals in specific areas to China's benefit," he argues, "will drive a wedge into the diplomatic progress China has made." The reason for this new stress on bilateral engagement is that as China's economy grows, it becomes hungrier for resources and more nervous about lines of supply, which explains its desire to bind neighbouring states in mainland Southeast Asia more closely.

Take the case of Cambodia, where closer ties to Beijing are spawning a largely unseen web of economic, political and even military agreements that some Cambodian officials fear ties their country too closely to China. Last November, China and Cambodia signed a military agreement under which Beijing provides funds for military training as well as some equipment. Cambodia has also accepted aid to help build a railway linking China's Yunnan province to the sea, a strategic priority for Beijing. China has lent Cambodia more than $45 million in the last two years, mostly on interest-free terms. Cambodia's Prime Minister Hun Sen visited China in April to cement closer economic ties, the official Chinese news agency Xinhua reported.

China has a high cultural profile in Cambodia, helping to establish new schools and promoting the study of the Chinese language. Asia's largest Chinese school, with some 14,000 students, is in Phnom Penh. "It seems to be more than purely strategic," says a Western researcher in Phnom Penh. "It comes across as China trying to project itself as a leader of Asia."

Indeed, for some Cambodians, China has gained a strategic foothold in the country at the expense of Cambodian autonomy. "China is geopolitically using Cambodia as a buffer against its old foe, Vietnam," says a Cambodian official who did not wish to be named. "Everybody is worried but nobody dares say anything."

It's a similar story in Burma. In March, Chinese Vice-Premier Wu Yi was in Rangoon to sign 24 pacts on economic and technical cooperation. Burma's ties with China have become so close that some regional diplomats suspect that Beijing now has a big say in domestic politics. Indeed, in January 2003, Hu Jintao, then China's acting president and now confirmed in the position, met with Burmese junta leader Than Shwe in Beijing and urged the Burmese leader to consider speeding up political change, according to a senior Thai diplomat briefed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. The Chinese also gave Burma $200 million in low-interest loans.

COMPLAINTS OF UNEVEN TRADE DEALS
The common gripe in Burma is that China is dumping cheap goods and demanding special privileges for Chinese companies. China is reportedly asking Burmese authorities for a China-friendly economic zone near Rangoon.

Even the stronger, more developed economies in Asean have started to worry about the impact of closer ties with China. "The beauty of a multilateral free-trade agreement is that it does not put China at the centre of the region's economy," says Mari Pangestu, an economist at Indonesia's Centre of International and Strategic Studies in Jakarta. But when China does a deal like the bilateral trade pact signed in June last year with Thailand, China becomes an unequal partner.

Under the Sino-Thai agreement, which initially applies to fruit and vegetables, cheap Chinese apples and pears have flooded into Thailand--especially from nearby Yunnan province, which is one of the largest producers of fruit and vegetables in China. Garlic and onions from Yunnan, for example, are now cheaper in northern Thailand than local produce. Meanwhile, Thailand has had a hard time selling its exotic durians and mangosteens in China. The official Thai News Agency reported that in the first three months of the agreement, which kicked off eight months ago, imports of fruit and vegetables from China increased more than 200% while exports from Thailand to China only increased 80%.

"The Chinese are unfamiliar with our products and we have had problems marketing them because of lengthy quarantine procedures," says a senior executive with a major agribusiness conglomerate in Bangkok. The Thais knew they might initially come out on the short end of a straight deal on produce with China, but were optimistic about the longer-term benefits. The devil, however, is in the details. Thailand wants China to consider an open-skies agreement to increase air-cargo traffic and streamlining customs procedures. Beijing has agreed only to study the proposals.

In smaller countries like Burma, Laos and Cambodia, the economic imbalances in the two-way trade are even more apparent. Imports into Burma from China last year were valued as high as $900 million, compared to $170 million in exports from Burma into China, according to official Chinese figures. Tiny Laos received imports from China worth almost $90 million last year, more than double 2002's figure, the Vientiane Times reported. Laos, meanwhile, exported just $8 million worth of goods to China, a 15% increase.

Yet, China insists that its growing influence in Asia threatens no one. At the Boao Forum for Asia held on Hainan island in April, senior technocrats and policymakers who advise the leadership insisted that China's rise will be peaceful and beneficial to the region. Among them was Zheng Bijan, dean of the influential Communist Party School and said to be a close adviser to key Chinese leaders. He also helped fashion China's diplomatic policy of engaging Asia. "If China does not provide economic opportunities for the region, it will lose the opportunity for a peaceful rise," Zheng told his audience in Hainan. Seeking to address an area of concern, he added: "This is by no means a bid for hegemony."

DOUBLE STANDARDS
Hegemony may be a long way off, but double standards are emerging. For all of Beijing's rhetoric about regional financial cooperation and free trade, the one major multilateral forum that China does not embrace is the Mekong River Commission, one of the oldest regional bodies in Asia. China is only an observer, but the dams China has built in the upper reaches of the Mekong to serve some 14 power plants are starting to affect the water levels in the lower reaches of the river that flows through Southeast Asia.

Optimists like Sheng Lijun, a Chinese specialist on regional diplomacy at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, argue that China won't allow selfish interests to hijack its diplomacy. "China will seek to balance its diplomacy finely," he says. "Sometimes they will win more, but then they will seek to compensate in other areas." Pang Zhongying, professor of International Studies at Nankai University in Beijing, agrees that "the rhetoric of win-win is for real. China is strategically committed to ensuring that Southeast Asia benefits from China's growth."

But another long-term view of China's rise in Asia, assuming that it continues its trajectory of economic growth and political stability, is that Beijing will eventually seek a pattern of engagement with the region similar to that adopted by the United States. Without admitting to its own strategy, the U.S. clearly sees China's bilateral engagement with Asia as more political than economic. In testimony to the U.S. Congress early this month, Assistant Secretary of State James Kelly said that China's bilateral agreements mean little in economic terms, "but they serve notice of how China is using its newly won economic power to expand its presence and political influence among its southern neighbours."

Washington long ago discarded engagement on a multilateral level in favour of a series of bilateral agreements with individual countries--commonly termed a "hub-and-spoke arrangement." There are signs that China is moving in this direction, especially in the military realm. President Hu announced at the Boao forum in April that China would seek "security dialogue and military-to-military exchanges" with other Asian countries. "China is ready to set up a military-security-dialogue mechanism with other Asian countries and actively promote confidence-building in the military field," Hu said.

One stumbling block in such military ties is Taiwan. Not all Southeast Asian countries are likely to feel comfortable about accepting the kind of demands they may get from the Chinese military, where conservative elements are keen to prevent Taiwan from declaring independence.

Last November at a meeting of the Asean Regional Forum, a regional security forum created under Asean's auspices in the 1990s, China proposed a regular meeting of regional defence officials on security policy. Significantly, in his April speech Hu made explicit the desired basis of military cooperation, which includes "non-alignment, non-confrontation and non-targeting of any third party." Many countries in Southeast Asia are discovering that friendship with China is not unconditional.

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The Tiananmen Papers

The Tiananmen Papers
By Andrew J. Nathan

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2001

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Summary: In China today, economic reform continues apace. Political liberalization, however, remains essentially frozen -- as it has been since the tragic suppression of student demonstrations in the spring of 1989. The massive student protests, which filled Beijing's Tiananmen Square and other public places in cities throughout China, were meant to push the country's authoritarian rulers toward political reform. They failed.

Andrew J. Nathan is Professor of Political Science at Columbia University and the author of numerous books, including China's Transition. He is co-editor with Perry Link, Professor of Chinese language and literature at Princeton University, of The Tiananmen Papers, to be published around the world this month by PublicAffairs and in a Chinese version later this year. Documents in the book were compiled by Zhang Liang (a pseudonym).

INSIDE CHINA'S POLITBURO

For the first time ever, reports and minutes have surfaced that provide a revealing and potentially explosive view of decision-making at the highest levels of the government and party in the People's Republic of China (PRC). The materials paint a vivid picture of the battles between hard-liners and reformers on how to handle the student protests that swept China in the spring of 1989. The protests were ultimately ended by force, including the bloody clearing of Beijing streets by troops using live ammunition. The tragic event was one of the most important in the history of communist China, and its consequences are still being felt.

The materials were spirited out of China by a sympathizer of Communist Party members who are seeking a resumption of political reform. They believe that challenging the official picture of Tiananmen as a legitimate suppression of a violent antigovernment riot will help unfreeze the political process. The extensive and dramatic documentary picture of how China's leaders reacted to the student protests is revealed in The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership's Decision to Use Force Against Their Own People-In Their Own Words. This article is adapted from the extensive narrative and documents in that book.

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THE STUDENTS' CHALLENGE

The 1989 demonstrations were begun by Beijing students to encourage continued economic reform and liberalization. The students did not set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was a dangerous regime. Nor did the regime relish the use of force against the students. The two sides shared many goals and much common language. Yet, through miscommunication and misjudgment, they pushed one another into positions where options for compromise became less and less available.

The spark for the student movement was a desire to commemorate the reformer Hu Yaobang, who had died on April 15. He had been replaced two years earlier as general secretary (party leader) by another moderate, Zhao Ziyang, after student demonstrations in December 1986.

Although there was a provocative edge to the behavior of students in the spring of 1989, most of them stayed within the bounds of certain pieties, acknowledging party leadership and positioning themselves as respectful, if disappointed, supporters of the party's long-term reform project.

Once begun, however, the commemoration quickly evolved into a protest for far-reaching change. On May 4, a student declaration was read in Tiananmen Square calling on the government to accelerate political and economic reform, guarantee constitutional freedoms, fight corruption, adopt a press law, and allow the establishment of privately run newspapers. The declaration said important first steps would include institutionalizing the democratic practices that the students themselves had begun to initiate on their campuses, conducting dialogue between students and the government, promoting democratic reforms of the government system, opposing corruption, and accelerating the adoption of a press law.

Zhao struggled to achieve consensus within the leadership around a conciliatory line toward the students. Senior leader Deng Xiaoping seemed willing to consider anything, so long as the students were somehow cleared from the square in time for Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's upcoming summit visit. But disaster struck for Zhao's moderate strategy on May 13, when the protesting students announced a hunger strike. During the next few days, the intellectuals joined in, incidents in the provinces began to erupt, and the summit that the authorities envisioned as a triumphant climax to years of diplomacy with the Soviet Union was thrown into the shadows. The huge foreign press contingent that had come to Beijing for the summit turned its main attention to the student movement.

Over the course of several weeks, the hunger strikers gained the support of tens of millions of other citizens, who took to the streets in scores of cities to demand a response from the government. The government at first tried to wait out the hunger strikers, then engaged them in limited dialogue, and finally issued orders to force them from the square. In reaching that decision, the party suffered its worst high-level split since the Cultural Revolution. Those favoring political reform lost out and their cause has been in the deep freeze ever since.

The regime has, to be sure, diminished the range of social activities it purports to control in comparison with the totalitarian ambitions of its Maoist years. It has fitted its goals of control more to its means and no longer aspires to change human nature. It has learned that many arenas of freedom are inessential to the monopoly of political power.

Several noteworthy books and an important documentary film have told the story of the Tiananmen events from the viewpoint of students and citizens in Beijing. The book from which this article is adapted provides the first view from Zhongnanhai-the former imperial park at the center of Beijing that houses the Party Central Office, the State Council Office, and the residences of some top leaders. Although the leaders occupied distinct official posts in a triad of organizations-the ruling Chinese Communist Party, the State Council (government cabinet), and the Central Military Commission-behind those red walls they acted as a small and often informal community of perhaps ten decision-makers and their staffs.

The eight "elders," retired senior officials who together amounted to China's extraconstitutional final court of appeal, joined their deliberations at crucial moments. (Bo Yibo is the only one of these elders still alive, and he is no longer politically active.) Three of the elders were most influential, and among these the final voice belonged to Deng Xiaoping, who was retired from all government posts except one and lived outside Zhongnanhai in a private mansion with his own office staff. It was at this house that the most crucial meetings of these tormented months took place.

THE PAPER TRAIL

Into Zhongnanhai flowed a river of documentation from the agencies charged with monitoring and controlling the capital city of Beijing and the vast nation beyond it. On a daily and hourly basis Party Central received classified reports from government, military, and party agencies and diplomatic missions abroad. The material included reports on the state of mind of students, professors, party officials, military officers and troops, workers, farmers, shop clerks, street peddlers, and others around the country. Also captured in these reports is the thinking of provincial and central leaders on policy issues; the traffic on railways; discussions in private meetings; man-in-the-street interviews; and press, academic, and political opinion from abroad.

Often such materials were distributed only to the top forty or so leaders, and many were limited even more sharply to the five-man Politburo Standing Committee plus the eight elders. (The Communist Party's Political Bureau-or Politburo-Standing Committee is the highest organ of formal political power in China, despite constitutional provisions that legally give that role to the National People's Congress.) Certain documents went to only one or a few leaders. Taken as a whole, these reports tell us in extraordinary detail what the central decision-makers saw as they looked out from their compound on the events unfolding around them, and how they evaluated the threat to their rule.

Added to these are minutes of the leaders' formal and informal meetings and accounts of some of their private conversations. In these we observe the conflict among a handful of strong-willed leaders. We learn what the ultimate decision-makers said among themselves as they discussed the unfolding events-how they debated the motives of the students, whom they identified as their main enemies; which considerations dominated their search for a solution; why they waited as long as they did and no longer before ordering the troops to move on Tiananmen Square; and what they ordered the troops to do. Perhaps most dramatic of all, we have definitive evidence of who voted how on key issues, and their reasons for those votes, in their own words.

