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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

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

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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 the outside world against each other. The outcome will have a major impact on whether China succeeds in becoming a nation capable of having truly constructive and durable relations with the rest of the planet.

On one hand, the nation’s economic revolution has helped position it as a confidant powerhouse of trade, a more responsible global powerbroker and even as a reassuring military presence. On the other, China remains trapped by a past and a mindset steeped in a sense of victimisation, which tempts it to export blame for internal problems.

The main question is whether China can escape the pull of this old psychological syndrome - which kept it preoccupied throughout the 20th century with debilitating sentiments of weakness, insecurity and humiliation - and allow itself to be guided by a new outlook on the world, and even on old enemies.

The anti-Japan demonstrations are a symptom of the old syndrome, fuelled by grievances born at a time when China was, indeed, aggrieved and humiliated. With China’s growing economic clout, rising standards of living, and increasingly respected place in the world, one would hope that the Chinese and their leaders would find a way to let go of the dead. Yet, even as the lustre of the “China miracle” dazzles the world, the Chinese seem loath to leave behind their dark feelings of victimisation. Instead of assuming a new national paradigm based on the reality of their accomplishments, China’s leaders cling to the old one of their country as the victim, the “sick man of Asia” being “cut up like a melon” by predatory imperial and colonial powers like Japan. That bitter memory of oppression and exploitation lingers in the minds of too many Chinese.

Of course, Japan did occupy China, committed unimaginable savagery, and has since paid no reparations or apologised in a convincing way. Nevertheless, what benefit does China gain by continuing to raise these issues? What is worth the risk of alienating the world’s second-largest economy and one of China’s most important trade partners?

First and foremost, aiding and inciting the expression of popular anger against Japan gives Communist Party leaders a powerful and readily available vehicle for rallying domestic support, thereby legitimising their own power. At the same time, the demonstrations represent China’s experience of the world as an unequal place where the weak are inevitably bullied, exploited and humiliated. This mindset suggests that despite the panoramic skylines and five-star hotels, China has a long way to go before it truly comes to understand and appreciate its actual accomplishments and status.

Of course, China’s wounded psyche and the desire for restitution from its former tormentors deserve sympathy. In this sense, China, like many countries, could be said to have something of a bipolar personality. Much of the emotional force of Mao Zedong’s revolution derived from the widespread sense of unequal treatment and humiliation by foreign powers, and this revolutionary fervour has never been properly interred.

Just as Mao’s portrait has never been taken down from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, so whole elements of his revolution continue to survive in China’s institutions, ways of thinking and modes of interacting with the world. Like recessive genes, they sometimes suddenly re-express themselves.

The role of victim is all too familiar to the Chinese, perhaps even somewhat comforting, for it provides a way to explain (and explain away) China’s problems. But it is also dangerous, because it derives from China’s old weaknesses rather than its new strengths. The era of Japanese militaristic and imperialist power has long gone, and the world is beating a path to China’s door. The last thing it needs is to remain trapped in the past.

Orville Schell, one of the foremost experts on China, is a dean at the University of California at Berkeley.

Copyright: Project Syndicate

Posted at 11:31 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, APRIL 26, 2005

SALZBURG On Friday, Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan expressed “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology” for the Japanese atrocities committed during World War II. It was not unlike the “deep remorse” and “heartfelt apology” that his predecessor, Tomiichi Murayama, expressed in August 1995, or similar “remorse” expressed that same year by Hisashi Owada, then a senior foreign office official and now a judge on the International Court of Justice in The Hague, when he attended the Beijing Women’s Conference to apologize for Japan’s exploitation of 200,000 “comfort women” as sex slaves for its soldiers.

The Japanese have been apologizing and remorsing for decades, but no one seems to be listening, or, at least, willing to believe them. For many Japanese, the international community’s unwillingness to recognize their efforts seems both frustrating and unfair.

Like the Germans, the Japanese saw their wartime leadership tried and executed for their crimes against humanity. Like the Germans, the Japanese paid vast sums of money in compensation. And like the Germans, the Japanese have been unsparing in their history books, so much so that today Japanese speak wearily of jigyaku shikan - “masochistic historiography.” Nevertheless, six decades after the war, while Germany is embraced in a union of European nations, Japan is barely on speaking terms with its Asian neighbors. And still apologizing.

As the Japanese enter this new round of apologia and remorse, they may want to draw some lessons from the German experience. Few nations in history have perpetrated such heinous crimes. Fewer still have practiced public contrition and national introspection so convincingly and effectively. Germany has entered what may be described as the post-post-Holocaust era, in which German troops can return to territories once occupied by their Nazi predecessors and the German people can engage in public discussion of the “victims” of allied bombings without accusations of historical relativism.

But the path to public absolution has been long, slow and often arduous. Initially, most Germans were content to leave their guilt hanging on the gallows with the “main war criminals” in Nuremberg, but subsequent generations have confronted the past with an accelerating sense of moral responsibility.

In 1970, Willy Brandt made an historic visit to Poland where he fell to his knees before a monument to the victims of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. His “knee fall” appeared to be as spontaneous and heartfelt as it was, the most powerful man in Germany pulled to the ground by the weight of German guilt. The image seared itself into public memory: a single picture worth a single word. With Brandt’s gesture, a new symbolic word entered the German political vocabulary, Kniefall.

A decade and a half later, President Richard von Weizsäcker recognized the notion of “collective responsibility.” In the last two decades, the Germans have met this responsibility collectively and successfully. German governments, Social Democratic and Christian Democratic alike, have played central roles in rebuilding the societies of the former Soviet bloc. German industry has paid hundreds of million of dollars in compensation to former slave laborers. The Berliners have blotted out prime commercial real estate for a sprawling memorial to the Holocaust. When it comes to the wages of guilt - and compensation - the Germans have set the gold standard.

The Japanese have hobbled far behind their former axis allies. Their efforts have been sporadic, awkward and generally unnoticed by the international community. The difficulties are as much cultural as political or economic. Willy Brandt’s Kniefall was so memorable because it was so unexpected, but what was surprising for a German, may be unthinkable for a Japanese. As a former Japanese diplomat told me recently, such a gesture by a Japanese would not only seem disingenuous to the international community, it could appear absurd even embarrassing to the Japanese.

Another obstacle may be the Japanese attitude toward forgiveness. They can mourn the victims of Hiroshima while harboring little or no resentment toward those who dropped the bomb. He told me the Japanese are a “forgiving” people. But he admits that while it may be noble to forgive the victimizer when you are the victim, it is a bit more awkward to expect same sentiment when you are the victimizer.

With Friday’s apology, Koizumi has opened a new opportunity for the Japanese to confront their past and seek reconciliation with their Asian neighbors. They should be thoughtful, ideally introspective, as they move forward. Before Brandt, it was difficult to imagine any German leader falling to his knees in remorse. Brandt’s Kniefall helped redefine the Germans’ image not only to the world, but also to themselves. The Japanese may require a similarly transformative moment. Before they can overcome their past, it could well be that they will have to overcome themselves.

(Timothy W. Ryback codirects the Institute for Historical Justice and Reconciliation at the Salzburg Seminar.)

Posted at 7:20 PM · Comments (0)

By China’s Biggest Gamble: Can it have capitalism without democracy? A prediction.
Posted Friday, April 22, 2005, at 9:38 AM PT

Tiananmen Square

Western-style laissez-faire expected any minute now
On my last evening in Beijing, I walked west on the long blocks of the city’s main drag toward Tiananmen Square. The sun was setting when I arrived, and, on the north side of the road, beneath the portrait of Chairman Mao on the Gate of Heavenly Peace, crowds of tourists were streaming out of the Forbidden City. On the south side, in Tiananmen Square itself, kites and flags were flying, and entrepreneurs posing as “students” were cruising around entreating foreigners to visit a nearby art “exhibit” in which their works were purportedly displayed. The students’ story was clever and well-choreographed, but I’d already fallen for it once that day (enduring a guided tour of machine-made paintings being sold to fund a “trip to America”). So, I just wandered around the square and watched the sun set over the Chinese flag.

The story of what happened in Tiananmen in June of 1989 is different in China than the one we tell in the United States. In America, we remember the student protests as a plea for democracy, for our form of government (who has forgotten the students’ mock-up of the Statue of Liberty?). But in China, people describe the students’ goals as not democracy, per se, but as the end to corruption, the ability to air grievances, and the right to more control over their lives (or, as one person put it, the right to refuse to be shipped off to some dumpy factory for 40 years—a fate that would drive anyone into the streets). Although these ideals were closer to our form of government than China’s was in 1989, they were not the “one man, one vote” system we hold so dear, the one that, in America, we herald the Tiananmen students as having died for. And, by local estimation, Chinese have gotten much of what the students were really hoping for 16 years ago.

In Beijing, as in Shanghai, the businesspeople I spoke to seemed more concerned about preserving their ability to make money than about gaining the ability to vote leaders out of office or to express themselves however they pleased. One expects businesspeople to tend toward this end of the idealism scale, but in the U.S., democracy and freedom of speech are so fundamental to our sense of ourselves and our country that even our businesspeople can’t imagine life (or economic success) without them. So, it is interesting to see China succeeding—on the surface, anyway—without them.

The question remains: Can the Chinese model—capitalism without elections or free expression—succeed forever? The common Western theory is that the more China’s wealth grows, the more the pressure will build, until one day, the Communist Party’s chokehold on power will break and American-style freedom of speech and democracy will follow (or, alternatively, that, in a desperate attempt to preserve itself, the party will revert to Cultural Revolution-style oppression and stop the economy cold). Both theories presume that free speech and elections are high on the average Chinese citizen’s agenda, but, for now, a strong economy seems to take priority. (“The average guy wants to buy a car, eat vitamins, and get his kids into Berkeley,” said one Beijing entrepreneur. “As long as the government doesn’t screw that up, he’s willing to play along.”) The Western theories also presume that the transition from socialism to capitalism inevitably includes a transition from one-party rule to elected, multiparty democracy, but perhaps this isn’t so. Especially when the leaders of the one party know exactly what keeps them in power—fat consumer wallets—and are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to control the spread of potentially destabilizing ideas.

For China’s economy to continue to thrive—and for its companies to grow strong enough to compete globally on something other than price—the government will have to continue to reduce corruption, strengthen property and legal rights, and develop a more efficient capital allocation system (including a securities market in which government connections are not a prerequisite for raising cash). In a democracy with a free press, the pressure that forces such changes often comes from decision-makers’ fear of being ravaged in the media and/or voted out of office. In China, the repercussions may not be so immediate and direct, but based on the government’s actions over the last decade, it knows well that continued economic reform and success are not only good for the country but key to its survival. The pressure is there, in other words, with or without the media, and the government continues to make progress in reducing corruption and buttressing legal and property rights.

The government also seems to be deciding that, at least in the realm of business and finance, greater press freedom helps advance its economic goals and lessen its regulatory burden. Business journalism keeps companies honest and makes customers and investors comfortable that they at least have a forum in which to complain. Such freedom is not all good—in the media’s eagerness to advance its own economic agenda, it often manufactures scandals where there are none and spins normal free-market processes into institutional or regulatory failures. But just as a free market is more effective than central planning at, say, managing crop production and pricing, a free press enhances the regulatory abilities of a government and creates the information flow that capitalism requires.

But the Chinese government will probably continue to stifle the press’s freedom to criticize it. As demonstrated by the government’s subtle, sophisticated control of all forms of media and its ongoing penchant for firing, beating up, jailing, and perhaps even killing journalists who cross vaguely defined lines, we won’t see a Michael Moore of China anytime soon (see Perry Link’s essay in the New York Review of Books). But I doubt this will hinder the ongoing development of China’s vibrant economy.

The key test of China’s version of capitalism, of course, will be during the bust that inevitably will follow the current boom (some day). If elections were held today, many in China suggest, the current leaders would win the popular vote. On the whole, thanks to the economy, people feel they have done a good job. During the bust, the pressure for change will increase, with or without the press. If the government is to maintain control in such an environment, it will probably have to engage in a practice that has long been a fixture of oligarchies and democracies alike: blame. As long as the countrywide pain can be laid at the feet of an individual or group, instead of the system—and as long as the scapegoats can be tossed out on their respective rears—the public pressure for revolutionary change can probably be controlled. If China can survive that inevitable economic crisis without a political uprising, we will probably be able to conclude that a dynamic free-market economy need not, in fact, go hand in hand with democracy.

Posted at 6:58 PM · Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

Days of Empire

Genghis Khan would have applauded the US use of shock and awe to take Iraq. And why not — it worked for him 750 years ago

If history repeats itself, the story of Baghdad is perfect evidence of it. Nothing much has happened there recently that the ancient city has not seen before.

The military methods used by its latest conquerors two years ago were exactly the same as those employed when it was first taken almost 750 years earlier. Like the Mongols and their Christian allies, who conquered Baghdad in 1258, the Americans and their friends converged on it in several columns, overwhelming anything that was sent to meet them with hugely superior mobility and firepower. With token support from a few cautious Shia, they slipped into the suburbs, surrounded the city and softened it with a devastating bombardment before making their final assault. But the similarity does not end with a general summary of their strategies. The tactical details were identical, too.

In 1927 Britain’s leading strategist, B. H. Liddell Hart, wrote that the tank and the plane were the heirs to the Mongol horsemen. In his view the same tactics applied; and there were many, including Germany’s Heinz Guderian, the father of blitzkrieg, who agreed with him. Before long the campaigns of Genghis Khan were being studied in British, French, German and American military academies, just as they had always been in Russia. The Second World War began with blitzkrieg, a mechanised version of the swift, crippling attacks carried out by the Mongols in the 13th century; and in the course of the war two of the leading tank commanders, Rommel and Patton, acknowledged that they were students of Genghis Khan.

Like all soldiers of the steppes since the days of the Parthians more than 2,000 years ago, the Mongols were mounted archers. By timing the release of their arrows to come between the footfalls of their horses, they could maintain their accuracy even at the canter, just as stabilisers enable guns to keep their aim while the bodies of their tanks roll up and down. But none of their commanders used this skill as devastatingly as the Great Khan.

The characteristic which made Genghis Khan the most successful conqueror in history was his genius for organisation. He mustered his army in multiples of ten, subjected it to regular and rigorous training, issued it with standardised equipment, including long-range, short-range and armour-piercing arrows, and selected and promoted his officers entirely on merit, not breeding.

There was little about his army that would not have been familiar to any modern professional soldier. His capacity to manoeuvre was so bafflingly brilliant that most of his enemies assumed that his armies were much larger than they were. Using an exaggerated version of a traditional steppe tactic, the feigned retreat, he could lure an entire army into a prepared position, suddenly surround it with huge formations of mounted archers and then destroy it with his withering firepower — just as Patton’s tanks were to do with part of the Afrika Korps.

A modern army advances on a broad front. So did the Mongols. But the Mongols were the first to do it. When Genghis Khan moved west towards Samarkand his right flank was in the desert north of the Aral Sea and his left was more than 800 miles southeast of it in the Pamir Mountains. When his sons invaded Europe, their front was even broader, with its right on the Baltic and its left in Transylvania.

For a 20th-century general, command and control of such a front are made possible only by modern communications, but the Mongols managed equally well with what were then leading-edge communications of their own. By day they kept contact over short distances with flags — the Mongols invented semaphore — and over longer distances their network of mounted couriers and staging posts was faster than the Pony Express.

On the invasion of Europe, the first objective was the conquest of Hungary and the destruction of its army, which had assembled to the west of the Danube. But the Mongol flanks were threatened by large armies in Poland and Transylvania. In consequence, when the Mongol centre reached the east bank of the Danube it halted and waited. On April 6, 1241, after learning that the threatening armies on its flanks had been located, it turned and started to retreat. Next day the Hungarians set out after it. On April 9 the Polish army was annihilated at Liegnitz, On April 10, 500 miles to the south, the Transylvanian army was defeated at Hermannstadt. On April 11 the Mongols in the centure turned and routed the pursuing Hungarians. Their co-ordination was perfect. They could not have done better if they had been issued with radios.

One of the most familiar images of the recent fighting in Iraq was that of troops or tanks crossing a bridge with their artillery firing over their heads to push back the Iraqis on the other side. Once more the Mongols were the pioneers. The first record of a “rolling barrage” appears in the chronicles of that battle with the Hungarians, when the Mongols began by crossing a bridge unopposed while their trebuchets (huge mechanical slings) lobbed smoke bombs and explosive grenades over their heads and pushed back the Hungarians “to the accompaniment of thunderous noise and flashes of fire”.

At the end of that terrible day the Mongols opened a gap in their encirclement, allowing the Hungarian survivors to escape. Then, just as the allies attacked the Iraqis when they withdrew from Kuwait in 1992, the Mongol mounted archers swarmed in on either side of the desperate column; and for 30 miles, according to the chronicles, the road back towards the Danube was strewn with corpses “like stones in a quarry”.

Genghis Khan has suffered even more than most conquerors at the hands of Hollywood. His undoubtedly spectacular atrocities have been given much more emphasis than his genius; and he has been the victim of the most ludicrous miscasting — John Wayne and Omar Sharif, for heaven’s sake! One can only hope that a new drama-documentary by the BBC will go some way to straightening the record.

This time, at last, the film is shot in Mongolia with a mostly Mongol cast; and it depicts the Mongols’ transformation from tribal warriors to professional soldiers. If George W. Bush ever gets to see it, it may come as a surprise to him — and a delight to his critics — to learn that he and his generals have so much in common with Genghis Khan and his warlords. The differences between a mounted Mongol horde and a modern mechanised army are all differences in technology, not technique.

The Devil’s Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe, by James Chambers (Phoenix, £9.99; offer £8.49 from Books First, 0870 1608080) .Genghis Khan, BBC One, Monday, 9pm

Genghis Khan: fighter, lover
# Genghis Khan (1162-1227) was orphaned at 13. He began with a mere handful of followers, united the Mongolian tribes, and rose to become the most successful conqueror in history.

# His empire was the largest ever conquered by a single commander. It included the lands now known as Mongolia, northern China, most of Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

# At its height, in the reign of his grandson Kublai, it was the largest continuous empire in history, stretching east from the borders of Hungary, through Russia, the Middle East and reaching the Pacific Ocean.

# The Mongol empire was the first to know religious tolerance. In the capital, Karakorum, churches, mosques and temples stood side by side.

# In his empire, women had equal rights with men, even among subject peoples.

# His laws prescribed the death penalty for merchants who allowed themselves to go bankrupt for a third time.

# He had 500 wives and concubines.

Posted at 11:53 PM · Comments (0)

Teetering on the verge of success, but with failure always threatening to knock at the door, Ghana has lately taken up the mantle of what passes for a success story in Africa. It is the new darling in the halls where donors like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the United States and Britain talk about making sure foreign aid does not end up in the hands of corrupt regimes.

What they have in mind are people like Kofi Asare, who labors mightily on his modest farm high in the hills near his village SamSam, carrying his ripe yellow pineapples on his head to get them from the fields to his truck. Dripping with sweat, the 28-year-old Mr. Asare is the very picture of Africa getting its act together. Last year, he made $10,000; enough to make the transition from mud hut to cement house. This year, with an eye warily on the future, he has planted 2,500 of a new “low acid” pineapple pioneered by the Del Monte Foods Company that threatens to smoke the Ghana “smooth cayenne” variety out of Europe’s supermarkets.

But Ghana is a good kid in a really bad neighborhood. Its West African neighbors, from Liberia to Sierra Leone to the Ivory Coast, have bred so much fighting in the last 10 years that they make Ghana seem like Iowa. Ghana does not have insurgents running around its hinterlands dressed in wedding gowns and wigs (like Liberia and Sierra Leone) or 8-year-old rebel soldiers toting machine guns (Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast).

It has had four successful elections since 1993, and has actually experienced a peaceful transfer of power between democratically elected governments, another rarity in the neighborhood. Indeed, it is becoming a haven for refugees who come not only from Ghana’s unruly neighbors to the west, but also from other conflict zones in Africa. Last week, a group of refugees from Darfur, Sudan, showed up. It remains unclear how they made it across the continent, crossing the Togolese border from five countries away, but the Accra government is busy making plans to settle the Sudanese refugees.

Ghanaians like to brag that they have passed the point of no return in making their humid patch of West Africa a functioning democracy with all the perks that brings: a free and vibrant press, steady though slow economic growth, tourism. There is even a shopping mall with a multiplex cinema going up in Accra. With such obvious payoffs for adopting good governance, many Ghanaians say it is inconceivable that the country will turn back to the failed-state practices that have taken so many other African countries down the drain. “If anyone tried anything like a coup here, this place would immediately become ungovernable,” says Kweku Sakyi Addo, the host of one of Ghana’s innumerable political talk shows. “We’ve seen what happens in other African countries. There is no way people will put up with that here.”

But for all the talk of what a model African country Ghana is, it is still, literally, dirt poor, a fact of life that demonstrates just how removed Africa is from the proverbial rising tide of the global economy that is supposed to be lifting all boats. Ghana has a per capita income of $421 a year; most people survive here on $300 to $400. Ten-year-old girls still run barefoot up to stopped cars in the sweltering midday heat trying to sell anything they think will bring in money - from oranges to cellphone batteries to toilet paper. Street children still sleep on the median separating highway lanes.

And while the Ghanaian government appears to have a clear idea of exactly what steps it must take to try to alleviate the huge divide between Accra’s growing middle class and the country’s rural poor, some goals are already slipping. Child mortality rates, already high, increased in 2004; nobody seems to know why. A huge gender gap remains in primary-school education: far more boys make it to school than girls.

Almost half of Ghana’s national budget comes from foreign aid; Britain is its largest single-country donor. But the size of the country’s budget, a scant $3 billion, supporting some 20 million people, is testament to just how far Ghana still has to go, and just how much more it still needs to climb out of poverty. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s proposal for rich countries to drastically increase their aid to Africa in a Marshall Plan approach would be a huge step toward helping to bring the continent back into the folds of the rest of the world.

Ghana shows what a tough road this is going to be. But it also shows that bringing Africa back is eminently doable.

Posted at 11:34 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, APRIL 22, 2005

It happens all the time: during an airport delay the man to the left, a Korean perhaps, starts talking to the man opposite, who might be Colombian, and soon they are chatting away in what seems to be English. But the native English speaker sitting between them cannot understand a word.

They don’t know it, but the Korean and the Colombian are speaking Globish, the latest addition to the 6,800 languages that are said to be spoken across the world. Not that its inventor, Jean-Paul Nerrière, considers it a proper language.

“It is not a language, it is a tool,” he says. “A language is the vehicle of a culture. Globish doesn’t want to be that at all. It is a means of communication.”

Nerrière doesn’t see Globish in the same light as utopian efforts such as Kosmos, Volapuk, Novial or staunch Esperanto. Nor should it be confused with barbaric Algol (for Algorithmic language). It is a sort of English lite: a means of simplifying the language and giving it rules so it can be understood by all.

“The language spoken worldwide, by 88 percent of mankind, is not exactly English,” Nerrière says. “I don’t think people who think this gives them an edge are right because it’s not useful if they cannot be understood by English speakers.” His primer, Parlez Globish, is an attempt to codify worldspeak and since its publication by Eyrolles in Paris last year, he says, his Web site www.jpn-globish.com has had almost 36,000 hits.

A retired IBM marketing executive, Nerrière speaks excellent English but switches to Globish if he is not getting through. “I look at their faces. Lack of understanding is very easy to decipher.”

The main principles of Globish are a vocabulary of only 1,500 words in English (the OED lists 615,000), gestures and repetition. Grammar will be dealt with in the next volume, “Découvrez le Globish,” due next month.

The Web site also includes song lyrics because Nerrière reckons this is an excellent way to learn words, even if they are not on the Globish 1,500. “Strangers in the Night” is one choice, but what is the student to do when Sinatra goes “scoobie-doobie-do”?

“Doesn’t matter,” Nerrière replies buoyantly. “I saw ‘A Chorus Line’ three or four times on Broadway and I know all the songs by heart. I never understood the line ‘If Troy Donahue can be a movie star you can be a movie star,’ but I managed to reproduce it well enough in a way it could be understood.”


The point, he says, is to reach the threshold of understanding. But neither threshold nor understanding is on the 1,500-word list. “In Globish it would be the target, the goal, the objective. I use three words to reach the point where you would be understood everywhere.”

The list goes from “able” to “zero.” Niece and nephew, for example, are not included, “but you can replace them with the children of my brother,” Nerrière says. He feels he erred in putting in both beauty and beautiful and in including “much” and “many” but not “lot.”

“Much is for ideas, many is for things you can count. A lot works for both cases, the others require a little more understanding.”

The seeds for Globish came about in the 1980s when Nerrière was working for IBM in Paris with colleagues of about 40 nationalities. At a meeting where they were to be addressed by two Americans whose flight had been delayed, they started exchanging shoptalk in what Nerrière calls “une certaine forme d’anglais perverti.” Then the Americans arrived and beyond their opening phrases, “Call me Jim,” “Call me Bill,” no one understood a word. And Jim and Bill, needless to say, did not understand perverted English.

One might say that, except for Jim and Bill of course, everyone was speaking Globish though they didn’t know it. “They all, like me, spoke low-quality English, not really Globish. One might have a vocabulary of 2,000 words, another of 1,200 and not the same words. One of the things of interest in Globish is that with 1,500 words you can express everything. People all over the world will speak with the same limited vocabulary.”

With many corporations imposing English as the lingua franca wherever their base, Nerrière sees a great future for Globish, which he has trademarked. Learning it by computer and practicing it by free-access telephone will make things even easier. And there is a new law in France that gives employees the right to 20 hours per year of instruction in a given subject.

“The idea is to increase their employability by teaching them skills unrelated to their present employment. For me, the odds of someone asking for a course in macramé are very small and the odds of asking for a course in Maltese are also small. Why not Globish? If it could be of use in this small grocery shop where I work maybe it will help me in the big hotel where I hope to be.”

There is an other advantage, he argues. “At 20 hours a year you need 24 years to learn English with no result whatsoever since it would be spread too thin for the learner to remember what had been said two weeks earlier. With Globish you not only have free telephone access via the Internet but you could get cheap lessons in places like India where people speak good English and wages are low.”

Nerrière reckons that with 182 hours plus learning “Strangers in the Night,” the student should be able to communicate in Globish. It is not a pretty language - full of redundancies and lumpy constructions - but Nerrière repeats that it is nothing but a tool when proper English is not understood. “It is not the language of Hamlet, Faulkner or Virginia Woolf,” he explains.


But the worst thing for the French about this international language is that it isn’t French. Nerrière argues rather subtly that if people learned Globish, the French language would remain unsullied because franglais would die out.

“It would end this crazy French terror about English and francophonie. The French say you are killing the French language and I say, no, we are saving it from being killed by English.”

There is one possible hiccup in this scheme. The fluent Globish speaker will not be understood by native English speakers. No problem: Nerrière already is preparing a Globish version in English in addition to the Italian and Spanish editions, which will be out shortly. So he is not only protecting French from invasion but he is getting Americans to become, so to speak, bilingual.

“Absolutely!” Nerrière says triumphantly. “This is the way to get Americans to learn another language.”

Posted at 2:28 PM · Comments (0)

2005-04-05

The Allies wrestled for control of the world while the civilian population was taken hostage.

“The train tracks crossing the city,” states the US governmental report on the effect of the Hiroshima bomb, “were back in working order by August 8, two days after the attack.” Only then did the gamma waves and neutrons manifest themselves in human bone marrow and start taking deadly effect. Even thin cement slabs near Ground Zero had stopped the radiation. The majority of the 80,000 deaths were caused by heat radiation, shock waves and flying debris.

40 year old Shugita Chiyoko, searching for her husband among the body parts strewn under the Shosoji Temple on August 7th, only recognised him by his feet. “My husband had a very high arch.” The neighbours were amazed. “‘We’ve been married for 20 years,’ I said. ‘I can tell by his feet that it’s him.’ Around his ankles were the leggings he’d worn when he left that morning. The rest was cut off.”

Only in 1950 did American physicists start researching nuclear heat waves, measured in calories per square centimetre (cal/cm2). President Truman had had the thermonuclear, or hydrogen, bomb built in January. Its destructive potential, measured during the first test in November, was the equivalent of ten million tonnes of TNT, compared with twenty thousand tonnes for the Hiroshima bomb. But the real advantage of the new weapon lay in its thermal effect. Since the heat waves outstripped the shock waves, the data from the 1945 explosions were reviewed.

The fire storm that enveloped the area around Hiroshima had a radius of 1.5 km and a thermal output of roughly 10 cal/cm2. A one million tonne bomb would achieve 22 cal/cm2. But fire damage was hard to predict, as too many other variables are involved. What role is played by wind, temperature, humidity and the individual incendiary properties of each city?

Data to answer such questions had only existed for ten years. The Luftwaffe had pioneered bombing raids over Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry. But it was only since 1943 that the incineration of cities from the air had amounted to deliberate mass killing. The fire bombing of Hamburg killed 45,000 people overnight, more than the Luftwaffe had achieved in nine months of dropping bombs on England. Only eight weeks earlier,the fire in Wuppertal had resulted in 3,000 deaths, an unprecedented figure until then.

The fire in Wuppertal burnt in the air circulation pattern particular to enclosed river valleys. In Hamburg it was the dry summer heat; in Heilbronn, Dresden and Pforzheim it was winter snow. Tokyo was built almost entirely of wood and paper, Darmstadt of sandstone, Munster of brick. Hildesheim and Halberstadt were criss-crossed by narrow streets lined with half-timbered houses, Mannheim was divided into classic quadrants, Dortmund and Duisburg were made up of sprawling 19th century blocks. The thermonuclear planners delved into the fund of knowledge left by the area bombing of the Axis powers. This was the only way to understand how individual cities burn.

The historic fires in San Francisco, Hamburg and London had nothing in common with the procedure whereby in only 17 minutes (Würzburg) or 21 minutes (Dresden), cities were showered with hundreds of thousands of incendiary bombs. These sparked thousands of fires, which within three hours became a flaming sea, several square kilometres wide. Large natural fires normally have a single source, and are driven for days by the wind. But war statistics showed that such winds played a minor role in fires caused by bombs. The real destructive power was not in the wind that drives the fire, but in the fire itself, which unleashes its own hurricane on the ground.

Neither buildings nor people can escape the logic of the elements of fire and air. A fire starts, it sets the air in motion, fire and air form a vortex extinguishing life and all that belongs to it: books, altars, hospitals, asylums, jails and jailers, the block warden and his child, the armourers, the people’s court and all the people in it, the slave’s barracks and the Jew’s hideout, the strangler as well as the strangled. Hiroshima and Dresden, Tokyo and Kassel were transformed from cities into destructive systems. The agent of change is the bomb war, and the bomb war is its construction site. Work continues to this day, it’s a work in progress. There is hardly a nation not working at it, and the numbers are growing.

When 40 years ago, a handful of atomic scientists studied the complex chemistry and mechanics which the war generation had used to raze cities, they were seeking what no one had experienced since the war: military mass destruction in real time, the laboured route from Warsaw to Hamburg to Nagasaki.

