“Imagine an iron house without windows, absolutely indestructible, with many people fast asleep inside who will soon die of suffocation. But you know since they will die in their sleep, they will not feel the pain of death. Now if you cry aloud to wake a few of the lighter sleepers, making those unfortunate few suffer the agony of irrevocable death, do you think you are doing them a good turn?”

 

“But if a few awake, you can’t say there is no hope of destroying the iron house.”

A nice quote, not unlike some of the comments I got in the Ai Weiwei post. Mr. Millward’s point is, in a nutshell:  that businesses (and Bob Dylan) admittedly don’t have an obligation to spread democratic values. BUT that we can appeal to the stated principle of Facebook “to help people understand the world around them” and nail them with that.

This is an argument reminiscent of the Google non-evil saga, which makes me think:  the day all those tech companies stop getting themselves in trouble with their idealistic statements we will know the tech market is growing old…

Back to the post, I am not particularly against Mr. Millward’s point: the Chinese are “sleeping” in their iron house, let’s make some noise to wake them up. Then again, it may still be 5am in China now with the time difference, perhaps they want to stay in bed a bit longer…  it’s fine if you want to make noise outside, lead by example. But please don’t make the mistake of breaking in to kick them out of their beds. Only theirs is the freedom to choose, even when their choice is a bit more of oppression.

The View from Reality Camp

Back from the fascinating realm of metaphor and into the tough Chinese internet. Quite apart from the moral side of this, there are some important issues with the practical implementation of the FB plan in China:

• As Bill Bishop already mentioned, the train has long passed for FB here. General social networks are all about critical mass of users, the rest is gimmicks. The only possible chance would be, as suggested by Hu Yanping,  to come with an existing local player.
• Either way, it is impossible to implement the level of censorship required on social networks today without effectively separating them from the rest of the World–(ie. to have the FB China servers open in China and the rest of the World with Facebook.com behind the GFW).
• This makes the whole Facebook plan pointless indeed, as it fails to deliver the single value that, in my view, could justify all the trouble: to help connect China with the rest of the World.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t worry so much about the ethical side of this–I doubt we will ever reach that point.  Facebook may lend their name to some weird creature in China, perhaps, and they will pay it with their reputation.  But the real core of Facebook  is the 500 million community that it has in the World, and this, unfortunately, is out of reach for the Chinese netizens.

It is unfortunate that all this discussion started with a response to Osnos’ blog,  because it caused the whole debate to turn around that. I regret that by doing this I have upset some people I respect, who were actively demanding Ai’s release. The fact is I disagree with and even dislike many of Ai and Liu’s statements, but now that they’ve been imprisoned for speaking out their views, there is only one right thing to do. This blog stands for Freedom of Speech.

So I have decided to borrow the banner from the roof of the Tate Museum and hang it on my own roof until my next posting, or until my blog goes down, whichever happens first. It represents not only Ai and Liu, but any person who has been imprisoned merely for having different ideas or for exposing hideous crimes, like the American hero Bradley Manning.

Summary and Main Points Taken

And finally, here are my main conclusions of the debate:

• There is a worrying trend in the pro-democracy movement in the West, including aspects as varied as Liu’s Nobel, the so-called Jasmine “revolutions” of China or the success of Ai’s art. The West creates its own icons without considering whether they have any chance to be accepted by the Chinese people—and of this much I am sure: the most important point for a democratic movement to succeed is to convince its own people. Any other road leads to Irak.
• One worrying aspect of the Liu and Ai work is they represent a radical current of thought that has a long history in China—from the early years of the republic, to the Cultural Revolution and then the “River Elegy” movement.  This is a current of  self-abasement and contempt of the own culture, which proposes wholesale replacement by “Westernization” , as Liu himself says. This kind of thought mirrors the opposite ultra-nationalist current, and they both feed on each other, at the expense of more moderate, balanced positions. I am afraid by supporting these options we are only pushing China even further from the West.
• Another way of seeing this is the usual blog discussions that many of us have with patriotic Chinese. In the media and schools, the CPP deliberately conflates China with CCP, promoting the idea that criticizing the regime is tantamount to attacking the country. Unfortunately, many of Ai and Liu’s statements only add to the confusion, as they direct their attacks to the culture and history of China rather than the party. This, and Liu’s openly pro-American stance in criminal invasion wars (all the while receiving money from the US) makes it extremely difficult to make a case for his independence, let alone his pacifism.
• I believe the best that can happen to the Chinese today (and to the rest of the World) is a progressive opening of China and a normal exchange with the West — free of weird inferiority/superiority complexes. I think initiatives like the WTO, the Olympics and many other in the last decade are conductive to this, whereas extreme statements like those of Ai and Liu only distance us more and more. There is way too much at stake to let it in the hands of impulsive characters.
• As a commentator said in the last post, the situation is not due to Western media bias, but rather to CCP pressure, which causes the moderate Chinese dissidents to decline interviews. Another journalist in the podcast confirmed also what we all know: that the media is there to sell stories and that a story with a special character sells better than a story without. In other words, the Western media doesn’t work for freedom, it works to sell papers—to Western readers. Which is why the Fourth Estate in international politics is essentially flawed.
• So, partly due to the CCP and partly due to the structure of the World media, we end up with these heroes created to our own image. Fine, that’s how the World works today, it is faulty, but not deliberately evil. Just please, do not kid yourself, don’t dream that you are seeing the heroes of the Chinese, or the leaders that will change China.

Are there other options?