The records reveal that if left to their own preferences the three-man majority of the Politburo Standing Committee would have voted to persist in dialogue with the students instead of declaring martial law. At the crucial Politburo Standing Committee meeting of May 17, two of the five members, Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili, voted against martial law. The third-ranking member, Qiao Shi, abstained. We can see from his remarks that he was not in favor of using force. But Qiao, by abstaining, and Zhao, by offering his resignation, deferred to the elders' decision in favor of martial law.

Such seeming weakness was no doubt explained by the knowledge that resistance to Deng Xiaoping would have been futile. The Tiananmen papers reveal that the Politburo Standing Committee was obligated by a secret intra-party resolution to refer any stalemate to Deng and the elders. The documents further show that Deng exercised absolute control over the military through his associate Yang Shangkun, who was president of the PRC and standing vice chair of the Central Military Commission. Had the Standing Committee refused to honor the elders' wishes, Deng had ample means to exert his authority.

Had the Standing Committee majority had its way, China's recent history and its relations with the West would have been very different. Dialogue with the students would have tipped the balance toward political reform. Instead, China has experienced more than a decade of political stasis at home and strained relations with the West.

In 1989 Jiang Zemin was party secretary in Shanghai. He committed no heinous act at that time, although his closing of the World Economic Herald newspaper for being too sympathetic to the student cause is still widely resented by intellectuals. What The Tiananmen Papers reveals is that his accession to supreme power came about through a constitutionally irregular procedure-the vote of the elders on May 27-and that the elders chose him because he was a pliable and cautious figure who was outside the paralyzing factional fray that had created the crisis in the first place. This accession route was widely suspected, but the details have never been known before. Although Jiang is not necessarily a committed political conservative, he has paid deference to the concerns of conservatives as a way of balancing contending forces and maintaining his own power.

Today's second-ranking member of the party hierarchy, Li Peng, was premier in 1989. Not only did he advocate a hard line against the students and go on television to declare martial law, as is already known, but the papers show that he manipulated information to lead Deng and the other elders to see the demonstrations as an attack on them personally and on the political structure they had devoted their careers to creating. The Tiananmen Papers also reveals his use of the intelligence and police agencies to collect information that was used to persecute liberal officials and intellectuals after the crackdown.

Both Li Peng and Jiang Zemin are scheduled to step down from their high-level party and state offices in 2002 and 2003. Some commentators expect Jiang will try to retain his third post, that of chairman of the Central Military Commission, thus enabling him to exert influence as a party elder from behind the scenes, as Deng did in the period described in The Tiananmen Papers.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

Throughout the subsequent years, the issue of how to label the student movement has remained alive. Just before ordering the troops to move, the leadership made an official determination that the incident was a fan'geming baoluan (counterrevolutionary riot), an even more severe label than that of "turmoil," which the authorities had applied up to then, and one that implied (falsely) that the demonstrators were armed and had shed blood. Neither designation has ever been officially withdrawn. But in deference to opinion at home and abroad, informal official usage has gravitated to the softer term "political storm" (zhengzhi fengbo, equivalent to "political flap"), a term first introduced by Deng a few days after the crackdown.

Since 1989, there has been a constant stream of appeals for formal reconsideration of the official determination. Ding Zilin, the mother of a student who died on June 4, has led a movement to demand an accounting. In 1999, former high-ranking Zhao Ziyang aide Bao Tong circulated a letter urging the party leaders to acknowledge the mistakes made ten years earlier, calling the opportunity to reverse the verdict the current regime's "greatest political resource" for reviving its legitimacy. On a broader canvas, the party has faced constant demands for political reform. It has responded with arrests and purges of dissidents outside the party who demanded reform. But a sharp debate over reform has also developed within the party. In the course of this debate participants on both sides started to use a technique that had previously been rare in PRC history: that of leaking documents to the outside world-a technique of which The Tiananmen Papers is a spectacular extension.

The party believes it has learned from Tiananmen that democratization is not an irresistible force. There is a widespread view in the West that where globalization and modernization occur, fundamental changes in the party-state system are inevitable, leading to the rise of civil society and some form of democracy. Whether this is right or wrong, the leaders in power in China do not believe it. For them, the lesson of Tiananmen is that at its core, politics is about force.

The events of 1989 left the regime positioned for its responses to later challenges, such as the Chinese Democratic Party in 1998-99 and the Falun Gong religious movement since 1999. In both of these incidents and others, the key to the party's behavior was its fear of independent organizations, whether of religious followers or students, workers or farmers, with or without a broad social base, and with or without party members as constituents. The core political issue has remained what it was in 1989, even if the sociology has been different: the party believes that as soon as it gives in to any demand from any group that it does not control, then the power monopoly that it views as the indispensable organizational principle of the political system will be destroyed.

Many in China, however, share the view held widely overseas that this kind of political rigidity cannot persist in the face of rapid social and ideological change. Can the regime muddle through and survive, or will it implode? This is the choice the backers of this book are trying to avoid. By reopening the issues that were closed in 1989, they seem to want to open a breach in the power monopoly without causing a collapse.

Documents of the sort quoted in this article and in the book from which it is adapted are available to only a tiny handful of people in China. The compiler, who brought the contents of the documents out of China, can be publicly identified only by the pseudonym Zhang Liang. Issues of safety for the compiler and his associates do not allow for public disclosure of the extensive efforts at authentication taken by co-editor Perry Link and myself. China scholar Orville Schell, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote the book's afterword, which explores the issue of authentication of such documents. Schell concurs that there are convincing grounds to assume that the compiler's motivations were honest and that the documents were credible despite the impossibility of making an absolute judgment about material in a closed society like China's.

Following are excerpts from some of the key documents:

THE TIANANMEN PAPERS

DENG XIAOPING AND THE APRIL 26 EDITORIAL

On April 25, Li Peng and other officials went to Deng Xiaoping's home to report on the student demonstrations in Beijing and 20 other cities. Deng's response formed the basis of an April 26 editorial that became the party's verdict on the student movement.

Excerpts from Party Central Office Secretariat,

"Important meeting minutes," April 25:

Li Peng: Some of the protest posters and the slogans that students shout during the marches are anti-Party and antisocialist. They're clamoring for a reversal of the verdicts on bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution [Communist Party jargon for Western cultural influences].

The spear is now pointed directly at you and the others of the elder generation of proletarian revolutionaries.

Deng Xiaoping: Saying I'm the mastermind behind the scenes, are they?

Li Peng: There are open calls for the government to step down, appeals for nonsense like "open investigations into and discussions of the question of China's governance and power," and calls to institute broader elections and revise the Constitution, to lift restrictions on political parties and newspapers, and to get rid of the category of "counterrevolutionary" crimes. Illegal student organizations have already sprung up in Beijing and Tianjin. ... The small number of leaders of these illegal organizations have other people behind them calling the shots.

In Beijing there have been two attacks on Xinhua Gate in quick succession; in Changsha and Xi'an there was looting and arson on April 22, and in Wuhan students have demonstrated on the Yangtze River Bridge, blocking the vital artery between Beijing and Guangzhou. These actions seriously harm social stability and unity, and they disrupt social order. Those of us on the Standing Committee all believe that this is turmoil and that we must rely on law to bring a halt to it as soon as possible.

Deng Xiaoping: I completely agree with the Standing Committee's decision. This is no ordinary student movement. The students have been raising a ruckus for ten days now, and we've been tolerant and restrained. But things haven't gone our way. A tiny minority is exploiting the students; they want to confuse the people and throw the country into chaos. This is a well-planned plot whose real aim is to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system at the most fundamental level. We must explain to the whole Party and nation that we are facing a most serious political struggle. We've got to be explicit and clear in opposing this turmoil.

Li Peng: ... Shouldn't we organize an editorial in the People's Daily right away, in order to get the word out on what Comrade Xiaoping has said?

That afternoon the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Committee General Office telegraphed the decision to Zhao Ziyang, party general secretary, who was on an ill-timed official visit to North Korea. Zhao wired back: "I completely agree with the policy decision of Comrade Xiaoping with regard to the present problem of turmoil."

Excerpt from the People's Daily,

April 26, 1989, editorial, "The necessity for a clear stand against turmoil":

This is a well-planned plot to confuse the people and throw the country into "turmoil." Its real aim is to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system at the most fundamental level. This is a most serious political struggle that concerns the whole Party and nation.

The editorial re-ignited the waning student movement, which mounted huge next-day demonstrations in major cities. In Beijing, 50 thousand students from many campuses marched, carrying banners, including one bearing quotations from Deng Xiaoping and Lenin favoring democracy. With irony, they sang the song "Without the Chinese Communist Party There Would Be No New China," and they elicited tears from bystanders when they shouted, "Mama, we haven't done anything wrong."

In the three days after publication the State Security Ministry and Xinhua News Agency sent 36 reports to Zhongnanhai on the reactions of various social strata. Many citizens felt that the editorial was too harsh-that it "defined the nature of the incident at too high a level of seriousness" and that it was not helpful for resolving the problem. The reports described widespread sympathy and protective feelings for the students among university presidents and other high-ranking party and administrative officials. One official revealed that on his campus, two-thirds of faculty members were refusing to attend meetings to study the editorial. Others pointed out that the blame for the demonstrations ultimately lay in the failings of the party itself, without which the students would have no need to protest.

STRAINS AMONG THE LEADERS

On the morning of May 13 Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and PRC President Yang Shangkun went to Deng Xiaoping's home and reported on their recent work. Yang was Deng Xiaoping's closest confidant and business manager within the leadership. Zhao explained the positions he had taken at several Politburo meetings.

Excerpts from memoranda of conversations

supplied by a friend of Yang Shangkun who

cannot be further identified:

Zhao Ziyang: ... I've noticed that this movement has two particular features we need to pay attention to: First, the student slogans all support the Constitution; they favor democracy and oppose corruption. These demands are basically in line with what the Party and government advocate, so we cannot reject them out of hand. Second, the number of demonstrators and supporters is enormous, and they include people from all parts of society. So I think we have to keep an eye on the majority and give approval to the mainstream view of the majority if we want to calm this thing down.

Deng Xiaoping: It was obvious from the start that a tiny minority was stirring up the majority, fanning the emotions of the great majority.

Zhao Ziyang: That's why I think we have to separate the broad masses of students and their supporters from the tiny minority [who are] using the movement to fish in troubled waters, stir up trouble, and attack the Party and socialism. We have to rely on guidance. We have to pursue multilevel, multichannel dialogue, get in touch with people, and build understanding. We mustn't let the conflicts get nasty if we expect things to settle down quickly.

Deng Xiaoping: Dialogue is fine, but the point is to solve the problem. We can't be led around by the nose. This movement's dragged on too long, almost a month now. The senior comrades are getting worried. ... We have to be decisive. I've said over and over that we need stability if we're going to develop. How can we progress if things are in an utter mess?

Yang Shangkun: Gorbachev will be here in two days, and today I hear that the students are going to announce a hunger strike. They obviously want to turn up the heat and get a lot of international attention.

Deng Xiaoping: Tiananmen is the symbol of the People's Republic of China. The Square has to be in order when Gorbachev comes. We have to maintain our international image. What do we look like if the Square's a mess?

Zhao Ziyang: I'll stress the importance of the Gorbachev visit one more time in the media this afternoon.

Deng Xiaoping: As I've said before, the origins of this incident are not so simple. The opposition is not just some students but a bunch of rebels and a lot of riffraff, and a tiny minority who are utterly against opposing bourgeois liberalization. ... This is not just between the students and the government.

Zhao Ziyang: The consensus in the Politburo has been to use the policies of guiding and dividing, winning over the great majority of students and intellectuals while isolating the tiny minority of anticommunist troublemakers, thereby stilling the movement through democratic and legal means.

Deng Xiaoping: What do the ordinary people in society think?

Zhao Ziyang: The protests are widespread but limited to cities that have universities. The rural areas aren't affected, and the farmers are docile. So are urban workers, basically. The workers are unhappy about certain social conditions and like to let off steam from time to time, so they sympathize with the protesters. But they go to work as usual and they aren't striking, demonstrating, or traveling around like the students.

Deng Xiaoping: ... We must not give an inch on the basic principle of upholding Communist Party rule and rejecting a Western multiparty system. At the same time, the Party must resolve the issue of democracy and address the problems that arise when corruption pops up in the Party or government.

Zhao Ziyang: ... When we allow some democracy, things might look "chaotic" on the surface; but these little "troubles" are normal inside a democratic and legal framework. They prevent major upheavals and actually make for stability and peace in the long run.

ZHAO ZIYANG AND JIANG ZEMIN CLASH

On May 10, the full Politburo clashed over how to handle the student movement. Members agreed on the danger of the situation but disagreed over Zhao's line on how it should be handled. Zhao criticized Jiang Zemin for mishandling the World Economic Herald incident, and Jiang stoutly defended himself. (In a private conversation a day later, Yang Shangkun and Deng Xiaoping agreed that Jiang's handling of this incident struck the right balance between discipline and reform-mindedness.)

The student movement was also divided. Although some students returned to classes, others advocated continuing the strike. New leaders emerged, and various groups presented various demands. Journalists and intellectuals spoke out, new issues were added to old ones, and demonstrations burgeoned in the provinces.

