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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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2005

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Within days of the last Marine helicopter lifting off from the American Embassy in Saigon on April 30, one could see a new regional power balance taking shape.
It was a very different order from the one that the Kennedy administration had feared when it committed troops to Vietnam more than a decade earlier. Instead of triggering the fall of Southeast Asian dominoes into China’s lap, Vietnam was emerging as a barrier against the very influence that Washington had fought - Beijing’s.
A few days after watching North Vietnamese tanks crash through the gate of the presidential palace, I met a North Vietnamese colonel in a music store. Hoping to gauge the North’s political leanings, I had asked him if they read the Peking Review in Hanoi.
“Yes,” he said, nodding approvingly, “it’s very good paper, good to roll cigarettes.”
Nor did North Vietnamese troops entering Saigon show any affection for China. Mao portraits and flags hoisted in China town as a welcoming gesture to the Communists were swiftly ordered taken down.
The sound coming from the Chinese capital was not one of applause for Vietnamese comrades-in-arms. The People’s Daily headlined the threat from Soviet hegemonists, relegating the communist victory in South Vietnam to a secondary place.
This was the anticlimactic denouement of an American involvement in Vietnam that had been premised on stopping the Chinese.
Instead, as the North Vietnamese Army took control of Saigon, they made no attempt to interdict the evacuation, treating the U.S. helicopter evacuation as a temporary withdrawal. They refrained from raising their flags at the U.S. Embassy, sparing the United States the humiliation of its ignominious departure.
Meanwhile, in the north stood giant China, locked in a struggle with the Soviets and deeply suspicious of a pesky Vietnam that had fought repeatedly against Chinese attempts at domination. Thus, despite its success in driving out America, Vietnam continued to view the U.S. presence as a guarantee for its independence.
If there was ever any doubt about the wisdom of considering the Vietnamese as China’s puppets, it was removed four years later when China sent troops across the border to “teach Vietnam a lesson.” Deng Xiaoping had given advance warning of the “lesson” to President Jimmy Carter and received tacit American support for his actions.
Of course, by then, Vietnam, facing Chinese hostility and bloody border raids by Beijing’s ally, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, had signed a friendship treaty with the Soviet Union. Vietnam invited the Soviet Navy to Cam Ranh Bay, and, with Soviet aid, ousted the Khmer Rouge from power.
In another era or another context, the Vietnamese might have been applauded for bringing about regime change in Cambodia and liberating their neighbors from a genocidal nightmare. What instead followed the ouster of Pol Pot from Cambodia was nearly two decades of isolation and punishment of Vietnam. By July 1995, when the Americans finally returned to restore diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Asia’s geopolitical picture had again changed dramatically.
An economically vibrant and militarily resurgent China was well on its way to claiming leadership in Asia. Drawn together by the mutual need for a balanced situation in Asia, Hanoi and Washington had quietly begun taking baby steps in military cooperation.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld welcomed his Vietnamese counterpart Pham Van Tra to the Pentagon in 2003, when the two reached an agreement allowing U.S. Navy warships to call at Vietnamese ports. U.S.-Vietnam relations came full circle in November 2003, when - exactly 38 years after the first American marines landed in Danang - the U.S. frigate Vandegrift made a port call in Vietnam. It has since been followed by other warships.
A dispute over the positioning of the American and Vietnamese flags was resolved when the Vietnamese dropped their demand for the visiting ship to fly Vietnam’s red and gold flag above the Stars and Stripes. As the Vandegrift steamed into Saigon port, both flags flapped gently in the breeze, hanging side by side.
(Nayan Chanda, editor of YaleGlobal Online, covered the fall of Saigon for the Far Eastern Economic Review. He is the author of ”Brother Enemy: The War After the War.” )

Posted at 11:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2005

WASHINGTON One of America’s most important entrepreneurs recently gave a remarkable speech to a summit meeting of the nation’s governors. Bill Gates minced no words. “American high schools are obsolete,” he told the governors. “By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed and underfunded. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools - even when they are working exactly as designed - cannot teach our kids what they need to know today.
“Training the work force of tomorrow with the high school students of today is like trying to teach kids about today’s computers on a 50-year-old mainframe. Our high schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age. Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting - even ruining - the lives of millions of Americans every year.”
Let me translate Gates’s words: “If we don’t fix American education, I will not be able to hire your kids.” I consider that, well, kind of important. Alas, the media squeezed a few mentions of it between breaks in the Michael Jackson trial. But neither Tom DeLay nor Bill Frist called a late-night session of Congress - or even a daytime one - to discuss what Gates was saying. They were too busy pandering to those Americans who don’t even believe in evolution.
And the president stayed fixated on privatizing Social Security. It’s no wonder that the second Bush term is shaping up as “The Great Waste of Time.”
On foreign policy President George W. Bush has offered a big idea: the expansion of freedom, particularly in the Arab-Muslim world, where its absence was one of the forces propelling the Sept. 11 attacks. That is a big, bold and compelling idea - worthy of a presidency and America’s long-term interests.
But on the home front, this team has no big idea - certainly none that relates to the biggest challenge and opportunity facing Americans today: the flattening of the global economic playing field in a way that is allowing more people from more places to compete and collaborate with America’s kids than ever before.
“For the first time in our history, we are going to face competition from low-wage, high-human-capital communities, embedded within India, China and Asia,” President Lawrence Summers of Harvard told me. In order to thrive, “it will not be enough for us to just leave no child behind. We also have to make sure that many more young Americans can get as far ahead as their potential will take them. How we meet this challenge is what will define our nation’s political economy for the next several decades.”
Indeed, we Americans can’t rely on importing the talent we need anymore - not in a flat world where people can now innovate without having to emigrate. In Silicon Valley today, “B to B” and “B to C” stand for “back to Bangalore” and “back to China,” which is where a lot of America’s talent is moving.
Meeting this challenge requires a set of big ideas. If you want to grasp some of what is required, check out a smart new book by the strategists John Hagel 3rd and John Seely Brown entitled “The Only Sustainable Edge.” They argue that comparative advantage today is moving faster than ever from structural factors, like natural resources, to how quickly a country builds its distinctive talents for innovation and entrepreneurship - the only sustainable edge.
Economics is not like war. It can always be win-win. “But some win more than others,” Hagel said, and today it will be those countries that are best and fastest at building, attracting and holding talent.
There is a real sense of urgency in India and China about “catching up” in talent-building. America, by contrast, has become rather complacent. “People go to Shanghai or Bangalore and they look around and say, ‘They’re still way behind us,”’ Hagel said. “But it’s not just about current capabilities. It’s about the relative pace and trajectories of capability-building.
“You have to look at where Shanghai was just three years ago, see where it is today and then extrapolate forward. Compare the pace and trajectory of talent-building within their population and businesses and the pace and trajectory here.”
India and China know they can’t just depend on low wages, so they are racing Americans to the top, not the bottom. Producing a comprehensive U.S. response - encompassing immigration, intellectual property law and educational policy - to focus on developing American talent in a flat world is a big idea worthy of a presidency. But it would also require Bush to do something he has never done: Ask Americans to do something hard.

Posted at 10:57 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
SATURDAY, APRIL 30, 2005

NEW HAVEN, Connecticut Spring usually brings out lovers strolling through parks and students lounging on college quadrangles. In China and South Korea, however, spring has brought out demonstrators stoning Japanese restaurants and diplomatic missions and chanting “kill the Japanese.” The protests have even managed to overshadow the continuing North Korean nuclear crisis.
What’s going on? Is this simply a temporary blip or a preview of even greater conflict ahead? And why is Japan the target of both the Chinese and South Koreans?
The spring protests are releasing long-suppressed nationalist passions in East Asia. The region seems frozen in time, with 19th-century-style border disputes threatening peace and stability. Beyond the major problems of Korean reunification or the future of Taiwan, South Korea and Japan have all but thrown away the years they spent rebuilding relations because of a clump of useless rocks in the sea while Japan and China clash over the tiny Senkaku Islands close to Taiwan.
Such problems are almost insoluble, since each is linked to larger political and economic concerns. Japan cannot relinquish its claim to what it calls the Takeshima Islands, as demanded by South Korea, for fear that the Russians will use it as a pretext to end discussions over returning the Kurile Islands, as demanded by Japan. China, similarly, can allow no surrender of what it considers its territory, since that would give the Taiwanese, Tibetans and others a precedent for declaring independence. Moreover, the seas around these island outcroppings are rich in natural gas and fish stocks, and thus valuable in the larger competition for natural resources in Asia.
Beyond those issues, however, Chinese mobs claim that it is Japan’s efforts to get a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council that must be stopped, though why factory workers from Shanghai should care about that is a question few have stopped to ask. More understandable is Chinese and Korean outrage over Japanese school textbooks that both countries say whitewash Japanese atrocities during World War II. Yet if such textbooks, used by an insignificant fraction of Japanese schools, are enough to cause Chinese to assault Japanese exchange students, then the countries of East Asia indeed seem trapped by history.
The fundamental problem, however, is not the memories of World War II, bitter as they still are, but growing competition among the great powers of East Asia and the absence of a durable, indigenous security mechanism there. Because of this, there is neither trust nor a normal working relationship among these countries. No region-wide organization exists, as in Europe, to arbitrate disputes, build confidence or keep the peace. Conflicts are solved by ad hoc means. Only in the case of North Korea, whose nuclear weapons program potentially threatens every player in the region, has there been an effort to involve several nations in negotiations, though that, too, may have run its course.
That must change if East Asia’s leaders want to prevent the present from fettering the future of one-fifth of humanity. They must take the short-term risks of setting aside their passions and build a mechanism to give birth to a new era of cooperation. The alternative may be a flame that erupts into an uncontrollable conflagration.
(Michael Auslin, an assistant history professor at Yale University, is the author of ”Negotiating With Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy.”)

