The bum's rush out of Kashgar

Kashgar, China - I was in deep sleep when I heard someone ringing the doorbell of my room at the Tian Yuan Hotel. I looked at the clock, saw it was only 8 a.m. and rolled over to go back to sleep. Whoever it was could come back later. There was a “do not disturb” sign hanging in the door.

The bell rang again, then a third time. If it was housekeeping, they obviously thought some sort of emergency cleaning needed to be done.

Groggily, I put my glasses on and opened the door a crack. A short man in a red shirt peered back earnestly. He told me he was from the local government, and that I had to leave the city on an 11 a.m. flight. There were four other men in the hall, two of them in blue police uniforms.

“I'm sorry, but the security situation is not good,” the man in red told me. “You must leave the city for your own safety.”

I told him that I had a flight back to Urumqi the following morning. (I had been in the city for less than 24 hours, reporting on the local government's plan to demolish most of Kashgar's historic Old City.) The man in red seemed to know this already.

“No, you must leave today,” he said firmly, shaking his head.

Arrangements had been made for me to be on the 11 a.m. flight out.

After awkwardly gobbling down my breakfast under the supervision of two police officers, I was taken to the lobby where Elizabeth Dalziel, a photographer with the Associated Press, was already waiting with her own security entourage. Together we were driven to the airport and instructed to book flights back to Urumqi.

That's when it descended into farce. Elizabeth and I sat down and waited for the security men who were escorting us to buy us tickets and put us on a plane. That's how it goes in the movies after all.

But the security guys did nothing for the sort. They stood at the other end of the ticket counter from us, expectantly us to buy our own way back to the provincial capital, Urumqi. (Why they thought we'd be “safer” in Urumqi – where 156 people died in riots this week – than Kashgar was never explained. The best answer I got was from the man in red, who said that while Kashgar appeared safe, that “it could change at any second.”) The 11 a.m. flight took off without us, and the standoff dragged on.

The police instructed Elizabeth and I to buy tickets for the next flight out, just after 2 p.m. We called the Department of Foreign Affairs in Beijing, as well as the government media office in Urumqi, looking for clarification of our situation.

Were we under arrest? If not, could we return to the city? Why hadn't we been put on a plane, as the man in red said we would be?

Revealingly, the answers were different depending on which government department we called. Officials in Beijing had no idea we had been detained or why. The propaganda officials in Urumqi – who had made a show of being accommodating to the media this week, a clean break from a year ago when foreign journalists were completely barred from Tibet in the wake of riots there – told us that the officers in Kashgar had made a mistake and that we were free to go.

We passed that on to the officers guarding us, who retorted that they had been ordered to take us to the airport, and that those orders hadn't changed. An official from the local government promised to come out and mediate the situation, but never showed up.

“It's not possible to arrange interviews today,” she said. “You should leave.”

Even if we wanted to, we couldn't have. After the 11 a.m. flight, commercial air traffic in and out of Kashgar was stopped, apparently so that a succession of military planes could land and offload more troops.

Though Xinjiang is Chinese soil, both Urumqi and Kashgar have the feel of occupied cities this week.

Elizabeth got frustrated and – noticing that our guards had long since stopped paying attention us – made a daring run into the city to photograph afternoon prayers at one of the city's many mosques.

She was eventually found by police and brought back to the airport. Our fates were sealed, so rather than spend the night in Kashgar Airport, we gave up and bought tickets to the next flight out to Urumqi.

What happened in Kashgar today that they didn't want the foreign media to see?

To the best of my knowledge, nothing major. But with foreign journalists kicked out of the city, the Internet switched off and international calls blocked, we may never know for sure.

Climate change and Japan: Lost in perspiration

Tokyo, Monday, July 6, 2009 - As I sat facing the Foreign Minister of Japan in a boardroom adjacent to his downtown Tokyo office last week, I felt a bead of sweat form on my forehead. Trying to look as calm and sophisticated as possible, I reached up and dabbed at it with a tissue, but it was soon replaced by others.

The more I thought about it – more specifically, the more I thought about trying not to sweat – the damper I got. Soon, my body was a rain forest.

