Making a hit movie is a tough business, even for ChiComs.

It was supposed to be the patriotic holiday hit. “Confucius,” the government-backed bio-epic about the ancient philosopher, was tailor-made to stir national pride over Chinese New Year.

What they got instead was China’s answer to “Ishtar” — a box-office dud with the misfortune of having to compete against the Hollywood blockbuster “Avatar.”

“Confucius says: flop” read a headline in the Shanghai Daily.

Even a historian who was invited to the film’s prescreening to offer the project a shot of credibility gave the thumbs down, saying the movie was riddled with inaccuracies.

“It’s been, in a sense, a loss of face,” said Stan Rosen, a Chinese film expert at USC. “It really backfired.”

And they really ticked off the Chinese masses by pulling Avatar from some theaters to make room.

” ‘Confucius’ is not fashionable,” said Yang Jia, a 22-year-old college student inside a Beijing cinema where “Avatar” was selling out. “I’m just not interested in historical movies.”

“Confucius” may never have been expected to compete with the Hollywood hit had it not been for a controversial move by film regulators. Days before the Jan. 22 opening of “Confucius,” 2-D versions of “Avatar” were pulled from theaters to clear the way for the domestic release.

That set off a media backlash in print and online, pitting “Confucius” against a global sensation that had already become China’s top grossing film of all time.

Wu Renchi, a movie blogger based in Shanghai, called for a boycott of “Confucius” to protest what he said was state manipulation of the film industry.

“They took the rights of moviegoers away,” said Yu, whose site has attracted nearly 800,000 hits and many “Avatar” fans. “It’s just an excuse to protect domestic films.”

Chinese have few civil rights at all. Strange what upsets people.

Obama met with the Dali Lama behind closed doors and without media coverage lest he inflame the Chinese. The Chi-Coms are very touchy about smashing Tibet.

So why let a photographer take this photo?

It’s worth 10,000 words to the Chinese. It shows the world that Obama is so meek, he’ll hustle a dignitary out a side door like a cheap hooker in order to placate them.

IBD:

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke is on the hot seat in Congress as he faces an upcoming Senate vote to confirm a second term. The principal reason for slow-roasting Bernanke: anger over the chairman’s alleged inattention to the problems building up in the U.S. finance industry.

In some respects, though, Bernanke did raise alarms. As we have detailed in our seventh annual report to Congress, Bernanke, teaching in 2005 at Princeton, was among a group of prescient economists who recognized that the trade and financing imbalance between the U.S. and China was an aberrant development and signaled potential trouble.

Bernanke warned of a “global savings glut” in which developing Asian countries, led by China, were lending vast sums to the developed world — principally the U.S. — thereby reversing a historic trend.

That trend continues today, despite the global financial meltdown and despite repeated official promises by Beijing to shift its economy away from a dangerous dependence on running huge trade surpluses with the U.S. It’s as if the squirrels in China, having stocked up on enough nuts for the next decade, decided to keep gathering regardless of the consequences to the forest or the other animals.

How does China manage to keep amassing its record-setting foreign currency reserves — now at $2.3 trillion, enough to allow China’s central bank to buy all the technology, media and telecommunications companies listed on the New York and Euronext exchanges, or about 16% of all the New York Stock Exchange-listed companies? (more…)

China faces the consequences of its one-child policy.

Wang Weijia and her husband grew up surrounded by propaganda posters lecturing them that “Mother Earth is too tired to sustain more children” and “One more baby means one more tomb.”

They learned the lesson so well that when Shanghai government officials, alarmed by their city’s low birthrate and aging population, abruptly changed course this summer and began encouraging young couples to have more than one child, their reaction was instant and firm: No way.

“We have already given all our time and energy for just one child. We have none left for a second,” said Wang, 31, a human resources administrator with an 8-month-old son.

More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.

The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent.

The imbalance is worse in wealthy coastal cities with highly educated populations, such as Shanghai. Last year, people 60 and older accounted for almost 22 percent of Shanghai’s registered residents, while the birthrate was less than one child per couple.

Xie Lingli, director of the Shanghai Municipal Population and Family Planning Commission, has said that fertile couples need to have babies to “help reduce the proportion of the aging population and alleviate a workforce shortage in the future.” Shanghai is about to be “as old — not as rich, though — as developed countries such as Japan and Sweden,” she said.

No video? No problem.

James Pethokoukis

Guess what? It turns out the Chinese are kind of curious about how President Barack Obama’s healthcare reform plans would impact America’s huge fiscal deficit. Government officials are using his Asian trip as an opportunity to ask the White House questions. Detailed questions.

Boilerplate assurances that America won’t default on its debt or inflate the shortfall away are apparently not cutting it. Nor should they, when one owns nearly $2 trillion in assets denominated in the currency of a country about to double its national debt over the next decade.

Nothing happening in Washington today should give Beijing any comfort or confidence about what may happen tomorrow. Healthcare reform was originally promoted as a way to “bend the curve” on escalating entitlement costs, the major part of which is financing Medicare and Medicaid. That is looking more and more like an overpromised deliverable.

In an otherwise tightly scripted townhall meeting in China yesterday, one brave student asked Obama his opinion about the “Great Firewall of China,” the Internet censor-filter the Chi-Comms use to keep their 1.3 billion locals in the dark.

