World Watching And Politics

Human Rights In China

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Yesterday, as Bob and I stepped out the door of the Thai Consolate on E 52nd St. where we were applying for our visas to Thailand, we were met by about 50 Chinese people holding up banners condemning the beating of Falun Gong practitioners by police in Thailand last week. As I reported in an earlier blog, China is sending out agents to other countries to monitor the activities of not only mainland Chinese but also Chinese citizens of other countries. But we were surprised that Thailand of all countries would apparently support China in this horrendous persecution of such an innocuous activity.

Falun Gong claims it is a form of meditation with gentle exercises that cultivates inner balance by teaching truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. Falun Gong is becoming wildly popular in China and in over 60 countries worldwide. Practitioners claim that Communist Party head Jiang Zemin, fearing that Falun Gong’s widespread popularity will overshadow his own legacy, has ordered the traditional Chinese practice “eradicated.” This means that 100 million citizens are apparently cast as criminals. In the past five years, up to one million people, practitioners claim, have been illegally detained, with many tortured in slave-labor camps, psychiatric hospitals and prisons. More than 1,060 are confirmed dead with the actual number estimated to be more than 10,000. Practitioners are fined, fired from jobs, denied graduation, forced to divorce and flee their homes.

All Chinese press is state-controlled and people are told that the meditation is evil and drives people crazy. A couple years ago, Bob and I ran across a young girl who was waiting on us in a restaurant in a small southern town who was horrified that I thought Falun Gong was not dangerous!

Dr. Charles Lee, an American citizen was sentenced in March 2003 to three years in prison for planning to broadcast information on state-run TV about the persecution of Falun Gong. Dr. Lee has been subjected to force-feeding, brainwashing, beatings and slave labor, and denied contact with friends, family and U.S. consular officials. (http://rescuecharles.org).

US businesses and government officials supportive of Falun Gong have also been pressured and intimated to the extent that on Oct 4 2004, in response to the many cases of harrassment and violence by Chinese agents on U.S. soil, The U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed House Resolution 304 that said “The Government of the People’s Republic of China should immediately stop interfering in the exercise of religious and political freedoms within the U.S. such as the right to practice Falun Gong, that are guaranteed by the US constitution.

The NY Times runs stories, many front-page, almost daily about human rights abuses in China. Today, we read about one lawyer, Gao Zhang, who travels the country filing lawsuits over corruption, land seizures, police abuses and religious freedom. His opponent is usually the same: the ruling Communist Party. As a result of his successes, he has had his license revoked and has finally fled to the hills of Shanxi where he is persuing another case against the party on behalf of Falun Gong practitioners.

Yesterday on the front page was an article about the sleepy fishing village of Dongzhou, just 125 miles north of Hong Kong, the scene of a deadly face-off between protesters hurling homemade bombs and the police gunning them down in the streets. The article says “many facts remain unclear about the police crackdown” on a Dongzhou demonstration on Dec 6 protesting against the construction of a coal-fired power plant that the villagers knew was not approved by the central government. Residents say police fired into the crowd of demonstrators killing 20 or more people. But one thing is certain: The government is doing everything possible to prevent witnesses accounts of what happened from emerging by offering people money to keep quiet.

“Rural confrontations are increasing in China as local authorities confiscate land for construction of factories, power plants and other projects,” says the NY Times.

Deep Into Mao & China

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It’s cold and snowy outside and right now I am deep into the recently published biography of Mao Tse Tung by Jung Chang who also some years ago wrote the respected three-generation epic “Wild Swans.” Jung, born in China, was a Red Guard for a time during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed first-hand the devastation wrought by Mao. She soon after fled to Britain where she was educated. She and her British husband spent 12 years researching the Russian archives and interviewing many of the principal actors of the Cultural Revolution who are still alive.

The book answers my question about why most mainland Chinese still revere Mao after all the devastation he wrought. Apparently, it is because in the absence of a free press he manufactured his persona and made up the whole myth about the Long March (which he fed to the American journalist Edgar Snow who disseminated Mao’s lies in his book “Red Star Over China”) that most people in China still believe in today!

