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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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Should Mao Zedong’s huge portrait still hang above the front gate of Tiananmen Square? Should China’s ruling party still call itself communist?

These are not idle questions. Unless and until China’s leaders answer both questions with a simple “no”, they will continue to have blood on their hands and a tainted legitimacy. Many mainlanders do not accept communist rule precisely because the Communist Party denies its past, and remains unapologetic about its cruelty.

This is one reason why the mainland has a Taiwan “problem”. The communists insist that being Chinese means accepting the political reality of a sole communist sovereign.

Many Taiwanese think that, if being Chinese means accepting all that goes under the name of Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, they would rather deny their “Chineseness” than assume some of that shame.

Similarly, while a recent poll found that 70 per cent of Hongkongers are proud of being ethnic Chinese, a similar percentage are ashamed of the conduct of the mainland government.

Enshrined in the Chinese constitution are the following words: “Mao Zedong, the party’s chief representative, created Mao Zedong Thought, which has been proved correct by practice, and based on which the Communist Party developed the basic system of socialism economically, politically and culturally after the founding of the People’s Republic.”

But how “correct” was Mao? In her new book Mao: The Unknown Story, Jung Chang - author of the international best-seller Wild Swans - exposes startling new details that prove beyond doubt that Mao was a tyrannical, cruel hypocrite whose disregard for human lives and suffering surpassed that of even Stalin and Hitler. Her catalogue of Mao’s “correct practice” is numbing in its immorality and bloodthirstiness.

To help finance his communist movement in the 1930s, Mao squeezed poor peasant families, in the “red” zone he controlled, for any assets they had. Many families were forced out of their homes so that their meagre possessions could be requisitioned.

While hiding out in the caves of Yanan , Mao became a distributor of opium. Contrary to myths that he and his insurgents lived frugally during the Yanan days, they lived well on trading profits.

After the nationalist government collapsed in 1949, Mao’s “New China” emerged. Almost immediately, he launched a campaign to suppress “counter -revolutionaries”, berating one province for “being too lenient, not killing enough”. Killing “enemies” was not the sole purpose. Mao wanted to instil obedience by having as many people as possible witness the terror.

Masses of Chinese were sent to work camps, where prisoners endured harsh physical labour to “reform” their “bourgeois” habits and thoughts. During Mao’s rule, an estimated 27 million died in the camps. Close to 38 million people died of starvation and overwork during the infamous Great Leap Forward of 1958-1961.

Mao’s reaction? “With all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth - 50 million … but you can’t blame me when people die.” Millions more died during Mao’s Cultural Revolution of 1965 -1976. In all, it is estimated that more than 70 million people died in the “New China”.

China’s communist leaders must own up to their history and drop Mao and the communist legacy. The country needs a new constitution - one that enshrines genuine democracy. China deserves better; it requires better in order to reclaim the glory that was China.

