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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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Sunday, July 31, 2005; B01

BEIJING We’re losing the intelligence war against China.

No, not the one with spy satellites, human operatives and electronic
eavesdropping. I’m talking about intelligence : having an intelligent
understanding of and intelligent discussions about China — where it’s
heading, why it’s bidding to buy major U.S. companies and whether we
should
worry. Above all, I’m talking about formulating and pursuing
intelligent
policies for dealing with China.

The Chinese government today understands America much better than our
government understands China. Consequently, the Chinese government is
much
better at pulling our strings than we are at pulling theirs. China’s
top
leaders, diplomats and bureaucrats have a clear framework from which
they
view the United States, and they are focused and unified in formulating
and
implementing their policies toward us.

In contrast, our government’s viewpoint on China is unfocused,
fractured and
often uninformed. Is China still the Red Menace of the Cold War or a
hot new
competitor out to eat our economic lunch? Both views as well as a
hodgepodge
of other interpretations can be found in the halls of the White House,
Congress and the Pentagon. Add to that confusion a vicious domestic
political culture that brooks no compromise, and the chances of
formulating
a coherent China policy approach nil.

Playing the barbarians off against each other has been a core tenet of
Chinese foreign policy since the imperial dynasty days when China’s
maps
depicted a huge landmass labeled the “Middle Kingdom” surrounded by
tiny
islands labeled England, Germany, France, America, Russia and Africa.
China
was the center of the world and everyone else was a barbarian. That’s
why
the Chinese are delighted by spectacles such as when rival members of a
U.S.
congressional delegation screamed at one another in front of their
Chinese
hosts in the Great Hall of the People. And what should they think of
the
time top Chinese officials laid out clear policy objectives to an
American
business audience and a U.S. cabinet member responded by saying “Jesus
loves
the Chinese people”?

Since the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, China policy has been a
political
football that American politicians kick back and forth to score points
against one another. In the 1990s, it was a penalty-free game because
the
United States had the upper hand. China needed our capital, technology,
know-how and insatiable consumer market to build its economy, as well
as our
blessing to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).

But those days are over. China’s raging consumer market, its massive
export
machine, voracious appetite for global resources and more than $700
billion
in foreign exchange reserves puts the ball in its court. It is
difficult to
overstate the transformation that has swept China in the past 15 years.
To
frame it in terms of comparable historical changes in the United
States,
China has been simultaneously experiencing the raw capitalism of the
robber
baron era of the late 1800s; the speculative financial mania of the
1920s;
the rural-to-urban migration of the 1930s; the emergence of the
first-car,
first-home, first-fashionable-clothes, first-college-education,
first-family-vacation middle-class consumer boom of the 1950s; and even
aspects of social upheaval similar to the 1960s.

Today Chinese government officials and business executives admire, fear
and
pity the United States. They admire our entrepreneurial culture, free
markets, legal system and ability to unemotionally discard what doesn’t
work
while our best-in-the-world universities and enormous R&D capabilities
create new products and services. China’s economic reforms over the
past 25
years have been aimed at creating a Chinese variation of the U.S.
economic
system and its ability to unleash entrepreneurial instincts and harness
markets to build a world-beating economy.

China’s fear stems from seeing our high-tech military machine in
action. I
will never forget standing in front of the Beijing train station during
the
first Gulf War, amid a sea of Chinese workers, thousands of whom had
stopped
their bicycles in the street to watch slack-jawed as huge outdoor TV
screens
displayed footage of American missiles screaming down Baghdad
smokestacks.
Just a few blocks away in the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai,
Chinese
officials imagined such destruction raining down on Beijing and
realized
that their strategy of defending China with swarms of peasant soldiers
was
as outdated as Maoist philosophy. They immediately embarked on a
multi-decade plan to build a military as advanced as ours.

Chinese pity comes from their belief that we are a country in decline.
More
than a few Chinese friends have quoted to me the proverb fu bu guo san
dai
(wealth doesn’t make it past three generations) as they wonder how we
became
so ill-disciplined, distracted and dissolute. The fury surrounding
Monica-gate seemed an incomprehensible waste of time to a nation whose
emperors were supplied with thousands of concubines. Chinese are
equally
astonished that Americans are allowing themselves to drown in debt and
under-fund public schools while the media focus on fights over feeding
tubes, displays of the Ten Commandments and how to eat as much as we
can
without getting fat.

China is all about unity, focus and leverage. Chinese officials and
business
executives are obsessed with a single question: What advantage do I
have
over you? No surprise then that Chinese officials are delighted to be
funding ever larger portions of America’s budget deficit. They know
that if
they sat out one U.S. Treasury auction, the U.S. stock markets would
tumble.
They yawn when Congress threatens to impose huge tariffs on Chinese
imports,
knowing that the resulting huge price increases at Wal-Mart, Best Buy
and
the Gap would cost some members of Congress their jobs. And while the
Chinese do not relish sharing a border with the nutso North Koreans,
they
are happy to turn this bad situation to their advantage. The Bush
administration desperately needs China’s help in quelling the hermit
kingdom’s nuclear ambitions while we are bogged down in Iraq.

Still, China isn’t even a fraction as powerful as it pretends to be.
Beneath
the bluster, it is a nation beset with internal problems. Pollution
chokes
its air and water. The growing gap between the haves and have-nots and
rampant government corruption are triggering almost daily
demonstrations.
And China has no ideology other than enriching itself. The relentless
commercial drive that has shaken China out of its imperial and
socialist
stupor has now become an end unto itself, leaving a population that is
spiritually adrift. So far rapid economic growth, looser lifestyle
strictures and straightforward political repression have held things
together, but the Communist Party leadership knows that it needs a
different
formula for long-term success.

From a U.S. perspective, China’s untempered commercialism suggests a
nation
out to milk us of everything it can. What is being lost in our vicious
battles over China policy is that China and America have manageable
differences and many complementary interests. With an intelligent and
consistent China policy, the United States could help China and itself
at
the same time.

I offer these humble suggestions as a patriotic American who has lived
in
Beijing for 15 years — and as a person who respects the Chinese people
and
what they are accomplishing.

Domestic politics should stop at the U.S. border. Trench warfare on
China
policy between the political parties and executive branch factions only
plays into China’s hands.

Stop preaching instant democracy. After the Tiananmen massacre, China’s
state media engendered a “nationalism of resentment.” Aimed at cooling
the
ardor that young Chinese felt for America, the media portrayed the
United
States as having a secret agenda to keep China poor so that America can
stay
rich. A key part of this message is that America wants China to
democratize
because it will plunge the country into chaos. Those who survived the
insanity of the Cultural Revolution see the point. Even Chinese people
I
know who are unhappy with their government believe that a nation with
two
millennia of top-down rule can only pluralize gradually. America can
best
help China inch toward political pluralism by trying to strengthen
China’s
court system and rule of law and by making visas plentiful again for
Chinese
to attend our universities and public policy forums.

