I heart China

As soon as I got to work this morning, I began receiving invites after invites on MSN messenger to add a "(red heart) China" next to my name on the messenger. Apparently people all over China are doing this today to show solidarity in face of foreign media's recent antagonism against China.

I didn't add the red heart to my name, feeling not particularly patriotic this week.

I read my friend Lisa's blog entry on her road trip in California. That made my heart aching for the Central Valley which I had driven through so many times. Yet when my friend Jeff skyped from San Francisco and asked when I would move back to the US, I said I couldn't yet; even if I could, there's all that jazz in Beijing that I couldn't leave behind.

In the evening I read another friend's blog entry on her husband's appeal being denied. It reminded me of my sister's ordeal two years ago. I noticed the drizzle that had lasted all day and realized that my heart had been damp too.

In the office at 10pm, two of my colleagues noticed my MSN messenger did not have enough red hearts.

"You are not patriotic enough," one girl giggled. Then she began talking with the other girl about how every single friend of theirs was doing the red heart China today, about how the foreigners so misunderstood China. "They think Chinese men still wear queues and Chinese people are very rude. Yet they have no idea how advanced China has progressed."

They nodded at each other in complete agreement.

I wanted to defend the clueless "foreigners" but I quickly remembered there exist too many clueless foreigners just like that. Moreover, I didn't want to get into one more argument about patriotism and the reason of my lack thereof.

I msn'ed with my sister before I left office at 11pm. She said I read the friend's blog too. She said I would have gone crazy if I were in her shoes. That hopelessness. That lawlessness. That rottenness beneath the surface.

I jumped into one of the cabs waiting outside the office building; cabs had better business at this hour for everyone working late pass 9pm could get their cab fare reimbursed by the company. The driver had a heavy Sichuanese accent. I asked if he was from Sichuan. He said yeah, are you? I said yes.

His Sichuanese accent was different from mine--though only a true Sichuanese would be able to tell that--still it made me feel close. I asked why he had travelled so far to drive a cab in Hangzhou. He said he'd been working in Hangzhou for 10 years as a migrant worker before cabbing. He said life now was much easier except for his messed up sleep schedule due to his night cab shift.

When I handed him my 10 yuan cab fare, he inquired with big smiles piled on his endearing wrinkled face: "Do you need a receipt of bigger sum for reimbursement?"

That made my heart warm--only a true compatriot would offer that chance to fleece the company! Living in China, I realized once again, gave me chances everyday to enjoy that closeness of my people, to tell the subtle differences in us being Chines--accents and all--and to love my people because we share the same blood despite the illusions of shiny gaming exterior and the jingoism much contrary to my taste.

I Heart China.

Shame

China jails rights activist outspoken on Tibet
By Chris Buckley
Guardian - UK

BEIJING, April 3 (Reuters) - A Buddhist Chinese dissident outspoken on Tibet and other sensitive topics was jailed for three-and-a-half years on Thursday, a conviction likely to become a focus of international rights campaigns ahead of the Beijing Olympics.

Hu Jia, 34, was found guilty of "inciting subversion of state power" for criticising the ruling Communist Party, a verdict at which the United States expressed dismay.
"In this Olympic year, we urge China to seize the opportunity to put its best face forward and take steps to improve its record on human rights and religious freedom," the U.S. Embassy said in a statement.

The official Xinhua news agency said Hu had made a "confession of crime and acceptance of punishment", leading the court to issue a relatively light sentence. Hu's two lawyers said he had acknowledged "excesses".

"In the end, I think that he came to accept that some of his statements were contrary to the law as it stands," said defence lawyer Li Jinsong.

"So to some extent he accepted the prosecution's allegations."

Hu has 10 days starting on Friday to decide whether to appeal, but Li said he was unlikely to do so. Hu could apply for medical release to treat a bad liver and other illnesses, the lawyer added.

The "inciting subversion" charge can attract a jail term of five years or longer, and before the hearing lawyer Li Fangping said a long sentence was likely. After the hearing he said he was unaware of any deal in return for the sentence.

Another Chinese dissident, Yang Chunlin, who called for human rights to take precedence over the Olympic Games, was sentenced to five years in jail in late March for the same crime.