The effectiveness of the methods – a carpet of bombs dropped from a thousand choreographed planes on holy Cologne in 1942, the flash of energy in 1945, brighter than a thousand suns, deadlier than 200,000 tonnes of TNT – sent a message: it works! And that which works, anyone can do. And if everyone can do it, it is highly unlikely that nobody will. This ‘if’ is purely a matter of belief and luck; it is actually the realm of hope and prayers. The ‘how’ on the other hand is a practical occupation. Since Hiroshima and Dresden, this ‘how’ has been worked on feverishly. How could similar death zones be made to be safer, more manageable, more cost-effective and larger?

The downfall of the two cities also tells an ugly story about the ‘if’ of the weapon of mass destruction. With the know-how in place, the grounds for deployment practically took care of themselves. In 1939, a few weeks after Otto Hahn’s splitting of uranium had brought him closer to the laws of matter, research was launched into whether something like this could be used in a bomb. To describe this new source of energy, physicists Carl-Friedrich von Weizsäcker and Siegfried Flügge used an image: that the chain reaction in a cubic meter of uranium oxide would be sufficient to catapult Berlin’s Wannsee lake into the stratosphere.

The Wehrmacht understood immediately saw that this image was on its head. Far more practical would be to drop a force like the Wannsee onto a city like Berlin. Either way this was a practical application of Einstein’s formula E = mc2. Einstein, who fled to the USA to escape the Nazis, understood better than anyone the identity between understanding the world and destroying it. After Hahn’s uranium experiments, phenomenal capacities for energy and destruction were available to all. In his day, immense resources, a monstrous character and access to uranium were required. Everything is much simpler today; you can just buy it.

When the monster Hitler battered France in May 1940, taking Belgium on the way, he also gained access to the world’s uranium chamber: the Belgian Congo. This prompted Einstein to write President Roosevelt, advising him to counter the destructive potential in his formula. America should build an atom bomb as a preventive measure. To stop the annihilator Hitler from possessing it first, the free world must have a monopoly on it. Their bomb would arrive before his - to some extent, the weapon expression of his character: a machine of hell to overthrow the prince of hell. The only problem was that the bomb had to be built before the war was decided.

While the industrial giant USA embarked on the most formidable development project of all time, the military giants Germany and Russia competed for victory. Germany seemed to have the advantage in the autumn of 1942 as it stood at the heights of Caucasus and the banks of the Volga. Just next door lay Kazakhstan and Iran. Aside from these two front lines, thousands of kilometres apart, the Germans had another front about four kilometres over their heads. In the sky above Germany, the men of Prime Minister Churchill and Air Marshall Harris were fighting doggedly and with heavy losses. Since 1942 they had stopped bombing key military targets and started burning cities.

Because Germany had more factories than England had bombers, precision strikes on steel and hydrogenation plants were less painful than precision strikes on sparse aircraft. At the beginning of 1942, the 400 or so bombers did not present an insurmountable force for Germany’s anti-aircraft guns and fighter pilots. Understandably, the bombers took refuge in the darkness of the night sky where they were more difficult to see. But they couldn’t see much either, at most the vague outlines of a city.

A city like Hamburg, with 1.5 million inhabitants, cannot be bombed in 30 minutes with 3,000 tonnes of bombs. More time and more tonnage are needed. The British had to learn to burn cities. As one of their foremost fire strategists, Horatio Bond, explained, the navigational problem of “hit or not hit” could be solved by dropping 600,000 incendiary bombs on Dresden. The detonation bomb intended for the Krupp factory in Essen which lands instead on the Krupp hospital is a waste in military terms. Not so the incendiary bomb, because the hospital spreads the fire. All of the bombs pay off, because the city itself multiplies their effect. But the city fights them too, by extinguishing and choking the flames. The Royal Air Force and the US bombing fleet took three years to halfway master the technique of airborne fire bombing: the preparation of an inextinguishable inner city fire.

Between February and August 1945, in Dresden, Pforzheim, Würzburg, Halberstadt, Kobe, Osaka, Nagoya, Yokohama, Tokyo etc., a total of 330,000 people died in conventional incendiary attacks, 120,000 in nuclear ones. Four fifths of Japanese victims were buried without being identified. Dr. Shigenori, military air defence commander, wrote: “Countless bodies, clothed and naked, black as coal, were floating in the dark waters of the Sumida River. It was unreal. They were dead people, but you couldn’t tell if they were men or women. You couldn’t even tell if the objects floating past were arms, legs or burnt wood.” Before they died, they had jumped into the water to escape the fiery air which braised their lungs and set their clothes alight. People ran from the burning zones with their belongings strapped to their backs, failing to notice when these caught fire. One mother slung her baby over her shoulder and only noticed when she stopped to catch her breath that the child was engulfed in flames. Those who jumped into the water were no better off. The liquid was bubbling like the air, and the swimmers cooked in it.

Had the Hiroshima bomb hit Tokyo instead, there would have been four times the number of dead. Theoretically, 1,000 bombers each loaded with 10 tonnes of conventional munition could also have achieved 300,000 dead, but it would have been more laborious and far less certain of success. In Germany in 1945, death rates in the tens of thousands were only achieved three times: in Dresden, Pforzheim and Swinemünde.

The difference between the methods of destruction is, put simply, that nuclear weapons themselves produce the pressure and heat energy that pulverises buildings, sears people and generates fire. The combination of burning and explosion in conventional operations takes a less direct path via the materials of the city. These must react to the various impulses of the finely tuned munition: roofs are torn up, windows shatter. Otherwise, the houses wouldn’t become ovens, nor the cellars crematoriums; fire requires draught. The stone facades must channel the heat down to the foundations where the people are cowering.

There were cities like Berlin that did not work right. The width of the streets, the firewalls, the abundance of greenery and canals opposed the fire-injections and responded wrong. But Dresden’s narrow streets, decorative old town and wooden buildings fed the fires according to plan. The carefully selected triangle between the Ostragehege park and the main railway station functioned as a “fire-raiser”. The old cities, bent with age, testimonies to the distant past, were best suited to such attacks. Freiburg, Heilbronn, Trier, Mainz, Nuremberg, Paderborn, Hildesheim, Halberstadt, Würzburg: this avenue of German history shared the lot of Dresden in these months. For the allied fire bomb strategists, the study of their material composition was a science in itself.

In Watford, England, as well as in Eglin Field, Florida, and Dugway Ground, Utah, dummy towns were built complete with German and Japanese materials and inventories. This sort of thing requires thoroughness. Only real Japanese floor matting can be used, only the right number of real German toys in the German house. More woollen coats are stored in Germany than in Japan, in solid cupboards of oak, pine and beech. How many books, which curtains, what type of cushions? The German roof beams provide the crowning touch. Then the practise can start.

The practise is a success when the right combustibles meet the right materials. That is the most difficult part, because it has to be carried out from four kilometres up in the night sky.

Red and green lights mark the death zone as if drawn with a coloured pen. To drop all the munition into this lit frame, a new flight technique was developed in August 1944 over Königsberg, known as “the fan”. The oncoming squadron crosses a designated point, in Dresden a sports field. That is the hinge. When the point is crossed, the aeroplanes fan out from each other, to the north-east and the south-east. Each plane breaks off at its own angle, and knows a distance measured in seconds from the hinge, called the overshoot. Each pilot is allotted a different overshoot. When it shows on the display, the bomb bay opens.

The fan flies at three altitudes. With exact wind calculation, the munition from all three altitudes fall in parabolic trajectories over the target segment, equally distributed. Then it’s saturated. When an air force has achieved such a feat, it does not ask too probingly whether mass destruction is worthwhile from military perspective. There’s nothing wrong in showing what you can do. What does not count now will count later, and then it should be done well. One can only rehearse for future wars in current ones. That hardens people in a different way.

When soldier Jack Couffer walked among the houses of the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah in 1943, which, according to the Air Force “correspond to the type of housing in which 80 percent of the German industrial population lives”, he started imagining things. “I looked in the empty windows and imagined with terrible clarity that the houses were inhabited, bursting with life, with people walking through the narrow alleys on their way to and from the factories, street traders, shoppers, children playing. It is easier to set a sterile place like that on fire if you whisk such fantasies away”. The coming air war was no longer to be won with scruples. Five years later Curtis Le May, warhorse in the campaigns over Germany and Japan and then head of the US Strategic Air Command, comforted himself with the thought that as there were no longer any civilians, there was no longer anyone to protect. Otherwise he could not have run the office that developed the “Reaper” and “Trojan” plans in 1949 – 1950, in which 100 atom bombs were to be dropped on 70 Russian cities causing 2.7 million deaths. The plan was based on assessments General Le May had brought home from Japan. “We knew when we burned a city back then, that we would kill many women and children. The aim of the strategy is to destroy the enemy’s war-making potential. All that had to be obliterated.” The Japanese had a complex and broad-based manufacturing system. “You only needed to walk through one of our roasted targets and take a look at the ruins of the countless tiny houses. Some kind of drill press stuck out of every pile of rubble. The entire population was involved in building aeroplanes or war munition. Men, women and children.” That’s why they were slaughtered in the Second World War. “There are no innocent civilians. Nowadays you fight a people, not armed forces.”

When whole populations have to be exterminated, it is no wonder that 10,000 US nuclear warheads were amassed at the time of the Berlin and Cuba crises. Four hundred would have been enough to wipe out a third of the Russian population, which was 200 million in 1960. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara wanted to keep US casualties below 20 percent in the event of a skirmish. More would not be acceptable. As a result, 10 percent – a loss of 18 million – would be accepted.

Einstein had long lived in horror of his bomb, which was supposed to erase evil from the planet. It was evil itself and the evil was his creation. The special weapon against Hitler lost its addressee before it was ready. And already in November 1944, secret service intelligence suggested that it was a false alarm. Hitler’s weapon of mass destruction didn’t exist. The Germans were lagging way behind in these arts and would not achieve much more in this last of their foreseeable wars. General Eisenhower was already in Aachen, and Marshall Zhukov was on the Vistula. Both the same distance from Berlin.

While the armies raced against each other to take Hitler’s last bastions – the economic one in the Ruhr region and the political in Berlin - the atomic physicists were racing against the end of the war. It looked as though the military campaigns would be over before the bomb was ready. If Hitler – the bomb’s cause and intended object - was no longer a viable target, Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that, under certain circumstances, Japan might serve the purpose. But these circumstances were being taken care of, one after another. Like the Third Reich, the Empire of the Sun was militarily and economically knocked out, cut off from the sea and without a supply of oil, metal and foodstuffs. It was defenceless against Le May’s fire attacks. Moreover, the US de-coding service, which had broken the diplomatic code to the Japanese Embassy in Moscow, reported breathlessly that Tokyo was imploring Stalin to intercede for peace.

The uranium bomb was also non-essential because the fire hurricanes were capable of equally respectable damage. Moreover, it had just been established in Germany that surgical strikes on oil lines and transport routes caused far more military damage. With the German fighters grounded for lack of fuel, attacks could be carried out with practically no losses. This also made conventional mass destruction unnecessary. The relatively ineffective emergency stopgap would not, thankfully, be necessary; now there was something better. It was clear that the Allies would be victorious, Hitler and Albert Speer knew it as well. On January 30th, Speer, the Minister for Armaments and War Production, announced to Hitler that the country’s economy would be demolished in four to eight weeks. “After this collapse, the war can not be continued, also from a military perspective.” An accurate calculation.

But none of the war lords were clear on what kind of a political circumstance was to be established after these eight weeks on the shattered continent. At least Stalin knew what he wanted. Hitler knew things were out of his hands. All he could do was drag as many people as possible with him into death and leave all that remained standing in Germany to be decimated. Hitler’s instructions to Speer and the regional Nazi leaders dovetailed with those of the two remaining war leaders; Churchill and Roosevelt unleashed with their 3,000 aeroplanes an “around-the-clock-bombing”, which Basil Liddell Hart, the greatest British military historian of his day, termed “the Mongol devastations”. Two thirds of the bomb tonnage of the five year air war fell in February, March and April of 1945, most of it on militarily insignificant targets. The tiniest part of this tonnage, the precision strikes on the 16 major train routes connecting the Ruhr region with the rest of Germany, had the greatest effect.

The Western Allies had assigned most of their resources to building up their strategic air forces. Their future empire was to be based on this weapon, even better when combined with a nuclear load. Even if there was no suitable recipient for the nearly complete super bomb other than the mortally wounded Japan, War Secretary Henry Stimson, the bomb’s greatest advocate, already saw himself in possession of the “most terrible weapon ever known in human history”. The bomb had cost two billion dollars. A huge amount of money at the time, but little compared with the sums invested in the worst, or possibly second worst, despot in human history. The lord of the Gulag received ten billion dollars in war goods and supplies to conquer the lord of Auschwitz. The investment paid off.

At the price of over 20 million dead, Stalin had defeated the strongest army ever assembled, which in four years had put a total of eight million men on a breadth of front spanning a maximum of 2,500 km. No other military leader was capable of such a defence. But it was only possible thanks to 17 million tonnes of supplies from his Western partners. For them, the postwar balance sheet looked as follows:

On the assets side were the two billion dollars invested in the military trump card, the atom bomb. On the other side were liabilities of 10 billion dollars, which had promoted the monster Stalin to ruler of the continent. The way the war had progressed, the downfall of Hitler’s Germany could only lead to the hegemony of the Soviet Union over Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. And how the impoverished peoples of Southern and Western Europe – Italy, Greece, France – would situate themselves with respect to the political ideology of the invincible Soviet Union was uncertain. The outcome, unavoidable as it was, was not what the two leaders wanted. Neither Churchill nor Roosevelt could come to terms with this disaster.

At the Crimea conference of the big three in Yalta, Churchill recalled why his country had marched against Hitler. “Great Britain entered the war to defend Poland against German aggression. We stand beside Poland because it is a question of honour. Great Britain will never accept a decision which does not give Poland the security of ruling on its own territory.”

Stalin, whose forces had now been in Polish territory for three weeks, responded that he understood Churchill’s code of honour. “For Russians, however, the Polish question is not only one of honour, but also of security.” Russia had previously sinned against Poland, he said, and the Soviet government was keen to make good. “But the core of the problem lies significantly deeper. In the course of the last 30 years, the Germans have marched twice through Poland to attack our country. Why could the enemy march so easily through Poland until now? Above all because Poland was weak.” Stalin had by then installed his own followers to form a government that would make the Polish strong, free and independent.

“The British government”, said Churchill, “believes that this government does not represent even one third of Polish people.” Stalin responded that he would like to speak in his capacity as a military man. “As a soldier, what do I demand from the government of a country liberated by the Red Army? I demand that this government guarantee peace and order in the hinterland of the Red Army, prevent a civil war behind our front, and not stab us in the back.” In his view, neither the men of the government who had fled to London in 1939 nor their underground fighters had done that. They had attacked Russian weapons depots, had already murdered 212 Red Army soldiers, and violated his orders concerning the operation of radio broadcasts. When they are arrested, they complain. “If these forces continue attacking our soldiers, we will shoot them.”

Because these forces were already acquainted with Stalin when he and his partner Hitler divided Poland and liquidated its officer corps, they blamed the Russians for the annexation of their territory in 1939. East Poland had now been re-conquered; it was and remained White Russia. Stalin did not want his current partners to steal from him what Hitler had given him in the past. He offered the Poles one third of Germany as compensation. To keep this territory in the long run, they should get used to being protected by him.

“The Polish question has given the world headaches for five hundred years,” sighed Roosevelt. In Churchill’s view, it was necessary to ensure this would not continue. “Absolutely!” agreed Stalin. His headaches had diminished somewhat. All the ground in the East and South-East that Hitler had once subjugated was under Soviet control within a short period of time. And there was no one in sight to challenge him for it. Since advancing onto German territory in September, his Western allies were making extremely slow progress.

When the Germans started a counter-offensive from the Eiffel into the Ardennes killing 76,000 men, the nerves of the Western chiefs of staff were frayed. In Italy, their troops had been crawling for a year and a half up the boot and had hardly made it past Ravenna. Churchill wrote Stalin inquiring “whether we can count on a major Russian offensive on the Vistula front, or elsewhere, during January. I see the situation as urgent.” The Red Army, which had beaten the Wehrmacht colossus from the Volga back to Warsaw with incomparable martyrdom, had to quickly relieve the pressure on the inexperienced troops on the allied Western front.

Four weeks later in Yalta, Churchill expressed his admiration for the power of the operation which had begun on January 12. “The winter offensive was the fulfilment of our duty of comradeship,” said Stalin, adding that he had recognised “that the Allies needed them desperately.” They got a lot:

In 18 days, according to deputy chief of staff Aleksei Antonov, the Soviets had advanced up to 500 kilometres in the general thrust of the attack. “On average, we advanced 25-30 km in 24 hours.” 400,000 Germans had been killed or taken prisoner.

The Western powers remained where they had stood for the last four months, on a line roughly between Aachen and Saarbrücken. The respective distances of the Allied and Soviet troops from Berlin, more or less equal until the second week of January, had now changed dramatically. Marshal Zhukov was poised on the Oder near Küstrin, 70 kilometres from the German Reichskanzlei.

“How Poland was freed, and how the Red Army drove its enemy from the country,” said Churchill cryptically to Roosevelt, “is a development of major importance”. In Roosevelt’s cabinet it had been discussed for some time. At the end of October 1944, Averell Harriman, the US ambassador in Moscow, reported to War Secretary Stimson “how the Russians are attempting to force their rule on the countries they have ‘liberated’, and the use they make of their secret police in doing so.” For Harriman there was no difference between the Gestapo and the GPU, the Soviet secret police. US liaison officers had reported similarly on the cold contempt of Poland’s liberators, their plundering, murders and rapes. Churchill wrote to Roosevelt in April that it was necessary to get as far east as possible to curtail Stalin’s excesses.

From autumn to the following spring, the Western Allies came to see that their “war comrade”, who had won the liberation campaign, had his own way of reading the events. Making him see things differently was impossible. In late March and early April, the other Allies were just warming up their military muscles with the encirclement of the Ruhr region. No wonder; they outweighed the German forces 12 to 1. The German Western Army stopped fighting. Their tanks stopped moving. Petrol and the will to fight ran out at the same time. But in the military twilight of February – March, the West took a nervous look at the Soviet military steamroller, rolling forward with no regard for casualties, and loaded the bombs. The occidental Mongol devastations could begin.

Stalin had nothing comparable to this airborne might. While his men could walk 30 kilometres a day, Churchill’s bombers could fly at 300 kilometres per hour. The Russian army took 18 days to get from the Vistula to the Oder. But the British planes reached Dresden from the British Midlands in just five hours! After a 40 minute operation, the city is a heap of rubble, strewn with 35,000 dead. At a distance of 110 kilometres from the first lines of Marshall Konyev’s troops which were in the process of liberating Upper Silesia, this is, to put it mildly, the demonstration of a capacity. If not a military capacity, then at least the capacity of a military. Konyev, the conqueror on the ground, did not profit militarily from the attack and took no notice. Zhukov would later castigate the barbarianism of his allies in Dresden; from that point on, they were his arch enemies. But what were they in February 1945? And what was Zhukov for them in September 1939? An ally of Hitler’s in the subjugation of Poland. In one and the same war, enemies became partners, partners rivals and then partial enemies once more. The Cold War fronts replaced those of the World War as if by an invisible hand. The interfaces are Dresden in Europe and Hiroshima in Asia. In these theatres of slaughter, it is no longer possible to distinguish between partnership and enmity.

In Yalta, where bluffs were camouflaged in rhetoric and threats wrapped in hugs, Russia requested the help of its Western comrades in the storming of Berlin. Perhaps a final courageous ground initiative in the Rhine valley or Italy to join and engage the German troops. Or an air attack on the rail systems in Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden that would disrupt the transfer of Wehrmacht forces from the Western to the Eastern front. There was more courtship than need in the request and it didn’t cost anything to ask. The Western colleagues promised air support, although this was the last thing they were interested in providing. Yes, they smashed every railway station and train wagon they could find. But to stop troops that were taking off for the East before their eyes? Why, to let themselves be shot by them?

The British documents on Dresden give troop transports as the target of the attack. But this was not the objective of the night attack. At noon the next day, the Americans superficially bombed the railway installations, which were the first to be repaired. But they did not start a fire storm. The British flew a perfect fire storm attack, not at all interested in the important shunting areas and bridges. The paltry weapons parts produced in Dresden appear nowhere in the otherwise very detailed RAF inventories. They were irrelevant when compared with what Zhukov possessed: five times as many tanks, seven times as much artillery an 17 times the number of aeroplanes. The local military barracks remained unscathed by all these waves of attacks.

Like the bombing of Hiroshima, Dresden’s destruction has ever since been bound up with the question: “Why?” Two attacks with maximum overkill, each on a hopelessly defeated people! In the final spurt between the German and the imminent Japanese capitulations, the atomic physicists perfected their work with a test explosion whose lightning a blind woman claimed to have seen. Some of them started to grumble: “Why?” What had begun as an attempt to stop Hitler’s world domination was being directed at the last convulsions of a checkmated aspiring power. Certainly, the last Samurais would have prepared a bloody welcome for the invading forces. But what was forcing the marines onto the treacherous beaches? America could rely on the strangling grip of its sea blockade, its airborne superiority and its precision bombing. Time was on its side.

Perhaps, said the sceptics, we could simply demonstrate the omnipotence of the wonder weapon, without using it on people. We could drop it over the ocean! Scientific director J. Robert Oppenheimer, in contrast, saw through the logic of mass destruction: “It needs the impression”. Threats don’t impress, willingness does. If you don’t kill 100,000 defenceless people, nobody will believe you. Technical know-how must be accompanied by an iron will. A nation must act with a clear conscience, the proof will suffice for a generation.

The puzzle of who President Truman wanted to impress has been solved by the records. He was hoping the test explosion would coincide with the opening of the Potsdam Conference in July. Oppenheimer named the test after the godhead: Trinity. But the three gods disagreed on many points, such as Russia’s entry in the Japanese War. At Yalta, in a moment of weakness, Stalin had promised to attack the Japanese protectorate in Manchuria, the industrial paradise just north of Beijing. The strongest defence troops were stationed there.

But after all that had happened with Stalin in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Romania, his comradeship was turning into something sinister. The two Atlantic empires now wanted less of it, but couldn’t rid themselves of their Eurasian third, the devourer of continents. What was stopping Bolshevism from taking over China, and then Korea? Russia had always had its eye on Japan; invasion losses were of no importance to it. The only thing that could keep the giant in check were the apocalyptic ‘Little Boy’ – the slim uranium bomb – and ‘Fat Man’, the pot-bellied plutonium bomb.

Decisive was not Japan’s capitulation; that was already decided. But it had to capitulate as quickly as possible, and exclusively to the USA. The sequence of events speaks louder than words: August 6: ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima. August 8: the Soviets invade Manchuria. August 9: ‘Fat Man’ on Nagasaki. August 14: Japan capitulates to the USA. August 21: Japan capitulates to Russia. August 28: Japan capitulates to Mao Tse-Tung. The war ends.

But the principle of mass destruction has no natural end. After killing 100,000 random souls, no command prohibits the killing of ten million. It is not a matter of principle, but of what you can accept. Mao Tse-Tung, who forged Red China in 1949 out of the collapse of Japan, said he could easily replace 300 million losses. In a population of one billion, that’s 30 percent. One would take the Maos and McNamaras for blusterers, were it not for the fact that the tools for putting their words into practise do indeed exist.

In figures, Dresden and Hiroshima were short steps in the war of mass destruction. They lie just one generation back, and have deterred repetition, because they were seriously realised. Not that there was no other way out. From a military perspective, both cities burned to cinders needlessly. When Churchill gave the order to set Dresden alight, he thought of the hordes of refugees from Breslau and Silesia: “Tan the Germans’ hide as they retreat from Breslau”, “create panic and confusion on the administrative and evacuation routes”, “terror with military pretence”, as he wrote six weeks later. In this way the Royal Air Force was somehow a player in the collapse and reconstruction of the architecture of power in Central Europe. It gave the signal, even it could not control the ensuing events.

The forced partnership with Stalin’s fractious rogue state also made necessary the spectacle of the two atomic mushrooms. The liberators of East and South-East Asia curbed the oppressor at their side, to prevent him from gaining ground in this hemisphere as well. Yet another signal that had little effect. China was lost, and so was North Korea, over which the next war would have to be fought. Tiny, specious advantages, acquired with the curse of a weapon of mass destruction that will never go away, but is set to grow. Its first deployment went without a hitch. The know-how was there, and there was no alternative. Some people are probably still saying that.

*

The article originally appeared in German in Die Welt, on 10 February, 2005.

Jörg Friedrich was born in 1944. Since the 70s he has written extensively on the legal history of the Second World War, and the NS war crimes. His Book “Der Brand”, on the Allied bombing of Germany, achieved international acclaim. Jörg Friedrich lives as a freelance author in Berlin.

Posted at 2:25 PM · Comments (0)

Sunday, April 24, 2005; Page B06

THE BUSH administration’s challenge on Darfur is to persuade the world to wake up to the severity of the crisis. On his recent visit to Sudan, Deputy Secretary of State Robert B. Zoellick took a step in the opposite direction. He said that the State Department’s estimate of deaths in Darfur was 60,000 to 160,000, a range that dramatically understates the true scale of the killing. If Mr. Zoellick wants to galvanize action on Darfur, he must take a fresh look at the numbers.

The lowest Darfur mortality number previously cited came from the World Health Organization. Last year it reported that 70,000 people had died, and many observers repeated this number without explaining it. WHO’s estimate referred only to deaths during a seven-month phase of a crisis that has now been going on for 26 months. It referred only to deaths from malnutrition and disease, excluding deaths from violence. And it referred only to deaths in areas to which WHO had access, excluding deaths among refugees in Chad and deaths in remote rural areas. In other words, the 70,000 estimate from WHO was a fraction of a fraction of the full picture. The 60,000 number that Mr. Zoellick cited as low-but-possible is actually low-and-impossible.
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Other authorities suggest that mortality is likely to be closer to 400,000 — more than twice Mr. Zoellick’s high number. The component of this estimate involving deaths by violence is based on a survey by the Coalition for International Justice, a nongovernmental organization operating under contract with the U.S. Agency for International Development, which asked 1,136 refugees on the Chad-Darfur border whether family members had died violently or gone missing. These interviews yielded a death rate of 1.2 per 10,000 people per day. Extrapolating for all of Darfur’s displaced people, John Hagan of Northwestern University estimates that 140,000 people have died violently or gone missing since the start of the conflict. It’s possible that the refugees in Chad experienced atypical rates of violence, making that extrapolation unfair. But a study of camps for displaced people within Darfur, published last October in the Lancet, a medical journal, found that more than 90 percent of fugitives had fled their villages because of violent attacks, making the extrapolation appear justified.

What of nonviolent deaths? According to the WHO’s misquoted survey, which is based on interviews with nearly 17,000 internally displaced people, the mortality rate from malnutrition and disease comes to 2.1 per 10,000 people per day. Again, extrapolating for all displaced people, Mr. Hagan estimates that 250,000 people have died from malnutrition and disease since the conflict began, so that the total of violent and nonviolent deaths comes to 390,000. Mr. Hagan suggests that this number is conservative, because it assumes that only displaced people are at risk. Many people who remain in their vil- lages have been exposed to violence and food shortages.

Mr. Hagan’s estimate is similar to that of Eric Reeves, an independent Sudan watcher, whose reading of the available surveys is that 380,000 people have died so far. Both Mr. Hagan and Mr. Reeves say that civilians continue to die at a rate of 15,000 per month in Darfur. Of course, these analyses cannot be precise. But the consensus is that the death toll is more than three times higher than the midpoint of the numbers that Mr. Zoellick attributed to the State Department.

Mr. Zoellick deserves credit for visiting Sudan and declaring that “what has gone on in Darfur has to stop.” He may feel that the precise mortality numbers don’t matter. But his international partners will continue to drag their feet unless they are forced to confront the full horror of the killings. If they are allowed to believe that the death toll is one-third of its real level, the Russians and Chinese will pursue their commercial interests in arming Sudan’s government and extracting its oil; Europe will make inadequate humanitarian gestures; the Arab world will ignore the murderous policy of a fellow Muslim government; and the African Union, which has a peace-monitoring force in Darfur, will not step up its intervention enough to stop the killing. Mr. Zoellick needs to shake everyone awake. Next time he should cite better numbers.

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The Japan Times - April 24, 2005

Internationally recognized journalist and author Howard W. French was awarded an honorary doctorate Saturday in Tokyo in recognition of his years reporting on Asia as chief of The New York Times’ Tokyo and Shanghai bureaus.

The University of Maryland University College — which can accommodate more than 90,000 students worldwide through campus, overseas and online courses — bestowed the award during its 49th annual commencement ceremony for the Japan class held at the New Sanno Hotel.

In his keynote address, French urged the 90 graduates — more than half of them military personnel stationed in Japan — to apply their new skills to improving global human relations.

“Combat prejudice. Fight narrowness. Reject ethnocentricism. Reject the seductiveness of nationalism — which we Americans, too, are susceptible to under the cloak of what we call patriotism,” he said.

“This does not mean do not love your country,” added French, who was in Tokyo from 1999 until he moved to the Shanghai post in August 2003. “It means love everyone.”

The 47-year-old French, a Pulitzer Prize nominee whose 2004 book “A Continent for the Taking” — a searing analysis of centuries of exploitation of Africa — received broad acclaim, called the award his highest honor yet.

The Japan Times: April 24, 2005

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Long-running regional hostilities threaten the stability of east Asia

Martin Jacques
Saturday April 23, 2005
The Guardian

After being obliged by Tokyo to provide a seemingly endless series of documents, the cheerful official at the Japanese embassy in London eventually informed me that the person who helps to look after my little boy - and who happens to be Filipino - would be granted a visa to join us in Nagoya for four months. Alas, when she arrived at the airport, immigration officials interrogated her for over two hours, told her at one point that she would not be allowed in, and then finally agreed to admit her.

Japan does not like immigration. That is self-evident from even the most cursory observation of a street in any large Japanese city. It is difficult to see anyone who is not Japanese. That said, it seems highly unlikely that this kind of indignity would have been inflicted on a white person. It is directed especially at Japan’s near neighbours, particularly those from south-east Asia. As if to ram home the point, all visitors from that part of the world are required to go through a special health check before being allowed into the country.

The story is a metaphor for Japan’s attitude towards its east Asian hinterland. After centuries of isolation, Japan’s rapid industrialisation after 1867 catapulted the country into the ranks of the advanced world and left its neighbours trailing in its wake. This disparity served to further distance Japan from Asia and fuelled the kind of supremacist attitudes which saw Japan colonise Korea and Taiwan, north-east China and then briefly, during the second world war, most of south-east Asia, often with considerable barbarity.

After Japan’s defeat in the war, it grudgingly admitted partial responsibility for its actions but it never went through anything like the kind of cathartic process that was to transform Germany. Guilt was confined to an ambiguous and cryptic form of words, plus an economic largesse towards its Asian neighbours, China included. For Japan, money was easier and less costly than coming to terms with its past. The United States, which governed Japan for a brief period after the war and which has remained its protector and ally ever since, made little or no attempt to persuade Japan to do more; its interests lay in resisting communism in China, Korea and Vietnam, in which it saw Japan as a valuable ally.

Not surprisingly, Japan’s reluctant expressions of remorse, repeated again yesterday by prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, have never measured up to the profound sense of grievance felt by its neighbours, especially China and South Korea. As a consequence, the issue has festered and the wounds remain; unlike in Europe, there has been no closure. It is one of the reasons why Japan has never been able to exercise the kind of regional influence that its status as an economic giant would imply.

