Send in the Trolls? The Internet and the Fall of Chen Liangyu

Am I the only one who caught a whiff of troll in those prescient anti-Chen Liangyu sentiments reported by China Digital Times in Shanghai Earthquake, Media Rumblings (Part 2) ?

… The transfer of the PAP's Hong Liangkai to Shanghai from Shaanxi, where he received plaudits from acting governor Yuan Chunqing - a key Hu protégé, incidentally - was a strong signal that a big bust was in the offing… But before the fact, anonymous commentators drooled with anticipation on catching the report on Sohu.com:

Sept. 20 (Commentator #1): "Shanghai officials better be careful. A storm is approaching."
Sept. 20 (Commentator #2): "It's a big wave alright, I wonder whom it will drown."
Sept 23: "Let the storm come in! The fiercer, the better!"

Yes, the postings are as lame in Chinese as they are in English.

CDT thinks it’s a matter of sardonic literary styling.

Besides their sheer excitement, note that they phrase their punditry in lyrical innuendo aping party speak ("storm", as in an anti-corruption "storm").

Or maybe not.

There’s also this, from Letters from China via Asia Pundit:

The Web And The Fall Of Shanghai Gang

Shanghai's Party Chief Chen Liangyu was fired. What is the role of the Chinese Internet?

Hong Kong's broadsheet Ming Pao:
(In translation)

Sources said a few hours before Xinhua announced the removal of Chen Liangyu, the Chinese Internet authority suddenly ordered portal sites to open their online forums and not to limit netizens' speech. The order indicated that the authority expected the news of Chen's removal would certainly gain people's approval. Sina had recorded some 50,000 posts a few hours after the announcement. 99% of which were praise for the decision.

有消息指出，在新华社公布陈良宇罢官前数小时，内地网络管理部门突然下令各门户网站开放「新闻跟贴」和评论，不要限制网民言论，显示当局已预料到陈良宇下台的消息，定会获得舆论和民意支持。新浪网在消息公布后数小时内录得逾5万多个跟贴，其中99％都是赞誉之言，可见一斑。
* * *
99%. Groovy. Those are banana republic numbers. I guess Chen didn’t get around to organizing his MySpace buddies to freep the poll.

And this, from the same post:

Oriental Daily, Hong Kong's biggest selling newspaper:

(In translation)

Sources said Messrs Hu and Wen treasured the views expressed online; they therefore had known perfectly well about Chen Liangyu's discipline violation and Shanghai people's indignation.

消息表示，由于重视网上民意，胡锦涛、温家宝等人对陈良宇违纪案及上海民怨沸腾的情况十分了解。

And one more, again courtesy of Letters from China (gosh, I’m citing that guy a lot) , this time via China Digital Times:

Chinese Search Engines Ban "Huang Ju"

Search "黄菊" (Huang Ju) with Baidu or Google.cn and you will probably see either an error message or a blank page. It appears that Chinese search engines are ordered to ban "Huang Ju" again.

"Huang Ju" had been banned earlier this year and it was subsequently confirmed that he was hospitalised. Now what's up with the number six of the Politburo Standing Committee?

Huang Ju is widely seen as a member of the Shanghai Gang and a close political ally of Jiang Zemin.

So let’s recap.

The Chinese government manipulated Internet policy to encourage a display of popular indignation against Chen Liangyu. And maybe now they want to bring the experiment to a close now instead risking an uncontrolled extension to the next Jiang Zemin-affiliated domino, Huang Ju.

Re Chen Liangyu, the only question is:

“How much of this Internet outpouring was that righteous anger against profiteering bureaucrats that burns in every Chinese citizen’s breast—and was only given an outlet by the government—and how much of it was government manure cynically shoveled on Chen’s political grave in an organized simulation of public sentiment to make sure the dangerous miscreant remained dead and buried?”

Inquiring minds want to know.

Because undoubtedly the government is continually looking for ways to compromise the Internet as an arena of political dissent and organization of anti-government opinion and action.

There’s more to it than than simply strongarming providers of equipment and web services to filter, impede, and censor, or monitoring the international gateways to block access to forbidden and dangerous material, as the Open Net Initiative has exhaustively documented.

The Orwellian Big Brother model of proactive repression is certainly being applied: thousands of spooks reviewing material kicked out automatically by the surveillance software and cruising websites and chat rooms to identify purveyors of anti-government sentiment, who get visited by the cops and get a lesson in the hazards of mouthing off against the current regime.

According to a report posted on China Digital Times purportedly from an insider involved in the procurement of a “billion yuan” system for the Ministry of Public Security that will end Internet privacy as we know it inside the Great Firewall:

As soon as the system is put into service, all behaviors of Chinese Internet users will be recorded in the huge storage. Your online account, password, and conversation records will be under tight surveillance. And your online behavior can be traced back up to a year. A few days ago, after the PhD from the Ministry of Public Security stopped by our company and asked for the technical solution of the immense-capacity, immense-capability system, our boss told us privately that in the future, there will be no online privacy anymore. Don't use the Internet, he said. At that time we all thought he was only joking.

This looks like a Chinese approach to the (much, much grander) “Total Information Awareness” data aggregation and mining program that is a dream of the Bush administration. If the MPS is able to bring this baby in at a billion yuan, they’ll be sweeping the annual awards at the Secret Policeman’s ball. Given the exponential growth of web sites, pages, and links, hacks, and cheats, I smell boondoggle.

To a totalitarian regime, the government monitoring and enforcement model is probably irresistible. It’s got that whole top-down command economy vibe that is perhaps second nature to the CCP.

But it is also expensive, time-consuming, labor-intensive, and riles up foreign activists, media, and bloggers. It is also an exercise of political expression that tramples on the people’s yearning to express themselves and frustrates grassroots efforts to correct some horrific abuses in such an overt and unapologetic way that it is a pretty risky expenditure of government prestige.

There is a more aggressive and efficient way to hinder and delegitimize Internet-based popular expression. And that’s by degrading and discrediting the Internet itself as a source of genuine opinions and accurate information through the use of disinformation and proxies.

Perhaps China, as befits its schizophrenic character, has not only poured its resources into old-fashioned badness.

Maybe it has also adopted the best/worst practices in 21st century high-tech Free World Internet opinion management: astroturfing (creating the illusion of grassroots support or enthusiasm for a cause) and “trolling” (overtly confrontational and disruptive posting), in its myriad incarnations such as “concern trolling” (adopting a false air of sympathy and anxiety to point out purported problems of a site, candidate, or opinion); and the cardinal sin of “sock puppetry” (in which an opponent deliberately fabricates a false identity to provide the illusion of neutrality and sabotage the effectiveness of a website or cause).

When one considers how intensively governments, business, and causes around the world engage with the Internet, both overtly (through a direct presence) and covertly (through relatively benign proxies who derive their credibility from their supposed neutrality and malign proxies who seek only to disrupt), it seems to me a question not of if but when will the Chinese government adopt these tools—if it hasn’t already.

Wonder what a Chinese sock puppet could accomplish with the resources of the entire government at his or her back.

Maybe the government-encouraged expression of outrage against Chen Liangyu was, in part, a trial run.

So, we should perhaps paraphrase Stephen Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns:

But where are the trolls?

Quick, send in the trolls.

Don't bother, they're here.

Tigers Oh My!

Game Park Struggles to Deal with Surplus Tigers

Undoubtedly, there are places in China where animal conservation is the responsibility of trained, caring professionals fully conversant with the most progressive zoological practices and steeped in a love of four-legged critters that is both profound and humane.

To my uneducated eye, however, this was not the case at the Heilongjiang Siberian Tiger Park in Harbin, at least when I visited three years ago. The park is in the news today (Reuters via China Digital Times) because it is going to try to release some of its Siberian tigers into a protected area near the North Korean border.

Good luck.

On the day I visited the park, I signed up for a special tour that included a tiger feeding. We were driven into the main compound, a Guantanamo-esque affair of cyclone fence and concertina wire, in a rattly little bus, to await the arrival of the vittles.

We parked in the middle of a mélange of lounging tigers, some of whom sat up alertly right underneath the windows and gazed up at us intently with an unnerving “I am using my binocular vision to triangulate my spring, but what is this weird, watery material between me and the helpless humans” look.

They were distracted by the arrival of a little truck with a covered bed. The driver stopped the truck and activated a hydraulic control. The bed of the truck tipped up and a bewildered ox slid forlornly to the ground. The cow was promptly covered by a tiger scrum and dispatched with a practiced, bloodless nonchalance that was perhaps lost on the amazed (and a few horrified) human onlookers.

Fortunately, we were spared the gory spectacle of an actual tiger feed. The tigers, obviously well-fed, rasped and tugged at the kill in a desultory fashion before wandering off around the compound.

Later, as I toured the catwalks surrounding the main compound, vendors offered to sell live chickens for about $1 U.S., which they would then pitch over the fence to the tigers. Again, the tigers seemed to be in it more for the sport than the nutrition. The ground was littered with dead but uneaten chickens and a few tigers were padding about with tattered chicken-feather moustaches.

The game park had been very successful in breeding the tigers. In fact, it was so crowded that the fiercely territorial and solitary dominant males couldn’t handle it. They were killing off the junior males and had to be kept in solitary confinement in a separate yard.

Cranky tigers are not the only fallout from the overly successful breeding program, as Xinhua reported in August of this year:

More tigers, less funds: Chinese park faces dilemma

A northeast China park is having trouble making ends meet as its population of critically-endangered Siberian tigers climbs by more than 100 a year.

"We're very happy to see new cubs being born, but we're worried about how to feed them properly with our limited funds," said Wang Ligang, manager of Heilongjiang Siberian Tiger Park, the world's largest artificial breeding base for the endangered big cats.

The park, located in the suburbs of provincial capital Harbin, has more than 700 Siberian tigers.

"Each carnivore eats 80 yuan (10 US dollars) of raw meat a day, which adds up to 20 million yuan (2.5 million US dollars) a year for all 700 tigers," said Wang.

The cash-strapped park only makes 12 million yuan (1.5 million US dollars) a year out of ticket sales, he said.

...

Chief engineer Liu Dan said the park had 620 Siberian tigers last year and more than 80 cubs were born between January and July this year.

"Twenty to 30 cubs will be born in the coming months. We expect the tiger population to expand to 730 by the end of the year," he said.


In 2003, a staff member confided to me that they had tried to dispose of some of the excess inventory by releasing some tigers in remote parts of China’s Northeast.