Let Chinese companies purchase or merge with U.S. companies unless the
American company has genuine advanced military technology. We should
also
require reciprocity. Take the recent China National Offshore Oil
Corporation
Ltd. (CNOOC) bid to purchase Unocal Corp. Hysteria led to passage of a
ridiculous House resolution by 398 to 15 expressing national security
concerns about the deal, which involved a scant 0.8 percent of U.S. oil
production. Instead, the United States should have responded as China
would:
Use the deal as leverage. America’s politicians should have welcomed
the
CNOOC deal as long as China changed its own oil policies, which prevent
foreign companies from operating gas stations in China, compel them to
use
Chinese companies when exploring for oil and almost always offer
exploration
leases for foreigners at the edges of promising fields to help China
pinpoint the location of the biggest reservoirs for its own drillers.

Develop smart, workable rules on technology exports. Since the
mid-1990s,
China has been able to purchase almost any commercial technology it
desires
from Japan, Israel, Russia or the European Union. Bogged down in a
bureaucratic quagmire of ever-changing rules and approval processes,
U.S.
machine tool makers and silicon chip equipment manufacturers have
fallen
behind. If this continues, we will endanger our own national security
base
by weakening our technology companies and their R&D capabilities.
Nevertheless, many in Washington favor “catch-all control” regulations
that
could, for example, block a U.S. truck engine manufacturer from doing
business with a Chinese firm that supplies some engines for Chinese
army
trucks. European and Japanese truck engine makers doubtless will be
deeply
grateful.

Vigorously push trade issues that provide a long-term win-win for China
and
its trading partners. Our focus should be intellectual property rights
(IPR)
protection. China’s original modernization model was to invite foreign
firms
to manufacture for export in joint-ventures with Chinese companies.
China
was then supposed to learn to build its own companies and products. But
many
huge companies have been built through the wholesale theft of
intellectual
property and rampant copying of products. Within a three-block radius
of my
Beijing apartment, there are several dozen shops selling any Hollywood
movie
or American television series of note for $1 per DVD, copies of Prada
and
Louis Vuitton handbags for $10, nearly perfect copies of Callaway or
Taylor
Made golf clubs for $150, and fake North Face parkas for $35. Copied
pharmaceuticals, car parts and the whole gamut of industrial products
are
plentiful across China. Worse, more and more such products are being
exported. Chinese piracy is rapidly undermining political support for
China
in Congress and hampering the growth of its most innovative companies.

China knows the problem needs fixing but fears job losses and potential
unrest in the towns and villages that host copycat factories. New U.S.
Trade
Representative Rob Portman could take a lesson from a predecessor,
Charlene
Barshefsky, who drafted a road map to guide China to WTO accession. As
with
WTO, China lacks the political will or consensus to come up with a plan
on
its own. The U.S. government should also back a new effort by the U.S.
Chamber of Commerce and the American Chamber of Commerce in China to
rate
Chinese provinces and cities by their level of IPR enforcement. Public
embarrassment and internal competition for foreign investment may prove
to
be stronger motivators than foreign complaints.

I understand America’s genuine security concerns regarding China. But
they
should not be overblown to the point where they undermine our economic
security. I also understand that reaching a political consensus isn’t
easy.
But I am worried about the erosion of the sensible center. Chinese and
U.S.
politicians share the blame. As a global economic power, China can no
longer
employ IPR policies appropriate for a banana republic. And responsible
members of Congress can no longer gin up China hysteria to get votes.

The stakes are getting too high.

Author’s e-mail: jlmcgregor@jlmcgregor.com

James McGregor is a journalist-turned-businessman and former chairman
of the
American Chamber of Commerce in China. His book “One Billion Customers:
Lessons From the Front Lines of Doing Business in China” (Simon &
Schuster/ The Wall Street Journal Books) will be published in October.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 11:52 PM · Comments (0)

I’m on vacation in the States for the next couple of weeks, with family in the Blue Ridge Mountains — home — in Virginia.
I’ve always had a nagging sense of guilt for not updating this section of the site more often, but many other demands on my time have made that impractical. In the meantime, I hope people appreciate the frequently updated news offerings in the Snippets section, and the ever expanding photo galleries. On the latter, there’s a bit of news, as evidenced by the latest gallery — in black & white.
I’ve bought a medium format camera and am going to use it whenever practical, alongside my trusty Casio digital. I hope you’ll notice the improved resolution and more attention to composition. I’ve posted a couple of shots in this first medium format gallery in high resolution, just to give a flavor for the sharpness one can achieve with 120 mm film and good lenses.
There’ll be more news to come soon about pictures, and perhaps, too, about music.

Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (1)

Friday, July 29, 2005

STAFF REPORTER
The authorities issued a stern warning yesterday after a series of violent protests across the country, emphasising the Communist Party’s leadership and the need to abide by the law.

The People’s Daily vowed in a front-page commentary that no illegal attempts to disrupt social stability would be tolerated as the country went through a critical stage of reform.

“Unity and stability are the overarching themes for the country and the people’s wishes,” it said, noting the source of growing social unrest lay within the contrasting interests of various groups. “However, resolving any such problems must be done in line with the laws and the maintenance of stability. The solution of any problems must rely on the party, the governments, laws, policies and the system.

“Any illegal activities are not to be allowed and will be punished in accordance with laws.”

The commentary, also carried by Xinhua and state television, urged local authorities to actively deal with “instability factors” to prevent widespread public dissatisfaction from spreading or turning into violence.

Analysts said the warning was not unexpected, given that several senior officials had talked openly about increasing concern by the central leadership about the riots and protests.

Beijing-based political scientist Liu Junning said the issuing of such a strongly worded commentary showed President Hu Jintao was intent on taking a strong stance to maintain social stability.

Professor Liu noted that several recent “mass incidents” in southern provinces, mainly over compensation disputes after land requisitions, were yet to be settled.

“The People’s Daily article can serve as a guideline for local authorities on how to deal with similar mass protests in the future,” he said.

The commentary coincided with a report that 2,000 farmers had clashed with hundreds of police last week in a land dispute in Inner Mongolia that left dozens injured.

