Ch-infamous » China

Ultimate Tian’anmen dissident speaks from the grave, but who will listen?

josh — Fri, 15 May 2009 16:53:08 +0000

[Originally written for my "Reporter's Notebook," i.e., blog, at GlobalPost]

China watchers have been abuzz all day with news of a forthcoming book, “Prisoner of the State,” based on tapes secretly recorded by Zhao Ziyang, the former head of the Chinese Communist Party who was stripped of power and placed under house arrest after opposing the military crackdown in Tian’anmen Square in 1989.

Media large and small have greeted the book with blanket converage, including a fulsome review by Paul Mooney in the Far Eastern Economic Review and an impressive presentation of the tape recordings (with transcripts in Chinese and English) on the Washington Post website. While some in China will surely try to label the book a hoax, the tapes appear to be authentic.

[For those dismayed at the attention the book has received, suffice it to say that Zhao is considered a mensch by many who followed his career (no small feat for a Chinese government official) and there was considerable worry after he died that he had taken his insights to the grave.]

There’s no point in re-hashing all that’s been written about the book already. But I feel compelled to note it here because we are fast approaching the 20th anniversary of the Tian’anmen Square crackdown (June 4) and Zhao—or rather, Zhao’s death—is what first started me thinking seriously about how the event is remembered, and not remembered, inside China itself.

Zhao died in January of 2005, apparently after suffering multiple strokes while under house arrest. I recall it vividly because the day after he died I found myself sitting in a classroom with several Chinese journalists on the UC Berkeley campus, listening to a lecture on media in China. One of the journalists was slightly older and visbly shaken by the news. It emerged he had been on the square, a college student protesting for democracy, in 1989. When the professor asked him to offer his thoughts on Zhao, he made to talk, then covered his face and offered a muffled apology.

The instructor next turned to the younger journalists and asked them for their thoughts. Silence.

Finally, one of them spoke up, saying, “I’m not really sure why people here think it is such a big deal.”

These were not your average Chinese journalists. They were some of the top reporters from some of the country’s most daring publications—reporters who, had they been old enough in 1989, very likely would have been marching with the students under banners calling for press freedom. But they were not old enough in 1989. And while they knew as much or more about the episode as any American their age, they didn’t accord it the same significance.

An old official, maybe a good old offical, had died. That was it.

In subsequent conversations with young people in China, I’ve found the same thing: A tendency to view the protests and crackdown with a kind of clinical ambivalence. It was a turning point, to be sure, but nothing to get emotionally worked up about. This is not wholly the result of ignorance or propaganda: Any Chinese teenager with a reasonable grasp of Internet filter workarounds (which is to say, nearly all of them) can access Western news reports and documentaries on the subject. A fair number have. And yet, many still refuse to buy the notion that the protests were a good thing, or even a momentous thing. (Others have noted the same phenomenon.)

Coincidentally, I was talking with a Beijing friend last night about the legacy of 1989 for Chinese people and what, if anything, the older generations are telling their children about it. When the news about Zhao Ziyang’s book came out this morning, my friend, who’s 30, sent an email about one night nineteen years ago when she was lighting off fireworkers with her father. The firework casings were made of old newspapers:

There was enough scrap for me to tell they were all about how anti-revolutionary Zhao was and how Chinese people despised him. So i asked my dad if he was a bad man. My dad said “he’s not a bad man and don’t read this newspaper!”

They didn’t talk much about Zhao or Tian’anmen after that.

As of this writing, the Zhao tape excerpts on the Washington Post website and another set of excerpts on the New York Times site are both still accessible in China. It might be China’s Internet authorities haven’t gotten around to blocking them. Or it might mean they’re not all that worried.

Mandarin Oriental: We Hardly New Ye

josh — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:20:08 +0000

I’d originally meant to post this photo on my “Reporter’s Notebook” (read: blog) over at GlobalPost, but then the post morphed into a story and the editors decided to go with more dramatic art. It’s true, I arrived a tad too late to see the real explosions. It was tremendously entertaining nonetheless (Note: I can say this without being an asshole because no one died, or at least, we think no one died, and anyway these days there’s a seems to be a sort of karmic justice in a building intended solely for the filthy rich going up in flames).

