Vladimir Putin wins 2011 Confucius Peace Prize

Beijing: Vladimir Putin, man of peace?

Mr. Putin, the former and future President of Russia who is currently doing an internship as the country’s prime minister, has been called many things. Supporters have written pop songs about wanting “a man like Putin” in their lives, while his detractors think the precise opposite of the former KGB agent accused of demolishing Russian democracy and restoring parts of the old Soviet system.

One imagines that even Vladimir Vladimirovich himself would have been surprised by Tuesday’s news that he had been named this year’s winner of something called the Confucius Peace Prize. Mr. Putin is, after all, a man who shot to power by crushing the Chechen separatist movement with brute military force, famously vowing to hunt down the “terrorists” behind a series of mysterious Moscow bombings and to kill them “in the outhouse” if necessary.

Mr. Putin beat out a field that also included South African President Jacob Zuma, whom many see as tainted by allegations of rape and corruption, and Gyaltsen Norbu, the Tibetan whom Beijing controversially named the Panchen Lama after the 6-year-old boy identified by the Dalai Lama as the real 11th Panchen Lama disappeared in China in 1995. Other nominees reportedly included Bill Gates and Kofi Annan.

The inaugural Confucius Peace Prize was awarded last year in response to the somewhat more reputable Nobel Peace Prize being given to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, who is currently sitting in jail for his role in drafting a pro-democracy manifesto known as Charter 08.

That first Confucius prize went to Lien Chan, a Taiwanese politician who said he’d never heard of the award, and who didn’t bother to pick it up. The prize – a glass statuette – was instead received at a Beijing ceremony by a baffled young girl (pictured) with no apparent connection to Mr. Lien.

“China is a symbol of peace…. With over one billion people, it should have a greater voice on the issue of world peace,” the prize committee explained on its website at the time.

Nobel Peace Prize host Norway, meanwhile, was dismissed as “only a small country with scarce land area and population” thereby unqualified “to represent the viewpoint of most people.”

This year’s prize will be again handed out on Dec. 9, one day before the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony in Oslo.

The award has evidently embarrassed China’s Ministry of Culture, which once backed the Confucius Prize, but earlier this year disavowed it and set out to establish its own Confucius World Peace Prize. That trophy is also scheduled to be handed out on Dec. 9, though a winner has yet to be named.

The announcement of Mr. Putin’s award was only briefly available on Chinese news websites Tuesday before those webpages disappeared. The choice was considered a jaw-dropping one by those who saw the news before it was censored.

“This prize is insulting to Confucius,” was one commonly expressed sentiment on the popular sina.com web portal, where the news was briefly available.

“If it goes on for another two years, Ahmadinejad will be the next winner, and then will be [Hugo] Chavez and Kim II [Kim Jong-il]. What a pity that Gaddafi died too early, otherwise he would have had a turn too,” wrote another commentator.

Gaddafi may indeed have had a chance. One of the reasons the Hong Kong-based China International Peace Research Centre said it chose Mr. Putin was his push to prevent NATO from intervening in Libya’s civil war. Though Russia decided against using its United Nations Security Council veto to prevent military action – and Moscow later switched its support to the rebels when it became clear that Gaddafi’s regime was nearing an end – Mr. Putin’s efforts were deemed “outstanding in keeping world peace.”

Meanwhile, Liu Xiaobo remains in a prison in northeast China. He has another nine years to go on his sentence.

Google and China go to war

The world’s most populous country and its best-known brand are in a new kind of war today, with the search engine formally opening hostilities after a series of incursions by the e-PLA.

Both sides have plenty to lose, with Google admitting it may have to withdraw from the potentially lucrative Chinese market – the world’s largest, with more than 300 million Internet users – and the Chinese government likely to lose international respectability over allegations that it participated in or tolerated the hacking of Gmail accounts belonging to Chinese human rights activists and others.

Another risk for the Communist Party is that it seems to be incurring the wrath of that same online community, which has already learned to live, grumpily, without sites such Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The Chinese Internet is abuzz today with news that Google will stop censoring searches on google.cn – and may soon withdraw from China completely; raising the possibility of a Chinese Internet that increasingly exists as a separate entity from the rest of the World Wide Web.

Here’s a quick sampling of some of what is being said (note: Baidu, which cooperates with Chinese government censors, is the most popular search engine in the country, with more than 60 per cent of the market):

“Alas, a huge country of 1.3 billion people and 9.6million square meters land can't accept a website, sad” – a netizen named “Han” from Beijing who posted at the news.qq.com site.

