Modern East Asia

[Anonymous]

In the LA Times (2-13-07), there is an article about the big five countries coming to an agreement with North Korea on financial aid and nuclear disarmament. It seems all the involved nations have come to a tentative agreement that North Korea will stop its nuclear program and let in inspectors in exchange for aid. Of course, the article gives few details as to how much aid is involved and how much from each nation. Even so, this is a good sign that diplomacy still works!![Edit by="jlatimer on Feb 13, 7:45:21 PM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

Another "ultimate penalty" article about a sanctioned Chinese official, this one comes from the front page of the Valley Edition of the Los Angeles Times for 30 May 2007 and deals with the death sentence given to Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of China's Food and Drug Administration. The reporter, Mark Magnier, describes the $832,00 Zheng pocketed from bribes, kickbacks and other forms of graft while in office as "not huge," at least not according to "the standards of Chinese corruption cases." Apparently what caused the public outrage that contributed to the government's giving Zheng a death sentence was the large number of untested drugs and food products he allowed into the Chinese and international markets, with the result that dozens of Chinese citizens died from untested medicines and thousands of cats and dogs perished in the US from eating pet food contaminated by toxic elements in wheat gluten exported to Canada from China. This last factor was no doubt the one that sealed Zheng's fate. China, as all the world knows, has become a major exporter of you-name-it. Whatever the product might be, it has a Chinese manufacturer and supplier. Tarnishing China's lucrative international reputation as a supplier of safe, reliable, inexpensive goods was no doubt the ultimate crime for which the hapless Zheng must pay the ultimate price.

Although many of us might like to see stiffer penalties imposed on corrupt heads of the American FDA, which has bungled, over the years, everything from thalidomide to Vioxx, still, most of us would not support a death penalty for such malfeasance. On the other hand, the officials of the People's Republic can and do administer such punishments on a not infrequent basis (see vgairola's post for 07-08-2006 in this thread on the execution of the "richest man in China" for graft). Although the fact that the Chinese administer and support such punishments probably reflects a kind of Confucian-Mencian legalist tradition antedating considerably the 1949 revolution, there seems little doubt that the severity of Zheng's sentence stems from China's new consciousness of itself as a major supplier and exporter. The Chinese FDA was established as recently as 1998, when Zheng was appointed its first director after several decades spent working for successful state-run pharmaceutical companies in Hangzhou. In 2002 the agency became responsible for approving all new drugs, thus opening the door to big pressure and even bigger bribes, according to Hao Zhao, an associate professor at Beijing's Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business. Zheng's death sentence, handed down 29 May by the Beijing Intermediate Court, is being reviewed by the state supreme court and might possibly be reduced as part of the appeals process. The article notes that a deputy governor of Anhui province was executed for corruption in 2003. And yet, the article notes also that such corruption is widespread and that employees of state-run companies who decide to become whistle-blowers can face severe retribution. Zhou Huanxi, a woman who reported to state regulators the illegal adulteration of drugs by the company she worked for, Hangzhou Aoyi Baoling Pharmaceutical, was rewarded for her courage and honesty with a three-year prison sentence "on trumped-up charges of trying to extort the company with harmful information."

So it seems that corporations are king, even in a nominally communist state where there are no corporations, at least not officially. It seems also that China's Draonian punishments by death penalty are having little effect on coporate corruption. The Chinese leaders blame corrupt officials like Zheng Xiaoyu. Confucius and Mencius would blame the leaders and call for their punishment. I agree with Confucius and Mencius, although punishment of corrupt and incompetent heads of state is no more likely a prospect in the People's Republic than it is here in the US.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School

[Anonymous]

The Column One piece in the Valley Edition of the Los Angeles Times for Thursday, 31 May 2007, "Shattered as a lover and a spy," tells a sad story of unrequited love caught in the Cold War ideological struggle between Taiwan and the People's Republic at a time when the personal was inescapably the political. Kan Zhonggan was an eleven-year-old boy when his working-class parents sent him from Shanghai, the city of his birth, to live with an uncle in Taiwan in the months prceding the 1949 revolution. On the island young Kan was innoculated with the virulent anti-communist propaganda promoted by Taiwan's strongman, General Chiang Kai-shek (and supported by the US with its inflexible position that Taiwan, or the Republic of China, was the "true China").

