Bloodthirsty Liberal

In China, not likely.

I’ve been easy on China lately, but only out of constraints of time and attention span.

What with spying, stealing, human rights violations, and coal mining deaths, they’ve been ever the bad actors on the world state that they’ve always been (I mean the Keanu Reeves of world state bad actors).

But in about ten years we’ll get our revenge when they can’t get laid:

Breaking China [Mark Steyn]

As readers may recall, I’ve been scoffing for years at theories of China as the 21st-century hyperpower. It has two huge structural defects — a) an aging population; and b) an ever more male population. This last is entirely owed to the Commies’ disastrous one-child policy which ensured the abortion of millions and millions of girl babies: A woman’s right to choose turns out in practice to be the right not to choose any women. Result: Millions and millions of young men who’ll never get a date. Not a recipe for social stability. A new report by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences considers some of the issues:

According to the report, 24 million men reaching marriageable age by 2020 will never marry because of the sex imbalance. Think of it in these terms: what if the entire population of New York City or of Australia was never able to marry. Imagine the social implications in a city or nation that large where no one can marry. Imagine if that city or country is comprised solely of 24 million men; men with no homes to return to at night; men without the responsibilities of a family to keep them engaged in productive pursuits.

That would be a problem for a responsible state with respect for individual liberty and the rule of law.

China? China???

While the number of baby girls being born has declined, the number of kidnappings and trafficking of young girls has risen. According to the National Population and Family Planning Commission — that’s right, the very organization responsible for the one-child family policy — abductions and trafficking of women and girls has become “rampant.”

Young girls are being kidnapped within China and also from neighboring countries (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, Thailand) by organized gangs who sell them to families with boys of a similar age. The girls will be raised by the families and given as brides to their sons as soon as they reach marriageable age. Others are shipped to brothels within China for a life as sex slaves.

To which Steyn concludes:

In his schoolgirl paeans to totalitarianism, has the China-smitten Thomas Friedman of the New York Times ever addressed these structural defects? Or any of the ecopalyptic warm-mongers expressing barely concealed admiration for Beijing’s population-control measures?

The gap between how smart Tom Friedman thinks he is and how smart Mark Steyn actually is is so wide, even President Obama’s narcissism can’t span it.

I don’t know, is it me, or is it China?

A court in China’s Xinjiang region has sentenced a further five people to death for their role in July’s deadly ethnic riots, the worst in decades.

The sentences bring the number of people condemned to die over the riots to a total of 22.

Well, maybe they were incorrigible killers.

But him?

China has accused foreign diplomats of meddling in its internal affairs, after some were critical of the trial of prominent Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

The country’s foreign ministry urged those who had expressed concerns about the trial to respect its legal process.

…

“Some officials from some countries’ embassies in China released so-called statements, which is a gross interference in China’s judicial internal affairs,” Ms Jiang said, adding that these violated the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations.

She expressed China’s “strong dissatisfaction” over their actions, adding that China’s “judicial sovereignty” should be respected.

Mr Liu, a prominent government critic and veteran of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, could be jailed for 15 years if convicted.

A writer and former university professor, he has been in jail since 2008, after being arrested for writing a document calling for political reform in China.

Known as Charter 08 and released to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it called for greater freedoms and democratic reforms in China, including an end to Communist one-party rule.

The trial has been heavily criticised by right groups, with Human Rights Watch (HRW) describing it as “a travesty of justice”.

I’m as guilty as anyone, but why did everyone know Andrei Sakharov’s name, yet so few know Liu’s?

But this one may be the most depressing of all:

A Chinese man has been jailed for 12 years for killing and eating a rare Indochinese tiger.

Kang Wannian, a villager from the southern province of Yunnan, said he had encountered the tiger while out fishing, and killed it in self-defence.

The animal may have been China’s only wild Indochinese tiger, which is on the brink of extinction.

Four other men were jailed for sharing the tiger meal and covering up the incident.

“Call the Joneses! Look what wandered in for dinner.”

He sweat like a pig; he might taste like one as well.

Not quite done. Still a little pink.

If we’re still worried about the polar ice caps, btw, send Gore to Spitsbergen for a little R&R. He’s a one-man cold front:

In the Department of Delicious Irony, we see that the Al Gore Effect has struck the Copenhagen conference:

World leaders flying into Copenhagen today to discuss a solution to global warming will first face freezing weather as a blizzard dumped 10 centimeters (4 inches) of snow on the Danish capital overnight.

“Temperatures will stay low at least the next three days,” Henning Gisseloe, an official at Denmark’s Meteorological Institute, said today by telephone, forecasting more snow in coming days. “There’s a good chance of a white Christmas.”

