Dog Fights

CHANGSHA, China – Translating a Chinese name into Roman characters can obscure personality traits. Guo Sanjun, or Sanjun Guo, written in letters means little. But 郭三军 goes a long way towards explaining why this man seemed so happy to explain the advantages of Russian fighter jets at a quarter past midnight.

San or 三 means three, jun or 军 an all-purpose character for military things. Take together "三军" is Third Army. What a presumptuous name! Did his parents know that he would grow up to be a towering giant, over six feet tall with a wide frame? That he job would require him to participate in meetings with Hu Jintao, Wen Jiabao and other members of China's crème de la crème?

I could have asked Mrs. Guo, but the timing seemed wrong. She appeared in the hallway of the soft sleeper train car in her pink nightgown. When her mouth opened to speak there were only four teeth, each one a solitary piece of enamel in an empty quadrant. Like many older Chinese women she seemed timeless: I would have accepted her age
being 55 or 90. She appeared annoyed.

"Why are you still awake?" she said to her son. "You talk too much. These people aren't interested. Come to bed."

Sanjun, the largest man in the compartment, bigger than a billion of his countryman, at first responded to the rebuke with sheepishness, his face pointed down at the floor. But then, perhaps realizing that he is 35-years-old and no longer 12, lashed out.

"I'm talking to these foreigners!" He gestured toward Zach and I. "We're discussing things!"

Mrs. Guo didn't looked impressed. Her son meekly ended his tirade by promising to come back to the sleeping cabin soon.

The pair was returning from a vacation in Yunnan, to see the Old Town in Lijiang and Tiger Leaping Gorge, by some measurements the deepest gorge in the world. When the T-62 finished its 38 hour journey from Kunming to Beijing, Mr. Guo would resume his job at the Ministry of Athletics. He introduced himself as a secretary, playing off the duel meanings of the word. He supervised Olympic preparations but served as a stenographer when high Communist Party officials held meetings.

He works, in his own words, like a dog. Six days is a short week, seven is a long one (the Chinese are striving, but have not yet succeeded in creating an eighth day). As the Olympics get closer there are more of the latter than the former.
"I am serving my country," he said. "This is my chance to be in the history."

That last quote featured a bit of Chinglish because this conversation took place mostly in English, the first since crossing the Laos border. At the hospital, on the bus, on the train, I used Chinese. I mention this because this man's education (at People's University, the third best school in Beijing) and language abilities ("I'd better know English," Sanjun said. "I paid a fucking lot of money to learn it.") set him apart from the ordinary Chinese I have been meeting on this trip. This is a man of some privilege, and his blunt opinions surprised me.

We met in the dining car. Zach and I played a card game called "500," a variation of Gin Rummy. At Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, six armed policemen escorted a pregnant woman with child off the train. Later in the evening, after the fuyuans pushed us out of the dining car to make way for overflow passengers and we went into the soft sleeper car's hallway to converse, Sanjun told us the woman had been caught smuggling drugs.

They found 470 grams of heroin hiding against her swollen belly. She would get 10 years, Sanjun said, and then told us about Chinese drug law. At the national level, getting caught with 500 grams – a little more than a pound – is a death sentence. Some municipalities are tougher. In Beijing 100 grams buys a free bullet, the same in
Shanghai. But Chinese are not without compassion; a pregnant woman is not killed.

Sanjun explained that drug traffickers take advantage of this loophole, luring hundreds of pregnant peasants as mules from the Burmese border of Yuannan Province toward the major shipping ports along the Southeastern coastline. The Third Army man had little sympathy.

"They're all dogs," he said. "Fucking bitches."

Then Sanjun brought out the military hardware, a thick pile of Chinese military magazines. He held me read through the latest issue, one with a line of Russian soldiers on the front. The F-18 is now outdated. There are mechanical problems with some Israeli equipment deployed in the West Bank. The magazine's longest article was a profile of three "Heroes of the Nation," a family of physicists. Readers are breathlessly told how California Institute of Technology staff said they would rather shoot the brilliant scientists than allow them to return home to the Motherland. But they did, and they proved key when China's hydrogen and nuclear bomb programs.
Sanjun helped me translate with relish, filling in words such as "advantage," "traitor," and "celebration," quickly. I liked this man, his clearly drawn sense of morality and crisp humor. If he believed I belonged to a class of American devils, he didn't let on.

“Third Army” isn’t a ridiculous name in the People’s Republic of China. The Third Army fought bravely in both the Chinese Civil War and Second World War (known here as The War to Resist Japanese Aggression. Edgar Snow’s classic Maoist account of the Revolution mentions a failed mutiny right here in Changsha. “However, the revolt was quickly suppressed, due to the loyalty of the Third Army,” he writes.

