High Court hears Chen detention case
　

‘GROCERY SHOP’: The former president’s newly rehired lawyers argued against the evidence used to convict, saying it was similar to that in ‘a traditional grocery shop’
　

By Shelley Huang
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 1
　

The Taiwan High Court yesterday held a second detention hearing on arguments from prosecutors and former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) lawyers to determine whether Chen should remain in detention. The hearing was continuing at press time.

After the High Court’s decision on Sept. 24 to keep the former president behind bars for another three months, until Dec. 23, Chen and his attorneys filed an appeal to the Supreme Court.

Presiding Judge Teng Chen-chiu (鄧振球) explained the appeals court’s decision to extend Chen’s detention by saying he was suspected of committing serious crimes and, as a former president, he has more ­channels to flee the country than an ordinary citizen.

The judges also expressed concern about the large amount of money and other assets the former first family possesses overseas.

After reviewing the High Court decision, the Supreme Court sent the case back to the appeals court for a new hearing.

The Supreme Court said the High Court’s reasons for keeping Chen in detention did not adequately explain why this was necessary, and questioned evidence supporting the High Court’s notion that Chen and his family hid huge amounts of undisclosed cash and other assets overseas.

The Supreme Court also called into question the High Court’s reasoning that Chen has more ­channels to flee the country because he is a former president. The Supreme Court asked the lower court to reconsider whether it was necessary to keep Chen detained, since as a former president, he is under surveillance by eight to 12 bodyguards from the National Security Council.

During the second detention hearing held at the High Court yesterday, Chen said little, while his newly rehired lawyers made lengthy arguments on his behalf.

Hung Kwei-san (洪貴參) said the district court’s ruling on Sept. 11 had blatant structural mistakes and was not based on facts or evidence. Hung likened what he called a “messy ruling” to “accounting records of a traditional grocery shop.”

Cheng Wen-lung (鄭文龍) and Shih Yi-lin (石宜琳) argued that the district court should not have found Chen guilty for what his wife Wu Shu-jen (吳淑珍) was accused of doing.

Shih listed several reasons not to keep Chen detained, including the lack of evidence proving the former first family’s offshore assets were obtained illegally. He also argued that keeping a defendant in detention because the defendant has been accused of serious crimes violates the presumption of innocence.

Cheng said that after District Court Judge Chou Chan-chun (周占春) ruled to release Chen in December last year, Chen did not escape, showing that he has no intention of fleeing if he is released.

Prosecutors argued that even though Chen has security guards to protect him 24 hours a day, the guards are not legally bound to inform judicial authorities about Chen’s whereabouts. They also said that because Chen has been convicted of serious crimes, his incentive to flee the country has increased.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taipei branch director Huang Ching-lin (黃慶林), secretary of Chen’s office Chiang Chih-ming (江志銘) and other Chen supporters sat in on the trial.

DPP protesters heckle Ma in Taichung
　

DERAILED: Democratic Progressive Party councilors are worried that the Taichung MRT will suffer the same problems as Taipei's Neihu Line if the same team builds it
　

By Ko Shu-ling
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 3
　

President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was heckled in Taichung City yesterday when protesters expressed concern over the city’s proposed mass rapid transit system (MRT), which they said might end up with similar problems as the Muzha-Neihu Line in Taipei City if the capital city’s construction team were to handle the project.

Ma was heckled while addressing the audience at a ground-breaking ceremony for Taichung City’s MRT system.

Shouting “Ma Ying-jeou, shameless” and “Ma Ying-jeou, don’t come here,” Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Taichung City councilors interrupted Ma’s speech soon after it began.

Ma, who ignored the hecklers, continued his speech, as city government officials and organizers tried to contain the noise, while Taichung Mayor Jason Hu (胡志強) and Deputy Mayor Hsiao Chia-chi (蕭家旗) looked embarrassed.

