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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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…Their controversial views, reflected in a revisionist history textbook, are being lapped up by the young

Have the Japanese apologised enough for the war? Here are some facts. In 1972, Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka told the Chinese that Japan “deeply reproached itself”; in 1982, chief cabinet secretary Kiichi Miyazawa expressed “remorse”; the emperor himself, in 1990, spoke of his “deepest remorse” in South Korea; in 1995, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama offered his “profound apology” to Asian victims; Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, in China in 1997, repeated Murayama’s feelings of “deep remorse”; and Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he was sorry in 2001, 2002, 2003 and yet again last month.

Given the fact that these apologies covered Japanese colonialism in Korea, the brutal invasion of China, the maltreatment of POWs and the forced prostitution of “comfort women”, it would be hard to maintain that Japan has officially denied its dark history. Does this mean, then, that the recent violent demonstrations in China, with mobs hurling stones at Japanese consulates, restaurants and shops while the police looked on benevolently at this venting of popular rage at “Japanese pigs”, were wholly off the mark?

In some ways, yes. Although ostensibly sparked by the publication of a new Japanese textbook (used by less than 1 per cent of Japanese schools), the protests were clearly inspired by politics, domestic and international. Economic growth and xenophobic nationalism have become the last justifications for the Chinese Communist Party’s continuing monopoly on power. Popular discontents - about unemployment, corruption, pollution and the suppression of free speech - are deflected by allowing people to let off steam against Japan, or at times, the US. Popular sentiment takes the place of open debate. The “feelings” of the Chinese people are invoked to press China’s claims as a dominant Asian power. Japan’s desire to join the Security Council of the UN, its defence of Taiwan, and its claim to gas-rich spots in the East China Sea, are the real issues. The Japanese textbook is just an excuse.

And yet this does not let Japan entirely off the hook. There are reasons, apart from cynical manipulation, why Asians still have a hard time accepting Japanese statements of contrition at face value. For the Japanese themselves have not yet become reconciled with their past. A recent trend towards nationalistic assertiveness in Japan has been expressed in some curious views of the war. Consider, for example, the work of a highly popular manga artist, named Yoshinori Kobayashi, whose three-volume comic strip On War, published in 1998, offers in the most strident tone the following thesis: the Japanese war was just; Japan was liberating Asia from “the white racists”; the so-called Nanking Massacre of 1937 was a Chinese fabrication; the “comfort women”, driven into Japanese army brothels from Korea, China and South-east Asia, were all just greedy prostitutes; in short, the stories of Japanese war crimes were mostly propaganda, spread by the victorious allies and echoed by unpatriotic Japanese leftists. The first volume of On War alone sold more than 600,000 copies, mostly to young people.

Kobayashi is much more than a comic-strip artist. He co-founded a committee that seeks to produce more “patriotic” history textbooks for Japanese schools. The Society for History Textbook Reform, or Tsukurukai, was set up in 1996 by Kobayashi and several conservative academics, worried that a negative picture of the Japanese wartime past would rob younger generations of national pride. The comfort women issue in particular was seen as an intolerable slur that should be purged from existing textbooks.

Asked what he thought was wrong with most Japanese textbooks, one well-known Tsukurukai member, Nobukatsu Fujioka of Tokyo University, said that “they are not written with Japanese people in mind. They present a history that is hostile to Japan.” He attributes this to “Japanese socialists, communists and liberal media”, as well as foreigners who see “Japan as nothing but an evil aggressor during the war”. This kind of masochism, he believes, must be stopped.

Neither Fujioka, who is an expert on education, nor Kobayashi, nor most of their colleagues who are concerned about Japanese masochism, are professional historians. But their views, reflected in the latest textbook that sparked protests in China, have a growing appeal among young Japanese who are tired of being told that their country was uniquely wicked in the war and should apologise for it all the time. A similar weariness concerns the postwar constitution, drawn up by Americans in 1946, which deprives Japan of its right to use military force. This is not just irksome to a few rightwing diehards. The pop art guru of contemporary Tokyo, Takashi Murakami, an affable man in a modish pigtail, explained the fascination of his generation for childlike cartoons and violent comic-strip fantasies by claiming that the US-imposed, pacifist postwar order had turned Japan into a nation of irresponsible children - which is pretty much what Kobayashi and his colleagues think too.

There are several reasons why even pop art has soaked up some of the gripes of grumpy rightwing professors. One is the collapse of the left, which had dominated many educational institutions for decades. This phenomenon is not of course limited to Japan, nor is the effect of this political shift on the way people look at the past. But the shift has been particularly dramatic in Japan because the presentation of history is not just an academic problem but a festering sore running through mainstream Japanese politics. When the US-led Allies occupied Japan after dropping the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one of the first things General MacArthur’s administration did was to tackle Japanese education. Japanese were ordered “to eliminate from the educational system of Japan those militaristic and ultranationalistic influences which in the past have contributed to the defeat, war guilt, suffering, privation, and present deplorable state of the Japanese people”.

Since patriotic education, which included emperor worship and the idea that the Japanese were a superior race with divine roots, had played an important role in mobilising the Japanese for war, this was not a spurious measure. Henceforth, the production of history textbooks would be privatised and no longer be subject to government control. But before new textbooks could be published, “ultranationalistic” and “militaristic” passages in the old ones were blocked out in black ink. Teachers who had extolled the unique virtues of the divine Japanese race until the surrender in August, 1945, now taught the unique virtues of American-style demokurashi. Moral education (shushin), with its stress on sacrifice and discipline, was a particular target of the occupation authorities since this was regarded, not without reason, as the main obstacle to the new spirit of individualism. Cultural re-education was not just limited to school books but to the arts as well. Samurai dramas were banned for a short while, in movies and even in the Kabuki theatre. And generally, Japanese were encouraged to believe that their brutal wartime behaviour was rooted in deep cultural flaws.

Those who stood on the left of the political spectrum, which included much of the Japanese intelligentsia, had no problem with these policies. Like most Japanese they were glad to be rid of the oppressive wartime regime and embraced democratic change. Marxists had their own ideological reasons for seeing the dark past in terms of “feudalism” and “capitalist imperialism” and it was not uncommon in the 1950s and 1960s for Marxist school teachers to praise Chairman Mao’s China while denouncing imperialist Japanese history in the most lurid manner. Such teachers had a strong influence on the Japan Teachers Union, whose institutional power only began to crumble in the 1980s. Many school textbooks reflected their views, even though leftist biases were almost invariably watered down by conservative education ministry bureaucrats.

Cultural conservatives, not unnaturally, took a very different view of the US occupation. They felt robbed of their national identity. Even though American censorship was minimal compared with Japanese wartime censorship, some writers and thinkers felt deeply humiliated by foreigners telling them what to think. And conservatives, who deplored the “moral vacuum” that replaced emperor-worshipping nationalism, have tried to fill this vacuum with the old patriotic spirit ever since. A rosier view of the wartime past is part of this effort, which has found support among many conservative politicians, including prime ministers.

The issue of moral education and patriotic history is closely linked to the postwar constitution. To leftists and liberals, official pacifism has always been seen as a way to atone for the militarism of the past - something that is not pointed out in the Chinese media. Teachers associated with the Japan Teachers Union discussed Japanese war crimes as an integral part of what came to be called “peace education”. Pacifism was not only the answer to Hiroshima but also to the Nanking Massacre. More has been written in Japan about Japanese war crimes than anywhere else, albeit often with an ideological slant.

With the waning of Marxism, however, and the waxing of resentment over the idealistic but somewhat unrealistic pacifist constitution, the terms of the historical debate in Japan have changed. In fact, this already began in the early 1950s when China had “gone Communist”, the Korean War was under way, Japanese war criminals were released from prison and reds were purged from public life with American connivance. Men who had never endorsed the pacifist constitution, postwar education or war guilt entered the mainstream of Japanese politics.

As long as the majority of the Japanese people still held on to the pacifist ideal and resisted a revival of old-style moral education, rightwing nationalists had little room for manoeuvre. Prime- ministerial visits to Yasukuni Shrine, where the souls of imperial soldiers including quite a few war criminals are enshrined, are symbolic gestures that please Japanese veterans and other conservative voters at the cost of irritating Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese liberals, but they cannot restore Japan’s right to go to war again. And neither can public remarks about the justness of Japan’s war, the moral decadence of the young or the negative effects of masochistic history teaching.

What has shifted, though, in the wake of the Cold War (which is not really quite over in East Asia), is the public consensus that official pacifism is a realistic or even desirable option in the long run. It was humiliating for Japan to write cheques for the Gulf War in 1991 while being forced to be a passive bystander. Since Japan is so dependent on the US for its security, most foreign policy simply follows the dictates of Washington DC. Many Japanese people who hold no brief for wartime imperialism feel that it is time for a change. Not a few also feel that the time for apologising is over.

This is why Kobayashi’s comic strips have found a ready audience. Not because militarism is on the rise in Japan, but because the old leftwing shibboleths are losing their persuasive power. And this owes a lot to the dogmatism of pacifist intellectuals, who can be as inflexible as rightwing patriots. If one adds the cynical manipulation of popular sentiment in China, one can see why this has stoked up a kind of rebelliousness or at least irritation which the patriots can exploit. Since young Japanese, like young people everywhere, are becoming more ignorant of the facts as the war slips into the past, they also lack the critical sense to challenge some of the more outrageous claims of the historical revisionists.

Denial, then, is not the whole story in Japan. And neither is the lack of official remorse. The problem is that history was politicised from the moment the American victors chose to remake Japan in their own image. This turned out to be successful in many respects: Japan has a flawed but functioning democracy; militarism is pretty much dead; and most Japanese lead secure, prosperous lives. But when constitutional law, military defence, foreign policy and history education become hopelessly entangled, the last thing people care about is the honest truth.