Was I nervous? Perhaps, though the interview could hardly be called highly charged, given that I'd been requested to submit the questions I would ask weeks ahead of time. Foreign Minister Hirofumi Nakasone wasn't so much responding to my queries as he was reciting answers off a sheet that had been prepared for him by aides.

It could have been the three-piece suit I was wearing. If I was ever waterboarded in Guantanamo Bay, my interrogators would quickly find out that one of the reasons I became a foreign correspondent was to avoid having to wear a suit and tie every day. My wife swears that my mood changes for the worse – and I start to sweat – as soon as I have that extra piece of cloth around my neck.

But the biggest reason I was sweating is that it was 28 degrees inside the central Tokyo building that hosts Japan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Four years ago, as Japan (like nearly every other industrialized country) lagged behind the greenhouse gas emission reduction targets set out for it in the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, Environment Minister Yuriko Koike made a decision that lands somewhere between the visionary and the sadistic: Tokyo would slash energy use by decreeing that thermostats in government departments could never be set lower than 28 C.

Businesses were urged to set the same standard and many did. By the end of the year the government had a genuine success in the fight against global warming to crow about. In 2005, the Cool Biz campaign, as it became known, was estimated to have resulted in a 460,000-tonne reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide, a number equivalent to that emitted by one million households in one month. The next year was even better: a 1.14 million-tonne reduction in carbon dioxides, equivalent to 2.5 million households for one month.

Cool Biz also set off a sartorial revolution in Japan (one that no one bothered to inform your correspondent about) as instinctively formal businessmen and government officials were forced to ditch their jackets and ties or sweat to death. That said, at least two government officials I met last week had ties that they sheepishly pulled out of their pockets whenever the occasion demanded.

All of which makes Japan's recent dithering over climate change a bit hard to fathom. Prime Minister Taro Aso enraged environmentalists last month by setting a new emissions-reduction target that many felt falls short of what Japan is capable of. The way Japan presented the new number – a 15 per cent cut over the next 11 years – sounded impressive enough, but put up against the Kyoto Treaty baseline of 1990 emission levels, it translates into only an 8 per cent cut from that point, or barely beyond the 6 per cent reduction that Japan and many other countries have already committed to back in 1997.

When I asked Hirofumi Nakasone, the Foreign Minister, about the international reaction to his government's new targets, he politely retorted that Japan was still a leader in the climate-change fight and that what the world needed post-Kyoto was a new climate change pact that bound rapidly developing countries such as China and India (who got a pass in 1997) to make reductions as well. He mercifully avoided reminding me that Canada was recently named the country that has done the least to reduce emissions of any in the G-8 (Japan came fifth).

Still, coming from the government that hosted Kyoto, Nakasone's point-the-finger-at-others defence had me wondering how serious Japan really is in 2009 about curbing carbon emissions.

I'd hate to think I got all hot and sweaty for nothing.

The ‘Anonymous Netizen’ declares war on Beijing

Beijing, Thursday, June 25, 2009 - It has, until now, been a one-sided fight. For years, the censors employed by the Chinese government have launched wave after wave of attacks against China’s vibrant online community, blocking access to websites, shutting down discussions and sending police to deal in person with those who get too chirpy online for Beijing’s liking.

The war on what are known as China’s “netizens” has escalated in recent months. First, it announced a sweeping crackdown on Internet pornography that also had the side benefit of shutting down websites better known for hosting dissident bloggers and lively political discussions. Popular sites such as YouTube, Blogspot and Wordpress were among the sites barred.

Earlier this month, the Chinese government moved to block Twitter, and all its edgy Tweeting about the 20th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

The net result is infuriating. Often, I find myself swearing at the computer screen as attempts to do simple research are blocked by the net nannies. Even blogs about my beloved Edmonton Oilers often fall on the wrong side of the Great Firewall of China. Instead of gossip about this weekend’s NHL draft, all I get is the familiar notice: “The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”

Like many Internet-savvy Chinese, I can get around the blocks using a virtual private network. But many of China’s 298 million Internet users are believed to lack the know-how, or the funds, to circumnavigate the Great Firewall.

