Chinese "UFO" Videos

So either China has been recognized even by aliens as the new alpha nation worth visiting, or digital videography has achieved widespread popularity in Guangzhou



We'll probably learn soon enough that this was all just a publicity stunt for an upcoming Chinese science fiction movie.

San Francisco Guzheng Music Society Annual Concet May 1

Take San Francisco-based guzheng master Weishan Liu, add Shanghai's young virtuoso Liu Le (in photo, above), put them together with some of the Bay Area's most talented guzheng players, and you get a wonderful concert that music lovers shouldn't miss. As an added incentive, Liu Le will be playing the U.S. premieres of no less than four different pieces.

As you can see on the postcard reproduced above, the event is Sunday, May 1, from 3 to 5 pm at the Chinese Culture Center in downtown San Francisco.

For more details, see the San Francisco Guzheng Music Society's web site.

First Penguins, Now Cats and Rabbits: The Santa Dress-Up Continues

One can learn many things by visiting the web site of Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency. It's an often eye-opening look into how that government reports the world – sometimes much fairer than you'd expect, other times depressingly to form (such as its coverage of the recent Nobel Peace Prize brouhaha).

I noted a while ago a photo feature on the Xinhua site about penguins dressed as Santa. Now, Xinhua comes back with not one but two photo features on Santa-clad animals: rabbits and cats.

So go ahead and click through to those features for your holiday cute-overload.

As to why officially atheist China is paying so much attention to Christmas, your guess is as good as mine.

More Stupid Moves by China

And the award for overacting and tin-eared political moves goes to ... the People's Republic of China.

China continues its scorched-earth campaign against the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to activist Liu Xiaobo, this time banning some major Western news web sites in the lead-up to the Nobel ceremonies. The country is also boycotting the ceremonies, as to be expected; what's disgusting is the rogue's gallery of countries that are joining the boycott: Afghanistan, Algeria, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Russia, Venezuela, Pakistan, Iraq, Morocco, Iran, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Egypt, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam. Some of those countries just want to maintain good ties with their powerful new business overlord, China, and others want to protest the award of the prize to dissidents – after all, they don't want their own dissidents to get the crazy idea that their authoritarian governments might not be universally loved. Some, of course, are both worried about their economic overlord and about dissidents. Either way, it's a disreputable list to be on.

This is good timing in that this is happening as Julian Assange's arrogant Wikileaks attack on the West (and it is mostly an attack on the West and the way the current Western leader, the United States, exerts influence in the world) is getting some push-back from governments; we are seeing the true colors of the Assange movement, as techno-anarchists are attacking anyone who disagrees with them. If you don't like the look of American influence around the world, take a look at China's actions and its list of pals above, and envision what the world will look like as American influence wanes. It ain't pretty, and it ain't democratic.

Let's not forget the ridiculous competitor to the Nobel Peace Prize that China's communist government dreamed up, the Confucius prize, which was immediately rejected by the first awardee. At least Taiwan continues to be a bright spot of democratic brazenness. Through a mixture of free expression and open media, they are giving China the black eye that Wikileaks could only hope to give it:

Darth Vader at Brandenburg Gate

Some photos just need to be explained.

For more, see Xinhua. (Xinhua/Reuters photo)

Siberian Tiger Cubs Raised by Goats

Here, courtesy of Xinhua News (the government news service in China), is a short report on two Siberian Tiger cubs who have been raised ... by a goat.

Figured that would be a feel-good way to head off toward a happy Thanksgiving. (After all, it's the holiday that everyone except a turkey could love.)

Penguins Dressed as Santa

Yet another critical development where America should be leading, but Korea takes the lead instead:

Esquire Chinese Fashion

Just sharing a good magazine cover:

China's New Bullet Trains Reminds Us U.S. is Standing Still

The front page of the Financial Times this morning shows off two science-fictionish-looking bullet trains that have just gone into service between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Yes, the People's Republic of China has just added two new cool super-fast trains to its network of rapid rail that, the FT informs us, now extends 7,430 kilometers. I don't know what that is in miles and am too lazy to look up the conversion, but I know it's a lot.