Mao began with no official party status and conscripted local “bandits” that he called an “army.” Then he basically stole a small army from a military commander through blackmail, manipulation and by taking advantage of a technologically ineffective communication system between Shanghai and the rest of China and Moscow where Stalin was pulling the strings. It was by creating an army and by that he was then able to gain credibility and ascend to party leadership. All the while he was carried over snow-covered mountains on a litter by mostly barefoot carriers so he could comfortably read his books.

Meanwhile, Stalin’s top agenda was China’s defeat of the Japanese. Mao’s modus operandi was to lead Stalin into thinking he was following the Soviet line but all the while outmaneuvering Chiang Kai Khek and the Nationalist Army and all other Red factions who were competing for power…no small feat! Moscow bought into Mao’s deception and protected Mao.

Chiang Kai Khek’s nationalist forces had been “chasing” Mao from the south (his wife raised millions of dollars in the U.S. for this war) but let Mao and his “army” go because Stalin was holding Chiang’s son hostage in Moscow. Ironically, for Chiang, the Reds took over China and it took Chiang 11 years to get his son back. As we know, Chiang eventually fled to Taiwan.

Another eye-opening book is the biography of Mao written by his personal physician of 25 years. After Mao died, his physician moved to Chicago near his two sons who had been university educated there. The biography was published just before his death around 1995.

When I was in Bangkok this summer, I gave the biography to a young Chinese woman in her early 20’s who was “visiting her boyfriend.” “He is very fat,” she said laughing, “but he is a very rich Texan!” She was by herself sitting next to me at a sushi bar. Her English was perfect and she was reading a Bangkok travel book in English! Since it is very unusual for mainland Chinese to get out of China alone, I suspect she was there to observe and report back. “Is it true, she asked, “that blacks have group sex?” Astounded, I answered that some may, but people are individuals and you can never say “all” people of an ethnic or racial group do anything! She looked puzzled. We talked for several hours the next morning in a busy coffee shop. I told her I thought Mao was worse than Hitler and she flew off the handle. “My mother (who is a university professor) loves Mao,” she yelled. She also embarrassed me to death in front of the Thais that were present: “I hate Buddah!” she yelled when I asked about Buddhism in China.

Meeting her reminded me of a young mainland Chinese “spy” in Australia who went public about a mainland Chinese spy network that apparently reports on overseas Chinese and asked for asylum when he realized that he had been duped by the Party leadership. Australia, trying to get along with China hesitated but finally gave him temporary asylum (the US refused). He said that if he returned to China he would probably be killed or at least jailed and tortured, a claim that China refuted.

It would have a profound consequence if these books became available to the mainland Chinese. Even better, the Chang book would make an incredible epic movie…and with all the pirated movies in China…it would spread like wildfire among the youth.

Terrorists In Thailand

Posted on by Laughingnomad

Last year Thaksin’s government sent in police militia to quell fundamentalist Islamic violence in a southern Thai province that is populated primarily with muslims. As a result over 60 combatants were kiilled. In retaliation, the jihadists continue to murder Buddhist monks and teachers as well as civilians in several southern provinces.

Today from the Christian Science Monitor:
Emergency rule was imposed on three provinces of southern Thailand wracked by violence in an Islamist rebel campaign to return the region to an independent sultanate. But critics said the move would be meaningless to residents there, many of whom consider the central government corrupt. More than 800 people have been killed since the violence erupted 19 months ago, two of them in the past two days.

Walking Out On The Iranian Ambassador

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Foreign Correspondents Club hosted another panel discussion last night with the Iranian ambassador to Thailand, H.E. Mohsen Pakaein

Western observers were confounded by the surprisingly strong victory in Iran’s recent presidential election by dark-horse candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a conservative cleric, mayor of Tehran and former Revolutionary Guard. At his first presidential press conference, Ahmadinejad declared that his victory marked the dawn of a new Islamic revolution that would spread around the world. He also vowed to press ahead with his country�s controversial plans to acquire a uranium enrichment capability, adding that neither he nor Iran would be dictated to by the West.