Indeed, Japan has remained peculiarly aloof from its own continent. In many respects, it likes to consider itself part of the west. But as east Asia has been economically transformed over the past 30 years, that mindset has become increasingly unsustainable. East Asia is no longer its impoverished backyard, but a vibrant and increasingly powerful region that demands respect. Japan’s ostrich-like attitude towards its own past has left it with feet of clay. It seems uncomprehending towards the huge resentments that animate not only the Chinese, but also the Koreans, Filipinos and many others. Indeed, it appears almost nonplussed by the latest protests, a sentiment reflected in Koizumi’s statement yesterday, which merely represented a repetition of previous utterances. It would not be difficult - in theory at least - for Japan to disarm its critics by a sincere display of remorse, by a willingness to engage in open bilateral investigations of the past, in a heartfelt rather than grudging mea culpa. If anything, though, it is moving in the opposite direction, becoming more inflexible and less willing to demonstrate contrition.

This is summed up in the person of Koizumi. Despite widespread protests both within Japan and from its neighbours, he has insisted on making an annual visit to the Yasakuni shrine in Tokyo, where Japan’s war dead are symbolically buried, including 14 class-A war criminals executed in 1948 after the Tokyo war-crimes trials. Earlier this week he dismissed the idea that these visits were provocative towards the Chinese. Meanwhile, he is gently steering Japan in the direction of a more high-profile regional role, as illustrated by the joint US-Japanese state ment on Taiwan, the move towards revising article 9 of the constitution concerning Japan’s military role, and the pursuit of a permanent seat on the UN security council.

It would be wrong to believe that the feelings displayed on the streets of numerous Chinese cities over the last three weeks do not accurately reflect the feelings of ordinary Chinese people. They resent Japan’s failure to atone for its past, not least the Nanking massacre in which, according to the author Iris Chang, 300,000 were slaughtered. The recently revised junior high school textbook - which glosses over such events and which was one of the causes of the recent demonstrations - serves only to add insult to injury. None of this, of course, is new; what has changed is the context. A more self-confident and nationalistic China, expressed most obviously in the young who took to the streets, now feels that it is time for the Japanese to make amends.

It is difficult to feel optimistic about the prospects for relations between the two countries. True, there are growing economic ties, with China now Japan’s biggest trading partner, while China is widely credited with having finally pulled Japan out of its long-running recession. Their economies, moreover, are remarkably complementary. But the sources of friction are deep and intractable.

East Asia is frozen in time. Unlike in Europe which, since the war, has been through a profound transformation, relatively little has changed in east Asia - ironic perhaps, given the extraordinary economic growth. Old conflicts remain as relevant as they were half a century ago - Taiwan, the division of Korea, and Japan’s colonisation of its neighbours. Given this backdrop, the rise of China is likely to result in a growing contest with Japan for regional hegemony. The wider implications should not be underestimated; these are the second and third largest economies in the world, and east Asia will soon be the second most powerful economic region in the world.

The attitude of the US is likely to reinforce this outcome. As the major military power in the region, it sees its relationship with Japan as the main means by which to resist growing Chinese ambitions. The Americans will surely encourage the Japanese to play an increasingly active military and diplomatic role in the region; indeed, there are strong signs that they are already doing this. Japan will, in part, be a surrogate for the US in its own growing rivalry with China.

Japan, meanwhile, has few allies in the region. In the present Sino-Japanese spat, it is difficult to think of a single country - with the possible ambiguous exception of Taiwan - which sides with Japan. South Korea’s sentiments, for obvious reasons, lie overwhelmingly with China. Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore have all expressed sympathy with Chinese sentiments. Japan has only itself to blame: it is the author of its own estrangement and it shows no sign of being willing to do anything about it.

· Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the LSE Asia Research Centre

Posted at 11:10 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright - The Telegraph

Khartoum
(Filed: 23/04/2005)

A metallic maze of chimneys, pipes and vents glitters
on the horizon in the desert outside Khartoum,
dominating the landscape for miles around.

This new oil refinery is the jewel in the crown of
Sudan’s military regime. It forms the vital artery of
a thriving oil industry that poured £1 billion into
government coffers last year.

Without this windfall gain - likely to be far larger
this year - President Omar al-Bashir could not
maintain his military machine, let alone wage war
against rebels in the western region of Darfur. Nor
could he hope to withstand the international pressure
that his bloody campaign in Darfur has brought upon
him.

Moreover, the oil that started to flow as recently as
1999 has given President Bashir an indispensable
international ally.

Almost unnoticed by the outside world, China has
become the key player in Sudan’s oil industry.

Beijing has invested £8 billion in Sudanese oil
through the China National Petroleum Company (CNPC), a
state-owned monolith. The cost of Khartoum’s new
refinery alone was about £350 million.

Freshly painted billboards in Khartoum carry pictures
of smiling Chinese oil workers and the slogan: “CNPC -
Your close friend and faithful partner”. But this
faithful friend is secretive about its stake in
Africa’s largest country. China’s embassy in Khartoum
and its commercial office declined to talk about oil.

A CNPC spokesman said: “We are a shareholder in a
number of operating companies here. We conduct our
operations through them. If you want to learn more,
you must contact the mines and energy ministry.”

Yet CNPC’s annual report discloses that about half of
all its overseas oil comes from Sudan. It deployed
10,000 Chinese workers to build a 900-mile pipeline,
linking Heglig oilfield in Kordofan province with Port
Sudan on the Red Sea.

The company’s report trumpets this achievement as its
“first long-distance crude pipeline constructed and
operated abroad”.

In fact, China shamelessly curried favour with Mr
Bashir by speeding up this mammoth project so it could
be finished in June 1999 - the tenth anniversary of
the coup that brought him to power.

China is now dependent on Sudan for seven per cent of
all its oil imports. Hence Beijing has gone to great
efforts to shield Mr Bashir.

Last September, the United Nations Security Council
passed resolution 1564, threatening Sudan with oil
sanctions unless it curbed the violence in Darfur. But
China immediately rendered this meaningless by
pledging to veto any bid to impose an embargo.

Critics accuse China of being Sudan’s chief
international protector.

“It’s very clear that’s what is happening,” said
Georgette Gagnon, the deputy director of the Africa
desk at Human Rights Watch.

“China is now the largest foreign investor in Sudan so
it has an economic interest in ensuring that the
Sudanese government is not penalised too harshly. It
has been opposed to sanctions from day one.”

Beijing needs Sudan because its appetite for oil is
insatiable.

China’s economic boom means that oil consumption is
forecast to grow by at least 10 per cent every year
for the foreseeable future. If so, China’s domestic
reserves will be depleted in the next two decades.

So the quest for overseas oil is one of Beijing’s
central goals. On Thursday China signed a “strategic
partnership” with Nigeria, a major oil exporter, and
has oil interests in at least three other African
countries.

In its scramble for Africa, China portrays itself as a
more benign partner than the colonial powers and the
modern-day multinational companies.

President Hu Jintao told an Asia-Africa summit in
Jakarta yesterday: “In pursuit of world peace and
common development, China will always stand by, and
work through thick and thin, with developing
countries.” America has already snapped-up the world’s
largest reserves. Saudi Arabia and Iraq - with 370
billion barrels between them, 45 per cent of the
world’s total - are effectively closed to China.

Sudan, by contrast, is a no-go area for western oil
companies. American investment was officially banned
in 1997 and European multinationals steer clear of the
avalanche of protest that would accompany any dealings
with Mr al-Bashir’s regime. China, however, has no
such scruples.

So far, Sudan has only 563 million barrels of proven
reserves, but the energy ministry estimates that at
least five billion barrels lie beneath its deserts.

Sudan’s few independent voices say this has brought
disastrous consequences. “The crisis in Sudan is being
fuelled by the issue of oil,” said William Ezekiel,
editor of the Khartoum Monitor. “The government is
ready to ally with Satan if it can protect its own
interests.”

Posted at 11:05 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright: International Herald Tribune

DATELINE: DAR ES SALAAM, Tanzania

BODY:
Tanzania has reinvented itself twice. The first time was in 1964, after a bloody revolution had overthrown the Omani-descended sultan who ruled the neighboring spice island of Zanzibar.

Tanganyika, as it was then, persuaded the successful African-led rebels to join their island with the mainland, and Tanzania came into being. This union remains precarious because of latent Zanzibari nationalism after too many years of misrule.

The second time was when Julius Nyerere, the founding father of Tanzanian independence, stepped down in 1985. Two successive presidents over the last 20 years have ushered in free-market reforms, fundamentally altering the direction of a once moribund socialist economy.

But the legacy of the Zanzibari revolution of 1964 and of Nyerere who died four years ago still hang over the country. Nyerere, who had been a teacher, became Tanzania’s headmaster: He was incorruptible and unpretentious, but authoritarian. His great accomplishment was that he inspired his people to resist the tugs of tribalism and pull together as one people.

Nyerere’s Christian socialist ideology led him to dream of new ways of organizing society, even though there were barely the rudiments of modern structures. Tanzania became riddled with loss-making state industries, banks and plantations.

His biggest mistake of all was what he called “ujamaa” a kind of collectivization inspired by the Israeli kibbutz. This momentous exercise, which uprooted people whose families had farmed the same scattered plots for hundreds of years, failed totally, after having consumed enormous resources and alienated many aid donors. Tanzania fell into increasing disrepair as the economy plunged downward.

The president today is the unassuming Ben Mkapa, once Nyerere’s press secretary. Later this year he will step down, having completed two terms in office, leaving the country transformed into a possible capitalist success story, but with Zanzibar’s volatile politics still rumbling offshore.

Although Mkapa’s governing party dominates Tanzanian politics, he encourages internal debate and multiple rival candidates in elections. The press is free, although not particularly vigorous. Death sentences have been suspended and thousands of prisoners pardoned while he has been in office. Security at his residence is barely visible.

When I asked Mkapa what Nyerere would say if he could revisit his country, he replied that “he would be uneasy that I have given away too much of what was publicly owned and he would probably be upset that I had built up such a prosperous middle class.”

But no one I talked to, either in the ministries or the villages, wants to wind back the clock. Free-market reforms and privatization have propelled Tanzania out of its economic lethargy.

A handsome annual growth rate of 6 percent and burgeoning tax revenues have enabled the Mkapa administration to make sure there is a primary school in every village and to start to expand secondary education and health centers.

When I visited the villages in the district of Iringa, eight hours by road from Dar es Salaam, the capital, I could hardly believe my eyes. When I worked here as an agricultural extension agent 40 years ago, there used to be in the market place just a few heaps of vegetables.

Now there was a cornucopia of produce zucchini and pineapples, eggplant and guavas, fresh peas being podded and a truckload of fresh cabbages being unloaded.

Where once you could only buy maize, now there were sacks of rice from local paddies and Nile perch from Lake Victoria. There was sunflower oil, brought in from the fields that dazzle the countryside with their yellow flowers among the green maize. And everywhere tomatoes enormous baskets of them, with a local sauce factory consuming the surplus.

All this is quite new, as are the cell phones that reach 90 percent of the villages in Iringa district, enabling traders and farmers to cut out the middlemen and find the best price on their own.

Can this continue? Tanzanian economists and the president speak of growth rates of up to 9 percent. World Bank and International Monetary Fund officials are more cautious. But no one thinks that it will fall much below 6 percent unless Zanzibar, with its evenly balanced two-party struggle, explodes.

After the governing party has selected its presidential candidate in May, Mkapa says he will spend a good deal of time talking to the militants on both sides in Zanzibar to defuse the talked-about confrontation at the coming general election in October.

If the country can get past that milestone then we can start to believe that Tanzania, maneuvering at the end of the runway, is ready to get in line for take off.

Posted at 1:23 AM · Comments (0)

The Chinese call it a war crime. The Japanese describe it as an ‘incident’. David McNeill reports from Tokyo on how the Nanjing massacre still haunts an uneasy relationship

20 April 2005

Last weekend, 15-year-old Akari Shimoda sat down to dinner in Tokyo and watched in amazement as snarling protesters in Shanghai shouting “Japanese pigs out” filled her television screen. The demonstrators surrounded the Japanese consulate in the city and pelted it with rocks and bottles before smashing shop windows, overturning cars and beating Japanese students.

“It’s a scary country,” said Akari, who says she does not understand the phrase “repent for war crimes” on the placards of the protesters. “The police just stand around and let them act.”

Does she know why the protesters are angry? “Not really. I think Japan did something to China in the past, I’m not sure what. It was so long ago.”

Japanese children’s ignorance of Asian history, thanks to a curriculum that glosses over imperial Japan’s brief but brutal colonial adventure until 1945, has been a source of controversy in Asia for decades. The contrast in China, where every 15-year-old is taught that wartime Emperor Hirohito’s brainwashed troops butchered and looted their way across their country for 14 years, could not be starker.

This contested history, stoked by growing economic and regional rivalry, helps explain why distrust and suspicion lurk beneath the surface of a booming bilateral trade relationship.

“There is so much hate between our two countries,” says Alice Lee, a saleswoman in Guangzhou, southern China. “Even though I like Japanese culture and products, we Chinese find it hard to forgive them for what they did to us in the past.”

Japanese troops poured into the wartime capital city of Nanjing on 13 December 1937, after suffering heavy casualties in Shanghai. They then began a six-week orgy of medieval raping, killing and looting, carrying out what the United Human Rights Council called “the single worst atrocity during the World War Two era in either the European or Pacific theatres of war”.

An American eyewitness, Minnie Vautrin, who kept a diary, wrote on 16 December 1937: “There probably is no crime that has not been committed in this city today.” Witnesses said soldiers practised with bayonets on tied-up prisoners, burnt others alive and set dogs on children.

Pregnant women were raped and bayoneted, decapitated heads were put on spikes or waved around like trophies, hundreds of unarmed civilians were mown down with machine guns and dumped in rivers and open graves.

Tillman Durdin, the New York Times reporter who called the rape of Nanjing “one of the great atrocities of modern times”, described a car journey to the city’s river front. “The car just had to drive over these dead bodies. And the scene on the river front, as I waited for the launch … was of a group of smoking, chattering Japanese officers overseeing the massacring of a battalion of Chinese captured troops.”

The most famous witness was John Rabe - the so-called Good Man of Nanjing, an Oscar Schindler-type businessman who ran the local Nazi party but became leader of an international safety zone that reportedly saved 250,000 lives.

After weeks watching children and old women being repeatedly raped then murdered, often with extreme cruelty, he wrote in his diary that the suffering “dumbfounded” him. Exactly how many were killed in Nanjing is one of the most bitterly contested statistics of the Second World War.

The best-known account, by the Chinese-American author Iris Chang, who committed suicide earlier this year and who said she “felt rage” and suffered nightmares during her research, claims more than 300,000 Chinese died and at least 20,000 women were raped. Her 1997 book, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II, was the target of a vitriolic campaign by neo-nationalists in Japan who said it was full of lies and exaggerations.

Today, Nanjing is another of China’s booming, rapidly modernising cities, a metropolis of more than four million people with wide tree-lined streets and a new highway stretching to Shanghai. The city memorialises the winter of 1937 in a sparse concrete bunker in the south-western suburbs where the figure “300,000” is carved in four-foot black lettering on the museum wall. Inside, an exhibition of pictures of mutilated corpses and glass cases containing the bones of the victims concludes with a visitors’ book.

“I cried when I learnt what my country did,” reads a comment from one of the many Japanese visitors.

In the catalogue of Japanese war crimes in China, Nanjing is rivalled only by the gruesome experiments of Unit 731, which was then the most elaborate biological warfare programme ever created; a four-mile complex of squat buildings in Ping Fang, south of Harbin, that turned diseases such as typhoid, anthrax, smallpox, cholera and dysentery into mass-produced killers.

The atrocities included dissection of live prisoners in an attempt to determine the effects of pathogens on the human body.

Yoshio Shinozuka, who was just 16 years old when he was dispatched by authorities in Tokyo to help the Unit 731 scientists, remembers the first time he assisted in an experiment on one of the prisoners who were known asmurata, or logs.

“I knew the Chinese individual we dissected alive,” he recalls. “At the vivisection I could not meet his eyes because of the hate in them. He was infected with plague germs and, as the disease took its toll, his face and body became totally black. Still alive, he was brought on a stretcher to the autopsy room, where I was ordered to wash the body. I used a rubber hose and a deck brush to wash him … The man’s organs were methodically excised one by one.” The results harvested by military scientists from these experiments were, by 1940, being used to spread typhoid, cholera and plague across China.

Teams of soldiers were sent to dump pathogens in rivers and water supplies. When these methods proved too slow and soldiers ended up poisoning themselves, military brains were racked for more efficient delivery systems. Shinozuka and his colleagues were put to work cultivating fleas.

When Japanese planes flew over Chongshan village in Zheijiang Province in 1942, the residents remember seeing a black cloud descending from the skies. Within days, many residents developed high fevers, headaches and swollen lymph nodes; the symptoms of flea-borne plague - the same disease that wiped out much of the European population in the Middle Ages. Within two months, about 400 people, or one-third of the village’s population, had died.

Estimates of casualties from Japan’s germ warfare programme in China from 1932 to 1945 vary, but the most careful English- language study so far, by the American historian Sheldon H Harris, says that even by late 1942 the casualty count “fell into the six-figure range”. Outbreaks of disease continued long after the scientists - whose parting gift was to release thousands of disease-ridden rats before dynamiting the germ factories - melted back into post-war civilian life back home.

Few Japanese students know anything about Unit 731, even though, after years of denial, a Japanese court ruled in a landmark lawsuit three years ago that the germ warfare programme did exist. Most Chinese know the whole sordid tale, including the bitter sting at the end.

While Shinozuka and other Unit 731 minions were sent to Chinese prisons as war criminals, the military mandarins who had built the programme and boasted of its war-winning potential to Tokyo were protected in exchange for their research findings.

In newly released documents published by historians over the past decade, American military scientists emphasised the “extreme value” of the intelligence information gained in Japanese germ-warfare tests. “The value to the US of Japanese biological warfare data is of such importance to national security as to far outweigh the value accruing from ‘war crimes’ prosecution,” wrote one. The military seal of approval meant immunity for the key figures, including the programme’s architect, Shiro Ishii, who died in Tokyo in 1959 without ever spending a day in court.

Many went on to have lucrative post-war careers in the medical industry. Unit 731 and its aftermath ranks, according to the veteran Japanese civil rights lawyer Keiichiro Ichinose, with the worst of the Nazis’ war crimes. “The government here has got to come to terms with this before it can move forward with the rest of its Asian neighbours,” he says.

Japan’s way of moving forward since the war has been to sign normalisation agreements with its former enemies, ending all claims for compensation, and to hand over billions of dollars in development aid, an apology of sorts that means not having to say the word sorry.

But its failure to make a clean break with the past has allowed the issue of war guilt to be manipulated by Beijing, which has ratcheted up patriotism, anti-Japanese and anti-US rhetoric as the social fallout from two decades of breakneck capitalism has grown. And as disputes over resources and territory worsen, this patriotism threatens to take on a life of its own.

As Japanese businesses and consulates in China cleaned up after another weekend of rioting, one of the sadder sights on television was diplomats on both sides insisting that they had not said sorry. “It is Japan who should apologise first for its war history,” said Wu Dawei, the Vice-Foreign Minister. Meanwhile, Japan’s Foreign Minister, Nobutaka Machimura, was telling the press in Tokyo that he had not expressed “deep apologies” during a private meeting with Li Zhaoxing, his Chinese counterpart. “I said no such thing,” he said. After all these years, sorry, it seems, is still the hardest word.

What it says in the Japanese textbooks

The history textbook at the centre of the dispute between Japan and its neighbours is just one of eight selected by Japan’s Ministry of Education for use in secondary schools. In it, the Japanese invasion of Asia is called the “war in Asia and the Pacific” and the word “invasion” changed to “advancement”, or replaced with neutral phases like “extension of the battle line”.

References to Unit 731 are dropped. The 1937 Nanjing massacre is changed to the “Nanjing incident” and the casualties played down, with the implication that China invented the episode - a common contention among Japanese nationalists; Shintaro Ishihara, Tokyo’s governor, famously called the massacre a “Chinese lie”.

References to “comfort women”, or an estimated 100,000-200,000 sexual slaves from across Asia forced to service imperial troops, are not included.

The 1943 Greater East Asia Conference, held in Tokyo, was said to be working for the “cooperation of each country and the elimination of racial discrimination”, even as imperial scientists were experimenting on Chinese prisoners in Unit 731 like animals in a zoo.

The benefits of Japan’s brief colonial rule of the Korean peninsula are extolled and China is essentially blamed for its own subjugation for rebuffing Japan’s attempts in the 1920s to deal with the country “in a spirit of co-operation”.

War in China was prolonged, the textbook says, because of the tactics of the Chinese Communist Party, which formed an alliance with the Nationalists in the 1930s. The population in Japan’s colonial outposts around Asia “co-operated” to defeat Western imperialism.

This approach is combined with the sometimes selective use of facts: readers are told that Japanese people tried to save Jews from the Nazi Holocaust but not that imperial scientists were also conducting Nazi-style experiments on Chinese and other Asian prisoners; that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been judged a crime on a par with the Holocaust and the African slave trade, but not that the Japanese war machine also enslaved millions of Asians.

The Japan that emerges from the pages is moderate, stoic and put-upon; a reluctant warrior steering a tortuous path between the Scylla of national security and the Charybdis of Western colonialism. It is a comforting picture, but not one that the rest of Asia is likely to agree with.

Posted at 11:12 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The International Herald Tribune

DATELINE: CALCUTTA

BODY:
During his visit last week, Prime Minister Wen Jiabao dazzled Indians with the oblique diplomacy at which the Chinese excel. Resisting pressure to proclaim China’s recognition of India’s 1975 annexation of the Himalayan kingdom of Sikkim, he nevertheless delighted his hosts by quietly handing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a map that showed Sikkim as just another Indian state.

Indians are hoping that similar sophistication also explains Wen’s refusal to commit himself to India’s claim to a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. All he would say in this context was that “China understands and supports India’s aspirations to play an active role in the UN and international affairs.” Jubilant listeners interpreted this as effective support, arguing that only Japan’s embarrassing candidature prevented an explicit endorsement.

More likely the Chinese are waiting to see which way the Indian cat jumps in the emerging pattern of alignments. The stakes were underlined when the United States, which has been wooing India with the prize of global status as a future counterpoise to China, pressed its suit during Wen’s visit with the offer of a range of military network systems of far greater consequence than the controversial fighter jets promised to both India and Pakistan.

China’s objective is to redraw Asia’s strategic map so that a booming but friendly India replaces Japan as the other regional pole, and also supplements, if not replaces, the United States as a virtually bottomless market for inexpensive Chinese consumer goods.

Hence a $20 billion trade target for 2008, rising to $30 billion by 2010, that would oust the United States as India’s largest trading partner. The intense interest Wen, himself an engineer, took in India’s information-technology industry confirmed plans to develop former Prime Minister Zhu Rongji’s imaginative proposal for a marriage between Indian software and Chinese hardware, presumably one day to mount an Asian challenge to the West’s industrial supremacy.

There is no denying the temptation for India in this replay of cold war games. The “guiding principles” for settling boundaries could pave the way for peace along the long Himalayan border by swapping disputed territories over which the two neighbors fought a brief but bitter war in 1962. Moreover, their new “strategic and cooperative partnership for peace and prosperity” acknowledged parity between the two sides, whereas in the past China treated India as a regional power, important in South Asia maybe, but of no more global consequence than Pakistan, which has one-fifth India’s area and one-seventh the population.

Though the partnership arrangement’s content and purpose have not been defined, Indians see it as setting an Asian imprimatur on U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice’s highly gratifying description of India as “a major world power in the 21st century.” It is a moot point whether Wen would have been so forthcoming without this earlier U.S. overture.

Despite last week’s bonhomie, India remains wary of Chinese moves and maneuvers in South Asia and surrounding seas. Continuing military (including nuclear) help for Pakistan, where Wen stopped off before flying to Bangalore to start his Indian tour, remains a sore point, the $250 million deep-sea port China is building at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea being a particular cause for anxiety. When ready, it will enable the Chinese, already entrenched in Myanmar across the Bay of Bengal and with a surveillance station in the Coco Islands, to restrict India from both flanks.

China’s pointed cordiality toward King Gyanendra of Nepal is another irritant. In contrast, the United States is as severe with the king as India is.

Similar rivalry in the 1950’s enabled India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, to hold the world’s spotlight. A revival of heady diplomacy is a reminder that the Indian Dream is not so much to exercise world power as to be hailed as a world power. Having said goodbye to Wen, India’s external affairs minister, Natwar Singh, flew to Washington for parleys with Rice. Pakistan’s strongman president, Pervez Musharraf, will be in New Delhi this weekend, and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan a few weeks later.

The lesson of all this shuttling is that in the emerging Great Game, India will neither forsake its American alliance for a Chinese version of the Concert of Asia, nor help the United States to contain China. A John Foster Dulles among the neoconservatives would undoubtedly find this neutrality immoral.

***

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, a former editor of The Statesman in India, is a visiting senior research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.

Posted at 10:57 AM · Comments (0)

LETTER FROM ASIA
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

Published: April 21, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, April 19 - The banners had been carefully printed, the slogans memorized, and the students and young unleashed onto the streets of China’s largest, most sophisticated city, where they were to speak sacred truths and make the enemies of the people tremble.

Chinese today have little experience of mass organized protests, so when the Government tolerated - some would say encouraged - a huge anti-Japanese demonstration here that flirted with turning into a riot over the weekend, for many it bore echoes of the mass manipulation of students of another era, the Cultural Revolution.

For hours on Saturday, thousands of Chinese, from teenagers to people in their 30’s, lay siege to the Japanese consulate in this city, smashing its windows and defacing its walls with a copious rain of rocks and bottles. But for all the expressions of anger against Japan by people far too young to have memories of China’s brutal subjugation by its neighbor, at its most basic level this was a festival of runaway nationalism, of a government-nurtured Chinese-ness.

Declaring themselves to be all one people, the demonstrators proclaimed their love of the police who escorted them as they marched to the consulate, smashing Japanese shops along the way. Banners extolled Chinese greatness, in contrast to little Japan, chanters called for their homeland to stand tall, and talk was dominated by Chinese “feelings,” a word repeated over and over, as if no other feelings counted.

Revealingly, people who had lived through the real Cultural Revolution, not the sanitized one taught in China’s history books, watched from the sidelines with looks of amazement and worry. They were old enough to remember just how badly things can go when intoxication is the order of the day, and laws are swept aside by feelings.

“I watched the police cars escorting the demonstrators and felt this all looked familiar, like an official event in the Cultural Revolution, but those drew bigger crowds and were more emotional,” said Zhu Xueqin, a historian at Shanghai University who emerged from a public library to watch the march go by. “I observed it as a bystander, and the people observing around me looked indifferent, seemingly full of reservations.”

Shanghai is the most dazzling symbol of a China that has changed so much since the Cultural Revolution as to be almost unrecognizable. But in some important ways, most notably the government’s will to control information and through it people’s minds, the events of the weekend here and their aftermath show that this country has barely changed at all.

The Maoist slogans of 40 years ago have been replaced by anti-Japanese watchwords, and then as now, few of those caught up in the excitement paused to examine the relationship of today’s slogans to the truth. Here were students mouthing such claims as “Japan has never apologized to China,” or “Japanese textbooks whitewash history.” Many Japanese textbooks have recently de-emphasized atrocities committed in China, and some have been widely distributed. But in China, the most tendentious of them is the one cited as a representative sample, although it is used by less than 1 percent of Japanese schools.

Others said, trembling with conviction, that Japan wants to keep China down, or even instigate the country’s breakup. Never mind that for over two decades, Japan has been a leading source of development assistance for China - to the tune of $30 billion in low interest loans - helping build everything from Shanghai’s futuristic airport to expensive highway and water systems in the country’s vast, impoverished west.

Few in the Chinese crowds, including many educated in the country’s best schools, seemed aware of facts like those, or of any other side to the story save what could be fit into the dichotomy of a China that is essentially good and a Japan that is predatory, evil, conniving or, in a word heard over and over, “disgusting.”

Like anything that involves information in China, this ignorance seems the result of careful planning. Since diplomatic relations between the two countries were normalized in 1972, for example, Japanese officials have apologized numerous times to China for the suffering their country inflicted in the 20th century. In 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the war’s end, for example, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama spoke of the ” tremendous damage and suffering” his country had caused, adding, “I regard, in a spirit of humanity, these irrefutable facts of history, and express here once again my feelings of deep remorse and state my heartfelt apology.”

But China’s state-controlled media have usually focused on finding fault with each Japanese pronouncement, sustaining the belief that Japan has indeed never apologized.

The largest question, perhaps, is why China would so carefully sustain anger at Japan.

One possibility is that in recent years, the legitimacy of China’s leadership has rested on few things so much as the idea of inevitability - a destined ascension of the country to prosperous world-power status and a return to the unquestioned pre-eminence in the East that it enjoyed before the 20th century. In this picture there is little room for Japan, a country that has derailed China’s ambitions before, and suddenly seems unwilling to fade.

This could help explain China’s reactions to Tokyo’s bid for a United Nations Security Council seat and discussions under way in Japan about revising the country’s so-called peace constitution, as well as Chinese nervousness about Taiwan, which Japan, together with the United States, recently called a joint security concern.

By midweek, signs were multiplying that China’s leaders were rethinking their confrontation with Japan, at least at the level of public relations. With the ugliness toward their neighbor threatening a loss of international sympathy on other issues, China first reportedly made a quiet offer to repair Japan’s damaged consulate, and on Tuesday urged an end to demonstrations.

Left aside in the weekend’s atmospherics in the effort to dispel them was the question of whether China has done a better job teaching history than its neighbor. In the West, it is accepted as fact that more Chinese were killed by the policies of Mao Zedong than by the Japanese, including many by summary execution and other atrocities that are glossed over in Chinese textbooks. In those books, Mao is still treated with reverence.

China also claims never to have seized territory from a neighbor, but China attacked India by surprise in 1962 and the details of other campaigns, from Korea and Xinjiang in the north to Vietnam and Tibet in the country’s south and west, are also absent from textbooks.

More remarkable than any glance at the receding past, however, was the way news of the anti-Japanese demonstrations has been treated in China in the here and now. Chinese authorities televised notices that the protests had not been approved on the eve of Saturday’s anti-Japanese demonstration, which served as much as anything else as an announcement of the event. The news the next day avoided all mention of disorder. Similarly there were no images of young people pelting the Japanese consulate at their leisure, within arm’s reach of paramilitary police.

The seeming contradictions in all of this were not lost on all Chinese, however. Discussions have raged all week on the Internet, with many questioning their countrymen’s behavior and the government’s permissiveness toward anti-Japanese violence. “How shameful is it that to release our emotions we damaged the property of our countrymen and bullied the weak,” wrote one forum participant? “You call yourselves patriotic? Patriotic what?”

Posted at 1:09 AM · Comments (0)

In an interview, columnist and author Thomas L. Friedman says globalization has outpaced its critics

YaleGlobal, 18 April 2005

Nayan Chanda:

Reading the book, one gets the impression that you took a dive into the innards of globalization and came out with some amazing tales of how things are happening behind the scenes that we don’t see. What are, the main forces changing the globalized world today?

