The view from over here - 1

The lunchtime meeting today had been organized by the Henry Jackson Society, the Left's particular bugbear, in the House of Commons (luckily in one of the committee rooms where the acoustics were good and the mikes worked). The guest was the eminent academic and commentator, Professor Walter Russell Mead and his topic was an obvious riff on a once highly influential book by Professor Francis Fukuyama: The Crisis in Europe: the Return of History and what to do about it.

As one would expect, Professor Mead gave a very cogent and exhilarating analysis of the many problems the world is facing today but, as a journalist from Die Welt pointed out, we have all heard a great many depressing talks and read a great many even more depressing articles of that kind recently. What did Professor Mead think were some of the answers?

Professor Mead's main solution was (and, to be fair, we were coming to the end of the session but, to be equally fair, that was supposed to be part of the presentation) that the US should restore its interest in Europe and re-engage in a dialogue with its European partners. Or, in other words, as he said the Lone Ranger, having ridden away, should now return (no word of how Tonto might feel about  that).

The European Union, Professor Mead explained, was American foreign policy's greatest accomplishment; it had been one of the aims of the Marshall Plan (some stretching of history here), had been supported diplomatically and politically throughout its history but has, to some extent been left to its own devices in the last few years. The US underestimated the difficulties European weakness and lack of cohesion will cause to it. Having, as it thought, defeated the bad guys (twice, presumably), knocked all the European heads together, the US announced that it will do what the European had always said they wanted and that is leave them all alone. Apparently, that is not what the Europeans wanted deep down and it is time to recognize this fact.

We'll be over, we're coming over
And we won't come back till it's over, over there.

Well, that's fine, except that it would appear that it is never going to be over, over here. We saw that when Yugoslavia disintegrated into a series of wars in the nineties, the EU though the egregious Jacques Poos announced that "this was Europe's hour" only to plead with the Americans to come back and sort the mess out after all. It seems that they will have to come back again in the sense of taking greater interest in this pesky little continent and its pesky problems.

Is that really the answer? Obviously, as an Atlanticist and an Anglospherist I want to see a continuation of the existing links between certain European countries and the United States, adding Canada, Australia and New Zealand into that network. But would a greater involvement by the US in the EU's problems really help anyone? Somehow, I doubt it.

Let us go back to the beginning of Professor Mead's talk. We are, he said, facing the greatest geopolitical crisis since the 1960s with President Putin's Russia displaying the most obvious signs of naked aggression since the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. (Whatever happened to Afghanistan in 1979 and, more recently, Georgia?)

Facing this growing aggressiveness we have a West that is in some disarray, both politically and economically; in fact, in most disarray since the 1930s.

I have a problem with these shock-horror announcements because they seem to be so wobbly in their evidence. Are we facing the greatest crisis since the thirties or the sixties? Is this the biggest geopolitical upheaval since 1918, 1945, 1989 or last year?

Not long ago Legatum Institute tweeted a link to a discussion by various global thinkers, put together by Foreign Policy whose premiss was that "the world as we know it fell apart in 2014". This was said on a number of occasions at the Institute's events by no less a person as Anne Applebaum Director of Transitions Forum and author, among other books, of an excellent history of Eastern Europe in the immediate post-war period. She has also written about the Gulag. It seems to me that compared to what she described in those books makes the events of 2014 rather small potatoes.

As the presentation went on, Professor Mead narrowed down the time scale and focused on three countries that are unhappy with the world order that was established in 1989 - 91, that is after the fall of the Soviet Union, and are ready to challenge it. So we are really talking about a possible world order that is twenty-five years old. Could it be that there was no world order established in those years but that events were the beginning of the break-up of the post-Second World War order and that break-up is still going on? That is one explanation of events.

The three countries that are challenging the world order, according to Professor Mead, are China, Iran and Russia. Of these China is the most powerful and capable with the greatest long-term potential. It is, however, already interdependent with the existing world order and benefits from it greatly; therefore, its challenge is unlikely to be a particularly destructive one. There are issues on which it feels aggrieved but, on the whole, it has had less effect on the surrounding area than the other two countries.

When challenged on this subject during the discussion by a somewhat long-winded China expert, Professor Mead, defended himself robustly. China, he reiterated, has not made any real changes in the geopolitical structures close to her, partly because she faces stronger countries than Iran and Russia and partly because its leadership miscalculated in  2008 - 9: the US had not been weakened quite as much as they thought and the sudden aggressive reaction alarmed various countries like Japan who now have a far more active foreign and defence policy.