Sin-ming Shaw is a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York

Copyright: Project Syndicate

Posted at 1:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Republic

June 27, 2005

BODY:
At a major Asian security conference this month, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld was typically blunt. Discussing China’s military
modernization, Rumsfeld said that China’s upgrade of its military
technology was a threat to countries across Asia. “Since no nation
threatens China, one wonders: Why this growing investment?” Rumsfeld
asked.
Unfortunately, he is focused on the wrong problem. China is indeed on
the
verge of posing a major threat to U.S. power and could potentially
dominate
parts of the developing world. But the real concern is not that China’s
armed forces will challenge the mighty U.S. military, which soon may
spend
more on defense than the rest of the world combined.
No, China’s rising power is reflected in a different way. In late 2003,
Australia hosted back-to-back state visits by two world leaders. The
first
to head down under was George W. Bush, a staunch ally of Australia,
which,
along with the United Kingdom, was a major provider of non-U.S. troops
for
the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. On arrival, however, Bush was
treated like a boorish distant cousin; his official reception was
polite,
but barely so. He stayed just 21 hours, and, speaking before the
Australian
parliament, faced protests outside and inside the chamber, where Green
Party senators repeatedly interrupted him with catcalls.
The treatment was far different when Chinese President Hu Jintao
arrived
for a more extended stay. Though, less than a decade ago, fear of being
swamped by Asians was a potent electoral issue in Australia, now
Canberra
threw open its arms to the Chinese leader. For days, Australia’s
business
and political elite feted Hu at lavish receptions. And, at China’s
request,
Australian lawmakers barred potential irritants—like Tibetan
activists—from parliament, as Hu became the first Asian leader to
address
the Australian legislature, receiving a 20-minute standing ovation.
Perhaps
this differing treatment shouldn’t have been surprising. Australia’s
leaders were simply following their people’s lead. Recent polls suggest
that, despite decades of close American-Australian relations,
Australians
generally have a more favorable view of China than of the United
States.
China has also scored diplomatic successes in Latin America, long
thought
to be within Washington’s sphere of influence. During a highly
successful
twelve-day Latin America trip, which, like his visit to Australia,
coincided with a brief Bush trip to the region that received a cool
reception, Hu signed some $30 billion in new investment deals and
subtly
staked a claim that the United States was failing as the major power in
the
region. Hu stopped in regional giant Brazil, where President Luiz
InAcio
Lula da Silva upgraded bilateral trade ties with Beijing and decided to
send Brazilian advisers to Beijing to study Chinese economics. During
an
earlier trip to China, Lula had cooed to Hu: “We want a partnership
that
integrates our economies and serves as a paradigm for South-South
cooperation.”
Most important for Beijing, in oil-rich Venezuela, a nation
increasingly
shunned by the United States—which tacitly condoned a 2002 coup
attempt
against Venezuelan leader Hugo ChAvez—Chinese officials are
solidifying an
alliance with Caracas while providing ChAvez an opportunity to point
out
Washington’s failures in the region. While ChAvez talks of slashing oil
deliveries to the United States, he promises Beijing a long-term supply
of
petroleum. “China is a world power. She doesn’t come here with
imperialist
airs,” announced the Venezuelan leader, leaving the distinction with
another world power unsaid. ChAvez also plans to send advisers to Iran
to
help Tehran funnel its oil to Beijing. (Iran has inked deals to supply
China with natural gas and to provide the Chinese state oil company,
Sinopec, with a stake in one of Iran’s biggest oil fields.)
Beijing’s inroads with Australia and Latin America, two vastly
different
regions of the world, signify aspects of the same sea change. For the
first
time in centuries, China is becoming an international power, a nation
with
global foreign policy ambitions. In fact, China may become the first
nation
since the fall of the Soviet Union that could seriously challenge the
United States for control of the international system.
As it develops, China has several key interests in the world. Because
of
China’s booming economy and lack of domestic resources, securing stable
supplies of oil, natural gas, and other natural resources—as well as
safe
passage for these resources—is of primary interest to Beijing. Second,
as
China’s leading companies continue to grow and improve the quality of
their
products, Beijing clearly needs access to foreign markets. Less
obviously,
but no less significantly, China seeks to demonstrate that it is an
international power, worthy of the same respect as the United States
and
capable of projecting enough power to limit U.S. intentions in Asia and
other parts of the developing world. And, perhaps most important,
Beijing
wants to bring its own socioeconomic and political models to other
developing countries, just as the United States historically has been
committed to—at least rhetorically—the spread of democracy.
Beijing is pursuing these interests through a two-pronged strategy. On
the
one hand, China appears to be building a string of alliances across the
globe with nations shunned by the United States—nations like
Venezuela,
Iran, Sudan, Burma, and Zimbabwe. At the same time, China appears to be
wooing non-rogue developing nations—both democracies like Brazil and
stable pseudo-authoritarian states like Malaysia. Beijing does so by
championing a vision of international relations centered on national
sovereignty—one that contrasts sharply with recent U.S. doctrine, by
leveraging China’s economic successes to win over foreign leaders and
by
using Chinese soft power to win hearts and minds even in places like
Australia, once considered firm American allies.
China’s rise may have significant positive effects. As China takes on a
larger role in the world, it may come to assume a large role in
peacekeeping, global aid disbursements, and other responsibilities
currently handled by the United States and other wealthy nations. China
even contributed funding to elections in Iraq. Because it straddles
both
the rich and the poor world, China could also help mediate between
developed and developing countries at institutions like the World Trade
Organization (WTO).
Yet China’s more prominent international footprint is likely to
threaten
U.S. interests seriously. Beijing’s quest for natural resources will
thrust
it into competition with the United States, particularly in crucial
regions
like West Africa and the Middle East. China’s emergence as a growing
power
could threaten America’s role as the primary guarantor of stability in
Asia. Its increasing access to international markets could damage U.S.
corporations, especially if Chinese businesses were subsidized by
Beijing
through soft loans that would allow them to operate unprofitably, at
least
for a time, and squeeze competitors’ margins. And China’s power could
damage one of the most important U.S. interests of all: the spread of
democracy, which will ultimately enable us to win the war on terrorism.
Despite stumbles in Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and other places where
the
White House continues to choose stability or cooperation on
counterterrorism over liberalization, the United States remains the
major
force for democratization in the world.
Though hawks have been warning of a “China threat” for over a decade,
they
usually focus on China’s military capabilities, not its diplomatic
skills.
The view elaborated in Rumsfeld’s speech will likely be reflected in an
upcoming Defense Department report on China’s military intentions,
programs, and strategies. Hawks have pushed to make the report as dire
as
possible, portraying China as a military threat that has sized up the
weaknesses of the U.S. Armed Forces. Similarly, a recent Atlantic
Monthly
piece by Robert Kaplan forecasts a military showdown with Beijing. Yet,
while China probably has the world’s third-largest military budget, in
most
respects, Beijing badly lags the U.S. military. The Chinese military
still
relies too heavily on conscripts and wastes time and resources forcing
troops to study political doctrine. Beijing probably spends less than
$80
billion per year on its military, according to a rand study, in
contrast to
over $400 billion that the White House requested for the Pentagon’s
fiscal
year 2006 budget. (China’s defense spending as a percentage of GDP is
also
smaller than that of the United States.) In fact, a 2003 report on the
Chinese military by the Council on Foreign Relations concluded that
Beijing
was at least two decades from closing the gap on the United States.
In reality, an insecure Beijing, weakened by 150 years of foreign
incursions into China, historically pursued a relatively nonaggressive
foreign policy, focusing on defending core interests but rarely seeking
influence over issues outside its borders and usually abstaining from
important debates at the United Nations. In launching China’s reforms
in
the late ’70s, Deng Xiaoping pushed the country to develop its domestic
economic and social resources, and not to focus on foreign affairs. In
fact, Deng often explicitly warned China not to be a world leader—at
least
not for now—and, during Deng’s time, China remained a poor,
inward-looking
nation.
That has begun to change. In May alone, China ran a trade surplus of
almost
$9 billion, and it sits atop the second-largest pile of currency
reserves
on earth. High growth—combined with intensive inculcation of
nationalism
via the Chinese press and education system—has created a
self-confident
populace more insistent that China play a major role in the
international
system, as University of Colorado Sinologist Peter Hays Gries notes in
his
book, China’s New Nationalism. And, though this nationalism sometimes
lies
dormant beneath the surface of Chinese society, it can explode with
little
warning, as with the anti-Japan protests this spring—when I witnessed
Beijingers, who normally brag about their Sony DVD players, scrambling
over
each other to try to smash up the Japanese embassy.
Meanwhile, two decades of development have also sharply raised the
education level of Chinese leaders and diplomats. As former Time
foreign
editor Joshua Cooper Ramo notes in a fascinating new essay called “The
Beijing Consensus,” “In 1982 only 20 percent of China’s provincial
leaders
had attended college. In 2002, this number was 98 percent.” The Chinese
government has made a concerted effort to upgrade its diplomatic corps,
boosting their language fluency and other important skills. As a
result,
today Chinese leaders and diplomats are savvier and more knowledgeable
about the outside than the men of Deng’s generation. As one former
American
diplomat in China told me, Chinese officials can now describe in detail
the
splits within the U.S. neoconservative movement, a grasp of nuance
sorely
lacking in Beijing just ten years ago.
Richer, more worldly, more confident, China’s mandarins have begun to
reassess their place in the world. As Ramo writes, China is pursuing a
deliberate policy to bolster its role in the international system and
project its development model abroad. It is enunciating a new foreign
policy doctrine, just as a young United States once did. The China
doctrine
has several components. One is the idea of “peaceful rise”—that China
is
growing into a preeminent power but would never use its strength
unilaterally to threaten other countries, supposedly a sharp
distinction
from U.S. policy. Second is the notion that China has created a model
of
socioeconomic development that can be applied elsewhere—what Ramo
calls
the “Beijing consensus” of development for poor nations. This model
argues
that developing nations must pursue innovation-led growth by obtaining
the
latest technology; must control development from the top, so as to
avoid
the kind of chaos that comes from rapid economic opening; and must rely
on
links with other developing nations to counter the economic advantages
of
Western states. In controlling development from the top, of course, the
Beijing model implicitly rejects both the free market and the idea that
ordinary citizens, not a small elite of rulers, should control
countries’
destinies.
China then wields its policy doctrine, along with other weapons like
trade
and aid, to draw developing nations to its side. Beijing focuses in
part on
countries like Iran and Sudan, which are shunned by the United States,
but
it also aims closer to Washington’s heart, seeking, if not to win over
U.S.
allies, then at least to complicate their loyalties by emphasizing that
gains for developing nations come at the expense of arrogant Western
powers. Playing off Western powers works: As prominent Indian economist
Jayanta Roy said after visiting China, “I was happy to see that there
is a
hope for a developing country to outstrip the giants in a reasonably
short
period of time.”
The Chinese challenge is most obvious in three areas of the world:
Asia,
Latin America, and Africa. Asia is China’s natural sphere of influence
and
the one with the largest number of ethnic Chinese living outside
China’s
borders. Asia is also the area in which China has made up the most
ground
on the United States. At first, China concentrated on Asian nations
alienated from Washington. Since 1997, the United States has enforced
severe sanctions against Burma’s dictatorship. China has unsurprisingly
paid the sanctions no mind. Instead, Beijing has sold Burma’s military
junta over $1 billion in military equipment. In return, Chinese
businesses
have gained access to Burma’s valuable natural resources, while Chinese
diplomats have become almost the only foreigners with insight into the
workings of the secretive Burmese government. Today, wealthy Chinese
businesspeople cruise the streets of Rangoon, Burma’s impoverished
capital,
in late-model Mitsubishi jeeps, gabbing on ultra-pricey cell phones.
In Laos, until recently blocked by Congress from enjoying normal trade
relations with the United States, China has become one of its largest
trade
partners. In Cambodia, where Prime Minister Hun Sen’s poor human rights
record—including alleged involvement in a grenade attack that maimed
an
American citizen—has led to frosty relations with Washington, China
has
given Phnom Penh at least $200 million in loans. Likewise, after the
recent