Copyright The Financial Times

Posted at 4:25 PM · Comments (0)

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Tsuguo Morita received an unexpected phone call on the night of April 15, 2001.

The man calling on the vice chairman of the Japan Association for the Bereaved Families of the War Dead turned out to be Junichiro Koizumi, who was then running for the presidency of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party.

That fateful call was the beginning of an international row that continues to haunt Sino-Japanese relations today. Ties between the two Asian powers have recently sunk to a level Beijing describes as the lowest-ever in their history of diplomatic relations, which were normalized in 1972.

“His message was that he would certainly visit Yasukuni Shrine on Aug. 15, if he is elected LDP president,” Morita recalled. Aug. 15 is the day when Japan surrendered to the Allied powers to end World War II in 1945.

Morita immediately thought Koizumi was asking the association to back him in the LDP race because of his promise to break a political taboo that many of his predecessors have respected out of fear of setting off protests in other parts of Asia.

Koizumi won the race, beating ex-Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who was formerly chairman of the association but did not pledge to visit the contentious Shinto shrine.

The association claims a membership of 1 million households whose kin are among Japan’s war dead, and is one of the LDP’s largest support groups.

“We’ve highly appreciated (Koizumi’s) visits to the shrine,” Morita said.

Yasukuni Shrine, located in Tokyo’s Chiyoda Ward, honors 2.47 million Japanese who have died in wars since the late 19th century. Also enshrined are 14 wartime leaders convicted as class-A war criminals by the Allied-led war tribunal, including Prime Minister Gen. Hideki Tojo.

Visits there by Japanese government leaders have frequently been a source of diplomatic ire with Japan’s Asian neighbors — particularly China and South Korea — because of the shrine’s role as a spiritual pillar for Japan during the war.

Koizumi has visited the shrine once a year since becoming LDP president and prime minister in April 2001. Despite fierce protests from China and South Korea, he has said he intends to go this year as well and will pause only to “make an appropriate judgment” on the timing.

Sources close to Koizumi say the prime minister reckons the diplomatic row with China over the visits will calm down and eventually go away if he only gives it time.

“China will eventually admit its error,” a source quoted Koizumi as saying during a meeting with business leaders last year. Instead, the row has escalated.

Earlier this week, Chinese Vice Premier Wu Yi, who came to Japan on an apparent fence-mending mission, snubbed Koizumi by canceling a scheduled meeting at the last minute. Beijing later described the action as a protest over remarks about Yasukuni by Japanese leaders that “are negative for the development of better relations.”

While many LDP leaders have adopted a hardline view toward China and support Koizumi’s visits to the shrine, New Komeito, the LDP’s junior coalition partner, is becoming more vocal in urging him to show restraint in view of the troubled ties.

On Thursday, New Komeito chief Takenori Kanzaki said the most important thing in keeping tensions with China from escalating “is for the prime minister to refrain from visiting” the shrine.

What is not clear, however, is whether Koizumi will heed such calls.

Some Foreign Ministry officials said they believe Koizumi should stop the visits to improve ties with China, which is strategically important to Japan in both economic and security terms. China has surpassed the United States as Japan’s largest trading partner.

But they also said they have almost given up on trying to change Koizumi’s mind.

“It’s a very sensitive issue. (Probably) the most sensitive issue” for foreign policy advisers to Koizumi, a senior government official assigned to the Prime Minister’s Official Residence said earlier.

The official said Foreign Ministry bureaucrats have not been been able to explain the diplomatic merits and demerits of the Yasukuni visits to Koizumi, because they believe it’s useless to try to change his mind.

“If he could change his mind, the story would be different. But he won’t,” said the official, who was a foreign policy advisor to Koizumi.

Why does he insist on visiting Yasukuni despite all the anger and the risk of damaging Japan’s diplomatic ties in the region?

Koizumi has only explained his persistence by saying “it is only natural” to pay respects to the Japanese who gave their lives for their country.

“I still don’t understand why I should not express respect and gratitude for all the war dead,” Koizumi told a May 16 House of Representatives committee session.

He also argued that other countries should not “interfere” with how Japan remembers its war dead.

But some people believe there are political reasons for the visits as well, including demonstrating that he is consistently a “stubborn maverick” who will keep his word with the Japanese war dead association.

“I think he has prioritized not changing what he has once decided, no matter what other countries may say,” said Koichi Kato, a House of Representative member once considered a key ally of Koizumi.

Kato said Koizumi is probably monitoring the reactions of the Japanese public to make a decision on the Yasukuni issue.

“Popular approval ratings (for his Cabinet) in media polls have recently risen. I think it will further harden his resolve,” Kato said.

A poll conducted by the Yomiuri Shimbun from May 14 to 15 showed 51.4 percent of the 1,880 respondents supported the Cabinet, up 3.6 percentage points from April and the first time it has topped 50 percent in six months. The respondents accounted for 62.7 percent of 3,000 people contacted for the poll.

The same poll also showed that 48 percent of the respondents support the shrine visits, while 45 percent are opposed.

Political reasons aside, it is widely believed that Koizumi, known to be an emotional man, truly sympathizes with the Japanese soldiers who died in war during the 1930s and 1940s, in particular the young kamikaze recruited in the closing days of World War II.

Koizumi has cited “Ah Doki no Sakura,” a collection of writings left by the doomed pilots, when asked to mention a book that has impressed him most in his life.

When Koizumi visited a museum dedicated to the kamikaze in Kagoshima Prefecture in February 2001, two months before becoming prime minister, he shed tears for several minutes while viewing the exhibition, an official at the Peace Museum for Kamikaze Pilots said.

“With his eyes closed, he started shedding big tears and couldn’t move and kept standing there,” said the museum official, who was interviewed by phone and only gave his name as Matsumoto.

Kato describes the prime minister as a politician who depends much on emotion and intuition instead of logic and reason when making decisions.

And he’s also not one to listen to the advice of others, he said.

“When we were drinking, he often said that politicians should act by intuition,” Kato said. “He said if politicians listen to the opinions or explanation of others, particularly those of bureaucrats, they will be indecisive and their (political) messages will only become weak.

“Instead, Koizumi said, you should keep saying what your intuition tells you because then your message will carry more strongly to the people.”

Kato, a former career diplomat and a China expert, warned that if Koizumi keeps visiting Yasukuni, it will only keep Japan from pursuing its strategic interests in Asia while allowing China to expand its economic presence to a dominant position in the region.

“China will form free-trade agreements with other Asian countries” while Japan will continue to be troubled with the Yasukuni problem, Kato said.

The Japan Times: May 28, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 5:01 PM · Comments (0)

May 28, 2005, 7:56PM

EXAMINING THE MYTHS: The China outsiders don’t know :Beyond cocktail party wisdom about 1 billion neighbors

BEGINNING with Marco Polo’s sojourn in China in the late 13th century, there
have been two Chinas ? the China of the imagination, as interpreted by
Westerners, and the real China as experienced by the Chinese. Post-imperial
China provided some of the most powerful images of the 20th century.

As we still see in old newsreels and magazines, Shanghai in the 1930s was a
center of international glamour and intrigue. Next came the utter destruction
of World War II, then Mao’s China and the rampages of the Red Guard.

Today, China’s economic rise, symbolized by space-needle towers and
construction cranes in major cities, occupies a similar romanticized place in
the minds of foreign commentators. As I write this article while flying over
China, I am reminded of what lies beneath. China has its own vast and
enduring reality, its own strengths and its own weaknesses.

When outsiders speak of China, when you see media images of China, you should
remind yourself that most of what we Westerners see and discuss are simply
journalistic myths. The problem with these myths is that they interfere with
our ability to understand what is really going on in China, and what is
really going on is hugely important to everyone on the planet.

Chinese history is barely studied in the United States. I find that many
people who talk about China sprinkle a few facts on a well-worn agenda. I
often hear comments that the Chinese are taking our jobs and stealing our
intellectual property. The 2 million U.S. workers who have lost their
manufacturing jobs probably don’t realize that many millions more Chinese
have lost theirs over the same period of time, mostly because of
restructuring of state-owned enterprises. U.S. media companies upset over
intellectual property violations in China seemingly don’t remember when
similar laws were flouted in Japan. Things got better when Japanese companies
grew and needed these same protections themselves.

Protection of intellectual property is by and large a developmental problem
shared by all countries at some point in their history.

Another oft-cited claim is that the imbalance of Chinese men to women will
lead to roving bands of single men who will build an army based on sexual
frustration, which will inevitably attack the United States.

These are just a few examples of cocktail party wisdom about China that
reveal our lack of basic knowledge. Let’s explore a few myths:

? China is emerging from a 1,000-year slumber.
Actually, China had the world’s largest economy less than 200 years ago, when
it accounted for 30 percent of world’s total value of goods and services and
had a population of more than 300 million. Today, we are witnessing the re-
emergence of China as an international economic and political power.

It is this shared national vision that unites China, and its newly emerging
middle class is the vanguard of this dream. Misperceptions about this group,
the target of both pro-democracy advocates and Western ad agencies, are
subtly intertwined with many myths.

? China is a juggernaut. We have to do something stop them, like force them
to revalue their currency.
The best possible outcome for the U.S. consumer is for China’s economy to
keep expanding at its current rate. China’s middle class works and saves so
that the Chinese government can buy billions of dollars of U.S. Treasury
bonds, low-interest debt that supports the spending habits of both the U.S.
government and American consumers, who in turn buy Chinese-manufactured goods
at Wal-Mart, which keeps the whole cycle going.

Realistically, even a massive revaluation, on the order of 30 percent, would
not get U.S. companies now manufacturing in China to shut down and reopen in
the U.S. We are in too deep, and China is too entrenched as the world’s
manufacturing hub.

