It's Time

Chinese dissident on trial after using Skype to send poem.

It's time, Chinese people!
The square belongs to everyone
The feet are yours
It's time to use your feet and take to the square to make a choice.

Zhu Yufu

Those in power everywhere hate democracy and popular protest.

Chomsky on US/China relations

It's just an aside, really, in his article, 'Who owns the world?' at TomDispatch, but it is so very right, and beautifully sarcastic.

There is also much concern about the growing Chinese military threat. A recent Pentagon study warned that China's military budget is approaching "one-fifth of what the Pentagon spent to operate and carry out the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," a fraction of the U.S. military budget, of course. China's expansion of military forces might "deny the ability of American warships to operate in international waters off its coast," the New York Times added.

Off the coast of China, that is; it has yet to be proposed that the U.S. should eliminate military forces that deny the Caribbean to Chinese warships. China's lack of understanding of rules of international civility is illustrated further by its objections to plans for the advanced nuclear-powered aircraft carrier George Washington to join naval exercises a few miles off China's coast, with alleged capacity to strike Beijing.

In contrast, the West understands that such U.S. operations are all undertaken to defend stability and its own security. The liberal New Republic expresses its concern that "China sent ten warships through international waters just off the Japanese island of Okinawa." That is indeed a provocation -- unlike the fact, unmentioned, that Washington has converted the island into a major military base in defiance of vehement protests by the people of Okinawa. That is not a provocation, on the standard principle that we own the world.

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Addendum: Also on today's reading list, Lewis Shiner's Black and White, in which I find this:

“Who owns the world?” Robert’s father asked suddenly.

Robert looked at him in confusion.“I don’t know what you’re asking. The rich and powerful, I suppose?”

Robert’s father nodded.“I suppose. I would like to think that we all own it, in common.

– from p. 140 of the pdf version.

New tense discovered by The China Post!

Drum roll... the singular tense!

In an editorial (criticising an open letter by eminent academics commenting on dirty tricks ahead of next year's presidential elections in Taiwan) they write:

that primary was described [in the letter] as “the primaries for next year's presidential elections,” which they should have written as presidential election, in the singular tense.

I'm a linguist and used to confusions between tense and aspect, but this is new to me.

What's even better (delicious schadenfreude...) they made the mistake in a failed attempt to score petty grammar points over political opponents*. As far as I can see, 'presidential elections' is absolutely fine: certainly there are plenty of examples of its use online by native speakers, e.g. here.

For the (shabby) political background to the editorial, see here and here and here (reverse chronological order).

There's incompetence, and then there's the kind of incompetence required to:

a) think ad hominem comments on grammar bolster a political argument
b) pick on a perfectly correct use of English and call it a mistake
c) not think twice about b) given the letter is signed by a who's who of Taiwanologists -- professors, emeritus professors etc -- at least one of whom surely would have noticed an error, you might think
and
d) invent the singular tense
and, I suppose,
e) rush it all into print

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* Actually not opponents, but concerned academic friends of Taiwan, at least some of whom are supporters, like the China Post, of the current 'Nationalist' government in Taiwan. But the China Post takes a narrow --one might say Leninist -- view: criticise anything done by the Nationalist party and you're an enemy.

Donate to disaster relief in Japan

Sorrow and fury

There’s always one public figure, in every disaster, who makes an idiot of himself (and mocks the memory of the dead and the efforts of rescuers and survivors) by claiming it’s divine intervention. And in Japan, somehow it's always this one.

Obvious question for this moron: If the tsunami was a blow aimed by God at egoism and populism in Japanese politics how come you’re still here?

Follow-up: How’s your prediction about looting by foreigners going?

What if it is a girl?

I’m on strike today, and I’m making the most of it by reading Japan Focus. I don’t think I’ve ever done a royal story here, but it’s always good to try something new, so here’s a link to Sean Curtin’s article on the issue of female succession to the Japanese throne, “Japan's Imperial Succession Debate and Women's Rights”.

Just when Japan’s Imperial House was on the verge of an historic reform that would have marked an enormous step towards making it a more gender equal institution, the legislation permitting an Empress to reign was suddenly shelved. The immediate cause of the abrupt turnaround was the surprise announcement that 39-year-old Princess Kiko, the Emperor’s daughter-in-law, was pregnant. The announcement led Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro to promptly abandon his reform plans, handing victory to ultra-conservatives who bitterly opposed the proposals.

...

Read the complete article

Princess Kiko.

Princess Kiko is the wife of the current emperor’s second son, Prince Fumihito. If her baby is a boy he would be the first male in his generation, and would be third in line to the throne after the Crown Prince (his uncle) and his dad. (Are you following this? Royal watchers must love genealogy...)