Obama replied that free discussion and criticism…

“make me a better leader because it forces me to hear opinions I don’t want to hear.”

That’s rich coming from a President who has:

• belittled legitimate critiques of his healthcare reform (Ok, Nancy’s) as “lies and distortions”
• gone after Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and others by name
• declared that the time for “debate is over” before much debate even began
• tried to turn the taxpayer funded NEA into a propaganda arm for his administration
• called citizens who protest his policies as “tea baggers,” a gay slur
• leads a party that periodically threatens to stifle talk radio by bringing back the “Fairness Doctrine.”
• enjoyed, until recently, a voluntary news firewall by the mainstream media that has filtered out news detrimental to Obama’s rule

One suspects that, deep down, Obama envies China’s leaders who don’t have to deal with impertinent citizens. The Chinese townhall meetings are so orderly, don’t you know.

Two months ago, NYT columnist Thomas Friedman let this idea slip.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

Great photographs from China’s recent 60th anniversary celebration.

LA Times:

With no plans one Saturday, Zhang Xin told his wife, son and mother to wear something smart and hop into the family sedan. He could have taken them to the Forbidden City or the Great Wall, but he decided on another popular destination — IKEA.

Riding an escalator past a man lying on a display bed with a book opened on his belly, the clan sauntered into the crush of visitors squeezing onto the showroom path, bumping elbows and nicking ankles with their yellow shopping trolleys.

Zhang said the family needed a respite from the smog and a reliable lunch.

“We just came here for fun,” said the 34-year-old office manager. “I suppose we could have gone somewhere else, but it wouldn’t have been a complete experience.”

Welcome to IKEA Beijing, where the atmosphere is more theme park than store.

When the Swedish furniture giant first opened here in 1999, it hoped locals would embrace its European brand of minimalism. A decade later, Beijingers have done just that. Perhaps too much.

Every weekend, thousands of looky-loos pour into the massive showroom to use the displays. Some hop into bed, slide under the covers and sneak a nap; others bring cameras and pose with the decor. Families while away the afternoon in the store for no other reason than to enjoy the air conditioning.

Visitors can’t seem to resist novelties most Americans take for granted, such as free soda refills and ample seating. They also like the laid-back staffers who don’t mind when a child jumps on a couch.

Purchasing anything at Yi Jia, as the store is called here, can seem like an afterthought.

Maybe not so old. But those prickly ChiComs used plainclothes cops armed with umbrellas to stop photographers.

Mei Fong in The Wall Street Journal

XIN’AN VILLAGE, HANZHONG, China — With no eligible women in his village, Zhou Pin, 27 years old, thought he was lucky to find a pretty bride whom he met and married within a week, following the custom in rural China.

Ten days later, Cai Niucuo vanished, leaving behind her clothes and identity papers. She did not, however, leave behind her bride price: 38,000 yuan, or about $5,500, which Mr. Zhou and his family had scrimped and borrowed to put together.

When Mr. Zhou reported his missing spouse to authorities, he found his situation wasn’t unique. In the first two months of this year, Hanzhong town saw a record number of scams designed to extract high bride prices in a region with an oversupply of bachelors.

Zhou Pin with his now-missing bride

The fleeing Mrs. Zhou was one of 11 runaway brides — hardly the isolated case or two that the town had seen in years past. The local phenomenon has fueled broader speculation among officials that the fast-footed wives may be part of a larger criminal ring.

“She called me soon after she left,” says Mr. Zhou, a slight man with a tentative smile. He says she asked how he was doing, and apologized for the hardship she had caused. “I told her, ‘I will see you again one day.’ ”

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

China blanketed Tiananmen Square with police officers Thursday, determined to prevent any commemoration of the 20th anniversary of a military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters that left hundreds dead.

Visitors to the sprawling plaza in central Beijing were stopped at checkpoints and searched, and foreign television crews and photographers firmly turned away. Uniformed and plainclothes officers, easily identifiable by their similar shirts, seemingly outnumbered tourists.

A few pursued television cameramen with opened umbrellas trying to block their shots — a comical dance that was broadcast on CNN and BBC. There was no flicker of protest. Other than the intense police presence and the government’s blockage of some popular Internet services, the scorchingly hot day passed like any other in the capital.

China’s government has tried hard over the years to obliterate the memory of the huge student-led protests that shook the Communist Party and captivated the world for weeks.

An official reacted angrily Thursday to a call by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton for a public accounting of the incident.

“The U.S. action makes groundless accusations against the Chinese government. We express strong dissatisfaction,” a Foreign Ministry spokesman, Qin Gang, told reporters at a regular briefing.

Sure, we all just imagined that line of tanks.

“The party and government have already come to a conclusion on the relevant issue,” he said. “History has shown that the party and government have put China on the proper socialist path that serves the fundamental interests of the Chinese people.”

In a statement Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton urged China to publish the names of the dead, missing or detained when the military crushed the protest, saying an accounting would help China “to learn and to heal.”

Speaking of accounting, Hillary better pipe down lest the Chinese stop buying US securities. Without them Obama cannot borrow us into bankruptcy.

Access was blocked to popular Internet services like Twitter, as well as to many university message boards. The home pages of a mini-blogging site and a video-sharing site warned users they would be closed through Saturday for “technical maintenance.”

