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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

[]
[] MAO
The unknown story
Jung Chang and Jon Halliday []
[]
[] 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, grab-what-you-can mentality that plagues China today flourished under Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, but the foundation for public cynicism was laid by Mao.

The situation in China today seems also to explain why Chang and Halliday have written Mao: The unknown story. Their passion may be partly the result of Chang’s memories of the pain she suffered under Mao, as set forth in Wild Swans. But a greater reason is clearly that the Mao myth still haunts China today. Hitler and Stalin have fallen from grace, and the less gargantuan twentieth-century tyrants – Pinochet, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and others – are buried even further from any greatness. But Mao’s “portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square”, write Chang and Halliday, and the current Chinese regime “declares itself to be Mao’s heir” even as it continues to obliterate much of the truth about the man. A recent survey by China Women magazine found that Mao is a number-one hero among Chinese teenagers, who understand “hero” to mean, inter alia, “kind and caring; tolerant; selfless; honest; brave” – all qualities that could not be further removed from the Mao that Chang and Halliday reveal. Early this summer, Chinese government officials notified editors at the Far Eastern Economic Review that its June issue would be banned from China if it carried a review of Chang and Halliday’s book written by the
distinguished China-watcher Jonathan Mirsky. Reviews in the Financial Times and on the BBC were also blocked.

The Chinese government clings to its Mao myth because it fears that its shaky legitimacy would be even shakier without it. Propaganda officials do what they can to protect Mao’s image, so it is hard to blame Chinese teenagers for their abysmal understanding of Mao. Yet it would be a mistake to see today’s pro-Mao sentiment as something entirely stimulated from above. In the 1990s, a wave of “Mao fever” became a genuinely popular trend in China. Ordinary people, exasperated by rampant corruption and vaulting inequality in the money-rules-all Jiang Zemin years, looked back at the 1950s and felt a certain nostalgia, as if to say, “whatever Old Mao’s faults may have been, at least we didn’t have these problems back then”. Mao may have been “too correct”, but at least there was an idea of correctness in the air, whereas now anything goes, and public morality is a sham. This Mao-nostalgia was made easier, of course, by distance from the man himself. A joke in the 1990s said there are two reasons why people visit Mao’s mausoleum at Tiananmen: to salute him and to confirm his death. Both feelings were genuine.

If China is finally to free itself from Mao, the Chinese people will have to relinquish their Mao myth, and this clearly is what Chang and Halliday hope that their book will help to achieve. In the end, though, they have concentrated too much on the figure of Mao. They tend to divide the leaders of the Communist movement into good people (Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and others) who were trying to help the common folk, and bad people (Mao, Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng, Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, and many others) who cared only for themselves. In making these divisions they feed the assumption, which is deeply embedded in Chinese political culture, that if only the good people can gain the upper hand, everything will be fine. But this is an oversimplification. Not only did the “good” people behave pretty badly (Deng Xiaoping ordered more than one massacre of civilians during his career); more fundamentally, the problems are intrinsic to the whole political system and its subculture, not merely the fault of individuals. To be sure, Mao did play a major role in creating that system – in which fear and blackmail induce “thought work” and “confession”; in which A’s “mistake” can become B’s club for destroying A (Chinese officials, when appearing in groups, still monitor one another’s speech); in which insincere language manipulation turns into an art of self-defence; and in which suspicion of rivals, jockeying for position, colluding and betraying, deception, obsession with secrecy, the private recording of phone calls, etc – behaviour much like that of the Mafia but less brotherly, as Simon Leys observed more than twenty years ago – all become routine. Once this system was established it was not merely peculiar to Mao: it belonged to everyone. In modified form it is still with us.

People inside this system know what it is really like, but, precisely because they are part of it, need to dissemble to outsiders. Foreigners who cannot see past the surfaces become trophies of the system’s deception and sometimes even turn into official “friends of China” (although, to the insiders, little true friendship, and even less respect, is actually involved). Part of Chang and Halliday’s passion for exposing the “unknown” Mao is clearly aimed at gullible Westerners. Mao entranced Edgar Snow, Zhou Enlai charmed Henry Kissinger, and in both cases the consequences for Western understanding of China were severe. Chang and Halliday quote Kissinger on how talking with Zhou resembled a Chinese banquet, “prepared from the long sweep of tradition and culture, meticulously cooked by hands of experience … many courses … some sweet and some sour …”. Here I pause to wonder whether “sweet” and “sour” are a subtle reference to Kissinger’s background knowledge of Chinese culture,
specifically to the hybrid dish called sweet-and-sour that is common in Chinese-American restaurants. Would he also, in France, extol haute cuisine by reference to French fries? Kissinger’s memoirs make clear that his praise for the rarefied summit of the Mao world was not only tactical flattery, but the result of naivety and a very superficial understanding of China. Moreover Kissinger is not alone. For decades many in the Western intellectual and political elites have assumed that Mao and his heirs symbolize the Chinese people and their culture, and that to show respect to the rulers is the same as showing respect to the subjects. Anyone who reads Jung Chang and Jon Halliday’s book should be inoculated against this particular delusion. If the book sells even half as many copies as the 12 million of Wild Swans, it could deliver the coup de grâce to an embarrassing and dangerous pattern of Western thinking.

Posted at 1:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

Saturday July 23, 2005

Fifty years ago this month, when China was finally at peace after decades of war, Mao Zedong launched a new revolution in the countryside - for reasons that are still highly controversial. Mao insisted that the peasants wanted more and bigger cooperatives; they were a “blank sheet of paper” on which beautiful socialist words could be written. China could not mark time in the transition to socialism, or else it would go backwards.

Mao’s impatience in that July of 1955 set in train a tragic sequence of events which led first to the people’s communes and the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61. The failure of the Great Leap amid serious famine encouraged his critics to speak out, and led in turn to the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) when he sought to crush their “revisionism”. Finally, reacting against the last two turbulent decades of Mao’s life, his successors have jettisoned socialist policies, moderate as well as extreme, and embraced capitalism in all but name.
In China today, where the government still believes criticism of the chairman should “not go too far”, serious argument over Mao and his motives is mainly confined to academic websites. Most ordinary Chinese either regard the entire Maoist period as “madness” and “chaos”, or remember nostalgically the time when, it is claimed, “we could sleep without locking our doors”.

Western biographies of Mao since his death in 1976 - most recently Mao: a Life, by Philip Short - have sought to strike a balance between his grand vision and its deeply flawed reality. This approach is now challenged in Mao: the Unknown Story, a new biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday that delivers an uncompromisingly negative view. Their verdict, as summarised by the Guardian’s reviewer, is that Mao “lacked either idealism or a clear ideology … he was driven by a personal lust for power”, and that his rule was based above all on the “use of terror” by which he “enforced his will” on the Chinese people.

The book is based on impressive research and a formidable array of sources, but its strongly argued conclusions should provoke a lively debate. First, can the Chinese revolution really be explained, as the authors imply, as if the Chinese people were terrorised by Mao into overthrowing the Nationalist government - did they not already have good reason? As Jonathan Fenby’s recent study puts it, corruption under Chiang Kai-shek was “a way of life”, his carpetbaggers plundered the areas liberated from Japan, and the rural masses were “alienated by oppression”. To a significant extent, the civil war of the late 1940s was a class struggle in which, as the US embassy reported at the time, the communists’ mass support derived from “the agrarian and industrial proletariat”.

