Liu Xiaobo

Liu Xiaobo appears in the news a lot these days. He is the recipient of a Nobel peace prize, one that the Chinese government is hell-bent in preventing him from actually receiving. The Chinese government is really enraged about him, and to know why I'll have to explain more about his prize and how he got it.
In 1977, a group of Czech intellectuals irritated the then communist Czech government by producing a document called the Charter 77, which demanded human rights and democracy, and lambasted the Czech government for denying its promises in this regard. Though the Czech government lashed out, ultimately the demands outlined in Charter 77 were upheld after the fall of communism. Liu Xiaobo and a large number of other Chinese intellectuals were inspired by this document, and made a similar one called Charter 08 (as it was written in 2008).
This clearly annoyed the Chinese government, who not only was very irritated to be criticized like that, but also considers human rights to be a load of western bullshit that would derail Mao's vision of an equal society. Mr. Liu then went on to further annoy them:

(It would take) 300 years of colonialism. In 100 years of colonialism, Hong Kong has changed to what we see today. With China being so big, of course it would require 300 years as a colony for it to be able to transform into how Hong Kong is today. I have my doubts as to whether 300 years would be enough.

These kinds of views are generally seen as seditious, and I think if I expressed any similar beliefs (if I advocated that it would be a good thing if America were to be conquered by another country, say Germany or China), I think I would be loudly denounced as a treasonous bastard, though not arrested. The Chinese government, nationalistically insulted, arrested Mr. Liu on grounds of sedition.
The Chinese government was further enraged when Mr. Liu was awarded the Nobel peace prize for the work on Charter 08, and its inability to lobby the Norwegian Government to influence the decision. (Members of the selection committee are chosen by the Norwegian parliament, but the government has no further input on selection and certainly enjoys nothing remotely similar to veto power.)
So that's why he's imprisoned, why the Chinese government is mad at Norway, and why shit will fly for years to come from all this. I argue that human rights, "Ren Quan" in Chinese, is an important part of Sun Yat Sen's "Minquan," or "people's power."

Chinese Democracy

A leutenant general in the Chinese army has an argument that democracy will come to China inevitably. It can be delayed for a limited amount of time before heads roll, but it will come, sooner or later, and the later, the messier the transition. The president also seems to believe that democracy is inevitable.
I can think of a few ways it could happen. It could spread from an already democratic section, like Hong Kong, or Taiwan. It could be a populist revolt. Or, it could be granted by the existing Chinese government, which would work wonders on its retention of power. Let me assume that, and discuss the existence of a democratic China, one year after the transition.

Taiwan's last objections to rejoining the mainland are gone, and the Pan-Blue movement of Taiwan overwhelms their Pan-Green opponents to vote to rejoin the mainland. And there was much rejoicing, although not in the Pan Green parties.
The Chinese nation now has 1,361,732,740 people, living on 9,677,012 km2 of land. These people are immediately massively shifting about. The eastern seaboard is being rapidly depopulated, and the empty west is somewhat less rapidly being filled. (Part of the reason that China's western regions are so depopulated is that they're very hard to live in. Deserts in the north, and really high mountains in the south.) GDP rises by 40% annually for quite a few years as the Hukou system is dismantled from a regional-transition barrier, to being a mere family record kept for personal genealogical purposes. The now mobile people find economic opportunities, starting with arbitrage, but quickly moving into regional factories and business opportunities.
On election day, the Chinese voter has some 14 political parties to chose from. I predict a tight race primarily between the CCP (having gained popularity from allowing democracy) and KMT, with a very marginal victory by the CCP, which must then establish a coalition to govern effectively. The results will largely depend on how the system is structured, with some systems working better than others. I think a European parliamentary system could work, or the Israeli system, but the US style "winner take all" would not work. (China's political opinions are diverse enough that a "winner take all" system would self destruct within 3 elections.)
Internationally, I predict that absorbing Taiwan would mellow China towards Japan slightly, but not by much. It would still treat Japan as an arch-rival, and glare at it suspiciously with every chance it could get. I predict it would dump North Korea like a hot coal, and enjoy warm friendship with South Korea. A cool, mild like of America would also ensue.
I also anticipate that the Chinese guy will, at his convenience, point out numerous things that I turn out to be wrong about.

