Amit Varma reports that Indian actress Pooja Bhatt is upset that someone "stole" the title of her upcoming film… Cabaret.

The report quotes Bhatt as saying:

My production company (Fish Eye Network) registered the film under four names with two spellings — Cabaret, Kabaret, Cabaret — The Dance of Love and Kabaret — The Dance of Love. I have the necessary documents to prove that I am the owner of the title.

She also accuses the film industry of having "a herd mentality and no originality".
And no, the reporter did not ask her if she had seen this particular film directed by Bob Fosse and starring Liza Minnelli.

It’s long been known that agricultural subsidies in the West result in a massive misallocation of funds that could be put to more productive job-creating use elsewhere, while simultaneously hampering growth in the third world.

How should developing countries react when they can’t develop a market-oriented farming industry?  Daniel Drezner links to a NYT op-ed on outsourcing/offshoring that notes one way of doing so:

The rich countries can’t have it both ways. They can’t provide huge subsidies for their agricultural conglomerates and complain when Indians who can’t make a living on their farms then go to the cities and study computers and take away their jobs. Why are Indians willing to write code for a tenth of what Americans make for the same work? It’s not by choice; it’s because they’re still struggling to stand on their feet after 200 years of colonial rule. The day will soon come when Indian companies will find that it’s cheaper to hire computer programmers in Sri Lanka, and then it’s there that the Indian jobs will go.

A year ago Jiao Guobiao was a little- known professor, quietly teaching
journalism and advising graduate students at Peking University. Then the former journalist decided to write a scathing, online attack against the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. Mr. Jiao said the department’s officials were as powerful and
self-righteous as the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. "Anyone
who touches them will get burned," he wrote.

Indeed, we can be thankful that Jiao  Guobiao isn’t in jail.

Thanks to the long arm of the Internet, Chinese and English versions of the essay were soon being read around the world, propelling the gentle-mannered scholar into the international spotlight…
He was fired in April — right after leaving China to take a fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington.
Mr. Jiao is the latest casualty in the Chinese government’s war against academic dissent, a campaign that has caught many scholars by surprise. Shortly before a new, younger generation of Chinese leaders took office in 2002, intellectuals in Beijing were hoping that Hu Jintao, who is now the country’s president, would be a force for reform.
Since taking the reins of power, however, the new regime has launched a bitter attack on freedom of expression. Newspapers have been shut down, books banned, journalists and dissidents imprisoned, and scholars brought under increased pressure to toe the official line. The political situation is the worst it has been in years, many scholars say.

I’m no fan of factory farming, but it’s hard not to feel sympathy for shareholders of Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group. The conglogerate - which introduced economies of scale to Thailand’s chicken farming industry - has been hammered by the outbreak of bird flu.:

It is Asia number one poultry’s exporter and, in many cases, controls the whole production chain, from feed to retail sales of processed chicken. Feed, and more specifically hybrid seed corn production, is the most lucrative part of this vertically integrated business. (4) According to Viroj Na Ranong, a researcher at the Thailand Development Research Institute "It is the poultry business that made CP well known in Thailand. In the seventies, the company entered the market with new breeds and the contract farming system inspired by its US partner Arbor Acres. As a result, chicken became the cheapest meat in the market. It changed people’s eating habits and backyard poultry disappeared." (5)
Even though its chicken operations account for only10% of the CP Group’s revenue, the avian flu hit the whole economic empire. The day after the Thai government officially recognised the outbreak of the virus, CP’s stock plummeted by 12.5% and the Stock Exchange of Thailand index fell sharply. In Thailand, when CP sneezes, the whole business community catches cold or, in this case, flu.

Via the Avian Flu Blog.

After Malaysia’s ‘Miss Tourism Pageant expells Miss Tibet‘ due to pressure from China, Imagethief again notices that the Communist Party of China is public-relations deficient.:

Ignore for a moment that beauty pageants are insipid (and muslim Malaysia seems like an odd place for a pageant, although its large number of ethnic Chinese are less wound about such things). If it were a question of international recognition, a political statement or a major piece of journalism I could understand diplomatic involvement. But a beauty pageant? Do you have a hobby? Friends? A dog to walk? A charity to start? Visas to issue? Is there really nothing better that the Chinese consulate in Malaysia could be doing than obsessing about beauty pageants?