Second, to what extent does “lust for power” adequately explain Mao’s long career with the Communist party? Even if he was attracted by its revolutionary violence, would it not have been more rational to hitch himself to the rising star of Chiang Kai-shek (who was not averse to shedding blood himself)? Third, although Mao’s grasp of Marxist theory in his early years was shaky, were his extensive theoretical writings over five decades really nothing more than camouflage for his ambition?

The real tragedy for China, I would argue instead, is that far from being uninterested in ideology, Mao in his later years became obsessed with it. By 1955 five years of communist rule had, in spite of the Korean war, greatly improved the life of the majority of Chinese. Even if not quite the “golden era” that many older Chinese recall with nostalgia, it was a huge transformation. The crude death rate fell by nearly half in eight years; except for the worst year of the Great Leap (1960), it would remain well below the comparable figure for India.

Yet Mao was not content to take a gradual road towards socialism and the rebuilding of China. He rejected the orthodox view that the “productive forces” (such as mechanisation and land fertility) must be fully developed before the introduction of more socialist “relations of production”. Older and wiser peasants disagreed, but many young Chinese (and some of Mao’s colleagues) shared his enthusiasm. The Great Leap goal of “catching up and overtaking” the west was rooted in a revolutionary romanticism with its origins in half a century of nationalist struggle.

Lust for power also seems an incomplete explanation for Mao’s launching of the Cultural Revolution. With China’s secret police under the sinister Kang Sheng at his disposal, could he not have simply had his critics cast into labour camps or shot? Instead, and fatally for China, Mao went back to the theoretical drawing board. If the masses were less enthusiastic for socialism than he had thought, the problem must lie in the ideological “superstructure”: China needed a Cultural Revolution.

In an important set of notes compiled in 1961-62, Mao began to identify some of the social tensions that persisted under “socialism” in China (and the Soviet Union) and focused particularly on new vested interests and bureaucracy. His anti-elitist goals became popular in the Cultural Revolution with marginalised groups such as working-class students, contract workers excluded from state benefits and junior party members chafing against their seniors’ privileges.

If China’s search for socialism under Mao was not wholly bogus, why did it prove such a disaster? Mao’s imperial style and refusal to heed criticism was principally to blame; even when the peasants in his home village warned him that the Great Leap was failing, he refused to listen - and sat down to write a poem instead. By the time of the Cultural Revolution he had replaced all his loyal colleagues, except for the premier Zhou Enlai, with ultra-left zealots and political opportunists.

In the 1980s, Chinese critics of Mao (before the post-Tiananmen clampdown) set his rule in the wider context of a semi-feudal political culture allied to a rigidly authoritarian party.

In the end, Mao himself saved the party from destruction during the Cultural Revolution - having converted it into his docile tool. Significantly, the origins of the post-Mao democracy movement right up until 1989 lie among former Red Guards who were alienated by this refusal to translate egalitarian rhetoric into reality.

Finally, we should ask how far western (effectively US) hostility encouraged Mao’s radical turn from the mid-1950s onwards, fostering a climate of chauvinism from which China has not yet completely emerged.

Mao’s offer in 1945, ignored at the time, to visit Washington and talk with President Roosevelt, made good sense as an early attempt to “triangulate” between the US and the Soviet Union. Even more intriguing were China’s later efforts in 1955 to open a dialogue with the US in the spirit of “peaceful coexistence” that followed the 1954 Geneva conference. These talks foundered because Washington was prepared to talk detente with only the Soviet Union, not China - thus helping (perhaps not by accident) to widen the gap between Moscow and Beijing. When Richard Nixon was finally willing to do business with China nearly two decades later, the compromise formula adopted on the pivotal issue of Taiwan was one Washington had refused to table in 1955.

Next year is the 30th anniversary of Mao’s death; it is time (especially in China) for a new debate on the chairman, omitting neither warts nor ideas.

· John Gittings’s The Changing Face of China: From Mao to Market is published by OUP next week

Posted at 1:41 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Boston Globe

FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2005

BOSTON None of the many newspaper obituaries about General William Westmoreland exhumed one of the most important things he ever said:
‘The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”
Westmoreland said that in the Oscar-winning 1974 Vietnam documentary “Hearts and Minds.” The quote so stunned director Peter Davis that he gave Westmoreland a chance to clean it up. In a 1997 guest letter to The Washington Post in response to criticism that he cherry-picked the quote to push his antiwar agenda, Davis said, “When we filmed the interview, Westmoreland paused after making that statement, yelled ‘Cut!’ and said he wanted a retake because that wasn’t how he meant to express himself.
“In the second take, the general began saying exactly the same thing but we ran out of film. We then gave him a third chance to amend his remarks - much the way Ted Koppel gave Al Campanis of the Los Angeles Dodgers a chance to change what he was saying about nonwhite baseball players lacking the ‘necessities’ to be managers - and Westmoreland repeated the statement about the ‘Oriental.’ I used the third take, since the statement was most complete.”
The quote was important because it spoke to a military and White House that assumed in Vietnam they would overpower an inferior people. Assumptions of cheap life in the East led to bombing without a conscience by the West, admitting no mistakes along the way. President Lyndon Johnson boasted in 1967 that everything was moving along nicely as we Americans were outkilling the North Vietnamese forces 10-1. Ultimately, it was the American people who decided that the price was too high for the war to continue.
Westmoreland is dead, but he lives on in our invasion and occupation of Iraq. President George W. Bush makes no sweeping statements that Arabs or Iraqis do not put the same high price on life as Americans. But he makes Americans into unassailable saints.
“We’re dealing with an enemy that has no conscience,” Bush said on the campaign trail last year. “Today, if you noticed, there was a car bomb near a school. These people are brutal. They - they’re the exact opposite of Americans. We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity. We believe in freedom. They have an ideology of hate. And they’re tough, but not as tough as America.”
This righteousness became twisted paternalism. We originally invaded Iraq to save ourselves from a future attack by Saddam Hussein using his weapons of mass destruction. We learned quickly that they did not exist. The White House switched to saying the invasion was to save the Iraqi people from Saddam.
That was ironic, since we have bombed and killed thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of Iraqi civilians to “save” them. The right wing loves to hound liberals and the left, claiming that they ignored Saddam’s prior carnage to his people. But two years after the invasion, the hawks have still not answered why two massacres - however careful our soldiers tried to be - make a right.
It is clear that the real reason we switched to the bomb-the-Iraqis-to-save-the-Iraqis excuse was because, as we keep learning, the White House knew well before the war that the evidence of weapons of mass destruction was far too skimpy to merit Bush’s claim that Saddam was buying uranium from Niger for nukes. It was too thin to warrant Vice President Dick Cheney telling America before the war: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, our allies, and against us.”
We will never admit it, but our bombs spoke Westmoreland’s words. The administration believed Iraqi life was cheap and plentiful enough so the people left standing would not complain about those lowered into the grave. This was best expressed in Cheney’s boast the Sunday before the invasion that “we will be greeted as liberators.” That was the same day that Cheney also said the White House believed Saddam had reconstituted nuclear weapons, even though the International Atomic Energy Agency said there were none.
Exaggerated claims for war. Bombing the innocent to defeat our opposites. Westmoreland failed in Vietnam, playing the enemy for cheap. Iraq is failing, with Americans discovering how cheaply their president played them. There is yet no director in this remake to yell, “Cut!”
(Derrick Z. Jackson’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 2:05 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright China Daily
Updated: 2005-07-22 09:16

When Edgar Snow (July 19, 1905February 15, 1972) came to China in 1928, he did not expect his whole life would be closely tied to this ancient, vast and then, poor country.

