Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Saturday, January 22, 2005
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.
.
All this is something new on the world stage, as yet little noticed in the West, and it could prove to be either good news or bad news.
.
The obvious “good” arises from the prospect of the world’s second-largest economic power at last stepping confidently and determinedly into the international arena and sharing the burden of tackling and soothing the world’s many sicknesses. The less happy prospect is of a Japan more enmeshed than ever with American military power and therefore arousing even more hostility in a prickly China, regardless of Japanese investment.
.
Despite these dangers, the positive outcomes from Japan’s new direction look worth backing. But they need to be understood and interpreted correctly by the West, not lost in translation.
.

Japan I
 
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.
.
All this is something new on the world stage, as yet little noticed in the West, and it could prove to be either good news or bad news.
.
The obvious “good” arises from the prospect of the world’s second-largest economic power at last stepping confidently and determinedly into the international arena and sharing the burden of tackling and soothing the world’s many sicknesses. The less happy prospect is of a Japan more enmeshed than ever with American military power and therefore arousing even more hostility in a prickly China, regardless of Japanese investment.
.
Despite these dangers, the positive outcomes from Japan’s new direction look worth backing. But they need to be understood and interpreted correctly by the West, not lost in translation.
.

Japan I
 
LONDON Japan is once more going from strength to strength, and this time not just on the economic front. Militarily, diplomatically and in terms of cultural influence and general global activism, Japan is transforming itself, and at speed - not merely into a “normal” country, but into a formidable player across a wide front.
.
Militarily, the Japanese have embarked on a huge upgrade of their overall power-projection capabilities, reinforced by a big expansion of intelligence resources and of their already large satellite program.
.
In effect, this is a farewell to the old “Yoshida doctrine,” which based security strictly on national self-defense. Instead, it ushers in a new phase of “equal partnership” defense arrangements, especially with the United States, with interlocking ground, air and maritime forces at an unprecedented level of interoperability and intimacy.
.
This is going hand in hand with the procurement of a mass of new sophisticated weaponry and an extensive command-and-control make-over, adding up to a force structure second only to that of the Americans, and in some areas equal to it in quality and certainly well ahead of most other military establishments around the world.
.
Japan is not “going nuclear,” and there is no great interest in that option. But the decision has been made to procure a full system of ballistic missile defense, and to work further with the Americans in this area.
.
In short, Japan is re-emerging as a major military power both in East Asia and globally. But that is only part of the new picture.
.
After years of immobilism, Japan has now wheeled forward a strongly proactive foreign-policy-making system, which puts it at the center of the world diplomatic scene. For example, the country is playing a central role in Indian Ocean rescue-and-recovery operations, and it won out against China over the route of the proposed oil pipeline from Siberia to the Pacific.
.
Japan’s passion for balance and harmony is satisfied by the matching of much closer U.S. security links with heavy economic gravitation toward China. Thus bets are hedged all around, with some far-sighted policy makers eyeing India as the next big destination for Japanese investment - a counterweight to the Chinese counterweight, so to speak.
.
If all this sounds like old-style realpolitik and “hard power” talk, then look at the cultural front - clothes designs, interior décor themes, films, art, food, lifestyles - where American brands are being challenged and driven out by “Tokyo cool.”
.
After Japan’s decade of stagnation and the prolonged quagmire of deflation and non-performing loans, its banks are gradually cleaning their balance sheets, consumers are cautiously spending again and cutting-edge innovation is re-emerging all across the manufacturing front. But is this recovery just another phase in the cycle of the country’s amazing ups and downs since World War II?
.
It is indeed more than just a commercial replay of the past - it is Japan on a fundamentally new policy trajectory. What strikes the outsider is how the repositioning this time is being given an intellectual underpinning of admirable depth and thoroughness.
.
This is both refreshing and necessary, since Japanese public opinion is being asked to turn from its years of pacificism to the opposite - a strong forward stance in world affairs, as exemplified by the expanding commitment in Iraq and even a willingness to sign up to pre-emptive security doctrines which, so their American partners insist, are an essential part of the war on terror. These are the new tests of “normal country” status that Japan is thinking through and to which it now seeks to adjust.

Posted at 11:50 PM · Comments (0)

1/30/05

When Malcolm Gladwell published The Tipping Point five years ago, he had no idea what a sensation it would be. It was so difficult to classify that he wasn’t even sure where it would be put in bookshops. Yet his guide to the spread of ideas, trends and fads went on to become a global bestseller, selling more than 800,000 copies. It helped to launch the field of viral marketing and has been described as one of those rare books that changes the way you think. So it is no surprise that his new book - Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - has been a bestseller on Amazon for months, even though it is not due to be published until next week.

Gladwell has suggested we meet in Savoy, a chic Mediterranean-style restaurant in SoHo, downtown Manhattan, among the fashionable boutiques and artists’ lofts. He wrote much of Blink here, on leave from The New Yorker magazine, where he is a staff writer and thinker-at-large, renowned for thought-provoking essays on subjects as diverse as plagiarism, drug prices and the science of tomato sauce.

Savoy is a warm respite from the driving rain outside, and the upstairs restaurant is quiet - just a few couples and some businessmen. Minutes after the agreed meeting time, Gladwell slips into the seat opposite, greets me warmly and apologises for his late arrival. “I normally eat the burgers here, which are excellent,” he says. “But I was just in Scotland where I had some great sausages.” It takes me longer to choose grilled spiced lamb kebab with cucumber salad and yoghurt vinaigrette on whole wheat flatbread from the Savoy’s richly annotated menu.

Gladwell is quietly spoken and casually dressed in T-shirt and V-neck jumper. My first impression is of a young academic, but with an ineffable air of coolness, an image enhanced perhaps by his Jimi Hendrix Afro hairstyle. (His mother is Jamaican; his father English.)

He looks different from the press photos I have seen. His hair is longer and herein lies a tale, and the genesis of Blink. Gladwell says his life started to change “in many small ways” when he decided to let his hair grow a few years ago: he started to get picked up for speeding, he was taken out of the line at airports; he was even mistaken by the police for a rapist. “I was amazed at the impact of such a small change. It got me thinking about snap judgments. How powerful they are when they are right and how dangerous when wrong,” he says.

The waitress takes our order. Gladwell dispenses with a starter and wine, and I follow suit.

You could say Blink is about trusting your intuition, though Gladwell won’t. “I hate that word, it’s so overloaded - it’s a way of demeaning this process, saying it’s all emotional. I really want people to take snap judgments seriously. Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t obliterate its legitimacy,” he says, twisting a lock of wiry hair around his finger.

Blink is what Gladwell calls an “intellectual adventure story” in the spirit of The Tipping Point. However, instead of big theories about social dynamics, Gladwell has turned his attention to the first couple of seconds in which we make decisions, what he variously dubs “rapid cognition” or “thin slicing”. His thesis is this: quick decisions based on first impressions are often much better than those made after lengthy analysis; less information can be better than more; or simply: sometimes the best way to judge a book is by its cover. (Although he also shows how people can make extraordinarily bad, tragic, snap decisions.)

Gladwell introduces an array of characters who excel at “rapid cognition” in different contexts. As in The Tipping Point, he draws stories from a wide range of domains: food tasting, car sales, war games, chair design, even speed-dating. I ask him where he gets his ideas. “People tell me a lot. And I root aimlessly around libraries. Everything in Blink comes from a different place, comes out of some idiosyncratic encounters with a book or someone who told me a story,” he says, making it seem deceptively easy.

I ask whether it was difficult to write Blink following the huge success of The Tipping Point. “No, not at all. The success of The Tipping Point was totally unexpected. It was a gift. It was like a bolt of lightning,” he says. “I will accept whatever fate this book grants me. Personally, I feel it is a more rigorous book. I don’t know whether that makes the book better or worse - but as a writer it’s a little bit more satisfying.

”I realise, however, that I have fallen completely into the rock band problem - a very popular first album, then a second album where they ‘want to do something more interesting’ but it turns out to be much worse,” he says with a wry smile.

He dubs this “the Radiohead problem”. Gladwell has a gift at coining sticky catchphrases to describe and present his ideas - such as the “tipping point” itself. Blink is full of them: the Warren Harding Error, the Storytelling Problem, the Perils of Introspection - it is one reason why he is unlikely to suffer from the “Radiohead problem”.

The philosopher Isaiah Berlin divided people into foxes, who know many little things, and hedgehogs, who know one big thing and Gladwell, unsurprisingly, identifies himself as a fox. He believes his eclecticism and curiosity is due in part to his upbringing. Although he grew up in Canada, he is English. “The best kind of English person,” he jokes. “One who has left.” (His parents moved to Canada in the late 1960s to escape the racial climate in Britain at the time.)

”There is something about being an immigrant that allows you to explore your surroundings with enthusiasm, without any fetters or allegiance. And my parents are very curious and open-minded people, they encouraged this kind of ethnicity.”

The conversation turns to marketing, a subject close to Gladwell’s heart. In Blink, he reveals an astonishing fact: simply by asking someone to explain their personal preferences, their preferences change. People are not good at expressing what they like, so when asked to choose something new, that they don’t understand, they opt for the familiar. This is particularly true when products are experienced briefly, divorced from their context. Gladwell says this is why focus groups, the bedrock of marketing research, don’t work, particularly when it comes to new or radical ideas. “Most people who use focus groups hate them. Yet everyone participates in this fiction to get the answer they want. We have inadvertently created a culture of conservatism in large corporations. We don’t… realise we are doing it, so that’s a significant cost,” he says.

The proprietor arrives at our table and greets Gladwell warmly. “I am being interviewed. I have turned your restaurant into a place of business,” he jokes.

One of the most provocative sections of Blink concerns a military simulation undertaken by the US military in 2002. Gladwell tells how a marine officer, Paul van Riper, recruited to play a rogue military leader in the Gulf in the war game, fought US forces that were equipped with the most comprehensive and developed information systems known to man. Using a low-technology approach, combined with the element of surprise, he won.

”One of the themes here is the unwarranted overconfidence that comes from thinking you have all the information,” he says. “In Blink, I quote the study where doctors are given various kinds of information about a patient.

”And you discover that there is no difference in the accuracy of the diagnoses whether they receive two pages, five pages or 10 pages of information. The only thing that is different is the confidence in these judgments.

”There is this myth that the US military did no planning. They did do planning. It’s just that the planning was preposterous. They were just massively overconfident, they knew that country, they had been there 10 years before, they thought they knew Saddam Hussein, they thought that they had all the pieces,” he says wiping his plate clean with some bread.

Although Gladwell has been doing most of the talking, he finishes eating well before me. After we order coffees and dessert, the conversation drifts over a broad terrain: twins, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris (of The Fog of War fame), the recent election (on which he is scrupulously neutral). Gladwell is innately inquisitive, always voluble, but also a very good listener.

Before we leave, I want to talk about the subject of priming, possibly one of the most fascinating ideas in the book. In Blink, Gladwell reveals how people’s behaviour can be powerfully influenced by their frame of mind. “Prime” students in a quiz to think of professors and they perform better; prime them to think of soccer hooligans and their performance deteriorates. Ask black people to fill in their race in a questionnaire and they achieve lower test scores. Gladwell paints a picture of a mutable, highly malleable personality, under the influence of unconscious forces that are poorly understood. It’s radical stuff, I suggest.

”While writing Blink I became profoundly sceptical of our ideas of personhood. I think that we have a set of highly specific idiosyncratic responses to specific situations but I no longer believe much in the idea of character,” he says. “It is radical, but that’s why it’s fun.”

Posted at 11:16 PM · Comments (0)

JAN. 30 is here at last, and the light is at the end of the tunnel, again. By my estimate, Iraq’s election day is the fifth time that American troops have been almost on their way home from an about-to-be pacified Iraq. The four other incipient V-I days were the liberation of Baghdad (April 9, 2003), President Bush’s declaration that “major combat operations have ended” (May 1, 2003), the arrest of Saddam Hussein (Dec. 14, 2003) and the handover of sovereignty to our puppet of choice, Ayad Allawi (June 28, 2004). And this isn’t even counting the two “decisive” battles for our nouveau Tet, Falluja. Iraq is Vietnam on speed - the false endings of that tragic decade re-enacted and compressed in jump cuts, a quagmire retooled for the MTV attention span.

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But in at least one way we are not back in Vietnam. Iraq hawks, like Vietnam hawks before them, often take the line that to criticize America’s mission in Iraq is to attack the troops. That paradigm just doesn’t hold. Americans, including those opposed to the war, love the troops (Lynndie England always excepted). Not even the most unhinged Bush hater is calling our all-volunteer army “baby killers.” This time, paradoxically enough, it is often those who claim to love the troops the most - and who have the political power to help alleviate their sacrifice - who turn out to be the troops’ false friends.

There was, for instance, according to the Los Angeles Times, “nary a mention” of the Iraq war or “the prices paid by American soldiers and their families” at the lavish Inauguration bash thrown for the grandees of the Christian right by the Rev. Lou Sheldon of the Traditional Values Coalition at Washington’s Ritz-Carlton. This crowd cares about the troops much the way the Fifth Avenue swells in the 1936 Hollywood classic “My Man Godfrey” cared about the “forgotten men” of the Depression - as fashion ornaments and rhetorical conveniences. In that screwball comedy, a socialite on a scavenger hunt collects a genuine squatter from the shantytown along the East River. “All you have to do is go to the Waldorf-Ritz Hotel with me,” she tells her recruit, “and I’ll show you to a few people and then I’ll send you right back.”

In this same vein, television’s ceremonial coverage of the Inauguration, much of which resembled the martial pageantry broadcast by state-owned networks in banana republics, made a dutiful show out of the White House’s claim that the four-day bacchanal was a salute to the troops. The only commentator to rudely call attention to the disconnect between that fictional pretense and the reality was Judy Bachrach, a writer for Vanity Fair, who dared say on Fox News that the inaugural’s military ball and prayer service would not keep troops “safe and warm” in their “flimsy” Humvees in Iraq. She was promptly given the hook. (The riveting three-minute clip, labeled “Fair and Balanced Inauguration,” can be found at ifilm.com, where it has seized the “most popular” slot once owned by Jon Stewart’s slapdown of Tucker Carlson.)

Posted at 10:58 PM · Comments (0)

DAVOS, Switzerland: After decades languishing as the last item on the global agenda, seemingly helpless to stem its own decline, Africa is poised this year for what the rock-star Bono called “its moment” - a time when the world will be pressed to provide the money and the will to reverse a continent’s slide.
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To reinforce the point Thursday at the World Economic Forum in this Swiss resort, an American billionaire, a former American president, a British prime minister, two African presidents and Bono himself took to the stage to drum home the point to an assembly of more than 2,000 of the world’s rich and powerful people.
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If their entreaties had a loud subtext, though, it was that the Bush administration will come under mounting pressure this year to underpin an effort to give Africa a new boost. Washington, that is, will be called upon to maintain its commitment to spending billions of dollars to counter AIDS and foster development and to expand the portion of its wealth that it spends on the continent.
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“The United States needs to move further up the table” of aid donors, as listed by the proportion of their overall wealth that they contribute to development aid, Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, said at a news conference. Gates, who has just announced a $750 million gift to help poor children gain access to vaccines, was speaking shortly before he, Bono and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the former U.S. president Bill Clinton at a public session that ranked as one of the heavyweight events here…

…This year, Prime Minister Blair has pledged to use his chairmanship of the G-8 wealthy nations and Britain’s forthcoming presidency of the EU to begin what he called Thursday “a big, big push forward.”

Africa’s battle with AIDS, poverty and decline were “so shocking that it almost defies our imagination,” he said.

“If what was happening in Africa happened in any other part of the world there would be such a scandal and clamor,” he said. “Africa is the one continent that has been going back over the last 30 years.”
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The response, Blair said, would come through increased aid, efforts to end African conflicts and moves to end official corruption and tyranny.
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It would also come through enhanced campaigns against killer diseases such as AIDS and malaria.
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One British idea, called the International Finance Facility, is to tap an extra $50 billion in development aid around the world by raising money in advance on global financial markets.
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Those themes are familiar but Westerners are hoping that African leaders will take charge of their destiny after a history of colonialism and cold war division. In changing some of its institutions to deal with its own social and economic problems, Obasanjo said, African leaders had shown that “we want to help ourselves.” But, he said, the levels of aid to deal with deficiencies in food, jobs, schools and health care were not enough.
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“We are getting aid, but what are we getting it for? We are getting aid when we have flood, disaster. We are not getting the critical mass of funds to make development possible,” he said.
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Not only that, but with conflicts in Darfur, Congo, Ivory Coast and other places, Mbeki said, “the priority we have set ourselves is to say: obviously we have to address matters of peace and stability on the continent, make sure that we end all these conflicts, because without that we don’t have development.”
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The issue is as much how to raise new money as how to ensure it is spent effectively at a time when western governments are preoccupied with matters such as the war in Iraq, nuclear policy in Iran and with disasters such as the Asian tsunami that threaten to divert aid from Africa.
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Moreover, Clinton said, while America’s business and political elite were beginning to pay more attention to Africa, “we have never created an effective political constituency” in support of the continent’s development needs.
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“It is never a voting issue” that politicians see as likely to determine whether they win elections, Clinton said.
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At the conference, President Jacques Chirac of France suggested a series of international taxes to raise money to combat AIDS and promote development - including a levy on money transfers into countries like Switzerland with strict banking secrecy laws.
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But that idea - which won some support from the financier George Soros on Thursday - did not seem to meet with much approval on the podium.
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Clinton warned against “us getting diverted into that instead of keeping people alive.” The issue of America’s keeping promises that President George W. Bush has already made seems likely to recur.
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The United States “should not retreat under the weight of these crushing budget deficits,” Bono said.
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Against that, Senator Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader, said America led the world in Tsunami relief efforts and provided 60 percent of the world’s emergency food supplies.
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“We are the world’s single biggest resource of aid,” he said.
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Talk of the Tsunami disaster inspired Obasanjo to say that he had thought “the milk of human kindness had been sucked from humanity” by the world’s weariness with giving.
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But the generosity of the global charitable response to the Asian disaster “gives me courage, gives me hope and makes me feel that we can still make it.”
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Bono offered one more reason why the world should help. Around 40 percent of Africa’s people are Muslim, he said, and some African states risked becoming labeled failed states as Afghanistan was under the Taliban regime.
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“Africa is not the frontline of the war against terrorism,” he said. “But it could be soon.”
.

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See more of the world that matters - click here for home delivery of the International Herald Tribune.
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< < Back to Start of Article
DAVOS, Switzerland: After decades languishing as the last item on the global agenda, seemingly helpless to stem its own decline, Africa is poised this year for what the rock-star Bono called “its moment” - a time when the world will be pressed to provide the money and the will to reverse a continent’s slide.
.
To reinforce the point Thursday at the World Economic Forum in this Swiss resort, an American billionaire, a former American president, a British prime minister, two African presidents and Bono himself took to the stage to drum home the point to an assembly of more than 2,000 of the world’s rich and powerful people.
.
If their entreaties had a loud subtext, though, it was that the Bush administration will come under mounting pressure this year to underpin an effort to give Africa a new boost. Washington, that is, will be called upon to maintain its commitment to spending billions of dollars to counter AIDS and foster development and to expand the portion of its wealth that it spends on the continent.
.
“The United States needs to move further up the table” of aid donors, as listed by the proportion of their overall wealth that they contribute to development aid, Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder, said at a news conference. Gates, who has just announced a $750 million gift to help poor children gain access to vaccines, was speaking shortly before he, Bono and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain joined Presidents Thabo Mbeki of South Africa and Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria and the former U.S. president Bill Clinton at a public session that ranked as one of the heavyweight events here.
.
For as long as it has been in decline, of course, much of Africa has been the object of earnest debate and handwringing, even as other regions of the world once known for their poverty struggled to gain niches in the global economy. The themes of poverty and disease have changed little, except to worsen.
.
This year, Prime Minister Blair has pledged to use his chairmanship of the G-8 wealthy nations and Britain’s forthcoming presidency of the EU to begin what he called Thursday “a big, big push forward.”
.
Africa’s battle with AIDS, poverty and decline were “so shocking that it almost defies our imagination,” he said.
.
“If what was happening in Africa happened in any other part of the world there would be such a scandal and clamor,” he said. “Africa is the one continent that has been going back over the last 30 years.”…

see the entire article at the link below.
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Posted at 3:41 PM · Comments (0)

An interesting follow-up to the Lawrence Summers controversy.

Posted at 3:23 PM · Comments (0)

This is absolutely hilarious. Listen for yourselves at the link below.

Posted at 3:20 PM · Comments (0)

2004 was the year of jun-ai (pure love), epitomized by the huge popularity of Yon-sama (the reverential nickname for Bae Yong Joon, star of the hit Korean drama “Winter Sonata”) and a craze for sentimental love stories that gripped the nation from Hokkaido to the Okinawa.

So what exactly is a jun-ai relationship? Well, it should be platonic or, at most, include just one sexual encounter. A jun-ai couple should also be faced by many obstacles contrived to keep them apart and pining for a romantic reunion. Jun-ai quotient also rises if it’s a hatsukoi (first love) situation — a pair who fell in love when they were 15 and somehow managed to keep those nascent emotions intact in spite of the passage of time.

The Japanese set great store on the hatsukoi thing, being convinced that the purest love comes when one has never loved before. For this reason hatsukoi is considered sacrosanct, a treasure that will never be tarnished with petty problems that inevitably plague a relationship between seasoned lovers.

Ideally, one or the other of the hatuskoi couple will die (preferably in his/her teens) at the peak of their love, thereby preserving the memory of the relationship, in all its purity, beauty and fervor, forever. Which brings us to “Seka-chu” (short for “Sekai no Chushin de Ai wo Sakebu [Crying out Love in the Center of the World]”), the miniseries that rivaled “Fuyu-Sona” (short for “Fuyu no Sonata [Winter Sonata]) in terms of hankie-wringing. Even the Shibuya gals called out “Seka-chu mitaina koi ga shitai!” (I want to have a relationship like the one in ‘Seka-chu’!) and subsequently toned down their makeup in preparation for the pure, honmono no koi (genuine love).

Yes, the once-chic otegaru na kankei (casual affair) is out — along with burgers, konbini (convenience stores) and other evils of fast-food culture. Nothing is tackier than having a string of sefure (sex friends) but no real kareshi (boyfriend) with whom to take walks, dinners and enjoy long, meaningful conversations. The important thing (for women, anyway) is to get into rabu modo (love mode) before they throw themselves into a full-fledged relationship, to be ready for romance so that when the daarin (darling) does come along, he will spot the signs immediately. Then they can both launch into that most coveted of states: uru-uru na ai (starry-eyed love).

According to the numerous rabu ankeeto (surveys about love and relationships) printed in Japan’s myriad fashion magazines this time of year, young women long more for shinmitsusa (intimacy) over sex and enjoy the process of seduction far more than its consummation. For this, women polish their bodies and hydrate their skins (the effect is called rabu-hada, or skin that’s made for love) in order to appear jun (pure), shiawase (happy) and stress-free and emulate the lovely, almost-unattainable heroine in a jun-ai monogatari (story).

They also welcome a bit of pain, for what’s true love without a thin icing of setsunasa (sadness) over all the delicious sweetness? The phrase setsunai yo (I feel a little blue) has practically become a compliment when spoken between two lovers; it means they’re capable of finely nuanced emotions and that by sharing their depression they feel that their relationship could last a long time.

What a lot of women say, however, is that the young men of this country are too thick to understand this need for emotional drama. Twenty nine-year-old Minako says resignedly: “Kono kuni no otokowa fukami ga nakute nijigenteki sugiru” (The men in this country have no depth and are too two-dimensional).

The men, on the other hand, say that it’s enough to kokuru (confess their love) with commitment and sincerity; after that, where’s the need to discuss emotions? “Suki to ittandakara mou iiyo” (I said I love you, so that’s that) is a famed line spoken by the hero in one of the torendii dorama (trendy dramas) the networks churn out with regularity.

Men are also bound by tradition: For a long time, any Japanese male who spewed forth about kojinteki kanjyou (personal feelings) was considered a big-time wimp and a loser. However, recognizing society’s need for men to hone their verbal skills, many companies now encourage their male employees to participate in company-sponsored communications classes. Whether this new trend will transform them all into Japanified versions of “Yon-sama” remains to be seen.

And another, somewhat related piece, by Phil Brasor, another of my favorites at the JT:

MEDIA MIX

Single thirtysomethings under the spotlight

By PHILIP BRASOR

Last weekend, Nihon TV broadcast a two-hour program based on Junko Sakai’s bestselling book “Makeinu no Toboe (The Howl of the Loser Dog),” a piece of nonfiction. The show, however, was a standard trendy drama, meaning long on ritzy real-estate and product placements, short on situations that resemble real life.

Thanks to Sakai, “makeinu” has become an everyday word that the media uses to describe a female thirtysomething who’s not married but wishes she were. In the book, however, the definition is narrower: women approaching 40 with insecure jobs and no marriage prospects in sight.

The drama took a predictably neutral view. The three makeinu represented three distinct types: One was a very successful businesswoman who longed for marriage and children but who found fulfillment in her professional responsibilities; another was a divorced, childless woman who didn’t see any point in going through marriage again; and the third was a ditzy fashion fatality who wanted to marry but only if the man had lots of money and she didn’t have to give up her frivolous lifestyle.

For balance, a kachiinu (winner dog) was written into the story, a housewife who once worked with the businesswoman but now finds satisfaction taking care of her husband and son full-time.

At some point in the drama, each character came to doubt the direction her life had taken, but, in the end, they all learned to appreciate what they had. The forced even-handedness was infuriating, but the show’s lukewarm attitude was a welcome corrective to the media’s more judgmental interpretation of the terms. As one character put it, “Makeinu and kachiinu are just words,” meaning they make it easy to stereotype women.

Stereotypes are easier to work with than complex issues, and makeinu has become a convenient buzz word in the escalating public debate about later marriages and declining birthrates.

The makeinu stereotype implies that responsibility for Japan’s birthrate crisis lies with unmarried women in their 30s. The weekly magazine Aera has been instrumental in promoting this view. In a recent issue, there was an article that focused on a 37-year-old man who makes about 7 million yen a year and owns a condominium in Tokyo but can’t find a woman who’s interested in him. He attends matchmaking parties but finds that single women his age are looking for someone with more money and a higher position.

Sakai, it should be noted, wrote in defense of makeinu and blamed men for the marriage stalemate, saying that single Japanese males in their 30s were immature and uninterested in “real women.” But the Aera article says the opposite, and supports its assertion with its own survey. Their most interesting finding is that 80 percent of the single male respondents said they would marry a woman who made more money than they did, while only 10 percent of the single women said they would marry a man who made less money than they did. Similarly, 60 percent of the men said they would gladly become househusbands, while an equal percentage of women said they would never want their spouses to be homemakers.

The upshot is that, contrary to popular belief, it is men who have become more open-minded about the economic aspects of marriage and not women. As one scholar in the Aera article put it, tradition says that in marriage women have the right not to have to make a living, while men have the right not to do housework. But as earning a living has become more difficult, housework has become easier. In the process, most men have decided to give up their privelege but most women haven’t.

To feminists and anyone who believes in equality, such a development is depressing, but one has to keep in mind that everything is discussed within the realm of matrimony, which is a limiting concept. Aera implies that makeinu are materially obsessed. They not only do not want to worsen their financial situation when they marry, but look upon a potential husband as less a partner than as something that “confirms” their worth as a human being.

In the new Jun Ichikawa movie, “Tony Takitani,” based on a story by Haruki Murakami about people devoid of endearing qualities, a character played by Rie Miyazawa epitomizes this idea when she says that she buys designer clothing because it “fills in the part of me that’s missing.”

Media pundits complain that such women are undermining Japanese society, but regardless of their implied “irresponsibility,” there is no turning back. Makeinu are a natural product of the consumerist ideals that have driven the Japanese economy for the past 40 years. They are blamed for the dropping birthrate because they see husbands as commodities, but maybe it’s the institution of marriage as an economic contract that needs to be reconsidered.

Several weeks ago the Mainichi Shimbun published the results of its own survey, which found that even married couples don’t want to have children until their lives are not just stable but affluent. It’s an understandable desire, but a very recent one. Only since the 1960s have people in the industrialized world had the luxury to put off having a family for whatever reason. Makeinu can’t be blamed for a process they have no control over.

Posted at 4:41 PM · Comments (0)

Last week, I asked readers to help kick off this new series on the China gold rush by sending me suggestions, contacts, and stories. I am grateful for and startled by the quality of the response. I am sorry I have not yet had time to thank each writer individually.

As I started thinking about China, I asked myself what the possible ways are to make money doing business there, and I decided to write today about what seems to be the most obvious one: direct investment—that is, buying or starting China-based businesses. The country’s cities, valleys, and hillsides are strewn with decaying factories and idle workers, relics of the failed central-planning experiment, and global markets are hungry for the fruits of low-cost production. So if one just finds an undercapitalized factory and adds some management expertise …

Ah, the dream world. I assumed direct investment might be easy money until I picked up Mr. China, one of the 17 China business books piled up in my study. A memoir written by the former president of ASIMCO, one of the first big China funds, Mr. China describes in hilarious detail what happened when the author bought a bunch of Chinese auto-parts factories. The book suggests that the direct-investment strategy is, if not a complete hallucination, close.

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Author Tim Clissold first visited China in 1988, while working as an accountant in London. Captivated, he quit his job and moved to Beijing, where the hazards of the planned economy quickly became clear: The government set the price of cabbages too high that year, encouraging farmers to grow little else, and the city soon filled with massive piles of rotting produce. Clissold finished his studies in 1992, the year Deng Xiaoping turbocharged economic reform by saying, “To get rich is glorious.”

Clissold joined forces with an ex-Wall Street boss named Jack Perkowski and an ex-Red Guard in the Ministry of Foreign Investment named Ai Jian. The trio visited an endless series of government ministries in search of opportunity: “iron and steel, telecommunications, paper, electronics, chemicals, rubber, building materials, float glass, cement, light industry, power generation, even aircraft maintenance.” The usual practice was to diversify risk by investing in multiple industries, but Perkowski and Clissold decided to focus primarily on auto parts. Over the course of nine months, they visited 100-odd component factories in 40 cities, looking for deals.

In China, as elsewhere, it’s usually not what you know, but who you know, and the players were factory bosses, municipal bureaucrats, and party officials. The courting ritual often began with a banquet, such as the one thrown for Clissold and Perkowski by the mayor of Changchun. The festivities were fueled by baijiu, a liquor that, from Clissold’s description, is not far removed from diesel fuel.

The goal of the Chinese banquet is “to impress,” and this is accomplished by serving bizarre animal parts. At the Changchun banquet, as the baijiu flowed, Clissold and Perkowski were treated (hazed?) with duck webs, cow’s lung, goose stomach, fish lips, goat’s tendons, ox’s forehead, tortoise casserole, steamed rabbit ears, duck’s tongues, black scorpions, and deer penis. The Changchun deal blew up, but others didn’t, and over the next few years, ASIMCO invested $400 million in about 20 Chinese factories. Then the real fun began.

There was Pang, the factory boss in Harbin, who was fired but wouldn’t leave. Instead, he just squatted in his office and continued giving orders, telling workers to choose between “the factory and the foreigners.” Pang couldn’t be physically dragged out because he was the chairman of ASIMCO’s joint-venture partner, so the business imploded.

There was Wang, the manager of a brake-pad factory in Zhuhai, who disappeared after attending a trade show in Las Vegas. The first theory was that he had been mugged or killed, but then someone noticed the missing $5 million. The chief of the Zhuhai anticorruption bureau was willing to investigate—if ASIMCO gave him some cash and a car. A Beijing court deemed the case “confusing” and held ASIMCO liable for all losses and costs.

There was the drunken argument at a “picnic” on the grasslands of Mongolia, in which a translator sliced off a factory director’s ear. There were the irate investors in New York, forever screaming through speakerphones, demanding that managers be sacked and the staggering cash bleed controlled. There was the faux pas at the Beijing brewery, when ASIMCO went over the head of the local bureaucrat, Madame Wu, and schmoozed some ministry bigwigs instead. ASIMCO won the deal and invested $60 million—only to discover that, a few days later, about $2 million remained. (The vanishing $58 million temporarily overshadowed the brewery’s quality control problems: When the cheap glass bottles weren’t exploding in the markets of Beijing and maiming or killing people, they were often filled with only an inch of beer, or an inch of leaves, or, in one case, a ball of adhesive tape.) After soothing the jilted Madame Wu and trying but failing to fix the business, ASIMCO unloaded the wreckage on Tsingtao.

After eight years in China, Clissold was waylaid by a “weird viral attack that had inundated my heart and liver and gotten into my joints.” The doctors misdiagnosed the symptoms as a heart attack and attributed it to stress.

The near-death experience gave Clissold a chance to think, and his first thought, not surprisingly, was to quit. Then, he decided that he would instead “find a Chinese solution to a Chinese problem.” China, he concluded,

was a society that had no rules—or, more accurately, plenty of rules that were seldom enforced. China seemed to be run by masterful showmen: appearances mattered more than substance, rules were there to be distorted, and success came through outfacing an opponent. … One thing was for sure: if you played by the rules, you were finished.

At the time Clissold collapsed, the fund was on track to lose everything. After another few years of effort, he and his partners salvaged about half of the original investment, and ASIMCO, still run by Perkowski, evolved into China’s major auto-components supplier. (Clissold eventually took refuge at Goldman Sachs.)

So the lesson, perhaps, is that success in Chinese direct investment requires decades of commitment, deep government relationships, and superhuman effort. New regulations allow total foreign ownership in some industries, thus reducing the use of joint ventures, which Clissold describes as “incredibly difficult to manage because Chinese and Westerners don’t think in the same way.” The structural advantage of total ownership, however, is probably offset by the fact that, after 15 years and billions of dollars of capital, the low-hanging fruit is probably gone. There’s no easy money left, and it wasn’t that easy to begin with.

******

Posted at 2:24 PM · Comments (0)

This came to my attention thanks to Janet, whose taste is impeccable. It arrived today in the mail, and I’m listening now. Details to come…

Details are in: This is wonderful stuff, rara rhythms from Haiti and jazz combined, fantastic drumming and incantatory singing. Try Konbit Rara for starters.

Posted at 2:18 PM · Comments (0)

I finished reading this on my return flight from the States the other day, and it was splendid throughout, even if it struck me as three books in one: a beautifully written tale of personal growth and emergence into worldly, sensitive adulthood; a well-researched and compelling account of the Buddha’s life, philosophy and impact on the world; and least expectedly a reflection on modern history, from nationalism to globalization.
I will be adding some excerpts here when time allows.

Posted at 2:12 PM · Comments (0)

An extraordinarily learned look at the history of cities, their lives and their problems from Sumer, Memphis, ancient China and Rome to the cities of today’s world.
John Reader wrote one of the best books on Africa in the last 10-20 years, “Africa, A Biography of the Continent,” and he has shown his versatiliy and virtuosity here with this typically industrious effort.

Posted at 2:10 PM · Comments (0)

Strolling to the bus stop, fidgeting during a meeting, standing up to stretch, jumping off the couch to change channels, and engaging in other minor physical activities can make the difference between being lean and obese, researchers reported yesterday.