Plus, it’s obviously bad PR for the CPC to be attacking this cutie.

UPDATE: Angry Chinese Blogger has more.

Via ESWN, 11 people are being tried for criminal use of the internet.  But it’s not about politics, it’s about porn.

So what exactly were they doing that constituted criminal behavior? Well, this should have been easy to guess.  As a country, China has the second largest number of Internet users.  When Chinese people get on the Internet, most of them are not banging the keyboard to talk about freedom or democracy.  Similarly, as a country, the United States has the largest number of Internet users and most Americans do not get on the Internet to talk about the privatization of social security or the nomination of John Bolton as US Ambassador to the United Nations.  The common thing about the United States and China is that the most popular subject on the Internet is … pornography.
The name of the web site in this case is "99bbs.com."  It was founded in 2002 by a 19-year-old Fujian resident named Wang Rong.  The web servers for the website are located in the United States, and therefore beyond the reach of Chinese law enforcement.  The web site may have begun as a general interest forum, but in 2003 it began to distribute pornographic movies, pictures and articles.  During this time, Wang Rong recruited the defendants over the Internet to manage various aspects of the operations.

Moving beyond Malaysia’s Star and Singapore’s New Paper, Singapore’s Sarong Party Girl makes it on to the BBC.

Mei Zhong Tai and Michael Turton continue to debate the logistics of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan.

Arms Control Wonk wonders what was on the menu during the mid-level US-North Korea meeting in Beijing. The answer: steak and cheesecake.

More Phillip K Dick moments, but this time it’s educational:

It was the first time the DPP had hosted a conference like this, and
although they did a really good job organizing and coordinating all the
events, their inexperience in manipulating the delicate mock-crises
eventually took a toll; in the span of forty minutes Saturday night, (
it was a pretty long day, from 8:00am til midnight) we learned that
China was threatening Taiwan unless they immediately accepted the
one-China policy, a Taiwanese dissident had assassinated the Chinese
premier, Muslim extremists had captured and blocked the Singapore
strait, and Pakistan had inexplicably seized the opportunity to invade
India. Perhaps more restraint on the part of the control staff would
have been more appropriate.

No matter how enraged someone may be by terrorism, it would be ignorant to attack a mosque. It is doubly ignorant to attack a Sikh temple, as two have been in the UK. Via Sepia Mutiny:

You know, I had naively hoped that this wouldn’t happen across the pond. Contrary to America, where Sikhs are more scattered and less understood, I thought that in England, people were more knowledgeable about Sikhism, that they could tell the difference between al-Qaeda and an innocent group of people who had nothing to do with transportation treachery. Perhaps some, if not most of the English can…but much to my alarm, there are quite obviously a dangerous few who can’t. To them, a turban is a turban is a turban. Bend it like Beckham and bomb it like someone ignorant.

“Such attacks are an affront not only to the great Sikh religion but to entire humanity,” the spokesman said.
“The Sikh community in the United Kingdom has carved out a highly respected place for itself in the British society through its industriousness and commitment,” the spokesman said.

None of that matters. We are foreign and we wear turbans, just like that bastard Osama. Thanks to a coincidence of complexion, we are complicit and we will pay.

More news from the wonderfully open society that cares more about human lives than it does about saving face:

A leading Hong Kong virologist researching the deadly H5N1 strain of avian influenza told The Scientist this week that new regulations from China’s Ministry of Agriculture will prevent him investigating the virus.
"They are trying to stop me, trying to stop my investigation," said Guan Yi, a University of Hong Kong researcher whose group published a paper in Nature today (6 Jul 2005) describing the latest sequence data isolated from dead geese near Qinghai Lake in western China….
[…] "God help me," Guan said, sounding exasperated, "they are trying to close everyone’s lab." He said he believes the new rules are an excuse for authorities to exert tighter control over the dissemination of lab results, and are not aimed at protecting the wider population from bird flu outbreaks that have dotted the country in recent months.