Posted at 10:23 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

THURSDAY, JULY 28, 2005

HOUSTON China’s oil thirst
Lately there has been much grandstanding about the dangers of the bid by a government-backed Chinese oil company, Cnooc, for Unocal. But American protectionists are focusing on the wrong target.
It’s true that China could be a threat to American energy security some day, but not because it wants to buy an American company already on the block. Before American politicians intervene to make sure that Unocal’s Indonesian gas and oil fields remain in the hands of a U.S. corporation, they would do well to recall some history.
In the 1930s, the Japanese government, urged on by the Japanese military and domestic oil firms, began asserting control over oil imports, refining facilities and oil resources in its colonies in China to the detriment of the Western companies, which, at the time, owned the majority of Japan’s oil business. The Japanese government considered this a vital move to protect the country’s security.
But American and European oil companies protested. In August 1934, Walter Teagle of Standard Oil and Henri Deterding of Royal Dutch Shell lobbied Washington to frighten Japan into moderation by hinting at a cutoff of American oil exports. The State Department demurred, but mutual tension over oil supplies escalated into paranoia and contributed to the build-up to World War II.
The outcry over China’s potential acquisition of Unocal may or may not partake of the same kind of historical dynamic. But in reality, China’s purchase of Unocal’s Indonesian assets is hardly a threat that merits the rise in bilateral tensions and political gamesmanship that could follow an American effort to block the Cnooc deal.
In fact, even if the Chinese acquired Unocal - which seems less likely now that a rival bidder, Chevron, has sweetened its offer - Cnooc’s oil output would still be a small fraction of that of top American companies.
Chevron, for example, produced more than 1.8 million barrels a day in 2004 from reserves holding close to 8,599 million barrels. Cnooc barely produces a tenth of that from its overseas holdings. The top three American firms - ExxonMobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips - together produced about 5.6 million barrels a day last year. It is hard to imagine how China’s purchase of Unocal’s limited oil assets would threaten such powerful American companies or the United States itself.
Moreover, it is in the American interest to promote open access to foreign investment in oil exploration and production. Without it, American oil companies could not survive.If anything, the United States should be pushing policies that expand such access in oil-rich countries like Iraq, Mexico, Russia and Saudi Arabia.
That said, there is real reason for American concern about China’s suddenly voracious oil thirst. Right now, that thirst translates into a willingness to overbid for assets like Unocal. But to what strategies might China turn if Western competitors prevent it from acquiring choice assets?
Already, China has secured some very attractive oil acreage in countries with which the United States has had troubled relations - notably Iran, Sudan and, more recently, Venezuela. In some cases, the Chinese have purposely gone this route to take advantage of American sanctions policies.
In doing so, they’ve helped to undermine the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to isolate these nations, and they’ve given such countries the impression that so long as they have oil, they can fruitfully play China and the United States against each other.
From economic ties, political and military relationships often follow, and these pose even more fundamental risks to American security. China has begun expanding its light arms trade in many of the countries that supply it with oil.
In Sudan, China has had to deploy quasi-military personnel to protect its oil facilities from local insurgents. And Beijing initially took a nonconstructive position on the crisis in Darfur, mainly because it couldn’t afford to alienate the Sudanese government, since the China National Petroleum Corp. has a big presence in Sudan’s prolific Heglig field.
As China’s energy requirements expand, Beijing’s tactics could become more assertive, even aggressive. It is certainly not in America’s interest for China, a nuclear power, to be increasingly susceptible to political pressure from oil-producing states, or for it to lock out other consuming nations from sources of energy.
The United States won’t enhance its security by threatening to obstruct China’s Unocal purchase. Instead, American policymakers should explore the possibility of a constructive, high-level dialogue with China on energy and the Middle East.
The U.S. Department of Energy runs an alternative energy research program with Beijing that could serve as a good example of how to nurture common interests. America would also be wise to bring China into the oil emergency stockpiling system in coordination with the International Energy Agency, because reducing the risks to China’s supply is a winning strategy for the United States, too.
For now, the United States can afford to take the high road. China won’t be a serious economic rival for years to come. And maybe by that time, its political stance will have changed on key issues like North Korea, Iran, intellectual property and, most important, human rights.
In the meantime, we should not forget that if it wanted to, the U.S. Navy could block China’s access to Cnooc’s foreign oil any day of the week. China, however, would have difficulty imposing such a blockade on American companies. It’s true that as an oil importer, China is on the rise. But who here is really a threat to whom?
The United States should take a step back and see the Unocal bid for what it is - a move to be settled by the market.
(Amy Myers Jaffe is a fellow for energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.)

Posted at 4:45 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe
TUESDAY, JULY 26, 2005

BOSTON President George W. Bush sure cared about Niger in 2003 when he said, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Vice President Dick Cheney sure cared about the yellowcake, so much so that one of the reported reasons that the diplomat Joseph Wilson went to the African nation in 2002 was because of Cheney’s interest in checking out any possible links between Saddam and nuclear weapons. Wilson found no evidence of uranium sales.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld cared enough about Niger that, like Bush, he said Saddam Hussein “has the design for a nuclear weapon” and was “working on several different methods of enriching uranium and recently was discovered seeking significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Rumsfeld used that assumption to conflate the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with Saddam, a tie disproved by Bush’s own 9/11 commission.
Rumsfeld said: “We looked at the destruction caused by the terrorists who took jetliners, turned them into missiles, and used them to kill 3,000 innocent men, women and children, and we considered the destruction that could be caused by an adversary armed with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. Instead of 3,000 to be killed, it could be 30,000, 300,000.”
Let us hope an administration that used Niger to fake out the world for its invasion of Iraq can take the time to go back to that country to prevent death to many times more people. To almost the complete silence of the United States, Niger, one of the world’s poorest nations, was hit last year by natural weapons of mass destruction - locusts and drought.
That double whammy decimated cereal production. Now, the United Nations and Oxfam are pleading for the world to pay attention. While Rumsfeld got us into war over fears of 300,000 Americans being killed, 3.6 million people in Niger - one-third of its population - are already malnourished, and 2.5 million of them face outright famine.
Jan Egeland, the UN relief coordinator, said last week that 150,000 children there will die soon without immediate aid. Relief agencies have been warning about the possibility of this since last autumn, but for all of the self-praise of wealthy nations at the recent Group of Eight summit, the response to this crisis has been appalling.
An initial call for aid by the United Nations in November resulted in almost nothing. This spring the United Nations called for $16 million and received only $3.8 million. The crisis has escalated so rapidly that Egeland revised the figure needed to $30 million, but so far, only $10 million has come in.
Egeland called the world’s sloth a tragedy in itself. He said that if wealthy nations had been on top of the crisis early, it would have cost only $1 a day to prevent a child in Niger from being malnourished. Now, he says, it will take $80 a day to save the child’s life. Egeland noted that the $3.5 billion a year that the United Nations asks wealthy countries for humanitarian aid “is one-third what Europeans eat in ice cream a year and is one-tenth of what Americans spend on their pets a year.”
The United States, unfortunately, stands out for standing on the sidelines. Bush has boasted of increases of aid to Africa, and, yes, the United States is by far the world’s biggest giver of aid in absolute dollars. But it has taken three years for Bush’s Millennium Challenge Account to start giving out aid, and as a portion of U.S. gross domestic product, we are at the bottom of wealthy nations. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain wanted the nations to commit to a target of 0.7 percent of GNP for aid at the G-8 summit. Sweden, Norway, Luxembourg, and Denmark all already give at least 0.7 percent. The United States gives 0.16 percent. It is the only wealthy nation under 0.2 percent.
The president of Niger was one of five African leaders who came to the White House last month when Bush touted increased trade to the continent. “The United States will do our part to help the people of Africa realize the brighter future they deserve,” Bush said at the time. The nation that was so concerned about yellowcake in Niger now needs to give its people the grain they deserve.
(Derrick Z. Jackson’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 9:34 AM · Comments (0)