The most detailed study ever conducted of mundane bodily movements found that obese people tend to be much less fidgety than lean people and spend at least two hours more each day just sitting still. The extra motion by lean people is enough to burn about 350 extra calories a day, which could add up to 10 to 20 pounds a year, the researchers found.
_____Obesity_____
• Brazil Newspaper Slams NY Times Over Obesity Story (Reuters, Jan 27, 2005)
• Part of McDonald’s Obesity Suit Revived (Reuters, Jan 25, 2005)
• Part of McDonald’s Obesity Suit Revived (Reuters, Jan 25, 2005)
• Study: Obesity May Hinder Cancer Screening (Associated Press, Jan 24, 2005)
• Study: Obesity May Hinder Cancer Screening (Associated Press, Jan 24, 2005)
• More Stories



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“There are these absolutely staggering differences between people who are lean and people who are obese,” said James A. Levine of the Mayo Clinic, who led the research published in today’s issue of the journal Science. “The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could, in and of itself, account for obesity quite easily.”

Perhaps more importantly, Levine and his colleagues also discovered that people appear to be born with a propensity to be either fidgety or listless, indicating that it would take special measures to convert the naturally sedentary into the restless — especially in a society geared toward a couch-potato existence.

“Some may say this is a story of doom and gloom — that people with obesity have no choice. It’s all over. I would argue exactly the opposite,” Levine said. “There’s a massive beacon of hope here. But it’s going to take a massive, top-down approach to change the environment in which we live to get us up and be lean again.”

Other researchers agreed, saying the new study, while small, provides powerful new evidence that a major cause of the obesity epidemic is the pattern of desk jobs, car pools, suburban sprawl, and other environmental and lifestyle factors that discourage physical activity. And despite generations of parents’ admonitions to the contrary, people should be encouraged to be fidgety.

“Figuring out ways to increase physical activity — not necessarily getting people jogging every day but just building physical activity into a person’s day — are reasonable strategies that have the promise to combat this epidemic of obesity,” said William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The number of Americans who are overweight has risen dramatically in recent years, with more than two-thirds now overweight or obese, raising the prospect of an epidemic of heart disease, diabetes and other weight-related ills. The reason for this is a subject of intense debate, with many experts blaming a combination of too much junk food and too little exercise.

Levine and others have done earlier studies suggesting a dearth of routine activity may be part of the problem, but the new study is the most exhaustive to date.

“We all know people who can’t seem to stand still and others who hardly move,” said Eric Ravussin of the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La., who wrote a commentary on the study. “This is really the first time this has been assessed in this level of detail.”

For the study, Levine and his colleagues developed a system that can detect the smallest tap of a toe — high-tech underwear resembling bicycle pants and sports bras or T-shirts embedded with sensors, originally designed for fighter jets, that take measurements every half-second.

Ten men and 10 women, half of them lean and the other half mildly obese, wore the garments 24 hours a day for 10 days as they went about their usual routines. They went to the Mayo Clinic every morning to be weighed, get new undergarments so researchers could download the data from the previous day’s undergarments, and get their meals for the day, so the researchers knew exactly what they were eating. All considered themselves “couch potatoes” because they eschewed regular exercise.

Based on millions of bits of data, the researchers determined that each day, the lean subjects spent at least 150 more minutes moving in some way than the obese subjects.

Next, the researchers overfed nine of the lean subjects and put seven of the obese subjects on diets to see if losing weight would make the obese more fidgety, or if gaining weight would make the lean less active. They then monitored them for another 10 days.

“It could be the obesity was making the difference — not the other way around. We thought, ‘Well, in that case if they lost weight they’d start standing more, and surely then if they got heavier they’d gravitate to their chairs more,’ ” Levine said. “Neither of these things happened. The obese person remained a sitter, and the lean person remained a stander.”

Other research has indicated that some people may be born with a predisposition to move while others are born the opposite.

Posted at 12:33 PM · Comments (0)

at 4:25 AM PT

Smoke free by decree
If you’re indignant that your boss just shut the smoking room and outraged that you have to leave the bar to light up, take heart. Life could be worse. You could be Bhutanese.

The tiny, trendy Himalayan kingdom recently became the world’s first nonsmoking nation. Since Dec. 17, it has been illegal to smoke in public or sell tobacco. Violators are fined the equivalent of $232—more than two months’ salary in Bhutan. Authorities heralded the ban by igniting a bonfire of cigarette cartons in the capital, Thimphu, and stringing banners across the main thoroughfare, exhorting people to kick the habit. As if they have a choice.

Meddling with an issue as personal as smoking is always tricky, and politicians err at their own peril. Yet Bhutan’s ban appears to be sticking and with little public outcry. Even the country’s smokers seem resigned to a smoke-free future. “If you can’t get it, you can’t smoke it,” concludes Tshewang Dendup, who works for Bhutan’s only broadcaster. He picked up his smoking habit while studying at Berkeley, but says he is now rapidly “downsizing” his consumption.

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So, how has Bhutan managed to pull off a nationwide smoking ban while other nations dither? Bhutan is a Buddhist nation, and many Buddhists believe smoking is bad for their karma. Then again, Sri Lanka and Thailand are also predominantly Buddhist, and plenty of people smoke there.

The answer lies not in Bhutan’s religion but in its famous quirkiness. This is a country that has elevated contrariness to a national trait. Convention says an impoverished yet stunningly beautiful nation like Bhutan should welcome tourists with open arms—and count the dollars. Yet Bhutan restricts the number of foreign tourists (about 9,000 last year) and charges fees of $200 per day. Convention says that gross national product is the best measure of national progress. Yet Bhutan is aiming for another mark: What it calls “gross national happiness.” If Bhutan were a celebrity, it would be Johnny Depp—reclusive, a bit odd, but endearing nonetheless.

The Himalayas that surround and engulf Bhutan are a curse and a blessing, cushioning the nation from the shock waves that globalization has generated in other developing countries. The first foreign tourists only arrived in 1974. Television and the Internet are even more novel, having arrived only in 1999. Yet Bhutan largely remains the Shangri-la that wealthy tourists crave. Thimphu is the world’s only capital city with no traffic lights.

So, having sat out the traditional development rush, Bhutan hopes to steer its own course, avoiding the mistakes of the industrialized world. Because of its homogenous and small population (anywhere from 800,000 to 2 million people, depending on which estimates you believe), Bhutan just might succeed in barring the demon weed. The nation’s unusual culture makes a sudden and complete tobacco ban possible. The country is ruled by a benevolent king, Jigme Singye Wangchuk, who is widely revered and universally obeyed. “Bhutanese are pretty happy to sacrifice for their fellow citizen,” says Linda Leaming, an American who has lived in Bhutan for the past eight years. “The individual is subjugated to the good of society.”

It also helps that Bhutan has few smokers compared other nations. Only about 1 percent of the population lights up, according to the health ministry. (Foreign observers believe the actual figure is 3 percent or 4 percent.) Tobacco isn’t grown in Bhutan. It is a very small, poor market, and it costs a tremendous amount to import goods. All these are factors that have reduced interest in cigarettes.

Yet, even in obedient Bhutan, a few whispers of dissent have cropped up—where else?—on the Internet. “Policy makers wake up,” griped one anonymous Bhutanese, writing about the smoking ban on the Web site www.kuenselonline.com. “There is something called personal rights that should be upheld. Educate rather than force or impose.” Others worry the tobacco ban will merely encourage a black market in Marlboros. Also others chime in that Bhutan faces more pressing problems than smoking: corruption, alcoholism, and a penchant for doma or betel nut, which Bhutanese chew habitually. Doma, a stimulant that turns your saliva red, has been linked to higher incidence of oral cancer.

Bhutan’s parliament, which passed the smoking ban, anticipated complaints. It added a few sizable loopholes. Foreigners can still smoke and import tobacco (but if caught selling it to Bhutanese they will be charged with smuggling). Bhutanese are, technically, allowed to smoke in their homes and can even import small quantities of tobacco for “personal use,” though they’ll pay as much as 200 percent in customs duties and sales taxes for the pleasure.

Bhutanese officials say that, by banning tobacco, they hope to set an example for the rest of the world. Ireland recently banned smoking in public places, though the sale of tobacco remains legal. Other European countries, such as Norway, are enacting less-stringent smoking bans.

In most of Asia, though, the trend is toward more smokers, not fewer, as countries rush to emulate Western habits and as tobacco companies look east for new customers. Once again, Bhutan finds itself the exception to the rule.

Posted at 9:55 AM · Comments (0)

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, author of the book, Chain Of Command: The Road From 9-11 to Abu Ghraib. He spoke recently at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York.

SEYMOUR HERSH: About what’s going on in terms of the President is that as virtuous as I feel, you know, at The New Yorker, writing an alternative history more or less of what’s been going on in the last three years, George Bush feels just as virtuous in what he is doing. He is absolutely committed — I don’t know whether he thinks he’s doing God’s will or what his father didn’t do, or whether it’s some mandate from — you know, I just don’t know, but George Bush thinks this is the right thing. He is going to continue doing what he has been doing in Iraq. He’s going to expand it, I think, if he can. I think that the number of body bags that come back will make no difference to him. The body bags are rolling in. It makes no difference to him, because he will see it as a price he has to pay to put America where he thinks it should be. So, he’s inured in a very strange way to people like me, to the politicians, most of them who are too cowardly anyway to do much. So, the day-to-day anxiety that all of us have, and believe me, though he got 58 million votes, many of people who voted for him weren’t voting for continued warfare, but I think that’s what we’re going to have.

It’s hard to predict the future. And it’s sort of silly to, but the question is: How do you go to him? How do you get at him? What can you do to maybe move him off the course that he sees as virtuous and he sees as absolutely appropriate? All of us — you have to — I can’t begin to exaggerate how frightening the position is — we’re in right now, because most of you don’t understand, because the press has not done a very good job. The Senate Intelligence Committee, the new bill that was just passed, provoked by the 9/11 committee actually, is a little bit of a kabuki dance, I guess is what I want to say, in that what it really does is it consolidates an awful lot of power in the Pentagon — by statute now. It gives Rumsfeld the right to do an awful lot of things he has been wanting to do, and that is basically manhunting and killing them before they kill us, as Peter said. “They did it to us. We’ve got to do it to them.” That is the attitude that — at the very top of our government exists. And so, I’ll just tell you a couple of things that drive me nuts. We can — you know, there’s not much more to go on with.

I think there’s a way out of it, maybe. I can tell you one thing. Let’s all forget this word “insurgency”. It’s one of the most misleading words of all. Insurgency assumes that we had gone to Iraq and won the war and a group of disgruntled people began to operate against us and we then had to do counter-action against them. That would be an insurgency. We are fighting the people we started the war against. We are fighting the Ba’athists plus nationalists. We are fighting the very people that started — they only choose to fight in different time spans than we want them to, in different places. We took Baghdad easily. It wasn’t because be won. We took Baghdad because they pulled back and let us take it and decided to fight a war that had been pre-planned that they’re very actively fighting. The frightening thing about it is, we have no intelligence. Maybe it’s — it’s — it is frightening, we have no intelligence about what they’re doing. A year-and-a-half ago, we’re up against two and three-man teams. We estimated the cells operating against us were two and three people, that we could not penetrate. As of now, we still don’t know what’s coming next. There are 10, 15-man groups. They have terrific communications. Somebody told me, it’s — somebody in the system, an officer — and by the way, the good part of it is, more and more people are available to somebody like me.

There’s a lot of anxiety inside the — you know, our professional military and our intelligence people. Many of them respect the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as much as anybody here, and individual freedom. So, they do — there’s a tremendous sense of fear. These are punitive people. One of the ways — one of the things that you could say is, the amazing thing is we are been taken over basically by a cult, eight or nine neo-conservatives have somehow grabbed the government. Just how and why and how they did it so efficiently, will have to wait for much later historians and better documentation than we have now, but they managed to overcome the bureaucracy and the Congress, and the press, with the greatest of ease. It does say something about how fragile our Democracy is. You do have to wonder what a Democracy is when it comes down to a few men in the Pentagon and a few men in the White House having their way. What they have done is neutralize the C.I.A. because there were people there inside — the real goal of what Goss has done was not attack the operational people, but the intelligence people. There were people — serious senior analysts who disagree with the White House, with Cheney, basically, that’s what I mean by White House, and Rumsfeld on a lot of issues, as somebody said, the goal in the last month has been to separate the apostates from the true believers. That’s what’s happening. The real target has been “diminish the agency.” I’m writing about all of this soon, so I don’t want to overdo it, but there’s been a tremendous sea change in the government. A concentration of power.

On the other hand, the facts — there are some facts. We can’t win this war. We can do what he’s doing. We can bomb them into the stone ages. Here’s the other horrifying, sort of spectacular fact that we don’t really appreciate. Since we installed our puppet government, this man, Allawi, who was a member of the Mukabarat, the secret police of Saddam, long before he became a critic, and is basically Saddam-lite. Before we installed him, since we have installed him on June 28, July, August, September, October, November, every month, one thing happened: the number of sorties, bombing raids by one plane, and the number of tonnage dropped has grown exponentially each month. We are systematically bombing that country. There are no embedded journalists at Doha, the Air Force base I think we’re operating out of. No embedded journalists at the aircraft carrier, Harry Truman. That’s the aircraft carrier that I think is doing many of the operational fights. There’s no air defense, It’s simply a turkey shoot. They come and hit what they want. We know nothing. We don’t ask. We’re not told. We know nothing about the extent of bombing. So if they’re going to carry out an election and if they’re going to succeed, bombing is going to be key to it, which means that what happened in Fallujah, essentially Iraq — some of you remember Vietnam — Iraq is being turn into a “free-fire zone” right in front of us. Hit everything, kill everything. I have a friend in the Air Force, a Colonel, who had the awful task of being an urban bombing planner, planning urban bombing, to make urban bombing be as unobtrusive as possible. I think it was three weeks ago today, three weeks ago Sunday after Fallujah I called him at home. I’m one of the people — I don’t call people at work. I call them at home, and he has one of those caller I.D.’s, and he picked up the phone and he said, “Welcome to Stalingrad.” We know what we’re doing. This is deliberate. It’s being done. They’re not telling us. They’re not talking about it.

We have a President that — and a Secretary of State that, when a trooper — when a reporter or journalist asked — actually a trooper, a soldier, asked about lack of equipment, stumbled through an answer and the President then gets up and says, “Yes, they should all have good equipment and we’re going to do it,” as if somehow he wasn’t involved in the process. Words mean nothing — nothing to George Bush. They are just utterances. They have no meaning. Bush can say again and again, “well, we don’t do torture.” We know what happened. We know about Abu Ghraib. We know, we see anecdotally. We all understand in some profound way because so much has come out in the last few weeks, the I.C.R.C. The ACLU put out more papers, this is not an isolated incident what’s happened with the seven kids and the horrible photographs, Lynndie England. That’s into the not the issue is. They’re fall guys. Of course, they did wrong. But you know, when we send kids to fight, one of the things that we do when we send our children to war is the officers become in loco parentis. That means their job in the military is to protect these kids, not only from getting bullets and being blown up, but also there is nothing as stupid as a 20 or 22-year-old kid with a weapon in a war zone. Protect them from themselves. The spectacle of these people doing those antics night after night, for three and a half months only stopped when one of their own soldiers turned them in tells you all you need to know, how many officers knew. I can just give you a timeline that will tell you all you need to know. Abu Ghraib was reported in January of 2004 this year. In May, I and CBS earlier also wrote an awful lot about what was going on there. At that point, between January and May, our government did nothing. Although Rumsfeld later acknowledged that he was briefed by the middle of January on it and told the President. In those three-and-a-half months before it became public, was there any systematic effort to do anything other than to prosecute seven “bad seeds”, enlisted kids, reservists from West Virginia and the unit they were in, by the way, Military Police. The answer is, Ha! They were basically a bunch of kids who were taught on traffic control, sent to Iraq, put in charge of a prison. They knew nothing. It doesn’t excuse them from doing dumb things. But there is another framework. We’re not seeing it. They’ve gotten away with it.

So here’s the upside of the horrible story, if there is an upside. I can tell you the upside in a funny way, in an indirect way. It comes from a Washington Post piece this week. A young boy, a Marine, 25-year-old from somewhere in Maryland died. There was a funeral in the Post, a funeral in Washington, and the Post did a little story about it. They quoted — his name was Hodak. His father was quoted. He had written to a letter in the local newspaper in Southern Virginia. He had said about his son, he wrote a letter just describing what it was like after his son died. He said, “Today everything seems strange. Laundry is getting done. I walked my dog. I ate breakfast. Somehow I’m still breathing and my heart is still beating. My son lies in a casket half a world away.” There’s going to be — you know, when I did My Lai — I tell this story a lot. When I did the My Lai story, more than a generation ago, it was 35 years ago, so almost two. When I did My Lai, one of the things that I discovered was that they had — for some of you, most of you remember, but basically a group of American soldiers — the analogy is so much like today. Then as now, our soldiers don’t see enemies in a battlefield, they just walk on mines or they get shot by snipers, because It’s always hidden. There’s inevitable anger and rage and you dehumanize the people. We have done that with enormous success in Iraq. They’re “rag-heads”. They’re less than human. The casualty count — as in Sudan, equally as bad. Staggering numbers that we’re killing. In any case, you know, it’s — in this case, these — a group of soldiers in 1968 went into a village. They had been in Vietnam for three months and lost about 10% of their people, maybe 10 or 15 to accidents, killings and bombings, and they ended up — they thought they would meet the enemy and there were 550 women, children and old men and they executed them all. It took a day. They stopped in the middle and they had lunch. One of the kids who had done a lot of shooting. The Black and Hispanic soldiers, about 40 of them, there were about 90 men in the unit — the Blacks and Hispanics shot in the air. They wouldn’t shoot into the ditch. They collected people in three ditches and just began to shoot them. The Blacks and Hispanics shot up in the air, but the mostly White, lower middle class, the kids who join the Army Reserve today and National Guard looking for extra dollars, those kind of kids did the killing. One of them was a man named Paul Medlow, who did an awful lot of shooting. The next day, there was a moment — one of the things that everybody remembered, the kids who were there, one of the mothers at the bottom of a ditch had taken a child, a boy, about two, and got him under her stomach in such a way that he wasn’t killed. When they were sitting having the K rations — that’s what they called them — MRE’s now — the kid somehow crawled up through the [inaudible] screaming louder and he began — and Calley, the famous Lieutenant Calley, the Lynndie England of that tragedy, told Medlow: Kill him, “Plug him,” he said. And Medlow somehow, who had done an awful lot as I say, 200 bullets, couldn’t do it so Calley ran up as everybody watched, with his carbine. Officers had a smaller weapon, a rifle, and shot him in the back of the head. The next morning, Medlow stepped on a mine and he had his foot blown off. He was being medevac’d out. As he was being medevac’d out, he cursed and everybody remembered, one of the chilling lines, he said, “God has punished me, and he’s going to punish you, too.”

So a year-and-a-half later, I’m doing this story. And I hear about Medlow. I called his mother up. He lived in New Goshen, Indiana. I said, “I’m coming to see you. I don’t remember where I was, I think it was Washington State. I flew over there and to get there, you had to go to – I think Indianapolis and then to Terre Haute, rent a car and drive down into the Southern Indiana, this little farm. It was a scene out of Norman Rockwell’s. Some of you remember the Norman Rockwell paintings. It’s a chicken farm. The mother is 50, but she looks 80. Gristled, old. Way old – hard scrabble life, no man around. I said I’m here to see your son, and she said, okay. He’s in there. He knows you’re coming. Then she said, one of these great — she said to me, “I gave them a good boy. And they sent me back a murderer.” So you go on 35 years. I’m doing in The New Yorker, the Abu Ghraib stories. I think I did three in three weeks. If some of you know about The New Yorker, that’s unbelievable. But in the middle of all of this, I get a call from a mother in the East coast, Northeast, working class, lower middle class, very religious, Catholic family. She said, I have to talk to you. I go see her. I drive somewhere, fly somewhere, and her story is simply this. She had a daughter that was in the military police unit that was at Abu Ghraib. And the whole unit had come back in March, of — The sequence is: they get there in the fall of 2003. Their reported after doing their games in the January of 2004. In March she is sent home. Nothing is public yet. The daughter is sent home. The whole unit is sent home. She comes home a different person. She had been married. She was young. She went into the Reserves, I think it was the Army Reserves to get money, not for college or for — you know, these — some of these people worked as night clerks in pizza shops in West Virginia. This not — this is not very sophisticated. She came back and she left her husband. She just had been married before. She left her husband, moved out of the house, moved out of the city, moved out to another home, another apartment in another city and began working a different job. And moved away from everybody. Then over — as the spring went on, she would go every weekend, this daughter, and every weekend she would go to a tattoo shop and get large black tattoos put on her, over increasingly — over her body, the back, the arms, the legs, and her mother was frantic. What’s going on? Comes Abu Ghraib, and she reads the stories, and she sees it. And she says to her daughter, “Were you there?” She goes to the apartment. The daughter slams the door. The mother then goes — the daughter had come home — before she had gone to Iraq, the mother had given her a portable computer. One of the computers that had a DVD in it, with the idea being that when she was there, she could watch movies, you know, while she was overseas, sort of a — I hadn’t thought about it, a great idea. Turns out a lot of people do it. She had given her a portable computer, and when the kid came back she had returned it, one of the things, and the mother then said I went and looked at the computer. She knows — she doesn’t know about depression. She doesn’t know about Freud. She just said, I was just — I was just going to clean it up, she said. I had decided to use it again. She wouldn’t say anything more why she went to look at it after Abu Ghraib. She opened it up, and sure enough there was a file marked “Iraq”. She hit the button. Out came 100 photographs. They were photographs that became — one of them was published. We published one, just one in The New Yorker. It was about an Arab. This is something no mother should see and daughter should see too. It was the Arab man leaning against bars, the prisoner naked, two dogs, two shepherds, remember, on each side of him. The New Yorker published it, a pretty large photograph. What we didn’t publish was the sequence showed the dogs did bite the man — pretty hard. A lot of blood. So she saw that and she called me, and away we go. There’s another story.

For me, it’s just another story, but out of this comes a core of — you know, we all deal in “macro” in Washington. On the macro, we’re hopeless. We’re nowhere. The press is nowhere. The congress is nowhere. The military is nowhere. Every four-star General I know is saying, “Who is going to tell them we have no clothes?” Nobody is going to do it. Everybody is afraid to tell Rumsfeld anything. That’s just the way it is. It’s a system built on fear. It’s not lack of integrity, it’s more profound than that. Because there is individual integrity. It’s a system that’s completely been taken over — by cultists. Anyway, what’s going to happen, I think, as the casualties mount and these stories get around, and the mothers see the cost and the fathers see the cost, as the kids come home. And the wounded ones come back, and there’s wards that you will never hear about. That’s wards — you know about the terrible catastrophic injuries, but you don’t know about the vegetables. There’s ward after ward of vegetables because the brain injuries are so enormous. As you maybe read last week, there was a new study in one of the medical journals that the number of survivors are greater with catastrophic injuries because of their better medical treatment and the better armor they have. So you get more extreme injuries to extremities. We’re going to learn more and I think you’re going to see, it’s going to — it’s — I’m trying to be optimistic. We’re going to see a bottom swelling from inside the ranks. You’re beginning to see it. What happened with the soldiers asking those questions, you may see more of that. I’m not suggesting we’re going to have mutinies, but I’m going to suggest you’re going to see more dissatisfaction being expressed. Maybe that will do it. Another salvation may be the economy. It’s going to go very bad, folks. You know, if you have not sold your stocks and bought property in Italy, you better do it quick. And the third thing is Europe — Europe is not going to tolerate us much longer. The rage there is enormous. I’m talking about our old-fashioned allies. We could see something there, collective action against us. Certainly, nobody — it’s going to be an awful lot of dancing on our graves as the dollar goes bad and everybody stops buying our bonds, our credit — our — we’re spending $2 billion a day to float the debt, and one of these days, the Japanese and the Russians, everybody is going to start buying oil in Euros instead of dollars. We’re going to see enormous panic here. But he could get through that. That will be another year, and the damage he’s going to do between then and now is enormous. We’re going to have some very bad months ahead.

Posted at 9:53 AM · Comments (0)

Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator of the Financial Times, has written a remarkable but flawed defence of the global market economy: Why Globalisation Works: The Case for the Global Market Economy (Yale University Press). Wolf conceives globalisation in essentially economic terms. The book says little about the political, social, cultural and environmental aspects of globalisation, although he does argue that nation states remain the locus of political debate and legitimacy and that the best way to combine economic globalisation with political stability is via liberal democracy. But it is economic globalisation - meaning greater openness of trade, free movement of capital, expansion of foreign direct investment - which is the focus because it is, in Wolf’s view, the key to boosting prosperity and the life opportunities of all.

Wolf’s mission is to dispel the illusions about globalisation promulgated by the forces of what he calls anti-globalisation.com, or the “new millennium collectivists.” The book is about the intellectual clash between liberal capitalism and its opponents. Wolf is on the streets fighting a new wave of dark forces. The stakes are high: disorder and the fragmentation of the global economy threaten unless they are defeated. And defeating them requires both showing them they are wrong and offering hope for a better future.

Wolf’s voice is clear, serious and didactic, and his book offers a carefully crafted account of the global market economy and the strengths and limits of his opponents’ views. Yet there is also something anachronistic about the book and the territory it covers: its agenda seems to have been set a few years ago when the anti-globalisation movement was at its peak and hundreds of thousands were marching against the forces of economic globalisation. These days, after 9/11 and the war in Iraq, it is seldom asked whether we are for or against globalisation. The ground has shifted to a debate about the type of globalisation we want. On these grounds, Wolf’s contribution is less impressive.

I have been thinking and writing about globalisation and global governance arrangements for over a decade, and have considered much of the material that informs Wolf’s book. It is therefore interesting to reflect on the points of similarity and difference in our background and approach.

Wolf begins his book with a brief autobiographical essay, describing his recent family history and its influence upon him. His father was an Austrian Jewish refugee who came to Britain before the second world war, and his mother was from a Dutch Jewish family. My parents were both Jewish and born in Germany, one in Leipzig and the other in Berlin. Both came to Britain in the early 1930s fleeing the Nazis. Wolf, like myself, was brought up with a strong sense of the menace of authoritarian dictatorships, and we both learned early about the importance of the values of an open society and of the forces, from the left and right, which might threaten it.

Both Wolf and I grew up in communities strongly committed to the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and the pursuit of reason - the impartial pursuit of truth - and with a strong sense of the fragility of the world’s commitment to them. But while he believes that the liberal market economy is the best means of embedding these ideals, and that markets and liberal states create a framework for humans to be free and equal, I consider that the Enlightenment ideals remain unfulfilled in important respects and that the neoliberal form of globalisation to which Wolf subscribes is a challenge to them.

We have both been influenced by Friedrich Hayek. Wolf takes him as one of the great champions of personal liberty, of the market economy as a necessary condition of democracy, and of the dangers of intrusive government. I, like Wolf, take Hayek as one of the great theorists of the market, and of its advantages over other systems. But I also think that Hayek failed to grasp the nature of markets as systems of power which can also threaten liberty and democracy. Wolf conceives of markets as powerless mechanisms of co-ordination, while I understand them as highly fluid and risk-laden - often generating damaging externalities with regard to health, welfare, income distribution and the environment.

This is not an argument for abandoning the market, but it is an argument - explored in my new book Global Covenant - for reframing it. If we want to guarantee personal liberty and the efficient and just operation of the market, we must build bridges between economic and human rights, between the commercial and the environmental, and between national and international jurisdictions. Hayek does not help here at all. For both Hayek and Wolf, at the feast of the global market, power is largely absent.

Nevertheless, both Wolf and I believe that globalisation has been much misrepresented. We agree, for example, that globalisation is more than Americanisation; that there has been no straightforward collapse in welfare, labour or environmental standards (although there are big challenges); globalisation does not mean the end of the state; it has not just compounded the globe’s inequities; the gap between the world’s richest and poorest states is greater than it has ever been and is growing, yet there is some evidence that the proportion of those living in extreme poverty is falling; global economic processes have not always reinforced corporate power; developing countries do not always lose out in world trade; and economic globalisation and the current structure of economic governance do not exclude the voice and influence of developing countries. Most of Wolf’s book is devoted to examining propositions such as these, and while he does not paint a wholly rosy picture of economic globalisation, the force of the book is to show that anti-globalisation.com has precious little to offer.

We agree on the need to dispel these myths, but Wolf’s portrait of economic globalisation does not get to the heart of the problems of globalisation in its current neoliberal form. I will stress three of them here: global market integration is not the indispensable condition of development; a “market first” political philosophy cannot provide adequate terms of reference for thinking about a range of transborder problems and the capacities of multilateral organisations to cope with them; and liberal market philosophy is the wrong philosophy for the age in which we live. We require, instead, a cosmopolitan social democratic philosophy to guide a world of overlapping communities.

Wolf’s main argument is that “a successful move to the market, including increasing integration in the world economy, explains the success stories of the past two decades.” Developing countries which have prospered, notably in Asia, have all followed this path. But his argument needs questioning in a number of respects.

First, the experience of China and India - along with Japan, South Korea and Taiwan earlier - shows that countries do not have to adopt liberal trade or capital market policies in order to benefit from enhanced trade and faster growth. All these countries have grown relatively fast behind protective barriers. It is true that as these countries have become richer, they have tended to liberalise their trade policy, but there is not a simple causal relationship at work. As Dani Rodrik, the Harvard economist, has shown, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that countries become more open as they become richer.

Furthermore, recent research has found that one of the main factors limiting the capacity of the poorest countries to develop is the liberalisation of capital. Geoffrey Garrett, a professor of political science at UCLA, has shown that what hurts developing countries faced with a broad liberalisation programme is not the pursuit of free trade per se, but the free movement of capital. While tariff liberalisation can be broadly beneficial for low-income countries, rapid capital liberalisation in the absence of sound domestic capital markets can be a recipe for “volatility, unpredictability and booms and busts in capital flows.” Countries that have rapidly opened their capital accounts have performed significantly less well in terms of economic growth and income inequality than countries that have maintained tight control on capital movements but cut tariffs. An IMF study published in March 2003 found that there is no consistent support for the theory that financial globalisation per se delivers a higher rate of economic growth.

Economic protectionism does not work as a general strategy, but there is evidence to suggest that a country’s internal economic integration - the development of its human capital and national market institutions, and the replacement of imports with national production where feasible - can be stimulated by state-led industrial policy. The evidence indicates that the development of state regulatory capacity, a sound public domain, the ability to focus investment on job creating sectors in competitive and productive areas and the protection of infant industries are more important priorities than integration into world markets. This finding should not come as a surprise, since nearly all today’s rich countries began their growth behind tariff barriers and only lowered them once their economies were relatively robust.

The argument here should not be taken, as Wolf might suspect, as a simple endorsement of old leftist, state-centred development. Public objectives can be delivered by a diversity of actors, public and private. And the development of civil society is an indispensable part of national development. Although there can, of course, be conflicts between economic development and the strengthening of civil society, all countries need sufficient autonomy to work out their own ways of managing this conflict.

Developing nations need the latitude to create individual polices and institutions which may depart from the orthodoxy of global market integration. Similarly, organisations such as the WTO need a broader range of policies to encourage the different national economic systems to flourish within an equitable, rules-based global market order.

Wolf acknowledges elements of these arguments throughout his book, especially in his discussions of the work of Dani Rodrik and Ha-Joon Chang (see Michael Lind’s essay in Prospect, January 2003). He accepts that there is much more involved in successful development than trade liberalisation, and that financial liberalisation carries risks. He does concede some ground to the critics of market liberalisation and global economic integration. But he never allows that these concessions have implications for the very basis of his liberal market approach - for its explanatory power and prescriptive value.

There are many ways of conceiving and categorising the global challenges that we face. Jean-François Rischard, vice-president for Europe of the World Bank, usefully thinks of them as forming a triumvirate of problems, concerned with sharing our planet (global warming, water deficits, biodiversity and ecosystem losses), our humanity (poverty, global infectious diseases, conflict prevention), and our rulebook (intellectual property rights, unsustainable debt, trade, finance and tax rules). Wolf seems to think that global challenges such as these can be addressed by the current interstate order, even if it does require reform (notably in relation to the IMF and the WTO). But how urgent global problems might be resolved is far from clear, for the problem-solving capacity of the international system is not effective, accountable or fast enough. There are three main difficulties.

To begin with, there is no clear division of labour among the many international governmental agencies: functions overlap, mandates conflict, and aims and objectives get blurred. This is true, for example, in the area of health and social policy, where the World Bank, the IMF and the World Health Organisation often have competing priorities.

A second, related set of problems surrounds those issues which have both domestic and international dimensions. These are often insufficiently understood or acted upon. There is an ultimate lack of responsibility for problems such as global warming and the loss of global biodiversity. Institutional fragmentation means that these issues fall between agencies. This latter problem is also manifest between the global level and national governments.

A third set of difficulties relates to an accountability deficit in the international agencies which stems from power imbalances among states. Multilateral bodies need to be more representative of the states involved with them. Developing countries are under-represented in many international organisations. There must also be arrangements in place to ensure consultation and co-ordination between state and non-state actors, and these conditions are seldom met in multilateral decision-making bodies.

Underlying these institutional difficulties is a lack of symmetry or congruence between decision-makers and decision-takers. The point has been well articulated recently by Inge Kaul and her associates at the UNDP in their work on global public goods and what they term the “forgotten principle of equivalence.” At its simplest, the principle suggests that those who are significantly affected by a global development, good or bad, should have a say in its provision or regulation. Yet all too often there is a breakdown of “equivalence” between decision-makers and decision-takers. For example, a decision to permit the “harvesting” of rainforests may contribute to ecological damage far beyond the borders which formally limit the responsibility of a given set of decision-makers. A decision to build a nuclear plant near the frontiers of a neighbouring country is likely to be taken without consulting that country, despite the risks for it.

Systematising the provision of global public goods requires extending and reshaping multilateral institutions. Pressing issues include the need to develop criteria for fair international negotiations; strengthen the negotiating capacity of developing countries; create advisory scientific panels for major global issues (following the example of the intergovernmental panel on climate change); create negotiating arenas for new priority issues (such as access to water), together with appropriate grievance panels (such as a world water court); and expand the remit of the UN security council to examine and, where necessary, intervene in the full gambit of human crises - physical, social, biological, environmental.

Liberal market philosophy offers too narrow a view, but clues to an alternative strategy can be found in an old rival - social democracy - which Wolf explicitly rejects. Traditionally, social democrats have sought to deploy the democratic institutions of individual countries on behalf of a particular national project - a compromise between the powers of capital, labour and the state. They have accepted that markets are central to generating economic wellbeing, but recognised that in the absence of appropriate regulation they suffer serious flaws - especially the generation of unwanted risks for their citizens, and an unequal distribution of those risks.

Social democracy at the global level means pursuing an economic agenda which calibrates the freeing of markets with poverty reduction and the protection of basic labour and environmental standards. What is required is not only the enactment of existing human rights and environmental agreements and the clear articulation of these with the ethical codes of particular industries (where they exist or can be developed), but also the introduction of new terms of reference into the ground rules or basic laws of the free market and trade system. Precedents exist: in the social chapter of the EU’s Maastricht treaty, for example, or in the attempt to attach labour and environmental conditions to the Nafta regime.

Social democratic globalisation requires three interrelated transformations. The first would involve engaging companies in the promotion of core UN principles (as the UN’s global compact does at present). To the extent that this led to the entrenchment of human rights and environmental standards in corporate practices, it would be a significant step forward. And to avoid these principles being sidestepped, they need to be elaborated in due course as a set of mandatory rules. The second set of transformations would thus involve the entrenchment of revised codes, rules and procedures - concerning health, child labour, trade union activity, environmental protection, stakeholder consultation and corporate governance, among other matters - in the terms of reference of economic organisations and trading agencies.