“I knew this day was coming. (With a slogan like) “Don’t be evil” Google, you can’t stay long here.” – “Liyuan” from Wuhan, also at news.qq.com

“How sad this news is indeed! A world with only Baidu’s rules is not what I want to see!” – “Tianlu” from Wuhu City at the same site

Tianlu’s post drew a reply from a netizen who gave their name as “Xiangmatou”: “This is what the people in power would like to see the most. It is easier and more convenient for them to rule people’s views and the direction control of information.”

The discussion at the Chinese website of the Global Times newspaper was tamer, with some openly doubting whether Google would carry through on its threats:

“Isn’t it a hype? China is such a big market. How can Google be willing to give up such a big cake? But if it is true, it is a loss for us, because Google has more sources than Baidu. It’ll be a pity!” was one representative reader post.

(Interestingly, the state-run Xinhua news service took a similar line, suggesting that Google’s decision was not yet final and that the government was “seeking clarity” on the Internet giant’s intentions.

The U.S.-based China Digital Times, meanwhile, has been translating and compiling some of the reaction to the Google-China spat on Twitter (which can be accessed in China by those able to reach a Virtual Private Network. Some of the most interesting:

@hecaitou: After Google leaves China, the world’s top three websites on Alexa —Google, Facebook and Youtube are all blocked in China. This is not an issue of Google abandoning China, but one of China abandoning the world.

@mranti Withdrawal of Google means: 1 Scaling the wall is now an essential tool 2 Techies, you should immigrate

@lysosome On campus discussion forums Google tag has been removed

@Fenng Ten years online has turned me from an optimist into a pessimist

Speaking of Twitter, I’m regularly “tweeting” on this (and other topics) over at http://twitter.com/markmackinnon

A victory for Beijing in the New Great Game

Beijing: A few hours ago, in a place called Samadepe on the rarely visited border between the Central Asian states of Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the global balance of power tilted ever so slightly.

Flanked by the leaders of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, Chinese President Hu Jintao today turned a symbolic wheel as oil started flowing into a new 1,833-kilometre pipeline that snakes east from Turkmenistan and across Central Asia to Xinjiang in the far west of China, where it will connect with China’s own pipeline network.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has insisted that Russia is not bothered by the opening of the pipeline, but that’s difficult to believe. Mr. Putin’s nine years in power (the first eight as president) have been spent trying to reestablish Russia as a global force. Key to that effort has been its role as one of the world’s biggest producers of natural gas, a position that was strengthened by its effective monopoly over the pipelines coming out of the former Soviet states of Central Asia.

That monopoly has now been broken. The Turkmenistan-Xinjiang pipeline is the first that will transport gas from Turkmenistan, the world’s fourth-largest producer, to market without going through Russian territory. When it reaches full capacity in another three years, it will pump up to 40 billion cubic metres annually, feeding China’s rapidly-growing and energy-starved economy, meeting half of the country’s current demand.

In building the new pipeline, China can also claim victory in a race with both the United States and Europe. Both have sought for years to establish a route to bring Turkmen gas west without going through Russia, efforts that were repeatedly thwarted by interference from Moscow as well as Iran, which blocked efforts to build a pipeline underneath the Caspian Sea.

Though Mr. Hu was characteristically understated about the importance of the moment his new partners were effusive in welcoming Beijing to centre stage in Central Asia.

“This project not only has commercial or economic value. It is also political,” Turkmen Presidnet Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov told reporters. “China, through its wise and farsighted policy has become one of the key guarantors of global security.”

It’s a change that happened slowly. Russia has seen its already waning influence over its former backyard plummet since the onset of the global recession, which has hit the Kremlin’s coffers – and thus its ability to speak the language the Central Asia’s kleptocrats prefer – hard. The United States and Europe, meanwhile, have danced back and forth between courting the region’s leaders and condemning them, occasionally breaking ties completely, over human-rights abuses.

In the meantime, China, a late joiner to struggle for influence in Central Asia (dubbed “The Great Game” in the 19th Century as Russia and Britain jostled there), has quietly used its financial clout to make fast friends in the region, handing out massive loans and building the pipeline connecting Kazakhstan to Xinjiang. China’s Communist leaders, naturally, have no qualms about doing business with the unelected “presidents-for-life” who rule Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.

