I went into New York yesterday to drop off my application and paperwork for a Z (working) visa and was completely and utterly rejected. Seems that my working permit indicates that I'll be living in China for purposes of employment, while my invitation letter says I'll be participating in a vague-sounding "exchange program".

My employer ensures me that this is the same phrasing they've used to obtain Z visas for other foreign experts in the past... but as you all know, what used to be good enough isn't cutting the mustard these days. A new invitation letter is on the way, but since it's issued by the State Administration of Foreign Experts Affairs there's no telling how long it'll take. My flight back to Beijing on July 17 is in serious jeopardy.

Not that I'm the only one complaining, by any means. Having it out with a visa officer in the line next to mine was what I think — using my super-powers of ethnic stereotyping and observation — was an ex-Soviet middle-aged Jewish businessman. He was screaming through the glass partition, "I've been to China ten times! I never had problems getting a visa before! I'm going to be entering through Kazakhstan but leaving by plane! Don't you know that there are valid land crossings into China?!?"

So, I'll just have to sit and wait. The best part was when I complained to the visa officer that getting a new invitation letter from China was "tai mafan" (too much trouble), and she responded, "Not as much trouble as Chinese people have getting a US visa." What, is this some sort of contest?

She reminded me of the commenter who frequently tells me that nothing would make him happier than seeing a purported splittist sympathizer get denied entry into China. I remain optimistic.

Two vaguely related news items today, both of which tie into the whole pre-Olympic security craziness we've been living through in China lately...

First, the Olympic torch is heading to Xinjiang on Wednesday... probably. Surprised? So is everybody else, because the festivities have suddenly been moved forward a week. The torch relay was kinda maybe sorta supposed to go through Tibet this week, but those plans are up in the air and very hush hush. (Translation: nobody know what the f#%! is going on.)

AFP has published a prequel follow-up on the whole "Uyghurs bomb a police station" story from last week. The first article indicated that the attack was in response to a heavy-handed police crackdown in Xinjiang. This article — again based on an interview with a spokesman for the World Uyghur Congress — fleshes out a few details:

China has tightened controls on Muslims in its remote west ahead of the Olympic torch's arrival next week to thwart any actions aimed at disrupting the relay, residents and exiles said.

The measures include detaining thousands in the Xinjiang region and forcing Muslim religious officials to undergo "political education" on "protecting" the Olympics, said Dilxat Raxit, spokesman for the Germany-based World Uighur Congress.

With the Beijing Olympic torch expected in Xinjiang on its nationwide tour, authorities have also confiscated the passports of some Muslims, Uighurs told AFP.

"They are afraid people might travel abroad and join some sort of plot against the Olympics," said a college-educated Uighur woman in her twenties, whose passport was taken by police here earlier this year.

The woman, whose name was withheld by AFP to protect her from police reprisals, was forced to cancel plans to attend graduate school overseas....

Beijing Olympic organisers recently said the sensitive Xinjiang torch leg would take place June 17-19, a week earlier than planned. It originally was to transit the capital Urumqi, Kashgar, and two other cities.

However, Olympic officials last week would not disclose up-to-date plans to AFP amid confusion surrounding sensitive relay legs following violent unrest in Tibet in March that laid bare simmering discontent in China's minority regions.

A stage was set up near Kashgar's main mosque, apparently for torch ceremonies, but residents said there had been no new announcement on when the flame would arrive.

China has blamed the confusion on schedule changes caused by the May 12 Sichuan earthquake.

Raxit said Muslims in Kashgar have also been ordered to avoid any contact with foreigners, report any overseas journalists operating in the area and sign pledges denouncing separatism and supporting Beijing.

Thousands of Muslims who were not residents of Kashgar and Urumqi also had been forced to leave those cities, he said.

I've even heard that some cities in Xinjiang are now issuing strange new local residence cards to foreigners, to sort out the good from the bad.

Of course, Xinjiang isn't alone in suffering from "the confusion" sweeping across China these days. Everywhere I go in Beijing, I hear foreigners complaining about visa troubles. I, too, am amongst those who will have to return to their home countries now that the Hong Kong visa run has become a nightmare.
••••

The second item is a review of Charles Cummings' new China thriller, Typhoon, with a plot particularly relevant to the news above:

In Charles Cumming's well-timed and excellently executed Typhoon... the pantomime villain lurking in the background this time is the spectre of Islamic fundamentalism.

This might at first glance seem opportunistic and a mite improbable, but that only reflects one of the book's key themes: how little any of us know or apparently cares, especially since 9/11, about the rampant human rights abuses in China's other controverisally annexed province: Xinjiang....

