Will a conflict break out over Taiwan?

That will depend on China:

JJ: Will the U.S. Navy be sinking Chinese warships, in the Taiwan Straits, at some point during the next 10-15 years?

The hope is that the PLA Navy isn’t sinking US warships in the East China Sea using European weaponry. This would mean the end of NATO. The Chinese have claimed the China Sea (the East China Sea and the South China Sea) as an inland lake and thus, sovereign Chinese territory.

The Chinese approach to territorial issues is relatively simple - anything that was part of the Chinese empire at the high-water mark of that empire, the Qing dynasty, is rightfully Chinese territory, including tributary states like Tibet, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Okinawa (Ryukyus) and Korea. The analogy is to an Austria or a Turkey that decides to recover the empire of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. This is why China bears watching.

The Chinese education system has hammered home for generations that historical losses of conquered territory on the battlefield are unacceptable humiliations for the Chinese state. In contrast, the Chinese state’s conquest and annexation of foreign lands is defensive and in any event, the basic right of the Chinese people. Throughout history, various peoples have held the taking of foreign lands to be legit at different times - it’s called the right of conquest. The difference with the Chinese is not simply that they’ve held this view for 5000 years, they continue to hold it even today.

The Chinese threat has little to do with Communism and everything to do with the territorial irredentism that has been a central aspect of Chinese values for thousands of years. US and Chinese warships will eventually clash, although probably not in the Taiwan Straits* until Chinese missile and gun emplacements on land within range of the straits are completely destroyed.

* That’s the equivalent of walking right up to your opponent’s gun barrel.

Why the F-22?

M: We have 100% air superiority over the entire globe, yet we're spending a ton of money on the F-22.

This is because we do need to prepare for campaigns that are not like Iraq, such as a potential tussle with China over Taiwan. China is slightly larger than the US, and has an economy 150x as large as Iraq's (purchasing power parity numbers). The nearest land-based US warplanes will be hundreds of miles away from Taiwan (in Okinawa), whereas Chinese warplanes will be 40 miles away. The Chinese are buying hundreds of the latest Russian air-superiority warplanes coupled with Israeli avionics and anti-ship and anti-aircraft missiles designed with Israeli help. They are also buying expensive S-300 air defense batteries by the truckload (with ranges of 400 km) to destroy the Taiwanese air force and repel American jet fighters.

As conflicts go, Iraq is just a minor skirmish. When the balloon goes up over Taiwan, that's when we'll see dozens of American KIA on a daily basis. That is why we need the F-22.

Florida Splendid China Theme Park will discontinue operations

A Chinese theme park in Central Florida closes:

Things are not always as they appear in the world of Central Florida theme parks: trees are made from fiberglass, Presidents turn out to be robots, and the park that appeared the most serene was actually the most controversial.

Florida Splendid China, a $100 Million theme park which opened in 1993 on 76 acres just West of the main entrance to Walt Disney World, brought to visitors the beauty and landmarks of China in miniature form. Accurate scale models of some of that China's most interesting architectural and cultural sites, peopled with a motionless ceramic population, were scattered along the park's curving and well landscaped (if not particularly shady) paths.

The miniatures included replicas of The Great Wall of China (this version was half of a mile long and built brick by brick), The Terra Cotta Warriors of Xi'an, The Leshan Grand Buddha Statue (in 1/8th scale), The Forbidden City (including a miniature Emperor's wedding procession), Potala Palace (the spiritual center of Tibet and traditional seat of the Dalai Lama) and more than 50 others representing the diversity of cultures within the region.

Although all of the miniatures were meticulously done, some were more effective than others. The Yurts of Mongolia, for example, were on so small a scale compared to the surrounding grass that they appeared like nothing so much as upended dog bowls. It only took a few years for a few of the scenes to begin showing cracks and other wear, with some of the small figurines that populated them broken or missing entirely.
a miniature scene at Florida Splendid China

In addition to the miniatures there were shows scheduled throughout the day that included a review of Chinese culture and music and troops of acrobats doing truly amazing things with jars, hoola-hoops, and their own bodies.

