The China Visa Mystery
Make a good title for a novel, that. Or, how about The Mystery China Visa? Actually, it's not a laughing matter because "Chinese officials have been clamping down on visa applications and implementing bureaucratic impediments to new and renewed visa applications under the guise of pre-Olympic security," says Rodger Baker in "China, the Olympics and the Visa Mystery". Something bigger is brewing reckons Baker and he rather ominously notes that: "Assumptions that China is only focused on continued good economic ties with the world shouldn't be taken as gospel — China has a track record of shutting down external connections when internal crises brew."
In the July/August edition of Foreign Affairs, Elizabeth Economy and Adam Segal touch on this in "China's Olympic Nightmare", but Baker makes for the more compelling reading, especially when he says that "In another two months... it will become clearer whether this was a spate of excessive paranoia or a reflection of a much more significant crisis facing the Chinese leadership — and the evidence increasingly points toward the latter." Uh, oh. Rainy Day has never bought the Chinese Century cant. It's the last best hope of those whose world fell apart in 1989 and every bit as discredited as its proponents. The smiling mask is bound to slip and when it does we'll see the true face of a wicked leadership that encourages oppression in Tibet, genocide in Darfur and repression at home, to mention the better documented crimes. Prepare for a shock.
Meanwhile, Mao Kelly is struggling to make sense of his life in the lastest episide of Think or Swim.