Sign from a Shanghai Mexican bar.:

(via Kenny Sia)

Well, a particular video game in Japan could be Good for you… if you’re a woman.. if you have the right peripheral… and if you consider "hysterical paroxysm" to be therapeutic. Via Japundit, Game Girl Advance discovers innovative uses for the trance vibrator.:

Even without the trance vibrator, the game puts you into a trance state - it’s a raver’s game, a game of pure sensation. The goals are simply to progress to the next level - not so complicated. But getting there is a sublime visual and aural experience. There’s also an invincible "travelling" mode, if you want to just sit back and move through the levels without worrying about your avatar’s taking damage.
But god damn, the trance vibrator started thumping like crazy in time with the music.
Well, what would you have done? I moved the vibrator into my lap.
"Oh my GOD! This game rocks! Here, you play." I handed him the controller but you’d better believe I kept that vibrator right there in my lap….

If censorship wasn’t enough, this should help encourage at least 51% of us to support the xbox boycott.

A friend of mine, Thirdpartydreamer, who is also a specialist on the history of health and nutrition in China, pens an excellent review of the book, Jesus in Beijing: How Christianity is Transforming China and Changing the Global Balance of Power by David Aikman (2003):

I must confess that I picked up this book in an antagonistic spirit.
Aikman is a conservative evangelical who’s just been hired to teach at
Patrick Henry College (the new college designed to send home-schooled
Christian men into government service—women are admitted to the school,
but are not expected to pursue careers. Check out the school’s website, or see the recent New Yorker article
on PHC). Since he styles himself a China expert, and boasts an
impressive set of credentials (Ph.D. in History from the University of
Washington, former Time reporter in Moscow and Beijing), I thought his
take on Christianity in China might be worth checking out…even if his
oeuvre contains such dubious entries as the recent George Bush is the Messiah or whatever it’s called (okay, it’s Man of Faith: the Spiritual Journey of George W. Bush).

Aikman’s
thesis here is that Christianity is spreading like a brush fire in the
People’s Republic today, especially in the form he considers the most
promising: the underground house church. House churches he contrasts
with the state-approved and state-controlled congregations affiliated
with the Three Self Patriotic Association (the government’s Protestant
outfit) and the Catholic Patriotic Association (the government’s
Catholic outfit). He relies for his information on the members of the
underground churches themselves, and participates uncritically in their
boosterism. One suspects that Aikman overestimates how pervasive
underground Christianity really is—not to mention how likely it is that
Chinese Christians will change the way the People’s Republic interacts
with the world (curbing its human rights abuses and bringing it in line
with American foreign policy, as Aikman assumes Christianity will
naturally do).

Read on….

The North Koreans have agreed to return to talks, OneFreeKorea isn’t too optimistic: "North Korea will have to compromise substantially on transparency, something I doubt they’re prepared to do.". Also at 1FK, a reader’s letter indicates that the dictatorship’s film-making propaganda department may soon start to employ focus groups.:

A North Korean propaganda film about the repatriation of a spy Lee In-Mo who had languished for years in a South Korean prison may have a short shelf life, according to defectors now living in the South.
"What we could not believe in the movie was that Lee and others were conducting hunger strikes in the prison," said one defector about the movie.
"Refusing to eat was a form of resistance in the South? Boy, South Korea must be a paradise. That’s what we said among ourselves"

Deng Xiaoping will not be on the 500 yuan note - unfortunately that means, should such a bill come into existence, it will also have Mao’s murderous mug. Also from Danwei, news that China continues to use formaldehyde in beer.

Tokyo and Beijing have agreed to co-operate against the Triad and Yakuza.

After a successful soft launch, the Shanghaiist goes live tomorrow. Given that the venture is headed by Dan Washburn, and features esteemed contributors such as Running Dog and myself, expect nothing less than excellence.

Big media… well Canada’s CTV .. have started to notice Western corporate complicity in China’s internet censorship (though it’s sad that a Canadian broadcaster didn’t bother to mention Nortel (or Alcatel).:

Now, U.S. companies are providing equipment and software that
enables service providers to enter thousands of banned keywords and web
addresses for automatic blocking.
Cisco Systems Inc., which is based in San Jose, Calif., sold the
communist country routers that have the ability to block not only the
main addresses for web sites, but also specific sub-pages, while
leaving the rest of the site accessible.