Meanwhile, California is still squabbling over building a north-to-south high-speed rail line in the state. The California version will travel slower than the 400 km/h of the Chinese trains, but much faster than the usual slow rail traffic in this country.

What's happened to us? Why aren't cutting-edge trains and bridges and skyscrapers being built here in the United States? Are we too lazy? (Okay, okay, so 7,430 kilometers equals 4,616.788 miles, and 400 km/h equals 248.54848 miles per hour -- so I've proven that Americans can reform.) Too cheap? Too worried about government spending needed to do giant infrastructure projects? Or – and I think this is the main reason – do we no longer care?

I can be tempted to sympathize with that last reason. I get easily tired of the boosterism of most people in most places, for whom being the biggest and best is a self-justifying pursuit. New Yorkers think they're the center of the universe. San Franciscans think they're the coolest people ever. Texans think nothing can't be made better by making it bigger and gaudier. And we'll easily get tired of the boosterism and the boasting of other countries, such as China's rapidly expanding national economy and ego.

But Americans' lack of interest in being cutting-edge on technology and infrastructure strikes me less as a modest and mature reaction to having achieved a great deal, and more like a rejection of the concept of advancement and technology (and science) altogether. I don't think it's a coincidence that our country's fundamentalist religions are gaining strength and political power at the same time as our country has lost its fascination with how the world really works. Instead, the new spiritualism seems more dedicated to defending how we feel things are, and that's not how science works.

You can't build a 248-mph bullet train without science. Jesus and St. Paul (and the Talmud and Dianetics and the Koran and every other religious source) didn't leave us directions on building bullet trains. That's okay. I don't want Deepak Chopra or Rev. Al Sharpton performing brain surgery or designing suspension bridges, and I don't want Sir Richard Branson or Steve Jobs giving me warmed-over Wired editorials as pop spirituality.

Defenders of America's drift often claim that China's able to do these giant leaps of technology because it has an authoritarian government. But Europe is filled with countries that are even more democratic than the United States, and they're building record-breaking tunnels and bridges and high-speed trains all across that continent.

Another tactic these defenders of staying put use is to argue that private enterprise will build these things in the United States, and we don't need government involvement and funding. If that were true, of course, we'd already have privately built high-speed rail here, but we don't. I'm all for a vibrant and expanding private sector; as I've written here before, I think one of the best things to happen to space technology has been the government's near-exit from the field and private industry's embrace. But let's face it: Private enterprise will be just as happy designing and building the trains and bridges and buildings in Asia or South America or wherever as they would be building them here. Whoever cuts them a check.

Yesterday I read these words by David Gergen, a longtime presidential aide and political commentator, that he spoke at The Commonwealth Club recently:

[T]he reason America became the number-one nation in the world was that we had the best educational system in the world. As of 1900 we were the most-educated people in the world, and we continued to improve the quality of education in this country right through the first decades of the 1900s. Every generation went to school on average two years more than their parents did, and that happened generation after generation after generation. As of the 1960s, we were number-one in college graduation rates in the world, and we had and continue to have the best universities in the world. But since the 1960s and ’70s, since that “Nation at Risk” report, we have actually gone downhill very rapidly. We are now number 15 in terms of college graduation rates. And you know a third of our kids are not finishing high school, another third finish but are not ready for college, not ready for 21st-century jobs, only a third come through the system. We talk about No Child Left Behind – it’s a joke; we are leaving millions of children behind. That’s because we haven’t come to deal yet with this chronic condition.

Gergen identifies part of this overall decline, which is we're just feeding less-educated and less-equipped people into the world, while other countries are equipping their students better and better, all to the betterment of their economies.

I want bullet trains. I want spaceships. I want new cures for diseases. I want giant windmills offshore powering my cities. I want supercomputers. And I want them here, in the United States, as well as elsewhere.

But I fear the tidal forces of culture and history are going to hold back America for a while, until this new wave of superstition has run its course.

Hillary Clinton on How to Deal with China

Addressing The Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco October 15, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton answers a question about U.S. policy toward China.