Seeking to make himself heard over the protesters, Ma raised his voice and said “let’s hope our DPP friends stop making so much noise for the sake of the future of the greater Taichung area.”

Protesters and city officials then engaged in a wrestling match, with officials trying to seize the protesters’ banners.

Protesters shouted: “Why are you pushing us? Is this the way you treat your guests?”

Protesters said they were worried that Taichung’s MRT system would have the same problems as the capital city’s Muzha-Neihu Line if the team responsible was brought in to build the new system in Taichung.

The Neihu-Muzha Line has experienced a series of malfunctions and system breakdowns since it began services on July 4. DPP Taipei City councilors have condemned the city government for doing a poor job of integrating the Neihu Line’s Bombardier system with the Muzha line’s Matra system. The constant problems led the city to consider returning the Muzha Line to the Matra system and suspending the Neihu Line for inspections.

Operations on the line have improved substantially since the Deaflympics began early last month. Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) has said the city government will work with Bombardier to bring system stability to 99 percent by the end of next month.

Hau has apologized to the public over the system’s instability and formed an emergency response team to handle the crisis.
　

SEF dismisses allegations about Chiang's trip to UK
　

By Ko Shu-ling
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 3
　

The Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) yesterday dismissed allegations that SEF Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤), who doubles as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) vice chairman, was spending taxpayers’ money on an overseas trip to engage in party affairs.

Saying “there was a considerable discrepancy” between the facts and media reports on Chiang’s trip, SEF spokesman Maa Shaw-chang (馬紹章) told a press conference that the purpose of Chiang’s trip to the UK and Switzerland was to explain the current situation and future prospects for cross-strait relations rather than to engage in party activities.

“He is not spending taxpayers’ money on party matters,” Maa said.

Maa said Chiang’s trip to the UK was so that he could attend the Conservative Party’s annual conference and meet parliamentarians from all over the world. In Switzerland, Chiang visited the secretariat of the WTO to gain a better understanding of member states’ efforts to sign free-trade agreements, Maa said.

As for the two SEF staffers traveling with Chiang, Maa said they were there to prepare Chiang’s presentations and to engage with the press, adding that their jobs were related to cross-strait affairs.

While Chiang’s travel expenses would be taken care of by the KMT, the SEF would pick up the bills of the two officials, Maa said.

Maa made the remarks in response to a report published by the Chinese-language Apple Daily yesterday.

Maa said Chiang was not required to obtain permission from the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) for the trip, nor had the SEF informed the council of the trip in advance.

Maa said the SEF would consider providing personnel to accompany KMT Chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) or Democratic Progressive Party Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on similar trips should they make a request.

An SEF official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the KMT was too preoccupied with the year-end elections to send anyone on the trip.

At a separate setting yesterday, MAC Deputy Minister Liu Te-shun (劉德勳) said while the council respects the SEF’s operations, the foundation must obtain the consent of the council if they conduct cross-strait activities, especially if there is public funding involved.
　

Yang backs Ma's 'modus vivendi' diplomacy
　

By Jenny W. hsu
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 3

Minister of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) Timothy Yang (楊進添) yesterday continued to back the modus vivendi as the country’s best strategy for a bright diplomatic future despite the opinion of several pan-green legislators that such a non-confrontational approach had hurt the nation’s diplomacy.

Speaking to the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee, Yang, who became foreign minister last month after his predecessor stepped down over the mishandling of the aftermath of Typhoon Morakot, repeated an oft-heard speech regarding President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) foreign policy platform — modus vivendi, or flexible diplomacy, in which Taiwan and China cease battling to lure away each other’s allies.

Yang said since the implementation of the policy, Taiwan’s participation in international organizations has increased dramatically, including its accession to the World Health Assembly as an observer and its inclusion in the WTO’s Government Procurement Agreement. He said Taiwan’s relations with its allies and non-allies were stronger than ever.