I imagine the best critic that can be done to all this is: “do you have any better option?”

Sincerely, I believe there are other options. They are surely not as accessible as Ai, because they shy away from Western media. They may be difficult to accept in our countries, because their ideas clash with preconceptions of what dissidence should be. Moreover, their art or writing might be very specific to the Chinese public, making them impossible to sell in the West.

These are all major difficulties, sure. But frankly, I just don’t see anyone is trying so hard to surmount them.

We have seen in the past how the media ignores thinkers who don’t conform with strictly Western standards of “dissidence”.  One obvious example I think of right now is Han Han, who has immensely more weight in China than Liu or Ai. Another is Xu ZhiYong, who did a comprehensive study of the Tibetan problem, not to mention the cases of the black cells in Beijing, studies that were incomparably more elaborate and politically risky than the lists of Ai.

I am not suggesting we should turn these people into media stars, that wouldn’t help much. But it would be interesting to keep an eye on them, rather than  spend all the efforts inflating our own myths. When the day comes, it will be people like that who will make a difference.

The trouble is,  I don’t think he chose the right issue to address. Many of us who (mildly) oppose all this Ai Weiwei fad don’t do so on the grounds of irrelevance, but for other more important reasons.  In particular, we fear that the disproportionate focus of Western media on characters like Nobel Liu XB or Ai WW is counterproductive, and it can undermine the democratic dissidence in China.

Both Liu and Ai are quite extreme characters. Both have a few things in common: an aggressive style, an economic dependency on the West, and (coincidence?) a radically pro-Western stance. More crucially, both share a taste for expressing their views or creating “art” [1]  by means of destroying  the things that are dearest to all Chinese who love their country, communist or otherwise:  their history, their culture, their wounds of the colonial period.

You could argue this is just a natural reaction because Liu and Ai both suffered the excesses of patriotism.  You could argue that their pro-Western views are unrelated to their economic dependence. You may convince me of these points: but how are you going to convince the Chinese? If this is about promoting democracy, shouldn’t marketability to Chinese be a core consideration?  Of all the remarkable dissidents that China has, how come we chose as our stars these two, a present on a silver tray for the editors of the Global Times?

Of course, Ai Wei Wei is just an artist, and it fine if he chooses to be bohemian and provocative. Liu is a writer, and good for him if he believes that Chinese culture is inferior to Western. Neither of them should be arrested for their ideas. But this doesn’t qualify them as political models either.

The point is, Liu and Ai do not stand for what most open-minded Chinese people want: pragmatic policy and progressive change. We choose to highlight these two characters not because they represent a Chinese ideal, but because they represent our ideal of  what the average Chinese dissident should be. And I am afraid, by doing so we are pushing China even further apart from us.

Is there some aspect of Liu or Ai that I forgot in the equation? What do you think?

1. I am just a simple engineer, you will excuse me for thinking that breaking historical vases or taking photos of your middle finger is not remotely art

This show is déjà vu, but if you are interested you can see some thoughtful analysis of the question in the latest China Hearsay post. I completely agree with that post, including some historical comparison with the Jim Crow laws that some might find far-fetched (more further-fetched comparisons available below)

Even more interesting to me is the reaction of the American/European public to these kind of announcements. As Stan points out, typically it is outrage or even amusement: “the balls!”  Implicit in this tone and attitude is the rock-solid certitude that the USA and its allies indeed respect human rights more than China.

Whether it is in politics, science or any other field, intelligent people don’t have blind certitudes. This attitude of smug self-evidence is, in itself, a symptom that we should worry. Such strong convictions normally belong to fanatics, or else are the fruit of lazy (and carefully manipulated) minds. I think we have a bit of both here.

First of all, here is my answer to Stan’s analysis of USA vs. China human rights question:

I agree.

There is however another angle that makes a stronger argument for China, that is foreign policy. I am surprised they didn’t use it this time, and they stuck to the fair play of domestic vs. domestic comparison.

It is obvious that China cannot “win” on the domestic rights comparison today. Even in China most educated people realize this, but they rationalize it and accept it as a temporary situation while China is developing, which will slowly improve over the years (a not unreasonable position, IMO).

But back to the foreign policy argument. Although it is not always stated so clearly, I understand it goes like this: Since human rights apply equally to all humans, and an Iraqi life is as valuable as an American or Chinese life, then the thousands of innocent people killed in a reckless, self interested and illegal intervention, which was consciously based on lies, are morally no different from the victims of Mao Zedong’s policies (Mao’s absolute numbers are larger, but that’s because he was dealing with a much larger population).

And in any case, even if you consider only 10% of the victims of American foreign policy are innocent, the trampling of human rights is still orders of magnitude larger than the 100 odd dissidents that are soft-repressed in China, most of them getting away with a few months detention or house arrest.

I am an old reader of this blog and this is not an attempt at trolling or sparking controversy. I just sincerely wonder how Americans rationalize this — I find myself considering this problem more and more often since I live in China, and it’s very hard to get a sound moral standpoint. I have no issue with people criticizing China’s abuses, just like many of us criticized the Iraq war. What I find completely amazing is that millions of Westerners seem genuinely convinced that their governments are somehow less evil or more just than the Chinese one. Any answers?

In the meantime, I have come up with some partial answers here, and you are welcome to add more below.

I am afraid that if our attitude looks like that of intolerant fanatics, it is because we ARE intolerant fanatics. It is a quirk of the Western character that has marked us for many centuries, the need to have our strong faith and genuinely believe that every mean is justified to defend it. Christianity, Islam, Communism, Capitalism, Democracy, you name it, in every time and place we had some holy idea we had to impose on others.