With his name carrying such a history, Sanjun’s unfettering support of the state is not a surprise: it’s foretold in his characters. He justified his militarism to me with a joke: "Other people do drugs. Some people like pussy. I read this." I laughed and accepted this position. When we parted shortly after the appearance of his nightgown-clad mother and did the customary exchange of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, I thought this time I might actually hang out with this man and argue military tactics among the dogs of Beijing.

Shooting off in space

ALBANY, N.Y. - So I see China has a "space weapon."

One strike on an obsolete weather satellite with a Cold War-era ballistic missile, and pundits declare an arms race.

"The Chinese have reawakened the notion of a space war by telling the world that, although it cannot compete with American technological advances, it can undermine the best in the business by adopting asymmetric tactics," Michael Evans wrote in The Times.

I'm not worried.

Although they got lucky this time, I place little faith in the navigational skills of the Chinese military. Records of Chinese explorer Zhang He's Ming Dynasty voyages are so confused that historians aren't sure if went to Greenland, the Cape of Good Hope or Rhode Island. That might have been six centuries ago, but hitting a moving satellite out of a space with a missile is like striking a piece of pollen from 200 yards away with a dart: pretty impossible.

The last half dozen navigators I've met in China (taxi drivers) can't even stay on the road, let alone hit a target.

Also, I doubt that China's influential pirate-DVD lobby will allow the country to attack United States communication systems. Without these, these businessmen can't receive the latest in Hollywood entertainment, add Chinese subtitles that ignore the movie's plot, and export them around the world for 50 cents a piece.

Finally, there's the sensible argument from "some analysts," (thanks, Joseph Khan) that China's real reason for testing the weapon was to encourage the United States to seriously negotiate space weapon limits.

That'd be fine, because although I'm not too worried about Chinese space missiles, I don't like the idea of hunk of weather satellite taking out a piece of my backyard.

The Capture of Jiang Zhendong

WICHITA, Kan. - At 8 p.m. on December 19th, Wang Donghong picked up the phone at Central China Television's Beijing office.

The caller, a man, didn't immediately reveal his reason for calling. He would only admit that, "When I see a police car or hear a police siren, I get very afraid," and that he was involved in a crime.

Wang pressed for more, but the man didn't give any additional information. She gave him her cell phone number, and the next day he called the studio.

"My name is Jiang Zhendong," he said. "I am from Funing county, Qinhuangdao city. I committed a crime in Tangshan."

Jiang wanted to surrender, and for Wang to accompany him when the time was right. They agreed on December 20 in Beijing.

When Jiang arrived at the studio, police were in place on the floor above the interview room. But Jiang was having second thoughts. He thought he might not turn himself in after all. What he didn't know was that the news crew had already made the decision for him.

"Ultimately, Jiang Zhendong was not especially clear about surrendering. On the other hand, we cannot let a known wanted criminal just walk right out. Therefore, we still needed to notify the police. As soon as the police are involved, everything has to follow the judicial process. Therefore the police gave Jiang Zhendong a lot of time to think about what he wanted to do," said producer Fu Liaojun.

Halfway through a catered lunch with his mother, the police escorted Jiang out of the building. He is now police custody, facing an unknown sentence for economic crimes.

Xu Youyu, a Chinese academic, disagreed with the reporter's action. He believed Wang erred by notifying the police about this man's crime. The decision to surrender is Jiang's alone, and Wang broke her journalistic responsibilities by informing the police. Here are a couple of answers from an interview Xu gave with the Chinese magazine yWeekend in response to the case:


Q: What do you think the reporter should have done?
A: She should not tell her supervisor, and she should definitely not tell the police. I believe that she ought to find some personal friends who can give her advice. At the very least, she ought to feel that it was painful and immoral to inform her supervisor and the police.

Q: But this reporter received a call to the program unit during office hours. It was not a personal telephone call. Should she inform her supervisor and the police?
A: (brief silent pause) I am going to insist on my viewpoint. Even if she was at work, she is not a machine spare part. She is human above all, and so she ought to heed the call of morality. Perhaps my viewpoint is extreme. But I am worried that they made sure that many fugitives who might have wanted to talk will choose to continue to remain in flight because they are afraid of being turned in.


A criminal wants to turn himself in for a crime. Should the reporter involved notify the police?

This would be a tricky situation no matter the country. Is the reporter just an observer, or are there times when he or she become part of the events unfolding around them?

***

Dawn on the second day of the Kansas autumn arrived under clear skies. The sun rose parallel to the eastbound lane of Kellogg Drive, Wichita's main traffic artery. I saw the rays through my rear view mirror, speeding at 67 mph towards a stand-off in the suburb of Maize.