Despite the now clear divisions on strategy, the Politburo at its May 10 meeting decided to make further efforts at dialogue with the students. Dialogue had been attempted a number of times in April and May. Some efforts were rebuffed, as when student leaders during the memorial service for Hu Yaobang mounted the steps of the Great Hall of the People with a seven-item petition. No officials would meet with them.

At other times, meetings between student representatives and mid-level government officials were exercises in avoidance. An April 29 meeting between government officials and 45 student representatives was marked mostly by the officials evading questions by changing the subject.

On May 13, the students announced their hunger strike.

Excerpts from State Security Ministry, "Trends in Tiananmen Square," fax to Party Central and State Council duty offices, 11:58 pm, May 14:

Today, more than one thousand students began a hunger strike in the Square. About twenty thousand students and citizens looked on during the day, and this number grew to one hundred thousand in the evening. ... The striking students were regularly supplied with drinking water, soda, sugar, and medicine. By 10 pm more than a dozen of them had fainted or suffered stomach cramps and were rushed to first-aid centers in ambulances provided by the Beijing Government.

THE GORBACHEV VISIT

On May 16, while Deng Xiaoping met with Gorbachev inside the Great Hall of the People, thereby bringing about the long-sought normalization of Sino-Soviet relations, tens of thousands of people from all corners of society demonstrated outside in support of the students.

On the evening of May 16, Zhao Ziyang called on Gorbachev at the elegant state guest house called Diaoyutai. It was here that Zhao made his fateful comment to Gorbachev that even though Deng Xiaoping had retired from his party posts in 1987, the party had recognized that his wisdom and experience were essential and that for the most important questions he would still be at the helm. Zhao's observation could be interpreted as a veiled way of saying that any mishandling of the student protests was ultimately Deng's responsibility, and it became one of the counts against him when he was later dismissed from the party leadership.

THE STANDING COMMITTEE MEETS IN EMERGENCY

On the evening of May 16 the members of the Politburo Standing Committee-Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili, and Yao Yilin-held an emergency meeting. Party elders Yang Shangkun and Bo Yibo also attended. The hunger strike had evoked a strong, broad response in society, and the leaders were under pressure to find a solution.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of the May 16

Politburo Standing Committee meeting":

Zhao Ziyang: ... The students' hunger strike in the square has gone on for four days now. ... We've had dialogues with their representatives and have promised we'll take them seriously and keep listening to their comments, asking only that they stop their fast, but it hasn't worked. The Square is so crowded-all kinds of excited people milling about with their slogans and banners-that the student representatives themselves say they have no real control of things.

Yang Shangkun: These last few days Beijing's been in something like anarchy. Students are striking at all the schools, workers from some offices are out on the streets, transportation and lots of other things are out of whack-it's what you could call anarchy. We are having a historic Sino-Soviet summit and should have had a welcoming ceremony in Tiananmen Square, but instead we had to make do at the airport. We're supposed to have had two sessions of summit talks today in the Great Hall of the People, but we had to meet at Diaoyutai instead. That's the kind of anarchy we're in.

Zhao Ziyang: ...When I got back from North Korea I learned that the April 26 editorial had elicited a strong reaction in many parts of society and had become a major issue for the students. I thought it might be best simply to skirt the most sensitive issue of whether the student movement is turmoil, hoping it would fade away while we gradually turn things around using the methods of democracy and law. But then on May 13 a few hundred students began a hunger strike, and one of their main demands was to reverse the official view of the April 26 editorial. So now there's no way to avoid the problem. We have to revise the April 26 editorial, find ways to dispel the sense of confrontation between us and the students, and get things settled down as soon as possible.

Li Peng: It's just not true, Comrade Ziyang, that the official view in the April 26 editorial was aimed at the vast majority of students. It was aimed at the tiny minority who were using the student movement to exploit the young students' emotions and to exploit some of our mistakes and problems in order to begin a political struggle against the Communist Party and the socialist system and to expand this struggle from Beijing to the whole country and create national turmoil. These are indisputable facts. Even if a lot of the student demonstrators misunderstood the April 26 editorial, still it served an important purpose in exposing these truths.

Zhao Ziyang: As I see it, the reason why so many more students have joined the demonstrations is that they couldn't accept the editorial's label for the movement. The students kept insisting that the party and government express a different attitude and come up with a better way of characterizing the movement. I think we have to address this problem very seriously because there's no way around it. ...

Li Peng: Comrade Ziyang, the key phrases of the April 26 editorial were drawn from Comrade Xiaoping's remarks on the 25th: "This is a well-planned plot," it is "turmoil," its "real aim is to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system," "the whole Party and nation are facing a most serious political struggle," and so on are all Comrade Xiaoping's original words. They cannot be changed.

Zhao Ziyang: We have to explain the true nature of this student movement to Comrade Xiaoping, and we need to change the official view of the movement.

ZHAO ZIYANG LOSES GROUND

On the morning of May 17 the Standing Committee of the Politburo met at Deng Xiaoping's home. Besides Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili, and Yao Yilin, elders Yang Shangkun and Bo Yibo also attended.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of the May 17 Politburo Standing Committee meeting," document

supplied to Party Central Office Secretariat for its records by the Office of Deng Xiaoping:

Zhao Ziyang: The fasting students feel themselves under a spotlight that makes it hard for them to make concessions. This leaves us with a prickly situation. The most important thing right now is to get the students to de-link their fasting from their demands and then to get them out of the Square and back to their campuses. Otherwise, anything could happen, and in the blink of an eye. Things are tense.

Yang Shangkun: ... Can we still say there's been no harm to the national interest or society's interest? This isn't turmoil? If anybody here takes the position that this isn't turmoil, I don't see any way to move ahead with reform and opening or to pursue socialist construction. ...

Li Peng: I think Comrade Ziyang must bear the main responsibility for the escalation of the student movement, as well as for the fact that the situation has gotten so hard to control. When he was in North Korea and the Politburo asked Comrade Ziyang's opinion, he sent back a telegram clearly stating that he was "in complete agreement with Comrade Xiaoping's plan for dealing with the unrest."

After he came back on April 30 he again said at a Politburo meeting that he endorsed Comrade Xiaoping's remarks as well as the word "turmoil" that appeared in the April 26 editorial.

But then, just a few days later, on the afternoon of May 4 at the Asian Development Bank meetings-and without consulting anybody else on the Standing Committee-he gave a speech that flew in the face of the Standing Committee's decisions, Comrade Xiaoping's statement, and the spirit of the April 26 editorial.

First, in the midst of obvious turmoil, he felt able to say, "China will be spared any major turmoil."

Second, in the presence of a mountain of evidence that the aim of the turmoil was to end Communist Party rule and bring down the socialist system, he continued to insist the protesters "do not oppose our underlying system but demand that we eliminate the flaws in our work."

Third, even after many facts had clearly established that a tiny minority was exploiting the student movement to cause turmoil, he said only that there are "always going to be people ready to exploit" the situation. This explicitly contradicts Party Central's correct judgment that a tiny minority was already manufacturing turmoil. ...

Yao Yilin: ... I don't understand why Comrade Ziyang mentioned Comrade Xiaoping in his talk with Gorbachev yesterday. Given the way things are right now, this can only have been intended as a way to saddle Comrade Xiaoping with all the responsibility and to get the students to target Comrade Xiaoping for attack. This made the whole mess a lot worse.

Zhao Ziyang: Could I have a chance to explain these two things? The basic purposes of my remarks at the annual meeting of the directors of the [Asian Development Bank] were to pacify the student movement and to strengthen foreign investors' confidence in China's stability. The first reactions I heard to my speech were all positive, and I wasn't aware of any problems at the time. Comrades Shangkun, Qiao Shi, and Qili all thought the reaction to the speech was good; Comrade Li Peng said it was a good job and that he would echo it when he met with the ADB representatives. ...

Now, about my comments to Gorbachev yesterday: Ever since the Thirteenth Party Congress, whenever I meet with Communist Party leaders from other countries I make it clear that the First Plenum of our Thirteenth Central Committee decided that Comrade Xiaoping's role as our Party's primary decision-maker would not change. I do this in order to make sure the world has a clearer understanding that Comrade Xiaoping's continuing power within our Party is legal in spite of his retirement. ...

Deng Xiaoping: Comrade Ziyang, that talk of yours on May 4 to the ADB was a turning point. Since then the student movement has gotten steadily worse. Of course we want to build socialist democracy, but we can't possibly do it in a hurry, and still less do we want that Western-style stuff. If our one billion people jumped into multiparty elections, we'd get chaos like the "all-out civil war" we saw during the Cultural Revolution. ...

I know there are some disputes among you, but the question before us isn't how to settle all our different views; it's whether we now should back off or not. ...To back down would be to give in to their values; not backing down means we stick steadfastly to the April 26 editorial.

The elder comrades-Chen Yun, [Li] Xiannian, Peng Zhen, and of course me, too-are all burning with anxiety at what we see in Beijing these days. Beijing can't keep going like this. We first have to settle the instability in Beijing, because if we don't we'll never be able to settle it in the other provinces, regions, and cities.

Lying down on railroad tracks; beating, smashing, and robbing; if these aren't turmoil then what are they? If things continue like this, we could even end up under house arrest.

After thinking long and hard about this, I've concluded that we should bring in the People's Liberation Army [PLA] and declare martial law in Beijing-more precisely, in Beijing's urban districts. The aim of martial law will be to suppress the turmoil once and for all and to return things quickly to normal. This is the unshirkable duty of the Party and the government. I am solemnly proposing this today to the Standing Committee of the Politburo and hope that you will consider it.

Zhao Ziyang: It's always better to have a decision than not to have one. But Comrade Xiaoping, it will be hard for me to carry out this plan. I have difficulties with it.

Deng Xiaoping: The minority yields to the majority!

Zhao Ziyang: I will submit to Party discipline; the minority does yield to the majority.

Standing Committee Stalemates

At 8 pm the meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee resumed at Zhongnanhai. Committee members Zhao Ziyang, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili, and Yao Yilin attended. Yang Shangkun and Bo Yibo participated in their role as party elders.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of the May 17

Politburo Standing Committee meeting":

Zhao Ziyang: The question for this evening's meeting is martial law. First we need to consider whether the situation has reached a point where martial law is our only option. Will martial law help solve the problem or only enlarge it? Is it in fact necessary to impose martial law? I hope we can discuss these questions calmly.

Li Peng: The decision on martial law, Comrade Ziyang, was made by Comrade Xiaoping at this morning's meeting. I support Comrade Xiaoping's views on martial law. I believe that the topic for the present meeting is not whether martial law should or should not be imposed but, rather, what steps to use in carrying it out.

Yao Yilin: I strongly support Comrade Xiaoping's proposal to impose martial law in Beijing's urban districts. Taking this powerful measure will help restore the city to normalcy, end the state of anarchy, and quickly and effectively stop the turmoil.

Zhao Ziyang: I'm against imposing martial law in Beijing. My reason is that, given the extreme feelings of the students at this juncture, to impose martial law will not help calm things down or solve problems. It will only make things more complicated and more sharply confrontational. And after all, things are still under our control. Even among the demonstrators the vast majority is patriotic and supports the Communist Party. Martial law could give us total control of the situation, yes; but think of the terror it will strike in the minds of Beijing's citizens and students. Where will that lead?

In the forty years of the People's Republic, our Party has learned many lessons from its political and economic mistakes. Given the crisis we now face at home and abroad, I think that one more big political mistake might well cost us all our remaining legitimacy. So I see martial law as extremely dangerous. The Chinese people cannot take any more huge policy blunders.

Qiao Shi: I've wanted to express my view all along. We can't afford any more concessions to the student movement, but on the other hand we still haven't found a suitable means for resolving the situation. So on the question of martial law, I find it hard to express either support or opposition.

Bo Yibo: This is a Standing Committee meeting in which Comrade Shangkun and I are only observers. We don't have voting rights, but we both support Comrade Xiaoping's proposal to impose martial law. Just now everyone on the committee had a chance to express his opinion. I think we should make the opinions even clearer by taking a vote. ...

Following Bo Yibo's suggestion, the five members of the Standing Committee took a formal vote. Li Peng and Yao Yilin voted for martial law; Zhao Ziyang and Hu Qili voted against it; Qiao Shi abstained.

Yang Shangkun: The Party permits differing opinions. We can refer this evening's vote to Comrade Xiaoping and the other Party Elders and get a resolution as soon as possible.

THE ELDERS DECIDE ON MARTIAL LAW

On the morning of May 18, the eight elders-Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, Deng Yingchao, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo, and Wang Zhen-met with Politburo Standing Committee members Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Hu Qili, and Yao Yilin and with Military Affairs Commission members General Hong Xuezhi, Liu Huaqing, and General Qin Jiwei and formally agreed to declare martial law in Beijing. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang did not attend the meeting.

Li Peng opened by describing the split that had emerged within the Standing Committee on the evening of the 17th over the question of martial law. Bo Yibo provided additional detail. Then the elders began explaining why martial law was necessary.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of an important

meeting on May 18," document supplied

to Party Central Office Secretariat for its

records by the Office of Deng Xiaoping:

Deng Xiaoping: We old comrades are meeting with you today because we feel we have no choice. The Standing Committee should have come up with a plan long ago, but things kept dragging on, and even today there's no decision. Beijing has been chaotic for more than a month now, and we've been extremely restrained through the whole thing, and extremely tolerant. What other country in the world would watch more than a month of marches and demonstrations in its capital and do nothing about it?. ...

