Hope is not a plan

The Chinese space program just sent a pair of astronauts into space, marking their second successful launch of a crewed vehicle.

The BBC story

Extensive coverage on Xinhua

In Al Jazeera, too

Rising spending by Chinese consumers will make China the second-largest market in terms of household consumption in the world by 2014, next only to the United States, said a study by Credit Suisse First Boston.

By 2004, the Chinese consumer market was the seventh-largest in the world, after the United States, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

The Xinhua article

If you have the money to buy the meds, one way to do an end-run around China's one-child policy is through fertility medications. As reported in this BBC article, fertility treatments are being taken even by couples without fertility issues. They're hoping for one of the frequent consequences of such treatments -- multiple-child pregnances. China's "one child" policy is more accurately a "one pregnancy taken successfully to term" policy, so loading multiple children into one pregnancy is a very effective workaround.

To date, the only proven means of birth rate limitation is mass affluence -- an internal limiter. Any external limitations will always inspire workarounds.

Xinhua is at its most blatantly propagandistic when reporting on Taiwan, as in this series of articles. However, rather than promoting the concept of reunification of Taiwan with the mainland, the articles present the image of China as a possessive ex, unwilling to even admit that a breakup ever occurred and that there's anything to talk about -- Taiwan should just get over itself and come home.

Of course, it's not my perception that they're targeting with these pieces, any more than North Korean propaganda ever truly targets anyone outside of the peninsula.

Walking around Monterey last week, I made the non-novel observation that there's an ever-increasing supply of Caucasian parents with adopted Asian children -- girls, specifically.

Indeed, as the Wikipedia article on international adoption notes, adoptees from China are overwhelmingly female (95%).

Though the adoption rate from China (~7,000 in 2004) is a pittance compared to the birth rate (on the order of 15 million in 2004), it still seems as if we're moving toward a future where not only might 15% of men in China not be able to find a spouse, they'll be able to look overseas at Chinese-American women who, while possibly being raised with some appreciation for their ethnic heritage, really won't be Chinese at heart.

An amusing entry on the talk page for the above-cited Wikipedia article suggested that these Chinese-Americans will learn Chinese and return to China to change the country. I doubt it. Most American-born kids of Chinese immigrants would be reluctant to do that; I can't imagine a Chinese-American woman raised on the central California coast would be excited about living in the PRC.

It's sad that the huddled masses of our time are abandoned baby girls, but I'm glad to have them here in the States. We're definitely coming out ahead on that deal.

I recently modified my gmail clips to include a number of news feeds, including Xinhua. This means I occasionally receive bits and pieces of exciting propaganda, such as:

U.S. asks Taiwan authorities to correct comments over "National Unification Council"

The quoted remark from the State department:

"We have seen reports that senior Taiwan officials have said, with respect to the 'National Unification Council', that there is no distinction between 'abolish' and 'ceasing activity' and that the effect of Taiwan's action earlier this week was to abolish the Council," the State Department said in a statement.

"We expect the Taiwan authorities publicly to correct the record and unambiguously affirm that the February 27 announcement did not abolish the 'National Unification Council', did not change the status quo, and that the assurances remain in effect," the statement added.

I am, perhaps, naive. But why are we worrying so much about Taiwan antagonizing China? China may be a totalitarian state, but it is by far the most rationally run out of the suite of totalitarian states that we've dealt with. What is the PRC going to do?

Invading Taiwan would be crazy. The U.S. may not be able to handle another war on the ground, but our fleet could certainly make the Taiwan Strait unhinhabitable for anyone else.

They could trade embargo the U.S., but I don't see that working well, either.

So what's the downside to letting Taiwan antagonize the PRC? Why do we play so nice with a totalitarian state that is already occupying one neighboring nation and wants to incorporate another? We fought tooth and nail to keep the Soviets from expanding their empire, yet I don't see us handing out Stingers to Tibetans.

As reported in this BBC article, Chinese media outlets such as the China Daily are praising Ang Lee on his Oscar win while cutting portions of his acceptance speech that refer to Hong Kong and Taiwan as distinct regions, as well as cutting this quote:

Lee said: "They taught all of us so much, not just about the gay men and women whose love is denied by society but, just as importantly, about the greatness of love itself."

An article in Xinhua titled "Chinese filmmakers, directors congratulate Ang Lee on Oscar win" contains this quote:

"I want to congratulate Lee on his success. I haven't got the chance to watch his 'Brokeback Mountain,' but I have always liked the elegant and graceful style of his movies," said Huang Shuqin, an acclaimed director in the Chinese film circle who is also a member of the 10th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), China's top advisory body in its annual full session here.