Old Computers are Poisoning Asia

Uh oh. Why are old computers poisoning Asia? Economic reasons. They're taking apart old, unwanted computers for their valuable minerals, which they sell.
Discovery news is reporting on the dismantling in India, and Worldwatch reports on the Chinese Conditions. They're both frantically unsoldering components as fast as they can, as the components contain valuable copper, gold, and aluminum. Worthless components, like silicon and lead, are discarded. Some of it vaporizes, and the local air is contaminated with smoke. People in the area have traces of many metals in their blood, some of which are poisonous.
As much as this leads to suffering, the local people are encouraging it, as it's paying them more than traditional area jobs, and this allows them to send their children to school, so that they earn far more money. In a little bit of time, India and China will be so rich as to not bother with this, and will likely send on their e-waste to poorer countries like Cambodia, or Somolia. (Both China and India have massive electronics industries, and an increasing demand for electronics as they industrialize.)

How to Breathe Easy in Tibet

Tibet is an interesting place. Practically the earth's west (or east) pole, it is about 2 miles above sea level, cold, dry, and inhospitable to a large portion of the world's population. It is the highest known region on earth. The world's tallest mountain from sea level, Mt. Everest, in on its border with Nepal. If the average person were to fly there, they would probably develop immediate and severe altitude sickness, and doctors suggest that travelers to such high elevations first travel to lower elevation destinations and sleep to acclimatize to the thin air. Medical studies show that acclimatization consists of speeding up your breathing, and growing more red blood cells. At Tibet's altitude, the average person has so many red blood cells that they begin to clog your circulatory system. (At which point they clot and cause conditions requiring medical intervention.) Yet the people native to the region manage it just fine. How?
Discovery News reports that a four nation study group examined Tibetans verses lower-elevation-living Chinese people to the east of them. Participants had a blood sample drawn, genes in their blood's DNA (DNA is found in every single one of your cells) analyzed, and so on. Tibetans have more efficient hemoglobin, and it's genetic to them (as compared to a "nurtured" lifestyle difference). DNA coding for red blood cells is found in our second chromosome, and Tibetans have one variant that doesn't appear in any other population. It is a variant on EPAS1.
Presumably this evolved from living in a region very close to the "death zone" from which acclimatization is literally impossible. Those able to extract more oxygen from the thin air were better able to engage in farming, trade, and other life-sustaining activities, and had more opportunities to get married than those that spent their days panting and exhausted. People living closer to sea level would gain no real advantage from this.
And no, unfortunately the only way to gain this gene would be to be born with it. And the only way to get your children to be born with it would be to marry a Tibetan. Possibly in the future one may have this gene inserted by retrovirus.

The great replanting

Discovery reports that China is now the only region on Earth that has more forest in 2010 than 2000. Everywhere else, more forest is being cleared than planted.
Why? For one, it's a restoration of the ancient condition. The area from inner Mongolia to about Chongching was once an immense forest that got cleared over the years to make way for farms and towns and cities and so on over the course of Chinese civilization. The more it got cleared away, the more Asia suffered from dust storms and the region suffered from drought and erosion as the soil literally blows off to the east.
For two, China is an industrializing country, and kind of ashamed at the way that it's the biggest producer of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Wanting a green record, they have commanded every citizen in China to plant 3 trees per year, which I imagine is somewhat tricky for the urban dwellers, who'd have to take time off work and go far far away to even have the room to do it. Still, success. The central forests are back in a way that they haven't for some 2000 years now.
In any case, the Chinese government believes that this will improve the environment in central China, not just for wildlife, but for people and cities, as water supplies become protected and dust is held firmly in the earth by root networks. And it would look better aesthetically too.
I feel so out-engineered.

Mr. Wu's Amazing Robots

Just outside of Beijing, a touring journalist, Paul Merton, has discovered a man named Mr. Wu, who makes a multitude of robots with no educational training. Yes, the original sources spell his name "Woo," but I'm pretty sure that it's this one, transliterated "Wu."
Mr. Wu's robots are of varying utility. Many are just little walking toys of entertaining novelty. And all are named after him, and a number describing the order of their invention. I think his most interesting is Wu-25, a rickshaw bot that announces something in Chinese as it hauls you about. (The video does not translate that, unfortunately.) I'd totally buy that. Most impressively, all of Mr. Wu's robots are made of things that other people threw away.
When uneducated people accomplish things like this, it leaves me in awe, since I've met very educated people who could do no such thing. I also am left wondering how much more such people would accomplish if granted an education.
Also, if I had money, I would totally hire Mr. Wu. His current job as a farmer is a total waste of his talents.