…

Denmark has a maritime climate and milder winters than its Scandinavian neighbors. It hasn’t had a white Christmas for 14 years, under the DMI’s definition, and only had seven last century.

No wonder China is telling everyone to [bleep] off:

China has refused to even discuss actually reducing its current greenhouse gas pollution because that would go contrary to the country’s rapid pace of economic growth. It says it will cut emissions as a percentage of future economic growth but has balked at international verification and monitoring, calling that a threat to its sovereignty. Instead it prefers to act as its own watchdog on compliance.

“Its own watchdog”: reports don’t indicate whether China said that with a straight face, but I’m not sure even a guard at Buckingham Palace could refrain from bending over and slapping a knee at that one.

Watchdogs are a delicacy over there.

Shouldn’t Mark Steyn receive a royalty check for this?

More than 30 years after China’s one-child policy was introduced, creating two generations of notoriously chubby, spoiled only children affectionately nicknamed “little emperors,” a population crisis is looming in the country.

The average birthrate has plummeted to 1.8 children per couple as compared with six when the policy went into effect, according to the U.N. Population Division, while the number of residents 60 and older is predicted to explode from 16.7 percent of the population in 2020 to 31.1 percent by 2050. That is far above the global average of about 20 percent.

The imbalance is worse in wealthy coastal cities with highly educated populations, such as Shanghai. Last year, people 60 and older accounted for almost 22 percent of Shanghai’s registered residents, while the birthrate was less than one child per couple.

I was having a friendly discussion with someone the other day, during which the other person claimed that socialism did have a successful model, in Europe. I had two responses (and chose the third, to nod thoughtfully): one, that Europe does not have true socialism, but just a spectrum of welfare states; two, that whatever you call what they practice, it’s successful only in the short term, if at all.

Again, to credit Steyn, you can ratchet up all the yummy, generous social programs you want if you don’t have to pay for your self defense (thanks to Uncle Sam), and if you have no kids to take care of. Just don’t think you can get old. The European welfare model is good for one generation, tops. But retiring at 55, after maybe twenty years of working (those advanced degrees take time), and ample vacation time, works only if there’s another generation—your kids—to pay for your golden years (all three decades of them, thanks to medical advances).

Oops, did I write “kids”? I meant “kid”—or 1.3 kids, give or take a freckle or two. Hey, at least they didn’t abuse the recklessly generous maternity and paternity leaves offered throughout Europe. All well-meaning and humane—but none of it affordable.

China can just crush its swelling geezer population with tanks (they took out the wrong demographic in 1989); does Europe even have nay tanks?

China makes money the old fashioned way: they scam green energy initiatives to the tune of a billion dollars:

The United Nations body in charge of managing carbon trading has suspended approvals for dozens of Chinese wind farms amid questions over the country’s use of industrial policy to obtain money under the scheme.

China has been by far the biggest beneficiary of the so-called Clean Development Mechanism, a carbon trading system designed to direct funds from wealthy countries to developing nations to cut greenhouse gases.

China has earned 153m carbon credits, worth more than $1bn and making up almost half of the total issued under the UN-run programme in the past five years, according to a Financial Times analysis. The credits are currently trading at about $10-$15 each.

Swe-e-e-e-t.

China-based consultants said the CDM’s board in Bonn began refusing approval for Chinese wind power projects in the middle of 2009, over concerns Beijing had deliberately lowered subsidies to make them eligible for funding.

Well, of course: it’s like welfare. If you make too much money, you’re not eligible. So-o-o-o…

Come on, I can hear China saying, we followed the rules—now you’re going to change them? What’s up with that?

China bilking the UN for a cool billion—I have to tip my cap.

The magic doesn’t translate

One blogger even pined for the tough line taken by former President George W. Bush.

“Like a star rushing from one show to another, Obama has come and gone, without stirring the slightest ripples,” blogger Zhao Dezhu wrote in an online post.

Zhao, who writes a popular blog and twitters under the name Hecaitou, said the visit made him miss Bush who “couldn’t speak with flowery language and even made grammatical mistakes but spoke as plainly as an American farmer.”

Obama, by contrast, speaks “with sweet but empty words.”

The rest of the world is catching on. When will we?

- Aggie

Looks like President Obama bowed to the wrong Asian:

Federal Reserve officials sometimes sound as if their only worry is the domestic U.S. economy, but their gusher of dollars is starting to have serious consequences for the rest of the world. Nowhere is this more evident than in Asia, where President Obama is getting an earful from leaders this week about what all those greenbacks are doing to their economies.