Note that, unless he breaks the law, Huang Shuqin will never have a chance to see Brokeback Mountain in China, as it's not being released there.

In response to the release of the U.S. State Department's 2005 Country Report on Human Rights Practices the PRC has once again tried to deflect attention from themselves by pointing out human rights issues in the United States, as reported in Xinhua and Al Jazeera.

This is a shoddy dodge. Even if the U.S. did not have a better human rights record than China, it would still be a dodge to say, "Well, look at how bad your record is." If one abuser calls another abuser an abuser, that's still a valid description, if it's true. Convert this to playground logic -- the PRC is basically saying, "He broke the rules too, so stop trying to punish me for what I did!"

It's mischief. They attempt to deflect a valid point with an ad hominem attack.

The Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in China may be discontinued as an administrative entity, according to this Chosun Ilbo article. At its creation fifty years ago, Yanbian was 62% Korean, but this has declined to 33%, despite a somewhat more relaxed policy allowing second children for ethnic minorities. The cutoff for having an autonomous prefecture for an ethnic minority in China is 30%.

Apparently, Koreans are choosing to go to other regions of China where Korean companies are setting up shop, as well as moving to South Korea.

This exodus from Yanbian and the possible loss of its autonomous status are notable inasmuch as this area represents roughly the northern half of the ancient Korean kingdom of Koguryo, from which the contemporary name "Korea" is derived.

The Chinese government is whining up a storm about the Canadian Parliament's unanimous decision to bestow honorary Canadian citizenship on the Dalai Lama. This honor, previously given to Nelson Mandela and Raoul Wallenberg, has the PRC quite upset:

"The Dalai Lama is a separatist so I don't think he should be honored with that. That will harm the Canadian image and harm the relationship between China and Canada. We hope these things will not happen in the future," he [Zhang Weidong of the Chinese embassy in Ottowa] told a news conference.

I have to say, this is only improving Canada's image for me. The current Chinese government has such a stark fear of loss of control that they can only label the Dalai Lama as a separatist and hope that people don't think too hard about the circumstances of Tibet's "entry" into the PRC and the way the PRC is trying to convert Tibet into a hideous tourist playground for China.

The CNN article

In the US, increases in health-care costs and a general aging-out of the population means that we're going to be facing some serious financial problems in the years ahead.

China has this problem, compounded by an ever-more-drastic demographic shift, by which the country continues to become more and more male.

This is not a new problem, but it's not improving, either. A PRC government report this week says that the boy:girl birth ratio is 118:100 on average, and up to 130:100 in some areas. By 2020, they expect to have 30 million more marriage-age men than women.

That's not going to turn out well.

BBC article

One of the downsides of successfully testing your antisatellite missile?

A 2,600km-wide debris cloud.

Chalk one up to the PRC for bad orbital citizenship.

...where the entire small town is rioting, at least numbers-wise.

Several people were injured as up to 20,000 people clashed with 1,000 police in Hunan province on Friday, a local official told Reuters news agency.

The Boxun Chinese news website said the clash was sparked by rising public transport costs. A witness told the BBC sporadic incidents continued on Monday.

These kinds of mass protests are not uncommon in rural China in the last few years.

BBC article

As reported by the AP, mirroring a report from Xinhua, Tibet's Communist Party secretary ranted about a perceived conspiracy between, well, everybody China's trying to suppress.

In a speech, Tibet's Communist Party secretary, Zhang Qingli, warned that the Dalai Lama was "ganging up with Taiwan independence forces, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, democracy movements, and the Falun Gong in an attempt to establish an alliance aimed at splitting the motherland," the official Xinhua News Agency reported on it Web site.

Zhang's list includes groups Beijing has accused of threatening the communist government or Chinese sovereignty. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement has called for independence for the Muslim, Central Asian border province of Xinjiang and is alleged to have links to al-Qaida. The Falun Gong, a meditation practice, managed to draw millions of followers in the 1990s before Beijing violently suppressed the group, banning it as a cult.

The "motherland." Nice. Let's not tell him that the major dialects of Chinese are, in reality, different languages. That might harsh his Maoist mellow.

