BOORSEE

DILI, East Timor — It was the farthest trip of his pontificate and one of the longest papal trips ever in terms of days on the road and distance traveled. But Pope Francis, age 87, hobbled by bad knees and bent over with sciatica, appeared to be having the time of his life.

With half of East Timor’s population gathered at a seaside park, Francis couldn’t help but oblige them with a final good night and languid loops in his popemobile, long after the sun had set and the field was lit by cellphone screens.

It was late, the heat and humidity had turned Tasitolu park into something of a sauna, and most of the journalists had already gone back to their air-conditioned hotel to watch the Mass on TV. But there was Francis, defying the doubters who had questioned if he could, would or should make such an arduous trip to Asia given everything that could go wrong.

“How many children you have!” Francis marveled to the crowd of 600,000, which amounted to the biggest-ever turnout for a papal event as a proportion of the population. “A people that teaches its children to smile is a people that has a future.”

The moment seemed to serve as proof that, despite his age, ailments and seven hours of jet lag, Pope Francis still could pope, still likes to pope and has it in him to pope like he used to at the start of his pontificate.

That’s never truer than when he’s in his element: in the peripheries of the world, among people forgotten by the big powers, where he can go off-script to respond to the spirit of the moment.

And it was certainly the case on his 11-day trip through Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and Singapore, during which he clocked nearly 33,000 kilometers (20,505 miles) in air travel alone. It was a trip that he had originally planned to make in 2020 but COVID-19 intervened.

Four years and a handful of hospitalizations later (for intestinal and pulmonary problems), Francis finally pulled it off. He seemed to relish getting out of the Vatican and away from the weighty grind of the Holy See after being cooped up all year, much of it battling a long bout of bronchitis.

Francis does tend to rally during foreign trips, though he usually sticks to a script when he’s in the protocol meetings with heads of state, dutifully delivering speeches that were written in advance by Vatican diplomats.

But when he’s meeting with young people or local priests and nuns, he tends to show his true colors. He’ll ditch his prepared remarks and speak off-the-cuff, often engaging in back-and-forth banter with the faithful to make sure his message has stuck.

Doing so thrills the crowd, terrorizes his translators and complicates the work of journalists, but you always know Francis is enjoying himself and feels energized when he goes rogue. And he went rogue plenty of times in Asia — and on the in-flight press conference coming back to Rome, during which he urged American Catholics to vote for who they think is the “lesser evil” for president.

Francis started in Indonesia, arguably the most delicate destination on his itinerary given the country is home to the world’s largest Muslim population. The Vatican would be loathe to say or do anything that might cause offense.

And yet from his very first encounter with President Joko Widodo, Francis appeared in a feisty mood, praising Indonesia’s relatively high birthrate while lamenting that in the West, “some prefer a cat or a little dog.”

Francis has frequently made the same demographic quip at home in Italy, which has one of the world’s lowest birthrates. But the high-profile trip meant that his trademark sarcasm got amplified. American commentators immediately assumed Francis had entered the “childless cat ladies” debate roiling U.S. politics, but there was no indication he had JD Vance in mind.

Even in the most delicate moment in Jakarta, at Southeast Asia’s biggest mosque, Francis threw protocol aside and kissed the hand of the grand imam and brought it to his cheek in gratitude.

In Papua New Guinea, Francis was similarly jazzed after pulling off a visit to a remote jungle outpost that had seemed impossible for him to reach: The airport in Vanimo, population 11,000, doesn’t have an ambulift wheelchair elevator that Francis now needs to get on and off planes, and bringing one in just for him was out of the question.

The stubborn pope, who really, really wanted to go to Vanimo, ended up rolling on and off the back ramp of a C-130 cargo plane that Australia had offered to get him, and the metric ton of medicine and other supplies he brought with him, to the town.

Despite the considerable security concerns of entering a region torn by tribal rivalries, Francis seemed to relish the jungle visit, perhaps because he felt so much at home. A dozen Argentine missionary priests and nuns have lived in Vanimo with the local community for years and had invited him to come. They decorated the simple stage in front of the church with a statue of Argentina’s beloved Virgin of Lujan, to whom Francis is particularly devoted, and had a gourd of mate, the Argentine tea, waiting for him.

In East Timor Francis had to negotiate perhaps the most sensitive issue clouding the visit: the case of Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, the revered national hero who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent independence campaign. The Vatican revealed in 2022 that it had sanctioned Belo, who now lives in Portugal, for having sexually abused young boys and ordered him to cease contact with East Timor.

Francis didn’t mention Belo by name and didn’t meet with his victims, but he did reaffirm the need to protect children from “abuse.” There was nary a mention of Belo’s name in any official speech during a visit in which East Timor’s traumatic history and independence fight were repeatedly evoked.

In Singapore, his final stop, Francis once again ditched his remarks when he arrived at the last event, a meeting of Singaporean youth on Friday morning.

“That’s the talk I prepared,” he said, pointing to his speech and then proceeding to launch into a spontaneous back-and-forth with the young people about the need to have courage and take risks.

“What’s worse: Make a mistake because I take a certain path, or not make a mistake and stay home?” he asked them.

He answered his own question, with a response that could explain his own risky decision to embark on the Asia trip in the first place.

“A young person who doesn’t take a risk, who is afraid of making a mistake, is an old person,” the 87-year-old pope said.

“I hope all of you go forward,” he said. “Don’t go back. Don’t go back. Take risks.”
…

SHANGHAI/BEIJING — Shanghai halted transportation links, recalled ships and shut tourism spots including Shanghai Disney Resort on Sunday as it braced for Typhoon Bebinca, in what could be the strongest tropical cyclone to hit the Chinese financial hub since 1949.