But, amazingly! The tigers were habituated to humans, unafraid of motor vehicles, and showed a distinct preference for raiding stockyards and killing cattle, much to the chagrin of the local farmers.

Wonder how that happened.

According to the Sept. 25, 2006 Reuters article:

[An official with the Siberian Tiger Artificial Propagation Base] said trial release of 12 tigers four years ago was promising -- though ten of those tigers were now back in captivity.

Hmmm.

Another more entrepreneurial solution to the surplus--call it Rent-a-Tiger--didn’t work out so well, either:

From People’s Daily, in December 2002:

Missing worker confirmed eaten by Siberian tiger in NE China

A worker missing for more than two weeks from the Changbai Mountain Siberian Tiger Park was believed to be killed and eaten by Siberian Tigers in the park, a security official with northeast China's JilinProvincial Forestry Bureau said Saturday.

Zhang Chuanjun, the official, said investigations show Liu Jinling was killed by the tigers when he acted against regulations to entered the park without taking any protective measures.

...the park is a private tourist site which opened to visitors in July this year.

It now has 12 Siberian Tigers, rented from a Siberian Tiger park in Harbin, capital of neighboring Heilongjiang Province.

Liu, a patrol worker, went missing on Nov. 18. Later, pieces of his clothing and body were found in the park. It is believed that Liu was killed by the tigers before he was eaten. At the time of his patrol, the Siberian Tigers had been released from their cages and were roaming free around the park.

As it is currently the snowy season, most park workers were on vacation and Liu was left to oversee the tiger park. Rather than following regulations to use a special vehicle when the tigers are released, evidence shows Liu took a short cut and was found by the tigers.

Zhang Chuanjun said that the park is operating legally and all security and safety measures follow regulations. The Changbai Mountain Siberian Park will likely pay Liu's relatives about 100,000 yuan (12,091 US dollars) in compensation, sources with the park disclosed.

On Oct. 3, a worker at the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park was killed by a tiger and the victim's relatives received compensation of 150,000 yuan (about 18,000 US dollars) from the park.


So, as I said, good luck with the new tiger preserve.

Experts are not optimistic, according to Reuters:

But other experts said the plan was doomed unless the forests of northeast China were better protected from logging and human encroachment.

"Increased human activities, such as highway construction, have turned tiger habitats into isolated islands," Sun Haiyi, deputy chief of the Heilongjiang Provincial Institute Wildlife, told Xinhua, adding that such isolation led to dangerous in-breeding.

Nevertheless, I must confess I have a guilty fondness for the old-fashioned Chinese entrepreneur bureaucrat, the type of person who is not chosen for his qualifications, nor is he given training, financial assistance, or administrative support suited to his chosen enterprise.

He is given opportunity—the opportunity to leverage his charter for all the bank loans, legitimate operations, quasi-licit business activities, and personal profit he can squeeze out for himself, his buddies, and his clout down at City Hall—and some remarkable and remarkably bizarre businesses are the result.

Like a game park with a tiger surplus.

Or, of course, a sloppily managed tiger park where one of the staff gets eaten—and it takes Human Resources two weeks to realize the poor guy is missing.

I remember the jovial head of an exotic bird park—with dozens of rare species from flamingos to raptors to emus under his care—confiding to me that he had gotten the job because his previous employment, as manager of a county manhole factory, had vanished when a new real estate development had swallowed up his plant.

Nevertheless, the park was a success until anti-bird flu measures mandated the dispersion of his flocks.

I hope the manhole cover guy—like those Siberian tigers released into the wild—will continue to find unexpected opportunities, unexploited niches, and successes that cannot be predicted by science or logic in the new China.

Pope Benedict and the Buddhism/Masturbation Controversy

Pope Benedict’s recent scuffle with Islam, including his non-apology—characterized by Middle East observer Abu Aardvark as “that time-honored classic ‘I'm sorry that you got angry when I called you fat’” dodge--- has highlighted his confrontational stance toward other faiths.

A column by Madeleine Bunting in The Guardian makes a case for his hostility toward Judaism and Buddhism as well.

In the process, Bunting retails the notorious statement made by Benedict while he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, purportedly equating Buddhism with masturbation.

Buddhist Channel reported that the full quote, delivered in an interview with L’Expresse in 1997, went like this:

"If Buddhism is attractive, it's only because it suggests that by belonging to it you can touch the infinite, and you can have joy without concrete religious obligations,'' Ratzinger said. ``It's spiritually self-indulgent eroticism.''

Other outlets cut Cardinal Ratzinger some slack, opining that “auto-erotisme”, the term used in the original article, could more accurately translated at “self-love” or “narcissism”.

Actually, auto-eroticism is an English-language term coined by the sexologist Havelock Ellis to describe mental or physical sexual activity not directed toward a sexual partner. It was later picked up by Freud.

Cardinal Ratzinger knows his Freud. He considers Freud an originator of the secular spirit he detests, and entitled one of his major pronouncements on the decadence of Europe “Europe and its Discontents”—a play on Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.

In this case, I assume Cardinal Ratzinger employed auto-eroticism as a term of art, using a modern term for the sinful, non-reproductive sexuality abhorred by the church to condemn a kind of shallow spiritual gratification that he considers futile, degenerate, and dangerous to the soul.

So, although the Pope was not referring to Buddhists as masturbators, they can find little consolation in the awareness that what he really meant is that he was dismissing their spiritual exercises as pathetic and contemptible.

In any event, Benedict’s hostility toward non-Catholic faiths is a matter of public record.

Religions that have felt the lash of his disapproval include Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, and Anglicanism.

In 2000, the National Catholic Reporter published a list of Cardinal Ratzinger’s greatest hits, including a money quote from the same L’Expresse interview:

"In the 1950s someone said that the undoing of the Catholic church in the 20th century wouldn't come from Marxism but from Buddhism. They were right."

Reportedly, at the time Cardinal Ratzinger was incensed that there were allegedly more Frenchmen studying to be Buddhist monks than Benedictine monks.

As the Catholic Church’s top doctrine cop—running the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a.k.a. the Inquisition--he also ordered a German Benedictine monk, Willigis Jager, a.k.a Zen master Ko-un Roshi, to cease and desist from all public statements and activities promoting dialogue between Catholics and Buddhists.

Beyond strict demands for doctrinal conformity and acknowledgement of the Catholic Church’s unique role as interlocutor between humanity and the one true God, Pope Benedict’s worldview is apparently militantly Euro-centric. Europe, in the Pope’s view, is a creation of Catholicism and the implication is that Catholicism without Europe cannot survive.

There was speculation that Cardinal Ratzinger chose his papal title not to commemorate Pope Benedict XV, but to honor St. Benedict, who founded the Benedictine order and is credited with saving Catholicism from extinction in the European Dark Ages.

The Pope considers Europe to be Catholicism’s home turf, under assault from alien faiths and lazy tendencies toward syncretism (literally “Cretan towns forming an alliance” according to my Webster’s, but figuratively speaking a meaningless mishmash).

Islam at the gates of Europe is Pope Benedict’s particular bugbear.

The Pope’s perspective—in which Catholicism is inextricably bound to its European matrix—has a creepy clash-of-civilization vibe and his recent statements criticizing Islam were undoubtedly a conscious “stay outta my yard” challenge to the demographic, social, and political encroachment of Islam into Europe.

In the lament on decadent, faithless Europe that he coauthored—Without Roots—Cardinal Ratzinger wrote:

At the hour of its greatest success, Europe seems hollow, as if it were internally paralyzed by a failure of its circulatory system that is endangering its life, subjecting it to transplants that erase its identity. At the same time as its sustaining spiritual forces have collapsed, a growing decline in its ethnicity is also taking place.

Hmmm…”a growing decline in its ethnicity”. I don’t think he’s referring to a shortage of good Vietnamese restaurants in Rome.

Pared to the bone, the Pope’s attitudes look a lot like racism cloaked in theology.

Reuters reported on an interview Cardinal Ratzinger gave to Le Figaro in 2004:

Joseph Ratzinger... has said Muslim but secular Turkey should seek its future in an association of Islamic nations rather than the EU, which has Christian roots.

In an interview last year for France's Le Figaro Magazine, Ratzinger, then doctrinal head of the Roman Catholic Church, said Turkey had always been "in permanent contrast to Europe" and that linking it to Europe would be a mistake.

If Pope Benedict is going to be busy re-fighting the crusades in Europe and the Middle East and reliving the glories of the Inquisition, he’s not going to have a lot of interest and energy in dealing with Buddhism except as a competitor for the hearts, minds, and souls of the parfit knights of his Caucasian Round Table.

Indeed, since he is wrapped up in his theory that European civilization is uniquely Catholic, he seems ready to write off the rest of the world—at least those parts with “great cultural protagonists”, as he termed them, such as East Asia and South Asia--as spheres that are innately Buddhist , Muslim, or Hindu.

It will be interesting to see how the Roman Catholic Church fares in China under Benedict’s reign.

The Twisted Triangle: America, China, and Sudan

Beyond the unfolding humanitarian disaster, the Darfur crisis may well represent the final collapse of a ten year effort by Sudan’s Islamic dictatorship to engage with the United States—and the end of a five year effort by the Bush administration to spin its tangled relationship with Sudan’s ruler, Omar al-Bashir, into geopolitical gold.

China’s rise to pre-eminence in Sudanese affairs is probably the symptom of this failure, rather than its cause.

America's difficulties in executing its Sudan policy have now put the world in the awkward position of demanding that China condemn Khartoum--while at the same time ignoring the fact that the world has been condoning American accommodation of the regime ever since the Bush administration took office.

For some observers, what has been mystifying about the Darfur crisis has not been China’s oil-inspired, opportunistic support for the Khartoum regime.

It has been George Bush’s unusual policy of engagement and forbearance--it has even been characterized as appeasement--in his handling of Sudanese strongman Omar al-Bashir, even as Bashir takes foreign policy stands that would exile a European democracy, let alone an genocidal, radical Islamicist dictatorship from Washington’s good graces.

This has created the impression that Khartoum could disregard multilateral condemnation at the UN because it relied on its unique unilateral relationship with the United States.

Consider this:

Al-Bashir supported Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. He backed the Taliban. He harbored Osama bin Laden. Sudan is still listed as one of the seven state sponsors of terrorism in the world. Recently, al-Bashir supported Hezbollah against the U.S.-backed Israeli attack.

Nevertheless, under President Bush the U.S. has refrained from excoriating, isolating, and destabilizing this dictator.

In fact, our famously thin-skinned and vindictive president has swallowed insults from al-Bashir, and endured outrages that would have condemned any other national leader to the Bush administration’s diplomatic doghouse.