Democratic Progressive Party Legislator (DPP) Tsai Huang-liang (蔡煌瑯), however, said the approach had done the country little good because in order to appease China, Taiwan had agreed to use the name “Chinese Taipei” in international settings. That name, Tsai said, has caused much confusion because people may interpret it to mean that Taiwan is part of China.

The legislator said that the country’s top research facility, Academia Sinica, which has a high reputation, has been listed as being located in “Hsinchu, China.”

Furthermore, Tsai said South Africa, in an attempt to prevent an influx of illegal Chinese immigrants, had also set a high bar for Taiwanese nationals to obtain a visa to visit South Africa, which broke diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1997.

Tsai said all Taiwanese nationals must present a financial statement showing they have at least NT$80,000 in assets and the visa was only valid for 10 days, a considerably more stringent policy when compared with other countries, such as the US, where a normal non-immigrant visa is good for five years. The UK has also given Taiwan passport holders visa-waiver privileges of up to six months.

“This is because the South African government views us as part of China,” Tsai said.

Yang said he would look into the matter, but added that the visa regulations have been the same since the two countries severed ties.

DPP Legislator Chai Trong-rong said when describing visits to Taiwan made by foreign dignitaries, MOFA should say they are “visiting Taiwan” (訪台) and not the term “visiting the Republic of China” (訪華) that it currently uses.

Jiang defends decision to ban Kadeer
　

By Loa Iok-sin
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 4

Minister of the Interior Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) yesterday defended his decision to bar exiled Uighur rights activist Rebiya Kadeer from visiting Taiwan, despite widespread criticism of the ban.

Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators lashed out at the minister as he made his first appearance before the legislature’s Internal Administration Committee.

Jiang said last month that Kadeer, president of the Munich-based World Uyghur Congress (WUC), should not be allowed into the country since she has “close relations to a terrorist group.”

He also accused WUC secretary-general Dolkun Isa of involvement in terrorist activities that led Interpol to issue a “red notice” for him.

Jiang’s remarks were criticized by opposition lawmakers, civic groups, Kadeer and Isa.

Kadeer said that she would file a lawsuit against the government unless it apologized for the terrorist remark.

DPP Legislator Kao Jyh-peng (高志鵬) asked Jiang if he had changed his mind about freedom and human rights since becoming a minister, given that he had a reputation as a liberal when he was a professor of political science at National Taiwan University.

“You’ve lost the spirit of a liberal professor and have become a liar,” Kao said.

Jiang protested, saying he respected a lawmaker’s right to question his decision, “but you cannot label a minister with such a humiliating word, that’s unacceptable.”

He denied abandoning his liberal beliefs, but defended his decision.

“Interpol has issued a red notice for the WUC secretary-general, so in our national interest we would of course reject the entry of Kadeer, who is the WUC head,” Jiang said.

His response did not convince DPP Legislator Yeh Yi-jin (葉宜津), who questioned whether the government was following China’s agenda because it was Beijing that asked Interpol to issue the notice.

“There are other countries that have rejected Isa’s entry — China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan — but these countries are all close allies of China and are considered authoritarian to some extent,” Yeh said. “Why are we following their standards?”

If Kadeer and Isa had close connections to terrorist groups, “why would the US grant political asylum to Kadeer and Germany grant Isa citizenship?” Yeh said.

“Every country has different national interests to defend, and it’s not unusual that someone is allowed into one country, but not another,” Jiang said.

“China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan made their decisions in defense of their national interests too,” he said.

In related news, a group of Japanese academics said yesterday that Kadeer would visit Japan this month to deliver a series of speeches about human rights in China.

They said they had invited her to speak about the lives of ethnic minorities and women in China, but she would not be involved in any political activities during her trip.

Kadeer is scheduled to arrive on Oct. 20 for a 10-days visit, said Seiji Nishihara, an economics professor at the International University of Kagoshima.

“We don’t see her as a terrorist as the Chinese authorities argue, and as part of our academic activities we want our students to watch and listen for themselves what’s happening in the world, through her speeches,” he said.