Li Xiannian: I feel like the rest of you, and I think it's too bad that an accurate assessment of what's going on here has to depend on us old comrades. We have no choice but to show concern when things get as chaotic as they are now. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang has an undeniable responsibility here. What's the difference between what we're seeing all across the country and the Cultural Revolution? It's not just Beijing; all the cities are in chaos. ...

Deng Xiaoping: The April 26 editorial defined the nature of the problem as turmoil. Some people object to the word, but it hits the nail on the head. The evidence shows that the judgment is correct.

Li Peng: ... The reason Comrade Zhao Ziyang has not come today is that he opposes martial law. He encouraged the students right from the beginning. When he got back from North Korea, he came out with his May 4 speech at the Asian Development Bank without clearing it with anyone else on the Standing Committee.

The speech's ... tone was completely different from the April 26 editorial's, but it got wide distribution and had a big propaganda impact. From then on we felt it was obvious that Comrade Zhao Ziyang's opinions were different from Comrade Xiaoping's and those of the majority of comrades on the Standing Committee. Anyone with political experience could see this, and certainly the ones causing the turmoil could also see it. ...

Yang Shangkun: ... The problem we now face is that the two different voices within the party have been completely exposed; the students feel that someone at the Center supports them, so they've gotten more and more extreme. Their goals are to get the April 26 editorial repudiated and get official recognition for their autonomous federations [as opposed to the student organizations organized and controlled by the government].

The situation in Beijing and the rest of the country keeps getting grimmer. So we have to guarantee the stability of the whole country, and that means starting with Beijing. I resolutely support declaration of martial law in Beijing and resolutely support its implementation.

Wang Zhen: ... These people are really asking for it! They should be nabbed as soon as they pop out again. Give 'em no mercy! The students are nuts if they think this handful of people can overthrow our Party and our government! These kids don't know how good they've got it! ... If the students don't leave Tiananmen on their own, the PLA should go in and carry them out. This is ridiculous!

Bo Yibo: The whole imperialist Western world wants to make socialist countries leave the socialist road and become satellites in the system of international monopoly capitalism. The people with ulterior motives who are behind this student movement have support from the United States and Europe and from the KMT [Kuomintang] reactionaries in Taiwan. There is a lot of evidence that the U.S. Congress and other Western parliaments have been saying all kinds of things about this student movement and have even held hearings. ... Members of the overseas Chinese Alliance for Democracy, which we have declared to be an illegal and reactionary organization, not only voice support for the student movement but openly admit that they advise the students and even plan how to reenter China and meddle directly. ... So you see, it was no accident that the student movement turned into turmoil.

Hong Xuezhi: For a soldier, duty is paramount. I will resolutely carry out the order to put Beijing under martial law.

Qin Jiwei: ... I resolutely support and will resolutely carry out the orders of Party Central and the Military Affairs Commission for martial law in Beijing.

LI PENG MEETS WITH STUDENT LEADERS

Also on May 18, Li Peng and other government officials met at the Great Hall of the People with Wang Dan, Wuerkaixi, and other student representatives. Li said that no one had ever claimed the majority of students had been engaged in turmoil, but that too often people with no intention of creating turmoil had in fact brought it about.

He stood firm on the wording of the April 26 editorial and said the current moment was not an appropriate time to discuss the students' two demands. Wang Dan had said that the only way to get the students out of Tiananmen Square was to reclassify the student movement as patriotic and put the student-leader dialogue on live television.

ZHAO ZIYANG'S SORROWFUL SPEECH

At 4 am on May 19, following the close of the Politburo Standing Committee meeting, Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng visited Tiananmen Square, accompanied respectively by Director of the Party Central Office Wen Jiabao and Secretary-General of the State Council Luo Gan. Knowing his political career was near an end, Zhao made remarks that brought tears to the eyes of those who heard him. "We have come too late," he said, and he begged the students to protect their health, to end the hunger strike, and to leave the Square before it was too late.

"We demonstrated and lay across railroad tracks when we were young, too, and took no thought for the future," he told the students. "But I have to ask you to think carefully about the future. Many issues will be resolved eventually. I beg you to end the hunger strike."

Zhao was exhausted, and his doctor urged him to rest. On the morning of May 19 he requested three days' sick leave.

PROVINCIAL STUDENTS CONVERGE ON BEIJING

Many students had come from universities outside Beijing to camp. On the eve of martial law, the Railway Ministry reported to Zhongnanhai that a total of 56,888 students had entered the city on 165 trains between 6 pm on May 16 and 8 pm on May 19. The flood of students had stressed the already overstretched system. Most of the students had demanded to ride without tickets, took over the trains' public-address systems, asked passengers for contributions, hung posters in and on the cars, and even demanded free food.

Of some 50,000 students in Tiananmen Square on May 22, most were from outside Beijing, and many of the Beijing students had returned to their campuses or gone home. Official records showed that at least 319 different schools were represented in the square.

BACKLASH TO MARTIAL LAW

When martial law was declared, it applied to only five urban districts of Beijing. But it elicited fierce opposition throughout the capital, nationwide, and internationally. Troops from 22 divisions moved toward the city, but many were stopped in the suburbs or blocked in city streets and failed to reach their destinations. In the first of what would be many similar instructions, on May 20 Yang Shangkun ordered that the soldiers should never turn their weapons on innocent civilians, even if provoked.

Provincial authorities voiced the requisite support for Beijing while taking actions locally to try to assure that nothing spectacular happened in their own bailiwicks. On May 21, student leaders in the square voted to declare victory and withdraw but reversed their decision under pressure of widespread sentiment among new recruits in the square to continue the strike.

THE ELDERS DISCUSS A SUCCESSOR

The same day, Deng Xiaoping again convened the party elders, since the younger generation of leaders seemed unable to manage.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of important meeting, May 21, 1989," document supplied to

Party Central Office Secretariat for its

records by the Office of Deng Xiaoping:

Deng Xiaoping: We can all see what's happened. Martial law hasn't restored order. This isn't because we can't do it; it's because problems inside the Party drag on and keep us from solving things that should've been solved long ago. ... Zhao Ziyang's intransigence has been obvious, and he bears undeniable responsibility. He wouldn't even attend the party-government-army meeting that the Standing Committee of the Politburo convened.

When others saw that the Party general secretary didn't show up, they all knew something was wrong. He exposed the differences within the Standing Committee for all to see. He wanted to draw a strict line between himself and us in order to make his stand clear. So we've got to talk about the Zhao Ziyang problem.

Li Xiannian: I've said all along that the problem's inside the party. The party now has two headquarters. Zhao Ziyang's got his own separate headquarters. We have to get to the bottom of this, have to dig out the roots. Otherwise there can never again be unity of thought inside the Party. ... When he opposed martial law he had his own political agenda, which was to force us senior people to hand over power and step down, so that he could go ahead with his program of bourgeois liberalization. With us senior people in the way, his hands were tied and he was stuck. Zhao Ziyang is no longer fit to be general secretary.

Wang Zhen: Zhao Ziyang's never paid a whit of attention to people like us. ... What he really wants is to drive us old people from power. We didn't mistreat him; he's the one who's picked the fight. When he falls it'll be his own fault. ...

Yang Shangkun: ... We should look at the big picture and make solidarity our top priority. This isn't the right moment for replacing a general secretary. Instead we could ask Zhao Ziyang for a self-criticism and avoid making big changes on the Politburo Standing Committee. ...

Deng Xiaoping: ... In the recent turmoil Zhao Ziyang has exposed his position completely. He obviously stands on the side of the turmoil, and in practical terms he has been fomenting division, splitting the Party, and defending turmoil. It's lucky we're still here to keep a lid on things. Zhao Ziyang stimulated turmoil, and there's no reason to keep him. Hu Qili is no longer fit for the Standing Committee, either.

Chen Yun: ... Comrade Xiannian has pointed out to me that Comrade Jiang Zemin from Shanghai is a suitable candidate. Every time I've gone down to Shanghai he always sees me, and he strikes me as a modest person with strong party discipline and broad knowledge. He gets along well in Shanghai, too.

Li Xiannian: ... I noticed, after the April 26 editorial, that again it was Shanghai that took the lead in pushing the spirit of Party Central. Jiang Zemin called a meeting of more than ten thousand officials the very next day, and he yanked the World Economic Herald into shape. That was something! That move-given what was going on-put him under tremendous public pressure, but he stood firm, didn't budge, and stuck to principle.

Then, when the Party, government, and army at the Center declared martial law, again it was Shanghai that took the lead in action. This kind of firm attitude's hard to come by. In political action and party loyalty, Jiang Zemin has been a constant. And of course, he's got a good knack for economic work. Shanghai's built a good economic foundation these last few years. ... I like the idea of him as general secretary.

THE SELECTION OF JIANG ZEMIN

On the night of May 27, Deng Xiaoping and the other seven elders met for about five hours at Deng's residence to finalize a successor to Zhao Ziyang as Communist Party general secretary.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of important meeting, May 27, 1989," document supplied to

Party Central Office Secretariat for its

records by the Office of Deng Xiaoping:

Deng Xiaoping: I've checked with Comrades Chen Yun and Xiannian, and they completely agree with my view that the new leadership team must continue to carry out the political line, principles, and policies of the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee. Even the language should stay the same. The political report of the Thirteenth Party Congress was approved by all representatives at the time. Not a single word of it can be changed. The policies of reform and opening must not change, for several decades; we've got to press them through to the end. This should be what we expect and require from the new generation of [Party] Central leadership.

Unless someone objects, I move that the new Standing Committee of the Politburo be made up of the following six comrades: Jiang Zemin, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, Yao Yilin, Song Ping, and Li Ruihuan, with Comrade Jiang Zemin as

general secretary.

The motion to appoint Jiang as general secretary and to add Li and Song to the Standing Committee had been approved by the elders by a show of hands. But this violated the Chinese Communist Party Constitution, which stipulates that the Politburo Standing Committee should make such decisions.

THE ELDERS DECIDE TO CLEAR TIANANMEN SQUARE

On the morning of June 2, party elders Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo, and Wang Zhen met with the Standing Committee of the Politburo, which at that juncture consisted only of Li Peng, Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of important meeting, June 2, 1989," document supplied to

Party Central Office Secretariat for its

records by the Office of Deng Xiaoping:

Li Peng: Yesterday the Beijing Party Committee and the State Security Ministry both submitted reports to the Politburo. These two reports give ample evidence that following the declaration of martial law a major scheme of the organizers and plotters of the turmoil has been to occupy Tiananmen Square to serve as a command center for a final showdown with the Party and government. The square has become "a center of the student movement and eventually the entire nation."

Whatever decisions the government makes, strong reactions will emerge from the Square. It has been determined that, following the declaration of martial law, events such as putting together a dare-to-die corps to block the martial law troops, gathering thugs to storm the Beijing Public Security Bureau, holding press conferences, and recruiting the Flying Tiger Group to pass messages around were all plotted in and commanded from the Square. ...

The reactionary elements have also continued to use the Square as a center for hatching counterrevolutionary opinion and manufacturing rumor. Illegal organizations such as the AFS [Autonomous Federation of Students] and AFW [Autonomous Federation of Workers] have installed loudspeakers on the Square and broadcast almost around the clock, attacking party and state leaders, inciting overthrow of the government, and repeating over and over distorted reports from [the Voice of America] and the Hong Kong and Taiwan press.

The reactionary elements believe the government will eventually crack down if they refuse to withdraw from the square. Their plot is to provoke conflict and create bloodshed incidents, clamoring that "blood will awaken the people and cause the government to split and collapse." A few days ago these reactionary elements openly erected a so-called goddess statue in front of the Monument to the People's Heroes. Today they are planning to launch another hunger strike in the Square.

... When the turmoil began employees of the U.S. embassy started to collect intelligence aggressively. Some of them are cia agents. Almost every day, and especially at night, they would go and loiter at Tiananmen or at schools such as Peking University and Beijing Normal. They have frequent contact with leaders of the AFS and give them advice. The Chinese Alliance for Democracy, which has directly meddled in this turmoil, is a tool the United States uses against China. This scum of our nation, based in New York, has collaborated with the pro-KMT Chinese Benevolent Association to set up a so-called Committee to Support the Chinese Democracy Movement. They also gave money to leaders of the AFS.

As soon as the turmoil started, KMT intelligence agencies in Taiwan and other hostile forces outside China rushed to send in agents disguised as visitors, tourists, businessmen, and so on. They have tried to intervene directly to expand the so-called democracy movement into an all-out "movement against communism and tyranny." They have also instructed underground agents to keep close track of things and to collect all kinds of information. There is evidence that KMT agents from Taiwan have participated in the turmoil in Beijing, Shanghai, Fujian, and elsewhere. ... It is becoming increasingly clear that the turmoil has been generated by a coalition of foreign and domestic reactionary forces and that their goals are to overthrow the Communist Party and to subvert the socialist system.

Wang Zhen: Those goddamn bastards! Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen so long?! They're really asking for it! We should send the troops right now to grab those counterrevolutionaries, Comrade Xiaoping! What's the People's Liberation Army for, anyway? What are martial law troops for? They're not supposed to just sit around and eat! They're supposed to grab counterrevolutionaries! We've got to do it or we'll never forgive ourselves! We've got to do it or the common people will rebel! Anybody who tries to overthrow the Communist Party deserves death and no burial!

Li Xiannian: The account that Comrade Li Peng just gave us shows quite clearly that Western capitalism really does want to see turmoil in China. And not only that; they'd also like to see turmoil in the Soviet Union and all the socialist countries of Eastern Europe. The United States, England, France, Japan, and some other Western countries are leaving no stone unturned in pushing peaceful evolution in the socialist countries. They've got a new saying about "fighting a smokeless world war." We had better watch out. Capitalism still wants to beat socialism in the end.