But in the following years, he made history in journalism by becoming the first Western journalist to visit Yan’an, the then “red capital” of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in 1936. His interviews resulted in his masterpiece “Red Star Over China.”

Snow was exemplary with his reporting of China, as the participants expounded during the two-day international conference “Understanding China: Centennial Commemoration of Edgar Snow’s Birth” on Tuesday and Wednesday.

The forum, marking the centenary of the birth of Edgar Snow, was jointly hosted by the Peking University, the State Council Information Office and the University of Missouri.

Wu Tingjun, professor and dean at the School of Journalism and Communication of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, said: “He just took an unbiased attitude and tried to reveal the accurate facts of what he thought to be a correct enterprise for China.”

Yin Yungong, director of the Institute of Journalism and Communication under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, agreed. He quoted the facts that Snow had criticized China’s Great Leap Forward (19581959) and the “cultural revolution” (19661976) during his talks with Mao Zedong.

Yin also cited the fact that Snow even reported an aborted family planning programme in 1956, which had been ignored by Chinese historians.

Gong Wenxiang, executive dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at the Peking University, said besides giving more accurate information to the outside world, competing interpretations on the same issues should be encouraged to allow readers to make decisions for themselves.

Road to Yan’an

Born in Kansas City in the State of Missouri, a small hinterland city where people had “little knowledge about foreign lands,” Snow decided to travel around the world.

After taking his undergraduate studies in journalism at the University of Missouri, Snow came to Shanghai at the age of 23.

He planned to stay in Shanghai for six weeks, but then found a job writing for the English language newspaper, The China Weekly Review.

Maybe the most important factor in Sonw’s decision to stay in China was his employer, US journalist John Powell. Powell told Snow that China was to experience a tremendous change and it would become the world’s biggest news story, said Zhao Yuming, president of China Society of Journalism History.

In 1929, invited by the then Minister of Railways Sun Ke of the Kuomintang (KMT) government, Snow travelled along 8,000-miles of railways in China, writing reports on his experiences.

But in Saraqi, a small town in Suiyuan Province, part of today’s Inner Mongolia, Snow was shocked to see farm fields covered with corpses, due to three consecutive years of drought.

He wrote: “Have you seen a man who has gone hungry for a month? Poor Children are just bags of bones. Their bellies, filled with bark and saw dust, look like tumours” in his famous feature “Save 250,000 lives” published in The China Weekly Review.

In an essay published in 1958, Snow recalled that his trip to Saraqi was a key turning point in his life.

From that time on, he began to write and work towards improving the welfare of the Chinese people.

In 1931, Snow met the talented US travel writer Helen Foster and the two soon fell in love. They married and moved to Peiping, then name of Beijing in 1933. While working as a journalist for several US newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and the New York Times, Snow was hired by Yenching University which was merged into the Peking University in the 1950s as a lecturer of journalism.

“We often went to his home to discuss how to save China. Snow supported our views and tried to protect us from arrest and persecution,” the 93-year-old Huang Hua recalled at the conference.

In 1936, the CPC invited some progressive foreign journalists to visit Yan’an to report on its efforts to defend the country against the aggressive Japanese invaders, who were positioned in the suburbs of Peiping and Tianjin.

Through the introduction of Madam Soong Ching Ling (18931981), wife of the founder of the Republic of China Dr Sun Yat-sen (18661925), Snow accepted the invitation. He pretended to go to Inner Mongolia for an interview but in fact went to Xi’an, from where he was escorted by plainclothes Red Army soldiers to the blockaded areas governed by the CPC.

Snow met Zhou Enlai (18981976) and interviewed Mao Zedong (18931976) in Bao’an, near Yan’an. In a small cave-house, Mao related his life story and his account of the revolution. To help Snow finish his interviews and objectively and accurately describe the Red Army and its people, Zhou drafted a 96-day interview itinerary for Snow.

Under Zhou’s suggestions, Snow spent one month on the Red Army frontline, living together with Red Army soldiers.

Snow wrote a range of news stories and features for Western newspapers and agencies during his four-month stay in Yan’an. But what made him famous was his book “Red Star over China,” published in London in 1937.

The book was the first Western book to give an accurate first-hand account of how the CPC, the Red Army and the people under the CPC’s governance were struggling to defend their country against the Japanese invasion and improve people’s welfare.

The book was so popular in the West that it sold out rapidly. “Some people even denied that there was such a thing as a Red Army. There were only thousands of hungry brigands,” according to one of Snow’s accounts of the period written in 1958.

Witness to revolution

After returning from Yan’an, Snow introduced the struggle of the CPC and the Red Army to the wider world. Many progressive youths went to Yan’an to attend the Red Army under his advocacy.

In 1937, after the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression broke out, Snow wrote extensively on how Chinese people fought the invaders bravely.

He visited Yan’an in 1939 again and lobbied the US government to give support to the movement.

After major Chinese cities were occupied by the Japanese army, Snow went to Hong Kong to collect money to finance the China Industrial Cooperation Campaign. It was aimed at absorbing displaced workers in order to build small factories in rural areas to produce life essentials and war materials for the Chinese armies.

In 1941, Snow returned to his hometown after 13 years. Thanks to his lobby, US President Franklin Roosevelt (18821945) directed several million US dollars to the campaign.

In 1950s, shortly after the People’s Republic of China was founded, McCarthyism spread across the United States and Snow was persecuted as a friend of the CPC. He lost his job and his books could not be published in the United States. Eventually, Snow had to move to Switzerland with his family but kept his US citizenship.

Historians reveal that in mid 1950s, Snow applied to take a trip to New China, but his request was refused by the US Government. His long term struggle to provide independent coverage of China eventually resulted in a visit to the country in 1960. Snow became one of the few Western journalists who truthfully reported the new China to Western readers.

During his trips in 1960 and 1964, Snow spent several months investigating and interviewing in cities, factories and the countryside.

In 1970, he was invited to inspect the National Day Parade on the Tian’anmen Rostrum with Mao Zedong, which was seen as a signal of friendship by the Chinese Government to the US Nixon Administration.

In February 1972, just weeks before Nixon launched his historic visit to Beijing, Snow died of cancer. In his final hours, Snow said “I love the Chinese people,” according to the memoir of Lois Snow, his then wife.

