The Mukden Incident, or the Death of Dong Bei

September 18, 1931

It was quiet near Liutiao He, a lake near Mukden, Manchuria. Lieutenant Kawamoto Suemori took a couple of men and placed a small charge of dynamite near Japan’s South Manchurian Railway tracks. Japan had received control of this railway, on Chinese soil, from white men who didn’t care what happened to anyone they could define as yellow.

Two colonels in Tokyo wanted to make sure that Japan could take over all of Manchuria, so the Manchurians could grow crops for consumption by the superior race that lived in Tokyo.

The blast didn’t really do very much and the tracks were in good shape when the next train went by. In Tokyo they said the Liutiao Railway Bridge had been knocked down by Chinese dissidents. There hadn’t been any Chinese near the blast area and it wasn’t a bridge. The blast didn’t really hurt anything or anyone, but now the Japanese had an excuse to take over all of Manchuria.

Chiang Kai-Shek  had ordered Zhang Xueliang, the young marshal of Manchuria, not to resist but let the Japanese take all the area that ended at the Black Dragon River.  The Back Dragon River was China’s border with Russia.

And so the slow dismantling of China began, a natural evolution since the Opium Wars let England and others seize Chinese ports for their countries.

The people of China were very angry about their country’s position and felt a communal loss of face. In Shanghai they started boycotting any products from the land of the rising sun.

The Japanese had decided that the Chinese were a weak people, undeserving of being treated honorably by their army, so the road to the Rape of Nanjing was under construction. In Heaven the Gods wept for the Chinese people.

From "Shanghai Rose"  http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Whitney-Turner/e/B004G7E40U/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0

Skies over France

My novel "Shanghai Rose," which takes the reader from skies over France in WWI to front row seat at the Japanese invasion of Shanghai, begins with this look at aerial warfare.

 http://www.amazon.com/Rich-Whitney-Turner/e/B004G7E40U/ref=ntt_dp_epwbk_0: 

We are flying from the fields of Flanders across the border to targets of opportunity in Ypres, Belgium.  As we had readied for takeoff,  a Royal Flying Corps  Officer told us the Germans had launched 50,000 mustard gas canisters against our soldiers there.

It isn't just the gas that has me concerned for those below. When a man's foot develops gangrene, doctors amputate it, effectively changing the course of his life. It happens all too frequently in the brutal, seemingly permanent, jagged slashes in the landscape, where soldiers'  feet rot away in rain soaked trenches. The guilt I'm feeling in being above it cancels much of the joy I once received from flying.

 My plane, the "American Angel," is one of four Sopwith Camels leaving France. Crosby's plane had earlier experienced engine trouble so we are late arriving at the battle. I think conditions are looking good until I  notice  nine German planes. My body suddenly tightens as I encounter the fear of death that travels with men in war. Concerns for other men cease.

 I'm a sitting duck and  mutter an oath as my Camel is hit. The plane shudders and I  find myself falling in a fast full power spin. I am right over the Hun trenches, so I decide to try to pull out, turn her around, and attempt to reach our nearest airfield. My Camel is badly shot up with many of the flying wires cut, so it won't be easy. Somehow, I interrupt the fall  and turn the plane towards our lines. I  say a quick prayer,  worry I am too close to the ground, and black out.

At the forward aid station, the first focused image I see involves a pair of hazel eyes with a nurses' cap perched above them. I quickly assume I must've crashed somewhere over British lines. When she speaks with perfect diction I feel I've fallen into the library of a British country house.

"Hold on flight lieutenant," she says. "We're going to give you something for the pain."

Update

For anybody left out there who still checks my blog, I've been writing them for two years with braces on my elbows and hands. I've done this because my neck has stenosis, arthritis and herniated discs. This affects the use of my hands. My lumbar region has the same problems, with scoliosis thrown in. Now my body has decided those braces are foreign objects and reacts strongly to their use. I am completing a book called "Shanghai Rose," which begins in World War I and includes a rewrite in the first person of a novel I pulled off Amazon called Winters in Shanghai. With a little help from my friends I should have it posted on Amazon in about a month. I hope you like it.(By the way, no matter what they say about dictation, if you can't position the cursor by hand in a rewrite, you might as well pack it in)  I'm pretty happy with my life and I figure obstacles are there to be overcome. Ganbatte, Jia You, Fi-Ting

Hongbao (Red Envelope) in China and America

The Hongbao (red envelope) is the name for bribing someone in China. It isn't just companies that need to bribe officials in the middle kingdom. I've worked with Chinese professors who had to pay off the reviewers in order to get a grant to do research in the United States. China, a country I really like a lot, is about as corrupt as possible.