Last month, President Bush sent envoy Jendayi Frazer with a personal appeal to al Bashir—complete with the publicized offer of a high profile meeting between al-Bashir and Bush during the upcoming UN session, the precious face time that every prestige-hungry Third World strongman is supposed to crave--in return for Sudan’s acquiescence to a UN takeover of the African Union peacekeeping venture in Darfur.

When Frazer arrived, her car was TP’d with anti-American slogans at the airport, she was kept waiting for three days while Bashir attended to more pressing business, and, when he finally received her, he promised that the president’s letter would be studied—by the functionaries in his foreign ministry.

The stock excuse has been that Sudan’s assistance in the war on terror justifies toleration of its unsavory behavior. But that dog doesn’t hunt anymore.

As Marcia Katz reported in her May 2006 article in The New Republic:

The Sudanese government once possessed valuable terrorism intelligence--because, for a number of years, a number of terrorist outfits operated out of Khartoum. And, after September 11, when it feared it might become a target in the war on terrorism, Khartoum began sharing that information. The Los Angeles Times reported in April 2005, for instance, that Sudanese intelligence have detained Al Qaeda suspects for interrogation by American agents, turned over passports and other evidence recovered in raids on suspected terrorists' homes, and expelled extremists from the country. The State Department's most recent report on global terrorism declares that "Sudan's overall cooperation and information sharing improved markedly and produced significant progress in combating terrorist activity." Yet a senior government official says Sudan's intelligence is no longer that valuable: "No, not anymore. The motherlode? We got that in 2003. We didn't get it lately."

The Sudan situation is, at its foundation, a story of George W. Bush’s high hopes and unrealistic expectations. It is also the story of his weakness for the astounding master stroke that, because of impatience and shortsightedness, consistently eludes him.

And the roots of the story lie not in Darfur or China. They lie in another Sudanese civil war fought not so long ago—the long-ignored and quickly forgotten civil war waged between the Arab Muslim north and the African south for over 20 years.

The history and circumstances of the north-south conflict are reviewed in great detail on Human Rights Watch’s Sudan page.

Sudan is another example of shoddy nationbuilding by European imperialism. It has an Arab Muslim north, black African animist-Christian south, and a non-Arab Muslim east (the Darfur region). The Arab Muslims control the national administration out of Khartoum, but kept busy subjugating rebellions by the other ethnic groups, who rightly believe that their regions are getting jobbed out of their fair share by Khartoum.

The struggle with between north and south has a much longer and bloodier history than the Darfur conflict. In its most recent iteration, from 1986 until 2005, it killed approximately 2 million people.

The Clinton administration’s Sudan policy was hostile and reactive.

It closed the US embassy in Khartoum in 1996, compelled bin Laden’s deportation from Sudan in the same year, and then bombed Sudan’s al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in retaliation for bin Laden’s attack on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.

An article in the November 2004 Sudan Tribune provides an interesting recap of Clinton’s regime-change activities against Sudan that appear quite Bushian in their implacability:

In fact, Washington opted for the policy of containment and isolation against Sudan and at the same time increased its support to the Sudanese armed resistance seeking to oust Bahsir’s regime.

Washington also backed a three-way attack against Sudan in 1997 by Eritrea, Ethiopia and Uganda.
…
Until the end of his second mandate in 2000, Clinton not only remained adamantly opposed to any kind of rapprochement with Sudan, but spared no effort to further isolate the African-Arab country at both regional and international levels.

Most importantly, perhaps, for the future history and for the attitude of the Bush administration, Clinton’s national security team spurned al-Bashir’s repeated initiatives, as arranged and reported by U.S. Muslim businessman Mansoor Ijaz, to promote constructive engagement and rapprochement between Sudan and the U.S. by delivering up the head of Osama bin Laden.

Then President Bush, the avowed anti-Clinton, reversed the policies of the previous administration in favor of something that, paradoxically, looks very much like Clintonian engagement (from the Sudan Tribune article quoted above):

Khartoum was relieved with the arrival of a new Republican administration to the White House led by President George W. Bush in 2001.

Only a few weeks later, the Center of Political and Strategic Studies in Washington recommended a change in U.S. policy towards Sudan based on interaction rather than containment and isolation.

Indeed, the Bush administration looked at Sudan with a different eye.

Yes, there was oil there.

Sudan is another one of those countries described as being second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves. But the oil was off limits to U.S. companies until the “state sponsor of terrorism” label could be lifted—something that was eagerly yearned for not only by the U.S. oil companies but also the Sudanese government.

And there was also Christianity: the leader of the southern rebels, John Garang was a Christian, some of his soldiers were Christian although many were animist; and his opponents in Khartoum were undeniably and militantly Muslim.

Sudan therefore became an issue of considerable interest to a very important element of George Bush’s political base—evangelical Christians.

Samantha Power’s excellent report on Sudan and Darfur in the October 30, 2004 New Yorker, Dying in Darfur, provides this amusing vignette, illustrating the agitation that the north south civil war inspired in evangelicals in George Bush’s home town of Midland, Texas.:

In 2002, Fikes and other activists invited thirteen Sudanese exiles to visit Midland during its annual Christian-music festival, and paired them with local youths to construct two portable “Sudanese villages.” The first had seven wooden huts with grass roofs, a large thatch-roofed church, and a market, modelled on that of a typical southern Sudanese town. The second consisted of six huts that had been burned or partly demolished. Fikes had ordered some plastic skeletons from a Halloween Web site and set them aflame (“with the town fire marshal on hand!”), so that they could be displayed as charred corpses. The American evangelical community’s intense interest in Sudan put [America’s Sudan peace envoy John] Danforth and the rest of the U.S. government team under considerable pressure.

Al-Bashir’s continued eagerness to engage with the United States in 2003 is made clear from this Sudanese government press release:

On Monday 8th December, 2003 the President of the United States of America George W. Bush called President Omer Bashir of the Republic of the Sudan.

President Bush commended the willingness of the two parties of the conflict to make peace in Sudan. He congratulated President Bashir on the progress made thus far in the Sudan peace process and indicated that he was watching the peace process closely. He confirmed to President Bashir that he would remain involved till the Sudanese achieved peace in their country. He said he called to encourage both parties to walk the last lap toward peace. He confirmed to President Bashir that the peace would pave the road for good relation between the Sudan and the United States of America and he would be glad at that time to receive him at the White House President.

On his part, President Bashir thanked his American counterpart for his personal involvement in Sudan peace process. He said "without that deep involvement, we would have not accomplished what we have accomplished today."

…Two hours later, President Bashir received at his office Reverend Franklin Graham, President of the Samaritan’s Purse. President Bashir confirmed to Reverend Graham that peace would enhance the scope of religious freedom and co-existence among Sudanese. He said "Sudanese are tolerant by nature". Reverend Graham reiterated his commitment to work for peace and reconciliation in Sudan. He promised to become a friend and a frequent visitor to Sudan.

Franklin Graham, by the way, is Billy’s son and the President’s go-to guy for issues of Christian conscience affecting Sudan.

Christian considerations aside, John Garang offered the prospect of becoming a loyal American client in Africa, an alternative and possible successor to the fundamentally distasteful if temporarily useful al-Bashir.

Garang had attended Infantry Officer Advanced Course at Fort Benning, Ga., and then continued to graduate studies at Iowa State University from 1976 to 1981. He and his wife spoke English fluently. It would be easy to imagine southern Sudan as an African version of Kurdistan: a pro-American ethnic enclave relying on the U.S. for security and a useful thorn in the side of an unsavory, potentially hostile Arab Muslim regime controlling the capital. With U.S. support, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to imagine Garang taking over the whole country.

The Bush administration had incentive, leverage, and assets. And it had grand plans for Sudan. It was determined to broker a peace agreement, restore Sudan to the family of nations, and put U.S. at the center of Sudan’s oil industry.

Success in Sudan would provide President Bush with a high profile success in the eyes of blacks and Muslims, two groups with whom he was not very popular; get America into the Sudan oil patch; and establish a U.S. ally in Africa on the fringe of the Muslim world.

Not a bad day’s work, and the fact that President Bush would be able to compare and contrast his own soft power diplomatic achievements in Africa with the dismal failure of Bill Clinton with respect to the Rwandan genocide and letting bin Laden slip through his fingers was no doubt a delicious lagniappe.

The first objective was achieved, by accommodating the Sudanese regime, instead of confronting it.

Khartoum’s participation was bartered for by promises of a ticket out of pariah status, an alliance with the World’s Only SuperpowerTM, a deluge of petro investment dollars, and the promise of that old standby of US Third World diplomacy: hundreds of millions of dollars in construction aid:

In December 2003, all-Africa.com had reported on President Bush’s personal phone calls to al-Bashir and Garang to promote the pact and concluded:

President Bush is believed to be willing to announce that Sudan can be taken off the 'terrorist list' if a settlement is reached. The administration is also reportedly ready to commit millions in new reconstruction funds following a settlement.

With U.S. participation, a Comprehensive Peace Agreement was brokered between north and south in January 2005. The south received autonomy with a promise of an independence referendum in the future; a share of oil revenues; an allocation of cabinet posts; and John Garang as Vice President.

Anticipation of the juicy deal coming down the pipe had evoked this remarkable headline in the Sudan Tribune on the occasion of the 2004 U.S. presidential election:

Sudan prayed for Bush victory.


Israel’s Debkafile is perhaps not the most accurate reporter of news. But it is a faithful chronicler of grandiose neo-con fantasies and this report from 2004 catches some of the giddy enthusiasm of the Bush White House over the new Sudan policy:

For the first time ever, American diplomacy will have succeeded in converting a country dominated by radical Muslims – in Sudan’s case since the 17th century - into a secular democracy – in a period, moreover, when fundamentalist Islam is at its most militant and only a few years after Khartoum played host to Osama bin Laden’s headquarters.

Bush also has a special occasion in mind with an eye on the African American vote where his support is relatively weak. He will step forward as the first US president to plunge deep and head-on into problems endemic to the African continent. The Sudan peace will show the way to accommodations of other conflicts. He has allocated liberal sums for the fight against AIDS and steps for raising the standard of living of hundreds of millions of Africans. On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.

If the US president has his way, the White House lawn will be fully booked this year with ceremonies centering on the Sudanese reconciliation, which he rates more highly than the Israel-Palestinian handshake hosted by Bill Clinton eleven years ago.

