Austin Ramzy has a decent story, "KFC Targeted in Protests Over South China Sea," about an uptick in Chinese protests directed at the United States for its support of the Philippines' successful suit, decided last week in The Hague by an international tribunal, denying China's territorial claims over the South China Sea. According to Ramzy,
KFC outlets in about a dozen cities, including Hangzhou, in Zhejiang Province; Changsha, in Hunan Province; and Yangzhou, in Jiangsu Province, were targeted by protests and calls for a boycott on Monday, according to a report from Sohu News, a Chinese online news outlet. But the campaign was far smaller than previous nationalist boycotts, and state media outlets warned protesters to avoid any illegal behavior.
Ramzy doesn't mention the bombings of Kentucky Fried Chickens in Egypt last year. Yum Brands, the corporate owner of KFC, says it plans on selling its China operations, no doubt a shrewd business decision given that we are at the beginning of what promises to be a prolonged period of showy super-power saber rattling.
HONG KONG — China said Monday that it had begun what would become regular military air patrols over disputed islands and shoals of the South China Sea, highlighting its claim to the vast area a week after an international tribunal said Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty over the waters had no legal basis.
China’s air force flew a “combat air patrol” over the South China Sea “recently,” Xinhua, the official news agency, reported, citing Shen Jinke, an air force spokesman. The patrol consisted of bombers, fighters, “scouts” and tankers and would become “regular practice,” Mr. Shen said, according to Xinhua.
The announcement of the air patrols, plus a separate statement that China would conduct military exercises in the South China Sea off the coast of Hainan Island, came as Adm. John M. Richardson, the chief of United States naval operations, was in Beijing to discuss the South China Sea and other issues that arose after the tribunal rebuked China’s claims over the waters on July 12.
The landmark decision rejected China’s assertion that it enjoys historical rights over a huge area of the South China Sea encompassed by a “nine-dash line.” China had argued that the tribunal had no jurisdiction in the matter.
***
On Monday, Admiral Richardson’s Chinese counterpart, Adm. Wu Shengli, said China would continue construction in the South China Sea. In the past two years, China has reclaimed thousands of acres on seven features in the Spratly Islands, an area where Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam also have claims, building ports, large airstrips and radar installations.
“We will never stop our construction on the Nansha Islands halfway,” Xinhua, in a separate report, quoted Admiral Wu as saying, using the Chinese name for the Spratly chain. “The Nansha Islands are China’s inherent territory, and our necessary construction on the islands is reasonable, justified and lawful.”
***
Bonnie S. Glaser, a senior adviser for Asia at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that a more telling test of China’s posture after the decision last week may come when the United States Navy resumes so-called freedom of navigation operations in the South China Sea, which often involve testing Chinese claims by ordering American ships to transit within 12 nautical miles of Chinese-claimed features.
The story is worth reading for its helpful map of the South China Sea.
The U.S. is in a pickle here. It can only threaten belligerence, belligerence that the Chinese know is a complete farce. Is the U.S. willing to go to war over territorial claims and island construction in the South China Sea? How can it when it is fighting multiple wars in the Greater Middle East and Africa and every aspect of its political life is divided? The GOP is split, as are the Democrats. The deep state is intact but it is at capacity managing the rewrite of Sykes-Picot and its reboot of the Cold War, not to mention the dissolution of the European Union that these moves have elicited. Also worth mentioning, a completely moribund U.S. antiwar movement will rise from the dead if it looks as if Obama's Asia pivot is going to morph into a shooting war.
No, all the U.S. can do is plead for the Dragon to come to the negotiating table. An illuminating sample of the pleading tone can be found in an unsigned editorial published by The New York Times last week, "Testing the Rule of Law in the South China Sea":
Given China’s stake in peaceful trade with the rest of the world, it would be foolish for President Xi Jinping to take provocative actions that could inflame regional tensions and conceivably lead to a military confrontation with its neighbors or the United States. Retaliatory measures — further island-building at Scarborough Shoal, for instance, or declaring an air defense zone over large portions of the South China Sea — would be risky.