Chinese state media reports that sexual transmission has, for the first time, overtaken other methods of transmission for HIV within China. China officially saw 70,000 new HIV cases in 2005, with about half due to sexual transmission. This is especially problematic in policy terms, as it moves HIV transmission out of somewhat neater "high risk" boxes such as intravenous drug users and into the "general risk" population. The epidemiological difficulty this represents is enhanced by decades of policy and even older social traditions that stand in the way of having an open discussion about sex. Sexual transmission of HIV is also likely to accelerate in the face of a large, migrant bachelor population and a concomitant pool of sex workers.

The high degree of stigma associated with HIV - and a lack of confidentiality - can also deter people from being tested at all.

China, like the United States, has serious issues with accepting the value of harm reduction.

BBC article

The government of Iran just released from custody two Chinese nationals who were arrested for taking pictures of a military complex in the town of Arak.

The Chinese foreign ministry said: "In early July, two people from Chinese companies mistakenly took some pictures of some sensitive buildings when they were helping local owners to conduct field measurements in Iran.

"They were detained by Iranian police and now they have been freed. The foreign ministry and Chinese embassy in Iran have warned Chinese citizens in Iran to behave so as to prevent misunderstandings."

Indeed. It's always good to prevent these misunderstandings.

BBC article

Items produced in China are once again turning out to contain problematic bonus ingredients. A batch of Bindeez beads -- little beads meant to be arranged artistically and then sprayed with water to fix them in place -- was found to be coated with gamma-hydroxy butyrate, the anesthetic and date-rape drug. Apparently, the manufacturers of this batch went "off formula" and decided to mix some GHB into the surface fixative on the Bindeez, a fact that was discovered when several children were hospitalized after swallowing Bindeez beads (note that a bunch of little swallowable beads is already probably not the best kids' toy).

The manufacturers insist that this is a batch-specific issue.

Naturally, there's a lot more vigilance about products imported from China in the last year, but this brings up an interesting question about the hit rate in successfully identifying items that are, one way or another, "off formula." If pet food causes kidney failure and toys knock kids out, the adulteration is apparent. But how long will it take to discover that a product simply lacks a necessary active ingredient. If toothpaste contains poison, that's clear. If it lacks fluoride, then that's an incremental increase in cavities over a large population, and that is not amenable to product-linked surveillance.

It's hard to say if there's a ready solution to this issue, or not.

BBC article

In case you missed it, this Voice of America article reports on the recent decision and too-late-to-matter reversal by the Chinese Foreign Ministry refusing to allow the U.S.S. Kitty Hawk and associated ships to dock in Hong Kong for the Thanksgiving holiday. This event, planned long in advance with official Chinese permission, would have let American sailors spend their holiday in port. Many of them planned on meeting up with family members who flew all the way to Hong Kong just to spend a couple days with their loved ones.

As the Kitty Hawk carrier group sailed to Hong Kong, the Chinese Foreign Ministry suddenly and without explanation denied them docking rights. This decision was reversed on Thursday (that would be Thanksgiving day) with the following bit of puerile doublespeak from spokesman Liu Jianchao:

"We have already decided to allow the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier group to stay in Hong Kong for rest and reorganization during Thanksgiving. It is based completely on humanitarianism. China has already informed the U.S. of this decision," he said.

Naturally, this weak-sauce reversal was far too late, and the carrier group was already well on its way to another port, away from the sailors' families. Whether it's because we gave the Dalai Lama an award or some other sad little reason, this is a huge act of disrespect, especially in the face of friendly fleet visits from the Chinese navy to American ports in the last year.

It is a sad and little display, of a type best retained for use within China, and not without.

Steven Spielberg withdrew this week from his role as an artistic adviser for this year's Olympics in Beijing, citing China's continued failure to do much of anything about the ongoing violence in Sudan's Darfur region. China buys some two thirds of Sudan's oil, a fact that on its own puts China in a unique position vis-a-vis the government of Sudan. Of course, the corollary is that it also puts the government of Sudan in a unique position vis-a-vis the energy-hungry nation of China -- especially in light of the Chinese government's reluctance to seem to be supporting any kind of divisive or separatist movement anywhere in the world.

I did wonder, though, why Spielberg didn't simply quit in the first place over the Chinese government's role in ruling China.

BBC article

The government of China announced this week that it foiled a plot by Uighur separatists to do something unspecified and bad to the Olympics -- although this link was not initially announced when the raid in Urumqi originally hit the news.

"Their aim was very clear, which was to damage the Beijing Olympics," Wang Lequan, head of the Xinjiang region Communist party, said on Sunday.