Thomas L. Friedman:

In doing this book, I didn’t really read a bunch of other books, I really dove into the companies themselves who were spearheading this process. And the book, in that sense, is very inductive. I looked at what companies were doing and then tried to tease out the general patterns.

To begin with, my primary tutors for this book, were two Indian entrepreneurs: the president of Wipro, Vivec Paul, and the CEO of Infosys, Nandan Nilekani. So, how did I happen to end up with two Indian entrepreneurs? It’s because they’re actually at the epicenter of it now.

Secondly, I really dove into some key companies that are now globalizing and are really the source for understanding globalization. Wal-Mart, UPS – these are companies we don’t traditionally think of as being goldmines of insights into globalization, but in fact if you understand what’s going on inside these companies, you can get an amazing view of the flattening of the global playing field and the forces that are doing it.

Nayan Chanda:

Both these companies you mention do not produce anything. They agglomerate or repackage others’ products. So how are they tapping the resources from this flat world?

Thomas L. Friedman:

Well, in the case of Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart’s great innovation, as you say, is that Wal-Mart doesn’t make anything. But what they do is draw products from all over the world and get them into stores at incredibly low prices. How do they do that? Through a global supply chain that has been designed down to the last atom of efficiency.

In the case of UPS, they’ve designed a global delivery system that allows them to deliver their products with that same efficiency; they literally have a phenomenon at UPS called “end-of-runway services.” Right before your product gets shipped, they’ll attach something: a new lens to your camera … a special logo to your tennis shoes. That’s how efficient these systems have become.

Nayan Chanda:

Now of course, there have been a lot of criticisms of the business model of Wal-Mart, because it is driven by the single motive: maximizing profits for shareholders. And in the process, they give products at a cheap price to the consumers. But people are complaining that this model leaves the workers out of the equation. … So, is this a good model to promote?

Thomas L. Friedman:

Well, Wal-Mart to me, really demonstrates one of the phenomena of a flat world. I would call it “multiple-identity disorder.” I have to tell you, the consumer in me loves Wal-Mart. Wow, you can go there and get really quality goods at really low prices. … The shareholder in me loves Wal-Mart. The citizen in me hates Wal-Mart, because they only cover some 40 percent of their employees with health care … and when a Wal-Mart employee that doesn’t have health care gets sick, what do they do? They go to the emergency ward at general hospital, and … then we tax-payers pay their health care. The neighbor in me is very disturbed about Wal-Mart. Disturbed about stories about how they’ve discriminated against women, disturbed about stories that they’ve locked employees into their stores overnight, disturbed about how they pay some of their employees. So when it comes to Wal-Mart, Nayan, I’ve got multiple identity disorder, because the shareholder and the consumer in me feels one thing, and the citizen and the neighbor in me feel something quite different.

Nayan Chanda:

How do you resolve the dissonance you have between the citizen in you and the consumer in you?

Thomas L. Friedman:

I really support consumer activism that will say to Wal-Mart, that we as neighbors and consumers will say to Wal-Mart, “I love your low prices, but you know what? We’re ready to spend five cents more … if you’ll use two of those five cents to cover more of your employees with health care.”

Nayan Chanda:

One of the few views that have come out of your book, the criticisms seem to be that in your flat world, the poorest of the countries, like Africa, don’t really figure. So why are you leaving Africa behind in your discussion of the flat world?

Thomas L. Friedman:

I have a chapter in the book called “The Un-Flat World,” in which I talk about the countries that are still the majority that still aren’t flat. You know, the job of the analyst is really to identify a trend, just when it reaches the tipping point, but before anyone else sees it. And the trend is this flattening process, which I think has reached this tipping point, as evidenced by the degree that China and India – one-third of the planet – have been able to use and exploit this platform.

But I fully recognize that although it’s reached the tipping point, there are still a lot of people who are not part of it. Africa is not part of it because it hasn’t learned to globalize. Our job, as citizens of the planet, let alone as citizens of the wealthiest country in the world, is to help create the tools and conditions for places like Africa to be part of it.

Nayan Chanda:

Another point that becomes clear in your book is the role of the individual. And these individuals, who are either part of the flat world or outside of the flat world, are not geographically confined to one area. And at the same time, these people have political power, influence. How can these people’s influence be not destructive?

Thomas L. Friedman:

It’s a problem actually. The flat world is a friend of Infosys and of Al-Qaeda. It’s a friend of IBM and of Islamic jihad. Because these networks go both ways. And one thing we know about the bad guys: They’re early adopters. Criminals, terrorists – very early adopters. The person who understands supply chains almost as well as Sam Walton [founder of Wal-Mart], is Osama Bin Laden. We have an issue there with the most frustrated and dangerous elements of the world using this flat planet in order to advance their goals. Our job is to try to soak up those tools, so that we can use these collaborative tools in a more constructive way.

Nayan Chanda:

Another element which is interesting compared to “Lexus and the Olive Tree,” is that olive trees have not disappeared; olive trees still have strong roots. So how do nationalism and a flat world intersect?

Thomas L. Friedman:

You know in Lexus I wrote that no two countries would fight a war so long as they both had McDonald’s. And I was really trying to give an example of how when a country gets a middle class big enough to sustain a McDonald’s network, they generally want to focus on economic development.

In “Flat World,” I take that theory one step further into what I call the “Dell Theory” – you know, Dell Computers. The Dell Theory says that no two countries that are part of the same global supply chain will ever fight a war as long as they’re each still part of that supply chain.

Do I think this guarantees that there won’t be a war? No, I understand olive trees; people will do crazy things over their olive trees. But here’s what I predict: If you do go to war and you’re part of one these supply-chains, whatever price you think you’re going to pay, you’re going to pay ten times more.

Nayan Chanda:

From the United States, it seems that the olive tree is simply turning away. There is barely a discussion in political circles or in media circles. How do you explain that, and what can one do about it?

Thomas L. Friedman:

I think there are four factors; it’s a kind of “perfect storm” that’s come together. … First of all, there’s 9/11, which completely distracted everyone – including myself – from this. Number two, there’s the dot-com bust. A lot of very silly people equated globalization with the dot-com boom. And so when the bust came along, all these people said that globalization was over. Well, actually a flat world drove globalization to a whole new stratosphere. And the third factor is Enron. Enron made all CEOs guilty until proven innocent. As a result, people weren’t interacting with them. Fourth is what’s going on in the world of academia and basically the anti-globalization movement – which is basically dead today – because China and India have embraced this process and this project. I would argue that the anti-globalization movement and the people who have been its intellectual leaders, have been kind of dining out on the carcass of Globalization 2.0. And they’re kind of like jackals that have been eating and picking away at this carcass all these years. They’re all still talking about the IMF and the World Bank and conditionality – as if globalization is all about what the IMF and World Bank impose and force on the developing world. Well when the world is flat, there’s a lot more globalization that’s about pull. This is people in the developing world – in China, Russia, India, Brazil – wanting to pull down these opportunities.

So for all these reasons, right when we’ve reach this incredible inflection point – the world is getting flat, which I believe this is the equivalent of Gutenberg and the printing press – nobody is talking about it.

Posted at 11:42 AM · Comments (0)

China’s growing economic power and diplomatic clout may portend a turning of the tide against the US in Asia

YaleGlobal, 20 April 2005

Winning friends, influencing people: Premier Wen Jiabao is greeted by people in Vientiane waving Lao and Chinese flags. (Photo: Reuters)

WASHINGTON: In a recent poll of Australians conducted by the Lowy Institute in Sydney, 69 percent of those surveyed had “positive feelings” towards China, while only 58 percent had such sentiment for Australia’s staunch ally, the United States. Equally striking is that 72 percent of respondents agreed with Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer’s expressed view that the United States should not automatically assume Australia’s assistance in the event that US becomes embroiled in a conflict with China over Taiwan.

Other surveys over recent months in South Korea and Thailand – which, together with Australia, the Philippines, and Japan are the formal US allies in Asia – have revealed similar shifts in perceptions. The Thai and South Korean publics clearly hold very positive images of China, while their esteem for the United States has declined.

What is going on here? At the governmental level, all five allies profess their official allegiance to the US alliance architecture that has maintained peace and stability in East Asia since at least 1975. But these polls do reflect rather dramatic shifts in public opinion throughout many Asian societies – in favor of China and against America. The significant exceptions to this rule are in Japan and Taiwan – where the opposite trend has occurred.

Underlying these shifting public perceptions lie three phenomena.

First – particularly relevant in the South Korean case – Seoul finds itself much more in tune with Beijing’s views (and vice versa) than Washington’s approach to the North Korean nuclear problem. Publicly, the South Korean and US governments profess their agreement on the Six Party Talks and how to handle the North – but underneath, the ROK government shares many perspectives with China.

Second, many Southeast Asian governments are frustrated by Washington’s myopic focus on the war on terrorism in the region, while not being attentive to a variety of other regional concerns.

Third, and of greater importance, has been China’s “charm offensive” and very successful diplomacy in recent years throughout the Asian region. Taken together with Washington’s twin preoccupations with the North Korean nuclear problem and the war on terror, China’s proactive approach to its neighbors has contributed to this shift in regional perceptions.

China’s increased economic power and these changing perceptions have prompted countries along China’s periphery to readjust their relations with Beijing. As China’s influence continues to grow, many of these countries look to Beijing for regional leadership or, at a minimum, take into account China’s interests and concerns in their decision-making. Although China is far from being the only consequential power, its desire for a larger role has become a principal catalyst in shaping a new order in Asia. The region’s increasing view of China as a status quo power is even more pronounced when compared with the frequently negative images of China in the past.

China’s new proactive regional posture is reflected in virtually all policy spheres – politically, multilaterally, economically, and militarily. Politically, China’s bilateral relations with its neighbors have never been better; many formerly antagonistic relationships (Russia, India, Vietnam, South Korea, Indonesia) are now thriving.

Multilaterally, China’s deep engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) countries in Central Asia reveals a key element in Beijing’s enhanced regional profile: It reflects an increased appreciation by the Chinese government of the importance of norms and “soft power” in diplomacy. Chinese print media, television, music, food, and popular culture are spreading around the region as never before. So, too, are Chinese tourists fanning out across the region, often filling the void left by American tourists staying home after 9/11, the Bali bombing, and tsunami; 800,000 Chinese toured both Thailand and Singapore in 2004.

Beijing’s growing appreciation of “soft-power diplomacy” is also evident in China’s efforts to train future generations of intellectuals, technicians, and political elites in its universities and technical colleges. China increasingly sees higher education as an instrument of statecraft. Approximately 80 percent of the 78,000 foreign students studying in Chinese universities last year came from other Asian nations. Calculating the influence of this academic training on future generations of Asian elites is difficult to measure with any precision, but their experiences will certainly sensitize them to Chinese viewpoints and national interests. Those who enter officialdom may be more accommodating of Chinese interests and demands. They will also share personal connections with former classmates and will move up through professional hierarchies simultaneously.

China’s growing engagement with the Asian region is perhaps most evident in the economic domain. According to official Chinese customs statistics, trade between China and the rest of Asia topped US$495 billion in 2003, up 36.5 percent over 2002. During the first eight months of 2004 (final year-end figures are not yet available), China’s exports and imports continued to surge; exports to its 13 neighbors grew by an average of 42 percent, while imports surged on average 66 percent. Trade growth has been stimulated particularly by sharp rises in China’s imports of components and semi-finished products from around the region (which jumped 42 percent to US$272.9 billion), much of which is assembled into final-demand goods and exported to the United States and Europe. Today, nearly half of China’s total trade volume is intra-regional, and unlike China’s trade with the United States and Europe, it is relatively balanced.

In the security sphere, considerable anxiety remains about the pace and scope of China’s military modernization program, as well as Beijing’s refusal to renounce the use of force against Taiwan. The recent passage of China’s “Anti-Succession Law” only heightened these concerns.

Yet, in recent years, Beijing has become much more sensitive to these regional concerns and has worked hard to try and assuage them. China has been able to offset concerns about its buildup against Taiwan with a series of confidence-building measures of four principal types:

• bilateral security dialogues initiated with several neighboring countries (to date with Australia, India, Japan, Mongolia, and South Korea),

• military-military exchanges (including joint naval exercises),

• increased participation in the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), which Beijing sees as a potential catalyst for establishing a regional cooperative security community, and

• increased military transparency, as demonstrated by its publication of several defense white papers and invitations to observe Chinese military exercises.

Again, while regional concerns remain regarding China’s military capabilities and ambitions, these efforts have gone some way towards ameliorating the angst.

Despite the significance of China’s regional rise, it is tempting – but premature – to conclude that the Asian regional system has become Sinocentric or dominated by China. This is decidedly not the case. China shares the regional stage with the United States, Japan, ASEAN, and increasingly India. The United States remains the region’s most powerful actor, although its power and influence are neither unconstrained nor uncontested.

Today, the Asian regional order is an increasingly complex mosaic of actors and factors. China is certainly among the most important of these, and its influence is being increasingly felt. Nonetheless, the shifting public perceptions of China and the United States – as reflected in the polls mentioned at the beginning – is an indicator of current trends and perhaps a harbinger of things to come.

The author is Professor of Political Science & International Affairs, and Director of the China Policy Program, in the Elliott School of International Affairs at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Portions of this article are drawn from his recently-published article “China Engages Asia: Reshaping the Regional Order, published in International Security, Vol. 29, Issue 3 (Winter 2004/2005), available at: http://mitpress.mit.edu.

Rights:
© 2005 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

Posted at 11:33 AM · Comments (0)

20 April 2005

Where is the origin of human beings? From where did
the ancestors of today’s ethnic groups worldwide
migrate? An explorative program on human races’
migrations was initiated on April 18.

To uncover the centuries’ mystery, scientists with ten
research centers of the participant countries ¨C
including China, Russia, France, Britain — will
collect 100,000 human DNA samples in five years to
outline an accurate genetic structure of peoples in
the world.

The School of Life Science of Fudan University in east
China’s Shanghai municipality is the only institution
in East Asia and Southeast Asia designated to the
program. It will be dedicated to collect over 10, 000
DNA samples in the region.

China started independently in 1997 on the Chinese
part and has made some achievement, according to Dr.
Li Hui from the School of Life Science of Fudan
University. From the nearly 20, 000 DNA samples
collected on different ethnic groups in China, it is
found that Chinese ancestors set off from northeast
Africa about 50, 000 years ago, across the Middle
East, South Asia and Southeast Asia, arrived in
today’s Yunnan and Guangxi about 30, 000 years before
now.

They evolved into 56 ethnic groups throughout tens of
thousands of years, among whom, Han and Tibetan people
were the latest to branch out therefore were the
closest in terms of blood tie. This provides strong
evidence for the concept that “Han and Tibetan people
had the same ancestors”.

Every cell in the human body has a whole set of
genome, in which 99 percent of the DNA sequence
information is the same and one percent is
individually specific. If the samples are huge in
amount, the one percent of individual information will
converge into a large database through which
scientists can easily find the common characteristics
of different groups.

As for gene security, which draws much concern, Fudan
University has specially established an ethics
committee committed to monitoring the research on the
DNA samples on China’s part. Personal information will
be stored anonymously and can not be shown without
personal password.

Posted at 1:34 AM · Comments (0)

Note: I’ve talked extensively about this beautiful book in the Reading Table section and elsewhere. hf

Pankaj Mishra

An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World
by Pankaj Mishra

Farrar, Straus and Giroux,422 pp., $25.00

In his new book, Free World, Timothy Garton Ash remembers the friends he had behind the Iron Curtain who used to tell him, “We are the West trapped in the East.” There are many kinds of East, as Garton Ash quickly acknowledges, and yet sometimes they seem to be linked by this theme of imprisonment and what arises out of it, a longing for enlightenment and liberation (in a secular form). We in the West have watched for years would-be refugees going off to find—or lose— themselves in India, or in a Buddhist monastery, eager to absorb the “wisdom of the East.” Yet what’s awaiting them at the other end, increasingly, is people hungering for the wisdom of the West.

The West, for those far away, means a haven of modern thinking, reason, and clear-headedness, qualities not always apparent at home, and a refuge from ritualism and superstition; those who long for it are Occidentalists in a hopeful sense. And though such admirers are to be found in every traditional or impoverished culture, they are especially conspicuous in countries such as India, where centuries of British rule have left many people thinking of London or Oxford as the natural culmination of their ambitions, social or intellectual. Nirad Chaudhuri was able to complete his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, in some sense, by moving to North Oxford; V.S. Naipaul, though growing up far from Asia, began to take an interest in his Eastern and colonial roots only after he had established himself in England, and felt he could bring a Western sense of history and critical inquiry to his often disheveled homelands. The note of sorrow and even bitterness one increasingly hears in his work comes in part from his sense that, having arrived at last in the West, he finds it crumbling all around him.

Pankaj Mishra is the latest distinctive heir to this tradition, and his deepest theme is how the dream of the West at once inspires and confounds a hopeful young man in small-town India who longs to escape the “cruel, garish world of middle-class India” and to remake himself, much as Naipaul has done, through books and reflective wanderings alone. Mishra’s first book, Butter Chicken in Ludhiana (1995), describes his travels around a provincial India where a new video-and-Vegas culture is creating a bumptious bourgeoisie that has taken in the latest toys from the West, but has no sense of how to use them. His first novel, The Romantics, in 2000, brought the theme closer to home by describing an Indian student in Benares, his head full of Flaubert and Turgenev, watching, in bewilderment and with mingled wonder and disappointment, the Western visitors around him picking up and dropping philosophies and partners with an ease unimaginable to him. These drifters look nothing like the people he has met in the pages of Edmund Wilson or Schopenhauer; more hauntingly, though having had the benefits of Enlightenment cultures, they seem lost themselves, confused and disenchanted. The book is moving because it shows us the passage to the East as it looks from the other side of the fence, Siddhartha, you could say, as it might seem to one who looks for the answer to life’s riddles to Germany.

In An End to Suffering Mishra carries his quest further by recounting his reflections, over a dozen years, on the Buddha. The Buddha has obvious appeal to him as a fellow rebel against the abstractions and corruptions of the Hinduism of his day, spurning the unending speculations of Brahmins who tell those of a less fortunate caste that karma means their fate is fixed, and their duty is to defer to Brahmins. The Buddha, though entirely Eastern by origin, provides an example, in fact, of the very qualities that Mishra has long admired in the West: reason, rigor, and the power of the mind (Buddhism can more easily be called a highly empirical “science of mind” than a religion). In his account of the Buddha’s life, Mishra presents us with a restless young seeker who becomes almost a model of roaming meditation and unflinching self-inquiry. Not the least of the ironies that lie behind this deeply serious and thoughtful book is that perhaps the greatest philosopher the Indian subcontinent has ever produced is increasingly fashionable in India because he is regarded as an icon of the West.
1.

An End to Suffering is, in effect, three different books woven together: a searching account of the author’s own coming of intellectual age; a patient and meticulous retelling of the Buddha’s life and philosophy; and an attempt to place the Buddha in the setting of Western thought, from Plato to Borges. In other hands, such an ambitious mosaic might seem like two books too many, and there are times when Mishra’s efforts to connect almost everything in his life, from his travels in Kashmir to his talk with the brother of Gandhi’s assassin to the precedent set by the Buddha, can seem strained. But he is the rare writer who is at ease as a historian, philosopher, traveler, and memoirist, and the combination of roles allows him to produce a book that few others could even have attempted.

Readers of The Romantics will recall that Mishra can evoke an earnest young Indian’s experience of his world with uncommon beauty and plangency, and his account begins with a heartfelt description of how, in flight from the chaos and confusion of urban India, he settled, many years ago, in a tiny village in the hills of northern India “facing the empty blue valley and remote mountain peaks in the north.” There, with nothing for company but his books and his own thoughts, he set about excavating the Buddha’s history and identity, in part, perhaps, to help acquire a sense of history and identity himself. To recover a past, it could seem, might be the first step to charting a future.

Mishra’s strength in such passages lies in his ease with his own vulnerability, his readiness to present himself as questing, uncertain, full of hopes for the West that the West is unlikely to fulfill. He responds to the Buddha as one who questions everything, even the mind and the world we think we know; but he also turns this questioning spirit on the Buddha, asking how his ideas for individual transformation can help the social order, and how much they merely encourage the unfortunate to accept their lot in life.

Most Indian writers now prominent in the West—Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, and Amitav Ghosh, for example —were educated and have long resided in the West; Mishra’s work gains particular force from the fact that he grew up entirely in India, in a railway town “that had no bookshop or library,” the son of an improvident Brahmin family displaced by Independence. His father, he writes, grew up “several hours away by bullock cart on an unpaved road” from the institutions of British India, and his own story (as the dust jacket of the Random House edition of The Romantics describes his fictional character Samar) is that of the “classic young man from the provinces, propelled by curiosity and passion beyond his comprehension.”

Many scenes in the new book are strikingly similar to those in his novel (fiction and nonfiction seeming to flow together in Mishra as a single insistent attempt to resolve questions of belonging). He gives us an articulate college friend, and a return to the friend’s home village; Western women flirt with Eastern traditions, as if unsure of whether it’s exoticism or wisdom they’re after; there is a description of the Sunday morning Brahminical rites of the narrator’s father, reminding the son of how estranged from his ancestors he is; and the young man takes himself off to a quiet village in the hills (in The Romantics, this is Dharamsala). In both books, the wish to find a voice of one’s own in cacophonous India, and to understand a West that exists mostly in one’s head, has a special urgency for a young man who cannot be confident that he will ever travel farther than Nepal.

Anyone who has been to India knows how calm and settled its mountain communities can seem after the swarming intensity of the plains, and Mishra evokes with perfectly modulated lyricism a world few of us have seen from within, describing the rhythms of daily life in Mashobra (population 2,000), where he savors at last the luxurious phrase he’d met only in books: “I read all morning.” You can feel the meditative quiet and seclusion of his surroundings, “the soft bells of the old English church” chiming in the distance, and much as Naipaul in his Enigma of Arrival evokes a landlord next to his solitary cottage who comes to stand for imperial anomie and decline, so Mishra, in what could be called The Enigma of Transit, describes a landlord, Mr. Sharma, who, in his lonely scholarship and air of unfulfillment, embodies for the young writer the destiny he wishes to escape.

It is central to Mishra’s story that we owe the rescue of the Buddha from complete obscurity to Europeans: it was Europeans, he tells us, who invented the very word “Buddhism,” around 1820 (though he doesn’t tell us, as Karen Armstrong does in her recent biography of the Buddha,[*] that in the nineteenth century many scholars believed the Buddha himself was an invention of Buddhism), and it was European amateurs who worked hard to recover texts that had been lost and even to dig up the Deer Park at Sarnath, where the Buddha gave his first discourse. To Hindus like Mr. Sharma, we learn, the Buddha is just another local god, a figure of legend more than of history; Buddhism for them is in any case often a refuge for low-caste Hindus who wish to escape the hierarchy into which they were born (in 1956, more than 300,000 Dalits, or “Untouchables,” converted to Buddhism in a single stroke, to get rid of their dead-end status). For Mishra, as for Hegel, Indians are sunk in a “magic somnambulic sleep”; as recently as the nineteenth century, he tells us, many British scholars thought the Buddha was Egyptian or even Ethiopian, so forgotten was he in the region of his birth.

It’s possible at times to hear an intelligent young man’s impatience with his surroundings in some of this: Mishra’s India sounds as hostile to self-realization and ambition as the bourgeois Germany of many of the novels of Hermann Hesse. When The Romantics came out, some readers in India pointed out that in its very first paragraph its Indian author alluded to Benares as the “holiest of pilgrimage sites that Hindus for millennia have visited,” a little as if an American writer were to call New York in one of his books “the dynamic commercial center that many Americans dream of visiting.” Their fear that his work was aimed principally at a foreign audience was quickened by the fact that a major figure of fascination in the book is actually called Miss West. Yet Mishra is poignantly alert to the insufficiencies of the West, and he unfolds his narrative with such candor and such modesty that it soon becomes evident that self-definition is a matter of real importance to him.

All of us create a Buddha (or any icon) out of our own needs, perhaps, and Mishra’s Siddhartha is very much a creature of the head more than the heart, a solitary, displaced traveler a little like himself. In place of the Cartesian “I think, therefore I am” (as Armstrong also notes), the Buddha radically cut through virtually all our conventional concepts of being and selfhood, to the point where “I” and “think” and even “am” all cease to exist. One of the striking achievements of An End to Suffering is its careful and lucid attempt to set the French notion of Enlightenment against the Buddhist one. In Europe, after all, the Enlightenment was a matter of philosophers offering new visions of society; in the case of the Buddha, typically, it refers only to the individual learning to still the mind, to go beyond the place where systems and theories of all kinds exist, and so see through the mind, in every sense.

Like most other writers, Mishra presents the Buddha as more physician than metaphysician, a deeply pragmatic soul simply concerned with easing the burden of suffering. A large part of his liberation came in the man’s very modesty; he was, he stressed, not an exceptional being; he had no special powers; he was just an ordinary person, doing what any ordinary person can do if so he applies himself. “Mere faith in what the guru says isn’t enough,” he always insisted, in Mishra’s paraphrase (much as his most visible follower in the world today, the Dalai Lama, does even now). “Be your own refuge” was the heart of his doctrine. “Seek no other refuge.”

Karen Armstrong begins her recent biography of the Buddha by saying that “there is not a single incident in the scriptures that we can honestly affirm to be historically true”; and yet, like Mishra, she describes the Aryan culture of small towns and wandering ascetics into which the Buddha was born, six centuries before the birth of Christ, and emphasizes that there was a “spiritual hunger” abroad then, rising from “a widespread malaise and bewilderment resulting from the change and upheaval that urbanization brought with it.”

The comparisons with our own time are evident, both for her and for Mishra (and as Mishra does, Armstrong finds correspondences with the Buddha’s ideas in Hume). Where Mishra goes beyond Armstrong is in attempting to see how the Buddha’s life can throw special light on his own; he approaches the story not as a scholar, or as one who feels any need to call himself a Buddhist, but as a thinker, moved by the Buddha’s almost scientific program of self-discovery. “I had never been religious-minded,” he writes at one point. “I didn’t think that mystical self-absorption was the best way to approach an objective historical reality, [but] I began to meditate, thinking that it might somehow help me understand the Buddha.” There is little in his book of the radiance and uplift of Peter Matthiessen’s The Snow Leopard, or Andrew Harvey’s A Journey in Ladakh, two enduring general introductions to Buddhism in practice; and yet in their place Mishra’s book has a depth and deliberation that earn our trust.
2.

Mishra’s larger aim is to put the Buddha in the setting of Western thought, as if to resolve the breach in himself between Western learning and Eastern circumstance, and, with his erudition and range, he is able to tell us that Wagner planned to write an opera on the Buddha, Rilke carried a small bust of the Buddha around with him, Einstein called Buddhism the religion of the future (since it was compatible with science, refusing to hold to what could not be empirically proved), and Claude Lévi-Strauss said that all that he had learned and thought was no more than was found by the “Sage at the foot of the tree.” Many of the freshest pages in the book offer striking correspondences between the Buddha’s ideas and those of Epicurus, Marcus Aurelius, even Adam Smith and Montaigne. Perhaps the central figure among such thinkers is Nietzsche, who saw early on that the fading of the Christian god might propel people toward a rational philosopher from the East who proposed a struggle against suffering rather than a struggle against sin. Buddhism, for Nietzsche, “is a hundred times more realistic than Christianity—it has the heritage of a cool and objective posing of problems of its composition, it arrives after a philosophical movement lasting hundreds of years; the concept ‘God’ is already abolished by the time it arrives.”

At times, these comparisons can seem abrupt (“like Rousseau, the Buddha disliked selfishness, and upheld the value of compassion”), and I was reminded of the Dalai Lama pointing out, as he often does, that, though the Buddha and Marx have much in common, it is the differences between them that are ultimately more important: they can no more see eye to eye than a man looking at his thought processes and one staring at a factory. The intellectual history in An End to Suffering is impressive, but never quite so moving as the single image of Samar in The Romantics (though it could be Mishra) wistfully admiring a postcard picture of Proust on his windowsill in a dusty Indian town.

In the second half of the book Mishra discusses myriad figures from the history of civilization and thought, from Alexander the Great, through the Emperor Ashoka, to Tagore, and sometimes the names go by in a blur. At one point, for example, of his dream of being a writer not bound by India’s past, he writes:

That ambition was inseparable from the modern bourgeois civilization of the West; and from my earliest days as a reader I had sought, consciously or not, my guides and inspirations in its achievements—in the novels of Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Proust; the music of Brahms and Schubert; the self-reckonings of Emerson, Thoreau and Nietzsche, and the polemics of Kierkegaard and Marx.

It was clear from the works of these men that to be a writer was to engage rationally with, rather than retreat from, the world; it was to concern oneself particularly with the fate of the individual in society.

In fact, if anything is clear in Emerson and Thoreau, it is that they deliberately chose to see the individual and society as entirely separate; the individual, for them, could find his self only outside conventional society. Indeed, both “Self-Reliance” and “Civil Disobedience,” like almost everything they wrote, seem to argue that to be a writer is not to engage with the world, but to make a better life outside of it. In any case, 203 pages later, Mishra writes, “The individual figures I had admired in India—Montaigne, Flaubert, Proust, Tolstoy, Emerson, Nietzsche—[were] people who had been marginal within their own societies, alienated from, and often actively opposed to, their main political and economic tendencies.” (Other readers may alight on the word “men” in that first excerpt, and note that there are no traces of George Eliot or Virginia Woolf cited here to illuminate the Buddha’s thought.)

As his personal story draws to an end, Mishra describes, touchingly again, how he arrived in London at long last, found work as a broadcaster and writer, and yet, attaining the place he had always dreamed of, found himself strangely unsatisfied, homesick even, much like the Western seekers he had observed in Benares. He travels to America, happily unencumbered for him by expectation, and even goes through an extended Buddhist retreat near San Francisco. Amid the violent nationalisms that he has witnessed from Afghanistan to India, Mishra turns more than ever to the Buddha for his concentration on the mind alone as the place where we can control our own destinies, free of ideologies or received ideas; unlike most philosophers, after all, the Buddha not only diagnosed the world’s delusions, but offered a solution to them to which all of us have access.

But the book is really Mishra’s story rather than the Buddha’s, and at its best it gives the so-called “clash of civilizations” an inward and urgent intensity. For millions today the conflicts of East and West are matters far from abstract, as they find themselves tugged one way by their traditions, which may seem increasingly moribund, the other by modern technologies and institutions that seem foreign and often menacing.

There are times here when a reader may feel the shadow of V.S. Naipaul, the secular master of solitary wandering and unsparing introspection, hang quite heavily over Mishra’s writing. Here is the same impatience with would-be revolutionaries, the fascination with historical travelers at the expense of contemporary ones, and, most of all, the search for self in a culture that is seen as having lost all contact with itself and with its history.

But Mishra’s very willingness to practice meditation in his little cottage, the tenderness he brings to lost Westerners whom Naipaul is more apt to see in terms of pride and humiliation, his very interest in the Buddha (where Naipaul has reposed his faith at times in a distinctly secular vision of human civilization) all show that he can go where the older writer has not. Indeed, the place that Mishra and others of his generation have found in the cultural conversation of the West is to some extent the result of what Naipaul and his contemporaries achieved. When Naipaul and R.K. Narayan, Derek Walcott and Samuel Selvon were beginning to make their way in English letters, there were few precedents for them; the weight of colonialism was felt firsthand; and when Naipaul, for example, left Trinidad, he could not be sure he would ever see his family again. Now history has moved so quickly that the West is ever more hungry for voices from the East.