This is how we manage to digest so easily the terrible injustice caused by our regimes, by invoking Democracy, the purifying faith. Everything is justified, because we voted for it, even if the victims of the war never had a say. The CCP has learned to mimic this absurd justification, and similarly calls itself democratic, as the votes of a few (the Central Committee) decides for the whole. In sum, our democracies have the same legitimacy in Foreign Policy as the CCP has in China — only they are infinitely more cruel, and tougher at repressing Freedom of Speech.

When it comes to something as essential as Human Rights, we really need to stop being so frivolous. We should draw a clear line between defending Democracy, a mere political opinion subject to discussion, and standing for Human Rights, a matter of dignity and survival. With the usual shallowness of the Western media, we have turned the whole thing into a carnival, enforcing the notion that only we hold the Truth, and giving a thousand reasons for the Chinese public to believe our protests are hypocritical and self-interested.

In conclusion:  I sincerely hope that China will continue to criticize more consistently America and other countries — hopefully with studies of better quality than this one. Western Foreign Policy clearly lacks checks and balances, our media has failed to play its role, and China is the only hope to balance this out.

Here is to hoping the CCP get their act together and stop their paranoid repression of Freedom of Speech. Then China might earn enough credibility to play its role in the World. It is urgently needed.

Some things I liked watching this week:

• The coverage of the Earthquake continues to be great. Contrary to what some feared, the official media has prominently displayed the CCP leaders bowing to the Japanese flag, and some touching videos of Sichuanese victims remembering how Japan helped them in 2008. The hero of today? Not a soldier, but a young Chinese student who has decided to stay put in her post in Sendai, to continue with her duty in spite of the danger. I found it all really moving, perhaps because it was unexpected.
• Another outside event: China has abstained from vetoing the UN resolution that allows “all necessary measures” against Libya if Gaddafi does not hold fire immediately. The same day the CCTV has openly explained this to the public, stating the possibility of foreign countries to intervene in Libyan affairs. I wonder if this would have been presented differently, had the tsunami not distracted attention from the Jasmine ideas—the vote itself would have probably been the same, it looks like there was no other option.
• Finally back to China: there has been this amazing story of the salt, you can read it all in this interesting post. One of those crazy viral chains that spread like wildfire in China. Someone started a rumour that salt is essential against radiation, and within hours there was a nation-wide run on the convenience stores:

An interesting phenomenon that this blogger explains as lack of political trust. I agree, and I add the following:

What is really remarkable about China is that the hoarding was so completely irrational. I mean, why would you get salt of all things? Anyone can go on the internet and see third party information to check about the salt. The first thing I did Tuesday is goggle “salt iodine radiation” to find some expert advice.

It looks like Chinese people don’t have this instinct of looking for different sources, perhaps due to years of media control. In the end, this is not a story of distrust, but rather of blind trust: the trust of all those absurd sms chains started by some Zhejiang guys (salt merchants?) saying that you need to get salt.

What is it that makes Chinese society so conductive for viral chains? My guess: not only distrust of the government, but also the lack of a liberal education and the instinct to search the truth for themselves.

To be fair, it was mostly older people and uneducated peasants that acted this way, there is still hope for the young generations. My colleagues at work found it all rather funny, and I received lots of jokes. They were also spreading like wildfire on kaixinwang.

The Japanese are queuing to get water. The Americans are queuing to get iPad 2s. The Chinese are queuing to get salt.

If you don’t live in China you probably think this is just normal disaster reporting. But after witnessing a number of recent disasters on Chinese TV, what I saw yesterday just felt real. The program was focusing on the victims rather than on politicians or soldiers—the presenter introduced last minute updates and had experts comment on them live—the channels were not all broadcasting exactly the same images—the speech was natural and not issued from a single mold—there were spontaneous human feelings on the screen, rather than the tired patriotic routine.

Even the ubiquitous Lianghui completely disappeared from some of the channels.

Of course I don’t expect this is be a new trend in Chinese TV. I assume that since it was the weekend and there was nothing directly at stake for the CCP, the officials in charge didn’t bother to issue directives—one can even imagine that the whole thing has been welcomed with relief in a certain sense, as it definitely deflects the heat of all those J revolutions.

It is sad though, that we have to see a catastrophe outside the country to get serious journalism in China.

In any case, I like to note this, especially after reading some reports in the Western media (a bit too eager in my opinion) of Chinese people gloating over Japanese disgrace. Yes, there were some teenage morons gloating from the solitude of the internet-rooms, perhaps taking the whole thing for a new round of WoW.  But this was in no way the general feeling I have seen over the weekend. And the media and the government have shown their support for Japan in no uncertain terms.

From my little website, all the support to the Japanese in these difficult moments.

With the previous experience of 2009 and following my own instructions, this time it has been a piece of cake, I managed to get the site completely open in less than 2 hours. Unfortunately, the GFW mechanism has also learnt since last time, and they have done  a URL block on the string “chinayouren.com”, which has forced me to change my URL. My new address is: http://chinayouren-free.com, write it down.

Yes, I know, how original. It is not supposed to be a statement of any kind, nor am I trying to rub it in. On the contrary, for those of you who have been paying attention, you know the only reason my unblocks are effective is because I am not well known to the censors. The minute I start getting too smart about it I will be down again in a click. This is not a campaign, and I am not an activist.