“It has to be a ceremony even more impressive than the 1993 White House signing of declarations of principles by Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat,” said a senior US official preparing the event. “It will be an ‘African Camp David’, but one that will not fail.”

Bush’s advisers are preparing to stage a truly gala reception for the two Sudanese leaders, the first of a series showcasing the presidency’s breakthroughs in Africa in full sight of the American electorate and culminating in a splashy signing ceremony in March or April.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice has set up a committee with heads of the African American community. Working out of an undisclosed location in Los Angeles, they are assess the next moves on Sudan and their impact on voting patterns in November.

As Danforth’s mission draws to a successful conclusion, the president’s senior political adviser Karl Rove is taking charge of strategy on Sudan and its exploitation as campaign fodder.

Let’s highlight a truly wonderful passage:

On the agenda too is a highly evocative ritual at the White House at which Sudan’s president will solemnly forswear his country’s dark past as recruiter of slaves for America and the Arab caravans carrying African slaves around the world.

Sudan would not only be reclaimed for the Christian God and Big Oil.

It would also help exorcise the guilt of the GOP’s white southern base for its slaveholding past, and place the onus firmly on the backs of those troublesome but ultimately contrite Muslim Arabs.

Now, that’s a peace deal for the ages!

None of that stuff ever happened, of course.

President Bush’s plans for a colorful African triumph on the White House lawn were derailed by the helicopter-crash death of John Garang in 2005 that must be reflexively described as “suspicious”, even though the aircraft was lent him by his Ugandan allies; and by shameless reneging on the details of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement by the Khartoum regime.

President Bush tried to keep the dream alive. He kept the State Department on the case and intervened personally to advance the peace process; met with Garang’s successor, Salva Kiir Mayardit; Garang’s widow Rebecca was one of three non-U.S. citizens honored by a place in Laura Bush’s box at the 2006 State of the Union address; and aid flowed to the south, in the form of a $40 million Dyncorp contract to house and train the south’s army as part of the buying-off process.

However, there were limits to the energy and commitment America was willing to bring to bear on the situation. When faced with a severe challenge and difficult choices, its largely unilateral diplomacy proved incapable of preventing the Sudan situation from unraveling.

The biggest dark cloud of trouble that doomed the Bush’s carnival of diplomatic, religious, and racial reconciliation was in Sudan’s northwest: Darfur proved his undoing.

There was serious unrest in Darfur before the CPA. Unfortunately, the Bush administration tried to wish away the problem with a combination of optimism and obstinate neglect.

Again, quoting Marcia Katz:

American policymakers [decided] in early 2004 that they would try to finish the North-South deal before turning to Darfur--even if it meant ignoring a genocide. Their rationalization went like this: The North-South agreement was grounded in core principles about sharing power and wealth that Darfuris could then use as the foundation for a peace agreement of their own. The North-South agreement would also dilute the extremist regime in Khartoum by integrating Southerners into the national government and creating a new order more sympathetic to Darfuri concerns. Lastly, the agreement called for democratic elections in 2009, which would give President Omar Al Bashir and his National Congress Party an incentive to promote peace and prosperity in the whole country.

This approach served the administration's political interests, but it was a fatal miscalculation--"a way to interpret the status quo positively," as Gayle Smith, an Africa specialist at the Center for American Progress and onetime director of African affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), puts it. For one thing, the agreement was very specific about the division of power and resources between the North and South. To subsequently incorporate other parties and regions would require difficult renegotiation.


Rebel agitation in the northwest intensified—perhaps partially in response to the perception that the CPA was indeed a ready-made template for Darfuri empowerment.

However, Khartoum apparently decided it was not going to give away its territory and oil revenue chunk by chunk, and committed itself to the destruction of the Darfur rebels as a credible political and military force.

The tool Khartoum adopted was the notorious Janjaweed.

Khartoum could not rely on its army, which had a sizable Darfurese component (and after all, John Garang had risen to a privileged position in the Sudanese army, commanding forces charged with suppressing the southern insurrection, before he switched sides and became the rebels’ charismatic and highly effective leader).

So Sudan outsourced the dirty work to irregular Arab militias, which engaged in attacks extensive enough to become universally recognized as ethnic cleansing and behavior brutal enough to be termed genocide by many observers.

The African Union—envisioned as a Third World cadet NATO—took on Darfur as its first project, in the process revealing itself as underfunded and inexperienced (in generous official parlance) and inept, corrupt, and totally out of its depth (the scathing unofficial view) in trying to secure the Darfur region.

In June of this year, Robert Zoellick of the U.S. State Department and Hilary Benn of the U.K. inserted themselves in African Union negotiations for two days and tried to solve Darfur with an agreement that can be described charitably as half-assed.

It was signed with only one of the rebel groups, Minni Minawi’s Sudanese Liberation Army, which took its (presumably generous) payday and disintegrated in a vortex of banditry; it made no provisions for restraining or disarming the Janjaweed; and indeed made virtually no demands on Khartoum while leaving the burden for security on the hapless AU force.

A negotiator for one of the rebel groups provides some insight into the Darfur Peace Agreement:

The US engineered peace for Darfur, commonly known as Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) is both “fake and unsustainable”. Its prime engineer Mr Robert Zoelick and his arch Experts produced a document that turns out to be a mockery of international diplomacy. As Professor Reeves said, the DPA was borne dead right from day one. In addition to the government of Sudan, the only other signatory of the DPA was Minni Minnawi and his SLM fraction, erroneously and persistently promoted to be the biggest Darfur “rebel” group. Subsequent attempts to create a force out of Minnawi by the international community, the AU and the Government of Sudan came to naught. The US too was involved in this fiasco, culminating in Minnawi’s visit to the White House. The visit was by means ill-advised.

That the DPA is dead if not borne so is beyond doubt. Mr. Pronk, the UN Special Representative to Darfur described it as “severely paralysed, does not resonate with Darfur people and requires major rewriting”. Lashing Minnawi to sign the agreement, Mr Zoelick warned him: “I could be a very good friend but could also be a nasty enemy”. Well Mr, Minnawi chose “a very good friend”. Mr President, I trust you concur with us that any agreement that is an outcome of bullying cannot guarantee “lasting and sustainable peace”.

Mr. Minnawi has so far failed to sell the DPA to Darfur people. Both of his public rallies in Alfashir and Khartoum had to be cancelled. But he is not the only one who failed to recommend the DPA in a public venue to Darfur People. Mr. Egeland, the Head of UN Humanitarian Operations had a tragic experience. His attempt to recommend the DPA to Darfur IDPs [internally displaced persons—ed.] ended up with his interpreter lynched in front of him. If the IDPs do not think that the DPA is good for them, who else does?



For “lynched” read “beaten and hacked to death”.

As reported above, President Bush even took the extraordinary step of meeting with Minni Minawi in July 2006, and made what sounds like a futile and humiliating attempt to cajole him into behaving like a genuine American client.

From the Washington Post:

Bush told the rebel leader that his forces must refrain from violence and pressed him to forge an alliance with other factions in Darfur to broaden support for a peace agreement, [NSC spokesperson] Jones said.
…

Jones had no comment on how Minnawi responded.

When a policy’s success relies on inviting a powerless, semi-retired, and risk-adverse bandit to the White House for a dispirited jawboning session, you can say that policy is in trouble.

From the same article:

Minnawi faces rising opposition to his leadership among commanders in northern Darfur, including those from his Zaghawa tribe, according to the United Nations.

"He signed under incredible U.S. pressure and was probably given a lot of promises by the U.S. and the U.K.," said Jemera Rone, a Sudan specialist with the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. "I'm sure he feels that the U.S. government now owes him and the people of Darfur quite a lot."

A report issued earlier this month by the U.N. mission in Sudan cited allegations by displaced Sudanese that Minnawi's faction "was indiscriminately killing, raping women and abducting" civilians.

"That agreement is not working, and one of the many reasons is Minni Minnawi," Kenneth H. Bacon, president of the advocacy group Refugees International, wrote last week in a letter to Bush.

Refugees International said yesterday that Minnawi's forces have conducted a "reign of terror" in North Darfur by beating and raping women, killing young men and displacing thousands of people. Bacon asked Bush to "please stress" to Minnawi that the rebel leader "must honor the terms of the Darfur Peace Agreement and stop fighting."

At the time I speculated that this deeply flawed agreement was rushed out in order to provide a riposte to Hu Jintao’s high profile trip to Africa.

Hu’s visit certainly furnished the occasion for an ill-advised attempt to regain political traction on Sudan with a stunning diplomatic master-stroke. On that superficial level, I expect the DPA was meant to wrong-foot the Chinese president and win America a PR victory, and it succeeded, if temporarily and at the expense of further antagonizing China.

The greater significance of the DPA was probably that is was part of a failed, last-minute attempt to cobble together a strategic counter to China’s burgeoning influence in Sudan and to try to salvage the relationship that had evolved with such promise since President Bush’s election in 2000.

But the desperate measures appear to have come to nought.

The hastily-concluded Darfur Peace Agreement is in shambles.

Al-Bashir claims that he has a right to pursue the rebel groups that opted out of the June 2006 Darfur peace agreement. That’s not an unreasonable position. Trouble is, his only sound doctrine and effective order of battle relies on the use of the ethnic cleansing cum genocidal Janjaweed.

Now Khartoum is preparing a new offensive in the northwest; the shadow of riot and massacre hangs over two million desperate and despairing people huddled in squalid refugee camps; and the developed countries have declined to underwrite the AU peacekeeping contingent beyond September 2006, apparently deciding that its utility even as a figleaf for First World inaction wasn’t worth the money and trouble needed to refund its mandate.

Cynically, al-Bashir offered to allow the AU force to remain if Sudan funded it, thereby turning it into a toothless auxiliary of his army.

As a result, the crisis has been tossed into the UN, the venue in which, because of Chinese and Russian resistance, meaningful action is the least likely.

George Bush is disappointed, but I suspect al-Bashir is seriously annoyed.

The cornerstone of the 2005 deal—rehabilitation of Sudan’s international standing—seems further off than ever because of uproar over Darfur. It’s a promise that George W. Bush can no longer deliver on.

So Khartoum gave away direct control of a good third of its territory to the southern rebels in the CPA autonomy deal and got nothing in return.

What’s more, under the terms of the CPA, in 2011 the south is supposed to get a vote on independence and if it goes ahead, southern Sudan and its oil fields are undoubtedly gone forever.