By saying this I'm not demeaning the incredible work ethic of the Chinese people, or the fact that I've come to know Chinese with incredible integrity. These people have made my life richer and more fulfilled because of the opportunity I've had to work with them and know them as friends.

I always find it funny that we've passed international bribery laws, when the only way to get a foothold in China is to pay someone off. It's a universal truth.

I also don't want to sound holier than thou about my country. Many of my friends, who are well read and knowledgeable, believe that America, although not at the Chinese level, is becoming more corrupt. I grew up in a time when the average CEO made 40 times the amount  a man on the factory floor received. Now the average CEO makes 430 times what the factory worker does.

It seems more and more clear that our Congress is bought and paid for. Bankers own the Republican Party and Democratic senators like Chuck Schumer. Under Clinton they got rid of the Glass-Steagle act which separated investment banks from commercial, deposit accepting banks.

Under George Bush banks were allowed to be irresponsible and take incredible risks, which in turn ruined many of the retirement funds held by individuals.

The war between those who want this situation fixed, so we will never have to bail out banks again, and the bankers who think they'll make less of a profit with regulation, is an intense one with the bankers' lobbyists going all out. The fact that we save these banks from bankruptcy with taxpayer dollars seems never to be a bone of contention as they pay these lobbyists.

Because our history of anti-communism means the envelope will never be red, I wonder what color we will eventually use.

Why People are Running from Stocks

Yesterday I was watching Bloomberg television to escape the novel I was writing. Things were bad, with the unemployment rate rising and new job creation absurdly low. I listened to two different experts interpret the data:

One man said that you had to realize that the winter was warm and therefore the data is distorted because a lot of new employment was created in earlier months.

 The next man pointed out that not only was job creation in May very poor, but March and April had both been revised downwards. In other words the results for  labor creation in the two months before May were lower than the government had originally said they were.

It is this kind of manipulation by individual analysts which so distorts the true economic picture. People are running away from stocks in droves. The interest rate on the 10 year treasury is the lowest in history.

People are scared because they don't trust Wall Street. Given what these experts opined it seems like a perfectly rational response to me.

King Dimon and Congress

I just saw a headline which said "Dimon agrees to appear before Congress." The sub head says "he hasn't agreed to a date."

Well that's just fine. We learned long ago that Congress was owned by the big banks, so it isn't surprising he gets to pick and choose when he might drop by.

J.P. Morgan Chase, Dimon's bank, recently botched some really big bets (they prefer to call it hedging) which went bad. J.P. Morgan Chase, of course, doesn't really care very much since we, the taxpayers of the United States, will always come in to make them whole.

It's pretty clear that we didn't learn anything from 2008 and the financial crisis. The Republicans have been trying to fight off any new regulation of the banks. Dimon, however, really failed to oversee the bank's trading strategies and has made it more difficult for the GOP to hide the fact they're for the rich people.

The Democratic senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, wouldn't do anything to upset the banks under any conditions.

The common people in America may still not understand that they mean nothing to the congressmen, senators, and bankers who run America. Maybe we'll never get it.

Sorry Jews, You're Not Going With US

I find the position of born-again Christians fascinating when it comes to the state of Israel. They protect Israel because it must exist for the Apocalypse and the Rapture that follows.

So think about this, in the Rapture only Christians will escape to heaven, leaving the Jews behind in the smoldering ashes.

I suppose this doesn't bother the Jews, because they don't believe in what we call the New Testament anyway. However I'm a Christian who has a Jewish daughter, who was brought up in that tradition because her grandparents are Holocaust survivors.

Christians who use Acts 4: 8 through 12, to insist only Christians will have life after death are clearly setting up the Jews as a fall guy. In other words, you're not going to go, but we will use you for a while.

Somehow that doesn't sound like the Christian thing to do.

The Ballad of Zhong Yao Ren

               The American immigration experience wasn't always easy if you weren't white. I'm going to tell you a story, but change the name because his descendents still live in Arizona. It's a story that unfortunately is a part of American history. He was of Chinese heritage  so let's call this the Ballad of Zhong Yao Ren.

               A second generation American, Zhong owned a grocery store in Phoenix, Arizona. He was at a gas station near his market when a deputy sheriff came over and, without cause, beat him so badly he spent a week in the hospital. Phoenix didn't help with the medical bills. Later they let this deputy sheriff go. But back then in Arizona there was going to be no acknowledgment of a racially motivated beating.