In fact, the ruling offers a fresh opportunity to address maritime disputes in a peaceful manner. China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, condemned Tuesday’s ruling but said Beijing remains open to negotiations. Nations in the region have often gone wobbly in the face of pressure from Beijing. At this critical moment, despite competing interests of their own, they need to join the Philippines in endorsing the tribunal decision and then proceed, if necessary, with their own arbitration cases.
The United States, which is neutral on the various claims, can help ensure a peaceful, lawful path forward. The Obama administration has said that disputes should be resolved according to international law, a position it now reaffirms. It has built closer security relations with Asian nations and responded to China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea with increased naval patrols. This combination of diplomacy and pressure is sound, but the hard part is getting the balance right.
My guess is the U.S. is going to play the long game. Draw out negotiations, play cat and mouse with its destroyers and its spy planes, and hope that Abe can rapidly militarize a pacific Japanese populous. Better than a war with China, but still foolish and unsuccesful.
At some point the Gray Lady stopped referring to the Hong Kong pro-democracy sit-in as a "Revolution" and started calling it a "Movement." I thought that by the end of the sit-in's first week it was basically over because by then it was clear that the police were not going to make the mistake they made initially, which was the police mistake made during the Seattle WTO ministerial of responding to peaceful protesters with massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray and flash-bang grenades. When the police respond with massive force to a non-violent demonstration it actually brings more people into the streets.
By the end of the first week in Hong Kong the crowds were thinning. The first burst of enthusiasm had spent itself.
At this point there are two main encampments: one in the Admiralty district and one in Mong Kok. The Zuccotti Park encampment, the hub of the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement, managed to survive for two months, from September 17 to November 15, 2011 before Mayor Bloomberg's police force broke it apart early one morning.
I'm sure the leaders of the Umbrella Movement are aware that the clock is ticking and something needs to be done soon to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street; hence the planned straw poll designed, most likely, to generate momentum to get officials back to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, as Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report in "Pro-Democracy Movement’s Vote in Hong Kong Abruptly Called Off," the vote crashed on the launch pad:
HONG KONG — Organizers of a planned vote among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators abruptly canceled it on Sunday, exposing tensions and confusion over how to sustain the movement a month after protesters occupied major streets to demand free elections.
Student leaders and organizers of Occupy Central With Love and Peace, the group that laid the groundwork for a civil disobedience campaign for democracy, had urged people to vote at protest sites on Sunday and Monday as a way of registering their support for student negotiators seeking political concessions from the government.
The referendum boiled down to two simple questions: Did voters endorse demanding that the Hong Kong government press Beijing to make democratic concessions on election rules, and did they agree that the changes should apply to city Legislative Council elections in 2016 and the race for chief executive in 2017?
But hours before the balloting was due to start on Sunday night, organizers announced it was off and apologized. They said there was too much disagreement over the wording and value of the vote. “We acknowledge that there was not enough consultation with the public,” they said in an emailed statement.
At a news conference, some organizers were contrite, while others cast their surprise move in the best possible light.
“It won’t affect the morale of this movement,” said Alex Chow Yong Kang, the secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. “This decision can rebuild the trust between us and the protesters. Protesters have all along shared a single goal; it’s just that they may have different views about the execution.”
But even before the cancellation, the vote, intended as a display of unity, had brought into focus tensions among protesters over how to hone their broadly shared aspirations into durable demands and strategies.Such strains could deepen as the protesters face fatigue in their own ranks and the refusal of the Hong Kong government and Chinese Communist Party leaders to make the major concessions demanded by demonstrators, said David Zweig, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“The question becomes: What’s the endgame?” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he was visiting. “Once they didn’t pull out earlier and declare victory, they needed something from the government to be able to declare victory. Now they need to find some endgame, and I think that they’re not going to find it without compromise.”
Although supporters of the protests were unlikely to disagree with the two wordy propositions on the canceled ballot, some feared the vote could pave the way for unacceptable compromise or premature withdrawal from the street occupations in three parts of the city. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law who is a co-founder of Occupy Central, earlier denied that intention and said he had no power over deciding when protesters left the streets. Occupy Central had initially envisioned a much smaller, briefer protest in Central, the main financial district of Hong Kong.
At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Tai said that he could not say how to sustain the protests into a second month. “You can just go down to the plaza and ask the protesters who have stationed there for so many days, how long do they prepare to stay. I think you can get a good answer.”