Kan, now 72, recalled for reporter Ching-Ching Ni what this propaganda was like and what effect it had on him as a young man. "They [the Taiwanese government] told us the communists were the embodiment of evil, that they shared wives and tossed landlords into the sea. It seems like a joke now, but I was a kid. I believed everything. I hated the communists so much I could eat their flesh and drink their blood." Charged with such super-patriotism, Kan was ripe for recruitment by Taiwan's spy masters, who trained him in code writing, secret radio messaging and the planting and detonation of explosives. Assigned to assassinate Communist Party leaders, bomb major cities and foment counterrevolutionary resistance, the zealous 22-year-old Kan took up a cover job as a salesclerk in Hong Kong and awaited orders to report to the mainland for active undercover spy duty. But in Hong Kong in 1957 he met a young woman named Xiao Zhen, an attractive teacher involved, along with her father and brother, in counterrevolutionary resistance. Although married, she fell in love with Kan and fled with him, against his spy master's orders, to Shanghai where they enjoyed four blissful days, young and in love, with the whole world ahead of them, before both were arrested by plainclothes policemen. Kan got a 20-year sentence, Xiao five years.

Now comes the sad part. During imprisonment the flame of loved burned true and pure in both hearts. Kan once caught a glimpse of Xiao at a distance through the small window of his cell while she was out in the women's exercise area. When his jailers found out about this, they blocked up his window so that he had no more views of the outside world for the duration of his confinement in that prison. Before his time was up, Kan was moved to Qinghai province in the far west, China's equivalent of Siberia, where he was forced to do hard labor. Upon his release he worked at a string of menial jobs while he tried to reunite with his true love Xiao Zhen. In 1985 he finally located her, working in an office in Shanghai, the city of their four days of happiness a lifetime ago. Their reunion was restrained but intensely emotional, like something out of Henry James or Kazuo Ishiguro. And, in the end, it was heartbreaking. She had waited for him, as he had for her, she refusing to leave the labor camp after her five-year term was up, staying on as a prison employee, preferring life on the inside to life outside without Kan. Finally, after seventeen long years of fruitless waiting, she had married a former counterrevolutionary, a kind man who had cared for her when she fell sick in prison. She showed Kan pictures of her husband and son. To this day Kan blames himself for not having found her in time, before she remarried. But China is a large, populous country with a cumbersome bureaucracy. That he found her at all borders on the miraculous.

Is there a moral to this sad love story, other than life sucks? I think so and it has to do with the destructive force of propaganda. Noxious anti-communist propaganda, promoted by Taiwan (and the US) iinspired Kan and Xiao's quixotic espionage endeavors. Party-line communist propaganda dictated the terms and nature of their punishment. The losers are the ordinary people whose views and lives are warped by propaganda. The old Latin proverb got it wrong. In our times it is not love but propaganda that conquers all. This sad love story could be used to teach our students about the pitfalls of propaganda, especially our contemporary US variety, which would have them hate Muslim terrorists as passionately as the young Kan once hated communists, and would encourage them to throw their own lives away in service no less "patriotic" than that which once inspired idealistic spies and lovers Kan Zhonggan and Xiao Zhen.

Leigh Clark
Monroe High School[Edit by="lclark on Jun 20, 6:09:58 PM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

Buried in the World in Brief section of the LA Times was a short blurb about the Rape of Nanking toll being disputed by the Japanese (6-20-07). According to the clip, 100 Japanese lawmakers from the ruling party said the number of civilians killed by Japanese soldiers during the 1937 Rape of Nanking "has been grossly inflated." The spokesperson said that they believe only 20,000 Chinese were killed and that Chinese officials inflated the number for propaganda reasons. China has estimated the deaths at 300,000. However, most historians agree that at least 150,000 civilians were killed and tens of thousands of women were raped. I think this is another example of the Japanese government trying to re-write history.

[Anonymous]

I saw the LA Times article too. I fully agree with your description and analysis of the sad situation. Interestingly enough, I talked about the article in my World History class as an example of Cold War propaganda. It was good timing since we were covering the Cold War when the article was printed. Over the past year, I've made it a point to include the different aspect of propaganda from varoius sources and show how propaganda can be used, and misused, to get people do do or think something they normally wouldn't. My hope is for my students to understand what propaganda is, and its affects, so they will be better able to think critically for themselves, instead of being told how to think.

[Anonymous]

What steps has Mexico City taken to reduce air pollution? Also, how can pollution controlls be applied to China if they are uninterested? I'll be in mexico City this summer, so it will be interesting to see how they have done over the last time I was there. I'm just not sure how we can realistically get China to do what we have done to reduce pollution if they are only interested with industrialization. Go Padres!!

[Anonymous]

On a related issue, check my other posting on "From Silk to Oil" regarding the increase in oil consumption and lack of renewable energy in China. [Edit by="jlatimer on Jun 22, 3:20:45 PM"][/Edit]

[Anonymous]

When I was in Taipei in the 1980's the air pollution was palpable and the traffic was intense. I just came across an article describing part of Taipei's answer--a still-building, very modern subway system. The article at http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/taipei-metro-re.html describes the system's features. What I found even more interesting are some of the comments describing aspects of "Asian culture."

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