Posted at 10:55 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

When I say that I could live in airports, I’m not speaking metaphorically: a few years ago, I worked out that (like many FT readers, I’m sure) I spend 40 days a year either in an airport or an aircraft - in short, in the physical equivalent of jet lag, neither here nor there.

Extrapolated across a lifetime, this figure (of almost six weeks a year, more than 10 per cent of my existence) could come to eight or nine years in all, while my friends who work in consulting or international banking may spend as much as 11 or 12 years of their lives in mid-air. More time in anonymous passageways than in a single home often and yet we never stop to think of it until, perhaps, it is time to make a summation of our lives.

It was this sense of a whole life spent in transit that moved me once to go and spend two weeks in and around Los Angeles airport, taking it as a model of this new form of lifestyle, and an exemplum of the modern world, in which people live in between destinations, not so much in one culture or another as in the cracks between them.

Sometimes, just to get my work done, I’ve had to fly from Damascus to London to New York to Los Angeles to Kyoto in a week; and many times, when I’ve headed off to somewhere I think of as exotic - North Korea, say, or Bhutan or Easter Island - I’ll notice that the marvels and incongruities I experience en route are just as startling as anything I’ll see at the other end.

Flux has become a country in itself, I often think, and yet, unlike most other countries, it remains uncharted, neglected by the history books, and with no guidebooks yet to explain

its curious customs and sights.

I think this intuition of mine - that travel might become not just a means but an end in itself - must have begun soon after I was born in Oxford, to parents from India, and we moved to California - I rejoicing in the fact that I belonged to none of these places but could claim some native acquaintance with them all.

By the age of nine, I had begun, in the classic imperial fashion (though a vicarious subject of Empire myself) to go to school (in England) by aircraft.

Home in California, where my parents lived, was formalised, somewhat foreign and curtained; school was the realm of the barbarians, overseen by some feudal chieftain. The aircraft, the airport - the fact of being in the passages between the fixed points, under the legislation of no government, waited on by solicitous cabin attendants and offered films and Cokes and furtive glimpses of Raquel Welch a few rows ahead of me - began to seem the place to be.

It’s common to think of travel, nowadays, as an alternative life and whole parallel universe, a complete Fourth World with its own holy scriptures (the Lonely Planet guidebooks), its own soundtrack (the Lionel Richie and Eric Clapton tunes that are the mainstay of every third world bar), its own odd constituency (bangled Danes and young Israelis who’ve just been released from their country’s armed forces).

There are some who travel in a spirit of flight, or pilgrimage, acutely aware of what they’re leaving behind or what they’re permanently moving towards - fugitives, perhaps, who call themselves seekers; but there are many of us who travel just by habit. It’s the only home we know.

For us - for me, at least - it’s domesticity that is the foreign country where we don’t entirely trust the natives. It’s the notion of community that’s alien, and stasis that seems a nice word for paralysis. If I stay more than three months in any country, I start to feel unsettled (or prompted to seek out unsettledness of a more fruitful kind); it’s not that I have an itch to stir or cabin-fever, it’s just that I feel I’m betraying something in myself and have gone over to the other side. I therefore have made travel the portable home I take everywhere I go. I have been largely based in Japan for 12 years now, but live there on a tourist visa. As soon as I finished my A-levels, I took off for the summer to see the India that was technically my motherland but remains terra incognita to me even now.

After returning for a final term at school, I hived myself off to a Mexican restaurant in California, where I used my chameleon complexion to serve as a sub-waiter, courteously pouring hot sauce into customers’ laps and distributing glasses of water over their freshly made tacos. With the money I earned from this, I got on a bus in Tijuana and travelled through Central America and then Colombia, Educador, Peru and Bolivia before flying up the eastern coast of South America, through Rio, Salvador and Surinam, and hopping through Trinidad and Barbados back to Miami, where I got a bus home to California. By the time I arrived at college, therefore, I knew my only education would come on the road. Pan Am was my Harvard, to paraphrase Melville, poet laureate of mad explorers, and BOAC (as it was then) my Yale.

I went to get a post-graduate degree in literature, and spent much of my time at the university writing guidebooks to Italy, Greece, Britain and France. I finally got myself a job in New York and promptly took off on a holiday in Burma and Thailand. And then another holiday to Bali. And then another in India, finally acknowledging that my rewards would have to be internal ones and I would have to trade the security of a steady job for the familiarity of an unsteady life. Ever since, I’ve switched passports as if they were credit cards. As I draw close to 50, I’ve never owned a home.

The currency in which I earn my living really does at times seem to be frequent flier miles, and I horrify friends by saying that my ideal domestic environment is a hotel (I write this in a small guest-house in the foothills of the Himalayas, where I’ve been staying for six weeks). It is not that I necessarily think travel is better than fixity, only that it is better for me. Staying in one place would be a form of maximum security prison in which I would be no use to society or myself.

If you are living a life of constant movement, the one thing you most need is stillness. Stillness is something deeper than mere settledness, and something physically and metaphysically different from staying put: the Dalai Lama travels constantly round the world but what he carries to people everywhere is, to some degree, the focus and gravitas of his stillness.

Four times every year, I go for weeks at a time to a Catholic hermitage where (though no Catholic) I seldom leave my little cell and look out on an ocean that never moves. For much of the rest of the year I choose to base myself in a two-room flat in rural Japan where I have no car, no bicycle, no internet, no TV: I move only as far as my legs will take me. Travel that leads to travel would lead only to a different kind of fixity of routine.

And yet, in my places of stillness, what I am doing, as much as anything, is preparing myself for movement: as an archer does when pulling back his bow. As a boy I used to think myself unusual in going to school by aircraft. Now - though such frequent movement is of course still the province of only a minority (and of the 100m exiles who never sought to leave their homes, for whom displacement is a misery) - I see movement slowly becoming a greater part of almost every life.

The still life of my grandparents’ age has fractured into the MTV fragmentation of our own. This brings with it discordance, anarchy and confusion (jet lag, you could say, accentuated by culture shock and altitude sickness). It also brings with it possibility. Cyberspace has given us a new way to think of distance and geography, and movement for me has become one of the languages it is wise to speak because the very notion of home, community and self is being reformed.

Learning fluency in movement - the new nation I inhabit - I look around and find that I am in a country that constantly expands and is already more dynamic and more populous than most of the fixed states of the world.

Pico Iyer is the author of ‘Sun After Dark’ (Bloomsbury/Knopf), ‘The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home’ and ‘Falling off the Map: Some Lonely Places of the World’

*Pico Iyer’s most recent book of travels, ( published by Bloomsbury in the UK/Knopf in the US), is SUN AFTER DARK: Flights into The Foreign. He is also the author of The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls and the Search for Home and Falling off The Map: Some Lonely Places of the World

Posted at 1:17 PM · Comments (0)

Posted April 25, 2005

This review appeared in the Spring 2005 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.
——-

For Russia, the last century was one bitter cruelty after another—the Tsar, war, revolution, famine, Stalin, war, Communism. Her people lived under totalitarianism for seven decades, longer than any one else. Something happens to a society under the total state. In time, fear, lies, denunciation, and arrest fray the bonds that hold a healthy society together. In Russia’s case, these strains have left it much like an ocean: cold, vast, and swarming with strange creatures.

James Billington’s Russia in Search of Itself is a wise reflection on Russia’s destiny by a lifelong student. It has a somewhat uneven feel, as if it were written first as a series of essays. But Billington, who has served as the Librarian of Congress since 1987, is an eminent authority, and the insights found in his book transcend its faults.

Billington catalogues Russia’s quest for the National Idea. “No nation,” he says, “ever poured more intellectual energy into answering the question of national identity than Russia.” Nor has the search ever been more urgent; an answer could mean salvation. But Russia’s pursuit is schizophrenic. Its lost empires have spread both pious Orthodoxy and militant atheism. Since the Middle Ages, it has been divided into serfs and masters with little in between. And in the 1830s, it was divided again by the contest between Westernizers and Slavophiles—Turgenev looked West, Tolstoy East. The Soviets officially put that question on hold, but if you want to spark a dinner-table debate, ask Russians whether they belong to Asia or Europe.

Throughout her history, Russia’s misfortune has been to watch mounting discord reach a breaking point, and then snap violently in one direction or the other. Billington observes that each time Russia has reconstituted itself—in 1861, with Alexander II’s abolition of serfdom; in 1917, with the Bolshevik’s seizure of the state; and in 1991, with the USSR’s dissolution—it has been swift, unexpected, and a self-declared break with the past.

Russia prides herself on a long and celebrated cultural tradition, but some of it is borrowed. Her early art and religion, for example, were appropriated from Byzantium. (In 988 C.E., Prince Vladimir I converted Russia to Orthodoxy; legend says he considered Islam, but it had a fatal shortcoming: no alcohol.) Peter the Great modeled his state on Sweden, his Baltic rival. During the Silver Age, Russia’s nobility spoke French, bought Italian art, and, “most fatefully of all,” says Billington, thought in German. And when Tsars Alexander III and Nicholas II pushed Russia into the Industrial Revolution, their beau ideal was Germany, with whom they would war twice in the next 60 years.