I arrived 10 hours in to find a pile of weary Maize residents hunched against a fence near a street corner. Blocking their entrance were half a dozen police cars and a Salvation Army van. These people told me, drooping eyes testament to a night without sleep, how they'd been cleared out of their homes around dinnertime by police, who said a neighbor barricaded himself inside a nearby house and claimed to have explosives. They had to leave right away, unsure of when they'd be back.

The Salvation Army arrived soon after the standoff began, offering food, hot drinks and hotel vouchers. Few took the vouchers, sure that they would be back inside long before daybreak. Nearly half a day later, it looked as if vouchers would have been the smart option.

Three hours later, it appeared as if I might be wasting my time as well. I had little to report back to the office for several hours on the scene. A stern police officer blocked my approach to any of the negotiators, and all anyone else at the scene had was constant but false rumors that the standoff would soon end.

I crossed the street where the police cars gathered and sat down on the sidewalk. I took out my breakfast - a mostly crushed bag of Chex - and started to eat.

"Hey. Excuse me," a voice said from a white SUV parked just up the road. It belonged to a woman, in her early 30s, with bleached blond hair messily arranged in a ponytail. She wore a white T-shirt with a faded design on it, and a mostly smoked cigarette sat in her right hand.

"Do you have a cell phone charger? I really need to make a phone call. It's urgent."

I did have a cell charger, but we quickly realized that my ancient phone wasn't compatible with her model.

I stood there, apologizing, when the woman started unloading her story: She was the girlfriend of the man inside the neighborhood. He had a couple warrants against him, but he was a good person. Now the police surrounded the house of another friend, guns trained at the man she loved.

Her phone rang. The conversation was short, her battery was almost dead.

"He says he's going to turn himself in." She looked up at me, tears forming in face, "No, no, no, No! NO! NO!"

I rushed over to the neighborhood's entrance, trying to see the action that was about to unfold. I couldn't. The only media who witnessed the surrender was one of the local television stations, which raised a camera to the top of their truck's transmission tower. My editor, watching back in the newsroom, saw the man leave his home peacefully, wearing no shirt or guns, and be swarmed by over a dozen police officers.

A police captain walked through the barricade and fielded questions from the standoff. Who was this man? We don't know, we know he didn't live at the house, he said. Are other people involved?

"We know that the man was talking to people inside the home," he said. "We'd like to talk to those people."

During the press conference, two police officers went over to the white SUV and escorted the woman away.

Back in the newsroom, I wondered if I should have gone to the police when I first met the girlfriend. The police would have wanted speak with her, and trained negotiators might have been able to end the standoff sooner.

But I'm a journalist, not an agent of the police, and that's why I believe I made the right decision in holding back. I can report the actions of suspected criminals and their associates without turning them into the police. Criminals should be captured by the police or turn themselves in out of their own free will, not because they decided to tell their story to a journalist.

Wang Donghong's decision to interview the Jiang Zhendong was a good one, even more commendable because it took place in China. And since Jiang hinted that he wanted to turn himself in, bringing the police to the station was also a good idea.

I admire Wang's careful balance of duty to her audience and her legal responsibilities. As I know, the decision can be difficult.

(The facts and quotes of Jiang's case presented here are based on EastSouthWestNorth's translation of the yWeekend article.)

Watch Out for the Language Police

BEIJING - Two white dudes can't help sticking out on the streets of China, but what happens when you're trying to remain undercover?

This was my predicament as I met with a friend from university for a quick dinner yesterday evening. He's not with the CIA or any undercover organization. The reason for our discretion was that being discovered by an even more sinister group: his fellow classmates. Steve is on a language program here, with a language pledge.

Language pledges are a special form of punishment. With these programs, you agree not to speak English for several months at a time. Not to your friends, not while you are at dinner. This particular program had just a couple exceptions: writing e-mails, calling home and reading the Internet. That's it: no English hour or getting trashed clause (this would not be a problem for me, as the amount of Chinese I speak is directly proportional to the amount of drinks I've had). Just a hell of a lot of Chinese.

I've been speaking a fair share of Chinese these past few days; I'd even wager the some days the amount of Chinese spoken has been nearly level with the amount of English, but there was no way that our only meeting in several months was going to be conducted entirely in Chinese.

But there can be serious consequences for breaking this pledge: you get thrown out of the program.Waiting outside the East Gate of Beijing Normal University, I practiced some stock phrases to greet my friend. He appeared, speaking Chinese at the speed of a cheetah (he's in a quite high level) and wandered into a back-alley roast meet restaurant.

When the conversation switched to English, I got to hear more about the program: it was really, really hard. There's hardly any time for socializing, no matter what language. The people here (many from Ivy League schools) are really serious about learning Chinese. By the end of this program, Steve should learn a lot of Chinese, and get really good at spotting white people from miles away.