Deng Xiaoping: Comrade Xiannian is correct. The causes of this incident have to do with the global context. The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given a lot of encouragement and assistance to the so-called democrats or opposition in China-people who in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation. This is the root of the chaotic situation we face today. ... Some Western countries use things like "human rights," or like saying the socialist system is irrational or illegal, to criticize us, but what they're really after is our sovereignty. Those Western countries that play power politics have no right at all to talk about human rights!

Look how many people around the world they've robbed of human rights! And look how many Chinese people they've hurt the human rights of since they invaded China during the Opium war! ...

Two conditions are indispensable for our developmental goals: a stable environment at home and a peaceful environment abroad. We don't care what others say about us. The only thing we really care about is a good environment for developing ourselves. So long as history eventually proves the superiority of the Chinese socialist system, that's enough. We can't bother about the social systems of other countries. Imagine for a moment what could happen if China falls into turmoil. If it happens now, it'd be far worse than the Cultural Revolution. ... Once civil war got started, blood would flow like a river, and where would human rights be then? In a civil war, each power would dominate a locality, production would fall, communications would be cut off, and refugees would flow out of China not in millions or tens of millions but in hundreds of millions.

First hit by this flood of refugees would be Pacific Asia, which is currently the most promising region of the world. This would be disaster on a global scale. So China mustn't make a mess of itself. And this is not just to be responsible to ourselves, but to consider the whole world and all of humanity as well. ...

Li Xiannian: ... Tiananmen Square is now that root of our turmoil-disease. Just look at that thing-like neither human nor demon-that they've erected there in our beautiful Square! Are the people going to accept that? Absolutely not! We're never going to get a voluntary withdrawal from the Square. Tiananmen has been polluted for more than a month now, ravaged into a shadow of itself! We can't breathe free until the Square is returned to the hands of the people. We have to pull up the root of the disease immediately. I say we start tonight.

Yang Shangkun: The fact that we're going to clear the square, restore order, and stop the turmoil in no way means that we're giving up on reform or closing our country off from the world.

Deng Xiaoping: No one can keep China's reform and opening from going forward. Why is that? It's simple: Without reform and opening our development stops and our economy slides downhill. Living standards decline if we turn back. The momentum of reform cannot be stopped. We must insist on this point at all times.

Some people say we allow only economic reform and not political reform, but that's not true. We do allow political reform, but on one condition: that the Four Basic Principles are upheld. [The Four Basic Principles are Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong thought, socialism, the people's democratic dictatorship, and leadership by the Chinese Communist Party.] ...

We can't handle chaos while we're busy with construction. If today we have a big demonstration and tomorrow a great airing of views and a bunch of wall posters, we won't have any energy left to get anything done. That's why we have to insist on clearing the Square.

Yang Shangkun: Troops have moved into the Great Hall of the People, Zhongshan Park, the People's Cultural Palace, and the Public Security Ministry compound. The thinking of all officers and soldiers has been thoroughly prepared for a clearing of Tiananmen Square. After nearly half a month of political thought work, all officers and soldiers have deepened their understanding of the severity and complexity of this struggle and have comprehended the necessity and the legality of martial law.

Li Peng: I strongly urge that we move immediately to clear Tiananmen Square and that we resolutely put an end to the turmoil and the ever expanding trouble.

Qiao Shi: The facts show that we can't expect the students on the Square to withdraw voluntarily. Clearing the square is our only option, and it's quite necessary. I hope our announcement about clearing will meet with approval and support from the majority of citizens and students. Clearing the Square is the beginning of a restoration of normal order in the capital.

Deng Xiaoping: I agree with all of you and suggest the martial law troops begin tonight to carry out the clearing plan and finish it within two days. As we proceed with the clearing, we must explain it clearly to all the citizens and students, asking them to leave and doing our very best to persuade them. But if they refuse to leave, they will be responsible for the consequences. ...

THE ORDER TO CLEAR THE SQUARE

At 4 pm on June 3, Yang Shangkun, Li Peng, Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin held an emergency meeting with responsible military officials.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of the June 3

Politburo Standing Committee meeting":

Yang Shangkun: I really did not want to call this meeting. The situation has become extremely volatile-beyond what anybody's goodwill can handle. We have to settle on some resolute measures for clearing the square. Let's begin with you, Comrade Li Peng.

Li Peng: Late last night a counterrevolutionary riot broke out in Beijing. A small handful of counterrevolutionaries began spreading rumors and openly violating martial law. They were brazen and lawless, and their behavior has aroused extreme indignation among the masses. We must resolutely adopt decisive measures to put down this counterrevolutionary riot tonight. ... The PLA martial law troops, the People's Armed Police, and Public Security are authorized to use any means necessary to deal with people who interfere with the mission. Whatever happens will be the responsibility of those who do not heed warnings and persist in testing the limits of the law.

Yang Shangkun: You all get the picture now. I've also just been in touch with Comrade Xiaoping, and he has asked me to relay two points to everyone. The first is: Solve the problem before dawn tomorrow. He means our martial law troops should completely finish their task of clearing the Square before sunup. The second is: Be reasonable with the students and make sure they see the logic in what we're doing; the troops should resort to "all means necessary" only if everything else fails. In other words, before we clear the Square, we should use TV and radio to advise students and citizens to avoid the streets at all costs, and we should ask the ones who are in the Square to leave of their own accord. In short, we've got to do an excellent job on propaganda work; it has to be clear to everyone that we stand with the people, and we must do everything we possibly can to avoid bloodshed. The Martial Law Command must make it quite clear to all units that they are to open fire only as a last resort. And let me repeat: No bloodshed within Tiananmen Square-period. What if thousands of students refuse to leave? Then the troops carry away thousands of students on their backs! No one must die in the Square. This is not just my personal view; it's Comrade Xiaoping's view, too. So long as everybody agrees, then it will be unanimous.

JUNE FOURTH

Tiananmen Square lies at the geographic center of the capital city and just southeast of Zhongnanhai, where the last dynasty's emperors had their hunting park and where top Communist Party leaders now work. Beginning with the May Fourth movement against imperialism and for democracy in 1919, Tiananmen has also become a traditional site for popular protests. These protests have often been led by university students, who are especially numerous here because Beijing is the country's preeminent center of higher education.

As soldiers entered the city in plainclothes and in uniform, instead of meeting with popular understanding they encountered anger and some violence. The party leaders' hopes of avoiding bloodshed foundered on this resistance and the troops' emotional reaction to it.

The government's internal reports claimed that Deng Xiaoping's goal of no deaths in Tiananmen Square was achieved. Most of the deaths occurred as troops moved in from the western suburbs toward Tiananmen along Fuxingmenwai Boulevard at a location called Muxidi, where anxious soldiers reacted violently to popular anger.

Excerpt from Martial Law

Command, "Situation in the Muxidi

district," Bulletin (Kuaibao), June 3:

Advance troops of the Thirty-Eighth Group Army, who were responsible for the western approaches, massed in the western suburbs at Wanshou Road, Fengtai, and Liangxiang. At 9:30 pm, these troops began advancing eastward toward the Square and encountered their first obstacle at Gongzhufen, where students and citizens had set up a blockade. An anti-riot squad fired tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into the crowd. At first the people retreated, but then they stopped. The anti-riot squad pressed forward, firing more tear gas and more rubber bullets. Again the crowd retreated but soon stopped.

The troops kept firing warning shots into the air, but the people displayed no signs of fear. The stretch from Gongzhufen to the military museum, Beifengwo Street, and Muxidi is less than two kilometers, but the troop advance was slow because of citizens' interference. The crowd threw rocks, soda bottles, and other things, but the troops maintained strict discipline and did not fire a single shot in return.

Believing the troops would not use live ammunition, the citizens grew increasingly bold. At 10:10 pm, tens of thousands formed a human wall at Beifengwo Street to block the troops, the two sides faced each other over a distance of twenty to thirty meters. Some of the citizens continued throwing rocks and other objects. Using an electric bullhorn, the commanding officer exhorted the citizens and students to disperse and let the troops pass. When the measure failed, he decided to use force to assure his soldiers could reach their positions on time.

Infantrymen led the way, firing into the air. The soldiers-with the first two rows in a kneeling position and those in the back standing-pointed their weapons at the crowd. Approximately 10:30 pm, under a barrage of rocks, the troops opened fire. Sparks flew from ricocheting bullets. When people in the crowd realized that live ammunition was in use, they surged in waves toward the Muxidi Bridge. Their retreat was hindered by the roadblocks they had set up, and for this reason some in the crowd were trampled and badly injured.

Excerpts from State Security Ministry,

"Situation at Muxidi on the evening

of the third," Important intelligence

(Yaoqing), 2 am, June 4:

... At Muxidi Bridge the troops were stopped once again as citizens and students threw the broken bricks they had prepared in advance. A few dozen baton-wielding members of the troops' anti-riot brigade stormed onto the bridge, where they were met with a barrage of broken bricks as thick as rain. The brigade was driven back. Then regular troops, row by row, came rushing onto the bridge chanting, "If no one attacks me, I attack no one; but if people attack me, I must attack them," and turning their weapons on the crowd. People began crumpling to the ground. Each time shots rang out, the citizens hunkered down; but with each lull in the fire they stood up again. Slowly driven back by the troops, they stood their ground from time to time shouting "Fascists!" "Hooligan government!" and "Murderers!"

... Some soldiers who were hit by rocks lost their self-control and began firing wildly at anyone who shouted "Fascists!" or threw rocks or bricks. At least a hundred citizens and students fell to the ground in pools of blood; most were rushed to nearby Fuxing hospital by other students and citizens.

... After infantrymen had cleared the street of roadblocks, returning fire the whole time, armored cars and army trucks drove onto the Muxidi Bridge. From then on there were no more lulls in the shooting. Soldiers on the trucks fired into the air continuously until people hurled rocks or verbal insults, and then they fired into the crowd.

... Around 11 pm, armed foot soldiers, armored cars, and army trucks headed toward Tiananmen. After the troops had passed, citizens and students pushed electric buses back into the street, placing them across it, and set them on fire to block troops that were following. It was then approximately 11:40 pm.

At midnight some citizens set up new roadblocks on the eastern approach to Muxidi Bridge. To the east of the bridge, near the subway station, lay twelve lumps of flesh, blood, and debris. The bodies of dead and wounded were being delivered continually to the door of Fuxing hospital. Some arrived on three-wheeled flat-bed carts, others were carried on wooden doors, and some came on the backs of motorcycles. One bloody corpse whose face was unrecognizably mangled was carried on a door. Virtually everyone at Fuxing hospital was cursing "Fascists!," "Animals!," and "Bloody massacre!"

By 1:30 am, Fuxingmenwai Boulevard in the area of Muxidi Bridge was deserted and shrouded in deathly silence.

LIGHTS OUT IN THE SQUARE

By 1 am on June 4, all martial-law troops had entered Tiananmen Square and for three hours pressed students to voluntarily leave before the 4 am deadline for clearing the square.

Excerpt from State Security Ministry,

"Trends in Tiananmen Square," fifth of six overnight faxes to Party Central and State Council duty offices, 6:08 am, June 4:

At four o'clock sharp all the lights in the square went out, sending its occupiers into a panic. At the same time, the Martial Law Command continued to broadcast its "Notice to Clear the Square," now adding: "We will now begin clearing the square, and we accept your appeal to evacuate."

The Beijing Government and the Martial Law Command then broadcast a "Notice Concerning the Immediate Restoration of Order in Tiananmen Square." It listed four demands:

• Anyone on the Square who hears this announcement must leave immediately.

• Martial law troops will use any means necessary to deal with those who resist this order or disobey by remaining on the Square.

• The Square will be under the strict control of martial law troops after it is cleared.

• All patriotic citizens and students who do not want to see turmoil in the country should cooperate with the martial law troops to clear the Square.

At this point students who were gathered on the steps of the Monument to the People's Heroes used blankets, sticks, canvas, and other things to light a bonfire on the western side of the monument. Then they began singing the "Internationale."

[Hunger strikers] Hou Dejian and Zhou Duo returned to the Square after meeting with martial law authorities. Over the student public-address system they called for an immediate evacuation. In the dark, people were saying school buses from Peking University had come to take students back to campus, but this news caused no notable reaction from the students. The area was shrouded in darkness, except for the distant flames and street lamps on Chang'an Boulevard.

Martial law troops advanced toward the monument from north to south in two columns. Soldiers of the shock brigade first smashed two AFS loudspeakers then advanced through the crowd on the western steps of the monument with their assault rifles pointed alternately into the air and at the students to frighten them off. About that time the students around the monument, who were under the direction of the General Headquarters for the Protection of Tiananmen Square, conducted a voice-vote. Those, including Hou Dejian's group, who shouted "Leave!" were louder than those who shouted "Stay!"

The leader of the command post then told the students in the Square to "prepare to leave the Square in an orderly manner under your school banners; students, citizens, workers, and citizen monitors should evacuate toward Haidian District and move toward Zhongguancun."