Google and China

I'm sure you've heard it elsewhere first. The Chinese government hacked Google's email servers to dig up dirt on human-rights activists. So Google has retaliated by no longer censoring their searches, and announcing that if this requires them to leave China, well, then so be it. (A quick note that Google is the host of this blog.)
I can still remember when Google was first introducing itself to China. Many pundits were furious that they were making any concessions at all. Google's business department answered this by claiming that they were doing this all for the best, and to trust them on it.
I'm surprised by the Chinese response. While the government is predictably furious, the common people seem delighted by Google's move. Chinese citizens are shown laying flowers on Google's signboard. Maybe it's just sympathy for the hundreds of employees who will likely to lose their jobs, or maybe it's a deliberate siding with Google's position. Real news from China has been difficult to determine.
In any case, it looks bad for the Chinese government. The whole "censor stuff you don't like" thing looks stupider every day, the image of them abroad is mostly that of thieving and insufferable-ness, that working in China will mean having your technology stolen and endless regulation.
The thrust of the Chinese argument is that they're turning their backs on billions of dollars. Such is true in literal terms. China has 1.3 billion people, who have between them $8.8 trillion USD to throw around. But Google is arguing that it's not a fair market. Things were set up to give local competitors, like Baidu, every conceivable advantage, and Google every conceivable disadvantage. Google managed to get maybe 20% of the local market, and it was made very clear that it wouldn't get higher than that.
And yes, the Chinese Renmenbi has a value, but so does reputation, security, trust, and a thousand other intangibles that the Chinese government poked at. This event is not over. I predict much screaming by both sides in the near future.

Shanxi Automated Brickworks

Fact #1: Bricks sell in China's Shanxi province for 3000 yuan per pack. (~$438?)
Fact #2: The Chinese government has shut down numerous slavery rings in Shanxi, in which people were imported to produce bricks. There is apparently a labor shortage in Shanxi.
Fact #3: Steel and machine tools are now quite common in China.

Hm, hypothetically there's money to be made on this.

Step #1: Enter China on business visa.
Step #2: Fill out Foreign Owned Corporation paperwork. (Machine translation of the company name is "山西自动化砖砌."
Step #3: Rent cheap land. (In a nod to the official communist policy, one may not buy land in China, merely lease it for 99 years, with possible renewal.)
Step #4: Build rail-furnace, calibrate belt speed such that bricks emerge fully fired.
Step #5: Clay harvesting machine. (Probably involves clay-knife, scoop, and storage bin.)
Step #6: Brick shaping machine. (Say, 5 or 6 plates that squeeze the clay into a rectangular shape.)
Step #7: Hire some workers to operate the clay harvesting machine and to move the hot bricks into containers using tongs.
Step #8: Sino-fy the company by selling shares until you own none of it.

If you are Chinese, you can skip steps 1, 2, and 8.

China's Olympics: The Engineering

Right, so having read the previous post, we can now discuss the actual things China did to solve its real and/or perceived problems in Beijing.

The smog would have to be the first thing to go. "Come to Beijing, die of lung disease!" is a horrible tourism positioning. That and harm coming to invited guests is really shameful, especially to a "face" culture such as China. (China's neighbors are also "face" cultures for the most part.)

A large portion of northern Beijing had nothing in it. So it was converted into a large park with an intricate pond. The plants would, in theory, soak up the pollution. But this wouldn't happen fast enough to have clear skies in August, so a supplemental step was taken of deliberately causing a eutrophic bloom. The growing algae sucked all the pollution from the water, which made the water hungrily absorb more pollution from the air. The algae was then harvested and put somewhere discrete so it wouldn't decay, which would have ended the cycle.

With clearing skies, the Beijing authorities then looked to traffic. The load of cars was not only making getting around a slow process, but was also a major contributor to the pollution problem in the first place. It was ruled that cars must alternate their trips on the road, with one day for cars with even plates, the next for cars with odd plates. Carpooling was encouraged.

This was still not enough, so the subway system was massively expanded, especially between the airport, most of the hotels, and the grounds. Traffic would not be a problem with all of these subway lines in place. (More are still planned to encourage a reduction in car use after the games.)

The city ugliness then got the authority's attention. The various stadiums were works of art, certainaly, but wouldn't work well in a drab, brutalist city. Gardeners worked madly to grow many little flower gardens, especially near the stadiums. City residents quite enjoyed this sudden splash of color.