Aside from the show schedule, visitors were free to wander the grounds and look at the scenes, or to just sit, relax, and enjoy the view. A large play structure, Panda Playground, was built to entertain kids when the slow pace of the park got too boring. Florida Splendid China had no rides, no bright lights, and no frenetic action and flashy stunts like you find at the other theme parks in the area. It was designed for relaxation and contemplation of the beauties of the Orient. On the surface, the park was serenity itself -- but in the background, if you listened, you could hear the sounds of protest...

Florida Splendid China presented a peaceful picture of China as it had once been -- the temples populated by quaint, colorful monks, no troops stationed in Tibet, and no tanks in Tiananmen Square. Protestors charged that Florida Splendid China was a tool for propaganda rather than entertainment, and they often staged demonstrations outside the park, and also worked to end school field trip visits.

The park's critics charged that depictions of Tibet's Potala Palace, Mongolian Yurts, and other landmarks from other cultures as being within China were attempts to legitimize Chinese Communist occupation of formerly independent areas, that the multiplicity of religious sites gave a false impression of religious and cultural tolerance within China when those religions were being oppressed, and that the park was actually owned and operated by the Chinese Government through China Travel Services and was in violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. Park officials denied that there was any political purpose to Florida Splendid China. The vice president of China Travel Service told The Orlando Sentinel: "We're a theme park. Nothing more."

Americans never embraced Florida Splendid China. Unlike its sister park in China, Shenzhen Splendid China, which has been a major success with thousands of visitors each day, the Florida park was rarely crowded. It seemed to have been built for a much greater volume of guests; several restaurants built within the park remained empty and closed. If it was propaganda, the message wasn't getting out as widely as first planned.

As the park deteriorated in the Florida sun, Sunny Yang, once President of the attraction, attempted to negotiate a sale of the park in 2000, but was recalled to China and placed under house arrest, in part because of allegations of financial mismanagement from his handling of the attraction. In 2002 the Orlando Business Journal called Florida Splendid China "the theme park equivalent of a ghost town." Compared to the other theme parks of Central Florida, it didn't seem so splendid, after all.

On December 30, 2003, the following appeared on the park's website: "FLASH!!! Florida Splendid China Theme Park will discontinue operations in Central Florida as of the close of business on December 31, 2003. This determination was reached primarily due to the continued downturn in the tourism economy, as evidenced by the closing of other tourism-dependent businesses in the area. Despite several years of attempting to achieve successful theme park operations, the company has concluded that it could not longer continue to incur significant losses. To our friends and supporters, we express extreme regret that this action has become necessary."

The park is now closed.

A decade ago, the Chinese government saw fit to invest (via the government-run China Travel Service) some of its US dollar reserves in a Chinese theme park in Florida. Unfortunately, it may have invested far too little money to develop compelling attractions - a mere $100m, compared to the $4b it took for Disney to set up Euro Disney. The basic attractions that caused Chinese tourists to flock to its Shenzhen theme park were insufficient to attract tourists away from Universal Studios or Disney World in Florida.

Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance

Chinese historians tend towards hagiographies of the Chinese Communist state, while depicting other great powers (and potential rivals) as evil and manipulative. The New York Times looks at what Shanghai's high school students are taught:

The history teacher maintained a blistering pace, clicking from one frame quickly to the next, during a lecture on China's relations with the world from 1929 to 1939 in one of this country's most selective high schools.

There was Hitler, shown on parade, his hand lifted in the Nazi salute. The teacher mimicked the gesture, to brief laughter, announcing the year the dictator came to power, with no pause for a discussion of fascism. Pushing ahead quickly, he said the United States was exploiting Canadian and Latin American resources, while Britain fed off India. Wherever it could, France, which was dismissed in barely a sentence, mostly followed Britain's example.

Getting to the meat of the lesson, the teacher said Japan decided to pursue its own longtime desire for a continental empire, and attacked China. The presentation lingered on a famous 1937 picture of a Chinese baby sitting in the middle of a Shanghai road amid the Japanese aerial bombing of China. Then, moments later, the teacher announced plainly, "America's attitude toward the Japanese invasion of China stopped at empty moral criticism."

This country has made a national pastime of wagging its finger at its neighbor, Japan, which it regularly scolds for not teaching the "correct history" about Japan's invasion of China in the 1930's, straining relations between Asia's biggest powers.