Thursday July 28 2005
Copyright - The Guardian

The United States and Australia have been working in secret for 12
months on an alternative to the Kyoto protocol and will reveal today a joint pact with China, India and South Korea to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The deal, which will be formally announced by the US deputy secretary
of state Robert Zoellick in Laos today when the five “partners” hold a press conference, comes a month after Tony Blair struggled at the G8 summit to get George Bush to commit to any action on climate change.

Details of the agreement are not yet public but it is clear it is
designed to give US and Australian companies selling renewable energy and carbon dioxide-cutting technologies access to markets in Asia.

It is thought the pact does not include any targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which the rest of the developed world has signed up to under Kyoto.

The US, Australia and China are big coal exporters and are anxious to
develop and export clean coal technologies.

The existence of the pact appeared to come as a surprise to Downing
Street yesterday.

The government eventually issued a statement through the Department
for Environment welcoming the agreement but warning that it could not
replace Kyoto. It also made clear that Mr Blair would continue to discuss climate change with America, China and India, as part of his G8 presidency.

Oliver Letwin, the Conservative environment spokesman, said it was
“odd” that the pact had not figured in the Gleneagles discussions but added: “I hope that it means Bush at last accepts the need to move in a sensible direction.”

Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, described Mr Bush’s
failure to disclose the deal at Gleneagles as “a poke in the eye for
Tony Blair”.

The existence of the pact, and the fact it was designed as an alternative to Kyoto, were disclosed by Australia’s environment minister, Senator Ian Campbell.

He said: “It is quite clear that the Kyoto protocol won’t get the
world to where it wants to go. We have got to find something that works better.
We need to develop technologies which can be developed in Australia and exported around the world - but it also shows that what we’re doing now,under the Kyoto protocol, is entirely ineffective. Anyone who tells you that the Kyoto protocol, or signing the Kyoto protocol is the answer, doesn’t understand the question.”

Kyoto would fail because “it engages very few countries, most of the
countries in it will not reach their targets, and it ignores the big
looming problem - that’s the rapidly developing countries”.

He disclosed that the US and Australia had been working on the deal
for 12 months.

The British government statement said: “We welcome any action taken by governments to reduce greenhouse gases … The announcement from
Australia and others certainly does not replace the Kyoto process.

“Kyoto represents a historic first step in world cooperation but needs to be built on post 2012 - that process continues in Montreal later this year. We made excellent progress on climate change at Gleneagles.

“The G8 leaders, including President Bush, signed up to a plan of
action to reduce emissions. In addition … China, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa and India, were brought into the debate on energy needs, development and climate change, on equal terms.”

The trade agreements in the Kyoto protocol allowed developed countries, and companies in them, to export clean technologies to developing countries and make money by claiming carbon credits. These credits are the notional tonnes of carbon saved by using low-carbon technologies and renewables to generate electricity rather than dirty coal or other fossil fuel plants. These deals are not open to the US and Australia because they repudiated the treaty.

Environment groups across the world yesterday expressed doubts that
the US was doing any more than safeguarding its own trade in technology.

Mr Juniper said that only a legally binding treaty which set targets
and timetables to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would achieve the 60% reductions which scientists said were required to save the planet from climate change.

“I fear this is another attempt to undermine Kyoto and a message to
the developing world to buy US technology and not to worry about targets and timetables.”

US environmental groups agreed and pointed to an energy bill expected
to move through Congress this week which includes $8.5bn in tax
incentives and billions of dollars more in loan guarantees and other subsidies for the electricity, coal, nuclear, natural gas and oil industries.

The White House said that President Bush intended to sign the bill.

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited

Posted at 5:28 PM · Comments (0)

By Mure Dickie in Beijing and John Reed in Johannesburg - Copyright The Financial Times
Published: July 27 2005 03:00

Robert Mugabe may be a pariah in western nations these days but his image clearly remains untarnished in the eyes of Chinese diplomats, who on Tuesday named him an honorary professor.
Undismayed by criticism of Mr Mugabe’s urban eviction programme, which the United Nations says has made 700,000 poor people homeless, Beijing’s foreign affairs college instead hailed his “brilliant contribution” to diplomacy and international relations.
“[Mr Mugabe] is a man of strong convictions, a man of great achievements, a man devoted to preserving world peace [and] a good friend of the Chinese people,” gushed An Yongyu, Communist party secretary of the Foreign Ministry-controlled college.

Such praise and the warm welcome given Mr Mugabe by Hu Jintao, China’s president, underline Beijing’s willingness to embrace leaders widely shunned in the west as part of its efforts to build international influence and ensure access to key resources.

China signed a $600m (€499m, £344m) oil deal with President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan in May, shortly after he ordered a bloody crackdown on demonstrators. It has also been expanding economic ties with Sudan, despite accusations that its government has been involved in genocide.

Elsewhere in Africa, China’s Eximbank last year approved a $2bn credit line for Angola, which, like Zimbabwe, has a poor human rights record but is the continent’s second largest oil producer. China, after the US, is a main customer.

At their meeting on Tuesday Mr Hu told Mr Mugabe that China and Zimbabwe were “sincere friends and trustworthy partners”. Beijing planned to expand diplomatic co-operation with Mr Mugabe’s government, Chinese state media quoted Mr Hu as saying before their joint signing of an economic co-operation agreement.

With no details of the pact announced, it was unclear whether China plans to be as generous with its money as it has been with its praise.