China's New Super-Bus. Or, Why Isn't America Building the Future Anymore?

In her landmark science-fiction novel China Mountain Zhang, writer Maureen F. McHugh takes her young hero to China, where he rides a fantastic public bus that assembles and disassembles its separated cars depending on their individual destinations. When they're all together as one, they make up a large, multi-car, double-decker bus, but each car will go soaring off on its own route, or will join up with the rest of the bus as their routes merge.

From my sloppy description, that might be hard to imagine. I heartily recommend McHugh's very good book to you if you want to get her idea in better form. But the key point is that in the book, China has become the leading power in the world, the United States reduced to a near vassal-like status. All of the innovation and energy in the world comes from China.

I think it would be overstating things to say that that's becoming the situation today. But when I heard about proposals for a Chinese super-bus that would coast over other vehicles on the road, I thought, Isn't that the kind of so-crazy-it-might-work futuristic idea that America is supposed to create? Or Germany created before it went kablooey last century?

When I lived in Chicago a decade ago, the city buses were being fitted with technology that would let them prolong a green light if they were approaching an intersection. This was expected to speed up bus service, where buses were averaging something like a mere 13 mph in city traffic.

Now watch the video below for an illustration of the Chinese concept for speeding up urban transportation. The video is in Chinese, but even those of us who don't know Mandarin or Cantonese can still get the gist of the idea from the video. (If the embedded video doesn't work, you can watch it here.)



China Mountain Zhang aside, China's ascendancy to the pinnacle of world power is not likely in the near future, but it is rapidly ascending to the height of economic power. This year it became the number-one user of energy on the planet, outdoing even us profligate energy-wasters in America. Last year it overtook Germany as the world's third-largest economy, and this year it is claiming to have supplanted Japan as the world's second-largest economy, though many people are disputing that claim. (Not a big deal if it's wrong, because it'll be true soon enough.)

I'm not afraid of a wealthy and powerful China. I would prefer it be a democratic and free China, rather than the authoritarian and sometimes brutal China that it is. But it is no longer a Maoist China, thank god, and its rise – along with India's – will help counterbalance the threat of violent extremism in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Also, China is unlikely to supplant America as the world's most influential and powerful nation any time soon. Or possibly any time. China faces incredible internal pressures from economic dislocations, income disparities that surpass an American Republican's wildest dreams, and widespread corrupt officials, and it's surrounded by often pliant but also nervous neighboring nations. No country rises so far without tremendous disruptions. The United States tore itself in two with its civil war.  England went through horrific civil wars and persecutions. France invented modern state terror and marauded across Europe. Germany lost control of its crazies and thereby lost control of its civilization. Japan turned itself over to brutal imperialist leaders who left mass murder in their wake. And the list goes on. I hate to say it, because I'd much rather see eternal peace and freedom and prosperity, but China is just as likely to hit the wall of its internal contradictions at some point. We can only hope it comes out of it freer and more peaceful than it came out of the horrors of the Maoist period.

But until that happens, we've got the possibility of giant buses soaring along Chinese streets. America should be building those, or dreaming those dreams. Instead, we're busy entertaining our populist crazies, we're spending ourselves into long-term oblivion (and no, I don't mean the stimulus spending, that's a different, temporary, and necessary profligacy), and we're fighting wars we should be handling differently.

I want the buses.

Is Sarah Palin Gunning for 2012?

NMA News has posted this video on YouTube. Now that the Germans have the lego World Cup videos, and the Chinese have these animated news reports, I think this proves beyond a doubt that Americans have lost the video race. (We also lost the World Cup, but you're trying to forget that, I suppose.)

Turmoil, Dissention Reported at China's Science Fiction World Magazine

The Science Fiction Blog reprints a Chinese news report about conflict between editors and the president of the company that publishes Science Fiction World, reportedly the world's largest SF magazine.

According to the article, the editors are rebelling against drastic cost-cutting that has forced them to try to write the stories themselves, and for the art staff to do the illustrations themselves (rather than pay professional fiction writers and artists to do so).