However, a visit to a Chinese high school classroom and an examination of several of the most widely used history textbooks here reveal a mishmash of historical details that many Chinese educational experts themselves say are highly selective and often provide a deeply distorted view of the recent past.

Most Chinese students finish high school convinced that their country has fought wars only in self-defense, never aggressively or in conquest, despite the People's Liberation Army's invasion of Tibet in 1950 and the ill-fated war with Vietnam in 1979, to take two examples.

Similarly, many believe that Japan was defeated largely as a result of Chinese resistance, not by the United States.

"The fundamental reason for the victory is that the Chinese Communist Party became the core power that united the nation," says one widely used textbook, referring to World War II.

No one learns that perhaps 30 million people died from famine because of catastrophic decisions made in the 1950's, during the Great Leap Forward, by the founder of Communist China, Mao Zedong.

Similar elisions occur in everything from the start of the Korean War, with an invasion of South Korea by China's ally, North Korea, to the history of Taiwan, which Beijing claims as an irrevocable part of China.

"The Anti-Japanese War finally succeeded, and Taiwan came back to the motherland," another leading textbook states, referring to Japan's defeat in World War II and the loss of its colonial hold on Taiwan.

IBM turns lead into gold

IBM has now sold its PC unit to Lenovo, China's largest PC manufacturer:

China's largest personal computer maker, Lenovo Group Ltd., said on Wednesday it is buying control of IBM's PC-making business for $1.25 billion, capping the U.S. tech giant's gradual withdrawal from the business it helped pioneer in 1981.

The agreement, which forms the world's third largest PC business, calls for Lenovo to pay IBM $650 million in cash, $600 million in Lenovo Group common stock and for Lenovo to assume $500 million in net balance sheet liabilities from IBM.

IBM will hold an 18.9 percent stake in Lenovo.

The deal closes an era for the world's largest computer company and kicks off a new age in which China's top PC maker Lenovo steps onto the world stage as a major PC brand and IBM partner.

The sale of IBM's PC desktop and notebook computer lines frees the company to focus on higher-margin businesses such as computer services, software, more powerful server computers, and storage as well as computer chips, analysts have said.

For Lenovo, which is battling intense competition in its home market, the deal with the world's largest computer company marks a breakthrough in its efforts to build its business overseas. It would also make the company part of a small but growing group of Chinese manufacturers buying overseas brands.

Lenovo will take ownership of IBM "Think" trademark family, including its ThinkPad notebook brand and its ThinkCenter desktop line. Lenovo will also buy out IBM's interest in its joint venture with Lenovo rival Great Wall Technology, China's No. 2 PC maker.

Lenovo will hire 10,000 IBM PC employees -- including about 2,300 in the United States -- mostly product designers, marketers and sales specialists -- and some 7,700 elsewhere, principally in China, where IBM operates a manufacturing joint venture.

Now, IBM's PC unit is a screwdriver factory, just like Dell and Lenovo. All it does is bolt on other companies' parts and designs. It doesn't design the screen, the CPU, the operating system, the motherboard, the keyboard or the mouse. Even the semiconductor manufacturing equipment on which the PC industry is based is made by other firms.

An acquaintance who has worked at IBM believes the PC unit loses $1B per year (only $250m officially - known only to the planning community within IBM - on pain of discharge). IBM has received almost almost $2B from Lenovo for an operation that was hemorrhaging cash - in effect, turning lead into gold. It appears that IBM has unlocked the long-sought secrets of alchemy.

Meanwhile, Dell is eating Lenovo's lunch - in China, even though the Chinese government openly prefers Lenovo products, because it has significant ties to the Chinese government. Will IBM's brand name save Lenovo? Unless Lenovo upgrades its quality control, the IBM name will merely be a fancy logo on a Lenovo PC. But therein lies the problem - with an increase in quality will come an increase in costs. At its current rock-bottom prices, Lenovo already has a problem competing with Dell. What happens when Lenovo hikes its prices to pay for the cost of acquiring IBM's brand name and the cost of upgrading quality control?

