The Chinese, it turns out, can act as crazy in their patriotism as Americans. Even Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corp. and until recently one of the world's great Sinophiles, was heard declaring in Washington last week that the Chinese miracle hasn't produced many dividends for foreign investors. Then there's France, which is always secretly competing with the United States to see which country can be more highhanded in asserting its national interests. This year France may take the prize. (Washington Post)

美漢擲石﹕日本不懂反省錯誤 : A news story from several days ago about a non-Chinese speaking Californian who joined in the recent demonstrations against the dwarf pirates. Seems he started by damning G. W. Bush which gave him enough steam to damn the Japanese. Given enough time, he was on track to animadvert Walmart and Starbucks, Karl Rove and the Gubernator. He's quoted as saying, "Look! China is changing!" On the other hand, a pale-face making an appearance is probably good for downsizing xenophobia. If he was Canadian, I'd suspect a Mountie in mufti: they've infiltrated many a demonstration in Canuckistan before. Given that he's a Californian, it's more likely he's Dudely Do-Right (sic). Either way, good for some hee-haws.

Part of the above HK Yahoo article is translated into English near the bottom of this page. Money quote: "We were told this was an entirely spontaneous event, so the people leading the movement must have no role," said Tong Zeng, who has been organizing anti-Japan activities since the late 1980's. "The police wanted to maintain tight control."

北京嚴防「五一」「五四」大遊行: The PRC monolith cracking down as it must, for it's always been weak, not just in the knees but also between the ears. 1989 Tianmen started with bureaucratic inability to decide how or whether to shut down the students. Then Deng Xiao-ping was unable to recruit generals in Beijing to carry out his clamp-down and had to go head-hunting in the bumpkin south to find butchers worthy of the name. At the end of the clamp-down Deng had to step in to stop the wild shooting that broke out between two of the armies he brought up from the south to quell the students. The mad, mad PRC... May it soon rest in peace.

前美大使：中共在解體 全球大遊行事關重大: There's a lot of hype over at epochtimes about PRC commies leaving the party to the tune of nearly one million apostates. This exodus of the righteous indignant is credited to an inspirational series allegedly written by a communist party member. The series has been translated as The Nine Commentaries, but why be shy? If we're going to try to evoke cherished traditions, let's call it A Nine-Legged Essay on the Mandate of Heaven. The series digs up the PRC's smelly past and rifles through its rotten present. It's long winded though impressively readable as such things go. I got as far as number three before pausing for prayer and R&R (you'll see what I mean when you check out the length). The Chinese original of The Nine Commentaries is here.

Though [China] has taken steps to join the community of nations, it now appears to be launching a newly militant program of nationalism. Japan is the proximate target, but one ultimately suspects that all this is aimed at the U.S. The U.S., however, isn’t helping matters by threatening to launch a currency- and trade-protection war against China. (link)

Grassroots Interaction in the Sino-Japanese Relationship (link) Interesting how shallow the quoted writer's understanding of Japanese culture is. The product of a communist culture mass-manufacturing a proletariate with arrested critical thinkings skills, he's too much a local product, too much the peer-approved chauvinist and blue-nosed moralizer to have much interest in what makes these queer Japs tick. I'm not being snide. After all, it is fascinating stuff that someone can talk about his former pastime as a soldier raping and killing girls, and do so in front of his passive politely-smiling wife. But rather than an attempt to understand Japanese psychology and interaction, instead we have the all too common sight of an adult venting teenage angst in lieu of ventilating some curiosity, some ideas, some penetrating insight. With the Chinese MSM, presumably there's little tradition of popular psychology (not that US MSM is that much better, though at least political correctness makes media professionals crudely cautious about moral judgements that cross cultural lines). Myself I'm not a fan of morals at all. An obsession with morals by my lights are a sure-sign of a provincial mindset. Ethics however... Perhaps because China as an empire highly stressed assimilation of ethnic groups in the French colonial fashion (failure to speak the Empire's language was actively punished, empire-centric names had to be adopted by conquered peoples, the whitewashing of indigenous identity was aggressively pursued: though much of this has changed in today's China, in part as tourism in minority areas has become more popular and the mainstream developed a growing sympathy for minorities). For all these reasons and more, unlike the colonizing Japanese and English and the French, perhaps ethnology has been little pursued by China's several millenia of indigenous colonizing powers? I don't know. Yet.

When Hong Kong first became a British colony, flogging was a common practice used to punish criminals. (link)

Easily the most unfair and even ridiculous interview of a politician I've seen. I'm no fan of Charles Kennedy (candidate for British Prime Minister), but this BBC interview... Good grief! I imagine it's supposed to be hard-hitting, but it's really just cherry-picking a la Bill O'Reilly (video link) It would have been more productive to put Kennedy on C-Span, give him ten minutes to freely yammer in a civilized setting and then turn him over to the harsh mercies of the call-in hoi polloi. I have one of interviewer Jeremy Paxman's books "The English" on a back shelf. Bait for dust-bunnies, it's just as relentlessly humorless as he is here in the flesh.