Posted at 1:55 AM · Comments (0)

Date: July 22, 2005

Thank you for the great work you do to inform and alert readers of the
humanitarian emergencies and natural disasters that threaten the lives
and livelihood of millions of people. The words you write and publish
can have a direct impact on the support organizations like the World
Food Program (WFP) receive to help save lives in emergency situations
around the world.
As you cover the food emergency in Niger, we kindly request your
assistance in letting your readers know that they can help those affected by
donating to organizations like Friends of the World Food Program. We
would greatly appreciate it if you would include the donation
information indicated below in or near articles about the situation in Niger
and/or on your web site.
More than 2.5 million people face a serious food crisis in Niger, one
of the world’s poorest countries, and another million people are
considered highly vulnerable. Drought and a devastating locust invasion have
resulted in exceptionally poor harvests this year. Children are the
most vulnerable; tragically, many are beginning to die from starvation.

To date, WFP has received only $5 million of a $16 million appeal to
reach 12 million of the most needy people in Niger, leaving a shortfall
of nearly 70% for this emergency operation.

Please inform your readers that they can help!
Tax deductible donations can be made to:

Friends of the World Food Program (Friends of WFP)
1819 L Street, NW Suite 400
Washington, DC 20036

Or online at: www.friendsofwfp.org

For more information, contact: Jennifer Haefeli, 202 530 1694,
jhaefeli@friendsofwfp.org

# # #
Friends of WFP is a non-profit organization dedicated to building the
public commitment and political leadership necessary to alleviate world
hunger. For more information, visit www.friendsofwfp.org.
The World Food Program is the largest international food aid
organization in the world and the United Nations’ frontline agency in the fight
against hunger. Every year, on average, WFP feeds 90 million people in
over 80 countries. For more information, visit www.wfp.org.

Posted at 3:22 PM · Comments (0)

Published: July 22, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

Thursday’s statement from the People’s Bank of China, announcing that the yuan is no longer pegged to the dollar, was terse and uninformative - you might say inscrutable. There’s a good chance that this is simply a piece of theater designed to buy a few months’ respite from protectionist pressures in the U.S. Congress.

Nonetheless, it could be the start of a process that will turn the world economy upside down - or, more accurately, right side up. That is, the free ride China has been giving America, in which the world’s richest economy has been getting cheap loans from a country that is dynamic but still quite poor, may be coming to an end.

It’s all about which way the capital is flowing.

Capital usually flows from mature, developed economies to less-developed economies on their way up. For example, a lot of America’s growth in the 19th century was financed by investors from Britain, which was already industrialized.

A decade ago, before the world financial crisis of 1997-1998, capital movements seemed to fit the historic pattern, as funds flowed from Japan and Western nations to “emerging markets” in Asia and Latin America. But these days things are running in reverse: capital is flowing out of emerging markets, especially China, and into the United States.

This uphill flow isn’t the result of private-sector decisions; it’s the result of official policy. To keep China’s currency from rising, the Chinese government has been buying up huge quantities of dollars and investing the proceeds in U.S. bonds.

One way to grasp how weird this policy is would be to think about what a comparable policy would look like in the United States, scaled up to match the size of our economy. It’s as if last year the U.S. government invested $1 trillion of taxpayers’ money in low-interest Japanese bonds, and this year looks set to invest an additional $1.5 trillion the same way.

Some economists think there is a deep rationale for this seemingly perverse policy. I think it’s something the Chinese government stumbled into as it tried to protect itself from the 1997-1998 crisis, and it is reluctant to change because the Chinese economy has been doing well. That is, China’s leaders don’t want to mess with success.

But pressures against China’s dollar purchases are building. By keeping the yuan down, China is feeding a trade surplus that is creating a growing political backlash in America and Europe. And China, which is still a poor country, is devoting a lot of resources to the accumulation of a basically useless pile of dollars instead of to higher living standards.

The question is what happens to us if the Chinese finally decide to stop acting so strangely.

An end to China’s dollar-buying spree would lead to a sharp rise in the value of the yuan. It would probably also lead to a sharp fall in the value of the dollar relative to other major currencies, like the yen and the euro, which the Chinese haven’t been buying on the same scale. This would help U.S. manufacturers by raising their competitors’ costs.

But if the Chinese stopped buying all those U.S. bonds, interest rates would rise. This would be bad news for housing - maybe very bad news, if the interest rate rise burst the bubble.

In the long run, the economic effects of an end to China’s dollar buying would even out. America would have more industrial workers and fewer real estate agents, more jobs in Michigan and fewer in Florida, leaving the overall level of employment pretty much unaffected. But as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, in the long run we are all dead.

In the short run, some people would win, but others would lose. And I suspect that the losers would greatly outnumber the winners.

And what about the strategic effects? Right now America is a superpower living on credit - something I don’t think has happened since Philip II ruled Spain. What will happen to our stature if and when China takes away our credit card?

This story is still in its early days. On the first day of the new policy, the yuan rose only 2 percent, not enough to make any noticeable difference. But one of these days Chinese dollar purchases will trail off, and we’ll find ourselves living in interesting times.

Posted at 11:23 PM · Comments (0)

It took us three years of e-mails, phone calls, meetings, discussion and drafting documents to come up with the Carnegie-Knight Initiative. It consists of three main elements:

1. A “research and policy” piece that will be run out of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard’s JFK School. Here, we have in mind a vehicle through which schools can collectively speak out on critical media issues of the day. That means journalism educators can have more voice. For example, as Judy Miller from the New York Times goes to jail over refusing to release anonymous sources and Matt Cooper from Time Magazine does not, or the case of “60 Minutes and Dan Rather’s coverage of Bush’s National Guard service. These would be examples where journalism schools and universities might want to weigh in on the discussion and debate.

2. An experimental curriculum reform element that encourages journalism programs to match-up reporters with scientists, urban planners, economists, historians, social scientists, legal scholars, foreign policy experts or public policy specialist to co-teach courses.

3. News 21 laboratories, or “incubators” at UC Berkeley, USC, Northwestern and Columbia, which will hire our best recent graduates to experiment with new kinds of multi-media reporting that combine television, radio and the web in new and innovative forms of interactive journalism. (Berkeley will begin by coordinating News 21.)

Some wonder if this “initiative” is not just a caucus of self-righteous and self-designated elitist deans forming itself into a priesthood to get some grants to the exclusion of other university programs. I hope that is not the case.

This is not an exclusive club

First, I should say that UC is a public university and that The Graduate School of Journalism there, where I am Dean, is itself far from being a well-endowed (or a well-heeled) institution. However, we do hope that it is at least a pretender to the aristocracy in terms of excellence in education.

Second, I should also note that there are stipulations in the research part of the grants (to be administered by Alex Jones at the Shorenstein Center) that require two thirds of the funds go to universities other than the five initiators. Moreover, Carnegie is also making four $100,000 grants available to other journalism schools each year for the kind of curriculum experimentation that we ourselves are committed to trying. So, in this way, we hope to serve as a prime mover rather than as some exclusive group that brooks no intruders.

