From Other Lisa…cross-posted at the paper tiger

I, and I expect many others, was taken by surprise by the scope of Hurricane Katrina’s destruction. This morning, here in Los Angeles, it seemed as if the damage was less than had been feared. By this afternoon, the extent of the devastation was becoming clear. Small towns along the Gulf Coast are literally gone, swept away down to cement slabs. No one knows how many have died in places like Biloxi and Gulfport. As for New Orleans, the situation there grows more dire by the hour, as levees fail and the waters of Lake Pontchartrain flood the bowl-shaped city.

Some of the footage coming out of the region looks as bad as anything one saw from last December’s horrific tsunami. We can assume that the loss of life won’t be remotely on that scale, but undoubtedly hundreds are dead at least, and hundreds of thousands have lost everything.

This was an act of nature made worse by the hand of man - read this report for the details. Let’s hope that we learn from this and come to understand that “Homeland Security” also means a country where we invest in our infrastructure, where we protect the environment, and where we devote whatever resources are necessary to assist people and communities struck by such unimaginable disasters.

In the meantime, a lot of folks are going to need a lot of help. Here is a great post at the Booman Tribune, listing Hurricane Katrina disaster relief organizations and links. Booman is a progressive blog, but you’ll find charities of every kind on this round-up. I urge anyone who is able to pitch in. Every dollar/yuan/euro helps…

UPDATE - Gordon of the Horse’s Mouth has sent along an Editor & Publisher piece. The title is “Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? ‘Times-Picayune’ Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues.” I don’t have time to blog about it now, but here’s a relevant excerpt:

New Orleans had long known it was highly vulnerable to flooding and a direct hit from a hurricane. In fact, the federal government has been working with state and local officials in the region since the late 1960s on major hurricane and flood relief efforts. When flooding from a massive rainstorm in May 1995 killed six people, Congress authorized the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, or SELA.

Over the next 10 years, the Army Corps of Engineers, tasked with carrying out SELA, spent $430 million on shoring up levees and building pumping stations, with $50 million in local aid. But at least $250 million in crucial projects remained, even as hurricane activity in the Atlantic Basin increased dramatically and the levees surrounding New Orleans continued to subside.

Yet after 2003, the flow of federal dollars toward SELA dropped to a trickle. The Corps never tried to hide the fact that the spending pressures of the war in Iraq, as well as homeland security — coming at the same time as federal tax cuts — was the reason for the strain. At least nine articles in the Times-Picayune from 2004 and 2005 specifically cite the cost of Iraq as a reason for the lack of hurricane- and flood-control dollars.

Newhouse News Service, in an article posted late Tuesday night at The Times-Picayune Web site, reported: “No one can say they didn’t see it coming. … Now in the wake of one of the worst storms ever, serious questions are being asked about the lack of preparation.”

In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

From Martyn…

On 1st September, T1bet celebrates its 40th anniversary of becoming an

I was bit struck by a post I read today over at ESWN which begins as follows:

You know the meme — the Chinese Communist Party leaders are a bunch of ruthless butchers who have slaughtered tens of millions of Chinese citizens. Okay, so we got that out of the way. Here is the question: Why do they do that? You know the meme. They want to seize onto their power. Next question: To seize onto their power in order to do what? This is where it is usually stuck — they want to seize onto the power in order to seize onto the power, and this is obviously not intellectually satisfying unless you think every one of them is Mao Zedong as portrayed in Jung Chang’s so-called ‘biography.’

Now we get to the question of Wen Jiabao. What does he want? The photo below (via Xici Hutong) was taken during his recent field study trip in Anhui. Here, he is having lunch at the Ma’anshan Steel Factory workers’ cafeteria. For his own meal, he insisted on paying four RMB as required under the rules.

ESWN then makes the case, with which I agree, that Wen is a good guy who wants what’s best for his people and that there are many more in the CCP like him. True enough.

But…I have to admit I was put off by some of his phrasing. What if I wrote, “You know the meme — the Stalin clan was a bunch of ruthless butchers who have slaughtered tens of millions of Russian citizens. Okay, so we got that out of the way.”

I find this disingenuous, because by calling it a “meme,” ESWN is strongly implying this is something of a red herring, something we automatically think, Pavolvian-style, when the CCP comes to mind. It implies we are naive to think this way.

I would counter that it is not a meme at all, it is a matter of fact, and it can be documented, justified and proven. They have done these things. Is there more to the story, and has there been progress? Of course. But they have slaughtered millions, although today they no longer do so and no one claims they do. No one.

I had this conversation with a reader earlier today as we sipped coffee in Sanlitun. There are so many truly noble people in the party, idealistic, urbane, compassionate and profoundly decent. He was telling me about his many friends in the CCP that fit this description. But, he said, that doesn’t change the party’s track record or neutralize their sins past and present. No matter how many good apples in the CCP basket, they are still authoritarian and ruthless, and at times borderline totalitarian. He asked aloud, “How can the party be so bad when there be so many wonderful pary members?”

I’m sorry, if someone said to me, “You know the Nazi meme, about how they slaughtered millions of Jews,” I think I’d be offended. I often agree with ESWN and link to his site more than just about any other, but his choice of words bothered me all day, as it borders on a whitewash. Praise the CCP for the progress of recent years, but don’t deny that it’s got more blood on its hands than just about any other political party in power today. No matter how nifty Wen Jiabao is, that fact remains and is anything but a meme.