Pressing its case – and perhaps seeking to close the VPN loophole – Beijing recently announced that all personal computers sold in the country after July 1 would include a creepily named software package known as Green Dam Youth Escort that would spare the censors some work by blocking a lot of websites itself. Beijing has since backed down somewhat, but you get the sense that the relative freedoms many Chinese enjoy online is something the government will continue to craft ways to restrict.

This morning, the Chinese version of Google, google.cn, was blocked, again as part of the stated effort to crack down on Internet pornography. Google responded meekly by saying it would do what it could to comply with China’s new demands, which include that it prevent Chinese surfers from accessing foreign-based websites.

Others were not so willing to take the latest assault lying down. Within hours of the Google block, an angry cry dubbed the “2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens” began circulating on the Chinese Internet.

Here it is, in a translation provided by www.shanghaiist.com . It you want to see the original page in Chinese, click here.

2009 Declaration of the Anonymous Netizens

To the Internet censors of China,

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We have seen your moves on the Internet. You have deprived your netizens of the freedom of speech. You have come to see technology as your mortal enemy. You have clouded and distorted the truth in collaboration with Party mouthpieces. You have hired commentators to create the "public opinion" you wanted to see. All these are etched into our collective memory. More recently, you forced the installation of Green Dam on the entire population and smothered Google with vicious slander. It is now clear as day: what you want is the complete control and censorship of the Internet. We hereby declare that we, the Anonymous Netizens, are going to launch our attack worldwide on your censorship system starting on July 1st, 2009.

For the freedom of the Internet, for the advancement of Internetization, and for our rights, we are going to acquaint your censorship machine with systematic sabotage and show you just how weak the claws of your censorship really are. We are going to mark you as the First Enemy of the Internet. This is not a single battle; it is but the beginning of a war. Play with your artificial public opinion to your heart's content, for you will soon be submerged in the sea of warring netizens. Your archaic means of propaganda, your epithets borrowed straight from the Cultural Revolution era, your utter ignorance of the Internet itself - these are the tolls of your death bell. You cannot evade us, for we are everywhere. Violence of the state cannot save you - for every one of us that falls, another ten rises. We are familiar with your intrigues. You label some of us as the "vicious few" and dismiss the rest of us as unknowing accomplices; that way you can divide and rule. Go ahead and do that. In fact, we encourage you to do that; the more accustomed you are to viewing your netizens this way, the deeper your self-deception.

You are trying in vain to halt the wheels of history. Even with your technocratic reinforcements, you will not understand the Internet in the foreseeable future. We congratulate you on your adherence to your Cultural-Revolution style conspiracy theories in your dealings with dissent; for we too get nostalgic at times. We toast to your attempts to erect a Great Wall among your netizens, for such epic folly adds spice to any historical narrative. Still, there's something we feel obliged to tell you.

NOBODY wants to topple your regime. We take no interest whatsoever in your archaic view of state power and your stale ideological teachings. You do not understand how your grand narrative dissipated in the face of Internetization. You do not understand why appealing to statism and nationalism no longer works. You cannot break free from your own ignorance of the Internet. Your regime is not our enemy. We are not affiliated in any way with any country or organization, and we are not waging this war on any country or organization, not even on you. YOU are waging this war on yourself. YOU are digging your own grave through corruption and antagonization. We are not interested in you, destined for the sewage of history. You cannot stop the Internetization of the human race. In fact, we won't bat an eyelid even if you decide to sever the transpacific information cables in order to obtain the total control you wanted. The harder you try to roll back history, the more you strain the already taut strings, and the more destructive their final release. You are accelerating your own fall. The sun of tomorrow does not shine on those who are fearing tomorrow itself.

We are the Anonymous Netizens. We are the sum of the world's entire online population. We are coordinated. We are dominant. We are innumerable. For every one of us that falls, another ten joins. We are omnipresent. We are omnipotent. We are unstoppable. We have no weaknesses. We utilize every weakness. We are the humanity under every mask. We are the mirrors of conscience. We are created equal. We are born free. We are an army. We do not forgive. We do not forget.