The U.S. money and support for Khartoum that was supposed to compensate for the giveaway to the south and assure the survival and prosperity of what will probably become the new Islamic Republic of North Sudan hasn’t materialized; and al-Bashir is no doubt sufficiently realistic to understand that future administrations are going to side with the southern Sudanese political force that is adored by Christian evangelicals, and his a) tyrannical b) Muslim c) Arab regime is going to find itself squarely in the regime change crosshairs when push comes to shove.

Al-Bashir has his back against the wall and President Bush can’t help him.

All President Bush can do is plead with al-Bashir publicly and privately to play along and accept some gesture that will placate the world community—like “rehatting” the AU troops as part of a UN force—and al-Bashir is having none of it, at least for now.

Instead, al-Bashir has readopted the defiant language of Arab nationalism in his dealings both with the United States and the UN. With relations between Sudan and the U.S. are reverting to open hostility, it is very unlikely that Khartoum will welcome a UN force that might become the vanguard of a Western regime change offensive against his regime.

In an August 29, 2006 AP story carried on Yahoo as Sudan president claims west conspiracy, and in contrast to the effusive mutual handkissing between Bush and al-Bashir in 2003 quoted above, the Sudanese strongman declared:

"Everybody knows the Americans and British are scheming against the Sudan," al-Bashir said at a rally to muster support for his opposition to the proposed deployment.

"We shall not be the first country to be recolonized in Africa. ... We are free and shall not be enslaved," al-Bashir told about 2,000 workers belonging to a federation of unions.

With the clock running out on control of the south—and perhaps his entire regime; with U.S. support revealed as a taunting mirage; and with President Bush, the one U.S. political actor emotionally committed to engagement with Khartoum, fading into distracted lame-duck weakness as the end of his final term in office looms, it’s not surprising that al Bashir has increasingly relied on China—which, since 1996, has taken advantage of Khartoum’s pariah status to become the single largest foreign investor in Sudan’s energy industry--as the one power with the determination and strong stomach to support his regime domestically and on the international stage.

Once again the Bush administration finds itself in the familiar and unenviable position of suddenly finding itself with little leverage and few options in dealing with a troublesome regional crisis. In contrast to North Korea and Iran, there is less excuse here since the United States has been engaged with the Sudan regime for the last five years.

Unable to explain its awkward, unrealistic, and now disintegrating flirtation with this terrorist state, the White House understandably looks for a scapegoat:

China.

The title of the Washington Post’s September 6 editorial Responsible China? Darfur exposes Chinese hypocrisy pretty much conveys the political line of frustrated administration policymakers.

The United States and its European partners have called upon Sudan to let the U.N. force in. But China, which has enormous leverage over Sudan because of its investment in Sudanese oil fields, has failed to push the Sudanese into accepting the "realistic option" of a U.N. deployment.

Rather ironic that Sudan, which was supposed to serve as the keystone of Bush administration engagement with Africa, has turned into an exclusive sandbox for the Yellow Peril.

More to the point, it should be recalled that the United States has consistently pursued Sudan as its exclusive Great Power trophy, most recently when it decided that it would pursue its Darfur diplomacy directly with Khartoum and use the African Union as its vehicle, excluding China and bypassing the UN.

But that didn’t quite work out.

So President Bush has been forced to return to the UN to try to get the Security Council to rescue not only Darfur, but Sudan—from itself, and the genocidal activities that will remove it permanently beyond the diplomatic pale--by insertion of an effective peacekeeping force.

Its credibility and clout diminished by the failure of its DPA initiative, the U.S. government is reduced to impotent table pounding by its media proxies and indignant finger wagging by humanitarian and evangelical groups trying to somehow coerce China into helping out.

It must be especially galling to President Bush that not only is his diplomacy in Sudan in disarray, but the Chinese are in there scooping up the oil.

It’s amazing what poorly conceived, badly executed, and intermittent diplomacy can accomplish.

In the past, I’ve argued that liberal criticism of China, though justified in certain aspects, has been misplaced since the true issue was that Khartoum could always counter any pressure from China by intensifying its rapprochement with Washington, a patron that had demonstrated its unwillingness to censure its wayward client.

However, if al-Bashir has truly burned his bridges with Bush, and not just engaging in reckless brinksmanship, then the sub rosa US support that Khartoum has relied in order to flout international censure with impunity may be gone—and the Chinese finally will have the leverage we’ve always been so eager to ascribe to them.

Unfortunately it doesn’t look like they are in the mood to help us out.

It must seem absurd to Beijing that China is expected to sanction its ally to rescue a unilateral US diplomatic initiative that was designed primarily to strengthen US influence at China’s expense--simply because the wheels have come off the President Bush’s Sudan bandwagon and there’s nobody else around to help pick up the pieces.

No doubt a lot of eye-rolling about that in Zhong Nan Hai.

The true significance of the Darfur war—and China’s crucial role in propping up the Khartoum regime—will probably be revealed in the south, not the northwest.

The main oil reserves are in the southern province of Abyei. In order to make the CPA deal work, Khartoum (and the Bush administration) did not sweat the details of power-sharing and boundary definition there.

But Khartoum has been working the problem non-stop ever since, desperately, illegally, and ruthlessly.

As the distinguished Sudan-watcher Eric Reeves writes:

At the same time, the National Islamic Front senses that it will enjoy virtually complete diplomatic protection from China and other international actors, and that the Western nations that helped bring the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) to fruition are not sufficiently engaged to ensure that key terms of the CPA are respected. This is extremely dangerous and may well lead to renewed war in the south, possibly in the near term. For example, Khartoum’s refusal to accept the findings of the distinguished international Abyei Boundary Commission creates of the oil-rich Abyei enclave a potential flash-point for renewed violence. Though the Government of South Sudan seems determined to seek international arbitration in its effort to force Khartoum to abide by the terms of the CPA, many in the SPLM have made clear that continued intransigence on Khartoum’s part could lead to war, which will almost certainly be the most violently destructive phase of a civil war that began in 1955, on the eve of Sudan’s independence from Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule.

In a replay of Darfur tactics, Khartoum is supporting militias in Abyei. Not regular army troops strong enough to turn on the central government, but forces strong enough to drive people from their homes and challenge the southern administration’s claim to uncontested sovereignty over the crucial oil regions there.

I believe that China’s crucial role is to come in and beef up the oil production, transportation infrastructure, and security and assist Khartoum in creating the “facts on the ground” that will help it deny the ownership of the oil assets to the southern regime after independence—and make it easier to defend these assets against a southern counterattack.

Maybe the Chinese believe they have a special expertise in the economic penetration and exploitation of mineral resources in unfriendly ethnic enclaves—think Tibet and Xinjiang. And their determination, patience, and focus might also prove to give China more lasting influence and success in Sudan and throughout Africa than the lazy “just add freedom” grandiosity of the Bush administration.

In theory, the Bush administration could resign itself to the current situation, in which China has favored access to Sudan’s oil and the trust of the Khartoum regime, and promise to respect its position and interests in return for Beijing’s active participation in compelling a genuine cessation of the violence in Darfur.

But that would mean abandoning the increasingly unattainable goals and ever more remote dreams that the Bush administration apparently still cherishes--for an American triumph in northeastern Africa, an isolated , cowed, and weak Muslim regime in Khartoum, the prospect of Sudan’s eventual conversion into a pro-US bastion centered in the south, and the positioning of Sudan’s oil reserves within America’s orbit and far outside of Chinese reach—in exchange for simple humanitarian goals.

The current campaign of China-bashing—attacking the one party we now accept has the capacity to influence the Khartoum regime—appears to indicate that the U.S. hasn’t made this choice.

So until a U.S. administration reconciles itself to the loss of its position of advantage in Sudan—or the situation somehow lurches back into Bush’s favor—accommodation with Beijing on Sudan will remain unattainable.

And for the foreseeable future, for the people of Darfur, there may be no respite—and no rescue.

A Long Way from Shangri-La

China’s expressions of disapproval at the Dalia Lama’s seventh visit to Mongolia have been relatively muted, apparently limited to a sullen statement of objection and delaying one flight to Ulaan Baatur on the pretext of bad weather.

It’s good thinking for China to keep a low profile, since Buddhism in Mongolia is struggling with difficulties of its own, and would perhaps welcome the distraction of being able to blame the profoundly unpopular Chinese for picking on them.

A monk blogging the visit on Mongolia Web, evocatively titling his post Dalai Lama drops bomb on Mongolia’s monastic community, provides a picture of a religious movement wrestling with serious internal problems--and a long way from Shangri La:

The post-independence discipline of the Mongolian monastics is in many ways mixed, and His Holiness used this opportunity to finally draw the line. During the Communist era, Gandan was the only monastery permitted to function, though under tight scrutiny (including monastic spies) and constant interference. The few who were allowed to serve there were constantly 'encouraged' to marry and maintain households.

Precious few were able to resist and it is these 'married monks' who became the teachers of the post-independence generation. As a result, there is a pervasive idea that 'Mongolian Buddhism is different' and that it is really not unusual to have a secret girlfriend, or even a wife and family, and still maintain the appearance of a monk.

His Holiness exposed this thinking today to the bright glare of the Vinaya, the Buddha's teachings on a monk's discipline. He began by remarking that during his 1997 visit, there were about 150 monks, but now there were hundreds more in robes. He said that the number of monks is not at all important, however, it's the purity of their lives that matters. In fact, if they're not keeping their precepts, the number of monks is pointless. Then he said it straight out:

"If you have girlfriends or wives or are not keeping the precepts of a monk in other ways, you should disrobe. Do it 100% or don't do it. Period. Stop wearing the clothing of a monk altogether and confusing people and staining the lineage. Try to be a good lay Buddhist but stop pretending to be a monk. Before 1990, there was some excuse. For those who chose a monastic life after 1990, there's no excuse."


Interestingly, the author subsequently deleted the post, possibly in response to criticism that Mongolian Buddhist dirty linen was being aired in public. The lone commenter on the now vanished article objected:

The language used in this report is as harsh as communist propaganda. Although truth is bitter. The way of reporting should be better than this. Since the audience is mongolian community.

Respect should be there for the religion even the evil deeds are being done by unhealthy people'

However, the piece had already been picked up on Tyson William’s Buddhist Journal, where I rediscovered it.

Mongolian Buddhism labors under some unique historical burdens.

The religion has alien roots, with its services conducted in the Tibetan language.

More importantly, in recent history, Mongolian Buddhism has frequently served as a vehicle for foreign interference in Mongolia affairs.

Significant elements of the Buddhist establishment in Mongolia were sponsored by China’s Manchu Qing dynasty in an effort to extend Chinese control.