During the questioning, much of which was hard-hitting, the ambassador gave party-line non-answers….most of it prompted by his sharp-eyed aide sitting by his side. We had recently heard a presentation by Nobel Peace Prize winner Sharon Ebidi from Iran who, as an attorney supporting freedom of the press, told us that they estimate that up to 200 journalists were in prison. So when the ambassador denied any violation of human rights, I got up from my front row center table, turned my back on the ambassador and walked out….many others trickling out quietly after me.

A retired Scottish engineer and human rights worker, a young Russian Jew who fled his “lost generation” and immigrated to Thailand at the age of 28 and a woman who is a Korean/English interpreter and I justly debriefed the talk over beer until well into the morning.

Press: Enemies of the Thai State?

Posted on by Laughingnomad

The Foreign Correspondent’s Club hosted another panel as part of it’s occasional series on freedom of the press this week.

Panel members were Anchalee Paireerak, operator of http://www.fm9225.com, one of two closed�websites, and executive director of and political commentator for community radio FM92. Also speaking was a representative from SEAPA, the Southeast Asian Press Alliance, Pravit Rojanaphruk, senior reporter for The Nation, commentator on media reform, promotion of transparency and public accountability and democratic culture, and Sue Saeri Mee Jing Rue author of a recently published Thai-language work on the subject “Does Press Freedom Really Exist?”
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Critics have long maintained that Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra is unwilling to accept a totally free press, especially when it is critical of his policies.� They argue that his administration has fired, sued or otherwise silenced most of the independent voices on the air and in print — an assault on press freedom that they believe carries the pungent scent of power abused. Mr. Thaksin’s government has responded by promising better relations with the media in his second term.

But in mid-June, the government acted again. After, Anchalee Paireerak, the female 32 year old professional journalist & operator of the 24 hour community radio news station criticized Thaksin for enriching himself through his political policies, The Ministry of Information and Communications Technology ordered her two websites shut down on the grounds that they posed a threat to national security, defamed senior officials and employed language guaranteed to incite public unrest.

However, Anchalee explained that when the officials appeared on her doorstep to close her down, they explained that the reason was because her radio antenna was higher than 30 feet, reached too wide an area and could interfere with air traffic causing a plane crash. We all laughed at that of course. She has decided to leave Thailand for Australia temporarily after being sued by one of Mr. Thaksin’s corporations. She has established another website: http://www.fm9225.net.

The most interesting comments were made by the SEAPA representative who outlined the complexity of the economic and cultural pressures against a free press in Thailand. For example efforts to unionize the journalists have failed miserably because it is culturally very difficult for Thai people to confront authority.

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“11 Minutes” Outranks Mao

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On my way to my BTS Skytrain station, I stop for lunch at The Emporium, an upscale indoor shopping mall where there is a variety of restaurants on the 5th floor. A young Asian woman sitting next to me at a sushi counter is reading an English language travel guide. I wonder if she is from Singapore but to my surprise she is from Beijing. She is here with her “fat” Texas boyfriend, but “he is rich,” she says. I am impressed by the command of spoken and written English by this 26 year old woman.

Fascinated to find a mainland Chinese traveling outside the country, I said that I was told by many Chinese that the only way to get a passport was via an organized holiday tour or a business trip with associates. Her business card reads that she is manager of the contacting department of a cultural communications company but I never did understand what her job is.

We met the next morning for coffee…talking intensely for four hours. One of my questions related to the fact that even after everything that happened during the cultural revolution, I still see statues and big portraits of Mao everywhere in China. She said her mother thought Mao was a hero for China. I told her I thought Mao was worse than Hitler. She bristled and said that that wasn’t true. I told her that I thought that many people in China don’t really know what happened for the ten years of Mao’s campaigns in the countrysides where it is estimated that anywhere from 30 to 80 million people died.

Then we visited an English language bookstore where I recommended the shocking biography of Mao written after Mao’s death by his personal physician of 25 years, “Wild Swans,” a story of three generations of a Chinese family, “11 Minutes” by Paulo Coelho-a book that I think is being read by every traveler from Europe to Asia, and “Soul Mountain” by Chinese author Gao Xingjian who was the first Chinese to win the Nobel prize for literature. I have since received an email from her telling me she was moved down to her soul by “11 Minutes,” the true story of a prostitute who discovers love.