For those who want the full photographic story, fellow resident alien Caroline Killmer, who lives near the now crispy Rem Koolhaas creation, has a fine set of pics on her photoblog. She also posted a brief (but vivid) video to CNN’s iReport.

More of my photos here.

Living with The Hand

josh — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:01:12 +0000

From the Ch-infamous shameless self-promotion department, my review of Michael Meyer’s new book, The Last Days of Old Beijing, published recently on China Digital Times:

Western observers have been lamenting the demise of “Old Beijing” since at least the 1920s, when the Chinese capital started itself stumbling in the direction of modernization. Each time, the city’s ancient charms-it’s intimate lanes ( hutong) and enigmatic courtyard houses ( siheyuan)-are said to be not long for this world. Each time, they survive to seduce the next generation of would-be eulogizers. Now comes Michael Meyer’s “The Last Days of Old Beijing: Life in the Vanishing Backstreets of a City Transformed,” due out from Walker and Company this month. How much is there to be gained in listening to yet another requiem for a place that never seems to die?

The answer, in Meyer’s case, is plenty.

An award-winning travel writer, Meyer has done what few other foreign residents in Beijing are willing to do: actually live in the hutong. It’s true, many Westerners rent courtyard houses, but theirs are the neo-imperial mini-palaces of New Beijing, cleared of riff-raff, retrofitted with radiators and equipped with sit-down toilets. Meyer’s perch in the neglected lanes south of Tian’anmen Square is not so luxurious. For heat in winter, he relies on cups of Nescafe and the bowls of dumplings foisted on him by the Widow, his busy-bodied old neighbor. The dumplings and instant coffee processed, he walks across the lane to the public latrine, where one of his students once bowed to him as he squatted, pants around ankles, over the open trough.

Read the full review here (proxy required for those in China).

CIRC 1: Virtual China by the Numbers

josh — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 05:49:31 +0000

Another China Internet conference, another excruciating walk along the cliff’s edge of mental collapse. Like last year’s gathering of Chinese bloggers, this year’s gathering of China Internet researchers (the China Internet Research Conference, held at Hong Kong University over the weekend) featured an avalanche of information and opinion about the development of the Chinese Internet delivered in such volume and with such velocity I occasionally had to resist the impulse to raise my computer up in front of my face as a shield. It’s taken me this long just to recover.

I’ll sift through my notes for more substantive observations later, but in the meantime, here are a few of the more surprising/noteworthy statistics that surfaced in the presentations:

80: Percentage of Chinese Internet users who think the Internet should be managed or controlled. (From survey cited by Deborah Fallows of Pew Internet Research)

85: Percentage of above who think government should do the controlling.

300 or so: The number of Chinese blogs in a sample of more than 500 that carried content critical of the government, corporations, social phenomena, etc. (From Ashley Esarey, assistant professor, Middlebury College).

Midnight to 4am: Time during which majority of politically critical blog posts in China are written. (A. Esarey)

43: Percentage of Americans who answered “yes” to the question “Do you think China will inevitably change with the Internet?” (From Zogby Poll, January 2007, cited by Lokman Tsui)

1: Hangzhou’s position in ranking of 30 major Chinese cities based on percentage of people who blog (from China Media Monitoring study cited by ESWN blogger Roland Soong.)

What to make of all this? It’s anyone’s guess. If there’s a singe line to summarize the findings presented at the conference, it’s this: China’s Internet is a schizophrenic and slippery–and, therefore, as unpredictable–as the country itself.

To get a fuller sense of the confusion, see the official CIRC blog (heroically compiled in real time by John from Global Voices and Dave from Mutant Palm) as well as coverage from Kai Pan at CN Reviews here and here.

[Image: CIRC 2008 group photo, courtesy of RConversation]

Sichuan Earthquake II: Mass Mourning

josh — Mon, 19 May 2008 08:45:25 +0000

This video shows the start of a three-day period of national mourning for victims of last week’s Sichuan earthquake, which started today at 2:28pm—a week to the minute after the quake hit.

In Beijing, the entire city shut down for what in the US would be a moment of silence but in China was a prolonged wail. It is Chinese tradition to cry out loudly at funerals, although in this case the wailing was done by air raid sirens and, appropriately enough for a city that continues to add motor vehicles in seeming violation of every law of urban planning and physics, car horns.