It is the U.S. consumer who cannot be stopped. We have an absolute
codependence, built upon our addiction to the new opiate of the masses,
plastic money. The Chinese are the frugal relatives that we, the big
spenders, go to for a loan when our bad habits catch up with us.

Are they to be feared?

Given the choice, which would you rather be: the Chinese producer or the U.S.
consumer?

? China has a modern financial system.
China’s financial system, particularly its banks, is driven by policy
considerations and connections rather than good commercial credit guidelines.
In spite of minuscule returns, China’s middle class keeps saving, and in fact
has achieved the highest savings rate of any country ? nearly 40 percent of
income. The Chinese have incentives to save, not because of high interest
rates but because the world’s largest socialist country no longer offers its
citizens much of a social safety net.

The financial system is hard to measure because the informal lending market
is huge, a result of deformities that make it difficult for anyone other than
an unprofitable state-owned enterprise to obtain credit.

Many Chinese look at the stock market as a kind of casino, where only
insiders make money. Nowhere else in world financial history has a stock
market shown such poor returns, with an economy growing at an average annual
rate of 10 percent.

? China’s middle class is clustered in the east, and everyone in the interior
is poor and rural.
Surprisingly, rural-income growth is outpacing urban incomes. Rich farmers
and wealthy entrepreneurs are found throughout the interior. Recent increases
in food prices and the lowering of agricultural taxes have bolstered this
trend, with the middle class now sprinkled throughout urban and rural China.

A further fine point: China has more than 200 cities with populations of more
than 1 million and the most populous city in the world, not just China, is
Chongqing, located squarely in the center of China ? nearly 1,000 miles from
the eastern seaboard.

? China’s middle class alone is bigger than the entire population of the
United States.
Well, certainly not now. By most reliable estimates, being a member of the
middle class, defined as earning more than $10,000 per household per year, is
a status attained by less than 5 percent of the population. However, true
income is difficult to measure because of the huge underground economy ?
thought by some to be half again as large as China’s official economy.

Aspirations of wealth are high. A study by the Chinese Academy of Sciences
found that nearly half of all Chinese consider themselves middle class, even
though they do not meet the objective economic criteria. By 2020, the middle
class could form a solid majority. China has a population bulge similar to
the baby boom generation in the United States, which raises the question of
whether China will grow rich before it grows old. If not, it will witness one
of the biggest demographic time bombs in world history.

? Chinese middle-class consumers will force democracy to take root in China.
The assumption is that along with their Big Macs and lattes, the Chinese are
imbibing the precepts of democracy and free elections. The common assumption
among Westerners is that economic prosperity will result in a middle class
demanding a political structure that would protect their new wealth. There is
not much evidence to support this, other than a proliferation of lawsuits.
According to Elizabeth Economy of the Council for Foreign Relations, “So
far … the middle class has not organized in any meaningful way to push for
wholesale political change.”

What unites well-to-do Chinese? Belief in the re-emergence of China as a
superpower that hosts the Olympics and launches manned spacecraft. Lest
anyone forget, China is still a communist country, founded on the principle
of equalization of economic and other resources. These resources are far more
limited than we realize and will hamper economic growth. The poor state of
the environment, severe water shortages and a truly scary health-care system
could profoundly handicap China, as well as hurt the rest of the world.

The central political ques-tion is: What are the conse-quences for China’s
leaders if incomes converge, or, conv-ersely, if they divide increas-ingly
between rich and poor?

Whatever the outcome, we have to be careful not to layer our expectations of
what China might become over our unexamined assumptions.

Hale is CEO and publisher of China Online, a Chicago-based business and
economic news and analysis service. She is working on a book about the
monetary history of China and wrote this article last week during a trip
there.

Copyright The Los Angeles Times)

Posted at 11:24 PM · Comments (0)

The dramatic last-minute cancellation of a meeting between Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and visiting Chinese Vice Prime Minister Wu Yi has plunged relations between Beijing and Tokyo to a perilous new low. The incident indicates that recent efforts to improve battered bilateral ties have collapsed, and highlights the complete deadlock over Koizumi’s contentious annual pilgrimages to the war-tainted Yasukuni Shrine, the issue which forms the backbone of Beijing’s criticisms of his administration.

A senior Japanese diplomat, who did not wish to be identified, told Asia Times Online, “It is a very worrying development. The Chinese have thrown down the gauntlet, and the worrying thing for us is that it looks like Mr Koizumi is going to pick it up.”

Before Wu abruptly called off her scheduled audience with Koizumi and prematurely returned to Beijing, she had been on an eight-day tour of Japan specifically designed to ease Sino-Japanese tensions. The fact that the goodwill mission was terminated in such an undiplomatic fashion does not bode well for Sino-Japanese relations.

Beijing has given Koizumi a highly public slap in the face and sent Tokyo the strongest possible signal of its diplomatic displeasure. Koizumi’s recent comments about visiting Yasukuni infuriated Beijing and most likely triggered the latest spat. The episode appears almost certain to set the two sides on a collision course over Koizumi’s annual shrine pilgrimages, the most recent of which was in January 2004.

The Tokyo shrine served as the spiritual symbol for Japan’s wartime military regime, which was responsible for atrocities in China. Today it honors the nation’s war-dead, but also controversially deifies 14 class A war criminals. Beijing says it is insensitive and inappropriate for a Japanese leader to pay homage at such an establishment, likening such visits to a German leader visiting a Nazi memorial.

A Japanese Foreign Ministry source has told Asia Times Online that he believes Koizumi’s refusal to give an undertaking not visit the shrine this year led to Wu’s sudden return home. Officially, Tokyo denies any Yasukuni connection and in a statement Foreign Ministry deputy spokesman Akira Chiba said, “The Chinese side made it very specific that it has nothing to do with Yasukuni.” When Koizumi was asked if the Yasukuni factor lay behind the aborted meeting, he simply replied, “I have no idea - I have tried not to negatively affect relations with China.” Wu herself merely explained her lightning departure by saying, “I have some domestic business to do.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan later said that remarks by Japanese leaders and commentary in the Japanese media about the Yasukuni Shrine during Wu’s visit were a factor in canceling her meeting with Koizumi. He also said, “The Yasukuni Shrine is the top issue in Sino-Japanese relations.”

Wu was the most senior Chinese official to visit Japan since 2003. The last Chinese head of state to visit Japan was former prime minister Zhu Rongji, in October 2000, before Koizumi came to office.

A series of angry anti-Japan demonstrations across China last month has brought Sino-Japanese relations to what Beijing says are their lowest point since diplomatic ties were established three decades ago. The protests were set off by the authorization of a Japanese history textbook which critics say whitewashes history, and further fueled by resentment at Japan’s bid for a permanent United Nations Security Council seat and anger over Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine.

There is now real fear in the business community that ever worsening political relations will eventually damage booming economic ties. So far they have not significantly harmed trade flows that generated a staggering US$170 billion in 2004. China’s rapid economic growth, 9.5% in 2004, has created a massive demand for imported goods, which has fueled strong export growth for Japanese companies.

The Yasukuni cloud
Last November, Chinese President Hu Jintao advised Koizumi in blunt terms not to visit the Yasukuni Shrine in 2005. The year marks the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II, which is an especially important milestone for China because its traditional calendar runs on a 60-year cycle. For Beijing, the Yasukuni visits have become a line in the sand which Koizumi must not cross.

After his encounters last year, first with Hu, and later with Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, Koizumi fell unusually silent about his shrine-going intentions and Beijing interpreted this to mean he would refrain from making a pilgrimage this year. However, on May 16, the day before Wu arrived on her fence-mending mission, Koizumi strongly hinted that he probably would visit the shrine this year. During questioning at the Lower House budget committee, he declared, “I don’t understand why I should stop visiting Yasukuni Shrine,” adding, “I will decide appropriately when to go.”

He robustly defended his past actions, saying linking his Yasukuni pilgrimages to militarism “should not be taken seriously” and stressed that Japan was a country committed to peace. Ignoring overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he also denied that his shrine forays had in any way harmed relations with Tokyo’s neighbors. “Japan’s diplomacy has not been deadlocked nor isolated. It’s going fine,” he told disbelieving lawmakers. With more conviction he explained, “Every country wants to mourn their war dead, and other countries should not interfere with the ways countries pay tribute to the war dead.”

In an attempt to justify pilgrimages to a shrine where war criminals are also worshiped, he said, “I still don’t understand why it’s inexcusable to pay homage and express gratitude for the war dead as a whole - it’s in the teachings of Confucius, it is the offense and not the offenders that should be condemned.”

Japanese diplomats are now bracing themselves for a new shrine excursion. One told Asia Times Online, “Do not be too surprised if Mr Koizumi visits Yasukuni this autumn.” Such a visit would almost certainly trigger an intense outpouring of anger in China, adding a dozen more nails to the coffin of Sino-Japanese relations. Koizumi’s comments seemed timed to undermine Wu’s confidence-building trip before it had even begun. On arriving in Japan, she politely reiterated Beijing’s stance: “We should carry out what the Chinese president and the Japanese prime minister have agreed [to] in Jakarta on promoting Sino-Japanese relations.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan directly responded to Koizumi’s remarks by saying, “It is not a question of worshipping the dead, but rather of how to face up to history.”

The Chinese press took a far more critical approach, but the Beijing leadership held back its fire in the hope that Wu’s mission might produce a more conciliatory tone from Koizumi. However, on Friday he made similar remarks about visiting Yasukuni and Beijing lost patience. On Sunday at a meeting in Beijing, Hu voiced his frustration with Koizumi. He told visiting Liberal Democratic Party secretary general Tsutomu Takebe and New Komeito Party secretary general Tetsuzo Fuyushiba that he was “concerned over the visits to Yasukuni Shrine, because it is a place that enshrines convicted Japanese class A war criminals along with the war dead.”