Swoop on a decade to almost the present day and Joe goes back to China to find all his old nemeses waiting for him, coiled up within a cold-blooded maverick plot to use Uighur separatists to damage China's reputation on the eve of the Olympic Games.

Now where would he ever come up with a plot like that? I'll have to try and get my hands on a copy when I'm back in the U.S. next month.

It's official... in less than 24 hours the entire country will know that I'm an ass. If you're in the Middle Kingdom and own a television, make an effort to watch China Right Here on Tianjin TV tonight (Saturday) at 6pm.

Hear me talk about never leaving Xinjiang, always being the sundried tomato king, and various other nonsense. Watch me ride a camel, as if that's something I did every day. Sigh.

The previous entries about making this program are here and here. I'll try to get a copy of the show and upload it to YouTube someday, unless one of you beats me to it.

John Bellinger — previously a legal adviser to the National Security Council and currently shoveling shit over at the State Department — served as the Bush administration witness du jour.

A transcript of the hearing indicates that there is at least some congressional support for allowing the Uyghurs in limbo to start new lives in the United States:

BELLINGER: You mentioned the case of the Uighurs, I think, Mr. Rohrabacher. But that's where diplomatic assurances come in, because if we don't have a good alternative, if the alternative is to let the person go into the United States, I think you will be hearing from your constituents as to why are we letting someone go, who poses a risk to our country.

ROHRABACHER: Well, the question with the Uighurs, of course, was that the chairman and I have actually come to the conclusion — and I've looked at it — they were not a threat to the United States. In fact, perhaps their original incarceration was an error in judgment.

And when we have an error in judgment, again, we should admit it, and in this case not send them back to communist China, because of communist China's human rights record, and instead by admitting our mistake, permit them to stay here. The chairman and I in fact are signing a letter to that accord to the State Department.

The representatives also brought up the recently released information on Uyghur detainees being prepared for interrogation by the Chinese at Gitmo:

PITTS: Just to follow up on this Uighur situation, the Department of Justice inspector general report had a very interesting relevant footnote 134, where the IG revealed that an FBI agent told the IG that the Chinese government officials came to Guantanamo and interrogated the Uighurs being detained there by the U.S. military.

And he reported that at the request of the Chinese government interrogators, these people, the Uighur detainees, were subjected first to forced sleeplessness, and then low temperature room for night and day, before questioning by the Chinese officials.

The key point here is that U.S. government officials invited the very Chinese government that mistreated the Uighurs, caused them to flee China, and they were allowed by the U.S. to interrogate them at a highly restricted U.S. military base, where ironically members of Congress are not even allowed to talk to the detainees.

And allegedly, the U.S. military personnel were directed to soften them up, abuse them, whatever you want to call it, before getting them ready for questioning by the Chinese officials.

Who made the decision to allow the Chinese government to interrogate a persecuted religious minority in a U.S. military base? Who would make that decision?

BELLINGER: Sir, I would assume that would be the Department of Defense, and you would have to put the question to them. I will say, trying to connect this with the chairman's question, that we are concerned about the situation of the Uighurs.

We made the decision early on that because we thought they would be mistreated if returned to China, that even though a number of years back we had concluded not that they were wrongly picked up — they were picked up because they were in a training camp in Afghanistan — but it was concluded rapidly that they were not trying to fight us, but they were trying to fight the Chinese.

So we made the decision early on that they needed to be sent somewhere, but they just couldn't be sent back to China. But as far as that decision in Guantanamo, sir, you would have to ask the Defense Department.

DELAHUNT: Would the gentleman yield for a moment?

PITTS: Yes, Mr. Chairman.

DELAHUNT: I think — and we will obviously invite the Department of Defense to come before us and explain why the communist Chinese security agents were allowed to interrogate the Uighurs — that's a question that must be posed, and I think my friend from California concurs with me on that.

ROHRABACHER: If the gentleman — Mr. Pitts — would...

PITTS: Yes.

ROHRABACHER: I do concur, and I would associate myself with the outrage of Mr. Pitts and my chairman. And the fact is that this stems from a fundamentally flawed China policy itself, that this administration treats one of the world's most vicious dictatorships as if it is a country like Belgium or a democratic country.

And what we are seeing is flowing from that fundamental error on the part of the administration, or amoral policy of the administration, so I associate myself with — I'm more outraged than both of my colleagues on this.

And thus settling the question of who was most outraged, the meeting was adjourned. I'd like to post the full transcript below, but it's more than 20,000 words. If anyone really wants to read it, let me know.

If you need to catch up, read the first part of this ongoing series. Department of Defense bozos, you're on notice... stay tuned for Softening 'Em Up III!