The Category 1 typhoon, packing maximum sustained wind speeds near its center of around 144 kph, was about 500 kilometers southeast of Shanghai as of 1 p.m.  It is expected to make landfall along China’s eastern coast after midnight on Monday.

The strongest storm to make landfall in Shanghai in recent decades was Typhoon Gloria in 1949, which tore through the city with gusts of 144 kph. Shanghai was last threatened by a direct hit in 2022 by the powerful Typhoon Muifa, which instead landed 300 kilometers away in the city of Zhoushan, in Zhejiang province.

Shanghai is typically spared the strong typhoons that hit farther south in China, including Yagi, a destructive Category 4 storm that roared past southern Hainan province last week. But Shanghai and neighboring provinces are taking no chances with Category 1 Bebinca.

Resorts in Shanghai, including Shanghai Disney Resort, Jinjiang Amusement Park and Shanghai Wild Animal Park, have been temporarily closed while most ferries have been halted to and from Chongming Island – China’s third-biggest island known as “the gateway to the Yangtze River.”

More than 600 flights to and from Shanghai were also canceled, according to local media.

In Zhejiang, ships have been recalled while several parks in the provincial capital Hangzhou announced closures.

Bebinca’s arrival will coincide with the Mid-Autumn festival, a nationwide three-day holiday when many Chinese travel or engage in outdoor activities.

China’s Ministry of Water Resources on Saturday issued a Level-IV emergency response — the lowest level in China’s four-tier emergency response system — for potential flooding in Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui. 
…

…

BEIJING — At Beijing’s largest antiques market, Panjiayuan, among the Mao statues, posters and second-hand books are prominent signs warning against the sale of publications that might have state secrets or “reactionary propaganda.”

Some of the signs display a hotline number so that citizens can tip off authorities if they witness an illegal sale.

China’s antique and flea markets were once a gold mine of documents for historians, but now the signs are emblematic of the chill that has descended on their ability to do research in the country.

On one hand, Beijing wants to increase academic exchange and President Xi Jinping last November invited 50,000 American students to China over the next five years — a massive jump from about 800 currently.

How much steam that will gather is very much an open question. But scholars of modern Chinese history in particular — arguably among the people most interested in China – fear that tightened censorship is extinguishing avenues for independent research into the country’s past.

This is especially so for documents relating to the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution — the most historically sensitive period for the Chinese Communist Party — when Mao Zedong declared class war and plunged China into chaos and violence.

“I would say the period of going to flea markets and simply finding treasure troves is pretty much over,” said Daniel Leese, a modern China historian at the University of Freiburg.

Trawling for documents “has basically gone out of favor because it has simply become too complex, difficult and dangerous,” he said, adding that younger foreign scholars are increasingly relying on overseas collections.

The Chinese Communist Party has exerted control over all publications including books, the media and the internet since establishing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, with the degree of censorship fluctuating over time.

But censorship has only intensified under President Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012 and has blamed “historic nihilism” or versions of history that differ from the official accounts for causing the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In recent years, a raft of new national security and anti-espionage legislation has made scholars even more wary of citing unofficial Chinese materials.

Some scholars of modern Chinese history who have published studies that either challenged Chinese state narratives or are on sensitive topics say they have been denied visas to China.

James Millward, a historian at Georgetown University, said he had been visa-blocked on several occasions after contributing to the 2004 book Xinjiang: China’s Muslim Borderland but has since received short-term visas a few times albeit after a lengthy process.

The political climate is also shaping how historians choose their research subjects. One historian based in the U.S. said he has chosen to work on non-controversial topics to maintain travel access to China. He declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the issue.

China’s education ministry did not respond to a Reuters request for comment. The foreign ministry said it was unaware of relevant circumstances.

Documentary discoveries

Leese and other foreign historians say they previously found case files of persecuted intellectuals as well as secret Communist Party documents at Chinese flea and antique markets.

These were often donated by relatives of deceased officials or painstakingly rescued by booksellers from recycling centers near government offices disbanded during the mass state sector layoffs of the 1990s.

But the government has, since 2008, cracked down on flea markets and other sources of used books and documents. Buyers have been arrested, sellers have been fined and used book websites have been cleared of politically sensitive items, according to domestic media reports, collectors and four overseas researchers who spoke with Reuters.

In 2019, for example, a Japanese historian was detained for two months on spying charges after buying 1930s books on the Sino-Japanese War from a second-hand bookshop.

Two years later, a hobbyist accused of selling illegal publications from Hong Kong and Taiwan publishers on Kongfuzi, China’s biggest website for used books, was fined 280,000 yuan ($39,000) for not having a business license, Chinese media reported.

And this year, two workers at a recycling center were punished for selling confidential military documents, state media said.

Buyers now cultivate personal relationships with merchants who sell through WeChat, said a Beijing-based collector interested in documents from the Cultural Revolution, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Historians also note that access to the vast majority of local government archives has been restricted since 2010 and their digitization has enabled censors to heavily redact them.

Foreign-based historians add that their counterparts in mainland China can only preserve materials for posterity in the current political climate. But not all are downbeat.

“Even under Xi, Chinese scholars continue to seek openings and enlarge the understanding and interpretation of PRC history,” said Yi Lu, assistant history professor at Dartmouth College, who has worked extensively with Chinese university collections of 20th-century materials. “All is not lost.”
…