Uzbekistan crackdown on demonstrators, China quickly welcomed Uzbek
autocrat Islam Karimov to Beijing. Across the Pacific Ocean, meanwhile,
China has become a major aid donor to countries like Fiji—countries
that
could be crucial to U.S. military basing and missile defenses but that
Washington has essentially ignored.
But, in the past five years, Beijing has also honed in on countries
with
close relationships with the United States, nations like South Korea,
Thailand, and Mongolia. Again, understanding that leveraging Beijing’s
policy doctrine is crucial, Chinese diplomats repeatedly contrast
China’s
“peaceful rise”—and its supposedly nonthreatening posture—with an
aggressive, unilateralist United States. “We Asian countries” must work
more closely together, at this time of “new manifestations of power
politics,” Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told Southeast Asian leaders at a
2003 summit, using typical Chinese coded language to refer to the
United
States. What’s more, Chinese diplomats emphasize that China does not
prod
foreign nations to pursue political reform or market-driven economic
liberalization. This reassurance is popular among Asian nations—such
as
Cambodia or Thailand—that have poor human rights records, that resent
U.S.
criticism of their domestic affairs, and that have a history of
centralized
economic planning, which makes China’s Beijing consensus economic model
appealing.
The response to Beijing has been overwhelming. As Southeast Asia
scholar
Carlyle Thayer has reported, China has inked long-term bilateral
cooperation agreements with Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore.
The
Philippines, a former U.S. colony, has, for the first time, accepted
military aid from China. At the same time, while progress on several
prospective trade pacts between the United States and Thailand have
stalled, trade between China and Southeast Asia is growing by nearly 20
percent per year, and ten Southeast Asian nations have agreed to join a
free-trade zone with China. China’s trade with the rest of Asia is also
expanding. Even India, which has a long-standing border dispute with
China,
has established new trade ties with Beijing.
Asian leaders increasingly look to China for economic and political
cues as
well. Though, less than a decade ago, Beijing maintained icy relations
with
Jakarta—strained by periodic attacks on Indonesia’s ethnic
Chinese—today,
Indonesia’s president publicly praises China’s emergence as a leader in
Asia. Singapore’s senior minister, Goh Chok Tong, has expressed similar
sentiments, saying, “China’s extraordinary development sets the example
for
other Asian countries to follow.” Ramo has reported that Vietnam, which
fought a border war with China only 25 years ago, is now studying
China’s
economic models for clues to faster development. In South Korea,
President
Roh Mun-Hyun has led Seoul toward Beijing’s orbit, looking to China for
help handling North Korea. In Thailand, which, during the cold war, was
probably America’s staunchest ally in Southeast Asia, Prime Minister
Thaksin Shinawatra has said that China and India are now the “most
important countries for Thailand’s diplomacy.” Meanwhile, Central Asian
nations have formed a regional security group with China, the Shanghai
Cooperation Organization—an organization in which China takes the
lead,
pushing the group to focus on issues of concern to Beijing, such as the
restive ethnic minority Uighur population in western China.
As they look to China, Asian leaders are increasingly willing to do
Beijing’s bidding. Nations from Nepal to Singapore have restricted the
activities of Tibetan and Falun Gong activists. Presumably at China’s
insistence, Malaysia’s deputy prime minister publicly warned Malaysian
politicians to avoid official visits to Taiwan, while Thailand tried to
deny a visa to a top Taiwanese labor official.
Average Asians, too, look to China, which is building up its soft power
in
the region. In one poll, three-quarters of Thais said they considered
China
Thailand’s closest friend, while less than 10 percent picked the United
States. Asian businesspeople covet invites to the Boao Forum for Asia,
a
conference about Asia’s future held on a Chinese resort island to which
Beijing invites thousands of business and political leaders. Asian
students
increasingly seek out education in China, rather than the United
States,
and Chinese-language schools are gaining popularity in South Korea,
Malaysia, and other countries. Meanwhile, ethnic Chinese living outside
the
Chinese mainland, once afraid to showcase their heritage for fear of
being
singled out as a wealthy minority, have become increasingly outspoken
about
their roots. In part, they are more comfortable with their heritage,
because China has begun actively promoting Chinese culture through new
cultural centers and TV stations. (By contrast, the United States has
cut
back on its cultural centers in Asia, many of which used to be
affiliated
with the United States Information Service.) “It looks like being
Chinese
is cool,” publisher Kitti Jinsiriwanich told The Wall Street Journal,
explaining his decision to produce a glossy magazine about ethnic
Chinese
life in Bangkok and why advertisers were lapping up his copy.
In Africa and Latin America, where postindependence economic models
imposed
by Western international financial organizations have failed to raise
living standards, China’s ideas, its companies, and its emphasis on a
multipolar international system are also increasingly welcome. Beijing
has
signed trade deals with 40 African states. In many resource-rich
African
countries—including pariah nations like Sudan, where Beijing covets
Sudanese oil—China has dramatically bolstered its diplomatic and
economic
presence, as Stephanie Giry has reported in these pages (“Out of
Beijing,”
November 15, 2004). In Zimbabwe, Beijing has become a major provider of
military hardware, including fighter jets. “Suffering under the effects
of
international isolation, Zimbabwe has looked to new partners, including
China, who won’t attach conditions [to aid],” one Western diplomat told
The
Christian Science Monitor.
Hu’s 2004 trip to Latin America highlighted China’s growing power there
as
well, even as the Bush administration neglects the region. As Ramo
notes,
China’s enormous consumption of natural resources, such as steel, oil,
and
copper, makes it an essential ally and trading partner of nearly any
nation
in Latin America and Africa. Indeed, not only did Hu sign $30 billion
in
new investment deals during his Latin trip, but China has become
Brazil’s
second-biggest trading partner. By comparison, during his 2004 Latin
America swing, Bush spent little time anywhere other than Colombia and
Chile (and almost got in a fistfight in the latter). Furthermore, the
American president has failed to persuade Latin nations to back his
proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas pact, one of the White House’s
main goals for the Western Hemisphere.
As in Asia, China’s education system and culture— components of its
soft
power—have become attractive to African and Latin American elites.
Beijing
has developed a proposal to bring over 10,000 African professionals to
China for human resources development. And, as in Asia, key African and
Latin leaders, awed by China’s economic success, praise Beijing’s
foreign
policy doctrine and development model. “China is doing a wonderful
job,”
Muyingo Steuem, a Ugandan government adviser dazzled by China’s big
cities,
told The Financial Times during last year’s World Bank conference on
poverty alleviation, held in bustling Shanghai. “In developing
countries,
China is regarded with a mixture of envy, admiration, and awe,” U.N.
Development Program chief Mark Malloch Brown told the FT during the
same
conference.
In some respects, China’s new foreign policy assertiveness is only
natural,
and it could benefit the developing world. Until 150 years ago, China
was
one of the world’s most powerful nations, and Beijing is, in many
respects,
regaining the position in foreign affairs and global trade it enjoyed
for
centuries. As China engages more with the developing world, it is
beginning
to project its power for the good of others. It has been expanding its
participation in U.N. peacekeeping operations. Beijing has also started
playing a larger, more positive role in global trade talks and could
help
to bridge the gap between richer nations and the developing world on
tough
issues like agricultural subsidies; China has also lived up to its WTO
commitments, in some cases more so than the United States. After the
Asian
tsunami, China offered significant aid disbursements to affected
nations
(though Beijing’s pledge of roughly $85 million in initial government
aid
was dwarfed by the U.S. offer). China also has become more of a player
on
the U.N. Security Council, a role it traditionally abdicated—Beijing
has
backed antiterrorism resolutions and avoided blocking the U.S.-led war
in
Iraq. As China becomes more powerful, it may take on a more beneficent
role
at Turtle Bay.
But, despite significant political opening over the past two decades,
China
remains a highly authoritarian state, one in which individuals who try
to
form national political organizations are suppressed. In recent months,
the
government has launched a new strike against dissent, detaining
prominent
intellectuals, upping its crackdown against the Uighurs and other
ethnic
minorities, increasing press censorship, and bolstering its Internet
firewalling. China also canceled an international human rights
conference
due to be held in Beijing and arrested a Hong Kong-based journalist for
the
Singapore Straits Times and a Chinese researcher for The New York
Times.
Today, China has the largest number of journalists in jail of any
country.
This is hardly an ideal political model for developing
nations—following
the Chinese model might forestall democratization. Indeed, African,
Asian,
and Latin American democrats certainly can take no comfort in their
leaders
moving closer to Beijing, since China places no priority on human
rights in
its decisions about its allies. Beijing’s aid and trade prop up the
brutal
Burmese and Sudanese regimes, allowing them to ignore Western
sanctions,
and Beijing reportedly has helped prevent the U.N. Security Council
from
taking tougher action against genocide in the Sudanese region of
Darfur.
What’s more, China’s talk of noninterference may be just that—talk. As
the
University of Colorado’s Hays Gries writes, China historically has
practiced a politics defined by the term biao li bu yi—“surface and
reality differ.” After all, Chinese academics at government-linked
think
tanks say that, ultimately, China will surpass the United States in
Asia
and control the region. Some foreign leaders recognize that China’s
kinder
face abroad may mask a desire to increase Chinese power across the
developing world. A classified report by the Philippine armed forces
captures the difference between Beijing’s statements and actions. It
notes:
“China’s actions are widely viewed as a doubled-edge[d] diplomatic
strategy
aimed at furthering its strategic goals in the region.”
Unfortunately, though some nations may resent China’s growing power,
too
often they resent the United States more. The United States has all but
abdicated its presence in parts of the developing world, and Washington
seems unprepared for China’s emergence as a more aggressive foreign
policy
actor. Washington lacks enough diplomats who truly understand China’s
foreign policy intentions and how it executes its ambitions on the
ground.
Foreign Affairs editor James Hoge has noted that the workforce at the
U.S.
Embassy in Beijing is half the size of the one assigned to the new
embassy
in Baghdad.
At the same time that China’s influence has grown, the U.S. means of
leverage—aid allocations, trade deals, academic ties, popular
culture—are
weakening, undermined by everything from new restrictions on student
visas
to the prisoner abuse scandals at GuantAnamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Worse,
when dealing with longtime allies like Thailand, Washington too often
talks
about little other than terrorism. Asians find the American “obsession”
with terrorism tedious, Karim Raslan, a prominent Malaysian writer,
told
The New York Times. “We’ve all got to live. We’ve all got to make
money,”
he said. “The Chinese want to make money, and so do we.”
Savvy American officials are beginning to understand how China is
switching
from a defensive to an offensive foreign policy. During an important
visit
to Southeast Asia earlier this year, new Deputy Secretary of State
Robert
Zoellick, a former trade negotiator, tried to recapture lost ground. He
emphasized not only counterterrorism cooperation but also economic
ties,
aid disbursements, and other issues of importance to Asian nations. The
mild-mannered Zoellick was a hit. “The Zoellick road show was an
important
signal from Washington that Southeast Asia was not being ignored by the
world’s No. 1 superpower,” enthused the Singapore Straits Times.
Meanwhile, administration hawks—who concentrated on China early in
Bush’s
first term—are beginning to refocus their attention on Beijing. Even
as
Rumsfeld talks about China’s military power, other hawks are trying to
more
effectively leverage key foreign allies against China. They are doing
so by
drawing important nations more tightly under the U.S. security
umbrella.
Washington appears to have convinced Tokyo to move closer to the U.S.
position on Taiwan—as reflected in a joint statement issued in
February—and the Bush administration is reaching out to India, with
Rumsfeld calling for closer ties with New Delhi.
But these are only initial steps. Is Washington up to the task of
reorienting foreign policy to handle a competitor like the cold war-era
Soviet Union, one with a defined foreign policy doctrine and allies
across
the globe?
Too often, official Washington, whether focused on China’s military or
awed
by China’s booming economy, simply disregards the gravity of China’s
changing foreign policy. During a private luncheon last year for the
American ambassador to Thailand, one person asked about recent unrest
in
southern Thailand, where the United States closed its consulate a
decade
ago—and where the region has become a potential hotbed of Islamic
extremism. The ambassador mentioned that the United States was still
trying
to exert influence in the south and had reopened a program in southern
Thailand, a small “American corner” where Thais could read
English-language
books to learn about the United States. What happened to the U.S.
consulate, asked someone else in the audience. The ambassador paused.
“I
think it’s the Chinese consulate now,” he said. Everyone in the room
laughed.