I was checking out Frog in a Well's interesting collection of 20th century Chinese currency, when I suddenly remembered taking the picture you see above two years ago in the Xinjiang Museum.

I'm not exactly sure if you can call it a bank note (it says something about being a "construction bond"), but the imagery is fantastic and it comes from an interesting period in Xinjiang history.

The text along the bottom reads "printed in the 30th year of the Republic of China" above the date, 1941... during the decade between the briefly independent First and Second East Turkestan Republics, when Sheng Shicai ruled with an iron fist and Moscow more or less called the shots in Xinjiang. Chairman Mao's little brother, Mao Zemin, was living in Urumqi at the time and became the proud father of a baby boy that year, named Mao Yuanxin. (Mao Zemin and his pregnant wife were arrested by Sheng Shicai and the baby was born in prison. Mao Zemin was executed in Urumqi two years later, and the baby grew up to become a central figure in the Cultural Revolution and an ally of the Gang of Four.)

And check out the engraved imagery. How much more could they pack in there? You've got poorly rendered quasi-Nationalist soldiers, Soviet tanks, a smoke-belching factory, the Emin Minaret in Turpan, several monoplanes, a biplane, and the shifting sands of the Taklamakan Desert. That's not to mention text in Uyghur, Chinese, and Mongolian.

Click on the image above for a closer look.

Late news tonight from AFP of an attack on a police station last week in Sangong, Xinjiang. The town appears to be right near China's border with Kazakhstan:

Ethnic Uighur Muslims in western China have attacked a police station with rocks and petrol bombs to protest a pre-Olympic crackdown, an exiled group said Friday.

The petrol bomb attack occurred last week in Sangong township in China's western-most Xinjiang region, Dilxat Raxit, spokesman of the German-based World Uighur Congress, told AFP.

Local police confirmed the attack when asked by AFP, but refused to comment further on the case.

Raxit said it was prompted by a police crackdown aimed at heading off unrest among the Uighurs, the largest ethnic group in Xinjiang region, ahead of the Beijing Olympics in August.

No further details at the moment, but I'll check again in the morning and update this post if anything new comes out. The AFP article is posted below.

Up in the title bar I claim to focus on northwest China, though that almost always means writing about Xinjiang, and occasionally Tibet. Today, though, I'd like to turn your attention to Gansu for a moment.

When the earthquake struck on May 12, Sichuan was absolutely devastated, but southern Gansu was also hit hard. 364 people were killed and thousands of buildings were damaged or destroyed. The scale of the disaster pales in comparison to what happened in Mianyang, Mianzhu, Aba, etc... but there are plenty of other people out there blogging about Sichuan.

An article in yesterday's South China Morning Post publicized Gansu earthquake victims' complaints that the aid they're receiving is inadequate and slow to arrive:

Zhang Quanshou, party secretary of Ranjia village, reachable only by a treacherous switchback mountain road, said they desperately needed more tents. All 72 houses in the village had collapsed.

"We know the governments are not deserting us, but we do need more help," a tearful Mr Zhang said.

Huang Huawen, party secretary of Yulei township, whose 5,670 villagers lost much of their farmland to two reservoirs, said township authorities had been overwhelmed in the first days after disaster struck, because they were left to themselves to cope. The township had received 800 tents but would need another 1,000, he said.

Many in Wen county have been dismayed by the scant support. Some blame a gagging order by the province's publicity department on media coverage of the quake's impact on Gansu.

"It's ridiculous to watch Gansu reporters in Sichuan covering the quake while the hardship at their doorsteps is ignored," Mr Huang said.

Everyone appreciates the enormous difficulty of conducting relief operations on the scale of what we're seeing now in Sichuan, but it's important to make sure that no one gets left out... after all, an earthquake victim is a victim no matter if they live in Sichuan, Gansu, Shaanxi, Chongqing, Henan, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan, or Yunnan (all of which suffered at least one quake-related death, according to Wikipedia).

SCMP also reported last week that the more than 100 pandas in Gansu's Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve have vanished without a trace:

Not a single panda has been seen by inspectors at the Baishuijiang National Nature Reserve in Gansu's Wen county, the world's biggest panda reserve, according to reserve director Li Shiren.

Mr. Li said the animals were easy to find before the May 12 quake....

Mr Li said the quake triggered many landslides in the reserve, and most of the roads built last year to monitor the animals were damaged.

Adventures in Gansu have given me a number of priceless memories over these past few years in China, so I figure I owe the province a bit of attention every once in a while. The areas of Gansu along the border with Sichuan are incredibly remote, and I hope you'll keep the people (and pandas) there affected by the earthquake in your thoughts.

Go, go, Gansu! 甘肃加油! You can read the full articles from SCMP below.