…

At a conference in Singapore, Hong Kong chief executive Donald Tsang—a former finance minister—said Friday he’s “scared” about loose U.S. monetary policy. “Where is the money going—it’s where the problem’s going to be: Asia,” Mr. Tsang said. “You can see asset prices going up, not only in Korea, in Taiwan, in Singapore and in Hong Kong, going up to levels that are incompatible or inconsistent with the economic fundamentals.”

On Saturday, China’s top banking regulator, Liu Mingkang, chimed in that the Fed’s binge is the main cause of “massive speculation.”

…

The larger mistake is to believe that any nation can devalue its way to prosperity. As other currencies rise in value and force productivity gains, the U.S. economy will become relatively less efficient. American living standards will decline, as those in Asia rise. This is the real lesson of the Connally-Nixon devaluations of the 1970s and the inflation that followed.

We’ll all be bowing soon enough.

It’s a given that Zimbabwe’s behavior will be criminal and deranged, but exactly how the criminality and derangement expresses itself is endlessly fascinating:

Investigators for the world’s diamond control body say Zimbabwe should be suspended because its security forces are raping women, killing illegal miners, and smuggling gems out of a diamond field in the troubled country’s east.

Human rights groups have made similar accusations, but the charges carry particular weight coming from Kimberley Process investigators who visited Zimbabwe in June and July. Their recommendations are in a confidential report the Associated Press obtained yesterday.

Zimbabwean authorities have repeatedly denied such charges, including in statements to Kimberley Process investigators and officials. The investigators said that they found evidence contradicting the official account and that information provided by Zimbabwean authorities “was false, and likely intentionally so.’’

…

The Kimberley Process was established in 2002 in an attempt to stem the flow of “blood diamonds’’ - gems sold to fund fighting across Africa. Participants must certify the origins of the diamonds being traded. Suspension could result in buyers shunning Zimbabwe’s diamonds.

What does Robert Mugabe care if Africans are slaughtering each other? For once, he’s not the one doing the slaughtering.

But hey, he’s not all bad. Even a blind, rabid hyena finds a rotting, stinking corpse once in a while:

“We are sick and tired of the old model, where China comes to Africa and extracts raw materials and goes back to China,” Arthur Mutambara told Reuters in an interview on Friday. “Now we are not interested in that.”

China is one of the few countries close to the long-embattled Zimbabwe government, but that did not deter Mutambara from challenging Beijing to do more to help development.

“We are not going to produce raw materials in Zimbabwe for China. China will come on our terms as partners,” he said during a trip to China to attend the World Economic Forum in the northeastern Chinese port city of Dalian.

I love the tough talk, but I would caution him against too cozy a partnership. The Mafia has partnerships, too, but the deals are rarely equitable.

I think I know why President Obama shuns his half-brother George living in a squalid shack in Kenya. He can’t afford the precedent it might set:

By the standards of some other presidential siblings, Mark Obama Ndesandjo – the US president’s half brother who lives in China – is a positive boon.

Normally he keeps quietly to himself in the southern Chinese boomtown of Shenzhen where he lives with his Chinese wife, practicing calligraphy and teaching piano to orphans.

On Wednesday, though, he emerged briefly to promote a semi-autobiographical book he has published which he says draws on his childhood with an abusive father – who was President Barack Obama’s father, too.

“My mother used to say of my father, he’s a brilliant man but a social failure,” Mr. Ndesandjo, who took the name of his stepfather, told reporters at a short press conference in Guangzhou.

That was pretty much the image the US president painted of his dad in his best-selling memoir “Dreams From My Father”: no scandalous revelation there.

“A brilliant man but a social failure”. Hmm, with the addition of the suffix -ist, I think we have the perfect description of the son.

What were we just saying about the moral bankruptcy of communist regimes?

Human-rights groups urged China to halt its investment in a Myanmar gas project over fears of abuses and unrest.

The 609-mile Shwe gas pipeline project runs from Myanmar’s Arakan state to China’s Yunnan province. State-owned China National Petroleum Corp. holds a 50.9 stake in the project in partnership with the Myanmar Oil and Gas Enterprise.

…

Voice of America reports that more than 100 groups and political parties across 20 countries participated in the Shwe Gas Movement petition Wednesday to China’s President Hu Jintao, presented to Chinese embassies in Asia, Australia and Europe.

“There are already reports of human-rights violations in Arakan state connected to the project’s exploration phase, including arrests and beatings of fishermen, and abuses will escalate as the project progresses,” the petition states.

Based on previous experiences in Myanmar, the petition points out, partnerships with the MOGE on infrastructure development projects “invariably” lead to forced displacement, forced labor and loss of livelihoods.

And China asks: “what’s your point?”

I see theirs: if they’ve invested in Sudan and Iran, among other benighted spots, why not put a little money in Burma? Money’s money, and oil’s oil.