To the point that China was now the second largest economy (that keeps changing and it is never clear to me how these things are defined) Professor Mead replied that the connection between GDP and world influence is not all that straightforward, pointing to the fact that in the mid-nineteenth century France's GDP was greater than Britain's but that did not lead to French domination of the world.

Moving on to Iran, the picture is a little odd. That country has the least long-term potential of the three yet it is the one that has made the greatest changes, in its favour, in the area that immediately surrounds it. When one looks at the situation in Iraq and Syria one cannot argue with that. Turkey, Iran's rival for influence in the Middle East, has retreated. But Hezbollah is, as far as one can tell, not as strong or powerful as it used to be. For all of that, Iran has done well and that is without going into the convoluted negotiations it has been conducting for decades about its nuclear power.

To a great extent the reason is the basic weakness and unsustainable structure of its immediate neighbours (Israel being the one exception but they are satisfied with keeping a watching brief for the time being), made worse by the events of the so-called Arab Spring.

Does this affect the rest of the world? Well, not so that you'd notice at present though that may change if Iran really does develop a nuclear bomb.

That brings us to Russia, which is, according to Professor Mead betwixt and between those two. It ought to be very powerful, in possession of a nuclear arsenal (whose efficacy is not altogether clear) and in possession of a vast reserve of oil and gas. But unlike China, Russia has not been able to use these advantages to strengthen its economic base even if we ignore the various rumours and news items that indicate a greater weakness in the former than has been assumed.

Russia is alienated from the existing world order in a more fundamental way than China and that is despite the enormous efforts made after the collapse of the Soviet Union to integrate the country into that world order: G7 turned into G8, membership of G20, various agreements with NATO, membership of WTO and so on. For reasons that were obviously beyond the scope of the talk Russia has not managed to take advantage of any of it and has returned to her historic distrust of the West.

When one adds to that the obvious fact that most of the countries that border on Russia have weak governments, chaotic economic policies and, for the most party, dysfunctional structures, one can see that Russia is in a better position than China to make geopolitical changes as well as being more willing to do so.

Of course, one needs to add a few points. Russian interference in those countries has contributed to those weaknesses as well as to Russia's own stagnation. Furthermore, not all countries fall to her machinations. The Baltic States are managing reasonably well for the time being and even Georgia has recovered from the last war sufficiently well to look to the West again.

[This is becoming rather a long blog. So, I shall stop here and write up Professor Mead's comments about the European Union in a separate posting.]

Twenty-five years ago

Who could ever forget this picture or the news we all woke to that day? The Chinese army was moving into Tiananmen Square and its tanks were squashing, quite literally, the peaceful protests of people who thought that China, too, ought to be moving towards some kind of democracy?

What happened to tank man? We do not know. Here are a few stories and speculations. I have always assumed that he was imprisoned, humiliated and executed but, it seems, that may not be the case. Perhaps, one day we shall find out.

All the media is or will be writing about it so I need to put up only a few links. The Wikipedia account is a good starting point; the BBC has put up a gallery of pictures; the Independent has an account of how it all happened; and a reminder that protests in China in 1989 were not confined to Beijing but had swept the country, though you would never know from the silence that has surrounded those events in the country since then.

Meanwhile, the Chinese government has moved fast to silence all remembrances and arrest several prominent dissidents (mostly re-arrest) but in Hong Kong, the crowds turned out in force. Not that we in the West have much to feel smug about, not when one reads stories about such sites as LinkedIn going beyond China's censorship rules in a crazy effort not to upset that government.

The last word in this posting must go to The Onion: Chinese Citizens Observe 25-Year Moment Of Silence For Tiananmen Square Massacre. As one reply said: brutal but true.

Absolutely hilarious

And now for the true socialist view of Margaret Thatcher's career: no, not Glenda Jackson or the ridiculous UK Uncut or some idiotic drama teacher from south-west London but the real McCoy, the Chinese view though it is not clear how official this is.

Here is a sample:

Thatcher grew up in a classical English petty-bourgeois family. Her father owned two grocery shops in Grantham. He preached the word of God, was staunchly patriotic, and became the town’s Mayor from 1945-6. His self-confidence derived from selecting food that commanded a good price and turned a good profit. His daughter, Margaret, also formed her intellectual outlook around the petty proprietor’s fetish for the magical qualities of prices.