A head of state, but no leader

Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 8

The Presidential Office’s statement on Wednesday that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was not involved in the decision to allow construction of the 23-story I Pin Building (一品苑) in the Boai Special District (博愛特區) when he was Taipei mayor should come as no surprise.

The exoneration of Ma over actions deemed to have jeopardized his security now that he is president is just the latest example of his avoiding responsibility for anything controversial or potentially embarrassing that occurred on his watch.

Other examples include the infamous NT$1 billion (US$30 million) Maokong Gondola mess, which has been closed for more than a year since mudslides made it unsafe. Contractors and low-level engineers took the blame at the time, even though it was top-level maneuvering that resulted in the project avoiding an environmental impact assessment.

Ma also escaped censure in February when the China Chemical and Pharmaceutical Co was fined after failing to declare a conflict of interest when it signed a lucrative deal to supply drugs to Taipei City hospitals in 1998. At the time, Ma was mayor and one of his sisters was the company’s deputy manager.

A complete list of such incidents is too long to list here, but they span Ma’s tenure as mayor and continue into his presidency.

The most recent example came in August, when Typhoon Morakot exposed the government’s woeful preparations and disaster-response effort. Decisions by Ma and his inner circle arguably exacerbated the suffering and contributed to the death toll, yet it was left to Premier Liu Chao-shiuan (劉兆玄) and a few members of his Cabinet to fall on their collective swords, even as Ma belatedly toured disaster-hit areas apologizing, yet refusing to accept substantial responsibility.

All these examples have a common thread: Others take the heat while Ma remains on his pedestal. But as president, Ma has fewer places to hide. That is why from day one of his presidency he has attempted to highlight that under the Constitution the president is a figurehead and the premier is responsible for the day-to-day running of the country.

While the Constitution may state that the office of president only bears responsibility for cross-strait affairs, national defense and diplomacy, public perception is not dictated by the law and a majority of the public still view the president as the nation’s leader — someone whose job it is to make the big decisions and take the consequences. Ma has to cast off his legal blinkers and understand that. After all, it is the president who chooses the premier and other top officials. If they are not up to the task, then he is responsible.

Former US president Harry Truman famously had a sign on his desk reading: “The buck stops here.” If Ma had such a sign, it would read, “The buck doesn’t belong here.” His previous ironclad popularity has begun to suffer because of this.

If he continues in this vein, Ma may well ensure he leaves office with his self-esteem intact, but the overarching memory for many will be that of a weak president unwilling to face up to the consequences of his actions.

Museum is misguided
　

Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 8

I truly do not understand why or how the National Palace Museum could possibly turn down an offer for two bronze animal heads (“National Palace Museum turns down famed bronzes,” Oct. 8, page 1).

After all, by accepting the two pieces, the museum would be bringing these bronzes back into the loving embrace of the Middle Kingdom’s bosom.

It would be a truly magnificent and wonderful act of supreme patriotism to rescue these objets d’art from the greedy, rasping red-haired barbarians. Such an act of patriotism would do wonders to reverse the reigning sentiment of resentment in China brought on by the centuries of humiliation caused by foreigners, including the plundering of such treasures as the two bronzes in question. I would think that any patriotic Chinese would jump at the chance.

One must never forget that, according to the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) own mythology … er … I mean ideology, the officials currently in control of the “Republic of China” (ROC) are the sole legitimate governing authority for all of China, including Tibet and parts of Mongolia.

Ergo, in their capacity of sole legitimate rulers of all China, the KMT would have every right to take possession of these two bronze pieces and the other pieces in the Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent collection also.

After all, better that these priceless artifacts should be in the hands of the only rightful rulers of China, as opposed to those of the filthy “Communist Bandits.” Or have I overlooked something? Has the grand, dialectical current of history passed me by? Has the “song” changed so much?