Japundit continues to debunk myths about the ‘tiny archipelago ‘ although the ‘panty-pulling craze’ is a less attractive myth than two earlier debunked hoaxes.:

Two of the most famous Japan craze hoaxes are the see-through skirt hoax (neither the see-through version nor the printed-on version of this hoax is true) and the scanty bathing suit hoax.

In Malaysia, TV Smith reprints a letter to the editor that really should have been published.:

On April 29 this year, reader Donald Tan copied me a letter he sent to a major newspaper. In it, he stated his worries about a precariously perched flyover. It was being built over a busy expressway he uses daily. He also enclosed a picture (above). The letter was never published by the newspaper nor the subject investigated for reasons unknown…
This afternoon, prophetically enough, the structure collapsed onto the road below, smashed a passing car and injured several workers.

The bishops of the Philippines no longer live under the shadow of Sin (Cardinal Jaime Sin that is) and have decided to remain out of politics. A separation of Church and State in the Philippines would be amazing. Now all that’s needed is a removal of the influence of ex-presidents (While I like Ramos, I  would also extend Torn&Frayed’s list to include the late Marcos).

Who says Singapore is conservative… Cowboy Caleb brings us a look at the phallic souvenirs of the Lion City.

Of course just because Singapore isn’t conservative doesn’t mean it’s entirely liberal.:

Media freedom in Singapore is constrained to such a degree that the vast majority of journalists practice self-censorship rather than risk being charged with defamation or breaking the country’s criminal laws on permissible speech.

Wannabe Lawyer points out why I couldn’t find any decent pinball games in Singapore.

Yet more proof that the mouthless one from Sanrio is a corrupting influence.

From Rational Ignorance:

A guy from Japan recited the first 83,000 decimal places of the number pi.
Oddness aspect number one is the obvious question of why bother to do that.
Of course, the answer appears to be: to get a world record by beating another guy from Japan.
That other pussy could only recite pi to 42,000 decimal places.

Michael Turton has a good post and a lively debate on the likelihood of a Chinese attack on Taiwan. He considers my earlier post (among others) to be naive - both in its assessment of the capabilities of Taiwan and its allies and on my assessment of the Communist Party of China being a rational actor.

From many years of reading and watching history I put very little faith
in the ability of leaders to rationally manage events. Asia watchers
especially should be the first to discount the idea that leadership
will avoid war to get rich, or for some similar material goal. Prior to
WWII Japan followed policies whose goals were to bring it into war with
China, Russia, the US, and the UK, the four largest political entities
on earth, all at the same time.

This is a fair point and, to clarify, I certainly don’t think that the CPC are rational over Taiwan. On cross-straits matters, the CPC has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to be irrational. I could imagine numerous scenarios where they would launch an assault on the island. If, for instance, there were an indication from Washington that it would not intervene (or the perception that Washington would not intervene). Or if Pan-Green forces did manage to formalize the island’s independence.

However, the basis of the Gertz article (which Michael rightly characterizes as propaganda) is that China is positioning itself to attack within two years. I do not discount that there are events that would prompt China to irrationally attack Taiwan - but I do not see anything that would encourage China to do so in that timeframe. Moreover if China did attack by end 2007, it should not expect victory.

If pushed, the CPC will indeed act irrationally. For now, Hu Jintao has probably been more rational on the Taiwan issue than previous leaders. The tone of official CPC propaganda has shifted away from the threats of yesterday. Instead we are each day bombarded with flattery of Taiwan’s Pan-Blue camp and tales of cross-strait corporate co-operation. I won’t debate whether this will benefit the KMT and others, but it is paying dividends for Hu. Despite the military buildup, the trend that I’m seeing is an increasing demilitarization of the Taiwan issue.

I’m not a seasoned Sinologist and Hu plays politics with his cards close to his chest, but I think it’s safe to say that China’s senior leadership is finally getting the fact that lobbing missiles during elections is not the way to achieve unification.

But yes, counting on the CPC to remain rational is not a good basis for a defense policy. China’s military buildup does need level-headed consideration - Rumsfeld’s comments were welcome, Gertz’s paranoia isn’t.

