Foundinchina.com

Well well! Whatever next? The king of martial arts mayhem has developed a latent tendency for brown-nosing by making some CCP-esque comments about freedom in China:

“I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not,” Chan said. “I’m really confused now. If you’re too free, you’re like the way Hong Kong is now. It’s very chaotic. Taiwan is also chaotic.”

Chan added: “I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled. If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want.”

Secretly, Chan has clearly always fancied himself as a tank driver. He’d have done a great job 20 years ago. 

Thankfully, those pesky, anarchic students in Hong Kong have got a different, less anally oriented message for China’s leaders: be accountable; do it now!

Students at a Hong Kong university have called for the Chinese government to be held accountable for events in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago.

The booklet will now be made, after students from eight universities in Hong Kong criticised what they said were efforts to suppress freedom of speech.

Only 79 out of almost 2,000 students in the University of Hong Kong students’ union voted against the motion.

Correspondents say the result shows the continued strength of feeling about the killings in Tiananmen Square.

The university vote has garnered a lot of local media attention, especially during this sensitive period for Beijing in the run-up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests.

“We have had lots of discussion at the university and have realised there is a lot of diversity of views,” said Vincent Fok, council chairman in the students’ union.

He said Hong Kong students were more well-informed about the events than their counterparts from the mainland.

The union leader, Ayo Chan Yi-ngok, is under pressure after saying that some student leaders in the 1989 protest had acted irrationally.

At the City University, a plan to issue a booklet about the Tiananmen Square protests was initially quashed by students who said the 1989 events were of little relevance.

Gotta be proud of those HK students as the CCP net draws tighter around them.

On a related note People’s Daily (what a crappy name for a dictator’s mouthpiece) is censoring the names Zhao Ziyang and Hu Yaobang. That’s what happens when a child’s mind controls the media.

Update

Predictably, there has been a backlash from people in Taiwan and Hong Kong (at whom Chan’s comments were directed) against Chan’s support for state repression. Silly bugger; I could have told him it’s a bad idea to upset your fan base. Need a new PR man, Jackie?

There’s a very intelligent discussion going on at cnreviews following Kai Pan’s article on this story. He is basically taking issue with the ‘western media take’ on Chan’s remarks. It’s well worth a read, as are the comments that follow, even if I can’t quite agree with his angle.

Let’s give credit where credit’s due: there’s absolutely no discrimination in China. None whatsoever.

It doesn’t matter whether you are:

• rich or poor
• male or female
• able-bodied or disabled
• black or white
• tall or short
• Christian or atheist
• young or old  

… you’re still going to get the crap beaten out of you if dare to make the simplest of gestures in remembrance of one of the CCP’s few good men. That link is a report from the BBC that is no doubt sending a few ripples of alarm through the ranks of those that live in the hope (myself included) that it will one day be the CCP that initiates an act of remembrance and respect. Here’s what happened:

A 75-year old Chinese academic is in hospital after receiving what he called a brutal beating at a cemetery.

“Five minutes after I went in, five strong men suddenly appeared. They punched and kicked me until I fell to the ground and could not move any more. I’m 75 years old, you know,” he said.

Sun Wenguang said he had been trying to pay his respects to the late communist leader Zhao Ziyang, who was purged for supporting the 1989 Tiananmen protests.

Mr Sun, 75, had visited Mr Zhao’s grave annually, but this year marks the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown.

The Chinese government treats its crushing of pro-democracy protests on Tiananmen Square as taboo.

“I still can’t move now. I’m just lying in bed. What they did was audacious and unprincipled. Very savage. Especially as they did it to me before thousands of people,” Mr Sun said from a hospital in Shandong’s Jinan city.

“They wanted to punish me and let people know that Zhao Ziyang is not allowed to be memorialised,” he claimed.

He said he had suffered three broken ribs and injuries to his hands and legs in the attack at the Revolutionary Martyrs Cemetery in Jinan on Saturday.

More here from the NYT.

It beggars belief that the man with the megaphone in this famous picture from 1989, a voice of moderation doing his best to persuade crowds to disperse in order to prevent the bloodshed that followed, should be so feared by China’s regime. He was a good man that actually lent credibility and respect to the Communist Party. When is Chinese insecurity over the Tiananmen issue going to end?

This was a truly appalling, and clearly CCP-sanctioned, act of brutality.

Economical with his anniversaries?

It’s going to be a big year of anniversaries for China, as Jonathan Fenby  wrote in his article for the Guardian yesterday. In the great Chinese tradition of rote learning and the reduction of history to a politically tolerable list of names, dates, and events, it is also likely to be a year of selective memory for Chinese leaders.