In 1924, with the death of the Bogd Khan—the reincarnation of Jebtsundampa, head of the Buddhist religion in Mongolia, and Mongolia’s absolute ruler prior to 1921--the Buddhist church in Mongolia lost its grasp on temporal power through the efforts of an indigenous progressive movement that, although it was apparently operating under Comintern direction, is still respected in Mongolia as the vanguard of the Mongolian struggle for self determination.

Under the new constitution, Mongolia became the world’s second socialist state after the USSR and the special political position of the Jebtsundampa was abolished.

Over the next few years the regime made efforts to foreclose potential avenues for a resurgence of Buddhist political power.

According to Alexander Berzin’s authoritative account:

...the Mongolian Communist Party Congress of 1925 announced that the Jebtsundampa would not incarnate again with the same religious and political status as before. Rather, he would be reborn as General Hanumant in Shambhala. For verification of their claim, they said they would consult with the Dalai Lama, though it is doubtful that they ever did. .. In 1929, the Seventh Party Congress … formally forbade the installation of a ninth Jebtsundampa, although the reincarnation had been found in Tibet.

The mystical kingdom of Shambhala is supposed to exist on a remote, spiritual plane—a convenient realm of exile for an inconvenient, perpetually reincarnating political force.

Nevertheless, its physical manifestation was sought for by Western mystics (it was the inspiration for Shangri La), and Japanese militarists even asserted its location in Japan, as part of their scheme to create a new Japan-centric Asian military, political, and spiritual order, according to Berzin.

Not surprisingly, Buddhism remained a destabilizing element in Mongolian politics.

In 1932, rebellious elements in Mongolia called on the Panchen Lama to invade Mongolia (supported by Chiang Kai-shek as a counterweight to the Dalia Lama’s political and military strength in Tibet—yes, it gets complicated) to overthrow the Communist regime.

During its aggression in Northeast Asia, the Japanese empire attempted to peel Mongolia away from the Soviet Union by promoting Pan-Mongolianism based on Buddhist revival.

In the 1930s, at Stalin’s command—and to curtail Mongolia’s not unenthusiastic flirtation with Japan--the Mongolian regime was purged of its pro-Buddhist elements, including its Prime Minister, Genden, who had stated that “on earth there were two great geniuses—Buddha and Lenin”.

His successor, the pliant Choibalsan, orchestrated the wholesale destruction of the Mongolian Buddhist temples and murder of monks in order to transform Mongolian society into an obedient and reliable instrument of Soviet policy.

In a melancholy exhibit in Ulaan Baatur’s Genden Museum for the Victims of Political Repression you can reach out and touch the skulls of monks exhumed from a recently discovered mass grave, each with a neat bullet hole near the top of the head. They were some of the victims of a mass campaign of terror in 1937 that claimed nearly 30,000 victims.

Only Gandan Monastery survived and, as described above, the few remaining monks were encouraged to compromise their their vows and marry in order to decrease the moral authority of the church.

After the communist system collapsed in Mongolia in 1989, the Dalai Lama has sought to rejuvenate Buddhism in Mongolia through his visits, encouragement of new Buddhist establishments, dispatch of personnel, and the training of new monks in Dharmsala.

However, in addition to its historical difficulties, the Mongolian Buddhist church has struggled to accommodate itself to the new realities of Mongolian society.

The Mongolian Communist Party, reborn as the People’s Revolutionary Party, has survived as a potent political force in post-1989 Mongolia, and remains hostile to Buddhism.

Recent efforts to allow the current incarnation of Jebtsundampa--currently residing in Dharmsala—to return permanently (he has paid one brief visit without government invitation) have been blocked by invocation of the 1924 constitution.

Mongolian Buddhism also runs afoul of the burgeoning official cult of Chinggis Khan.

The great Khan is aggressively promoted by the government as a focus of Mongolian nationalism (and revered as the conqueror of China and Russia) as the modern alternative to “the lights that failed”—Communism and Buddhism.

In particular, Buddhism is blamed for diluting the innate martial valor of the Mongolian man. Mongolia has been the plaything of Russia, China and, to a lesser extent, Japan for the last few hundred years, and some blame this on the fact that up to half of Mongolia’s male population was cloistered in Buddhist monasteries during this unhappy period.

More importantly, Mongolia’s support of religious freedom has thrown the nation open to an influx of Christian missionaries. There are at least 17 Protestant sects active in Mongolia, and approximately 200 churches.

Ulaan Baatur boasts a high profile, professionally managed TV station, Eagle TV, invested in by American evangelicals, that combines Christian prostelization and non-religious news and entertainment programming.

The evaporation of Soviet financial support caused a crisis in Mongolia’s economy and society, and the Christian denominations have moved quickly to offer medical, technical, and social services. Many of their activities are managed through an umbrella organization, Joint Christian Services, with an impressive array of projects.

In what might be called the Christian religio-entertainment sphere, Ulaan Baatur’s sports stadiums have also played host to lavishly advertised faith-healing spectacles by the likes of Word of Faith’s Peter Youngren.

From zero in 1989, the number of Christian converts has grown in double digit rates to exceed 20,000, primarily in Mongolia’s urban centers. Mongolia’s population skews very young, with two-thirds of the population under 30 years of age.

The Fellowship of Christian Students website run by Tom and Nancy Lin provides an interesting snapshot of Christian religious activity in Mongolia, much of it centered on outreach to youth, as well as some highly detailed but unsourced statistics on the awareness and adoption of Christian belief inside the country.

The Church of Latter Day Saints has been especially active in its engagement with Mongolia and has registered precisely 6,346 converts as of 6 July 2006. Its sleek grey building next to the Chinggis Khan hotel is perhaps too small to be called “hulking”, and its cadre of suited, badged, and fluent Mongolian-speaking missionaries too young to be called overbearing, but the pervasiveness of the LDS presence in Ulaan Baator can be called remarkable.

The presence of the South Korean denominations in Mongolia are less obvious to Westerners, but may be the dominant force in Christian missionary work in Mongolia. Reverend Moon and his Unification Church have turned their attention to Mongolia, and are probably working both at the popular level through overtly religious activities, and at the political level through the Reverend Moon’s aggressive and well-funded NGOs.

20,000+ believers currently represents less than 1% of Mongolia’s population. However, Mongolia’s social and spiritual niches seem to resemble South Korea more than any other country in Asia, and it does not seem inconceivable that Christian denominations in Mongolia could achieve penetration similar to that in South Korea, where approximately 30%-40% of the population is Christian.

By Mongolian standards, the churches have access to significant financial resources and there are accusations that people join the church for material benefits, not just food and clothing but the chance to study abroad.

However, beyond these selfish motives it appears clear that many Mongolians are attracted to Christian churches because of the association in their minds between Christianity and the new spiritual vigor and potentialities that the dominant religion of Western capitalism and democracy seems to represent.

The Mongolian Buddhist church, on the other hand, is hampered by its miserable history and limited in the financial resources it can bring to the competition for the hearts and souls of Mongolians. It receives limited financial support from the cash-strapped government for reconstruction of temples but does not enjoy tax exemption for land or income. Well-heeled financial patrons are not abundant in Mongolia’s impoverished society.

Mongolian Buddhism itself is still trying with the assistance of Dharmsala, to work its way out of the human legacy of the Communist domination and corruption of the movement. But at the same time, factionalism seems to be harming the church, as one group of monks is pressing for a more national church with its scriptures translated into Mongolian, instead of read in the traditional Tibetan.

This is not merely a problem for the religion inside Mongolia.

Anecdotal information indicates that the Mongolian variation of Lama Buddhism has not been able to assert itself against the Christian sects even in Inner Mongolia, where Christian churches do not enjoy official tolerance and must organize and proselytize sub rosa.

An informant claimed that “in every town” in Inner Mongolia that he had visited the newest and finest building was always a Christian church, allegedly linked to South Korean evangelical support.

This implies that, contrary to the situation in the ethnic Tibetan regions of the Tibet Autonomous Region, Qinghai, and western Sichuan, Lama Buddhism in ethnic Mongolian areas has been unable to occupy a central position in the psyches of people looking for an alternative to Communism, commercialism, and Han Chinese rule.

From the Chinese point of view, then, Mongolian Buddhism is perhaps a welcome drain upon the energy, resources, and prestige of the Dalai Lama, and the more time he spends there the better.

World of Shadows

Zhang Hongbao is the Chinese leader of the world’s second largest qigong (“spiritual exercise”) sect, Zhong Gong. He resides in comfortable exile in Pasadena, thanks to a vigorous campaign for asylum in the United States that gained the support of Trent Lott and the late Jesse Helms, and attracted worldwide attention.

In addition to his status as a spiritual leader, Zhang styles himself president of the “China Shadow Government”, claiming the power to rally tens of millions within China to his cause.

A Chinese democracy activist, John Kosumi of the China Support Network, once wrote hopefully, “What Wei Jingsheng [the signature dissident and rallying point for the democracy movement in the 1980s] had once been to Deng Xiaoping, Zhang Hongbao had become to Jiang Zemin.”

Then, in 2003, Zhang was indicted on five felony counts related to a beating he allegedly inflicted on his housekeeper. He insisted the charges were a facet of an effort by the Chinese government to destroy him and his movement.

Indeed, Zhang faced the genuine peril of deportation from the United States and return to China for almost certain incarceration and possible execution when he went on trial in Pasadena in 2005.

However, Zhang’s peril raised little furor in Chinese dissident circles, from the US government, or from conservative confront-China circles that would normally welcome a chance to raise America’s consciousness as to the importance of confronting tyranny and supporting freedom of religious expression in China.

The sordidness of the alleged offense, Zhang’s diminished credibility as a principled dissident, and the marginalization and division of the Chinese democracy movement in America determined that the matter would be handled as an ordinary criminal case resolved discretely at the local intersection of justice, money, and high-powered legal representation.

In contrast to the extensive worldwide coverage Zhang’s asylum case in 2000 attracted, the assault case was only covered in depth by local papers such as the Pasadena Star-News and the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, which devoted several articles to the case. The Los Angeles Times and the AP covered it sporadically, reporting the resolution of the case on March 1 by a plea-bargain.

Zhang Hongbao pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor, paid a nominal fine, and went free, receiving credit for one day already served in LA county jail.

According to the LA Times (Jason Felch, “Chinese Dissident Avoids Deportation in Alleged Beating”, Los Angeles Times print edition, March 1, 2006), Zhang’s attorney, Mark Garagos, stated that Zhang was “ecstatic”.

