ChinaBounder Weekender

The Olympic opening ceremony… astounding. I was half expecting some tacky nonsense along the lines of the Lunar New Year TV specials that CCTV puts on. But this was in a different league.

Now, sure, I part want to ask how much all that cost, how many millions of dollars for an hour of spectacle, money spent on show in a nation where millions lack basic health care or education. I want to ask how many hundreds of hours of rehearsal that all took – rehearsal under obligation, not choice. And the whole idea of spectacle – spectacle as a planned, coordinated event – has some uncomfortably fascist overtones to it.

And the ceremony did a pretty good job of reminding just how great China was in the past, surveying the four major inventions, the compass, paper, gunpowder and printing, and that great individual, Zheng He, a man who, had he had more voice, would have utterly changed China’s destiny. Where did that China go?

The modern era, naturally, was neglected. After all, what is there to say about the Communists? They have done nothing for China except made China suffer. Indeed, when it came to the current era, out came the lies and bullshit, all of a piece with CPC style – spinning this as the ‘green games,’ claiming China cares for its environment. Arrant bollocks, that, just like the other standard lie they always trot out at such times – namely, all China’s ethnic minorities being one big happy family.

But all that to one side – this was a virtuoso display, a triumph of planning and coordination and, indeed, imagination, something China does not always do so well. Yes, some creative stuff here, though with one or two slightly random left turns such as Sarah Brightman (though she did sing in Mandarin, which deserves a nod.) And while I suspect many of those 15,000 performers involved did not always do so willingly, there is still pride and awe to be had out of performing with such skill to an audience of billions. I’m sure the UK’s opening ceremony in four years’ time will come nowhere close to that.

So, yes, a fantastic opening ceremony and one that does indeed live up to China’s aspirations of impressing the entire world.

But what about the rest of it? Looking back to my ten Olympic predictions, it’s time for a review of some of them.

7. Chinese spectators will boo and jeer any Japanese athlete who wins gold.

No golds won yet, of course. But the mood has already been set -- the ‘welcoming’ Chinese audience just got in a little warm-up, booing the American athletes as they walked out into the stadium during te opening ceremony. There’s China’s sporting spirit for you.

6. At some point in time during broadcasts from China there will be a sensational event (in the eyes of the Chinese government) resulting in a blackout of TV transmission signals. China will claim a band of ‘terrorists’ from Xinjiang or Tibet were about to hijack the TV signal with the help of ‘foreign elements.’

Half way there. Beijing is busy stoking fear of the Other, fear of Muslims from Xinjiang. Beijing has paraded the ‘terrorist threats’ from its western colony. Expect that drum to be beaten much harder in the next two weeks.

And lesser ‘threats’ are showing up too – the pro-Tibet banner unveiled recently by two Western activists in sight of the stadium, for example. Both people were deported, of course, as was another activist, Phill Bartell. His ‘crime’ was putting up a poster reading ‘Tibet will be free.’ Three more Americans were detained for questioning China’s one child policy. Others were detained for holding prayers in public and calling for greater religious freedom. One woman was threatened with jail and told she’d be unable to see her children – and she was not even an activist. But she was Tibetan – and the Tibetans, like the Uighurs, are treated with fear and suspicion by the Han. This kind of shit will continue throughout the next two weeks (and indefinitely beyond that). The Olympic Games will be held strictly on the terms of the CPC. China’s claim to respect free speech is a lie.

5. All China’s top leaders will attend the Olympics and will be seen to have new coiffures and dye-jobs.

Check. Camera close up on Hu Jintao. I’ll admit he at least tried to crack a smile, but he couldn’t pull it off. So he relapsed into default mode – stiff waxwork, barely moving, no hint of emotion on his face.

2. Beijing’s Special Forces police will be involved in a shoving match with NBC or some other Western media concerning where they move the broadcast trucks, what time they are broadcasting, who they are interviewing, or some minor action that the broadcast team considers a democratic right.

The crackdown on press freedom is continuing apace. There have been a few showy demonstrations of ‘press freedom,’ for example a number of blocked websites being opened up. But even that shows the communist mindset – the sites were opened just before the beginning of the games and they’ll sure as shit be closed off again a few minutes after the last strains of the closing ceremony have died away.

Already two Japanese journalists were rousted by Chinese paramilitary police, beaten and kicked for merely trying to explore the veracity of Chinese claims about a ‘terrorist incident’ in Xinjiang. Police in the region also forced their way into the hotel room of an AFP reporter and forced him to delete pictures he had taken of the scene of the attack. There should be no surprise that this happened. The Chinese security services are largely manned by thugs. To imagine they will be able to change their style, even for the two weeks of the games, is naïve in the extreme.