Posted at 1:18 AM · Comments (0)

Monday, April 18, 2005; Page A17

China, a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council, has made clear that it doesn’t think Japan is deserving of similar status.

You might wonder why not. After all, Japan is one of the world’s largest contributors of foreign aid and most generous backers of the United Nations, a successful democracy for more than a half-century, with a powerhouse economy and a constitution that forbids aggression.

But here’s the problem, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao explained last week: “Japan needs to face up to history squarely.” After another weekend of anti-Japanese protests and riots in China, China’s foreign minister yesterday amplified that “the main problem now is that the Japanese government has done a series of things that have hurt the feelings of the Chinese people … especially in its treatment of history.”

Truth in history is an interesting standard for great-power status. One intriguing response would be for Japan to embrace it and suggest politely that, if China wants to keep its Security Council seat, it ought to do the same.

There’s no doubt, as Premier Wen implied, that some Japanese have a hard time admitting the terrible things their troops did in China, Korea and other occupied Asian countries before and during World War II. Apologies sometimes seem to be mumbled, and textbooks sometimes minimize past crimes.

Recently, for example, Japan’s education ministry approved a textbook that refers to the 1937 Nanjing Massacre as an “incident” during which “many” Chinese were killed, though some estimates of civilian deaths run as high as 300,000. News of these textbooks helped spark the anti-Japanese riots in Chinese cities.

But put the issue in some perspective: Many textbooks receive ministry approval in Tokyo, and no school is forced to use any particular one. Issues of war guilt or innocence, and of proper historiography, are debated endlessly and openly in Japanese newspapers, magazines and universities. Some Japanese demonstrate against politicians who won’t go to Yasukuni Shrine — where Japan’s war dead, including some who were judged war criminals, are honored — while other Japanese demonstrate against politicians who do go.

Compare this to the situation in Premier Wen’s China. There is only one acceptable version of history, at least at any given time; history often changes, but only when the Communist Party decides to change it.

For example, according to a report by Howard W. French in the New York Times last December, many textbooks don’t mention that anyone died at what the outside world knows as the 1989 massacre of student demonstrators near Tiananmen Square. One 1998 text notes only that “the Central Committee took action in time and restored calm.” Anyone who challenges the official fiction is subject to harsh punishment, including beatings, house arrest or imprisonment.

And if the 300,000 victims of the Nanjing Massacre are slighted in some Japanese textbooks, what of the 30 million Chinese who died in famines created by Mao Zedong’s lunatic Great Leap Forward between 1958 and 1962? No mention in Chinese texts; didn’t happen.

Well, you might say, how a nation treats its internal history is less relevant to its qualifications for the Security Council than whether it teaches its children honestly about its wars with other nations. A dubious proposition, but no matter; as the Times found in its review of textbooks, Chinese children do not learn of their nation’s invasion of Tibet (1950) or aggression against Vietnam (1979). And they are taught that Japan was defeated in World War II by Chinese Communist guerrillas; Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima and Midway don’t figure in.

“Facing up to history squarely” isn’t easy for any country. Americans don’t agree on how to remember the Confederacy. Russia can’t yet admit to Soviet depredations in the Baltic republics. And, yes, Japan too often sees itself purely as a victim of World War II.

But in countries that permit open debate, historical interpretations can be constantly challenged, revised, maybe brought closer to the truth. In dictatorships that use history as one more tool to maintain power, there’s no such hope.

China’s Communists used to find it useful to vilify Russia in their history texts. These days, for reasons of China’s aspirations to lead Asia, Japan makes a more convenient villain. Next year might be America’s turn. The reasons may be complex, but none of them has much to do with facing history squarely.

fredhiatt@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 2:10 AM · Comments (0)

“When we first opened the shop, we were getting about 20 customers a month. Now, six months later, it’s up to 150 a month. We’ve franchised our system to 40 shops nationwide, and their monthly turnovers average between 300,000 yen and 3 million yen. We expected most of the clients to be “otaku” (geeky) types, but as it turned out, most of them are ordinary salarymen in their 30s and 40s.”

Speaking to Nikkan Gendai (April 16) is Hajime Kimura, manager of Doll no Mori (Forest of Dolls), a business that opened last August in Tokyo’s Ota Ward. It specializes in deliveries of “Dutch Wives” to homes and hotels. For those unfamiliar with this term, Dutch Wives are life-size latex mannequins used by men as a sex substitute.

The most popular “gal” in Doll no Mori’s stable of four silicone hookers is a realistic-looking adolescent female that, if purchased at retail, would cost 600,000 yen. Rental rates range from 13,000 yen for one hour to 45,000 yen for 24 hours, with an additional charge of up to 6,000 yen for pick-up and delivery. For customers who wish to dress up their dollies in suitable costumes, options (charged at 1,000 yen each) supplied include wigs and items of apparel, such as French maid, nurse and school uniforms, negligees and bathing suits.

“Although they have realistic skin texture, they’re cold to the touch,” Kimura continues. “So many men will first warm them up in the bath or with an electric blanket before they start playing.”

According to a writer who covers the sex trade, the dolls are typically used to provide company while men view steamy adult videos.

“Some use them to snap photos,” he says. “I’ve heard others say that they prefer them because they don’t want to risk contracting a disease by patronizing sex shops. Others have told me they wanted to practice on them as a sort of trial run before giving up their virginity.”

“People have been saying for a long time that men have lost their desire for real women,” sex therapist Kim Myung Gun explains to Nikkan Gendai. “Rather than have sex with a woman who doesn’t fulfill their expectations, they would rather play with something that corresponds to their fantasy, even if she’s not real.”

The Doll no Mori website can be viewed (in Japanese only) at http://www.dollnomori.com/main.html

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Posted Friday, April 15, 2005 - Copyright Slate

You can’t take it anymore. All this yammering about how much money everyone is making in China. (You don’t know anyone actually making money in China, but from what you read, hear, and see, you gather everyone is.) Real estate, cell phones, video games, chewing gum, cement—1.3 billion people, it seems, are in the process of striking it rich. And China is not some silly hallucination like the Internet. China is … China—the next great economic superpower, the biggest growth story in the history of the world. You can’t afford to miss it.

Note that this is probably similar to the way you felt about the Internet in the 1990s (or the way you feel about real estate now). Then review your options. Assuming you’re not up to the most labor-intensive and least risky way to cash in on the boom—moving to China, learning the language(s), buying or starting a company, and settling in for a decade or two—you’ve probably been daydreaming about the fortune to be made in China stocks.

Well, keep dreaming. Because, on the off chance that you happen to buy a China stock that appreciates 10 or a hundred-fold, you’ll probably sell too early and miss the gains, or hang on too long and end up where you started. Or, you will also buy a dozen China dogs that go to zero and, between these losses, trading commissions, taxes, lost wages, and stress-induced therapy bills, you’ll eventually conclude that you could have done better selling insurance in Toledo. Should this happen, don’t beat yourself up too much: Most casual investors who mistake the stock market for a ticket to riches have a similar experience.

But you’re not going to take my word for it, are you? You still want to know how you, Joe Laowai, can put some money to work in the latest-greatest-surefire investment scheme the world has ever seen. You’ll probably be sorry, but it can be done—with difficulty.

Most Chinese stocks aren’t available—at least not to you. China’s domestic stock markets in Shanghai and Shenzhen feature two classes of stock: “A-Shares,” which are denominated in yuan and, until recently, could be owned only by Chinese citizens, and “B-Shares,” which are denominated in dollars and can be owned by foreigners. With an account at a global brokerage firm like Merrill Lynch, you might be able to buy some “B-shares,” but, in the tradition of Groucho Marx and all clubs willing to have him as a member, you probably wouldn’t want to own any (the “B-Share” market is rumored to include the sorriest lot of public companies on the far side of the Pacific). So how do you buy “A-Shares”?

Well, if you happen to be a bank, fund, or brokerage firm with $10 billion in assets, a multiyear track record, and the willingness to commit at least $50 million, you may be able to qualify as a Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor, which will allow you to buy up to 10 percent of the outstanding stock in any listed company (provided you and other QFIIs don’t own a total of more than 20 percent—China is not about to let foreigners abscond with its crown jewels). If you’re short of $10 billion, then you may be able to strike a deal with an established QFII like UBS, in which the QFII buys the stocks you want, then sells you a “swap” that passes some of the profits and losses through to you (“some” because the QFII won’t do this out of the goodness of its heart). Of course, to make this worth the QFII’s while, you’ll still need to commit a few million.

So, forget about A-shares. Instead, turn your attention to the Hong Kong and New York stock markets. Chinese companies can sell stock in Hong Kong (known as, respectively, “H-Shares” and “Red chips,” depending on whether the companies are incorporated in China or just have assets there). Most of these companies are controlled by the Chinese government, but they tend to be, as one hedge-fund manager put it, “real companies” (as opposed to some of the horrors listed in Shanghai and Shenzhen).

If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of global brokerage trades (with every middleman taking a cut), cross-border ownership, foreign taxes, and currency conversion, issues that go with investing in Hong Kong, you can buy the American Depository Receipts or “ADRs” of Chinese companies that have listed in New York. If you go this route, though, you should be aware that what you are often buying is not the actual stock of a Chinese company, but the stock of, say, a Cayman Islands company that has a contractual relationship with a Chinese company, one that you and every other poor sod who buys the stock must pray will last longer than many contractual relationships in China (Tim Clissold and others report that, in China, contracts are often viewed as a snapshot of an ever-evolving arrangement). You should also be aware that the same Chinese companies occasionally list stock on all three markets, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and New York; that the three stocks often trade at different prices; and that arbitrageurs a thousand times more nimble than you forever exploit the difference.

If this sounds as nerve-racking as it is, your other option is to leave China stock-picking to professional investors who live in China, visit the companies, and speak Chinese (in other words, people who possess the basic advantages that, in any industry but this one, one might assume were essential to the task), and buy a mutual fund instead. This is wise. But here, too, beware. Even dime-a-dozen, U.S.-focused mutual funds often charge egregious fees, so you can imagine what most foreign funds charge. It may be true, as some argue, that China’s markets are so inefficient that fund managers can justify fat fees by delivering above-market performance (the opposite of the case in the United States, where they seldom do), but we don’t have enough history to know for sure. In any case, you’re probably best off seeking low-cost active funds, passive index funds, or exchange-traded funds (single securities designed to track an index).

The paradox of China investing right now is that even though the economy is screaming along, China’s domestic markets are sucking wind—and have been for years. To experienced investors, this is not so surprising—economic performance and stock performance often diverge—but it has left most of China’s tens of millions of retail investors feeling surly and begging for government handouts to cover their losses. Normally, this is an excellent time to buy (when everyone else thinks you’re crazy), but in the case of China’s domestic markets, the half-decade decline has only rendered stocks “expensive” instead of “outrageous.” Sadly, they’re still miles from “cheap.”

In Hong Kong and New York, China stocks may actually be cheap (it’s hard to know for sure given the uncertainties surrounding the economy, legal system, accounting system, currency, Taiwan situation, etc.) This said, a China-stock synopsis would not be complete without the caveat that there is absolutely no reason for you to buy them. Buying any stock, even an American one, is far more dangerous than the mainstream media would have you believe (low-cost, diversified funds offer a better risk/reward profile). Buying a single emerging market stock, meanwhile, is akin to playing Russian roulette. Unless you have a massive portfolio—or an unusually high appetite for risk—you can get all the China exposure you’ll ever need by owning U.S. companies that do business there, or, if you’re aggressive, small helpings of Asian or emerging-market funds.

If you simply can’t stand not having some direct China exposure, then toss a few dollars at a low-cost, diversified country fund. But make sure it’s only a few dollars. And recognize that, in addition to the possibility of posting impressive gains, you may 1) lose most of your money; and/or 2) sit tight for 20 to 30 years before you break even. Remember Japan, the last great Asian investment opportunity? Its chief stock index, the Nikkei, currently trades at approximately one-q

Posted at 11:09 PM · Comments (0)

The Africa You Never See

Sunday, April 17, 2005 - Copyright The Washington Post

In the waiting area of a large office complex in Accra, Ghana, it’s standing room only as citizens with bundles of cash line up to buy shares of a mutual fund that has yielded an average 60 percent annually for the past seven years. They’re entrusting their hard-earned cash to a local company called Databank, which invests in stock markets in Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana and Kenya that consistently rank among the world’s top growth markets.

Chances are you haven’t read or heard anything about Databank in your daily newspaper or on the evening news, where the little coverage of Africa that’s offered focuses almost exclusively on the negative — the virulent spread of HIV/AIDS, genocide in Darfur and the chaos of Zimbabwe.

Yes, Africa is a land of wars, poverty and corruption. The situation in places like Darfur, Sudan, desperately cries out for more media attention and international action. But Africa is also a land of stock markets, high rises, Internet cafes and a growing middle class. This is the part of Africa that functions. And this Africa also needs media attention, if it’s to have any chance of fully joining the global economy.

Africa’s media image comes at a high cost, even, at the extreme, the cost of lives. Stories about hardship and tragedy aim to tug at our heartstrings, getting us to dig into our pockets or urge Congress to send more aid. But no country or region ever developed thanks to aid alone. Investment, and the job and wealth creation it generates, is the only road to lasting development. That’s how China, India and the Asian Tigers did it.

Yet while Africa, according to the U.S. government’s Overseas Private Investment Corp., offers the highest return in the world on direct foreign investment, it attracts the least. Unless investors see the Africa that’s worthy of investment, they won’t put their money into it. And that lack of investment translates into job stagnation, continued poverty and limited access to education and health care.

Consider a few facts: The Ghana Stock Exchange regularly tops the list of the world’s highest-performing stock markets. Botswana, with its A+ credit rating, boasts one of the highest per capita government savings rates in the world, topped only by Singapore and a handful of other fiscally prudent nations. Cell phones are making phenomenal profits on the continent. Brand-name companies like Coca-Cola, GM, Caterpillar and Citibank have invested in Africa for years and are quite bullish on the future.

The failure to show this side of Africa creates a one-dimensional caricature of a complex continent. Imagine if 9/11, the Oklahoma City bombing and school shootings were all that the rest of the world knew about America.

I recently produced a documentary on entrepreneurship and private enterprise in Africa. Throughout the year-long process, I came to realize how all of us in the media — even those with a true love of the continent — portray it in a way that’s truly to its detriment.

The first cameraman I called to film the documentary laughed and said, “Business and Africa, aren’t those contradictory terms?” The second got excited imagining heart-warming images of women’s co-ops and market stalls brimming with rustic crafts. Several friends simply assumed I was doing a documentary on AIDS. After all, what else does one film in Africa?

The little-known fact is that businesses are thriving throughout Africa. With good governance and sound fiscal policies, countries like Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Senegal and many more are bustling, their economies growing at surprisingly robust rates.

Private enterprise is not just limited to the well-behaved nations. You can’t find a more war-ravaged land than Somalia, which has been without a central government for more than a decade. The big surprise? Private enterprise is flourishing. Mogadishu has the cheapest cell phone rates on the continent, mostly due to no government intervention. In the northern city of Hargeysa, the markets sell the latest satellite phone technology. The electricity works. When the state collapsed in 1991, the national airline went out of business. Today, there are five private carriers and price wars keep the cost of tickets down. This is not the Somalia you see in the media.

Obviously life there would be dramatically improved by good governance — or even just some governance — but it’s also true that, through resilience and resourcefulness, Somalis have been able to create a functioning society.

Most African businesses suffer from an extreme lack of infrastructure, but the people I met were too determined to let this stop them. It just costs them more. Without reliable electricity, most businesses have to use generators. They have to dig bore-holes for a dependable water source. Telephone lines are notoriously out of service, but cell phones are filling the gap.

Throughout Africa, what I found was a private sector working hard to find African solutions to African problems. One example that will always stick in my mind is the CEO of Vodacom Congo, the largest cell phone company in that country. Alieu Conteh started his business while the civil war was still raging. With rebel troops closing in on the airport in Kinshasa, no foreign manufacturer would send in a cell phone tower, so Conteh got locals to collect scrap metal, which they welded together to build one. That tower still stands today.

As I interviewed successful entrepreneurs, I was continually astounded by their ingenuity, creativity and steadfastness. These people are the future of the continent. They are the ones we should be talking to about how to move Africa forward. Instead, the media concentrates on victims or government officials, and as anyone who has worked in Africa knows, government is more often a part of the problem than of the solution.

When the foreign media descend on the latest crisis, the person they look to interview is invariably the foreign savior, an aid worker from the United States or Europe. African saviors are everywhere, delivering aid on the ground. But they don’t seem to be in our cultural belief system. It’s not just the media, either. Look at the literature put out by almost any nongovernmental organization. The better ones show images of smiling African children — smiling because they have been helped by the NGO. The worst promote the extended-belly, flies-on-the-face cliche of Africa, hoping that the pain of seeing those images will fill their coffers. “We hawk poverty,” one NGO worker admitted to me.

Last November, ABC’s “Primetime Live” aired a special on Britain’s Prince Harry and his work with AIDS children in Lesotho. The segment, titled “The Forgotten Kingdom: Prince Harry in Lesotho,” painted the tiny nation as a desperate, desolate place. The program’s message was clear: This helpless nation at last had a knight — or prince — in shining armor.

By the time the charity addresses came up at the end, you were ready to give, and that’s good. Lesotho needs help with its AIDS problem. But would it really have hurt the story to add that this land-locked nation with few natural resources has jump-started its economy by aggressively courting foreign investment? The reality is that it’s anything but a “forgotten kingdom,” as a dramatic increase in exports has made it the top beneficiary of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a duty-free, quota-free U.S.-Africa trade agreement. More than 50,000 people have gotten jobs through the country’s initiatives. Couldn’t the program have portrayed an African country that was in need of assistance, but was neither helpless nor a victim?

Still the simplistic portrayals come. A recent episode of the popular NBC drama “Medical Investigation” was about an anthrax scare in Philadelphia. The source of the deadly spores? Some illegal immigrants from Africa playing their drums in a local market, unknowingly infecting innocent passersby. Typical: If it’s a deadly disease, the scriptwriters make it come from Africa.

Most of the time, Africa is simply not on the map. The continent’s booming stock markets are almost never mentioned in newspaper financial pages. How often is an African country — apart, perhaps, from South Africa or Egypt or Morocco — featured in a newspaper travel section? Even the listing of worldwide weather includes only a few African cities.

The result of this portrait is an Africa we can’t relate to. It seems so foreign to us, so different and incomprehensible. Since we can’t relate to it, we ignore it.

There are lots of reasons for the media’s neglect of Africa: bean counters in the newsroom and the high cost of international coverage, the belief that American viewers aren’t interested in international stories, and the infotainment of news. There’s also journalists’ reluctance to pursue so-called “positive stories.” We all know that such stories don’t win awards or get front-page, above-the-fold placement. But what’s happening in Africa doesn’t need to be cast in any special light. The Ghana Stock Exchange was the fastest-growing exchange in the world in 2003. That’s not a “positive” story, that’s news, just like reports on the London Stock Exchange. I imagine a lot of consumers would have found it newsworthy to learn where they could have made a 144 percent return on their money.

My independent film was made possible by funding from the World Bank, for which I am extremely grateful. But the bank wouldn’t have had to step in if the media had been doing their job — showing all Africans in all facets of their lives. In a business that’s supposed to cover man-bites-dog stories, the idea that Africa doesn’t work is a dog-bites-man story. If the media are really looking for news, they’d look at the ways that Africa, despite all the odds, does work.

Author’s e-mail: capineau@aol.com

Carol Pineau, a journalist with more than 10 years of experience reporting on Africa, is the producer and director of the film “Africa: Open for Business,” which premiered last week at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Posted at 9:50 AM · Comments (0)

(The pictures which go with this article are classic. I’ve got some dozing shots of my own here, too. Click to read more

Train carriages filled with white-collar workers dozing off on each other’s shoulders are one of the most striking sights in Japan.

Two comotose commuters on a Tokyo train

It’s no wonder that a nation notorious for its sluggish economy and apathetic citizenry can’t seem to set a course out of the doldrums, because — according to a global survey on sleep habits — half the country is blundering through life half asleep.

The study by market research firm ACNielsen, published last month, found that 41 percent of Japanese people manage six hours or less zzzzs per night, making it the most sleep-deprived nation on Earth.

Even the somnolent and slothful authorities have acknowledged the extent of the problem, listing sleep as one of the targets for action under the government’s Healthy Japan 21 campaign. In this, it lists “ensuring sufficient sleep” as one of the goals “to ensure the maintenance of mental health.”

Sleep deprivation certainly isn’t healthy — it has been used as a torture technique since Roman times — and prolonged lack of sleep induces psychosis and causes victims to lose their sense of self-identity.

But according to a 1999 study by Penn State’s College of Medicine, even one night of disrupted or missed sleep by a healthy person can drastically alter their chemical balance, and also cause daytime sleepiness and fatigue. The research found that interrupted sleep also disrupted immune systems, leading to an increase in the likelihood of infections and disease, and that even such mild sleep deprivation drastically reduced productivity and increased the chances of accidents at home or at work.

According to Yuriko Doi of the National Institute of Public Health, Japan, white-collar workers with poor sleep quality are more likely to take sick leave, suffer from poor physical health and have problems in occupational activities as well as personal relationships.

Time for a few zzzs between trains

“The effects on performance are wide-ranging and severe,” she says. “In terms of quality of life, poor sleep quality causes all sorts of misery.”

After the last 10 years of downsizing, many office workers have to work very late. According to Makoto Uchiyama, director of the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, sleep loss is hitting Japan’s millions of middle-aged men particularly hard.

“When it comes to relationships at work and at home, sleep loss seems to be having a devastating effect,” he said. “And it is possibly linked to the huge numbers of men driven to suicide in middle age.”

Men in their forties and fifties now make up 40 percent of the 35,000 people ending their own lives in Japan every year, and the current upsurge in the suicide rate can be mostly attributed to a massive rise in suicides among this group.

Although the effects of sleep loss on the vast majority of the population are far less dramatic, they have a profound influence on the way the nation operates. One of the most obvious effects is rendering workers less efficient. Perhaps Japan’s dozy workforce has something to do with its poor labor-efficiency rating — it ranks 18th out of the 30 OECD countries.

Yuriko Doi says that although a precise figure has not been calculated, the cost of sleep loss to the Japanese economy could amount to tens of trillions of yen. She cites “Wake Up America,” a 1990 study conducted in the United States, which estimated that poor sleep quality cost the world’s largest economy $15.9 billion a year. The mind boggles at what it must be costing the world’s second-biggest economy every day of every week of every year right now.

It’s no secret that in these days of restructuring and downsizing, Japanese office workers are being forced to work inhumanly long hours. Taisuke Aimono, a 28-year-old white-collar worker, said that on weekdays he gets by with as little as four hours sleep a night.

“I finish work after 10 p.m. most week nights,” he explained. “After drinks with colleagues, the commute home and a couple of hours winding down in front of the TV, it’s 2 a.m. and I have to be up 4 hours later.”

But Aimono says that he often feels dozy during the daytime, and most of his colleagues push themselves to the limit. “Everybody in my office looks exhausted all the time,” he says. “They’re always complaining of being tired and feeling depressed. We all think we’re tough, but sooner or later one of us is going to collapse.”

Sayuri Tenmizu, a 31-year-old saleswoman, says she knows she should get more sleep, but she can’t fit more than six hours into her daily routine. “Magazines say your skin and general health suffer if you don’t get enough rest, but I just can’t get to bed before 1 in the morning,” she says. “I wish I could sleep more, I feel like I’m always half asleep — like I’m always numbed to life.”

Both Tenmizu and Aimono admit that they spend a large portion of their evenings in front of the television, and watching TV may well have something to do with Japan’s chronic lack of sleep. According to the annual Eurodata TV Worldwide study published last week, Japanese people spend more time in front of the TV than any other nation, with an average daily viewing time of 5 hours 1 minute.

The health and wealth of the nation is at stake — and it’s high time Japan turned off the TV and went to bed.

The Japan Times: April 17, 2005

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Published: April 16 2005 03:00 | Copyright The Financial Times

Some Nigerians refer half-jokingly to the “coup from heaven” that took place in 1998 - the sudden death of General Sani Abacha, the repressive military dictator, a few months after a visit by Pope John Paul II.

For many in Africa it would take another miracle for Cardinal Francis Arinze, the Vatican-based Nigerian who was part of that papal delegation, to succeed as pontiff. The continent has not produced a Pope for more than 1,500 years, since St Gerasius I, believed to have been of African parentage, in the 5th century.

A combination of three factors underpins Cardinal Arinze’s potential for the papacy which Vatican watchers believe make him a favourite to succeed Pope John Paul II.

First is the rapid increase in the number of Catholics in Africa, now estimated at 135m, or 13 per cent of the world total. The second is his experience in reaching out, like John Paul II, to other religions, coming from a continent where established Christian churches bump up against Islam and a fast-expanding Pentecostalist movement. The third and most controversial is his adherence, again in the mould of the late pontiff, to rigid Catholic mores with respect to the family, gay unions, abortion and contraception.

Among Cardinal Arinze’s posts during his 20 years in the Roman Curia he has served as president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, an ecclesiastical institution that aims to promote links between the world’s religions. Hailing from a nation that lies on the fault-line between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, his knowledge of Islam is seen as an asset by many Catholics who think the next Pope should bridge the gap between the west and Islam in much the same way as John Paul II was a bridge to the Communist countries during the cold war.

As Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, Cardinal Arinze enjoys high standing as a cleric, appealing to the traditional wing of the church. But his conservatism places him at the heart of the heated debate about the church’s stance towards contraception, particularly in Africa, which is grappling with the combined impact of rapid population growth and the spread of HIV/Aids.

While the Catholic Church in Africa has become increasingly involved in the response to the epidemic and awareness about the disease, its continued opposition to the use of condoms outrages many HIV/Aids activists. Placing the emphasis instead on sexual abstinence, Catholic leaders have frequently challenged the effectiveness of condoms as a weapon against infection and argued that they encourage promiscuous behaviour.

At a local level, this position is sometimes muted, and individual priests and nuns have distributed condoms for disease prevention. But only a minority of senior Catholic churchmen have condoned condom use.

One, Bishop Kevin Dowling of Rustenberg in South Africa, has maintained that condoms can be seen “not as a means of preventing the transmission of life, but rather as a means of preventing the transmission of death to another”. Bishop Maurice Piat of Port-Louis, Mauritius, has described condoms as “a stopgap, a lesser evil”, while arguing that HIV/Aids should be fought “not with rubber but with human resources”.

As the epidemic took root in Africa, Cardinal Arinze did not openly address the issue of whether condoms should be promoted. “He opposed poor moral values, just as John Paul II did. It wasn’t a question of whether condoms are a good or bad thing, but more about discouraging promiscuity,” said Father Felix Ajakaye, a spokesman for Nigeria’s Catholic secretariat. “Being a good Catholic does not mean you are old-fashioned.”

Experts say upholding strict Catholic marriage doctrine is problematical in many African societies, in view of the widespread practice of traditional weddings, informal unions, polygamy and inter-denominational marriages, in a continent where different brands of Christianity are often mixed together and distinctions between them blurred.

The 72-year-old Cardinal Arinze’s conservative instincts may be seen as a strong point should he be promoted on the thinking that he could convey those values to Africa’s burgeoning Christian population, of which Nigeria accounts for the largest part - some 20m. His views are unlikely to set him against those who fear the Vatican could be hijacked by liberal thinkers.

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Published: April 15 2005 18:25 Copyright The Financial TImes

Signing up for a beginner’s Italian class is usually a simple enough task, but for Sebastian, a second-year student at Smith College in the US, it proved complicated. Smith has always been a school for women, which is what Sebastian was when he began a bachelor’s degree there in 2001. But since then, he has become a man. At least that is how she thinks of herself. Himself. That is how his friends think of him, too, but it isn’t necessarily how a new Italian teacher would see him. And since Italian is such a gender-specific language, Sebastian needed to let the teacher know before the semester began that there would be a new studente in class, not a studentessa. Feeling apprehensive, he asked an Italian-speaking friend, who was also “transgender”, to go with him to the teacher’s office. “Can you help us,” asked the friend. “This semester my friend needs to speak Italian like a boy.”

”Ma certo,” came the reply. No problem. And that was it. If accommodating Smith’s growing number of transgender students was always that easy, life would be a lot more straightforward, both for the students and the college itself. But it rarely is.

Established 134 years ago, Smith has educated some of America’s most influential women. Feminist pioneers Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan are graduates. So is the poet Sylvia Plath and former Republican first ladies Nancy Reagan and Barbara Bush. Set on a slope overlooking the town of Northampton in western Massachusetts, Smith is one of the four surviving “seven sisters” network of elite all-female schools.

It has been resolutely dedicated to the advancement of women (and women only) ever since it was set up. Its founder, Sophia Smith, was a wealthy New Englander who made it clear in her will that she wanted Smith to be a liberal arts college for women, equal to the best available to men; a place where women could “develop as fully as may be the powers of womanhood”.

In its promotional literature, the college boasts that its all-female student body offers a superior academic environment where women are encouraged to be anything from chief executive to US president. “At Smith,” the slogan goes, “women come first and do best.” So what does such an institution do when some of its women decide to become men?

Of the 2,500 women who attend Smith, about two dozen describe themselves as “female-to-male transgender”, or women who have become men. The term “transgender” itself is a catch-all that includes a wide spectrum of people who don’t identify with their birth sex; from transsexuals, who use surgery to change their sex, to those who change their appearance cosmetically - cross-dressers, as they used to be known, though such a term is considered old-school today. The number of transgender students at Smith is small, but it has been enough to create significant divisions on the campus. On one hand are the students who take an orthodox view of their college’s mission. These are the “girls with pearls” - the more traditional women who are at the college because of its rigorous academic training and its venerable heritage.

”If they want to be boys, they should go to a co-ed school,” says one alumnus from the 1990s, who did not wish to be named for fear of being labelled intolerant. “Women go to Smith because they only want to learn with other women.”

For these students, who pay $37,000 a year in tuition fees, Smith is first and foremost for women. Women, they say, learn better without the distractions of male classmates, and if an all-women college accepts, teaches and graduates male students, it will go down the path of the other “seven sister” colleges and lose an invaluable part of its heritage. Women’s colleges are an endangered species - Sarah Lawrence and Vassar have gone co-ed and Radcliffe has been subsumed by its former brother school, Harvard.

At Smith, males from neighbouring colleges such as Amherst and Hampshire are permitted to attend selected courses, but since they aren’t full-time college residents they do not cause as much tension as their transgender classmates.

For those students from the progressive, feminist tradition of Steinem and Friedan, Smith’s transgender students fit naturally on a campus that has long been tolerant of sexual difference. Notably tolerant. When the widely read Princeton Review of US colleges is released each year, Smith is regularly rated one of the top 10 most “gay friendly” colleges in the country. Students joke that the college’s motto should be “Queer in a year or your money back”. The campus has long been home to organisations such as the Lesbian Bisexual Transgender Alliance’s Women of Colour Committee. The National Enquirer tabloid once dubbed Smith’s hometown of Northampton “Lesbianville USA” because of its visible population of gay women. (One Smith student told me it is the only place in the US where local 14-year-old boys are mistaken for university students.)