Last year, I was invited to the city of Almaty in Kazakhstan to address the Eurasian Media Forum on the theme of a “new Cold War” between Russia and the West, sitting on a panel alongside such combatants as former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and Kremlin spin doctor Gleb Pavlovsky.

When the Americans and the Russians took a break from verbally attacking each other, an audience member asked a Chinese panelist where Beijing stood in the escalating dispute. His response came back to me today as I watched the television footage from Turkmenistan.

“We leave matters of war and peace to the Americans and the Russians,” he said, adding that China preferred to focus on building up economic relations with its neighbours.

The audience, made up of Central Asia’s business and political elite, gratefully applauded.

Mr. Hu, tear down this firewall!

Beijing: It was supposed to be a place to remember where you were and what it meant to you on Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell between East and West Germany, marking the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe.

But something very different – and fascinating – is happening instead at the Berlin Twitter Wall, a website that went online last week as part of the city of Berlin’s anniversary celebrations. Instead of reminiscences about life behind the old Iron Curtain, the site is being overloaded with complaints about a new barrier sealing people off from the outside world: China’s thick web of Internet censorship, referred to locally as the Great Firewall (or GFW, in character-saving Twitterspeak).

Most of the writers posted in Chinese, and claimed to be doing so from inside China, where Twitter and dozens of other popular websites have been blocked by the Communist government headed by President Hu Jintao. (Click here for an incomplete list of the banned sites.)

Blocked sites can be accessed from inside China via virtual private networks, provided you have both a private computer and the tech savvy to do so. The entire province of Xinjiang – home to 21 million people – has been almost completely without Internet service since deadly ethnic riots hit the city of Urumqi on July 5.

Here is a sampling of some of the postings the Berlin Twitter Wall has seen in the past couple of days. The tag #fotw refers to “fall of the wall”:

“All kinds of walls will have their day of collapse. #fotw” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by “xtzc.”

“The collapse of the wall needs everyone’s help.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by xiaopohen,

“I have a dream: We will see the anniversary if the fall of the Great Fire Wall in near future.” – posted Monday, Oct. 26 by guoyumin

Here are a few others translated by the China Digital Times:

“#fotw We climb the Great Firewall because it has blocked out all of the dissent, and we do so to eventually get rid of the Wall.” – by miaofeng

“The wall built for others will eventually become a grave for the builders. #fotw” – by liujiang

“#fotw It has been twenty years, and we are still in the Wall.” – by gengmao

“#FOTW All Chinese on the electronic Berlin Wall, spectacular!” – by peterlue

“My apologies to German people a million times [for taking over this site]. But I think if Germans learn about our situation, they would feel sorry for us a million times.” – by ChrisicGong

Predictably, by Monday evening local time, the Berlin Twitter Wall was no longer accessible in Beijing.

Mr. Hu, please?

A police state without traffic police

Beijing: “Qiguai. It means strange,” my Chinese teacher said, repeating the new word again so that I could grasp its rising-then-falling pronunciation.

“What did you find qiguai when you first arrived in Beijing?”

“The taxi drivers,” I responded, without hesitation. The teacher giggled as my classmate/wife tried to explain that Canada’s rules of the road are somewhat different than those in China, primarily because, well, there are rules and people follow them. Getting into a Beijing taxi is often akin to taking a seatbeltless ride on the Zipper, or one of those other rides that tour Canada’s exhibitions each summer.

The only thing more dangerous than being in a Beijing taxi is daring to cross the street in front of one. After 10 months of living here, I’ve concluded that the rules of the Beijing road are roughly as follows:

- Trucks and buses are supreme, and can pretty much drive any where and any way they choose. Bus drivers may be public servants in other countries, but in Beijing they’re threats to public safety.

- Cars come next, with bigger cars clearly having the right to force themselves into any lane they choose, even if occupied by a smaller vehicle. This may be a Communist state in name, but there’s a rigid caste system when it comes to travelling on paved surfaces.

- Bicycles and those old-fashioned enough to still ride them are expected to scatter out of the way of anything with a motor.

- Pedestrians are the bottom of the ladder, and enjoy the exact opposite of the right of way. Even if you’re already in the intersection, and the walk signal is green, you’re expected to dive out of the way of any car that happens to turn right through the crosswalk. If pedestrians really needed to get where they are going, they’d be in a car, preferably a large one.