Some Internet users tried to evade the censors by referring to June 4 as May 35 on electronic bulletin boards or message sites. Others proposed wearing white, the Chinese traditional color of mourning, as a silent form of protest.

Intrepid Nan invades China with her global outlook.

…Pelosi linked global warming to environmental justice, saying the right to a clean environment is also a human right.

“I do see this opportunity for climate change to be … a game-changer,” she said at Tsinghua. “It’s a place where human rights — looking out for the needs of the poor in terms of climate change and healthy environment — are a human right.”

China has 1.3 billion people, 900 million of whom live in poverty. Real poverty — not the cell-phone-owning, Food-Stamp-spending variety of poverty capitalism has made possible in the USA.

Seriously, does she think people subsisting on scraps care one bit about scary projections from western computer models?

To achieve this, Pelosi said governments would have to make decisions and choices based on science.

“They also have to do it with openness, transparency and accountability to the people,” she said. “Everyone has to have their situation improved by it.”

Echoes of H.G. Wells and the early Progressives whose faith in science — and a willingness to impose its dictates on everyone, like it or not.

In answering a question from a student about how Pelosi was going to get Americans to cut back on their carbon emissions, the leading Democratic lawmaker said it was important to educate children on how to conserve energy and for citizens to build more environmentally friendly homes.

“We have so much room for improvement,” she said. “Every aspect of our lives must be subjected to an inventory … of how we are taking responsibility.”

James Fallows:

• No one uses voicemail. When some one calls you on your mobile phone, you generally pick it up. Mobile calls take precedence over face-to-face conversation, which is generally interrupted by a call. [Too many times to count, I have seen people take mobile-phone calls while giving a speech or presiding at a meeting. It's the norm, not something rude.]
• China uses SMS more intensively. SMS may have become entrenched because of the low cost of sending text messages. The first thing Chinese do in the morning is check their IM first, not their email. [Though, this assumes they turned off the phone at night!]
• Instant messaging, combined with SMS, is a hugely popular means of communication. China’s leading IM platform, QQ (Company: Tencent (HK:0700)), has 350 mm users-over 50 times the audience of Twitter! [Two days ago on the Beijing subway, I counted 25 people in the same car as me all typing out or reading text messages and only two actually talking on the phone. Also, you're never out of mobile-phone coverage in China -- on subways, in elevators, wherever. Discussion of reasons some other time.]
• Only 56% of all Chinese internet users have email addresses. [If you want to reach a busy American, you send email to the Blackberry. That gets you nowhere here.]
• Ownership of PCs is much lower, especially in 2nd and 3rd tier cities, where heavy PC usage is at Internet cafes.
• Unlike the West, where e-commerce was Web 1.0 and social media is Web 2.0, China’s internet usage started as a social phenomenon first and is just now moving to more utilitarian purposes.

James Fallows has been living in China for three years, and thus has a unique perspective among journalists writing about that nation of 1.3 billion.

Our economies are so entwined, our problems become their problems, and quickly.

In September, as Olympic spectators were leaving Beijing, migrant workers returned, via packed buses and trains. In the capital as in fast-growing cities all across China, country people stand out in the urban crowd. Their hands and faces are more weathered, their clothes simpler and more ragged. Often they move about town lugging unwieldy bundles of bedding and belongings wrapped in the plaid-patterned, woven-plastic fabric that somehow has become standard for such purposes in poor countries around the world.

This post-Olympic flow back into the city was expected—but what happened next was not. In mid-October, at about the time retail sales were collapsing in the United States, we started seeing extra buses muster each morning with full loads of migrants headed out of town again. On an icy afternoon in November, I passed a site where a huge new office complex was being built. Its towering construction cranes, which just a week earlier had been swinging loads of cement and steel so close to the sidewalk that passersby ducked, were motionless. The frontage road was lined with buses whose license plates were from Hebei province—the sticks. A driver told me that the convoy would take workers back to their home village—“For now, no work”—and then come back for another load as soon as it dropped this batch off.

Through the rest of the winter and early this spring, Beijing’s air stayed notably clearer than it had been at the same time a year ago. Part of that was because of unusually windy weather, and part may have been a residual benefit of Olympic cleanup measures. But it was also a sign that fewer factories were running in the heavy-industrial districts upwind of Beijing.

Fallows goes on to describe possible outcomes, dismissing the notion that China will unravel like the old Soviet Union. He sees a China coming out stronger because of the recession.

here is one more part of the big picture: the opportunities that today’s disruption may be opening for future Chinese growth.

Nearly 30 years ago, during another big worldwide downturn, I went to Silicon Valley and to Detroit for this magazine, to compare the way two different industrial cultures coped with economic hardship. Many of the companies I visited in each place are still with us—GM and Ford in Detroit; Apple, Intel, and HP in Silicon Valley. But quite a few I visited in California have now vanished. (Remember Eagle Computer Company, or Osborne?) We know that the high-tech industry is a source of growth, but—unless you work in it—you can easily forget that it’s extremely volatile. Then as now, people in the high-tech business emphasized that even though no one likes being disrupted, the volatility of America’s industrial culture is a necessary part of its success. It couldn’t produce so many new companies with new technologies if it weren’t so ruthless at eliminating old ones.