But this cannot be implemented without a third set of transformations, focused on alleviating the harshest cases of economic suffering. This means that development policies must challenge unequal access to the global market, and ensure that global market integration, particularly of capital markets, happens in sequence with the growth of sustainable public sectors, which guide long-term investment in healthcare, human capital and physical infrastructure, and the development of transparent, accountable political institutions. Moreover, it means eliminating unsustainable debt, seeking ways to reverse the outflow of net capital assets from the south to the north, and creating new finance facilities for development purposes. In addition, if such measures were combined with a (Tobin) tax on the turnover of financial markets, and/or a consumption tax on fossil fuels, and/or a shift of priorities from military expenditure (running at over $950bn a year globally) to the alleviation of severe need (direct aid amounts to $50bn a year globally), then the developed world might really begin to accommodate those nations struggling for survival and minimum welfare.

This is a big agenda, which cannot, of course, be realised all at once. Yet, as I argue in Global Covenant, it is feasible, and can be pursued on a step by step basis. And unless we move in this direction, and make social justice a priority alongside liberty, then tens of millions of people will continue to die unnecessarily every year of poverty, disease and environmental degradation.

The shift in the agenda of globalisation I am arguing for - a move from liberal to social democratic globalisation - would also have payoffs for today’s most pressing security concerns. If developed countries want rapid progress towards global legal codes that will enhance security and ensure action against the threat of terrorism, then they should also participate in a wider process of reform that addresses the insecurity of life experienced in developing societies. Across the developing world, human rights and democracy are seldom perceived as legitimate concerns in the abstract. They must be connected with humanitarian issues of social and economic well-being, such as education and clean water.

To be concerned today with the Enlightenment ideals of freedom, democracy and reason, one needs to think about their entrenchment in an era in which political communities and states matter, but not solely and exclusively. States are hugely important vehicles for aiding the delivery of effective public regulation, equality and social justice, but they should not be thought of as occupying a privileged level of politics. They can be judged by how far they deliver these public goods and how far they fail. The question is not why globalisation works, but rather how it can be made to work better to bridge the gaps between liberty and social justice, economic and human rights concerns, the accelerating affluence of some and the continuing poverty of many. Liberal economic philosophy does not equip us adequately for this task. End of the article

Posted at 1:07 AM · Comments (0)

Having become workshop to the world, is China poised to storm the bastions of its high-technology industries? Thanks partly to foreign expansion by Huawei, telecommunications equipment maker, and a few other Chinese companies, the idea is starting to be taken seriously abroad - above all in the US, ever jealous of its technological pre-eminence.

Some commentators predict China may rival US information technology leadership in only a decade. Its scientific achievements also provoke awe. Stephen Minger, a stem-cell scientist who led a UK fact-finding mission to China last year, says he was stunned by the sophistication of its medical research and laboratories.

Since the late 1980s, the number of science and engineering doctorates awarded in China has exploded. It now has more researchers than Japan. Its annual research and development spending, though still well below US levels, is rising five times faster, while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says China’s biggest exports are now high-tech products. But those dazzling statistics mask an often more mundane reality. The bulk of China’s “high-tech” exports are actually low-margin commodity products such as personal computers and DVD players, assembled from imported components that account for most of their value.

In contrast to the home-grown IT industries of Japan and South Korea, two-thirds or more of those exports are from partly or wholly foreign-owned plants. China’s state-owned companies spend relatively little on R&D and have almost no international brands or distribution networks - a drawback acknowledged by Lenovo’s purchase of

IBM’s barely profitable PC business.

Ah, say the China-boosters, but all that is mere prologue. China’s abundant cheap brainpower, energy and determination to succeed make it only a matter of time before it grows into a formidable “knowledge economy”. Again, appearances may deceive. R&D effort is only a rather crude measure of input. Its economic value depends on the quality of output and how it is commercialised. On both counts, China still has much to prove.

Its engineers’ high calibre and low cost have spurred western companies such as General Electric and International Business Machines to set up laboratories there. But China’s state-owned enterprises seem less adroit at exploiting those assets. The OECD last year gave most SOEs low marks for innovation and for training and organising researchers. McKinsey, the management consultancy, says China’s software industry lags behind India’s, because of its fragmented structure and poor management. That may change as more foreign-trained IT engineers with business experience return from abroad. However, they face big barriers to disseminating technology across industry. Not only are foreign companies operating in China increasingly careful to keep core technologies to themselves but Chinese companies collaborate little with each other or with universities.

Weak intellectual property laws, long assailed by western companies, are also a self-inflicted handicap because they provide no rewards for innovation. China’s international patent applications, though growing, are still less than 1 per cent of the total filed in the US and Europe. And while start-up companies abound in China, they are poorly supported by its financial system. Its bigger banks favour lending to state-owned industries; venture capital is in its infancy, and the country’s immature equity market fails to offer the dependable exit route demanded by sophisticated early-stage investors.

That compels many company founders to rely on funds raised from relatives. Some management gurus believe China’s model of family-based capitalism is a shaky foundation for enduring corporate structures. Japan’s Kenichi Ohmae says his successful Chinese friends care more about getting rich quickly than creating world-beating businesses.

Historians puzzle over why, for 500 years after inventing gunpowder, China invented so little else. No country, of course, is bound to repeat history, and China has shed centuries of insularity to embrace foreign investment, trade and technology. But whether its future is as a high-tech powerhouse in its own right or as the world’s biggest branch-plant economy remains an open question. guy.dej@ft.com

Posted at 11:34 PM · Comments (0)

Several people have asked about this. The RSS feed link is in the “About” section of the site. It is still in beta for now, but seems to work.
I’ve also posted a RealAudio link in the “Interviews” section of a lecture given today in Michigan, at Calvin College.

Posted at 10:56 AM · Comments (0)

Please see the RealAudio link below to hear the lecture.

Posted at 10:54 AM · Comments (0)

y, Jan. 20, 2005, at 4:22 AM PT

There’s gold in them hills! And real estate! And junk bonds! And cell phones! And Internet cafes! And a billion Chinese shoppers!

Every age has its gold rush. The Dutch went mad for tulip bulbs in the 17th century. A hundred years later, canals were all the rage. In the 1840s, gold. In the 1860s, railroads. In the early 20th century, phones, radio, cars, and planes. In the 1980s, Wall Street. In the 1990s, the Internet. And, now, in the 2000s … China.

Pick up a newspaper and you’ll see a story about the latest American company plotting its assault on “the greatest untapped market on earth.” Search Amazon, and your screen will fill with books offering 101 tips for making a killing in the PRC. Say “China” to executives and investors, and they’ll casually mention their last trip to Beijing. The boom is on, and everyone wants in.

Of course, even as we all feel a sudden desire to enroll in Mandarin classes, we should remember that the current China frenzy has only progressed to the second of five phases that define most gold rushes. To wit:

1. Spark: A few early birds strike it rich—and get themselves on the cover of Fortune.

2. Boom: The rest of us drool with envy and rush to cash in. The torrent of inflowing capital upsets the supply/demand equilibrium and drives prices to the moon, making the early birds even richer. This is where China is now.

3. Bust: The level of interest (capital) exceeds the level of opportunity (places to put it). Returns plummet, prices collapse, and herds of recent arrivals and Kool-Aid drinkers lose their shirts.

4. Mature growth: Savvy, patient contrarians sift through the wreckage, buying assets from the disillusioned for pennies on the dollar. This, in turn, becomes the most profitable, if least glamorous, phase. It’s the one that the Internet boom has just entered.

5. Decay: See Polaroid, Xerox, and the British Empire.

Developing countries tend to experience multiple gold rushes, as the pendulum of socio-politico-economic reform swings forward, swings back (e.g., Russia), and then swings forward again. Today’s China boom is only the latest in the country’s history, and it probably won’t be the last.

But in China’s case, the long-term optimism seems particularly well-founded. Given the country’s rate of progress, it is hard to imagine China not becoming the leading economic superpower over the next 50 to 100 years. The intermediate steps, however, will likely be incredibly complex and volatile, especially for Westerners. China’s combination of cultures, languages, military power, income disparity, one-party rule, legal and regulatory systems, infrastructure, and, simply, vastness, will confound many.

No matter what happens, the boom will produce great stories. Slate has asked me to tell some of them. Specifically, I have been asked to focus on the stampede of American executives, companies, journalists, consultants, and investors currently elbowing each other out of the way to snag first-class seats to Beijing.

Before I begin, a confession: Thanks to a previous life as a Wall Street Internet analyst, I know a bit about business and a bit about gold rushes. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about China:
Language. To say I don’t speak a word of Chinese would be an overstatement, but only just. I can say “hello” in one Chinese language (I think), but I don’t know which one. I am also familiar with a refrain sung on the PBS Kids show Sagwa, the Chinese Siamese Cat, which, to my ears, sounds like “Hop on Yo.” I am told it means “You’re my best friend.”
History. I took a class in high school called “Changing China.” It covered the few thousand years through Deng. I remember discussing a picture of Deng swimming in a river (the Yangtze?). The picture had great significance, apparently, because of a famous earlier photo of Mao doing the same thing.
Geography. I would probably be able to find Beijing and the Yangtze on a map (probably), but I’ve never set foot in China. The farthest East (West?) I’ve been is Japan, where I lived for a year at the end of its ’80s boom.
Cultural Revolution. I have read Nien Cheng’s memoir, Life and Death in Shanghai, twice. The story of a middle-aged woman ripped from her house and jailed for six years for refusing to confess her terrible capitalist crimes (working for Shell), the book reveals how entire societies can go temporarily insane (a surprisingly useful lesson).
Business. A while back, my insight into the China business opportunity might have been summarized as “big, really big.” This perception was supported by the usual idiot outsider logic: Multiply the price of whatever you are selling by 1.3 billion and begin hyperventilating. I have since read enough to understand that direct investment in China, at least, is no silk road to riches. (I have not read enough to understand what the silk road to riches is.)

So that’s what I know. To fill the vacuum, I’ve ordered 17 books from Amazon. Soon, I will begin talking to people.

The idea of this series is to examine the gold rush first from a distance (New York), and then jet over and see the fuss firsthand. To be successful, I will obviously have to remedy my ignorance post-haste. I will also have to find people who know what they are talking about and are willing to tell me.

And that’s where I need your help.

Maybe you’re an American entrepreneur who has a great story about doing business in China. Maybe you’re a Chinese businessperson who can’t believe how foolish American investors are. Maybe you are someone who knows a great factory I should visit in Shanghai, a brilliant executive I should talk to, or just the right guy in the Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation. If you are, please tell me about it (on background, if necessary: I don’t believe in risking one’s career just to get the word out).

So if you have any suggestions for people I should talk to and topics I should study, please e-mail me at chinagoldrush@yahoo.com.

To keep the series focused, I am also going to try to answer two questions: one general, one specific. The general question is whether China really is the business opportunity of the age—at least for American business executives. The specific one is whether I should try to cash in on this gold rush (and the last one) by buying the stock of a Chinese Internet company.

Again, please send suggestions for topics, stories, and contacts to chinagoldrush@yahoo.com. Thank you.
Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, lives in New

Posted at 11:49 PM · Comments (0)

This story isn’t going away, and shouldn’t. It speaks volumes about what ails Japan’s press and its democracy, too.

Last Monday, a meeting organized by the Violence Against Women in War Network Japan to discuss its ongoing lawsuit against NHK was moved at the last minute from a tiny room in the Bunkyo Kumin Center to a large hall at the YMCA. The change was made to accommodate the many reporters who were suddenly interested in VAWW-NET in the wake of the scandal involving Shinzo Abe, the deputy secretary general of the Liberal Democratic Party.

Obviously, VAWW-NET hadn’t anticipated much interest in the meeting before the Asahi Shimbun reported on Jan. 12 that Abe and another LDP Diet member, Shoichi Nakagawa, asked NHK executives in Jan. 2001 to alter a documentary about a mock tribunal being sponsored by VAWW-NET. The purpose of the tribunal was to hear testimony from women who had been forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II, and to pass down verdicts on those deemed responsible. The tribunal found the late Emperor Showa, among others, guilty of crimes against humanity.

The YMCA was packed, but there was only one TV camera, and that belonged to the Korean Broadcasting Service. Local broadcast media seemed uninterested in what VAWW-NET had to say about the scandal, which wasn’t surprising. So far, the only things that have interested TV journalists are the accusations flying back-and-forth between the Asahi on one side and NHK and the LDP on the other.

Abe took full advantage of this interest. He made the rounds of the news programs to show his face and thus prove he had nothing to fear. The strategy worked. On TV Asahi’s “Hodo Station” host Ichiro Furutachi practically groveled, so impressed was he that Abe had condescended to appear. On Fuji TV’s Sunday-morning talk show, Abe was treated like a martyr by the pundits who interviewed him.

The absence of hard questions allowed Abe to say what he wanted to say, which was that he deserved an apology from both the Asahi and Satoru Nagai, the NHK producer who held a press conference on Jan. 13 to reveal that he believed it was Abe and Nakagawa who put pressure on NHK’s executives to alter the documentary. According to VAWW-NET and persons involved in the program’s production, the executives had references to Emperor Showa’s guilty verdict and testimony from former Japanese soldiers removed, thus rendering the program totally irrelevant.

What Abe managed to do on his trip around the networks was plead innocent to censorship while promoting the ideological agenda that the alleged censorship supported. He wildly misrepresented the tribunal with regards to its organization, claiming, for instance, that it was the idea of one woman, the late activist Yayori Matsui, who happened to be an Asahi Shimbun reporter. In fact, it was an international effort attended by many respected legal professionals and covered by press from all over the world. He said that the organizers decided to hold the tribunal at the Kudan Kaikan because it is located close to the Imperial Palace, when in fact it was the only large public hall in Tokyo that didn’t reject the organizers’ request. He also said that the event was crawling with “spies” from North Korea.

None of the TV journalists challenged him on any of these points, partly because they didn’t care but mainly because Abe is untouchable due to his support for the families of Japanese abducted to North Korea. He even implied that the scandal was cooked up to distract him from that work. Consequently, other LDP rightwingers were encouraged to trumpet their own ignorance of the matter. Former prime minister Yoshiro Mori blasted the tribunal for giving Emperor Showa “the death penalty.” No sentences were passed. It was a mock tribunal whose main purpose was to give the former sex slaves their day in court, even if it was a court without any legal authority.

When the scandal broke, Abe practically admitted to pressuring NHK. Though he hadn’t seen the documentary, he said he already knew it was “biased” and asked NHK to make it fair. Over the next week, he progressively altered this story as he came to understand what it was he was really admitting to. He now claims that he never mentioned anything to NHK about bias.

Nakagawa also wised up, saying that he didn’t meet with NHK executives until after the broadcast. But last Tuesday, the Asahi published a full-page explanation of its news-gathering methods for the story, including a phone transcript of a reporter corroborating facts with Nakagawa that reads like a comedy skit. Nakagawa repeatedly contradicts himself and at one point says the original edit of the program “violated the Broadcast Law” even though he, too, hadn’t seen it. He also boasts about telling other LDP members that they shouldn’t approve the NHK budget, which is exactly the kind of threat NHK was allegedly neutralizing by editing the program.

Regardless of whether or not Abe and Nakagawa did try to influence NHK, the public broadcaster is responsible for the final product. The program they broadcast did not include verdicts or testimony and yet did include comments by a famous rightwing professor that placed doubt on the veracity of the former sex slaves. All one has to do is read reports of the tribunal in any publication that covered it and compare them to the documentary that was aired to realize that NHK abused the public’s trust and violated one of the most basic tenets of journalism: It withheld essential information so as not to offend the powers that be. Call it what you will, it’s still censorship.

Posted at 12:44 PM · Comments (0)

Click to see pictures from my visit to Harbin and of the Unit 731 HQ

The rest is history

Published: January 21 2005

Roughly 20 miles from Harbin, in northeastern China, are the remains of a huge walled compound, equipped with prison cells, operating theatres, barracks, incinerators and even a private airport, where Japanese army doctors belonging to Unit 731 performed mostly fatal medical experiments on Chinese, Korean and Russian prisoners during the second world war. In fact, nothing remains except parts of the incinerator and the main office building; the rest was destroyed by the Japanese before their defeat in 1945.

The office now houses one of many new museums in China aimed at displaying atrocities inflicted by the Japanese on the Chinese. Much care and money has gone into these museums. Most were built during the past 10 years or so, and more are on the way in this anniversary year of the end of the “anti-Japanese war”, as the Chinese call it. They are a peculiar mixture of sacred memorial sites, emphasising Chinese “martyrdom”, and chambers of horror. The architecture often shows the influence of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish museum in Berlin, though without anything like his artistic refinement - a generic memorial style of jagged edges and broken spaces.

I spent my Christmas Day in the Harbin museum, examining various atrocities recreated in tableaux vivants made of stone or wax. There you can see how the victims were subjected to freezing experiments, or vivisected while still alive, or injected with fatal germs, or attacked with bombs containing diseased rats or fleas. One such scene, of villagers dying horribly of typhus, is accompanied by the amplified sounds of moaning and screaming.

The point of all this is made clear in texts written on the walls (accompanied in one such museum in Shenyang by eyes crying tears of blood): the Chinese people, with 5,000 years of civilisation, must never again be humiliated by foreign aggressors. Only a great and strong nation will guarantee the survival of the Chinese race. Ever greater national strength will emerge from the blood of the martyrs of Japanese militarism. This is what is known in China as “patriotic education”. And the museum in Harbin is officially designated a “site of patriotic education”.

Such patriotism, based on a sense of collective victimhood and a resolve to be a supreme survivor among nations, has come to replace Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought as the official ideology of the People’s Republic of China. We will no doubt hear more of it in this anniversary year. Chinese government leaders are adept at using Japanese war guilt as leverage in Sino-Japanese diplomacy. One of the main issues dividing the two nations is the fact that Japan’s prime minister Junichiro Koizumi pays his respects at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where the souls of those who have died for their emperor (including convicted war criminals) are worshipped. When Japan protested against a recent sortie by a Chinese submarine in Japanese waters, the Chinese once again brought up the issue of Yasukuni.

Koreans, both in the south and the north, are as prone as the Chinese to define their national identities in terms of Japanese aggression. The legitimacy of the Kim dynasty in the North rests on the largely mythical role played by Kim Il-sung as an anti-Japanese resistance hero. In the South, much of the patriotic museum near Seoul, built under the last military regime in the 1980s, is given over to the same kind of tableaux one sees in China, depicting demonic Japanese and martyred Koreans. The message is similar too: to survive, Koreans must be disciplined and strong.

Perhaps Koizumi should be more sensitive to the feelings of his country’s former victims, as Japan’s liberal press often points out. Certainly, the crimes of the past - any country’s past - should not be forgotten. But there is, nonetheless, something disturbing about east Asian patriotic ideology, especially in China. That the truth of Chinese butchery of its own citizens is still suppressed, while anti-Japanese feelings are continually stoked, smacks of self-serving hypocrisy. Many more Chinese died at the hands of Chairman Mao than at the hands of the Imperial Japanese Army.

But there is something else too. Patriotic education is full of a type of nationalism, born in Europe and transplanted, often through Japan, to China and Korea, which has had lethal consequences: ethnic nationalism combined with social Darwinism. It is the struggle for survival of the fittest nations and races. The weak must perish. This ruthless notion was harnessed to the cause of American conquest and late European imperialism. First world war propaganda, particularly in Germany, was soaked in it. Nazi anti-Semitism, and the resulting genocide, was an extreme version. And it drove the Japanese conquistadors in China and Korea in the first half of the 20th century. As the superior race in Asia, so the Japanese were told, it was their duty to invigorate the weaker races of Asia with a firm crack of the imperial whip.

Now the Chinese are being told that only discipline, vigilance and ever greater national strength will save China from future humiliations. Civic patriotism of the French republican or traditional US kind has no place in an authoritarian system such as that of the People’s Republic of China, let alone the vague post-national idealism of the European Union. Japan’s official pacifism, which is fast crumbling anyway, certainly has little appeal. Ideologically, the PRC, like North Korea, and to a much lesser extent South Korea, is firmly stuck in the late 19th century, when Darwinist ideas made their first impression.

The early Social Darwinists in China, Japan and Korea were modernists. Many thought of themselves as liberals who wished to reform their deeply traditional societies along western lines. The first republican leader of China, Sun Yat-sen, was an active promoter of minzu zhuyi, or ethnic nationalism. He was influenced by Japanese thinkers who called it minzokushugi. And they, in turn, were strongly influenced by Darwin and Spenser. Even though the Chinese revolt against the Qing dynasty that had ruled China for centuries had a strong ethnic component (Han Chinese against Manchus), the traditional idea of China was less one of ethnicity than of language and civilisation. The modern nation-state was essentially a product of the 19th century, and the model was western.

Western influence on the non-western world in the past 200 years has been partly about an ideological struggle whose echoes can still be heard today, not least in the Middle East. Should modern nationhood be built on blood and soil, or on a common sense of citizenship? French or Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy, or Germanic-Russian authoritarianism? Both models have had their ups and downs, but the latter tended to win in East Asia, at least until a few decades ago. It is still winning in China. And one of the reasons is Japan’s history of aggression.

When the then prime minister of Japan, Tanaka Kakuei, first met Chairman Mao in 1972, the chairman allegedly thanked the Japanese leader warmly, for, as he put it, without the Japanese war communism would have been defeated. He was right, of course. But post-Mao, Chinese nationalism owes just as much to the Japanese. And there are important lessons to be drawn from this in the light of what is happening in Iraq today.

During the Meiji Period in the late 19th century, Japan was an inspiration for Asian reformers. After its own revolution in the 1860s, Japan became a model of westernised modernity. Liberalism and Social Darwinism often went together. One of the great Japanese free-thinkers of the 19th century, Fukuzawa Yukichi, was obsessed with the idea of national vigour. He was a keen advocate of civil liberties, but also convinced that Japanese should marry westerners and eat more meat to strengthen the Japanese physique and improve the national gene pool. Liang Qichao, a leading Chinese reformer, received much of his knowledge of the west from Fukuzawa and other Japanese intellectuals. But his brand of Social Darwinism was more authoritarian. He believed that “freedom means freedom for the group, not for the individual”. To avoid being enslaved by other races, he argued, one should be a slave of one’s own.

This deeply illiberal notion also informed Mao’s brand of Leninist nationalism. Japan’s relative success, until the ultra-nationalists took over in the 1930s, in building liberal institutions, should have served the cause of Asian democracy. Instead, however, the Japanese thought they should impose their brand of modernity on other Asians, without democracy. Japanese military imperialism owed almost nothing to liberal ideas and a great deal to the most authoritarian version of Social Darwinism.

Manchuria was turned into a Japanese puppet state where the Japanese built the world’s most modern railways, fine hotels, huge industrial plants, excellent hospitals and an efficient bureaucracy, all in the name of Asian modernisation. In the official propaganda, Japanese ethnic nationalism made way for Asian nationalism. This had some appeal among the Chinese elite, but failed to convince most people. The Japanese then tried to conquer the rest of China by force, adopting an air of racial and cultural superiority that was deeply humiliating to the Chinese.

Ethnic nationalism played an even greater role in Korea. Koreans, like the Taiwanese but unlike the Chinese, were made subjects of the Japanese emperor, forced to adopt Japanese names and forbidden from using their own language. Since the “pure” Japanese were still deemed to be superior, Koreans and Taiwanese were made to feel like inferior Japanese subjects. In spite of this humiliation, many members of the Korean and Taiwanese elites collaborated with their Japanese masters, thinking this was the quickest route to national strength and modernisation.

Although Japan’s brutal attempt at modernist imperialism failed, much of its propaganda stuck. The Chinese and Koreans were more than ever convinced that national survival depended on ethnic vigour and national strength, based on authoritarian institutions. Following the line of Liang Qichao, they would be slaves to their own leaders, so as never to be slaves of foreigners. This is why the ideological vacuum left by the demise of Maoism (though not of the Communist Party) was filled so quickly by ethnic nationalism. And it also explains why the issue of Taiwan remains explosive.

From the point of view of blood-and-soil nationalism, Taiwanese independence is an abomination, a reminder of the humiliation of Japanese imperialism. But the Taiwanese, especially those whose ancestors left the Chinese mainland many centuries ago, see things differently. They are democrats now. The fact that they speak Chinese is no reason for them to submit to an authoritarian government on the Chinese mainland.

The South Koreans are now democrats too. It is surely no coincidence that with more open institutions, there is less demonisation of Japan. In fact, relations with Japan have rarely been better. The target of historical opprobrium has shifted from Japan itself to the former Korean collaborators, who are officially denounced as traitors to the Korean people. To make this stick, a law has been drafted to drop the term “pro-Japanese” in the official description of these villains. They are traitors, pure and simple. This may be just a populist move by an “anti-elitist” government, but the proposal for such a peculiar law shows the strength of feeling about the recent past.

Authoritarian mobilisation in the name of Darwinian war can unleash huge energies among peoples, to be sure. Perhaps the extraordinary spurts of economic growth in South Korea and China could not have happened without the fierce patriotism and rigid discipline that goes with it. But such energies can also be turned to darker causes, such as foreign conquest. East Asia is not the only part of the world where this 19th-century struggle is still being waged, and it behoves us, who live in the west, to pay attention, not least because we started it all.

Posted at 12:08 PM · Comments (0)

I’m off to the States (Michigan) for a talk and a very quick trip. Life is busy, sometimes you think too busy, but it is unfailingly rich. I’m hard-pressed to write for this space as often as I would like. So much juice goes into the day job, into family, into reading, into other writing projects.
I hope I’m keeping a rich enough mix of new materials in the other sections, particularly “Snippets,” which I update most often, too keep things going. I also plan to update the photos more often, both by steadily adding more galleries, and steadily adding to the ones that exist. The Shanghai, Japan and general China photo galleries, in particular, will keep growing with time.
I’ve got tons of more pictures, essentially archival stuff that I’ll add when time allows, and I especially like the idea of posting something from each of my trips as I go forward, which means that with time, given my travel routines, there’ll be huge amounts of stuff up.
I just started reading Pankaj Mishra’s “An End to Suffering” this afternoon, and am looking forward to spending several hours with it on the airplane. The writing is sublime. His descriptive powers are fantastic, and best of all, he is a writer in love with ideas — here, a young Indian man’s unique exploration of Buddhism. More on this book at the end of my trip.

Posted at 4:01 PM · Comments (0)

The Bush administration is in denial about its disastrous failure in
Iraq

By the former British Foreign Secretary

Inauguration does not do justice to the exuberant celebrations of this
week. Coronation would come closer. Washington ended yesterday with
nine official balls. The night before George Bush gave a new spin to the
phrase moveable feast by fitting in three separate banquets. He then expended
as much ordnance in peppering the sky over the Capitol with fireworks as
would get his occupation forces in Iraq through a whole 24 hours.

The contrasts between this uninhibited triumphalism and the real world
are as wide as the American continent. One visible contrast was provided by
the demonstrators camping out on the streets to protest at such extravagant
waste by an administration waging its own jihad on programmes against
poverty on the grounds that the federal budget cannot afford welfare.
Yesterday, Bush gave a new spin on welfare cuts by presenting them as
progress to an ownership society. The thousands of wealthy donors to
the campaign to re-elect the president who turned up at those dinners adore
this concept of an ownership society in which they get hefty tax cuts
paid for by the poor who get their budgets cuts.

Then there is the sharp contrast between the self-indulgent hubris of
the festivity and the fragile political victory which it celebrated. Bush
was re-elected by the smallest margin in 100 years of those presidents who
won a second term. His approval ratings this week are the lowest ever
plumbed by any president at the date of his inauguration. But among the balls,
banquets and bangs there was not a hint of the humility that would be
the essential starting point for a process of healing the deep political
division of his nation. The message of the jubilations could not be
clearer. He won another four years and was going to enjoy them, while
the other side lost and was going to have to put up with it.

Lastly there is the biggest contrast of all between the smug complacency of
the administration over its electoral victory and the disastrous military
failure of its adventure in Iraq. Since George Bush was re-elected over
200 more US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Each new day brings another
70 attacks on the occupation forces as the territory dominated by the
insurgents expands and the area which the occupiers can safely patrol
shrinks. This week a senior Kurdish leader, although a supporter of the
occupation, admitted that for a lot of its citizens, “the Iraqi government
exists only on television”.

The lawless background to the forthcoming elections has imposed whole new dimensions to the concept of a secret ballot. Most of the candidates will remain a secret lest they are assassinated. Polling stations are kept secret by the authorities lest they are blown up before election day in
a week’s time.

Iraq was the flagship project of the Bush administration and has turned into its greatest disaster. Yesterday’s jollities cannot conceal the brutal truth that they neither know how to make the occupation succeed nor how to end it without leaving an even worse position behind. And, God help us, thanks to the unshakeable loyalty of our prime minister, we are left trapped in Basra shamed by the latest pictures of prisoner abuse and dependent for any shift of strategy on decisions taken in Washington by an administration that has repeatedly ignored British advice since its
first monumental blunder of disbanding the Iraqi army.

A successful search for a new strategy can only start with a recognition that the present strategy has comprehensively failed. But the Bush administration II that took office yesterday is stuffed with people who are in denial about the dire situation of their forces occupying Iraq. In the couple of months since election day, George Bush has promoted the very people who thought conquering Iraq was a good idea and eased out anyone with a record of worrying about the consequences. Thus Condoleezza
Rice, who was author of the alarmist claim that Saddam could produce a mushroom cloud, replaces Colin Powell, who warned the president that if he broke Iraq he would own the process of putting it back together again.

Perhaps wisely, those who crafted yesterday’s inauguration speech hit the erase button any time the word Iraq crept into the text. Sinai and the Temple Mount got walk-on parts to provide biblical flavouring, but no location of contemporary controversy in the region got a mention. The only
hint in the speech that there might be a war going on was a reverential reference to the sacrifice and service of US troops. Piquantly, at this point the television cameras cut away to a shot of Dick Cheney looking suitably solemn, neatly reminding the informed viewer of the humbug of a president and vice-president thanking US troops for facing dangers in Iraq which they took care to avoid for themselves in Vietnam.

Not that Iraq was unusual in being left out of the script. There were no specifics about anything else, either. Instead, we were invited to drift along with a stream of generalities, untroubled by hard problems or real-world solutions. Freedom and liberty are universal values. The founding fathers of the US constitution, admirable though they may have been, do not hold patent rights over those concepts. They are embedded in the roots of the separate tradition of European social democracy and we must not let George Bush appropriate them to provide an ideological
cover for his new imperialism.

Nor should we accept the implicit assumption of Bush’s muscular foreignpolicy that freedom can be delivered from 38,000ft through the bomb doors. One of the rare passages of the speech when Bush appeared animated by his own text, rather than engaged in formal recitation, was when he saluted
the declaration of independence and the sounding of the liberty bell. But those were celebrations of freedom from foreign dominance - not to put too fine a point on it, independence from the British. He needs to grasp that other nations are just as attached to freedom from foreign intervention,
including domination by America.

The president and his speechwriters have yet to confront the tension between their rhetoric about freedom, which is universally popular, and their practice of projecting US firepower, which is resented in equal measure. That explains why, on the very day when the president set forward his mission to bring liberty to the world, a poll revealed that a large majority of its inhabitants believe that he will actually make it more dangerous. The first indication of whether they are right to worry will be
whether the Bush administration mediate their differences with Iran through the state department or through the US air force.

Posted at 11:30 AM · Comments (0)

I am doing some swimming against the current here. Many of my Japanese friends do not care for Murakami. They think he is pretentious and “American.” I can’t agree. I’ve also interviewed him a couple of times, and although this shouldn’t count when evaluating a book, I came away with a real appreciation of the person, too. He was generous, unpretentious and deeply thoughtful. Two of my favorites: South of the Border (the recollection of late youth and early loves here is extraordinary) and Sputnick Sweetheart. Underground, his non-fiction book about the Tokyo sarin gas attack is a reportorial tour de force.

New signals from Planet Murakami: Cat communication, fishy rain, and some moralizing

January 18th, 2005

Haruki Murakami brings back the heavy equipment.
photo: Elena Seibert
Kafka On The Shore
By Haruki Murakami
Knopf, 436 pp.
$25.95
Buy this book
Reading Haruki Murakami is like falling into something, a slumber, it may be, or a rabbit hole. Murakami’s prose is light as air; it doesn’t let on how deep you are going, not only into the trance of reading, but into the knotty matters that Murakami ultimately concerns himself with: the will to power, the acceptance of death, the ethical burden imposed upon us by the presence of evil in the world. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), his masterpiece, was a well so deep that even Murakami seems to have had trouble recovering from it; his recent novels have been relatively slight. In Kafka on the Shore, however, Murakami has gone back to work with the heavy equipment and tunneled a little farther toward the center of his planet.

And a strange planet it is: The Kafka of the title is a 15-year-old boy, on the run from his malevolent father and a more than usually literal oedipal curse. His story takes up half the book; the other half belongs to Nakata, an old man who lost the ability to read in the course of a mysterious wartime incident, but who, by way of compensation, can speak to cats and make fish rain down from the sky. Their paths converge in a private library on the southern island of Shikoku, presided over by a hermaphrodite and a former pop star who, in the late 1960s, threw the world out of kilter by opening an entrance to the world of the dead. A careful reader will be able to assemble a fairly clear picture of what happens next and why, but that kind of detective work isn’t necessary in order to enjoy the book, any more than you have to know chess in order to enjoy Through the Looking-Glass. Nor is causality really the point. As Kafka observes late in the novel, “[B]eyond any of those details of the real, there are dreams. And everyone’s living in them.”

That’s a big statement, but Murakami has never been shy of big statements; given the choice between trees and forest, he’ll take the forest every time. The amazing thing is that he is able to cobble together a world that’s lifelike enough to hold the reader’s attention out of what are, at bottom, gross abstractions. Here’s a building, as seen by Nakata: “A shabby, miserable sort of building. The kind where shabby people spent one shabby day after another doing their shabby work. The kind of fallen-from-grace building you find in any city, the kind Charles Dickens could spend ten pages describing.” Not Murakami. He has been compared to the American minimalists Chandler and Carver, but the comparison is inapt; minimalists believe in getting the details right, whereas for Murakami the details are an impediment to seeing the whole picture. This isn’t an aesthetic decision so much as a claim about morality: The forest is good, and the trees are evil. No wonder Kafka reads a book about Adolf Eichmann; who more than Eichmann was blinded by details? “There were heavy snowfalls. Power outages. Not enough poison gas to go around… . At his trial he described all this, no emotion showing on his face. His recall was amazing.”
Samsung

Murakami’s fiction has always had a moral dimension. The ghostly visitations of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, the mysteriously uncombusted barns of “Barn Burning,” the fantastical goings-on that make Murakami one of the few writers worth reading in The New Yorker’s stable all serve to excite the reader’s imagination, not for its own sake, but because it is only by means of imagination that we can apprehend those most fantastic notions, good and evil. This moralism can be heartening—it’s nice to think that the imagination is actually good for something—but in Kafka on the Shore, it often comes across as heavy-handed. The novel’s weakest scene pokes fun at a pair of nail-bitingly stereotyped feminists; Kafka’s mentor, Oshima, subjects the reader to a lecture about the dangers of ideology that concludes, “Each person feels pain in his own way, each has his own scars. So I think I’m as concerned about fairness and justice as anybody. But what disgusts me even more are people who have no imagination. The kind T.S. Eliot calls hollow men. People who fill up that imagination with heartless bits of straw … ” It’s as if Murakami were tired of turning the key in the wind-up bird of fiction, and had let the bird run down until it simply croaked out what was on his mind.

In another book, the lapse would be fatal, but Kafka on the Shore is so strange that even its chestnuts take on an air of mystery. It’s like a recording in which you hear the scraping of a musician’s chair: If the music is good enough, even the chair belongs to it. As Oshima says, “[A] certain type of perfection can be realized only through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.” This is a clunker too, but it’s delivered by a hermaphrodite who is driving a 15-year-old boy named Kafka to his mountain hideout, discussing Schubert all the while. The forest is rescued by the trees.”