Around 4:30 am the lights in the Square came back on. Students found themselves facing a large number of armed soldiers, who pressed the students closer and closer together. Tension gripped the protesters, especially when they saw rows of tanks and armored cars moving slowly through the Square from its north edge. The Goddess of Democracy, in the northern part of the Square, fell with a resounding thud. The tanks and armored cars kept advancing, knocking down and crushing student tents along the way, until they flanked the students on the east and west, as close as twenty or thirty meters away. From the northwest corner of the Square rows of soldiers wearing helmets and carrying batons kept pressing toward the students at the Square's center. Anti-riot police in protective headgear mingled with them.

About 5 am thousands of students, protected by the linked arms of monitors, retreated toward the southeast corner of the Square via the path between the grassy area and the monument. At first they moved slowly, but they soon began to bunch up as soldiers, some in fatigues, pressed toward them swinging batons. With their path to the monument blocked by troops and tanks, they threaded their way among tanks and armored cars toward the southern entrance at the east of the Square. They made an orderly retreat, carrying school flags and singing the "Internationale." Occasionally there were shouts of "Repressive Bloodbath!" "Down with Fascism!" "Bandits! Bandits!"-even "Fucking Animals!" and the like. Some spat on the soldiers as they passed.

Dawn broke about 5:20. The bulk of the students had left the Square, but about two hundred defiant students and citizens remained and were now completely hemmed in by tanks, which advanced on them slowly and patiently, gradually forcing them back. When this last group had finally been pushed from the Square and had rejoined its citizen supporters outside, some of its members mustered the courage to shout, "Fascists! Fascists!" and "Down with Fascism!" In reply, officers and soldiers who were gathered at the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall fired their weapons into the air and shouted in unison, "If no one attacks me, I attack no one!" By 5:40 am, the Square had been cleared.

Many investigations have established that in the entire process of clearing the Square, martial law troops did not shoot a single person to death and no person was run over by a tank.

Still, some killing of both citizens and soldiers continued during the morning hours. The populace was outraged, and rumors spread of casualties in the thousands.

In the following days the government confronted international and domestic reactions so vociferous that they threatened to fulfill Deng Xiaoping's worst fear: that a bloody denouement would make it impossible to continue reform at home and the open-door policy abroad.

NATIONWIDE PROTESTS CONTINUE

Between June 5 and 10, Zhongnanhai received nearly a hundred reports from the provinces on local reactions and on emergency meetings and police deployments undertaken in response. There were demonstrations in 181 cities, including all the provincial capitals, the major cities, and special economic zones. Many forms of protest, some of them violent, emerged. By June 8, the situation had begun to stabilize in some cities.

On the afternoon of June 9, Deng Xiaoping gave a talk to high-ranking officials of the martial law troops, and the State Council issued an "Announcement on Resolutely Preventing Disruption of Economic Order and Ensuring That Industrial Production Proceeds Normally." All province-level governments adopted procedures from the "Notice on Ensuring Urban Security and Stability" that the Party General Office and the State Council had issued. The Public Security Ministry's "Urgent Notice Demanding Close Surveillance and Control of Turmoil Elements" led municipal public security offices to launch an all-out campaign to arrest student leaders and citizen activists.

By June 10, this campaign effectively throttled protest activities everywhere, and an outward calm set over the country.

THE LEADERS TAKE STOCK

On June 6, two and a half days after what was now officially called "putting down the counterrevolutionary riots," the healthier elders (Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun, Bo Yibo, and Wang Zhen) met with the currently serving members of the Politburo Standing Committee (Li Peng, Qiao Shi, and Yao Yilin), plus National People's Congress head Wan Li and the incoming Party general secretary, Jiang Zemin.

Excerpts from Party Central Office

Secretariat, "Minutes of the CCP Central

Politburo Standing Committee meeting,"

June 6, with a small number of supplements added from a tape recording of the meeting:

Deng Xiaoping: If we hadn't been firm with these counterrevolutionary riots-if we hadn't come down hard-who knows what might have happened? The PLA has suffered a great deal; we owe them a lot, we really do. If the plots of the people who were pushing the riots had gotten anywhere, we'd have had civil war. And if there had been civil war-of course our side would have won, but just think of all the deaths! ...

Li Xiannian: If we hadn't put down those counterrevolutionary riots, could we be talking here now? The PLA soldiers really are the brothers of the Chinese people, as well as the sturdy pillars of the Party and the state. ...

Yang Shangkun: We've paid a high price for putting down these counterrevolutionary riots. Restoring social order in Beijing should be our top priority now, and that means we've got a lot of political thought work to do.

Bo Yibo: I've got some material here-reports from all the big Western news services and TV networks about the so-called June 4 bloodbath at Tiananmen and the numbers of dead and wounded. Let me read it. Associated Press: "At least five hundred dead." NBC: "Fourteen hundred dead, ten thousand wounded." ABC: "Two thousand dead." American intelligence agencies: "Three thousand dead." BBC: "Two thousand dead, up to ten thousand injured." Reuters: "More than one thousand dead." L'Agence France-Presse: "At least fourteen hundred dead, ten thousand injured." UPI: "More than three hundred dead." Kyodo News Agency: "Three thousand dead, more than two thousand injured." Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun: "Three thousand dead."

The impact is huge when numbers like these get spread all over the world! We need to counterattack against these rumors right now.

Li Peng: Mr. Bo is right. Yuan Mu is holding a press conference this afternoon at Zhongnanhai to release the true facts. The General Office of the State Council reports that as of noon today the basic statistics-which have been double- and triple-checked with Martial Law Headquarters and the Chinese Red Cross-are these: Five thousand PLA soldiers and officers wounded, and more than two thousand local people (counting students, city people, and rioters together) also wounded.

The figures on the dead are these: twenty-three from the martial law troops, including ten from the PLA and thirteen from the People's Armed Police. About two hundred soldiers are also missing. The dead among city people, students, and rioters number about two hundred, of whom thirty-six are university students. No one was killed within Tiananmen Square itself.

Deng Xiaoping: ... This incident has been a wake-up call for all of us. We'll never keep the lid on if we relax on the Four Basic Principles.

... Our use of martial law to deal with the turmoil was absolutely necessary. In the future, whenever it might be necessary, we will use severe measures to stamp out the first signs of turmoil as soon as they appear. This will show that we won't put up with foreign interference and will protect our national sovereignty.

Li Xiannian: The key to stabilizing things right now is to be supertough in tracking down the counterrevolutionary rioters, especially the plotters who were organizing things behind the scenes. This conflict is a conflict with the enemy. ...

Deng Xiaoping: We should mete out the necessary punishments, in varying degrees, to the ambitious handful who were trying to subvert the People's Republic. ... But we should be forgiving toward the student demonstrators and petition signers, whether from Beijing, from elsewhere in China, or from overseas, and we shouldn't try to track down individual responsibility among them. We also need to watch our methods as we take control of the situation.

We should be extra careful about laws, especially the laws and regulations on assembly, association, marches, demonstrations, journalism, and publishing. Activities that break the law must be suppressed. We can't just allow people to demonstrate whenever they want to. If people demonstrate 365 days a year and don't want to do anything else, reform and opening will get nowhere. ...

ROUNDING UP DEMOCRACY ACTIVISTS

The work of hunting down activists of the democracy movement in Beijing was shared by the martial law troops, the People's Armed Police, and the Municipal Public Security Bureau. Guidelines like the following help explain why most of those detained suffered physical abuse.

Excerpt from Martial Law Headquarters, "Unify thinking, distinguish right

from wrong, complete the martial law

task with practical actions," June 10:

In order to dissipate the anger and antagonism that martial law troops feel toward the residents of Beijing, to clarify the muddled understanding that many people have, to isolate the tiny minority of rioters from the vast majority of Beijing residents, and to establish correct attitudes toward the people, we need to ask all the officers and soldiers to concentrate their hatred on the small handful of thugs and rioters, to smash their evil nests, to punish the rioters, and to wrap up their martial law duties through concrete actions.

Issues number 26, 31, and 37 of the Beijing Public Security Bureau's Public Order Situation (Zhi'an qingkuang) show that 468 "counterrevolutionary rioters and creators of turmoil" had been arrested by June 10. On June 17, eight of these were sentenced to death for "beating, smashing, robbing, burning, and other serious criminal offenses during the counterrevolutionary riots in Beijing." By June 20, the number of "counterrevolutionary rioters" and "turmoil elements" who had been arrested was 831; by June 30, it was 1,103. Most of the arrestees were held in temporary detention centers or makeshift jails.

Once the situation in Beijing was under control and province-level authorities throughout the country had expressed their support, Party Central unfolded a series of measures against activists throughout the country.

MANY STUDENT LEADERS ESCAPE

Despite police efforts, people as well known as Yan Jiaqi, Chen Yizi, Wan Runnan, Su Xiaokang, Wuerkaixi, Chai Ling, Feng Congde, and Li Lu made their way out of China without a single person involved breaching confidence and collecting the rewards that such a breach would have brought.

Chai Ling, the Peking University graduate student who was general commander of the Tiananmen Square Command, evaded an arrest warrant and escaped from the country.

Feng Congde, a Peking University graduate student and deputy commander of the Tiananmen student headquarters, also evaded an arrest warrant and fled the country.

Li Lu, a Nanjing University student and commander in chief of the non-Beijing students at Tiananmen, fled to the United States.

Wang Dan, a Peking University freshman and leader of the Autonomous Federation of Students, was arrested. In 1998, he was released for a medical parole and went to the United States.

Wuerkaixi, a Beijing Normal University freshman and a leader of the AFS, fled to the United States and eventually went to Taiwan.

THE MOOD ON CAMPUS

A national survey conducted by the Xinhua News Agency at the end of June found university students everywhere in a mood of terror and resistance blanketed in silence.

Excerpt from Xinhua News Agency, "The

ideological condition of college students

nationwide," Proofs on domestic situation (Guonei dongtai qingyang), June 29:

Terror: A tense mood, under fear of punishment or arrest, pervades the universities. Leaders of the student movement have departed their campuses, and rumors are rampant about who is being picked up and when. The students who were most active in the movement are the most nervous. Some provinces have stipulated that even students who sat in to block traffic should be arrested, and many students have grown so insecure they cannot sleep well at night. A number of young lecturers at Wuhan University who had given speeches during the movement now are so terrified they sent their wives and children to their in-laws' homes and waited alone to be arrested at the university.

It is noteworthy that even students who only marched in demonstrations and shouted some slogans are frightened as well. One university administrator said students "thought of the recent student movement as a patriotic movement; many took to the streets to protest against official profiteering and then were puzzled when the movement was labeled 'turmoil.' Now the common mood is worry; the students are all wondering, 'Am I going to get punished?'''

A few nights ago about a hundred students were gathered at the gate of Heilongjiang University when a police car passed by. Someone yelled "Police!" and they all scattered like animals scurrying for cover. Some students have been thinking in terms of the arbitrary arrests during the Anti-Rightist Campaign and the Cultural Revolution, so when the slightest sign of something pops up, it has an exaggerated effect.

Resistance: Nationwide about one in five university students remains defiant. These students scornfully resist government decrees and oppose efforts to put down the riots. Some have adopted a "four don'ts" policy toward the domestic media: don't listen, don't read, don't believe, don't ask. Some students make obscene comments while they watch television. Some write on the walls of their dormitories and classrooms things like "Shut up!" "Thunder from the silent zone!" "China is dead!" "Where is justice?" "The government caused the turmoil!" "The truth will out some day!" "Yet another Tiananmen incident!" and so on. The students at many schools-especially the boys-sometimes seem crazed. When the lights go out at night they vent their rage with wild yelps and cries.

Silence: About one in three students maintains a purposeful silence. After June Fourth all the universities required students to reflect on their roles in the student movement. Many students kept going around in circles, willing to address only a limited number of concrete questions. On the matter of how to turn their own thinking around, they just kept silent. "I don't know" became the answer to every question, silence the shield against every arrow. When political study sessions were scheduled, some students just put up posters in their dorms and classrooms that read "silence is golden." The campuses had calmed down but had also turned as silent as graveyards. When the silence finally broke, students often avoided politics. They ignored the national news and turned to things like romance, mah-jongg, and other amusements.

The moods listed above affect not only students but quite a few university officials and teachers as well. It is reported that some Beijing officials and teachers, although they did not take part in the turmoil and are now actively working on the political thinking of students, cannot make their peace with phrases like "Riots took place in Beijing." They just cannot put their hearts into uttering such language. Some feel that it is understandable if the government makes some miscalculations and if the whole economy is not set right in a day but that embezzlement and corruption are unacceptable. To share ups and downs is fine, but for you to take the ups and leave me the downs is not.

An official from Peking University reports that things are tough for people from his university. When students check in at hotels, many get pushed out the door as soon as it is known where they are from. One Peking University student who was on business in Yanqing county actually got beaten up. The job assignments for seniors graduating in 1989 have been completed, but some employers, including the Central Party School, the Chinese Association of Handicapped People, and the Beijing Committee of the Youth League, have rejected certain students. This official is afraid that gifted students will not apply to Peking University this year, which in turn could lead to lower quality in the incoming class.

The report recommended that great care be taken in applying current policy to the students and that, at all costs, the numbers of those punished be strictly limited.

Chinese society fell into a deep anomie after June 4. Numbed, people everywhere turned away from politics. The sensitive intellectual class, and especially the young students with their exuberant idealism, entered the 1990s with nothing like the admirable social engagement they had shown in the 1980s. The campuses were tranquil, and China seemed shrouded in a dour mist that harbored a spiritual emptiness. Money ruled everything, morals died, corruption burgeoned, bribes were bartered, and when all this became known on the campuses it turned students thoroughly off politics. They had lost the idealism of the 1980s and now concentrated only on their own fates.

www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2004 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

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THE WHITE HOUSE FIB FACTORY GOES INTO HIGH GEAR

June 07, 2004

THE WHITE HOUSE FIB FACTORY GOES INTO HIGH GEAR

By Eric margolis

 

The White House’s Iraq fib factory went into overdrive last week, trumpeting claims the new `caretaker government’ the UN had supposedly just installed in Baghdad would be `fully sovereign’ and `totally independent’ by 30 June.