Posted at 2:17 AM · Comments (0)

June 27, 2005

The darkest side of China’s miraculous economic takeoff is probably its ever-widening wealth gap, which has become a major source of social unrest.

The striations in Chinese society from 26 years of economic reform and opening up run in a remarkable number of different directions: between the eastern coastal and inland regions, between urban and rural residents, and between the differing levels of society itself. The rich are becoming richer and the poor poorer.

Life appears to have improved greatly across the social spectrum if one follows the numerous reports of how feverishly China’s citizens have spent, both at home and abroad, buying luxuries.

The luxury carmaker Bentley planned to sell just 10 units when it entered China in 2002. By the end of the year, it had sold 92. There are now more than 300 Bentley sedans on mainland roads, including the top model, which sells for 11.88 million yuan (HK$11.15 million).

Richemont, the Swiss luxury goods group, held a watch show in Beijing’s Forbidden City in September 2004 to promote such brands as Lange & Sohne, Baume & Mercier, Cartier, Dunhill, IWC, Mont Blanc, Paget and Vacheron Constantin. At the show, Richemont’s senior executive Franco Cologni said the group had three to five million mainland customers. Their purchases of Richemont’s luxury goods at home and abroad now account for 40 percent of the group’s global sales.

Early last year, German luxury eyeglasses maker Lotos opened a shop in Beijing confident that the potential for mainland sales is huge.

About 20 years ago, mainland students in Western countries were considered poor though hard-working. Today in New Zealand, Australia, Canada or Britain, many teenage Chinese pupils are known as little “big spenders” living in fancy housing and driving expensive cars.

While this may be admirable, the other side of the picture is extremely bleak. In some remote villages, many families are forced to take their children out of school because they are unable to pay educational costs. Official statistics show the number of rural children forced to drop off the education rolls is more than one million. This is a tragedy.

The only hope for rural children to move up the socio-economic ladder is to pass tough entrance exams to make it to university. But today, many farmers cannot afford steadily increasing university tuition, even if their children are admitted.

Last year, a Sichuan high school graduate committed suicide because he was unable to pay a 600 yuan fee to participate in the college entrance exam.

As the economy grows, land is increasingly becoming a sought after resource. But when farmlands are requisitioned, peasants often get little or no compensation while developers and corrupt officials pocket huge profits.

The bloody incident earlier this month in Dingzhou, Hebei province, is a good example. The operators of a power plant paid the market price for a parcel of land for expansion. But local officials gave each farming family only about 2,000 yuan as compensation for their land. The families suspected that officials simply stuck a large portion of the land requisition fund in their pockets. Angry farmers occupied the requisitioned land, seeking to block construction. On June 11, 300 attackers armed with iron bars and knives stormed the farmers’ temporary huts, killing four and injuring dozens. Luckily for the farmers, the media exposed the attack to catch Beijing’s attention. An investigation is now under way.

After the incident, a Dingzhou official brazenly blamed the farmers for breaking the law by occupying the requisitioned land. But throughout Chinese history, officials’ bullying and oppression ultimately have forced peasants to rebel.

In cities, many laid-off workers from state-owned enterprises also live in poverty. In 2003, 21 million urban people were living on social security and 30 million rural residents were living in poverty. Another 60 million were living on per capital annual incomes of US$100 (HK$780) or less. So at least 100 million Chinese must be considered to be desperately poor. Conversely, the growing wealth generated by the new economy appears to be going into the hands of a very few. A survey by New Fortune magazine shows that in 2003, the top 400 tycoons had amassed more than 303 billion yuan - more than triple the entire gross domestic product of Guizhou province. A recent survey by the National Bureau of Statistics also indicates that 10 percent of urban residents command 45 percent of the total wealth in mainland cities.

According to a Nankai University team headed by Chen Zongsheng, the Gini Coefficient in 1988 was 0.35 which however rose to about 0.5 in 2003. GC is a measurement of wealth disparity which takes a value between zero and one. The bigger the number the greater the disparity. A value of 0.4 is regarded a red alert and 0.5 means likely social unrest.

It is time for Beijing to seriously address this issue of a widening wealth gap or inevitably it will jeopardize the country’s further development.

zhong.wu@singtaonewscorp.com

Copyright 2005, The Standard, Sing Tao Newspaper Group and Global China Group. All rights reserved. No content may be redistributed or republished, either electronically or in print, without express written consent of The Standard.

Posted at 3:57 PM · Comments (0)

June 27, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

Fifteen years ago, when Japanese companies were busily buying up chunks of corporate America, I was one of those urging Americans not to panic. You might therefore expect me to offer similar soothing words now that the Chinese are doing the same thing. But the Chinese challenge - highlighted by the bids for Maytag and Unocal - looks a lot more serious than the Japanese challenge ever did.

There’s nothing shocking per se about the fact that Chinese buyers are now seeking control over some American companies. After all, there’s no natural law that says Americans will always be in charge. Power usually ends up in the hands of those who hold the purse strings. America, which imports far more than it exports, has been living for years on borrowed funds, and lately China has been buying many of our I.O.U.’s.

Until now, the Chinese have mainly invested in U.S. government bonds. But bonds yield neither a high rate of return nor control over how the money is spent. The only reason for China to acquire lots of U.S. bonds is for protection against currency speculators - and at this point China’s reserves of dollars are so large that a speculative attack on the dollar looks far more likely than a speculative attack on the yuan.

So it was predictable that, sooner or later, the Chinese would stop buying so many dollar bonds. Either they would stop buying American I.O.U.’s altogether, causing a plunge in the dollar, or they would stop being satisfied with the role of passive financiers, and demand the power that comes with ownership. And we should be relieved that at least for now the Chinese aren’t dumping their dollars; they’re using them to buy American companies.

Yet there are two reasons that Chinese investment in America seems different from Japanese investment 15 years ago.

One difference is that, judging from early indications, the Chinese won’t squander their money as badly as the Japanese did.

The Japanese, back in the day, tended to go for prestige investments - Rockefeller Center, movie studios - that transferred lots of money to the American sellers, but never generated much return for the buyers. The result was, in effect, a subsidy to the United States.

The Chinese seem shrewder than that. Although Maytag is a piece of American business history, it isn’t a prestige buy for Haier, the Chinese appliance manufacturer. Instead, it’s a reasonable way to acquire a brand name and a distribution network to serve Haier’s growing manufacturing capability.

That doesn’t mean that America will lose from the deal. Maytag’s stockholders will gain, and the company will probably shed fewer American workers under Chinese ownership than it would have otherwise. Still, the deal won’t be as one-sided as the deals with the Japanese often were.

The more important difference from Japan’s investment is that China, unlike Japan, really does seem to be emerging as America’s strategic rival and a competitor for scarce resources - which makes last week’s other big Chinese offer more than just a business proposition.

The China National Offshore Oil Corporation, a company that is 70 percent owned by the Chinese government, is seeking to acquire control of Unocal, an energy company with global reach. In particular, Unocal has a history - oddly ignored in much reporting on the Chinese offer - of doing business with problematic regimes in difficult places, including the Burmese junta and the Taliban. One indication of Unocal’s reach: Zalmay Khalilzad, who was U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan for 18 months and was just confirmed as ambassador to Iraq, was a Unocal consultant.

Unocal sounds, in other words, like exactly the kind of company the Chinese government might want to control if it envisions a sort of “great game” in which major economic powers scramble for access to far-flung oil and natural gas reserves. (Buying a company is a lot cheaper, in lives and money, than invading an oil-producing country.) So the Unocal story gains extra resonance from the latest surge in oil prices.

If it were up to me, I’d block the Chinese bid for Unocal. But it would be a lot easier to take that position if the United States weren’t so dependent on China right now, not just to buy our I.O.U.’s, but to help us deal with North Korea now that our military is bogged down in Iraq.

Posted at 3:08 PM · Comments (0)

Jun 23, 2005

NEW DELHI - It is a courtship set to redefine the geopolitics of the region. One standing landmark of this relationship will be the three-day visit next month of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to the United States, where he will likely meet President George W Bush on July 18. Such are the myriad areas in which fresh initiatives are being sought - from military to energy to regional power plays to commerce - that not a single day goes by without important functionaries flying in or out of India. This is likely to continue for the next few weeks, after which preparations will begin for Bush’s India visit scheduled for later this year.

Sometimes commentators are blamed for going overboard about a high-profile interaction between the leaders of two countries. In the end, the meeting remains a photo opportunity, allows for the exchange of plenty of well-written dialogue, good food and a free holiday for the accompanying entourage. However, the buildup to Manmohan’s US visit has been quite encompassing, simply because there have never been so many issues to talk about and iron out, nor fresh beginnings to be made in Indo-US relations. It has been fortuitous, too, as it is the height of summer in India, and the country’s political and bureaucratic class are trying to wrangle visits abroad to escape the heat.

The list of Indian dignitaries who have or will head to US with the express purpose of preparing for the Manmohan visit is impressive. It includes Defense Minister Pranab Mukherjee, due to visit next week to discuss arms deals, including prospects for the joint production and supply of F-16 fighter jets, in a US bid to promote business as well as shoring up India against China; Foreign Minister Natwar Singh, who met Bush recently, during which the invitation to Manmohan was extended; Commerce Minister Kamal Nath, who spoke of Indo-US business prospects during his visit; and Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in India in March to set the ball rolling by talking about cooperation in nuclear energy and much more. A host of officials who have been traversing the distance include India’s Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran, officials of the Planning Commission, and the bureaucratic who’s who. National Security Adviser M K Narayanan is currently in Washington to iron out issues related to civil nuclear energy cooperation. Planning Commission deputy chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, who has been structuring the “energy dialogue”, met with Energy Secretary Samuel W Bodman recently, which resulted in the setting up of five working groups, including nuclear energy. Ronen Sen, India’s ambassador to Washington, has met US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.

The visits have been from the other side too. US State Department chief Stephen Krasner is making the rounds of India’s Foreign Ministry to inform about the US policy focus for the region. Krasner provides the intellectual thrust to India matters in the Bush administration. The US under secretary for political affairs, Nicholas Burns, who is third in the State Department hierarchy, will be here soon to give a final shape as well. He is likely to throw light on US thinking on UN reforms, including its support for two new permanent Security Council members without veto powers, which has been dismissed by some observers as a dubious attempt to break the unity of G-4 nations India, Brazil, Japan and Germany.

Recently, top American general Lieutenant-General Jeffrey B Kohler, who is director of the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency, gave a detailed presentation to senior Indian air force and defense officials on F-16 and F-18 fighter aircraft. Executives of Lockheed Martin, maker of F-16s, have been lobbying hard with Indian officials in the face of competition from French and Russian manufacturers of similar aircraft. In another related decision, India is to permanently station defense attaches at America’s central and pacific commands as part of a rapidly expanding military relationship.