Chinese industry has also been volatile, but in a way that has done less good for China’s economy as a whole. The small-business culture of China is one of the few parts of the world where Americans are considered sluggish and hyper-deliberative. As small companies scramble against each other to cut pennies from costs and minutes from schedules, they have become more nimble as subcontractors. But they still don’t keep much of the final rewards for themselves. Thus today’s shock is more than such companies can offset just by cutting costs.

In Beijing, in Shanghai, in Shenzhen, and elsewhere, I’ve recently visited companies that are trying to use the disruption of this moment to enter wholly new markets and do what so few Chinese firms have yet done: make high-tech, high-value products that bring high rewards. In a country as big and chaotic as China, you can find illustrations of any “trend” you want. But in only a few weeks of asking, I found indications of companies that were growing rather than shrinking, and of corporate leaders who were pouring in money based on their belief that now, when competitors are at their weakest and talent and assets could be snapped up cheap, is the time to prepare for their next big advance.

It’s a long, meaty article worth reading in its entirety.

The 48-year-old owner of a media company went on a two-week road trip through the U.S. last fall, visiting scenic sites and checking out properties from Los Angeles to New York. He’s been following the swoon in prices ever since, and next month he’s considering joining another prospecting group that is heading for San Francisco, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, three of the hardest-hit housing markets in the U.S.

Zhao’s budget: $1 million.

“L.A. is not bad; a lot of Chinese live there,” he said, noting that he was interested in both apartments and houses.

“Before, it was kind of private, a quiet thing among friends,” said Jamie Lee, a Chinese American who runs the Los Angeles Convention and Visitors Bureau office in Beijing. “Now it’s full-blown. . . . It’s huge.” Some of these groups “are talking about going every two weeks.”

The tours are a new twist on an old phenomenon.

Overseas Chinese have been buying Southern California properties for years. What’s different now is that they are starting to do it in large groups and quite openly.

Reporting from Shanghai — Caravans of cash-rich Chinese in Hummers and Lincoln Navigators have been weaving through American neighborhoods in recent months, looking for foreclosures and other bargain properties to buy.

With housing prices crashing in the U.S., home-buying trips to America are becoming one of the more popular tour group packages in China. New U.S. visa rules for Chinese tourists and a loosening of foreign investment policies by China have made it easier for people such as Zhao Hongjun of Beijing to go house hunting across the Pacific.

Jonah Goldberg thinks predictions of Chinese domination are off the mark, noting that the same was said for Japan in the ’80s, before their economy tanked.

The Japan example not only demonstrates that smart people can be wrong and that the elite chattering classes are prone to groupthink, but it helps illuminate why they are so prone to this sort of thing.

For more than a century, countless American intellectuals and business leaders have looked enviously at how foreign countries “planned” and “managed” their economies. Woodrow Wilson and the Progressives drooled over Otto von Bismarck, and today every self-proclaimed “global strategist” gazes at China’s managed capitalism like a kid with his nose pressed against a candy-store window.

Of course, China has made enormous progress since it decided that markets are a more desirable means of improving the lot of its citizens than organized mass murder. But China’s fans still have an enormous blind spot.

Ask yourself this: Why are we in this financial crisis?

Any short list of reasons would include a lack of transparency in markets and regulatory rule-making; collusion between business and government; the politicization of lending practices (including the socialization of risk and the privatization of profit through giant governmental entities like Fannie Mae); and, of course, simple greed.

Does anyone honestly think China doesn’t have these problems ten times over? It has no free press, no democratic accountability, and no truly independent regulators.

Unemployed worker Wang Wenming was angry at his boss for shutting down a massive Chinese factory this week that made toys for Mattel Inc., Hasbro Inc. and other American companies.

But the assembly line worker was also furious at the United States.

“This financial crisis in America is going to kill us. It’s already taking food out of our mouths,” the 42-year-old laborer said Friday as he stood outside the shuttered Smart Union Group (Holdings) Ltd. factory in the southern city of Dongguan.

Sorry, buddy. We couldn’t help it.

The company, which has struggled as global growth has slowed in recent months, employed 7,000 people in mainland China and Hong Kong. It wasn’t immediately clear how many have lost their jobs.

Economic upheaval in the U.S. is already changing and shrinking China’s vast manufacturing hub in the southern province of Guangdong, long regarded as the world’s factory floor. However, factory closures won’t just be a China problem — shoppers will feel the effect in malls and stores in the U.S. and Europe.

“When these companies go bust, the outcome is higher prices,” said Andy Xie, an independent economist in Shanghai. “Labor costs have gone up 70 to 100 percent in the last three or four years. But these guys have not been able to raise their prices because Toys “R” Us, Home Depot and Wal-Mart are saying no price increase. How is that possible?”

For years, there were too many factories competing to win bids from foreign buyers demanding prices that were often unrealistically low. The winners were American and European consumers, who enjoyed rock-bottom prices.

But many factories were scrimping on materials and stiffing their suppliers just to survive, Xie said. The financial crisis will be the final culling factor that forces many wobbly factories to go belly up and end an unsustainable situation, he added.

Last May I bought a window air conditioner made in China  from Costco for $49.99. I wondered how anyone could possibly make a profit doing that.

Answer: they couldn’t. Inflation is on the way.

Peter Hitchens: 

…China’s cynical new version of imperialism in Africa is a wicked enterprise.