Wang offered no specific evidence of the plot, and earlier reports on the raid had made no mention of the Olympics being a target for the group.

Some people hoped that having the Olympics in Beijing would prompt a freeing up in China, and an increase in human rights, but it's also quite likely that the PRC will use the Olympics as an excuse to keep on doing what it's been doing -- stamping down on separatists in areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet. Connecting this to the Olympics also builds sympathy for the event as a hallmark of peace and cooperation, taking our eyes off of other high-profile negative events associated with the Olympics, such as Steven Spielberg's withdrawal from planning for the event. Similarly, it can overcome stories like an uptick in food poisoning deaths in China, which may negatively impact exports of food and related products from China.

There have been two terrorist hits on the Olympics, one of them particularly heinous. By linking their crackdown on an ethnic minority separatist group to the concept of terrorism targeting the Olympics, the PRC buy themselves a free hand to do as they please to stifle dissent.

AP story
al Jazeera article

As the Olympic torch relay moved through London, protesters did their level best to disrupt its progress, including attempts to seize the torch and to put it out with a fire extinguisher.

Chinese officials suggested that these disruptions were against the spirit of the torch relay. This, in turn, might prompt one to ask about that torch relay. Where did it come from?

Ah, yes. Nazis.

As the BBC helpfully reminds us, the very first torch relay was devised by the Nazi party ahead of the 1936 Berlin games.

"Sporting chivalrous contest," Hitler declared just before the torch was lit, "helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire."

Other countries on the relay route like Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia would soon be invaded by Germans equipped not with Krupp torches but with Krupp munitions.

This is not to say that a symbol can't move beyond its origins to become something greater -- and in most years, the torch relay probably has done so. This year, however, the symbol -- like the Olympics -- is being used by another totalitarian power as a way to present itself as a modern member of the world community, even as its leaders look to suppress ethnic minorities and quash dissent.

This Wednesday, the torch will be in California. You can find its route through San Francisco here. I'll look forward to seeing whether or not it completes that route.

Following protests in London, the torch relay faced even greater opposition in Paris. Extensive protests along the entire relay line forced the extinguishing of the external torch several times, although the flame is always kept alight in a redundant lantern held securely within the relay bus. The relay eventually stopped short of its conclusion, and the planned welcoming ceremony at city hall was canceled after protesters hung a Tibetan flag and a banner depicting the Olympic rings as handcuffs on city hall itself.

Chinese officials once again pulled out their 1950s playbook and hit us up with the following convincing statement:

"The Olympic flame belongs to the people around the world," said Wang Hui, a spokesman for the Beijing Olympic organising committee.

"So the behaviour of a few separatists would not gain sympathy from people and will cause strong criticism and is doomed to fail."

They do need to update their public statements. I might have gone with something less like, say, 1950s Communist propaganda and more like the words of IOC president Jacques Rogge:

He criticised the attempts to disrupt the torch relay, saying violent protests, "for whatever reason," are "not compatible with the values of the torch relay or the Olympic Games".

One might presume that attempting to obliterate the cultures of ethnic minorities would be out of step with the Olympic spirit as well. Although Tibet has become the main thrust of protests during the torch relay, we should recall that the Tibetans share their oppressed status with the Uighurs and, notably, with the Chinese people themselves.

The torch relay hits California, specifically San Francisco, this Wednesday.

BBC article

If you're curious about those historical documents, you can read more here. Of course, the Communist People's Republic of China turning to historical records from the Yuan Dynasty to support the idea of Tibet being a part of China is rather curious. It's not as if China is currently under Imperial control. If we run on the precedent of "the world as it was in 1300 defines modern territories," then looking at a map of Europe in 1300 we see that much of Russia must be given to the "Western Kipchak Horde" (do you have their contact information handy?), that the bulk of the Mid-east can be remanded to the custody of the "Ilkhan Empire," and that Spain must, assuredly to their disappointment, be fragmented into Castile, Granada, and Aragon.

Not to mention how much of a pain it's going to be trying to figure out who to give all the Americas back to, individually. Do you suppose we can find the Aztec leadership? No?

Not to mention the fact that a reasonable chunk of China has to be given back to the Huns. Shoot. That's just problematic. Maybe the Mongols? Also consider that the Yuan dynasty itself is actually a Chinese branding of territorial control by an outside Khanate.

It's all very confusing. I just wrote to the editorial staff at Xinhua asking if they could please explain it all so that it makes sense.

Xinhua, your source for photos of models in swimsuits and the best in incoherent propaganda.

