In “Department of Good News” Ms. Collins has a question: Between the royal wedding and the release of the president’s birth certificate, what more could you possibly want to be happy? Yeah, bread and circuses. What more do we need? Mr. Kristof, in “Great Leap Backward,” says while a dramatic economic rise takes place in China, the country is also host to an equally dramatic yet much less impressive rise in human rights violations. Here’s Ms. Collins:
Well, I just don’t see how things can get better than this when it comes to current affairs. Prince William is about to get married and President Obama has released his long-form birth certificate.
All we need now is for the House speaker, John Boehner, to follow through on his call for the oil companies to pay their fair share of taxes. Then, really, I think we could go into the weekend with a true feeling of closure.
Boehner, you may remember, told ABC News that big oil companies don’t need the oil depletion allowance and that Congress “certainly ought to take a look at” the tax breaks our energy mega-firms enjoy.
What a great guy John Boehner is! You may not remember, but there was a time when Democrats hatedhatedhated him. That was before the House Tea Party Republicans started giving him so much misery. Now you have Howard Dean calling him a “reasonable person” and the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, offering to him “a bouquet.” Everyone loves a winner, except in Washington where losers are so much more attractive.
However, as soon as the Democrats started applauding the oil-company interview, a Boehner spokesman issued a clarification, which said that the House speaker “is opposed to raising taxes.” Obviously, when he said that we should look at things like the oil depletion allowance, he meant “look” in the same way that we are going to look at the royal wedding. It was not an invitation to join the buffet line.
Unlike the John Boehner Oil Tax Loophole Closing Bill, the wedding is definitely coming off, allowing the entire planet to bask in the aura of a fairy-tale moment before moving on to pregnancy rumors. And about time. The world cannot keep generating more than 100 million William/Kate-related blog postings a day for all that much longer.
I got that figure from Trendrr, which also reported that 40 percent of the English-language wedding Twitter messages originated in the United States as opposed to only 31 percent in the United Kingdom.
To which we can only respond: Well, there are a whole lot more of us. Also, as a nation, we pride ourselves on our Twittering. America intends to be the world leader in all things twit-related. Soon, there will be a ninth-grade proficiency test on it, and teachers whose classes perform badly will be fired.
Meanwhile, on behalf of all of us Yanks, let me say: Good luck, Kate and William!
Most of us have only been paying attention to you for a week or so, but, still, we have come to know you well. “Kate oozes refinement — her friends wear pearls while hunting,” Time magazine reported. That tidbit alone has kept me engrossed all day. Do you think Time meant fox hunting? A lot of bouncing around in fox hunting, and if the pearls broke I guarantee you that you would never, ever find them. Perhaps the Friends of Kate hunt ducks. Or squirrels. Nothing like a tasty squirrel stew, served to people sporting really expensive neckwear.
Estimates of the cost of the upcoming nuptials range from $34 million to more than $7 billion, depending on whether you factor in the bill for giving an entire nation a day off work. Either way, this is Kate’s special day and you cannot possibly put a price on that. Plus, there is nothing like a wedding to raise the national spirits. Who among us can ever forget the way the national psyche soared when Tricia Nixon tied the knot?
But I digress. In the other important, chapter-closing news of the moment, President Obama has released the long-form version of his birth certificate in an attempt to quell the unflaggable “birther” movement and get the news media to notice when he names a new secretary of defense.
Donald Trump immediately took credit. “Today I am very proud of myself,” he said. This is in contrast to normal days, when Trump is continually walking around in an existential funk, asking himself why he was ever born.
Our next question is how far the closure extends. Will the birthers who have been demanding to see that long-form certificate since 2008 now throw in the towel and move on to other important issues, such as whether the rapture will occur on May 21?
Emily Ramshaw of The Texas Tribune quickly tracked down the state representative who’s sponsoring the Texas version of the birther bill and found him — surprise! — unconvinced. Among other things, she reported, Representative Leo Berman wants to know why the hospital where the president was allegedly born doesn’t have a “plaque on the door” commemorating the event.
The more things close, the more they open.