Finally in 1991, Russia announced that it would adopt the markets and democracy of her Cold War adversary. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out as many hoped. Privatization became a giant swindle in which well-positioned bureaucrats divvied up amongst themselves the vast Soviet carcass. Russians would vote, but active and participatory civic associations would never develop. Within a matter of years, power and wealth were once again highly concentrated. Former Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin remarked, in superlative Russian fashion, “We wanted it to go better, but it turned out as always.”

Since 1991, failure and uncertainty have opened the floodgates to a number of strange ideologies. Billington focuses on the most influential and dangerous school, the “Eurasianists,” who combine nationalism with a foundation myth that places Russia back at the center of history. They intend to raise Russia from its knees so that it can once more face down the West. Billington calls them the “troubadours of autocracy.”

A.S. Panarin of the Russian Academy of Sciences, for example, calls for a “United States of Eurasia,” in which Orthodox Christianity and Islam would form a popular front against Western secularism and individualism. Activist Alexander Dugin dreams of an anti-Atlantic axis of Berlin, Tokyo, and Tehran, each led by “charismatic theocrats.” Politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky threatens to restore Alaska to Russia and spread radioactive waste across Germany. (One of his campaign slogans was “A man for every woman and a cheap bottle of vodka for every man.”) This January, he called on the Russian government to ban Jewish organizations, which, he explained, amount to “nothing less than Satanism.”

Eurasianism is an eccentric and bigoted movement, but Billington insists on taking it seriously. Most Westerners, however, dismiss the clownish Zhirinovsky. This would be a lot easier if he did not command Russia’s third-largest party, which doubled its vote in the December 2003 elections. Dugin, for his part, directs Russia’s burgeoning nationalist movement. Eurasianism boasts of disciples in the highest echelons of the Russian military and security services. The question of Russia is really the question of how authoritarian it will become.

Fascism has once again invaded Russia, this time without the aid of an army. It seems inconceivable in the land that lost 20 million of its own to Nazism, yet walls in Moscow are defiled with swastikas. Skinheads carry out hundreds of attacks annually against minorities—one Moscow rights-group estimates skinhead ranks at 50,000—and the number of attacks rises by a third every year. Meanwhile, in Russia’s parliament, a thriving Red-Brown alliance unites those nostalgic for departed glory and order. Marxist theory was always an overlay, but nationalism is not. According to Billington, the appeal of the new xenophobia has yet to peak.

Russians once ruled half the world, and now their decrepit military watches as its nuclear submarines sink and its helicopters crash. Former “brotherly nations” like Poland and Lithuania are isolating Russia by joining the E.U. President Bush promises Ukraine entry into NATO should it stay on the democratic course, a prospect which appears to Russians the way Russia’s stationing troops in Canada would appear to us. It’s hardly just nationalists who are frustrated by a West that classifies them as a “developing” nation alongside former client states, and that allows Mongolia into the World Trade Organization, but not them.

* * *

In a 1996 poll of political attitudes commissioned by Boris Yeltsin, three categories ended in a tie: democrats, Communist revanchists, and apoliticals. But one category beat them all: nihilists. Historically, Russia is the only country in which nihilism became an actual popular movement, and now, 150 years later, it has returned: Russian ballots feature the option “Against all.” In a March presidential poll, it placed second.

Russia in Search of Itself argues that most Russians understand success as the product of either good luck or immorality. Eighty-four percent believe themselves unable to influence decision-making. Consider that the term parliament comes from the Old French parlez, to talk. The word for Russia’s legislative body, on the other hand, the Duma, comes from dumat, to think: The politician’s job is to think for the people, and the people’s job is to accept it.

Billington worries that demagoguery will advance, not because of popular support, but because of popular indifference. Could a worrying New York Times headline, “Mounting Discontent in Russia Spills Into the Streets,” thus represent progress? Perhaps the spirit that moved hundreds of thousands of orange-clad Ukrainians to contest their December elections will make its way to Russia. Street protests might be the closest thing Russia has to an opposition.

For centuries, a Kremlin oligarchy, whether comprising Muscovite and Kievan princes, the Romanov court, or the General-Secretary’s Politburo, has governed Russia. But this seems to have finally given way to a rough and imperfect liberty. This does not mean, of course, that thousand-year-old traditions disappear overnight, or for that matter, over a decade of nights. The tiny parasitic elite is back, this time in the form of the superrich “new Russians,” and the siloviki, the super-bureaucrats. These groups, as Billington notes, are the chief obstacles to democratic change.

If you wish to understand the nature of arbitrary power in Russia, look no further than a little flashing blue light, the migalka. Available to elites with cash and connections, it confers on its owner the right to disregard any and all traffic laws. I’ve seen migalka-equipped Mercedes 600s and Land Rovers drive on sidewalks and fly through red lights at busy intersections.

During the Yeltsin era, a handful of “oligarchs” built financial-industrial clans that came to control nearly half the Russian GDP. Such a concentration of wealth, especially in the absence of reliable legal and financial institutions, distorts the growth of markets. Some estimate that this thievery has created a gap between rich and poor wider than the one that preceded the Revolution. By most indicators, Russia is now a Third World country, yet it is second only to the U.S. in its number of billionaires.

With the end of the Cold War, Russia lost half its industrial output. Each year, Russia’s population declines by a stunning one million people. At this rate, by 2050 its population will have shrunk by a third. Male life expectancy is 58 and falling (it’s 75 in the U.S.). One cause, according to a parliamentary report, is “stress generated by people’s lack of confidence in their futures and those of their children.” Another is alcoholism. The suicide rate between 1995 and 2000 was quadruple that of Europe. A sodden, depressed Russia can only be further eclipsed on the international stage.

President Vladimir Putin is working to reverse this. In his mind, a good number of Russia’s problems—poverty, terrorism, mafiosi, Chechnya—are the result of a weak and semi-dismantled state, and so he has set about rebuilding it. His soft authoritarianism, coupled with various tax, legal, and benefit reforms, has contributed to economic growth averaging 6.5% per year since 1998—though Russia’s economy is still only slightly larger than that of Los Angeles County. Putin has also taught the country’s most powerful men that they are nothing compared to his state. But if Russia is to democratize, the state cannot always win.

* * *

Everyone knows that the historic Iraqi elections in January were a breakthrough. Fewer know that the first constitutional transfer of power in Russian history took place only in 2000, when Putin succeeded Yeltsin. Though Russia’s democracy is in its adolescence, with all the immaturity and hesitancy typical of that difficult age, we often judge it by European standards. Russia is again trying to import institutions without the traditions that uphold them.

Remarkably, Russians see America as a country much like their own—large and multiethnic, unfurled across a continent. They also see the society—creative, open, tolerant, rich, and free—they wish for themselves. This gives Billington hope. But a fair prediction is that Russia’s fate is unpredictable. In the course of the last century, Russia made an unlikely metamorphosis from the bastion of reactionary monarchism, to the exporter of world revolution, to a struggling, dysfunctional democracy.

But one thing is certain. Russia possesses one-third of the world’s natural gas, 7% of its oil, one-fifth of its precious metals, endless forest and farmland, ports on seven seas, the world’s second-largest nuclear stockpile, and 140 million patient and educated citizens—all spread across eleven time zones. This means that no matter how stormy its progress, Russia will matter. Like the ocean, the strength of a nation is a matter of ebb and flow.

Posted at 4:43 PM · Comments (0)

Monday, Apr. 25, 2005 - Copyright Time
…But he isn’t through talking about racism, black actors — and why he doesn’t read Shakespeare

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August Wilson’s mom, a cleaning woman trying to raise four kids in the Pittsburgh slums, won a radio contest once. She named the product that went with the ad slogan “When it rains, it pours” (Morton salt), and the prize was a new Speed Queen washing machine. When the station found out she was black, Wilson recounts, his mother was offered instead a certificate for a used washing machine from the Salvation Army. Friends told her to take it anyway; it was better than the old washboard she was using to scrub her kids’ clothes. But she refused. “Something,” she said, “is not always better than nothing.”

Like many of the tales in August Wilson’s plays, this one reverberates across generations. Years later, Paramount was trying to make a movie out of Wilson’s play Fences, and Barry Levinson was interested in directing. Wilson thought of his mother when he nixed the idea, insisting that the play—about a former Negro League baseball player struggling to support a family in 1957—must be directed by an African American: “Man, I’m thinking, ‘Something is not always better than nothing.’ She influenced me in ways like that.”

Fences never did get made into a movie (though Wilson has written a new script, and producer Scott Rudin is trying to bring it to the screen). But that kind of principled pigheadedness seems perfectly in character for a man who has spent two decades of his creative life on a single mission: a cycle of 10 linked plays, each representing one decade in the black experience in 20th century America. The plays have received wide critical acclaim, Broadway runs, two Pulitzer Prizes (for Fences and The Piano Lesson) and upwards of 2,000 productions in regional theaters across the country. And now, finally, they are complete: the 10th play, Radio Golf, will open this week at the Yale Repertory Theater in New Haven, Conn. Wilson, an inveterate rewriter, will keep fine-tuning the play as it moves in August to the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and later, presumably, to Broadway. And then we can truly take the measure of one of American theater’s monumental achievements—and an artist who, in creating something where there was almost nothing, realized that for a project this big and this close to your soul, you have to invest everything.