From a New York Times article that came up randomly in a general news feed:

"It's terrible," said Lily Chang, 58, an American citizen who immigrated from Shanghai six years ago and now works at a gift shop in Chinatown. "This is not political. It's sports."

Untrue.

The torch relay is strictly political. It's always, each time it happens, a political display on the part of the host nation. Most years, that's a fairly innocuous thing, the equivalent of a gigantic tourist ad for the country. "Come to Greece!" "Visit Nagano, Japan!"

This year, it's propaganda for a government that has been consistently willing to massacre large numbers of its own people to maintain control, and consequently does not blink at suppressing ethnic minorities. The Olympic year has served as an excuse to kick up the abuse of ethnic minorities and others who aren't happy with totalitarian control.

If the government of the PRC wants to use the torch and the Olympics as a political symbol, it's only reasonable to reciprocate.

Tomorrow is go day. We'll see what happens.

In his column today, C.W. Nevius suggests that rather than the "stealth passage" of the torch relay through SF, including its last-minute diversion, was not so much an effort to avoid protesters as it was an effort to avoid handing the publicity of a trip through San Francisco over to the Chinese government.

For all the talk of protests leading up to the Olympic torch relay, we didn't hear much from the supporters of China.

They were waving thousands of huge, red Chinese flags or holding up identical, professional-looking placards that read "Beijing, 2008, torch relay."

Quite a few members of that crowd were on my train home today, hefting both giant PRC flags and those professional placards Nevius mentions in his column.

If Newsom did, indeed, extract the torch relay from the midst of an ever more egregious planned spectacle on the part of the PRC, I'm happy to hear it. We certainly won't receive official confirmation of that anytime soon.

From this article in the S.F. Chronicle:

One galling criticism in Chinese eyes has been the comparison with the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where the Olympic torch relay started - as a national glorification exercise under the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler.

In response to the Hitler comparison by a Times of London writer, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang said, "The Times and its journalist insulted the people of China and the world."

Conflating the government of the People's Republic of China with the Chinese people is exactly as insulting as conflating the Nazi government with the German people. In contrast, the Nazi-PRC correlation makes sense.

Late last week, a Chinese cargo ship carrying arms bound for Zimbabwe left the port of Durban in South Africa following a legal decision preventing the offload of its cache of weapons.

South Africa's government had said it could not legally prevent the arms being transported through the country but the high court in Durban ruled that the cargo could not be moved overland, though it could be discharged in the port.

The ship contains three million rounds of ammunition for AK-47s, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and several thousand mortar rounds, according to South Africa's Mail and Guardian newspaper.

The South African state-owned arms company, (not to be confused with the Philippines company of the same name) agreed to transport the weapons overland across South Africa to Zimbabwe after several private companies demurred. The South African government said that it was in no position to interfere in commerce between two sovereign nations, as there are currently no arms embargoes against Zimbabwe. That said, a number of countries (and the entire EU) have banned arms shipments to Zimbabwe.

The Chinese government, not particularly concerned about what happens in Zimbabwe but very concerned about not letting people touch its internal dealings, replied with the title quote of this post when challenged on the issue of sending arms into such an unstable nation.

BBC article

The Chinese government is having trouble lately moving things from place to place. The An Yue Jiang, freshly rejected by the dockworkers of South Africa, was reportedly making its way along the African coast, looking for a port of entry. Angola, generally friendly with China, announced yesterday that it wouldn't let the weapons shipment unload for transit to Zimbabwe.

Filomeno Mendonca, director of the Institute of Angolan Ports, said preventive measures have been taken although the An Yue Jiang has not requested to dock.

"We have warned our ports that this ship does not have authorisation to enter in Angola and therefore will not be assisted in Angola," Mendonca told a local radio station.

The latest news, however, is that the PRC is going to recall the vessel, sending a significantly smaller arms shipment by air, instead. With this, the Chinese government is clearly making a point, although the point could be anything from "we will not be messed with" through "we honor our commitments" and ending in "don't interfere in the internal affairs of other countries."

al Jazeera article

Showing that they can alienate pretty much anyone, the People's Republic of China has recently angered trading partner Russia by making home-made knockoffs of the the Russian Su-27 fighter aircraft.