Read the whole piece. It will cheer you up.

Outrage is as outrage does

Will this assure that China is removed from the United Nations Council for Human Rights? Don't be ridiculous.

What is going on in China?

This blog has kept out of the rather vague discussions about what might or might not be going on in China over the Bo Xilai affair, mainly because there is too much stuff being spoken and written about that country without any real knowledge, which I do not possess either.

However, even on the basis of the very slender understanding that is common or should be common to all who follow the news, talk to people who have worked in China or with Chinese companies and understands a little about Communism this blog has never accepted the idea that all is rosy there. China with its oppressive political system and an unspeakably corrupt crony capitalism that has not extended beyond the top layer has always seemed to be inherently too unstable to be the leading world economy for some time to come.

The scandal that is unfolding now demonstrates that instability and fills all of us with dread as to which way it might go. Bret Stephens attempts to pull together all that we know at the moment and tries to place it into the perspective of what the Chinese "capitalism" is all about.

But patterns of authoritarian behavior—particularly nepotism, corruption and rent-seeking—are hard to put down in the absence of the accountability mechanisms China so notably lacks: a vigorous free media, periodic elections, economic competition, a bias toward transparency, the rule of law. Instead, the only mechanism the regime has is the purge. It may work in the short-term for eliminating enemies or satisfying bloodlusts. It won't work in the long-term for shoring up the regime's waning legitimacy.

Meantime, China's economy is slowing as income inequality grows—historically an explosive combination. Foreigners in China report that trying to do business is often futile when it isn't outright dangerous. Wealthy Chinese are leaving the country in growing numbers, a de facto vote of no-confidence in an economy whose prospects are supposedly limitless.

Not a country on its way to economic dominance; instead it can cause a great deal of trouble.

Meanwhile ...

.... out in the big bad world there are rumours of a possible coup (by whom,one wonders) in Beijing.

Since Bo Xilai, one of China’s most powerful leaders, was removed from his job last Thursday,the bureaucracy and the public have been on tenterhooks, awaiting the next twist in the gripping political saga.

Besides a one-line statement on Mr Bo’s dismissal published late last week, China’s heavily censored media have not mentioned his name, let alone provided any clues about what will happen to him.

But the country’s netizens, in particular those using hard-to-censor Twitter-like microblogs, have been flooding the internet with information ranging from highly implausible to apparently authentic.

In one rumour that spread rapidly on Monday night, a military coup had been launched by Zhou Yongkang, an ally of Mr Bo’s and the man in charge of China’s state security apparatus, and gun battles had erupted in Zhongnanhai, the top leadership compound in the heart of Beijing.

But when the Financial Times drove past the compound late on Monday night, all appeared calm and by Wednesday evening there was no indication that anything was out of the ordinary.

But when the Financial Times drove past the compound late on Monday night, all appeared calm and by Wednesday evening there was no indication that anything was out of the ordinary.

As the Wall Street Journal reports

China's social-media services, which had allowed wide discussion of controversial politician Bo Xilai since his ouster last week, are now cracking down on searches for his name, as his downfall seems to have put much of the country on edge and given rise to fevered rumors of political infighting.

So we may not be able to find out much for a while. Needless to say, there is nothing on the Xinhua website.

They are not taking any chances

A few days ago the BBC reported that the Chinese authorities, ever mindful of the people's welfare, have taken an important step towards ensuring its intellectual aspect.

China has ordered TV stations across the country not to air any detective shows, spy thrillers or dramas about time-travel for the next three months.

All have been ordered off-air with immediate effect.

An official at China's state TV regulator confirmed to the BBC that the verbal order had been made.

China's Communist Party is preparing to mark 90 years since its founding and the authorities want TV stations to air programmes praising the party instead.

One must admit it is an odd choice of programmes to be taken off air unless, of course, those were the only ones shown regularly on Chinese TV, which does not seem to be the case entirely:

Wang Weiping, the deputy chief of the drama department at China's state TV regulator, called this a "propaganda period".

There are "dozens of good TV dramas related to the founding of the party" that stations can broadcast, he told the Beijing News.

Oriental TV in Shanghai told the BBC it was postponing its spy drama Qing Mang, due to air in 10 days time. It will be replaced by a comedy about mothers and their daughters-in-law.

