Burma's Slowly Shifting Landscape

Foreign investment in Burma's abundant natural resources is picking up around this isolated nation, but there is little hope that its benefits will reach anyone but members of the country's ruling military junta

In the spring of 1989, thousands of students from China’s elite universities occupied Tiananmen Square in Beijing for weeks to protest government corruption and demand democracy. More than a million people took to the streets. Then on June 4, as the world watched, Army troops and tanks rolled into the square, firing on the crowd and killing hundreds.

In the 20 years since, China has become more open economically and the rise of the Internet has allowed ordinary citizens to connect to the rest of the world. Yet censorship and the lack of democratic freedoms remain unchanged, and students seem disinclined to take their grievances to the streets.

We asked several dissidents — some in China and some in exile — as well as scholars of Chinese politics what forms of dissent are alive in China now? How has the government adapted its response to the people’s demands?

 

• Xiao Qiang, China Digital Times
• Woeser, Tibetan poet
• Bei Ling, Tendency, an exile literary journal
• Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, history professor, The China Beat blog
• Persian Xiaozhao, blogger in Shanghai
• Yang Jianli, Initiatives for China
• Donald Clarke, law professor, Chinese Law Prof Blog
• Jerome A. Cohen, N.Y.U. Law School’s U.S.-Asia Law Institute

I find it fascinating, and more than a little telling, that twitter and flickr have been blocked, while other places, NYTimes.com and Wikipedia to name but two, are still easily accessible. The motivation seems to be less about completely suppressing information, and more about stamping down on social networking.  And yet the Chinese version of Twitter, fanfou, is still operating here, and serves the same function as Twitter (and probably has far more users in China than its more famous "parent).  Is there just a fear, somewhere, of the chaos and fluidity inherent in "new media"?

Aung San Suu Kyi AC (Burmese: အောင်ဆန်းစုကြည် or ; MLCTS: aung hcan: cu. krany; IPA: [àunsʰánsṵtʃì]), born 19 June 1945 in Rangoon, is Prime Minister-elect,^[1][2][3] a pro-democracy activist and leader of the National League for Democracy in Burma, and a noted prisoner of conscience and advocate of nonviolent resistance. Aung San Suu Kyi was the third child in her family. Her name is derived from three relatives; "Aung San" from her father, "Kyi" from her mother and "Suu" from her grandmother.^[6] Suu Kyi won the Rafto Prize and the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. In 1992 she was awarded the Jawaharlal Nehru peace prize by the Government of India for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a military dictatorship. She is currently under detention, with the Burmese junta repeatedly extending her detention. According to the results of the 1990 general election, Suu Kyi earned the right to be Prime Minister, as leader of the winning National League for Democracy party, but her detention by the military junta prevented her from assuming that role.

She is frequently called Daw Aung San Suu Kyi; Daw is not part of her name, but an honorific similar to madam for older, revered women, literally meaning "aunt".^[7] Strictly speaking, her given name is equivalent to her full name, but it is acceptable to refer to her as "Ms. Suu Kyi" or Dr. Suu Kyi, since those syllables serve to distinguish her from her father, General Aung San, who is considered to be the father of modern-day Burma.

She is a Theravada Buddhist.

Some more information here and here.

Thanks to applez for bringing this back to my attention.

During the Beijing Olympics last August, I took my now five-year-old son to the square. On our journey there, our movements were observed by the CCTV cameras in the lift of our apartment block and outside the front gate of our compound, by the listening devices in our taxi, by the armed police who lined the streets and by the security guards who frisked us before finally allowing us on to Tiananmen. We emerged from the underpass and stepped on to the square. Apart from the crowds of policemen, the plain-clothes officers (instantly identifiable by their dark sunglasses and striped Airtex shirts) and the gaudy flower displays, the concrete-paved square, the size of nine football fields, was almost deserted.

Listening devices in taxis.  Interesting.  But I wonder.  Anyway, that aside, it's an interesting piece.

Genesis, by Bernard Beckett, Hardcover, 150 pages, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, List Price: $20

At some point in the future, an island nation seals itself off from the outside world to survive a mysterious plague. New Zealand writer Bernard Beckett builds this slim yet satisfyingly cerebral novella around one hopeful scholar's entrance exam to the mysterious Academy that has governed all aspects of life on this island for generations. Given that it's written as an extended Socratic dialogue on the nature of artificial intelligence, there's every reason to expect Genesis to be a bloodless read, full of feathery abstractions.

Yet Beckett lends sci-fi's perennial question — What makes us human? — a textured, three-dimensional emotional resonance. Yes, there are plenty of Big Ideas here, but they're folded into a gratifyingly soulful tale that barrels along to a boldly imaginative finish. If Asimov were less of a gear head or Tobias Wolff wrote more about robots, you'd end up with something that'd look a lot like this clever little book.