 

We would like to believe the White House. But this latest claim comes from the same truth-deficient people who concocted Iraq’s imminent threat to destroy the USA with nuclear and germ weapons, Saddam’s vans and drones of death, Saddam’s tryst with bin Laden, and a cascade of other preposterous fictions that would have made Nazi propaganda minister Dr Joseph Gobbels blush deep crimson.

 

The latest US-authored regime-change in Iraq was a political charade designed to soothe uneasy American voters who are increasingly alarmed by the aimlessness, mounting casualties, and $186 billion cost- as much as the Vietnam War at its height- of the Iraq misadventure.

 

The White House dreads the oncoming national uproar when the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq hits 1,000. It desperately needs to show some light at the end of the Iraq tunnel before November elections.

 

So it arm-twisted the UN’s dismayingly weak Secretary General, Kofi Annan, into allowing his organization to be crudely misused to legitimize continuing US-British occupation of Iraq by supposedly selecting candidates for the new `sovereign’ regime.

 

Throughout the entire Iraq crisis, Anan has persistently given in to or facilitated Washington’s demands, refused to strongly defend his weapons inspectors, and is now undermining the world body by allowing it to become a tool of Anglo-American Mideast policy. A strong secretary, like Dag Hammarskjold, would never have allowed this to happen.

In the end, Washington chose its own men and simply ignored the UN and humiliated its Iraq legate, Lakhdar Brahimi, after the world organization had provided the required fig leaf.

 

The result: Iraq’s new regime, installed under the guns of US tanks, makes the former Soviet Union’s Eastern European satellite states look like paragons of unfettered independence.

 

Off-the-shelf CIA `asset,’ Iyad Allawi, was made strongman-prime minister - just like Afghanistan’s US-installed figurehead Hamid Karzai, another CIA old boy. Iraq’s defense and interior ministries will also be run by other US `assets.’

 

Another unknown exile was made ceremonial head of state.

Some 160 US senior American `advisors’ will supervise all key ministries, notably defense, police, finance, communications and a new, CIA-trained secret police. All the US billions currently funding Iraq, and overall control of oil revenues, will be managed by a special US `advisory and monitoring board.’

 

France long ran its nominally independent West African colonies in a similar manner: French `advisors’ telling African ministers what to do, backed by the not so subtle threat of the French intelligence service and the Foreign Legion.

 

By comparison, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they left the newly installed regime considerably more independence of action than the US is giving its Iraqi satraps.

 

The supreme law of the Arab World: the men with the guns make the law. Iraq’s new puppet regime has no soldiers, only some useless police. Real power will of course be held by 140,000 US troops who will stay on, Washington says, to `guarantee security’ and `fight terrorism.’

 

The Bush administration suggests Iraq can order its troops to withdraw at any time; however, the next US-engineered Iraqi regime, due to be `elected’ next year, is expected to `invites’ them to stay on. Meanwhile, the Pentagon is building from 6 to 14 permanent military bases in Iraq, while major US firms are being encouraged to buy up Iraqi industrial assets on the cheap.

 

Next year’s Iraq elections, if held, will hardly reflect the nation’s will. Islamic, pro-Iranian, Nasserite, and Baathist parties will be banned. Only pro-US groups need apply.

 

This means that today’s bunch of collaborating exiles, political nobodies, and Kurds are likely to form Iraq’s next `elected’ regime. In short, a shadow regime whose independence and sovereignty may be limited to garbage collection and dog catching – the same bantustan-type formula Israel offered Palestinians.

 

The big decisions – military, internal security, oil, banking, industry, foreign relations, bases – will be decided by the real government, the US Embassy and Iraq’s American `advisors.’

 

Some members of Iraq’s new, American-engineered regime will eventually seek more independence from US control, or even demand outright sovereignty. But they will vividly recall how the last puppet rulers of British-controlled Iraq, King Faisal and strongman Nuri as-Said, were overthrown in 1958, and hanged from lampposts.

 

The moment members of Iraq’s current US-installed regime begins showing too much independence, they will be quietly replaced, or threatened by denial of US security protection, leaving them to facing their hostile, angry people. America’s Iraqi satraps are entirely dependant on US troops and bodyguards.

 

Two acid tests will determine whether any Iraqi regime is truly sovereign and independent of US control: the ability to order all US forces out of Iraq; and reaffirmation of Iraq’s active support of the Palestinian cause. Anything less means Iraq remains an American colony, all the Bush administration’s fancy doubletalk notwithstanding.

 

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In the US, raising cash can be so easy

In the US, raising cash can be so easy

Wednesday • June 9, 2004

Loh Kok Choy

BUSINESSES in the United States are fortunate in having access to a healthy mix of equity and debt financing. European businesses are fed on a diet of largely debt financing. Asian businesses have neither.

Singaporean businesses complain they are starved for cash. Let's take a trip to the US to find out how American enterprises find the money they need.

First stop: The Small Business Administration (SBA) in Washington. Did you know that the SBA has operated a small business loan programme for more than 50 years?

We hear about the SBA's venture-capital programme, but few know about its loan programme — perhaps because here we are in love with high-tech businesses and the eye sees what it searches for.

The loan programme finances 10 times more businesses than the venture capital programme does. Indeed, from this loan programme, we can learn much about the ways that flexibility can be built into a government assistance programme.

Lenders in the SBA programme range from small community banks to giants such as Wells Fargo Bank and Citibank. Lenders are allowed to vary interest rates, depending on the nature of the loan. However, since there is sufficient variety of lenders, there is no over-escalation of financing costs.

The secret is variety. There is a financing solution to fit every conceivable need. Businesses can opt for equity or for debt. In each category, there are abundant choices.

Now let's visit two very different lenders in San Francisco — Silicon Valley Bank and Wells Fargo Bank.

Getting the loan you can't afford

I don't know of a Singapore bank that is like the Silicon Valley Bank. At Silicon Valley, there is no need to prove that you are generating enough income to repay debt.

Who qualifies for Silicon Valley Bank loans? Mostly start-ups that have received initial rounds of venture capital financing.

They need more money to see them through till the next round of venture-capital funding. Silicon Valley Bank provides debt-financing that will be repaid once new capital funds are raised. It does not assess whether a business can repay its debt. It assesses whether it will attract venture investors. Clearly, it lends to a very specific group of businesses.

Wells Fargo targets a different segment. It uses a different assessment technique. Most of its customers are neighbourhood stores. If you apply for a Wells Fargo loan, the information that you must provide fits into about a quarter the size of an A4-size sheet of paper. How does a bank assess a borrower based on such scant information?

The answer lies in credit-scoring.

The bank needs just enough information to learn who the borrower is. It gets the other details from credit-rating houses and various databases. In fact, it may have decided on a borrower's credit limit before the borrower applies for a loan.

Now, let's visit the credit-rating houses. You know the names: Standard & Poor's, Moody's, Dun & Bradstreet, Fitch. They perform an important role in financial risk management. If you have invested in bonds, your decision might have been guided by the ratings. Businesses are rated on the probability of default on their obligations.

The rating industry has become a pervasive part of the US financial market, though credit reports have been known to go wrong at times.

For high-tech firms only?

Back to the SBA to examine its venture capital programme. The SBA does not invest directly in businesses. Instead, it invests in Small Business Investment Companies (SBICs) which, in turn, invest in small businesses. This is a clever way to multiply its ability to reach and fund businesses.

The true beauty of the SBIC programme lies in the types of businesses these funds invest in. They range from dry-cleaners to restaurants, retail shops, garment manufacturers, software developers and genetic engineers. The investments have been wide-spread: A&W, Apple Computer, and Amgen have benefited from this programme.

There are two ways the SBA provides its funds, depending on the types of investment the SBICs make. With some SBICs, the SBA takes preferred stocks (equity).

This mode of funding is normal for SBICs that have an appetite for high-tech start-ups. The risk of losing it all is high, but the upside is phenomenal if things work out. With other SBICs, the SBA takes the debenture (debt) route. This is favoured for SBICs which prefer to invest in more stable businesses, which have the ability to generate a steady income stream.

Business finance is a great enterprise in the US. If you are shopping for funds there, call on the SBA. Check out the community banks, the SBICs, Wells Fargo Bank or the Silicon Valley Bank. If you still don't find the answer, you may find it among the pink sheets, the yellow sheets, the bulletin boards, securitised loans, high-yield bonds, buy-out funds ...

The writer is a business adviser and was a general manager formerly at Spring Singapore. Do you have a view on this commentary? If so, email us at news@newstoday.com.sg.

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Vandals destroy Buddhas in Kazakhstan

Big News Network.com Wednesday 9th June, 2004 Vandals have shot off the face of an ancient Buddha engraved on a rock in a gorge in southern Kazakhstan, local media said Tuesday. The rocks with images of Buddha tower above the Ili river in the Tamgaly-Tash gorge in the Almaty region, 550 miles to the south of the capital, Astana. It is not certain when the Buddhas were engraved but most scholars think they are at least 700 years old. Hunters or tourists visiting the gorge destroyed a part of the arm of a Buddha three years ago, the Kazakh Karavan newspaper said. In addition to the images of Buddha, the gorge contains numerous petroglyphs from different epochs. A lot of people visit the gorge and generally the only damage that occurs is when they write their names on the rocks or leave garbage. Local authorities said they will post police officers to guard the images.

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What's Your Top 10 in Singapore?

Here’s my list of top 10 places to see and things to do in Singapore, and top 3 weekend trips (limited to 2 days’) from Singapore. 

 

My TOP 10 places to see and things to do in Singapore:

 

1.                  Food, Food, Food!  (Maxwell & Newton hawker centres)

2.                  Exotic festivals (Thaipusam) and traditional rituals (Taoist spirit mediums)

3.                  Asian Civilisation Museum Empress Place branch

4.                  Little India (most exotic area in Singapore)

5.                  Views from the Esplanade rooftop & the National Arts Library

6.                  Architecture & food in Joo Chiat/Geylang area

7.                  Chinatown (food all year round & the Chinese New Year bazaar)

8.                  Lizards of Sungei Buloh

9.                  View from Merlion & One Fullerton

10.              Zoo & Night Safari

 

Top 3 weekenders from Singapore:

 

1. Bangkok
2. Kuala Lumpur
3. Melaka food-driveup trip

 

What’s yours?  Add your list by clicking “Comments” below – and then “Post a Comment”

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Will you spend $1,000 to help Sentosa succeed?

Will you spend $1,000 to help Sentosa succeed?

Each visitor must shell out this sum per year to make tourism project a worthwhile investment

Monday • June 7, 2004

Lee Han Shih
peccavi013@yahoo.com

IF Sentosa is turned into a giant theme park, would you spend $1,000 there each year?

If your answer is "No", it could be bad news for the Sentosa Leisure Group (SLG), which is spending a huge sum of money to transform the island into a must-see destination for locals and tourists.

According to the SLG's Darrell Metzger, the group is raising as much as $8 billion in investment for the project — $6 billion for Sentosa and up to $2 billion for the southern islands.

The 57-year-old Metzger is the chief executive of the SLG, a statutory board formerly known as Sentosa Development Corporation. He played a key role in setting up Tokyo Disneyland and was head-hunted two years ago to remake Sentosa.

So, it is not surprising Mr Metzger has decided to turn Sentosa into a giant tropical theme park. Already, he has got Temasek Polytechnic to develop a $15-million Tourism Academy and has committed another $15 million for a zoo exhibit-cum-restaurant project.

Mr Metzger is also building a $140-million light rail network and is spending another $30 million to spruce up old attractions and add a 110m Sky Tower.

He has even persuaded the Pontiac group to erect a six-star hotel and the NTUC Club to build a second beach club. As if all that is not enough, the Sentosa CEO is talking to a major operator to invest up to $500 million in an entertainment park.

To Mr Metzger, the SLG has two tasks — first, develop the island's infrastructure and then persuade investors to develop new attractions. The two are linked: The higher the investment target, the more money the SLG has to put in to ensure its infrastructure can handle the traffic necessary to make the investments work.

This is a sound strategy. But it does depend on Mr Metzger being able to get all the investors he hopes to secure. If the new investments fall far short of his target, the SLG could end up spending billions of dollars on infrastructure development for nothing.

The spending proportion is about 75-25, Mr Metzger told The Business Times. For every $3 the SLG hopes to bring into Sentosa, it will have to put in $1 itself. To hit the $8-billion target, the SLG must fork out $2 billion.

Let us look at the numbers. Investors today can get a 5-per-cent return from low-risk bonds. They will demand a pre-tax profit of at least 10 per cent from risky tourism projects.

This means the projects must yield an operating profit of 20 per cent per annum, as half of the money will be used for servicing bank loans, replacing equipment and depreciating land leases.

To support $8 billion in new investments, the projects need to yield $1.6 billion in earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation each year. Assuming a 20-per-cent profit margin, this requires Sentosa to rake in $8 billion of sales a year to make it worthwhile for investors.

Last year, 4.2 million people visited Sentosa, 60 per cent of whom were locals. Mr Metzger thinks the number will go up to 8 million in 2012, with foreigners making up a higher proportion.