I chose free as in FOS, because it is easy to remember, but this operation is not free at all for me. I had to pay another 10$ for the new domain, and if this continues too long the GFW officers are going to squeeze Chinayouren dry. I feel also for the guys at the travel agency “chinayouren.com.cn” who have lost all the incoming connections from out of the mainland due to the URL string reset. They are mere pawns, as it were,  in an altogether larger game. [1]

One point that has made it easier for me to change the URL is the realization that Google is much less relevant to me than I used to think (changing URLs is bad for Google Rank). During my long absence, I have seen the hits from Google remain almost constant, so that my overall stats never went down catastrophically. But what did I get from this? Those were thousands of people coming over when I was not writing anything at all, staying a very short time on my site and not engaging with it in any way. In short, this kind of presence might be great for a commercial operation, but I conclude that a single link from twitter or weibo gets me more action than a hundred Googlers—far from killing the blog, I am beginning to think that social sites may be saving it.

The problem is the GFW knows this as well, and they are evolving fast to catch up with the times.

The New GFW

I plan to write more on the GFW,  I have some thought to this recently and I might have interesting insights. Also, I guess China is changing me over the years and I don’t feel so confident anymore to “lecture” this country on their political system. I tend to think more and more in terms of concrete issues rather than on broad theories—for many reasons we will discuss, I consider Freedom of Speech is the single most important objective for anyone who wishes the best for China. And internet FOS is right there at the top of the agenda.

A few points worth noting before I close the post:

• One of the things that has surprised me on my return is that the GFW has evolved in its ways and objectives, it is bolder than ever today, but technically it uses exactly the same methods as before – the real power of the internet censors is not so much on the GFW blocking, but rather on the control they have over publishers in the mainland, as has been noted many times.
• Interesting also is to analyze the reason why chinayouren was blocked this time. In 2009 there was a very clear link between my writing on Liu XB’s case and the block. I was always convinced that my blog had been put into a sort of black list connected to that case, and I got the confirmation last November. The same week they announced the Nobel award, my whole site was put on GFW block, even though I hadn’t been writing for a long time and my “Nobel thoughts” post didn’t attract any attention.
• Finally, I will have to keep a check on my “Jasmines” and “Nobels” in the days coming.I don’t worry so much abut the use of keywords, from what I have seen I am pretty sure there is no automatic block based solely on that. But if I go with big subjects and and get media/twitter attention, down I will go with

Welcome to the new chinayouren-free, the home of the free chinayouren!

1. this is a good example of how the Wall behaves in both directions. the server of that site is hosted in China as all the .cn, and you are trying to view it from outside, you are crossing the wall on the inverse direction and tripping the block as well. If you view it from the mainland without a VPN you will have no problem at all

First of all, let’s be serious. The idea that the ambassador didn’t know what was going on is an insult to intelligence, his appearing on camera lying to a Chinese passer-by only makes things worse. You might argue he was casually walking around, but in a stroll protest walking around is precisely the way to participate. You might believe he was saying the truth, but that would mean he is an incompetent officer, ignorant of the situation on the ground. Clearly that is not the case.

No, the ambassador of the USA has openly and consciously joined a minority protest against the Chinese government in Beijing. Mr. Huntsman’s action is clearly not due to incompetence, but to careful calculation, based on Western vanity and political ambition.

Don’t American politicians understand that democracy can only win if it is seen as homegrown? What would happen if the French ambassador was seen joining a protest for, say, the health reform in the US, would this help further the Democrats’ agenda? Does this kind of action help the millions of real, anonymous Chinese who hope for a more open system? Certainly not.

And of course politicians understand this. They know full well these actions are undermining the democratic movement in China, feeding the nationalistic tide that is the CCP’s most powerful weapon. The problem is they don’t care. Because their priority is not *Democracy in China*, but rather *to be the promoters of Democracy in China*. To publicly score a goal on the enemies of the faith, the intolerable leaders who have dared take China to international success without paying respect to our democratic sensibilities.

I know I am reading too much into this single event, it is unfair to single out American politicians. This is just the natural result of a misconception that the mainstream media establishment in the West has promoted for years: that believing in democracy is in itself a source of legitimacy. That we always know better.

Yes, most of us think that democracy is a better system of government than the CCP rule, and we wish the Chinese people could enjoy it as well. But somehow, in the West, we have come to imagine that our being born in such a system — without having done anything for it in most cases — automatically gives us the moral superiority to decide for others, to smugly disregard fairness and basic respect, and to discount the opinions of those pawns who don’t even know what is good for themselves.

Quite apart from its foolishness, this mindset has to be the number one factor destroying the credibility of democracy supporters worldwide.

Just to avoid misunderstandings: I don’t agree at all those Chinese nationalistic websites. I believe that Human Rights are above any political consideration, and that freedom of speech should be promoted regardless of borders and political systems. I even strongly support direct action to unblock the information channels. We all have the right and the duty to point our fingers where a government has trampled human rights — just as we accept others to point it out when our own own governments do the same.

But we need to understand this is a very different thing from telling the Chinese people how they should think, which minority political action they should join, or even to directly draft for them a political Charter and tell them which elite political figure they should regard as their moral leader.

Certainly, the whole thing would have been more effective if the Nobel wasn’t completely made worthless by last year’s award. But even without that, it couldn’t have any positive direct result. The government will not move because of outside pressure, and Mr.Liu, the brave drafter of the Charter, will hardly see his situation improved.