But protesters have voiced a range of opinions on the future of their grass-roots movement. Some have wavered from the demand that voters be allowed to put forward candidates for chief executive without vetting from Beijing, while others said that demand, called civic nomination, could not be weakened.
Peter Lee wrote recently on the Counterpunch web site, "Democracy in Hong Kong: The Unelected Battle," about a document dump "of the meeting minutes of the Alliance for Democracy, a grouping of pro-democratic organizations engaged in Occupy-related issues."
In the minutes, Benny Tai, the chief legal mind for Occupy Central with Love and Peace, frets that direct nomination -- the goal of the Umbrella Movement -- is not an international legal standard:
Unless the [document dump] report is repudiated, the pro-dems don’t have a legal leg to stand on within the framework of the Basic Law and the NPC; what’s more surprising is that they recognize that they don’t even have a particularly strong legal case for direct nomination under the “international standards” for democracy the students are currently trumpeting.
Claudia Mo, a Civic Party stalwart and ex-AFP reporter (which might explain why she has appeared a few times in AFP’s Occupy coverage as a quotable notable), observed that “international standards” seemed unclear.
Benny Tai, whose job is presumably to make an airtight legal case for the action, instead observed that international practices don’t demand popular nomination. In fact, the UK doesn’t have direct nomination, as a HKSAR representative pointed out during the student dialogue. The key stipulation is a matter of principle: Do citizens have real choice? Do the candidates represent different needs and backgrounds? The best he could say was that popular nomination would unequivocally meet international standards, not that it was the only way.
Even more problematically, perhaps, the UK opted out of the Article 25 of the Universal Covenant of Civil and Political Rights for universal suffrage and direct elections for Hong Kong during its merrily undemocratic colonial years, and the PRC succeeded to that treatment when it took over in 1997. The OHK legal case rests on the rather frail legal reed that Beijing inadvertently surrendered its reservation by holding legislative elections.
And that is the best that the cream of the Hong Kong legal profession and the NED—whose job it is to twist Beijing’s knickers on these kinds of treaties—has been able to come up with after over a decade of determined lawyering.
Remarkably, Benny Tai also voiced the concern that another popular referendum might be necessary to legitimate OHK’s demands and allow it to achieve standing as a negotiator, another tip that the case is not a legal slam dunk.(I might point out parenthetically that I approve of this state of mind, since otherwise we’re left with the metaphysical, undemocratic, and dare I say borderline-putschlike idea that the students can claim the right to speak for “Hong Kong” simply by putting feet on the street.)
So the struggle is in its essence political, not legal.
Without a solid legal strategy, therefore, OHK has turned to a political strategy, that is, to create a rumpus in Hong Kong sufficient to discredit the HKSAR report and reopen the issue.
In other words, absent any legal standing, a popular vote, even a straw poll held in the main protest encampments, became a necessity. The fact that it couldn't get off the ground bodes ill for the Umbrella Movement. Judged by the standards of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park, it has a month left.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee urged China on Thursday to allow elections in Hong Kong without restrictions on who can run as a candidate. The move appeared likely to draw strong criticism from Beijing, where officials decided in August to set strict guidelines for the 2017 election of the city’s next leader, prompting mass sit-in protests.
The 18-member panel in Geneva said that Hong Kong needed to do more to ensure that its people had not only the right to vote, but also the right to run for office.
“Hong Kong China should take all necessary measures to implement universal and equal suffrage in conformity with the covenant, as a matter of priority for all future elections,” Cornelis Flinterman, a member of the rights panel from the Netherlands, said on Thursday, referring to an international agreement on political rights.
The committee focused on the Aug. 31 decision by China’s Communist Party-run legislature to adopt guidelines for the 2017 election that would effectively keep anyone not approved by Beijing from appearing on the ballot for chief executive, the city’s top post.
Under the guidelines, candidates must get the approval of more than half the members of a 1,200-person nominating committee, which includes many of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing tycoons as well as representatives of other social groups friendly to the central government. The city, Asia’s most important financial center, was transferred from British to Chinese control in 1997, and its legal and administrative system is separate from that of the rest of China.