Now, of course, the drooling morons are clamoring for his college transcripts because, you know, he just HAD to have been admitted to college under Affirmative Action and he cheated… Here’s Mr. Kristof, who is in Shanghai:
Since China is in the middle of its harshest crackdown on independent thought in two decades, I thought that on this visit I might write about a woman named Cheng Jianping who is imprisoned for tweeting.
Ms. Cheng was arrested on what was supposed to have been her wedding day last fall for sending a single sarcastic Twitter message that included the words “charge, angry youth.” The government, lacking a sense of humor, sentenced her to a year in labor camp.
So I tried to interview her fiancé, Hua Chunhui, but it turns out that Mr. Hua was recently arrested and imprisoned as well. That’s the way it goes in China these days. The government’s crackdown is rippling through the country, undercutting China’s prodigious growth and representing the harshest clampdown since the crushing of the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989.
The reason? Surprising as it may seem, the government is worried that China could become the next Egypt or Tunisia, unless security forces act early and ruthlessly.
“Of course, they’re scared that the same thing might happen here,” one Chinese friend with family and professional ties to top leaders told me. A family member of another Chinese leader put it this way: “They’re just terrified. That’s why they’re cracking down.”
Yet another official says that the Politburo internalized a basic lesson from the Tiananmen movement: It’s crucial to suppress protests early, before they gain traction. He says that from China’s point of view, the mistake that autocrats in Egypt and Tunisia made was not cracking down earlier and harder.
Paranoia also plays a role. Some Chinese leaders believe that America is nurturing a movement to subvert the government. Chen Jiping, a senior official, expressed this fear when he warned recently against “hostile Western forces attempting to Westernize and split us.” China, for a time, even blocked access to the blog of the outgoing American ambassador, Jon Huntsman Jr.
In truth, the differences with Egypt and Tunisia are profound. China’s leaders may be just as autocratic as those in the Middle East, and just as corrupt, but they’re far more competent. They’ve overseen astonishing improvements in the standard of living, in education, in health, in infrastructure. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself: That’s the topic of my next column.
Another reason for the crackdown seems to be jitters over the transfer of power next year. President Hu Jintao, who seems, to me, to be the least visionary Communist Party leader since Hua Guofeng in the late-1970s, is expected to step down and be replaced by Xi Jinping, the current vice president. Officials say that the plan is for Li Keqiang to be prime minister and Wang Qishan (perhaps the ablest of the three) to be deputy prime minister.
But there is still jockeying, partly because President Hu is weak. Chinese officials are remarkably open about criticizing Mr. Hu, and the critics are said to include the military brass and former President Jiang Zemin. The complaints have little to do with the crackdown on dissent (“That’s just a very small issue to them,” one Chinese official explained to me), and more to do with the way Mr. Hu has frozen or backtracked on economic and political reforms, allowed inflation to stir and harmed relations with the U.S.
Many ordinary Chinese seem to feel the same way. Most Chinese I have talked to don’t care much about dissidents; their main concerns are inflation, corruption and better jobs. Moreover, they feel freer in their daily lives — so long as they don’t challenge the government, it mostly will leave them alone.
Still, the crackdown represents a great leap backward, and it is particularly nasty in two respects.
First, the government is arresting not only dissidents and Christians but also their family members and even their lawyers. Second, after a long period in which police would torture working-class prisoners but usually not intellectuals, the authorities are again brutalizing white-collar dissidents.
One lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, was arrested and, by his account, subjected to beatings and electric shocks because he had represented Christians and dissidents. After a brief stint of freedom nearly a year ago, he apparently was arrested again and vanished. In China, “disappear” has become a transitive verb.
The crackdown has extended to the Internet. My teenage daughter, with me on this trip, complains that in China “everything is blocked.” By that, she means that Facebook and YouTube are walled off, access to Gmail and Google searches comes and goes, and even her homework on Google Documents is inaccessible.
Here we have a country that is coming of age, with an economic rise that is pretty much unprecedented in the history of the world — and it tarnishes those achievements with a harsh crackdown. For those of us who love China and believe in its future, this retreat is painful to watch.