Perhaps what I write is ludicrous, but it is no more risible than the pathetic excuse offered by the museum that “the artifacts do not fit its collection.” What stupendous bilge.

Neither can I accept museum director Chuo Kung-hsin’s (周�? claim that the museum had to follow professional ethics and reject any artifacts that were controversial, of unknown origin, or of contraband nature. That’s a load of cowardly, hypocritical tripe.

There can be no doubt whatsoever as to the origin of these bronze pieces. They were pilfered, but they were pilfered from China. To bring them back to China seems to me the ethical thing to do. And since the ROC lays claim to being the sole legitimate governing authority for all of China, it seems only justified that the bronze pieces be welcomed with open arms by the KMT.

MICHAEL SCANLON
East Hartford, Connecticut

China’s rise has dangers all around
　

By Sushil Seth
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 8

China’s rulers put on a big show to celebrate the 60th anniversary of their revolution. But the show was not open to the people of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), except on TV screens.

Beijing residents with houses and balconies with a view of the parade were barred from looking out. Nearby hotels were barred from accepting guests. This says a lot about the regime that doesn’t trust its own people while celebrating the country’s achievements over a 60-year period. What are they afraid of?

Obviously even after China’s impressive economic growth and growing military might, the regime still worries about its popular legitimacy. They don’t seem quite sure if the implied social contract they have made with the people for legitimacy, based on economic growth, is working or not.

China’s communist oligarchy seeks legitimacy for monopoly of power indefinitely, without popular participation. The exclusion of people from the National Day celebrations is a classical example of both arrogance and paranoia.

There are two elements to China’s strategy to keep people on its side. The first is continuing economic growth to absorb the growing pool of unemployed people. The recent economic slowdown has put a damper on that despite the large economic stimulus package. The hastily packaged stimulus spending is creating further distortions in an economy already lopsided toward real estate and stock markets as well some shoddy infrastructure spending.

The government is now reining down some of it for fear of fueling inflation. But with so much dependent on maintaining economic momentum to contain social instability, it seems like the government is always trying to plug a leaking boat that might flounder somewhere along the line.

Since there are no measurable yardsticks of popular support like democratic elections and supportive institutions, the government is always second-guessing its people. There is widespread social unrest across the country. The government has stopped publishing annual statistics of such protests because the situation is getting worse.

This is not to suggest that there is an imminent threat to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) power, but there is a steady, though scattered, groundswell of frustration and anger.

This anger is coalescing around corruption. At its recent CCP meeting, the leadership admitted that the corruption has “seriously damaged the party’s flesh-and-blood bond with the people and has seriously affected the solidity of the party’s ruling status.”

Corruption is everywhere in the country. Transparency International, an anti-corruption watchdog, listed China as the second-worst country for bribery out of 22 in its annual report last year.

Corruption now is institutionalized and because it involves all levels of the CCP and government, it is becoming increasingly difficult to root out. Even when some big fish is snared occasionally and punished severely, it is generally attributed to political vendetta.

This general sense of malaise and corruption is not helped when the sons and daughters of top party leadership control some of the biggest business conglomerates in China. For instance, the former president and party general secretary Jiang Zemin’s (江澤民) son is reportedly the country’s telecommunications tsar. Former premier Li Peng’s (李鵬) family controls the power sector. Former premier Zhu Rongji’s (朱鎔基) son is into banking. And President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) son recently sold automated ticket machines to the Beijing city government.

All these princelings might be shrewd businesspeople in their own right, but it is only fair to ask if they would have made it to the top without their political connections? No wonder corruption and nepotism have become the focus of people’s frustration and anger against the system.

The problem is systemic and entrenched at the highest levels in some form or another, so there is lack of concerted action to deal with it. Therefore, despite impressive economic growth as a source of legitimacy, the CCP is not so sure about its rapport with the people.