China offers both rulers and the ruled in Africa the simple, squalid advantages of shameless exploitation.

For the governments, there are gargantuan loans, promises of new roads, railways, hospitals and schools – in return for giving Peking a free and tax-free run at Africa’s rich resources of oil, minerals and metals.

For the people, there are these wretched leavings, which, miserable as they are, must be better than the near-starvation they otherwise face.

Persuasive academics advised me before I set off on this journey that China’s scramble for Africa had much to be said for it. They pointed out China needs African markets for its goods, and has an interest in real economic advance in that broken continent.

For once, they argued, a foreign intervention in Africa might work precisely because it is so cynical and self-interested. They said Western aid, with all its conditions, did little to create real advances in Africa, laughing as they declared: ‘The only country that ever got rich through donations is the Vatican.’

Why get so het up about African corruption anyway? Is it really so much worse than corruption in Russia or India?

Is it really our business to try to act as missionaries of purity? Isn’t what we call ‘corruption’ another name for what Africans view as looking after their families?

And what about China herself? Despite the country’s convulsive growth and new wealth, it still suffers gravely from poverty and backwardness, as I have seen for myself in its dingy sweatshops, the primitive electricity-free villages of Canton, the dark and squalid mining city of Datong and the cave-dwelling settlements that still rely on wells for their water.

After the murderous disaster of Mao, and the long chaos that went before, China longs above all for stable prosperity. And, as one genial and open-minded Chinese businessman said to me in Congo as we sat over a beer in the decayed colonial majesty of Lubumbashi’s Belgian-built Park Hotel: ‘Africa is China’s last hope.’

I find this argument quite appealing, in theory. Britain’s own adventures in Africa were not specially benevolent, although many decent men did what they could to enforce fairness and justice amid the bigotry and exploitation.

Robert Haddick compares the rise of modern China with Germany under Bismarck, raising the question of political stablity in Asia.

No economy has benefited more from today’s relatively open global trade and investment regime than China’s. With great success, China has pursued the export-driven growth strategy that Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan previously employed. And it is hard to find a major multinational corporation that has not attempted to stake a claim in China. Shouldn’t China’s deep integration with the global economy be enough to steer its leaders away from a reckless foreign policy?

The world economy was open and integrated in the years before World War I. Few restrictions on cross-border investment and trade existed. All of the major powers seemed to benefit from free trade and open investment policies. Yet such practices did not prevent the outbreak of the war.

In the case of today’s China, all indications are that China’s leaders do in fact want to focus on economic and social development. The massive migration of rural peasants from the interior to the coastal cities, combined with the winding up of many loss-making state-owned enterprises, means that China’s leadership must maintain a rapid pace of economic growth to smoothly absorb displaced workers into productive employment. For China to achieve this, it needs to maintain a high export growth rate and the importation of foreign technology, business practices, and direct investment.

Yet even if due only to accidents or misunderstandings, it is inevitable that frictions or confrontations with China will arise. It is always a good practice for statesmen to question their assumptions. Factors which seem to be logical deterrents from one culture’s perspective may be inoperative from another culture’s perspective under certain circumstances.

In his book Preventing Surprise Attacks: Intelligence Reform in the Wake of 9/11, Richard Posner examines the history of surprise attacks and what causes these attacks to be so surprising to the victims. Such attacks are surprising because the victims invariably considered the purpose of the attack, its target, and its method to be illogical, at least from the victim’s prior point of view. Dysfunctional intelligence and military bureaucracies have played a role as well. But the biggest culprit is usually that the victim was unable to see the world from the attacker’s perspective and was thus caught completely off guard. What the attacker considers to be the costs and benefits of the intended attack may differ greatly from the victim’s prior estimates, at least under certain circumstances.

There seems little doubt that China’s rise will disrupt Asia’s equilibrium. How China’s neighbors and the United States will respond remains uncertain because so much about China’s intentions—especially the purpose of its military buildup—remains uncertain.

Well, at least one American was gullible enough to believe what he saw on TV represented the true China.

Hugh Hewitt: 

Obama, earlier today:

Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics , Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure.  Their ports, their train systems, their airports are vastly the superior to us now, which means if you are a coporation deciding where to do business you’re starting to think, “Beijing looks like a pretty good option.”

I suppose so.  Provided you don’t mind de minimus pollution controls, employing people under Chinese labor conditions, and you don’t mind construction standards in the countryside that allow the collapse of thousands of buildings including schools when the earthquake hits, killing tens of thousands.

Obama has said a lot of stupid things recently, but the idea that totalitarian eye-candy engineering proves Beijing is the better than America is near the top of the list.

If Obama is concerned about making America a “good option” for corporations, he should reconsider his redistributionist tax policies.

Also, a naked summary of China’s infrastructure was the May 14 earthquake that killed 69,000 people, mostly because of crappy buildings that collapsed like houses of cards.

Sometimes, despite all the PR gloss you can apply, people and peoples reveal the reality of themselves.

Although China has come a long way in a short time, old police-state habits still linger. One irony of communism — touted to bring fairness to all the people — is its notorious inhumanity. Mao, either directly or indirectly, killed an estimated 40 million Chinese, yet his mug remains on public display.

So, from the People’s Republic of China we have this report:

Filmmaker Zhang Yimou, the ceremony’s director, insisted in an interview with local media that suffering and sacrifice were required to pull off the Aug. 8 opening, which involved wrangling nearly 15,000 cast and crew members. Only North Korea could have done it better, he said.