Wilson’s plays already stand apart from virtually anything else in contemporary theater. The overarching subject of his epic is the legacy of slavery, yet the plays teem with vibrant, idiosyncratic, fully imagined characters who are never reduced to political placards. The plays are realistic, even old-fashioned, in style but sprinkled with mysticism and magic: ghosts, visions, seers and a matriarchal figure named Aunt Ester, who recurs throughout the series and lives to the age of 366. With their poetic, often meandering dialogue, the plays typically start slow (anyone who says his eyes have never drooped in the first act of an August Wilson play probably isn’t being honest), but build to thrilling, sometimes violent, often otherworldly, climaxes. And although the last one, Gem of the Ocean, almost didn’t make it to Broadway (after an investor pulled out, producer Carol Shorenstein Hays, who had backed Fences, put in $1 million to save it), they have drawn black theatergoers in droves to a street that is still known, without irony, as the Great White Way.

Radio Golf brings the cycle into the 1990s. It is set in an inner-city redevelopment office, where two black businessmen (one of them running for mayor) are seeking to clear space for a new commercial development. There are purposeful echoes of earlier plays: descendants of two characters from Gem of the Ocean (set in 1904) are on hand, as is a character from Wilson’s 1960s play Two Trains Running; and Aunt Ester’s home is the last one marked for demolition. The social message is more overt than most in Wilson’s canon: the play is about the “failure of the black middle class,” he says, “who failed to return their expertise, participation and resources back to the community.” Yet the last chapter of this 10-part journey full of tears and tragedy ends with an affirmation, a hopeful sign for the future. “We got to be united and come together,” says Wilson, “before we can proceed on, into the 21st century.”

Wilson, who turns 60 this week, is sitting in an outdoor café on the Yale campus. A polite, doughy-faced man, he likes the outdoors because it allows him to puff on his Marlboro Lights, but on this unusually hot spring afternoon, he looks a bit formal and out of place in coat, tie and newsboy cap. He grew up in Pittsburgh’s predominantly black Hill District, dropped out of school in the ninth grade and set out to educate himself by devouring books in the library. One of the first was anthropologist Ruth Benedict’s Patterns of Culture. “In my plays I sort of work as an anthropologist,” he says, “finding those parts of culture, habits and whatnot that embody these people.” He soaked up the life of his neighborhood, even dropping in on funerals of people he didn’t know just to get a sense of the generations that came before—until one day a woman came up and asked, “Did you know my father?”

He started writing poetry, then poetic plays, and then (after moving to St. Paul, Minn., where his work was first staged at the Penumbra Theater Company) developed a realistic style laced with melodious dialogue inspired by the early blues songs he loved. He was influenced by the work of playwright Ed Bullins—who showed him that “you could put black folks on stage as black folks”—but was pretty much a theatrical naif. He hadn’t read Shakespeare (except for The Merchant of Venice in school) or Tennessee Williams or virtually any of the other modern American classics. There was some calculation there. When he started writing poetry, Wilson immersed himself in poets like Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell and Dylan Thomas—and “as a result, it took me from 1965 to 1973 to find my own voice.” In his plays, by contrast, “I was free to find my own way.” Says Marion McClinton, who has directed several of Wilson’s plays, including Jitney and King Hedley II: “He pulled his whole artistic style and breath and soul from who [black people] were. He wasn’t writing to get validation from the dominant cultural forces in this country. He didn’t care about that.”

Wilson has caught up on his reading a bit since then; he is a fan of Chekhov and has seen a few more (but only a few) Shakespeare plays. He goes to movies rarely and says that for 11 straight years, starting in 1980, he didn’t see a single one. (The last film he saw before he quit was Raging Bull, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro; the first one when he came back was Scorsese and De Niro’s Cape Fear, so he figured he hadn’t missed much.) He avoids the media spotlight, living in Seattle with his third wife, a costume designer, and their seven-year-old daughter. He moved there in 1990, after his second divorce, because he liked the quiet.

He remains a passionate, often politically incorrect, advocate for the black community. In 1996 he caused a ruckus with a speech in which he called for a separate African-American theater, castigated black playwrights and directors for participating in an “art that is conceived and designed to entertain white society” and decried the increasingly fashionable practice of “color-blind casting”—i.e., blacks playing traditionally white roles. The outcry was fierce; the drama critic Robert Brustein, in a blistering rebuttal in the New Republic, disparaged Wilson’s plays and denounced his words as the “language of self-segregation.”

Wilson’s views haven’t changed. The plight of black theater, he says, is even worse today, while color-blind casting has exploded—Denzel Washington in Julius Caesar and James Earl Jones in On Golden Pond on Broadway this spring alone. “If I see a production of Gem of the Ocean with a white cast, maybe I’ll change my mind. But Death of a Salesman with a black cast—that’s not the way blacks respond to this problem. It’s a white play. It’s intended to be.” He realizes that is not a popular view among African Americans in the theater. “I understand the rules of war too. The actors go, ‘There ain’t no work.’ That’s your fault. Start some theaters.”

Asked about the black political movement today, he responds, “What movement?” Black leaders? “We have Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, but it does not mean anything to black America, which is still under assault from the social practices of this society.” Bill Cosby’s criticisms of black parenting? “A billionaire attacking poor people for being poor. Bill Cosby is a clown. What do you expect? I thought it was unfair of him.” His modest, soft-spoken manner belies what is obviously a deep sense of grievance. He describes sitting down at a counter not long ago and watching a white man next to him snatch $2 off the table. “He thinks I’m going to steal his $2. That’s reality; that’s the world I live in.”

Now that he’s finishing up his 20th century cycle, Wilson can finally get to some projects he’s been putting off for years. He has finished 80 pages of a novel, and he wants to write a comedy, about a strike of coffin makers, featuring cameo appearances by Queen Victoria, Benny Goodman and the Platters. It’s a far cry from tortured Wilson characters like Herald Loomis, the itinerant searching for his wife after spending seven years in bondage in Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Wilson’s favorite among his works. But the closing line of that play might just as well apply to a playwright ready for the next leg of his remarkable career: “You shining like new money!” —With reporting by Kate Novack/New York City

Posted at 4:36 PM · Comments (0)

Editor’s note: Unnecessarily provocative title aside, this makes for very interesting reading. For the complete article, please see the Atlantic URL at the bottom.

Copyright The Atlantic Monthly | June 2005

The Middle East is just a blip. The American military contest with China in the Pacific will define the twenty-first century. And China will be a more formidable adversary than Russia ever was…

…In any naval encounter China will have distinct advantages over the United States, even if it lags in technological military prowess. It has the benefit, for one thing, of sheer proximity. Its military is an avid student of the competition, and a fast learner. It has growing increments of “soft” power that demonstrate a particular gift for adaptation. While stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones. All over the globe, in such disparate places as the troubled Pacific Island states of Oceania, the Panama Canal zone, and out-of-the-way African nations, the Chinese are becoming masters of indirect influence—by establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts, by negotiating construction and trade agreements. Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America’s liberal imperium.

How should the United States prepare to respond to challenges in the Pacific? To understand the dynamics of this second Cold War—which will link China and the United States in a future that may stretch over several generations—it is essential to understand certain things about the first Cold War, and about the current predicament of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the institution set up to fight that conflict. This is a story about military strategy and tactics, with some counterintuitive twists and turns.

From Atlantic Unbound:

Flashbacks: “Cold War, Part II?” (February 1997)
Atlantic articles discuss the history and possible future of NATO

The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes. During the fighting in Kosovo in 1999 (a limited air campaign against a toothless enemy during a time of Euro-American harmony; a campaign, in other words, that should have been easy to prosecute) dramatic fissures appeared in the then-nineteen-member NATO alliance. The organization’s end effectively came with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, in the aftermath of which, despite talk of a broad-based coalition, European militaries have usually done little more than patrol and move into areas already pacified by U.S. soldiers and Marines—a job more suggestive of the United Nations. NATO today is a medium for the expansion of bilateral training missions between the United States and formerly communist countries and republics: the Marines in Bulgaria and Romania, the Navy in Albania, the Army in Poland and the Czech Republic, Special Operations Forces in Georgia—the list goes on and on. Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military.

The second thing to understand is that the functional substitute for a NATO of the Pacific already exists, and is indeed up and running. It is the U.S. Pacific Command, known as PACOM. Unencumbered by a diplomatic bureaucracy, PACOM is a large but nimble construct, and its leaders understand what many in the media and the policy community do not: that the center of gravity of American strategic concern is already the Pacific, not the Middle East. PACOM will soon be a household name, as CENTCOM (the U.S. Central Command) has been in the current epoch of Middle Eastern conflict—an epoch that will start to wind down, as far as the U.S. military is concerned, during the second Bush administration.