It really is that bad. In his farewell to China blog entitled “How I survived China” James Fallows, the outgoing correspondent from The Atlantic magazine, writes about the advice he got from a Chinese doctor: “The most important ‘medical’ step you can take is to put on a seat belt in a car, wear a helmet on a bike, and run for your life in crosswalks,” the doctor told him.

Fallows goes on: “For the foreign diplomatic corps, the leading cause of death is traffic accidents. I worried every day about being mowed down by a bus, since they don’t stop at lights. My wife was run over in Beijing by a motor scooter that was going the opposite way down an eight-lane one-way road and was running a red light too. She’s fine now; the driver roared away, still against traffic, as soon as he climbed back on the bike.”

No one who lives in Beijing could have been surprised by that story (my parents are still recovering from the shock of a minor accident that occurred earlier this month when our car was struck by a driver backing down the wrong lane of a highway near the Great Wall). But sitting in our taxi this afternoon as it idled in thick Sunday traffic on the way home from our language lesson, it struck me that the drivers aren’t the problem – it’s the police who do so little to enforce the rules of the road that actually do exist.

It’s the oddest thing about living in this still-authoritarian state. The police are ubiquitous and absent at the same time. They stand on street corners (or nap in their cars) as cars recklessly run red lights right in front of them. It’s little surprise that – according to the official Xinhua news agency – China had the highest rate of road accident deaths in the world in 2007, at 5.1 per 100,000 cars.

Part of the problem is corruption. According to the Shanghai Oriental Morning Post, 47.2 per cent of all the new drivers they surveyed paid a bribe (the average price was 502 RMB, or about $75) to get their licenses rather than take the official drivers’ test. (Though could you pass the English-language version? Here it is.)

To my eyes, another factor seems to be that no one has told the policemen that they’re supposed to do police-y things like protect the public. During the National Day celebrations earlier this month, armed police were deployed on nearly every street corner to ensure the day passed smoothly and no one would do something outlandish like wave a Tibetan flag.

But that didn’t mean that any of them would lift an arm to help get snarled traffic moving again, or intervene to question a taxi driver who sped through a crowd of terrified pedestrians without so much as using a turn signal to warn anyone of his intention to do so.

The latter example is something that happens frequently, and right in front of the police who stroll about my east Beijing neighbourhood. (Nor do the same police ever intervene to break up the obvious drug-pushing and prostitution that takes place on the corners they patrol, but that’s another blog.)

But try walking through the streets with a T-shirt reading “One-party dictatorship is a disaster” (as lawyer Liu Shihui did recently in Guangzhou) and the police tend to move quickly and decisively.

Now I’ve never been entrusted with running a one-party police state, but as a pedestrian living in the capital of one, it’s all just a little qiguai.

Chinese democracy

Beijing, Saturday, Aug. 29: Living and working in China can sometimes be difficult, especially for a foreign journalist. The ever-growing restrictions on the Internet and freedom of speech can be truly depressing for those of us who make a living saying what we think and trying to coax others to do the same.

Sometimes it feels like the government in Beijing can behave abysmally and get away with it simply because it is far too economically powerful and important to be challenged any more.

But a week in North Korea (you can see all the writing, photos and video Sean Gallagher and I produced from our trip here on The Globe and Mail website.) has given me some important perspective on where China is, and how far it has come in the 30 years since Deng Xiaoping renounced Mao's excesses and implemented his policies of reform and opening.

North Korea hasn't had its Deng Xiaoping or Mikhail Gorbachev yet. It's still trapped in an era many Chinese would recognize from the bad old days. The paranoia that ruled during the Cultural Revolution – the fear that you could be denounced, arrested or worse for the smallest indiscretion – is still thick on the streets of Pyongyang. Catastrophic economic decisions that recall Mao's Great Leap Forward still wreak havoc on North Korea's industry and agriculture.

Halfway through our week in North Korea, Sean and I confided half-jokingly to each other that we were starting to miss the relative freedom of China. By today, we were lusting for Beijing's smoggy air like a long-remembered lover.

Following one last scare at Pyongyang Airport that involved a border guard suspicious of my passport, we boarded our Air Koryo flight home after one of the most interesting and intense weeks either of us had ever experienced. As our Russian-made Ilyushin-62 lifted off, Sean and I looked at each other, smiled and exhaled deeply. When it touched down at Beijing Capital Airport at just after 10 a.m., we started laughing out loud.