Yuval Shany, a member of the rights panel from Israel, said the nominating committee was “not fully representative of the Hong Kong population.”
The irony of Israel lecturing China about providing full representation for Hong Kong passes, of course, without comment by Forsythe. One wonders why the Human Rights Committee doesn't implore the United States to allow candidates to run without restrictions. Better yet, why not an official U.N. rebuke for the myriad voter identification laws being passed by Republican legislatures to disenfranchise poor people?
One possible silver lining is that the Umbrella Movement is creating a new international standard, "Civic Nomination," one that is not practiced in the industrialized core Western democracies. This can be used, as it is in London, to reignite Occupy Wall Street.
An obligatory part of any political campaign is taking credit or claiming victory (no matter how large the defeat) once the campaign is over. Proof that the Umbrella Revolution has already folded up comes in the form this morning of pro-democracy leaders claiming success because dialogue has begun between protesters and the Hong Kong government. Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong write this morning in "As Hong Kong Protest Ebbs, Organizers Claim Small Gains" that
Although the protest leaders and the remaining participants, who still numbered in the hundreds, insisted that the so-called Umbrella Revolution was a long-term project that was far from over, there was a sense on Monday of a winding down and, after 11 days of overnight street protests, a dissipation of energy.
“I’m very, very, very tired,” said Dennis Chan, 28, letting out a melodramatic sigh as he prepared to go home to sleep after 10 days at the sit-in near the government center. “We all are.”
“It won’t end today, but maybe tomorrow, maybe later, too, when there are fewer and fewer people,” he added. “It’s hard to say that we’ve won this battle. But it’s been positive in making pressure on the government to open a conversation with the students.”
Even the protest leaders, as they began to reflect on what the movement achieved and where it failed, were already adopting the past tense.
“All gates were closed before,” Yvonne Leung, a spokeswoman for the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said in a phone interview. “We have now won some space for dialogue, and we’ve seen a growth in our civil society. The people used to be unaware of their own power, but now they know.”
On Monday, the student groups that are the driving force behind the protests honored a commitment they made to the government the night before to clear the barricades enough to allow civil servants to return to work. By early Monday morning, all the entrances to the main government office complex were open, and workers were streaming in.
Protesters remained at the camps and some roads remained blocked at the two main protest sites — at the central government offices in the Admiralty area downtown and the Mong Kok neighborhood across the harbor in Kowloon — but just steps away, it was business as usual in this bustling financial hub.
But if Occupy Wall Street (OWS) taught us anything, it is that once the encampments are taken down and cleared away it is very hard to put them back up. Popular movements are fickle. People are ruled by the "Been There, Done That" mindset. Movement leaders can't just push a button and expect another mass uprising.
So the students will get a few meetings with government officials, officials who are already offering the carrot of a some sort of pro-democracy participation in the nominating committee that sparked the Umbrella Revolution to begin with:
Mr. Ho, who along with founders of the protest movement, called Occupy Central With Love and Peace, are advising the student leaders in the talks, said Beijing and Hong Kong needed to “go back to the drawing board” and include the views of the democratic protest movement in a report to the National People’s Congress. “Everything is in the hands of Beijing,” he said.
But the government has all but ruled out such a reset.
Two Hong Kong government officials said that the current process for drafting a new elections law already calls for a new round of public consultations but is limited to how a nominating committee will be structured. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said it was highly unlikely that the Hong Kong government would agree to revisit the decision of the National People’s Congress, which it considers the final word on the matter.
That demand by the students and democratic lawmakers was unrealistic, they said. “Sooner or later, it’s going to sink in with them that what they’re asking for, they’re just not going to get,” one of the officials said.
Moreover, the talks provide a useful delay for the government, helping to sap the energy of the protests without promising a meaningful compromise.
Michael Tien, a pro-Beijing member of the Legislative Council in Hong Kong, said that was a conscious element of the government’s strategy.
“Time is on the government’s side,” he said in a telephone interview. The talks “keep the Occupy movement under certain constraints so that it really doesn’t affect the day-to-day business in Hong Kong.”
He said the students should focus on realistic goals, such as working to adjust the composition of the nominating committee that will vet candidates for the territory’s top job starting in 2017.