But if the new baby is a girl, then the current government, who are right-wing pragmatists, will have to rejoin battle with the right-wing ideologues in their own party. I am praying for the patter of tiny pink-booted feet...

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Naruhito, Masako and Aiko

A disclaimer: obviously the abolition of the Japanese monarchy is really the best outcome -- for ordinary Japanese people, and I imagine, the members of the royal family themselves. (Just as Johann Hari argued that the British royals would be much better off abolished.) In particular, Princess Masako, the wife of the Crown Prince, has apparently been suffering serious depression, partly due to the idiotic pressure on her to produce a male heir. Good luck to her and her family.

The future empress of Japan?

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I don’t expect to be returning to the subject of royalty here soon, but I have just emembered that there are some heirs to the Korean throne kicking around somewhere...

And I discover that the son of the last Korean crown prince, Yi Ku, died last year (Korea Times article, Royal Archive article) in Japan, where he had been educated and spent much of his life in exile.

Yi Ku and Julia Mullock, his wife

All very political. And of course the Japanese and Korean royal families may be very distant relatives, as the Japanese emperor pointed out a while ago.

News; mothballs

Regular readers - if there are any - will have been disappointed at the lack of updates and annoyed by the proliferation of spam comments. I have tightened things up so that spurious comments are harder to post and I'll gradually remove the ones that are already here.

As for new posts, I can't promise. I'm trying to get my PhD thesis written, so updates will be infrequent at best. If you use rss, please subscribe to my rss or atom feed so you will see when I do manage a new post without having to check back at the website.

Taiwan, China and maps

Time magazine recently printed a map with Taiwan and China in the same colour, prompting protest from the Taiwanese government, according to an article from The Age, collected on Asia Media. National Geographical has done the same in the past and printed a correction.

It's not so long since maps in Taiwan showed Taiwan, China and Mongolia as one country, with a capital city at Nanjing and Beijing still labelled Peping, I think.

Eric Hobsbawm on US hegemony

There's only one part which mentions East Asia, in the first paragraph:

Three continuities link the global US of the cold war era with the attempt to assert world supremacy since 2001. The first is its position of international domination, outside the sphere of influence of communist regimes during the cold war, globally since the collapse of the USSR. This hegemony no longer rests on the sheer size of the US economy. Large though this is, it has declined since 1945 and its relative decline continues. It is no longer the giant of global manufacturing. The centre of the industrialised world is rapidly shifting to the eastern half of Asia. Unlike older imperialist countries, and unlike most other developed industrial countries, the US has ceased to be a net exporter of capital, or indeed the largest player in the international game of buying up or establishing firms in other countries, and the financial strength of the state rests on the continued willingness of others, mostly Asians, to maintain an otherwise intolerable fiscal deficit.

...

Read the complete article on ZNet (originally in The Guardian)

I agree with this, and with pretty much everything in the rest of the article, although I would go for a less certain tone on the current and future workings of the global economy (but then, I'm not a Marxist).

There's a biographical article on Hobsbawm, also at the Guardian, from 2002.

he still believes that asking Marxist questions is the way to understand the world - to tackle the big questions, to fit things together into a pattern , "even if it may not be the right pattern". He adds: "I used to believe you could predict the direction in which history goes. But contingency is clearly more important than we used to allow."

Cyber War in East Asia

There is a cyber war in East Asia, according to the Japan Times:

If comments on bulletin boards were bullets and hacking attacks real skirmishes then East Asia would probably be a war zone now.

Mirroring offline diplomatic clashes, Internet users in Japan, China and Korea have been posting verbal assaults and hackers launching determined cyber-attacks.

Internet technology has also been at the core of recent frictions over textbook and territorial disputes.

In China, mobile phones and the Internet were used to organize protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses. In Korea, citizens debated the row through blogs and bulletin-boards. In Japan, irate netizens reacted with sometimes jingoistic attacks on their country's neighbors.

As tensions peaked this Spring, numerous sites in Japan were targeted by hackers -- presumed to be based in China and Korea. Government ministries, universities, local authorities and the national police agency Web site were affected.

Yasukuni Shrine posted a notice on its Web site reporting that as many as 15,000 DOS (denial of service) attacks a second had been launched against its home page. The shrine described them as "a base act . . . terrorism that is a fundamental negation of Internet law and order."

Despite some reports of counter-attacks by Japanese hackers, it seems that Japan generally came off the worse in the cyber skirmishes.

Until recently Japan's digital security has been weak, says Naoki Miyagi of the National Information Security Center, a 26 strong department set up this April.

...

The Chinese government was also caught out by changing Internet technology.

During domestic protests against Japanese diplomatic missions and businesses organizers employed text messages, blogs, Web sites and online messaging systems.