Safely back on Chinese soil, we could talk freely for the first time in days. While in Pyongyang, we had been guarded in what we said even inside our shared hotel room, assuming it was listened to (a suspicion that was bolstered every time we opened our door and spotted a Workers' Party cadre lingering in the hall outside with seemingly very little to do).

In the presence of our minders, who stayed with us from dusk until dawn, we stuck to our cover stories. He was an English teacher, obsessed with correcting my Canadian pronunciation. I was the author of a book on recent Russian history (true enough), and fascinated by the Soviet-era friendship between Moscow and Pyongyang.

Repeating our lines was nearly as dull as it was difficult. Maybe it gave us some small insight into how careful North Koreans have to be in what they say every day of their lives.

For all modern China's flaws – and there are many – it is now a place where ordinary people, at least in Beijing and other big cities, can act and dress how they want. No one has to wear a Mao pin or join the Communist Party if they don't want to.

My earlier caveats aside (and they remain important), Chinese can also largely think and say what they want, provided they don't get too deeply into politics, or try and post those thoughts on the Internet.

Many Chinese are affluent now, and many more are no longer poor. Most of them are free to decide which way is the best for them to make money and feed their family. Those who have cash spend it how they choose, often travelling the world as they do so.

All of this progress gets too often forgotten by Western journalists such as myself who see a country in mid-journey and judge it by the distance it still has to go, rather than how far it has travelled.

Several large Chinese tour groups were in North Korea at the same time that Sean and I were there. Though our North Korean minders limited our interaction with them, I suspect the younger Chinese wanted to see what it looks like to live in a fanatically ideological country that has cut itself off from the world. The older ones came perhaps to remember what it was like to live in just such a place.

They can do that now. For them, it's the past, no matter how painful.

Sadly, for North Koreans it remains the here and now.

Through the looking glass: peeking at North Korea from across the Yalu

Dandong, China - Monday, Aug. 24: Photographer Sean Gallagher and I landed today in the northeastern Chinese city of Dandong after a 90-minute flight on Air China from Beijing. We were met at the airport and taken straight to a hotel called the Pearl Island Golf Club.

There's a driving range here, but no golf course that we can find. Our room does offer a nice view across the Yalu River into North Korea, though.

It's our first glimpse into the Hermit Kingdom: a row of grey two- and three-storey buildings that appear to be uninhabited. Further east, there's a Ferris wheel that doesn't turn and an industrial zone where a single smokestack pumps black smoke into the air. The other factories, whatever they make or made, appear closed.

The contrast with the Chinese side is unmistakable. This side of the river is a construction site, with multi-storey apartment blocks and office buildings rising before your eyes. The locals stroll along a paved boardwalk and sit on the banks to stare at the Hermit Kingdom across the Yalu.

The North Korean side is deathly quiet in contrast. Even using the zoom lenses on our cameras, we only see a handful of residents, most of them walking or cycling. Not a single car drives by in the time we watch the other bank, though there is the occasional truck.

After an hour on our own, our tourist agent picks us up and takes us to the waterfront. Our first stop is the Broken Bridge, a broken metal span that was cut in half by a U.S. B-29 during the Korean War.

But that history is not what draws people here any more. Like the rest of the tourists, Sean and I walk right past the photographs explaining what happened here in 1953. It's at the end that we get our cameras out and resume photographing the south bank of the Yalu. The B-29's intent may have been to cut off a vital supply route for the North Korean army that was then pushing UN forces back south with the help of Chinese “volunteer” fighters, but 56 years later its lasting impact has been to create a tourist stop that allows voyeurs to get a few hundred metres closer to North Korea without the need for a visa.

“I feel a bit dirty,” Sean confesses in his London accent after we finish the 20 yuan (about $3.50) tour. It does indeed feel wrong to stare and point at the people across the river as though they are zoo animals.

But peering into Stalinism's last redoubt is a lucrative industry here in Dandong. After our walk to the end of the Broken Bridge, we board a tour boat crammed with more than 70 Chinese tourists. The boat crosses the middle of the river – presumably into North Korea waters – as cameras snap away and tourists pose against a backdrop of patrolling soldiers and bare-chested men wading waist-deep into the water to fish with nets. Another packed boat leaves every 30 minutes.