Read Michael’s full argument (and comments) here also an initial rebuttal by Mei Zhongtai here.

Late-linkage after a blogging-free Friday.:

A new group blog for the Indian blogosphere DesiPundit

US conservatives attack Hollywood, but they should love Bollywood:

1. No sex. If you’re lucky, you might see some wet sari.

2. The films often revolve around finding a wonderful spouse and getting married.

3. The bigger the wedding, the better.

4. Lots of piety. Religion is *never* mocked or portrayed in a negative light.

From IslaFormosa, a look at Taipei’s bid to host the 2020 Olympics and Taiwan’s former president goes manga.

Even former ROC President Lee DengHui got on the bandwagon by posing as as the fictional character Edajima Heihachi of the anime series Sakigake!! Otokojuku. It’s no secret that Lee is a pocket ‘Japanophile’. He was educated in Japan and can speak Japanese quite fluently (he was given a scholarship to Kyoto Imperial University). His cosplay was widely seen as a way to shore up support from young people for his Taiwan Solidarity Union party’s Taiwan independence platform.

The first issue of the Cambodia Economic Review is online.

I mentioned that Bill Gertz’s Washington Times item on China’s rising military threat would be a good template for a Phillip K Dick-style novel, a libertarian site in the US has developed an initial treatment:

China has emerged as the world’s largest and fastest-growing economy.
After retaking Taiwan in 2007, and annexing North Korea a year later,
China then successfully "Finlandized" Japan, and now oversees a vast
Pacific empire that would have made the 1942 Japanese government green
with envy. China’s thirst for the Middle East’s oil leads it to support
radical Islamic clerics, but this support goes unpunished, as no major
country stands a chance if it goes against China’s wishes.
The
xhiang, introduced in 2009, is now the world’s premier currency,
followed by the euro, the Canadian dollar, and the U.S. dollar.

The top news story from Thursday? According to Xinhua and CCTV it was that Hu Jintao met world leaders. Tom Vanvanij, meanwhile, looks at Thailand’s Nation Channel.

Kevin in Pudong translates offensive reaction on Chinese bulletin boards about the London bombings:

Terrorism is the only way for the weak to fight back against the strong. No matter what reaons they may have, the US-British attack on the people of  Iraq was wrong and constitutes blatant terrorism. All the weak can do in response is to bring you down with them.

"Terrorism is the only way for the weak to fight the powerful"… it’s not surprising that so many Chinese netizens think this way. Perhaps its because they can’t access messages from birthday boy Dali Lama.

On the bombings, there was the typical reaction from the left to blame Blair and blame Bush. Reaction to the bombings from some in the anti-CCP camp was equally distressing.:

America, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the free world will never be secure until China itself is free. The road to victory in the War on Terror does not end in Kabul, Baghdad, Tehran, or Damascus, and it certainly doesn’t end in Jerusalem. The road ends, and lasting victory can be found, only in Beijing. Until China is on the list for liberation, preferably peaceful, the War on Terror will never end.

Rebecca McKinnion has a roundup of Arab reaction and displays a banner Muslim bloggers can use to show their disgust at the bombings.

Has Howard found his cajones? Australia has granted Chinese defector Chen Yonglin a visa.

Sure, sushi and sashimi can give you worms, but you should be safe if you use (sake wouldn’t hurt either).

More musings on Sinofascism.

Free condom distribution is helping the people of Uttar Pradesh, though not necessarily with birth control or AIDS prevention.:

Some workmen mix them with tar and concrete to give a smooth finish to roads, or to make waterproof ceilings, and some villagers use them to carry water when working in the fields. And, of course, youths turn them into water bombs. But the main use here is in the sari industry, where they’ve become an essential part of the production process

In Japan, it’s time to scare the neighbors - though anti-Japan sentiments from Chinese and Korean political leaders no doubt helped gain support for the constitutional amendment. An East Asian war is still unlikely. But Japan faces other security threats.

In our continuing series of links useful for tourists in Pyongyang, here’s a useful site on the city’s subway system.

The author of a slanderous tome on former Malaysian deputy PM Anwar Ibrahim has gotten one year in jail. The book’s financiers have not been established or punished.