The third thing to understand is that, ironically, the vitality of NATO itself, the Atlantic alliance, could be revived by the Cold War in the Pacific—and indeed the re-emergence of NATO as an indispensable war-fighting instrument should be America’s unswerving aim. In its posture toward China the United States will look to Europe and NATO, whose help it will need as a strategic counterweight and, by the way, as a force to patrol seas more distant than the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. That is why NATO’s current commander, Marine General James L. Jones, emphasizes that NATO’s future lies in amphibious, expeditionary warfare…

…In the Pacific, however, a Bismarckian arrangement still prospers, helped along by the pragmatism of our Hawaii-based military officers, five time zones removed from the ideological hothouse of Washington, D.C. In fact, PACOM represents a much purer version of Bismarck’s imperial superstructure than anything the Bush administration created prior to invading Iraq. As Henry Kissinger writes in Diplomacy (1994), Bismarck forged alliances in all directions from a point of seeming isolation, without the constraints of ideology. He brought peace and prosperity to Central Europe by recognizing that when power relationships are correctly calibrated, wars tend to be avoided.

Only a similarly pragmatic approach will allow us to accommodate China’s inevitable re-emergence as a great power. The alternative will be to turn the earth of the twenty-first century into a battlefield. Whenever great powers have emerged or re-emerged on the scene (Germany and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century, to cite two recent examples), they have tended to be particularly assertive—and therefore have thrown international affairs into violent turmoil. China will be no exception. Today the Chinese are investing in both diesel-powered and nuclear-powered submarines—a clear signal that they intend not only to protect their coastal shelves but also to expand their sphere of influence far out into the Pacific and beyond.

This is wholly legitimate. China’s rulers may not be democrats in the literal sense, but they are seeking a liberated First World lifestyle for many of their 1.3 billion people—and doing so requires that they safeguard sea-lanes for the transport of energy resources from the Middle East and elsewhere. Naturally, they do not trust the United States and India to do this for them. Given the stakes, and given what history teaches us about the conflicts that emerge when great powers all pursue legitimate interests, the result is likely to be the defining military conflict of the twenty-first century: if not a big war with China, then a series of Cold War—style standoffs that stretch out over years and decades. And this will occur mostly within PACOM’s area of responsibility…

…The relative shift in focus from the Middle East to the Pacific in coming years—idealistic rhetoric notwithstanding—will force the next American president, no matter what his or her party, to adopt a foreign policy similar to those of moderate Republican presidents such as George H. W. Bush, Gerald Ford, and Richard Nixon. The management of risk will become a governing ideology. Even if Iraq turns out to be a democratic success story, it will surely be a from-the-jaws-of-failure success that no one in the military or the diplomatic establishment will ever want to repeat—especially in Asia, where the economic repercussions of a messy military adventure would be enormous. “Getting into a war with China is easy,” says Michael Vickers, a former Green Beret who developed the weapons strategy for the Afghan resistance in the 1980s as a CIA officer and is now at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, in Washington. “You can see many scenarios, not just Taiwan—especially as the Chinese develop a submarine and missile capability throughout the Pacific. But the dilemma is, How do you end a war with China?”

Like the nations involved in World War I, and unlike the rogue states everyone has been concentrating on, the United States and China in the twenty-first century would have the capacity to keep fighting even if one or the other lost a big battle or a missile exchange. This has far-reaching implications. “Ending a war with China,” Vickers says, “may mean effecting some form of regime change, because we don’t want to leave some wounded, angry regime in place.” Another analyst, this one inside the Pentagon, told me, “Ending a war with China will force us to substantially reduce their military capacity, thus threatening their energy sources and the Communist Party’s grip on power. The world will not be the same afterward. It’s a very dangerous road to travel on.”…

…Whatever we say or do, China will spend more and more money on its military in the coming decades. Our only realistic goal may be to encourage it to make investments that are defensive, not offensive, in nature. Our efforts will require particular care, because China, unlike the Soviet Union of old (or Russia today, for that matter), boasts soft as well as hard power. Businesspeople love the idea of China; you don’t have to beg them to invest there, as you do in Africa and so many other places. China’s mixture of traditional authoritarianism and market economics has broad cultural appeal throughout Asia and other parts of the world. And because China is improving the material well-being of hundreds of millions of its citizens, the plight of its dissidents does not have quite the same market allure as did the plight of the Soviet Union’s Sakharovs and Sharanskys. Democracy is attractive in places where tyranny has been obvious, odious, and unsuccessful, of course, as in Ukraine and Zimbabwe. But the world is full of gray areas—Jordan and Malaysia, for example—where elements of tyranny have ensured stability and growth…

…At the moment the challenges posed by a rising China may seem slight, even nonexistent. The U.S. Navy’s warships have a collective “full-load displacement” of 2.86 million tons; the rest of the world’s warships combined add up to only 3.04 million tons. The Chinese navy’s warships have a full-load displacement of only 263,064 tons. The United States deploys twenty-four of the world’s thirty-four aircraft carriers; the Chinese deploy none (a principal reason why they couldn’t mount a rescue effort after the tsunami). The statistics go on. But as Robert Work, a senior analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, points out, at the start of the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War, Athens had a great advantage over Sparta, which had no navy—but Sparta eventually emerged the victor.

China has committed itself to significant military spending, but its navy and air force will not be able to match ours for some decades. The Chinese are therefore not going to do us the favor of engaging in conventional air and naval battles, like those fought in the Pacific during World War II. The Battle of the Philippine Sea, in late June of 1944, and the Battle of Leyte Gulf and the Surigao Strait, in October of 1944, were the last great sea battles in American history, and are very likely to remain so. Instead the Chinese will approach us asymmetrically, as terrorists do. In Iraq the insurgents have shown us the low end of asymmetry, with car bombs. But the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art. That is the threat.

There are many ways in which the Chinese could use their less advanced military to achieve a sort of political-strategic parity with us. According to one former submarine commander and naval strategist I talked to, the Chinese have been poring over every detail of our recent wars in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf, and they fully understand just how much our military power depends on naval projection—that is, on the ability of a carrier battle group to get within proximity of, say, Iraq, and fire a missile at a target deep inside the country. To adapt, the Chinese are putting their fiber-optic systems underground and moving defense capabilities deep into western China, out of naval missile range—all the while developing an offensive strategy based on missiles designed to be capable of striking that supreme icon of American wealth and power, the aircraft carrier. The effect of a single Chinese cruise missile’s hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda’s attacks on the Twin Towers. China is focusing on missiles and submarines as a way to humiliate us in specific encounters. Their long-range-missile program should deeply concern U.S. policymakers…

…What should be our military response to such developments? We need to go more unconventional. Our present Navy is mainly a “blue-water” force, responsible for the peacetime management of vast oceanic spaces—no small feat, and one that enables much of the world’s free trade. The phenomenon of globalization could not occur without American ships and sailors. But increasingly what we will need is, in essence, three separate navies: one designed to maintain our ability to use the sea as a platform for offshore bombing (to support operations like the ones in Iraq and Afghanistan); one designed for littoral Special Operations combat (against terrorist groups based in and around Indonesia, Malaysia, and the southern Philippines, for example); and one designed to enhance our stealth capabilities (for patrolling the Chinese mainland and the Taiwan Strait, among other regions). All three of these navies will have a role in deflecting China, directly and indirectly, given the variety of dysfunctional Pacific Island republics that are strengthening their ties with Beijing…

…Andersen Air Force Base, on Guam’s northern tip, represents the future of U.S. strategy in the Pacific. It is the most potent platform anywhere in the world for the projection of American military power. Landing there recently in a military aircraft, I beheld long lines of B-52 bombers, C-17 Globemasters, F/A-18 Hornets, and E-2 Hawkeye surveillance planes, among others. Andersen’s 10,000-foot runways can handle any plane in the Air Force’s arsenal, and could accommodate the space shuttle should it need to make an emergency landing. The sprawl of runways and taxiways is so vast that when I arrived, I barely noticed a carrier air wing from the USS Kitty Hawk, which was making live practice bombing runs that it could not make from its home port in Japan. I saw a truck filled with cruise missiles on one of the runways. No other Air Force base in the Pacific stores as much weaponry as Andersen: some 100,000 bombs and missiles at any one time. Andersen also stores 66 million gallons of jet fuel, making it the Air Force’s biggest strategic gas-and-go in the world.

Guam, which is also home to a submarine squadron and an expanding naval base, is significant because of its location. From the island an Air Force equivalent of a Marine or Army division can cover almost all of PACOM’s area of responsibility. Flying to North Korea from the West Coast of the United States takes thirteen hours; from Guam it takes four.

“This is not like Okinawa,” Major General Dennis Larsen, the Air Force commander there at the time of my visit, told me. “This is American soil in the midst of the Pacific. Guam is a U.S. territory.” The United States can do anything it wants here, and make huge investments without fear of being thrown out. Indeed, what struck me about Andersen was how great the space was for expansion to the south and west of the current perimeters. Hundreds of millions of dollars of construction funds were being allocated. This little island, close to China, has the potential to become the hub in the wheel of a new, worldwide constellation of bases that will move the locus of U.S. power from Europe to Asia. In the event of a conflict with Taiwan, if we had a carrier battle group at Guam we would force the Chinese either to attack it in port—thereby launching an assault on sovereign U.S. territory, and instantly becoming the aggressor in the eyes of the world—or to let it sail, in which case the carrier group could arrive off the coast of Taiwan only two days later…

…I have visited a number of CSLs in East Africa and Asia. Here is how they work. The United States provides aid to upgrade maintenance facilities, thereby helping the host country to better project its own air and naval power in the region. At the same time, we hold periodic exercises with the host country’s military, in which the base is a focus. We also offer humanitarian help to the surrounding area. Such civil-affairs projects garner positive publicity for our military in the local media—and they long preceded the response to the tsunami, which marked the first time that many in the world media paid attention to the humanitarian work done all over the world, all the time, by the U.S. military. The result is a positive diplomatic context for getting the host country’s approval for use of the base when and if we need it.