In short, we seek to become ever more inclusive as the situation evolves. After all, the object is to gain some kind of broad, critical mass, not limit the effort in an exclusive way.
Speaking personally, I can say that the experience of working with Geoff Cowan (USC), Alex Jones (Harvard), Nick Lemann (Columbia) and Loren Ghiglione (Northwestern) has been a truly wonderful one. Even though we compete for the best students, there has been little sense of competition in our dealings with each other. Instead, there has been much welcomed collegiality, a common recognition that we confront shared problems due to the fact that journalism is rapidly changing and that aspects of “the media” are in a very uncertain, even parlous, state of grace.

“Our involvement was hardly optional”

What we can do to help is uncertain. But, I think we all felt that rather than just whine, we should at least make an effort to form some new civil society-based coalition where the sum was greater than the parts. Moreover, we felt that since we were all from big research universities, which comprise the largest pieces of civil society real estate in America, we ought to do what we could to engage these august institutions collectively in the debate over the media. After all, we are all in education, and the most fundamental job of journalism is to educate the public. So, we certainly have a dog in this fight!

And finally, we recognized that, since there are fewer and fewer workplaces in the broadcast media of such excellence that our graduates are truly eager to join them, we had to either get involved, or in effect confront the prospect that we were training students for the kinds of jobs that did not really exist. So, in a sense, as we pondered the situation, we felt that our involvement was hardly optional. Like it or not, we were involved.

Now, let me address your question about a “New Church” and a “priesthood” marching under the standard of a bogus mythology propagated by Watergate and the kind of hero worship and celebrity kultur that developed around the likes of Woodward and Bernstein.

Frankly, getting this effort together has been a lot of hard work, and usually it hardly felt like an establishmentarian priesthood in quest of a lot of grant money. Yes, these are good universities and excellent journalism programs. But, there are others equally as good. To get this effort organized took thousands of hours of grunt work both on the part of the five universities and the two foundations.

An understandable yearning for press heroes

I think it fair to say that that only way we felt part of a priesthood was in so far as we have truly came to enjoy each other’s company and derived a certain measure of energy and possibility from the thought of working in concert. And, we actually have learned a good deal from each other. But, that was part of whole purpose from the outset.

(And parenthetically, Jay, let it be known that we would wish for nothing more than your presence in whatever watchdog priesthood of media we may come to comprise!)

But, in reading your blog entry, the larger question you address is not so much whether we as the founding schools of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative have anointed ourselves as “priests,” but whether the whole last few decades of journalism have not been ginned up on an almost chiliastic vision of a second journalistic coming in the trans-substantiated form of Carl and Bob.

I take your point about the need for a healthy skepticism about heroes of all sorts who invariably get delaminated from the contexts in which they arise as well as from those others who sustain them. They are often turned into larger than life figures, albeit, with a few toes of clay. But, let’s be honest. There is something about every fraternity, profession, and even society, that does seem to need to lionize and mythologize certain people so that they become iconic hood ornaments. I have just finished reading the Odyssey and the Iliad again, and despite all the mortal flaws of these Homeric heroes – and Greece was the birthplace of western heroes and hero-worship -people seemed to need heroes and to be inspired by them.

In this sense, it may be fair to say that Woodward and Bernstein have become unreal personifications of latter-day people’s yearnings (with a little help from Hollywood and “the media”) to believe that somewhere in the Fourth estate there are/were dragon slayers who are/were diligent, trustworthy, efficacious and often bigger-than-life. This hardly surprises me. People do want to believe. Being able to identify, or create, heroes, helps them believe. It also sustains and exhilarates them.

It is true that much of the rest of the press were less than aggressive about the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Nixon administration. But, then it is also true that they have not been able to get much traction against the shameless spin-mongering and outright distortions of the Bush Administration. And, let’s not even raise the question of the war in Iraq and WMD.

The P.R. apparatus and the propaganda of the state

Indeed, speaking as someone who has studied China and other Marxists-Leninist states for the last 45 years, there are haunting similarities between the public relations apparatus of the current administration and the propaganda apparatus of Leninist political parties. They include ultra-loyalty and obedience to the supreme leader; extreme party discipline; an absolute imperative to stay on-message (fidelity to “the correct line”); maximizing the use of state organs for propaganda purposes; and a poorly evolved appreciation of the essential role that the Founding Fathers of this country imagined for the press as an independent watchdog over all kinds of power (whether state, ecclesiastical, corporate, etc.)

I am not saying that there is a comparison between our government and that of a Leninist state like China, but I am saying that the role and acceptance by our state of the media as a legitimate and necessary institution is weaker now than ever before. I am also suggesting that because of their commercial/corporate backgrounds, when it comes to the question of “communications,” many in the higher reaches of government have a keener appreciation of public relations than of independent, hard-hitting and often abrasive investigative journalism. Their tendency is to want to use communications as “the mouthpiece” of the state and party, rather than to see the most important role for communications as one of opposition and challenge to established power centers.

This almost religious veneration of Woodward, Bernstein, Bradley, Graham means that people did, and still do, feel a deep need to believe that someone can, and will, stand up to these prevailing centers of power and propaganda. The Watergate hearings were cathartic, because sclerotic Washington did finally rise for one grand moment to dig in the Washington manure pile and get past the spin and PR to search out truth and fact from falsehood. And, yes, by now we have forgotten many of those other figures like Sen. Sam Ervin or Sam Dash who played such important parts in the saga. What we remember instead is their personifications.

“Bereft of good models… despondent about their profession”

Al Pacino played Lowell Bergman (who is on our faculty at UC Berkeley) in “The Insider,” the story of Lowell’s joust for “60 Minutes” against the tobacco industry. And, yes, Lowell, who is an excellent investigative journalist, but still a mortal, comes out looking something like a journo-Godhead. Sure, you can say that Pacino’s version of Bergman—just like Redford and Hoffman’s version of Woodward and Bernstein—is a somewhat glossy, incomplete, idealization of what really happened. But, what else is new?

Are we as citizens not entitled to take some heart in a few inspiring stories of valorous deeds just like all those who have gone before us who believed in good kings, kind monks, patriotic warriors or dedicated political figures? Look at children’s books? Heroes abound! I just read my kids a book on Hannibal as seen through the eyes of his nephew, and it was a terrific story. Is it an historical distortion? Sure! The nephew probably never existed and certainly didn’t write a book! I know it isn’t journalism, but is that impermissibly warped story telling?

From the Bible on down men have sought exemplars. Sure, they may only tell part of the story, and sure young journalism students and acolytes should not be lulled in visionary stupor by such mythologized, heroic examples. But it all seems quite understandable to me, especially in this age of extreme skepticism, doubt and cynicism that people yearn for some hopeful models for human action even polish up, or invent, a few larger than life inspirations.
In any event, I don’t think journalism schools have used this mythology to sell soap!

Indeed, what I worry about is not so much that the next generation of journalists will be swayed by or sell out to press mythology, but that they will end up so bereft of good models and so despondent about the state of their profession that they may lose all hope and idealism. Then what? After all, if you are going to be a journalist, repayment must come in some other currency than dollars. One of those alternative currencies journalism trades in is “able to make a difference.”