Although Hu stressed his hope for improved relations, he also raised two other areas of serious Sino-Japanese friction: the treatment of history in Japanese textbooks and Japanese policy on Taiwan. China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted Hu as saying Tokyo needed to “correctly deal with the history issue and the Taiwan issue by firmly learning from the past and looking to the future”. Hu also ominously warned, “China-Japan ties have developed step by step, but it would be possible to damage the relations in an instant.”

Japan split on China policy
The Japanese public appears deeply divided over Koizumi’s confrontational style, which has pushed Sino-Japanese relations onto the rocks. According to a recent NHK News poll, 48% of respondents opposed Koizumi’s visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, while 40% were in favor. A Yomiuri Shimbun survey found 48% supported or somewhat supported them, while 45% opposed them.

However, the Yomiuri Shimbun poll found 65%of Liberal Democratic Party voters supported Koizumi’s shrine trips, while the majority of opposition supporters opposed them. The same survey also showed deep unhappiness with Beijing’s handling of last month’s anti-Japanese demonstrations in China. Eight-five percent stated that Koizumi should urge Beijing to apologize and pay compensation for the angry protests. Ninety-two percent said they were dissatisfied or somewhat dissatisfied with Beijing’s reaction.

This climate is creating the potential for very serious political clash, especially if, as seems likely, Koizumi defies Beijing’s warning and visits Yasukuni this year. Sino-Japanese ties are in deep trouble, and Wu’s unexpected return home signals that things are unlikely to improve any time soon.

J Sean Curtin is a GLOCOM fellow at the Tokyo-based Japanese Institute of Global Communications.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Posted at 8:30 PM · Comments (0)

S the heavy rain pelted the windows of the taxi, Julio, my regular driver in Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, hardly seemed worried. He calmly piloted the cab through the flooding streets, as water rose above sidewalks and spilled onto people’s front lawns.

Approaching my hotel, near the beach in a low-lying area of the city, the rain picked up, and soon I felt my feet getting wet. I looked down, and saw rain coming through the bottom of the taxi, like a boat taking on water. Still, Julio wasn’t concerned. “No problem, no problem,” he said, and continued chatting on his mobile phone while driving.

At that moment, the car stalled, leaving us stuck in the middle of a waterlogged street. “No problem,” Julio said again. And he was right. Within five minutes, a group of men had emerged out of nowhere to help us push the car to the side of the road. They expertly tipped the cab on its side, letting the water run out the bottom like a child’s toy. Julio smiled and shrugged, opened a big bottle of fruit juice, and lay down in his car until the rain stopped.

Julio clearly had absorbed the laid-back Mozambique ethos. After nearly two decades of civil war, the country, a former Portuguese colony - and home to over 1,500 miles of undeveloped Indian Ocean beachfront, some of the finest diving and deep sea marlin fishing in the world, and a unique Afro-Iberian-Brazilian culture - is rediscovering its place as one of Africa’s most alluring, and most relaxing, tourism destinations.

This is, in fact, the country’s second chance to get tourism right. Mozambique had one brush with mass tourism before - in the 60’s and early 70’s, before the decades-long war between the government and guerrilla insurgents, and then civil war afterward, which made this country off limits to most tourists. Back then it was a playground for white South Africans, thousands of whom would flock here on low-cost package vacations, rarely spending much money in the country itself. This time around, local travel specialists say the tourism ministry is rebuilding the infrastructure and focusing on the development of intimate resorts, hoping that a more-well-heeled class of traveler will follow.

“We need to promote Mozambique more as a boutique destination,” Sylvia Campos, a veteran Mozambican travel operator, told me over thimble-sized cups of European coffee at the Girassol Bahia, a boutique hotel in Maputo. “We are trying to position ourselves for high-end tourism,” she said. “We need good investments that will conserve the cultural landscape.”

The Girassol is one of many new addresses in Maputo, which has witnessed a building boom since the civil war ended in 1992. When I arrived in Maputo in February to begin a weeklong trip to Mozambique, the city’s broad, Iberian avenues, wide, zocalo-like public spaces, and new skyscrapers were on a much larger scale than my previous destination, Lilongwe, the tiny capital of neighboring Malawi.

But Maputo, population roughly a million, still feels like a small town. At stoplights, Julio would frequently encounter friends in nearby cars; at the Girassol, Sylvia ran into one old pal after another, and was constantly getting up to kiss cheeks. And unlike residents of many African cities, which empty at night, Mozambicans crawl their vibrant city at all hours - snacking at sidewalk stands offering enormous yellow mangoes and papayas and popping into hundreds of bars for some of the Portuguese-language Afro-Brazilian funk that wafts out into the streets.

All this activity makes Maputo one of the safer capitals in Africa - certainly safer than the wealthier, but more crime-ridden, cities of South Africa. Even heavy afternoon rains during monsoon season dissipate by early evening, hardly crimping any activity.

On my days in Maputo, I would spend mornings wandering up from my hotel, the Holiday Inn, to the downtown, perched on a bluff overlooking the water - the city sits both on the Indian Ocean and at the confluence of three rivers.

Walking along Avenida Julius Nyerere, a main drag, I passed strings of restored Iberian-style mansions, all pastel pink and yellow and fuchsia, with wide, wrap-around wrought-iron balconies, roofs of brown South American tile, and gardens of palm fronds and flame trees. It was like an African St.-Tropez, complete with exquisitely coiffed matrons in absurdly high heels walking ridiculously small white dogs. When I got lost, I could easily find directions; though Portuguese is the primary language, many young Mozambicans speak English.

Occasionally, a structure would stand out amid the warren of Portuguese buildings: the totally restored colonial Polana Hotel, a temple in white, with white-suited waiters serving simmering white lattes inside a shimmering white building; or the towering main cathedral, completed in 1944 by Portuguese authorities who reputedly grabbed teenage girls and checked if they were virgins. If the girls weren’t, they were counted as prostitutes and employed as manual laborers - a decision that undoubtedly didn’t help Portugal’s image in Maputo.

Inside many of the older structures, enterprising Mozambicans have built gelaterias, cafes and restaurants featuring upscale versions of Mozambican food, one of the world’s original fusion cuisines. Because Mozambique was influenced not only by Portugal and its own African roots but also by Arab traders and migrants from Portugal’s Asian and Latin American colonies, Mozambique’s cosmopolitan cuisine mixes Brazilian spices, Asian styles including Indian, and Portuguese and African produce -Portuguese cod steak and potatoes, local seafood and tropical fruits.

Restaurants in Maputo showcase this fusion with flair; at each place recommended by locals, the food seemed to get more sumptuous. One night, plates of seafood tapas at Miramar, a seaside cervezaria that attracts hip young Mozambicans in short skirts and tight slacks, their mixed skin tones a sign of the integration of Africans and European and Brazilian migrants. The next evening, an enormous fish dinner at Costo del Sol, a local institution famous for its footlong prawns, grilled with Portuguese spices and piri-piri, a fiery African chili sauce.

In Mozambique, the war can seem like an age ago, though there are reminders, like the national flag; Mozambique hasn’t changed the flag’s insignia, which still bears an assault rifle crossed with a shovel. One afternoon, I poked into the National Museum of the Revolution, which chronicles the revolt against Portuguese rule and subsequent war between the Socialist government and rightist guerillas through the 80’s, ending in 1992. Inside the dimly lighted structure, a lone guard dozed in her chair. I wandered the musty exhibits - endless paeans to “O Socialismo” and grainy photos of Mozambican leaders with Fidel Castro.

“Anyone been here today?” I asked the guard, who’d woken up.

“No, no one,” she replied, before promptly nodding off.

My last evening in Maputo, I stayed in the new Catembe Gallery, a model for Mozambique’s boutique tourism. Across a narrow stretch of water from downtown, in a fishing village near a local elephant preserve, Konraad Collier, a Belgian, had redecorated an old mansion, furnishing the rooms with exquisitely detailed local weavings, and adorning the walls with paintings by local artists. The tiny hotel - it housed less than 30 guests - had an intensely personal feel, with staff hanging out with guests at the bar late into the evening. “We want to have a total experience for guests that makes the hotel feel like their home,” Konraad said.

The next morning, I drove north along the narrow coastal highway, to spend four days at Barra, one of the Mozambican beach spots just beginning to be developed. Rather than braving the driving myself - the travel industry is still constrained by Mozambique’s potholed roads - I’d hired Pedro Pinto of the local tour company Mozambique Adviser. Pedro’s family had come to Maputo from Portugal in the early 1960’s, and stayed after Mozambique’s independence in 1975.

As Pedro piloted our four-wheel-drive vehicle, we zoomed through the rugged coastal landscape. Outside Maputo, deep green fields of sugar cane dotted with thatched huts and jacaranda trees gave way to small markets stocked with cassava and the mildly alcoholic fruits of local cashew nut plants. We sucked the cashew nut fruits dry, wincing as their mild tannins dried our mouths. As we neared the beach, we passed both mosques and groups of Christians dressed in white, holding hands and praying in circles under palms along the side of the road.

By sunset, we had arrived at the province containing Barra, the place where Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama first landed in Mozambique, in the late 15th century, and proclaimed it “Land of the Gentle People.”

Like Catembe, my beach hotel, the South African-run Barra Lodge was a new boutique operation, much nicer than the bungalows on nearby beaches. The owners had tastefully decorated the place with local wood and Mozambican carvings, staff members remembered my name, and I even had a personal waiter, Teles, who served nearly all my meals and taught me Mozambican slang.