A Talk By Shirin Ebadi

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Bob has been in the north for the last week so I joined the Foreign Correspondents Club the other day as a way of meeting other English speaking people in Bangkok.

Membership is reciprocal with Foreign Correspondents Clubs around the world; I first discovered the club in Phnom Penh, Cambodia a couple years ago. The club provides journalists with a venue and equipment for media activities but also provides memberships for other expats who live abroad or visit often…my category being “retired.” The club, in the penthouse of the Mayeena Building, sponsors activities like talks by visiting personalities like the Dalai Lama, has a bar and restaurant and a collection of English language papers, books and magazines.

So my first visit was to a talk given by Shirin Ebadi, the Muslim activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003. The talk was very short…the questions by many of the media seemed designed for making their own statements about other governments like Burma, North Korea, the U.S. and Iraq.

Ms Ebidi is a self declared human rights activist (having once been jailed for her activities) and one of the many attorneys who are working together with many of the nearly 200 journalists who are currently incarcerated in Iran. She said that it is impossible to determine the exact number of people jailed for their human rights work because the statistics are not released by the government and families do not want to tell why their members are in jail for fear of reprisal.

Her most adamant point was that violence and war solves nothing but instead intensifies conflict. She added that Iran is not in a position to pose any danger to any of it’s neighbors. Then she continued by saying that it is left up to various Non-Governmental Organizations in Iran to go into neighboring countries with any messages, eg. human rights workers in Iran “are in agreement with Iraq’s Muslim leader, Sistani, who is adamantly advocating separation of church and state in Iraq.”

In describing her work, Ms Ebidi stressed that “the power of the pen is much stronger than the power of arms…the work of the pen can do more than an entire army,” she said. (Most of the people in attendance clapped in agreement when she commented that now that Saddam Hussein is going to be put on trial, the country must put western governments on trial too for collaborating with Hussein when he gassed the Iranians during the seven-year Iran/Iraq war!)

“So human rights activists are fighting for the freedom of the pen,” she said. “All societies need freedom of expression…the first stepping stone of democracy.” Regarding Burma, she said that the role of mass media is critical and the media should demand that the democratically elected leader and Nobel Prize winner, Aung San Suu Kyi, be given her freedom from house arrest.

When asked for her reaction to the Muslim woman in New York City who led a group of Muslim women in prayer over the objections of male Muslim leaders, she said she was not a religious person so she couldn’t comment on religion…but then went on to say that all women should be able to practice their religion the way they want. Islam, like all other religions, can be interpreted differently but any interpretation must be consistent with today’s societies. “What is the true Islam,” she asked? She answered herself by saying that “we all have a small piece of the truth. We must believe in what we are doing and believe in our path and allow the others to follow their own paths.” But then she added that “many use Islam to impose their political will on others.”

The most interesting question was asked by a woman from the BBC. She wanted to know how Ms. Ebidi was able to be critical of Iran, a country, like Thailand, that considers criticism as unpatriotic, without incurring reprisal. Her answer was that sometimes activists are accused of plotting against national security, but that it is impossible for one person to make a complete change in a country and any change must take place through the people. “The world is a mirror that reflects the good and bad in us eventually,” she concluded.

A man at my table was a professor of engineering at a local university. After introducing myself (retired and a traveler) he wondered why I was interested in “this.” I thought it was an interesting question. I was kind of speechless for a moment since the answer seemed so obvious to me. Then I remembered that my son Doug told me that when they got married his Thai wife, Luk, didn’t know who Prime Minister Thaksin was…an example of the lack of general knowledge of and interest in civic affairs. The other person at my table was a woman who worked in the human resources department of an oil company who was going to be doing business with Iran. The man at the table had a slight Indian accent but side-stepped the where are you from question from the woman. I mentioned that I thought the speaker was very “cagey” in her answers…and the guy was delighted with the use of the word “cagey” but I admitted I had no idea how the word came to be used this way! I love this stuff.