At the same time, the rural masses of the country have largely missed out on the benefits of economic growth, with resources mainly directed to China’s industrial economy. Indeed, they have been subsidizing industrial growth through diversion of rural land, water supply, relatively depressed prices of rural products and export of cheap labor to work on urban construction and industrial sites.

There is widespread paranoia at the CCP’s top level about danger lurking everywhere, evident in the exclusion of people from official celebrations. This manifests itself even more severely when dealing with ethnic minorities such as the Tibetans and Uighurs.

Indeed, the CCP is not averse to using the mainstream Han population against these marginalized minorities to whip up national hysteria, inside and outside the country. This was evident at the time of the Beijing Olympics.

At the same time, there is a deeply felt sense of the historical humiliation inflicted on China during the 19th century, as well as the Japanese invasion and atrocities of the last century.

Therefore, when Mao Zedong (毛澤東) declared China’s liberation and the inauguration of the PRC on Oct. 1, 1949, he also proudly announced that this was the moment when “China has stood up.” In other words, China’s “liberation” was essentially couched in nationalist terms.

However, Mao got distracted with his power plays — leading to purges, disastrous experiments in economic and social engineering like the Great Leap Forward, which culminated in the lost decade of the Cultural Revolution.

It was only after Mao’s death that Beijing got a clear sense of direction under paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) about building up the country into a modern and powerful state. To achieve this it was imperative to create a growing and modern economy. The only successful model for this was to harness aspects of capitalism to build up China.

Apart from economic growth, nationalism (increasingly as xenophobia) is another important plank in the CCP’s exercise in popular legitimacy.

The 60th birthday military parade, with China’s armed might on display, was intended both to rally people around the CCP as the architect and builder of national power and serve notice on the world that China means business when it comes to defending and promoting its perceived national interests.

And these national interests are not static but expanding with its global power.

Deng advised that China should bide its time while getting on with the task of building a strong and powerful nation.

Today’s leaders believe that China is in a position to flex its muscles but without going overboard as it still has quite some way to go to attain military parity with the US.

But the upcoming generation of new communist leadership material is quite jingoistic in terms of China’s national interests. Wang Xiaodong (王曉東), an influential leader of the China Youth and Children Research Center, for instance, is quoted in the Australian newspaper as saying that the younger generation “will globalize its [China’s] national interests, and this will affect not just our close neighbors but the whole world. It [China] must gain the capacity to protect those interests.”

The process of expanding China’s national interests, and securing them with greater projection of its military power, has already begun to be evidenced from the scramble for resources. Its stark manifestation was the jostling of a US ship in the South China Sea and similar incidents of lesser intensity.

The PRC’s 60th birthday was a massive display of its power, with an obvious message for the world.If the CCP comes under pressure from increased social unrest (as seems likely), the temptation to turn up the nationalist heat to rally people around the flag might be irresistible.

This is not what the world is looking for from a rising China.

Sushil Seth is a writer based in Australia.

PRC censors bogged down in blogs
　

Blogger Jeremy Goldkorn has something in common with Twitter, Facebook and YouTube:They’ve all been barred by China’s regulators

By Jeremy Goldkorn
THE GUARDIAN
Friday, Oct 09, 2009, Page 9

‘Most hilariously, and this is difficult for anyone who has not spent time in China to understand, the state-owned China Daily newspaper ran a quote from me complaining about censorship on the top headlined story of its front page.’
　

ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
　

On July 3, Chinese government censors blocked access to Danwei.org, the Web site I have edited from my home in Beijing since 2003. It is hosted outside China, so it’s easy for zealous regulators to flip an electronic switch and restrict access. Most of our content is translated from the Chinese media and Internet, which gave us a certain amount of protection: Most Chinese people who write or publish in China self-censor, and this is why we had escaped the censor’s wrath. Until July.