Kenny Sia treats himself to a two ringgit luxury public toilet experience.

Imee Marcos, the glamor-shot savvy daughter (see left) of Ferdinand and Imelda, says Filipinos should not tolerate liars and thieves (chortle). More on the  situation in the Philippines at  MLQIII, PCIL, By Jove and Sassy. Also Gateway Pundit has a selection of links.

Inflation in North Korea, yes the NK won has continued to become more worthless.

GI Korea and explore the even-handedness of Seoul’s press.

 

My eyes are not on Asia tonight and my heart and prayers are elsewhere.

Mongolia has been making great strides in democratization, and it looks ready to embark on a bold experience in land privatization. I’m a big fan of Hernando de Soto, so this strikes me as marvelous news. Nabetz at New Mongols isn’t as optimistic.:

The question of land-privatization is not a new one in Mongolia. David Sneath addressed the question from a historical perspective in a draft paper called "Notions of Rights over Land and the History of Mongolian Pastoralism" (2000). In this paper, Sneath speaks of historic and traditional Mongolian ideas of land ownership and their development and points out how land reform in the form of privatization has historically been met with strenuous opposition from herders. The emphasis of his article eventually becomes Inner Mongolia. Eventually, he concludes that the story of private ownership in Inner Mongolia (China) should warn us that market liberalism and land privatization (1) does not square with Mongolian sentiments with regard to land and (2) will ultimately cause environmental degradation (case in point, Inner Mongolia) because of the constraints that it places on traditional herding and grazing practices.

Canadian journalist, author and ex-red guard Jan Wong offers a list of "10 things China does better than we do." I’ll concur that (coastal) China does beat Canada in many of the points she mentions - banking hours and cell phones particularly - but as someone who has lived in Singapore for half a decade, it should be noted that many of the items on the list are done far, far better in the city state and elsewhere in Asia.

1. Cellphones
By any standard you can think of — coverage, price, ubiquity — China’s cellphone practices beat ours. You can use them in elevators, subways and parking garages. They work in Tibet, at the Great Wall, in remotest rural China, which is more than you can say for Ontario cottage country. Patients, doctors, nurses and visitors use them in hospitals, too, with no apparent ill effects. …

From Kevin in Pudong, translation of an item from a Chinese academic who argues that it is racist NOT to criticize China:

   According to a Xinhua report from Washington, “data from the US Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that there are over 2 million people serving prison and jail sentences in the United States. According to documents prepared by the British gov—ment, this exceeded the amount of prisoners in all other countries, including Russia, ranking first in the world.”
   By the time I got to this part of the report, I started feeling a little suspicious: what does “all other countries, including Russia” mean? What about China, who accounts for half of the executions in the world one year after another? We Chinese citizens aren’t even qualified to be included amongst “other countries”? Wouldn’t you say this is a form of discrimination?

Who says blogs can’t be revenue generating? Via the Mainichi Daily:

Inviting her classmate Mai along for the ride, so to speak, Masami posted a notice on a blog and immediately got 30 responses, despite her fairly steep charge of 50,000 yen a head.
Jitsuwa Knuckles supplies photos of Masami accompanied by young Jun Hashimoto, 20, an underclassman at the same school who got the nod when he admitted to the campfire girls that he was still completely uninitiated in the ways sex.
"Really? How sweet," she crooned, eager to deprive him of his virginity.
Two other guys, Naoki and Masaru, joined in for the fun and games. The group left the train station set off the sticks like five perfectly innocent hikers. When they arrived at the camp site, darkness was fast approaching. While one of the guys pitched the tents and laid out the sleeping accommodations, another got the briquettes going on the barbie.

There’s lots of great blogging on the CNOOC bid for Unocal. That’s not suprising given the blogosphere’s unfailing ability to denounce the actions of grandstanding politicians. Yesterday we noted Billmon’s fine screed on the US Congressional vote against the proposed takeover. Today, Beijing PR flack Imagethief today lambasts the typically ham-fisted CPC reaction:

Honestly, there may be a brilliant PR slagfest going on behind the scenes, but publicly the rhetoric on both sides is pure cold war. I really think China, as a state, is PR deficient. They don’t seem to understand how to make public statements that don’t sound utterly provocative:

"We demand that the U.S. Congress correct its mistaken ways of politicizing economic and trade issues and stop interfering in the normal commercial exchanges between enterprises of the two countries," the Chinese Foreign Ministry said in a statement released Tuesday.