The students have demanded an open election for chief executive, without a vetting committee on nominations; the resignation of the current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying; and to revisit the entire process that led to the National People’s Congress decision.
Yet in a sign of the gulf that lies between even the more realistic positions of the two camps, Mr. Ho said that cosmetic adjustments to the nominating committee that Mr. Tien suggested were off the table. “We are totally uninterested in it,” Mr. Ho said.
If Occupy Central sticks to this bargaining position it is going to come away with nothing. Why? Because OWS-type uprisings are one-off events. A core can remain as an info clearinghouse and pressure group able to stage smaller actions, but the ability to repeat prolonged mass sit-ins is just not there.
That is of course unless the protest movement is actually paid for by the oligarchy and has support of elements within the government, as we saw in Thailand this year with the Bangkok-based protests against the government of prime minister Yingluck Shinawatra that acted as a prelude to the military coup.
Thomas Fuller has an interesting story in today's paper, "Household Debt and Signs of Drought Squeeze Economy in Thailand," about drought in Thailand hitting the country's rice farmers, many of whom are highly indebted. Bad news for the military junta:
“The economy is the bread and butter of legitimacy,” said Thitinan Pongsudhirak, director of the Institute of Security and International Studies at Chulalongkorn University. “When it comes to politics, the military can command and control — they have very little open opposition. But they cannot control the world economy. And they cannot control the weather.”
In a country with seven million farming households, mostly small landholders, the water shortage will affect the poorer segment of the population.
Kuakoon Manasumphunsakul, a senior technician in the irrigation department of Chiang Mai Province, says the flow of runoff into dams is half the historical average because of an inadequate number of storms during the rainy season, which ends in about a month.
“We have to be prepared for a drought — it’s definitely going to happen,” he said. “If we don’t start saving water, it will be severe.”
The dam closest to the city of Chiang Mai is at 17 percent capacity, the second-lowest level since it was built two decades ago.
Although the water shortage appears to be mostly the result of lighter rainfall this year — dams in Thailand’s southern neighbor Malaysia are also sharply below their average levels — Nipon Poapongsakorn, an expert on rice cultivation at the Thailand Development Research Institute, says the problem has been amplified by decisions of the previous government to release too much water from dams over the last two years to avoid a repeat of the devastating floods of 2011.
Now the prospect of drought is leading to what Mr. Kuakoon calls “water wars” among the hotels and residents in cities, factories in industrial areas and farmers in the countryside.
In addition to the north of the country, the authorities have warned farmers in the rice basket of the country, the basin of the Chao Phraya River, against planting a second crop this year because of the lack of water.
Ms. Ampai, the farmer, said the ban on planting rice was announced through the municipal loudspeakers. She now hopes to plant other crops, possibly onions or garlic. But they will also require water from the dam.
“If they don’t release the water, we will go and protest,” Ms. Ampai said. “They are transferring too much water to the city.”
The Bhumibol Dam, one of the country’s largest and the source of irrigation for a large part of the rice-growing heartland, is at only 40 percent of capacity, a water level seen only three times since it began operations in 1964.
The Thai central bank says farmers have among the highest debt levels in the country. But they are by no stretch the only Thais with debt problems.
Total household debt has doubled during the last four years, to over 10 trillion baht, or $306 billion, in the second quarter of this year, the equivalent of around 80 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and one of the highest rates in Asia. These numbers do not include the thriving business of black-market loans.
Amara Sriphayak, who retired as an assistant governor of the central bank last week, recently warned that debt could cause a “huge decline in household spending rates” and created risks to the country’s financial stability.
Pawnshops are a growth industry in cities and towns around the country. The Chiang Mai municipal government opened a fourth pawnshop last year and plans to open another this year.
A contradiction of the Hong Kong student-led protest movement is that it proceeded as if it had more support that it actually did. It called itself "Occupy" in emulation of Occupy Wall Street but tactically it was more akin to Thailand's People's Alliance for Democracy or Yellow Shirts, the popular front of the Thai military and Bangkok ruling elite. Yet there is no indication that the Hong Kong ruling elite support the students and Occupy Central. The ruling elite everywhere want to keep making money and protect their position at the top of the food chain.