1. ChinaBounder Olympic Edition panties will outsell all other brands of panties throughout China.

Well… they’re not quite outselling other brands yet. But they’re surely getting more popular. I hear from my sources (ok, former lovers) that ChinaBounder brand panties are now on sale in cities from Guangzhou in the south to Harbin in the far north. And indeed one enterprising journalist, I am told, has been following up on this story. But more of that over the weekend…


And, now that the Olympics has begun... you know the drill if you're a visitor in China. 'T' for Tibet and 'X' for Xinjiang.

Reason Number 15 - The Value of our Death

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 29
"Every day in China, 320 people are killed in the workplace. That’s around 110,000 people per year, says the head of China’s State Administration of Work Safety, Li Yizhong (apparently forgetting some 6,800 victims indicated by the mathematically correct figure).

Li says that he does not expect this situation to improve significantly over the next ten to twenty years.

Mining is the single most deadly industry. In addition to the huge number of disease victims it causes, over 6,000 people die in China’s mines every year, due to fires, floods, cave-ins and gas build-up.

Many of these deaths are due to managerial indifference to safety rules or lack of safety equipment. And labor rights groups say the true figure is several times higher than this, due to extensive cover-ups of accidents.

China frequently launches showy crackdowns, announced with glowing headlines in the media, to try to reduce the endless cycle of corruption and death.

In 2005, it announced a campaign to close 7,000 small mines. This was slightly under a third of the total number of mines operating at the time, approximately 24,000. But the central government soon had to back down on this plan due to extensive opposition around the country.

Officials admitted that by January 2006 nearly 60% of the 5000 mines they had ordered to close had refused."

ChinaBounder comments:

Out of the weak comes forth strength.

This is the China the West knows little about. This is the real China – the millions upon millions working out of sight, out of mind – digging the coal, mining the minerals, making the toys and shoes and bags and food and white goods and clothes and electronics and all the rest of it.

These are the millions who give China the economic strength it has today. Without them, China would remain the nothing-much nation it was for much of the 20th century.

Hidden behind factory doors, exposed to danger and death, denied any meaningful chance to speak up. No rights, no trade unions, no voice.

That’s what China’s strength is built on. Exploitation, initiated by the Communists and seized upon by the West.

When I go back to my home country I’m struck each time by the cheapness of many goods in the shops – and depressed, for I know the cheapness of those goods is predicated upon the suffering and exploitation of workers in China.

It’s maybe no surprise the West sucks up these cheap goods eagerly, for the misery that produces them is from far away, in another country. What does the suffering of nameless, faceless Chinese workers matter to the West? The square root of fuck all, as far as I can see.

But it is a surprise that China itself does not care about its own workers…

No, fuck that; it’s no surprise at all. Of course the workers of China get a raw deal. They’re the poor, the insulted and the injured, and in today’s China such people simply do not matter.

So let’s toss another 320 on the pile – that’s today’s total of dead – and celebrate the booming economy, the flow of cheap goods, and the chance for some tiny fraction of us to keep on getting richer.

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 30
"Ironically, while attention at home to 320 people dead a day stirs not one change to regulations concerning safety, Chinese politicians instantly demand actions, solutions and apologies when problems involve their citizens overseas.

In April 2007, in Milan, Italy, police gave a Chinese woman a parking ticket since she was unloading goods from her car in a restricted area. They also tried to confiscate her car documentation. The woman, Bu Luowei, says that the policeman turned his back on her and began insulting Chinese people with his colleague. Police say Bu pushed them, and have charged her with insulting a civil servant and injuring police officers.

Whoever is telling the truth, what happened next is not in doubt. Hundreds of Chinese staged a protest, and fighting broke out when Italian riot police were called in to stop the unscheduled gathering. More than ten Chinese were hurt along with seven police officers.

In the days following this event, China protested. “We hope the Italian side deals fairly with the issue and seriously considers the justified demands of local Chinese nationals and takes real measures to protect their legitimate rights and interests,” a statement on the ministry’s website said.

The Chinese government demanded a meeting with Milan mayor Letizia Moratti, and China’s Premier, Wen Jiabao, demanded a report on the riot.

For China, a relatively trivial incident overseas in which no one died and no one was seriously hurt creates a diplomatic storm and nationalistic breast-beating because it plays well in the international press – China cares for its citizens.