Often the key role in managing a CSL is played by a private contractor. In Asia, for example, the private contractor is usually a retired American noncom, either Navy or Air Force, quite likely a maintenance expert, who is living in, say, Thailand or the Philippines, speaks the language fluently, perhaps has married locally after a divorce back home, and is generally much liked by the locals. He rents his facilities at the base from the host-country military, and then charges a fee to the U.S. Air Force pilots transiting the base. Officially he is in business for himself, which the host country likes because it can then claim it is not really working with the American military. Of course no one, including the local media, believes this. But the very fact that a relationship with the U.S. armed forces is indirect rather than direct eases tensions. The private contractor also prevents unfortunate incidents by keeping the visiting pilots out of trouble—steering them to the right hotels and bars, and advising them on how to behave. (Without Dan Generette, a private contractor for years at Utapao Naval Station, in Thailand, that base could never have been ramped up to provide tsunami relief the way it was.)…

…The first part of the twenty-first century will be not nearly as stable as the second half of the twentieth, because the world will be not nearly as bipolar as it was during the Cold War. The fight between Beijing and Washington over the Pacific will not dominate all of world politics, but it will be the most important of several regional struggles. Yet it will be the organizing focus for the U.S. defense posture abroad. If we are smart, this should lead us back into concert with Europe. No matter how successfully our military adapts to the rise of China, it is clear that our current dominance in the Pacific will not last. The Asia expert Mark Helprin has argued that while we pursue our democratization efforts in the Middle East, increasingly befriending only those states whose internal systems resemble our own, China is poised to reap the substantial benefits of pursuing its interests amorally—what the United States did during the Cold War. The Chinese surely hope, for example, that our chilly attitude toward the brutal Uzbek dictator, Islam Karimov, becomes even chillier; this would open up the possibility of more pipeline and other deals with him, and might persuade him to deny us use of the air base at Karshi-Khanabad. Were Karimov to be toppled in an uprising like the one in Kyrgyzstan, we would immediately have to stabilize the new regime or risk losing sections of the country to Chinese influence…

The URL for the complete article is http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200506/kaplan.

Posted at 3:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Boston Globe
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 27, 2005

BOSTON North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Il is acting up again. This time, he has shut down the country’s 5MW nuclear reactor. This could be for routine maintenance. Or it could be the start of a process to extract plutonium from the reactor to build more nuclear weapons. The CIA believes North Korea already has two, plus material for perhaps six to eight more. A third possibility could be a bluff to strengthen his bargaining position.

In deciding how to respond, the Bush administration should remember the adage that to overcome your adversary, you must imagine how he thinks.

Imagine, for example, you’re the leader of an isolated country whose conventional military is increasingly ineffective, whose economy has collapsed, whose benefactor has pulled the plug on you, and whom the world views with contempt.

Now pretend you have one card up your sleeve: a fledgling plutonium-based nuclear program that is frozen under a controversial agreement and a nascent, illegal uranium-based nuclear program to back it up. What would you do if the U.S. president:

1) Lists you as one of three members in an “axis of evil” (the other two being Iraq and Iran)?

2) Implements a national strategy of preemptive defense, allowing for a first-strike attack against you?

3) Employs this strategy to invade Iraq, which turns out not to have nuclear weapons, and deposes its leader?

4) Refuses to join European allies in engaging Iran - the other member of the “axis” - whose nuclear program is far less developed than yours (even though he now says he doesn’t oppose their efforts)?

As leader of this isolated nation in question, you can:

1) Give up your nuclear program and hope that the president who despises you lets you stay in office.

2) Sit by quietly while the president polishes off Saddam Hussein in Iraq and turns his attention to the “totalitarian” regime in Iran, knowing that when he’s done in the Gulf, he’ll likely come after you as the last standing member of the axis.

3) Unfreeze your nuclear program, build as many nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, and try to hold off what looks like a near certain attempt to force your country’s collapse.

If you’re sitting in Pyongyang, the choice isn’t very difficult. Kim may be ruthless and immoral, but he is not stupid. He has acted as any leader would to ensure his and his nation’s survival.

So where do we Americans go from here? Attacking North Korea militarily isn’t an option. We don’t know where all of its nuclear installations and material are located. A military strike would also likely start a war in a region that is home to 80,000 to 90,000 U.S. troops. It would further rupture vital alliances, particularly with China and South Korea, our third and seventh largest trading partners.

A hard-line policy short of a military strike isn’t the answer either. To date, the administration’s muddled approach to North Korea has only elicited the very reaction it sought to avoid. In 2001, the North had zero to two nuclear weapons. Today, it may have six to eight. In 2001, the North’s plutonium program was frozen and monitored by international inspectors. Today, the North has unfrozen the program, reprocessed the plutonium and is on the verge of reprocessing more.

All this means that the only option is meaningful engagement, a policy we have avoided by demanding that the North dismantle its entire nuclear program before it receives anything concrete in return other than heavy fuel oil. But there are few leaders foolish enough to give up the one card that guarantees their nation’s survival based only on promises of future concessions by an adversary they don’t trust.

To be sure, Kim knows that he cannot survive without opening his country. He has studied China and Vietnam to see how leaders there embraced economic reform while holding on to political power. He has begun to implement some of the changes he has seen with modest success. Visitors report seeing more goods in stores and more activity on the streets.

Kim can’t do it alone, however. He has to have outside help. If the United States, China, South Korea and Japan do not help him open to the world, he will revert to whatever he has to do to survive - peddling nukes or nuclear material for much needed currency. This would be our worst nightmare.

We must therefore hold our noses in seeking to bring the North into the world community, including securing its membership in security forums, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, etc.

In taking this approach, we must make clear that we will engage the North only on the condition that it does not conduct a nuclear test or sell its nuclear know-how or stockpile to others. Crossing this red line will bring the severest consequences immediately - with an iron-clad guarantee from China that it will not use its veto in the Security Council to prevent this. To be sure, the prospect of doing another deal with Kim Jong Il is unpalatable. But letting the situation spiral further out of control is unpardonable.

(Jason T. Shaplen was policy adviser at the Korean Peninsula Energy Organization from 1995-1999. James Laney was U.S. ambassador to South Korea from 1993-1997. This article appeared in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 1:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Slate
Posted Wednesday, April 27, 2005

The yellow brick road to riches
As I reach the end of my China experiment—ship a Sino-ignoramus across the Pacific and see what he learns—it’s time to answer the two questions I posed at the outset. First, is the China gold rush real enough that adventurous, fortune-seeking young people should enroll in Mandarin classes and go east? And, second, should I, a former Internet analyst, try to cash in on the gold rush by buying a Chinese Internet stock?

The first bet is what Wall Streeters would call a “layup.” Definitely go east. The best way to stack career odds in your favor is to hitch yourself to long-term growth trends (that way, even if you make boneheaded career mistakes, you’ll still be dragged along). Based on the last 30 years, China’s long-term growth trend is as powerful as any in history, and the majority of the country’s consumers and workers are still waiting to get into the game. A reversal in government policy seems unlikely—the disaster of the Mao years is the historic exception rather than the rule—and most other serious threats to the economic miracle (Taiwan, Japan, overcapacity, class instability) would likely have temporary rather than permanent impacts. Even if China’s economy stumbles—which, at some point, it will—those with China experience, connections, fluency, and expertise should be able to find some way (or someone) to employ them.

Just because the long-term trend is up-and-to-the-right, of course, doesn’t mean that growth will proceed in a straight line or is in any way guaranteed. Fifteen years ago, it seemed all but certain that the last Asian tiger, Japan, was going to blow past the United States, buy up all of our companies and real estate, and win with money a war it had lost with guns a half-century earlier. Alas, Japan is now mired in its second decade of stagnation. The same uncertainty holds for China. With respect to the economy, no one knows what the future holds, and there’s no sure thing. Still, if I were 21 and fancy-free, I might be cramming at Berlitz and preparing to move to Shanghai.

The second question is tougher. The idea of buying a Chinese Internet stock is tempting, especially if done in the spirit of education and entertainment. Some of the leading NASDAQ-listed Chinese Internet companies—Sina (portal), Shanda Interactive (gaming), and others—have demonstrated staying power and profitability. Even with the application of a hefty China-uncertainty discount, their stocks do not seem expensive, especially relative to the long-term opportunity. The stocks have also, of course, demonstrated preternatural volatility, so much so that buying them with less than a five-year time horizon would be nuts (or, rather, would be like going to Vegas, bellying up to the craps table, and consigning your hard-earned wad to the luck of the dice—entertaining, but stupid).

In its five-year trading history, for example, Sina, one of the leading candidates to be “the Yahoo! of China,” has traded as high as $59 and as low as $1 and now bounces around between $20 and $35. Sina came public in early 2000, at the height of the Internet fever, and immediately blasted to the moon (“One-point-three billion people—you do the math!”). A few months later, when everyone remembered that there was no advertising to speak of in China, it collapsed. Then, after latching onto a revenue stream that didn’t exist in the United States, cell-phone messaging, Sina blasted off for $45 again … until everyone realized that the keys to the cell-phone kingdom were firmly in the hands of the cell-phone companies, whereupon it cratered. Then Shanda was going to buy Sina at a humongous premium. Then the government cracked down on Internet cafes. And so on. The good news is that, today, Sina is trading at about the same level as it was when it went public five years ago, has built a diversified business, and (according to its financial statements, anyway) is earning about $1 per share. The bad news is that one could wake up tomorrow, learn that the Chinese government has tweaked a policy, and be the proud owner of a Cayman Islands shell corporation.