Our boat captain has chosen The Carpenters as the soundtrack for the 30-minute excursion. Every sha-la-la-la. Every whoah-oh-oh. At first it seems wildly inappropriate, but later it occurs to me that Yesterday Once More (the song's title) might be exactly how many Chinese feel as they peer at a country still living through the disastrous leadership China itself experienced decades ago during the Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward.

Dinner that night is an alcohol-soaked affair at a North Korean restaurant in Dandong. Beef, rice, kimchi and a fruit alcohol that our guide mixes into our Taedonggang beers.

The patrons are in a great mood, singing and clapping along with a lively stage show. It's just a guess, but it feels like they're delighted to be among the very few allowed to leave the paranoid and impoverished place across the river.

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.

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)

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.

The case of the Impeccable underwear

Beijing: It was one of the most bizarre new stories in recent weeks, a quasi-clash between the American and Chinese navies in the South China Sea.

The incident, according to the various accounts, ranged at times between the very dangerous and the farcical, with five Chinese boats coming so close to the USNS Impeccable – waving Chinese flags and demanding that the American ship leave the area – that the Impeccable resorted to using fire hoses to force their pursuers back. Undaunted, the Chinese sailors stripped to their underwear and kept up their dangerous game of chicken.

American officials have condemned the Chinese actions and portrayed the incident as an example of growing Chinese aggressiveness, and many news organizations used the story as an opportunity to discuss China's plans to eventually build its first aircraft carrier.

But looking at a map of where the incident occurred (BBC has a nice one), I find myself wondering how the U.S. navy would respond to a Chinese spy ship floating so close to its territorial waters. (The Impeccable is an unarmed surveillance craft that specializes in tracking submarines. As noted on the Danwei website, the Impeccable also looks “like something in which a James Bond villain would plan world domination.”)

The South China Sea is a mess of duelling claims, with China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei and Vietnam all declaring sovereignty over parts of it. It's also one of the most strategically important bodies of water anywhere, with some 10 million barrels of oil passing through every day aboard tankers. Underneath lies even greater treasure – somewhere 7.7 billion barrels and 28 billion barrels of crude oil. Hence the competing claims and the U.S. navy's interest in patrolling the region.

The area that the Impeccable was operating in was actually just outside of China's territorial waters, but within what is known under international law as its exclusive economic zone. So the American ship had a right to be there, though the law (to me) seems vaguer on whether foreign nations can park active military vessels in another country's economic zone.

Most Chinese are cheering on their navy's new willingness to give even the shirts off their backs for their country. “Let's send some ships to the American exclusive economic zone a few times to see the reaction of the U.S.,” a Shandong resident posted on the popular sina.com web portal. “We must control the deteriorating situation in the South China Sea by force,” chimed in blogger Wangfengchuizhou.

This may not go away soon. While Obama and Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi met last week in Washington to defuse tension over the Impeccable incident, the brouhaha escalated again shortly thereafter, when the Filipino parliament passed a law claiming sovereignty over parts of the Spratly Island chain that are also claimed by China. China responded by announcing it was sending its biggest and fastest patrol boat to the area, while the Impeccable is still floating around, now accompanied by a destroyer.

Random notes

* I spent last week in Tokyo, but where I really wanted to be was Osaka, where they were dredging up old statues of Colonel Sanders. Apparently, this means the Hanshin Tigers have a chance at baseball glory this year. They haven't won the national championship since elated fans tossed the Colonel and his secret recipe into the Dotonburi River in 1985, following the Tigers' last title win. Call it the Extra Crispy Curse.

* While the U.S. and China were playing strip tag in the South China Sea, Japan was sending off two of its own destroyers to join the international anti-piracy mission off the coast of Somalia. China has already done the same, but Japan's deployment is yet another stretch of its famously pacifist post-World War Two constitution. (On a related note, I dropped by Canada's own pirate hunters last fall. You can still read the article here.)

* Is there a ban on importing cheese into China? James Fallows of The Atlantic investigates over at his superb blog.

* I was saddened, but not surprised, to see that He Weifang, an outspoken law professor at Peking University, has been reassigned to the Western province of Xinjiang, an effective demotion that also takes Prof. He out of the media spotlight in Beijing. Prof. He knew that he was courting trouble when he signed Charter 08, a document that calls for democratic reform in China. When I last contacted Prof. He, he agreed to an interview, and then backed away a few days later. He explained that he was “reluctant to talk about the Charter at this moment.”