So at the end of the day you have a mass pro-democracy youth movement tactically emulating a fascist popular front (not OWS because OWS never staged multiple street sit-ins in several locations throughout one city) egged on by slanted reporting in the Western media. Given all the contradictions, I suppose the Umbrella Revolution has to be considered something of a success.
Yesterday summer got off to a wonderful start. I ran for the first time in two weeks. My foot and leg issues, both left and right, seem to be healing well enough now that I was able to putt around on the soft artificial turf of a soccer field located in the neighborhood while a father scrimmaged with his sons kicking the ball back and forth. The Sun was high in the east and it was still early, not even 9 AM. A guy shot hoops by himself shirtless at an adjoining basketball court. An old man, also shirtless, walked back and forth in the middle of the soccer field. And I ran around the perimeter listening to my iPod. I kept looking up at the Sun. It was all too good to be true.
I topped the day off by preparing myself a dinner of two garden burgers and three-potatoes worth of homemade french fries. I then sat down and watched the 196-minute roadshow cut of The Sand Pebbles (1966), which I had picked up at the library earlier in the afternoon.
If you ever want a cure for whatever ails you, try sitting down to a Steve McQueen movie, particularly anything he did from The Cincinnati Kid (1965) to Bullitt (1968). You'll be treated to a view of American masculinity that is long gone. Athletic, laconic, working class, always butting up against the-powers-that-be, the McQueen take on heroism does not exist anymore. Now we favor super-assassins or comic book superheroes.
The Sand Pebbles, with its story of a U.S. Navy gunboat patrolling the Yangtze River when the Kuomintang took control of China from the warlords in the 1920s, premiered at a time when LBJ's going-all-in commitment to war in Vietnam was starting to arouse significant domestic opposition. The Sand Pebbles, for its time, is a surprisingly provocative anti-imperialist statement from a major Hollywood studio (Twentieth Century Fox). The message? Nations traffic in lies and everyday people -- the sailors, the coolies, the whores, the missionaries -- are merely grist for the mill.
It has been quite some time since the last "The Colt 45 Chronicle" post. The reason for the delay is the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time, my wife and I watched the whole thing unfold on television, and I think we were deeply affected by it, enough at least that I wrote a fictional account of the crackdown from the perspective of an actual Columbia exchange student who returned home to Beijing to participate in the democracy uprising. I wrote it in a letter to my friend Mark who was teaching English in Madrid.
I was motivated by the Tiananmen Square student protests but also I think I was influenced by recently having read Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage(1895) as I rode the subway back forth to various temporary clerical jobs. In the introduction to my Signet paperback edition it was mentioned that Civil War veterans who read the novel thought the twentysomething Crane was actually a grizzled former combatant at Chancellorsville. Instead, he was a sensitive young man who wasn't born until six years after the Civil War but who successfully conjured up the battlefield by means of his imagination.
I thought the same thing could be done with Tiananmen. So what you get is a The Red Badge of Courage inspired rendering written in the early Grunge Age by a young man suffused with the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac. It is laughable, and I was immediately embarrassed once I sent the letter off to Mark. I think the next time I saw him I even apologized for subjecting him to it. But it is what it is.
In the weeks prior to and following the June 4 anniversary, the New York Times ran many stories devoted to Tiananmen and its aftermath. I didn't have time to read many of them, but I went back later and did something of an audit. And what surprised me was how little, despite the prodigious number of column inches, was really there. It brought to mind Hemingway's idea that whatever is edited out from a piece of writing leaves a trace presence, a gravity. Papa's directive was always to cut freely because the weight of that which is eliminated the reader will feel as if by some occult power. Well, the reverse is true. Publishing story after story regardless of actual substance will create a presence, even if it is merely a mirage. This is how thought control works in the "free" Western world where media monopolies dominate with government approval.
Probably the biggest story the Gray Lady ran was on Chinese billionaire Xiao Jianhua, who in 1989 happened to be the student body president of Peking University. "With Choice at Tiananmen, Student Took Road to Riches," by David Barboza and Michael Forsythe, is meant to be a morality tale where the Gray Lady instructs her readers on the hopeless venality of the Chinese government. Barboza and Forsythe begin their lengthy article by writing that
A few days after the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests 25 years ago, the Chinese government filled the airwaves with a list of the 21 most wanted student leaders accused of stirring up an antigovernment rebellion. At the top of the list was a 20-year-old student at Peking University named Wang Dan, who set up an unofficial student union to mobilize his classmates to demand democracy.