And these abbreviated reactions from a Salon review by Charles Taylor:
Murakami is too refined, too unadorned a writer for “Kafka on the Shore” to go spinning off into incomprehensibility. And if I read him right, the conclusions he’s reached here are homiletic: The world offers no promises of safety; knowing ourselves means knowing the worst we are capable of; regret for the past deadens us to the present; and, most strongly, a full life means running the risk of encountering the pain and violence the world holds.

The combination of pat lessons and loose narrative threads might be a fatal one for any book, especially a book as big (nearly 500 pages) as this one. But I loved reading “Kafka on the Shore.” The book may not, finally, add up (or not to anything deep), but it never feels hackneyed. Murakami has written a novel where the fantastic is trite and the everyday is profound.

Toughout “Kafka on the Shore,” Murakami’s writing strikes a singular balance between the ascetic and the sensual. A simple meal, a nap, the feeling of lying in the sun, the satisfying sweat you develop from exercise, the joy of having books to read — in other words, some of the simplest pleasures you can imagine — are rendered with the type of simplicity that only comes from extraordinary refinement. (Perhaps Murakami writes so beautifully about sex because, as with the fantasy elements of his novels, he treats it naturally, not as something apart from life.) Murakami, a great jazz fan, does something in his prose comparable to what Miles Davis did in his great ’50s work: His notes are spare but so carefully chosen that together they feel rich. You don’t think about what has been eliminated but about the essence that has been distilled into the unadorned words.

Posted at 10:19 AM · Comments (0)

I like the Salon airplane and flight writer, Patrick Smith and his long-running column, Ask the Pilot, a lot. Since I’ve posted Stuart’s pictures of the A380Click to see photos, I thought I’d post this anti-hype take on the plane. There’s also encouraging news of new air connections between the US and West Africa, which have been severely impaired since the demise of Air Africa (a disaster that’s never been adequately recounted).

“You’re probably wondering about the A380, the new Airbus überjumbo rolled out to much fanfare this week in Toulouse, France. Baseline model of the double-decked behemoth will have legs for about 8,000 nautical miles. Naturally, perhaps, first in line for the A380 is Singapore Airlines. Initial deployment will be to London and Sydney in the second quarter of 2006.

Regulars to these pages know of my ambivalence toward the A380, and the much-awaited uncurtaining ceremony was something I’d anticipated with equal measures of excitement and clenched teeth. First and foremost the plane is ugly — a ponderous giant with none of the elegance of the Boeing 747, the airliner it will soon supplant as world’s biggest after a 35-year reign. And while the A380’s assorted superlatives and technological innovations are certainly worthy of marvel — it will be the first civil transport with a gross maximum takeoff weight exceeding a million pounds — accolades like “milestone” and “revolutionary” are undue.

When the 747 debuted with Pan Am in 1970, it was over twice the size of its largest existing competitors, the single-aisle Douglas DC-8 and Boeing 707, and was able to carry three times the number of passengers. By comparison the A380 will outlift the 747-400, its closest rival, by only about 30 percent, over roughly equal distances. It has “a tail as tall as a seven-story building,” gushed an Associated Press reporter from the party in Toulouse. Incredible, yes. And but one story taller than the 64-foot fin of the 747. Unlike the venerable Boeing, or for that matter the Concorde, there’s nothing so fundamentally radical about the A380.

The plane’s most impressive aspects aren’t its girth and power but its architecture and onboard systems. With dual auxiliary power units and multiple fail-safe components, Airbus has built an aircraft almost guaranteed never to cancel or divert. With several hundred passengers aboard and a limited number of airports able to accept A380 operations, nearly perfect reliability will be crucial.

Those airport restrictions, by the way, are mainly a function of logistics — gate and terminal space, loading equipment, etc. — and not runway limits. The ship’s average landing speed will be no different from that of the A320 (about 145 knots), a fifth of its size, and under most conditions will require less runway than a 747.

A typical three-class arrangement offers seating for approximately 540 people, and fuselage mockups have proposed extravagances like bars, duty-free boutiques and nurseries. Such frills, argue cynics, are bound to go the way of those piano lounges found in the upper decks of the original 747, destined to be swapped out for additional rows of seats. (An all-economy A380 would have room for 800 passengers, versus about 580 for the highest-density version of the 747.)

Chances are that’s overly pessimistic, for the trend these days is toward increasingly swanky perks, particularly in the premium cabins. The 747 emerged in a time when flights rarely exceeded about nine hours’ duration. With 14-, 15-, even 18-hour trips now commonplace, the art of perfecting long-haul satisfaction needs a higher, more permanent standard. Boutiques and spas may be wishful thinking, but in an era when fully flat sleepers have become de rigueur even in business class, you can expect luxurious, cutting-edge amenities in the forward rows, and a modicum of improvements in the back as well. Economy is planned as a 10-abreast layout, just as one encounters on 747s. With a cabin width about 13 inches greater overall, that gives the traveler 1.3 additional inches per seat. Not to mention the economy-class frills now supplied by many top carriers — on-demand seat-back video, ergonomically sculpted chairs, headrests and footrests, etc.

The A380 order book (at the Airbus list price of $280 million per aircraft):

Emirates: 43
Lufthansa: 15
Qantas: 12
Singapore Airlines: 10
Air France: 10
FedEx: 10
Malaysia Airlines: 6
Virgin Atlantic: 6
Thai Airways: 6
Korean Air: 5
Etihad Airways: 4
Qatar Airways: 2

Excepting FedEx, whose freighter variant of the leviathan will be ready for market in 2008, no North American carriers have submitted orders or options. This isn’t the time, I suppose, as the seven largest U.S. airlines recently posted a combined net loss of $1.3 billion for the third quarter of 2004. That’s the busy summer period, historically the industry’s most profitable stretch. Passenger loads have been back to pre-Sept. 11 levels for over a year now, but $50-per-barrel oil prices, owing in large part to the Iraq war, have ensured mounting losses. Southwest and Alaska Airlines were the only U.S. carriers in the black last summer. Even JetBlue’s profits plunged 70 percent for the period.

Financial plight aside, however, there’s some rousing news on the home front:

Just after 10 p.m. on Dec. 10, a United Airlines 747 touched down at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City — the former Saigon — heralding a return of U.S. airline service to Vietnam for the first time in almost 30 years. As passengers and dignitaries descended stairs to the tarmac, women in traditional ao-dais costumes presented gifts of lotus flowers and lanterns. Chapter 11 be damned, United Flights 862 and 869 will operate daily between Ho Chi Minh and Hong Kong. From HKG, the carrier’s onward nonstops serve San Francisco, Chicago and Tokyo. Predictions call for 11 percent annual growth in U.S.-Vietnam passenger traffic.

Even more exciting, Continental Airlines announced it will soon introduce flights from its Newark hub to Lagos, Nigeria. Scheduled for June 2005, this will mark the first service of a U.S. passenger airline to any destination in Africa since Delta pulled out of Cairo, Egypt, in late 2001. No American entity has flown to any sub-Saharan point since Pan Am’s routes (to Monrovia, Dakar, Nairobi and elsewhere) were abandoned prior to that airline’s collapse in 1991. Continental also will become the only U.S. airline operating to six continents, a distinction it will share with numerous foreign counterparts.

New York-Lagos, which would not have garnered my wager as a likely candidate for such a premiere, is considered a highly lucrative market. “Our Lagos service will be highly attractive to Nigerian and American transatlantic travelers,” said Continental CEO Larry Kellner in a statement. “Particularly executives in energy-related industries.” The route was previously covered by the long-embattled Nigeria Airways, which finally closed its doors in 2003.

Nigeria, by the way, was ranked the world’s third most corrupt nation by a watchdog organization called Transparency International. The group says 40 percent of the country’s petroleum income is stolen or squandered by government corruption and mismanagement. Allegedly — though I can’t confirm this — one of the reasons British Airways ceased its London-Lagos flights was because its airplanes were routinely stripped of equipment, including galley supplies, furnishings and even cockpit electronics, during layovers. Rumors say armed guards will accompany crew and passengers on Continental’s flights from Newark.”

Posted at 1:51 AM · Comments (0)

All of us, a thousand times a day, read faces. When someone says “I
love you, ” we look into that person’s eyes to judge his or her sincerity. When we meetsomeone new, we often pick up on subtle signals, so that, even though he or she may have talked in a normal and friendly manner, afterward we say, “I don’t think he liked me,” or “I don’t think she’s very happy.” We easily parse complex
distinctions in facial expression. If you saw me grinning, for example, with my eyes twinkling, you’d say I was amused. But that’s not the only way we interpret a smile. If you saw me nod and smile exaggeratedly, with the corners of my lips tightened, you would take it that I had been teased and was responding sarcastically. If I made eye contact with someone, gave a small smile and then looked down and averted my gaze, you would think I was flirting. If I followed a
remark with an abrupt smile and then nodded, or tilted my head
sideways, you might conclude that I had just said something a little harsh, and wanted to take the edge off it. You wouldn’t need to hear anything I was saying in order toreach these conclusions. The face is such an extraordinarily efficient instrument of communication that there must be rules that govern the way we interpret facial expressions. But what are those rules? And are they the same for everyone?…
…Silvan Tomkins may have been the best face reader
there ever was. Tomkins was from Philadelphia, the son of a dentist from Russia. He was short, and slightly thick around the middle, with a wild mane of white hair and huge black plastic-rimmed glasses. He taught psychology at Princeton and Rutgers, and was the author of “Affect, Imagery, Consciousness,” a four-volume work so dense that its readers were evenly divided between those who understood
it and thought it was brilliant and those who did not understand it and thought it was brilliant. He was a legendary talker. At the end of a cocktail party, fifteen people would sit, rapt, at Tomkins’s feet, and someone would say, “One more question!” and they would all sit there for another hour and a half, as Tomkins held forth on, say, comic books, a television sitcom, the biology of emotion, his problem with Kant, and his enthusiasm for the latest fad diets, all
enfolded into one extended riff. During the Depression, in the midst of his doctoral studies at Harvard, he worked as a handicapper for a
horse-racing syndicate, and was so successful that he lived lavishly on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. At the track, where he sat in the stands for hours, staring at thehorses through binoculars, he was known as the Professor. “He had a system for predicting how a horse would do based on what horse was on either side of him, based on their emotional relationship,” Ekman said. If a male horse, for
instance, had lost to a mare in his first or second year, he would be
ruined if he went to the gate with a mare next to him in the lineup. (Or something likethat-no one really knew for certain.) Tomkins felt that emotion was the code to life, and that with enough attention to particulars the code could be cracked.
He thought this about the horses, and, more important, he thought this about the human face.

Tomkins, it was said, could walk into a post office, go over to the “Wanted” posters, and, just by looking at mug shots, tell you what crimes the various fugitives had committed. “He would watch the show ‘To Tell the Truth,’ and without fault he ould always pick the person who was lying and who his confederates were,” his son, Mark, recalls. “He actually wrote the producer at one point to say it was too easy, and the man invited him to come to New York, go backstage, and show his stuff.” Virginia Demos, who teaches psychology at
Harvard, recalls having long conversations with Tomkins. “We would sit and talk on the phone, and he would turn the sound down as Jesse Jackson was talking toMichael Dukakis, at the Democratic National Convention. And he would read the faces and give his predictions on what would happen. It was profound.”…
…Ekman and Friesen decided that they needed to create a taxonomy of facialexpressions, so day after day they sat across from each other and began to makeevery conceivable face they could. Soon, though, they realized that theirefforts weren’t enough. “I met an anthropologist, Wade Seaford, told him what Iwas doing, and he said, ‘Do you have this movement?’ “-and here Ekman contracted
what’s called the triangularis, which is the muscle that depresses the corners of the lips, forming an arc of distaste-“and it wasn’t in my system, because I had never seen it before. I had built a system not on what the face can do but on what I had seen. I was devastated. So I came back and said, ‘I’ve got to learn the anatomy.’ ” Friesen and Ekman then combed through medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular movement that the face could make. There were forty-three such movements. Ekman and Friesen called them “action units.” Then they sat across from each other again, and began anipulating each action unit in turn, first locating the muscle in their mind and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other closely as they did, checking their movements in a mirror, making notes of how the wrinkle patterns on their faces would change with each muscle movement, and
videotaping the movement for their records. On the few occasions when
they couldn’t make a particular movement, they went next door to the
U.C.S.F. anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle. “That wasn’t pleasant at all,”
Ekman recalls. When each of those action units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in combination, layer- ing one movement on top of another. The entire process took seven years. “There are three hundred combinations of two muscles,” Ekman says. “If you add in a third, you get overfour thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations.” Most of those ten thousand facial expressions don’t mean anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces that children make.
But, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesenidentified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion…
…Ekman and Friesen decided that they needed to create a taxonomy of facial expressions, so day after day they sat across from each other and began to make every conceivable face they could. Soon, though, they realized that their efforts weren’t enough. “I met an anthropologist, Wade Seaford, told him what I was doing, and he said, ‘Do you have this movement?’ “-and here Ekman contracted what’s called the triangularis, which is the muscle that depresses the
corners of the lips, forming an arc of distaste-“and it wasn’t in my system, because I had never seen it before. I had built a system not on what the face can do buton what I had seen. I was devastated. So I came back and said, ‘I’ve got to learn the anatomy.’ ” Friesen and Ekman then combed through medical textbooks that outlined each of the facial muscles, and identified every distinct muscular
movement that the face could make. There were forty-three such
movements. Ekman and Friesen called them “action units.” Then they sat across from each other again, and began manipulating each action unit in turn, first locating the muscle in their mind and then concentrating on isolating it, watching each other closely as they did, checking their movements in a mirror, making notes of how
the wrinkle patterns on their faces would change with each muscle
movement, and videotaping the movement for their records. On the few occasions when theycouldn’t make a particular movement, they went next door to the U.C.S.F. anatomy department, where a surgeon they knew would stick them with a needle and electrically stimulate the recalcitrant muscle. “That wasn’t pleasant at all,”
Ekman recalls. When each of those action units had been mastered, Ekman and Friesen began working action units in combination, layer- ing one movement on top of another. The entire process took seven years. “There are three hundred combinations of two muscles,” Ekman says. “If you add in a third, you get over four thousand. We took it up to five muscles, which is over ten thousand visible facial configurations.” Most of those ten thousand facial expressions
don’t mean anything, of course. They are the kind of nonsense faces that children make.
But, by working through each action-unit combination, Ekman and Friesen identified about three thousand that did seem to mean something, until they had catalogued the essential repertoire of human emotion…

The New Yorker - August 5, 2002

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Elsewhere in the world, mixed marriages are no big deal. In Japan, however, the kokusai kekkon (international marriage) is still an issue tinged with exoticism and other-worldliness. Witness the enormous success of manga series “Daalin wa Gaikokujin” (My Darling is a Foreigner), and you’ll see the point.

The author, a woman who professes she had never thought she would marry a non-Japanese, fell in love with, and subsequently married, an American. The subsequent karuchaa shokku (culture shock) prompted her to create the books based on the couple’s daily life. For her, little details of her husband’s behavior assumed enormous significance, and the difference in how he viewed life in general and Japanese life in particular was one me kara uroko (scales dropping from one’s eyes) event after another.

But, at the same time, the sheer joy and discovery that’s a big part of kokusai kekkon comes to the fore, and the manga is being hailed in jyoseishi (women’s magazines) as both a heart-warming love story and a kind of instructional manual for those preparing to take the kokusai kekkon plunge themselves.

Some of the magazines have taken the subject a step further and include real how-to manyuaru (manuals) with such titles as: “Gaijin Daalin wo Getto Suru Killaa Item (Killer Items That Will Get a Gaijin Darling)” and “Gaijin to no Renai wo Kekkon ni Musubitsukeruniwa (How to Convert a Gaijin Love Affair into Marriage).” Most of these instruct women to combine the traditional yamatonadeshiko (stereotypically demure Japanese woman) with gendaiteki tsuyosa (modern-day strength). For example, a gaijin hunter should carry a hand-ironed handkerchief at all times, but she should also be able to voice her opinion on current affairs, preferably in English. (Oddly, there’s no mention that in order to do so, she should subscribe to this paper).

In any case, the manuals seem to be working since statistics show that the number of marriages between Japanese women and foreign men has doubled (8,158 couples in 2003) over the past 20 years. For many women, foreign men represent everything naisu (nice) that Japanese just can’t (or won’t) provide. Top on everyone’s list is the conviction that foreign men are sweeter and more romantic, that they will keep saying “I love you” well into middle age. And if the daalin is from the U.S. or Europe, he will of course, smilingly share the burden of kaji (household chores) and ikuji (child-raising) and be home by 8 p.m. — at the latest. Chances are the daalin will take her back to his home country to live in luxury, and most importantly, their children will have the coveted daburu kokuseki (double nationalities). There it is, the scenario of the ultimate kachigumi (winning team).

Unfortunately, all isn’t as rosy as the magazines would have us believe — as the number of marriages has risen, so has the divorce rate. One couple out of every 2.5 split up, and the reasons often seem to be the very thing that brought them together, i.e., kachikan to seikatsu shuukan no chigai (difference in values and living styles).

When Japanese men marry a non-Japanese, the No. 1 choice of nationality is Chinese, followed by the Philippines. Stories in danseishi (men’s magazines) suggest that such women are much more passionate, kind and industrious than Japanese women, and the articles exhort sabishii dokushin otoko (lonely single guys) to broaden their horizons and look overseas.

Interestingly, Japanese women choose Korean men over any other nationality, followed by American. Experts say the Yonsama Ninki (Bae Yong Joon popularity) may have something to do with this. But according to my girlfriends, they’ve always suspected that Kankoku no otoko wa jyounetsuteki de ichizu (Korean men are passionate and faithful), much more so than the cold, distant, absent Japanese male.

My friend Mariko, herself married to Scotsman Andrew, sums up her views on the kokusai kekkon: Kekkyoku kokuseki wa kankei nai (in the end, nationality doesn’t matter), and it all boils down to individual traits and personalities. “It’s always dangerous to generalize according to where the person is from,” she warns. But on the other hand, Andrew washes the dishes, takes out the trash, takes care of the kids, and, for the first two years of their marriage, brought her breakfast in bed every Sunday morning. “Konna koto yattekureru Nihonjinotoko wa zettai inai (No Japanese man would ever do such a thing),” she smiles smugly. Sorry girls, he’s taken.

The Japan Times: Jan. 20, 2005

Posted at 9:59 AM · Comments (1)

NHK altered its 2001 documentary on a mock tribunal over Japan’s wartime sexual slavery before it was aired because of “political pressure” from senior lawmakers in the Liberal Democratic Party, the TV program’s chief producer said Thursday.

News photo
NHK producer Satoru Nagai mops away tears during a news conference at a hotel in Tokyo.

“We were ordered to alter the program before it was aired,” Satoru Nagai told reporters in Tokyo. “I would have to say that the alteration was made against the backdrop of political pressure.”

The program originally included footage of a mock trial held by civic groups in December 2000. The “verdict” found the late Emperor Hirohito, posthumously known as Emperor Showa, guilty of permitting the sexual slavery.

Historians say Japan sent as many as 200,000 women — many from the Korean Peninsula, which was then under Japanese rule — to frontline brothels that served Japanese soldiers. Japan called the sex slaves “comfort women.”

This segment was substantially cut before NHK aired the program.

“It is obvious that it was altered to gain consent from Mr. Abe and Mr. Nakagawa,” Nagai said, referring to key LDP politicians. “I believe (NHK) President Katsuji Ebisawa was aware of everything.”

On Jan. 29, 2001 — the day before the program was to be aired — senior NHK officials met with Shinzo Abe, who was then deputy chief Cabinet secretary, and LDP lawmaker Shoichi Nakagawa, Nagai said, quoting his superiors.

Nakagawa, the current trade minister, was then head of a Diet group that was discussing what to do about history textbooks that were beginning to mention wartime atrocities committed by Japan during its aggression in Asia.

Nagai said he was told at the time by a senior NHK broadcasting bureau official, who had just met with Abe and Nakagawa, to immediately alter the program. The LDP pair had reportedly learned about the program’s contents before its scheduled broadcast, he added.

Nagai said he was specifically ordered to delete the verdict from the mock trial, as well as the testimony of the former sex slaves.

“(People involved in the production of the program) opposed the revisions, but we were told to do it under orders,” Nagai told the news conference. “Several days later, I learned from one of my seniors that (the NHK executives) had met with Mr. Abe (before the broadcast).”…

This from Mainichi Shimbun on the same subject, and further below, some online discussion about censorship and history in Japan.

NHK producer says political intervention was ‘constant’

A chief NHK producer in charge of a 2001 program on Japan’s sexual slavery during World War II said Thursday that workers were forced to edit the program because of political pressure and that political intervention at NHK was “constant” under the system built up by NHK President Katsuji Ebisawa.

Mainichi Shimbun

NHK producer Satoru Nagai wipes away tears during his news conference in Tokyo on Thursday.

“We were forced to edit the program under pressure from politicians. NHK allowed the political intervention,” the chief producer, Satoru Nagai, said in a news conference in Tokyo.

“Outspoken cases of political intervention like this are rare, but since the establishment of the system under President Katsuji Ebisawa, political intervention has been constant,” Nagai said. “President Ebisawa ought to have received a report about this problem and understood it. The president and executives should all resign.”

It is unusual for a whistle-blower who is still working to come out and hold a news conference.

In December last year, Nagai requested that NHK’s compliance commission, the body that handles whistle-blowing within the broadcaster, conduct an investigation into the incident. He reportedly decided to hold a news conference because one month had passed without any investigation being conducted.

Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Shoichi Nakagawa and former Chief Cabinet Secretary Shinzo Abe reportedly summoned Takeshi Matsuo, then executive director-general of broadcasting, over the program, which featured a mock trial on the Imperial Japanese Army’s use of “comfort women” during World War II, Nagai said.

Nagai, 42, said the program was almost completed on the evening of Jan. 28, 2001, two days before the scheduled broadcast. However, shortly after 6 p.m. the following evening, Matsuo approached him and said, “We’re going to change the program. Show it to me.” He then took the rare move of viewing the program with Naoki Nojima, an NHK executive in charge of Diet affairs at that time, and program production official Ritsuko Ito.

Part of the mock trial that said the emperor bore responsibility was subsequently cut, and comments from well-informed people criticizing the mock trial were increased, according to Nagai.

Then on Jan. 30, the day of the broadcast, another order was given to cut testimonies from former “comfort women,” the term used to refer to sex slaves during the war.

NHK officials maintain that the program was edited based on an independent decision. But Nagai contradicted the statement.

“In response to the second revision order, in particular, everyone there at the time was opposed, including the section head,” Nagai said.

NHK admitted that the program had raised a stir when various Diet members heard about it, but said this had not affected the impartiality or fairness of the program.

Explaining his reasons for holding the news conference, Nagai said he needed to state the truth.

“Holding the news conference might be disadvantageous for me. For four years, I worried about this, but I decided that I had a responsibility to state the truth,” he said with tears in his eyes.

Both Abe and Nakagawa have denied pressuring NHK to edit the program. (Mainichi Shimbun, Japan, Jan. 13, 2005)

The following comments were made in a discussion on the NBR Japan Forum:

“As most of you know by now from the news, a whistle-blower, who is a chief producer at NHK, has claimed NHK in 2001 bowed to political pressure from LDP officials (Abe and Nakagawa) by cutting out material from a program. The program was about sex slaves and a mock trial that found Emperor Hirohito guilty of war crimes. This happened while the Diet was deliberating the NHK budget for the coming year.

In watching the commercial media take up this issue, I perceive an
attempt to turn this into more NHK-bashing. In reality, the government should be taken to task for this illegal interference. But how can that happen, with the LDP firmly in power, and a media all too eager to stomp on their publicly funded rival?

The public, meanwhile, will find another excuse not to pay their
monthly NHK fees, when their wrath should really be directed at the politicians they continue to put in power.

—
John, Tokyo

These from the same string:

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Shoichi Nakagawa on Thursday
categorically denied having applied political pressure regarding a 2001 NHKtelevision program on a mock tribunal on Japan’s wartime sex slavery.

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=9&id=324692

NHK had two lengthy segments dealing with this on the morning news.
Notonce was it mentioned that the issue involved the issue of the
so-called comfort women. Indeed, only those with the sharpest ears would have caught the one quick reference to a mock trial dealing with the issue of wartime crimes against women carried out as part of Japanese government policy.

I cannot recall a more blatant case of fiddling the news and diddling
the viewer than this. The NHK treatment of this issue makes even the
narratives of the Society to Create New Textbooks look like veritable muckraking.

From William in Fukuoka:

This story could prove to have considerable staying power, as NHK is
demanding a correction from Asahi, which is standing by its story. Trade minister Nakagawa, meanwhile, is threatening to sue for libel. List members may be interested in a couple of links describing the background of the incident in more detail.

Lisa Yoneyama, a prominent academic in the field of WWII memory and
redress issues, was a principal in the January 2001 mock trial for wartime forced prostitution. She was angered enough to start a protest petition that is still archived on the H-Net Japan site:

http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-japan&month=0103&week=a&msg=0t/XliJwrDxtI6GWTFsS6Q&user=&pw=

Yoneyama went on to write an article called “NHK’s Censorship of
Japanese Crimes Against Humanity,” in the Winter 2002 issue of Harvard Asian Quarterly:

http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~asiactr/haq/200201/0201a002.htm

Most list members are well aware that LDP heavyweight and potential
next prime minister Shinzo Abe is the grandson of Nobusuke Kishi, who
served as prime minister between 1957 and 1960, after doing three years in Sugamo prison as a convicted Class A war criminal.

Kishi is one of those figures who keeps popping up in my current
research on the Chinese forced labor redress movement. He was minister of commerce and industry in the wartime Tojo cabinet, which approved the resolution resulting in the kidnapping and subsequent slave labor in Japan of 40,000 Chinese men. As point man for the industrialization of Manchuria, Kishi was also deeply involved with the nuts-and-bolts implementation of the forced labor policy.

Fast forward to the late 1950s. The rehabilitated Kishi is now prime
minister and there are persistent calls, from the Chinese side and
progressive Japanese quarters, to repatriate remains of some of the nearly 7,000 Chinese who died in Japan and to erect memorials. Government officials shift into “denial and coverup” mode, insisting that no records (namely the 1946 “Foreign Ministry Report” listing victims’ names, places of abduction, dates of labor and companies served) exist anymore.

The purpose of the concealment / destruction of records was to ward off any lingering potential for war crimes prosecutions, as well as to avoid demands for compensation from the Chinese government, relations with which would not resume until 1972. The official “no records exist” fabrication also enabled the Japanese government to maintain, quite outrageously and right up until 1993, that the Chinese victims were contract laborers who voluntarily came to Japan.

Then comes another NHK connection. In May 1993, someone connected to
the Tokyo Overseas Chinese Association passes NHK a dusty copy of the
long-suppressed Foreign Ministry Report and NHK runs the story. (In fact, last year’s Fukuoka High Court ruling, now being appealed to the Supreme Court, referred to this “NHK scoop” as a key element in determining time limits for the filing of victims claims.) On August 14, 1993, NHK runs a 60-minute special called “The Phantom Foreign Ministry Report: Record of Chinese Forced Labor.” (In Japanese, “Moboroshi no Gaimushou Houkokusho - Chuugokujin Kyousei Renkou no Kiroku,” with an NHK book by the same name.)

The 1993 NHK documentary was straightforward and fact-based, which is
to say extremely damaging to the government’s disingenuous position.
Today, redress proponents would love to see a rebroadcast of the important program, but have been told (informally, I suppose) by NHK that it’s not going to happen. With conservatives setting the agenda these days, 2005 is clearly not 1993.

All of this is to note that when discussing WWII-related topics, NHK is not much different from Japanese society at large: it’s a lot safer and easier to stick to domestic “victim mentality” stuff than to wade into the more self-critical areas of Japanese war responsibility. It will be interesting to watch how NHK portrays the slew of 60th anniversary commemorations. Heavy on Okinawa in June and the A-bombs in August, I would wager; much less regional or historical context.

Finally, a recent noteworthy book on the topic of Japanese media
self-censorship is “A Public Betrayed: An Inside Look at Japanese Media Atrocities and Their Warning to the West,” by Adam Gamble and Takesato Watanabe (Regnery, 2004).

The book has chapters entitled “Whitewashing the Nanjing Massacre” and “Attacking Former Sex Slaves.” Related to a separate recent list topic, there’s also a chapter called “Anti-Semitism in a Country without Jews,” dealing with things like Holocaust denial in Japan.

William

And from Earl:
I’ve been working my way through news reports on this issue and
reviewingrecordings of Sunday morning talking heads programmes in which this was an issue (not on NHK, by the way). A few very, very general observations
-

For a society in which foreigners are repeatedly told that Japanese
communicate by non verbal expression (so-called haragei), it seems that when challenged, the party line becomes, “Well I didn’t explicitly say cut[we weren’t explicitly told to cut] the segment that begins nn minutes mm seconds into the programme, therefore there was no pressure exerted.”

Too bad Kurosawa is still not making films. This flap looks like a
contemporary version of Rashomon with N! (N factorial) versions of the “truth” N being composted of NHK management, the NHK union, the NHK producer of the programme, N+1 politicians, N+1 newspapers, etc.
Further, this “truth” seems to change by the hour, if not by the minute.

When NHK first broadcast its denial (I am not guilty of the heinous
crime that I’m not going to name in this news broadcast. Proof that I’m not guilty is demonstrated because my diary does not show my guilt and all the friends I’ve asked say I’m not guilty, at least not guilty as charged.), it left the impression that any meetings with politicos that might have theoretically influenced the content of the programme, the subject of which we dare not mention, took place after and not before the broadcast.
Yet, today, we get this.

[Shinzo] Abe has admitted he met with NHK officials a day before the
program was aired Jan 29, 2001, and told them the program was “biased,” he said his action ws not unlawful. “I was asked to give my opinion and told them to be fair, as the law says,” Abe said.

http://www.japantoday.com/e/?content=news&cat=9&id=324870

I cannot speak for Japanese and as an American my haragei skills are
doubtless not up to the level of those of native Japanese. But, I
worked in radio broadcasting in the US for nearly a decade both in the commercial and non-commercial sector. If a major sponsor or a state legislator with oversight on your budget suggests a programme is “biased,” you don’t say, “**** off!” You go immediately into damage control mode and see what you can do to keep them happy without appearing to have completely sold your soul.

Posted at 11:58 AM · Comments (0)

This is gifted book reviewing/essay writing by Pico Iyer. The link to the entire article is located below, a it comes highly recommended. I’ve ordered the book, too, and can’t wait to read it.

The Perfect Traveler

“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in Frederic Prokosch’s 1935 book, The Asiatics[*]:

Past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark alleys, black-lidded girls with roses in their hair bringing us ices.

A page later, the young narrator is being shown up to a room in Peshawar, along the Afghan border, noting the “great brownish stains” on the wall, getting bombarded by mosquitoes. Down in the coppersmiths’ area of the marketplace below, old men in green turbans sit near young men with “collyrium-painted eyes” and from every side comes the “chah, khach, kukha” of opium eaters. Everyone, the wanderer tells us, “looked hungry; not for food, but for something else.”

When Prokosch wrote those words, evoking in particular detail the look and smell of Peshawar—and, in later pages, of Rangoon and Saigon and Ladakh—he had not been to a single one of them. He was, in fact, a twenty-nine-year-old research fellow at Yale who had just completed a doctoral thesis on “The Chaucerian Apocrypha.” As a boy, the young painter and poet from Wisconsin had spent a year in Austria and Germany—returning to Texas in 1915 with better German than English; and his father, a professor of Germanic philology who would later become Sterling Professor at Yale and president of the Modern Language Association, would keep the house filled with cosmopolitan flavors. Yet as he sat in his room on Elm Street in New Haven, poring through atlases and travel diaries, and writing only from imagination, suddenly (as he recalled, almost fifty years later, in his 1983 memoir, Voices) the young Prokosch saw himself walking through the rain along the road past Ba’albek. “Day by day,” he remembered,

this vision of a continent grew more vivid in my mind. It kept growing in the darkness, it seeped into my dreams. I’d wake up in the night with a sudden glimpse of a tropical city, a shabby old hotel, a picnic by the Brahmaputra, and I’d turn on the light and jot it down quickly.

The vision was so intense—so lived in, one might say, so possessed—that to go to any of the places Prokosch describes today is to find that he caught them better, sight unseen, than most of us could manage on the spot. The single most implausible word in The Asiatics was that startling disclaimer on the title page, “A Novel.”

On the surface, the book simply tells the story of a young American, adrift in Beirut, who manages to hitchhike his way across Turkey, Central Asia, and India, and ends up near Hanoi. Passive as many a wayfarer is, the narrator nevertheless records, for example, spices and jewels and “dried citron and figs” in the marketplace in Tehran and, more than that, he seems to confront everywhere a “labyrinth of sunlight and shadow.” Much as a travel writer might, he encounters Nestorian priests and self-proclaimed Assassins, gets put up by a Persian villager who claims to have been Freya Stark’s lover, and is ushered into the court of a Siamese prince and an Indian maharajah. Indeed, he has hardly embarked upon the journey before he runs into an opium smuggler, a guardian of a harem, and (the first character in the book) a man who tells him, “Every beautiful city in the world is growing uglier year by year.”

As soon as The Asiatics was published, in 1935, it was, not surprisingly, a runaway success, ultimately translated into seventeen languages and turning its young author, as his friend and champion Gore Vidal recalled, into a figure of almost Byronic panache. Thomas Mann, a friend of Prokosch’s father, pronounced the book “astonishing” and André Gide called it “unique among novels and an authentic masterpiece.” Camus noted, perceptively, that it “invented what might be called the geographical novel.” Even those with no knowledge of the well-connected author were stirred (and one of the first congratulatory telegrams Prokosch received, from a publishing house in London, was signed by T.S. Eliot). Wise beyond his years, and clearly unabashed in his imaginings, the hitherto unpublished writer seemed set for life.

By that time, Prokosch was already at King’s College, Cambridge, pursuing a life of letters and semi-permanent exile. He wished “to avoid the vulgarization of money and publicity,” as he put it—and in that aim, he may have succeeded more than he would have liked. He quickly became a talismanic figure for wanderers and professional expatriates—Vidal remembers a cult of Prokosch in the US Army in the Forties, and the great American chronicler of Japan, Donald Richie, has said that he was moved to travel, as a boy growing up in Lima, Ohio, by reading Prokosch’s early work. Yet to most Americans, his exquisite, almost perfumed world seemed remote. World War II put an end to the exotic romances of the Thirties (Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth had come out in 1931, Lost Horizon in 1933), and even as Prokosch made it at last, much later, to Damascus and Isfahan and Agra, he fell increasingly out of public view.

Prokosch followed up his initial surge with a similar work of fiction, The Seven Who Fled, in 1937, about seven Europeans propelled out of Kashgar by local unrest, and then, in 1939, with The Night of the Poor, about a midwestern boy hitchhiking around America. “Landscape is a state of the spirit,” he wrote in The Seven Who Fled, more or less voicing his personal creed, “it is a constant longing for what is to come, it is a reflection incomparably detailed and ingenious of what is everlasting in us, and everlastingly changing.” That book was translated into French by Marguerite Yourcenar, and Prokosch’s first book of poems, The Assassins, in 1936 was praised by W.B. Yeats as “astonishing …the talent of a real visionary, and often magical.”