Foreign reporters and diplomats were excluded from Hu's hearing but Xinhua gave details of the offences.

The court heard that from August 2006 to October 2007, Hu published articles on overseas-run Web sites, made comments in interviews with foreign media and "repeatedly instigated other people to subvert the state's political power and socialist system", Xinhua said.

In two Web site articles, one on law enforcement ahead of last year's Communisty Party Congress, and one entitled "One Country Doesn't Need Two Systems", Hu spread "malicious rumours and committed libel", Xinhua quoted the verdict as saying.
Dozens of well-wishers gathered outside the court to express support for Hu and rowdily air their own grievances.

"Hu Jia is a hero to us because he stood up to speak out, so we should also speak out," said one of them, Li Hai.

International human rights groups were quick to condemn the verdict.

"This verdict is a slap in the face for Hu Jia and a warning to any other activists in China who dare to raise human rights concerns publicly," said Mark Allison of Amnesty International.

"It also betrays promises made by Chinese officials that human rights would improve in the run-up to the Olympics."

WIFE UNDER HOUSE ARREST

Starting with advocacy for rural AIDS sufferers, Hu emerged as one of the nation's most vocal advocates of democratic rights, religious freedom and self-determination for Tibet, recently shaken by protests and a security crackdown.

"Hu spread malicious rumours, and committed libel in an attempt to subvert the state's political power and socialist system," the court said, according to Xinhua.
His conviction is likely to become a focus for critics of the Communist Party's strict controls on dissent and protest ahead of the Olympics in August.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice raised Hu's case when in Beijing in February, and the European Union and other Western governments have also pressed China on the matter.

Hu's relatively rapid trial suggested authorities wanted to get it out of the way well before the Games, said Joshua Rosenzweig of the Duihua Foundation, a San Francisco-based group that works to free Chinese political prisoners.

"I think a lot of people hoped that, given the damage that China's international image has suffered over the past few weeks, ... Hu would have been treated with more leniency," Rosenzweig said.

Hu was detained by police in late December after spending more than 200 days under house arrest in a Beijing apartment complex.

"I don't think that three-and-a-half years is actually all that light," said Rosenzweig. "Especially when you add in the two years of what amounts to illegal house arrest."

Hu's wife, Zeng Jinyan, who has also often criticised the Chinese government, and their infant daughter remain under house arrest and their telephone is cut off.
Zeng attended the hearing, emerging with her baby from the courthouse visibly upset before being whisked away in a police vehicle.
(Additional reporting by John Ruwitch in Hong Kong; Editing by Nick Macfie and Jerry Norton)

Paranoia

One day after I cursed the idiotic Olympics-induced paranoid that triggered the flight restriction to Beijing, I seethed again with anger at the security checkpoint at the Shanghai Hongqiao airport. I had traveled by train from Hangzhou to Shanghai in order to catch a flight back to Beijing, for ever. Now the guards were taking forever examining my toilettery bag, opening and sniffing at everything, the toothpast tube, the tiny cologne bottle, the hair gel jar, and even my dental floss pack.

"You have to check in this jar because it's over the size limit," I was told by this particularly fastidious female guard who held my hair gel jar with outstretched arms as if it was radioactive.

After they wrote down the details of that jar in a record book, I was escorted to the exit leading back to the check-in area. It felt like 911 all over again.

At the check-in counter, while the pretty attendant attached the baggage tag to my duffle bag, I asked in exasperation what had caused this...carefulness. The upcoming Olympics? The unrest in Tibet?

"Earlier this month some terrorists brought a bottle of gasoline onto a flight from Xinjiang to blow up the plane," The attendant smiled at me sweetly. "Ever since then it became really strict."

"Were they Ughigur?"

"Of course."

With the Ughigur terrorists and the Tibetan riot, the government's paranoid doesn't seem so idiotic after all.

The Tibetans

I'm so swamped with work in Hangzhou that I've been almost oblivious to the heated media war between China and the West over the reporting of the recent riot in Lhasa. Only through reading my friends' blogs did I realize that it's actually a BIG deal out there. (Of the few I read, Rebecca's post here I found most close to how I feel.)