Yet the more than 300 deaths every day from workplace accidents within China, plus the thousands of serious injuries and poisonings every year, indicate a little less care on the domestic front."

My repeated exhortation: 'T' for Tibet. 'X' for Xinjiang. It's important. It's humanity.

Reason Number 14 - The Glass Children

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 27
"The Glass Children of China now number over 90,000,000 according to figures provided by government authorities in Beijing. They are the children that have been allowed to be born to couples since the 1979 implementation of the ‘One-Child Policy,’ which constitutes the largest birth control restriction in the history of mankind.

They are ‘glass’ children because they are easy to see through or perhaps see ‘into,’ seeming to have a similar set of physical and psychological problems. The Glass Children of the one-child policy are also very fragile.

These ‘Little Emperors’ and ‘Little Empresses’ are only-children and are the object of their parents’ love as well as that of four grandparents. Such children are often known as ‘one mouth, six pocket’ children. Even though boys tend to be spoiled more than girls, both boys and girls suffer from an excess of love and an upbringing that would be considered astonishingly cosseted by any world standard.

According to Chinese media reports, they are ‘described by critics as spoiled, self-centered and in need of discipline.’ Their built-in fragility is quickly exposed should a parent ever actually say ‘No.’

Those Glass Children born since the early 80s are now of legal marriage age in China (20 for women, 22 for men), and now adult psychological problems are beginning to surface. Tan Jianfeng, a psychological expert, said that China had around 16 million patients with psychological problems, one third of who witnessed the first symptoms during their childhood or puberty. It is estimated that psychological problems exist in some 20% to 30% of the population, but that most sufferers are children.

Even though through their young years to adulthood these 90 million plus children have such similar and easily-identifiable psychological problems, they have few resources to call upon.

China has only 17,000 professionally registered psychiatrists, according to the Chinese Psychiatrist Association. That is 113,000 psychiatrists short of what is needed to meet rising demands. Another estimate puts the figure at an astonishing 2.4 psychologists per million people. Most Western countries have a 10-times better ratio."

ChinaBounder comments:

It’s a common enough stick the West uses to beat China, the one-child policy. But for me the real problem is simply one of legitimacy. The human race is clearly expanding too fast and if, as a species, we do not control our reproduction, then there can be little hope for a fair existence for most of us. The world will simply polarize into a few haves and billions of have-nots.

In those terms, then, China is showing leadership. But it is not so, really, for the choice to limit the size of a society must be taken by that society. In the case of China, the one-child policy has been decided by diktat, by the crooks and thugs who have seized power. The people of China had no voice in the decision, though they are the ones to suffer for breaking the rule (from punishments such as fines through to forced abortion and sterilization.) For that reason more than any other, the policy is illegitimate.

Yet what most interests me about China’s single-child policy is how it makes children a commodity.

One of the problems of the policy is that, in a patriarchal society like China, it leads to gender imbalance, as would-be parents abort female fetuses hoping for the subsequent conception of a male child.

Beijing’s first response to this was to ban gender screening of unborn children. Of course, in a country of cut corners like China, that was wholly ineffective. Bribe-driven, it was an easy matter for parents to find the gender of their child and order up a termination accordingly.

So Beijing’s next step was to change the rules, at least for those in the countryside, where attitudes are most traditional. The new rule said that if your first child was female (or disabled, which is much the same thing), well, bad luck, have another go and try to bring forth men-children only.

Thus the system which already valued male over female now had official blessing, a girl worth less than a boy – say, a dollar to a euro. That was the first step in the commoditization of children. A quick fix, a fudge – much easier to implement than the more ‘difficult,’ ‘radical’ solution of leading by example, of allowing women to take positions of power in Chinese society.

The next stage was akin to the periodic fine-tuning of the Federal Reserve, or the Bank of England, an ad-hoc adjustment of the children-marketplace. Thus, when there was a dip in the liquidity of the children-market – as, for example, during the recent Wenchuan earthquake which led to the death of so many thousands of children, killed due to the greed and negligence of all those layers of Chinese officials – the government’s response was to prime the market by telling bereaved parents they could have another child.

When you try to make a society through social engineering, you turn people into mere nuts and bolts.

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 28

"These 90 million plus loners form the 2nd Army of Instability. From their university-educated ranks will come the officers, the captains, and the generals – giving leadership not in the traditional sense of the military, but offering leadership as individuals asking psychological questions.