“I don’t experience myself as ‘a priest’”

I realize that such a phrase may sound a trifle corny to grizzled veterans, but this is one of the animating spirits of our trade for many good journalists. God knows, most of us are not being paid so well—at least compared to other professions—that we do not look for some compensatory sense that what we do is worthwhile.

In short, I do not share Greg Lindsay’ critique that “journalism school professors” (our professors are almost all journalists!) sell students “a mindset, a worldview, and ideology” that is somehow erroneous and corrupting. (See Lindsay’s essay for Media Bistro.) That is a gross over-simplification. At least here at Berkeley, I do not think our students are all lathered up like religious zealots for “good old fashion shoe leather reporting.” We want them to have good ethics and ideals, but we also want them to be sophisticated, world traveled, realistic and skeptical.

Whatever one believes about the animating mythologies of journalism and its role in society, who among would deny its importance? Who among us would deny that things are rapidly changing and that there are dysfunctional links in the whole food chain of reporting? What I mean by this is that the chain on which information is vectored to the public and then digested by society and the powers-that-be is broken.

As a journalist, or a dean, I don’t experience myself as “a priest,’ much less as a member of some new church. I experience myself as someone who has been around the journalistic block a few times, seen some real problems with our profession; and wants to do what I can to keep this institution in good running order. I also see great uncertainty for our students in terms of where they can expect to matriculate and find dignified places of work that will sustain them, even rudimentarily, in their future lives. If you are about to go into television these days, things don’t look so great.

The assumption that the press matters is under threat

Final thought: As I survey the landscape, what worries me most is that I think one of the oldest assumptions about journalism—namely, if the story can be told, something will happen for the better—is slowly being rendered inoperable. (But, maybe it never was operable, and I am in some mythology myself!)

I prefer to think that the chain once existed, more or less, and now has acquired some major breaks it in. In other words, we can no longer blithely assume that if a reporter does his/her shoe-leather investigations and writes or produces a good revelatory story that an editor will welcome it; the publisher will publish it; producers will air it; readers and viewers will become better informed; the collectivity of citizens will demand action; hearings will be held, commissions formed laws passed, court cases will be adjudicated; and reforms will be made. Isn’t that the way things are or were supposed to work? And, if not, how the hell are they supposed to work?

Alas, we can no longer assume that journalists have this catalytic ability. We have in too many ways been bull-dozed aside. (I think this is the real message of Judy Miller going to jail.) We still can, to some degree, do our thing, but we are increasingly maligned, marginalized and presumed by many power centers (government, state, church, etc) to be troublesome, negative, unpatriotic and unreliable. Now, we are even threatened with jail.

The assumption that the press matters, can have an effect when it does its job and should be protected is what is under threat. Our problem is not so much that we are lost in a mythology of the press. It is that we are threatened with being dislodged from the presumption of Americans that we have a necessary role to play in the life and governance of this country.

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Howard W. French
FRIDAY, JULY 22, 2005 - COpyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI A revealing book has just been published about a closed and secretive East Asian country that devotes a huge portion of its budget to developing nuclear weapons, even as millions of its people starve to death.
Among the many revelations in the book are details of how the country’s leaders ran a lucrative narcotics trade in order to finance their survival. There are equally telling accounts of the development of an all-suffocating personality cult, under which the masses are required to wear pins bearing their leader’s likeness and to recite his words, which are revered as a source of “immense joy to the people of the world.”
Readers should be forgiven for guessing that the book in question concerns North Korea, the hereditary Marxist dictatorship that is frequently described as the world’s most bizarre state. But readers who reached that conclusion, however logically, would have been wrong. The thick and heavily researched book in question is “Mao: The Unknown Story,” by Jung Chang.
Among the book’s numerous anecdotes is the story about a China, reduced to near-African levels of poverty by Mao Zedong’s leadership, that nonetheless invested heavily in lofting a satellite in 1970 to orbit the globe, while warbling the Maoist anthem, “The East Is Red.”
This feat was neatly duplicated nearly three decades later by North Korea’s present-day leader, Kim Jong Il. In 1998, and without warning, he launched a rocket that flew over Japan, ostensibly to place his own paean-warbling satellite into orbit.
Stories like these, of which there are a great many, help drive home a lesson unintended by Chang’s book: That however troubling or reprehensible the North Korean leadership may have been over the years, when seen by the historical standards of its neighborhood, its behavior has been anything but weird.
The North Korean regime’s most obvious bloodlines flow from the Soviet Union of Stalin and the China of Mao in the 1950s and 1960s, with its confrontationist stance and seeming obliviousness to human life. The examples of both these maximum leaders counseled Kim Il Sung that even a country like his could be willed to greatness.
“Factories don’t stress efficiency,” said Li Chunhu, dean of Korean studies at Shanghai International Studies University. “They depend on ideological campaigns, people’s war, to encourage people to work. These were all things we experienced ourselves.”
The often-overlooked third pillar to what appears today to be a unique and unusual system - one characterized by the people’s absolute identification with an all-powerful, quasi-divine leader - is Imperial Japan. North Korea, a colony for 35 years, emerged from the ashes of Japan’s collapsed empire.
Even today, elderly Japanese say the brainwashing of the North Korean populace and the ritual acts of slavish devotion to the Kims, father and son, recall the indoctrination and emperor-worship of Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Japanese ideology of that era was known as kokutai, meaning national polity, but the word became a catchall to describe absolute devotion to a sacred emperor and a sense of being Japanese, distinct and superior to all things foreign.
By 1936, Japan was spending 47.7 percent of its budget on armaments. As in North Korea today, a society “dyed in one color,” according to official propaganda, the kokutai ideology made this kind of abnegation possible by stressing the need for “a structure of unanimity” in national life.
People were urged “to live for the great glory and dignity of the emperor, abandoning one’s small ego, and thus expressing our true life as a people,” wrote Herbert Bix in “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan.”
Given a chance, most North Koreans today would readily recognize kokutai as a near twin of their own ruling ideology, Juche. The Korean term, equally a catchword, literally means self-reliance and is meant to draw a firm line between things Korean and everything else.

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Copyright - The International Herald Tribune

THURSDAY, JULY 21, 2005

TOKYO China rising



The ever-growing economic power of China poses important questions: will China, despite its lack of freedom, become a true world-class power? And if and when it does, how should the international community respond?

With 760 million laborers, an average wage that is a small fraction of America’s, and one of the highest savings rates in the world (38 percent to 42 percent, though much of this is wasted by the dysfunctional Chinese banking system), China has enjoyed annual economic growth of 9 percent for the last quarter-century.

The Central Intelligence Agency, using the purchasing power parity method, ranks the Chinese gross domestic product as the second largest in the world, about 62 percent of the American and 1.94 times Japan’s, the third largest.

Yet Beijing has yet to forcefully claim the title of world leader.

There are two possible reasons. First, China is actually still poor and weak. About two-thirds of the Chinese population is systematically excluded from the glittering, vibrant urban centers and have the low living standard typical of a developing nation. While China’s most developed regions, Shanghai and Beijing, were ranked by the United Nations in 2001 as equivalent to Greece and Singapore, the more populous provinces, like Gansu and Guizhou, were ranked with Haiti and Sudan.