* Check out Stephanie Nolen's new blog, Subcontinental, among her latest writings from, er, the subcontinent, is a post from the Tibetan capital in exile, Dharamsala.

Free Liam Gallagher!

Beijing: Sigh.

So the powers-that-be here have decided that British rock band Oasis can't play their first-ever gigs in mainland China because Liam Gallagher (the Gallagher brother with the nicer voice and even less of a grasp on things like politics than his sibling) played at a “Free Tibet” concert on Randalls Island in New York in 1997.

That's the reason being given by the band, anyway. Oasis were scheduled to play a pair of shows in Shanghai and Beijing in early April and said in a statement that they were “bewildered” by the decision, which came just three weeks after the shows were announced.

“According to the show's promoters, officials within the Chinese Ministry of Culture only recently discovered that Noel Gallagher appeared at a Free Tibet Benefit Concert on Randall's Island in New York in 1997, and have now deemed that the band are consequently unsuitable to perform to their fans in the Chinese Republic … during its 60th anniversary year,” the statement reads.

Leaving aside the question of just exactly what or where the “Chinese Republic” is, the government-ordered cancellation is bad news for Chinese music fans, even those who aren't particularly keen on “Wonderwall” and everything that followed.

Here's an incomplete list of some of other musicians who played that day at Randalls Island: U2, R.E.M., Eddie Vedder, the Beastie Boys, Alanis Morissette, the Foo Fighters, Sonic Youth, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones, a Tribe Called Quest and Ben Harper. So the ban on Oasis might mean no shows by Bono, Pearl Jam or Alanis in the Middle Kingdom either, although Sonic Youth did play Beijing last year without any problems.

The Chinese government is hypersensitive regarding foreign artists performing here, particularly since last March, when Bjork – another singer who was on the stage that day in 1997 – finished a concert in Shanghai with her song “Declare Independence” and shouted “Tibet! Tibet! Raise your flag!” over the final bars. There was some chatter among Chinese music fans about what the notoriously unpredictable Gallagher brothers might do on stage.

(It's not just the Tibet issue that gets the censors back in their 1970s frame of mind. All major foreign acts need to submit a setlist to the authorities before performing; the Rolling Stones were famously made to drop several songs with “suggestive” lyrics before they were allowed to make their 2006 debut in China. “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Woman” or “Beast of Burden” all got excised for fear of what hearing such songs live might do to the locals.)

In my books, if the Chinese authorities were going to ban Oasis for a perceived offence to the people of China, they should have targeted the other Gallagher, Noel (the one with the unibrow who writes most of the better tunes), who made a far bigger error when he referred to Shanghai – maybe you've heard of it, population 18.9 million – as “the middle of nowhere” in an interview with That's Shanghai magazine.

The good news is that an April 7 Oasis show in Hong Kong is apparently still going ahead. “One country, two systems,” the formula under which Hong Kong was absorbed back into China in 1997, apparently means one concert for 1.3 billion people.

Dima and Volodya look East

Amidst all the commentary about the inauguration of President Dmitriy Medvedev and his boss/subordinate Prime Minister (as of a few minutes ago) Vladimir Putin, the bit that struck me as most interesting was President Dima's announcement that he would head east on his first foreign trip, to Kazakhstan and China.

It makes sense. Arguably no country has closer ties with the Kremlin than Nursultan Nazarbayev's Kazakhstan, something that was plain to all of us who took part in the Eurasian Media Forum in Almaty last month - where the few Westerners in the room were repeatedly scolded by a crowd that clearly shared the Kremlin's worldview. Meanwhile, Russia and China have rapidly expanding trade, and last year conducted a large-scale joint military operation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization looks increasingly like it could be the authoritarian east's military answer to NATO.

There are few places where President Dima would get a warmer reception than Astana and Beijing.

Still, it's worth recalling here that eight years ago, the newly inaugurated and "westward-looking" President Putin chose the United Kingdom for his first trip (after a brief and telling stop in Belarus). Back then, he was accorded the red-carpet treatment by someone named Tony Blair, and was famously received by Queen Elizabeth II.

Eight years on, the dream of Russia joining the West appears dead - buried by Chechnya, NATO expansion, Kosovo, colour revolutions, missile defense and the Alexander Litvinenko saga.

So Dima and Volodya are looking the other way for friends.