On such a campus, some students insist that not only do women who decide to become men belong there, but college administrators should do more to officially acknowledge them. Hana Meadwell, a first-year campus activist, is one such student. She has a “faux-hawk” hair style - cut short on the sides with a longer stripe of hair in the middle - and a badge on her blazer reads “Yes. I’m in the right bathroom.”

She says the college needs to do a lot more to help transgender students. “It really doesn’t want to deal with the trans issue right now.” As for those who do not think such students belong at the college, she believes they don’t have a deep enough understanding of the issue. “The negative side wonders why a man would want to go to a women’s college, or why he’d want to stay,” she says. “They’re uninformed.”

Smith wants to be an accepting environment, where every student can explore who she wants to be. For transgender students, the bathrooms have been a testing ground. After a group of transgender students and their allies tore down gender-specific plaques, Smith created some “gender-neutral” restrooms.

It is not the only college that is grappling with transgenderism and the campus activism it has provoked. More than 25 American institutions have taken steps to accommodate transgender students, according to the advocacy group, Transgender Law and Policy Institute. Nearly a dozen have created, or have promised to create, gender-neutral restrooms, including the University of Chicago, which has 15 on its campus. Four, including New York University and Cornell University, either require or strongly encourage their health and counselling staff to attend training courses on transgender issues. University health insurance plans seldom cover the hormone and surgical procedures now sought by transgender students who decide to “transition” at college, but the University of California is reportedly considering adding cover for such services to its plans. (The procedures don’t come cheap: a “top operation” or breast reduction costs up to $10,000.)

A number of schools have replaced “male” or “female” boxes on official university forms with a single blank line that lets students state their “gender”. And a few allow students to change their name and gender designation on their official records. But housing has been a trickier proposition About two years ago, Wesleyan, a respected liberal-arts university in Connecticut, created a gender-blind dormitory hall. For the 2003-04 academic year, it offered a space where transgender students could live either in single rooms or with roommates who did not mind living with a student who had changed sex. After a huge amount of media attention - and some hate mail - the school ended the experiment after a year. Wesleyan director of university communications, Justin Harmon, says the experiment failed because it stigmatised students who lived on the floor but were not transgender, and called too much attention to the transgender students themselves. “It turned out to be a bit of a ghetto,” he says. The university now assigns housing to transgender students on a case-by-case basis. But Harmon is well aware that the debate is not about to go away. “The truth is that a lot of universities and colleges are looking at trans issues emerging from the high school population,” he says. “There are people who specifically self-identify as trans on their college applications.”

The activism of transgender students and their supporters raises complicated questions about the way we think about gender. Is it what we’re born with or is it merely one of many roles we learn? Something one has or one does? Either transgender recognition is merely political correctness at its most extreme, or it represents the next crucial battle for civil rights.

”Just as Herbert Marcuse’s theories were important on campus in his day, gender theory is important now,” says Paisley Currah, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute.

The theory sometimes requires translating for the uninitiated, especially the use of pronouns. Deciding to call oneself “he” rather than “she” is considered a highly significant event, akin to coming out. A declaration of such a change to friends or family doesn’t necessarily mean a woman will always be a man, but shows that she wants to experiment with gender roles. In theory, reversing pronouns - or going back to calling oneself “she” - isn’t supposed to be as dramatic.

Yet when I mentioned to one transgender student at Smith that I was going to meet a transgender friend, and used the friend’s male pronoun, the student corrected me, somewhat cattily: “I heard he’s gone back to the old pronoun.”

The transgender movement has also come up with a series of gender-neutral terms such as “hir” (pronounced “here”) to represent the possessive “her” or “his”; and “ze” (”zee”) to represent the pronouns “she” and “he”. The expressions do not appear to have caught on. During my four days in Northampton, the words never crossed anyone’s lips - except to explain that they existed - and sometimes they were delivered with an ironic roll of the eyes.

Whatever its cultural significance, the transgender movement poses everyday logistical difficulties for institutions such as Smith, where admissions are open only to women whose gender at birth was female. In an exchange of e-mails with Smith, the college said that a female candidate who wanted to be called “male” would be eligible.

A female who was using hormones or surgery to become a male seems a trickier proposition: the college gave an ambiguous response. “We would never be privy to that information,” said media relations director Kristen Cole.

For those students who have decided to become men, the registrar’s office notifies professors of the name change. If a student wants to change her pronoun, most professors are likely to respect that decision. But for the most part, it is the students who are either puzzled or who are actively resisting.

And the question remains: why would a man attend an all-women college? Why not just go to a co-ed school?

Anne Bassett was a 16-year-old at New Hampshire’s exclusive prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy, when she announced that she was transgender. Bassett applied and was accepted to Smith and to Trinity, a co-ed college with a reputation for being “trans-friendly”. Bassett chose the women’s school.

”Another trans guy I know from Exeter recommended Smith, and Trinity has a huge frat culture,” Bassett says over dinner at a local Chinese restaurant. About five feet tall with oatmeal-coloured hair, the baby-faced Bassett brought his boyfriend, Jesse, an affable, deep-voiced man with long hair who sometimes dresses as a woman. They met at a local goth club.

Now a third-year student, Bassett echoes what many say about the college: it’s a safe place for those who have changed gender. But while the transgendered may not be as susceptible to loutish, random acts of hatred at Smith, they’re not entirely accepted either. A second-year transgender student, Ethan Helainen, has encountered varying kinds of resistance, ranging from sceptical curiosity to outright intolerance.

”I’ve had first-years ask me why I’d want to stay here,” Helainen says. The questions aren’t asked in a hostile way - usually they arise in the course of casual conversations about gender, either in workshops, seminars or around a table. Students simply ask him, as I did, why, if he identifies himself as a male, does he remain at Smith?

”I got in before I knew what I wanted to be,” he replies, adding that he’s not going to pick up and leave just because his identity shifted. “I love it here. It feels like home.”

Earlier this year, though, Helainen went to a house meeting to talk about its big sister/little sister mentoring program and suggested that “sib” replace “sis” - as in “big-sib/little sib”. The request provoked a woman on his floor to write about the excesses of political correctness in a school newspaper, singling out the incident without naming Helainen.

”Everyone on campus should have the right to feel comfortable,” wrote Virginia Phillips in The Sophian. “No one should trample the minority but, in the same respect, the minority shouldn’t be allowed to scare everyone else into silence.”

Helainen says that initially the newspaper article was hurtful. The subtext was that transgender students didn’t have a place at the college, and in the viral way gossip flies across a small campus, it was clear that the writer was aiming at Helainen. (Phillips did not return my calls.) Ultimately, Helainen says he understands Phillips’ point and has no wish to pursue the matter further with her.

This is just a microcosm of a debate that has been held on campus for almost two years. In the spring of 2003, “trans” students began campaigning for a referendum to purge the school constitution of all gender-specific language. They wanted to replace “she” with “the student” and “her” with “the student’s”. About 1,100 students took part in the plebiscite, and the proposal was passed narrowly, by 50 votes.

A year later, the School Government Association held elections in which SGA vice-president Shawn Basta, a transgender student, ran for president. During the campaign, a broad coalition called for another referendum to overturn the constitution’s pronoun change, claiming that there had not been enough information before the original vote. Many students saw this as an unpleasant move aimed at calling attention to Basta’s gender identity.

”The campus was very divided,” recalls Alexandra Keller, faculty liaison to the Gay Bisexual Lesbian Trans activist group. “There were buttons, stickers. People stopped talking to each other. But I don’t think people over-reacted,” says Keller. “We tend to think in a binary way about gender, when there is a broad continuum of desire. The referendum questions whether or not it should be represented.” The constitution remained unchanged, but Basta lost.

While life for Smith’s transgender students may occasionally be difficult, what happens when they emerge as young male graduates and apply for a job, holding a degree from a women-only school?

Sebastian, the Italian language student, is due to finish his fine arts degree next month but he doesn’t seem perturbed about life after Smith. Candid, articulate and slightly nervous, he looks more youthful than his 21 years and is undoubtedly male in appearance - in transgender parlance, he “passes”. His breasts have shrunk and his voice has deepened since he started taking testosterone more than a year ago. He sings bass in a choir and has long sideburns - you would think he had been born a boy.

He will not have any trouble graduating from the college, but what happens when a potential employer receives his college transcript with a female name on it? Or when a human resources staff member can’t figure out how this man graduated from a prestigious women-only college? Since Sebastian plans to take a job as a cabinet-maker, he is not so concerned.

Nor is Bassett. He says a transgender friend who graduated from Smith last year got a job without a hitch. “If someone interviewing me asked me how I graduated from Smith,” says Bassett, “I’d reply that every year the college graduates a few boys.”

And perhaps, once these people leave with their degrees, the hardest part will be over. Worries about toilets and dormitories will be moot; they can live with whomever they please. They have declared their pronoun change. Difficult questions about identity may never end, but they can start getting on with their lives.

The identity crisis at Smith College, however, is just beginning. There are males in the classrooms, in the dorm halls and applying for jobs. This may mean that the school’s original mission has been compromised, or that Smith has fallen victim to its own lofty ideals of tolerance. Either way, the transgender controversy underscores what many Smith students already know: boys are a huge distraction.

Craig Offman is a freelance writer based in New York.

Posted at 1:48 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The New York Times

When Turkey was massacring Armenians in 1915, the administration of Woodrow Wilson determinedly looked the other way. The U.S. ambassador in Constantinople sent furious cables to Washington, pleading for action against what he called “race murder,” but the White House shrugged.

It was, after all, a messy situation, and there was no easy way to stop the killing. The U.S. was desperate to stay out of World War I and reluctant to poison relations with Turkey.

A generation later, American officials said they were too busy fighting a war to worry about Nazi death camps. In May 1943, the U.S. government rejected suggestions that it bomb Auschwitz, saying that aircraft weren’t available.

In the 1970’s, the U.S. didn’t try to stop the Cambodian genocide. It was a murky situation in a hostile country, and there was no perfect solution. The U.S. was also negotiating the establishment of relations with China, the major backer of the Khmer Rouge, and didn’t want to upset that process.

Much the same happened in Bosnia and Rwanda. As Samantha Power chronicles in her superb book, “A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” the pattern was repeated over and over: a slaughter unfolded in a distant part of the world, but we had other priorities and it was always simplest for the American government to look away.

Now President Bush is writing a new chapter in that history.

Sudan’s army and janjaweed militias have spent the last couple of years rampaging in the Darfur region, killing boys and men, gang-raping and then mutilating women, throwing bodies in wells to poison the water and heaving children onto bonfires. Just over a week ago, 350 assailants launched what the U.N. called a “savage” attack on the village of Khor Abeche, “killing, burning and destroying everything in their paths.” Once again, there’s no good solution. So we’ve looked away as 300,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with another 10,000 dying every month.

Since I’m of Armenian origin, I’ve been invited to participate in various 90th-anniversary memorials of the Armenian genocide. But we Armenian-Americans are completely missing the lesson of that genocide if we devote our energies to honoring the dead, instead of trying to save those being killed in Darfur.

Meanwhile, President Bush seems paralyzed in the face of the slaughter. He has done a fine job of providing humanitarian relief, but he has refused to confront Sudan forcefully or raise the issue himself before the world. Incredibly, Mr. Bush managed to get through recent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and the entire NATO leadership without any public mention of Darfur.

There’s no perfect solution, but there are steps we can take. Mr. Bush could impose a no-fly zone, provide logistical support to a larger African or U.N. force, send Condoleezza Rice to Darfur to show that it’s a priority, consult with Egypt and other allies - and above all speak out forcefully.

One lesson of history is that moral force counts. Sudan has curtailed the rapes and murders whenever international attention increased.

Mr. Bush hasn’t even taken a position on the Darfur Accountability Act and other bipartisan legislation sponsored by Senators Jon Corzine and Sam Brownback to put pressure on Sudan. Does Mr. Bush really want to preserve his neutrality on genocide?

Indeed, MTV is raising the issue more openly and powerfully than our White House. (Its mtvU channel is also covering Darfur more aggressively than most TV networks.) It should be a national embarrassment that MTV is more outspoken about genocide than our president.

If the Bush administration has been quiet on Darfur, other countries have been even more passive. Europe, aside from Britain, has been blind. Islamic Relief, the aid group, has done a wonderful job in Darfur, but in general the world’s Muslims should be mortified that they haven’t helped the Muslim victims in Darfur nearly as much as American Jews have. And China, while screaming about Japanese atrocities 70 years ago, is underwriting Sudan’s atrocities in 2005.

On each of my three visits to Darfur, the dispossessed victims showed me immense kindness, guiding me to safe places and offering me water when I was hot and exhausted. They had lost their homes and often their children, and they seemed to have nothing - yet in their compassion to me they showed that they had retained their humanity. So it appalls me that we who have everything can’t muster the simple humanity to try to save their lives.

Posted at 12:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Japan Times

No matter how alarming the day’s news is, you can always count on Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi to put a happy face on it. In the daily press conferences where he sidles up to journalists to field a few softballs he always has a way of making everything sound inconsequential.

“No, I don’t think you can say that at all,” he remarked with mild surprise when a reporter asked if he would describe Japan’s current diplomatic situation as being “happo fusagari (trapped on all sides).”

“Japan-Korea, Japan-China and Japan-Russia relations are all progressing smoothly.”

Of course, nothing at the moment is going smoothly between Japan and its neighbors — Chinese citizens throw eggs at the Japanese Embassy, South Koreans threaten to sever economic ties and Russian President Vladimir Putin grudgingly agrees to a summit where he will probably refuse to budge on the northern islands issue. And everybody, journalists and citizens alike, know it’s not going smoothly, but they accept the prime minister’s bland reassurances because they expect nothing else.

Japan’s position is to ask these countries to “respond sincerely” to its overtures for “meaningful dialogue,” which is another way of saying that if we just sit tight and don’t get excited it will all work itself out. But for the past few decades nothing has worked itself out. Regardless of the hyperbolic intransigence that characterizes China’s and South Korea’s anger regarding Japan’s refusal to fully acknowledge past crimes, Japan itself almost never “responds sincerely” to these countries’ complaints. The only country it responds to at all is the United States. You want “show troops” in Iraq? You got ‘em.

Years of putting off any real reckoning with their former enemies and colonies has inured the Japanese citizenry to Asian bitterness, thus resulting in an intractable apathy that the government counts on. The media gleefully reports the violent reaction in South Korea to Shimane Prefecture’s ordinance claiming that those rocks in the Japan Sea it calls Takeshima and which South Korea calls Tok-do belong to Shimane.

The reporting plays up Korean hysteria without providing much in the way of context. The Japanese reaction is more subdued and therefore presented as more civilized, but that’s because most Japanese don’t care while most Koreans do. Every single Korean, it seems, knows all about Tok-do and its history because they learned about it in school. They have an emotional stake in those rocks, while Japanese people can’t even locate them on the map.

The government doesn’t care much either, but it makes polite noises to the effect that Korea is mistaken and the islands are Japanese territory. It does so partly because it doesn’t want to upset nationalists, but mostly it does so out of habit. The media meanwhile sniffs around for appeasers. “Asahi Shimbun says why not just hand Takeshima over to Korea!” accuses a headline in Shukan Shincho.

The Asahi article in question was written by Yoshinobu Wakamiya, a reporter who studied in South Korea. In the 17th century a Japanese fisherman from the area now known as Shimane and Tottori prefectures got lost and landed on Ururun Island, which is near Tok-do. When he returned to Honshu, he asked the shogunate, which forbade Japanese from leaving the archipelago, for permission to return to the area to fish. Permission was granted. This story seems to be the source of Japan’s historical claim.

Wakamiya picks up the story in 1905, when the Meiji government unilaterally incorporated Takeshima (then called Matsushima) into Shimane Prefecture and later that year revoked Korea’s diplomatic rights. Five years later it annexed the Korean Peninsula, so Koreans view the 1905 declaration as the first step toward colonization. After the war, Japan avoided discussing the fate of Tok-do, and Korea took advantage of this reticence by occupying it. But no formal negotiations have ever been carried out.

There is no real advantage to Japan in its claim, except maybe some fish. Koreans obviously feel an attachment to Tok-do that very few Japanese feel toward Takeshima. It would be in Japan’s interest if, as a gesture, it gave up all claims to the island. In turn, the South Koreans might support them on territorial disputes with China and Russia that are more vital to Japan’s interests, as well help them with the North Korean abduction issue. Wakamiya points out that Japan will never fight a war over Takeshima, “and we’ll never get them otherwise.” So why not do the smart thing?

Because the smart thing takes imagination and courage, neither of which the prime minister shows evidence of possessing in abundance. If he did, he would have already called China’s bluff. Obviously, China has no real problem with students and other malcontents bashing Japanese companies, because without a target for their anger they’d probably be bashing their own government.

Japan’s reaction is to demand an apology and insist that the Chinese authorities crack down on these hooligans. It’s not an unreasonable demand given the circumstances, but all it does is fortify the stalemate. However, if Koizumi announced that he will no longer visit Yasukuni Shrine in his capacity as prime minister he would put the Chinese government on the spot. They would have to respond in kind.

As with holding on to Takeshima, continuing state visits to Yasukuni do nothing to advance Japan’s national interests. The majority of Japanese people care little about Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni and even less about Takeshima. The prime minister should listen to the people’s apathy.

The Japan Times: April 17, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 11:09 AM · Comments (0)

Published: April 17, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, April 16 - One day before a high-level Japanese visit aimed at defusing rising tensions between the countries, thousands of Chinese surrounded the Japanese Consulate here in an angry daylong demonstration.

After a three-hour march that began on the Shanghai riverfront, steadily gaining strength along a 10-mile route, well over 10,000 Chinese gathered at the consulate chanting anti-Japanese slogans and throwing a variety of missiles - from heavy chunks of pavement to paint balloons and bottles - at the consulate while several thousand law enforcement agents looked on passively.

Asked by a reporter whether anything could be done to rein in the violence, a Chinese officer answered, “By whom?” and then walked away as if annoyed. In several hours, there appeared to be only one arrest.

The Chinese tolerance of the violence drew immediate protests from Japan, whose foreign minister, Nobutaka Machimura, was to visit Beijing on Sunday. “Even though information was available beforehand to infer that there would be a demonstration, nothing was done to prevent it,” the Japanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Mass protests are rarely tolerated by the Chinese authorities. The lenience on Saturday provoked wry comments from many ordinary Chinese. “They say it is fine to denounce Japan, but the government must know that people have even more serious grievances against the state of affairs in our country,” said a man named Zhang, who declined to provide his full name.

Another man, a 23-year-old barber in central Shanghai, where several shops catering to Japanese were destroyed, said he had nothing against Japan or Japanese people. “People are taking part in this march because they aren’t allowed to protest anything else,” he said. “In your country, people are allowed to demonstrate freely, so something like this probably wouldn’t attract many people. Here we are never given a chance to protest, so everyone wants to see it for himself, to be there.”

The demonstrations, with their heavily nationalistic overtones, were the latest spike in tension between Japan and China. Whether consciously or not, protesters used slogans that echoed anti-Japanese campaigns of a century ago, denouncing “little Japan,” calling Japanese dogs, urging China to “stand up,” and calling for a boycott of Japanese products. Many protesters said they were angry about a new version of a history textbook that they said whitewashed the darkest chapters of Japan’s imperial conquest of China in the 1930’s and 40’s.

Others said they had been motivated by a recent dispute between the countries over tiny islands in the East China Sea thought to be rich in oil and gas deposits. Still others cited reports that Japan was seeking a seat on the United Nations Security Council, which they said was intolerable unless Japan apologized more forthrightly for atrocities committed in China more than 60 years ago.

Posted at 11:06 AM · Comments (0)

When Robert Kagan famously wrote that, in their approach to power and security, Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus, what might he have said about Japan? In most respects, post-modern Japan has been more like Europe than America in preferring diplomacy to force, persuasion to coercion and multilateralism to unilateralism. Indeed, it might be said that Japan is even further towards the Venusian end of the celestial spectrum in its aversion to the instruments ofmilitary power. No other country in the world explicitly renounces war as a sovereign right; or eschews the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes; or proscribes land, sea and air forces as well as other war potential. This deeply ingrained pacifism is all the more remarkable when one considers that Japan is not an Asian Costa Rica, but the world’s second-largest economy, a major financial power and a favored candidate for a permanent seat on an expanded United Nations Security Council.

But there is another Japan—one with a long martial tradition, embodied in the ancient samurai of legend, which in the first half of the 20th century destroyed Russia’s Baltic fleet, colonized Korea, invaded China and subjugated Southeast Asia before its eventual catastrophic defeat in 1945. Today, Japan is once again a leading military power, with the world’s third-largest defense budget (after the United States and China) and a quarter million men and women under arms. Its Self-Defense Force (SDF) is deployed on peacekeeping operations around the world, for tsunami relief in Southeast Asia and in support of U.S.-led coalitions in Afghanistan and Iraq. More and more politicians chafe at the self-imposed constitutional restrictions on the military and believe that Japan must be more resolute and assertive in defending its vital interests, including taking pre-emptive military action, when necessary. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has talked up constitutional reform and declared his desire to see Japan become a “normal country.” He has even dared to call the SDF what it really is—a modern army, navy and air force.

Is this a dangerous reawakening of Japan’s martial instincts and desire for hegemony, as critics maintain? Or are we seeing the emergence of a pragmatic new realism that is a natural and long-overdue readjustment to the nation’s much altered and more foreboding external environment? And if so, what will be the strategic consequences of a more assertive Japan? Japan is moving away from its pacifist past towards a more hard-headed and outward-looking security posture characterized by a greater willingness to use the SDF in support of Japan’s foreign policy and defense interests. This shift is evolutionary, not revolutionary. But it is gaining momentum and represents a watershed in Japan’s postwar security policy that will require some new thinking in Washington as well as Tokyo.

Pacifism’s Denouement

Pacifist sentiment has become so entrenched in modern Japan that the country’s capacity for change is apt to be discounted, or underestimated, even by long-time Japan watchers. Granted, Koizumi’s robust utterances on national security often run ahead of policy, and he is certainly not the first contemporary Japanese prime minister to seem like a hawk among doves, as Yasuhiro Nakasone’s tenure in the 1980s reminds us. But the shift away from pacifism is palpable, irreversible and more broadly based than Koizumi’s alone.

The most compelling evidence of the sea-change underway in Japanese attitudes towards security is the accelerating erosion under Koizumi’s stewardship of the constitutional and administrative restraints on the use of force and collective self-defense. The chief cause is that a once-apathetic public is becoming increasingly concerned about the deterioration in Japan’s security environment, mainly due to the spread of transnational terrorism, North Korean antipathy, and China’s burgeoning economic growth and military power. Recent polls, including one conducted by the authoritative Asahi Shimbun newspaper, show that a clear majority of Japanese people and parliamentarians are now in favor of constitutional revision (kaiken), and nearly half want to abandon the prohibition on collective self-defense. Significantly, younger people are more inclined to support revising the constitution than their parents.

A contributing factor is the weakening of the coalition of interests in the Diet that has long defended the constitutional status quo (goken), especially the precipitate decline in influence of the left-leaning and traditionally pacifist Social Democratic Party (SDP). The eclipse of the SDP and its allies on the political Left has increased the probability that the war-renouncing Article 9 of the constitution will be rewritten substantially to explicitly recognize the existence of the SDF. Other likely amendments will make it easier for the government to sanction the SDF’s deployment in a wide range of contingencies, although these international contributions are likely to be limited to non-combat roles for the time being. As a result, future Japanese governments will no longer be seriously encumbered by constitutional restrictions that have clearly outlived their usefulness. Any decision to dispatch the SDF will henceforth be made, as in all other countries, according to the political judgement of the government of the day and calculations of national interest.

However, revision of the constitution is not the only reason for supposing that Japan is shedding more than half a century of embedded pacifism. It is difficult for non-Japanese to appreciate the extraordinarily detailed administrative constraints on what would be considered normal defense activities in most countries. Some of these have bordered on the absurd. One senior Japanese defense official was heard to lament that tanks en route to counter an invasion would never get there in time because they were required to observe the speed limit and stop at red lights. The reason was the almost complete absence of mobilization legislation that would give the government authority to suspend civil law in the event of a military emergency.

These impediments have now been largely removed with the June 2004 passage of seven bills in the Diet. These bills augment contingency legislation enacted the previous year and designed to facilitate civil-defense cooperation between the national government and the prefectural and local authorities in the event of an emergency or an attack on Japan. The bills improve military preparedness and mobilization by allowing the Japanese and U.S. military to use seaports, airports, roads, radio frequencies and other public property in an emergency. They also permit the SDF to fire on commercial ships outside Japan’s territorial waters if they refuse inspection during a crisis.

Koizumi has also steadily whittled away the normative constraints on overseas deployments of the SDF. The U.S.-led Operation Enduring Freedom to destroy Al-Qaeda’s redoubt in the mountains of Afghanistan, supported by Japanese destroyers and supply ships, demonstrated conclusively that the era of checkbook diplomacy is finally over and that henceforth Japan intends to pull its weight militarily within the U.S. alliance. Iraq was an even greater break with tradition. In an unprecedented decision, Koizumi succeeded in gaining parliamentary approval to send some 600 troops to southern Iraq. The troops could only be used in non-combat roles. Samawah was selected because it was notionally free of conflict, but their very presence confirms that Japan has crossed a political Rubicon and that the government is determined to make the SDF a more usable and useful force.

Japan’s Strategic Intentions

What is less clear is how the SDF will be deployed in the future, and for what purposes. There are two diametrically opposed views about Japan’s strategic objectives. Those skeptical of its peaceful disposition and benign intentions contend that Tokyo is incrementally acquiring the military capabilities and strategic reach to complement its economic strength and give effect to long-suppressed regional power aspirations. Skeptics argue that Japan’s expanding peacekeeping activities, government pressure to revise the constitution, cooperation with the United States in missile defense, and procurement of military platforms and weapons systems that can be used offensively are  all evidence of Tokyo’s hegemonic intent.

Pragmatists, on the other hand, consider the changes in Japan’s security policy to be largely illusory and maintain that the government’s commitment to defense reform and greater burden-sharing within the alliance is rhetorical, rather than substantive. In their eyes, Koizumi’s promise of military support for the United States in Afghanistan fell far short of expectations. And despite the fanfare and flag-waving, Japanese forces dispatched to Iraq are serving in non-combat roles, forbidden to shoot other than in self-defense. Thus, there is very little prospect of Japan becoming more assertive globally or contributing much of real strategic value in East Asia, other than in the defense of Japan. A corollary is that Japan will continue to rely on the United States as a military shield while wielding the sword of mercantilism, cultivating a range of partners, including U.S. adversaries such as Iran, to hedge against economic dangers.

Curiously, neither side of this debate has grasped the real significance of the shift in public opinion or the reorientation of security policy that has been under way for more than a decade. A close examination of current Japanese attitudes towards security does not suggest the collective mindset of a resurgent hegemon. There is no political constituency for transforming the SDF into the kind of expeditionary force that would be necessary to sustain a new Japanese hegemony in Asia. With the possible exception of a small group of ultra-nationalists, who continue to harbor delusions of a return to some form of imperium, “normalizers” within the major political parties evince remarkably modest strategic aspirations.

Furthermore, the country’s aging population and the existence of a resilient, mature democracy works against a revival of militarism. Given its geostrategic vulnerabilities, energy dependence and declining birth rate, Japan is hardly in a position to embark on a policy of military adventurism or expansionism in East Asia, not least because it would be vehemently opposed by China, Japan’s principal competitor for regional influence, as well as its major ally, the United States.

Those who fear a return of militarism in Japan also fail to appreciate the domestic constraints on defense spending, which is legally capped at 1 percent of GDP, far lower than in most comparable countries. China, for example, spends 4.1 percent of GDP on defense, the United States 3.3 percent, South Korea 2.8 percent, France 2.5 percent, and Australia 1.9 percent. In East Asia, only Laos spends less as a percentage of GDP. Even a comparison by purchasing power parity shows Japan’s per capita defense expenditure as around one quarter that of the United States and half that of France.

Although this translates into an annual defense budget of $41 billion a year, the third largest in the world, more than 50 percent goes to salaries and personnel costs. So the money available for military hardware and support systems is less than might be expected for a budget this size. Moreover, Japan’s defense budget is being stretched by research and development related to the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defense Program (BMD), which will cost around $1 billion in financial year 2004/05 and an estimated $10 billion this decade, all of which will have to be absorbed within the existing budget. Thus, the scope for order-of-magnitude increases in combat power, particularly force-projection capabilities such as aircraft carriers and long-range bombers, is limited by fiscal as well as political realities.

However, eschewing the role of a regional hegemon does not mean that Japan should remain forever a strategically neutered superpower while others are free to configure the world according to their national interests and ideological proclivities. Japan’s foreign policy and defense elites envisage playing a more constructive role in regional and global affairs, free of constitutional shackles, by building and shaping institutions and norms according to Japanese values and interests. This is what Koizumi means when he talks about Japan becoming a “normal” state. It also implies a greater willingness to use force and dispatch the SDF on operations beyond Japan’s borders in coalitions of the willing, as well as UN-sanctioned peacekeeping operations.

These are developments that should be welcomed, rather than being a cause for alarm. What must be remembered is that unlike Europe, where war between states has become virtually unthinkable, Japan inhabits a region where interstate conflict is still a realistic prospect. It would be foolish in the extreme for Japan to emulate Europe’s security approach, which emphasizes confidence-building measures to resolve intramural disputes while reserving force for out-of-area operations. The strategic balance in northeast Asia is far less stable and predictable than in Europe, and Japan’s alliance obligations mandate the maintenance of a military capable of modern warfighting both at home and abroad. SDF personnel should not be seen as blue-helmeted NGOs.

Alliance Implications

But how durable is Japan’s alliance with the United States, the foundation stone of its security for the past half century? Could the alliance founder, or be fatally weakened, by rising Japanese nationalism or by a reassessment in Washington that Japan matters less? There are some disturbing portents. Fewer than 10 percent of Americans feel close to Japan as a country, and China’s emergence as a major trading nation has already eroded Tokyo’s influence in the halls of U.S. commerce and industry. The sense of shared strategic interests that once strongly united Japanese and Americans has dissipated. Although opinion surveys show that the Japanese public continues to express support in principle for the alliance, there is strong local opposition to the U.S. presence in areas like Okinawa and Atsugi, fueled by resentment over the sexual misconduct of U.S. servicemen and the occupation of valuable public land by the U.S. military.

Even so, it is difficult to envisage the circumstances that would lead to a breakdown or hollowing-out of the alliance. After a period of neglect during the Clinton Administration, President Bush moved decisively in his first term of office to rejuvenate ties with Tokyo, reflecting the administration’s assessment that a strong, regionally engaged Japan is crucial to three important U.S. strategic interests in East Asia: balancing China’s rising power, providing greater logistic and intelligence support for the U.S. military, and facilitating U.S. deployments to potential trouble spots. The Pentagon knows that for political and strategic reasons it would be virtually impossible to replicate the facilities it enjoys in Japan. Guam is too far away, and the Vietnamese are unlikely to permit the United States to reoccupy its former base at Cam Ranh Bay. Australia and Singapore are useful stopovers for deployments in Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, but not the Taiwan Straits, where any conflict with China is most likely to be played out. Furthermore, the global realignment of U.S. military forces announced in August 2004 can only enhance Japan’s strategic value to the United States as its principal Asian ally and a key base for troop deployments to the Middle East and Central Asia.