"If it wasn't for the Internet then such large and widespread demonstrations wouldn't have taken place," says Qi Jing Ying, a researcher into the Chinese Internet at the University of Tokyo.

Chinese Internet users have become increasing adept at breaching the so-called Great Firewall of China.

"My friends and teachers in China can use proxy servers instead to access banned sites," says Qi Jing Ying. Denied many other democratic freedoms, the Chinese have thrown themselves into political debate on the Internet, she says.

Qi contrasts the tone of the Chinese Internet to that in Japan, where the content of bulletin boards like the popular 2 Channel is often dismissed as trivial.

"Even Chinese foreign office officials and political leaders look at Chinese political Web sites. I doubt that Koizumi is watching 2 Channel."

Meanwhile, in South Korea the Internet has hosted public reaction to the territorial and textbooks disputes.

South Korea has the highest broadband penetration rate in the world. Sites like the popular Daum Web portal and its bulletin boards are a venue for debate and protest.

...

Hacking attacks on Japan and other countries are well publicized in Korea. During a previous Japanese textbook controversy in 2001, three South Korean high school students going by the nom-de-net "anti-Japan" attacked the server of the rightwing revisionist "tsukurukai" textbook association, disabling it for several days.

...

Read the complete article

The most interesting thing here for me is the differences between young people in the three countries: in South Korea, generally high levels of activism and high technical literacy; in China, a small proportion of mainly young people getting around the government's restrictions; in Japan, complacency.

What the article ays about young Koreans fits well with what Charles Armstrong says on OhmyNews about changing attitudes in Korea (I quoted a different part of this article in my previous post here):

In a country that had been almost unique in its overwhelmingly pro-American popular opinion a generation earlier, statistics reflected a sharp change of attitude. For example, a poll by the Joongang Ilbo newspaper, taken in December 2002, revealed that 36.4 percent of South Koreans viewed the U.S. unfavorably, only 13 percent favorably, and 50 percent were neutral. Within these statistics, there were striking differences according to age: only among those in the over-50 age group did the majority express a favorable opinion. Furthermore, 62 percent of South Koreans in their 20s and 72 percent in their 30s wanted to restructure the U.S.-ROK alliance to make it more equal; only 21 percent of those in their 60s agreed with this.

Again, there is more going on here than simply the general rise of "anti-Americanism." Several factors contribute to this changing Korean attitude toward the U.S., 60 years after liberation from Japanese colonialism. First, there has been a generational change, with the rise to power of the "386" generation (Koreans in their 30s, who entered university in the 1980s and were born in the 1960s), who had come of age in the era of democratic protest, a time when criticism of the authoritarian ROK governments, and of the Americans who had backed them, went hand-in-hand. With the rise of this generation came the decline in influence of the conservative and reflexively pro-U.S. political establishment that had dominated South Korean politics since liberation. While the current conservative opposition is by no means insignificant, it seems unlikely that a simplistic "pro-Americanism" will ever return as the dominant mode in South Korea.

Second, there has been the growth of a vocal and critical civil society, and with it a re-examination of historical events and memories both by the government and various non-governmental organizations. Historical investigation commissions have been formed to examine various aspects of the Japanese colonial period, as well as events in which the U.S. played a direct or indirect role: the Gwangju Massacre of 1980, the bloody suppression of the Jeju Island uprising in April 1948, missing persons from the period of military rule, and so on, inspired in part by similar such commissions formed in the post-authoritarian states of South Africa, Argentina, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere.

Significantly, investigators are probing not only the role of the U.S., but also of the former ROK government and citizens. Citizens' activism and participatory democracy have become part of the political landscape and everyday vocabulary of today's South Korea, with the explosive growth of NGOs, many quite critical of U.S. policy. The organization of such groups and activities has been greatly facilitated by the use of the Internet, in which South Korea ranks among the highest in the world, and the concomitant rise of what Koreans call "Netizens."

Third, with the relative decline of South Koreans' sense of affinity with the U.S., there has been a strong turn toward Asia, especially China but also, in complex ways, Japan. China has replaced the U.S. as South Korea's largest trading partner; more Korean students now study in China than in America; South Korean popular culture has become all the rage in Japan, China, and Southeast Asia, while Japanese culture -- long banned by the South Korean government -- has taken off in Korea. On the other hand, the current dispute over Dokdo/Takeshima, as well as the controversy over the Japanese textbook issue and war memories more generally, reflect underlying differences between Korea and Japan that need to be resolved before relations between the two countries can become stable and friendly over the long term. And yet, despite these tensions, Koreans have increasingly warmed to the idea of an East Asian free trade area, and even a European Union-style economic and political community, although these may be only be a distant dream at this point.