On the other hand, Barra, set between the ocean and a freshwater bay, lacked some important amenities, like easily masterable bug netting. My first night, mosquitoes devoured my legs, leaving me looking like a chicken pox victim. (I soon learned how to use the netting.)

Even so, Barra Lodge is already spawning imitators. Up the Mozambican coast, in the Bazaruto archipelago, South African and Saudi investors have recently opened boutique lodges offering exquisite diving, and people were buying up beach land to build private homes.

Outside my room, Barra’s attractions were obvious. Mozambique offers some of the finest diving of any country that borders the Indian Ocean, in part because the long war limited the fishing industry, preventing commerce from destroying fish and coral and fouling the water’s visibility. And in comparison to many Asian beaches, where divers must sail miles from shore, in Barra the marine life was easily accessible and dives were cheap - less than $80 a dive.

After just a 10-minute boat ride, I snorkeled off a nearby reef, where coral shaped like brains and razors retained their natural bright blues and reds, not yet worn into a dull brown. Two-yard-wide manta rays, giant eels, barracuda and schools of tiny, fluorescent blue pepperfish swam below. Enormous clams the size of a human being blended into the coral, until they slowly opened and closed their mammoth mouths.

In the evenings, when the blazing sun began to set, I’d stroll along the beachfront. Over miles of white and ocher sand, I never saw more than two or three others, along with occasional fishermen in dugout canoes. Barra reminded me of Southeast Asia before the development of big resorts like Phuket.

On my last evening in Mozambique, I strolled out to Barra Lodge’s beachfront bar, where chefs were barbecuing piles of freshly caught prawns, kingfish and crab, and the waiters were bopping to Portuguese funk and passing around a local version of a mojito, a drink blending Mozambican cane sugar and fruit liquor. On the water, in the distance, dhows sailed around the tip of Barra beach, taking the last passengers of the day home. Two Mozambican women in long dresses and floral-patterned headscarves, with pots of fresh fish balanced on their heads, wandered in from the beach.

With the full moon shining through wispy cirrus, and ocean breezes blowing in, I loaded plate after plate of seafood, tempted by the freshness of the prawns and crabs. After an hour of eating, I thought I was full. Then Teles brought over Mozambique’s most famous fusion dish, curried crab - local crustaceans lightly stir-fried and then marinated in a thick red curry, with hints of Goan and Brazilian spices Portuguese curried crabs, in a rich, thick gravy.

I reached for more.

Posted at 8:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Click to see photos

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: May 29, 2005
SHANTOU, China - Nothing but the faint sound of birds nesting on surrounding hilltops can be heard inside this new mountaintop site - part museum, part monument - that is the first public commemoration of one of the darkest chapters in China’s recent past.

Inside the circular pavilion that is the site’s centerpiece, the walls are lined with a series of gray tablets, each starkly engraved with images depicting the Cultural Revolution, China’s decade-long descent into madness, beginning in the mid-1960’s.

There is Mao swimming in the Yangtze River in 1966, giving a bravura demonstration of his vigor at age 72, and a false sign of hope to a country almost religiously devoted to him. The weeks and months ahead would instead reveal that time to be the dawn of a new and terrible era, during which perhaps a half million people were killed, a few of whom are buried in these hills alongside the trails that lead to the exhibits.

“Under heaven, all is chaos,” Mao wrote, announcing the era’s tone exultingly to his wife and co-instigator, Jiang Qing, in a letter quoted on another tablet. From that point, the slate panels function almost like a newsreel as the events, ever more senseless, unfold. There are the huge rallies in Beijing that August, where millions of young people, inspired by Mao’s utopian oratory, waved their Little Red Books in frenzied adulation as he spoke.

There is the arrest and humiliation of the state president, Liu Shaoqi, who was denounced as a “capitalist roader” and beaten severely. He “died under tragic conditions,” in the delicate wording of the museum, a private institution opened earlier this year without the blessings of a government that still prefers to suppress discussion of past atrocities.

There is the smashing of priceless antiquities and the burning of books by Red Guard militias, part of a heedless rush to sweep away the old and build a new society from scratch. There are the denunciations and beatings of teachers, and later of the students by students themselves, as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution began to devour its own children.

Then, finally, come the stunningly candid scenes of Mao himself, growing more decrepit by the frame, physically decomposing, the Communist demigod rotting in his armchair by the end of the decade of horror, like an overripe fruit. In some scenes, Chairman Mao is barely able even to hold his head upright as his country falls apart around him.

It has taken 29 years for anyone in China to mount a public exhibit on the period of state-sponsored terror and turmoil that swept this country from 1966 to 1976. And it is telling that it has happened here, on the outskirts of this out-of-the-way city in the northeastern corner of Guangdong Province, far from the public eye.

Just as remarkable is the hush that surrounds the museum, which provincial officials have reportedly ordered newspapers here not to write about. Chinese intellectuals who have published novels and nonfiction accounts of the Cultural Revolution describe restrictions like those as the product of a system that, while open like never before for the world’s business, still remains determined to manage what the public can and cannot learn and what they should remember and forget.

“I had to talk to 10 publishing houses before I could get my last novel published,” said Ke Yunlu, a writer who has focused unrelentingly on the Cultural Revolution. “In it, a group of students stoned their teacher to death, and after 10 years, when there is an investigation, nobody admits anything. This is what history is like in China: no stones are ever thrown, but people are dying.”

Recently China has demanded that Japan face up to the brutal history of its conquest of this country between 1937 and 1945, but for the Cultural Revolution, not yet a generation into the past, the country’s archives remain closed and academic conferences and seminars banned.

“It is very unhealthy for a nation to forget about its past,” said Zhang Xianliang, one of China’s best known authors, who was arrested at age 20 for a poem deemed counterrevolutionary during another period of ideological fervor, in the late-1950’s. He spent most of the Cultural Revolution in labor camps. “Our history and our memory are full of empty pages. We still can’t talk publicly about Mao’s crimes, but that day will come.”

At the end of the 1970’s, many Chinese vented their feelings about the arbitrary destruction of millions of lives and careers during the Cultural Revolution, and for a time the subject enjoyed a vogue among writers.

What could be said in the press, however, was strictly limited and debate was reined in by a government made nervous by the criticism.

Eventually, a bland official judgment said that during Mao’s career he had been “right” 70 percent of the time.

A visitor at first found the museum here abandoned but for a lonely guard, whose teeth were stained by constant intake of tea and tobacco. The hilltop is home to a pagoda; steles in honor of Communist leaders, like Mr. Liu, and Deng Xiaoping, who were victims of Mao’s purges; and, at the summit, a large cement ink brush and book, apparently intended to symbolize freedom of speech.

On a return visit the next morning, the site was overrun with laughing schoolchildren, but their teachers insisted the Cultural Revolution’s history was not being taught to them and said the outing was merely intended to give the students some fresh air. Pressed to say how she would explain the killings and purges if a curious student inquired, one teacher said, “I’d just say every country makes mistakes.”

Later, a couple of elderly women who acknowledged living through the period dodged questions about their impressions of the museum, and walked away when asked about their experiences of the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Three local men in their 30’s, one of them using a video camera, also toured the site. “Every family had some kind of experience of this history,” one of them said. Asked if he had heard the stories of his parents and grandparents, he said, “They only say China is growing now, and it is better to look to the future.”

Even the museum’s founder, Peng Qian, a former deputy mayor of this city who raised money for it from private donations, including one from the Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing, dodged a reporter’s requests to meet, saying he was too busy and later turning his telephone off to avoid further calls.

Next Article in International (18 of 18) >

Posted at 3:39 PM · Comments (2)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SATURDAY, MAY 28, 2005

SINGAPORE Is use of the English language at its high-water mark? One might
not think so in Asia. Millions of Chinese are learning it, thousands of
already fluent Indians are changing their accents to meet the demands of call
centers. Almost everywhere in Asia English is the second language, and it is
in everyday use in India, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia.

But there are hints that things are changing, that while English will surely
remain the global lingua franca for the foreseeable future, its position may
be undermined by different languages.

Given the current fascination with all things Chinese, its language naturally
comes to mind as possible substitute for English when Asians are dealing with
each other.

A recent survey in British Hong Kong revealed a declining number of people
comfortable with conversing in English. In Korea, there has been a huge
increase in numbers learning Chinese. Ditto, to a lesser extent, in Japan.
Japanese and Korean may be conceptually different, but these nations share
much cultural history and still use some Chinese characters as well as local
alphabetic scripts.

In Thailand, with its large and growing population of people of Chinese
origin there is a revival of interest in Chinese. Chinese is also enjoying
some revival in today’s more liberal Indonesia. And even in Malaysia, where
the ethnic and linguistic divides are deep and define the politics of the
nation, the government recently encouraged Malays to study Chinese.

In addition to China’s size, the huge overseas Chinese network in east Asia
provides, in theory, a basis for Chinese to be the lingua franca.

But things are not so simple. China’s ideographic writing is hard enough for
the Chinese, let alone for others. Even countries most subject to past
Chinese cultural influence (Korea, Vietnam, Japan) have largely or completely
replaced it with alphabetic scripts. Historically the scripts of Southeast
Asia, before the arrival of Arabic and then Roman scripts, were all of Indian
derivation, as is still the case in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Singapore, which is predominantly Chinese, lies at the heart of the language
issue. In Singapore everyone learns English in school and each racial group -
Chinese, Malay, Tamil - must study its own language.

This month saw the relaunch of an official “Speak Good English” campaign to
counteract the spread of “Singlish,” a local patois including many Hokkien
and Malay words and constructions.

But do not assume Chinese is faring better than English. Since the late
1970s, Singaporean Chinese have been required to learn Mandarin and
encouraged to use it at home in place of the dialects which used to divide
them.