The 2nd Army’s intellectuals are already asking the simple yet dangerous questions such as ‘Who am I?’

China’s government champions that its family planning policies have been successful, and frequently offers the fact that birth of 400 million children have been prevented as a great success story.

Seen in a different light than the one shone from Communist doctrine, these 400 million could have been family members, siblings - brothers and sisters - unborn souls who may have provided normalcy, trust, happiness, and the continuation of family blood for those 90 million who were allowed to have life.

The Glass Children may eventually take the view that their parents were tricked, fooled and finally coerced into limitations on a scale never experienced by any non-warring society. The 2nd Army, with 400 million forbidden souls in tow, will then seek justice both for their parents and the liberation of the Chinese family."

'X' for Xinjiang. 'T' for Tibet. Make the signs with your hands, your crossed forearms. Don't let the lies and spin from Beijing make you forget China's captive peoples.

Reason Number 13 - Culture’s Price Point

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 25
"You cannot see the Great Wall from space. Yang Liwei, China’s first man in space, said he was unable to see the Wall while orbiting the globe in October 2003.

But in today’s China it’s getting even harder to see it from the ground. Photos taken of the Great Wall a century ago show one that is very different to what the world knows today. One such picture of a section of the Great Wall known as the Sister Towers shows two mighty stone guard towers built into a hillside dotted with trees and shrubs. Strong and imposing, they overlook a broad river. They are a sign of strength, confidence and glory, a symbol that all China could be proud of.

A photo showing the condition of the towers today is deeply shocking. All that remains is a few layers of base stones of one of the towers. The other is wholly gone – a phantom. The two photographic images placed side by side play tricks with your mind. First the shock, then comes the wonder, then comes sadness as you realize that in this case ‘gone’ means forever.

Even the river has gone, sucked up by China’s overuse of water and neglect, both based on the fallacy that economic development should take precedence over historical preservation. The hillside shows a few straggly trees and an expanse of bare soil and rock.

William Lindesay, a British activist dedicated to protecting the wall, spoke to a local dweller, 82-year-old Lu Wencai. 'The Towers aren’t here anymore, they’re gone' said Lu. Lu told Lindesay that the towers were first damaged by Japanese bombers in the Second World War. But, says Lu, the real damage came in the 1970s when the People’s Liberation Army built a railway into the area. They dismantled the towers and used their stones to build temporary shelters. Once the soldiers had gone the locals used the bricks themselves.

Lu’s story can be found repeated all along the Great Wall as decades of neglect and active abuse have destroyed one of the greatest feats of construction completed by mankind. Often China cries ‘We are the victim of foreign intervention,’ which in many cases has caused big difficulties for the country. However, the destruction of the Great Wall and the present lack of attention it receives is entirely caused by the neglect of the Chinese people. It is as if the words ‘Chinese’ and ‘culture’ are at war with each other."

ChinaBounder comments:

Another question I like to ask in class: ‘What do you do that is Chinese?’

‘Huh?’

‘I mean… what do you do that makes you Chinese.. what do you do that is a part of your culture, that is unique to China, that is traditional?’

Perhaps it’s an unwise question to ask. After all, the point of the class is to get people talking, and this question pretty much shuts down conversation. Few students have an answer.

Calligraphy’s the obvious reply, and indeed a few students will offer this answer, for calligraphy is still quite widely practiced (though often I get the sense that most students only do calligraphy because their more-traditional parents force them to.)

But after calligraphy the well is pretty much dry. Sometimes a student will offer ‘table tennis’ as an answer. And – having done this so many times before -- I have my response ready. ‘So table tennis is a Chinese tradition, is it?’

‘It is.’

‘Really? How long has it been a tradition?’

‘Well.. I don’t know exactly.. but for a very long time…’

Then I tell the student in question that the sport was invented in England in 1880 or so.

In the larger classes, at least one student will play a traditional Chinese instrument, a guqin, an erhu, the pipa or what-have–you. But for the most part it’s piano, violin – the standards of the Western orchestra.

Where is China’s culture? Where, when the nation’s most-loved sports are basketball and football, when its favorite festivals are increasingly Christmas and Valentine’s Day? I have found that more students know the date of those festivals than, say, the day of the Dragon Boat Festival or the Mid-Autumn Festival.