The above meetings are just an indicator of the parleys that have been happening. At Manmohan’s initiative, India is strategizing to secure a China-like massive leap in its exports to the deep US market. In its first meeting recently, the newly constituted trade and economic relations committee (TERC), chaired by Manmohan, discussed the outline of a medium-term strategy to be in place before the premier’s visit to the US. The aim is to double India’s share in the US market from the present 1% to 2% in the next five years. India’s exports are targeted to reach US$30 billion by 2010 from $13.2 billion in fiscal 2005.

In addition, trade in services and investment flows will be the focus areas of India’s US strategy. At the TERC meeting, the premier endorsed this assessment and emphasized that India must increase the level of economic interaction with the US. “China’s economic engagement with the US is 10 times that of India. There is vast potential for increased trade and investment relations with the US. We must consider how we can realize this potential,” he said.

Recently, India awarded a multi-billion-dollar aircraft augmentation exercise of government-owned Air India, to US-based Boeing, despite stiff competition from France’s Airbus. One of the reasons the contract went the US way was a personal intervention by Bush, who spoke to Manmohan.

However, there are those who have been expressing caution. Commenting on the new Indo-US dynamics, analyst K Subhramanyam said: “It should be appreciated that the US administration will not find it easy to do a U-turn in its policies towards India. It took some eight to 10 years after [Henry] Kissinger’s visit to China for American policies towards that country to become fruitful from the Chinese point of view. It would not be prudent for India to have a short list of demands as a litmus test of US sincerity. The list should be broad enough to allow flexibility to the US even while testing its avowed purpose to help India become a world power.”

In a recent article on Indo-US relations, Ashley Tellis, an India-born American and former staffer of the National Security Council, said: “The greatest risk to the new Bush strategy, therefore, is that the administration may be unable to realize the policy changes needed to make increased Indian access to such technologies possible.”

One sticking issue is the Iran-Pakistan-India oil pipeline that the US is opposing, given its distrust of Iran over its nuclear program. Rice expressed misgivings about the pipeline while she was in India in March. Earlier this month, the US threatened sanctions on Pakistan if it went ahead with the project, disregarding US concerns over Iran’s nuclear plan (US plays spoiler in pipeline accord June 17). In the new environment of improved India-Pakistan relations, both the countries are keen to go ahead with the construction of the pipeline, which will make the gas transport much easier and cheaper for India and generate large revenues for Pakistan.

In an unusual rebuff to the US, Pakistan has asserted that the decision on whether or not it will allow the pipeline to run through its territory will solely be taken in consideration of its national interest, thus hinting that it is willing to take on the US on the issue. All of this makes for an interesting play of international diplomacy and arm-twisting, with Iran declaring that a decision on the pipeline will be made in two weeks.

But apart from the pipeline and issues regarding UN reforms, the mood is to make things work. In a speech Burns made to the Transatlantic Democracy Network Conference in Brussels on May 26, he said: “I think if you look at American foreign policy worldwide, the greatest change you will see in the next three or four years is a new American focus on South Asia, particularly in establishing a closer strategic partnership with India … Our relationship is now at the best point that it’s been since the creation of modern India in 1947,” he noted.

“If you look at all the trends, there’s no question that India is the rising power in the East. India is the world’s largest democracy. India has so much in common with the United States and with Europe in what it wants to achieve in the world and what kind of world it wants to see,” said Burns. “I think you’ll see this as a major focus of our president and our secretary of state, and it will be the area of greatest dynamic positive change in American foreign policy.”

Indeed, the fury of the parleys in the past few months cannot be dismissed as a flash in the high-octane summer months in India. There is every indication of the beginnings of a new threshold.

Siddharth Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing.)

Guiding hand in India, China ties (Jun 15, ‘05)

Posted at 11:25 PM · Comments (0)

8 The notion of American exceptionalism—that the United States alone has the right, whether by divine sanction or moral obligation, to bring civilization, or democracy, or liberty to the rest of the world, by violence if necessary—is not new. It started as early as 1630 in the Massachusetts Bay Colony when Governor John Winthrop uttered the words that centuries later would be quoted by Ronald Reagan. Winthrop called the Massachusetts Bay Colony a “city upon a hill.” Reagan embellished a little, calling it a “shining city on a hill.”

The idea of a city on a hill is heartwarming. It suggests what George Bush has spoken of: that the United States is a beacon of liberty and democracy. People can look to us and learn from and emulate us.

In reality, we have never been just a city on a hill. A few years after Governor Winthrop uttered his famous words, the people in the city on a hill moved out to massacre the Pequot Indians. Here’s a description by William Bradford, an early settler, of Captain John Mason’s attack on a Pequot village.

Those that escaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.

The kind of massacre described by Bradford occurs again and again as Americans march west to the Pacific and south to the Gulf of Mexico. (In fact our celebrated war of liberation, the American Revolution, was disastrous for the Indians. Colonists had been restrained from encroaching on the Indian territory by the British and the boundary set up in their Proclamation of 1763. American independence wiped out that boundary.)

Expanding into another territory, occupying that territory, and dealing harshly with people who resist occupation has been a persistent fact of American history from the first settlements to the present day. And this was often accompanied from very early on with a particular form of American exceptionalism: the idea that American expansion is divinely ordained. On the eve of the war with Mexico in the middle of the 19th century, just after the United States annexed Texas, the editor and writer John O’Sullivan coined the famous phrase “manifest destiny.” He said it was “the fulfillment of our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” At the beginning of the 20th century, when the United States invaded the Philippines, President McKinley said that the decision to take the Philippines came to him one night when he got down on his knees and prayed, and God told him to take the Philippines.

Invoking God has been a habit for American presidents throughout the nation’s history, but George W. Bush has made a specialty of it. For an article in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, the reporter talked with Palestinian leaders who had met with Bush. One of them reported that Bush told him, “God told me to strike at al Qaeda. And I struck them. And then he instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did. And now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East.” It’s hard to know if the quote is authentic, especially because it is so literate. But it certainly is consistent with Bush’s oft-expressed claims. A more credible story comes from a Bush supporter, Richard Lamb, the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, who says that during the election campaign Bush told him, “I believe God wants me to be president. But if that doesn’t happen, that’s okay.”

Divine ordination is a very dangerous idea, especially when combined with military power (the United States has 10,000 nuclear weapons, with military bases in a hundred different countries and warships on every sea). With God’s approval, you need no human standard of morality. Anyone today who claims the support of God might be embarrassed to recall that the Nazi storm troopers had inscribed on their belts, “Gott mit uns” (“God with us”).

Not every American leader claimed divine sanction, but the idea persisted that the United States was uniquely justified in using its power to expand throughout the world. In 1945, at the end of World War II, Henry Luce, the owner of a vast chain of media enterprises—Time, Life, Fortune—declared that this would be “the American Century,” that victory in the war gave the United States the right “to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

This confident prophecy was acted out all through the rest of the 20th century. Almost immediately after World War II the United States penetrated the oil regions of the Middle East by special arrangement with Saudi Arabia. It established military bases in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and a number of Pacific islands. In the next decades it orchestrated right-wing coups in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile, and gave military aid to various dictatorships in the Caribbean. In an attempt to establish a foothold in Southeast Asia it invaded Vietnam and bombed Laos and Cambodia.

The existence of the Soviet Union, even with its acquisition of nuclear weapons, did not block this expansion. In fact, the exaggerated threat of “world communism” gave the United States a powerful justification for expanding all over the globe, and soon it had military bases in a hundred countries. Presumably, only the United States stood in the way of the Soviet conquest of the world.

Can we believe that it was the existence of the Soviet Union that brought about the aggressive militarism of the United States? If so, how do we explain all the violent expansion before 1917? A hundred years before the Bolshevik Revolution, American armies were annihilating Indian tribes, clearing the great expanse of the West in an early example of what we now call “ethnic cleansing.” And with the continent conquered, the nation began to look overseas.

On the eve of the 20th century, as American armies moved into Cuba and the Philippines, American exceptionalism did not always mean that the United States wanted to go it alone. The nation was willing—indeed, eager—to join the small group of Western imperial powers that it would one day supersede. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote at the time, “The great nations are rapidly absorbing for their future expansion, and their present defense all the waste places of the earth… . As one of the great nations of the world the United States must not fall out of the line of march.” Surely, the nationalistic spirit in other countries has often led them to see their expansion as uniquely moral, but this country has carried the claim farthest.

American exceptionalism was never more clearly expressed than by Secretary of War Elihu Root, who in 1899 declared, “The American soldier is different from all other soldiers of all other countries since the world began. He is the advance guard of liberty and justice, of law and order, and of peace and happiness.” At the time he was saying this, American soldiers in the Philippines were starting a bloodbath which would take the lives of 600,000 Filipinos.

The idea that America is different because its military actions are for the benefit of others becomes particularly persuasive when it is put forth by leaders presumed to be liberals, orprogressives. For instance, Woodrow Wilson, always high on the list of “liberal” presidents, labeled both by scholars and the popular culture as an “idealist,” was ruthless in his use of military power against weaker nations. He sent the navy to bombard and occupy the Mexican port of Vera Cruz in 1914 because the Mexicans had arrested some American sailors. He sent the marines into Haiti in 1915, and when the Haitians resisted, thousands were killed.

The following year American marines occupied the Dominican Republic. The occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic lasted many years. And Wilson, who had been elected in 1916 saying, “There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight,” soon sent young Americans into the slaughterhouse of the European war.