The company's president looks pretty bad in the report, but frankly this is too far away and the reports too unclear at this point to know if it's as bad as it seems. After all, the president would have to be a dunderhead to expect editors to write the fiction, unless they just happened to be accomplished fiction authors in addition to being editors. So, while reserving judgment, we'll call him guilty. (Ain't blogging great?)

What Do Jay Leno and Google Have in Common?

They're both self-inflicted problems. The Jay Leno/Conan O'Brien debacle was all the result of terrible decisions by NBC management; Google's debacle in its China business is all a result of terrible decisions by its management, which had lowered its moral standards in order to rake in money in an authoritarian country.

Yikes.

European vs. American Economics: Paul Krugman Gets the Facts

Once again, The New York Times' economist and columnist Paul Krugman provides some clarity amid the illusions. He takes a look at the widely held belief in the United States that Europe's economy is stagnant, decaying, and out of date due to high taxes, high social spending, and all around general Europeanishness.

The reality, Krugman writes, is the opposite. The statistics for productivity, economic growth, and much else are very similar for the two economic blocs. Plus they have actual health care that people can use.

Of course, anyone who follows the news carefully could already have guessed that. Just this week, China officially assumed the mantel of the world's number-one exporter. No surprise there; we've been expecting it to happen any day now for years. But which country did China beat out for the title? Was it conservative powerhouse America? Low-cost India? No, it was Germany, the land of lengthy vacations, clean streets, high wages, and a strong social safety net. Even in the second slot, Germany ain't doing too badly. You know how American car companies are either bleeding money left and right or are welfare wards of the state? Volkswagen reported record sales and is on pace to become the world's top carmaker.

So why do we keep following the same political mantra in this country, like political lemmings headed over the cliff?

China Blocks Access to Berlin Wall Anniversary Twitter Page

When I was in Berlin for the second time, a one-week visit in March 2001, I was only slightly luckier than when I visited a couple months earlier, at least when it comes to finding remaining portions of the now-defunct Berlin Wall. Despite plenty of time spent in the very impressive (historically speaking) government quarter in Berlin Mitte -- the central area of the capital city -- and the nearby Unter den Linden or the beautiful Tiergarten, I saw nothing of the remains of the Berlin Wall. The closest I came was a visit to former East Berlin to interview someone for Internet World magazine, whose offices were one block away from Mauer Park ("mauer" is German for "wall," so you get the memorial idea of the park, right?).

But I don't recall being able to find anything that looked like that hated wall. Objectively, that's probably a good thing. Germans are in no danger of forgetting about the division of their country in the Cold War aftermath of World War II. And, frankly, finding remants of it wasn't my top priority. When I travel, I prefer to get off the beaten path and wander into lesser-known neighborhoods and find restaurants and bookstores along the streets and just stop in to see what I'll find.

It was a nice trip to what has become a normal (thank goodness) city.

So the news that China has been blocking a Twitter page dedicated to the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall seems like one more example of China acting like a hyper-sensitive child. Apparently, China's autocratic rulers were discomfited because Chinese were using the Twitter page to voice their not-so-nice views of the Chinese Communist government. Wonder which government will be most bothered by Twitter -- China or Iran?

Hmmm, maybe China's just upset that they're going to stop getting free money from Germany under the new government.

Caijing, Chinese Anti-Corruption Magazine, in Turmoil

Despite the Chinese government's attempts to retain and even increase its control over the dissemination of news and information, there is at least one magazine that apparently speaks out, having built its reputation by publishing reports on corruption.

A leading financial publication, Caijing has somehow managed to survive for years, despite official preference for sweeping corruption under the rug. But now, Financial Times reports (linked article requires subscription) that much of the staff has walked out and the magazine's future is in doubt.

Forbes asks whether the turmoil at Caijing is from government pressure, internal feuding, or the longtime editor's wish to start a new publication. Might even be a combination of those choices, Forbes notes.

We'll have to wait and see. An independent and crusading journalism voice in China is rare and should be supported. Until we learn what's going on, check out the English-language edition of Caijing's web site.