What this Nobel may probably bring is some important indirect consequences, such as:

1- The government will learn perhaps that raw power is not always the best way in international politics. How were they expecting to threaten Norway, not buying any more oil and smoked salmon? The problem of soft power, which ccp has definitely NOT mastered yet, may have to be reconsidered.

2- This is a very direct attack against the party, and even if it comes dressed in neutral scandinavian colours, everyone knows this represents the Western establishment. Internally this might provoke some reactions and give strength to the radical. This and the pressure on the yuan may quickly escalate in the coming weeks.

3- There is no way to know ultimately what will be the outcome of all this. From a pure justice point of view, clearly a person imprisoned for writing about human rights is more worthy of this prize than a newly elected politician. But looking at the World political and economic situation today, I am afraid this might be a not so smart move.

Let’s hope for the best. In the meantime, congratulations to Liu, a brave Chinese man.

The data was immediately published by the People’s Daily Chinese. A month later, it came out in the English version of the paper, and since then it has been making the rounds of the Western press, with the predictable apocalyptic spin.  Within China, however, the article has failed to spark any significant debate, even though the subject wasn’t censored. It is already positive that the authorities speak openly of this problem, but clearly a different approach is needed to raise awareness and find solutions.

With the help of my sister, pediatrician Dr. Madariaga, I have been comparing data from different primary sources outside and inside China. The CASS data coming from China official statistics turns out to be very consistent with previous outside sources, like the often quoted BMJ study. It is also the most pessimistic of all, and the most politically credible, as the patriotic CASS can hardly be accused of anti-CCP bias.

What follows is my analysis of the existing research from a different perspective. Not to do projections on the future, but to see what these numbers tell us of the Chinese today, and what solutions can be found. The results are shocking, read and judge by yourself:

The Story: A Very Common Occurrence

Today, almost 20% of the pregnancies that happen in China are manipulated using the simple method of ultrasound scan to determine gender, followed by abortion in case it is a female.

Most first time pregnancies are natural, with only a few percent points of manipulations. This makes sense, as the 2nd trimester abortions necessary for sex selection are not without risk for the mother’s reproductive capacity. Most families prefer to assure the first descendant, knowing that if it is a girl they will get a second go anyway.

However, about 50% of the first birth parents (the same 50% who had a girl?) decide to go for a second one. It is here that the gender manipulation happens massively. Around 30% of these families manipulated their pregnancy using the method described, with some provinces like Anhui showing a rate of up to 50% manipulations for second births.

This shows that sex selective abortion is not a minority problem practiced by a few rogue parents. It is a very common occurrence, with large parts of the population and the health sector taking part in it. In spite of the illegalization of ultrasound scans for sex detection in the 90s, it is obvious that a large part of the doctors are colluding with the public to ignore the law. In short, in most parts of China practicing sex selective abortion is extremely easy and extremely common. Practically anyone can do it.

Among these depressing results, here is a positive note: The very fact that the practice is so widespread would mean that government information campaigns can have a very important effect if they are done seriously. On the other hand, supervision and control campaigns are condemned to fail, although some particular measures might be applicable. More on this in “Conclusions” below.

The Numbers

Here is the basis data for the story above. I have used several research papers shown in references. In particular, the research done by the British Medical Journal in 2005 has been one of the most useful. Where possible, I have used the CASS paper because it is more recent, and the data (from the 2009 Statistical Yearbook) should be statistically sounder.

According to CASS, among the registered children below 4 years old, there were 123.26 males per 100 females. It is known that the expected value is around 105/100 females, therefore:

1– According to this ratio, there should be around 117 girls born with those 123 boys. 17 girls are missing, these are pregnancies that have been selectively aborted (about 7% of the total 240).

2- However, to get rid of that 7% of female fetuses, it means that around 14% of the pregnancies actually used ultrasound scans with the intention of aborting. Of this 14%, approx half were male and they proceeded, half were female and they aborted.

3- The ultrasound+abortion properly performed should give close to a 100% success. However, due to the illegality of the method and the lack of resources in many areas of China, I have introduced an efficiency E of 90%±10 to cover errors, cheats, late diagnostics, etc.

Following the steps above, we get the following general formula for the percentage of manipulated pregnancies N, where X is the male/100females ratio, and E is the success rate of sonography+abortion.

N = [(X*100/105 - 100)/(X*205/105)]*205/100E = [(X-105)/X]/E

With this simple formula we can estimate the number of manipulated pregnancies in the different cases provided by the BMJ study (this data is from 2005, for registered births. It is more conservative data than the CASS 0-4 year olds). Here are the numbers I obtain for different cases:

Confidence: Because of the different sources, it is hard to estimate overall confidence parameters. I have taken the following assumptions, and the intervals should be close to the 95% confidence range:

• Natural ratio is 105±2 with a very high confidence rate.
• The Statistical Yearbook table gives 2 decimals precision.
• The BMJ data gives confidence levels of 95%.
• I have taken the E as 90%±10, to cover even the most conservative case where there is a 100% efficiency in the system.

But more than the confidence numbers, the consistency of all the different sources over time strongly backs these results. The  interval on BMJ 1st birth makes this information hardly usable, but for the rest of the lines in the table, the results are significant beyond doubt. In particular, the 2000 census, the BMJ paper and the CASS all confirm main line: Almost 20% of the total pregnancies are gender manipulated.

Unregistered, Adopted, Infanticides and Others

One of the main objections that can be done to this data is that those 7% girls missing from the census 0-4 year olds are not all due to abortion, but to unregistered births (including infanticides, abandonments and children just kept out of the law). Certainly, some part of the N values I am giving corresponds to these occurrences, but it is so small as to be insignificant in the statistics.