I can’t find the whole statement on MOFA’s English website; possibly this is an inflammatory translation of a perfectly reasonable written Chinese statement (this was, apparently, a written statement and not from one of MOFA’s regular press conferences). But if it has been reported as written, honestly, it seems dim. If I were writing a statement calculated to harden the position of the US Congress, it would look pretty much like this. And even if it is an inflammatory translation, that’s probably something MOFA ought to take account of in its statements. That is, if it doesn’t want to see US congressmen burning Chinese flags

Glenzo, a HK-based CNOOC shareholder also cringed at the MOFA statement, he much prefers the level argument put forth by CNOOC chairman Fu Chengyu (via WSJ):

The majority of Unocal’s Asian reserves are gas. Its proven reserves are mostly committed to long-term contracts in the region, notably for domestic gas markets in Thailand and Bangladesh. Unocal also has very substantial gas resources–or unbooked reserves–particularly offshore East Kalimantan, Indonesia, which will be developed for the production of liquefied natural gas (LNG). Although CNOOC will have no direct influence over the marketing of the LNG, since this is conducted by Indonesian state-owned entities, it is expected that the clean-burning LNG will be sold primarily into Asian markets.

Brad Setser looks at another WSJ piece on the bid and muses that the proposed deal can be seen as an asset swap:

Consequently, it is fair to say that China financed the purchase of Unocal out of its trade surplus. But it equally could be said — given that China is attracting 60 or 70 billion dollars of FDI a year — that in some broad sense the purchase of Unocal is an asset swap. China gets Unocal, and in particular its Asian gas fields and in exchange US and other firms get manufacturing facilities in China. Rather than using the dollars associated with inward FDI flows to purchaser even more Treasuries and Agencies for China’s reserves, in some sense CNOOC plans to draw on the broad pool of dollars coming into China to purchase a US firm.

At China Matters, an argument that the US left has latched on to the bid as a way to compensate for its otherwise dovish foreign policy.:

Much of the opposition stems from a visceral distaste for the CCP regime and awareness of the human rights horrors it has perpetrated over the last eighty years, culminating in the Tian An Men incident.
But some of it looks like a calculated attempt to stake out some defendable political turf for the left on national security and foreign affairs.
Americans are becoming increasingly aware that the U.S.A. is an empire, with burdens and opportunities well beyond those of ordinary nation-states. And Americans recognize that the right wing has an ideology matching this power—kick-ass unilateralism in the service of U.S. hegemony.
The Democrats and, especially the left, are having a hard time coming up with an electable package that combines traditional—and admirable—concern with human rights and social justice with a strategy that defines and manages American power in a crowd-pleasingly pro-active and hairy-chested way.

The Great Firewall of China continues to expand beyond the mainland’s borders, with distressing news coming from Japan and Nepal.

First, from the ‘tiny archipelago’ Gaijin Biker reports:

Hot on the heels of recent news that Japan will discourage people from using the Internet anonymously comes another disturbing announcement. Kyodo News reports:

The government said Thursday it will promote the use of filtering software against what it judges to be harmful information over the Internet, in a bid to prevent such incidents as group suicides and production of explosives via use of the Internet.

The government will map out procedures and criteria for police to ask Internet service providers to disclose information on the senders of messages on planned suicides. It will also try to educate people about the dangers of "harmful online information," and enhance consultation services about it, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoda said.

Japan’s proposed censorship would be limited
to ‘DIY sucicide,’ bomb-making and generally reprehensible sites. Still, as Gaijin biker notes in the full post, there is a slippery
slope.

And ICE reports:

Reports suggest that the websites www.insn.org and www.samudaya.org are being filtered in Nepal. Recall that Nepal actually severed its connection to the Internet itself after the royal coup.

Nepal’s censorship seems limited to items critical of the ruling monarch. Or, in extreme circumstances, everything that hasn’t been state-approved. Yes, there is a slippery slope: Nepal is close to the bottom