Somehow the notion of "dozens of good TV dramas related to the founding of the party" does not fill me with any excitement. What, I cannot help wondering, are they afraid of? Wrong ideas or simply people not paying attention to the anniversary?

Another one

The Wall Street Journal highlights the case of yet another of the "disappeared" in China, the artist, Ai Weiwei.

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei posed an important question about the one-party state in this newspaper's Asian op-ed pages last year: "The question . . . is how a state based on limiting information flows and freedom of speech can remain powerful." And if that's possible, "what kind of monster" will it become?

Mr. Ai's detention Sunday at Beijing's airport as he attempted to travel to Hong Kong brings this juggernaut into sharp relief. The police have provided no information about the 53-year-old's whereabouts or explained why he was arrested. The same day, Mr. Ai's wife, nephew and a clutch of his employees were arrested and questioned. Authorities raided his Beijing studio and carted away computers and other items.

Mr. Ai has thus joined the growing ranks of China's new "disappeared." In February amid the popular Arab revolt, an online petition urged a similar Jasmine Revolution in China. The government has reacted by criminally detaining dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of the country's most prominent human rights lawyers, bloggers, democracy activists and others.

This, dear readers, is what real oppression looks like.

This is what real oppression looks like

I hear a great deal from various parts of the political spectrum that this country has become a tyranny, an authoritarian state, even a totalitarian one. While I do not like (and am on record as not liking) many of the developments in this country and would like to change (and am on record as wanting to change) many political developments, I consider comments like that to be an insult to people who live under real tyrannies.

Try this one.

China's crackdown on domestic dissenters continues, with a 10-year prison sentence issued on Friday to Liu Xianbin, a founder of the China Democratic Party and a signer of Charter 08, a pro-democracy charter. Mr. Liu was sentenced for subverting state power, which in China can mean anything the authorities want it to mean, even advocating for democratic freedoms.

This pattern of political behaviour started in February, round about the time things started shifting in the Arab world.

Mr. Liu's latest jailing is part of a crackdown that started in February, when a U.S.-based website posted a call for peaceful democratic protests in China. Beijing proceeded to round up scores of activists, human rights lawyers and others. Some have been confined to house arrest; others, like blogger Ran Yunfei, have been criminally detained.

The most worrying cases are those who have simply "disappeared" into the maw of China's extralegal shadow jails. Human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, who has been tortured before, hasn't been seen since April 2010. Teng Biao, Jiang Tianyong and Tang Jitian haven't been heard from since February.

The government is also squeezing the media, both domestic and foreign. The South China Morning Post reports that an outspoken columnist for Southern Weekly, a relatively liberal publication by Chinese standards, was recently pressured into a two-year "sabbatical." Internet censorship remains heavy. Foreign journalists in China's biggest cities have had their movements restricted and some have been physically assaulted by security agents.

Of course, things are not as bad as they were under Mao. Is that enough?

Oh and for those who tell me that what matters is China becoming a great economic power - many of those arrested and disappearing ones have been trying to tell the reality of that economic development. One cannot know the truth about the economy in countries where there is no freedom of speech. The two hang together.

The worst catastrophe in China's history

As Glenn Reynolds says, American (and other) apologists for Mao were comparing him to the early Christians and assuring us all that his rule was benign, give or take a few deaths, and necessary in order to provide the Chinese with a decent basic living standard.

That would not apply to the millions murdered during the Great Leap Forward and the many more who have lived on near starvation level ever since because agriculture was destroyed and the peasantry terrorized.

Frank Dikötter, professor at the Universities of London and Hong Kong, and author of the seminal Mao's Great Famine, has an article in the New York Times, one of those newspapers that praised Mao's and, let us not forget, Stalin's collectivization. (Walter Duranty remains a Pulitzer Prize winner.)

The estimates of those who understood what had gone on but could not get any documents was that the death toll was between 25 and 30 million. Professor Dikötter has managed to travel round the country and see documents in local party archives thinks that the true figure is at least 45 million, of whom 2 or 3 million were tortured to death or summarily executed. Others simply starved to death or died of grief as the man who had been forced to bury his 12 year old son alive. The boy had stolen a handful of grain.

Even the few cases Dikötter cites in the article are harrowing. I cannot imagine how terrible the book must be. Both are very well worth reading, though.