Theodore Roosevelt was considered a “progressive” and indeed ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. But he was a lover of war and a supporter of the conquest of the Philippines—he had congratulated the general who wiped out a Filipino village of 600 people in 1906. He had promulgated the 1904 “Roosevelt Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, which justified the occupation of small countries in the Caribbean as bringing them “stability.”

During the Cold War, many American “liberals” became caught up in a kind of hysteria about the Soviet expansion, which was certainly real in Eastern Europe but was greatly exaggerated as a threat to western Europe and the United States. During the period of McCarthyism the Senate’s quintessential liberal, Hubert Humphrey, proposed detention camps for suspected subversives who in times of “national emergency” could be held without trial.

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, terrorism replaced communism as the justification for expansion. Terrorism was real, but its threat was magnified to the point of hysteria, permitting excessive military action abroad and the curtailment of civil liberties at home.

The idea of American exceptionalism persisted as the first President Bush declared, extending Henry Luce’s prediction, that the nation was about to embark on a “new American Century.” Though the Soviet Union was gone, the policy of military intervention abroad did not end. The elder Bush invaded Panama and then went to war against Iraq.

The terrible attacks of September 11 gave a new impetus to the idea that the United States was uniquely responsible for the security of the world, defending us all against terrorism as it once did against communism. President George W. Bush carried the idea of American exceptionalism to its limits by putting forth in his national-security strategy the principles of unilateral war.

This was a repudiation of the United Nations charter, which is based on the idea that security is a collective matter, and that war could only be justified in self-defense. We might note that the Bush doctrine also violates the principles laid out at Nuremberg, when Nazi leaders were convicted and hanged for aggressive war, preventive war, far from self-defense.

Bush’s national-security strategy and its bold statement that the United States is uniquely responsible for peace and democracy in the world has been shocking to many Americans.

But it is not really a dramatic departure from the historical practice of the United States, which for a long time has acted as an aggressor, bombing and invading other countries (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Grenada, Panama, Iraq) and insisting on maintaining nuclear and non-nuclear supremacy. Unilateral military action, under the guise of prevention, is a familiar part of American foreign policy.

Sometimes bombings and invasions have been cloaked as international action by bringing in the United Nations, as in Korea, or NATO, as in Serbia, but basically our wars have been American enterprises. It was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, who said at one point, “If possible we will act in the world multilaterally, but if necessary, we will act unilaterally.” Henry Kissinger, hearing this, responded with his customary solemnity that this principle “should not be universalized.” Exceptionalism was never clearer.

Some liberals in this country, opposed to Bush, nevertheless are closer to his principles on foreign affairs than they want to acknowledge. It is clear that 9/11 had a powerful psychological effect on everybody in America, and for certain liberal intellectuals a kind of hysterical reaction has distorted their ability to think clearly about our nation’s role in the world.

In a recent issue of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, the editors write, “Today Islamist terrorists with global reach pose the greatest immediate threat to our lives and liberties… . When facing a substantial, immediate, and provable threat, the United States has both the right and the obligation to strike preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally against terrorists or states that support them.”

Preemptively and, if need be, unilaterally; and against “states that support” terrorists, not just terrorists themselves. Those are large steps in the direction of the Bush doctrine, though the editors do qualify their support for preemption by adding that the threat must be “substantial, immediate, and provable.” But when intellectuals endorse abstract principles, even with qualifications, they need to keep in mind that the principles will be applied by the people who run the U.S. government. This is all the more important to keep in mind when the abstract principle is about the use of violence by the state—in fact, about preemptively initiating the use of violence.

There may be an acceptable case for initiating military action in the face of an immediate threat, but only if the action is limited and focused directly on the threatening party—just as we might accept the squelching of someone falsely shouting “fire” in a crowded theater if that really were the situation and not some guy distributing anti-war leaflets on the street. But accepting action not just against “terrorists” (can we identify them as we do the person shouting “fire”?) but against “states that support them” invites unfocused and indiscriminate violence, as in Afghanistan, where our government killed at least 3,000 civilians in a claimed pursuit of terrorists.

It seems that the idea of American exceptionalism is pervasive across the political spectrum.

The idea is not challenged because the history of American expansion in the world is not a history that is taught very much in our educational system. A couple of years ago Bush addressed the Philippine National Assembly and said, “America is proud of its part in the great story of the Filipino people. Together our soldiers liberated the Philippines from colonial rule.” The president apparently never learned the story of the bloody conquest of the Philippines.

And last year, when the Mexican ambassador to the UN said something undiplomatic about how the United States has been treating Mexico as its “backyard” he was immediately reprimanded by then–Secretary of State Colin Powell. Powell, denying the accusation, said, “We have too much of a history that we have gone through together.” (Had he not learned about the Mexican War or the military forays into Mexico?) The ambassador was soon removed from his post.

The major newspapers, television news shows, and radio talk shows appear not to know history, or prefer to forget it. There was an outpouring of praise for Bush’s second inaugural speech in the press, including the so-called liberal press (The Washington Post, The New York Times). The editorial writers eagerly embraced Bush’s words about spreading liberty in the world, as if they were ignorant of the history of such claims, as if the past two years’ worth of news from Iraq were meaningless.

Only a couple of days before Bush uttered those words about spreading liberty in the world, The New York Times published a photo of a crouching, bleeding Iraqi girl. She was screaming. Her parents, taking her somewhere in their car, had just been shot to death by nervous American soldiers.

One of the consequences of American exceptionalism is that the U.S. government considers itself exempt from legal and moral standards accepted by other nations in the world. There is a long list of such self-exemptions: the refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty regulating the pollution of the environment, the refusal to strengthen the convention on biological weapons. The United States has failed to join the hundred-plus nations that have agreed to ban land mines, in spite of the appalling statistics about amputations performed on children mutilated by those mines. It refuses to ban the use of napalm and cluster bombs. It insists that it must not be subject, as are other countries, to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court.

What is the answer to the insistence on American exceptionalism? Those of us in the United States and in the world who do not accept it must declare forcibly that the ethical norms concerning peace and human rights should be observed. It should be understood that the children of Iraq, of China, and of Africa, children everywhere in the world, have the same right to life as American children.

These are fundamental moral principles. If our government doesn’t uphold them, the citizenry must. At certain times in recent history, imperial powers—the British in India and East Africa, the Belgians in the Congo, the French in Algeria, the Dutch and French in Southeast Asia, the Portuguese in Angola—have reluctantly surrendered their possessions and swallowed their pride when they were forced to by massive resistance.

Fortunately, there are people all over the world who believe that human beings everywhere deserve the same rights to life and liberty. On February 15, 2003, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq, more than ten million people in more than 60 countries around the world demonstrated against that war.

There is a growing refusal to accept U.S. domination and the idea of American exceptionalism. Recently, when the State Department issued its annual report listing countries guilty of torture and other human-rights abuses, there were indignant responses from around the world commenting on the absence of the United States from that list. A Turkish newspaper said, “There’s not even mention of the incidents in Abu Ghraib prison, no mention of Guantánamo.” A newspaper in Sydney pointed out that the United States sends suspects—people who have not been tried or found guilty of anything—to prisons in Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Uzbekistan, countries that the State Department itself says use torture.

Here in the United States, despite the media’s failure to report it, there is a growing resistance to the war in Iraq. Public-opinion polls show that at least half the citizenry no longer believe in the war. Perhaps most significant is that among the armed forces, and families of those in the armed forces, there is more and more opposition to it.

After the horrors of the first World War, Albert Einstein said, “Wars will stop when men refuse to fight.” We are now seeing the refusal of soldiers to fight, the refusal of families to let their loved ones go to war, the insistence of the parents of high-school kids that recruiters stay away from their schools. These incidents, occurring more and more frequently, may finally, as happened in the case of Vietnam, make it impossible for the government to continue the war, and it will come to an end.

The true heroes of our history are those Americans who refused to accept that we have a special claim to morality and the right to exert our force on the rest of the world. I think of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist. On the masthead of his antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, were the words, “My country is the world. My countrymen are mankind.” <

Howard Zinn, the author of A People’s History of the United States, is a historian and playwright. His essay is adapted from a lecture he gave for MIT’s Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies.

Posted at 12:28 AM · Comments (0)

MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2005 - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