Now there’s a gold standard for you — dark, brutal and starving North Korea.

Performers have complained that they sustained injuries from slipping during rain-drenched rehearsals or fainting from heatstroke amid hours of training under the relentless summer sun.

Cheng and 2,200 other carefully chosen pugilist prodigies spent an average of 16 hours a day, every day, rehearsing a synchronized tai-chi routine involving high kicks, sweeping lunges and swift punches. They lived for three months in trying conditions at a restricted army camp on the outskirts of Beijing.

“We never went out during the time we were training,” Cheng, 20, told the AP in a phone interview. “Our school is quite strict. When we stay in school, we can’t go out on our own, let alone when we’re at a military camp.”Any sacrifice to prove to the world how, uh, modern China has become.

Zhang told the popular Guangzhou weekly newspaper Southern Weekend that only communist North Korea could have done a better job getting thousands of performers to move in perfect unison.

“North Korea is No. 1 in the world when it comes to uniformity. They are uniform beyond belief! These kind of traditional synchronized movements result in a sense of beauty. We Chinese are able to achieve this as well. Though hard training and strict discipline,” he said. Pyongyang’s annual mass games feature 100,000 people moving in lock step.

Maybe they’re just hoping to get fed.

Performers in the West, by contrast, need frequent breaks and cannot withstand criticism, Zhang said, citing his experience working on an opera performance abroad. Though he didn’t mention specific productions, Zhang directed an opera at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2006.

“In one week, we could only work four and a half days, we had to have coffee breaks twice a day, couldn’t go into overtime and just a little discomfort was not allowed because of human rights,” he said of the unidentified opera production.

“You could not criticize them either. They all belong to some organizations … They have all kind of institutions, unions. We do not have that. We can work very hard, can withstand lots of bitterness. We can achieve in one week what they can achieve in one month.”

In the Olympic ceremony segment showcasing the Chinese invention of movable type, the nearly 900 performers who crouched under 40-pound boxes donned adult diapers to allow them to stay inside for at least six hours, Beijing organizers said.

Power to the People!

Chicago Boyz:

The Chinese government have shown themselves to be bunch of peasants with dung on their boots when it comes to international propaganda. The term in Chinese is “tu bao tz” (土包子) – pork buns (bao tz) made out of dirt.

Forget Yang Pei Yi (楊沛宜) and Lin Miao Ke (林妙可) – well, mostly. Forget the CGI fireworks. Forget that the enormous number of people used in the opening ceremony were from PLA song and dance troupes.

The big scandal is that China is showing us just exactly why investment there is still risky; why the “golden opportunity” everyone seems to be thinking lurks in China’s market is as frail as a butterfly. The Chinese government still has its fingers in every aspect of society, and that makes the shift from stable to unstable business environment just a power struggle away.

The CCP wanted these games to showcase the “new” China. Instead, they’ve provided two wonderful examples of why the new China is the old China painted up like a Shanghai warlord’s aging mistress.

Take, for example, the fact that the decision maker for the Lin Miao Ke switcheroo was a member of the Politburo:

“The national interest requires that the girl should have good looks and a good grasp of the song and look good on screen,” Chen said. “Lin Miaoke was the best in this. And Yang Peiyi’s voice was the most outstanding.”

During a live rehearsal soon before the ceremony, the Politburo member said Miaoke’s voice “must change,” Chen said in the radio interview. He didn’t name the official.

Yah, I’ll bet he declined to name names. But Mr. Chen also let it be known that the decision was not his, keeping an eye on future political developments in case these Olympics are judged to be politically ineffective in a post-hoc analysis. That way of thinking is very, very Communist. I don’t see much evidence of a new China there, do you?

Imagine the press reaction if a government official had issued such an order in the West. Not to mention that the National OC would have told him to kiss off. Even in the more authoritarian democracies such as Japan or Korea, that kind of political meddling would not have flown. That is not to say that some art director would not have made the switch long before it came to rehearsal, it’s that the decision would not have been political. And sponsors in the West would have been keenly sensitive to criticism if a contest winner had been substituted at the last minute for a “cuter” version.

James Fallows of The Atlantic has been living in Beijing for two years. Air pollution there is horrendous, but the government has pledged to clear the air by the time the Olympics start. This involves shuttering factories for the duration and implementing traffic controls.

Fallows has been taking a photograph each day to monitor progress. This image is from today. For his full chronicle, go here.

First, the video.

What you see below debuted April 15 on a Chinese website. In its first week, it drew one million hits. The English spelling is awful and its message confused, but it’s a window into how some young Chinese think.

The New Yorker writes about the creator of the video and his generation.

Tang spends most of his time working on his dissertation, which is on Western philosophy. He specializes in phenomenology; specifically, in the concept of “intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre, among others. In addition to Chinese, Tang reads English and German easily, but he speaks them infrequently, so at times he swerves, apologetically, among languages.

He is working on his Latin and Ancient Greek. He is so self-effacing and soft-spoken that his voice may drop to a whisper. He laughs sparingly, as if he were conserving energy. For fun, he listens to classical Chinese music, though he also enjoys screwball comedies by the Hong Kong star Stephen Chow. He is proudly unhip. The screen name CTGZ is an adaptation of two obscure terms from classical poetry: changting and gongzi, which together translate as “the noble son of the pavilion.” Unlike some élite Chinese students, Tang has never joined the Communist Party, for fear that it would impugn his objectivity as a scholar.

