Once the debt crisis of Dubai World appeared on the news, I happily went to my nationalistic friends to ask, "don't you think Shanghai will be the next Dubai?" No, they didn't even think about it. Of course Shanghai is different: Shanghai is not in the desert; it has a big local population; it has full backing of the Chinese government and the Chinese banks...

What Dubai and Shanghai have in common is that all their resources are concentrated in the hands of a few power elites. And these elites can indulge themselves in self-aggrandizement with few public accountability. Just look at the skyscrapers in these two cities. Now that the Burj Dubai is left half-done, the Shanghai Center--the 632m tower--might become the tallest building in the world when it is finished in 2014. Why is it a bubble? Because office buildings in Shanghai are already facing over-supply, the occupation rate is around 50%, and you cannot get your investment back from rent (according to current rent-purchase ratio) within 50 years. The power elites' obsession with erecting tall buildings might be a good case for psycho-analysis, but I will only write about what I know for sure, that they are betting with public money.

In the case of the Shanghai Tower, the developers are three government-owned companies. They are using the public land for free (In China, all lands are owned by the state), and they get their funding from state-owned banks. So what if the Shanghai Tower becomes just another empty building? The banks will write it off as a bad loan. What if the banks cannot survive so many bad loans like that? The government will use public money to bail them out (as it did in 2004). In other words, everyone is blackmailed by the bubble.

Dubai thought it had found a new path to prosperity when it stopped exporting oil. Shanghai is not that different, when it can no longer depend on exporting cheap labor (our unique natural resource), it resorts to credit expansion and construction as the engine of growth. Others have failed in that path, Dubai, Spain, Japan...but somehow many people here have no doubt that we will be the exception.

Shanghai-skyscrapers

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The Copenhagen Climate Talks is receiving a lot attention from Chinese media. There are debates over whether the US is taking too little responsibility and China is taking too much as a developing country. But you don't hear the kind of skepticism towards climate change common in the US (maybe because the smog in Chinese cities is quite hard to ignore). But certain argument from the American conservation radio shows will not make any sense to Chinese: If you are believe climate change, you must be anti-freedom, anti-America, elitist, and sissy. Some Chinese are against environmentalism because it is not profitable or convenient, but they don't have the moral imagination that they are defending a free-consuming lifestyle, defending normal and moral people against the threats of intellectuals or science, or even defending masculinity (I don't really get that part)... 

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I observe that, the far right in the US often viewed the people of the third world as backward, stupid and even barbarian, whose development depends on the help from the West; but the far left think of the people of the third world as innocent, peaceful, and free from all the materialist desires of capitalism. I just think both views are far from reality.

Reality is of course complicated. I have my own simplistic view though, I think the people of the third world are as bad as those in the first world, they are just as prone to prejudice, violence or greed. Yes I'm pretty cynical. So it's amazing that I met quite many nice and noble friends! I doubt my experience can be generalized into an assertion that there are many good people in the world though. I am probably just lucky.

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Most of my friends are leftists by American definition, and I admire their commitment to equality and freedom for all people. But two of them always chastise me whenever I suggest there are threats to people in the world other than American imperialism and capitalism. Today I casually suggested that the gunmen who did the killing in Mumbai are probably Islamic terrorists, and the two immediately start criticizing me for being almost a racist.

I tried to make clear that I'm not indicating that all muslims are terrorists, and that I'm aware the muslims suffered injustice in that region and part of the problem is American foreign policy. Then I asked my two friends if they felt the crimes of these terrorists are justifiable because of the injustice they felt. My two friends avoided the question, but went on to say the US military killed no less civilians in the irag war than these terrorists. But why can't we criticize islamic extremism and US foreign policy at the same time, one does not justify the other.

These two friends are particularly angry at me for putting Islam and Terrorist in the same word, but I have muslim friends who call these gunmen the same name as they represent an extreme fraction of the religion. What's wrong with possible links between religious fundamentalism and violence? We are worried about the feelings of muslims, who are supposedly the weak and repressed. But what about the feelings of those who are repressed in muslim regimes? What about the feelings of young girls who are stoned to death for adultery who were often just victims of rapes (I knew two real cases, one under taliban regime and one in Somalia)?

In my two friends' view, people in the third world were just living a happy and peaceful life until western imperialists and capitalists came. I cannot agree with that, the people in the third world were never that innocent. You can even take Tibet for example, the peaceful and spirtual shangarila in western imagination had one of the cruelest theocracy, with previous Dalai Lamas using bowls made of virgins' skulls.

To conclude, I'm not entirely intimidated by my two friends' iron fists of political correctness, I don't want to give up thinking about any human cultures critically, whether it's capitalism or socialism, western or eastern, the powerful or the powerless...

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will write tomorrow

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On a legendary Street in the city of Nan Jing, Chinese entrepreneurs work hard to create their own brands:

Sublime knockoff 1

Sublime knockoff 2

Sublime knockoff 3

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As I'm about to move back to China, I realized that it's time for me to get used to the Chinese way again. Actually I was never able to get used to it even since I was kid, but now that I learned more about the world, I can put everything in context and look at it more rationally.