Many children from unregistered births trickle back into the stats in the following years, as they register for immunization or schooling purposes. Surprisingly, in all the reference studies we see the sex ratios for 1-4 year olds (and even the 5-9yo) are higher than those of births, showing that late registrations tend to be more boys than girls. This causes the sex ratios at birth used in BMJ to be lower than the 0 to 4 year old values of CASS.

In a country like China it is inconceivable that significant numbers of people live their lives unregistered beyond childhood. To affect the statistics significantly, there would need to be millions of roaming “phantom” girls that have never been asked their IDs, and there would be at least some trace of this.

As for the murder/abandonment option, it simply does not make any ethical or practical sense for any Chinese familiy to do this today. If only because the ultrasound method is much better in any cost/risk calculation. This is the main reason to believe the ultrasound+abortion hypothesis accounts for the practical totality of my missing girls: it is by far the easiest way to do it for any Chinese family.

Sex Selection: How it happens

Form practicing specialists I obtained the information that at 15 weeks of pregnancy it is possible to determine the gender by ultrasound at almost 100% precision. Some research shows that this can be done even as early as 10 weeks, but let’s take the conservative assumption of 15 to account for the technological/legal situation in China. Even with this assumption, there is still largely the time to do a sex selective abortion.

In fact, according to this study by the WHO, virtually all 2nd trimester abortions in China are performed using medical methods. Induction with mifepristone and misoprostol for 10–16 weeks’ gestation, and intra-amniotic administration of ethacridine lactate for of >16 week’s gestation are routine methods in clinical practice in China.

So it is easy to figure out how this works. An ultrasound scan around week 15, followed by a drug induced abortion the same week, probably performed (and billed) by the same doctor for no more than 100$ the whole package. It is unlikely that doctors get much more than that, due to the available resources of the rural population, and the existence of competition. Virtually very hospital and consultation has ultrasound scans, and the numbers speak of a burgeoning sex selection industry.

Abortion in China: The holocaust

There are about 13 million abortions practiced in China every year, for a total of 18 million births. Almost 10% of the total abortions are motivated by gender selection.

Some Western “scientists” like to call this a holocaust of little girls, and they use it to expose the evil of the Chinese system. But we have to look at the problem more closely to understand how it happens, and why so many Chinese families are supposedly “evil”.

Nowadays abortion is freely available in China, and there are no defined time limits for access to the procedure. Sex selection is forbidden in theory, but in practice there is no way to know the motives of a person requesting an abortion. Certainly, sex selective abortion is a massive problem in the aggregate, but from the point of view of a single individual, it is not necessarily more “wrong” than other cases of abortion.

In fact, from a purely ethical point of view, it is not clear that most common reasons for abortion are any sounder than gender selection. Many Chinese peasants practicing this have serious economic and subsistence reasons to prefer a boy. How does this compare with other common cases, such as: because the time is not convenient, because the parents want to study, because they just couldn’t be asked to use contraception.

People with religious or ethical beliefs have all the right to call this a holocaust. But in all honesty they should include in the count most of the 13 million of Chinese abortions, as well as most of the abortions practiced in the West. Or is the destruction of a fetus any less wrong when its gender is not known?

It is about time China reduces its rate of abortions, but this is a different problem that has little to do with gender selection.

Why Prohibition is Completely Useless

The Chinese government forbid in the 90s the use of ultrasound for the purpose of gender assignment, in order to curb the growing trend of gender selection. In fact, it is the popularization of cheap ultrasound devices in the 90s, rather than the single child policy, which has been the main driver of the problem.

The problem with ultrasound scans is that they is an important diagnosis tool, and the devices themselves cannot be banned. As we have seen, abortions without a justified reason are not forbidden either. So what IS forbidden? Here is the reason why the law never worked and will never work: what is forbidden is to transmit information.

Information is famously the single most difficult thing to keep under control, and this is the basic element of information, a bit, boy or girl. It can be transmitted with the raising of an eyebrow. Considering the economic incentives, the large number of doctors who have access to the machines, the existing demand, the lack of a social conscience of the problem, the impossibility to prove the crime… one cannot imagine for a moment that this Prohibition can ever have any effect in China.

If the worrying trend shown in the graphs is going to be stopped, it will most certainly not be through prohibition. But see below are some alternative ideas that may work.

Conclusion and Some Ideas for the Government

Unfortunately, most of the articles published about this are concerned with either exposing CCP’s policies, or else drawing spectacular scenarios of the future. The goal of this post is just to analyze the existing research from a different perspective, looking at this serious problem from the side of its protagonists. This is part of my old quest to understand the Chinese people.

By looking at the other side of the problem, we have found some results that are shocking, even for Chinese readers. The reaction of disbelief I have seen in Shanghai friends, as well as the little debate existing on the internet even after an official source wrote about it, all illustrate the the low social awareness of this problem. I hope my results can be useful to increase this awareness, and in the meantime here is my little contribution to figure out effective policies:

1- Communication Campaigns: We have seen banning does not work, and no efforts by the central government is going to change this in the short term. On the other hand, because of the large proportions of the phenomenon in society, a vigorous information campaign is likely to have a strong effect amongst the least convinced of the “selectionist” parents and doctors. A massive long term campaign is needed, including films, adverts, sponsoring television characters, etc. to create a negative perception of gender selection. More importantly, the campaign should highlight the advantages of having a girl in China, which are rapidly growing as the gender imbalance makes females more demanded.