Such uncertainty is par for the course for those who try to trade individual emerging market stocks, especially from half the world away. Emerging market stocks do have a (small) place in the average portfolio, but the safest way to own them is through diversified emerging-market mutual funds. That way, the risk of any particular company or country is minimized, and one is simply betting that, over the long term, emerging economies will continue to develop.

If one were able to invest in the growth of the Internet in China, instead of in individual companies, this would be a much safer bet. China has, by and large, missed out on the worldwide development of the television, radio, film, and newspaper industries, so the Internet should rapidly garner an even larger share of media and communications usage and spending in China than in the West. This said, the China Internet leaders do not appear to be as dominant as, say, Yahoo!, eBay, and Amazon were at the beginning of the industry’s development in the U.S., and the Internet is a winner-take-most game. The “Yahoo! of China” and “Google of China,” in fact, might end up being Yahoo! and Google, which would make Sina, et al., the equivalents of Lycos and Excite. So, unless you are willing to construct a diversified basket of stocks that tracks the growth of the Internet medium in China, as opposed to particular companies, you should just hang on to your wad.

Epilogue
The trouble with a series like this is that only now that it is ending do I feel prepared to write it. My four-month crash course just scratched the surface of the China business landscape, leaving me with more questions than answers. What helped this project most were the thousand-odd notes I received along the way from Slate readers, the vast majority of which were intelligent, supportive, and helpful.

A few readers did resent the send-the-rookie approach, and others were annoyed by my requests for help, as if I were offloading work that I should have been doing on my own. To this I would say again, with deep gratitude, that many of the better stories in the series were gifts from Slate readers to Slate readers, with my playing the role of grateful delivery boy. And I would also say that—in this age of blogs and grass-roots investigative reporting—readers and listeners will continue to play an ever-greater role in programming the mainstream media, something we can all be thankful for.

Thanks again for all the help, feedback, and thoughts. Please continue to send ideas and comments to chinagoldrush@yahoo.com.

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - Slate
Posted Wednesday, April 27, 2005

A menu from the 1900s
“Have You Eaten Yet?,” the wonderful Chinese restaurants exhibit now on view at New York’s Museum of Chinese in the Americas, takes a Babel of ephemera and makes it speak. One’s visit begins with an absence: the never-photographed first Chinese eateries in America, known as “chow chows.” These sprung up in California in the mid-19th century to serve Cantonese laborers—true holes in the wall, it seems, marked, as per a Chinese tradition, with yellow cloth triangles. No menus have survived, if ever there were any; who knows but that they served stir-fried buffalo. Still, we may gather that the workers liked the fare, for we do have the advertisements of competitors, who suddenly began offering free potatoes with their meals. The spud strategy was ultimately for naught, though: The Chinese restaurant had been born.

Would anyone have bet the bank on Chinese food back then? According to Chinese Restaurant News, there are now more Chinese restaurants in America than there are McDonald’s franchises—nearly three times as many in fact. In the 19th century, though, the Chinese were scorned as rat-eaters; nothing could have been more revolting than eating what they ate. An 1877 magazine cartoon titled “Uncle Sam’s Thanksgiving Dinner” shows various immigrants happily eating their national dishes—a Frenchman, for example, tucks into his frogs—while an officious African-American manservant conveys a turkey to Uncle Sam. All is harmony, right down to a Native Indian who, unable to abide a chair, squats peaceably beside his fellow guests. Only one personage draws horror from the other diners—the Chinaman, about to eat a rodent.

Click image to expand.

A Chinese restaurant in the 1900s
Yet despite this prejudice, and despite the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which categorically barred further Chinese immigration, Chinese restaurateurs strove to make a place for themselves. With trepidation: Chinese food was often embedded in the familiar. For example, one early menu lists “Grilled Dinner Steak Hollandaise” and “Roast California Chicken with Currant Jelly,” with “Fine Cut Chicken Chop Suey” presented as just another option. As if to counter stereotypes, early interiors featured stunningly sophisticated wood-carving; early images, too, include a surprising number of tuxedos. Observes show curator Cynthia Ai-Fen Lee, “It’s as if the owners are trying to say, It’s OK. Don’t be scared.” And indeed, the phrase “Try it” recurs hypnotically throughout the exhibit. Still, despite the best efforts of the restaurateurs, something disreputable remained, not only about Chinese food, but about people who ate it. In 1903 the New York Times described the Chinatown clientele: “It is the men and women who like to eat after everybody else is abed that pour shekels into the coffers of the man who knows how to make chop suey.”

Shekels. What an interesting currency to have gratuitously cited. Let me just say that one of my favorite parts of this exhibit is the wonderful collection of kosher Chinese menus from New York restaurants, sporting names like “Glatt Wok” and “Shang-chai,” and serving dishes like Matzoh Foo Young. Lee speculates that East European Jews, themselves marginalized, flocked to Chinese restaurants as a way of forging a new, modern, “cosmopolitan” identity—as a way of becoming American. Not that things “Chinese” were generally recognized as American; it took outsiders to see the obvious. Visiting Chinese anthropologist Fei Xiaotong, for example, was amused and amazed by a restaurant he visited in the early 1940s. “It was called a Chinese restaurant,” he wrote, “but … nothing made me feel the slightest at home.”

Dance makes it onto the menu
After the Second World War, mainstream Americans, too, began to see the Americanness—eureka!—of some “Chinese.” And Chinese Americans celebrated this: On a menu from the 1950s, a man smilingly paints characters on his “Chinese Easter Eggs.” By this point, though, Chinese restaurants were about more than East Meets West. They were sites where not only Chineseness but ethnicity in general was made and made fun of. Fei Xiaotong noted how, “Looking up from the table, I saw right in front of us a troupe of half-naked women doing Spanish dances. … Suddenly the dancing stopped and, to the same kind of ‘music,’ a young woman whom one would guess to be Cuban came on … various cultures of different origins came helter-skelter together …” Concoctions like Mani-shaigetz Cocktails—half Manischewitz wine and half Christian Brothers brandy—were served.

A menu that spoofs “Chineseness”
But of course “China” and “Chinese” food remained the focus. Menus gave history lessons and told origin stories—explaining the beginnings of chop suey, or the fortune cookie, or takeout. And in the 1960s, they spoofed “Chineseness,” too—citing Confucius freely and frequently and warning things like, “We take care special banquet dinnas but can only takee limit numbers. First comes first serve, you please placee order early for no disappoint.”

Chinatown was not the only purveyor of “Chineseness” in the 1960s. In 1967, the Ideal Toy Company brought out a Chop Suey board game, which involved picking things up with chopsticks. (“You don’t have to be Chinese to play the Chop Suey game!”) Companies like Chung King and La Choy likewise encouraged housewives to “cook Chinese” with cheerfully proffered, sanitized products; visitors to the exhibit should not miss the exuberantly un-PC commercials on CD, or the numerous “how-to” pamphlets with their inspired recommendations: “Either boiled or broiled, frankfurters dipped in Shou-you sauce make excellent sandwiches,” for example. The “Try it!” that so often punctuates these entries has a distinctly new, profit-oriented tone—the all-American tenor of a toothpaste ad.

Happily, change was on its way. The 1965 liberalization of immigration laws brought new arrivals and new food, from Sichuan and Hunan and Shanghai. Multiculturalism—and Nixon’s visit to China in 1972—inspired an “authenticity revolution”; this transformation was further fueled by the demands of the growing immigrant clientele. Charles Lai, the director of the museum, recalls wandering into a Chinatown restaurant as a boy in the ’60s and realizing that everyone else in the place was white. “I felt like, what am I doing here?” he says. But no more: Today, Chinese and Chinese Americans are important customers, as are other Asians and Asian Americans, and some restaurants are once again catering to newly arrived workers. How “authentic” they are, though, depends on how you define “authentic.” “It is and isn’t a return to the way things were at the beginning,” says Lee. She points out that with globalization, food is changing quickly even in Asia; what constitutes Chinese food is evolving.

In the kitchen at a family restaurant, Salt Lake City, Utah, 1950
The epic kitsch of the exhibit is balanced by touching recollections, on video and in notebooks, of what it was like to work and grow up in Chinese restaurants, both in America and abroad. I loved the many humble, vivid accounts and encourage others to take these in, as one may, sitting atop rice-sack-cushioned stools. While resting there, one might also appreciate the beauty and intelligence of the exhibit and the absence of cliché. There is no red; there are no lanterns or fortune cookies. Here, in the heart of Chinatown, in a kitsch-filled room, one finds, happily, kitsch-free thought.

Gish Jen is the author, most recently, of The Love Wife.

Posted at 1:11 PM · Comments (0)

I have been getting some “hate e-mail” lately from readers of Chinese ethnicity. Basically, they are furious with my columns for strongly supporting permanent UN Security Council membership for Japan. They think that Japan is no good and cannot be trusted. There seems to be no reasoning with them.