LIBERTY LEADS THE INTERNET.

WE'RE COMING.

TWEET! China blocks Twitter

BEIJING – One minute, I was marveling at all the free-flowing chatter on Twitter about the looming anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. There were links being posted to information about that day that has never been shown in China’s state-controlled media. A campaign encouraging Chinese to wear white, a colour of mourning, on Thursday was spreading tweet by tweet.

I found myself wondering how long it would be allowed to continue.

Then I hit the refresh button and a far-too-familiar message appeared on my computer screen: “The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading. The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again.”

The Great Firewall of China has grown again. Forty-eight hours ahead of the most sensitive date on the Chinese calendar, a host of popular websites, including photo-sharing site Flickr.com, search engines Livesearch.com and Bing.com (Microsoft’s answer to Google), as well as Hotmail, are all suddenly inaccessible, in addition to Twitter.com.

Video-sharing site YouTube and blogger portals Wordpress and Blogspot have already been blocked for weeks.

No one needed to tell Chinese Twitterers why the crackdown on free expression happened at the start of June.

“Isn’t it rather obvious why? Because of certain events that transpired just shy of 20 years ago,” wrote Kaiser Kuo, a well-known Beijing-based Twitterer who identifies himself as a guitarist, writer and a father of two. “Hopefully this will pass after the [expletive] sensitive date.”

“I believe that this website is closed because of two days of later -- June 4,” chimed in Zuola, a popular Chinese blogger whose own page also falls on the wrong side of the Great Firewall, but who had still been managing to reach a wide audience through Twitter.

Earlier this year, China announced that it now had 298 million Internet users, more than any other country. An estimated 70 million Chinese have personal blogs, forcing a government used to having complete control over the flow of information to adopt new tactics. But China’s Internet community has been learning and adapting just as fast.

Many of the Chinese on Twitter were quickly back to tweeting as normal within minutes of the new block, logging on through virtual private networks to go around the censors. However, less web-savvy Chinese (and those unable to afford the cost of a VPN) will no longer be able to read what they write. Nor will they be able to see pictures posted on Flickr, or use their Hotmail accounts.

The move appears part of a wider effort to censor media ahead of Thursday’s anniversary. The hard copy of the South China Morning Post that I get delivered from Hong Kong has stopped arriving in recent days, although the International Herald Tribune that gets delivered by the same company keeps coming through.

BBC World television goes off the air each time one of their anchors tries to introduce a piece about the anniversary. They’re getting slow on the trigger finger though, I actually caught a brief glimpse of Tank Man the famous unknown rebel who stood alone in front of a row of tanks in 1989, on BBC today before the screen went blank.

The government also seems to have moved to silence well-known dissidents ahead of the anniversary. Bao Tong, a former top Communist Party official whom I recently interviewed for The Globe and Mail was taken from his home today by security agents and reportedly driven to his home village in southern Zhejiang province. Ding Zilin, head of the Tiananmen Mothers organization (I also interviewed her for my piece this weekend about today’s generation of Chinese students), was also told to leave the city, and phones at her apartment rang busy all day.

All this over an anniversary that many loudly insist is a non-event. "The party and the government long ago reached a conclusion about the political incident that took place at the end of the 1980s and related issues," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told a news conference today.

No question there. The party and the government are decided.

But today they don’t seem quite so certain about the people.

Addendum: An interesting little moment developing that may say something about the futility of trying to censor the Internet in 2009.

"China blocks Twitter" is now the No. 3 topic on Twitter, behind only "Air France" and "goodsex."

Number 8 is the conversation this was meant to squelch: "Tiananmen." (http://twitpic.com/6gqvl)

Change, all of a sudden, in Mongolia

Beijing - Amid all the alarming news about North Korea’s recent nuclear test and the reflections on the Tiananmen Square massacre of 20 years ago this week, a little piece of promising news from this region got far less attention than it deserved.