This looks interesting.

"The Robots Of Death" sounds like a lost Akira Kurosawa film, if Kurosawa had only embraced the killer-robot genre. But the 1977 Doctor Who story is something just as great: a Hitchcockian thriller that has something to say about our relationship with technology. Spoilers of death!

The Doctor Who story "Robots Of Death" is a murder mystery, even though it's obvious right away who's killing tons of people on board a claustrophobic mining vessel picking its away across the ore-rich sands of the planet Kaldor. The identity of the murderer is right there in the story's title. The whodunnit aspect is much more about what's making these robots kill people, and what does it mean for a society that's utterly dependent on robots? The first question has an utterly, delightfully demented answer. The second one, you'll be pondering for hours after you watch it.

Would love to watch this right now.

I have the head of Jack Kirby in my office.

I built it myself.  Which means, this being the late-postmodern 21st Century, I stole it from someone else and then tinkered with it until it became a transformative work.  What I actually did was steal the Hanson Robotics-designed android head of Philip K Dick off an airplane, resculpted the front and filled its brain with the work of, interviews with and anecdotes about Jack Kirby.  Like the original Philip K Dick head, it now does the work of an oracle of that mysterious time, the 20th Century, and of the seminal years of a 20th Century art form.  In the case of Phil Dick, this was the science fiction story.  In this case, it is of course the comic book.

It doesn’t like me much, the Jack Kirby head.  Not least because I have caused him to come into being as the central node of the opening sequence of this series of columns.  This is a column that’s mostly about comics.  All kinds of comics.  Which means it’s also a series of columns about the head of Jack Kirby.  That is not to say that Jack Kirby is the be-all and end-all of comics.  I could, perhaps, have caused to have constructed the disembodied head of Winsor McKay (whose real first name was Zenas, which is one of the best names ever and I kind of want to build his head just to ask him why he gave up one of the best names ever), or of Trina Robbins (except that she’s still alive and could probably beat me up) or Hugo Pratt (pointing to an early Eddie Campbell zipatone-encrusted original page and asking “how does he do that with the little dots?”) or Osamu Tezuka or Frank Hampson.

An essential writer, and I wish that here in China I had, or could buy, more of his books.

China blocks Twitter service ahead of anniversary

Tue Jun 2, 2009 7:35am EDT

 

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By Lucy Hornby

BEIJING (Reuters) - Access to the popular social networking service Twitter and email service Hotmail was blocked across mainland China late on Tuesday afternoon, two days before the twentieth anniversary of a bloody crackdown on Tiananmen Square.

Indignant users filled chatrooms with protest, after access to Twitter was denied shortly after 5:00 pm (0900 GMT) on Tuesday.

"The whole Twitter community in China has been exploding with it," said Beijing-based technology commentator Kaiser Kuo.

"It's just part of life here. If anything surprises me, it's that it took them so long."

Thursday is the twentieth anniversary of June 4, 1989, when tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square before dawn to quell weeks of protest by students and workers. China has never released a death toll from the crackdown on what it classes as a "counter-revolutionary" conspiracy.

Other Internet users reported not being able to access Windows Live, a service offered by Microsoft Corp. which also owns Hotmail, and also Flickr, an online photo sharing service owned by Yahoo.

"This is so frustrating. Now I feel China is exactly the same as Iran," said a financial professional and avid Twitter user in Shanghai, referring to Iran's May ban of popular social networking site Facebook.

Twitter is an Internet-based text message service that allows users to post updates -- called "tweets" -- of no more than 140 characters.

Users in Beijing reported accessing the service without difficulty earlier on Tuesday, and even successfully searching potentially sensitive words such as "Tiananmen."

While professional and urban Chinese often use foreign Internet tools, including Twitter, Hotmail and Facebook, the vast majority of Chinese use similar domestic services that are carefully monitored for any sign of content deemed subversive.

Access to video-sharing site YouTube, owned by Google was blocked in China in March, after overseas Tibetan groups posted graphic footage of China's crackdown on protests by Tibetans in 2008.

(Additional reporting by George Chen in Hong Kong; Editing by David Fox)

Numerous ways around this, of course.

However, [Chan Wai Yee's] priority is to promote documentaries in Hong Kong. ‘I can make my own films full time but I won’t be a big influence. I may make many films but audiences may not know where to see them or even know about their existence,’ she says. ‘Hong Kongers simply don’t make it a habit to watch documentaries.’ She is convinced a group of locals do enjoy such films, but have no idea where to find them.

This is from the magazine I found here in Hong Kong. The article is interesting.