HONG KONG Is the bid by the China National Offshore Oil Corp. for the American oil company Unocal another act in a classical tragedy that will lead inexorably to the United States and China destroying the commercial embrace they both cherish?
From a political perspective, the bid could scarcely have come at a less opportune time. It is destined to rile many in a U.S. Congress already fretting over trade issues and the Chinese currency peg. It will be another boost to those calling for punitive tariffs against all Chinese goods. From an overall Chinese perspective, the bid could be deemed unwise.
Yet there is also a compelling logic to it. The cash offer of $18.5 billion looks huge enough but it amounts to little more than one month’s addition to China’s foreign exchange reserves at the rate of accumulation seen over the past year. Where else is China supposed to put its pile of dollars? Into yet more of the low yielding debt paper of Fannie Mae and the other agencies fueling America’s housing bubble?
Paying a fancy price for Unocal may be a less dumb investment than buying U.S. debt and helping keeping alive the cheap money era that Alan Greenspan has perpetuated as chairman of the Federal Reserve. At least China gets real assets, not increasingly dubious promises to pay secured on ever more lenient mortgage loans to sub-prime U.S. household borrowers.
Having been encouraged to join the global capitalist system, China naturally feels that it has as much right to buy a U.S. oil company as an Indonesian gas field or an Australian mining company.
And from the perspective of the Unocal shareholders, it looks a good deal too. Who else but China is so flush with cash that they are prepared to outbid the multinational oil giants, in this case Chevron? “Take the money and run,” might be the best advice, just as it was when IBM sold its personal computer business to China’s Lenovo or U.S. investors unloaded iconic real estate such as the Rockefeller Center to over-eager Japanese buyers in the late 1980s. Such purchases of overseas assets at inflated prices added to the problems Japan faced when its own asset bubble burst in 1990.
But if the reaction of many Americans to the bid confounds their own capitalist principles, Beijing also needs to remember the contradictions of its own position. To finance its bid, China National Offshore Oil Corp., or CNOOC, will have to leverage itself to an approximate 50:50 debt-to-equity ratio - a very high level for a resources company, particularly in a sector with such price volatility.
Such leverage is only possible because CNOOC is a government-controlled state enterprise. The ability of such companies to borrow almost as much as they please explains the problems of China’s state banking system and illustrates how far China has to go to reach U.S. concepts of private capitalism.
Lurking in the background, too, is the fact that China’s dollar hoard stems at least in part from its refusal to submit its currency even to modest amounts of market force. While its system remains so different, China cannot be expect to be treated as would a bidder from Europe or Mexico.
The Unocal issue cannot be separated from the wider issue of U.S.-China trade imbalances. The assumption that the relationship will endure because the two are dependent on each other - the United States on Chinese savings, China on the U.S. consumer - is dangerous. To the divisions over trade and currency are now being added the even more emotional issues of ownership and national security. In the real world, there is a difference between China’s ownership of Unocal and Fannie Mae debt.
The only way to avoid these problems going from bad to worse is to address not the symptoms but the macroeconomic origins. Thanks to Greenspan, money is absurdly cheap in the United States, hence the alarmingly low household savings rate, rising indebtedness and buoyant consumer demand. And money is cheap in China, too, as it pegs its currency and its interest rates to Greenspan’s policies, in the process creating growth led by excess investment - not least by state enterprises - and unsustainable export expectations.
Can China and America grasp these fundamental causes before the symptoms overwhelm them? That, not the fate of Unocal, is the issue both countries have to face if their commercial entente is to survive.

Posted at 12:24 AM · Comments (0)

Monday, June 27, 2005; Copyright The Washington Post

Some people fear the economic threat from China. Others fret about expensive oil. With the skill of an accomplished arsonist, China has now poured gas on the flames of these separate anxieties, turning two medium-size fires into a single inferno.

The arson takes the form of a bid by a largely state-owned Chinese oil company for California-based Unocal. Until Wednesday, Unocal was heading into the arms of Chevron, which had made a friendly takeover offer. But China National Offshore Oil Corp. is offering a premium for Unocal’s assets, triggering a fight over whether the federal government should block it on national security grounds.

The Unocal bid brings China one step closer to stirring up the sort of full-blown protectionist fury that confronted Japan two decades ago. Critics were already anxious about China’s global strength in low-end manufacturing, its allegedly manipulative currency policy and its piracy of U.S. intellectual property. Now they can also worry about China’s acquisition of U.S. companies. Last year a Chinese firm took over IBM’s personal computer business, and now another one is bidding for Maytag, which makes household machines including Hoovers. The Unocal bid, at $18.5 billion, would be the biggest Chinese deal so far.

Does it matter if China owns U.S. companies? Japan went on a corporate spending spree in the 1980s, and the chief victims were not Americans, as the protectionists predicted, but the Japanese themselves. The Japanese paid inflated prices for Hollywood studios and landmark New York buildings. The exiting American owners made off with a nice profit. The Japanese got burned.

The Unocal bid has triggered the same muddled complaining that attended those Japanese takeovers. The protectionists say the Chinese want to pay for Unocal with cheap loans from their taxpayers, just as Japanese corporations were once denounced for accessing cheap capital from servile banks. But this means that China’s taxpayers are offering sure profits to Unocal’s shareholders. Admittedly, it also means that Chevron’s shareholders stand to forgo a business opportunity, but then that opportunity may not have paid off. From the view of U.S. economic interests, this is a net plus.

Equally, the protectionists say that if the Unocal bid is allowed to go forward, the Chinese will use the power of corporate ownership to manipulate oil prices; worse, China could even blackmail America by withholding energy supply. This echoes old fears of Japanese semiconductor makers, which were said to be plotting sinister dominance of the memory-chip business in the 1980s. As the protectionists explained it, the Japanese plan was to destroy U.S. rivals by undercutting their prices, then later to ramp up their own prices and hold U.S. industry (including the defense industry) for ransom.

But the protectionist fears are based on a misunderstanding of markets, which are harder to corner or manipulate than people seem to understand. Japan’s assault on the memory-chip market never did produce the feared lock on this product. Instead, U.S. chipmakers prospered by moving upscale from plain memory chips to fancy microprocessors, and the supposedly oligopolistic Japanese memory-chip firms were soon challenged by South Korean rivals.

Does China’s advance on the oil market threaten American interests more acutely? It’s true that oil is a political commodity: Saudi Arabia and other big producers use their power over the oil price as a diplomatic lever. China, for its part, has a clear policy of buying up oil fields to boost its energy security. Since foreigners aren’t taking a free-market view of the oil business, it may seem naive for the United States to do so — especially when oil prices are around $60 a barrel.

Yet it’s hard to paint a plausible scenario in which Chinese control of Unocal would hurt us — despite loud exclamations to the contrary from Congress. For one thing, Unocal’s oil output accounts for a tiny fraction of U.S. consumption. The firm’s chief asset is undeveloped natural gas in Indonesia that’s going to take at least five years to develop — by which time the current tightness in the energy market will probably have dissipated because of the development of new oil fields.

But there’s a more fundamental objection to the protectionist anxiety. The protectionists worry that China will ship all of Unocal’s output home to its own industries, thus hogging scarce oil supplies and taking them “offline.” Even if this were possible, it wouldn’t matter: Unocal’s oil and gas would be meeting Chinese demand that would otherwise have to be met by Chinese purchases on world markets. In other words, China would be reducing both the supply and the demand for energy in the open market. Prices paid by American consumers wouldn’t budge.

What if there were a real oil crisis? A simulation conducted last week in Washington suggested that a couple of middling terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Alaska would be enough to cause a global oil shortage, sending prices above $100 a barrel. Yet Chinese ownership of Unocal wouldn’t affect this picture. China could respond to the crisis by routing Unocal’s energy to its own industries. But again, oil is fungible, so this wouldn’t matter.

You can see why this is not the dominant view in Congress. China is, after all, a communist dictatorship, and we shouldn’t assume its intentions are friendly. Equally, the American oil addiction is a genuine problem, and we should strive to break our dependence on potentially unstable suppliers such as Saudi Arabia. But although the Unocal bid seems to yoke these twin problems together, the appearance is deceptive. If you look for a convincing reason to block China’s bid for Unocal, you’re not going to find one.

mallabys@washpost.com

Posted at 12:59 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SATURDAY, JUNE 25, 2005

SINGAPORE Did Chinese sailors really discover America before Columbus? A new exhibition sets the scene, presenting new evidence that lends support to the assumptions made in “1421: The Year China Discovered America” by Gavin Menzies.

“1421: The Year China Sailed the World,” in Singapore in a special tent near the Esplanade (until Sept. 11), is primarily a celebration of Admiral Zheng He’s seven maritime expeditions between 1405 and 1423. With a fleet of 317 ships and 28,000 men, Zheng He is generally acknowledged as one of the great naval explorers, but how far he actually went remains a matter of dispute.

With original artifacts, videos and interactive exhibits, “1421” aims to take visitors through Zheng He’s life story, setting the historical and economic context of his voyages. Against this factual background, Menzies’s theories are presented, along with new evidence, mainly maps, backing his claims.

The exhibition starts in Hunnan (China) in 1382, with a narrative space giving some background on Zheng He’s youth. Zheng, a Chinese Muslim, was captured as a child in wartime by the Ming army and made a eunuch to serve at court. He became a scholar and a trusted adviser to the third Ming emperor, Zhu Di, who sent him on a mission to “proceed all the way to the ends of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas.”

When the giant fleet returned in 1423, however, the emperor had fallen. With that change of leadership, China began a policy of isolationism that would last hundreds of years. The large ships were left to rot at their moorings, and most of the records of the great journeys were destroyed (though some argue the records still exist).

A lattice maze in the exhibition takes visitors through the internal turmoil dominating the early part of the Ming dynasty. In the main room, five giant masts and sails mark the admiral’s first five voyages, each depicting the destination while highlighting important historical facts such as the trade of spices and teas and life on board the ships.

With 600 years of sailing experience, the Chinese had already developed many tools useful to sailing over great distances - like magnetized compasses and watertight bulkhead compartments of a kind the West would have to wait hundreds of years for. Importantly, Zheng He’s ships, known as junks, included on-board vegetable patches, growing soybeans in tubes all year to provide protein and vitamin C, guarding sailors against scurvy.

Along with examples of spices and other goods that the fleet would have brought back to China, the visitors can find ancient artifacts like unusual animal-shaped money from Malacca (Malaysia) made of tin, which the Chinese produced as currency when their copper coins ran out. Shaped in the form of animals like crocodiles, turtles and chickens, these coins were exclusive to Malacca but have been found in shipwrecks throughout Asia.

Arguing that the Chinese had reached America 70 years before Columbus, Menzies’s book caused a stir when it was published in 2002. “Columbus had a map of America, de Gama had a map showing India and Captain Cook had a map showing Australia, and it’s not my saying; it’s the explorers saying it,” the retired British Royal Navy submarine commanding officer said in an interview. “None of the great European explorers actually discovered anything new. The whole world was charted before they set sail. So somebody before them had done it, and that was the basis of the book,” he said.