But there is no doubting the potential significance of Beijing’s backing for Mr Mugabe and for other beleaguered regimes. China’s economic boom has made it a key buyer of global commodities, in which many cash-strapped African states abound. Its financial clout, bolstered last week by a 2 per cent revaluation against the US dollar, has turned it into a significant investor in many developing countries.

Zimbabwe, which devalued its currency by 39 per cent against the dollar last week, is suffering critical shortages of basic goods and faces expulsion from the International Monetary Fund.

South African media have speculated that China might advance financing to Zimbabwe in exchange for concessions to mine some of its rich reserves of platinum, coal and other minerals.

Beijing’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council also makes it a potentially potent diplomatic ally. A UN report last week sharply criticised Operation Restore Order, its military-style urban resettlement programme, and the matter may be raised before the Sec urity Council. Zimbabwe says the clearances are an attempt to reform slums but the UN called them a “catastrophic injustice”.

China’s censored media have avoided such controversies during Mr Mugabe’s six-day state visit, his first since 1999. However, they have noted details of his career, such as his early work as an educator and anti-colonial freedom fighter.

He appears to have been in an excellent mood in Beijing. When giving a speech after receiving his honorary professorship, Mr Mugabe, 81, “spoke with such fervour, he completely lost track of the time”, the official Xinhua news agency reported.

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Copyright - The Guardian

Survey reveals main cause of death of people under 35

Xining, China
Tuesday July 26, 2005
The Guardian

Suicide is the main cause of death among young adults in China, the state media said yesterday in a report that highlights the growing pressures to succeed in love, work and education in one of the world’s fastest changing societies.

Increasing stress, loneliness and a lack of medical support for depression are thought to have contributed to an annual suicide toll that is estimated at 250,000 people a year.

According to the China Daily, an additional 2.5 million to 3.5 million make unsuccessful attempts to kill themselves each year.

Referring a recent survey by the health ministry, the paper said that suicide was the fifth most common cause of death in China after lung cancer, traffic accidents, heart disease and other illnesses.

But it is most prevalent among young urban intellectuals and rural women. Exam stress, career worries and relationship problems are named as the main reasons why suicide has become the main killer of people aged between 20 and 35.

Newspapers are filled with stories of bright and wealthy college students - almost all of them single children because of the state’s one-child policy - who kill themselves because they fear that they cannot fulfill their families’ aspirations.

Among the most recent tragedies was the death of a student at Guangzhou University in southern China who jumped off a campus building last week.

“I’m very sorry I can not live up to your expectations,” wrote the student, named Jun, in a farewell note. It was an all too common story on campuses throughout China.

In the first six months of the year, 14 students killed themselves in Beijing, compared with 19 in the whole of 2004. According to the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Centre, China has 22 suicides for every 100,000 people, about 50% higher than the global average.

Some of those who suffer get little public sympathy, notably the 1,000-plus communist cadres who kill themselves every year after being exposed in anti-corruption campaigns.

Others are ignored, particularly rural women whose suicide rate - about 30 in every 100,000 people - is among the highest in the world.

With many husbands leaving their villages to go and find work as migrant labourers in the cities, women in the countryside have less support in dealing with the traditional pressures of motherhood, farming and moving in with their in-laws. Many also have access to pesticides - a very painful but effective way to commit suicide.

But political, academic and media attention has focused on depression among young urban intellectuals who are at the forefront of China’s economic boom.

More than 60% of people surveyed in a recent two-year study of 15,431 depression sufferers were in their 20s or 30s, the China Daily said.

“Society is full of pressure and competition, so young people, lacking experience in dealing with difficulties, tend to get depressed,” Liu Hong, a Beijing psychiatrist, told the paper.

Such concerns have reached the highest levels of government. Last September, the State Council issued its first mental health policy document, aimed at targeting resources at high-risk groups and making it easier for people to receive treatment.

But the response has been slow. Investment in China’s healthcare system has fallen far behind the country’s economic growth, particularly in the area of psychology.

According to Norman Sartorious, former director of the World Health Organisation’s mental health programme, China has one psychiatrist for 100,000 people - about 20 to 30 times lower than the rate in Europe.

One reason is the cultural stigma attached to depression, which is seen as a character flaw rather than as a medical ailment. In the past it was also associated with decadent western societies, but now that China is growing wealthier it is starting to face up to the problem.

Two years ago, the first national suicide prevention centre was established in Beijing. It has been flooded with more than 220,000 calls, but only one in 10 of those seeking support has been able to get through first time.

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HOWARD W. FRENCH - Copyright The New York Times
Click to see photos
July 26, 2005

HUITENGXILE, China, June 25 - From the distance the turbines look almost forbidding, looming very large on the horizon like some clawed space invaders. But one must get up close, very close, to hear the slightest hum as their blades spin, harvesting power from the wind.

Apart from the random bleating from a huge herd of sheep, the loudest noise in this open, rolling grassland of Inner Mongolia is the buzz from the transformers that dot the plain, collecting electricity from this small army of 96 metallic monsters with their spinning blades.

Blessed with vast, empty countryside and a seemingly permanent stiff breeze blowing across the steppes, the buzz of transformers is growing steadily louder in this far northern province as investors pour money into the wind farm. It is already huge, and may soon be getting much larger.

“Today we’re producing 68 megawatts, but by 2008, we’ll generate at least 400 megawatts,” boasted Li Yilun, the director of the Huitengxile power plant. “By then, we will be the biggest wind farm in all of Asia.”

China’s skyrocketing energy needs have recently grabbed the world’s attention through its bold efforts to take over foreign oil companies like the American oil independent Unocal. It has also made big investments in petroleum production in countries as far-flung as Sudan and Venezuela. But at home, with petroleum growing scarce, coal choking the air of major cities and coal mining killing 6,009 people last year, the Chinese government is moving just as aggressively to develop alternative energy supplies.

By 2020, starting from a minuscule base that it has established only recently, China expects to supply 10 percent of its needs from so-called renewable energy sources, including wind, solar energy, small hydroelectric dams and biomass like plant fibers and animal wastes.

So far, wind power is making the most impressive strides, so much so that even if Mr. Li’s boast of soon having the largest wind farm in Asia comes true, he will have plenty of competition within China alone.

Already, large wind farms are sprouting up in much more heavily populated provinces, like Guangdong, Fujian and Hebei, and with Chinese and foreign turbine manufacturers competing furiously for this fast-expanding market, the cost per kilowatt is becoming increasingly competitive with China’s abundant coal. Many coastal provinces, meanwhile, are developing plans to build wind farms just offshore, where winds are strong and land use is not an issue. Projects like these are expected to deploy huge new turbines with 87-yard-long blades, each capable of generating 1.2 megawatts of electricity, enough to power hundreds of homes, if not more.