I can’t speak for the city as a whole, but from where I watched (the 20th floor of the Full Link Plaza, next to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at a major intersection on the east Second Ring Road) it was a truly astounding scene, equal parts pathos and spectacle. Like something Michael Bay would put in a movie if Michael Bay had heart and an imagination.

The interesting thing at Full Link was the scene at the front door. Around 2pm, the building staff walked out and started dispensing white T-shirts (white is the color of mourning in China) pasted with house-shaped stickers reading 我们和你在一起 (“We are with you,” the national earthquake slogan Hu Jintao has been repeating again and again in televised conversations with victims). There was a massive scrum, during which the staff pleaded in vain for people to line up and one woman who had nearly been knocked over complained that taking part in the mourning might get her killed. By 2:30, what looked like half the population of the building had gathered on the sidewalk. With the minute about to strike, the people on the sidewalk (all but a few dressed in the white t-shirts) suddenly organized themselves into rows, faced west and bowed their heads. Traffic stopped on a dime in every direction, leaving the roads empty in a way they never are. Then the car horns started up, echoing off the buildings in a single drawn-out blast that I imagine was ear-splitting at ground-level but did sound strangely mournful from where I was listening (you can hear it in the video over a shot of the flag flying in front of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs building.)

After three minutes, the traffic started up again, the crowd dispersed and everything went back to normal.

I’m as skeptical as anyone over the Chinese rhetoric about unity and harmony. In a country this large, with this many people and this kind of social stratification, the idea that all Chinese everywhere are part of the same household usually seems shockingly dumb, if not dangerous. But, having witnessed this scene, I’ll admit the idea has a certain undeniable power in situations like the earthquake.

It’s not just a matter of mass sympathy. As the TV coverage of Hu Jintao’s ministrations has demonstrated, simply saying “we’re with you” to people who’ve lost their houses and relatives is effective only to a certain point, after which it starts to sound horribly, viciously lame. There is, however, a practical benefit to be reaped from the “greater Chinese family” idea. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, China has received $1.3 billion in donations for quake victims, a full 85 percent of which has come from people inside the country. Already that’s a third of all the donations charities collected for Hurricane Katrina victims—after only a week, in a country with a per capita GDP barely a tenth of the United States’ (by relatively generous estimate).

~~Seeing what happened today, I’d be willing to lay money down on Sichuan beating Katrina in donations before the Olympics start.~~

Any takers?

[NOTE: I've received several messages expressing displeasure with this last line, and upon further reflection, I agree it is in bad taste. I apologize to any who may have taken offense. And for the record, I've donated on multiple occasions.]

Sichuan Earthquake: Instability Not Just A Question of Architecture [UPDATED]

josh — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:09:25 +0000

[See below for update] First things first, to the people who’ve asked: All in Beijing is fine. On the San Francisco scale, the Beijing earthquake hardly rated. I didn’t feel a thing, in fact, although friends who work in the higher office buildings report swaying ceiling fixtures and feeling vaguely like they may have had more to drink over the weekend than they originally thought.

As for the real earthquake in Sichuan, I’m in no position to add to the torrent of news, other than to laud the Guardian for it’s prescient coverage, not just of the tragedy that has befallen people near the epicenter, but also of the speed with which their grief has turned to rage at the real estate developers and government officials whose responsibility it is to make sure buildings have a certain resilience in such situations. To wit:

Twenty-four hours after the quake hit, they were losing hope and only rage was left. They blamed everyone: soldiers for coming too late, the builders for cutting corners, officials for – they claimed – siphoning off cash.

“The contractors can’t have been qualified. It’s a ‘tofu’ [soft and shoddy] building. Please, help us release this news,” the husband said.

“About 450 were inside, in nine classes and it collapsed completely from the top to the ground. It didn’t fall over; it was almost like an explosion.”

The distraught couple’s neighbour, still half-hoping for a sight of her daughter, burst out angrily: “Why isn’t there money to build a good school for our kids? Chinese officials are too corrupt and bad.

“These buildings outside have been here for 20 years and didn’t collapse – the school was only 10 years old. They took the money from investment, so they took the lives of hundreds of kids. They have money for prostitutes and second wives but they don’t have money for our children. This is not a natural disaster – this is done by humans.”

