Scattered Thoughts, June 6, 2024
The Mysterious Mayor Alice Guo of Ban Ban Philipines, Chinese students behaving badly in the USA, and WW2 Japanese citing Confucianism to advocate Fascist human rights abuses, but there is still more
Greetings. Welcome back. I expect to soon reduce this to a once a week schedule. This will allow me to spend more time on each piece, and hopefully you will see positive changes. As stated, at the moment, this is a work in progress, developing and seeking its identity as it unfolds and evolves. Honestly, I am a bit confused. This sort of format, where I offter lots of links and my comments and context, strikes me as a pretty good one. Readers get recommendations on stories they might miss, they can read them, and then they can get my additional, informed commentary and thoughts on the article. However, the statistics that I get from Substack show the very few people are actually following through on the links or share them with others. Therefore, apparently, my impression that weekly pieces like this are something people would like, few actualy seem to be enthused by them.
Back in the 1980s, when I first entered the field of Asian Studies, one of my motivations was to improve intercultural understanding and work for world peace. Alas! This week, I find myself sharing some pretty ugly stuff about Chinese people, but, remember, we are speaking of individuals here, not an entire ethnic group or nationality, and the truth is most of the news that’s printed about most of the people in most news stories shows them doing something bad. It’s just the way it is. Please, work for peace. We are all humans living on the same planet and it’s always much nicer when people can get together, share food, share music, and share jokes and laugh together than when they fight. Just a reminder.
And meanwhile, share these pieces, tell your friends, and give me feedback. And, for goodness sakes, follow these links and you will find some good stuff.
Mayor Alice Guo, her mysterious past, and the POGO Hub
Oh my, Mayor Alice Guo of Ban Ban, Philipines. And look at that smile. Look at those eyes. “I know somethhing you don’t know,” they scream. Such a weird ass story. You can’t make this stuff up.
First a quick review.
You know all those scam phone calls and emails you and the people you know get? Well the sad fact is that some of those people on the other end of the line don’t want to be there. Yes, they know they are scamming you and trying to steal your money, but that doesn’t mean they wish to be doing this. Many of these callers have been coerced, tricked, enslaved, human trafficked into doing this, and are often facing threats of terrible things up to and including torture, sexual assault, and death if they don’t participate in these scams.
Often these people are forced to live and work in phone bank complexes in isolated, parts of the world where law is loose or non-existent. Many of these are located in the ethnic minority areas of Burma (Myanmar), traditionally known as lawless places, but this is not the only place where such scam phone centers exist.
Recently one was found on an island in the Philipines in a place called BanBan. (I did not name it. Really.) Philipine police raided the phone bank and set the phone reps free. (There were several hundred of these people, all being forced to make calls and trick others out of their money. According to new reports, there were 383 Filipinos, 202 Chinese and 73 other foreign nationals all held prisoner and forced to make calls tricking others out of their money.)
And then there was the question of what did local Mayor Alice Guo know about any of these goings ons? Not only was she Mayor of the locality where these things were taking place, but she also had once owned some of the property where the scam phone center where all these human trafficking victims were enslaved and making the scam calls against their will all day long.
People soon begain looking into the background of Mayor Alice Guo and discovered, strangely enough, she did not have one. That’s right. Records for Mayor Alice Guo at key points of her life were entirely non-existent. Nobody was able to prove who she was or where she came from.
I wrote about this a bit in an earlier edition of “Scattered Thoughts” two weeks ago on May 24, 2024. ( see This one here, okay? )
So, what’s been happening since?
Things have gotten weirder and weirder. While it looked for a while that Guo’s mother had been found, she was not the Filipina servant girl that Guo claims was her mother, but a Chinese woman locally said to be her mother (strange, I thought no one locally had any idea who her mother was, but apparently there were rumors) and when DNA testing was suggested the alleged mother woman who was Chinese fled and disappeared, presumably out of the country.
And, it appears, lots of police have been suspended from their duties and the Mayor, Mayor Guo herself, has been suspended from many of her duties and it’s just a really strange story and you can go google it.
BTW, when you do, you will soon encounter the phrase “POGO Hub” — “POGO” is "Philipine Offshore Gaming Operator” ( see Wikipedia: Philippine Offshore Gaming Operator for a more complete definition, and “a hub” is “a hub,” a place that is the center for an activty,
Here’s some news articles on it. There are others, lots of others. Just google “Mayor Alice Guo” and you will find them.
Guo willing to take DNA test - Manila Standard
https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/1946653/hontiveros-shows-papers-linking-guo-and-lin-wen-yi
Chinese students in the USA behaving badly
First, there are many advantages to having Chinese students in the USA. They spend money and create jobs, not just for universities but also for landlords, restaurants, and grocery stores in the areas where they go to school and in some cases, Chinese and other foreign students can make a noticable, positive impact on an area’s economy.
Aside from that immediate effect, there’s the brain drain, the way many of China’s best and brightest are leaving their homeland and settling abroad and by doing so providing their engineering, medical, research, and other much needed skills to their new homelands, including the USA, while simultaneously depriving China of these same skills. Believe me, when I say that the Chinese government is quite aware of this.
I have worked with Chinese students in many capacities and have no problems with them as a group.
However, having said that, well, sometimes bad things happen. And here we have twi very anomolous such bad things happening recently.