Tiananmen Square

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I had read that Tiananmen was the biggest square in the world. However, Mao’s huge Mausoleum takes up about a third of the square…almost right in the middle…so the area doesn’t seem all that imposing. Then I remember…don’t expect…just accept.

We passed up the viewing of the wax body. As I was gawking and wandering around trying to get a fix on where all the students were and where the tanks rolled into the square that day in 1989, I was approached by three young people who wanted to know if I was interested in viewing the student exhibits in the institute across the street. Having had experiences like this before (it’s a hard sell to “support a poor starving artist'” I turned the conversation…”we in the world have not forgotten 1989.” I said sympathetically. “Neither have we,” one of the boys said. But the girl who was leading the approach was not to be deterred…she was only six, she said, and then dismissed the remark saying that her parents would remember but they don’t want to talk about it.” When pressed again and I said I would visit the art exhibit another day, that was the end of the conversation. So much for student activism…the hustle yields the short term gain…sometimes but not this time.

End of a Disastrous Experiment

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I want to emphatically state (and I think Bob would concur) that I have nothing but admiration for this proud and resilient people who have survived 70 years of this “ideological tidal wave that affected virtually the entire globe,” according to Robert Harvey in his “Comrades…The Rise and Fall of World Communism,” “that left maybe 100 million dead in its wake, as well as twice that number homeless and suffering, and more than 30 million as slave labor of one kind or another and that shaped the lives of billions.”

Robert Conquest in “Reflections on a Ravaged Century,” argues that a group of sub-intellectuals fastened upon Marx’s convoluted and half-baked theories because of the new turn-of-the-century faith in science as the answer to every problem, including human ones” which was one response to a bewildering new world of social upheavel and unseen forces as lost men sought to gain control over the destiny of their lives.

I mention to three of our homestay hosts that I see T-shirts with CCCP (USSR or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and hammer and sickle on the backs…black humor born of a young generation that did not have to live through the bloodbaths…and when I see the responses on the faces of these women, I know I will not wear this T-shirt. It is not funny.

Are not some Muslim men today, full of shame because they are jobless and without family also reaching from out of a medieval creed with a leveling response in a desperate attempt to gain control over their lives? From communism to this?

Lingering Images of Russia

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Siberian countryside with endless kilometers of grassland and golden pine and white birch trees… small wooden, weathered, unpainted, picturesque, single story bungalows throughout Sibera with blue painted shutters-the banya (toilet and shower) in a small building nearby…Outside the cities groups of small two-story dachas (2nd homes with three-sided pitched roofs with garden in front providing relief from tiny flats and a chance to grow their own vegetables for those who can afford it…intensely flavored wine-red berry jam on Olkhon Island.

Drab, dilapidated Stalin-era block style apartment buildings that make maximum use of space but with absolutely no aesthetic value… there’s definitely a market niche in this country, Bob laments, for brooms, scrub brushes, soap and paint…. black leather jackets, Lenin-style hats (never saw any baseball style hats) and shoes with pointed curled up toes on men and women with spike heels—click click click)…. Especially in evenings, but any time of day, people strolling or standing around with an open bottle of beer in hand… Occasionally someone toppling over from inebriation to be caught by a comrade before falling…people with an aloof veneer-not an air of superiority-just reserved as in “I’m minding my own business…you mind yours”-sometimes seemingly shy but when the exterior is cracked they smile readily and extend themselves with varying degrees of warmth and good humor-especially on the train where we have an opportunity to interact……deep underground metros-monumental works of art in themselves (no photos allowed)…wonderful rich soups and more soup, each a little different than the next…

Experiencing daily life in cozy cluttered apartment homestays with friendly middle-aged to elderly single women who get 30% of what we paid. The provided breakfasts range anywhere from here’s the eggs-cook your own to elaborate spreads in tiny rooms… tiny bathrooms (literally wc’s) with sit down toilets that took three times to flush clean…overheard conversations that sound like arguments in a tone of voice you and I would take offense at but then we think it’s all just bluster…people walking in-between and in front of us with no regard for personal boundaries but not intending to be rude…urban store windows full of fashionable clothing and products that only about l% of the people can afford and then only because they operate on the black market (one woman who works for the central bank whispered “yes, we take white money and black money.”