Sensationalism? Possibly. But I doubt it. “Toufu dregs”-style construction (豆腐渣工程) has long been a source of public anger in China, and a potent symbol of corruption at the local level. (Witness the fuming controversy over shoddy electric poles during this winter’s freak snow storms in the south.) And now it appears the widespread practice whereby officials and developers profit through architectural corner-cutting may have cost a few extra tens of thousands of lives.

Melinda Liu, Newsweek’s bureau chief in Beijing, and Richard Spencer, the Telegraph’s correspondent over here, both note that many Chinese saw the Tangshan earthquake in 1976 as an omen portending the death of Mao Zedong—the suggestion seeming to be that this earthquake could foreshadow something bad for the CCP. But if the Guardian’s report is at all reflective of the general mood, the appeal to superstition hardly feels necessary.

While it’s true Chinese people have been willing to give their central government the benefit of the doubt even in the worst of times, one has to wonder whether the death toll from this disaster—and in particular the role of corrupt officials in helping push it to such heights—doesn’t represent a serious threat to leaders in Beijing (and their dogged pursuit of social stability) beyond anything those protesting monks and flag-waving pro-Tibetsters could muster

[Image via Netease]

UPDATE [May 14, 6:40am, Beijing time]:

Tim Lesle, a former classmate of mine at the Berkeley journalism school who’s been working on a story about earthquakes in San Francisco, writes of the Sichuan disaster: “When an earthquake strikes, it’s not the earth that kills you. It’s everything else around you.”

As if in response, another colleague affiliated with China Digital Times (which is doing an heroic aggregating job with both English and Chinese reporting) just sent out a link to this wrenching video of an utterly collapsed school in Dujiangyan, broadcast recently on Dragon TV/东方卫视. According to the headline, the collapse buried 1200 students and killed at least 60:

Finally, Tim points to the fine reporting being done by the crew of NPR’s ‘All Things Considered,’ which was in Chengdu preparing a special week of broadcasts from Sichuan when the quake hit.

Chinese Lessons…No More.

josh — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:46:59 +0000

It’s become an annual spring ritual: Just as thousands of fresh-faced UC Berkeley seniors take delivery of their caps and gowns, complete one last drunken stumble through the ooze of Telegraph Avenue and emotionally prepare themselves to enter the illustrious world of Cal alumnihood, those with years still to spend on campus descend into paroxysms of helpless anxiety—alleviated briefly by participation in limp protests on Sproul Plaza—over the announcement of planned tuition rises and budget casualties. These announcements are so common, so inevitable, I usually ignore them the same way I’ve come to ignore double-figure death toll counts coming out of Iraq. But this year’s list of Berkeley budget casualties contains one item that, to me at least, is truly shocking: East Asian languages.

I use “casualty” here in the wide sense. The East Asian languages and cultures department at Berkeley will not die next year. It will, however, sustain egregious injury.

Come next fall, according an article in the Daily Californian, classes in Japanese, Korean and Chinese will have to be cut by 40 percent, 66 percent and 54 percent, respectively. The number of students taking those classes will have to be reduced by at least 1,500. As a result, no students outside the EALC will be allowed to study those languages.

In other words, the option of adding a little Chinese or Korean or Japanese to, say, a degree in history or engineering or business will no longer exist as of next year. At one of the world’s foremost institutions for the study of Asia. At an institution that just cut the ribbon on a new building—the C.V. Starr East Asian Languages Library, cost: $46 million—to house it’s world class collection of Asian language materials.

I will admit to taking a certain perverse satisfaction in this turn of events vis-a-vis the library. It pained me to no end to walk by that building while it was under construction, knowing it would open precisely as I was scheduled to leave the school. Oh, how I seethed with jealousy at the convenient access later generations would have to a legendary collection that, in my time, was scattered about campus in various dusty basement corners, half-lost in the abyss of pre-digital card catalogs. Now it seems those later generations won’t have the skills to make use of the collection after all. (“Ha ha,” he chuckles to himself, twiddling his fingers with Burns-like glee. “Suckers!”)

I suspect students inside the EALC may also be secretly dancing a little victory jig, now that they have their department to themselves. While I can’t speak for Japanese or Korean, Chinese classes at Berkeley are woefully over-crowded. I took two semester’s worth of Mandarin under the EALC’s auspices while in journalism school and in both it proved necessary to drag chairs in from neighboring classrooms to accompany the hordes. I spoke an average of two minutes, at most, in each class–not effective when one is trying to learn a language of such infuriating difficulty. Compare that to my undergraduate experience at a private college, where my five Mandarin co-sufferers and I were forced to endure the excruciating and humiliating, but ultimately helpful, ordeal of speaking the language constantly.