Yet even as Prokosch was living out the adventures he had once only imagined—spending time in Portugal and Stockholm, in Italy and Hong Kong (in later life he settled in Grasse, in southern France, where he collected butterflies and put out handmade editions of poems he loved)—he was known, when known at all, until his death in 1989 as the author of a best seller many years before. The sense of discovery his book commemorated— the discovery by an author of his theme, his world, the discovery by the world of a new infectious voice— would never be repeated.

To pick up The Asiatics today is to encounter a work that seems to be about youth as much as about Asia; its theme is the very sensations it describes, of possibility and movement and not knowing what will come next—a “sort of poetry and surprise,” as the narrator puts it—and its only larger purpose seems to be to exult in the excitement of going nowhere in particular. The rhythm of the book is less that of a train, with its destination marked on the front, than that of a fast-moving river boat that picks up a passenger here and drops off a wayfarer there, catching the light across the mountains, the sound from the huts along the shore. A large part of the meaning of the book seems to be that no logic connects one scene to the next.

This freedom from a sense of specific direction is a considerable part of the book’s contagious charm. Most books of travel are, at however unacknowledged a level, about seeking out the source of the Nile or the meaning of life; they pay lip service to a sense of purpose even when ignoring it. And novels, inevitably, aim to infuse every moment with a larger sense of meaning. Prokosch, however, seems more than happy to take every moment as it is—no more—and it is a striking feature of his narrator’s travels that, for all their near-constant danger and closeness to incarceration, there’s never a very great sense of tension. The narrator, like most young men his age, revels in a freedom from the past; and like almost all the wanderers and stragglers he meets along the way, he goes out of his way to live free of a sense of the future (when put on the spot, he says he’s going to Japan, though Japan is the one exotic Eastern place he never visits or describes). We are in a perpetual present here, akin to the swaying of a hammock under the casuarina trees.

Part of the shrewd understanding of the writer, one senses, is that he was catching a world that was only just coming into being, in all its aspects, and one feature of that new world (post-Jamesian, you could call it) is that people from the New World were going off in search of the wisdom and antiquity of the Old, and finding, often, that the Old World was hungering for the freshness of the New (“The mere presence of youth…makes my heart beat more quickly,” says a dying countess in Tehran, on meeting Prokosch’s unnamed alter ego). The logic of the book is that most of the people the young traveler meets are eager, because he is young, to pass on their wisdom to him; and he, because he is young, is eager to take it in. The result is that reading the book feels a little like being young yourself again.

In effect, therefore, The Asiatics becomes a portrait of a state of mind— and one in which wandering and youth come to seem synonymous; it is almost a Platonic distillation of the states that travel brings on, not least the fact that it pitches you into a realm of romance where nothing happens for a reason (reason, the sense of understanding, being one of the things you left behind at home), and anything could loom around the next corner. Now the traveler is set upon by brigands, now by bored beauties. Complete strangers are eager to offer him money or shelter or love, often for reasons far beyond his reckoning. The narrator goes back and forth constantly between walled gardens and open spaces, and when at one point he is locked up in a Turkish prison, looking out on a bordello, he seems to have attained the archetypal position of youth.

Prokosch is clearly a laureate of longing, as well as of expectancy; his strength is in evoking not just lanterned streets and the sound of bells in the night, dusk “dripping like gray moss from the trees” and “the celluloid rustling of insects,” but also in conjuring up a constant state of provisionality (one moment contradicts the last as readily as the main character does). The Asiatics is a book of atmospheres more than of events (let alone emotions). Yet what makes it stand apart from the works of Hermann Hesse, say, or Jack Kerouac, the other talismans of youth who might seem to be its cousins, is that this narrator is less a seeker than a collector. He’s not going anywhere; he’s just happy to pick up the colorful characters and pieces of philosophy and moods of transport that linger along the road. Being equally interested in truth and beauty and diversion, he’s equally uninterested in all of them, too…

…A highly gifted reader, Prokosch knew how to excavate places from the pages of books. “Cambodia is a haunted country,” he writes, forty years before the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, “full of shadows, full of ambiguous little hints of the past,” all but implying (correctly, as I see it) that the horrors later launched by Pol Pot and his henchmen to some degree sprang not just from themselves, but from something in their country’s spirit and its soil. More profoundly, he caught, even seventy years ago, the ironies of a world in which a Muslim will chastize an American for coming from a country with “no god” and in the next breath will ask to be taken to America (growing angry when refused)…

…But the character Prokosch’s narrator most resembles, over and over, is Odysseus. Like Homer’s hero he shows an engaging willingness to be detained by sirens and Circes everywhere he goes, and to forget entirely about his destination. Like Homer’s character, he spots goddesses bathing in a river and, in one unforgettable scene, great caravans carrying corpses across the open spaces of Asia, proceeding to the Underworld. Like Homer’s creation, most of all, he sees that the fundamental story of travel is the contest between enthusiasm and realism…

Posted at 12:50 PM · Comments (1)

There is some fantastic writing in the two NYRB articles highlighted in the “Snippets” section, one by Joyce Carol Oates, who has written often and written very well about boxing, on Jack Johnson. The other, is by Gordon Wood, and is a review of two new and seemingly indispensible books about the experience of chattel slavery in the “New World.”
I’ve been on a bit of a Jack Johnson bend lately, first mentioning the Miles Davis album named for the boxing champion, then reprising, at length, a 1910 Los Angles Times editorial about Jack Johnson whose plain and open racism is a valuable reminder for those who forget just how “respectable” such attitudes have been in the mainstream of American society.
Both articles deserve a close reading. Wood’s slavery book review has some tantalizing hints of possible answers to the question of why gaps in socioeconomic performance persist between African Americans and West Indian immigrants are common.

Posted at 11:59 PM · Comments (0)

“God, it would be good to be a fake somebody rather than a real nobody.”

—Mike Tyson, quoted in The New York Times, May 21, 2002

It was a scandalous and historic American spectacle, yet it took place in Sydney, Australia. It might have been a silent film comedy, for its principal actors were a wily black Trickster and a blustering white racist hero: heavyweight contender Jack Johnson vs. heavyweight champion Tommy Burns for the world title in December 1908. Though the arena in which the boxers fought reverberated with cries of “coon”—”flash nigger”—”the hatred of twenty thousand whites for all the negroes in the world,” as the Sydney Bulletin reported, yet the match would prove to be a dazzling display of the “scientific” boxing skills of the thirty-year-old Johnson, as agile on his feet and as rapid with his gloves as any lightweight.

The setting for this historic encounter was Australia and not North America, because the long-shunned Negro contender had had to literally pursue the white champion to the ends of the earth —to England, Ireland, France, and at last Australia—in order to shame him into defending his title. The bloody outcome of the fight, Johnson’s victory over Burns in the fourteenth round, the first time in history that a Negro defeated a white man for the heavyweight title, was an astonishment in sports circles and seems to have provoked racial hysteria on several continents. Immediately, it was interpreted in apocalyptic terms:

Is the Caucasian played out? Are the races we have been calling inferior about to demand to us that we must draw the color line in everything if we are to avoid being whipped individually and collectively?

—Detroit Free Press,January 1, 1909

If, as John L. Sullivan famously declared, the heavyweight champion is “the man who can lick any son of a bitch in the world,” what did the ascendancy of the handsome and stylish “flash nigger” Jack Johnson portend for the white race? Jack London, at that time the most celebrated of American novelists and an ostensibly passionate socialist, covered the fight for the New York Herald in the most sensational race-baiting terms, as Geoffrey C. Ward notes in this powerful new biography of Johnson, transforming a sporting event into a “one-sided racial drubbing that cried out for revenge”:

It had not been a boxing match but an “Armenian massacre”…a “hopeless slaughter” in which a playful “giant Ethiopian” had toyed with Burns as if he’d been a “naughty child.” It had matched “thunderbolt blows” against “butterfly flutterings.” London was disturbed not so much by the new champion’s victory—”All hail to Johnson,” he wrote; he had undeniably been “the best man”—as by the evident glee with which he had imposed his will upon the hapless white man: “A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s.”

Summing up the collective anxiety of his race, the poet Henry Lawson gloomily prophesied:

It was not Burns that was beaten —for a nigger has smacked your face.
Take heed—I am tired of writing—but O my people take heed.
For the time may be near for the mating of the Black and the White to Breed.

As if to fan the flames of Caucasian sexual anxiety, the new Negro heavyweigh champion returned in triumph from Australia with a white woman as his companion whom he introduced to reporters as his wife. (She wasn’t.) Through his high-profil career Johnson would flagrantly consort with white women ranging from prostitutes t well-off married women; in all, he would marry three. The first, Etta Duryea, wh may have left her husband for Johnson, was so thoroughly ostracized that sh attempted suicide repeatedly, and finally succeeded in killing herself with a revolver Johnson’s other liaisons were equally publicized and turbulent. In the prime of hi career as the greatest heavyweight boxer of his time Johnson had the distinction o being denounced by the righteous Negro educator Booker T. Washington fo “misrepresenting the colored people of this country” even as he was denounced at National Governors’ Conference by, among vehement others, the North Carolin governor, who pleaded for the champion to be lynched: “There is but one punishment and that must be speedy, when the negro lays his hand upon the person of a whit woman.” In 1913, Johnson had the further distinction of being the catalyst for th introduction in the legislatures of numerous states of statutes forbiddin miscegenation

It would seem that Jack Johnson was simultaneously the most famous and the most notorious Negro of his time, whose negative example shaped the low-profile public careers of his Negro successors through nearly five decades.[1] Only in the 1960s, with the emergence of the yet more intimidating Sonny Liston and the brash, idiosyncratic Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, was the image of Johnson revalued. The massive Liston, hulking and scowling and resistant to all white liberal efforts to appropriate him, was Jack Johnson revived and reconstituted as a blackness ten times black. Ali, as viciously reviled in the 1960s as he is piously revered today, was a youthful admirer of Johnson: “I grew to love the Jack Johnson image. I wanted to be rough, tough, arrogant, the nigger white folks didn’t like.”

Ali had the distinct advantage of being born in 1942, not 1878. He had the advantage of a sports career in the second half of the twentieth century, not the first. And, by instinct or by principle, he seems to have avoided white women entirely.

2.

Of great American heavyweight champions, Jack Johnson (1878–1946) remains sui generis. Though his dazzling and always controversial career reached its zenith in 1910, with Johnson’s spectacular defense of his title against the first of the Great White Hope challengers, the former champion Jim Jeffries,[2] Johnson’s poised ring style, his counterpunching speed, precision, and the lethal economy of his punches, seem to us closer in time than the more earnest and forthright styles of Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Larry Holmes, Gerry Cooney, et al. That inspired simile “float like a butterfly, sting like a bee,” coined to describe the young Cassius Clay/ Muhammad Ali in his early dazzling fights, is an apt description of Jack Johnson’s cruelly playful dissection of white opponents like Tommy Burns. Ali, a virtuoso of what was called in Johnson’s time “mouth-fighting,” a continuous barrage of taunts and insults intended to undermine an opponent psychologically, and the inventor of his own, insolently baiting “Ali shuffle,” can be seen as a vengeful and victorious avatar of Jack Johnson who perfected the precarious art of playing with and to a hostile audience, like a bullfighter who seduces his clumsy opponent (including the collective clumsy “opponent” of the audience) into participating in, in fact heightening, the opponent’s defeat. To step into the ring with a Trickster is to risk losing not only your fight but your dignity.

What was “unforgivable” in Johnson’s boxing wasn’t simply that he so decisively beat his white opponents but that he publicly humiliated them, demonstrating his smiling, seemingly cordial, contempt. Like Ali, except more astonishing than Ali, since he had no predecessors,[3] Johnson transformed formerly capable, formidable opponents into stumbling yokels. Like Ali, Johnson believed in allowing his opponents to wear themselves out throwing useless punches…

…In the first film footage showing Jack Johnson in the ring, a scratchy fragment fro the silent film of Johnson’s title fight with Tommy Burns in 1908, we see a tall unexpectedly graceful heavyweight with a chiseled upper body, slender waist an legs; Johnson’s head is smooth-shaved and his features might be described a “sensitive.” In the most widely published photographs of Johnson he as muc resembles a dancer as a heavyweight boxer. (At six feet, weighing a little more tha two hundred pounds, Johnson would be a “small heavyweight” by contemporar standards.) Two years later, in 1910, in his title defense against the much larger ex-champion Jim Jeffries, Johnson would perform with equal skill (despite the distractin presence of his old hero “Gentleman” Jim Corbett striding about at ringside screamin racist insults at him). Only in the last major fight of his career, against the six-foot-six two-hundred-thirty-pound White Hope giant Jess Willard, in Havana, Cuba, in 1915 did Johnson’s counterpunching style fail him: in the famous, or infamous, photograp of Johnson lying on his back, he has lifted a gloved hand to shield his eyes from th blinding Caribbean sun, and would afterward claim that he’d thrown the fight [8]

As heavyweight champion Johnson enjoyed a degree of celebrity unknown to any Negro in previous American history, basking in media attention that kept his handsome, smiling image continuously before the public. Like Muhammad Ali, whose handsome, smiling image would be recognized in parts of the world in which the image of the president of the United States wasn’t recognized, Johnson became an icon of his race: “the greatest colored man that ever lived.” When not training for an upcoming fight (in gyms and training camps to which the admiring public was invited), he embarked upon theatrical tours across the country. He shadowboxed, he sparred, he performed in vaudeville and burlesque routines.

Here was the very archetype of the “sport”—the dread “flash nigger” made flesh—in ankle-length fur coats, expensive racing cars painted bright colors, tailor-made suits, rubies, emeralds, diamonds displayed on his elegant person, and the dazzling gold-capped smile for which he was known. (Naturally, Johnson’s women were decked in jewels as well. Some of these jewels Johnson only lent to women for an evening on the town; others were given as gifts to his wives and remained theirs. Etta, his suicidal first wife, was ensconced in a luxury hotel in London during one of Johnson’s tours of English provincial music halls and provided with a chauffeur-driven $18,000 royal blue limousine with $2,500 worth of interior fittings, which seemed only to increase the unhappy woman’s wish to kill herself.)…

…Like Muhammad Ali, who compulsively boasted of being “the Greatest”— “the prettiest”—Johnson would seem to have been the very essence of male narcissism; like Ali, who would refuse to be drafted into the US Army in the mid-1960s to fight in Vietnam—”Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Vietcongs” was Ali’s improvised, brilliant rejoinder —Jack Johnson incurred the wrath of the majority of his fellow citizens by declaring in an interview given in London in 1911, “Fight for America? Well, I should say not. What has America ever done for me or my race? [In England] I am treated like a human being.” Both men would be hounded by righteous white prosecutors, fined, and sentenced to federal prison. (While Ali’s conviction for refusing the draft was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1971, Johnson served his full prison sentence on trumped-up charges of violating the Mann Act by crossing state lines with a call girl.)…

…

Posted at 11:47 PM · Comments (0)

One of the greatest achievements of historical scholarship during the past half-century has been the imaginative recovery of at least some of the realities of slavery in the New World. Indeed, in the past several decades we have acquired knowledge of the size of the African diaspora and the nature of slavery in the Americas that was not even imagined by earlier generations of historians. Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century at least 11 or 12 million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. It is evident now, if it never was before, that the development and prosperity of the European colonies in the New World depended upon the labor of these millions of African slaves and their enslaved descendants. Slavery existed everywhere in the Americas, from the villages of French Canada to the sugar plantations of Portuguese Brazil.

Thanks in particular to the records of slave voyages collected and digitized by the Du Bois Institute at Harvard, representing perhaps 70 percent of all slaving voyages, we now have a much more precise and detailed knowledge of the transatlantic slave trade than we ever thought possible.[1] The international slave trade, which David Brion Davis and Robert P. Forbes have called “the largest involuntary movement of human beings in all history,” involved all the maritime powers in Europe; they exchanged a wide variety of consumer goods with hundreds of African states and chiefdoms for millions of African slaves, most of whom ended up in the New World.

The Du Bois “dataset” not only gives us more accurate information about this slave trade, tracing, for example, 27,233 Atlantic slaving voyages, three quarters of which succeeded in bringing slaves to the Americas; it also throws new light on old issues concerning the mortality of the Middle Passage, the frequency of shipboard insurrections, and the ethnic origins of the enslaved Africans. All this new information about the slave trade is now available in a single source, a CD-ROM, published by Cambridge University Press.

Although the Du Bois Institute digital archive is an extraordinary resource that will generate new questions and new knowledge about the slave trade and slavery itself for decades to come, much of this new knowledge will necessarily be statistical. And important as numbers are, they do not tell us much that we want to know about slavery—the day-to-day lives of the slaves in the New World, for example, and their relationship to other slaves and to their masters. For that kind of information we need other sources, and in the absence of direct testimony by the slaves, personal and detailed writings by the slaves’ masters will have to do.

In the case of the two excellent books under review, which are based on the extensive diaries of two very different eighteenth-century British slave masters, Thomas Thistlewood of colonial Jamaica and Landon Carter of colonial Virginia, we have as intimate a picture of African slavery in British America as we are ever likely to get. In fact, the remarkable diaries of these two slaveholders are probably the most important source we have for revealing the nature of the master– slave relationship in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world. These colonial diaries are especially important because most of our knowledge of slavery has come from the antebellum period of the United States. The nearly simultaneous publication of these two diary-based histories written by two superb scholars, Trevor Burnard, recently appointed professor at Sussex University in England, and Rhys Isaac, professor emeritus at La Trobe University in Australia, marks an important moment in our efforts to understand the character of slavery in the British colonial world…

… it was not just the different levels of wealth in the two slave societies (Jamaica and Virginia) that distinguished them from one another; it was the different proportions of whites to African slaves that mattered more. Indeed, the extreme racial imbalance in Jamaica affected everything in the society. With whites making up only one in nine of the population, Jamaica was one of the most extensive racially based slave societies in history. During his first year on the island, Thistlewood lived in an almost exclusively black world. For weeks on end he saw no white people at all. Later he settled in the rural western end of the island where the proportion of slaves to whites was as high as fifteen to one.

Consequently, whites like Thistlewood lived in an Africanized society that rested on white fear, white equality, and white brutality. With almost no restraints placed on their personal freedom, whites ruled their slaves with a degree of violence that left outside observers aghast. Thistlewood routinely punished his slaves with fierce floggings and other harsh punishments, some of them sickeningly ingenious. One of his favorites was “Derby’s dose,” in which a slave was forced to defecate into the offending slave’s mouth, which was then wired shut for four or five hours.

Thistlewood was not an unenlightened man. He was a prolific book buyer and reader; he practiced medicine on his slaves and was something of an expert in botany and horticulture—in other words, he was quite civilized by Jamaican standards. Although Trevor Burnard at one point calls Thistlewood “a brutal sociopath,” he generally suggests that Thistlewood’s treatment of his slaves was not that unusual. Unlike Landon Carter and other rich eighteenth-century Virginia planters, who often developed a paternalistic attitude toward their slaves, most Jamaican whites were convinced that only the severe application of brute force could keep the numerous African slaves under control…

…Thistlewood arrived in Jamaica in 1750 at age twenty-nine with very few possessions. He was immediately sought after as an overseer and his wages rapidly rose to three figures a year, an enormous sum when compared to the average salaries of white British or North American workers…

…Not only were whites in short supply but their sex ratio was skewed, with 3.1 adult men to one adult woman. Thistlewood never married an Englishwoman but satisfied his quite formidable sexual drive by exploiting the slaves who were all around him. During his thirty-seven years in Jamaica he dutifully entered into his diary his 3,852 acts of sexual intercourse with 138 women, nearly all of whom were black slaves…

…Despite the brutality of Jamaican slavery, Jamaican slaves possessed an economic power and a degree of autonomy that the slaves in the Chesapeake and elsewhere did not have. Along with producing the sugar that made the island so wealthy, the slaves maintained “provision grounds,” independently owned plots of land that supplied the fruits and vegetables that fed both themselves and much of the white population. In colonial Virginia masters preferred to feed their slaves and themselves from rations produced on their own plantations, thus preventing their slaves from developing any substantial economic independence. By contrast, Jamaica’s provision-ground system tended to free the slaves from the tight economic control of their masters and to turn them into proto-peasants committed to maintaining their own property while being property themselves. Thus during Tacky’s rebellion, the most significant Caribbean slave revolt before the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, Thistlewood could arm his slaves, knowing that they would remain loyal to him out of concern for protecting their own patches of land…

…Compared to slaves in the West Indies, who were generally concentrated in large sugar plantations with horrendous rates of mortality, most Chesapeake slaves had normal life spans spent on small farms with four or five slaves; their extended families were often within walking distance. In Virginia there was a great deal of passive resistance, much withholding of labor, and many runaways, usually slaves taking “vacations” for a few days or weeks, since as yet there were no free states to run to; but before the Revolution there were no major slave rebellions in eighteenth-century colonial Virginia…

…Although Thistlewood did not express much interest in the American Revolution, Carter immediately sensed its radical implications for his patriarchal world. In November 1775, Lord Dunmore, royal governor of Virginia, fearful of the growing power of the patriot militia, promised freedom to all slaves who would flee their masters and rally to the King’s cause. In June 1776 eight of Carter’s slaves ran away to join the royal governor’s forces. There was a new day dawning, and Carter, though an American patriot, dreaded it, foreseeing a threat to all forms of patriarchal authority. The revolutionary talk of liberty could not be confined to white men, but necessarily spilled over and affected all social relationships, especially that of master and slave. Suddenly, Carter, who, like masters for thousands of years, had taken slavery for granted, now had to justify it as he never had to before. “Slaves are devils,” he wrote a few months before his death in 1778, “& to make them otherwise than slaves will be to set devils free.” But free they would be…

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Henry just returned from one of two big tournaments in the basketball season in Hong Kong, where his team, the Eagles, previously untouchable, met their betters and came out with their record and egos battered and bruised. They went 1-3 for the weekend. The morale is pretty low right now. Encouragement (to him) welcome!

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This is a hilarious satire by Bruce Kluger and David Slavin that consists of imaginary messages left for the celebrity freshman: Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL).

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Copyright 2005 The New York Times
Click to see pictures

DAYA BAY, China - The view from this remote point by the sea, with lines of misty mountains stretching into the distance, is worthy of a classical Chinese painting. In the foreground, though, sits a less obvious attraction: one of China’s first nuclear power reactors, and just behind it, another being rushed toward completion.

There are countless ways to show how China is climbing the world’s economic ladder, hurdling developed countries in its path, but few are more pronounced than the country’s rush into nuclear energy - a technology that for environmental, safety and economic reasons most of the world has put on hold.

In its anxiety to satisfy its seemingly bottomless demand for electricity, China plans to build reactors on a scale and pace comparable to the most ambitious nuclear energy programs the world has ever seen.

Current plans - conservative ones, in the estimation of some people involved in China’s nuclear energy program - call for new reactors to be commissioned at a rate of nearly two a year between now and 2020, a pace that experts say is comparable to the peak of the United States’ nuclear energy push in the 1970’s.

“We will certainly build more than one reactor per year,” said Zhou Dadi, director of the central government’s Energy Research Institute, which has strongly supported the country’s nuclear program. “The challenge is not the technology. The barriers for China are mostly institutional arrangements, because reactors are big projects. What we need most is better operation, financing and management.”

By 2010, planners predict a quadrupling of nuclear output to 16 billion kilowatt-hours and a doubling of that figure by 2015. And with commercial nuclear energy programs dead or stagnant in the United States and most of Europe, Western and other developers of nuclear plant technology are lining up to sell reactors and other equipment to the Chinese, whose purchasing decisions alone will determine in many instances who survives in the business.

France, which derives about a third of its energy from nuclear power, is the only Western country committed to a large-scale nuclear energy program. It is in a building lull now, but will need to begin replacing aging reactors within a decade or so.

Japan derives about 10 percent of its energy from nuclear sources and was once among the most favorably disposed toward nuclear energy. But a string of scandals involving comically shoddy practices, like mixing radioactive materials in a bucket, and near accidents have turned public opinion in many areas strongly antinuclear.

That leaves China as the only potential growth area for nuclear energy. And for China, which still derives as much as 80 percent of its electricity from burning coal, the lure of nuclear energy is as obvious as the thick, acrid, choking haze that hangs over virtually all the country’s cities.

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Our predecessors on this page, like Johnson himself, rightly described the match as a contest between individuals, not races. They decried the post-fight riots that left at least 26 people, mostly African Americans, dead nationwide. Far from rising above the sentiments of the day, an editorial on July 6, 1910, reproduced in its worst part here, expressed them all too shamefully. It reminded rioting whites that their “mental superiority … does not rest on any huge bulk of muscle, but on brain development that has weighed words and charmed the most subtle secrets from the heart of nature.” A “Word to the Black Man” warned “do not point your nose too high” and intoned: “If you have ambition for yourself or your race, you must try for something better in development than that of the mule.”

Here’s how the 1910 LAT editorial read in its entirety, under the headline: The Fight and its Consequences:
“It was a fight between a white man and a black man, but it is well at the outset not to pin too much racial importance on the fact. The conflict was a personal one, not race with race. There are other black men who can whip other white ones, and a greater number of whites who can whip blacks. Even if it were a matter of great racial import, the whites can afford the reflection that it is at best only a triumph of brawn over brain, and not brain over brawn. The black pugilist may be able to deliver stunning blows, but the stupidest mile in Missouri can hit harder. Johnson may spar cleverly, but a kitten can feint and ward better than any many. If the white race has no greater claim to superiority than that of pugilistic fitness, the sooner it abdicates in favor of its betters the happier it will be.
Pugilism and civilization bear no direct connection, but are in inverse ration. The Roman boxers may have been less clever than the winner of the fight at Reno; but as to taking punishment, the man who stood up against the sole-leather, cestus shod with drass nails could claim superiority over any modern fighter who has yet stood in the ring. In war (a vastly higher type of conflict) there are those who consider the African fresh from the jungle the making of the best soldier in the world. But the question is, how would they fare in battle commanded by one of their own race with an army of Europeans under the leadership of Napoleon (sic! see historical note below), Gen. Grant or von Moltke.
The white man’s mental supremacy is fully established, and for the present cannot be taken from him. He has arithmetic and algebra, chemistry and electricity; he has Moses, David, Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron and Burns; he has Herschel, Tyndal, Darwin and Edison to fall back upon. His superiority does not rest on any huge bulk of muscle, but on brain development that has weighed worlds and charmed the most subtle secrets from the heart of nature.
The members of the white race who are not a disgrace to it will bear no resentment toward the black race because of this single victory in the prize ring. That would be to manifest lamentable weakness, not strength; stupid foolishness, not wisdom; a cowardly disposition, not manliness.
Let the white man who is worthy of the great inheritance won for him by his race and handed down to him by ancestors “take his medicine” like a man. If he put his hope and the hope of his race in the white man who went into the ring, let him recognize his foolishness, and in his disappointed hope let him take up this new “white man’s burden” and bear it like a man, not collapse under it like a weakling.
And now…
A Word to the Black Man
Do not point your nose too high. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not be puffed up. Let not your ambitions be inordinate or take a wrong direction. Let no treasured resentments rise up and spill over. Remember you have nothing at all. You are just the same member of society today you were last week. Your place in the world is just what it was. You are on no higher plane, deserve no new consideration, and will get none. You will be treated on your personal merits in the future as in the past. No man will think a bit higher of you because your complexion is the same as that of the victor at Reno. That triumph is the personal asset of Arthur Johnson, a negro to be sure, but not the particular person who stands in your own shoes.
Remember that if it did establish the fact that, man for man all through the two races, yours was capable of being wrought into the best pugilist (which is not the case,) even then there would be no room for becoming swollen with pride. That would not justify your jumping at the very illogical conclusion that you are “on top.” You are no nearer that mark than you were before the fight took place. You must depend on other influences to put your race on higher ground, and you must depend on personal achievement to put yourself on higher ground.
Never forget that in human affairs the brains count for more than muscle. If you have ambition for yourself or your race, you must try for something better in development than that of the mule.
As to the white man who attempts to insult you because of the fair victory won by one of your race from one of the white race, you can well afford to ignore him and respect yourself. The fact that the man’s skin is white does not make him more or less brutal or cowardly. He is no credit to the white race and would be none to any race. Such conduct is more than foolish. It is asinine. No savage fresh from the jungle could manifest more brutish traits of character than this. White men who are men worthy of the name will not join in any fresh crusade against your race, already too long and too cruelly persecuted.
Do not dwell too much on matters of race, particularly when it relates to the characteristics in which the dullest of the brute creation is superior to men of all races and colors. Think rather of your own individuality, or your personal achievements. Be ambitious for something better than the prize ring. Cultivate patience, grow in reasonableness, increase your stock of useful knowledge, try for new things which distinguish man from the beasts that perish and leave no results of their life behind them. Endurance is part of Johnson’s qualities which stood him in good stead; hopefulness and good nature are others. Try to emulate this member of your race in these qualities. Their possession will do you more good and count for more in behalf of your race than it would if a black man were to “knock out” a white man every day for the next ten years.”

Note on history:
Napoleon’s armies were actually routed in Haiti by an army of African slaves commanded by an Afro-Haitian, Toussaint Louverture. Here is a quick excerpt from a Christian Science Monitor review of a recent book about the Haitian revolution.

“Napoleon Bonaparte resented Louverture’s independence, and he coveted Haiti’s wealth. In early 1802, Bonaparte sent his brother-in-law, General Leclerc, with a large army to reassert French dominance. Louverture and the Haitian people came to believe, quite rightly in the author’s estimation, that Napoleon intended to reintroduce slavery. Dubois shows how Leclerc’s men, some 80,000 in all, were caught in a military quagmire. After a year and a half of savage guerrilla warfare and an epidemic of yellow fever, 50,000 French soldiers were dead (Leclerc among them). Louverture ended up dying in a French prison. In late 1803, a defeated French Army boarded ships and left.”
Click to read the CS Monitor review

A favorite book of mine, Silencing the Past, by the University of Chicago historian, Michel Rolph Trouillot, deals brilliantly with this history, and with the way it has been relegated to the footnotes of history, or simply suppressed, as in the 1910 LAT editorial.

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1.
The intellectual links between China and India, stretching over two thousand years, have had far-reaching effects on the history of both countries, yet they are hardly remembered today. What little notice they get tends to come from writers interested in religious history, particularly the history of Buddhism, which began its spread from India to China in the first century. In China Buddhism became a powerful force until it was largely displaced by Confucianism and Taoism approximately a thousand years later. But religion is only one part of the much bigger story of Sino-Indian connections during the first millennium. A broader understanding of these relations is greatly needed, not only for us to appreciate more fully the history of a third of the world’s population, but also because the connections between the two countries are important for political and social issues today.

Certainly religion has been a major source of contact between China and India, and Buddhism was central to the movement of people and ideas between the two countries. But the wider influence of Buddhism was not confined to religion. Its secular impact stretched into science, mathematics, literature, linguistics, architecture, medicine, and music. We know from the elaborate accounts left by a number of Chinese visitors to India, such as Faxian in the fifth century and Xuanzang and Yi Jing in the seventh,[1] that their interest was by no means restricted to religious theory and practices. Similarly, the Indian scholars who went to China, especially in the seventh and eighth centuries, included not only religious experts but also other professionals such as astronomers and mathematicians. In the eighth century an Indian astronomer named Gautama Siddhartha became the president of the Board of Astronomy in China.

The richness and variety of early intellectual relations between China and India have long been obscured. This neglect is now reinforced by the contemporary tendency to classify the world’s population into distinct “civilizations” defined largely by religion (for example Samuel Huntington’s partitioning of the world into such categories as “Western civilization,” “Islamic civilization,” and “Hindu civilization”). There is, as a result, a widespread inclination to understand people mainly through their religious beliefs, even if this misses much that is important about them. The limitations of this perspective have already done significant harm to our understanding of other aspects of the global history of ideas. Many are now predisposed to see the history of Muslims as quintessentially Islamic history, ignoring the flowering of science, mathematics, and literature that was made possible by Muslim intellectuals, particularly between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. One result of such a narrow emphasis on religion is that a disaffected Arab activist today is encouraged to take pride only in the purity of Islam, rather than in the diversity and richness of Arab history. In India too, there are frequent attempts to portray the broad civilization of India as “Hindu civilization”—to use the phrase favored both by theorists like Samuel Huntington and by Hindu political activists.

Second, there is an odd and distracting contrast between the ways in which Western and non-Western ideas and scholarship are currently understood. In interpreting non-Western works, many commentators tend to ascribe a much greater importance to religion than is merited, neglecting the works’ secular interests. Few assume that, say, Isaac Newton’s scientific work must be understood as primarily Christian (even though he did have Christian beliefs); nor do most of us take it for granted that his contributions to scientific knowledge must somehow be interpreted in the light of his deep interest in mysticism (important as mystical speculations were to him, perhaps even motivating some of his scientific work). In contrast, when it comes to non-Western cultures, religious reductionism tends to be a powerful influence. Scholars often presume that none of the broadly conceived intellectual work of Buddhist scholars, or of followers of Tantric practices, could be “properly understood” except in the special light of their religious beliefs and customs.

2.

As it happens, relations between China and India almost certainly began with trade, not with Buddhism. Some two thousand years ago the consumption habits of Indians, particularly of rich Indians, were radically influenced by innovations from China. A treatise on economics and politics by the great Sanskrit scholar Kautilya, first written in the fourth century BCE, though revised a few centuries later, gives a special place to “silk and silk-cloth from the land of China” among “precious articles” and “objects of value.” In the ancient epic Mahabharata there are references to Chinese fabric or silk (cinamsuka) being given as presents, and there are similar references in the ancient Laws of Manu.

The exotic nature of Chinese products was captured in many Sanskrit literary works in the early part of the first millennium, as in the fifth-century play Sakuntala by Kalidasa (perhaps the greatest poet and dramatist in classical Sanskrit literature). When King Dusyanta sees, in the middle of a hunting expedition, the stunning hermit-girl Sakuntala and is overwhelmed by her beauty, he explains his passion by comparing himself to the way a banner made of Chinese silk flutters in the wind: “My body goes forward,/But my reluctant mind runs back/Like Chinese silk on a banner/Trembling against the wind.” In the play Harsacarita by Bana, written in the seventh century, the beautiful Rajyasri is portrayed at her wedding as gorgeously dressed in elegant Chinese silk. During the same period there are also plentiful references in the Sanskrit literature to other Chinese products that made their way into India, among them camphor (cinaka), vermilion (cinapista), and high-quality leather (cinasi), as well as delicious pears (cinarajaputra) and peaches (cinani).

While China was enriching the material world of India two thousand years ago, India was exporting Buddhism to China at least since the first century AD, when two Indian monks, Dharmaraksa and Kasyapa Matanga, arrived in China at the invitation of Emperor Mingdi of the Han dynasty. From then on until the eleventh century, more and more Indian scholars and monks came to China. Hundreds of scholars and translators produced Chinese versions of thousands of Sanskrit documents, most of them Buddhist works. Translations were going on with astonishing rapidity. Although the flow of translated work came to an end in the eleventh century, more than two hundred further Sanskrit volumes were translated between 982 and 1011 AD.

The first Chinese scholar to write an elaborate account of his visit to India was Faxian, a Buddhist scholar from western China who went in search of Sanskrit texts, intending to make them available in Chinese. After an arduous journey through the northern route to India via Khotan (which had a strong Buddhist presence), he reached India in 401 CE. Ten years later, Faxian returned by sea, sailing from the mouth of the Ganges (not far from present-day Calcutta), and going on to visit Buddhist Sri Lanka and to see Hindu Java. Faxian spent his time in India traveling widely and collecting documents (which he would later translate into Chinese). His Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a highly illuminating account of India and Sri Lanka. Faxian’s years in Pataliputra (or Patna) were devoted to studying Sanskrit language and literature in addition to religious texts, but, as will be seen, he was also greatly interested in contemporary Indian arrangements for health care.