               A patriotic man, Zhong loved America and all it stood for. He was proud and thought he should be accorded the same respect as any other man born in this country or naturalized here.

               One day he was in his new grocery store in a town outside of Phoenix (we won't mention the name of the town). All of a sudden this former deputy sheriff, who had turned into a common drunk, walked into the market. Zhong asked the man if he recognized him. The white man said no. At that point Zhong, who was cutting meet with a cleaver, raised his arm and chased the white man out the door, his cleaver above his head.

               He died a year ago, leaving behind his very successful children. They've never questioned their rights as Americans. My family came on the Mayflower, but Zhong knew what being American was all about. It doesn't matter when you arrived here; what color your skin is; or what your beliefs are. Everyone in this country deserves respect and Zhong Yao Ren never forgot that.

              

China: Where Supression of Infomation makesThings Worse for the Government and the People

In China, which has autocratic rule, you can shut down the channels of information available in most countries. In the Middle Kingdom, you can pretty much say what you want in an e-mail to one other person. The problem comes when you try to make a statement to multiple people. Your Internet provider will have to quickly step in and make sure this e-mail won't make political waves. China used to be very good at shutting down the flow of information, but just lately a crash of a new high-speed train got wider notice than party leaders expected.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have very good coverage of China and the Wall Street Journal translates its stories into Chinese and posts them on a website. I read both papers, and from conversations with Chinese friends on the Mainland, seem to know more than they do about what's going on with Bo Xilai and the death of a British citizen.

It has all the ingredients of Greek Tragedy. An ambitious wife with a lust for power and money, combined with the death of a British citizen who was apparently helping the party leader of Chongqing get money out of the country to foreign bank accounts. However, when you listen to the stories many Chinese immigrants pass from person to person, you hear about sexual activities by both Bo and his wife, multiple murders and vast amounts of money. The stories defy credibility.

This is all because China has worked so hard to keep information from its people. Rumors abound when there is a lack of freedom of information. Whatever strange things happened in Chongqing, the rumors have taken over. Suppressing information only makes people want to know more. And in a country in which gossip is on a world class level, the most lurid is bound to get the most attention. At a crucial moment of change in the leadership of China, rumors only fuel an instability where citizens imagine the worst

ADHD and Memories of Unfulfilled Dreams

For those of us with ADHD there is a compensation. I call it memories of unfulfilled dreams.

I guess it really started in the hammock strung between two trees on our farm. Because I was seven I was allowed to lay in it and travel to different worlds as my mind wandered off. But mostly my mind focused on the future of living on the farm, learning about life from my dad, and how perfect it would be.

Then I got a mild case of polio, which my dad caught, and within five days he was gone. Because of a pre-existing condition my father had no insurance. The farm and all the equipment, that hadn't been stolen in the night by neighbors, was sold off. However, to this day, I have a memory about the world I created while lying in the hammock. When things were tough, and if I didn't know if the Social Security check was going to feed us until the end of the month, I'd  go back to that memory, as if life had really turned out like that.

Later on I got ready for college.  Because of all the old movies I saw on television I envisioned Proms where they played "Deep Purple," and you met the girl next door and started life together. We'd go to the bonfire and then to the big game and life would be idyllic. There are less and less days in which I allow myself to drift back to that memory of unrealized expectations. I became a college Prof., a University VP and saw that the politics played in academia were probably more vicious than that involved in reaching the CEO position at Exxon.  However, for years, during those frequent  days as I fought that inner railroad train that wouldn't stop, they could be  forgotten by letting my mind drift back to those perfect worlds I'd created that never had a reality to match.

The Knock on the Door That Never Came

The other day I was talking to a friend in mainland China. I was complaining about the gridlock in Washington. We talked for a bit about Bo Xilai and how little the Chinese people knew about what was going on.

He then said to me, "I think you live in a very good country."

Those words brought back my perspective. As much as I criticize politics in this country, I can never forget why my ancestors came here in 1620. And it isn't just religious freedom that marks our country as a fine place. People still can be outspoken about any subject they want and about any one of our leaders.

 Some time ago, when I was in China, I picked up the Chinese name for GW. He was called Xiao (little) Bush because his father was Da (big) Bush. Bringing that concept back to America I put it in a very different context, one that the Chinese never intended. But I could denigrate his decisions in a college classroom. In China, denigrating Hu Jin Tao could end you in the slammer.

Calling him little Bush was a cheap shot, but I took it. They never came in the night to take me away.