Eight million visitors need to part with $8 billion to give a decent return for the SLG and its investors. Therefore, each visitor must spend about $1,000 every year on Sentosa.

Tourists do, on average, spend more than $1,000 each in Singapore. In fact, the 6.1 million who came here last year spent $7 billion or $1,400 a head. But a huge chunk of that money went to hotels and shopping.

The SLG is hoping to get its visitors — at least half of them being locals, who do not stay in hotels and do their shopping on Singapore island — to spend $1,000 each on its attractions.

But just look at Tokyo Disneyland, a place Mr Metzger knows intimately. Average spending on the theme park is about 10,000 yen ($155). The SLG is aiming for its visitors to spend about six-and-a-half times as much on Sentosa. Is this realistic? The answer is obvious. It follows that if the revenues cannot be generated, then the investments will not work.

The SLG is a statutory board, so the $2 billion or so it intends to put into Sentosa is public money. It has a duty to make sure money is not spent to pursue unrealistic targets. The SLG needs to take a long and hard look at its Sentosa plan and set a target that is more achievable, with less public money.

The writer is a freelance journalist.

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Putting the glam back into Kg Glam

	This story was printed from TODAYonline
	Putting the glam back into Kg Glam The heritage-rich area should reap the same fame and fortune as Chinatown and Little India Weekend • June 5, 2004 Prithpal Singh Few in Singapore have heard of it; even fewer know where it is. For those who don't know — it's part of our multi-ethnic historical heritage and it's in the Beach Road, Arab Street areas. And, there is a real danger that it will become a faint and distant memory unless something is done soon to revitalise this attractive but neglected part of Singapore. Like Chinatown and Little India which became the home of early settlers from China and India, Kampong Glam (Kg Glam) was settled primarily by seafarers and merchants from Indonesia, Malaya and the Arab countries. Names like Kandahar, Muscat, Baghdad, Pahang, Bali, Bussorah are not just places in the Middle East and our neighbouring countries. They are also names of streets in Kg Glam reflecting the rich Arab/Malay heritage of this area. Famous and rich Arab personalities like the Alsagoffs and the Aljunied families lived here. Originally a fishing village at the mouth of the Rochor River, it was the historic seat of Malay royalty in Singapore. The British-installed Sultan of Singapore lived in a palace, located at the end of a street appropriately named "Sultan's Gate", right in the heart of Kg Glam, next to the resplendent Sultan's Mosque. One wonders why an area with such character, heritage and history has not enjoyed the same fame and fortune enjoyed by Chinatown and Little India. Well, that was on the minds of some members of the Malay Heritage Board whom I met recently. They are determined to put Kg Glam on the map, on an equal footing with Little India and Chinatown. While still a daunting task, they have a far better chance of succeeding now than at any time in the past, and for good reason. After a $17-million makeover, the former Sultan's Palace and grounds, covering an area more than two acres, has been restored and redeveloped into the Malay Heritage Centre. It will house the best Malay/Arab Heritage Museum in this region and showcase Malay arts and crafts, cuisine and wardrobes, historical artifacts and treasures not seen before. This beautiful and unique setting and landscaped grounds will be the venue for regular traditional performances, weddings and other ceremonies. Together with the adjacent 100-year-old home of an Arab businessman which has now been restored and converted into an old world, regal-looking Malay restaurant, this area will surely become a show piece the Malay community that all Singaporeans can be proud of. It would symbolise the completion of the restoration of Kg Glam which began in 1989 but never quite took off. However, we cannot expect the Malay Heritage Board to carry this entire burden single-handedly. The Kg Glam area in general needs a huge amount of revitalising. It needs the most important ingredient of all for success — lots of people, both locals and tourists for its now quiet streets to acquire the bustling and sizzling atmosphere that Little India already has. One option is to remake Kg Glam into what it was originally — a kampong or village. The Singapore Tourism Board (STB) needs to put in marketing dollars and a campaign to create increased awareness, locally and internationally, possibly with a year-round calendar of activities. A multiracial committee of business and community leaders from Kg Glam, Little India and Chinatown, should be formed not only to advise the Malay Heritage Board in identifying opportunities but also to facilitate the migration of some aspects and commercial enterprises of Little India and Chinatown to Kg Glam. After all, there are Indian temples and a mosque in Chinatown, Chinese goldsmiths and Buddhist temples in Little India, so why can't a little of Chinatown and Little India be brought to Kg Glam. The writer is an aviation consultant and vice-president, Hotel Properties Ltd. If you have a view on this, email us at news@newstoday.com.sg.

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Afghanistan's Buddhas still under threat

from the June 08, 2004 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0608/p06s03-wosc.html Afghanistan's Buddhas still under threat By Scott Baldauf | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor MIS AINAK, AFGHANISTAN - Seven strangers pulled into town a few weeks ago with a keen interest in a nearby Buddhist temple. They asked the local villagers why they wanted to work for pennies when they could make hundreds of dollars stealing Buddhas instead. The villagers' response? On May 16, they called the cops and had the outsiders arrested. But by then it was too late. Heads and torsos, hands and feet were removed, leaving behind only the delicately formed draped clothing of a once-exquisite, now-defaced, Gandhara-style clay Buddha. And this is where the mystery begins. The arrested men were carrying official permission letters from the Ministry of Culture. And through pressure from the Culture Minister himself, the men were released, never to be seen again. Culture Ministry officials say it's all a misunderstanding. Local police say it's a case of corruption at the highest levels. And foreign diplomats say it's an indication that today's Afghan government may be no better at protecting Afghanistan's historic treasures than was the radical Islamist Taliban regime. "There are people working at the Ministry of Culture who know where these Buddhist places are, and they can help the thieves to find the artifacts," says Noor Mohammad Pakteen, the police chief of Logar Province, where Mis Ainak is located. "It's not just that one place. There are so many other places in Logar that have Buddhas. But the problem is that we don't have enough police officers to protect them." That there are any Buddhas in Afghanistan at all, of course, is a minor miracle. The 12th-century Afghan conqueror Mahmud of Ghazni did his best to destroy all "idols" in his native country, and traveled as far as India to destroy some of theirs as well. The 21st century Taliban followed in Mahmud's footsteps, setting off tons of explosives over three weeks before finally bringing down the historic Buddhas of Bamian in March 2001. But it's the charges of weakness at best and corruption at worst within the US-backed government of President Hamid Karzai that most frustrates historians. "There is corruption in this government, no question about it," says one Western diplomat in Kabul, speaking on condition of anonymity. "But Mr. Karzai himself is determined to stop it, and he promises that he will be acting soon to remove corruption." Given Afghanistan's numerous challenges it is hardly surprising that protecting Buddhas is a lower priority, this diplomat adds. For his part, villager Inzoor Gul has no doubts that the Buddhas were stolen with the help of Afghan officials. He says the strangers made it perfectly clear that their intent was profit, not preservation. "They told us that if we do this work for them, without the government finding out, they would share the money with us," says Mr. Gul. Police chief Pakteen says he conducted a thorough investigation into the arrested men, and is convinced that they were thieves. They were carrying letters from the Ministry of Interior and the Ministry of Culture, and the leader of the group - who spoke pashto with a Pakistani accent - even claimed to work for the US Embassy in Kabul. All of their paperwork, except for the Culture Ministry letter, was false. "The thief came to me and said, 'There is something I want to tell you but not in front of the others,'" Pakteen recalls. "When we went a little distance he told me, 'I am from the US Embassy.' These smugglers always use this technique, whether it's drugs or Buddhas. They use the name of a foreign embassy as power, they want us to be afraid of them and let them go." In any event, the accused thieves were eventually released. Pakteen sent the men to Kabul into the care of the Ministry of Interior, whose security chief released the men after a personal appeal by the Minister of Culture. Mohammad Nadir Rasooli, director of archaeology for the Culture Ministry, admits that the accused men were not employees of the ministry, but that they were local men who had found the site and had offered to show it to officials. It was all a misunderstanding, he says. "They were our guides, they were local people who brought information that there were Buddhas in Logar and by the time we got to the site, they [had been] arrested by the police," says Mr. Rasooli. "I personally don't have any relation with them to know whether they are good people." If the Buddhas are now stolen from Mis Ainak, he says, it was probably Pakistanis who stole them. "The smugglers want to sell Buddhas abroad, and Mis Ainak is a case like that," he says. In the tiny village of Mis Ainak, tribal chief Mohammad Arif says it doesn't matter much who took the Buddhas; what matters is that a vital part of his heritage is now gone.

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Crowded Thai skies could call mayday

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Southeast Asia

Crowded Thai skies could call mayday By David Fullbrook BANGKOK - Thailand's airline boom looks set to bust with eight airlines, and possibly more to come, battling for passengers. Different models may not be enough to save carriers from collateral damage spilling over from other sectors in a crowded market where no-frills jostles with feeder and luxury carriers. Last December, low-cost carriers took to Thailand's skies, sending prices tumbling. Budget Malaysian carrier AirAsia's ahead of schedule entrance, arm-in-arm with Shin Corp, the mighty communications conglomerate owned by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's family, forced Orient Thai to launch its low-fare division One-Two-Go ahead of time. Nok Air, Thai Airlines' new low-cost offshoot, promises to start flying trunk routes by July. In response, AirAsia, which operates small Boeing 737s like Nok, has added a few more routes, grabbing headlines, but One-Two-Go carries more passengers using larger Boeing 757s and 747s. Air travel was up 23.2 percent in the first quarter of 2004 against the same quarter last year. Komsun Suksumrun, a Phatra Securities aviation analyst, expects airlines to sell 9 million to 10 million domestic tickets this year, against 7 million for 2003, and rising to 12 million in 2005. "The impact is similar to what happened in other parts of the world. Demand has been growing through the year," says Komsun. "Down the road demand could grow even faster as AirAsia adds more services and Nok Air starts." However, such growth may not be enough to support so many airlines. "Thailand has sufficient room to grow, but I'm not sure the market can bear more than two or three true low-cost carriers. There may be room for one more, Nok Air perhaps. Beyond that, there will be a shakeout," says Ravindran Devagunam, an aviation consultant with Deloitte. Komsun agrees, seeing worrying parallels with Singapore. "My big concern is a shakeout. With a market growing 25 to 30 percent, there is only room for two to three carriers, not five or six. I'm afraid we could end up with too many airlines like Singapore." Singapore hosts Singapore Airlines' (SIA) subsidiaries Tiger Airlines and SilkAir, a Qantas Jetstar sibling, ValuAir, and Lion Airlines, Indonesia's leading private carrier, which runs a pseudo-hub. Even for wealthy Singapore, with plenty of visitors, five or six airlines may be a few too many for its 4 million residents. Nok's launch could burst the bubble. "The shakeout might take place faster, depending on when Nok Air launches. There will probably be a shakeout within six to 10 months, with two or three entrants exiting the market," says Devagunam. If not, tough competition from Thai Airways will. It is already competing fiercely with One-Two-Go, a response seen elsewhere in the region. "If you look at the AirAsia, ValuAir model, the minute ValuAir came out the mainline carriers cut prices to match," says Devagunam. "Will the likes of ValuAir be able to sustain that kind of price competition if they are not truly low cost?" he asks. One-Two-Go is responding by trying to replicate the casual walk-up approach taken by bus companies. In the works: a smart card holding personal information and a photo, replacing tickets, boarding passes and cash. Passengers will use it to pay for tickets by buying credits at convenience stores. Cardholders will receive bonus credits, special offers and more. One-Two-Go gets a powerful marketing database. However Orient/One-Two-Go is not prepared to destroy itself fighting a potentially unwinnable battle against well-connected AirAsia and Nok Air. Such concerns influenced it to select 757s, as they can easily switch to medium-haul lucrative Asian chartered and scheduled routes. Airlines reveal Achilles' heal With an increasingly crowded market, Thai AirAsia may need to tweak its model to survive because according to Devagunam, "The AirAsia model from Malaysia may not be completely relevant." Meanwhile Nok's heritage may be its Achilles' heal. Thai managers, often divided by squabbles, could turn on Nok if it steals traffic, rather than picking up travellers new to flying. Other carriers may fall victim to collateral damage as travellers come to expect low fares on all routes, and tourists wise up and start booking no-frills airlines online before they depart. "The survivors will be those that know the model well and how to drive costs down. I don't have high hopes for Air Andaman, Bangkok Airways and Phuket Air," says Komsun. Air Andaman is aiming to cut a niche by developing new routes and offering a quality, frills service, akin to JetBlue. PB Air, a small airline founded by the president of Boonrawd Brewery, continues to struggle on by focusing on secondary routes using comfortable new regional jets that come with high price tags, which make cutting fares difficult. Phuket Air is turning to medium-to-long haul routes, including London, while maintaining domestic services with turboprop aircraft that, while cheap to operate, are traditionally unpopular with jet-loving Asians. Bangkok Airways labels itself "Asia's boutique airline" to justify its high prices. Whether travellers will agree in the medium-term is questionable. Meanwhile, its Bangkok-Samui Island route, one of the world's highest yielding, is under threat. Upset that Bangkok Air is dragging its heels about opening up Samui airport, which it owns, to other airlines, the government has threatened to build a bigger airport on the island. Separation distances make that unlikely. Meanwhile an airport on nearby Pha Ngan Island is being considered, with Phuket Air rumored to be lobbying hard for the rights. If that airport materializes, Bangkok Air will be in trouble, especially as its routes to other tourist destinations around the region face growing competition. (Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)

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