From Martyn

Continuing one of more bizarre stories to come out of China recently (and that

From the AP:

Chinese health officials on Monday plan to announce an AIDS cooperation partnership with a U.S. institute, a measure that takes aim at combating what health officials fear will be a tenfold surge in HIV infection in China over the next five years.

The partnership between the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the University of Maryland’s Institute of Human Virology ?founded by one of the co-discoverers of the virus ?covers collaboration on clinical trials, technical assistance and development of better and faster tests and vaccines, institute officials said…

…While the Chinese CDC already sends researchers to the institute for training, the new agreement is expected to boost bilateral cooperation and allow American researchers to benefit from China’s centuries old medical experience.

“This is more than just missionary work,” Gallo said. “I think we have a real chance of getting help from China.”

The throw-away capper to this partnership comes in the last paragraph of the article:

The institute is also working on a commercial expansion of this partnership with a three-way collaboration with the China CDC and CK Life Sciences, a Hong Kong-based pharmaceutical company, which they hope to sign sometime later this year, Gallo said.

From Martyn…

There was much reporting in the international media of the China-Russian war games last week. Here in China, the games received blanket coverage and headlined the official state television news bulletins round the clock. The question is: why the fuss? After all, a mere 10,000 troops (8,200 from China and 1,800 from Russia) simply went through a week of co-ordinated air, sea and land exercises, including amphibious and parachute landings. Hardly groundbreaking stuff, and as Donald Rumsfield said,

From Other Lisa…

Interesting editorial in today’s UK Guardian about the Chinese textile industry, rural poverty and the potential consequences of a trade war with the West over cheap Chinese exports. The part that interested me was not so much about the textile controversy as the following commentary about the nature of Chinese peasantry and what has and has not changed since 1949:

Eight hundred million peasant farmers occupy a country almost exactly the same size as the USA. Most farm tiny plots of land leased to them by the village co-operatives, often the same plots their families have farmed for 2,000 years or more.

One of China’s best-kept secrets is that the communists never succeeded in breaking patterns of land ownership that were first legally registered in 350BC. A property-owning, one-party state has been transmuted into a lease-holding, one-party state .

China’s peasantry, unlike any other in the world, has a tradition of empowerment as well as a long experience of living on subsistence incomes. Today’s villages are testimony to the harshness of life. Houses are rarely more than a storey high and most have dirt floors with no more than rudimentary facilities; human waste is another useful source of fertiliser. Outside at this time of the year, vegetables are being dried ready for storage over the long winter. A family gets by on a weekly income of no more than ?0.

China’s rulers, imperial and communist dynasties alike, are profoundly wary of these peasant millions. Regime-change in China has always been rooted in a mass peasant revolt sparked by deep resentment of inequality and poverty; the last six imperial dynasties fell this way.

There are still a few people left who think there was a communist revolution in 1949. Today, it is pretty obvious, given the increasingly tenuous link between communism and contemporary China, that it was a seventh regime-changing peasant revolt. And the communist leadership is terrified that if it doesn’t deliver more prosperity and equality, it will fall prey to an eighth.

Your weekend open thread…relax, and stay cool!

What an amazing get-together. At least 12 of us congregated at one of the best Chinese restaurants I’ve been to in Beijing for some incredible food and a very, um, spirited conversation. We had bloggers and blog connoisseurs from the UK, Canada, the US, France and China representing all kinds of professions - marketers, teachers, students, investment bankers, even a movie star in the ascendant.

Each of us holds strong opinions about China, its past and its future, and about the state of US and world politics. So when you get that many strong-minded people together in one room for more than three hours with plenty of beer and other exotic beverages, there’s bound to be some pyrotechnics.

The most fiery topic was, not surprisingly, the question of whether the CCP has been a net plus or minus for China, and how they compare to other regimes in history. My dear friend Joseph Bosco cut them a bit more slack than some of the other attendees, some of whom (like frequent commenter Keir and, I admit, myself) are less willing to show them much forbearance. This led to an intense and fascinating discussion/inquiry into what China and its government are all about and whether they are now on the right track.

As always, it’s intriguing to actually see the faces behind the names underneath the comments. I think we automatically construct faces for these people we never see, so when we’re actually face to face it’s a bit of a surprise to discover just how wrong our imaginations were. In a day or two you’ll actually be able to see some of these faces for yourself. We were lucky enough to have a professional photographer on hand, and photos will be posted as soon as I get them.

Thanks to everyone who took the time and trouble to meet last night, and thanks for making the conversation consistently lively. To those who are about to launch their own blogs, keep us posted and good luck (and I hope you know what you’re getting into). And let’s try to make this an ongoing event, maybe twice a year.

From Other Lisa & Martyn…

From Saturday’s unlinkable SCMP, more on the upcoming Chinese version of “The Apprentice”:

The winner of the Chinese version of The Apprentice
will be hired on a lucrative 1 million yuan annual
salary in the business empire of maverick Beijing
property tycoon Pan Shiyi.

Speaking for the first time on being chosen by Donald
Trump to front the programme, Mr Pan said he would not
adopt the aggressive TV persona of the New York
property mogul with losing contestants.

“I definitely won’t say, `You’re fired!’ It’s just not
in my character,” said the 41-year-old, though he has
routinely sacked his worst-performing employees over
the past decade.

“Chinese people give others face. To tell somebody
he’s fired in such a tone, especially when this person
has literally not been hired, is not the Chinese way.
“I probably will say something like, `You will have a
better opportunity somewhere else’, in a way he will
get it and find the manner acceptable,” added the man
nicknamed Naughty Boy for his company’s innovative
designs.