Last Sunday, June 24, some 1.1 million Mongolians, or nearly three-quarters of all eligible voters, went to the polling stations. It was the country’s sixth presidential election since the country left the Soviet Union’s orbit and embraced multi-party politics in 1990 and this time around, another milestone was reached: a candidate other than the leader of the Mongolian Peoples’ Revolutionary Party won.

Following a hard-fought campaign, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj of the opposition Democratic Party won 51 per cent of the vote, ousting incumbent Nambariin Enkhbayar of the MPRP. And while the MPRP’s narrow victory in parliamentary elections a year ago had sparked deadly riots amid accusations of electoral fraud, there was no violence this time around or allegations of improprieties this time around.

Mr. Enkhbayar, whose party has dominated Mongolia politics for nearly 90 years, gracefully conceded defeat even before the final results were officially announced. The street parties began soon afterwards.

The vote was hailed as “free and peaceful” by the U.S. State Department. “This election is a clear demonstration of Mongolia’s continued commitment to democratic reform and represents a real achievement for such a young democracy,” spokesman Ian Kelly said in a statement. Even more remarkable was the fact that Mongolia’s democratic evolution has happened despite the fact the country is wedged between Russia and China, two giants somewhat less concerned with the will of the people.

Those who observed the process up close were just as impressed. “The riots last year had everyone a little worried. Here was the one country in the region that was seemingly doing very well in terms of building democracy and institutions – compared with everything else going on in Asia – and suddenly maybe that wasn’t the case. This election really reassured everyone,” said Julian Dierkes, an assistant professor at the Institute of Asia Research at the University of British Columbia who was on the ground in Mongolia as a monitor last week.

There is, unsurprisingly, a whiff of big-power politics in all this. Though Mongolia was never formally part of the old USSR, its political scene is very similar to that in former republics like Ukraine, Georgia and parts of Central Asia, with one party (in Mongolia’s case, the MPRP) seen as aligned with Russia and the other (Elbegdorj’s Democratic Party) closer to the United States. The early analysis is that the Mongolia’s new president will try and decrease the country’s reliance on Moscow by upping ties with the U.S., Europe and Canada. (China is also increasingly a player in Mongolia’s business scene, but until now has played only a background role in the political struggle.) All that aside, no one but the Mongolians cast their vote last week, and they now appear to have chosen a Democratic Party president who will have veto power over an MPRP-controlled parliament. Now all they have to do is work together to deliver on voters’ hopes that they can lead the country out of endemic poverty.

Despite opening its mining sector and signing lucrative deals with international firms, one-third of Mongolians live below the poverty line.


p.s. Speaking of Tiananmen Square, I’m watching BBC World in The Globe and Mail’s Beijing office as I type this. Each hour, when the anchor tries to introduce the piece BBC has done for the 20th anniversary of June 4, 1989, the screen here goes blank. I assume the piece they don’t want people to see is this one.

6+4 20

Beijing, May 20, 2009 – In today’s China, it’s often difficult to gauge how ordinary people feel about the Tiananmen Square massacre of 20 years ago. As the anniversary approaches, are the gory details of that day – and the fact the government still suppresses them – relevant in a country that looks nothing like the China of 1989?

Pro-democracy activists, all but a very brave few of them speaking from outside the country, insist that June 4, 1989 remains the blackest day in recent Chinese history. To them, the wound Chinese society suffered then won’t be anywhere near healed until the events of 1989 are brought before the public eye and those responsible for the bloodshed are made accountable.

When I recently interviewed Bao Tong – the top aide to the ousted Communist Party secretary Zhao Ziyang, and the only senior Communist official jailed for his role in 1989 (for standing with the students) – he certainly shared that point of view. He told me that Deng Xiaoping’s decision to use force to disperse the student protestors who had occupied Beijing’s central square to back their demands for change “caused all the [political] stagnation and backwardness in China over the past 20 years.” You can read the whole article here.

Similarly, Ding Zilin of the Tiananmen Mothers committee has been waging a long and lonely fight to force the government to investigate what happened on June 4, the day that her 17-year-old son Jiang Jielian was shot in the back and killed near Tiananmen Square. Her group has meticulously collected a list of 195 names of those killed during the crackdown, and she believes many more than that actually died that day.