However, the burden of learning written Mandarin as well as English has been
too great for many, forcing the government to ease the syllabus.

According to critics, the replacement of dialects with standard Mandarin has
been a setback for Chinese culture which had been transmitted through dialect
and clan traditions and associations. And it has cut the younger generation
off from many Southeast Asian Chinese who speak dialect but little Mandarin.

Finally, the two-language system has meant that most Singaporeans had a
minimal knowledge of Malay - which is, technically, the national language of
Singapore as well as the common language of Indonesia and Malaysia.

This came home to Singapore when it was noted how few of its tsunami relief
mission dispatched to Aceh could communicate in Malay.

After years of preferring to associate with English as the global language or
Chinese as the ethnic root, Singapore may be reawakening to Malay which,
before English, was the lingua franca of Southeast Asia.

It is now being made easier for Singapore’s non-Malays to add it their school
curriculum. Malay is not a tonal language (unlike Chinese); it is now written
in Roman script, and it has an uncomplicated grammar. Many see it as a
natural regional common language.

Even Singapore’s fourth language, Tamil, may have a future. Ethnicity draws
the nation to China but geography and perhaps economics may see closer future
links with south India, with Chennai and Bangalore.

For now, English will be the link between south and Southeast Asia but Tamil
is the main Indian language of Singapore and Malaysia as well as south India.

Thus, while one can foresee a very gradual decline of English in Asia, the
succession is unlikely to be simple.

SINGAPORE Is use of the English language at its high-water mark? One might
not think so in Asia. Millions of Chinese are learning it, thousands of
already fluent Indians are changing their accents to meet the demands of call
centers. Almost everywhere in Asia English is the second language, and it is
in everyday use in India, the Philippines, Singapore and Malaysia.

But there are hints that things are changing, that while English will surely
remain the global lingua franca for the foreseeable future, its position may
be undermined by different languages.

Given the current fascination with all things Chinese, its language naturally
comes to mind as possible substitute for English when Asians are dealing with
each other.

A recent survey in British Hong Kong revealed a declining number of people
comfortable with conversing in English. In Korea, there has been a huge
increase in numbers learning Chinese. Ditto, to a lesser extent, in Japan.
Japanese and Korean may be conceptually different, but these nations share
much cultural history and still use some Chinese characters as well as local
alphabetic scripts.

In Thailand, with its large and growing population of people of Chinese
origin there is a revival of interest in Chinese. Chinese is also enjoying
some revival in today’s more liberal Indonesia. And even in Malaysia, where
the ethnic and linguistic divides are deep and define the politics of the
nation, the government recently encouraged Malays to study Chinese.

In addition to China’s size, the huge overseas Chinese network in east Asia
provides, in theory, a basis for Chinese to be the lingua franca.

But things are not so simple. China’s ideographic writing is hard enough for
the Chinese, let alone for others. Even countries most subject to past
Chinese cultural influence (Korea, Vietnam, Japan) have largely or completely
replaced it with alphabetic scripts. Historically the scripts of Southeast
Asia, before the arrival of Arabic and then Roman scripts, were all of Indian
derivation, as is still the case in Thailand, Cambodia and Myanmar.

Singapore, which is predominantly Chinese, lies at the heart of the language
issue. In Singapore everyone learns English in school and each racial group -
Chinese, Malay, Tamil - must study its own language.

This month saw the relaunch of an official “Speak Good English” campaign to
counteract the spread of “Singlish,” a local patois including many Hokkien
and Malay words and constructions.

But do not assume Chinese is faring better than English. Since the late
1970s, Singaporean Chinese have been required to learn Mandarin and
encouraged to use it at home in place of the dialects which used to divide
them.

However, the burden of learning written Mandarin as well as English has been
too great for many, forcing the government to ease the syllabus.

According to critics, the replacement of dialects with standard Mandarin has
been a setback for Chinese culture which had been transmitted through dialect
and clan traditions and associations. And it has cut the younger generation
off from many Southeast Asian Chinese who speak dialect but little Mandarin.

Finally, the two-language system has meant that most Singaporeans had a
minimal knowledge of Malay - which is, technically, the national language of
Singapore as well as the common language of Indonesia and Malaysia.

This came home to Singapore when it was noted how few of its tsunami relief
mission dispatched to Aceh could communicate in Malay.

After years of preferring to associate with English as the global language or
Chinese as the ethnic root, Singapore may be reawakening to Malay which,
before English, was the lingua franca of Southeast Asia.

It is now being made easier for Singapore’s non-Malays to add it their school
curriculum. Malay is not a tonal language (unlike Chinese); it is now written
in Roman script, and it has an uncomplicated grammar. Many see it as a
natural regional common language.

Even Singapore’s fourth language, Tamil, may have a future. Ethnicity draws
the nation to China but geography and perhaps economics may see closer future
links with south India, with Chennai and Bangalore.

For now, English will be the link between south and Southeast Asia but Tamil
is the main Indian language of Singapore and Malaysia as well as south India.

Thus, while one can foresee a very gradual decline of English in Asia, the
succession is unlikely to be simple.

Posted at 10:16 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Friday, May 27, 2005; A27

“The storm center of the world has shifted … to China,” Secretary of State John Hay said in 1899. “Whoever understands that mighty Empire … has a key to world politics for the next five hundred years.”

Well, everything is different and nothing has changed since Hay announced the famous Open Door policy, which demanded American commercial access in China equal to that of other major nations. A century of Sino-American ups and downs — with far more of the latter — followed, but today, in very different ways, the United States still seeks an open door; the secretary of the Treasury and an enraged Congress are hammering China to revalue its currency to give U.S. companies a better chance to compete with the world’s fastest-growing major economy.

Arguments over the exchange rate are a small part of what goes on these days between the two most important nations in the world. Washington and Beijing have several vital common interests, notably in the war against terrorism and the desire for strategic stability in the Pacific and South Asia. And the two nations are still making an effort to work together; on the American side, responsibility for what Washington calls “the global dialogue” is primarily in the hands of Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, who is planning a visit to Beijing soon.

But although both sides officially deny it, Sino-American ties are slowly fraying while other issues take up the attention of senior American officials. Beyond the never-ending Taiwan issue and Washington’s concern over China’s growing military muscle, two huge factors put the relationship under constant pressure: first, substantially different attitudes toward the rights of people to express themselves freely and, second, the massive trade imbalance.

What vastly complicates U.S. relations with China is that every major foreign policy issue between the two countries is also a domestic matter, with its own lobbying groups and nongovernmental organizations ranging across the entire American political spectrum, from human rights to pro-life, from pro-Tibet to organized labor. The bilateral agenda, even a partial one, is daunting: Taiwan, Tibet, human rights, religious freedom, press freedom, the Falun Gong, slave labor, North Korea, Iran, trade, the exchange rate, intellectual property rights, access to Chinese markets, export of sensitive technology and the arms embargo.

In Washington, where different parts of the executive branch dominate on each issue and Congress plays a major role, it can be difficult to stick to a coherent overall policy. China, on the other hand, with its highly secretive, tightly disciplined and undemocratic system, can establish long-term policy goals and then work slowly toward them: The Chinese, are, as they like to remind visitors, a patient people.

China’s advance toward long-term goals has produced extraordinary economic results since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms began in 1979, notwithstanding the terrible 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square. In foreign policy, however, things had been different until recently. After its war against Vietnam in 1979, China became defensive, even passive, on the world stage.

But China’s new leaders have begun to match their economic power with a more assertive foreign policy. Taken individually, Chinese actions may look like a series of unrelated events. But they are part of a long-term strategy. Some recent examples:

· Premier Wen Jiabao’s self-proclaimed “historic visit” to India in April, during which the world’s two largest nations announced a “strategic partnership” — vague words, of course, that could mean almost anything, but quite different from those that have, over the past 50 years, characterized this tense rivalry (which included one war).

· President Hu Jintao’s stunning meetings in late April and early May with two top Taiwanese political leaders, marking the first such face-to-face meeting since Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek met in 1945.

· The anti-Japanese riots in April, which could not have taken place without the acquiescence of the government. Ostensibly meant to protest Japanese schoolbook misrepresentations of World War II atrocities, the demonstrations were in fact a crude signal that no matter what China’s official position is, it does not really want Japan to become a permanent member of the U.N. Security Council.

· The highly unusual public criticism on May 12 by a Chinese Foreign Ministry official of American policy toward North Korea. Beijing is just plain tired of being called upon by Washington to salvage the six-party talks that North Korea has boycotted for almost a year, when, China says, there has been a “lack of cooperation from the U.S. side.”

· China’s intent — for the first time since Beijing took over the Chinese seat in the United Nations — to play a central role in the choice of the next U.N. secretary general, who is slated, by regional rotation, to be from Asia. The new secretary general, who takes office Jan. 1, 2007, cannot be Chinese (no permanent member of the Security Council can have one of its own in that post). One leading candidate called on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice this month, but Washington has not yet paid the issue enough attention.

· Finally, China has begun buying oil fields in such remote areas as Sudan and Angola, part of a long-term strategy to address its rapidly growing energy needs. With energy policy come major foreign policy interests; this is probably related, for example, to China’s reluctant attitude toward strong U.N. action in the Darfur region of Sudan.

China’s gradual emergence as a political player on the world stage comes when there is a growing impression among other countries in East Asia that Washington is not paying the region sufficient attention. (Ironically, this is in sharp contrast to India, where relations with the United States are at their historical best.) If we lose interest and political influence in the Asia-Pacific region just as it grows in economic importance, the imbalance will surely return later to haunt a new generation of policymakers — and the nation. The challenge is obvious, but the lack of clear focus at the highest levels in Washington on our vital national security interests in the region is disturbing.