Even the strongest part of Chinese culture, its greatest claim to world fame, its cuisine, is sapping strength, evaporating into a mere simulacrum of what once it was. McDonalds and KFC and Pizza Hut are making inroads into the Chinese palate, and expanding Chinese waistlines accordingly. And indeed maybe that’s a synecdoche for where Chinese culture as a whole is heading -- at weekends, for example, there are long queues outside the Pizza Hut branch in Xujiahui, a central area of Shanghai. It’s a bizarre sight to see, and indeed I often shout out to the queue of assembled simpletons that they are lining up to eat high-fat low-nutrition high-cost low-taste shit. Why would anyone choose to eat Pizza Hut’s foul offerings? If it’s pizza you want the city has dozens of fine pizza places (JimiX on Beijing Xi Lu for example). But no – it’s Pizza Hut that takes the custom.

And that’s Chinese culture today – the victory of show over substance, tinsel over taste, glib over great. Sure, Chinese food remains strong and right now Western junk food is only a part-time choice. When Chinese tourists travel abroad, the majority of them only eat Chinese style food. It’s very rare for them to show much interest in the foods of other cultures – and while that’s no more than good sense in the case of eating British food, ranking rightly low in the global scale as it does, the rot has begun, it’s clear. China’s educated young largely do not know how to cook. Too much used to being cosseted by Mum and Dad, they have never learned basic kitchen skills. And along with this, many of the most glorious dishes of the Ming and Qing have been all but forgotten.

And so it seems to me that Chinese culture, once the greatest in the world, the most inventive, creative, energetic and daring, is today just a mummified husk. A few more taps and it will turn to dust.

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 26
"But one part of China’s cultural history does get a lot of attention – the Yuanmingyuan, or ‘Garden of Perfection and Delight.’ This garden, painstakingly built by six generations of Qing Dynasty emperors, was burned and looted by British and French forces in 1860 as a ‘lesson’ to China.

Since that time, it has remained a ruin. But in 2004 a meeting was held to discuss whether it should be restored. The consensus was that it should not be restored.

'The ruins are the most concrete evidence of Western atrocities and should be reserved as the scene of a crime. The lonely, desolated site is a silent accusation of the aggressive acts of foreign invaders, serving as an ideal place for a ‘patriotic education' said Ye Yanfang, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Another commentator said 'Without rehabilitation, the Yuanmingyuan displays explicitly the crimes committed by the Western allied forces. As time goes by the new Yuanmingyuan may obliterate the painful history in the minds of Chinese people.'

The victim mentality again.

But as so often, China is as much the victim of its own people as of external powers. Many cultural relics did in fact survive the looting by the British and French, but they were lost over the succeeding decades as the Chinese people themselves slowly took away objects from the garden. And, in the Cultural Revolution, there was extreme destruction as 800 meters of garden wall were knocked down, 1,000 ancient trees cut down, and numerous other objects looted or destroyed.

Who is calling for a memorial to the destruction China has visited upon itself? No-one. For China, as a victim, the aggressor must always be someone beyond its borders."

Keep the symbol in mind and in the public eye -- make a 'T' for Tibet and an 'X' for Xinjiang if you're visiting China for the Olympic games.

Reason Number 12 - The Conformists

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 23
"In China, everyday rules are there to be ignored. Bicycles and mopeds ride on the pavement. Pedestrians jaywalk, even on the highways. Subway passengers push on to carriages before those inside get off. Queues deteriorate into melees of pushing and shoving as more and more people simply jump to the front. Customers negotiate purchases without receipts, meaning neither party pays tax, and street-corner touts hand out fliers for all manner of illegal services from satellite dishes to fake diplomas.

Ignoring the rules is so pervasive that it has simply become a part of life. It is accepted and even tolerated, and hardly ever directly challenged by the police or other authorities. In many ways China is a freer country than you might have imagined. Not all Chinese people, of course, ignore the rules, but quite often the option is there should the inspiration hit you.

Not surprisingly, because people have no respect for the rules, they also have little respect for the sometime guardians of the rules. Every roadside altercation in China, from a minor dispute between two pedestrians to a collision between two cars, results in a crowd of eager watchers and usually the intervention of a policeman. As the policeman tries to sort out the arguments, those involved shout and even curse the police officer, at times jabbing an angry finger to dent the shirt on his chest. In a nation like America, even a raised voice to a law enforcement officer would bring the threat of arrest. In China, on-the-job abuse is apparently part of the job description.

For China today, ignoring the rules is a rule for life itself."

ChinaBounder comments:

Conformism. Indeed that’s the curse that afflicts the China I know. A sameness of opinion, word and deed. The individual with individual ideas – that’s what’s hard to find. I’ve met a few, a rare few, in my years in China.