But many other, often louder, voices say that Tiananmen Square no longer matters. They argue China’s astonishing economic progress in the past 20 years proves that Deng Xiaoping made the right decision in cracking down and preventing China from falling into the type of chaos that hit Eastern Europe and the former USSR after the collapse of Communism there. To them, it’s only Westerners with an “anti-Chinese” agenda who keep the Tiananmen issue alive.

(The government’s own changing view is nicely documented by Nicholas Bequelin of Human Rights Watch The most recent assessment given by a government spokesperson is “the government has already reached the verdict on 'June Fourth,' and the stability of the country was the foremost priority.”)

Rarely are ordinary Chinese voices heard on this topic. In large part, that’s because the government has made the topic taboo. It’s never mentioned in the state-controlled media, and Tiananmen-related websites on the Internet are routinely blocked by censors. People like Mr. Bao Tong and Ms. Ding are kept under heavy surveillance, with their phones monitored and their interaction with other Chinese strictly controlled. The events of that day are never discussed in polite conversation - it's almost as if they never happened.

Which is why I was fascinated by a little phenomenon that the Chinese edition of Google, google.cn, (otherwise best known for happily helping build the Great Firewall of China) inadvertently recorded. Take a look at this link. It’s a snapshot, sent my way by a Chinese Twitter pal of the top 10 most-searched items on google.cn for Tuesday, May 19, 2009.

The No. 2 most-searched term, and recent holder of the No. 1 spot, is the apocryphal string “6+4 20.” It looks like bad arithmetic, but it's in fact a reference to the sixth month, fourth day, and the 20th anniversary of June 4, 1989.

The Net Nannies would have to be at the top of their game to spot that one. Plug it into google.cn, and Google returns a load of sites that are normally blocked inside China, including (at the time I’m writing this, anyway) the Chinese-language Wikipedia entry on the massacre, which contains the famous photo of a man staring down a row of tanks and repeats assertions that thousands of people died on and around the square that day.

Apparently, a whole lot of ordinary Chinese aren’t quite convinced that Tiananmen Square no longer matters.

Thailand's stress-relieving street battle

Bangkok: There were just two of us on the empty street. Me, and the guy with the gun.

We were in the centre of the Thai capital, in broad daylight, but it couldn't have been more deserted. All the shops on Nakhon Sawan Road had their metal shutters pulled down after 24 hours of violent protests in the city. The road behind me was blocked by a burned-out bus that red-shirted protesters had positioned to keep the army out of their encampment.

There was nowhere for me to run. My assailant trained his weapon on me and let loose a jet of water straight into my chest.

He then collapsed into giggles like the six-year-old he was.

After days of escalating tension in Bangkok as the army faced off with supporters of former prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a hint of normalcy returned to the usually jovial Thai capital yesterday.

The state of emergency imposed by Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva is still in effect, and there are still soldiers on the streets, but most of Thais moved on to the important business of celebrating Songkran, the lunar new year.

That means heading out into the sweltering hot streets (it was 33 C today) with a water gun and an attitude. Buddha images are “bathed,” and so is anyone who walks into splashing range.

Many Thais appear to believe that extra karmic points are awarded to those who douse foreigners who walk around lost in thought, or women of any nationality foolish enough to wear white. Motorcyclists are another favourite target.

The clashes on Monday between the Red Shirts and the army (which left at least two people dead and more than 100 injured) led some to dub this holiday the “Black Songkran.” But Thais are a resilient people, having endured a staggering 18 coups in the past eight decades, as well as countless popular protests.

Even at the height of the violence this week, much of Bangkok carried on as if nothing abnormal was taking place. In the famous backpacking district around Khao San Road, it was as though this troubled place called “Thailand” that the newspapers were writing about was somewhere far, far away from the merry stretch of bars and restaurants.

Nonetheless, the city emitted a collective sigh of relief when the leaders of the Red Shirts called off their protest on Tuesday, putting at least a temporary end to the crisis. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a happy new year after all.

Me, I'm taking my cue from the kid and going shopping for a Super-Soaker.

Or at least a rain slicker.