Posted at 7:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

May 25, 2005; Page A12

With former Indonesia dictator Suharto on his death bed, and his democratically elected successor Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono visiting Washington this week, it is instructive to reflect on the changes that have taken place across East Asia since 1967, the year that Suharto took power. At that time, the United States was fighting a communist insurgency in South Vietnam, China was embroiled in the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, and only Japan qualified as a genuine democracy across the entire region. The Indonesian Communist Party had been suppressed with ferocious violence in 1965, and the U.S. was content to let Suharto rule with a strong hand for the next three decades.

Today, the political landscape is entirely different. Besides Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, and most recently Indonesia and East Timor have become genuine democracies. Throughout the region, democratic transformation has been underpinned by strong economic growth, ironically driven today by Chinese capitalism. One would have been foolhardy to predict such a future for Asia back in 1967.

This democratic revolution was helped along by a critical shift in American policy that occurred during the Reagan years, when the U.S. moved away from a “realist” policy of support for friendly dictators towards encouragement of democratic transition. This began in 1986 when Benigno Aquino’s assassination provoked the “people power” revolution that eventually brought Corazon Aquino to power as a democratically elected president of the Philippines. Paul Wolfowitz (who will soon become president of the World Bank and was at that time assistant secretary of state for East Asia), together with his boss George Shultz, played a key role in gently persuading President Reagan to give up on the dictator Ferdinand Marcos and take the risks of a plunge into democracy.

The following year, President Reagan quietly but firmly urged General Roh Tae-woo to support the establishment of democratic institutions when popular protests against military dictatorship in South Korea spread. This contrasts sharply with U.S. behavior seven years earlier, when Washington stood aside as General Chun Doo-hwan staged a bloody crackdown on demonstrators in Kwangju. The U.S. looked on favorably as well when Taiwan’s ruler, Chiang Ching-kuo, prepared his country for a political opening in 1988 and was succeeded by the democratically elected Lee Teng-hui.

* * *

This record shows that democracy promotion, which President Bush has recently put front and center on the American foreign policy agenda, is not a new initiative, but one that has been given real content over the past two decades. (Another example would be U.S. support for upholding the “no” referendum against General Augusto Pinochet in Chile in 1988, which again contrasts with a more sympathetic U.S. policy at the time of his rise to power in 1973.)

Democracy in Asia has been a messy business. Four newly elected presidents in new democracies there — Abdurrahman Wahid in Indonesia, Joseph Estrada in the Philippines, Roh Moo-hyun in South Korea, and Chen Shui-bian in Taiwan, faced impeachment proceedings shortly after being elected. Messrs. Wahid and Estrada were actually removed from office, the latter by means some people regard as unconstitutional. All four faced crises of legitimacy, either because they were elected by a minority of the voters, had no support in the legislature and faced disastrously low popularity ratings, or were charged with fraud or corruption. (In Chen Shui-bian’s case, this involved the bizarre accusation that he staged an assassination attempt on himself to gain sympathy in a closely contested election.)

Democratic politics in Asia, just as in the U.S., has been disappointingly personality- and scandal-driven, focusing on issues like the military records of the children of candidates in Korea to Mr. Wahid’s tendency to fall asleep during parliamentary sessions. The Philippines, with its low levels of education and income, has nominated two B-grade movie actors in a row to run for president; the one who got elected stayed up drinking and carousing as the economy tanked and cronyism ran rampant. But while Joseph Estrada was no Vaclav Havel, the manner in which Philippino elites used extralegal street demonstrations to remove him also raises questions about how well electoral politics is institutionalized there.

Many people in Asia have contrasted the uneven performance of Asian democracy to the technocratic efficiency of authoritarian states like Singapore and Malaysia. But the good news is that these recent problems represent the growing pains of new democracies and not a permanent feature of democracy itself. Indonesia, for example, inherited a highly complex constitution from the former regime whose provisions for the indirect election of the president led to Mr. Wahid’s selection, without clearly defining his powers. President Yudhoyono, by contrast, was elected under a much more straightforward direct election. The conservative Grand National Party in Korea made a strategic blunder in trying to remove President Roh by impeachment, when their dispute was really over policy. The gambit failed, and no Korean political party is likely to misuse impeachment powers in a similar way in the future. Finally, constitutional courts played critical roles in resolving executive-legislative deadlocks in the Philippines, Korea and Taiwan; in earlier years, these sorts of disputes would have been solved by military intervention. Democratic institutions, in other words, worked as they were supposed to.

Democratic politics can often make the United States uncomfortable, which is why Washington has at times preferred predictable authoritarians. Both South Korea and Taiwan have moved dramatically to the left over the past decade; their foreign policies are scarcely recognizable compared to what they were during the Cold War. South Korea has sought rapprochement with the Communist North, making impossible a hard-line U.S. policy to turn back Pyongyang’s drive for nuclear weapons, while Taiwan has threatened cross-Straits stability by making noises about independence from mainland China. The process of political change has been accelerated in these countries by winner-take-all presidential systems that contrast with the slower-moving parliamentary one in Japan. But there is no question that these reorientations in the policies of the two countries represent genuine democratic choices on the part of their populations, reflecting generational change in the Korean case, and the rise of indigenous Taiwanese in Taiwan’s.

It is Indonesia that most vividly demonstrates the fallacy of much of the contemporary conventional wisdom about democracy. Observers have argued at different times that, first, “Asian values” did not support democracy; that Islam was similarly an insuperable obstacle; and that paternalistic authoritarians like Suharto presented a good model for development. Contemporary Indonesia contradicts all three points. It is unquestionably Asian and Muslim, and yet has evolved into a credible democracy in the difficult years since the crisis that brought Suharto down in 1998.

Indonesia shows, in fact, that even for an Asian Muslim society, democracy is the only durable source of legitimacy. The Indonesian people supported Suharto’s soft authoritarianism only as long as it delivered the goods of rapid development, but when it hit a setback during the Asian crisis, that legitimacy crumbled. There was no reservoir of good will for dictators that are incompetent as well as corrupt. South Korea, whose crisis was comparable in magnitude, faced no similar challenge to its political system’s legitimacy because the latter was based on democratic choice. Indonesia still faces enormous problems: Corruption has moved from a wholesale to a retail level; poverty has increased, and Jakarta faces the threat of jihadism. But President Yudhoyono’s government has proven remarkably mature in working cooperatively with the U.S., Australia and other sympathetic governments to deal with problems from terrorism to tsunami relief.

In the democratic transformation of Asia over the past generation, the U.S. often played a critical role when it ceased to hold back, and indeed encouraged, local demands for accountable government. The East Asia of 2005 that resulted is incomparably more hospitable to U.S. interests than the one we faced when Suharto first came to power in the 1960s. It is something to keep in mind as we contemplate the trade-off between familiar dictators and uncertain democracies in other parts of the world.

Posted at 7:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

By Howard W. French
FRIDAY, MAY 27, 2005

TAIPEI Something rare happened in recent weeks with the unprecedented back-to-back visits to China of two of Taiwan’s most prominent opposition politicians.
Suddenly China, which has often shown all the subtlety of a jackhammer operator in its approach toward Taiwan, which it regards as a renegade province, is serving up a dish sprinkled with carrots.
With an unrelenting focus on shared history and culture, from tributes to Sun Yat-sen, the father of Chinese republicanism and the sole political ancestor claimed by elites in both countries, visits by James Soong and Lien Chan to their ancestral homelands, exchanges of calligraphy and other appeals to common roots, Beijing was smartly upping its game.
What the Chinese leadership of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao seems to be grasping is the increasingly central role of identity in the dispute between Taiwan and China across the tense and heavily armed divide of the Taiwan Strait.
For all its new astuteness, however, China may not yet have taken the full measure of the cultural challenges it faces if it wishes to attract Taiwan back into its political orbit, or to simply absorb it, without the use of force.
Quite distinct from the independentist rhetoric of President Chen Shui-bian and his ruling Democratic Progressive Party, a fast emerging sense of Taiwanese identity, one that is increasingly distinct from Chinese identity, is making this country a moving target for Beijing.
Except for a tiny aboriginal minority, well over 90 percent of Taiwanese trace their ancestry to China. But only roughly 15 percent of the population came to this island after 1949, the start of the Communist era. In cultural terms, this minority, many of them followers of the nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, known here as “mainlanders,” still identifies closely with the motherland. To a large degree, today the rest of the population sees itself simply as Taiwanese.
Among this population, for whom Taiwan’s separate identity is already a settled matter, impatience with Beijing’s insistence on reunification, and indeed with the perennial debate over Taiwan’s status, can be heard wherever one turns here.
“Why does my country’s status rank as an issue in the eyes of the world?” asked Dienfang Chou, a 33-year-old academic in the eastern town of Hualien. “For Taiwanese, this seems like some kind of discrimination.”
Even more despairingly, from the perspective of Beijing, as time goes by, this still relatively new phenomenon of national identity formation is even spreading among the children and grandchildren of the mainlanders, hence the urgency for China of finding ways of emphasizing common culture.
“Culturally, I still identify with China, and it is very hard for me to think of cutting off those ties,” said Arthur Ding, a research fellow in international relations at Chengchi University in Taipei. “My son, though, identifies with Taiwan.”
Given this movement, the inescapable conclusion is that China’s appeals to a common past, however tactically innovative, are woefully inadequate. Taiwanese democracy and openness have made this society an increasingly forward-looking place.
It is common for countries to fixate on particular neighbors. Indians increasingly complain, for example, that India’s obsessive focus on Pakistan, a poorer, slower-growing authoritarian country, holds their democracy back, preventing it from being as forward looking as it should.
Taiwan and China each serve the other in unique and vital ways that drive their relationship, as a sort of heirloom mirror. For Chinese, the island’s continued autonomy is a reminder of their country’s so-called century of humiliation, the violent dismemberment, lawlessness, exploitation by foreign powers and decadence brought to an end by Communist rule. In short, taking control of Taiwan, which Chinese ritually insist has always been “theirs” - typically disregarding all historical evidence to the contrary - is a matter of dignity.
Each glance at China, meanwhile, is a way for Taiwanese to measure their country’s startling progress since their democratization began with the lifting of martial law in 1987. Some Taiwanese say that if China were as rich and as free a society as the United States, their country’s separate status would be drained of most of its meaning; indeed, many here would clamor for unification.
Others insist, though, that Taiwanese identity goes well beyond essentially political questions like these. Asked how they felt about the mainland, ordinary Taiwanese, from taxi drivers to waitresses to office workers, said they felt little in common with the people or way of life there.
“Wan quan bu iyang!,” meaning completely different, exclaimed one man who had visited China and returned almost shocked. For him, the most important differences were in orderliness, public behavior and a Confucian sense of manners and respect for others. Most would say the erosion of virtues like these, which the man said he found missing in China, took place not in some distant, foreign-dominated past, but under Communist rule.
Other Taiwanese went further still, warning that China’s plans to allow more of its citizens to visit the island as tourists, intended as a good-will gesture and lift to the Taiwanese economy, could even backfire for these reasons, reinforcing a sense of difference rather than forging a deeper bond between the two peoples.
Whatever their feelings about popular mores next door, Taiwanese are united across political lines in their disdain for China’s heavy-handed authoritarianism, weak rule of law, official corruption on a vast scale and yawning gap between rich and poor.
“The fact is, the mainland’s economy is not as good as Taiwan’s yet,” said Chen Kongli, a professor at the Taiwan Research Institute at Xiamen University, in China. “And they think the political democracy is not as advanced on the mainland as in Taiwan. These are the two things the Taiwanese people are most proud of, their economy and their democracy.
“But the world is changing and China’s economy is growing fast, and our political development is making progress, too.”
David W.F. Huang, vice chairman of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, said: “In 50 years’ time, people may change perspective, but only if China genuinely changes, if China becomes a true democracy, which means at least that it should tolerate a difference of opinion, like Canada, which gives Quebec a choice, so long as it respects certain procedures. The problem is that China will not do that.”
In 50 years, though, assuming the peace can hold that long, Taiwanese identity, still in its infancy now, will have sunk far deeper roots. Can Beijing wait?