Mostly it’s conformism all the way. Again I will use an example from my life as a teacher – in which, now I think about it, perhaps I am rather the conformist too, given that my lessons are themselves settled and seldom-changing.

One part of the stuff I teach involves students giving a one or two minute presentation on a set topic. This is generally simple stuff, such as a favorite restaurant or sport, a trip somewhere, a close friend and the like.

With some questions, such as the best friend, there is necessarily a range of different answers. But when it comes to the favorite film or book question, or an admired hero, then the range of answers I get is tiny.

For the film question, far and away the most common answer is ‘Titanic,’ an excruciatingly bad piece of dross. Five out of ten students will always offer this answer, even this many years after the wretched film came out. Following this, the next most common answer is Forrest Gump, another dreadful film, and then Gone With The Wind (after reading the first badly-written sentence of that novel, I gave up on my plan of reading it). Next up it’s Harry Potter (also dreadfully-written tosh) and then Braveheart. After this there’s a smattering of whatever the latest blockbuster is (Transformers was very popular for a while). And that, more or less, is it. Perhaps five percent of students will pick a film other than these.

Perhaps half a percent of students will pick a Chinese film.

As for books, the range is much smaller. Top choice is Jane Eyre, and then, of course, Jane Austen. She is always identified as a writer of love stories, and students are surprised when I explain she is not a romance writer at all. And after Jane, the next big choice is Harry cunting Potter, again. Now, most of the students take the class to prepare for an English exam which assesses their readiness for university study in an English-speaking country. So at this stage of the class I’ll usually say ‘So… you’re having an interview to test your readiness for university, and you want to speak about a children’s book. What do you think that says about you?’

And for an admired hero? Top of the list, it’s Bill Gates. That’s for cupidity. Second, it’s Yao Ming. In the China sports scene, you’re no-one until you’ve got to the top. Trying doesn’t count. Heart doesn’t count. Only success matters, and if, as in the case of Yao, that success is found abroad, then worship is legitimized at home. It’s almost as if you’re no-one in China until the West says you’re someone. And third, it’s Michael Jordan, followed by Li Ka-shing – there’s the greed factor again. Everyone wants to be a billionaire.

The students I teach are among China’s best, the cream of the cream – they’re the ones who aim at big-shot universities abroad, they’re the tiny percentage of Chinese society with the money and the plans.

And if such students cannot be original even in something as trivial as ‘What’s your favorite film?’ how can they ever be original when they begin working life? How can they ever be anything but conformists?

‘Fault Lines On The Face Of China: 50 Reasons Why China May Never Be Great’ - Excerpt 24
"Ignoring the rules is, often, a socially trivial matter, certainly when it is accepted by the masses. But breaking the rules is a very different matter from ignoring the rules. Breaking the rules takes bravery. It requires great courage to stand up in China today and say ‘Stop. This is wrong. I protest.’ And doing that, in China, is dangerous.

The lack of those citizens with the courage to stand up and say ‘I protest’ is today the weakest link in the connection between China and greatness. Those few who do stand up suffer perils beyond imagination.

China has its dissidents, but they do not have a tradition of dissent and struggle in which to orient themselves, at least not a Chinese one. Their idols and role-models are also foreigners, such as Lech Walesa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclav Havel. And the dreamer, Martin Luther King.

Brave Chinese dissidents are very much a minority, and they are almost totally ignored by Chinese society. There are no parades calling for the freeing of China’s prisoners of conscience. How can there be? Most Chinese people are not allowed to know such prisoners exist, and of those who do know, many simply do not care enough to raise their voice, possibly to suffer a similar fate.

Think of William Wilberforce, who did so much to end slavery at the beginning of the 19th Century. Think of Emmeline Pankhurst, who fought to get women the vote in the early 20th century. Think of Rachel Carson, whose 1962 book ‘Silent Spring’ sparked off the global environmental movement.

These are people who did not just ignore the rules. They broke them, and allowed their countries to grow positively and dynamically freer. It is not that such people do not exist in China, it is that they will not raise their head above the parapet. Today, Chinese culture and society stresses conformity and consensus above all else. There is conformity in ignoring the rules, and conformity in refusing to break them.

When Chinese people feel fear, the fear that comes when they see their country is not changing, not developing its political liberties, then and only then will the charge be led over the parapets and into the firing line"

It's coming up soon -- the Olympics. Don't forget, if you have the chance to be on camera -- make a 'T" sign for Tibet and an 'X' sign for Xinjiang.