The most famous visitor to India from China was Xuanzang, who traveled there in the seventh century. A formidable scholar, he collected Sanskrit texts (translating many of them after his return to China), and traveled throughout India for sixteen years, including the years he spent in Nalanda, a famous institution of higher education not far from Patna. At Nalanda, in addition to Buddhism, Xuanzang studied medicine, philosophy, logic, mathematics, astronomy, and grammar. On his return to China he was greeted by the emperor with much pomp.[2] Yi Jing, who came to India shortly after Xuanzang’s visit, also studied in Nalanda, combining his work on Buddhism with studies of medicine and public health care.

For the entire text please follow the link below. Copyright 2004 The New York Review of Books

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Rising Powers: The Changing
Geopolitical Landscape

The likely emergence of China and India as new major global players—similar to the rise of Germany in the 19th century and the United States in the early 20th century—will transform the geopolitical landscape, with impacts potentially as dramatic as those of the previous two centuries. In the same way that commentators refer to the 1900s as the “American Century,” the early 21st century may be seen as the time when some in the developing world, led by China and India, come into their own.

* The population of the region that served as the locus for most 20th-century history—Europe and Russia—will decline dramatically in relative terms; almost all population growth will occur in developing nations that until recently have occupied places on the fringes of the global economy (see graphic on page 48). [6]

* The “arriviste” powers—China, India, and perhaps others such as Brazil and Indonesia—could usher in a new set of international alignments, potentially marking a definitive break with some of the post-World War II institutions and practices.

* Only an abrupt reversal of the process of globalization or a major upheaval in these countries would prevent their rise. Yet how China and India exercise their growing power and whether they relate cooperatively or competitively to other powers in the international system are key uncertainties.

A combination of sustained high economic growth, expanding military capabilities, active promotion of high technologies, and large populations will be at the root of the expected rapid rise in economic and political power for both countries.

* Because of the sheer size of China’s and India’s populations—projected by the US Census Bureau to be 1.4 billion and almost 1.3 billion respectively by 2020—their standard of living need not approach Western levels for these countries to become important economic powers.

* China, for example, is now the third largest producer of manufactured goods, its share having risen from four to 12 percent in the past decade. It should easily surpass Japan in a few years, not only in share of manufacturing but also of the world’s exports. Competition from “the China price” already powerfully restrains manufactures prices worldwide.

* India currently lags behind China (see box on page 53) on most economic measures, but most economists believe it also will sustain high levels of economic growth.

Telescoping the Population of the World to 2020

At the same time, other changes are likely to shape the new landscape. These include the possible economic rise of other states—such as Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and even Russia—which may reinforce the growing role of China and India even though by themselves these other countries would have more limited geopolitical impact. Finally, we do not discount the possibility of a stronger, more united Europe and a more internationally activist Japan, although Europe, Japan, and Russia will be hard pressed to deal with aging populations.

The growing demand for energy will drive many of these likely changes on the geopolitical landscape. China’s and India’s perceived need to secure access to energy supplies will propel these countries to become more global rather than just regional powers, while Europe and Russia’s co-dependency is likely to be strengthened.

Rising Asia
China’s desire to gain “great power” status on the world stage will be reflected in its greater economic leverage over countries in the region and elsewhere as well as its steps to strengthen its military. East Asian states are adapting to the advent of a more powerful China by forging closer economic and political ties with Beijing, potentially accommodating themselves to its preferences, particularly on sensitive issues like Taiwan.

* Japan, Taiwan, and various Southeast Asian nations, however, also may try to appeal to each other and the United States to counterbalance China’s growing influence.

China will continue to strengthen its military through developing and acquiring modern weapons, including advanced fighter aircraft, sophisticated submarines, and increasing numbers of ballistic missiles. China will overtake Russia and others as the second largest defense spender after the United States over the next two decades and will be, by any measure, a first-rate military power.

Economic setbacks and crises of confidence could slow China’s emergence as a full-scale great power, however. Beijing’s failure to maintain its economic growth would itself have a global impact.

* Chinese Government failure to satisfy popular needs for job creation could trigger political unrest.

* Faced with a rapidly aging society beginning in the 2020s, China may be hard pressed to deal with all the issues linked to such serious demographic problems. It is unlikely to have developed by then the same coping mechanisms—such as sophisticated pension and health-care systems—characteristic of Western societies.

* If China’s economy takes a downward turn, regional security would weaken, resulting in heightened prospects for political instability, crime, narcotics trafficking, and illegal migration.

“Economic setbacks and crises of confidence could slow China’s emergence as a full-scale great power…. ”

The rise of India also will present strategic complications for the region. Like China, India will be an economic magnet for the region, and its rise will have an impact not only in Asia but also to the north—Central Asia, Iran, and other countries of the Middle East. India seeks to bolster regional cooperation both for strategic reasons and because of its desire to increase its leverage with the West, including in such organizations as the World Trade Organization (WTO).

China’s Rise

Projected Rise in Chinese Defense Spending, 2003-2025

As India’s economy grows, governments in Southeast Asia—Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and other countries—may move closer to India to help build a potential geopolitical counterweight to China. At the same time, India will seek to strengthen its ties with countries in the region without excluding China.

* Chinese-Indian bilateral trade is expected to rise rapidly from its current small base of $7.6 billion, according to Goldman Sachs and other experts.

Just like China, India may stumble and experience political and economic volatility with pressure on resources—land, water, and energy supplies—intensifying as it modernizes. For example, India will face stark choices as its population increases and its surface and ground water become even more polluted.

Other Rising States?
Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, and South Africa also are poised to achieve economic growth, although they are unlikely to exercise the same political clout as China or India. Their growth undoubtedly will benefit their neighbors, but they appear unlikely to become such economic engines that they will be able to alter the flow of economic power within and through their regions—a key element in Beijing and New Delhi’s political and economic rise.

Risks to Chinese Economic Growth

Whether China’s rise occurs smoothly is a key uncertainty. In 2003, the RAND Corporation identified and assessed eight major risks to the continued rapid growth of China’s economy over the next decade. Its “Fault Lines in China’s Economic Terrain” highlighted:

* Fragility of the financial system and state-owned enterprises

* Economic effects of corruption

* Water resources and pollution

* Possible shrinkage of foreign direct investment

* HIV/AIDS and epidemic diseases

* Unemployment, poverty, and social unrest

* Energy consumption and prices

* Taiwan and other potential conflicts

RAND’s estimates of the negative growth impact of these adverse developments occurring separately on a one-at-a-time basis range from a low of between 0.3 and 0.8 percentage points for the effects of poverty, social unrest, and unemployment to a high of between 1.8 and 2.2 percentage points for epidemic disease.

* The study assessed the probability that none of these developments would occur before 2015 as low and noted that they would be more likely to occur in clusters rather than individually – financial distress, for example, would also worsen corruption, compound unemployment, poverty, and social unrest, and reduce foreign direct investment.

* RAND assessed the probability of all of these adverse developments occurring before 2015 as very low but estimated that should they all occur their cumulative effect would be to reduce Chinese economic growth by between 7.4 and 10.7 percentage points—effectively wiping out growth during that time frame.

India vs. China: Long-Term Prospects

India lags economically behind China, according to most measures such as overall GDP, amount of foreign investment (today a small fraction of China’s), and per capita income. In recent years, India’s growth rate has lagged China’s by about 20 percent. Nevertheless, some experts believe that India might overtake China as the fastest growing economy in the world. India has several factors working for it:

* Its working-age population will continue to increase well into the 2020s, whereas, due to the one-child policy, China’s will diminish and age quite rapidly.

* India has well-entrenched democratic institutions, making it somewhat less vulnerable to political instability, whereas China faces the continuous challenge of reconciling an increasingly urban and middle-class population with an essentially authoritarian political system.

* India possesses working capital markets and world-class firms in some important high-tech sectors, which China has yet to achieve.

On the other hand, while India has clearly evolved beyond what the Indians themselves referred to as the 2-3 percent “Hindu growth rate,” the legacy of a stifling bureaucracy still remains. The country is not yet attractive for foreign investment and faces strong political challenges as it continues down the path of economic reform. India is also faced with the burden of having a much larger proportion of its population in desperate poverty. In addition, some observers see communal tensions just below the surface, citing the overall decline of secularism, growth of regional and caste-based political parties, and the 2002 “pogrom” against the Muslim minority in Gujarat as evidence of a worsening trend.

Several factors could weaken China’s prospects for economic growth, especially the risks to political stability and the challenges facing China’s financial sector as it moves toward a fuller market orientation. China might find its own path toward an “Asian democracy” that may not involve major instability or disruption to its economic growth—but there are a large number of unknowns.

In many other respects, both China and India still resemble other developing states in the problems each must overcome, including the large numbers, particularly in rural areas, who have not enjoyed major benefits from economic growth. Both also face a potentially serious HIV/AIDS epidemic that could seriously affect economic prospects if not brought under control. According to recent UN data, India has overtaken South Africa as the country with the largest number of HIV-infected people.

The bottom line: India would be hard-pressed to accelerate economic growth rates to levels above those reached by China in the past decade. But China’s ability to sustain its current pace is probably more at risk than is India’s; should China’s growth slow by several percentage points, India could emerge as the world’s fastest-growing economy as we head towards 2020.

Experts acknowledge that Brazil is a pivotal state with a vibrant democracy, a diversified economy and an entrepreneurial population, a large national patrimony, and solid economic institutions. Brazil’s success or failure in balancing pro-growth economic measures with an ambitious social agenda that reduces poverty and income inequality will have a profound impact on region-wide economic performance and governance during the next 15 years. Luring foreign direct investment and advancing regional stability and equitable integration—including trade and economic infrastructure—probably will remain axioms of Brazilian foreign policy. Brazil is a natural partner both for the United States and Europe and for rising powers China and India and has the potential to enhance its leverage as a net exporter of oil.

Experts assess that over the course of the next decade and a half Indonesia may revert to high growth of 6 to 7 percent, which along with its expected increase in its relatively large population from 226 to around 250 million would make it one of the largest developing economies. Such high growth would presume an improved investment environment, including intellectual property rights protection and openness to foreign investment. With slower growth its economy would be unable to absorb the unemployed or under-employed labor force, thus heightening the risk of greater political instability. Indonesia is an amalgam of divergent ethnic and religious groups. Although an Indonesian national identity has been forged in the five decades since independence, the government is still beset by stubborn secessionist movements.

Russia’s energy resources will give a boost to economic growth, but Russia faces a severe demographic challenge resulting from low birth rates, poor medical care, and a potentially explosive AIDS situation. US Census Bureau projections show the working-age population likely to shrink dramatically by 2020. Russia’s present trajectory away from pluralism toward bureaucratic authoritarianism also decreases the chances it will be able to attract foreign investment outside the energy sector, limiting prospects for diversifying its economy. The problems along its southern borders—including Islamic extremism, terrorism, weak states with poor governance, and conflict—are likely to get worse over the next 15 years. Inside Russia, the autonomous republics in North Caucasus risk failure and will remain a source of endemic tension and conflict. While these social and political factors limit the extent to which Russia can be a major global player, in the complex world of 2020 Russia could be an important, if troubled, partner both for the established powers, such as the United States and Europe, and the rising powers of China and India. The potential also exists for Russia to enhance its leverage with others as a result of its position as a major oil and gas exporter.

Asia: The Cockpit for Global Change?

According to the regional experts we consulted, Asia will exemplify most of the trends that we see as shaping the world over the next 15 years. Northeast and Southeast Asia will progress along divergent paths—the countries of the North will become wealthier and more powerful, while at least some states in the South may lag economically and will continue to face deep ethnic and religious cleavages. As Northeast Asia acts as a political and economic center of gravity for the countries of the South, parts of Southeast Asia will be a source of transnational threats—terrorism and organized crime—to the countries of the North. The North/South divisions are likely to be reflected in a cultural split between non-Muslim Northeast Asia, which will adapt to the continuing spread of globalization, and Southeast Asia, where Islamic fundamentalism may increasingly make inroads in such states as Indonesia, Malaysia, and parts of The Philippines. The diversion of investment towards China and India also could spur Southeast Asia to implement plans for a single economic community and investment area by 2020.

The experts also felt that demographic factors will play a key role in shaping regional developments. China and other countries in Northeast Asia, including South Korea, will experience a slowing of population growth and a “graying” of their peoples over the next 15 years. China also will have to face the consequences of a gender imbalance caused by its one-child policy. In Southeast Asian countries such as The Philippines and Indonesia, rising populations will challenge the capacity of governments to provide basic services. Population and poverty pressures will spur migration within the region and to Northeast Asia. High population concentrations and increasing ease of travel will facilitate the spread of infectious diseases, risking the outbreak of pandemics.

The regional experts felt that the possibility of major inter-state conflict remains higher in Asia than in other regions. In their view, the Korean Peninsula and Taiwan Strait crises are likely to come to a head by 2020, risking conflict with global repercussions. At the same time, violence within Southeast Asian states—in the form of separatist insurgencies and terrorism—could intensify. China also could face sustained armed unrest from separatist movements along its western borders.

Finally, the roles of and interaction between the region’s major powers—China, Japan, and the US—will undergo significant change by 2020. The United States and China have strong incentives to avoid confrontation, but rising nationalism in China and fears in the US of China as an emerging strategic competitor could fuel an increasingly antagonistic relationship. Japan’s relationship with the US and China will be shaped by China’s rise and the nature of any settlement on the Korean Peninsula and over Taiwan.

“Russia’s energy resources will give a boost to economic growth, but Russia faces a severe demographic challenge…[with its] working-age population likely to shrink dramatically.”

South Africa will continue to be challenged by AIDS and widespread crime and poverty, but prospects for its economy—the largest in the region—look promising. According to some forecasts, South Africa’s economy is projected to grow over the next decade in the 4- to 5-percent range if reformist policies are implemented. Experts disagree over whether South Africa can be an engine for more than southern Africa or will instead forge closer relationships with middling or up-and-coming powers on other continents. South African experts adept at scenario-building and gaming see the country’s future as lying with partnerships formed outside the region.

The “Aging” Powers
Japan’s economic interests in Asia have shifted from Southeast Asia toward Northeast Asia—especially China and the China-Japan-Korea triangle—over the past two decades and experts believe the aging of Japan’s work force will reinforce dependence on outbound investment and greater economic integration with Northeast Asia, especially China [7] . At the same time, Japanese concerns regarding regional stability are likely to grow owing to the ongoing crisis over North Korea, continuing tensions between China and Taiwan and the challenge of integrating rising China and India without major disruption. If anything, growing Chinese economic power is likely to spur increased activism by Japan on the world stage.

Opinion polls indicate growing public support for Japan becoming a more “normal” country with a proactive foreign policy. Experts see various trajectories that Japan could follow depending on such factors as the extent of China’s growing strength, a resurgence or lack of continued vitality in Japan’s economy, the level of US influence in the region and how developments in Korea and Taiwan play out. At some point, for example, Japan may have to choose between “balancing” against or “bandwagoning” with China.

“…Europe’s strength may be in providing… a model of global and regional governance to the rising powers…”

By most measures—market size, single currency, highly skilled work force, stable democratic governments, unified trade bloc, and GDP—an enlarged Europe will have the ability to increase its weight on the international scene. Its crossroads location and the growing diversity of its population—particularly in pulling in new members—provides it with a unique ability to forge strong bonds both to the south with the Muslim world and Africa and to the east with Russia and Eurasia.

The extent to which Europe enhances its clout on the world stage depends on its ability to achieve greater political cohesion. In the short term, taking in ten new east European members probably will be a “drag” on the deepening of European Union (EU) institutions necessary for the development of a cohesive and shared “strategic vision” for the EU’s foreign and security policy.

* Unlike the expansion when Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Greece joined the Common Market in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brussels has a fraction of the structural funds available for quickly bringing up the Central Europeans to the economic levels of the rest of the EU.

* Possible Turkish membership presents both challenges—because of Turkey’s size and religious and cultural differences—as well as opportunities, provided that mutual acceptance and agreement can be achieved. In working through the problems, a path might be found that can help Europe to accommodate and integrate its growing Muslim population.

Defense spending by individual European countries, including the UK, France, and Germany is likely to fall further behind China and other countries over the next 15 years. Collectively these countries will outspend all others except the US and possibly China [8] . EU member states historically have had difficulties in coordinating and rationalizing defense spending in such a way as to boost capabilities despite progress on a greater EU security and defense role. Whether the EU will develop an army is an open question, in part because its creation could duplicate or displace NATO forces.

While its military forces have little capacity for power projection, Europe’s strength may be in providing, through its commitment to multilateralism, a model of global and regional governance to the rising powers, particularly if they are searching for a “Western” alternative to strong reliance on the United States. For example, an EU-China alliance, though still unlikely, is no longer unthinkable.

Aging populations and shrinking work forces in most countries will have an important impact on the continent, creating a serious but not insurmountable economic and political challenge. Europe’s total fertility rate is about 1.4—well below the 2.1 replacement level. Over the next 15 years, West European economies will need to find several million workers to fill positions vacated by retiring workers. Either European countries adapt their work forces, reform their social welfare, education, and tax systems, and accommodate growing immigrant populations (chiefly from Muslim countries) or they face a period of protracted economic stasis that could threaten the huge successes made in creating a more United Europe.

Global Aging and Migration

According to US Census Bureau projections, about half of the world’s population lives in countries or territories whose fertility rates are not sufficient to replace their current populations. This includes not only Europe, Russia, and Japan, where the problem is particularly severe, but also most parts of developed regions such as Australia, New Zealand, North America, and East Asian countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea. Certain countries in the developing world, including Arab states such as Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia, and Lebanon, also are dropping below the level of 2.1 children per woman necessary to maintain long-term population stability. [9]

China is a special case where the transition to an aging population—nearly 400 million Chinese will be over 65 by 2020—is particularly abrupt and the emergence of a serious gender imbalance could have increasing political, social, and even international repercussions. An unfunded nationwide pension arrangement means many Chinese may have to continue to work into old age.

Migration has the potential to help solve the problem of a declining work force in Europe and, to a lesser degree, Russia and Japan and probably will become a more important feature of the world of 2020, even if many of the migrants do not have legal status. Recipient countries face the challenge of integrating new immigrants so as to minimize potential social conflict.

* Remittances from migrant workers are increasingly important to developing economies. Some economists believe remittances are greater than foreign direct investment in most poor countries and in some cases are more valuable than exports.

However, today one-half of Nigerian-born medical doctors and PhDs reside in the United States. Most experts do not expect the current, pronounced trend of “brain drain” from the Middle East and Africa to diminish. Indeed, it could increase with the expected growth of employment opportunities, particularly in Europe.

The Contradictions of Globalization

Whereas in Global Trends 2015 we viewed globalization—growing interconnectedness reflected in the expanded flows of information, technology, capital, goods, services, and people throughout the world—as among an array of key drivers, we now view it more as a “mega-trend”—a force so ubiquitous that it will substantially shape all of the other major trends in the world of 2020.

“[By 2020] globalization is likely to take on much more of a ‘non-Western’ face…”

The reach of globalization was substantially broadened during the last 20 years by Chinese and Indian economic liberalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the worldwide information technology revolution. Through the next 15 years, it will sustain world economic growth, raise world living standards, and substantially deepen global interdependence. At the same time, it will profoundly shake up the status quo almost everywhere—generating enormous economic, cultural, and consequently political convulsions.

Certain aspects of globalization, such as the growing global inter-connectedness stemming from the information technology revolution, are likely to be irreversible. Real-time communication, which has transformed politics almost everywhere, is a phenomenon that even repressive governments would find difficult to expunge.

* It will be difficult, too, to turn off the phenomenon of entrenched economic interdependence, although the pace of global economic expansion may ebb and flow. Interdependence has widened the effective reach of multinational business, enabling smaller firms as well as large multinationals to market across borders and bringing heretofore non-traded services into the international arena.

Yet the process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even reversed, just as the era of globalization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was reversed by catastrophic war and global depression. Some features that we associate with the globalization of the 1990s—such as economic and political liberalization—are prone to “fits and starts” and probably will depend on progress in multilateral negotiations, improvements in national governance, and the reduction of conflicts. The freer flow of people across national borders will continue to face social and political obstacles even when there is a pressing need for migrant workers.

“India and China probably will be among the economic heavyweights or ‘haves.’”

What Would An Asian Face on Globalization Look Like?

Rising Asia will continue to reshape globalization, giving it less of a “Made in the USA” character and more of an Asian look and feel. At the same time, Asia will alter the rules of the globalizing process. By having the fastest-growing consumer markets, more firms becoming world-class multinationals, and greater S&T stature, Asia looks set to displace Western countries as the focus for international economic dynamism—provided Asia’s rapid economic growth continues.

Asian finance ministers have considered establishing an Asian monetary fund that would operate along different lines from IMF, attaching fewer strings on currency swaps and giving Asian decision-makers more leeway from the “Washington macro-economic consensus.”

* In terms of capital flows, rising Asia may still accumulate large currency reserves—currently $850 billion in Japan, $500 billion in China, $190 billion in Korea, and $120 million in India, or collectively three-quarters of global reserves—but the percentage held in dollars will fall. A basket of reserve currencies including the yen, renminbi, and possibly rupee probably will become standard practice.

* Interest-rate decisions taken by Asian central bankers will impact other global financial markets, including New York and London, and the returns from Asian stock markets are likely to become an increasing global benchmark for portfolio managers.

As governments devote more resources to basic research and development, rising Asia will continue to attract applied technology from around the world, including cutting-edge technology, which should boost their high performance sectors. We already anticipate (as stated in the text) that the Asian giants may use the power of their markets to set industry standards, rather than adopting those promoted by Western nations or international standards bodies. The international intellectual property rights regime will be profoundly molded by IPR regulatory and law enforcement practices in East and South Asia.

Increased labor force participation in the global economy, especially by China, India, and Indonesia, will have enormous effects, possibly spurring internal and regional migrations. Either way it will have a large impact, determining the relative size of the world’s greatest new “mega-cities” and, perhaps, act as a key variable for political stability/instability for decades to come. To the degree that these vast internal migrations spill over national borders—currently, only a miniscule fraction of China’s 100 million internal migrants end up abroad—they could have major repercussions for other regions, including Europe and North America.

An expanded Asian-centric cultural identity may be the most profound effect of a rising Asia. Asians have already begun to reduce the percentage of students who travel to Europe and North America with Japan and—most striking—China becoming educational magnets. A new, more Asian cultural identity is likely to be rapidly packaged and distributed as incomes rise and communications networks spread. Korean pop singers are already the rage in Japan, Japanese anime have many fans in China, and Chinese kung-fu movies and Bollywood song-and-dance epics are viewed throughout Asia. Even Hollywood has begun to reflect these Asian influences—an effect that is likely to accelerate through 2020.

Moreover, the character of globalization probably will change just as capitalism changed over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. While today’s most advanced nations—especially the United States—will remain important forces driving capital, technology and goods, globalization is likely to take on much more of a “non-Western face” over the next 15 years.

* Most of the increase in world population and consumer demand through 2020 will take place in today’s developing nations—especially China, India, and Indonesia—and multinational companies from today’s advanced nations will adapt their “profiles” and business practices to the demands of these cultures.

* Able to disperse technology widely and promote economic progress in the developing world, corporations already are seeking to be “good citizens” by allowing the retention of non-Western practices in the workplaces in which they operate. Corporations are in the position to make globalization more palatable to people concerned about preserving unique cultures.

* New or expanding corporations from countries lifted up by globalization will make their presence felt globally through trade and investments abroad.

* Countries that have benefited and are now in position to weigh in will seek more power in international bodies and greater influence on the “rules of the game.”

* In our interactions, many foreign experts have noted that while popular opinion in their countries favors the material benefits of globalization, citizens are opposed to its perceived “Americanization,” which they see as threatening to their cultural and religious values. The conflation of globalization with US values has in turn fueled anti-Americanism in some parts of the world.

“…the world economy is projected to be about 80 percent larger in 2020 than it was in 2000, and average per capita income to be roughly 50 percent higher.”

Currently, about two-thirds of the world’s population live in countries that are connected to the global economy. Even by 2020, however, the benefits of globalization won’t be global. Over the next 15 years, gaps will widen between those countries benefiting from globalization—economically, technologically, and socially—and those underdeveloped nations or pockets within nations that are left behind. Indeed, we see the next 15 years as a period in which the perceptions of the contradictions and uncertainties of a globalized world come even more to the fore than is the case today.

An Expanding and Integrating Global Economy
The world economy is projected to be about 80 percent larger in 2020 than it was in 2000 and average per capita income to be roughly 50 percent higher. Large parts of the world will enjoy unprecedented prosperity, and a numerically large middle class will be created for the first time in some formerly poor countries. The social structures in those developing countries will be transformed as growth creates a greater middle class. Over a long time frame, there is the potential, so long as the expansion continues, for more traditionally poor countries to be pulled closer into the globalization circle.

What Could Derail Globalization?

The process of globalization, powerful as it is, could be substantially slowed or even stopped. Short of a major global conflict, which we regard as improbable, another large-scale development that we believe could stop globalization would be a pandemic. However, other catastrophic developments, such as terrorist attacks, could slow its speed.

Some experts believe it is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918–1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated 20 million worldwide. Such a pandemic in megacities of the developing world with poor health-care systems—in Sub-Saharan Africa, China, India, Bangladesh or Pakistan—would be devastating and could spread rapidly throughout the world. Globalization would be endangered if the death toll rose into the millions in several major countries and the spread of the disease put a halt to global travel and trade during an extended period, prompting governments to expend enormous resources on overwhelmed health sectors. On the positive side of the ledger, the response to SARS showed that international surveillance and control mechanisms are becoming more adept at containing diseases, and new developments in biotechnologies hold the promise of continued improvement.

A slow-down could result from a pervasive sense of economic and physical insecurity that led governments to put controls on the flow of capital, goods, people, and technology that stalled economic growth. Such a situation could come about in response to terrorist attacks killing tens or even hundreds of thousands in several US cities or in Europe or to widespread cyber attacks on information technology. Border controls and restrictions on technology exchanges would increase economic transaction costs and hinder innovation and economic growth. Other developments that could stimulate similar restrictive policies include a popular backlash against globalization prompted, perhaps, by white collar rejection of outsourcing in the wealthy countries and/or resistance in poor countries whose peoples saw themselves as victims of globalization.

Most forecasts to 2020 and beyond continue to show higher annual growth for developing countries than for high-income ones. Countries such as China and India will be in a position to achieve higher economic growth than Europe and Japan, whose aging work forces may inhibit their growth. Given its enormous population—and assuming a reasonable degree of real currency appreciation—the dollar value of China’s gross national product (GNP) may be the second largest in the world by 2020. For similar reasons, the value of India’s output could match that of a large European country. The economies of other developing countries, such as Brazil and Indonesia, could surpass all but the largest European economies by 2020. [4]

* Even with all their dynamic growth, Asia’s “giants” and others are not likely to compare qualitatively to the economies of the US or even some of the other rich countries. They will have some dynamic, world-class sectors, but more of their populations will work on farms, their capital stocks will be less sophisticated, and their financial systems are likely to be less efficient than those of other wealthy countries.

China’s and India’s Per Capita GDPs Rising Against US

Continued Economic Turbulence. Sustained high-growth rates have historical precedents. China already has had about two decades of 7 percent and higher growth rates, and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have managed in the past to achieve annual rates averaging around 10 percent for a long period.

Fast-developing countries have historically suffered sudden setbacks, however, and economic turbulence is increasingly likely to spill over and upset broader international relations. Many emerging markets—such as Mexico in the mid-1990s and Asian countries in the late 1990s—suffered negative effects from the abrupt reversals of capital movements, and China and India may encounter similar problems. The scale of the potential reversals would be unprecedented, and it is unclear whether current international financial mechanisms would be in a position to forestall wider economic disruption.

When China’s and India’s GDPs Would Exceed Today’s Rich Countries

“Competitive pressures will force companies based in the advanced economies to ‘outsource’ many blue- and white-collar jobs.”

With the gradual integration of China, India, and other developing countries into the global economy, hundreds of millions of working-age adults will join what is becoming, through trade and investment flows, a more interrelated world labor market. World patterns of production, trade, employment, and wages will be transformed.

* This enormous work force—a growing portion of which will be well educated—will be an attractive, competitive source of low-cost labor at the same time that technological innovation is expanding the range of globally mobile occupations.

* Competition from these workers will increase job “churning,” necessitate professional retooling, and restrain wage growth in some occupations.

Where these labor market pressures lead will depend on how political leaders and policymakers respond. Against the backdrop of a global economic recession, such resources could unleash widespread protectionist sentiments. As long as sufficiently robust economic growth and labor market flexibility are sustained, however, intense international competition is unlikely to cause net job “loss” in the advanced economies.

* The large number of new service sector jobs that will be created in India and elsewhere in the developing world, for example, will likely exceed the supply of workers with those specific skills in the advanced economies.

* Job turnover in advanced economies will continue to be driven more by technological change and the vicissitudes of domestic rather than international competition.

Mobility and Laggards. Although the living standards of many people in developing and underdeveloped countries will rise over the next 15 years, per capita incomes in most countries will not compare to those of Western nations by 2020. There will continue to be large numbers of poor even in the rapidly emerging economies, and the proportion of those in the middle stratum is likely to be significantly less than is the case for today’s developed nations. Experts estimate it could take China another 30 years beyond 2020 for per capita incomes to reach current rates in developed economies.

* Even if, as one study estimates, China’s middle class could make up as much as 40 percent of its population by 2020—double what it is now—it would be still well below the 60 percent level for the US. And per capita income for China’s middle class would be substantially less than equivalents in the West.

* In India, there are now estimated to be some 300 million middle-income earners making $2,000-$4,000 a year. Both the number of middle earners and their income levels are likely to rise rapidly, but their incomes will continue to be substantially below averages in the US and other rich countries even by 2020.

* However, a $3,000 annual income is considered sufficient to spur car purchases in Asia; thus rapidly rising income levels for a growing middle class will combine to mean a huge consumption explosion, which is already evident.

Widening income and regional disparities will not be incompatible with a growing middle class and increasing overall wealth. In India, although much of the west and south may have a large middle class by 2020, a number of regions such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, and Orissa will remain underdeveloped.

Moreover, countries not connected to the world economy will continue to suffer. Even the most optimistic forecasts admit that economic growth fueled by globalization will leave many countries in poverty over the next 15 years.

* Scenarios developed by the World Bank indicate, for example, that Sub-Saharan Africa will be far behind even under the most optimistic scenario. The region currently has the largest share of people living on less than $1 per day.

If the growing problem of abject poverty and bad governance in troubled states in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eurasia, the Middle East, and Latin America persists, these areas will become more fertile grounds for terrorism, organized crime, and pandemic disease. Forced migration also is likely to be an important dimension of any downward spiral. The international community is likely to face choices about whether, how, and at what cost to intervene.

“…the greatest benefits of globalization will accrue to countries and groups that can access and adopt new technologies.”

The international order will be in greater flux in the period out to 2020 than at any point since the end of the Second World War. As we map the future, the prospects for global prosperity and the limited likelihood of great power conflict provide an overall favorable environment for coping with the challenges ahead. Despite daunting challenges, the United States, in particular, will be better positioned than most countries to adapt to the changing global environment.

As our scenarios illustrate, we see several ways in which major global changes could begin to take shape and be buffeted or bolstered by the forces of change over the next 15 years. In a sense, the scenarios provide us with four different lenses on future developments, underlining the wide range of factors, discontinuities, and uncertainties shaping a new global order. One lens is the globalized economy, another is the security role played by the US, a third is the role of social and religious identity, and a fourth is the breakdown of the international order because of growing insecurity. They highlight various “switching points” that could shift developments onto one path or the other. The most important tipping points include the impact of robust economic growth and the spread of technology; the nature and extent of terrorism; the resiliency or weakness of states, particularly in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa; and the potential spread of conflict, including between states.

*
On balance, for example, as the hypothetical Davos World scenario shows, robust economic growth probably will help to overcome divisions and pull more regions and countries into a new global order. However, the rapid changes might also produce disorder at times; one of the lessons of that and the other scenarios is the need for management to ensure globalization does not go off the rails.

The evolving framework of international politics in all the scenarios suggests that nonstate actors will continue to assume a more prominent role even though they will not displace the nation-state. Such actors range from terrorists, who will remain a threat to global security, to NGOs and global firms, which exemplify largely positive forces by spreading technology, promoting social and economic progress, and providing humanitarian assistance.

The United States and other countries throughout the world will continue to be vulnerable to international terrorism. As we have noted in the Cycle of Fear scenario, terrorist campaigns that escalate to unprecedented heights, particularly if they involve WMD, are one of the few developments that could threaten globalization.

Is the United States’ Technological Prowess at Risk?

US investment in basic research and the innovative application of technology has directly contributed to US leadership in economic and military power during the post-World War II era. Americans, for example, invented and commercialized the semiconductor, the personal computer, and the Internet with other countries following the US lead.a While the United States is still the present leader, there are signs this leadership is at risk.

The number of US engineering graduates peaked in 1985 and is presently down 20 percent from that level; the percentage of US undergraduates taking engineering is the second lowest of all developed countries. China graduates approximately three times as many engineering students as the United States. However, post-9/11 security concerns have made it harder to attract incoming foreign students and, in some cases, foreign nationals available to work for US firms.b Non-US universities—for which a US visa is not required—are attempting to exploit the situation and bolster their strength.

Privately funded industrial research and development—which accounts for 60 percent of the US total—while up this year, suffered three previous years of decline.c Further, major multinational corporations are establishing corporate “research centers” outside of the United States.

While these signs are ominous, the integrating character of globalization and the inherent strengths of the US economic system preclude a quick judgment of an impending US technological demise. By recent assessments, the United States is still the most competitive society in the world among major economies.d In a globalized world where information is rapidly shared—including cross-border sharing done internally by multinational corporations—the creator of new science or technology may not necessarily be the beneficiary in the marketplace.

a “Is America Losing Its Edge? Innovation in a Globalized World.” Adam Segal, Foreign Affairs, November December 2004; New York, NY p.2.

b “Observations on S&T Trends and Their Potential Impact on Our Future.” William Wulf (President, National Academy of Engineering). Paper submitted to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in support of the National Intelligence Council 2020 Study, Summer 2004.

c “Is America Losing Its Edge?,” p.3.

d Global Competitiveness Report 2004-2005, World Economic Forum, http://www.weforum.org. October 2004.

Counterterrorism efforts in the years ahead—against a more diverse set of terrorists who are connected more by ideology and technology than by geography—will be a more elusive challenge than focusing on a relatively centralized organization such as al-Qa’ida. The looser the connections among individual terrorists and various cells, the more difficult it will be to uncover and disrupt terrorist plotting.

* One of our scenarios—Pax Americana—envisages a case in which US and European consensus on fighting terrorism would grow much stronger but, under other scenarios, including the hypothetical New Caliphate, US, Russian, Chinese and European interests diverge, possibly limiting cooperation on counterterrorism.

“The US will have to battle world public opinion, which has dramatically shifted since the end of the Cold War.”

The success of the US-led global counterterrorism campaign will hinge on the capabilities and resolve of individual countries to fight terrorism on their own soil. Efforts by Washington to bolster the capabilities of local security forces in other countries and to work with them on their priority issues (such as soaring crime) would be likely to increase cooperation.

* Defense of the US Homeland will begin overseas. As it becomes more difficult for terrorists to enter the United States, they are likely to try to attack the Homeland from neighboring countries.