So today I read a piece of news about a young man who was shot dead by the police. According to the many witnesses at the scene, the young man was attached by a mafia, he escaped and asked the people around to call the police. A group police did come, but for some reason, instead of protecting this young man, they shot him dead.

This may sound bad, but we have to put it in context. Not many years ago, there were incidents in which the police shot hundreds of people, intentionally. This time, it's just one person, and the policeman probably was not even intentional.

What happened next is a little hard for me to swallow. The police published a statement saying that this young man was on drug, and he was attacking the police with a knife. But according to the witnesses, this young man was severely injured, had no weapon and was asking for the police right before he was shot. Even if he was a criminal, given that he has no gun and the policemen are fully armed, it wasn't necessary for the policeman to shot him. So how could the police lie so blatantly? I almost felt anger. But then I remind myself, if this happened 10 years ago, the witnesses wouldn't even dare to speak and we wouldn't even be able to reading the news about it. In addition, one of my favorite poets also took a bullet from the police during the Maoist era, her mother had to pay for the bullet that killed her daughter according to the Chinese law. This young man at least got a free bullet.

Thus, we can see signs of progress toward more openness and justice in this incident.

I  will  write more  on this subject later. But  here is a quick note on the milk powder crisis. Yes, it's quite bad  thousands of  babies  are sick because of the contaminated milk produced by state protected milk companies. But don't forget just 50 years ago during the big famine caused by bad policies, babies were not poisoned, but they were often eaten. So this is not really a bad time for Chinese babies from a historical perspective.

Writing like this really helps me to remain optimistic about my country.

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I can understand that Americans see their troop as their heroes, at least their troop rarely turned their guns at their own people (like what troops in many countries did throughout the history). But it's still fair to say that the American military can be wrong, and can do things that are not in the interest of most American people. I'm sympathetic with whoever suffers because of the War, but that does not make every American soldier an hero who can do nothing wrong. For those anti-government conservatives, if they think government is the problem rather than the answer, why should they firmly believe that the military--which follows the order of the government--is always on the right side?

No one will deny that American military had done things to stop crimes against humanity, but it also did many things just for imperialist intention (I will fill in examples here later). Is American imperialism in the interest of most American people? To believe that the military is always on the side of the people, is to conceive a world consisting of competing nation states who are a threat to each other. But what if the people in different countries share common interests, even more common interests than they share with their respective governments?

I think people who are not nationalists--including many soldiers--should only support the troops, whatever country they belong to, that protect the peace rather than start wars. Why do politicians always portrait the military as brave young people who serve the country and protect the citizens. Sometimes it's braver to be against a war than to participate in a war.

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I'm writing this as a response to the anti-American sentiment rising around the world in the past several years. I made many American friends during my 8 years vacation in the US, they are of diverse ethnicities and from different backgrounds, most of them are open minded, intelligent and compassionate. What I admire most in them is how critical they are of their own country and how sympathetic they are with people from the Third World. Sometimes I ended up defending the American Empire against my American friends. As I often said, what the US is doing in the world today, even including Iraq, is actually less cruel and exploitative than what the European countries did in the colonial era, or the Ottoman Empire or the Roman Empire further back in the history. Yes there is discrimination and inequality in the US, but there is a reason many people would still migrate to the US: other governments can be even more repressive and unfair towards their own citizens than the US towards the immigrants!

My friends often feel ashamed of having G.W.Bush as their president, who is indeed one of the worst leaders in the world's history. But it's not their fault. They have participated in the protests against Bush and they voiced their dissent in many public media. Actually it's quite impressive that half of the Americans didn't vote for Bush in 2004. I don't think many countries would behave better in the same situation.

Many Europeans have a sense of moral superiority and a contempt for American public. But Europe, when it had power, didn't hesitate to drag the world into WWI and WWII. Even today, nationalism and racism are still pervasive in many EU countries, so I see no evidence that the Europeans are generally more enlightened than Americans. In other areas, from the Middle East to Asia, anti-American sentiment are often used by authoritarian governments to fuel nationalism and make America the scapegoat of their internal problems. Again, I see no evidence that people in these areas embrace progressive values more than Americans.

There are many people in the US, represented by Bush, Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh etc, who replace patriotism with nationalism, replace moral values with religious fundamentalism, and replace egalitarianism with anti-intellectualism. They are disgusting and dangerous. But such people exist in every country. The sad thing is such people are calling my friends, who are striving to improve America, un-American and un-patriotic. I hope my friends will fight back, and take back the power to define American-ness. For me, my friends are the true Americans. And their values, from peace to justice to environmentalism, are what makes America great. And I hope the International community would see that anti-Americanism is not constructive, instead, we all would benefit if we help the liberals in the US to make the country better.

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