I think I live in a very good country

My Party is Right. Your Party is Evil

America's bifurcation has reached new levels of absurdity. More and more people are realizing this and 40% of the electorate are registered Independent. While Democrats have 38%, Republicans have just 28%.

When each party takes control of the presidency or a house of Congress they believe they've been given a mandate. This is patently ridiculous. The party that has gained the power quickly pushes things too far and the independents become disturbed.

If Santorum became the nominee of the Republican Party in the fall, Republicans would soon go the way of the Whigs.

With the revelation that John Corzine is a crook, just like all the other bankers, the Democrats can get off their high horse. He authorized the transfer of clients money into an overseas account the company used to meet the firm's obligations.

Whether the Justice Department, or the SEC will throw him in jail, of course, is another question. The fox is guarding the hen house and he was a powerful Democrat.

What I've seen from the Corzine incident is the inability of Democratic Party members to see that a member of their party could be a criminal. I already knew the Republicans were incapable of identifying the wolves among the sheep.

My guess is the percentage of the electorate that registers Independent will only grow. Both parties have blinders on. The Democrats don't want to reduce the deficit. The Republicans don't want to pay for the wars they start or the basic safety net required for the American people.

The next time you think you're right, and the other party is evil, try to think that you might be making another decision based solely on ideology. As they say, "the Devil knows Scripture too."

France, Savoir Faire and Soccer

As an American, when I used to visit France it was at best a mixed experience. Since I speak Chinese, not the lingua franca (which once was French), I was barely tolerated. But I've changed that situation.

When I lived in Europe, the last French official soccer jersey they had for sale was the home jersey. (They won the '98 World Cup in the Blue one.)  This white jersey stands out because everybody wanted the Bleu one.

Every day on my last visit to the City of Light I wore this, washing it at night in the hotel. I was waited on first in small restaurants. I also tried not to be an American, by not yelling and by being polite. (man, it was hard)

I also said only two things loudly which were "La Belle France, and "Vive La France."

I'm looking forward someday to once again being the Toast of Paris.

Bloomberg Tries to Destroy Whistle Blower

For the last 36 hours Bloomberg television has been trying to destroy the reputation of Greg Smith, the Goldman Sachs whistle blower. They've put on everyone they can think of who will demean him. They talk about how he'll never get another job. They talk about how low-level he is and they talk about the fact he only makes $500,000 a year.

This concerted effort to destroy his credibility makes me wonder if Wall Street learned anything at all about the financial crisis.

I no longer respect Mayor Bloomberg and will not watch Bloomberg.com. This unrelenting attack is one of the most vicious  in journalism and makes Bloomberg look like Rupert Murdoch.

People who know Greg Smith, who worked in the London office of Goldman Sachs say he is a man of the highest principles. He is someone who is ethical to a fault. Because of this, he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times which talked about the culture of Goldman Sachs. He said the bank tried to make money for the firm at the expense of its clients. Goldman Sachs has had its ethics questioned over and over. Its  flagrant self dealing is a matter of record.

We now know that Wall Street has learned nothing from the Financial Crisis. It will continue to do anything to make money at the expense of its clients. MF Global shows how little ethics matters on Wall Street.

Bloomberg has shown how little he respects the average American. I can't believe how much I used to admire him. Now I wonder just how slimy he is. Our country is in trouble and our public figures don't care.

John McCain and Neville Chamberlain

As he probably was for many others, John McCain used to be my hero. He was the rational voice in the Republican Party. I really miss him.

I still regard him as a great patriot, but the man who wants to drop bombs on a lot of countries is not the same John McCain I used to admire.

He has joined the Republicans who still think Neville Chamberlain is the enemy. In every war since World War II the Republicans have brought up the concept of appeasement and the Democrats, afraid to take a stand on anything except support for the teachers unions, have gone along.

The most interesting aspect of this is that Republicans were solidly behind America First which tried to keep us out of  the Second World War. They weren't interested in stopping the boxcars heading for Auschwitz. However, since Korea they've used Munich as a sledgehammer on other Americans who might not want to invade Iraq just because the Iraqis were nasty to George's daddy. So I watch John McCain, who now wants us to bomb Syria, and wonder if he knows how sleazy and uncoordinated the opposition is in that country?

It's too much I guess to hope the old John McCain will return. He has joined the disloyal opposition and wants us to kill everybody.

However, I still miss the John McCain that provided hope Americans could work together to fix our problems and transcend the vitriol and nastiness of our present two party system.