A counterterrorism strategy that approaches the problem on multiple fronts offers the greatest chance of containing—and ultimately reducing—the terrorist threat. The development of more open political systems, broader economic opportunities, and empowerment of Muslim reformers would be viewed positively by the broad Muslim communities who do not support the radical agenda of Islamic extremists. A New Caliphate scenario dramatizes the challenge of addressing the underlying causes of extremist violence, not just its manifest actions.

* The Middle East is unlikely to be the only battleground in which this struggle between extremists and reformers occurs. European and other Muslims outside the Middle East have played an important role in the internal ideological conflicts, and the degree to which Muslim minorities feel integrated in European societies is likely to have a bearing on whether they see a clash of civilizations as inevitable or not. Southeast Asia also has been increasingly a theater for terrorism.

Related to the terrorist threat is the problem of the proliferation of WMD and the potential for countries to have increased motivation to acquire nuclear weapons if their neighbors and regional rivals are doing so. As illustrated in the Cycle of Fear scenario, global efforts to erect greater barriers to the spread of WMD and to dissuade any other countries from seeking nuclear arms or other WMD as protection will continue to be a challenge. As various of our scenarios underline, the communications revolution gives proliferators a certain advantage in striking deals with each other and eluding the authorities, and the “assistance” they provide can cut years off the time it would take for countries to develop nuclear weapons.

How the World Sees the United States

In the six regional conferences that we hosted we asked participants about their views of the role of the United States as a driver in shaping developments in their regions and globally.

Asia
Participants felt that US preoccupation with the war on terrorism is largely irrelevant to the security concerns of most Asians. The key question that the United States needs to ask itself is whether it can offer Asian states an appealing vision of regional security and order that will rival and perhaps exceed that offered by China.

US disengagement from what matters to US Asian allies would increase the likelihood that they would climb on Beijing’s bandwagon and allow China to create its own regional security order that excludes the United States.

Participants felt that the rise of China need not be incompatible with a US-led international order. The critical question is whether or not the order is flexible enough to adjust to a changing distribution of power on a global level. An inflexible order would increase the likelihood of political conflict between emerging powers and the United States. If the order is flexible, it may be possible to forge an accommodation with rising powers and strengthen the order in the process.

Sub-Saharan Africa
Sub-Saharan African leaders worry that the United States and other advantaged countries will “pull up the drawbridge” and abandon the region.

Participants opined that the United States and other Western countries may not continue to accept Africa’s most successful “export,” its people. The new African diaspora is composed overwhelmingly of economic migrants rather than political migrants as in previous eras.

Some participants felt that Africans worry that Western countries will see some African countries as “hopeless” over the next 15 years because of prevailing economic conditions, ecological problems, and political circumstances.

Participants feared that the United States will focus only on those African countries that are successful.

Latin America
Conference participants acknowledged that the United States is the key economic, political, and military player in the hemisphere. At the same time, Washington was viewed as traditionally not paying sustained attention to the region and, instead of responding to systemic problems, as reacting primarily to crises. Participants saw a fundamentalist trend in Washington that would lead to isolation and unilateralism and undercut cooperation. Most shared the view that the US “war on terrorism” had little to do with Latin America’s security concerns.

Latin American migrants are a stabilizing force in relations with the United States. An important part of the US labor pool, migrants also remit home needed dollars along with new views on democratic governance and individual initiative that will have a positive impact on the region.

US policies also can have a positive impact. Some participants said the region would benefit from US application of regional mechanisms to resolve problems rather than punitive measures against regimes not to its liking, such as that of Fidel Castro.

Middle East
Participants felt that the role of US foreign policy in the region will continue to be crucial. The perceived propping up of corrupt regimes by the United States in exchange for secure oil sources has in itself helped to promote continued stagnation. Disengagement is highly unlikely but would in itself have an incalculable effect.

Regarding the prospects for democracy in the region, participants felt that the West placed too much emphasis on the holding of elections, which, while important, is only one element of the democratization process. There was general agreement that if the United States and Europe can engage with and encourage reformers rather than confront and hector, genuine democracy would be achieved sooner.

Some Middle East experts argued that Washington has reinforced zero-sum politics in the region by focusing on top Arab rulers and not cultivating ties with emerging leaders in and outside the government.

Although the Middle East has a lot to gain economically from globalization, it was agreed that Arabs/Muslims are nervous that certain aspects of globalization, especially the pervasive influence of Western, particularly American, values and morality are a threat to traditional cultural and religious values.

Europe and Eurasia
Participants engaged in a lively debate over whether a rift between the US and Europe is likely to occur over the next 15 years with some contending that a collapse of the US-EU partnership would occur as part of the collapse of the international system. Several participants contended that if the United States shifts its focus to Asia, the EU-US relationship could be strained to the breaking point.

* They were divided over whether China’s rise would draw the United States and Europe closer or not.

* They also differed over the importance of common economic, environmental, and energy problems to the alliance.

In our Eurasia workshop, participants agreed that the United States has only limited influence on the domestic policies of the Central Asian states, although US success or failure in Iraq would have spillover effects in Central Asia. Countries in western Eurasia, they believed, will continue to seek a balance between Russia and the West. In their view, Ukraine almost certainly will continue to seek admission to NATO and the European Union while Georgia and Moldova probably will maintain their orientation in the same direction.

“A counterterrorism strategy that approaches the problem on multiple fronts offers the greatest chance of containing—and ultimately reducing—the terrorist threat.”

On the more positive side, one of the likely features of the next 15 years is the greater availability of high technology, not only to those who invent it. As we try to make clear in our Davos World scenario, the high-tech leaders are not the only ones that can expect to make gains, but also those societies that integrate and apply the new technologies. For example, our scenario points up the beneficial effects of possible new technologies in Africa in helping to eradicate poverty. As we have noted elsewhere in this paper, global firms will play a key role in promoting more widespread prosperity and more technological innovation.

The dramatically altered geopolitical landscape also presents a huge challenge for the international system as well as for the United States, which has been the security guarantor of the post-World War II order. The possible contours as several trends develop—including rising powers in Asia, retrenchment in Eurasia, a roiling Middle East, and greater divisions in the transatlantic partnership—remain uncertain and variable.

* With the lessening in ties formed during the Cold War, nontraditional ad hoc alliances are likely to develop. For example, shared interest in multilateralism as a cornerstone of international relations has been viewed by some scholars as the basis for a budding relationship between Europe and China.

As the Pax Americana scenario suggests, the transatlantic partnership would be a key factor in Washington’s ability to remain the central pivot in international politics. The degree to which Europe is ready to shoulder more international responsibilities is unclear and depends on its ability to surmount its economic and demographic problems as well as forge a strategic vision for its role in the world. In other respects—GDP, crossroads location, stable governments, and collective military expenditures—it has the ability to increase its weight on the international stage.

“For Washington, dealing with a rising Asia may be the most challenging of all its regional relationships.”

Asia is particularly important as an engine for change over the next 15 years. A key uncertainty is whether the rise of China and India will occur smoothly. A number of issues will be in play, including the future of the world trading system, advances in technology, and the shape and scope of globalization. For Washington, dealing with a rising Asia may be the most challenging of all its regional relationships. One could envisage a range of possibilities from the US enhancing its role as regional balancer between contending forces to Washington being seen as increasingly irrelevant. Both the Korea and Taiwan issues are likely to come to a head, and how they are dealt with will be important factors shaping future US-Asia ties as well as the US role in the region. Japan’s position in the region is also likely to be transformed as it faces the challenge of a more independent security role.

“A key uncertainty is whether the rise of China and India will occur smoothly.”

With the rise of the Asian giants, US economic and technological advantages may be vulnerable to erosion.

* While interdependencies will grow, increased Asian investment in high-tech research coupled with the rapid growth of Asian markets will increase the region’s competitiveness across a wide range of economic and technical activity.

* US dependence on foreign oil supplies also makes it more vulnerable as the competition for secure access grows and the risks of supply-side disruptions increase.

In the Middle East, market reforms, greater democracy, and progress toward an Arab-Israeli peace would stem the shift towards more radical politics in the region and foster greater accord in the transatlantic partnership. Some of our scenarios highlight the extent to which the Middle East could remain at the center of an arc of instability extending from Africa through Central and Southeast Asia, providing fertile ground for terrorism and the proliferation of WMD.

Realization of a Caliphate-like scenario would pose the biggest challenge because it would reject the foundations on which the current international system has been built. Such a possibility points up the need to find ways to engage and integrate those societies and regions that feel themselves left behind or reject elements of the globalization process. Providing economic opportunities alone may not be sufficient to enable the “have-nots” to benefit from globalization; rather, the widespread trend toward religious and cultural identification suggests that various identities apart from the nation-state will need to be accommodated in a globalized world.

The interdependence that results from globalization places increasing importance not only on maintaining stability in the areas of the world that drive the global economy, where about two thirds of the world’s population resides, but also on helping the poor or failing states scattered across a large portion of the world’s surface which have yet to modernize and connect with the larger, globalizing community. Two of our scenarios—Pax Americana and Davos World—point up the different roles that the United States is expected to play as security provider and as a financial stabilizer.

Eurasia, especially Central Asia and the Caucasus, probably will be an area of growing concern, with its large number of potentially failing states, radicalism in the form of Islamic extremism, and importance as a supplier or conveyor belt for energy supplies to both West and East. The trajectories of these Eurasian states will be affected by external powers such as Russia, Europe, China, India and the United States, which may be able to act as stabilizers. Russia is likely to be particularly active in trying to prevent spillover, even though it has enormous internal problems on its own plate. Farther to the West, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova could offset their vulnerabilities as relatively new states by closer association with Europe and the EU.

Parts of Africa share a similar profile with the weak states of Eurasia and will continue to form part of an extended arc of instability. As the hypothetical Davos World scenario suggests, globalization in terms of rising commodity prices and expanded economic growth may be a godsend where good governance is also put in place. North Africa may benefit particularly from growing ties with Europe.

Latin America is likely to become a more diverse set of countries: those that manage to exploit the opportunities provided by globalization will prosper, while those—such as the Andean nations currently—that do not or cannot will be left behind. Governance and leadership—often a wild card—will distinguish societies that prosper from those that remain ill-equipped to adapt. Both regions may have success stories—countries like Brazil or South Africa—which can provide a model for others to follow. The United States is uniquely positioned to facilitate Latin America growth and integration stemming the potential for fragmentation.

In that vein, the number of interstate and internal conflicts has been ebbing, but their lethality and potential to grow in impact once they start is a trend we have noted.

* While no single country looks within striking distance of rivaling US military power by 2020, more countries will be in a position to contest the United States in their regions. The possession of chemical, biological, and/or nuclear weapons by more countries by 2020 would increase the potential cost of any military action by the United States and its coalition partners.

* Most US adversaries, be they states or nonstate actors, will

Posted at 12:34 PM · Comments (0)

Some presidents make the history books by managing crises. Lincoln had Fort Sumter, Roosevelt had the Depression and Pearl Harbor, and Kennedy had the missiles in Cuba. George W. Bush, of course, had Sept. 11, and for a while thereafter — through the overthrow of the Taliban — he earned his page in history, too.
But when historians look back at the Bush presidency, they’re more likely to note that what sets Bush apart is not the crises he managed but the crises he fabricated. The fabricated crisis is the hallmark of the Bush presidency. To attain goals that he had set for himself before he took office — the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the privatization of Social Security — he concocted crises where there were none…
…In fact, Social Security is on a sounder footing now than it has been for most of its 70-year history. Without altering any of its particulars, its trustees say, it can pay full benefits straight through 2042. Over the next 75 years its shortfall will amount to just 0.7 percent of national income, according to the trustees, or 0.4 percent, according to the Congressional Budget Office. That still amounts to a real chunk of change, but it pales alongside the 75-year cost of Bush’s Medicare drug benefit, which is more than twice its size, or Bush’s tax cuts if permanently extended, which would be nearly four times its size.
In short, Social Security is not facing a financial crisis at all. It is facing a need for some distinctly sub-cataclysmic adjustments over the next few decades that would increase its revenue and diminish its benefits.
Politically, however, Social Security is facing the gravest crisis it has ever known. For the first time in its history, it is confronted by a president, and just possibly by a working congressional majority, who are opposed to the program on ideological grounds, who view the New Deal as a repealable aberration in U.S. history, who would have voted against establishing the program had they been in Congress in 1935. But Bush doesn’t need Karl Rove’s counsel to know that repealing Social Security for reasons of ideology is a non-starter.
So it’s time once more to fabricate a crisis. In Bushland, it’s always time to fabricate a crisis. We have a crisis in medical malpractice costs, though the CBO says that malpractice costs amount to less than 2 percent of total health care costs. (In fact, what we have is a president who wants to diminish the financial, and thus political, clout of trial lawyers.) We have a crisis in judicial vacancies, though in fact Senate Democrats used the filibuster to block just 10 of Bush’s 229 first-term judicial appointments….

Copyright 2005 The Washington Post - for full article see the link

Posted at 12:18 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve discovered truth in advertising. From the title of CeDell’s first record to the names of each song (e.g. “If You Like Fat Women”: “the only way you’re going to get me baby is to run me down.”), there’s truth in this recording. True licks on a guitar that whirs and plinks, twangs and errs like some druken boat. Truth in a voice dripping with swamp juice and reeking of rotgut. I’ve had this record for some time, and have avoided listening to it much in the past on the theory that it is too wierd, too demanding. That’s wrong though. It’s great fun, if not altogether harmless fun. Consider “Murder My Baby,” a real twister from any point of view: vocals, licks, lyrics, you name it.

“You stay drunk every day. Baby you never come home. That’s why I’ve got to murder you baby. Baby if you don’t stop your cheating lies…
You know I work hard every day. Friday I bring home my pay. Sometime I want my baby woman. Don’t you change your ways? That’s why I’ve got to murder you baby. Baby if you don’t stop your cheating lies. You know I’d rather be in penitentiary baby (pronounced something like “10th century”. Baby I’m ‘bout worried out of my mind.
You know I’m sorry sorry baby. She say: ‘I’ve got to leave you alone.’ All I want you to do baby, is be there in the evening when I come home. That’s why I’ve got to murder that woman. Baby if you don’t stop those evil lies. You know I’d rather be in penitentiary baby (pronounced something like “10th century”, rather than worried out of my mind.”
She said: ‘I’m sorry sorry baby. I got to leave you alone.’ All I want you to do baby is love me when I come home. That’s why I’ve got to murder that woman. Baby if you don’t stop your cheating lies. You know I’d rather be in penitentiary baby, than worried out of my mind.”

Posted at 3:11 PM · Comments (0)

Like most artists of heroic proportion, Duke Ellington’s sweep is difficult to comprehend. His output of original compositions and co-compositions is estimated to number between 1,000 and 3,000 works, ranging from starkly simple pieces to complex adventures in long composition, from the lowest low-down blues (the swamp water virtually runs off the notes) to the most urbane renditions of the big city (its people, its architecture, its pulse, and its dreamy, private situations). His grand aesthetic vision was to bring work songs, spirituals, blues, and ragtime together with jazz, that aesthetic idiom of great latitude. Ellington combined his sources with more blistering force, imagination, and understatement than anyone had before him, inventing variations and grooves along the way. He produced music that would not only extend the reaches of jazz but would become one of the largest and most original bodies of American music ever created. Ellington’s early classics, produced between 1927 and 1940, have been often and rightly praised; his late work has been largely neglected. But the late work offers plenty of masterworks for the listener of sufficiently refined taste, or the one willing to sophisticate his or her taste. Put simply, Ellington’s late work is largely a secret treasure. Anyone purporting to be civilized, or who desires to be, should have as many late Ellington recordings as possible in his or her audio collection.

In conventional jazz writing, Ellington is said to have reached his musical peak in the three years of 1940 to 1942, when there is supposed to have been an unimpeachable balance between composition and personnel, resulting in stellar renditions and eloquent improvisation. But Ellington’s ongoing evolution, from 1943 to the end of his life, runs counter to the standard critical take. In that last 30 years of band-leading and composing, Ellington achieved a remarkable range and authority. This was the result of both the time he had spent in the musical game and the vast technical and human experience his players were able to bring to the music, resulting in an abundance of varied tonal depth, emotional expansion, and subtlety—all of which is revealed in an increasing number of reissues and remixes now available. These recordings, stretching from the ’40s to the ’70s, demonstrate just how brilliantly Ellington and his band developed, decade by decade, almost right up to his death in 1974…
…Jazz Party (1959), with its variety of material and unexpected guests whom Ellington makes compatible, is unusual even for Ellington. It is an example of the ever-surprising repertoire that became characteristic of late Ellington from 1959 to the end of his music-making. The recording contains an intriguing six-part suite (Ellington’s first six-part suite was the masterful 1948 “The Liberian Suite,” on Ellington Uptown), some witty blues writing for concert percussion and jazz orchestra, and a classic Strayhorn vehicle—”Upper Manhattan Medical Group”—used to challenge an inspired Dizzy Gillespie who appears in a guest slot. There are also a couple of luscious, humorous features for Johnny Hodges, and a rousing blues finale in which the great Oklahoma blues singer Jimmy Rushing and the Bop King Gillespie are propelled by the soft-shoe strutting and declarative riffs of a brass-and-reed ensemble clearly enjoying the weight of its groove powers.
The 1966 Far East Suite (RCA Victor) finds Ellingtonia enriching itself with new Third World influences. (This remix, which brings absolute clarity to it, is an example of contemporary technological gifts.) This is probably the best jazz-orchestra recording of that decade, the most forcefully successful blending of jazz and outside music. The musicians are in masterful and inspired form, which allows Ellington to effortlessly remake his palette once again, this time with the influences of the Middle East and Asia. The superb And His Mother Called Him Bill (RCA Victor) is a salute to the then recently deceased Strayhorn, which finds Ellington the pianist outplaying everyone else on the album. Like the hero in winter, with death and retirement taking many of his finest voices, Ellington continued to make superior music, as revealed by the 1971 “Goutelas Suite” found on The Ellington Suites (Pablo). He remained busy remaking his past and taking in new influences, as revealed on The New Orleans Suite (Atlantic Records) and the especially impressive very late Ellington of Afro-Eurasian Eclipse(Fantasy). There is no thrill in the arts like hearing a grand master expand his palette, reinvigorate himself, and take on all of the challenges specific to an era. Ellington said to a relative when asked what he thought of the new generation: “It’s not about this generation or that. In Art, the issue is regeneration.” These records make that case as powerfully as it has ever been made.
Into the face of death Duke Ellington wrote music until the end, and we are all the better for it.

Posted at 1:01 PM · Comments (0)

I started reading this the other night at the gym, and finished it on a flight a couple of days later. A few pages into you, you stop and say, the guy is certainly an able writer. That’s mostly from the sense of cadence in the early portions. I could already tell early on though, should the title have left any doubt, that substance-wise this book was going to shape up as a heavy handed morality tale; another of those virtuous Westerner in suspect and sinful Asia. The writing grew overblown, too. (Sometimes I felt like I was reading Lou Dobbs channeled through Jack Cafferty.) I’ve seen so many of these kinds of books, in Africa and now in Asia: poor man’s Kiplings, updated for this age, wandering about deploring the decadence, the lack of scruples and the shamelessness of the people he has traveled far to meet and claims to have gotten to know.
There’s a good deal of looking down the nose, a lot of sneering too, about “Chinese jackals” and Dark Lords. A lot of dismissal of the women as mere empty vessels, sex objects that one suspects early on, and he eventually lets on in his highly conflicted way, he lusts after nonetheless.
It’s the lack of forthrightness that galls most: forthrightness with self and with the readers. It comes through in the passages that deal with lust. It comes through in the more strictly business passages, as in this anecdote, hardly made fairer by the fact that it was delivered as a footnote at the bottom of the page:
“Although it may be apocryphal, here is a horror story that made the rounds: A foreign businessman set up a joing venture and built a modern plant to exacting specifications in the Chinese countryside. The foreign businessman checked up on the plant regularly, but one day he took a wrong turn and got lost. Coming over a hill, he saw the plant, though in the wrong location; apparently his Chinese partner had duplicated the entire plant and was already selling the product under a Chinese brand name at a lower price.”
Having said much in criticism, its deserves to be said that Gutmann has delivered a very interesting chapter on the ways major American companies have helped design China’s internet controls and other surveillance technologies. More reporting like this and less of the loose around the bar anecdotes from deep in the bosom of the expat community would have made for a far stronger book.

Posted at 12:02 PM · Comments (0)

This is a feature that got away from me while I lived in Japan. I’d always intended to write something on this, and struggled, as is often the case on trend stories there, how to do it without having the story fall into the “those wierd and wacky Japanese” category, an old, indeed venerable fallback of Western reporting on Japan.
Copyright 2005 The Financial Times:

Many Japanese women have the habit of demurely covering their mouth with one hand when they giggle.
To the casual observer, the gesture appears to be just another
manifestation of the rigid politeness for which Japan is famed.
But peer behind the hand, and the reason becomes clear: it is often an attempt to conceal a mouthful of crooked teeth.
Despite Japan’s economic clout and the technological prowess of its companies, experts contend the country’s dental services - and the teeth of its people - have made little progress.
The Japanese, along with the British, share the ignominious
distinction of having the worst teeth among G7 nationals.
Some experts contend that certain developing nations boast better
dental services than those available in Japan.
“The Japanese have much poorer oral conditions than not only
westerners but people in less economically developed nations,” says Dr Kazumi Ikeda, an orthodontist who has practised in Tokyo for more than 20 years.
“You would be horrified if you examined the smiles of those who appear on TV or in magazines, all dressed up.” …
Teethart, which specialises in teeth whitening services (or “teeth
manicure”, in its parlance), opened its first office in 1995 in the
posh Ginza district, and now has 12 salons in Japan. The number of its patients has swelled from 1,000 in 1995 to 17,000 in fiscal 2003.
Capitalising on the Japanese habit of lightening and whitening their skin (known as bihaku, which literally means “beautiful white”), Teethart promises to whiten women’s teeth to match their epidermis. “Just as your skin is white, wouldn’t you like to have white teeth?” asks a Teethart brochure…
…But why are Japan’s dental services so shoddy to begin with? The answer is the country’s healthcare system and the dental educationalsystem. The government sets dental fees, which promotes inefficiency…
…”In the States, if you educate patients and they understand more aboutthe products, they tend to buy the products. But in Japan, national health insurance covers everything and the fees are the same for every dentist, regardless of age or experience.”
Traditionally, Japanese dentists have been one of the biggest
financial supporters of the ruling Liberal Democratic party (LDP) over the years…
…Recently, a furore erupted over revelations that Ryutaro Hashimoto, a former prime minister, had received a cheque for Y100m on behalf of the powerful Japan Dental Association (JDA) in 2001, when he had dinner at a Tokyo restaurant with two former dental association executives, including its head, Sadao Usuda…

For the original article in its entirety, please see the link below.

Posted at 11:37 AM · Comments (0)

An excerpt from a Continent for the Taking, which ran in the January 4, 2005 edition of the Mail and Guardian (Johannesburg). http://www.themedia.co.za/article.aspx?articleid=194612&area=/media_insightfeatures/

“African solutions to African problems,” Washington’s code name for the war, was an exercise in moral bankruptcy arguably more crass and even more complete than the failure to stop the Rwandan genocide.

As it did in 1994, Washington pretended not to know the extent of the murder that was taking place in central Zaire lest it become a hot issue back home, drawing TV cameras and forcing action of some kind.

By the time most of the dust had settled, six years after Zaire was first plunged into war, 3,3 million people had died in the eastern half of the country alone, more than four times as many people as had died in the Rwandan genocide.

Moreover, by some neat trick of misdirection, once Mobutu was gone, the worst of the slaughter and starvation went almost entirely unnoticed abroad.

Clinton administration officials often grew impatient with questions about the human toll associated with the Kabila army’s seemingly effortless advance through the Zairian countryside.

On a visit to Kinshasa, David J. Scheffer, Washington’s ambassador at large for war crimes issues, once angrily dismissed my concerns about the murder of Hutu refugees by Kabila’s Rwandan Tutsi troops. Scheffer was far from alone in this attitude.

Almost across the board, American officials had written off the Hutu as a pariah population, and no one had time for questions about their fate.

The US ambassador to Zaire, Daniel Howard Simpson, ever fond of blustery talk, reduced the Hutu problem to a simple formula. “They are bad guys,” he once told me.

Posted at 4:49 PM · Comments (0)

Ah, poor me, poor me
Let me sing about it like a bird (yeah)
These might be called lyrics of the unfriendly skies. They come courtesy of Sinosplice.com. See the full lyrics in Chinese and English at the link below.

“Why are there so many morons in our society today?
They think just because they’ve got some money
They’re all big and bad
Know what pal? I can’t do everything
Don’t get on my plane and cause a big fuss
You’ll know I mean it
When I smack you upside the head
Damn, what do you want?
Filing complaints at the slightest thing
Who do you think you are?
You’re a moron (yeah), a moron…”

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Posted at 1:04 PM · Comments (0)

The random feature on IPods leaves a lot to be desired. It’s a lot less than random, whatever its selection method is. Often I get stuck in a rut, where I’m hearing far more Maria Callas or Thelonius Monk that I need in a week (Nothing against either of them. Both are favorites.). Other times though, the little machine seems almost divinely inspired, stringing together four or five songs that may be of different periods and genres, but are of a mood.
I’d recently bought my first Madeleine Peyroux disc, Careless Love, and burned it into my 40 gig portable random music server, rather than simply listening to it end to end. I’d almost forgotten about it, to tell the truth. Then the other evening, as I was leaving the gym, on came her song “This is Heaven to Me,” and yes, it was heaven. Floaty, effortless, deceptively simply music, a stylistic throwback with a heavy dose of Billie Holiday in Madeleine’s vocals, yet thoroughly original. I recommend it heartily.
The next songs to come up, by the way, were: I Fall in Love too Easily, by Johnny Hartman, Embraceable You, by Errol Garner, and The Very Thought of You, by Kurt Elling.
That was my entire cab ride home, high on romance and endorphins, and eager for a glass of wine.

Posted at 12:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The New York Times - Published: January 11, 2005

One mislaid credit card bill or a single dangling e-mail message on the home computer would have ended everything: the marriage, the big-time career, the reputation for decency he had built over a lifetime.

So for more than 10 years, he ruthlessly kept his two identities apart: one lived in a Westchester hamlet and worked in a New York office, and the other operated mainly in clubs, airport bars and brothels. One warmly greeted clients and waved to neighbors, sometimes only hours after the other had stumbled back from a “work” meeting with prostitutes or cocaine dealers.

In the end, it was a harmless computer pop-up advertisement for security software, claiming that his online life was being “continually monitored,” that sent this New York real estate developer into a panic and to a therapist.

The man’s double life is an extreme example of how mental anguish can cleave an identity into pieces, said his psychiatrist, Dr. Jay S. Kwawer, director of clinical education at the William Alanson White Institute in New York, who discussed the case at a recent conference.

But psychologists say that most normal adults are well equipped to start a secret life, if not to sustain it. The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, they say, and the desire to sample other identities - to reinvent oneself, to pretend - can last well into adulthood. And in recent years researchers have found that some of the same psychological skills that help many people avoid mental distress can also put them at heightened risk for prolonging covert activities.

“In a very deep sense, you don’t have a self unless you have a secret, and we all have moments throughout our lives when we feel we’re losing ourselves in our social group, or work or marriage, and it feels good to grab for a secret, or some subterfuge, to reassert our identity as somebody apart,” said Dr. Daniel M. Wegner, a professor of psychology at Harvard. He added, “And we are now learning that some people are better at doing this than others.” …

…Psychologists have long considered the ability to keep secrets as central to healthy development. Children as young as 6 or 7 learn to stay quiet about their mother’s birthday present. In adolescence and adulthood, a fluency with small social lies is associated with good mental health. And researchers have confirmed that secrecy can enhance attraction, or as Oscar Wilde put it, “The commonest thing is delightful if only one hides it.”

In one study, men and women living in Texas reported that the past relationships they continued to think about were most often secret ones. In another, psychologists at Harvard found that they could increase the attraction between male and female strangers simply by encouraging them to play footsie as part of a lab experiment…

…”It used to be you’d go away for the summer and be someone else, go away to camp and be someone else, or maybe to Europe and be someone else” in a spirit of healthy experimentation, said Dr. Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Now, she said, people regularly assume several aliases on the Internet, without ever leaving their armchair: the clerk next door might sign on as bill@aol.com but also cruise chat rooms as Armaniguy, Cool Breeze and Thunderboy…

Posted at 11:58 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The New York Times

SHANGHAI, Jan. 10 - It was just after 6 p.m. when China Southern’s flight CZ 3593, packed to capacity, backed out of the gate to begin a 90-minute run from Zhengzhou to Shanghai after a five-hour delay.

There were too many carry-on bags to fit in the overhead racks, so the flight attendants began stuffing them into one of the rear bathrooms, setting off protests by passengers sitting nearby. Hearing the hubbub, other passengers began to shout about how hungry they were, while others bellowed about how the delay had spoiled their business plans.

Under siege, the flight attendants withdrew behind drawn curtains to consider their options, finally deciding, with the cockpit crew, to return to the gate, where the excess luggage could be placed in the hold. At the gate, though, the situation steadily worsened over an hour or so, with some passengers demanding dinner even before takeoff, and others clamoring to simply get off the plane.

One passenger cornered an attendant in the galley and lectured her about crisis management procedures he had picked up in other countries. She broke down in tears.

“We are doing our best to take care of all of you,” the attendant said. “We are doing our best.”

Pity the Chinese flight attendant.

In a short time, China has spent a fortune assembling one of the world’s largest passenger airline fleets, building some of the most aesthetically pleasing and passenger friendly airports anywhere, many of them in the country’s secondary cities. The airlines are government owned and operated.

Yet passengers numbered 80 million last year, a fourfold increase from 1991. That means the flights have a circuslike quality, and the airline workers are stretched just to get through the day.

Posted at 1:32 PM · Comments (1)

I have just bought a new pair of boots. They come up to my knees and are black with chunky heels. They have got nice thick leather soles and were a great bargain. Today is my first day wearing them, and a couple of people in the office have said they look nice.

I would like to say two further interesting things about these boots. First, they turn out to be rather less comfortable than they seemed in the shop - the left foot is rubbing over the instep and the right foot is catching me just under the ankle. Second, I have just noticed there is a big white blob on one toe. Either I must have dropped some of my breakfast on to my foot this morning, or a bird shat on me on my way into work without me noticing.

I realise this column so far shows little sign of brain activity. There is a reason: I am suffering from the latest executive illness - Attention Deficit Trait - and writing soothing paragraphs about a non-challenging subject is a prescribed remedy.

The details of this new office epidemic are chronicled in the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review. ADT, it tells us, is a bit like Attention Deficit Disorder, but instead of being a genetic condition it is created by the way we work. We are so distracted and overwhelmed by our e-mails, our Blackberries, mobile phones and by all the conflicting demands of managerial life that our brains overload.

ADT turns brilliant people into frenzied underachievers who work flat out without ever getting much done. It is a “very real but unrecognised neurological phenomenon” says the HBR, and is 10 times as common as it was a decade ago.

The author of the article, Ned Hallowell, is a psychiatrist, and he explains what is going on inside the brains of us sufferers. Our frontal and pre-frontal lobes are the bits of our brain that help us behave like civilised, efficient office workers. When these get overloaded, the deeper parts of the brain that control emotion send out fear signals, paralysing our frontal lobes and making us unable to comport ourselves appropriately or effectively. The ADT victim starts to show signals of anger, irritation, anxiety.

Alas, this rings a very large, very noisy bell. Before Christmas I devoted an entire column to how irritating I was finding everything. Some readers said I was a spoilt little brat and should take a holiday in Iraq. Many others wrote in telling me to relax, and a couple suggested I “take a chill pill” - a phrase so irritating that just reading it may have done permanent damage to my frontal lobes.

I should now like to tell all these disgusted readers that they should give me a break. I have ADT, and therefore deserve their compassion.

According to Dr Hallowell, the best remedy is to create a “positive, fear-free emotional atmosphere”. Doing this turns out to be complicated, but I have tried to take in all his tips, and repeat most here, along with my comments.

1. Every four to six hours spend some time talking to people you like. This is great advice. I swear by it, though unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be helping my ADT.

2. Keep a section of your work space clear at all times. A messy desk is simply how I work. When I give it a partial tidy, I often feel worse.

3. Don’t e-mail until you’ve done other things first. I find e-mail helps me warm up in the morning, so I see nothing to be gained by this.

4. Get enough sleep. I quite agree. Only wish it was that easy.

5. Avoid sugar and alcohol. I don’t accept this at all. Nice treats to look forward to make life worth living.

6. Move around - walk briskly. This is a great tip. I do it anyway.

7. Do a rote task such as writing a note about your house or your shoes. See above.

8. Take a multi-vitamin pill. This tip is so feeble I hardly know how to respond. I have never understood why rational people with good diets think they need them - in fact I think less of all those millions who take them. (No messages on this point, please. My inbox isn’t big enough.) The idea that the Harvard Business Review seriously suggests that taking a multi-vitamin pill is going to help with ADT makes me suspect very strongly that ADT is an entirely bogus concept with bogus remedies.

If I reject the idea that I have ADT, there is another possibility. Last week I received a press release about another condition diagnosed by US doctors in Texas. It is called HWS - Hurried Woman Syndrome. This is also apparently an incredibly worrying illness, affecting 60m women in the US. The symptoms seem to be much the same as ADT, only with weight gain and sleeplessness. The remedies to this turn out to be writing lists, getting sleep, taking exercise.

I am most certainly a hurried woman, and usually proud to be one. But I no more have this syndrome than I have ADT. In truth, I don’t have any syndrome. Life is busy, and mostly I like it that way. I often get cross, and often find things annoying. There is another label for it, and it is stress. Sometimes stress is good, and sometimes it isn’t. Everyone’s way of coping is different. And I defy anyone to tell me that alcohol and a KitKat are a worse strategy for getting me from one end of the day to the other than tidying my desk and taking a multi-vitamin pill.

The one therapeutic thing to have come out of my research this week was writing the paragraph about my boots, which I much enjoyed. I apologise to readers if they enjoyed it rather less. In fairness to the HBR I should make clear that this was an exercise that was supposed to be completed in private rather than in the pages of a global newspaper.

Posted at 11:44 AM · Comments (0)

Sometimes you open the newspaper or a magazine and start reading and think ‘there it is, just what I’ve been thinking about.’
That happened this morning as I read a day old Financial Times article. I’d been too busy to read it last night, when it was only half a day old, and am increasingly finding myself reading yesterday’s newspapers at breakfast. (I long ago adopted the practice of putting my New Yorkers and Harpers and NYRBs in a bedside stack, letting them age before I read them, rationalizing that the lag gives me a better perspective on the pertinence of anything “topical”.)
Anyway, back to the FT. Lucy Kellaway, one of their columnists is having trouble focusing these days. She’s feeling a bit distracted. Having trouble getting going some days. And I thought it was just me!
Lucy’s observational gems are numerous. As a foretaste, here are some of her tips.
2. Keep a section of your work space clear at all times. A messy desk is simply how I work. When I give it a partial tidy, I often feel worse.
3. Don’t e-mail until you’ve done other things first. I find e-mail helps me warm up in the morning, so I see nothing to be gained by this.
4. Get enough sleep. I quite agree. Only wish it was that easy.
You can savor it all here.Click to read more On the previous page of the same Jan. 10, 2005 FT was an article under the headline: The ‘dismal science’ turns its attention to happiness. There, next to the headline was a scatter graph purporting to show the relative happiness of nations, with one axis being contentment, and the other GDP.
It turns out Ghanaians are happier than Americans, almost even with the Swiss, who come in second place just behind the Dutch. Who’s least happy? They’re having a hard time in the former Soviet republics. Spare a thought for Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia…

Posted at 11:32 AM · Comments (1)

A great essay on writing, which I’m including snippets of below. It appeared in the January 9, 2005 FT. See the link for the entire article.