“We have huge goals for wind power development,” Wang Zhongying, director of China’s Center for Renewable Energy Development. “By 2010, we plan to reach 4,000 megawatts, and by 2020 we expect to reach 20,000 megawatts, or 20 gigawatts.” If anything, Mr. Wang said, these targets are too conservative, and may be easily surpassed.

The biggest limitations, he said, were not in China’s wind-power potential, or in its generating technology, but rather in the country’s antiquated power grid, which cannot automatically reroute power from one region to another as demand and supply rise and fall. That makes it difficult to take full advantage of wind power, whose output vacillates according to the weather.

China’s wind-power program has roots in a visit to the United States 18 years ago, early in the country’s economic takeoff. A Chinese delegation witnessed modern wind turbines at work in Utah, then came back determined to adopt the technology at home.

“We bought some turbines and brought them to Urumqi to see how they performed, and the production data was very, very good,” said Wu Gang, a member of the delegation who was fresh out of engineering school at the time.

What followed is a story that encapsulates some of the main ingredients of China’s economic miracle, including the disciplined marshaling of intellectual and financial resources by a state determined to solve a problem and establish a sector it deems strategic.

After his return from the United States, Mr. Wu was put in charge of a state-financed wind farm in the western province of Xinjiang, where he was able to master all the technical aspects of the business. Later, the government provided the seed money for the business he now directs, the Goldwind Science and Technology Company. It is China’s largest producer of wind turbines, and remains 55 percent state owned.

China has backed wind power and other alternative sources in other ways. It has provided tax incentives for developers, imposed standardized electricity rates that amount to a subsidy for power sources like wind, which remain more expensive than coal, and has imposed equipment requirements that help local manufacturers.

In February, the Chinese government passed a nationwide renewable energy law that formalizes many of those incentives and mandates clear targets for increased power generation from alternative energy sources. China’s provinces will be required to buy electricity from alternative providers, even when the cost per kilowatt is substantially higher.

The outcome has been a real boom among suppliers of wind power equipment. “We’re expecting the sector to grow 50 to 75 percent a year between now and 2020,” said Jens Olsen, the chief representative of Vestas, a Danish turbine manufacturer that is the leading equipment supplier in China.

“The problem here now is the sector is growing so fast that the equipment producers can’t keep up,” said Mr. Wu of Goldwind. “China has a strong industrial base, and last year, more than 10 Chinese companies came into the market, but they will find that wind energy is not so easy. It involves so many different kinds of knowledge: aerodynamics, computer science, turbines, gear boxes.”

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July 25, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

All her life, Rachel Fair has been teased by other black Americans about her light skin. “High yellow,” they call her, a needling reference to the legacy of a slave owner who, she says, “went down to that cabin and had what he wanted.”

So it was especially satisfying for Ms. Fair, 64, when a recent DNA test suggested that her mother’s African ancestry traced nearly to the root of the human family tree, which originated there 150,000 years ago.

“More white is showing in the color, but underneath, I’m deepest Africa,” said Ms. Fair, a retired parks supervisor in Cincinnati. “I tell my friends they’re kind of Johnny-come-latelies on the DNA scale, so back up, back up.”

Ms. Fair is one of thousands of African-Americans who have scraped cells from their inner cheeks and paid a growing group of laboratories to learn more about a family history once thought permanently obscured by slavery. They are seeking answers to questions about their family lineages in the antebellum South - whether black, white or Native American - and about distant forebears in Africa.

The DNA tests are fueling the biggest surge in African-American genealogy since Alex Haley’s 1976 novel, “Roots,” inspired a generation to try to trace their ancestors back to Africa. For those who have spent decades poring over plantation records that did not list slaves by surname and ship manifests that did not list where they came from, the idea that the key lies in their own bodies is a powerful one.

But the joy that often accompanies the answers from the tests is frequently tempered by the unexpected questions they raise. African-Americans say the tests can make the ugliness of slavery more palpable and leave the hunger for heritage unsatisfied. Some are unsure what to make of the new information about far-away kin, or how to account for genes that undermine a racial identity they have long internalized.

The interest in using genetics to construct a family tree comes despite warnings from scientists that the necessary tools to tell African-Americans what many want to know the most - precisely where in Africa their ancestors lived and what tribal group they belonged to - are still unreliable.

The most that blacks who use DNA tests can hope to learn now is that their genetic signature matches that of contemporary Africans from a given tribe or region from a DNA database that is far from complete. To assign an ancestral identity based on that match is highly suspect, scientists say; a group whose DNA has not been sampled may be a more precise match, or the person might match with several groups because of migration or tribal mixing.

Each test can also trace only one line of a person’s many thousands of ancestors, making the results far more murky than the promise held out by some testing companies.

Still, the popularity of the DNA tests seems a testament to the unremitting craving for a story of origin. However flawed or scientifically questionable, the results provide the only clue many African-Americans have to the history and traditions that members of other American ethnic groups whose immigration was voluntary tend to take for granted.

“There’s just something about knowing something after years of thinking it was impossible to know anything,” said Melvin Collier, 32, a black student at Clark Atlanta University who recently learned that his DNA matches that of the Fulani people of Cameroon. “It’s still pretty overwhelming.”

Some African-Americans, more interested in searching out recent relatives who in many cases can be dependably identified with a DNA match, are asking whites whom they have long suspected are cousins to take a DNA test. And in a genetic bingo game that is delivering increasing returns as people of all ethnicities engage in DNA genealogy, some are typing their results into public databases on the Internet and finding a match that no paper trail would have revealed.

“I’ve been sitting here for years with nothing left to try and then, boom, this brand new thing,” said B. J. Smothers, a retired urban planner in Stone Mountain, Ga., who says the results of a DNA test have brought her closer than she had ever been to discovering the identity of her father’s grandfather. “DNA is our last hope.”

Ms. Smothers’s father, 88, knew that his father was born a slave in Wilcox County, Ala., but the DNA test showed that he has a European paternal ancestry, a result shared by nearly a third of African-Americans who take the test. The news was not exactly a surprise. But as eager as she is to discover the identity of her great-grandfather, Ms. Smothers is also bracing for a wave of new anger.

“I am kind of preparing myself for what I am going to feel when I find the family, when it’s real,” she said. She regularly looks for matches to her father’s DNA in the online databases where amateur genealogists publish their genetic identities along with more prosaic contact information. Some day, she is certain, she will find a match that will lead to her white relatives.