In reality, of course, this has the makings of an unmitigated tragedy. An empty CVSEALL will be a sad, sad sight. And the advantage to language majors turns out to be no advantage at all. The way the math works out, classes will still be just as crowded, but without the advantage of those silent non-majors sitting politely–and silently–in the back. Imagine, a whole generation of Berkeley Chinese literature majors who don’t know how to speak the language because they all had to compete madly with their peers for scraps of time with their teachers.

According to an AP report last month, the number of college students studying Mandarin in the US jumped 50 percent between 2002 and 2006.

In view of the decision, one is tempted to assume the university’s administrators may be dipping a bit too often into the campus police station’s stash of confiscated marijuana. In fact, the EALC’s predicament is an unfortunate consequence of how languages are taught–or, rather, who teaches them.

The governor’s budget proposal for next year will cut $30 to $40 million in funds for Berkeley. Since tenure rules prevent downsizing the professorial population, the university has decided to cut positions for non-tenured lecturers. It just so happens that at Berkeley, as elsewhere, the responsibility for teaching foreign languages falls to lecturers.

Students have mounted a valiant campaign to fight the cuts, with a Facebook group, a couple blogs (here and here) and an online petition. I sincerely wish them the best. It’s been bad enough watching the journalism school drift rudderless after it’s failed dean search. Were UC Berkeley as a whole to slide into irrelevance because of this, it’ll just do horrible things to the obituary value of all that tuition money I pumped into the place.

To the students: Should the protest effort fail, here is the best DIY option I’ve found: www.nciku.com. You can start by looking up 涸辙之鲋.

[Image: C.V. Starr library dedication, by Peg Skorpinski]

That Place in Western China that Starts with a “T”

josh — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 14:48:58 +0000

Tom Engelhardt, the editing guru whose baffling enthusiasm once prevented me from dumping journalism to go back to skimming the fat off of veal stock in some cut-rate San Francisco brasserie, would probably sooner suck the ink out of his pen than see me start a post on a topic by confessing I have nothing real to say about it. Sorry, Tom. In this case, I have no choice.

It’s not that I couldn’t go on about the riots in Tibet. I could. For pages, probably. But there are two problems with that: 1) Hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of people have already done it; and 2) Very little of what those hundreds (or thousands) have said is based on reliable information.

As Roland Soong at EastSouthWestNorth was astute enough to point out when all this erupted last weekend, virtually everything we hear about Tibet comes filtered through one of two very well-oiled propaganda machines: one in Beijing, the other in Dharamsala (where the Dalai Lama maintains Tibet’s government-in-exile). Even in the best of times, independent reporting on the place is both rare and restricted. Now? It’s anybody’s guess what’s really going on.

Rather than add to the blather, then, I’ll simply post a few useful links and hope everyone takes what they find with due skepticism:

—For a reliable first-hand account, the best choice right now is The Economist, which has the only accredited foreign journalist actually reporting from inside Lhasa.
—For reactions from the Chinese media and blogosphere, see Rebecca MacKinnon at RConversation, Roland at ESWN and John Kennedy at Global Voices
—For a more general overview, go to China Digital Times, which has done its damndest to set up a one-stop-shop of riot information and commentary.

And if the above don’t satisfy your Lhasa riot information jones, Kenneth Tan has complied the authoritative link list over at the Shanghaiist.

If it’s opinion you crave, then I’ll join the chorus in support of Dave at the Tenement Palm blog, who makes an unassailable yet somehow seldom heard argument that regular people on both sides of the China-Tibet shouting war need to stop waving their flags for a moment and try actually having a conversation.

[Photo by 2 Dogs]

2008: Impossible Expectations?

josh — Sat, 05 Jan 2008 11:10:15 +0000

Just ran across this new post by TIME’s Austin Ramzy about a recent government-sponsored Olympics survey in which Chinese people selected “another gold for Liu Xiang” over “a successful Olympics” as their greatest hope for Beijing 2008. The reigning world record holder in the 110m hurdles, Liu is arguably China’s most beloved athlete and has been subject to unbelievable 2008-related pressure ever since he took gold in Sydney in 2004. Now Chinese people appear to being saying they would rather see the Beijing Games end up in failure than see him lose. Or, to put it another way, if he loses, the Games may be considered a failure.