An original 1995 deal between the two countries for the sale of 200 Sukhois to the PRC was structured such that all the parts for the planes would originate in Russia, then be assembled into the final product under Russian supervision in Chinese plants. Things have not gone as planned, however, with the PRC refusing Russian access to construction sites and, much more dramatically, suddenly canceling a substantial portion of their parts order in 2004. Following a series of incidents involving Chinese attempts to acquire plans and parts for the Su-27, the PRC put in a final order for engines...and then began manufacturing its own knock-off version of the Russian fighter.

Dubbed the J-11B, the fighter is clearly a Sukhoi, despite the PRC's risible claim that it's entirely home made. What does this all mean?

The Russian military industry has not made clear what legal action it will take if it is convinced that China violated Russian intellectual property rights. However, a civil aviation technology analyst based in Moscow says that the J-11B incident will surely have a major impact on cooperation between China and Russia in the aviation industry.

Russia's economic recovery in the past few years means that money is no longer the only consideration in deciding where to export its military technology.

Indeed.

UPI article

(I originally saw this in Pravda, of all places. But I can't imagine ever actually citing Pravda.)

In response to a letter from the normally completely docile International Olympic Committee complaining that recent remarks made at a torch ceremony in Tibet were political in nature, the PRC's foreign ministry denied any attempt to politicize the Olympics.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao also said he had no knowledge of the IOC letter, but insisted that Zhang's remarks had intended only to foster a "stable and harmonious environment for the Olympics," and did not constitute politicization.

"China's solid position is against the politicizing of the Olympics," Liu said at a regularly scheduled news conference.

Indeed. Here are the entirely apolitical remarks Zhang Qinglin made at the closing ceremony for the torch relay in Tibet:

"The sky above Tibet will never change. The red five-star flag will always fly above this land," said Zhang, referring to the Chinese national flag that was adopted by the communist regime that occupied Tibet in 1951.

"We can definitely smash the separatist plot of the Dalai Lama clique completely," Zhang said.

One can hardly see the politics.

On that note, have there been prior Olympic ceremonies in which a political figure actually referred to smashing their enemies?

CNN article

As the Olympics approach, Uighur separatists in Xinjiang province have ramped up their activities. Yesterday, they drove a truck into a group of exercising police officers, then hit them with grenades and finally waded in with knives, eventually killing sixteen and wounding another sixteen. The two attackers have been captured.

Notably, the Chinese press did report this as a separatist attack, while still officially denying that the two prior bus explosions were terrorist acts. Perhaps it's harder to pretend that a grenade and knife attack was an accidental fuel explosion.

It appears, at least looking from the outside and as filtered through largely PRC-controlled reporting, that the Chinese government was not adequately prepared for just how much separatist groups would pile on the violence as the Olympics approach and more non-PRC media outlets fill into the country.

BBC article
al Jazeera article

I was so taken by this AP headline that I went ahead and quoted it.

It brings up an interesting question that I continue to wonder about, vis-a-vis the Russian government's continued attempts to destabilize some neighbors via ethnic tensions while hoping to hold down its own autonomy-seeking ethnic minorities. Where will the PRC place its support? Obviously, it wants to support another major power that similarly seeks to maintain its own internal integrity, but as China is dealing with its own ethnic separatists, it's a little painful for their government to have to decide to back the Russian effort to lever off South Ossetia and Abkhazia.

I'd still put money on the PRC government just hanging out, hiding behind the Olympics, and saying things like this:

China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang issued a statement during the weekend saying the conflict should be resolved peacefully through dialogue.

Indeed. How likely is that to happen?

Two different AP stories concerning China highlight the continued issue the PRC government has with public perceptions and maintaining control.

First, two police are dead in Xinjiang following another apparent conflict with Uighurs. "Apparent" inasmuch as it's difficult at the moment to get news out of Xinjiang that is not coming through official channels, unlike other parts of China that appear to have greater penetration by hard-to-control communication methods.

As an aside, the AP article refers to the Uighurs as a minority. Although they're a minority in the PRC as a whole, they're the single largest ethnic group within Xinjiang, outnumbering Han Chinese.

More troubling in terms of the stability of government control is a story from Shanghai about a spree killer of police who has elicited a great deal of sympathy from the public, as many people can relate to his backstory of being mistreated by the local police. Make no mistake that he's also still just a guy who snapped, but the fact that people are able to relate to his motivation and are willing to talk about it shows just how shaky internal support for the government really is.

Of course, these kinds of things have been ongoing for a while, but it's possible that in the wake of the Olympics, we'll see more coverage. Notably, the trial for the killer in Shanghai was deferred until after the Olympics, due to its controversial nature and its near-guaranteed ending in a death sentence.