2- Abortion Controls: Nobody can know if the motivation behind an abortion is gender selection or not. But what is sure is that practically all gender selection abortions occur after the 12th (probably 15th) week. In the frame of a general move to lighten the restrictions of the single child policy, the introduction of restrictive conditions for late abortions would  have an important effect in dissuading sex selective behaviors, apart from avoiding risks for pregnant women and other misuses of abortion. This should be accompanied by campaigns to promote contraception to avoid a sudden spike in fertility.

I wish someone inside the Chinese Government reads these points and considers them urgently, for the sake of China and the World. And please, speak about it, let everyone be aware of the problem, encourage debate. Not censoring is already a good step, but active measures should be taken as well to promote discussion. This is a problem that can never be solved by the authorities alone. Involve the people!

If you have some other suggestions, or else some question/correction, please leave them in comments.

References

• China’s excess males, sex selective abortion, and one child policy: analysis of data from 2005 national intercensus survey – BMJ
• Sex Ratios at Birth in China – CEPED-CICRED-INED
• CASS 中国2011-2015年期间需要关注的人口问题 – 2010 Social Blue Paper
• CASS 2010 Blue Paper Index – 2010 Social Blue Paper
• The worldwide war on baby girls – The Economist
• Abortion Laws Around the Word – Pew Forum
• Sonographic early fetal gender assignment, by V Mazza – 2001
• Surgical vs medical methods for second-trimester induced abortion-WHO
• 1 in 5 marriage age Chinese men to remain bachelors… – People’s Daily
• Abortion statistics cause for concern – China Daily
• Statistics China – UNICEF

1. for a simple introduction to the problem of gender imbalance in China and its potential consequences you can read this article from the Economist

I was flying back from Chongqing recently when I was reminded of the very frustrating problem of reading Chinese. There was a movie on the cabin TV and it had a particularity: it carried subtitles in Chinese and English in parallel, in two lines of comparable font at the bottom of the screen.

As I watched I kept forcing my eyes to stick to the Chinese subtitles in order to exercise my reading (the sound was off) but it was pointless. Every single time, before I had finished reading the Chinese I already knew the meaning of the line anyway. The words in English just seemed to transmit their meaning even if I was not looking at them.

Reading Chinese

We already spoke last year about the problem of Reading Chinese functionally. It is very important for advanced students of Chinese, because progress beyond a certain level depends largely on this ability. Many foreigners are able to read slowly and even do good translations of Chinese texts with the help of a cursor dictionary. But to read functionally, in my definition, is a completely different thing. It means to be able to read all sorts of general texts as quickly and reliably as an average native.

I have observed that this reading fluency is extremely difficult to attain for readers who were not educated in the Chinese system. And I know from personal experience that this is not a common problem of learning foreign languages; with practice, reading fluency comes parallel to speaking in languages with alphabetic script. This problem is unique to Chinese characters, and I have the impression that it has been largely ignored by educators.

The Reading Test

I want to differentiate very clearly the reading skills from the acquisition of new vocabulary/characters. Obviously when you need to look up words in the dictionary, reading is slower, but that is not what we want to measure. We can define a test to measure the reading speed :

The index is the time you take to read a 500 character text divided by the time taken to read a similar text (the next 500 character section in the same book) in your native language, with the premise that you are familiar beforehand with all the characters/words/expressions contained in the text, and no preparation prior to reading is allowed. The test is easily performed with a bilingual book, although it takes some trial and error until you find a section where there are no unknowns.

Since there is no vocabulary or missing character issue, the indexed difference in speed is mostly due to the difficulty in parsing the message, what I call the pure reading skills.

Parsing Chinese

I am beginning to suspect that this index is very difficult to decrease, even with long periods of daily reading. I scored about a 3 in the test last year, and almost one year later (pending careful testing) I am afraid I am not far from where I was. Actually, I might be cheating slightly because I was using an Obama book that I had already read before.

Let’s see all the possible reasons why it is so difficult to parse the message when we know all the elements inside it. As far as I can think, there are 3 main complex processes that we do when we read: 1- Recognizing the characters 2 – Parsing them into words 3- Parsing the words into sentences.

Step 1 – Recognizing the characters

It is understood that when we read English, we normally don’t read letter by letter to make out a sound, but rather we recognize whole words or even chunks of them at a glance. This allows us to read very fast, and I am sure the same kind of phenomenon happens when Chinese read their language. They see a 中央政治局常务委员会 in one beat of the eye.

I see here the first big obstacle to our reading. We have not developed the skills to make out these complex shapes automatically, and we are forced to consciously recognize each character before we move on. Even for the very basic characters in the previous paragraph, I still cannot take in all of it as immediately as I take “Politburo Standing Committee”.

What do you think? This is the Step 1.

Step 2 – Parsing the Words from Characters

One thing is to recognize a chunk of characters at a glance, but a different thing is to identify the words that they form. This step is extremely easy in Western languages, because the words are clearly separated by spaces, and proper nouns have Capital Letters. But written Chinese doesn’t offer this help, so there is an added parsing step in figuring out where are your units of meaning.

See for example the expression 发展中国家, I can tell you in no time that it means “developing country”. But now check out this random section of text I just copied from the internet:

前四个会议分别讨论了现有生物技术在发展中国家粮食和农业领域中的作物

Is it 在发展-中国-家粮食？Or is it 在-发展中国家-粮食? Obviously it is the second one, but if we read character by character and follow the statistically economic approach, our first tentative parsing would be the first one. A native reader sees the whole 5 character chunk at once and detects the word, but due to the difficulty of characters, most foreign readers see in small chunks of 2 characters, which forces them into a process of trial and error.