Family reunions via DNA are not always warm affairs. When Trevis Hawkins, 37, a black oncology nurse from Montgomery, Ala., e-mailed a white man with the same surname whose DNA matched his this year, the man seemed excited. But after Mr. Hawkins gave him the address to his family Web site, which includes pictures, he never heard from him again.

One African-American, upon confirming a match with a white man whose ancestors had owned his, told him he owed reparations and could start by paying for the test, said Bennett Greenspan, chief executive of Family Tree DNA, which offers tests for $129 and up.

But Charles Larkins, whose great-grandmother was a slave, says proving or disproving his suspicion that her owner was his great-grandfather would be cathartic.

Mr. Larkins recently e-mailed Hayes Larkins, the slave owner’s white great-grandson, to ask whether he would take the DNA test. Because the Y chromosome, which determines maleness, is passed virtually unchanged from father to son, scientists can use it to determine whether two men share a common ancestor.

“I’m not going to be like the Jefferson descendants, denying anything happened,” Hayes Larkins said, referring to a 1998 DNA test that indicated that Thomas Jefferson had fathered at least one child with his slave Sally Hemings, which his white family had denied.

The two Mr. Larkins are waiting for the results to arrive.

For Nickesha Sanders, who already knew her great-great-grandfather was a white slave owner in Tennessee, the appeal of the DNA test was the promise of a link to Africa. “I wanted to be able to connect to my history before slavery,” said Ms. Sanders, 26, a student at Texas Southern University. “I wanted it to be more than, the boat stopped at the shores, then slavery, emancipation, civil rights, all that struggle.”

To find out about her maternal ancestors, Ms. Sanders paid $349 for a test that analyzes mitochondrial DNA, which is passed on largely intact from mothers to their children and serves a similar purpose as the Y chromosome for scientists tracing ancestry.

The results, from a Washington company, African Ancestry, indicated that Ms. Sanders shared a genetic profile with members of the Kru people of Liberia, who, she was pleased to learn, were known for inciting slave rebellions. But the news did not mean as much to her grandmother, who had hoped to find proof of the American Indian blood she had always been told ran in the family, a frequent quest for African-Americans taking the tests.

The results have propelled some test-takers to plan visits to their newly adopted homelands and to find others here who have been told they share the same ancestry. In online discussion forums, African-Americans with the same DNA test results call each other “cousin.” After a lifetime of knowing only that their family came from Africa, some liken the new association to adopted children finding their birth mother.

“Africa is not a country; it’s a continent,” said LaVerne Nichols Hunter, a retired mathematics teacher in Pittsburgh, whose DNA test results placed her ancestors in Cameroon, Sierra Leone and Liberia.

But if DNA test-takers are making too much family history out of too little genetic information, social scientists say, it is not a phenomenon unique to the new technology.

“Identity is a process,” said Alondra Nelson, a sociologist at Yale who studies the intersection of race and genetics. “Narratives and stories about family and kinship are always to some extent people making meaning out of their experiences with whatever tools they have.”

When a radio host in Chicago revealed at a Kwanzaa festival last year that he was of Mende descent, several attendees who had received the same DNA result gathered to trade notes, a moment some said they found especially meaningful because slave owners made a point of separating Africans from the same tribes to prevent them from communicating.

But Kwame Bandele has learned enough about the civil war in Liberia, which the tribe his paternal DNA test identified is involved in, to feel deeply troubled by the kinship. A manager at General Electric, Mr. Bandele has tried to persuade the company to provide ultrasound machines for pregnant women in refugee camps.

He sends out e-mail with news about the war to friends, but feels he should be doing more.

“There was a massacre with machetes the other night,” he said. “My people are in bad shape.”

Ray Winbush, a psychology professor at Morgan State University, said being told that his ancestors hailed from the Takar people of Cameroon served to underscore his disconnectedness, both from an ancestral tribe he knows little about and from an American society that can still be a hostile place for African-Americans.

“It’s like being lost and found at the same time,” Mr. Winbush said.

Posted at 1:33 AM · Comments (0)

Spring 2005 - Copyright The National Interest

The Schizophrenic Superpower

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

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

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

Pacifism’s Denouement

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

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

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

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

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

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

Japan’s Strategic Intentions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alliance Implications

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Calming the Dragon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Way Ahead

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

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

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

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

Posted at 1:50 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright TLS

20 July 2005

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[] MAO
The unknown story
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday []
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[] 814pp. | Cape. £25. | 0 224 07126 2

In their new biography, Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans, a best-selling memoir of oppression under Mao, and her historian husband, Jon Halliday, show Mao Zedong not as a great philosopher, social idealist, or romantic hero of the downtrodden, but as a tyrant who manipulated anyone and anything he could in pursuit of personal power. The authors count him responsible for well over 70 million deaths in China, and on the whole see him as a greater scourge to the twentieth century than either Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin. But while Hitler and Stalin have been repudiated, both in their home countries and around the rest of the world, the myth of Mao survives today: not only as an emblem of the Chinese government, but as a romantic idea in the world’s imagination. Chang and Halliday want to change that.

Some parts of Chang and Halliday’s story were already known: how Mao welcomed Japan’s invasion of China, because it made his own political victory easier; how he grew opium in Yan’an to swell his coffers, encouraged Kim Il sung to launch the Korean War, and precipitated a huge famine during the Great Leap Forward. But Chang and Halliday are better than most in showing Mao’s wizardly ability as a schemer and tactician. He was no orator, and shunned public speaking; but he trolled incessantly for political information and was ruthless in calculating his personal advantage in any situation. Throughout his life he despised rivals. No one could remain his second-in-command for long; sooner or later every one of them was killed, banished, or immobilized by blackmail. Mao easily turned against people who were close to him – his mentors, his wives, his brother, his barber, even a bodyguard. To say that he “betrayed” these people would not be quite accurate, because betrayal implies a sense that one’s actions are wrong, and Mao seems to have been free of such notions. He simply did what worked. Chang and Halliday also review Mao’s personal indulgences: his villas, his sexual appetites, his catered towel-rubs in lieu of baths, his elaborate security measures, his lack of a wristwatch because he scheduled
no appointments: he summoned anyone, at any time of day or night, whenever he felt like it. But, except that we now have endnotes on such matters, none of these stories is exactly new. Chinese people have been relaying them for decades.