Honestly though, I don't understand what the big deal is--don't we know already that media, Chinese or Western, tend to write stories to fit their editorial bias? That the Western media tend to find some particular "Chinese" angles in their reporting? And that our beloved country tends to gloss over, intentionally or unintentionally, the historical wrongs done to ethnic minorities?

My first memory of meeting Tibetans was during a train ride at the beginning of the 1990s. I was in college then and they were highschool students coming home to Sichuan from Beijing. They were chatty sunny-looking kids who genuinely appreciated the chance attending better schools in the big Han cities--there's an entire program of that sponsored by the government. They said that they did not want to go back to their hometowns after schooling. They were eager, like most other people in China, for big-city life ("cultural genocide" was obviously not in their consciousness).

My second encounter with anyone Tibetan was in the mid 1990s in Boston. I was hanging out at Harvard Square. My Chinese friends were excitedly waving little Chinese national flags, waiting for the then-President Jiang Zemin to show up visiting Harvard. Exile Tibetans and Taiwanese were staging protests. Someone pushed a flag into my hand. I wandered by a protest stage. A couple of young Tibetans jumped at me. They yelled--Stupid Chinese, Don't You Ever Show That Stupid Flag of Yours at My Face! I yelled back--This Is America!

For many years after I could not forgive the Tibetans. Perhaps because of that close encounter. Or perhaps because I had an ex who's a Tibetan Buddhist Scholar absolutely loving everything Tibetan. I considered that too--as Lisa Simpson once famously said-- alternative in a mainstream sort of way.

Anyway, after my ex's constant brainwash over a few years, I stopped arguing that there's no ethnic bias towards the Tibetans because Chinese suffered harsh fate as well in the Cultural Revolution. I stopped getting into a fit each time my ex criticized China over Tibetan issues even though I was still pissed.

In the Spring 2004, I ran back to China. In Gansu I visited Xiahe, a big Tibetan town. I met a great Tibetan guy there who took me to visit his wife and his new-born baby girl in the hospital, and then his uncle who's a lama at the Labrang Monastery. They made me sweet Tibetan cakes in the lama's residence.

For a few years afterwards I cherished that sweet memory of Tibetan cakes in Labrang. Like all new-agey Chinese, I woo'ed and ahh'ed at everything spiritually Tibetan.

Then in the Spring of 2006, I met this young armed police guard of Mongolian ethnicity who came from Tianshui, another big Tibetan autonomous region in the Gansu province. He told me rough stories of growing up in that rough outpost region where the only high school in town was divided into two halves--Han and Tibetan. He studied with the Han Chinese who were constantly bullied and robbed by the knife-carrying Tibetan students.

The two sides constantly fought in school yards and in dorm rooms. One night during a particular nasty fight, the biggest Tibetan bully stabbed a broken beer bottle into the waist of a Han friend of the Mongolian kid. The Han kid spent months in the hospital. His friends, including my young Mongolian guard, sought revenge and ambushed the Tibetan bully one night. They beat the shit of him, and then they ran out of town.

The Mongolian guard said that before then, he had excelled in school and he had a beautiful sweetheart in the same class. That incident changed his life--he labored at an airport in Lanzhou before being dragged home by his uncle. The family sent him to the armed police to get him out of trouble. There went his dream of attending university with his beautiful sweetheart.

He told me that his raison-d'etre was to go back and to kill that Tibetan bully one day. His life had been completely ruined in that fateful night, by a swift thrust of a beer bottle held in the hands of a Tibetan. At my repeated requests not to kill, he would reply that he had his Mongolian pride to keep.

The moral of my drawn-out story? That people are stupid and we are all messed up.

So once again, I don't understand how the media and the media consumers can get so worked up over something--the Tibetan-Han relationship--that defies the line between black and white. I find myself again blaming both sides, which ends up feeling like hopelessly defending both sides.

It's complex. So... Am I being too indecisive?

Then at 5pm this afternoon, we got a mass email from the company HR: "Due to the upcoming Olympics, CAAC has decreased the number of flights to Beijing in order to cut down on traffic to the Capital. Please book your flight 4-5 days in advance if you need to travel to Beijing for business."

Ok, here's something so idiotic that there's no defending for it--at least not in my rush to feel decisively opinionated at something.