Tang had invited some friends to join us for lunch, at Fat Brothers Sichuan Restaurant, and afterward we all climbed the stairs to his room. He lives alone in a sixth-floor walkup, a studio of less than seventy-five square feet, which could be mistaken for a library storage room occupied by a fastidious squatter. Books cover every surface, and great mounds list from the shelves above his desk. His collections encompass, more or less, the span of human thought: Plato leans against Lao-tzu, Wittgenstein, Bacon, Fustel de Coulanges, Heidegger, the Koran. When Tang wanted to widen his bed by a few inches, he laid plywood across the frame and propped up the edges with piles of books. Eventually, volumes overflowed the room, and they now stand outside his front door in a wall of cardboard boxes.

Tang slumped into his desk chair. We talked for a while, and I asked if he had any idea that his video would be so popular. He smiled. “It appears I have expressed a common feeling, a shared view,” he said.

So it seems.

“China was backward throughout its modern history, so we were always seeking the reasons for why the West grew strong,” Liu said. “We learned from the West. All of us who are educated have this dream: Grow strong by learning from the West.”

Well, we didn’t have Mao to kill off 40 million of us, as he did in China. And if we did, we wouldn’t be quoting him on patriotic videos.

Tang and his friends were so gracious, so thankful that I’d come to listen to them, that I began to wonder if China’s anger of last spring should be viewed as an aberration. They implored me not to make that mistake.

“We’ve been studying Western history for so long, we understand it well,” Zeng said. “We think our love for China, our support for the government and the benefits of this country, is not a spontaneous reaction. It has developed after giving the matter much thought.”

In fact, their view of China’s direction, if not their vitriol, is consistent with the Chinese mainstream. Almost nine out of ten Chinese approve of the way things are going in the country—the highest share of any of the twenty-four countries surveyed this spring by the Pew Research Center. (In the United States, by comparison, just two out of ten voiced approval.)

As for the more assertive strain of patriotism, scholars point to a Chinese petition against Japan’s membership in the U.N. Security Council. At last count, it had attracted more than forty million signatures, roughly the population of Spain. I asked Tang to show me how he made his film. He turned to face the screen of his Lenovo desktop P.C., which has a Pentium 4 Processor and one gigabyte of memory.

Lenovo is the Chinese company that bought IBM’s personal computer division – those imperialists!

“Do you know Movie Maker?” he said, referring to a video-editing program. I pleaded ignorance and asked if he’d learned from a book. He glanced at me pityingly. He’d learned it on the fly from the help menu. “We must thank Bill Gates,” he said.

When people began rioting in Lhasa in March, Tang followed the news closely. As usual, he was receiving his information from American and European news sites, in addition to China’s official media. Like others his age, he has no hesitation about tunnelling under the government firewall, a vast infrastructure of digital filters and human censors which blocks politically objectionable content from reaching computers in China. Younger Chinese friends of mine regard the firewall as they would an officious lifeguard at a swimming pool—an occasional, largely irrelevant, intrusion.

To get around it, Tang detours through a proxy server—a digital way station overseas that connects a user with a blocked Web site. He watches television exclusively online, because he doesn’t have a TV in his room. Tang also receives foreign news clips from Chinese students abroad. (According to the Institute of International Education, the number of Chinese students in the United States—some sixty-seven thousand—has grown by nearly two-thirds in the past decade.) He’s baffled that foreigners might imagine that people of his generation are somehow unwise to the distortions of censorship.

“Because we are in such a system, we are always asking ourselves whether we are brainwashed,” he said. “We are always eager to get other information from different channels.” Then he added, “But when you are in a so-called free system you never think about whether you are brainwashed.”

Tang is right: millions of Americans swallow the ideas of Big Baloney without ever realizing how one-sided it is.

Sharon Stone, best known for crossing her legs on camera, is a friend of the Dali Lama (or so she claims).

When asked abut the recent horrific earth quake in China, which has caused upwards of 50,000 dead and 5 million homeless, Stone smilingly described the event as ” karma” – payback for the Chinese not being nice to the Tibetans.

James Fallows, who lives in China:

I think if more Americans came to China right now and saw how hard so many of its people are struggling just to survive, they too might ask: What are we thinking, in considering China an overall threat? Yes, its factories are formidable, and its weight in the world is huge. But this is still a big, poor, developing nation trying to solve the emergency of the moment.

Susan Shirk, of the University of California at San Diego, recently published a very insightful book that calls China a “fragile superpower.” “When I discuss it in America,” she told me, “people always ask, ‘What do you mean, fragile?’” When she discusses it here in China, “they always ask, ‘What do you mean, superpower?’”

Mark Leonard in The Prospect:

I will never forget my first visit, in 2003, to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) in Beijing. I was welcomed by Wang Luolin, the academy’s vice-president, whose grandfather had translated Marx’s Das Kapital into Chinese, and Huang Ping, a former Red Guard. Sitting in oversized armchairs, we sipped ceremonial tea and introduced ourselves. Wang Luolin nodded politely and smiled, then told me that his academy had 50 research centres covering 260 disciplines with 4,000 full-time researchers.