A more likely scenario is that Japan will remain within the alliance but that over time it will seek greater autonomy and equality. By any calculation, the alliance is a net strategic benefit for Japan. The U.S. nuclear umbrella still provides an unmatchable level of extended deterrence against an attack from a nuclear-armed state. This is a crucial consideration for Tokyo, since China and Russia are able to strike Japan with nuclear-armed missiles and North Korea may well possess a handful of rudimentary nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them. Moreover, the United States will be an essential counterweight to China’s growing power as demographic, military and economic forces shift decisively in favor of Beijing. Fifty years ago, there was one Japanese for every six Chinese; by 2050 the ratio will be an unprecedented one to 16, based on current demographic trends. While the Japanese economy still dwarfs China’s and its military packs a powerful punch, Japan’s relative position isdeteriorating. If the alliance disintegrated, Japan would have to double and perhaps triple defense spending to compensate for the loss of the capabilities that the United States provides. Even then it could never replicate the unique military and intelligence assets that the United States brings to the table.

The real question for Tokyo is how to create more political and decision-making space for itself in a security partnership that can never truly be one of equals because of the disparities in size and strategic weight. Might the U.S. special relationship with the UK serve as a model, as former U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and others have suggested? Despite superficial similarities—both the UK and Japan are maritime trading states anchored off the Eurasian landmass—Japan’s vastly different strategic circumstances and the absence of the unique historical, linguistic and cultural ties that underpin the Anglo-American relationship suggest otherwise.

More likely is an evolutionary process in which Japan gains a greater say on issues that are central to its security concerns in Asia and looks for opportunities to encourage more collaborative behavior in its American ally. There are increasing signs of independent thinking in Japan’s strategic engagement with the United States, which Washington must accept and encourage in the interests of a more mature and enduring partnership. Much of this is being driven by Japan’s involvement in BMD and the need to reach agreement with the United States on a complex range of associated political and operational issues.

Currently, Japan is not able to detect and intercept incoming ballistic missiles without U.S. assistance, a conspicuous deficiency given the established arsenals of China, Russia and North Korea. In the absence of a countervailing missile capability, which is forbidden under the current interpretation of the constitution, Tokyo has opted to participate in BMD research and development. The central aim of this ambitious and still controversial enterprise is to construct a missile shield able to protect Japan against a limited strike from North Korea (although it is unlikely to be an effective prophylactic against China’s or Russia’s more numerous and capable missile forces).

Joint tests are expected to commence in late 2005, and the proposed system, comprising land- and sea-based interceptors, will be activated in 2007. Aside from lingering doubts about whether the shield will actually work as hypothesized, participation in BMD with the United States poses some real policy conundrums for Tokyo. Neighboring states, particularly China, are concerned that the expertise acquired in sensitive areas of missile technology would be readily transferable should Japan decide to develop its own missiles and arm them with nuclear warheads. Japanese scientists are involved in research on four components of the SM-3 missile—the propulsion system, infrared sensors, lightweight nose-cone technology and the kinetic kill warhead. China worries that Japan might export missile technology to Taiwan, and extending the shield to cover the approaches to the island could negate China’s current missile advantage over Taiwan.

Over time, the future architecture and modalities of missile defense could significantly alter the power structure of the alliance and reshape Japan’s approach to national security planning. Successful collaboration on missile defense would be a powerful reaffirmation of shared U.S.-Japanese strategic interests, accelerating the trend towards greater equality within the alliance and stimulating reform of the SDF’s structure, organization and intelligence systems, as well as national security decision-making more generally. Already, Japanese officials have indicated their desire to have greater input into BMD planning and to share data obtained from the new FPS-XX radar system, which will improve the Pentagon’s ability to track ballistic missiles targeted against the United States. Prudent self-interest dictates that Washington should be generous in sharing sensitive missile technology with Japan and be prepared to cede a measure of operational control over the system itself, if it expects Japan to cooperate fully. Conversely, Tokyo must accept that any failure to deploy an effective missile defense system or shoot down missiles bound for the United States because of constitutional niceties could rupture or severely weaken the alliance.

More fundamentally, Washington and Tokyo both need to pay greater attention to alliance management, policy coordination and addressing the imbalances in their strategic partnership. The best metaphor to describe the way the alliance works in practice is the hub (the United States) and radiating spokes (Japan, Australia, South Korea and Thailand) of a wheel. The critical dialogue is between the hub and the spokes, seldom between the spokes themselves. If the alliance is to adapt and prosper in today’s vastly different strategic circumstances, the essentially uni-directional pattern of dialogue has to become more multi-directional and the alliance less dominated by U.S. interests and policy preoccupations. This will mean moving towards a more consultative, European style of alliance, which will provide Japan, Australia and the other allies with enhanced opportunities for ameliorating Washington’s unilateralist tendencies and sensitizing U.S. policymakers to Asian security perceptions and political realities. In exchange, the United States should expect greater burden-sharing and collegiality in dealing with common security problems.

Calming the Dragon

As the alliance is recast, Japanese and U.S. policymakers need to consider how best to reassure a nervous Beijing that a reinvigorated Japan, working in close cooperation with the United States in Asia, is not a threat to China. This will be no easy task because of the widespread view in Chinese policy and military circles that Tokyo’s strategic shift foreshadows a more assertive and possibly adversarial Japan. Of course, there is nothing new or surprising in this reaction, as Sino-Japanese rivalry has deep historical roots. It is manifest today in Chinese anxieties about Japan’s support for Taiwan and BMD and resentment over legacy issues, notably Koizumi’s repeated visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese war dead but in Chinese eyes is a symbol of the country’s imperial past. Until recently, these anxieties have been moderated by Japan’s constitution and Beijing’s recognition that the U.S. alliance has prevented a revival of Japanese military power. But as Japan breaks free from its constitutional shackles and the Red Sun makes its reappearance across the globe on the uniforms and flags of a reconstituted military, Chinese strategists are drawing conclusions that are troubling for future Sino-Japanese relations.

Among them is the belief that Japan wants to be a military as well as an economic power; that it is moving from a preoccupation with self-defense to accepting the broader alliance objectives of collective self-defense; that it is developing the capability to intervene militarily in the region; that the Koizumi government is playing up the North Korean threat so that it can break the constitutional taboo on collective self-defense; and that it is concealing its real strategic intentions by using peacekeeping and the War on Terror to desensitize the region to an expanded military presence.

Mirroring their neighbor’s concerns, Japan is distinctly uneasy about recent double-digit increases in Chinese military spending, the acquisition of advanced fighter aircraft and naval vessels from Russia, the rapid pace of defense modernization, and the build-up of China’s missile inventory. Such apprehensions are understandable. China’s recently purchased advanced Kilo-class submarines can interdict the main maritime trade routes that are crucial to Japan’s economic survival. Since 2000, there has been a dramatic rise in the frequency of Chinese naval incursions into Japan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Tokyo is particularly concerned about Chinese hydrographic surveys and oil drilling near the EEZ, as well as what appear to be intelligence-gathering operations by Chinese submarines, dramatically illustrated in November 2004 by the highly publicized incursion of a Han-class nuclear-powered submarine into Japanese waters near Okinawa.

Tensions have already flared over a number of unresolved territorial disputes at sea, notably the Senkaku Islands (Diaoyu in Chinese), which are located near rich deposits of oil and natural gas in the underlying sea bed. So far, these have been confined to polemical exchanges between Tokyo and Beijing and symbolic protests by Chinese activists. But the potential for miscalculation will increase as an energy-hungry China steps up its oil-exploration activities in the seas around the Senkakus and Japan responds by augmenting its maritime patrols and surveillance of the region. Already there are signs that for the first time the Koizumi government will allow Japanese oil companies to drill in a disputed area of the East China Sea, which would inevitably inflame anti-Japanese sentiment in China.

A critical issue for Japan is how a conflict between the United States and China over Taiwan would play out. In the event of hostilities, there is little doubt that the United States would expect Japan to provide intelligence and rear-area support for the U.S. carrier groups that would be dispatched to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack. This would expose the SDF to a Chinese counterstrike and risk drawing Japan into direct combat with China for the first time since World War II, the consequences of which would be incalculable for both countries.

Thus, paradoxically, mutual mistrust is growing in parallel with deepening economic interdependence. The challenge for Japan is managing relations with China so that bilateral tensions do not lead to open conflict or spill over and infect the wider region. This will require a much higher level of trust between the two Asian powers than has been evident to date and a willingness to consider new mechanisms for mediating and preventing disputes so that major crises can be averted.

Unfortunately, with the notable exception of the Six Party Talks on North Korea, neither Japan nor the United States has given sufficient priority to including China in strategies for mitigating existing conflicts and preventing new ones from arising. On the contrary, the impression has been created in Beijing that closer U.S.-Japanese security cooperation is premised on containing China and diluting its military power. Missile defense is illustrative, as is the developing trilateral security dialogue (TSD) between the United States, Japan and Australia, which was established in 2001 at the U.S.-Australian ministerial talks in Canberra. From Beijing’s perspective, the TSD looks suspiciously like the first step on the road to forming a new security bloc in Asia aimed at containing China. While Chinese fears that the TSD could evolve into an Asian-style NATO are misplaced and China should not be permitted to exercise a veto over U.S.-Japanese security cooperation, it makes no sense to antagonize Beijing by further institutionalizing the TSD and transforming it into a clubby, de facto trilateral alliance. A far better approach would be to create a security mechanism that allows China to  discuss northeast Asia’s many intractable security problems directly with Japan and the United States.

Such a mechanism already exists in the form of the Six Party Talks, which were established in 2003 to defuse and resolve the North Korean nuclear problem and which include all the northeast Asian states as well as the United States. China has rejected previous attempts to inaugurate a sub-regional security arrangement, fearing that it could be used as a vehicle for foreign intervention and meddling in China’s affairs, especially Taiwan. But Beijing is more comfortable with the format of the Six Party Talks and feels some ownership of the process. So there is every prospect that the Chinese would be favorably disposed to broadening the scope and agenda of the talks atsome future date. Enlarging the Six Party Talks would be an important confidence-building measure and would provide strategic reassurance to China that should help soften its opposition to extended U.S.-Japanese defense cooperation.

The Way Ahead

The principal conclusion to be drawn from this analysis is that Tokyo’s desire to pursue a more proactive security policy is not an unreasonable response to the more threatening and volatile security environment it faces. After nearly six decades of quasi-pacifism, it is time for Japan to move beyond the ideals of the post-World War II peace constitution and participate more fully in building and sustaining regional order and combating the emerging threats to security. Although fears that Japan might revert to militarism are real, they are ill conceived. Democracy and the rule of law are firmly entrenched, some constitutional restrictions on the use of force will remain, and the U.S. alliance ensures that Japan has no need for the nuclear weapons or major force-projection capabilities that would be inherently destabilizing and set off alarm bells in the region.

While the alliance once had been likened to dosho imu—lovers sharing the same bed but dreaming different dreams—Tokyo and Washington are increasingly sharing the same dreams. However, the administration needs to recognize that for all Koizumi’s reforming zeal in foreign affairs and defense, domestic and regional realities will continue to circumscribe Japan’s capacity to support the United States militarily. For its part, Tokyo must accept that a regression to the lackluster economic performances of the previous decade and a perceived unwillingness to pull its weight militarily could one day force a hard-headed reassessment of Japan’s strategic and economic value in Washington and elsewhere. A weakened U.S.-Japanese alliance and the beginning of a long-term decline in Japanese power could foreshadow an extended period of uncertainty and destabilizing strategic change that would be detrimental to both countries’ interests. A diminished, less-influential Japan would weaken Washington’s voice in Asia’s affairs.

The best way to preclude this outcome is for the administration to keep relations with Japan at the top of its Asian policy agenda, in recognition of Japan’s centrality to the alliance and to East Asia’s stability. However, in his eagerness to enlist Japan in the War on Terror and in support of U.S. global security interests, President Bush must be careful not to be too prescriptive or to pressure Tokyo into decisions on military acquisitions and deployments that raise the specter of a resurgent Japanese hegemon. At the same time, Bush must make clear his opposition to Japan acquiring nuclear weapons or major power-projection capabilities such as long-range bombers or aircraft carriers. This would be inherently destabilizing and ultimately antithetical to Japan’s own security interests.

Finally, Chinese insecurities will have to be addressed. Although the old adage that two tigers cannot live together peacefully on the same mountain no longer holds true in today’s global village—where tigers of all kinds coexist to mutual benefit—amicable Sino-Japanese relations cannot be assumed. Some creative new security architecture is required to help manage and alleviate the inevitable tensions ahead. U.S. policy has to be mindful of China’s legitimate security concerns but strike an appropriate balance between kowtowing and needless hostility to Asia’s rising power.

Posted at 1:31 AM · Comments (0)

What if the Japanese government apologised profusely and unconditionally for all the terrible things Japan did to China during the war? What if all Japanese textbooks described those wartime atrocities - the Nanking massacre, comfort women and so on - in full? What if Japan were to build lots of museums and memorials about Japanese war crimes committed in China, Korea, and south-east Asia? And what if Japan renounced all claims to disputed islands in the China Sea? Would this stop the Chinese from throwing stones at the Japanese embassy, or molesting Japanese students, or demonstrating against Japan’s bid for United Nations Security Council membership? Probably not. These outbursts of emotional and sometimes violent nationalism in China take place partly because they are the only expression of public protest the government allows.

Similar things can happen in a democracy too, of course, as they do in South Korea. When they occur, more or less spontaneously, neither the South Korean nor the Chinese government can afford to ignore them or stop them too forcefully. Hence the odd passivity of Chinese policemen when demonstrators smashed Japanese property in Beijing.

Sometimes, however, the Chinese and, to a lesser extent, the South Korean authorities deliberately inflame anti-Japanese passions to deflect attention from their own shortcomings. Nationalism, along with capitalist development, has become the only justification for the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power, and when capitalism falters nationalism must be cranked up. Ever since Deng Xiaoping opened China’s door to foreign, especially Japanese, investment, and Marxist ideology faded into insignificance, “patriotic museums” have sprouted all over China - most of them dedicated to past Japanese atrocities.

Japan’s record in the second world war is bad enough to stir up popular passions whenever they are needed. But the manipulation of xenophobia by Chinese rulers began long before the Nanking Massacre. When the Boxers, a revolutionary sect, went on a violent rampage against foreigners and westernised Chinese in 1900, they were encouraged by the Empress Dowager Zu Xi. She had to do this, because the discontent directed at foreigners was really about harsh economic conditions, for which the Chinese authorities were responsible. The Boxers hated all authority. So when foreign troops, including Japanese, put down the Boxer Rebellion, the Empress turned round and backed the foreigners.

That pattern has persisted to this day. And so has the explosive mixture in Chinese rebellions of xenophobia and anti-government protest. The Chinese resentment of Japan, too, stretches back at least as far as 1895, when the Japanese upstarts defeated the armies of the great Middle Kingdom. Even as Japan grew quickly into a world power, China lagged behind in economic development and saw its port cities come under foreign jurisdiction, while much of the country fell prey to violent warlords, and then to Japanese invaders.

One of the most famous and influential Chinese rebellions happened in May 1919, when students in Beijing demonstrated against the handover of German concessions in China to Japan. Ostensibly the so-called May 4 Movement started as an anti-Japanese demonstration. In fact, it was directed against the weak, backward and undemocratic Chinese government. The movement could have had many results. In the end, it turned out to be Mao Zedong’s revolution.

So the present government cannot but be aware of the potential dangers of allowing anti-Japanese protests to spiral out of control. It is often forgotten that student protests in China in the 1980s, culminating in Tiananmen Square in 1989, also began with riots against foreign students and “Japanese militarism”. Even as the latest anti-

Japanese demonstrations erupted in Beijing and Shanghai, tens of thousands of villagers began rioting in Zhejiang province, protesting against miserable economic and environmental conditions. Anti-Japanese demonstrations spilled over to Hong Kong this week and many more are being planned for this weekend in at least 10 Chinese cities. Chinese websites are buzzing with angry rhetoric. And the anniversary of the May 4 Movement is looming.

There is no evidence of a direct link between the rural Zhejiang protests and the anti-Japanese demonstrations elsewhere, but the very thought that such links might be possible would fill any Chinese government official who knows anything about history with dread. That is why the authorities will no doubt try to stop the demonstrations from going much further. But there is equally little doubt they will recur, no matter what the Japanese do.

The writer, professor at Bard College, New York, is author of Inventing Japan (Phoenix/Random House) and Bad Elements (Phoenix/Random House)

Posted at 12:14 PM · Comments (0)

The U.S. Must Act to Promote Peace in the Congo

Brussels/Nairobi, 14 April 2005: The International Crisis Group urges President George W. Bush in his meeting with Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame on April 15 to press the Rwandan government to take concrete action to promote peace in the Congo.

In a letter (full text below) addressed to President Bush, the Crisis Group has recommended three steps to marginalise the hardliners among the Rwandan FDLR rebels operating in the eastern Congo and to encourage the return of the 8,000 to 10,000 FDLR combatants still based in the Congo.

The FDLR have been at the centre of the two Congo wars. The FDLR remain a serious threat to the Congolese population on which its fighters live off and prey. While they are no longer a serious strategic threat to Rwanda, they can still launch cross-border raids into Rwanda and provoke incursions by the Rwandan army into the Congo. On March 31, the FDLR announced in Rome that they will abandon the armed struggle and declared that they are willing to return to Rwanda peacefully. However, there are indications that the FDLR will not act on its promise and will tie their return to political conditions.

In the letter, Crisis Group President Gareth Evans calls for the Rwandan government to prevent a deadlock by separating the hard-line political figures from those willing to return. The letter urges the Rwandan government to meet with FDLR military commanders for technical discussions on the modalities of their return. The Rwandan government has refused to do so until now.

In addition, the letter asks for the Rwandan government to identify the FDLR commanders who are wanted by Rwandan courts or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for crimes of genocide. It also recommends that the Rwandan government provide greater incentives for the FDLR commanders to return, such as the integration of those not guilty of atrocities into the Rwandan army.

If the Rwandan government does not act, the peaceful avenues for demobilisation are likely to fail and the only solution to the FDLR will be military. This will provoke the displacement and death of many more civilians in the region. President Bush’s meeting with President Kagame is a timely opportunity to further the peace process in both Rwanda and the Congo.

To find out more about the conflict in the Congo, visit our Congo advocacy page. This page has details of Crisis Group’s reports and opinion pieces on the conflict, details of our advocacy efforts to date, information on what you can do to support Crisis Group’s efforts, and links to other resources on the conflict.

Contacts: Andrew Stroehlein (Brussels) 32 (0) 485 555 946
Jennifer Leonard (Washington) 1 202 785 1601
To contact Crisis Group media please click here

Dear Mr President,

I write to urge you to utilise the visit of President Paul Kagame to Washington on April 15 to underline to him the importance of Rwanda taking several specific steps that would make a substantial contribution to peace in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Those steps are basically designed to marginalise the hardliners among the Rwandan FDLR rebels who have been such a destabilising presence in the eastern Congo over the last decade. Rwanda should be requested to:

accept a mechanism to meet with the FDLR military leadership for technical discussions (which would not touch on any political conditions) concerning its peaceful repatriation to Rwanda;

specifically identify those still in the Congo who are wanted by Rwandan courts or the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) for crimes of genocide; and

be prepared to integrate some high-ranking FDLR commanders not responsible for atrocities into the Rwandan Defence Forces.

Background. The FDLR have been at the centre of the two Congo wars. In recent years, they have been significantly weakened as the Congolese government has cut off their supply line, and defections have caused some of the top leadership to return to Rwanda. The movement currently numbers 8,000 to 10,000 fighters, based in the North and South Kivu provinces of the eastern Congo. While these insurgents are no longer a serious strategic threat to Rwanda, they can still launch cross-border raids and provoke incursions by the Rwandan army into the Congo. One such incursion took place last November and triggered a crisis that pushed the fragile Congolese transition to the brink. The FDLR is also a serious threat to the Congolese population on which its fighters live off and prey.

In March, the FDLR and the Congolese government met in Rome for talks under the auspices of the Community of Sant’Egidio. At the end of the meeting, the FDLR condemned the genocide, renounced the armed struggle and declared its willingness to return to Rwanda peacefully. On any view, if the rebels can be made to follow through on this promise, it will make a large contribution toward peace in the Great Lakes region.

There are signs, however, that the FDLR might not act on its declaration. Its political leadership, based in Europe, is much weaker and more divided than other Rwandan opposition parties and does not want to lose its main asset, the armed wing in the Congo. According to numerous reliable sources, it will now seek to attach political conditions to any return to Rwanda, such as the demand that the FDLR be permitted to function there as a political party, which presently stand no chance of being accepted by the Rwandan Government.

While there is a real need, as Crisis Group has consistently insisted, for a liberalisation of Rwandan politics, the nature of the FDLR and its violent past make the Rwandan government’s position understandable. But there is still a way forward. Many FDLR military commanders seem willing to return to Rwanda without political conditions: according to Crisis Group interviews with commanders in the field and demobilised combatants, the military leadership is tired after eleven years of armed struggle that has decimated its troops. President Kagame should take advantage of this opportunity to separate the commanders from the hard-line political figures.

Proposed technical discussions. It is unrealistic to believe the FDLR will demobilise if the Rwandan government does not meet with its military commanders and discuss their return. Until now, Kigali has refused, as it is opposed to any negotiations with a group it reasonably regards as criminal. What is needed, however, is not political negotiations but technical discussion of the modalities of the return to Rwanda. This should be coordinated with the Congolese government, which has recently proven itself eager to be rid of the movement.

Proposed treatment of suspected genocidaires. During these talks, the Rwandan government should provide a list of FDLR officers who are suspected of genocide crimes by either Rwandan courts or the ICTR in Arusha. These individuals should fall under either category I or II genocidaires, in other words those believed to be the most serious offenders. The Rwandan government has said that 10 to 12 per cent of the leadership was involved in the genocide. Other sources believe the number of such persons still with the FDLR may be much smaller. Rwandan intelligence has detailed lists of both the FDLR commanders and those accused of genocide, and it should be relatively simple to establish who are the wanted individuals. Naming them will isolate the hardliners and encourage the other leaders to return home.

The FDLR, before the repatriation of the remainder of the movement, would have to hand over to the ICTR or Kigali the genocidaires in their ranks and enlist immediately in the voluntary disarmament and repatriation process run by the UN peacekeeping mission, MONUC.

Proposed integration of FDLR commanders into the RDF. The FDLR military leadership still needs a strong incentive to return to Rwanda. It is clear that the $200 package on offer to regular demobilised combatants will not suffice to bring the leaders back. Many of them have expressed the desire to continue a military career. In 2003, Kigali orchestrated the repatriation of the Force Commander of the FDLR, General Paul Rwarakabije, by offering him and three other FDLR officers ranks in the Rwandan army. A similar offer should be extended to those in the current FDLR leadership who are not guilty of atrocities.

The Rwandan government should be encouraged to be more proactive in closing the chapter on the FDLR and removing it as a spoiler to the Congo peace process. In neighbouring Uganda and Burundi, flexible approaches to enemy militias have contributed to stabilisation of the region and demobilisation of thousands of combatants.

If peaceful avenues for demobilisation are exhausted, the only solution to the FDLR will be military. This will provoke the displacement and deaths of many more innocent civilians in the region. President Kagame’s visit is a timely opportunity to further the peace process in both Rwanda and the Congo.

Yours sincerely,

GARETH EVANS
President

Posted at 1:06 AM · Comments (0)

Fallout
Reviewed by James Gleick
Sunday, April 10, 2005; Copyright The Washington Post

By Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Knopf. 721 pp. $35

Six decades have now passed since the United States first launched the quintessential weapon of mass destruction against civilian targets, twice in one week, killing two cities in a blaze of nuclear fire. No one has done it since. J. Robert Oppenheimer would be surprised that we’ve gotten this far.

The atomic bomb would surely have come into existence without Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project, but the label “Father of the Bomb” could be attached to no one else. He felt his responsibility deeply. His self-lacerating conscience let him see with immediate and lasting clarity what his success meant for humanity. If he had done nothing else — if nothing else had happened to him — Oppenheimer would still be one of the 20th century’s great, complex, defining figures.

But Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the end for him; he did not walk away from American science or the atomic era he had helped inaugurate. His achievement and his anguish, before the bomb and after, make him a man to whom historians and artists are continually drawn. Heinar Kipphardt’s drama “In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer” transfixed international theater audiences in the 1960s, and a new opera by John Adams and Peter Sellars, “Doctor Atomic,” will debut this fall in San Francisco.

Martin J. Sherwin, a historian at Tufts University, began his Oppenheimer biography 25 years ago, exploring on horseback the high desert mesas of New Mexico that his subject first fell in love with as a boy visiting a dude ranch. Since Sherwin’s project lasted two decades longer than he intended — he was eventually joined by a second biographer and historian, Kai Bird — we can well believe him when he says it gave him “a new understanding of the complexities of biography.” It was worth the trouble. American Prometheus is comprehensive, finely judged where it most matters and sometimes revelatory. “Triumph and Tragedy” is a catchphrase much abused in biography subtitles; this subject earns it.

Oppenheimer was born in 1903, the first son of wealthy and cultured German Jews living in New York City, and was almost immediately understood to be bright and sensitive. Or as he said, “I was an unctuous, repulsively good little boy.” He was also lonely, prone to melancholy, fascinated by and confused about sex, and at once romantic and arrogant. He studied science at Harvard, read Dostoyevsky, Proust and T.S. Eliot’s new “The Waste Land,” wrote love poetry and painted landscapes in oil. These were the first, heady days of a new physics, quantum mechanics. He pursued this field to Europe, where it was gestating, sought out the pioneers of the new guard and strongly impressed all of them.

When he returned to become a professor at Berkeley, he was already known as America’s most brilliant young physicist. He became the first to predict the existence of antimatter, which he realized by dint of imagination and calculation should exist; and he did groundbreaking work on neutron stars decades before astronomers were actually able to observe any. Somehow, though, he always managed to fall short of solving the greatest problems. Bird and Sherwin aptly describe him as “a productive dilettante.” His near-contemporary, the physicist I.I. Rabi (whose strong, moral voice runs throughout this book), once said, “God knows I’m not the simplest person, but compared to Oppenheimer, I’m very, very simple.” Oppenheimer was the sort of person who studied the Bhagavad Gita in the original Sanskrit and gave clever names to his automobiles (Gamaliel, Garuda and later Bombsight). He had strong social and political convictions, identified himself with communists and communism, supported labor organizers and contributed money to Spanish republicans fighting the fascists.

He never did win a Nobel Prize. The authors suggest that his role as bomb-maker may have been weighed against him, but perhaps Rabi’s judgment — that the very greatest achievement in physics eluded him — is more to the point: “His interest in religion … resulted in a feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog. He saw physics clearly … but at the border he tended to feel that there was much more of the mysterious and the novel than there actually was. He was insufficiently confident of the power of the intellectual tools he already possessed and did not drive his thought to the very end.” He finished other physicists’ papers when they were stuck. He possessed exquisite taste in selecting problems. With hindsight, we can see that he was meant to be an inspirer, organizer and perfecter of scientists — and a leader.

He was shortly to leave dilettantism behind.

News came in January 1939 from two German scientists that the nucleus of a uranium atom could be split when bombarded with neutrons. Oppenheimer was not the only physicist to see what that implied. “I think it really not too improbable,” he wrote a friend, “that a ten cm [centimeter] cube of uranium deuteride (one should have something to slow the neutrons without capturing them) might very well blow itself to hell.”

When the time came for the United States to try building an atomic bomb, Oppenheimer both was and was not a natural choice to be director of the most ambitious scientific and industrial project in human history. He was at the pinnacle of American physics. In 1942, he was put in charge of fast-neutron research at Berkeley with an imaginative government title, “coordinator of rapid rupture.” On the other hand, the government’s security apparatus was nursing an antipathy to people with communist associations, and Oppenheimer’s were well-known. The FBI had opened an investigation bordering on harassment (he was seldom unwatched or unwiretapped) that continued for most of his life, generating 10,000 pages of dossier. The War Department denied him a security clearance at a moment when most of the world’s knowledge pertaining to atomic fission resided in his brain.

And he was no engineer. At the age of 38, he seemed ethereal. He was frail and underweight and failed his Army physical.

Yet some people would follow him anywhere. We can gauge his charisma from its reflection in others’ extravagant romanticizing: “His porkpie hat, his pipe, and something about his eyes gave him a certain aura.” His eyes were not just blue, but “the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen, very clear blue.” One physicist said simply, “When I was with him, I was a larger person.” Students imitated the way he spoke and the way he walked. “When he was impressed with something, he’d say ‘Gee,’ ” one recalled, “and it was lovely just to hear him say ‘Gee.’ “

The story of Oppenheimer’s success on that isolated New Mexico mesa, from the spring of 1943 to the summer of 1945, has been told many times. Bird and Sherwin capture all the drama and exhilaration and ironic glory. First there were 30 scientists in plywood barracks, surrounded by barbed-wire fencing; soon, 6,000 men and women were living and working in hundreds of buildings and trailers, creating an unruly, polyglot city. Oppenheimer got the job done. But for the people who spent those two years in his thrall, he also made it a golden time. “Here at Los Alamos,” an English physicist said, “I found a spirit of Athens, of Plato, of an ideal republic.” All in the service of mass death.

So were the scientists responsible for the consequences of the weapon they had made? Did moral duties follow from their technical ones? Edward Teller, who went on to lead the development of the hydrogen bomb, said no: “The accident that we worked out this dreadful thing should not give us the responsibility of having a voice in how it is to be used.” But Oppenheimer would not let himself off the hook that way. How the bomb was “to be used” was partly a scientific question, and Oppenheimer did that part of his job with ruthless efficiency. “Don’t let them bomb through clouds or through an overcast,” he told the officers preparing the attack on Hiroshima. “Don’t let them detonate it too high … or the target won’t get as much damage.” But at the same time, he was already trying to address moral and political issues. Looking ahead to the specter of a postwar arms race, he urged that the Soviet Union be fully informed about the bomb and its impending use; President Truman disregarded this advice.

Oppenheimer did not linger at Los Alamos. He left within months of the 1945 bombings and became director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He did not leave public life, however. As the government began to form committees and commissions and agencies to manage the new nuclear age, Oppenheimer seemed to be everywhere.

Even as he was being lionized in the national press, he was sharing his darkest visions with small audiences of scientists and others. “We have made a thing, a most terrible weapon that has altered abruptly and profoundly the nature of the world … a thing that by all the standards of the world we grew up in is an evil thing,” he said. He confessed to Truman in a private meeting that he felt he had blood on his hands — a statement the president found offensive and presumptuous. Truman angrily told Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson that Oppenheimer was “a cry-baby scientist” who had “spent most of his time wringing his hands and telling me they had blood on them.”