Since then, the Web site he created to centralize evidence to substantiate his book has received more than 100,000 e-mails from people across the globe coming forward with “massive evidence” corroborating his claims, Menzies said. “It’s no longer about my book. It’s really a collective work.”

Menzies, who is planning to revise his book by 2007 in light of the latest evidence, now believes that Zheng He was not the first to sail to America. “One of the mistakes I made in my book was to say that Zheng He did everything. He had a legacy. Most of the world had already been mapped by Kublai Khan’s fleet,” he said.

The exhibition shows copies of Kublai Khan’s maps, recently found at the U.S. Library of Congress by an academic. The documents clearly show North America. Menzies said he believes the maps, which are currently being carbon-dated, are from the late 13th century.


The exhibition also presents copies of Korean maps from the collection of Charlotte Rees, which she inherited from her father, a third-generation missionary born in China. Rees’s maps date from the 16th century, but they are believed to be replicas of Chinese maps dating to 2200 B.C. Menzies believes Zheng would have known of these maps and hence how to reach the Americas - although he had to improve the charts, which contained longitudinal errors.

According to Menzies, recent evidence has been found of what are believed to be wrecked Chinese junks in Florida, South Carolina, New York and Canada. More compellingly, Menzies says, a new archaeological site in Nova Scotia at Cape Dauphin, discovered by the Canadian architect Paul Chiasson and represented by photos at the exhibition, indicates an early Chinese settlement.

Chiasson, in an e-mail interview, said, “The position of the wall on the side of the hill (not the summit), the layout of the wall across the hilly topography and the relationship of a small settlement located within the wall to the overall enclosure all point away from a European origin and appeared to point to a Chinese origin.”

While some archaeologists argue that the settlement could be Viking, Chiasson disagrees, pointing out that the nearest and largest evidence of any Viking settlement in the area is more than 700 kilometers to the north and that the Vikings were building much smaller outposts than the one discovered.

The site has just been surveyed by Cedric Bells, who has also worked on a New Zealand site believed to have Chinese junks. Bells has found canals, smelters, mines, Buddhist tombs, Islamic graves, barracks, all pointing to a very large settlement, Menzies said. “This site is unquestionably Chinese and unquestionably pre-European. I actually believe it’s quite possible it was started by Kublai Khan and then further developed by Zheng He.”

Carbon extracted from one of the mines is now being carbon-dated, and there are plans to request permission from the Canadian government for DNA testing and carbon-dating to be made on the bones found in graves.

The new evidence is likely to generate as much controversy as the book. Tan Ta Sen, president of the International Zhen He Society, believes the evidence shown in the exhibition is “opening doors” but needs to be further substantiated.

“The book is very interesting, but you still need more evidence,” Tan argued. “We [the society] don’t regard it as an historical book, but as a narrative one. I want to see more proof. But at least Menzies has started something, and people could find more evidence.”

Posted at 12:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

By the grey standards of China’s government-appointed chief executives, Fu Chengyu has some odd habits.

“People in China think I am strange because I do not drink tea. I like coffee,” says the CEO of state-controlled China National Offshore Oil Corporation in an interview. This week, the 54-year-old did something even more maverick than shunning China’s traditional national drink. After consuming many cups of coffee in an all-night board meeting, Mr Fu launched a Dollars 19.6bn (Pounds 10.7bn) unsolicited bid for Unocal, pitting CNOOC against Chevron, the US oil major, and incurring the wrath of US politicians.

Mr Fu is the public face of the most ambitious and costly attempt by a Chinese company to buy a US rival against its will. Success would see him hailed as a hero in his home country and as a visionary by international capital markets. Failure could trigger a damaging row with the US and deal a severe blow to China’s desire to play a more prominent role on the world’s capital and energy markets.

Mr Fu, a CNOOC lifer who joined the company when it was founded in 1982, rejects suggestions that this is a historic moment in China’s transition from command to market economy. “This is not a pioneer transaction. That is a common view from those who are outside China,” he says.

“People inside the country have been taught more about globalisation than people in other countries.”

Throughout his two years at CNOOC’s helm, Mr Fu, a tall, square-jawed man with a sartorial sense unknown among fellow Chinese captains of industry, has striven to portray an image of self-confidence. Acquaintances describe a non-smoking, non-drinking workaholic with an international outlook. Mr Fu is proud of his unorthodox corporate upbringing, in which he rose, not through the Communist party ranks as is the norm in China, but from the grassroots as an oil engineer - first in China and then in the US. He obtained a masters’ degree in petroleum engineering at the University of Southern California in 1986. He says the spell abroad and 14 years spent managing Sino-foreign energy joint ventures, including one with Chevron, still informs his management style.

“Those experiences made me understand more and more the international oil industry and the importance of international capital markets,” he says. “We are not really like other Chinese companies. Our systems, models and processes are more like our western counterparts.”

Yet, in many ways, Mr Fu is a son of China’s recent troubled history. Part of a generation who grew up during the chaos of the 1966-76 cultural revolution, he spent his formative years in a country whose education systems and social fabric were struggling to recover from the aftershocks of Mao Zedong’s misguided policies. The experience was not entirely negative: many China watchers maintain that those barren years spawned business leaders who are more aggressive and more willing to take risks because of their desire to make up for lost opportunities.

Mr Fu, who played basketball and football at university but now lists his three main hobbies as “work, work and work”, fits that description. Although he is charming on a personal level, colleagues and shareholders have experienced his aggressive and secretive streak. Mr Fu was left seething when, last March, CNOOC’s non-executive independent directors’ rejected his first attempt to bid for Unocal and accused him of not giving them enough time to consider the deal. And when China’s state-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, the top regulator of state enterprises, asked CNOOC’s foreign partners to rate it in January, criticisms included its poor communication with external stakeholders.

Mr Fu’s silence in the six months since the Financial Times revealed CNOOC’s interest in Unocal was further ammunition for those who accuse him of paying scant regard to the rights of shareholders other than the government. Few, however, doubt Mr Fu’s drive to make his mark in the corporate world in China and beyond. In a letter to investors in February, he promised “volumetric growth” for CNOOC’s businesses in years to come, adding that “nothing may stop our future growth”. He is equally bullish about the Unocal take over. “This is just about the growth of the company. I have been here 23 years but I have to lay the solid foundations for the next 20 years,” he says.

Although his recent track record is strong - net profit grew 40 per cent last year and CNOOC’s Hong Kong-listed share price rose 50 per cent - some critics say this may have had more to do with high oil prices than with Mr Fu’s management. Indeed, some doubt whether he has what it takes to handle the Unocal deal, given his lack of experience in takeover battles, or to manage a global oil company.

Mr Fu remains a government appointee. Having won approval from the authorities for the bid after selling the deal as an answer to China’s thirst for energy, Mr Fu will be under pressure to deliver. “He may have made the case that the gas would be available by acquiring Unocal, but still, spending Dollars 19.6bn is a pretty big leap,” says a foreign energy executive.

Mr Fu has been praised in the Chinese media for CNOOC’s takeover bid but the tide could turn if the acquisition turns sour. “There are a lot of people in China who think that Unocal is not worth that kind of money and there will be a lot of finger-pointing at him if it doesn’t work,” says a China-based industry observer. Mr Fu appears painfully aware of the challenge he faces. When asked about the likely US political backlash to CNOOC’s takeover, his patience appears to run out. “There is nothing threatening US national security,” he says, raising his voice for the first time in the interview. “We can secure jobs in the US, we will sell the (US-produced) oil and gas in the US. I do not see how this harms the US.”

Mr Fu will need more than strong words to persuade the members of Congress and the senators lining up to lambaste the “Chinese takeover” of national oil assets. Caught between his political masters, foreign shareholders and blood-thirsty politicians, his plan and his personal ambition will be put to the test. If Mr Fu’s parting shot is anything to go by, though, Chevron, Unocal and the Hill may have found their match. “We are deadly serious to do this deal,” he says.

Additional reporting by Joe Leahy, Enid Tsui and Richard McGregor

Posted at 12:50 AM · Comments (0)

There used to be a common expression that money used to send men to the moon could better be spent on feeding people down here on Earth. As if in response, funding for space exploration was eventually cut and more money was channeled into so-called development aid, the ultimate aim of which, we were led to believe, was to end poverty in the world.
Men have not returned to the moon for many years and poverty has not only not been wiped out, it has become more widespread and more extreme. The piles of money that rich countries gave to poor countries to help them grow their economies usually ended up in the pockets of dictators or multinational companies, spurring cynicism rather than genuine development. As a result, most citizens of the developed world think that attempting to eradicate poverty is a noble but fruitless endeavor.

Changing this mindset is precisely the impetus behind a series of global campaigns that have emerged recently. The target of these campaigns is the leaders who will attend the G-8 summit in Scotland next month, and the most prominent event among them is the series of Live 8 concerts organized (or, more exactly, summoned into being) by Bob Geldof, the Irish rock star who became a full-time antipoverty crusader after he arranged the Live Aid concert in 1985.

Live Aid raised £140 million for African relief, but the money was immediately sucked up to pay debts. In other words, almost none of it went to poor people. Several years later, this sad fact impressed itself on Bono, another Irish rock star who participated in Live Aid, and led to his transformation into a global crusader with a more practical idea for exploiting his star power to end poverty.

“I realized that you can’t affect the structure of poverty without politicians,” he told the Yomiuri Shimbun two weeks ago. For more than a decade Bono has gone mano-a-mano with world leaders to convince them th