The most important of Chang and Halliday’s new discoveries have to do with the sustained role of the Soviet Union in Mao’s rise. Halliday reads Russian, and has made excellent use of the opening of Soviet archives after 1992. He and Chang assert that the idea of a Communist Party of China originated in Moscow in 1919 and detail the ways in which, beginning in 1921, the Comintern called the shots for Mao and other early Chinese Communists. Mao accepted the European Communists as his masters, and used them against his Chinese rivals, but also manipulated their feelings whenever he saw an advantage in doing so. The aim of Mao’s 1934–5 Long March to the north-west of China was to link up with the Soviets to obtain arms. Chang and Halliday destroy the myth of the Long March (which was rooted in Edgar Snow’s classic 1936 interview with Mao) by showing how its foot-soldiers were not eager Revolutionaries but common folk, recruited by force and shot if they straggled. The authors also marshal evidence to suggest – but not quite prove – that the Long March succeeded, not because of spectacular tenacity, but because the Soviets were holding Chiang Kai-shek’s son in a kind of genteel hostagecaptivity, and this induced Chiang to let the Reds through – even to provide them with maps. After 1949, Mao, turning towards the world stage, was obsessed with the goal of attaining nuclear arms from the Soviets, and made the fateful decision to export food from the Chinese countryside in order to pay for them. Chang and Halliday observe that if one counts the Great Leap famine deaths as in this sense nuclearrelated, then they outnumber the bomb-related deaths at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by about a hundred to one.

But weren’t Mao’s sympathy for peasants and his “rural strategy” his distinctive contributions to Marxist theory? Not at all, say Chang and Halliday. In the Civil War of the late 1940s, it was Mao’s rival Liu Shaoqi who pressed for a countryside strategy, while Mao insisted on attacking cities; after 1949, it was Mao who decreed an apartheid-like household-registry system that made peasant migration to the cities illegal. Chang and Halliday go so far as to refer to Mao’s “war on peasants”, but that metaphor does not seem quite right. Millions of peasants died incidentally to Mao’s purposes, and there is little evidence that he cared that they perished; but the deaths themselves were not his goal. “Contempt for peasants” would be a better phrase; Mao referred to them as “two shoulders and a bum” – that is, producers of labour and of human fertilizer. In large numbers, as “the masses”, they were like schools of anchovies to him, great swaths of which could be netted for his needs – which included, at various times, corvée labour, guerrilla armies, siege victims (who could thereby generate political leverage), producers of food for export, and grounds for the claim that China need not fear nuclear attack because so many people would still be left alive.

“His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power”, write Chang and Halliday. This is a good summary of their book, but to infer what was in Mao’s mind, at the end of his life or any other time, is not so easy. It was not a normal mind. (In 1955, Mao observed to a Finnish ambassador that a nuclear explosion of Earth would be “a big thing for the solar system” but nothing much for the universe as a whole.) Few people were close to Mao, but some who were – two girlfriends, his physician and a personal secretary – have left memoirs that suggest a truly peculiar psychological trait in Mao: he was without human sympathy. Mao’s doctor Li Zhisui tells of sitting next to Mao at a performance in Shanghai when a child acrobat slipped and crashed to the floor. The audience gasped. Mao, alone, laughed. Both the crowd’s gasp and Mao’s laugh were reflexive responses, not the products of deliberation. In my view, any attempt to understand the mind of Mao must seek to understand the mental conditions that would produce that kind of laugh.

Chang and Halliday avoid a topic that Chinese intellectuals have often speculated on: was Mao, to some degree, insane? Insanity ran in his family, including two of his children. In his later years Mao was so paranoiac that
he ordered attendants to make noise as they approached so as not to terrify him when they drew near. He had no normal family life and no true friends. For all his immense privilege and power, it is hard to imagine him, in the ordinary sense, as happy.

The myth of Mao diverges so far from the reality that one can understand an author’s impulse to approach it with a hatchet, as Chang and Halliday have very effectively done. But this approach leads them to omit the good that happened during the Mao years, even if it was not of Mao’s doing. The authors may have feared that to acknowledge anything beneficial would weaken their case against Mao or would play into the hands of those who argue that, despite all, the emergence of New China made it worthwhile to pay the price of Mao. They should have set such fears aside. No fair-minded reader can finish their book and then conclude that Mao was worth the price that China paid. To point to some of the good which occurred during the 1950s or 60s would not have undermined the authors’ case, but would rather have given it extra credibility.

For example, Chang and Halliday mention the many young people who, in the 1940s, believed the Communist ideals, and either flocked to Yan’an or joined the Party underground in the cities. But then they describe how Mao mistreated these idealists, without mentioning that, in the 1950s, they and large numbers of others, went on to help China to achieve significant progress in such areas as health, life expectancy, employment, housing, literacy and social services. Many 1950s idealists truly cared for the public good, made sacrifices for it, and thought that in doing so they were associating with Mao. Chang and Halliday could have shown this to have been a gigantic case of false consciousness. The exalted image of Mao in people’s minds bore no resemblance to the actual, highly secretive, Mao, who in fact was calculating how to exploit popular idealism as just one more route to personal power. In his Anti-Rightist drive of 1957, Mao betrayed the idealists. He criticized them, humiliated them, drove many to ostracism, divorce and suicide – and for every one that he persecuted he frightened dozens more. All this is without doubt true, but it does not follow that what these people did in the name of Mao was not good.

In China, traces of idealistic socialism survived as late as the 1980s, even as many of its intellectual leaders – Liu Binyan, Wang Ruoshui, Su Shaozhi and others – were purged or exiled. (Mao and his heirs have never tolerated serious Marxists.) In a 2004 interview, Liu Binyan, twentieth-century China’s leading investigative reporter, said that he still believes that “socialism with a human face” could have worked in China. In a posthumously published book entitled The Newly Discovered Mao Zedong, Wang Ruoshui, formerly a deputy editor-in-chief at People’s Daily, holds Mao responsible for numerous “errors”. Wang, certainly at the end of his life, was far from naive. His insistence on the word “errors” is his way of agreeing with Liu Binyan: things could and should have been different.
Another notable good that sprang from the Mao years was utterly unintended and unforeseen by Mao. Following the mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, a generation of Chinese suddenly saw their leader’s inspirational language (“serve the people”, etc) as fraudulent “empty talk”. Disillusionment taught them, better than any words of a Great Helmsman ever could, that from now on they would have to think for themselves. The co-author Jung Chang herself, who was born in 1952 and was once a Red Guard, is a clear example of this effect. Broadly speaking, among Chinese people of all kinds, the decades since high Maoism have seen a steady increase in the readiness to protest and to rebel at unfair treatment. This trend has had much less to do with intellectual influences, Maoist or Western, than with a recoil from the disasters that Mao inflicted. The same recoil has, of course, also had its costs. The often noted collapse of public morality in China in recent times is closely related. The unscrupulous, gra