Posted at 7:02 PM · Comments (0)

PARIS For historians of the 21st century, May 29, 2005, could become a highly symbolic turning point. If the French vote “no” to the referendum on Europe’s constitutional treaty - the likely result, if the latest polls are correct - they will, unwillingly and unknowingly, make sure that this becomes the “Asian century.”
The European Union would probably become a Magna Helvetia - a big Switzerland - or a museum of high and old culture and the good life. For a “no” vote will not be followed by a new departure for the Union, but by a combination of disarray and confusion, if not paralysis.
In their combination of fear and narcissism, French voters are expressing everything that is going wrong in Europe - or at least, in old Continental Europe. In the new members of the Union, like Poland and the Baltic Republics, one finds enthusiasm and the kind of energy evident in Asia: an appetite for success and a hunger for results. In France, on the other hand, a self-defeating, unrealistic, messianic search is going on for “another Europe,” in an anachronistic attempt to cling to a reassuring past that cannot be recreated.
At a time when the pace of history seems to be accelerating, particularly in Asia, a French “no” vote would lead the European Union to sit by and watch as the train of history leaves the station without it.
Such a demise would be the indirect result of the interaction in France of three factors.
The first is the alienation of a majority of the French from the cause of Europe. In the past, for the French, Europe was a way of pursuing national ambition through other means, of prolonging past glory, whereas for the Germans it represented a way to break from their past. Europe was also a way to impose badly needed structural reforms on reluctant French citizens in the name of the Union.
Today, by contrast, after last year’s EU enlargement, France no longer sees itself as the head of the European family. The French feel ill at ease sitting at a table with the distant and largely unknown cousins who have recently joined the club. Europeanization is no longer seen as the path to modernity but as a threat by all those who make the mistake of equating Europeanization with globalization, and blaming Europe’s enlargement for the transfer of jobs.
If the French tend to see Europe in such a dark and defensive way - and this is the second factor helping the No camp - it is because in recent political history they have never been so terribly morose and pessimistic about themselves, their present performance and their future opportunities.
A high level of long-term unemployment affecting the young in particular has acted as a cancer on France’s social structure. In the land of liberty, equality and fraternity, the demand for equality has canceled any sense of fraternity, as was illustrated by the recent quarrel over the suppression of a public holiday in order to finance the medical and social costs of caring for elderly people. And liberty has become, above all, the liberty to take to the streets to block any reform and to defend the interests of one’s own sector.
The third aggravating factor is the political elite itself. The divorce between society and the political class has been encouraged by the weakness of France’s leadership. Lacking inspiration and conviction, “they” may have failed in their duty to guide and educate the citizens of France about the cause of Europe.
The weakness of France’s leaders has been exploited by demagogues and political opportunists who have managed to stir fears and frustrations. The “no” camp has surfed a wave of negative emotion and arguments that are often irrational.
A victory by the “yes” camp would hardly bring about the rebirth of an energetic, dynamic and self-confident Europe, but it would at least prevent Europe falling, as France has, into a narcissistic identity crisis.
Today, for reasons of demography and moral energy, the future lies more with Asia than with Europe. But that is no reason to turn away from the European project. The future belongs, like victory, to those who desire it most, not to those who are doing their best to defeat themselves.
(Dominique Moïsi is a senior adviser at IFRI, the French Institute of International Relations.)

Posted at 1:54 PM · Comments (0)

20 - 5 - 2005

Google is doing business with a communist China notorious for internet censorship. Not only techno-libertarians should worry, says Becky Hogge.

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In December 1993, talking to Time magazine, technologist and civil libertarian John Gilmore created one of the first verses in internet lore: “The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it”. But according to a report published by George Soros’s Open Net Initiative (ONI), the Chinese government are doing a great job of disproving this theory. On 11 May, Google announced it would set up shop in the People’s Republic by the end of 2005. What can this mean for the citizens of China, and the citizens of the internet?

The Chinese effort to censor the internet is a feat of technology, legislation and manpower. According to the BBC, which is almost completely blocked within the “great firewall of China” (as it is known among techies), 50,000 different Chinese authorities “do nothing but monitor traffic on the internet”. No single law exists to permit this mass invasion of privacy and proscription of free speech. Rather, hundreds of articles in dozens of pieces of legislation work to obfuscate the mandate of the government to maintain political order through censorship.

According to Internet Filtering in China in 2004-2005: A Country Study, the most rigorous survey of Chinese internet filtering to date, China’s censorship regime extends from the fatpipe backbone to the street cyber-café. Chinese communications infrastructure allows packets of data to be filtered at “choke points” designed into the network, while on the street liability for prohibited content is extended onto multiple parties – author, host, reader – to chilling effect. All this takes place under the watchful eye of machine and human censors, the latter often volunteers.

The ramifications of this system, as the ONI’s John Parley stressed when he delivered the report to the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission in April, “should be of concern to anyone who believes in participatory democracy”. The ONI found that 60% of sites relating to opposition political parties were blocked, as were 90% of sites detailing the Nine Commentaries, a series of columns about the Chinese Communist Party published by the Hong Kong-based Epoch Times and associated by some with the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong.

The censorship does not end at the World Wide Web. New internet-based technologies, which looked to lend hope to free speech when ONI filed its last report on China in 2002, are also being targeted. Although email censorship is not as rampant as many (including the Chinese themselves) believe, blogs, discussion forums and bulletin boards have all been targeted through various measures of state control.

What then, of China’s 94 million web surfers? One discussion thread at Slashdot, the well-respected and popular discussion forum for techno-libertarians, is telling. When a well-meaning westerner offered a list of links prefaced with “assuming that you can read Slashdot, here are a few web pages that your government would probably prefer you not to read”, one poster, Hung Wei Lo responded: “I have travelled to China many times and work with many H1-B’s [temporary workers from outside US] from all parts of China. All of them are already quite knowledgeable about all the information provided in the links above, and most do not hesitate to engage in discussions about such topics over lunch. The fact that you feel all 1.6 billion Chinese are most certainly blind to these pieces of information is a direct result of years of indoctrination of Western (I’m assuming American) propaganda.”

Indeed, the recent anti-Japanese protests have been cited by some as an example of how the Chinese people circumvent their state’s diligent censorship regime using networked technologies such as mobile text messages (SMS), instant messaging, emails, bulletin boards and blogs to communicate and organise. The argument here of course is that the authorities were ambivalent towards these protests – one blogger reports that the state sent its own SMS during the disturbances: “We ask the people to express your patriotic passion through the right channel, following the law and maintaining order”.

China will have to keep up with the slew of emerging technologies making untapped networked communication more sophisticated by the day – RSS feeds, social bookmarking systems like del.icio.us and Furl and fledgling Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP, or telephony over the internet) packages such as Skype. Judging by the past record, it cannot be assumed that the state censorship machinery will not be able to meet these future challenges.

What does this mean for the internet? As the authors of the ONI report point out, China has the opportunity to export its censorship technology and methodology to states such as Vietnam, North Korea, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, to whom it already acts as a regional internet access provider. Further, as the second largest market in the world, it is a natural attractor for global web firms. The announcement that Google has secured a licence to operate in China has prompted many to ask how the US company will practice business there whilst staying true to its informal company motto “Don’t be evil”.

Already Google has been accused of collaborating with the Chinese government by omitting from its Google News service links b