This must be considered hyperbole, since Zhang was unable to gain acquittal and is now teed-up for a civil suit pursued by the housekeeper, Nan Fang He.

In fact, she and her lawyers may be pleased that Zhang and at least some of his wealth are safely in the United States and vulnerable to a civil judgment, instead of enmeshed in a prolonged appeal and deportation fight.

The case offers a window on the world of a Chinese qigong sect that seem to be bare-knuckle business and personality cult rolled into one, with a leader whose public posture is a mishmash of religiosity, dissidence, alleged illegality, and political grandstanding.

The Chinese democracy movement appears in the story as little more than collateral damage, and a footnote to the powerful forces roiling China’s economically vibrant but politically unevolved society.

Zhang gained notoriety and wealth in the early 1990s during China’s qigong craze as the master of the Zhong Gong sect (its full name is Zhonghua Yansheng Yizhi Gong or “Chinese Gong for Health Improving and Intelligence Enhancing).

In an atmosphere of heightened anxiety and enthusiasm amid the profound social dislocation of the post-Mao era, interest in qigong flourished among young and old in China’s cities.

The qigong craze was fanned by the emergence of qigong masters promising physical and mental well-being to those who followed their prescriptions for meditation and exercise. Admiring and credulous profiles of the masters, who claimed unique achievements and even special powers, appeared in the state-controlled media.

A transitory government willingness to tolerate new and more independent forms of popular expression, combined with the partial de-regulation of the economy, led to the emergence of movements that achieved a high level of organization and national reach.

Zhang Hongbao’s Zhong Gong’s movement grew quickly in this environment, both as a sect and an aggressive national business enterprise known as Tianhua (Kylin) Culture, that sold qigong-related products.

At the height of its influence, Zhong Gong claimed 34 million followers, 120,000 employees, 30 life cultivation bases, and 100,000 “branches”, and a reach within China only exceeded by Fa Lun Gong.

Zhong Gong differentiated itself from the larger and better-known Fa Lun Gong by promising its adherents that they could tap external as well as internal energies, thereby acquiring “special abilities” (te-yi) such as psychokinesis and ESP.

Zhang Hongbao’s charismatic leadership was apparently a large factor in the sect’s success. In the words of one qigong practitioner:

In 1988 another very important qigong master, Mr. Zhang Hongbao, added to the practice of qigong some more excitement. He attracted a large group of followers who called him their "zong shi" ("great master"). … Basing his project in Beijing, he organized many classes for qigong learning and charged high tuition. His method was obviously efficient in eliciting ESP and greatly inspired the learner's interest; thus his version of qigong was quickly propagated. Because of the adaptation of the clan system, a personality cult centering around Zhang Hongbao prevailed. In all areas of China, people were seen wearing Zhang Hongbao badges, just as people had worn Mao Zedong badges during the Cultural Revolution. It was said that Zhang Hongbao once held a news conference in the People's Hall.

…

In 1990 I met practitioners who attended Zhang Hongbao Qigong's classes. I found out how much they worshipped him. Before the ceremony of acknowledging the master, some even practiced repeatedly how to kowtow and asked onlookers to see if their postures were sincere enough. Learners of Zhang Hongbao Qigong liked to wear Zhang Hongbao badges, for they believed this was a way to connect themselves to their master's energy, which could increase their gong and bless and protect them. I have met many of them in different places. Their god was their master, and their belief was qigong.

When the Chinese government cracked down on Fa Lun Gong, Zhong Gong, and other qi gong sects in 1999, Zhang fled China, resurfacing in Guam, where he was detained and began a struggle for political asylum.

He was able to enlist the support of various Chinese democracy movement organizations, and also retain the legal services of Robert Shapiro, of OJ Simpson fame.

Reflecting the positive image of Zhang and his activities in the United States, Shapiro talked about his successful efforts to gain political asylum for Zhang on Larry King in June 2001 :

SHAPIRO: I represented one of the largest leaders of Chinese dissident group in the People's Republic of China. His name is Zhang Hongbao. And he has a group called the Zhong Gong, very similar to the Falun Gong, which is an exercise meditation group. He had one other element to it. He had an economic element, which dealt with health and well being.And the People's Republic of China became very, very concerned that these groups would eventually have political power. So they outlawed in 1999 the Falun Gong as an evil cult.And they were doing the same thing with the Zhong Gong. And he was threatened with all types of political persecution, including death. So he left China.And he went around the world, and he ended up in Guam, entering illegally with a fake passport. And he was detained by the United States government. And he sought political asylum.For 13 months, he was in custody when I came into the case. Because his political asylum application -- which should have been granted, because clearly, he was...

KING: He was under threat.

SHAPIRO: ... he was under threat -- the judge said, "I'm going to grant this." And then, the People's Republic of China sent letters to the United States government, saying that he is wanted for 20 rape cases. The judge, obviously, became very concerned, and asked that the State Department and the Library of Congress look into this. Both then...

KING: Wow.

SHAPIRO: ... and came back with an analysis which said, probably the charges that have been filed on their face are fraudulent. They are certainly very suspicious. And this is a common tactic that is done by the Chinese Communists for political dissidents.In any event, he is denied asylum before I come into the case. But he's granted wrongful withholding; that is, he can't be sent back to China.Both sides appeal. And he asks for release on bond. He's not going to go anywhere, because they're going to kill him if he goes back to China; that's the last place he would go. And for some reason, the United States government, at that time, would not acquiesce to the release.

KING: So what did you do?

SHAPIRO: I came into the case, and I went to Washington. And I started talking to political leaders. And eventually, we were able to get the support of then Majority Leader Trent Lott, who sent the letter to Attorney General Ashcroft.

KING: And?

SHAPIRO: And as a result, two days after the United States plane was released from China, Zhang Hongbao came back to Washington that night, so...

KING: He's a free citizen now?

SHAPIRO: He's here. Both sides are still appealing. But it's very clear to me that he will remain here. He's anti-Communist, pro- American. And quite frankly, it's one of the best things I've ever done, as you're aware.

KING: You're proud of this.

SHAPIRO: Yeah, very proud of it.

The opinion Mr. Shapiro refers to—a brisk dismissal of Chinese jurisprudence and the legal and evidentiary basis for the charges against Zhang--was prepared by The Directorate of Legal Research of the Law Library of Congress. It can be viewed on a portion of the Zhong Gong website entitled Zhang Hongbao in Blast Furnace, which collects documents and reports concerning his fight for asylum.

On Mr. Shapiro’s webpage, he lists his efforts on behalf of Zhang (referred to as “Mr. Hongbao”) as one of his signature accomplishments.

In testimony before Congress in 2005, China scholar Patricia Thornton described the mobilization of Chinese democracy activists on Zhang Hongbao’s behalf:

For example, when Zhong Gong leader Zhang Hongbao began a hunger strike to press for his release from detention in Guam while awaiting transfer to the US, several overseas Chinese dissident organizations-- including the Free China Movement, the Chinese Democracy Party and the Joint Conference of Chinese Overseas Democracy Movement-- rallied to his cause, organizing a press conference to draw attention to his plight. After winning his bid for political asylum in the US, Zhang returned the favor by joining forces with the banned Chinese Democracy Freedom Party, and by establishing an organization designed to push for the release of political dissidents from mainland Chinese jails. The virtual links between Zhong Gong and other overseas organizations, most notably Liu Siqing's Hong Kong-based Information Centre for Democracy and Human Rights, were quite close in the past.

Unsubstantiated scuttlebutt asserted that Zhang, in contrast to the avowedly apolitical Fa Lun Gong, supplied financial support for Chinese dissident organizations in America.

Zhang apparently managed to come to America with sufficient wherewithal not only to pay for Robert Shapiro’s legal services, but to acquire a large house in Pasadena and live comfortably there, despite the fact that he was presumably cut off from his followers, businesses, and income within China.

But in 2003, Zhang Hongbao’s quiet life in America unraveled .

First, on March 15, 2003 came the alleged assault on Nan Fang He—reportedly in response to a flareup concerning her shortcomings in supervising some contractors on the grounds of Zhang’s residence.

Then came Zhang’s arrest:

According to the police report, the housekeeper told officers that after bashing her head against a chair, Zhang told her: "If you tell the police, I will kill your whole family. If you tell your daughter, I will have her killed first."

After the incident, Zhang, along with two of his students, locked He in a room, according to the police report. Eventually, the housekeeper escaped, running to the street where she wandered bloody and dazed for hours before flagging down a taxi, the report said.

Shortly thereafter, Mdme. Yan Qingxin, Zhang's onetime domestic partner and erstwhile number 2 in the Zhong Gong movement, filed a civil suit claiming Zhang not only beat her but breached an agreement promising her half of the profits from Zhong Gong's operations during their 12-year relationship.

Damages demanded: $23 million.

Zhang obtained legal representation from Mark Geragos, a Los Angeles celebrity lawyer famous for his participation in high-profile criminal cases (Michel Jackson, Gary Condit, Winona Ryder, Scott Peterson). Geragos’ brother Matt is handling Zhang Hongbao’s defense against the civil suits.

The affair evolved into a blizzard of allegations, counter-allegations, and countersuits. Matters became so heated that the court granted restraining orders requiring Zhang to stay away from Nan Fang He, her family, and even her attorney for ten years.

On Internet message boards, Zhang’s partisans reported in the January 11, 2004 Pasadena Star-News :

One complaint alleges Zhang's housekeeper "maliciously punctured' the forehead of one of the guru's followers with a thorn, spoiling her chances for marriage.

Zhang, 50, of Pasadena, is the exiled founder of Zhong Gong, a Chinese spiritual wellness movement that once was reported to have as many as 38 million followers.

He was arrested in March for allegedly beating and falsely imprisoning his housekeeper, Nan Fang He, while his disciple Lisha Wu allegedly offered no assistance.

Zhang is awaiting trial on felony charges related to the case. If he is convicted, he could be deported to China where he faces criminal charges that could result in his execution, according to experts on the Chinese pro-democracy movement.

Wu's complaint alleges Nan Fang He punctured Wu's forehead while moving a plant at Zhang's Pasadena residence in September 2002. The facial injury "influence beauty directly,' Wu's complaint says. "I haven't married. It's easy to imagine the psychological pressure I endured.'