China is essentially still a giant labor-intensive processing factory. Among the great variety of industrial goods China now produces and exports, few are invented or designed by Chinese. As a result, the Chinese end up earning low wages at great costs to their environment, while foreign patent holders, investors and retailers capture the lion’s share of the profit. No wonder foreign capitalists are among the most enthusiastic cheerleaders of China’s rise.

Second, China’s foreign policy is still motivated by a besieged one-party regime’s desire for preservation. The persistent abuse of human rights and systematic suppression of freedom show how paranoid the regime is.

Many of China’s business leaders hold or seek foreign passports or residency. Capital flight from China has been surpassing foreign direct investment since the late 1990’s. Beijing’s top diplomatic objective has been to gain external acceptance that will prop up the regime, not to expand Chinese national interests or exercise power abroad.

This profound divorce of the regime’s political interest from the nation’s interest, of course, could easily change: Beijing could quickly become a typical rising challenger or even an imperialist power if it feels secure and powerful enough; the regime could also be aggressive and belligerent if it feels desperately weak and in danger of collapse.

Therefore, predictions that China will quickly become a world power, and will do so peacefully, are premature. Since the late 19th century, only one major non-Western nation, Japan, has risen to become a world-class power, and it did so only by wreaking much havoc.

Still, China should and can be powerful and rich. More important, the Chinese people deserve to be free: free from poverty and backwardness, free from the hurtful feelings of past humiliations, free from deeply trenched ethnocentrism and chauvinism, and free from political tyranny. Such a rise of China would enrich the world and truly glorify Chinese history.

Chinese people and the world must work together to devise and further social, political and institutional changes, in addition to promoting economic development, to ensure the peaceful rise of China.

It is also obviously premature to assume that China’s rise necessarily threatens the United States. Such a belief may become an enormously costly self-fulfilling prophecy. It is morally dubious to suppress the Chinese, a fifth of the human race, just because the government there is now undemocratic. It will take much more than devising some clever geopolitical moves to check and control China or to force a quick regime change in Beijing.

What is needed from the current world leaders is serious commitment, long-term goals, and steady leadership and coordination to help China rise and change, peacefully. The success or failure of China’s rise are too consequential to be left for Beijing to manage alone.

(Fei-Ling Wang is a professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an international affairs fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.)

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In “Machete Season,” 10 Hutu men recall how they enjoyed slaughtering their neighbors with machetes and clubs — and six years after the Rwanda genocide, feel no guilt.

July 20, 2005 | The 1994 Rwandan genocide was ignored by most of the world as it raged on. But in years since, the horrific event that claimed 800,000 deaths has garnered worldwide attention, thanks to numerous books and documentaries, and even a Hollywood film. Philip Gourevitch’s masterly “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” based on his dispatches from Rwanda for the New Yorker, became an award-winning bestseller. Romeo Dallaire, the United Nations commander stationed in Rwanda at the time, recently participated in a documentary based on his own memoir “Shake Hands With the Devil.” And last year, the tragedy of the slaughter was brought to the big screen in the surprisingly good “Hotel Rwanda,” a film starring Don Cheadle that managed to grab three Oscar nominations.

These renderings of the genocide include many unfathomable images of men furiously hacking at other men, of whole communities decimated while seeking refuge in church, of bloated, days-old bodies choking the country’s rivers. As by now most people know, in Rwanda, the vast majority of the Hutu population participated in the mass killing of their fellow Tutsi countrymen (as well as Hutu moderates) in only 100 days, a little more than three months. The killing was done without the efficient aid of gas chambers or bombs or machine guns; instead, most of the murders were of the one-on-one sort — a very personal, laborious killing in which many, many people willingly, almost enthusiastically, took part.

Although Western writers and artists have attempted, and will continue attempting, to translate the reality of a mass extermination, it’s a nearly impossible task. They succeed in many ways, but what they can’t quite get across is technical: What is it like for one entire population to kill another, day after day, for an entire season of the year? Did the men go to work too? Did they make love at night, and wake up and kill in the morning? Did they read books, get drunk, tell bedtime stories — all after a day’s kill? Did they cry?

“Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak,” the second book on Rwanda by French journalist Jean Hatzfeld, attempts to answer some of these questions, and gives this madness a shocking sort of order. Hatzfeld interviewed 10 Hutus six years after the genocide, while the men served time in jail. These Hutus were from the rural Nyamata district (population 119,000), which includes a small town and 14 surrounding hills (Rwanda is lush and mountainous) split almost half between Hutus and Tutsis. Beginning in April 1994, within six weeks, five out of every six Tutsis in Nyamata were killed.

The 10 men, ranging from 20 to 62 years of age, hailed from these hills, where most of them were farmers. “None of them has ever quarreled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, and women,” Hatzfeld writes. In fact, they lived next door to Tutsis, played soccer with them, went to church with them. “But these ten banded together,” Hatzfeld explains, “because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns.” Hatzfeld gives the reader a basic sense of who the men are — the little detail already provided in this review — but he wisely lets the men talk first before proffering their proper biographies. “That bunch was famous on the hill for carousing and tomfoolery,” said Clementine, a local Hutu who is married to a Tutsi. “Those fellows did not seem so bad.”

The Rwandan genocide officially began after the death of President Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu, whose plane was mysteriously shot down on April 6, 1994. The death of the president was the excuse the Hutu extremists needed to begin the killing that they had long planned. (Obviously, Rwandan history is ever more complicated: Hutu extremists had long been paranoid about Tutsi power; at various times Tutsis had suffered, and been slaughtered, at the hands of Hutus; a group of exiled Tutsis organized the Rwandan Patriotic Front, with whom Habyarimana had signed peace accords in 1993. Later, the RPF would enter Rwanda and stop the genocide.)

Hatzfeld’s band of ordinary Hutus, incited by extremists broadcasting on the radio, gathered together, singing songs and screwing around, and then headed down to the marshes where they believed the Tutsis were hiding. The new killers indeed bonded immediately: “We gathered into teams on the soccer field and went out hunting as kindred spirits,” said Ignace. “We had to work fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays — we had to finish up,” said Elie. “We canceled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same level for a single job — to crush all the cockroaches.”

The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It’s not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:

Fulgence: “First I cracked an old mama’s head with a club.”

Alphonse: “I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow.”

Adalbert didn’t remember the “precise details” of his first kill: “Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17.”

They meditate on murder like this throughout the book. Elie: “The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete — that is what we do every morning.” Alphonse: “Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away.”

Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word “cut” to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it’s a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.

Yet, there were differences. “Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity,” said Pio. “The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day.” Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: “We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit.” The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything — some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. “If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children,” one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night.

Many men insisted that this life — the one where they woke up and killed people all day — was a better one. “Man can get used to killing, if he kills on and on,” said Alphonse. Fulgence went one step further: “The more we saw people die, the less we thought about their lives, the less we talked about their deaths. And the more we got used to enjoying it.”