More on the Nobel Peace Prize

Glenn Reynolds links to a story about Liu Xiaobo's wife, the Chinese police and quotes some comments about Thomas Friedman's desire to see a Chinese political system in the United States. Two excellent sentences to be quoted:

Just because they sold you an iPhone doesn’t mean they’re for freedom.

And about Thomas Friedman:

They’re above criticism so long as he holds the Walter Duranty Chair at the NYT.

Love the idea of a Walter Duranty Chair at the NYT.

Meanwhile, Liu Xiabo's wife seems to have disappeared while the Chinese authorities, having denounced the prize, have lapsed into official silence.

Perhaps one day even China's history will become known

Back in the days when Communist fellow traveller Owen Lattimore (here is a link to the FBI file and here is Wikipedia, which tries to put him in the best possible light) was professor then professor-emeritus of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds with many people horrified by the fact that he had had to leave his American position because of ... shock, horror ... McCarthyism, there were many people who repeated his ecstatic descriptions of the glories of Chinese Communism and the wonderful benefits that accrued to the people of that country.

It was easy to work out that Lattimore was talking poisonous rubbish - he had been just as guilty about the Soviet Union during and after his notorious trip to some of the worst camps in the Gulag at Magadan and Kolyma. He had defended the horrors of Stalinism and was, in the sixties and seventies, defending the horrors of Maoism.

Other supporters of Mao were newcomers to the field. But even to my young ears they sounded utterly wrong. The fact that the language and arguments they used about China, of which I knew little, were the same they had used about the Soviet Union, made them very suspect.

Time has moved on and many people have accepted, more or less, that Mao was the greatest mass murderer in a century that was replete with them. Not everyone has done so. Notoriously, one of President Obama's short-lived aides, Anita Dunn, told not so long ago an assembled audience that Mao Tse-tung was one of her favourite political thinkers (along with Mother Theresa).

Above all, the people of China are still being denied the truth about their own history. It is slowly coming out, at least in the West. Ronald Radosh writes on Pajamas Media about a book that ought to become as well known as all the ones about the Holocaust: Frank Dikötter's Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962.

Interestingly enough, the Independent has written about the book and its author.

Mr Dikötter is the only author to have delved into the Chinese archives since they were reopened four years ago. He argued that this devastating period of history – which has until now remained hidden – has international resonance. "It ranks alongside the gulags and the Holocaust as one of the three greatest events of the 20th century.... It was like [the Cambodian communist dictator] Pol Pot's genocide multiplied 20 times over," he said.

Between 1958 and 1962, a war raged between the peasants and the state; it was a period when a third of all homes in China were destroyed to produce fertiliser and when the nation descended into famine and starvation, Mr Dikötter said.

His book, Mao's Great Famine; The Story of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, reveals that while this is a part of history that has been "quite forgotten" in the official memory of the People's Republic of China, there was a "staggering degree of violence" that was, remarkably, carefully catalogued in Public Security Bureau reports, which featured among the provincial archives he studied. In them, he found that the members of the rural farming communities were seen by the Party merely as "digits", or a faceless workforce. For those who committed any acts of disobedience, however minor, the punishments were huge.

State retribution for tiny thefts, such as stealing a potato, even by a child, would include being tied up and thrown into a pond; parents were forced to bury their children alive or were doused in excrement and urine, others were set alight, or had a nose or ear cut off. One record shows how a man was branded with hot metal. People were forced to work naked in the middle of winter; 80 per cent of all the villagers in one region of a quarter of a million Chinese were banned from the official canteen because they were too old or ill to be effective workers, so were deliberately starved to death.

Mr Dikötter's next book will be on the Communist Party's bloody take-over of China after World War II.

Another one

Another "innocent" victim of the McCarthyite "witch-hunt" appears to have been a purveyor of sensitive information to the Chinese communists. In the Wall Street Journal Jonathan Mirsky reviews Lynne Joiner's Honourable Survivor, the life of John S. "Jack" Service, one of the best known China hands in the State Department, a man much admired for his allegedly superb knowledge of that country, whose career was destroyed by accusations of espionage and treason.

Although he was eventually cleared of charges by some federal judge who clearly did not bother to look at the case in any detail, both the cloud and the halo of the martyr remained with him.