— Boston
Xiaolei Wu, who was studying jazz at the Berklee College of Music, was recently sentenced to two days in prison and then deported back to China. It seems when he discovered that one of his Chinese classmates at the school was posting pro-democracy, anti-Communist party slogans on signs he flipped out, went to an internet forum, and then posted that he was going to cut off her hands, and then call his mother, a government official in China, and have the other student’s family members arrested. Remember, beware of jazz musicians when excited!
Fortunately this does not fly in Boston, and he was arrested and convicted. While prosecutors pushed for a lengthy sentence, the judge pointed out that he was a first time offender, and that the sentence involved both deportation and the end of his academic studies in the USA, and thus was sufficient. She did say she was extremely concerned about Wu’s attempt to weaponize China’s legal system to punish people engaged in free speech abroad.
As for me, I agree with the judge and find the sentence sufficient as a deterrent and punishment. If people wish to dig deeper, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the thoughts and writings of Jonathan Haidt, the American social psychologist who has written extensively about how people form groups based around unifying symbols and react in explosive and irrational ways if the unifying symbols are threatened or attacked.
Here he is, Xiaolei Wu, dangerous and politically engaged foreign student of jazz.
https://www.reuters.com/world/chinese-student-gets-us-prison-term-threatening-pro-democracy-activist-2024-04-24/
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/article/3260260/chinese-student-boston-gets-9-months-prison-threatening-harassing-pro-democracy-classmate?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cm&utm_campaign=enlz-today_hk&utm_content=20240425&tpcc=enlz-today_hk&UUID=0a3ac1d8112cfe6b21fdee1a32dbcd5c&next_article_id=3260212&article_id_list=3260215,3260249,3260230,3260254,3260239,3260240,3260235,3260228&tc=22
And here’s a photo of the offending sign.
— Florida
Now this one is really weird and scary. In Florida, home of the dreaded “Florida Man,” we now have a bizarre incident involving “Florida Girl Chinese Student” doing something that could happen in the land of sunshine and home of Anita Bryant.
According to WUFT PBS, a local news source with ties to the University of Florida:
The University of Florida on Saturday banned a student from its property for three years who the Justice Department accused of being involved in a multi-million dollar scheme to divert biomedical samples of dangerous drugs and toxins from a campus laboratory to China.
Nongnong "Leticia" Zheng, 21, a senior marketing major in the business school and president of UF’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association, has not been formally charged with any crime. She confirmed in an interview Friday that the Justice Department notified her a year ago she was a target of a grand jury investigation and could face prison or deportation.“
Although the scheme to purchase and ship these things to China started in 2016, Zheng, the student, has only been involved for about a year.
In court records, federal prosecutors cited the role of a UF student they identified only as “Leticia” who was among students paid by organizers off campus to order small amounts of highly purified drugs – known as analytical standards – of fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine and methadone. The substances were delivered to a campus laboratory, then the organizers illicitly shipped the items to China.
I have decided to not include a link to her LinkedIn profile, but it’s there if you wish to see it.
https://apnews.com/article/university-illegal-drug-shipments-8ab0ca341c2d2554ea072ba35af0d813
https://www.wuft.org/fresh-take-florida/2024-05-26/uf-bans-student-from-campus-for-3-years-over-illegal-plot-to-ship-drugs-toxins-to-china
US Department of Justice Press Release on the Incident
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ringleader-and-company-insider-plead-guilty-defrauding-biochemical-company-and-diverting
Japan ww2 Confucianism
Stumbled across this and read it with interest. Heavy duty reading but interesting. It deals with the ideological motivations of Japanese soldiers in World War Two, their rationale for why what they were doing was good, just, and necessary, and the role that their interpretation of Confucian philosophy played in that motivation.
From my personal point of view, the key takeaway is that while Confucianism has been widely respected throughout Asian and throughout its history, the interpretation of what Confucianism is and advocates has varied widely throughout both time and location, just as has been the case with Christianity.
In fact, when I was at Cornell taking graduate level seminars in Asian history, we were forbidden to use “the C word” to explain things without being more specific and explaining both exactly what idea we were advocating but also how this position was tied in with and supported by the invocation that it was connected with Confucianism.
Read more here:
https://aeon.co/essays/japans-war-on-china-and-the-weaponisation-of-confucianism
Random stories worth sharing
Chinese immigration Concerns
https://www.scmp.com/economy/economic-indicators/article/3265627/chinas-eager-emigrants-fomo-real-and-move-overseas-may-be-now-or-never?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cm&utm_campaign=enlz-today_hk&utm_content=20240607&tpcc=enlz-today_hk&UUID=0a3ac1d8112cfe6b21fdee1a32dbcd5c&next_article_id=3265671&article_id_list=3265683,3265662,3265627,3265671,3265684,3265679,3265675,3265672&tc=8
Chinese geo-politics
Chinese internal affairs
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-banning-wealth-flaunting-behavior-social-media-rcna154240
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3265536/us-and-five-eyes-allies-warn-china-recruiting-western-military-trainers?utm_medium=email&utm_source=cm&utm_campaign=enlz-today_hk&utm_content=20240606&tpcc=enlz-today_hk&UUID=0a3ac1d8112cfe6b21fdee1a32dbcd5c&next_article_id=3265493&article_id_list=3265513,3265532,3265503,3265519,3265530,3265525,3265481,3265523&tc=23
A suggestion: Some interesting stories, but when you include the links, it might be a good idea to give a summary paragraph of what they contain. I didn't follow them but maybe a little summary would've enticed me further.