The Lenovo-IBM deal is a big step for IBM's profits. IBM will henceforth increase its earnings by $1B pre-tax, while also improving its balance sheet by $1.75B dollars. Lenovo, on the other hand, gets IBM's pension liabilities and the plants that have been losing IBM $1B a year.

Did he do this to you?

The unfortunate plight of China's rural disabled:

Every day for two months, 13-year-old Qian Qian positioned herself on a footbridge near the glass office towers of Guangzhou, one of China's wealthiest cities. Amid cigarette butts and candy wrappers, she tucked her immobile, pipe-stem legs under her body and placed a red plastic bowl in front of her, begging for money. Blood from cuts hardened on the soles of her feet, recalls Qian Qian and a man who saw her there.

"My home is in Anhui," Qian Qian remembers telling people who asked. "My family was wiped out by the floods."

Her real home, more than 2,000 miles to the north, wasn't in Anhui, nor was her family killed in floods. Qian Qian, born with a protruding spinal cord and deformed legs, was given away by her unwitting father, a small farmer struggling to pay medical bills, in return for some money and a promise that she would be cared for.

Instead, her new guardian took her to Gongxiao, a nearby village that has made a lucrative specialty out of begging, just as others have trained fortune tellers or basket weavers. Some locals say more than half of the village's 1,500 residents have begged to build houses or pay school tuition. The village regularly procured disabled children to help beg, a role Qian Qian was forced to play while her father thought she was working in a store.

Qian Qian says her new guardian, a man named Gong Qingping, gave her a razor blade and told her to cut her feet and legs to appear more destitute. Sometimes he gouged them himself, she says. Mr. Gong's daughter, now 17 years old, deposited Qian Qian at the Guangzhou bridge in the morning, watched her during the day and picked her up at night.

With little feeling in the lower half of her body, Qian Qian was unable to control her bowels or move very far and often she sat in her waste. She typically earned the equivalent of $5 a day, which she would hand over in a small plastic bag. Eventually, Qian Qian was able to fight back, in a way that transformed her life for a second time.

Qian Qian's story reflects the wrenching social changes under way in booming China, most notably a growing gap between newly industrialized wealth and the rural poor. For many stuck in the time warp of the Chinese countryside, begging is becoming an increasingly appealing profession. A beggar's income can be as much as 10 times that of a farmer.

...

After several Chinese newspaper articles appeared about Qian Qian, a U.S. charity, Children's Hope International, offered to sponsor her medical care. In August, she moved to a hospital in Beijing where she will undergo a series of surgeries. An American couple who run a nearby foster home say they might be able look after Qian Qian as she recuperates but it's possible she will later have to return to her family's home in Henan.

Doctors list her ailments as hepatitis B, skin cankers on her heels and dislocated hip joints. Although she probably won't ever walk and will continue to wear diapers, she may someday stand up on her own, her doctors say.

"Things might be different if she received good treatment earlier," says Liu Xiangchun, a 32-year-old orthopedic surgeon treating her. She travels the hospital hallways in a donated wheelchair, greeting doctors and nurses and playfully bumping into other patients. Now that her bedsores have healed, Qian Qian is expected to undergo surgery this week to repair her mangled spinal cord, according to the surgeon.

In her bright hospital room, Qian Qian keeps a newspaper article about her plight in a drawer. She can't read very well but recognizes a picture of Mr. Gong. She refers to him not as Dad, but "the bad egg." She has drawn a gun and a single bullet striking the back of his head. As for her real father, Qian Qian is cool toward him. "My Dad knew he wasn't taking me to see a doctor," she says.

In August, Mr. Xu asked village officials for financial help to see his daughter. The officials declined. After receiving inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about their decision, they changed their minds and offered Mr. Xu the equivalent of $60 -- enough for two round-trip bus tickets.

Later that month, Mr. Xu and his sister arrived at the Lotus Pond bus station in western Beijing wearing matching grey suit jackets. They made their way to the hospital as the sun rose.

Upon seeing her awake, Mr. Xu's sister smothered the groggy girl with a hug and teary kisses. Her father, wearing a sheepish smile, followed with a light touch to her shoulder and sat down near a window. He hadn't seen his daughter since he left her at the Gong compound three years earlier.