This year — after a period of relatively relaxed controls — the bodies who censor information and culture have come back with a vengeance. There are several reasons: 2009 has seen a number of “sensitive” anniversaries, including the May 4 student uprisings of 1919, the 1959 Tibetan uprising and Tiananmen Square in 1989. The riots in Urumqi in July added greatly to the tense atmosphere in Beijing.

Government nervousness about the Internet was exacerbated by hype in the Western press about Twitter bringing democracy to Iran. Another factor is the financial crisis, which has made mass unrest more likely.

Despite the repression of anyone who sets up as a dissident or suggests that the Chinese Communist Party is illegitimate, there is more anti-establishment chatter on the Chinese Internet than ever. China has a new but firmly established culture of citizens using the Internet to air their grievances with local authorities. This year’s most prominent example was the case of the young female hotel employee Deng Yujiao (鄧玉嬌), where Internet activism was the decisive factor in saving her from a murder charge, when she was widely believed to have acted in self-defense against an attempted rape. Such cases have made the government even more wary of the power of the Internet.

The celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China — which were taking place as I started writing this — have been another cause of sleepless nights for officials. Nobody wanted to be seen as being soft if anything were to have gone wrong.

But none of this explains why Danwei.org was censored. I do not even know if the block was a decision made by a person, or the effects of a filtering software that decided we had too many “sensitive” keywords. There is no hotline you can call and say: “Comrade, why did you censor my Web site?”

Danwei.org is in good company: YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other foreign sites are inaccessible at the moment. But the difference between those sites and mine is that I live in China, and the Web site is part of a company that operates in China and pays my bills. We’re also small; we are not a platform like Twitter. It was something specific that we published that got us blocked, and it feels personal.

Nonetheless, my situation is not Orwellian. A mirror Web site that displays all our content is accessible in China, and my company’s consulting business, which is closely associated with the Web site, is unaffected.

Life goes on. Within weeks of the site being blocked, I attended — by official invitation — a provincial government media forum at which I was allowed to air my views. Soon after that, a TV station hired me as a presenter to conduct interviews with officials and well-known business leaders about environmental problems. The program is for a Chinese audience, broadcast nationwide. Not exactly Hard Talk, and they may not broadcast the interesting footage, but I got to give a senior official a hard time about his department’s empty eco-slogans. I also asked Liu Yonghao (劉永好) — one of the richest men in China — what he intended to do about the methane emissions caused by the farting of all the cows his New Hope Group owns.

Most hilariously, and this is difficult for anyone who has not spent time in China to understand, the state-owned China Daily newspaper ran a quote from me complaining about censorship on the top headlined story of its front page.

So there is not really that much for me to complain about. It’s quite possible that our Web site will be unblocked in a few weeks. But the affair has marked me in some way. As JM Coetzee put it in On Censorship: “The contest with the censor is all too likely to assume an importance in the inner life of the writer that at the least diverts him from his proper occupation and at worst fascinates and even perverts the imagination.”

This has been true for me, and I am not alone. The most difficult part of any project in China is to get past the regulators, and thus writers, filmmakers, publishers and editors waste their creativity and squander their powers of innovation on self-censorship and red tape.

The effects are not just an underperforming film industry and under-representation on the world’s literary stage. Censorship contributes greatly to the crisis of trust. People don’t trust newspapers or companies, business people don’t trust each other, and no one — including the people who work in it — trusts what the government says.

Censorship also makes it very difficult for officials to understand how to deal with foreign cultural organizations and media. Two recent examples were the story of the Frankfurt Book Fair and dissident writers (and it’s not over yet), and the row over the Melbourne International Film Festival that brought international recognition to a voice the Chinese government had hoped to silence.

Last week Beijing saw a display of military and economic might that the government and people are rightly proud of. But China wants more for itself. The government is constantly calling for home-grown innovation in science, technology and culture, and for China to wield more “soft power” and have a greater influence on the world. These aims will be difficult as long as China’s bureaucrats retain their iron grip on culture and information.

Jeremy Goldkorn blogs about media, advertising and urban life in China.