There was no public mention then — and there have been very few mentions since — of the head of the official student union of Peking University at that time. His name is Xiao Jianhua. Mr. Xiao never opposed the government, and the events of June 1989 did not make him one of China’s “most wanted.” Instead, they catapulted him into the ranks of its most wealthy.
But after digesting the entire story all one comes away with is a sense that Xiao Jianhua is a smart guy who worked hard within the system to make a success of himself. There is neither a portrait of feckless collaboration nor a smoking gun of corruption to be found here. I found the most compelling passage to be a description of Xiao's devotion to reading:
He grew up in Feicheng, a poor farming village in a mountainous region of the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, one of six children born to a middle school teacher and his wife. At a young age, he was, by most accounts, a voracious reader of history and literature.
“Every morning, he’d get up at 5 a.m. and jog into the hills to study,” recalled Guo Qingtao, a childhood friend from the village and later a Peking University classmate. “He could recite every text from memory. He even read the teacher’s manuals.”
At 14, Mr. Xiao passed the highly competitive national college entrance exam and won admission to Peking University. He arrived in Beijing, friends say, with tattered clothes but ambitions to be a political leader.
“He loved politics,” said Zhou Chunsheng, his college math tutor and now a professor at the Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing. “He wanted to be a high official, and he was reading everything — social sciences books, Marxism, the collected works of Mao.”
Mr. Xiao’s path to power was interrupted, though, by the most momentous student protests since 1919. At Peking University, the students were not just swept up in the protests, they were among the leaders of it — the ones who led a march into Tiananmen Square, the city’s axis of political power, to press for political reforms.
At the time, Mr. Xiao was president of the university’s official student union. The duties were largely social, organizing lectures and dances, but the post was coveted because of its ties to the Communist Youth League, a launching pad for future careers in the party.
But in the spring of 1989, students at the university began to march on Tiananmen Square with a list of demands both for university leaders and for the Communist Party at large. Mr. Xiao, as the titular representative of his fellow students, was caught in the middle.
“Xiao tried to tell the government what the students demanded, but some of the activists didn’t like his conservative approach, so they set up their own organization,” says Mr. Guo, his former classmate. “At the time, he was only 17 years old and was put under a lot of pressure. Feeling powerless, he went to the library and buried himself in books.”
The responsibility of pressing the student cause fell to a history major named Wang Dan, who helped set up an alternative student association at the university and organized boycotts, sit-ins and hunger strikes.
The Xiao expose falls particularly flat when one studies Andrew Jacobs' "Tiananmen’s Most Wanted" post that appeared a day before the 25th anniversary on NYT's Sinosphere blog. A "where are they now?" of seven of the 21 Tiananmen protest leaders that the Beijing Public Security Bureau listed on a most-wanted circular issued on June 13, 1989, five of the seven ended up working on Wall Street.
Can there be any doubt that Wall Street is more corrupt than the Chinese government? After all, was it China that melted down the global economy causing untold suffering that we are still dealing with? Of course it wasn't. It was the casino capitalism promulgated on Wall Street and K Street.
But China is an unofficial official enemy, and Tiananmen was the proto-Color Revolution that failed. This autumn the Gray Lady will no doubt be celebrating the proto-Color Revolution that was the mother of all Color Revolutions, the fall of the Berlin Wall in East Germany.
Spring 1989
Democracy. Democracy. (We're on a roll now.) Looks like it's time for an American liberty & TV monoculture, globe round and China wide. -- Columbia student leaves Morningside Heights lecture hall, leaves strolls on campus greens (who knows? we might have seen him that day as he made his way to library main, text books neatly wrapped in arms), leaves for hometown Beijing when martial law is announced. Goes and joins his buddies on the SQUARE. Not much sleep or food -- but so the fuck what? Democracy rocks on old Tiananmen. Nights in sleeping bags on the hard ground under Mongolian stars and Chairman Mao (big sir) portrait. -- The morning becomes for him timeless. Early Saturday, he hears the crow of a cock, street bred and fed, as it tramps in the damp dawn dust of silent secret garbage alleys half a mile to the east; and he wakes and rolls over to snuggle into the softness and sweet smells of Mei Ju Ne, his love. She smells like summer, he thinks.