As a nurse's attendant swabbed the deep cuts on one of Qian Qian's heels, Mr. Xu knelt down and pulled off the powder-blue sock on her other foot. He looked at the puncture marks and bruises below the ankle.

"Did he do this to you?" he asked. "Did he do this to you?"

Qian Qian didn't say a word. She twisted her face away from her father and with eyes wet, stared up at the hospital lights.

Ruthless elegance

John Podhoretz speculates about GWB's firing of half the cabinet prior to his second inauguration:

For years now, liberals and leftists have been unable to decide whether they dislike George W. Bush because they think he's a doofus or because they think he's evil. So they've come up with a peculiar new political caricature to make sense of the president they simply cannot understand: To them, he's the Evil Doofus.

But this just doesn't work. You can't be both evil and a doofus. Doofuses have a sweet and dopey quality. Evildoers know what they're up to, and they're frightening in their relentless pursuit of bad aims.

Conservative fans have also found themselves puzzled by Bush. Many consider him the soul of decency, a good man of faith and dignity - a man who believes in loving thy neighbor as thyself and not casting the first stone.

These gentle qualities, however, contradict his vital appeal to those who want their president to be the kind of resolute tough guy who won't knuckle under to anybody - not Saddam Hussein, not some hoity-toity French president and not John Kerry and the Democrats.

So who is he? Doofus or evil? Nice guy or tough guy?

What if he's none of the above?

What if, in fact, he's a smoothie - someone who achieves his political aims with elegance that's all the more shocking because there's nothing especially elegant or smooth in his manner?

Consider his conduct in the wake of the election. It is now clear, from the way Cabinet secretaries are seemingly ousting themselves left and right, that most of the Cabinet departures were not voluntary.

How do I know this? Only because of the psychological impact of this election. Every Bush supporter, from the voter in Ohio to a White House staffer, felt as though he'd won part of the victory on Nov. 2.

It doesn't follow that eight (at present count) of his 15 cabinet secretaries would greet that sweet vindication by saying, "I'm outta here." Sure, these are tough jobs - but just because they're tough doesn't mean they're not fantastically desirable and that the people who hold them want to give up the door-to-door car, the traveling retinue that gets them a soda and a candy bar at the airport so they don't have to and the colossal office.

We know that both Attorney General John Ashcroft and Secretary of State Colin Powell wanted to stay on, at least for a while, and were given a hearty thank you and a goodbye handshake.

And we can discern from the bizarre conduct of Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson at his farewell press conference - you know, the one where he gave the terrorists tips on how to stage an attack on our food supply - that Thompson was firing a weird warning shot across Bush's bow because he was upset at his almost certain ouster.

And yet there they all went, one after the other. They were given the dignity of a seemingly personal decision to set a new course for themselves. When Richard Nixon won his second term, he demanded letters of resignation from all political appointees - a decision that had a thuggish cast to it even though it was probably an effort to do exactly what Bush has done.

The one person who didn't quite get the message - Treasury Secretary John Snow - was given an unidentified push in the media by a senior official who said he was welcome to stay if he didn't stay very long.

Note also how Bush kept the news of his most controversial choice - the decision to keep Donald Rumsfeld on as secretary of defense - until after the cascade of pseudo-resignations.

The president has cleared the decks for his second term with surprising speed and even a dash of ruthlessness. You might think ruthlessness and elegance can't co-exist, but you would be wrong. Elegance has a ruthless clarity about it, just as Bush has a ruthless clarity about him.

Interestingly enough, some liberals, include many media pundits, appear to take the view that cabinet officials exist to make life difficult for the president. Last night, while listening to Bloomberg radio, I heard the radio commentator trying to get affirmation of what he suggested was Bush's incompetence - over the campaign to get John Snow (the Treasury Secretary) to quit via leaks to the media - from a former Clinton Treasury official. The Clinton official declined to entertain the suggestion.

Cabinet officials serve at the president's pleasure. If they do not quit, they can be fired. If John Snow is in fact on the firing line, he will have been subjected to broad hints about his future with the administration. (On the other hand, the media could be wrong - they were certainly wrong about the possibility of Donald Rumsfeld being removed during the Abu Ghraib tempest in a teapot).