As he said this, I could feel myself shrink into the seams of my vast chair: Britain’s entire think tank community is numbered in the hundreds, Europe’s in the low thousands; even the think-tank heaven of the US cannot have more than 10,000. But here in China, a single institution—and there are another dozen or so think tanks in Beijing alone—had 4,000 researchers. Admittedly, the people at CASS think that many of the researchers are not up to scratch, but the raw figures were enough.

At the beginning of that trip, I had hoped to get a quick introduction to China, learn the basics and go home. I had imagined that China’s intellectual life consisted of a few unbending ideologues in the back rooms of the Communist party or the country’s top universities. Instead, I stumbled on a hidden world of intellectuals, think-tankers and activists, all engaged in intense debate about the future of their country. I soon realised that it would take more than a few visits to Beijing and Shanghai to grasp the scale and ambition of China’s internal debates.

Even on that first trip my mind was made up—I wanted to devote the next few years of my life to understanding the living history that was unfolding before me. Over a three-year period, I have spoken with dozens of Chinese thinkers, watching their views develop in line with the breathtaking changes in their country. Some were party members; others were outside the party and suffering from a more awkward relationship with the authorities. Yet to some degree, they are all insiders. They have chosen to live and work in mainland China, and thus to cope with the often capricious demands of the one-party state.

Doug McIntyre:

FILTHY air, calcified traffic, run-amok developers, the Dodgers versus the Padres. Sounds like a typical Saturday afternoon in Los Angeles, but this isn’t SoCal, it’s NorChi; Beijing, to be precise – a fascinating and somewhat frightening megalopolis of 16million-plus.

I hitchhiked to China with the San Diego Padres and sponged off the Dodgers, all part of Major League Baseball’s China Series, the first ever big league games to be played in the People’s Republic. As a “Bong Chi” fan and as the host of the morning show on the Dodgers’ flagship station, I was curious to see how America’s game would be received in a country that has received so many American jobs and nearly countless billions in U.S. trade.

What I discovered instead was a capital city so overwhelming in scale it makes Los Angeles seem like a village.

The vastness of Beijing cannot be overstated. The dominant feature of the skyline is a chorus line of cranes lifting I-beams to the umpteenth floor of the umpteenth office tower springing up out of the dust-choked streets below.

If you thought the Grand Avenue project was grand, wait till you get a peek at Peking, sorry, Beijing. With only a little hyperbole, Beijing is jumping out of the soil like weeds after a spring rain. There are so many loose billions floating around Beijing, you have to wonder if we don’t have more communists in L.A. In Santa Monica it’s a no-brainer.

he enormity of the investment in China’s capital takes your breath away. And speaking of breath, the air comes in regular and super-chunk. Take the worst acrid smoke of the brush fires and lay that across the entire city of L.A. every single day, and you’ll have some idea of what it’s like in modern Beijing. The Chinese government is aware of the problem but considers pollution “growing pains.”

How the people feel about it in the “People’s Republic” is of little concern. And that leads to the other dominant feature of Beijing: The uniform presence of uniforms.

Police and soldiers stand watch on every corner, every public gathering spot. Soldiers prevented the Dodgers’ team bus from entering the stadium. Soldiers prevented Chan Ho Park from signing autographs. Soldiers prevent any sign of public protest in Tiananmen Square. At times there were so many soldiers it appeared their only job was to watch each other.

Our oldest boy is a soldier, and we couldn’t be prouder of him. But when soldiers become the dominant feature of the street, you quickly see them as oppressors rather than protectors. In L.A. we’re trying to figure out how to hire 1,000 new cops. In Beijing, they seem to have 1,000 cops per square mile.

There is such a thing as being too safe.

Brussels Journal:

The Financial Times reports that China is to introduce taxes on grain exports.

Exporters of 57 types of grain, including wheat, rice, corn and soya beans, will have to pay temporary taxes of between 5 and 25 per cent, the country’s Ministry of Finance said on Sunday.

We in the European Union are currently subsidizing the Common Agricultural Policy to the tune of dozens of billions a year, meanwhile China is introducing export taxes on grain… of up to 25%. Now the Chinese don’t do things by accident.

With grain prices in the UK doubling in the last 12 months, and their being a global shortage of food, expect that food inflation over the next year to leap. Of course this won’t just affect the price of bread and risotto. The largest cost in chicken, pig and cattle is fodder. Beer will go up even more.

As The Telegraph points out today,

This will be a global trend [...] but higher food costs too. In 2007, wheat prices doubled – with the price of other crops like cocoa and coffee also jumping.

Next year, the growing – and increasingly wealthy populations of the developing world will keep global food demand rising. Global supplies – hit by more droughts, floods and the increased use of land for bio-fuel production – will struggle to keep up.

That’s why, in 2008, high food prices will replace expensive oil as the bogeyman of Western consumers and central bankers. Because food accounts for a large portion of disposable incomes, escalating food prices will seriously dent consumer confidence next year, while preventing deep base rate cuts.

What does the the EU do? As Chris Booker states today, many of these problems are either caused or exacerbated by the European Union; a sclerotic conception which has an elderly system designed to deal with the like of Pharaoh’s dream of seven fat years, but utterly unprepared for his nightmare of seven years of fallow.