I'm not the first person to observe that China's pre-earthquake troubles more or less vanished in the week or two after the disaster in Sichuan. Torch relay? Tibet riots? CNN? Xinjiang protests? The list of issues threatening to disrupt the harmonization of the pre-Olympic atmosphere kept growing bigger, and bigger, and bigger... until, poof!

It's sort of like the U.S. being pulled out of the Great Depression by World War II... no one wanted a World War — or the deaths of tens of millions of people — but we were sure glad to say goodbye to tent camps for the homeless in Central Park.

There are some signs, though, of a return to normalcy in the international back-and-forth between China and the West. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) last week authored an unusually strongly worded resolution calling on China to release Uyghur political prisoners and to preserve Xinjiang's cultural and linguistic heritage:

Etcetera, etcetera, etc.

Sorry for the long image, but there are pages and pages more where that came from if you feel like reading the complete text. Senator Brown also spoke after the resolution was entered into the record, first acknowledging the devastation of the earthquake and then quickly turning to criticism of the Chinese government.

Disasters often add grim new terminology to the English lexicon (see: IED, hanging chad, grassy knoll, etc.) and the Wenchuan Earthquake is no different. Actually, it is, because I can't think of any other event that took place in a non-English speaking country that so quickly produced a new English term, like quake lake.

I did a quick search to find the origin of the term in its current usage, and made another surprising discovery... quake lake seems to have spread like a disease from one brilliant mind at Xinhua, quickly attaching itself to respectable journalists across the globe. I even put together a little chart to track the progression:

Now that m'dawg Tania Branigan at The Guardian is pushing quake lake, I'm pretty sure it's gonna stick. Jake Hooker at the New York Times used the term for a second time today.

For all you outdoorsy types, yes, I'm familiar with Quake Lake in Montana, near Yellowstone National Park. The lake was formed in 1959 when a 7.5 magnitude earthquake struck the sparsely populated area, quickly becoming a tourist attraction. No word on whether or not the Xinhua writer had any previous knowledge of that particular lake, but I think the use of the lowercase quake lake as a general term for bodies of water created by seismic activity is new.

I suppose Xinhua has introduced other terms into the English language over the years, but quake lake comes without any political baggage and, better yet, it rhymes. Perhaps it's not as Orwellian as splittists, and it certainly lacks the panache of Cultural Revolution, but I think quake lake is the perfect way to quickly describe what would otherwise be tediously written out as "lakes formed when landslides caused by an earthquake result in the flow of a river being blocked".

A loyal Opposite reader has alerted me to an ABC News story about U.S. military personnel softening-up Uyghur detainees before their interrogation by Chinese visitors at Guantanamo Bay. The news was hidden deep inside a 400+ page report issued this week by the U.S. Department of Justice, detailing the FBI's involvement in the interrogation of detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Gitmo.

I downloaded the report to find the original reference — an extremely difficult task given that the report is only available online in an unsearchable PDF format. I finally found what I was looking for on pg. 183 (which is pg. 226 in the PDF if you end up downloading it yourself). The excerpt here comes from the "Sleep Deprivation or Sleep Disruption" section of a chapter on FBI observations of detainee treatment at Guantanamo Bay:

The scariest thing is that the footnote makes it clear that it was likely Chinese interrogators carrying out the sleep deprivation and sensory abuse of Uyghur detainees, under U.S. custody. At the very least, the Chinese were directing the effort to prepare the detainees for an effective interrogation.

I've heard that the brass over at the Pentagon are looking desperately for a way to get out of Guantanamo Bay... perhaps this is part of a secret plan to slowly turn everything over to the Chinese? I'm sure the PLA could whip that place into shape in a Beijing minute.

The observation of three minutes of silence across China at 2:28pm today was incredibly powerful. Standing silently at work with my Chinese colleagues, the eerie sound of sirens and car horns filling Beijing... I got a tingle up my spine. We were watching CCTV, and the images of rescuers standing at attention forced all of us to reflect on what has, by now, become an operation to retrieve tens of thousands of bodies buried beneath the bricks and concrete.

Later in the day, someone told me that people had been crying on the streets, and that no one had dared to move.

After three minutes of silence, CCTV switched over to live shots from Ti@nanmen Square, where what appeared to be a few thousand people had begun shouting slogans. Their cries were slightly nationalist in tone — long live China! 中国万岁! — but understandably so at a time of great national tragedy.

I couldn't help thinking that it must have been a long time since so many people shouted "long live" anything (or anyone) across from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, fists pumping the air in unison. When would that have been? Seriously... any educated guesses?

Now if they just add some pinyin addresses, almost anyone will be able to make their way around a city where I still somehow get north confused with south.