The cock crows, and its cry rips and rises out of the east side by side with the deep blue dawn sky promising a day full of the sun. He lifts up his head and cocks his ear and says to himself: "This, this is the cockcrow of the West, of enlightenment and freedom and Columbus and New York. Here I am in my birthplace, grand ancient Forbidden City Beijing, heart of the East, and I am alive . . . to it all . . . a great Western happening being announced in the East."
He sighs, letting his head fall back on old Tiananmen, and falls asleep to dreams of Broadway bookstores, 1 trains and university coffee shops. His eyes open and he sees an egg yolk hung up in the sky, and he thinks, What time is it? -- People are crazy and running all around and a dull hum is shaking his back.
The tanks come and the soldiers come. And he says, "Fuck this shit! Who do they think they are? They want to fight. I will stay here and fight with them."
He shouts -- "THIS IS OUR FUCKING SQUARE!"
So he stays. He finds Mei Ju Ne at the southern edge of Tiananmen, the area where the troops are massing; she's with some friends checking out the situation, trying to figure out if the troops are really going to march.
He grabs her. This scares her; and pissed off, she starts screaming. Friends avert their eyes, looking down at their shoes bashful and uncomfortable. He apologizes; tells her he didn't know where she was and was worried. She looks at him, and right then -- right then and there amid the fear and tension and incredible highness of everybody -- they exchange a glance of such pure sweet kindness that at that moment they know exactly what it is that they're going to have to deal with soon.
So they cut out immediately, leaving behind buddies to face and contemplate ugly green colored army, and they hustle towards the monument at the center of the Square.
The shooting starts and the tanks roll. Students scatter. A lot of the more energetic and vocal dissidents are the first to take to their heels, while some of the laziest and quietest are the most at ease in the bam and whistle of gunfire. He and Mei Ju Ne sit close to the monument and watch everything unfold. It seems unreal to them, like watching TV -- no, bigger, like a movie with Dolby sound -- a total sensory overload: Too many people running this way and that; too many people falling; too much noise and energy and confusion and fear and hate, and blood -- all that unreal strange leaping red just there -- and death, silent stupid meek sorry death littering everywhere.
And the bodies pile up and the tanks roll on. He is mad angry and teeth grinding; he wants to sprint and explode into that weak mass of frightened soldier steel, destroying it with his strength and fearlessness. But she is crying and very afraid, and he must not abandon her. So they stay, along with several hundred others, and they wait on the monument.
Eventually they come. And he sees them coming because they're not that far off. He can see the shine of the sun bouncing off round polished helmets. He puts his arm around Mei Ju Ne. She knows. The soldiers are sixty yards away and firing live rounds. He thinks back across the Pacific, back across America, to New York City, the land of his education and enlightenment, back to afternoons inside quiet subway stations, back to afternoons on the ferry looking at Liberty statuesque and ghostly green, a time when he dreamed of home, of China -- how much he felt for it, his love and need -- and his girl.
People start to drop around him. Wails moans screams -- people dying, brains spilling on stone. The soldiers have come bayonets drawn white. He hugs her to his heart and turns his back . . . .
A death, one soul vote for democracy. A Columbia student, the paper said, went back to his hometown when martial law was declared; was one of the students who chose to stay on Tiananmen Square after the People's Army began its advance. I guess he made his decision to take it on. Old big old bad ass grandpappy Death -- just the biggest thing any of us (anybody anywhere) will ever have to take on in our little chicken-scratched sojourn on the compost heap.
Two months ago today, Tuesday April 4 (which is recorded in my date book), we made our Columbia jaunt, Mark. Somewhere among the pretty fashionable liberal university babes sheltered by ivy-strewn brick walls and charcoal-black wrought iron fences was our holy Chinese saint-to-be. Fresh from bookstore browses and cigar chomping blanknesses, our most pressing and deep-felt problem was the boredom bought by too much liberty and liberality. We have switched the conjunctions in Pat Henry's famous American formula; switched it from an "or" to a"but. "