Zhang’s counterattack escalated with his announcement of the formation of the China Shadow Government in the summer of 2004, which he explicitly linked to his legal travails.
As an adherent of Zhong Gong explained in a post whose Chinese title evokes the rebellious heroes of the famous Chinese martial arts novel On the Water Margin (“Zhang has been forced to go up Liangshan”):

To this point, Zhang and Zhonggong are in great crisis, the situation is extremely severe and critical. The leader Zhang’s fame is greatly damaged, so is Zhonggong’s. Zhang is facing the trial in USA, so is Zhonggong, even including the International Zhonggong General Assembly. Once any kind of conviction was sentenced to Zhang and Zhonggong, Zhang won’t be able to work on the global development of Zhonggong and spreading Chinese culture, Zhonggong followers in the whole world and Zhonggong overseas organizations will not be able to survive and develop.

What’s worse, Chinese Communist government will get an excuse by way of taking advantage of US legal conviction to practice a new wave of persecution in mainland China where thousands of Zhonggong followers have been trying to seek justice for Zhang and Zhonggong. Or, CCP government will make use of US legal convictions to replace Zhang with Yan Qingxin, so as to take Zhonggong under its complete control. The motivation behind the facts that Yan Qingxin and her accomplices are so bold, so crazy in trying to push Zhang into a court is, therefore, very clear.

In such a situation, can Zhang survive? Can Zhang find a way out?

All these incidents are telling people one truth: so long as the tyrannical CCP government exists, Zhonggong can never develop, not even survive. Zhang is finally forced to openly rebel.

Aug. 8, 2003, Zhang officially announced to go public again in L.A., US. He takes it as his personal responsibility that China deserves a democratic social system and announced the official start of China Shadow Government. In his public announcement, he accepted people’s unanimous election result and became the President of China Shadow Government.

It is quite understandable to regard the formation of the China Shadow Government as primarily an attempt to burnish Zhang Hongbao’s dissident credentials and acquire domestic American political leverage in the face of his legal difficulties and the danger of deportation to China that they threatened.

Zhang Hongbao and his followers have sought to rebut the inference that the China Shadow Government was formed in response to the criminal and civil suits against Zhang, pointing out that it was “registered” eight months prior to the announcement in August 2003. They also make the contradictory assertion that Zhang’s legal problems are politically inspired and the Shadow Government is an inevitable act of self-defense.

It is difficult to find evidence of the China Shadow Government’s activities beyond a series of communiqués and reports posted on the Chinese-language section of the Zhong Gong website www.Tianhuaculture.com and translated into English on www.World-Chinese.com.

Primarily, the pronouncements of the Shadow Government seem to paint a dark picture of vainglory and personal grandiosity verging on megalomania.

A statement on the Zhong Gong website asserts:

“CCP leaders have always viewed Zhang Hong Bao as the biggest political rival.

(1) Deng Xiao Ping said Zhang Hong Bao is a remarkable character; entrusted Jiang Zemin at his deathbed to remember Zhang as the biggest challenger of CCP ruling.”

Other postings declare that the Chinese government was prepared to enter into a $4 billion trade agreement with the U.S. to get Zhang Hongbao returned to China.

The statements of Zhang’s followers indicate that he is regarded not merely as a dissident but as a charismatic leader and man of destiny:

When a great man is entrusted with a great mission, he often has to undergo bodily hardships, physical sufferings, and mental trials. The vicissitudes in the past years have sublimated Mr. Zhang Hongbao’s true feelings for the Chinese people and his sense of mission as a fighter to promote democracy in China. In his noiseless, intense struggles against both open and hidden enemies, in both open battles and skirmishes, Mr. Zhang has acquired his unique character of sang-froid and composure that enables him to handle numerous exigencies. …

This is truly an epoch-making event. History has picked Mr. Zhang Hongbao for a great mission. The Chinese people and all the people around the globe who care about democracy in China are looking forward to a magnificent answer sheet that Mr. Zhang Hongbao will submit to history!

Within and beyond the émigré community, Zhang’s recent writings have not done much to reinforce a picture of him as a realistic, reliable, or persuasive political force.
A sampling from the Shadow Government’s September 22, 2005 report CCP’s Post-Nuclear Super Weapons and Its Geostrategic Goal provides a taste.

The documents predict a war of conquest by China against the United States timed for a triumphal inauguration of Chinese hegemony at the 2008 Olympic Games.

Should the United States will be conquered before the Olympics, Jiang Zemin will be able to turn the Olympics into the gathering of all powers of the world, of which he will be the head, and realize his dream of “great leader in the great country”.

The post-war management of this large-scale modern war will require at least one (1) to one and one-half (1-½) years. By this reckoning, the war will start a year before Olympics in 2008, that is to say, it should start at the change from 2006 to 2007 (this war will not be postponed unless there is supreme strategy). The war shouldn’t last more than 70 days, leaving a little over one year for post-war management, to get ready for the Olympic Games.

Zhang goes on to describe three classes of superweapons he believes the Chinese are pursuing in order to destroy the United States per this timetable.

The first is a space-based weapon designed to disrupt electrical power.

The second is the power to induce powerful earthquakes and tsunamis, which he speculates was tested in the catastrophic Indian tsunami of December 26, 2004, pointing out, “The time was the commemoration day of Chinese Communist Party’s chief, Mao Zedong’s birthday.” He goes on to declare, “The Indian Ocean tsunami is telling the world that a deadly weapon on much higher scale has been born and has succeeded in its drill!”

In the third area, Zhang Hongbao returns to his area of expertise: qigong and the paranormal.

His remarks are worth quoting at length, not because of their strategic or political character, but because they illuminate a pattern of thought—traditional qigong—that has deeper roots and a wider and more dedicated circle of adherents in China than the democracy movement.

C. Supernatural ability will definitely be used as lethal weapons for world domination. …

For example: it is proved in Chinese almost thirties years supernatural abilities research that the application of supernatural abilities were not confined by space and time. The effect of doing within ten meters is the same as doing one hundred thousand meters far away. Therefore, supernatural ability persons can cut people’s hair thirty meters away, if the distance is three hundred thousand meters away, can the hair be cut? If using invisible scissors to distantly cut the hair, can he distantly cut the enemy head’s throat?

Take another example; if using “essence fire” to distantly burn other’s hair, can he remotely burn the eyes of enemy head or of sophisticated weapon operator?

Take an extra example; if using “invisible scissors” to remotely cut an apple, can he remotely cut the enemy leader’s head who refused to surrender?

Take a further example, if he can transport at his please numerous ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign coins and golden fishes to the appointed places and person’s body, can he transport chemical weapons to enemy’s commanding office or enemy’s senate or representatives house and directionally put these chemical weapons to the body of enemy head or relative persons?
If releasing energy to change the water into ice, can he remotely freeze person’s heart, blood or brains?

If using “astonishing essence fire from five elements” to burn the testing instrument, can he burn enemies’ computer operating system?

These inferences make people absolutely terrified but they are not most fantastic tales. Because there is people who plan to use these supernatural abilities in military affairs to contend the world domination. The public testing already proved the energy level of these supernatural abilities. Why not applied them in military affairs horizontally?

It’s easy to snigger at the idea of sinister qigong X-Men confounding Communist China’s foes with remote haircuts, frozen brains, and showers of goldfish.

One can also imagine that statements such as these, in the tradition of an esoteric and autocratic cult, have struck a fatal blow to Zhang’s credibility as the leader of a pro-democracy dissident movement.

A stripping-away of Zhang’s political support in the dissident community has resulted, with his close ally, the China Support Network, distancing itself from Zhang personally and the Shadow Government itself.

However, the Chinese version of Zhang’s article, with its pictures and fluent, confident prose, recapitulates key events of the qigong craze that filled many Chinese with excitement and wonder, and brings home the extensive appeal--and official patronage--that qigong and belief in the paranormal enjoyed in China in the 1980s and early 1990s.

Qigong beliefs, typified by Fa Lun Gong but also by Zhong Gong, were prevalent among the educated urbanites and, most disturbingly for the Chinese Communist Party, among many Party apparatchiks.

Qigong masters were brought to Beijing for successful demonstration of their powers before military and scientific experts, usually under the auspices of a Party leader who had a personal interest in the matter.

The Chinese Communist Party, which claims a monopoly on legitimate organized public expression, came to view the reach, organization, and fervor of the qigong sects with deep alarm once the initial fascination with this new popular movement had worn off.

The result was the 1999 crackdown that curtailed Fa Lun Gong and sent Zhang Hongbao into exile.

Fa Lun Gong has openly eschewed émigré political activism beyond seeking support from religious and human rights group and foreign governments to secure freedom of religious expression and the personal safety of its practitioners within China.

Zhong Gong has taken an overtly political stance, with decidedly mixed results.

It remains to be seen whether the qigong movements will serve as an effective adjunct to pro-democracy dissent, despite their superficial resemblances to the millenarian cults, overseas networks, and secret societies that contributed to the overthrow of China’s last imperial dynasty—the Qing--by progressive forces in 1911.

In some ways the qigong movement looks less than a repudiation of Communism than a redirection of its totalitarian impulses. Master teacher replaces Great Helmsman; qigong teachings push aside Marx, Lenin, and Mao; and the sect takes the place of the party.

Instead of abandoning the idea of one-party rule and replacing it with democracy, confused and threatened Chinese elites have turned to a revived nativist cultural and political identity that is not subservient to the West, and does not threaten the autocratic institutions that still govern China.

A biographical sketch of Zhang Hongbao by a follower offers an interesting perspective on the future master’s formative years, spent toiling as a forcibly rusticated youth on a state farm “in China’s ice-bound northern land” near Russia’s Siberian border:

[Zhang] became a legendary figure in that region because he was able to recite The Communist Manifesto and Dialectic Materialism and Historical Materialism, which is a text of hundreds of thousands of words. In the state-owned farm-reclamation systems of Helongjiang Province, he was widely known for his ability to “promulgate the original works of Marxism-Leninism without having to consult the texts.” With his unique critical perspective, however, he soon discovered the fatal loopholes in Marx/Lenin’s doctrines and embarked on his transition from a blind worshiper of Marxism/Leninism towards a critic of Marxist theory.

Zhang’s repudiation of Marxism did not lead him to democracy.

Instead it plunged him into the world of a millionaire qigong master—a world of shadows that outsiders seek to penetrate at their peril.

There does not appear to be a natural fit, either between Zhong Gong and the democracy movement, or between a chauvinistic, esoteric, and authoritarian sect and the American support for religious freedom and open societies meant to challenge the Chinese Communist regime.

In any case, the situation surrounding the Zhang Hongbao case illustrates the difficulties that arise when the aspirations of a democratic movement and the exigencies of a nativist religious sect collide.

The date for Nan Fang He’s civil suit has not been set.