In fact, the example given above is very elementary, but consider introducing into a text longer words, fixed phrases and foreign names like this one: 圣文森特和格林纳丁斯 (special prize of the jury to the foreigner who gets this). It is easy to see that the Chinese are adding a whole step of parsing that is practically inexistent in our languages.

In case you are skeptical, it is easy to do a realistic simulation of what that added step would mean if we had it in English. Just see how long you take to read this text, taken from this article:

karunanidhiwaslividthatdayanidhiandbrotherkalanidhihadbecometooambitious holdingpopularitycontestsagainstalagiriintheirnewspaper,whoseofficewas burntdown.rajadidnottakechargeofthetelecomministryalone.kanimozhiwas toremainhis”guide”.hewasfocused.hisallegedundersellingofthe2Gspectrum(a designatedpartoftheairwavesforusebymobilephoneoperators),whichcaused alossofRs22,466croreaspertheCBI’sestimate,surfaced.

Good luck! It is almost difficult to believe that Chinese actually read their language at normal speeds (and believe me, they do).

Of course, there is not an exact equivalence, because Chinese characters combine in different ways from English letters/words. But it gives a good feel of this tricky parsing step that is unique to Chinese. Native minds have developed since childhood to accomplish this in an instant, but this step involves some process that is quite different from what we are trained to do. Is it possible to acquire that ability? This is what I mean by the Step 2.

Step 3 – Parsing the Words into Sentences

The parsing of sentences once we have the words is overall similar to what we do in Western languages. In fact, Chinese grammar is not all that different from English grammar at the level of the sentence structure. Those tricky long sentences usually have a similar order, and the clauses are marked with commas (ideally) in a similar way to English. This step is much easier, in my experience, than parsing long sentences in agglutinative languages like Basque, where a good part of the grammar information is only given at the end of the sentence in the form of a verb declension.

Conclusions

This is only a 1.0 issue and it will be improved/completed in further posts. I wanted to share these points and get some feedback and ideas before I continue.

This subject is important because it can help us understand how the Chinese reading process works, and perhaps also develop a method to help all those students who are stuck in the advanced (but not functional) level. As more people decide to learn Chinese seriously, the number of students stumbling on this block will increase – it is already large even today.

For the moment, it seems clear that these Step 1 and Step 2 that I describe above are the main obstacle to fluent reading, but I want to find more ways to quantify this. In particular, I have the following ideas that we could try to do if someone is interested:

• Do a larger scale test for the Reading speed.
• Test the reading Speed of Natives in their own language and in English.
• Do a test to quantify Step 2 (by comparing word-spaced character reading speed with normal reading speed of a similar text)
• Answer to the question: is it actually possible to improve in Steps 1 and 2, or is it some automated process you need to learn as a child.
• Think of possible exercises to improve Steps 1 and 2.

Any ideas on this points will be welcome, and any links to previous research as well. Nothing of what I say here is written on stone, and I would very much appreciate other suggestions.

One of the things that foreigners enjoy lamenting in China is the destruction of architectural heritage. It is understandable, modern China has a terrible record of heritage destruction, and today there are cities with 2,000 years of history where it is hard to find any trace of old construction. But the worst is that you can witness the destruction ongoing even today, before your very eyes.

It is true that in the last years there is a growing awareness of this cultural loss (and the loss of tourism revenues), and the authorities have started to take measures. Unfortunately, these measures come in the form of “restoration”, usually by the method of demolishing and re-building something vaguely similar, in brand new materials. Of the many infamous examples of this, perhaps the concrete-and-plastic Jing An Temple in Shanghai is the most obvious.

As all my readers probably now, XinTiandi is an old neighborhood in Shanghai that was “restored” some 10 years ago into an Old Shanghai themed commercial area. A favourite question of many visitors – and particularly Europeans – is how many walls are still standing from the original buildings. In fact, most of it is 100% new, and I often wonder how it is possible that such a creation actually does attract “cultural” tourists, who flock there to take pictures of each other.

Recently I saw an article on China News saying that “The Second Xintiandi” was being built on Jiangguo Road. The project’s real name is 建业里, and it is a residential complex that bears little relation with the present Xintiandi. But both have one thing in common: they promise to restore the Shanghai Shikumen [1] to their original beauty.

This weekend I rode my bike to the place and took some pictures to illustrate how the “Xintiandis” are created. See the gallery below:

View Full Album

I was very interested in the commercial copy of the project, I copy here with my obnoxious comments:

1. Classic buildings with 80 years of history. [used to stand here]
2. The Historic Shikumen will be restored to their original beauty. [Not]
3. Creating the landmarks, Defining the Sky. [That's more like it]

I could only enter one part of the construction, but climbing on a railing outside I could see most of the rest. To be fair, there is a part close to the entrance (where the workers are) that has kept the old walls. The rest of the Shikumen has been completely demolished and it is being built from scratch, using reinforced concrete structure. In the picture taken from the crossroads you can appreciate the formwork.

I don’t think this is in any way important, the value of that Shikumen is insignificant compared to the old city of Kashgar or the Beijing Drum Tower Hutongs that are going to be “restored” soon. But it is a good illustration of the Chinese approach, and I will use it as intro to this series on heritage conservation that I was planning to do. More to come. Soon?

1. the Shikumen is a style of residential street typical of early 20th century Shanghai