Satisfied with the physical conditions, social engineering was then examined. The authorities had multiple fears on this matter.

Firstly, the continuing fight against rudeness. A lack of service culture had been noticed over ten years before, with locals complaining of clerks rudely dismissing them over anything deemed not part of the clerk's job. The clerk felt so secure in his position that he felt he could treat the customers any way he pleased. The government had been disabusing the clerks of this attitude. With firings. This was stepped up.

Secondly, spitting. While the traditional Chinese thing to do when one has a phlegm problem is to spit it on the sidewalk, and this is in fact the best thing to do medically, it tends to horrify people of European descent, who had a history of airborne disease that would be spread by such practices. (China has no such history, hence the spitting. Spitting the phlegm gets the problem outside your body, and unlikely to spread to another's, unless you spit it ON them, which they don't.) Many "manners teachers" went about the city instructing people about the rudeness of doing so, advising people to swallow their phlegm instead. While not as good as spitting medically, this still works. Stomach acid tends to destroy most bacteria and viruses. This way, the wealthy "first world" nations would not observe Chinese people behaving like the "backwards bumpkins" that they were depicted as in the past.

Language was then addressed. There are at least as many languages in China as in Europe, but functionally one can operate in China with two: Mandarin and Cantonese. Almost every Chinese citizen speaks at least one of those. Unfortunately, knowledge of non-Chinese languages is a bit more limited. China has a very long history of being an isolationist country, with little interest in what goes on outside its boarders. A recent interest in English was ramped up with government assistance in teaching, as well as instruction in French, German, Japanese, Russian, and a few other languages likely to be prevalent during the games. (As neither Mandarin nor Cantonese are common outside of China, most language students are utterly boggled by the ideographic writing system.) Confused outsiders would not be a good thing, it feels "unfriendly." (If I were told that a group of Beijing citizens were coming to see me, I think I'd want to learn at least a catch-phrase knowledge before they showed up. Even if they did learn a little English from the movies or Internet.) Japanese was especially surprising, as China has all but declared Japan to be a blood rival.

Dissent is a common worry of the Chinese government. Every dynasty since the earliest ones have made decisions unpopular with somebody or other, and the tradition about dissent is that you shut up and get back to work before you get in trouble. The authorities felt, for whatever reason, that protesters visible in the streets during the games would be embarrassing. This was solved in a method I don't really approve of: Anyone seen as likely to protest was unceremoniously deported. It may have short-circuited on-camera protests, I suppose, but that kind of behavior isn't good for the long term reputation. China is, like Germany, ultimately an "Order" nation, so I don't think it minds suffering the wrath of some for the desire of more.

Lastly, the authorities wanted to show off. To ward off the reputation of China as a poor country, and to flaunt technical sophistication, the airport was stocked with talking robots that recognized and spoke back with each of the languages I listed above. The robots reportedly walk autonomously (a difficult task), recognize specific people, remember short conversations, and other tasks. They have stock answers to common questions in the top languages. Speech recognition is difficult for robots, and recently large strides have been made by Chinese people in this topic. (I recall a researcher describing using his own difficult struggle to learn English to try and do the same to a computer, which doesn't understand any human language to begin with. Many aspects of speech recognition are counterintuitive.)

Many of China's dreams for the games did not come true. The organizer's idea of the long, multicircumnavigational torch relay was dogged by protests in quite a few of the ports it stopped at, to the annoyance of both government and common citizen alike. (The Chinese government has enraged quite a few people during its years. Many of the citizens feel like they are unfairly targeted as well.) The organizational efforts have been criticized rather soundly. Even in China, a few people suspect that the entire event is essentially a stunt, and that by the end of September, many of the improvements they enjoyed for the games would be dismantled for whatever reason.

This Olympics have often been described as China's "coming out" party, much of it being the Chinese government and people's way of saying, "Hey, we're a rich and powerful country now. We should be proud." They've worked hard for it. And plus, last week, the Chinese government did something I thought it would never do in a million years. It agreed to negotiate with someone they previously considered practically the devil himself: The Dalai Lama. (The Dalai Lama used to be the leader of Tibet, and pretty much has every reason to stir up trouble there and otherwise make the Chinese government miserable.)

Welcome to the first world, China. It isn't easy. You'll have to fend of entropy, sloth, and stagnation, and sometimes people will make fun of you.

Oh, and what's with you guys and Sudan? Really, I'd like to hear it.