Indeed, Oppenheimer sometimes spoke to politicians as if he were addressing children. He tried to warn of the possibility of nuclear terrorism — a bomb smuggled into a city in a container or crate. There was no high-tech defense, he noted. “What instrument would you use to detect an atomic bomb hidden somewhere in a city?” a senator asked in one closed hearing. Oppenheimer responded dryly, “A screwdriver” — to open cartons and suitcases. Bird and Sherwin show how well he anticipated our own world, where nuclear materials and technologies percolate through shadowy networks and where, as each new country joins the nuclear club, we have no answer, only perpetual surprise and bluster.

“Our atomic monopoly,” Oppenheimer warned in 1948, “is like a cake of ice melting in the sun.” In 1949, the Soviet Union exploded its first nuclear weapon, surprising Truman, who at first didn’t want to believe it. For his part, Oppenheimer believed that nuclear proliferation was inevitable but that it need not lead to an arms race. He opposed the crucial turning point: the development of the hydrogen “Super,” using nuclear fusion to release an explosive force many thousands of times greater than the first fission bombs. He feared that such weapons, if made, would surely be used.

Truman sided instead with the hawkish elements of his administration, who argued that the Soviets would develop these weapons on their own and that unilateral restraint would be suicide. He moved forward with a vast industrial program to ramp up the nation’s nuclear capability. The decisions were made mostly in secret, with virtually no public debate, and the legacy is ours: a global stockpile of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, a running cost to the American economy that has passed $5.5 trillion, and, in return, no realistic sense of nuclear security — even in a post-Soviet era in which we fear smaller and smaller nations and all the terrorist groups that might buy or steal their bombs.

When Oppenheimer fell, he fell hard. His chief antagonist was Lewis Strauss, a former financier whom Truman appointed to the AEC, where he found Oppenheimer an obstacle and an irritant. Strauss resented Oppenheimer’s opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb, and when President Eisenhower named Strauss chairman of the AEC, he immediately began trying to push Oppenheimer aside. In 1954, he drew up formal charges: accusations of disloyalty, ranging from having been “listed as a sponsor of the Friends of the Chinese People” to having “strongly opposed the development of the hydrogen bomb.”

“Red Ties Alleged,” the headlines blared. The rise of anticommunist hysteria served as a backdrop, but Oppenheimer was not a victim of McCarthyism. Strauss deliberately kept the Oppenheimer affair away from the volatile senator because Strauss wanted it handled carefully. It was personal. The proceedings were secret, outside any court or normal legal process. Strauss selected the prosecutor and the judges. He coached them with secret allegations from Oppenheimer’s FBI files that Oppenheimer and his lawyers were not allowed to see, much less rebut. All the while, Strauss and the FBI eavesdropped (with phone taps and hidden microphones) on Oppenheimer’s discussions with his lawyers. “Strauss and his allies were determined to silence the one man who they feared could credibly challenge their policies,” Bird and Sherwin write. This was no trial; it was, as the authors show in their harrowing chronicle, a “star chamber” and a “kangaroo court,” and the result was preordained. Oppenheimer’s security clearance was revoked and his government work severed.

Oppenheimer’s excommunication was not the end, of course. He lived another 13 years. One of President Kennedy’s last acts before he was assassinated was to prepare a rite of rehabilitation: giving Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi Award, a presidential prize then consisting of $50,000 and a medal of honor. But Oppenheimer’s public life was over; his wounds never healed. The best epitaph may still be George F. Kennan’s. The great diplomat eulogized Oppenheimer in 1967: “On no one did there ever rest with greater cruelty the dilemmas evoked by the recent conquest by human beings of a power over nature out of all proportion to their moral strength.” •

James Gleick is the author of several books, including “Isaac Newton,” “Chaos: Making a New Science” and “Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman.”

Posted at 12:57 AM · Comments (0)

April 13, 2005; Copyright The Wall Street Journal

Japan and China have been at each others’ throats for centuries over who dominates the Western Pacific, and particularly Taiwan and Korea. Like the long-seated rivalry between France and Britain in Europe, China, as the continental power, and Japan, as the island power, have engaged in repeated pitched battles over the years. On sea, land and in the commercial arena, the two countries have used everything from piracy and intrigue to coups to advance their own ends.

Until the late 19th century, China was clearly the dominant player. But then a modernized Japan defeated a waning China, seized Korea and Taiwan, and occupied most of China. Even after Japan’s military defeat in 1945, China was initially handicapped by the domestic catastrophes inflicted by its new Communist rulers, while the Japanese economic behemoth dominated. Only after Deng Xiaoping adopted the open-door policy in the 1980s did that begin to change. After more than two decades of rapid economic growth, China is rapidly replacing Japan as the major economic force in East Asia. Already it is Japan and Taiwan’s largest trading partner, has increasing economic influence in Korea and a proposed free-trade agreement is likely to further enhance its economic clout at the expense of Japan.

Throughout history, the U.S. has played a key role in the power struggle between these two Asian giants. In the 19th century it favored Japan, then the U.S. allied itself with China against Japan in World War II. Today Washington has strong ties to both Asian countries and how the U.S. plays its hand could have a crucial impact on the outcome. Whether the two countries can put aside their differences to continue down the path toward a prosperous, stable, and successful East Asia, or whether the region is torn apart by destructive competition and tension due to military build-ups, will partly depend on how America handles the situation.

The current disagreements over a permanent seat for Japan on the United Nations Security Council, the territorial disputes between Japan and China over the Senkaku or Diaoyutai Islands, and between Japan and South Korea over Tokdo or Takeshima Islands, as well as China and Korea’s fixation with Japan’s distorted version of its own imperialistic history in its textbooks are all manifestations of deep historic animosities and distrust. Japan has been bludgeoned unmercifully by China and Korea for its brutality during its invasions and occupations in the 20th century. Some of this reflects genuine emotion, but it also reflects an attempt to put Japan on the defensive while at the same time gobbling up its goods and superior technology.

In recent days a series of large anti-Japanese street protests in major Chinese cities has dramatically increased tensions. The Chinese want to block any political rise of Japan by keeping it out of the U.N. Security Council. China also wants to checkmate Japanese attempts at power projection by attacking its new role over the sensitive issue of Taiwan. China also plays on lingering anti-Japanese feelings among Asian states to hit Japan when its economy is still weak.

As China’s rapid military modernization, its improving power-projection capabilities and persistent sovereignty claims make Asians nervous, it is only natural that they should turn to the U.S. as the only military power that can protect them against China. The U.S. has naval facilities in Singapore, active security treaties with Thailand, the Philippines, Korea and Japan and security guarantees for Taiwan. This forms a ring of commitments and deployments around China which Beijing perceives as a containment policy engineered by Washington. The reality, of course, is that many in the U.S. policy establishment describe the relationship with China as the most important in the world, stressing common economic goals, cooperation on anti-terrorism, and the many other issues where the two countries can work together. America does not want to take sides in sovereignty claims involving a few uninhabited islands, nor does the U.S. need to join the bitter condemnations of Japan over its World War II behavior.

The Reagan and subsequent Bush administrations gave Japan top priority in their strategic calculations on Asia. Republican platforms in 2000 and 2004 placed Japan first in the listing of foreign-policy objectives in Asia. Reality, however, clearly has changed this as China has required more attention and the stakes with Beijing are demonstrably higher. China consumes much more time and is a media monster, both negative and positive.

That is amply demonstrated by the events of the past few years. For instance, the U.S. did not mistakenly bomb the Japanese Embassy in Belgrade in 1999, or collide with a Japanese fighter aircraft over Hainan in 2001. Nor did Washington send carrier battle groups off Taiwan in 1996 to neutralize a Japanese threat to Taiwan. On all those occasions, the object of American concern was China rather than Japan.

China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization took years to negotiate and generated some dramatic publicity as did ill-conceived and abortive attempts in the U.S. to deprive China of most-favored nation trading status if it did not shape up on human rights. In contrast, our tortured negotiations with Japan over trade and security have so far been an endless slog through the thicket of Japanese protectionism and unfair trading practices. However, America’s rage toward Tokyo during the 1980s has subsided as Japan wallows in continuing recession and China looms as the bigger economic challenge.

Japan, together with India and Brazil, are major regional powers that deserve permanent seats on the U.N. Security Council, although not necessarily with veto powers — at least initially. Increasing U.S.-Japanese security cooperation is, in part, a reaction to China’s expanding military power and Beijing’s inability or unwillingness to rein in North Korea’s nuclear-weapons ambitions.

Although the dynamism of economic cooperation and the growing role of the global supply chain have great potential to bring together former adversaries and reduce the chances of war, the road will be fraught with struggle and confrontation. The power of nationalism can be whipped up to undermine progress as is now in danger of happening, especially in China.

But the record of prosperity and stability, and a better life for the people of Asia should, in the long run, prevail over a cynical, but emotional preoccupation with territorial sovereignty and historic antagonisms.

Mr. Lilley is a former U.S. ambassador to China and South Korea and the author of “China Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Diplomacy and Espionage in Asia” (PublicAffairs, 2004).

Posted at 11:39 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

WASHINGTON In recent weeks, high-profile advocates have appealed for more foreign aid for the developing world. The Commission for Africa established by Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain recommends, in part, an additional $25 billion in aid per year by 2010. The United Nations Millennium Project’s recent report, “Investing in Development,” calls for more than doubling foreign aid from rich to poor countries over the next 10 years. These are certainly worthy goals, but what about the billions of dollars that stream illegally the other way, from poor countries to rich?

We’ve seen staggering examples of this phenomenon recently. A substantial portion of the billions of dollars skimmed from the UN oil-for-food program left Iraq with the assistance of overseas businesses and, some reports say, even UN officials. Riggs National Bank in Washington handled huge sums out of Chile and Equatorial Guinea. Research by the Center for International Policy and other organizations shows that the outflow of “dirty money” from poor countries far surpasses the inflow of aid. Preventing that money from leaving poor countries would give the West a way to help developing economies even without necessarily increasing foreign aid.

There are three sorts of cross-border dirty money: corrupt, criminal and commercial. Corrupt dirty money flows from government officials who abuse their authority and dip their hands in the till, then hide their stolen wealth offshore. This grabs the most headlines, but is actually the smallest part of the dirty-money problem, only about 5 percent of the total. Criminal dirty money encompasses proceeds from drug running, human trafficking, racketeering, securities fraud and more. Commercial dirty money is the most easily overlooked. Businesses try to hide revenue from their country’s tax inspectors by, say, directing buyers to deposit money in Western bank accounts. Private studies have estimated such practices in developing countries at 5 percent to 7 percent of their total trade, or more than $200 billion per year illicitly transferred abroad.

Even if foreign aid doubles, as the United Nations and Blair’s commission recommend, the outflow of dirty money is still vastly larger. Annual foreign aid totals $50 billion or so, while dirty money is upwards of $1 trillion per year, half of which passes from developing and transitional economies to the West. Once this money leaves a country, it rarely comes back.

What could such money accomplish if it stayed in poorer countries? It could be spent on consumption, releasing a multiplier effect through local economies. It could go into domestic capital investments, thus increasing employment. It could be deposited in local banks, forming the basis for matching loans.

Imagine hundreds of billions of dollars every year staying legally in poor countries, providing the funds for improvements in health, education, investment, employment - all the things that the UN Millennium Project report and its supporters espouse. Closing the West’s back door to dirty money would strengthen the most desperate countries, improving their ability to provide for their own needs, rather than depending on the largess of the rich and the powerful.

Even more than expanding their foreign aid packages, Western countries could deliver a bigger bang for their buck by reining in the financial abuses that they aid and abet. An elaborate structure of financial secrecy exists to shield dirty money from scrutiny: more than 60 tax havens, a million dummy corporations, $8 trillion or so parked offshore, porous anti-money-laundering laws in America and Europe, plus myriad banks and consulting firms ready to recommend intricate strategies that keep taxable profits out of the reach of struggling home governments.

The United States and its allies could begin to curb these abuses with a stroke of the legislative pen. A first step is to expand the number of crimes whose proceeds are subject to money-laundering charges. Incredibly, it is legal in the United States to handle money from crimes committed abroad, including racketeering, securities fraud, forgery, counterfeiting, human trafficking, slave trading, prostitution and tax evasion.

The impact of foreign aid is diluted when the back door remains open to illicit funds flowing out of developing and transitional economies into willing Western coffers. Giving generous assistance with one hand while taking in dirty money with the other hand undermines our best efforts to help the poor.

(Raymond Baker, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, is the author of the forthcoming book “Capitalism’s Achilles’ Heel.’’ Jennifer Nordin is the center’s director of economic studies.)

Posted at 5:58 PM · Comments (0)

Mr. Ribadu Pursues Smugglers
Of Up to $3 Billion a Year;
A Drain on Investment
The African Pride Disappears

Copyright THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
April 13, 2005; Page A1

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria — Each night, armed gangs tap into the oil pipelines that crisscross the swamps of the petroleum-rich Niger Delta. By some estimates, the smugglers steal up to 10% of Nigeria’s annual oil output, which was valued at $30 billion last year.

“Bunkering,” as the racket is known here, is one of the world’s biggest black markets, but authorities turned a blind eye for years. Africa’s most populous nation, Nigeria was ruled until recently by a succession of mostly military leaders, often eager to tap the nation’s oil riches for themselves and their cronies.

Then, in 2003, amid the country’s most recent drive to clean house, President Olusegun Obasanjo created a financial-crimes investigation unit. The new antifraud czar, Nuhu Ribadu, ordered clandestine tests of the oil used at some overseas refineries. The samples confirmed a long-held suspicion: Much of Nigeria’s stolen oil was being shipped by well-organized syndicates to destinations such as Ivory Coast and Cameroon and even as far away as Brazil. An informant turned in a list of suspected suppliers of the stolen oil.
[Nuhu Ribadu]

Next, Mr. Ribadu did a remarkable thing for Nigeria: He started going after the suspects.

Since taking charge of the new Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, Mr. Ribadu has pursued oil mobsters, Internet fraudsters and corrupt politicians. The former street cop has 185 active fraud and corruption cases working their way through the courts, up from zero before the commission started its work two years ago. Working in the capital of Abuja from an office overlooking goats grazing in a vacant lot, the wiry 44-year-old has locked up 200 alleged smugglers and seized $700 million in property, including a collection of office buildings, from suspects in oil smuggling and other crimes. Royal Dutch/Shell Group, whose joint venture with the state petroleum company pumps about half of Nigeria’s oil, says the amount of crude stolen from its network has fallen by almost half since early last year.

In the past three weeks, Mr. Ribadu’s political-corruption investigations have shaken Nigeria, triggering the sacking of two government ministers and the resignation of a leading lawmaker. Yesterday, the country’s former education minister and six legislators pleaded not guilty to charges related to alleged bribe-taking. Mr. Ribadu also ordered the arrest of his own ex-boss, the nation’s former chief of police. Last week the disgraced chief appeared in handcuffs at his arraignment, where he pleaded not guilty to a 70-count charge, including money laundering and theft.

Nigeria’s crackdown on corruption could have broad implications for world oil markets and the Western companies that do business here. Global oil prices are simmering near record highs as the world’s largest petroleum producers, including Nigeria, strain to meet soaring demand. Nigeria pumps about 3% of the world’s oil, much of it prized low-sulfur grade. The theft robs oil companies of revenue — discouraging investment that could bring more oil to the market — and bleeds the Nigerian treasury, which depends on crude for as much as 95% of its export revenue.

Cleaning up the oil business is essential to transforming Nigeria, which has struggled to achieve a stable democracy since the British left in 1960. The country is emblematic of the “oil curse,” in which easy petrodollars help entrench corrupt elites and discourage long-term economic planning. Embezzled oil money has helped grease the wheels of Nigeria’s dysfunctional political system.

Larger than Texas, with a population of 137 million, Nigeria is already one of the top suppliers to U.S. refineries. Its output is expected to double this decade. The U.S. hopes West Africa will offer a hedge against the volatile Middle East. But ethnic clashes and criminal activity in the oil-rich Delta lead to about 1,000 killings a year, according to consultants hired by Shell to study the region. Tensions between the Muslim north and Christian south often flare into violence. Factions from many of the country’s major ethnic groups have threatened a breakup of the fragile Nigerian federation.

Mr. Ribadu thinks his efforts could become a model to rid Africa and the developing world of fraud and corruption. “Nigeria is the focal point — it will hold the key to a change in all of Africa,” he says.

But sustaining early success against oil smuggling is proving tough. Mr. Ribadu’s commission has a meager $10 million annual budget. Nigeria’s poorly run courts have thwarted prosecution of some of his biggest catches. His officers often find themselves outgunned by smugglers during sting operations in the vast Delta swamps.

“If you just go on patrol without knowing the place, you end up a dead man,” says Ibrahim Lamorde, in charge of the commission’s crumbling Lagos office, surrounded by rows of impounded cars baking in the sun. “It’s more or less like a guerrilla war.”

Death threats against commission staff are common. Mr. Ribadu drives a bullet-proof BMW. When someone knocks at his office door, he instinctively glances at the grainy closed-circuit television set on his desk, which monitors three hallways leading to his office.
[Mujahid Dokubo Asari]

President Obasanjo last year sent in the army to quell a violent clash between two Delta warlords, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari and Ateke Tom. Mr. Asari declared “all-out war” on the government, sending crude markets soaring the day he spoke. Authorities say the two were fighting for control of lucrative smuggling routes. Smugglers typically pay protection money to such territorial bosses. That cash in turn has financed the creation of well-armed private militias in the region.

To get their oil to market, smugglers also “settle” with communities and traditional chiefs, often in the form of cash payments. Many law-enforcement officers and oil-company executives get a cut of the action, according to commission officials and outside analysts.

“We have every right to do whatever we want with our own oil,” Mr. Asari said in an interview in his walled compound in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s dilapidated oil capital on the edge of the country’s southern swamps. Last fall, he agreed to lay down his arms in a deal brokered by the president. He denies any personal involvement in the bunkering racket and says his aim is to win control of the Delta’s resources for the local people. But, he added, “If a bunkerer comes and wants to donate to our cause then, jolly well, we’ll accept it.”

President Obasanjo — a military ruler in the late 1970s turned elected leader in 1999 — declared he would clean up Nigeria after winning his second term in 2003. Among the reform-minded technocrats he brought into the government was Mr. Ribadu, a rising officer in the federal police.

Mr. Ribadu says his interest in fighting graft dates from law school in the early 1980s, as he watched a democratically elected government crumble amid rampant corruption. He probed corruption during his mandatory youth service after graduation, and later took a job as a beat cop walking the slums of Lagos, the crime-infested commercial capital. The move shocked his elite Muslim family. His father had served as a government minister, and police work was considered beneath the clan.

Cottage Industry of Fraud

By 1997, Mr. Ribadu was running the prosecution department of the federal police. He gained fame by building murder and financial-fraud cases against cronies of former dictator Sani Abacha. After taking over the fraud commission, he won international kudos for breaking up bank-fraud schemes spread via the Internet. In recent years, Nigeria has become home to a cottage industry of Internet scams that often lure victims with e-mail promises to share in a deposed dictator’s bank account. Last summer, the commission arrested a suspect who was impersonating Mr. Ribadu himself, in e-mails that began, “Re: Urgent Contract Payment Advice As Regards My Telephone Conversation With You Today.”

But the oil smugglers have proved elusive prey. According to authorities and people familiar with the trade, many of the smuggling rings are organized around so-called cults — violent gangs with names like the Icelanders, the Mafia Lords and Black Axe. The groups grew out of underground Nigerian college fraternities that date back to the 1970s.

Working mostly at night, they break into bits of pipe poking up from the swamps or buried lines on land. They siphon off crude to waiting trucks or flat-bottom barges. During a routine flight last month, the pilot of a Shell-chartered helicopter pointed out clusters of such barges tied up along the river banks.

Emeka Nwonyi, who took over the commission’s Port Harcourt office in December, meets with local military and police officers and Shell executives twice a month to share intelligence. He also relies on informants — often smugglers themselves — to identify targets. But acting on such information is risky.

A Tip Goes Sour

After a recent tip-off, Mr. Nwonyi says, his men and a detachment of army soldiers surrounded a village in the heart of the Delta. They watched as armed smugglers loaded a group of tanker trucks with crude. Outgunned, out of cellphone range and lacking a radio to communicate with nearby Navy patrols, Mr. Nwonyi withdrew his men. “It looked as if the place was hot,” he says. He planned to arrest the smugglers as they made their getaway, but they slipped away by a different route.

To break the stalemate, Mr. Ribadu has targeted the trade’s big financiers and buyers, who typically operate far from the marshes. The top rung of the trade is dominated by wealthy Nigerian businessmen, often teaming up with foreign buyers or middlemen, according to commission investigators. The Lagos office is investigating more than a dozen suspected Nigerian and foreign ringleaders and companies.

After filling barges in the Delta with oil, smugglers send the vessels down river and then load up larger tankers in open water headed for far-off markets. Two years ago, President Obasanjo prodded the navy to help. Armed with four World War II-era buoy tenders provided by the U.S. Coast Guard, the navy began stopping suspected smuggling ships.

In late 2003, the navy intercepted the Capbreton, a large tanker loaded with crude valued at $162,000. Authorities impounded the vessel. The Capbreton’s owner was listed as Okon Onyung, a retired army officer and local doctor, according to investigators. The commission arrested Dr. Onyung, froze his bank accounts and impounded his Lincoln Navigator.

But before the commission could press charges, a local magistrate granted Dr. Onyung bail. He disappeared and is now being sought by police. Dr. Onyung maintained his innocence during questioning by investigators. Attempts to reach Dr. Onyung for this article weren’t successful. His wife and a handful of foreign crewmembers were charged with unlawful conveyance of crude and are currently on trial. Ms. Onyung’s attorney has said she wasn’t involved in the alleged smuggling operation. Attempts to reach the attorney for comment weren’t successful.

In the same sweep that netted the Capbreton, the Navy brought in an even bigger catch: the 12,000-ton African Pride. About the length of a football field, the ship was bearing as much as 80,000 barrels of crude, valued at some $1.2 million. Navy officers seized the ship and tied it up at a Lagos wharf, jailing most of the crew.

Then, sometime between Aug. 6 and Aug. 8 last year, the tanker vanished. The lone guard posted to secure the ship later testified he left his post after having no contact from his superior officers for three weeks, according to Anthony Aziegbemi, chairman of a parliamentary committee on naval affairs that is investigating. Other testimony suggested there was a payoff to the navy to allow the ship to sail, but no conclusive proof ever emerged.

The navy eventually court-martialed three admirals in connection with the incident. The presiding officers ruled that two of the admirals be dismissed from the service for facilitating theft; the third was exonerated. The rulings are pending approval of navy headquarters.

Capt. Sinebi Hungiapuko, the navy’s director of information, denies that any bribe-taking took place. He adds that navy headquarters has no indication that any officers in the Delta are on the take. “But in an organization like this there can be bad apples,” he said.

Mr. Ribadu says he has made a big dent in spite of the setbacks. Shell executives say theft can fluctuate widely day to day, but currently stands at some 40,000 to 50,000 barrels a day, down from almost 100,000 barrels in early 2004.

Mr. Ribadu’s crackdown has prompted a number of high-level figures in the trade to flee the Delta, he adds. “We destabilized them,” he says.

Posted at 5:54 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Tuesday, April 12, 2005

HONG KONG There could scarcely be a sharper contrast than between the bonhomie displayed by China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, on his current tour of South Asia and China’s behavior towards its North Asian neighbor, Japan. The anti-Japanese demonstrations during the weekend, and some only slightly less nationalistic outbursts in South Korea, are not just forewarnings of future tensions in the region. They have implications for global governance and the United Nations system - in which India, in particular, would like to play a larger role.

The demonstrations in China may have got out of hand, but there is no doubt that they were initiated with the connivance of the authorities. While the old issue of Japanese school textbook versions of Japan’s occupation of China was one pretext, the main trigger was Japan’s push to become a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

It is always a worrying sign when students vent their wrath against foreigners rather than campaigning against injustices at home - and when governments drum up nationalist sentiments to divert attention from their own failings. The demands for apologies for Japan’s past sins have been highly selective.

It is true that Japan has not been as contrite as one would wish and the visits by Japan’s prime minister to Yasukuni Shrine, where some war criminals are buried, are poor diplomacy. But plenty of British textbooks, for example, show scant regard for Chinese views of the Opium Wars or the destruction of the Summer Palace. Likewise many American ones gloss over the massacres that accompanied the “civilizing” U.S. occupation of the Philippines. Queen Elizabeth II has not apologized to Indians for the Amritsar massacre and statues commemorating the bloody exploits of British imperialists are two a penny in London. Beijing also likes to forget that for much of Asia beyond China and Korea, Japan’s imperialism was welcomed as hastening the end of Western imperialism.

As for the South Koreans, in their demands for more Japanese groveling they like to forget the fact that President Park Chung Hee, widely praised for masterminding their economic miracle, was himself an officer in the Japanese army of occupation in Manchuria.

If none of this historical mud-slinging got beyond the more sensational news media it could be dismissed as no more relevant than the childish anti-German antics of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid press in Britain. But official encouragement of xenophobic attitudes is worrying in a region where cooperation will be vital when the United States is no longer both buyer and peacekeeper of last resort. It casts a shadow on much-advertised hopes of bilateral and regional free trade agreements, and currency cooperation, particularly for Southeast Asia, which needs Chinese-Japanese accord.

China’s stance on Japan’s membership of the Security Council makes nonsense of its claims to represent the developing and upcoming world. It is a crude and blatant attempt to protect its privileged position as the only Asian and only developing country that is a permanent member of the council. If there is to be reform of the United Nations and expansion of the Security Council to reflect the world today, Japan’s membership, along with that of India, Germany and Brazil, is essential.

Proposals for UN reform are due to be debated in September. The most favored new model for the Security Council is for an additional six permanent and three nonpermanent members, none with veto power. Discussion may get nowhere, as the United States, as well as China, appears to oppose enlargement, and Britain and France seem unwilling to give any ground in return for Germany’s membership. A more limited enlargement might attract U.S. backing.

Any country that purports to want greater Asian representation deserves bitter criticism if in practice it thwarts the aspirations of Japan and India. Pakistan’s objection to India’s membership is just as petty as South Korea’s objection to Japan’s. They show governments driven by the most narrow and self-centered considerations.

Perhaps China’s outburst of jingoism toward Japan will persuade the United States to take a more favorable view of Security Council reform, recognizing that a larger permanent membership (without veto powers) would be in its longer-term interest. China, of course, could still veto such enlargement, but is unlikely to do so. Its leaders usually have a better understanding of its global interests than displayed by the current outburst in Beijing.

Posted at 11:55 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright YaleGlobal, 11 April 2005

Using the past to serve the present: Chinese oppose Japan’s membership of the UN Security Council for failing to atone for its past crimes against the Chinese people

TOKYO: Sino-Japanese relations sunk to a new low last weekend when an estimated 10,000 to 20,000 Chinese protestors surrounded the Japanese Embassy in Beijing, pelting it with missiles and shouting “Japanese pigs come out” and “Be ashamed of distorting history.”

The protests, demanding a boycott of Japanese goods, followed Tokyo’s authorization of high-school textbooks that many in China condemn for whitewashing Japan’s brutal fifteen-year invasion (1931-45), and have rocked the already shaky partnership between Asia’s declining economic leader and its rising star.

Demonstrations also took place in South Korea, where Gil Won Ok and her elderly comrades gathered at the Japanese Embassy in Seoul to plead, pray and denounce the Tokyo government. “Who will take away my pain,” cried the frail 77-year-old who was barely a teenager when she was forced to provide sex to Japanese soldiers during World War II. “Atone for the past and let me die in peace!”

The pensioners – among the few still alive from an estimated 100-200,000 “comfort women,” the sex slaves of the Imperial Japanese Army – have been coming here since 1992 to demand an apology. But neither time nor mortality has dulled the emotional heat of their campaign, which is regularly stoked by what many Chinese and Koreans consider fresh insults. The new textbooks, which Korean government spokesman Lee Kyu Hyung said “beautify and justify” Japan’s occupation of much of Asia until 1945, have added fuel to the fire.

The war over what Japan teaches its children has raged since the early 1980s, but the latest battle emerges as the tectonic plates of Asian politics shift to accommodate the growing economic bulk of China, which is brushing up against its increasingly anxious neighbor. Tokyo has paid China compensation of about 3 trillion yen in Overseas Development Assistance since capitalist reforms began there in the early 1980s, and in an increasingly right-wing domestic climate, believes this is apology enough for past sins.

The most contentious history text – one of eight passed for use by Japan’s Ministry of Education – removes all references to the comfort women and atrocities such as the Nanjing massacre, and suggests that Korea invited the Japanese occupation a century ago. An additional civics text claims jurisdiction over a clump of rocks called Takeshima (Korean: Tokdo) that Japan seized in 1905 but Korea has held since 1945. “What nonsense is this,” editorialized the normally mild Korea Herald.

Both texts were written by the Society for History Textbook Reform, a group of neo-nationalist academics that claims the current curriculum in Japanese schools leaves youngsters “confused and no longer proud of their nation.” As an Asahi editorial said last week, the Society wants to “emphasize the ‘high points’ of Japanese history and ignore the ‘darker’ aspects; historian Jeffrey Kingston calls them the ‘Dr. Feelgoods of Japanese history.’ “

In 2001, the Society first won Ministry of Education approval for the texts, but grassroots opposition led by teachers and local activists across Japan blocked adoption. Backed by the huge Fuji-Sankei media conglomerate, the Society has since sold nearly one million copies of its history and civics texts, however, bringing what many considered extremist theories into thousands of ordinary Japanese homes and pushing the content of other textbooks sharply to the right. This year, just one new history textbook out of eight mentions the comfort women, down from seven in the mid-1990s, while references to other infamous war crimes have been toned down or dropped.

Emboldened by its success and by political and media support, including Japan’s biggest newspaper the Daily Yomiuri, the Society believes it is moving with the tide. “We’re confident we can change the teaching of history in schools here,” says one of its leading intellectual lights, Nobukatsu Fujioka. “More and more people share our opposition to instilling self-hatred in our children.”

Whether the Society succeeds on its second attempt remains to be seen. In 2001, its opponents cobbled together a powerful grassroots coalition that included everyone from Communists to Christians, and this movement could spring back into life. But while there is miniscule support among ordinary Japanese for school textbooks that extol Japan’s colonial rule in Asia, the Society enjoys weighty political backing, including over 100 members of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party and Tokyo’s powerful Governor Shintaro Ishihara. Revisionists already control the country’s largest educational council in Tokyo, which will decide this summer whether the textbooks will be used in thousands of schools across the megalopolis.

“The Japanese government is inflaming opinion across Asia with these textbooks,” says Hasegawa Takashi, a teacher and anti-textbook campaigner in Tokyo. “If they really think Chinese communists are to blame why play into their hands?”

If Tokyo can afford to ignore the anguished keening of Gil Won Ok and her dwindling fellow survivors, however, more troubling is the anger emanating from China, its biggest trading partner. There the textbooks inflamed already seething anger at Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s repeated visits to the Tokyo war memorial Yasukuni Shrine and Japan’s handling of the territorial conflict over the Diaoyutai (Japanese: Senkaku) Islands claimed by both China and Japan. In recent weeks, a boycott targeting Japanese goods has grown, and attacks on Japanese businesses in Chengdu and Shenzhen, and now Beijing and Guangzhou, have spooked otherwise bullish investors.

The Chinese attacks come on the heels of a massive online citizens’ campaign that claims to have gathered over 25 million signatures opposing Japan’s campaign for a permanent seat o