Reading Austin’s post puts me in mind of a topic I meant to mention here before I got sucked into my thesis vortex: the new “Impossible is Nothing” advertising campaign Adidas just launched in China and its excruciatingly vivid illustration of the kind of heat Chinese athletes face as the big dance approaches.

I wouldn’t ordinarily devote space on this blog to advertising, particularly when it comes from a company that gets plenty of exposure on its own. Every so often, however, one has to suck it up and recognize that a marketing firm (in this case, TWBA) has done something truly noteworthy.

What’s noteworthy about the Adidas campaign, which launched late last year, is its imagery: Color shots of various Chinese athletes doing their thing with the help of–sometimes on top of–millions of their compatriots, the latter strikingly sketched in black-and-white. According to the Shanghaiist, the campaign took six months to put together. In an earlier post on the TIME China Blog, Austin mentioned seeing immense crowds on Wangfujing, Beijing’s tawdry shopping street equivalent of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, queuing up in icy weather last month for a chance to have their photos inserted into post-card versions of the ad. The campaign has attracted massive, largely adoring, attention in the PR world. The Shanghaiist and Austin also both appear to have been inspired by it.

I’ll admit, the ads are breathtaking. Transcendent even. Like Apple’s legendary ad for the Macintosh during the 1984 Super Bowl. But there is also something undeniably disturbing about them, particularly in the spot (see above) featuring Olympic champion diver Hu Jia, in which people have replaced both the diving platform and the water. [Click here to see it full-size. I mean it. Click.]

The image reminds me of a painting I once saw in a Confucian temple in Jilin that depicted a precarious human pyramid composed of thousands of Imperial exam candidates climbing on top of each other in a bid to reach the highest official position. The Adidas ad’s message for Chinese people may be unity rather than competition, but it’s no less frightening for that reason.

The socio-political and nationalist implications of the campaign are deep and textured, and I’m sure someone with better deconstructionist chops than myself will eventually have a go at those. In the meantime, I worry what the ads mean for the poor individuals at the center of them. I’m sure there isn’t a Chinese Olympic athlete alive who hasn’t spent hours alone in the dark worrying about how the country’s billion-plus will react if they fail to meet expectations. But now the nightmare is rendered for them in vivid detail and broadcast everywhere–on billboards, on their friends’ TV sets, in the subways. Sure, the people in the ads are all hopping around in exuberant anticipation of victory, but how difficult it is to imagine that same writing mass shouting in the rage of defeat?

Athletes of that caliber probably thrive on pressure in ways mortal people don’t. Liu Xiang, at least, claims to revel in it. But certainly there must be a limit beyond which that pressure becomes counter-productive, when athletes get overloaded with it, like car engines flooded with too much gas.

Of course, in a sense, that’s precisely what makes the ads so brilliant. Whether Hu Jia wins and sends the crowd into mass hysteria or loses and gets torn apart, the message is the same: There’s no way you can miss this.

For my money, the still images have the greatest impact, but here’s the video version for those of you who want to see it:

No Shit: Revolution Scatology

josh — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 10:46:12 +0000

Appears they’ve done it again. As with a certain religious movement that shall remain nameless, an attempt by the “authorities” in Beijing to quash an act of heresy has had the effect of publicizing it far better than its perpetrators ever could.

The offender this time around is a Cultural Revolution-themed restaurant. The offense? Installing a “Liberation Zone” sign above its toilet. From Reuters:

“Times Gone Past,” a restaurant featuring waiting staff clad in People’s Liberation Army uniforms and decorated with photos of revolutionary heroes and maps of military battles, had taken the “red” theme too far and had been ordered to remove the sign, Thursday’s Beijing News said.

“Many customers had expressed their dissatisfaction, believing that putting ‘liberation zone’ on par with a toilet was akin to blaspheming the revolution and was an overly-casual use of the term,” the paper said.

In a country dangerously starved for the catharsis of national self-deprecation, this comes as a major blow. Seriously.

Full Reuters article here, original Beijing Times report (Chinese) here.

[Image Source: Beijing Times]