Service, who died in 1999, was eventually judged innocent of disloyalty to the U.S. and abetting Chinese communism. But for years he was accused of being one of the State Department China hands who had "lost China" to the Communists in the 1940s. "Honorable Survivor," by journalist Lynne Joiner, who was also his close friend, makes it clear—and this is Ms. Joiner's chief contribution—that at a minimum Service was "recklessly indiscreet" in his contacts with Communist sympathizers in the U.S. to whom he gave documents or disclosed details of U.S. policy.

That's quite bad enough. After all, a man who has risen high in the State Department should not find it so easy to be "recklessly indiscreet". But what Mr Mirsky tells us makes the story worse:

In two phone interviews with me shortly before he died a decade ago, Service admitted that in the 1940s he had given Jaffe a top-secret document revealing the Nationalist Order of Battle, which showed the exact disposition of the forces facing Mao's troops. When I observed that some might regard this as treason (I made no accusation), Service said he knew it. "I want to get this off my chest," he said, explaining: "I was gullible, and trusting, and foolish." He also told me that he had purposely ignored Mao's persecution, including executions, of his perceived enemies at Yan'an. Why cover for the supposedly moderate Communist leader? "I wanted them to win. I thought they were better than the Nationalists and that if we always opposed them we would have no access to the next Chinese government."

Service pressed me to publish our conversation, but friends of his said that it would be very painful. I agreed and after some time forgot the whole episode, until Ms. Joiner's book came my way. His stunning admission that he did supply classified intelligence to Jaffe, whom he must have assumed would pass it on, puts his later career—and Ms. Joiner's book—in a different light. If what Service told me near the end of his life is true, he can no longer be viewed as an innocent victim.

One cannot help wondering at Mr Mirsky's naivete and readiness to go along with half-truths.

What makes him think this will work?

President Obama has decided that he has not kow-towed to China enough. In order to rectify this omission he is postponing the Dalai Lama's visit to the White House.

In an attempt to gain favor with China, the United States pressured Tibetan representatives to postpone a meeting between the Dalai Lama and President Obama until after Obama's summit with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, scheduled for next month, according to diplomats, government officials and other sources familiar with the talks.

For the first time since 1991, the Tibetan spiritual leader will visit Washington this week and not meet with the president. Since 1991, he has been here 10 times. Most times the meetings have been "drop-in" visits at the White House. The last time he was here, in 2007, however, George W. Bush became the first sitting president to meet with him publicly, at a ceremony at the Capitol in which he awarded the Dalai Lama the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress's highest civilian award.

The U.S. decision to postpone the meeting appears to be part of a strategy to improve ties with China that also includes soft-pedaling criticism of China's human rights and financial policies as well as backing efforts to elevate China's position in international institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund. Obama administration officials have termed the new policy "strategic reassurance," which entails the U.S. government taking steps to convince China that it is not out to contain the emerging Asian power.

As it happens, China did absolutely nothing when successive American presidents met the Dalai Lama signifying their support for him and the people of Tibet as well as their interest in freedom and human rights.

Apart from making it clear that this Administration does not care about either of those concepts and will bow and scrape to any corrupt and tyrannical entity, what do President Obama and his advisers hope to achieve? Do they really believe that anybody respects those who display not principles at all? Why don't they ask the IOC?

Plus ça change ....

There are people around who solemnly assure me and anyone else who happens to be withing hearing distance that things are definitely changing in China. They are getting better, people are becoming more free, the state is moving in the right direction.

They have no evidence for this, beyond the odd story of how nobody seemed that afraid to talk to them when they were in Beijing as tourists. Hardly sufficient evidence in my opinion and shows how contemptuous these people really are of the Chinese, if they think that is a good enough development.

(A little like people who argue that abolishing the burqua in Western countries would be a terrible idea as it gives Muslim women the freedom to go out on the streets. As the rest of the female population is free to go out without covering themselves from top to toe, one wonders exactly who deprives Muslim women of their freedom. Answers on the back of the postage stamp, please.)

In China matters are moving in the wrong direction, as the New York Times reports under a rather unhappy title: "Arrres in China Rattles Backers of Legal Rights".

China's nascent legal rights movement, already reeling from a crackdown on crusading lawyers, the kidnapping of defense witnesses and the shuttering of a prominent legal clinic, has been shaken by the detention of a widely respected rights defender who has been incommunicado since the police led him away from his apartment 12 days ago.

One China's legal rights movement well; we must all offer whatever support we can. Somehow I do not think that proclaiming the wondrous democratic developments in China is quite what these courageous people are looking for.