My subject is imaginative writing: how it’s done and how to read it; how a writer develops his own distinctive voice and how the reader reacts to it; how the true voice and the public personality sometimes clash, confuse and contradict each other. My point of view is that of an endangered species that used to be called a man of letters, one of those unfortunate people who write not because they are Ancient Mariners with stories they are compelled to tell, or lessons they have to teach, still less because they are entranced by the sound of their own voices, but simply because, when they were young and impressionable, they fell in love with language as musicians fall in love with sound, and thereafter are doomed to explore this fatal attraction in as many ways as they can.

So what I have to say is based on a lifetime of trying to write in several genres: poems, novels and, above all, the kind of higher journalism that universities sometimes dignify as “the literature of fact”: non-fiction books on subjects that happened to interest me - anything from suicide to poker - several of which began as long pieces for The New Yorker. I have also written a great deal of literary criticism which, when I was starting out half a century ago, had not yet become just another arcane academic discipline with a technical vocabulary and specialised interests; it was thought of, instead, as a creative activity in its own right - a writer’s way of describing how other writers handle language and what it is that makes them unique.

Freelance writing is a precarious trade and I feel about it much the same as Mayakovsky felt about suicide: “I don’t recommend it to others,” he wrote, and then put a gun to his head.

Shifting from one literary form to another may mean you end up mastering none, but it has at least one advantage: it keeps you alert. The art of poetry is altogether different from that of prose, just as writing fiction is different from writing non-fiction, and literary criticism is different from them all. Fifty years of writing for a living have taught me that there is only one thing the four disciplines have in common: in order to write well you must learn how to listen. And that, in turn, is one thing writers have in common with readers.

What happens when you sit down with a book? Why do you do it? What’s the pleasure in it? Why do books, poems, even fragments go on being read years, sometimes centuries, after they were written, no matter how many times the death of literature is announced?

I’m not talking about transmitting or acquiring information. On the contrary, at this present moment of change, when the industrial revolution has been superseded by a revolution in information technology, facts and figures have never been easier to come by, although now they are packaged in an appropriately new form…

To acquire facts efficiently, scan a synopsis or gut a newspaper, you have to master the art of reading diagonally. Real literature is about something else entirely and it’s immune to speed-reading. That is, it’s not about information, although you may gather information along the way. It’s not even about storytelling, although sometimes that is one of its greatest pleasures. Imaginative literature is about listening to a voice. When you read a novel the voice is telling you a story; when you read a poem it’s usually talking about what its owner is feeling; but neither the medium nor the message is the point. The point is that the voice is unlike any other voice you have heard and it is speaking directly to you, communing with you in private, right in your ear, and in its own distinctive way. It may be talking to you from centuries ago or from a few years back or, as it were, from across the room - bang up to date in the here-and-now. The historical details are secondary; all that really matters is that you hear it - an undeniable presence in your head, and still very much alive, no matter how long ago the words were spoken: “Western wind, when wilt thou blow That the small rain down can rain? Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!”

Nobody knows who wrote that poem or even precisely when he wrote it (probably early in the 16th century). But whoever it was is still very much alive - lonely, miserable, hunkered down against the foul weather and a long way from home, yearning for spring and warmth and his girl. Across a gap of five centuries, the man is still our contemporary.

… The poem breathes from the page as vividly as the long-dead faces and their little dog breathe from the canvas. But it is a two-way pact: the writer makes himself heard and the reader listens in - or, more accurately, the writer works to find or create a voice that will stretch out to the reader, make him prick up his ears and attend.

I think this is something like what happens in psychoanalysis. Of course, there has always been a close connection between imaginative literature and the talking cure, not least because Freud himself read widely and wrote compelling prose. Both these accomplishments were unusual in a scientist and they generated in him an even more unusual respect for the arts. When, during the celebration of his 70th birthday, one of his disciples hailed Freud as “the discoverer of the unconscious” he answered, “The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious. What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.”

In the early years, psychoanalysts often seemed to take this connection in a literal, straightforward way. Freud, with his interest in archaeology, laboured to dig up the past and recreate it, almost as a work of art. It was as if psychoanalysis were a kind of dual story-telling: the patient told his story from his point of view and the analyst told it back to him, using his interpretations to give it a new shape and meaning. Freud may have called his method scientific but, in practice, he worked more like a novelist than a researcher, creating form and significance out of the chaos of the unconscious, especially as it expresses itself in dreams, the one area in which the imagination of even the most unimaginative people reveals itself.

And because dreams, in their dotty way, seem creative, this led to a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of art, particularly in the early days of psychoanalysis, when the idea of sexual symbolism was fresh and exciting and subversive. Instead of reading, say, a poem as a work of art with a life of its own independent of the author - as something which, in Coleridge’s words, “contains in itself the reasons why it is so and not otherwise” - psychoanalysts with a taste for literature often used it as though it were mere dream-stuff, welling up uncensored and unbidden, another “royal road to the unconscious” of the unfortunate author.

A century later, many psychoanalysts tend to be less interested in telling stories or creating an archaeology of the unconscious by digging up the past. They have broadened their focus to study not just the patient’s self and his history but his whole inner world. Because this inner world includes both his self and what analysts call his “internal objects” - imaginative representations of other people, both past and present, with whom the patient is continually entangled - the therapist’s task is to study how these “phantasy” figures are projected in the transference and counter-transference - that is, in the minute changes in the relationship between the patient and the analyst as they occur, moment-by-moment, in the consulting room.

From this more modern perspective, the story matters less than how it is told. Instead of looking for clues, the therapist is listening, like a poet or a critic, to the overtones and undertones, alert to the false notes, to whatever is off-key or flat, distinguishing between the genuine emotions and the fake, monitoring when and how and why he is moved and - equally important - when and why he is bored. It’s about detail and nuance - the body-language and the silences, what is said and what is left unsaid. And as with literature, everything depends on the tone of voice.

…The writer discovers this liberating and oddly invigorating relationship between psychic reality and aesthetic pleasure when he finds his own voice: it picks the locks, opens the doors and enables him to begin to say what he wants to say. But in order to find his voice he must first have mastered style, and style, in this basic sense, is a discipline that you acquire by hard work, like grammar or punctuation.

Voice is altogether different: “I don’t mean style… “ Philip Roth wrote, in The Ghost Writer, “I mean voice: something that begins at around the back of the knees and reaches well above the head.” Voice, he means, is the vehicle by which a writer expresses his aliveness, and Roth himself is all voice. Style, in the formal or flowery sense, bores him; he has, he has written, “a resistance to plaintive metaphor and poeticised analogy”. His prose is immaculate yet curiously plain and unostentatious, at once unselfconscious and unmistakably his own. Someone once said that reading him is like opening a cellar door and hearing the boiler roar into life. It’s also like being pitched headfirst into a family quarrel, with everyone shouting to be heard; it makes your heart contract with outrage and excitement both at once.

By comparing writing and psychoanalysis, I’m implying that finding your own voice as a writer is like the tricky business of becoming an adult. For a writer, it’s also a basic instinct, like a bird marking out its territory, though not so straightforward or so musical. So how do you do it? First, you do what all young people do: you try on other people’s personalities for size and you fall in love. Young writers, in fact, are a peculiarly promiscuous lot; my schoolboy passions included Eliot, Auden, Housman, Aldous Huxley, one after the other with not a gap between them. Every so often serial promiscuity culminates in le coup de foudre: you hear a voice and recognise it and know it’s for you just as surely as you recognise Miss Right across the room before you’ve ever spoken to her, even when - or especially when - she is hand-in-hand with Mr Wrong.

First, the writer’s voice dazzles you and you read everything you can lay hands on. If that doesn’t cure you, the sickness goes critical and you become obsessed with the beloved’s whole take on life: what he did, where he went, even the kind of people he slept with. You don’t want to be like him, you want to be him. In retrospect, infatuation is as embarrassing as promiscuity, but for the writer it is a necessary part of the weary process of growing up. That’s what happened to me with Aldous Huxley when I was at school and with William Empson and D.H. Lawrence when I got to Oxford. But literary infatuation is the same as other youthful infatuations: it doesn’t last and it’s hard to be friends afterwards. These days, I still admire Empson in a guarded way, but, apart from a handful of stories and poems, I find Lawrence’s shrill nagging almost intolerable. As Auden wrote in The Sea and the Mirror: “I am very glad I shall never / Be twenty and have to go through the business again, / The hours of fuss and fury, the conceit, the expense.”

There are other writers whom you fall for and stay in love with. It happened to me when I was a schoolboy and was given a poem by John Donne to comment on. At that point I had never heard of Donne and I had to read the poem - “Witchcraft by a Picture” - several times before I began to understand it. But I was seduced, at first hearing, by the tone of voice. It was like listening to subtly charged talk, aroused, casual, witty and restlessly argumentative, a curious mixture of logic and tenderness - real tenderness for real women with appetites and sweaty palms and unreliable temperaments. This, I felt, was how poetry should be - alive with feeling yet utterly unsentimental, and with nothing conventionally poetical about it. For a lusty adolescent, shut away in a monkish, sports-mad boarding school where love of poetry was not a weakness you confessed to, it was a revelation, love at first sight, and I never really got over it.

Posted at 2:42 PM · Comments (0)

A feeling of sheepishness accompanies this confession, but I discovered this on the soundtrack of Something’s Got to Give, and was really charmed. You can hear a sample through the link. And here, thanks to Google, are the lyrics, which I heartily endorse:

J’en avais marre de travailler
Et de perdre mon temps
A faire des boulots mal payés
Avec des gens très emmerdants,
Je cherchais la combine,
Et c’est pas facile,
De se tirer de l’usine
Pour partir dans les îles.
Je me creusais le ciboulot.
J’étais comme tous les gens,
Allergique au boulot,
Mais pas allergique à l’argent.
Je ne connais qu’une façon
De se tirer sous les tropiques
Quand on est petit, laid
Et qu’on a pas de fric.

ASSEDIC…
Je t’écrirai de temps en temps,
Toi tu m’enverras mon virement
Directement,
Tout là-bas, dans mon île
ASSEDIC
Avec ton amie RMI
Vous serez mes deux meilleurs amies
Ce sera dément.

L’Agence Nationale Pour l’Emploi
M’écrit de France.
Ils veulent à peine au bout d’un mois
Me gâcher mes jolies vacances,
En m’envoyant chez “Prisunic”
Décharger des camions.
Avec ma copine ASSEDIC,
Evidemment on a dit non
Je veux que ça dure toute la vie,
Que chaque jour soit férié.
Un jour, je recevrai l’avis
De fin de droit dans mon courrier
Mais faudra me payer cher
Pour retourner au carnaval
Du R.E.R
Et du Leclerc de Bougival

ASSEDIC…
Je t’écrirai de temps en temps,
Toi tu m’enverras mon virement
Directement,
Tout là-bas, dans mon île
ASSEDIC
Enfin ma place au soleil,
A moi les ciels vermeils
Et les beaux voyages…
M’en priver ce serait dommage.
ASSEDIC
Tu seras ma petite maman,
La Maman de tous les gens
Qui n’ont pas d’argent.

(Pas beaucoup… pas beaucoup…)

Posted at 6:09 PM · Comments (0)

This is vintage Codrescu, on New Orleans, an anomaly of an American city in so many ways. I haven’t said much in explanation of the gallery from there on this page. I went as an invited speaker to the annual African Studies Association meetings. It had been over a decade since I last visited. What did I discover? A depressing shell of an inner city: the no there there phenomenom, with hard living black folks haunting the street corners like spectral creatures. Urban renewal seems to be reduced to the formula of creating shopping malls, and there are plenty of those, plus a quaint streetcar renovated and put into service for the tourists. Oh, there was also the old French Quarter, where the rites in force seem to revolve primarily around getting young women to lift their shirts for the pleasure of drunken, howling crowds. There are plenty of takers, too.
Click to view gallery

Posted at 2:37 PM · Comments (0)

This piece served as my coffee this morning, a bracing piece of writing by Greg Tate, sent to me by my friend Sean, at the New School. I’ve posted more of it in the Snippets section to the right, below, and I’d encourage those who are interested in the place of African-Americans in the global commercial and artistic culture to read the whole thing in the Village Voice. For now, here’s a taste:

“…the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn’t even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren’t still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial “niggas.” By which I mean if we weren’t all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain’t no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.

Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the ’70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It’s equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America’s Ellis Island. It’s our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous…”

Posted at 11:35 AM · Comments (0)

We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop’s 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom and the like. As those digitized hiphop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray.
Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there’s really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers?who got bank and who got more.

Hard to argue with that line of thinking since, hell, globally speaking, hiphop is money at this point, a valued form of currency where brothers are offered stock options in exchange for letting some corporate entity stand next to their fire.

True hiphop headz tend to get mad when you don’t separate so-called hiphop culture from the commercial rap industry, but at this stage of the game that’s like trying to separate the culture of urban basketball from the NBA, the pro game from the players it puts on the floor.

Hiphop may have begun as a folk culture, defined by its isolation from mainstream society, but being that it was formed within the America that gave us the coon show, its folksiness was born to be bled once it began entertaining the same mainstream that had once excluded its originators. And have no doubt, before hiphop had a name it was a folk culture?literally visible in the way you see folk in Brooklyn and the South Bronx of the ’80s, styling, wilding, and profiling in Jamel Shabazz’s photograph book Back in the Days. But from the moment “Rapper’s Delight” went platinum, hiphop the folk culture became hiphop the American entertainment-industry sideshow.

No doubt it transformed the entertainment industry, and all kinds of people’s notions of entertainment, style, and politics in the process. So let’s be real. If hiphop were only some static and rigid folk tradition preserved in amber, it would never have been such a site for radical change or corporate exploitation in the first place. This being America, where as my man A.J.’s basketball coach dad likes to say, “They don’t pay niggas to sit on the bench,” hiphop was never going to not go for the gold as more gold got laid out on the table for the goods that hiphop brought to the market. Problem today is that where hiphop was once a buyer’s market in which we, the elite hiphop audience, decided what was street legit, it has now become a seller’s market, in which what does or does not get sold as hiphop to the masses is whatever the boardroom approves.

The bitter trick is that hiphop, which may or may not include the NBA, is the face of Black America in the world today. It also still represents Black culture and Black creative license in unique ways to the global marketplace, no matter how commodified it becomes. No doubt, there’s still more creative autonomy for Black artists and audiences in hiphop than in almost any other electronic mass-cultural medium we have. You for damn sure can’t say that about radio, movies, or television. The fact that hiphop does connect so many Black folk worldwide, whatever one might think of the product, is what makes it invaluable to anyone coming from a Pan-African state of mind. Hiphop’s ubiquity has created a common ground and a common vernacular for Black folk from 18 to 50 worldwide. This is why mainstream hiphop as a capitalist tool, as a market force isn’t easily discounted: The dialogue it has already set in motion between Long Beach and Cape Town is a crucial one, whether Long Beach acknowledges it or not. What do we do with that information, that communication, that transatlantic mass-Black telepathic link? From the looks of things, we ain’t about to do a goddamn thing other than send more CDs and T-shirts across the water.

But the Negro art form we call hiphop wouldn’t even exist if African Americans of whatever socioeconomic caste weren’t still niggers and not just the more benign, congenial “niggas.” By which I mean if we weren’t all understood by the people who run this purple-mountain loony bin as both subhuman and superhuman, as sexy beasts on the order of King Kong. Or as George Clinton once observed, without the humps there ain’t no getting over. Meaning that only Africans could have survived slavery in America, been branded lazy bums, and decided to overcompensate by turning every sporting contest that matters into a glorified battle royal.

Like King Kong had his island, we had the Bronx in the ’70s, out of which came the only significant artistic movement of the 20th century produced by born-and-bred New Yorkers, rather than Southwestern transients or Jersey transplants. It’s equally significant that hiphop came out of New York at the time it did, because hiphop is Black America’s Ellis Island. It’s our Delancey Street and our Fulton Fish Market and garment district and Hollywoodian ethnic enclave/empowerment zone that has served as a foothold for the poorest among us to get a grip on the land of the prosperous…

Picking up where Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement left off, George Clinton realized that anything Black folk do could be abstracted and repackaged for capital gain. This has of late led to one mediocre comedy after another about Negroes frolicking at hair shows, funerals, family reunions, and backyard barbecues, but it has also given us Biz Markie and OutKast.

Oh, the selling power of the Black Vernacular. Ralph Ellison only hoped we’d translate it in such a way as to gain entry into the hallowed house of art. How could he know that Ralph Lauren and the House of Polo would one day pray to broker that vernacular’s cool marketing prowess into a worldwide licensing deal for bedsheets writ large with Jay-Z’s John Hancock? Or that the vernacular’s seductive powers would drive Est*e Lauder to propose a union with the House of P. Diddy? Or send Hewlett-Packard to come knocking under record exec Steve Stoute’s shingle in search of a hiphop-legit cool marketer?

Hiphop’s effervescent and novel place in the global economy is further proof of that good old Marxian axiom that under the abstracting powers of capitalism, “All that is solid melts into air” (or the Ethernet, as the case might be). So that hiphop floats through the virtual marketplace of branded icons as another consumable ghost, parasitically feeding off the host of the real world’s people?urbanized and institutionalized?whom it will claim till its dying day to “represent.” And since those people just might need nothing more from hiphop in their geopolitically circumscribed lives than the escapism, glamour, and voyeurism of hiphop, why would they ever chasten hiphop for not steady ringing the alarm about the African American community’s AIDS crisis, or for romanticizing incarceration more than attacking the prison-industrial complex, or for throwing a lyrical bone at issues of intimacy or literacy or, heaven forbid, debt relief in Africa and the evils perpetuated by the World Bank and the IMF on the motherland?…

For the entire article, please follow the link. It is bracing reading….

Posted at 11:26 AM · Comments (0)

This web site comes to me at the suggestion of Marcus, an African music aficionado. It’s great to have access to this kind of music via MP3. I’m looking for the Koffi Olomide tracks on the hard to find CD “Stephie,” which I consider one of the best examples of Congolese rumba and ballad singing in the last decade. My disc has disappeared. Does anyone have it in MP3 form?

http://mattgy.net/music/

Posted at 12:38 PM · Comments (0)

Like most everyone, I’ve sought ways to come to grips with the catastrophe, watching the images of the tragedy rush past on the TV, reading or listening to the better accounts (like this one:http://www.npr.org/rundowns/segment.php?wfId=4274889), and yet becoming on a fundamental level somewhat numbed by the whole thing.
I was extremely moved at first, and still feel real, honest compassion over the loss of life. Still, there are amorphous elements here in the exhaustive, sometimes exhausting coverage, and in the aid and relief rush, even competition, that gnaw at me, making me uneasy.
What exactly is going on here? Why such eagerness? Compassion is absolute good, to be sure, so why is it so selective, so fickle? I’ve thought, unsurprisingly, about Africa, and the paltry response in places like Sudan, where a genocide is said to be taking place, and of the generalized indifference over the Congo, where four million people have died in the last five or six years as a result of the worst war we’ve seen since WWII. How many people even know? Fewer still care.
This all came together for me this morning, listening distractedly to the BBC. A woman named Nancy Birdsall, president of the Center for Global Development drew this contrast, which I paraphrase: “The equivalent of a tsunami takes place in Africa from the deaths to malaria every 11 days. There is the tsunami’s equivalent in AIDS deaths in Africa every 15 days.”
In other words, let’s interrupt this blithe feelgood reverie about our own goodness, and challenge ourselves to be less selective in our generosity. There is so much more to be done.

Posted at 11:57 AM · Comments (0)

It’s funny how prejudice works against you. I’d always thought of E.M. Forster as a dry and fusty writer, whose period English preoccupations would make reading him prohibitively boring. All I can say is how foolish that was. I recently picked up A Passage to India, driven in large part by the praise found for it in the book on writing, The Sound on the Page, which I have myself praised here.
As billed, the book is extraordinary, as a treatment of hollow bigotry, of the ways in the which the powerful of the world convince themselves of their own nobility, and interestingly, as an aside, has one of the smartest dialogues about the merits of “soft power” I’ve read anywhere, and this of course well before the term was coined. An excerpt, depicting a lawn party at a colonial club to which select ‘colonials’ were convened.
“This isn’t a purdah party,” corrected Miss Quested.
“Oh, really,” was the haughty rejoinder.
“Do, kindly tell us who these ladies are,” asked Mrs. Moore.
“You’re superior to them, anyway. Don’t forget that. You’re superior to every one in India except one of two of the Ranis, and they’re on equality.”
Advancing, she shook hands with the group and said a few words of welcome in Urdu. She had leart the lingo, but only to speak to her servants, so she knew none of the politer formas and of the verbs, only the imperative mood. As soon as her speech was over, she inquired of her companions: “Is that what you wanted?”
“Please tell these ladies that I wish we could speak their language, but we have only just come to their country.”
“Perhaps we speak yours a little,” one of the ladies said.
“Why, fancy, she understands!” said Mrs. Turton.
“Eastbourne, Picadilly, High Park Corner,” said another of the ladies.
“Oh yes, they’re English speaking.”
“But now we can talk: how delightful! ” cried Adela, her face lighting up.
“She knows Paris also,” called one of the onlookers.
“They pass Paris on the way, no doubt,” said Mrs. Turton, as if she was describing the movements of migratory birds. Her manner had grown more distant since she had discovered that some of the group was Westernized, and might apply her own standards to her.

Posted at 11:52 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve been slow in getting this material online (and there is much more to come). Editing and posting these pictures is proving to be a lot of work, but also, readily confessed, a lot of fun. The Berlin and Paris shots are from a trip to Europe taken in early October to attend the Ulysses Prize deliberations, in which “Continent” was a prize candidate.
A few days before my arrival in Berlin, a city I had never managed to visit before, a show of Friedrich Christian Flick’s collection opened at the Hamburger Bahnhoff Museum to great controversy. The collection was extraordinary, as is the story behind it, a few snippets of which are told below in excepts from a characteristically strong Michael Kimmelman essay in The New York Times, and a Peter Bild review, published in The Guardian. See the jump below for the text. The link to the gallery is here:
Click to see photos

Posted at 11:07 PM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French, grand reporter au New York Times, s’est révélé en Afrique en tant qu’Américain noir, en tant qu’être humain surtout. A Continent for The Taking est son premier livre ; il se déroule au mitan des années 1990, marquées par deux événements cruciaux : le démantèlement de l’apartheid et le génocide rwandais. Cet ouvrage est un vrai livre de journaliste aguerri : en 280 pages et onze chapitres, sont passés au crible la dictature de Sani Abacha, le virus Ebola, les guerres civiles du Congo-Brazzaville, le Liberia, etc.

A Continent for The Taking est également un énergique réquisitoire contre la politique africaine de Washington. Plus qu’un compte rendu au jour le jour, ce livre est une magnifique somme de récits empathiques et subtils, historiquement fouillés et documentés.

http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2004/09/WABERI/11629

Posted at 4:38 PM · Comments (0)

Kaori Shoji has long been a favorite of mine. Who couldn’t love this lede? It’s all the sweeter for me because Nakameguro was a favorite haunt of mine in Tokyo, too, two subway stops away from where we lived. I played tennis there sometimes with the boys…

TOKYO In a city where it doesn’t seem possible to be hip and laid back at the same time, a neighborhood called Nakameguro has managed to do exactly that without even trying. It’s hard to say exactly when this particular chunk of Tokyo became the mythologized epicenter for Relaxed Chic. From one day to the next, it seems, it got on the map and quietly refused to budge.

Unlike places like the Omotesando strip in Aoyama (teeming with foreign luxury brands), where Hollywood celebrity sightings are on par with Rodeo Drive, Nakameguro is full of the obscure and the snobbishly vintage. Fashion acquires an entirely new definition in the face of a pair of torn out, worn-through, stained Levis (vintage 1978), which the shop manager sleuthed out of someone’s attic in South Central Los Angeles.

And when you start congratulating yourself for combining a threadbare sweatshirt (kids’ size) with the logo “Pittsburgh Steelers,” and a 1986 Comme des Garçons skirt purchased in Nakameguro’s “Jumpin’ Jap Flash” or “Pina Colada,” you’re past help. You’re stuck, and there’s no escape.

Nakameguro, between Ebisu (home to posh foreign residences and the TOKYO — Taillevent restaurant) and Daikanyama (home to the president of Nissan, Carlos Ghosn, and the stomping grounds of Sofia Coppola) is at first glance remarkable only in its ordinariness.

There are no landmark buildings or gaudy billboards, and the shop signs are deliberately faded, small and obscure. The main street is typically Tokyo: noisy with cars and crowded with local housewives towing babies on bicycles. To the back of this street is where the Nakameguro addicts head. The Megurogawa waterway splits the strip right down the middle, and the street is hemmed in from both sides by stately old cherry trees.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/01/03/style/fkaori.html

Posted at 12:00 PM · Comments (0)

Wise words from Jared Diamond in the 1/1/05 New York Times.

In this New Year, we Americans have our own painful reappraisals to face. Historically, we viewed the United States as a land of unlimited plenty, and so we practiced unrestrained consumerism, but that’s no longer viable in a world of finite resources. We can’t continue to deplete our own resources as well as those of much of the rest of the world.

Historically, oceans protected us from external threats; we stepped back from our isolationism only temporarily during the crises of two world wars. Now, technology and global interconnectedness have robbed us of our protection. In recent years, we have responded to foreign threats largely by seeking short-term military solutions at the last minute.

But how long can we keep this up? Though we are the richest nation on earth, there’s simply no way we can afford (or muster the troops) to intervene in the dozens of countries where emerging threats lurk - particularly when each intervention these days can cost more than $100 billion and require more than 100,000 troops.

Posted at 5:28 PM · Comments (0)

This is a fantastic column which appeared in the November 30, 2004 edition of the International Herald Tribune (All rights reserved. It led me to the writer, who has just published a remarkable first novel, called Purple Hibiscus, which I’ll soon be talking about more in the Book Table section.
Here, meanwhile, is the lede of a story about her by a writer named Bron Sibree which appeared in the January 2, 2005 editions of the South China Morning Post (rights reserved!). I love Adichie’s quotes.:
:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is still coming to grips with the acclaim for her first book, Purple Hibiscus. Since this politically inspired, coming-of-age novel became a contender for last year’s Orange Prize and Man Booker Prize, the Nigerian-born, US-based novelist’s book and life have been the subject of intense media scrutiny in Britain, North America and Africa.

“I find it really intriguing to see how differently people react to the book, and I’m really amused by some of them,” she says.

Adichie, 27, expected it to provoke some irritation in Nigeria. But advance copies of the novel she wrote during her masters degree in Creative Writing at Johns Hopkins University incited outrage for its portrayal of families and Christianity. “For lots of people in Nigeria, it becomes more than just literature,” she says. “It becomes me saying something about us.”

Nor is Adichie surprised by the reaction to her novel in Britain, where it is to be released in paperback this month. The novelist has received some of the most extravagant praise lavished on a first-time novelist, thanks to what she says, with a chuckle, is Britain’s “post-colonial lens”.

“I think in some ways for them, it’s, ‘How much damage did we do in Nigeria?’ and, ‘How much is she reflecting it in her book?’” she says.

“Most novels from Africa are seen in this way in the UK,” says Adichie, who grew up under the military dictatorships of General Babangida, then General Abacha, who executed writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in 1995. But she was taken aback, and “most amused” by the US reaction to the book, where in the main, it has been lauded as a novel on family abuse.

“I’ve had people saying to me, ‘Oh, it’s interesting to know that abuse occurs in other parts of the world’,” says Adichie, who - after fending off a barrage of questions about her own family in the wake of the novel’s success - gets in early: “I grew up in a moderate Catholic family, and a very happy one.”

Purple Hibiscus chronicles the impact of politics and religion on a well-to-do Nigerian family through the eyes of 15-year-old Kambili.

“If I had to go back and write a first novel again, I would write Purple Hibiscus,” says Adichie. “When I think about Nigeria, it is home, but it’s also a place I feel very strongly about, and that I’m very worried about. Some of the things that worry me are religion, and the role it plays, and politics. I wanted to write about those, but I didn’t want to write a preachy book.”

She has written a novel that captures childhood, the beauty of the natural world, along with the horrors of religious fanaticism, domestic and political violence. Kambili’s sheltered world, and that of her brother Jaja, is circumscribed by the rules laid down by her wealthy Papa, whose strict Catholicism and espousal of human rights make him a revered figure in the community, yet a tyrant at home…

Meanwhile:

Dateline: Lagos
Light creeps over all of us standing in line outside the U.S. Embassy. For the first time, I see the blues and pinks of the buba the woman in front of me is wearing. And the hawkers and touts walking around are no longer shadows; I see their scarred faces, their calculating smiles.

I have been in line since 4 a.m. Some of the people in front of me spent the night in a tent opposite the embassy.

I wish I had not come back to Nigeria to renew my U.S. student visa, I wish I had done it in Britain or Canada. Then I chastise myself. This is my country. The reason I did not bother to go to another country was that I knew I would be asked to return to my “home country.”

The touts swarm around. “I have serious connections inside the embassy, Auntie,” one of them tells me. “Just 1,000 and you will enter today for sure.”

I would not give him 1,000 naira even if I had it to spare. The 12,000 naira visa fee is steep enough. As the sun rises, I estimate how much the embassy will make from the people in line today. They will give visas only to a fraction of these people but will take almost $100 worth of naira from each of them. Perhaps $40,000 for today. Conservatively

When I finally get to the entrance, the Nigerian guard looks through my passport. “Passport photos?” he asks.

I hand them to him.

He notices they are the same photos I have used in my British visa. “Get back!” he says. “Go and take another picture and come back! You cannot wear the same dress in two passports!”

I stare at him. “What does it matter as long as the photo is not more than six months old?”

“Are you insulting me?” he asks. “Are you insulting me, eh?” I turn and leave. Insult means many things to us Nigerians. Our self-confidence is so fragile that anything — a challenge, a correction, a question — could well become an insult.

When I come back the next day, with new photos, I am relieved to finally get into the cool embassy building, with garish paintings on the wall: an American girl holding a Nigerian flag, a Nigerian holding an American flag. The room is crowded. Preening and smirking, guards walk around, with comical jaunts to their gaits. Once in a while, they call out names and people rise eagerly, nervously, and walk to the interview booths.

Babies cry. There are many children here, because the Americans do not believe you when you tell them how many children you have; they have been known to give visas to four out of five children in a family.

The man beside me says that he is a philosophy professor and teaches at a college in Atlanta. A white woman comes in, with short hair that sticks up on her head like brush bristles. She is the director of the visa section, the philosophy professor tells me. She holds a loudspeaker to her mouth: “Raise your hands if you are here to renew a student or a work visa! Raise your hands high! I can’t see! High!”

Her tone makes me feel as if I am in primary school again.

“Keep the hands up! O.K., down!” She is wearing a multicolored caftan — the sort of thing a foreigner will wear to look African but an African will never wear. A child has walked up to her and is holding onto the caftan, looking up at her and smiling. He wants to play.

“Get this kid off me! Get this kid off me!” she says. “Who has this child?” She shakes her caftan as if to shake the child off until his mother goes and picks him up. “He just likes you,” she tells the woman. The woman glares at us. “You think it’s funny? O.K., I won’t tell you what I wanted to tell you about the interview process. Go ahead and figure it out for yourselves.”

She turns and walks away. The room is immediately mired in worry. “We should not have laughed,” somebody says. “You know white people do not see things the way we do.”

“White people don’t play with children,” another says. “Somebody should beg her not to be angry.” “I hope they will still interview us.”

The philosophy professor is incensed. “Can you imagine her talking to people in America or Europe like this?” he says. “She wouldn’t dare.”

I nod. I am as angry as he is — because of the collective humiliation of being in this soulless lounge, but also because of how quickly my people have forgiven her unprofessional rudeness, her infantile tantrum.

I am acutely aware of the complex layers of injustice here. The first is the larger injustice of our history, the benignly brutal colonialism that spawned vile military regimes — events that made this scene possible. Then there is the injustice of this glaring power dynamic: our government cannot demand that we be treated with dignity within our own borders. And, saddest of all, the injustice that we perpetrate on ourselves by not giving ourselves value, by accepting it when other people strip us of our dignity.

When it is my turn, the young American who interviews me says that she grew up in Philadelphia, where I lived for a short time during college. She is friendly and warm. She tells me that my new visa will be ready the next day. Later, when I tell my friend about this woman, I am told how lucky I was to get one of the few good ones.

As I leave the building, I hear the philosophy professor yelling at a man behind a glass screen. “How can you say I am lying?” he asks. “Why don’t you call Atlanta and verify? How can you say I am lying?”

He has not been as lucky as I have been.

**

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of the novel “Purple Hibiscus.”

Posted at 12:44 PM · Comments (0)

LANGLE, China - There are two kinds of families in this village: the relatively rich, who live in tiled villas with air-conditioning, and those who still hunt in the wooded hills with bow and arrow and send their sons off to become Buddhist monks when there are too many mouths to feed.

Such distinctions once lay in questions like who tills their paddies by hand under the broad, open skies in this rice-growing region of southwestern China, and who owns a water buffalo to perform the backbreaking work. But more and more these days, relative prosperity is tied to which families have daughters, many of whom go to Thailand and Malaysia to work in brothels.

“If you don’t go to Thailand and you are a young woman here, what can you do,” said Ye Xiang, 20, whose features still had the pudgy look of a teenager’s. “You plant and you harvest. But in Thailand and Malaysia, I heard it was pretty easy to earn money, so I went.”

At least 20 other young women from this tiny hamlet, which clings to a hillside just off a side road near the Mekong River, have headed off to foreign lands to work in the sex trade. “All of the girls would like to go, but some have to take care of their parents,” Ms. Ye said.
Click to view photos

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As promised folks, I’ve posted the pictures from Dengfeng, in Henan Province, where we visited the Shaolin Temple. The boys loved it, getting a kick (ha ha) in particular from the demonstrations of the temple’s masters, hanging out with the abbot, who heads the temple, and visiting some of the many extraordinarily large kung fu schools that line the road leading to the temple.
The only downside was the weather. It was bitterly cold. The coldest, perhaps, that I’ve experienced in China, save for a trek over the Tianshan mountains, in March 2004 (Click to view photos). Henry NEVER gets cold, and yet complained of the chill at the temple. Billy joked that his feet were so numb he felt like he had been to the ‘foot dentist.’
With no further ado, I’ll point you to the Shaolin pictures. Click to view photos
I’ve got lots of work to do still on captions on many of my galleries, and indeed there will be new galleries coming in the next few days, of Berlin, Paris and Singaopore. When time allows, I am planning on scanning and posting lots of archival materials, as well, from Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.
Some words are in order about the horrible Tsunami that has struck much of Asia and East Africa.
Happy New Year.

Posted at 1:37 AM · Comments (0)

From the 12/31/04 issue of The New York Sun.

THELMA GOLDEN is the chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem.

My favorites this year are all focused on Africa, a current obsession. Howard French’s “A Continent for the Taking: the Tragedy and Hope of Africa” (Alfred A. Knopf, 304 pages, $25) is necessary reading for anyone interested in the continent and trying to make sense of the current complex political, social, and cultural environment. I also loved Chimomanda Ngozi Adiche’s novel “Purple Hibisucus” (Alfred A. Knopf, 320 pages, $13) and Chris Abani’s novel “Graceland” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 336 pages, $24).

Posted at 12:23 PM · Comments (0)

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