Here are a few salient points from Fenby’s article:

History is still an intensely political matter in China but can, by its nature, be hard to control in the popular memory.

The echoes from the past are evident, from the central-provincial relationship to Tibet, from corruption to top-down rule and from regime legitimacy to the current harassment of signatories of the Charter 08 petition calling for greater political freedom.

…The approved version is written by those on top. Inconvenient events are either air-brushed out or presented in a stylised manner to fit current needs, as in the insistence that by crushing the 1989 protests the party and the army served the interests of the people.

…Hu’s personal link with the suppression in 1989 and the presence of his lieutenants in the territory’s administration increase the stakes. The crackdown on the Charter 08 movement has shown how concerned the politburo still is with dissent, however peaceful.

Holding up a distorting mirror to the past can be a tricky exercise when present realities provide a more challenging narrative. The snag for Hu Jintao and his colleagues is that they have only one version of history to present in this year of anniversaries, even if it is one that does not withstand examination.

The article is well worth reading in full.

Although Fenby is undoubtedly correct in saying that the version of history likely to be presented by Chinese leaders this year is not going to be one that can “withstand examination”, the real issue lies in the suppression of peoples’ will to examine in the first place.

It’s not that questioning, investigation, and scrutiny of the official word are uniquely western predilections, but rather that the scope and insistence of Beijing’s ‘message’ has rendered mute the voice of domestic inquiry. Indeed, the present wave of nationalistic fervour has strengthened opposition to those who would dare examine Chinese history without CCP blinkers. 

To this end the Chinese leadership are sitting comfortably, safe in the knowledge that any attempts by journalists, bloggers, historians, or intellectuals to present a more balanced view (or discussed at all on some issues) can be effectively spun as ‘western propaganda aimed at stifling China’s rise’. 

That is not to say there are no brave individuals in China willing to speak out against their repressive regime, or that non-Chinese commenters should give up their critiques of a government that stunts the intellectual growth of a nation by refusing to allow alternative viewpoints.

It is to be hoped that the growing number of seasoned, well-informed commenters among the expat community in China will lend their talents to a more open and objective discussion of 2009′s anniversaries, such that, several decades from now, we might one day be celebrating the anniversary of end of closed historical debate in China.

One such commenter, Jeremiah Jenne of the excellent Jottings from the Granite Studio, regularly writes ‘on this day in history’ articles for his site. They are always well-researched, well-balanced, and well-written. As a Qing historian teaching and researching his PhD thesis in Beijing, his writing also offers a fascinating insight into the historical record as it relates to China.

There’s certainly no shortage of important dates to keep him occupied in 2009, and they will be a must read for anyone with even a passing interest in this year’s anniversaries.

Today’s editorial from the Guardian:

After a thaw during the Olympics, China’s reimposition of censorship on websites run by the BBC and other news organisations is a matter of international concern. The relaxation may have been an opportunistic response to the protests of western journalists, never intended as a permanent change. Web censorship inevitably gets more publicity than China’s equally serious internal clampdown on dissent such as Charter 08′s call for multiparty elections and the protection of human rights. But this does not alter the fact that China’s repressive policies towards bodies such as the BBC and the New York Times are self-defeating and wrong. China’s economy has benefited greatly from the free flow of trade. The country has very ambitious plans to use the internet to attract western buyers to purchase Chinese goods directly from domestic websites instead of shops in London and New York. In this way China could capture the profit margins arising from transportation, wholesaling and retailing at considerable cost to western economies.

That is all very well, but China cannot have it both ways: taking advantage of the internet and a liberal trading regime to increase exports to the west, while setting up firewalls to keep the flow of information from the west out of its sphere. Freedom in this sense really is indivisible. The rot set in when the likes of Yahoo and Google yielded to Chinese pressure by agreeing to censor politically unacceptable content. Google claims that it is better for the Chinese to get filtered information than none at all and, creditably, it at least points out what data is being censored.

China’s web community is quite vibrant and inventive, often re-posting content when censors remove it, using technology to view banned sites, or employing analogies or homonymic characters. But they are countered by China’s army of technology-savvy censors and spin doctors. Buckling down to China’s restrictive rules gave a spurious respectability to such activities without helping Google much since Baidu, its Chinese equivalent, still has 70% of the search market.

China is a huge economic success story. Even now when GDP growth is expected to drop to 7% or less, with all that that implies for unemployment and social unrest, it is still expanding far faster than nearly all competing economies. But with success comes responsibility. Chinese President Hu Jintao marked 30 years of national reform last week by announcing: “There’s no way for us to turn back.” The BBC and the other news organisations should be used as a litmus test of China’s ambitions to carry on going forward. The trading of words is even more important than the trading of goods.

Couldn’t have put it better.