But when all reason and civilised discourse are abandoned, serious danger looms. Fortunately, the elders of both China and Japan have come to their senses and turned to their wise diplomats to cool things off.

This is why Chinese Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing and his Japanese counterpart, Nobutaka Machimura, are to be warmly congratulated for taking steps to move their countries away from further corrosive tension.

So is Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi: in Jakarta recently, at a major international conference, he apologised sincerely and effusively for his country’s past history of aggression and colonialism.

That very public apology should mark the beginning of the end of it - but it will not. I, for one, do not doubt his sincerity. But there are those who will not believe Japan’s apologies, no matter how often or how very sincerely they are uttered.

One reason is that some people simply do not like and do not trust the Japanese. But there is another reason for this stereotype: some Japanese individuals say things in public that tend to only fuel people’s fears and make them think the very worst about Japan, one of the world’s great cultures.

Take Shintaro Ishihara, the governor of Tokyo, one of Japan’s most popular politicians (alas), and the co-author of the infamous, angry book, A Japan That Can Say No.

In an exclusive article distributed by the Los Angeles-based Global Viewpoint, Mr Ishihara attacks China from almost every conceivable angle. And given the timing - in the heat of the worst political atmospherics in East Asia in recent memory - his gratuitous attack is deeply regrettable.

The governor virtually dismisses all Beijing’s arguable claims of sovereignty, whether over Taiwan, Tibet or disputed islands, as conclusive evidence of its expansionist ambitions. He condemns China for lacking the very basics of “civil society” and explains away the country’s fantastic economic growth as fuelled solely by exploitation and designed entirely to feed its aggressive-minded military expansion.

Of course, China has its problems, such as lopsided wealth distribution, a too-tenacious Communist Party and a cruel and ham-fisted system of stifling dissent. But Mr Ishihara, while entitled to his views, goes too far and paints Beijing as endlessly malevolent.

The truth is that if an objective opinion poll was taken of people’s views in Asia, the results would probably suggest that more people worry about military aggression originating from Japan at some point, rather than China. Not Mr Ishihara. He said: “Economic growth serves to maintain Beijing’s military modernisation. China’s economic rise also acts to justify the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party, which has achieved success through its hegemonic stance towards the rest of Asia…”

He then asks: “Can we really allow China, an outright defiant nation with massive political energy, to blatantly pursue its economic interests in the Asian region?” To which, I might ask Mr Ishihara: Well, what do you plan to do about it?

Actually, I do not think I will ask that question. I think I know his answer. And it would be the answer that many people in Asia would most fear about Japan.

Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is the founder of the Asia-Pacific Media Network.

Distributed by the UCLA Media Centre

Posted at 10:48 PM · Comments (0)

KORARO, Ethiopia

For seventh graders here, class is held under the shade of a ficus tree because there are only six rooms in the village school. On a recent day, students sat and listened as a visitor from Addis Ababa, hundreds of miles away, asked which of them expected to go on to the eighth grade.

Twenty-nine hands went up - the entire class. Their Addis Ababa visitor, Hailay Teklehaimanot, looked at them with frustration. “How will you get there?” he asked gently.

Seventh grade is the highest class offered at the Koraro Primary School, and the nearest eighth grade is nearly 20 miles away. That’s a good six-hour walk because the village has no car.

For a while, no one answered, and most students looked down at the dirt. Then Kahsay Gebneslasie, 14, spoke up. “We heard maybe they might open an eighth grade here,” he said. The school’s principal, Gidey Haileslassie, was standing nearby and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head.

A year ago, Koraro villagers scraped together the money to pay for a seventh-grade teacher, then put the class under the tree since there was no room in the school. Paying for an eighth grade is beyond the village’s means at this point.

If the rich world is actually going to deliver on its promise to halve global poverty by 2015, then it has to start somewhere. It may as well be here in this village, deep in Ethiopia’s northern Tigray Province, where food is scarce and water even scarcer, but 14-year-olds still cling to the hope that they will be able to go to eighth grade.

Koraro, which was recently chosen to be a United Nations test case in the fight against poverty, is where the rubber meets the road. It is one of the poorest and most isolated villages in the poorest and most isolated province of one of the world’s poorest and most isolated countries.

If poverty can be whipped here in Koraro, it can be whipped anywhere.

The place has nothing. Some 5,000 villagers live their short lives - life expectancy here is about 40 years - out here in the red dust and rocks, eking out a subsistence living. There is no topsoil and the land is eroded, so farming is an uphill battle.

Half of Koraro’s children - and there are some 1,500 of them - are underweight and malnourished. Only 34 families out of 1,500 have access to clean drinking water. The rest walk four miles round-trip to haul buckets of dirty water, and the water-borne illnesses they carry, into their homes for drinking, cooking and washing up. There’s no electricity, no doctor, no industry, no market, nothing.

But Koraro is drop-dead beautiful, with jagged red cliffs that look like skyscrapers towering over wide expanses of drylands. The centuries-old churches, most carved deep into the cliffs, testify to how long villagers have been here, in one of the world’s oldest cultures. Indeed, while it would appear easy for Koraro residents to decamp to a more hospitable site closer to the regional capital, Mekele, most of the villagers refuse to leave.

Zafu Tsegabu, who is 18, watched with her 2-month-old daughter as her husband moved to a bigger town about 25 miles away, and refused to join him. “This is my home here,” she said simply.

As soon as the people here were told that they had been singled out to be one of the United Nations’ test villages on poverty reduction, they organized themselves into committees to figure out how to get the job done. There’s a water committee and a school committee, an energy committee and a health committee. The United Nations plan, spearheaded by the economist Jeffrey Sachs, calls for the participation of foreign donors, the Ethiopian government and the village of Koraro.

Since Koraro has no money to offer, the villagers are supplying the labor and local materials. On a recent day, some 1,500 villagers - just about every able-bodied man, woman and teenager, were hacking rocks out of the earth and moving them into piles. The rocks will eventually be transferred to the site where they hope to build a village clinic.

Mr. Sachs’s proposal allots Koraro $250,000 a year for the next five years to turn itself around. The government of Ethiopia will kick in technical expertise, including help to build a proper road to link Koraro with the rest of the world.

The list of what the money will buy is as basic as it comes: five metal doors for the clinic, one diesel generator to provide occasional electricity to the village, three windows for the school, one grinding mill so villagers can turn their cereal crops into food, and a village truck that could serve a variety of needs.

But there is no eighth grade on the list. There are too many other basic necessities that have to come first.

Still, Koraro, if it works, can become a model for scaling up this type of development for villagers all over Africa - provided the rich world makes good on its promise to donate 0.7 percent of G.D.P. to foreign aid. The Group of 7 summit meeting in July, when leaders of rich countries will get together in Scotland, will probably provide critical answers to that question.

Britain, Germany and France have all provided timetables to ramp up their aid money to 0.7 percent by 2015. But the United States has yet to do the same.

In the meantime, the people in Koraro continue to hope and make plans. In the twilight of her life at age 30, Kidan Hagos, a mother of seven, leaned against a shady tree as she took a break from hacking rocks for the new clinic. Her youngest child, Haregeweini, 9 months old, was propped against her, nursing. Mrs. Hagos, for her part, took a moment to dream big.

Asked what she would ask for if she could have anything in the world, she spent a good three minutes carefully considering her answer.

“A food market close by,” she said, “and a well with good water.”

Posted at 5:20 PM · Comments (0)

Taught is a cliche in a spy-fiction review. This 1975 novel is a masterpiece of the genre, though - a genre I have little patience for unless the writing is top drawer.
The story unfolds in the wake of JFK’s assassination, which McCarry relates to the plot to kill Diem. The way he sustains atmosphere as the hero, Paul Christopher moves around the globe, is worthy of close study. The dialogue, too, crackles. There are some rather old-fashioned monologues about women, which haven’t aged well. What’s best here, though, is the book’s examination of the workings of power, high and low, which fills nearly every scene. Heartily recommended.

Posted at 4:12 PM · Comments (0)

A 400-plus page look at the way Western men — and history — have treated or regarded “Asian” women.
Prasso is really on to something when she attacks the stereotyping and the obsessions of Western men for “Asian” women. A newcomer to the subject, or to the region, will learn a lot, and others, I suspect, will find a lot that is already familiar.
I’ve put Asian in quotations because Asian womanhood is a totally artificial construct, and this gets back to one of the book’s problems. It is trying to lecture knowledgeably on the whole content, and this inevitably leads to a good deal of surface-skimming, and a good bit of repetition.
I also find it interesting that the cover bears an alluring picture of a geisha, one of the most fetishized images of “Asian” women around.

Posted at 4:03 PM · Comments (0)

I read this late in highschool, it made a deep impression, even though it left me more confused than I cared to admit to myself at the time. Then I forgot it. Or almost forgot it.
Something reminded me of it recently. Perhaps it was the long road trips I’ve taken in various parts of China, and a fair amount of religious and philospohical writing related to my China assignment.
Don’t be scared away by the preceeding sentence. The book is a delight, especially the quiet ways in which it explores relationships between family members and friends, and in the way Pirsig talks about our relationship with technology, as well.
There’s not a whole lot of Zen, as the intervening years have taught me. Rather, you’ll find a fair amount of philosophical rumination, relieved by the author’s gift for landscape and other descriptive writing.

Posted at 3:42 PM · Comments (0)

A contest for China’s soul is under way in the country, pitting two powerful forces and two very different stances towards