As the killing went on, the men became intoxicated by the idea of “finishing the job.” The idea appears to have been that when it was all over, the Tutsis would be gone, and there would be no reminder of them. So the drive to kill every last Tutsi became more ferocious. In Nyamata not one bond of friendship spared a life, writes Hatzfeld; unlike in Nazi Germany, for example, Tutsis found “not a single escape network.”

But there was another key component to the genocide’s ferocity: No one was watching. There is nothing so damning in “Machete Season” as when the men speak of the “whites.” One man suggests that the idea of genocide germinated in 1959, when Hutus massacred many Tutsis “without being punished.” And in 1994, Hutu extremists gradually realized that the world was averting its eyes from the present atrocities as well. “All the important people turned their backs on our killings,” said Elie. “The blue helmets, the Belgians, the white directors, the black presidents, the humanitarian people, and the international cameramen, the priests and the bishops and finally even God … We were all abandoned by all words of rebuke.” Pancrace agreed: “Killing is very discouraging if you yourself must decide to do it … but if you must obey the orders of the authorities … if you see that the killing will be total and without disastrous consequences for yourself, you feel soothed and reassured.”

These were ordinary men, for sure. And ordinary men would have feared the punishment of others; as soon as the West pulled out of Rwanda they knew they were free to kill. It’s clear that if some force had been monitoring them, at least some of the motivation to kill would have withered away. Fittingly, one of the chapters in the book is titled “A Sealed Chamber.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, because of this long absence of condemnation, the men have no regrets. “I want to make clear that from the first gentleman I killed to the last, I was not sorry about a single one,” said Leopord. Hatzfeld notes in amazement that the killers speak in monotone and “never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything.” During the men’s seven years in prison, they knew of not one Hutu suicide. If they were depressed, it was only because they were locked up. “Aside from the anguish of my years in prison,” said Pancrace, “I do not see my life as harmed by all these regrettable events.” The unfortunately candid Elie takes a stab at remorse: “In prison and on the hills, everyone is obviously sorry. But most of the killers are sorry they didn’t finish the job.”

“Machete Season” is realistic and, above all else, terrifying; Hatzfeld brilliantly organizes his subjects’ stories for maximum effect. His method captures the rhythm of a genocide — the cold, workmanlike, fierce nature of its repetition. The book goes on and on, the killers are still alive, they persist, they won’t stop talking. Just when you think they won’t mention their machete again, it’s back.

When the men return home from jail, it’s to a country in trauma. “The silence on the Rwandan hills is indescribable and cannot be compared with the usual mutism in the aftermath of war,” writes Hatzfeld. What Hatzfeld suggests is the possibility of an Africa in turmoil because of many of its people’s learned fatalism. Perhaps the most terrible line in “Machete Season” is spoken by Pio, who noted with astonishment the silence with which the Tutsis confronted their deaths, even as he came near to where they hid in the marsh, machete in hand. They did not fight back. They did not cry out. “They felt so abandoned they did not even open their mouths.”

Copyright Salon.com

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Copyright - International Herald Tribune

WASHINGTON The state visit to Washington this week by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India is of considerable bilateral and global significance. But there is a silent third party in the room: China.

Indeed, 10 days ago, the heads of all three states met at the G-8 summit meeting in Scotland. The intensive interaction will continue over the next six months as President Hu Jintao of China visits the United States in September, and President George W. Bush has committed himself to visiting both China and India by early 2006.

Washington’s current courtship of New Delhi takes place against the backdrop of a similar Sino-Indian entente, as well as thickening U.S.-China ties. Just in the last week the U.S. secretaries of state and commerce were in Beijing for intensive talks on security and trade issues.

Sino-Indian exchanges have also intensified since Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s highly successful April visit to New Delhi, including progress in sensitive border negotiations. Singh’s visit to Washington also symbolizes deepening interaction between American and Indian governments and society - most notably in the defense, trade and high-technology realms.

Washington’s engagement of the world’s two most populous nations (which together represent a third of humanity), each experiencing strong economic growth and a raised profile on the international stage, is strategically smart. As the U.S. government’s National Intelligence Council pointed out earlier this year in its report “Mapping the Global Future,” “the likely emergence of China and India as new major global players … will transform the geopolitical landscape in the early 21st century.”

Nowhere will that be more apparent than in the economic arena. One highly respected Wall Street banking firm forecasts that by 2050 China, the United States and India (in that order) will have the world’s largest economies and be in a position to dominate the global marketplace.

Thus, a new interactive dynamic has begun between the United States and Asia’s two continental powers. The task for all three is to manage ties as a virtuous circle rather than a competitive triangle.

There are some geopolitical thinkers in each capital who seek to use improved bilateral relations against the third party. Some in Beijing and New Delhi see strengthened Sino-Indian ties as a constraint on American hegemony. Others in Washington and New Delhi are suspicious of China and seek to build U.S.-India relations (particularly military ties) as a strategic counterweight to growing Chinese power.

These manipulative temptations should be resisted. To its credit, the Bush administration has publicly stated that the much-improved relationship with India, begun under the Clinton administration, has its own strategic logic and imperatives, and is not part of a China containment strategy.

On his way to meet Bush, Singh offered a similar assessment: “I don’t think our relationship with the United States is at the cost of our relationship with China.”

Indeed, the U.S.-India relationship is important for many of its own intrinsic reasons. Shared democratic values and political systems make the two countries, in the words of former Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, “natural allies.” A shared entrepreneurial spirit has also made these two countries the world leaders in information technology.

Similarly, the U.S.-China relationship has its own inherent dynamics. The relationship has a longer and deeper base than U.S.-India ties, insofar as they have developed in all spheres over the past three decades. The two societies are deeply intertwined economically and in other ways, while the two governments interact extensively over a wide range of bilateral and global issues.

Engagement is a fact of life, not a policy preference that can be turned on or off (as some in Congress seem to believe).

However, while the U.S.-India and China-India relationships steadily improve, Sino-American relations seem to be entering another strained and fractious phase in their long roller coaster relationship.

A new wave of anti-China acrimony is currently gripping Washington, especially in the Congress, fueled by allegations about China’s military buildup, threatened nuclear war, unfair trading practices, product pirating, human rights violations and attempted buyouts of U.S. companies (including Unocal).

Despite these concerns (and U.S.-India ties will also not be immune to ups and downs in the years ahead), there is no turning back from the growing interdependence of the three countries, including in the vital area of energy supplies.

Managing these expanding relations will increasingly be a key challenge for Washington, Beijing and New Delhi.

(Karl Inderfurth served as assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs from 1997-2001. David Shambaugh, worked on China in the State Department and National Security Council during the Carteradministration. Both are on the faculty of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University.)

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July 18, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

Washington

DURING the cold war, as the Soviet economic system slowly unraveled, internal reform was impossible because highly placed officials who recognized the systemic disorders could not talk about them honestly. The United States is now in an equivalent predicament. Its weakening position in the global trading system is obvious and ominous, yet leaders in politics, business, finance and the news media are not willing to discuss candidly what is happening and why. Instead, they recycle the usual bromides about the benefits of free trade and assurances that everything will work out for the best.

Much like Soviet leaders, the American establishment is enthralled by utopian convictions - the market orthodoxy of free trade globalization. The United States is heading for yet another record trade deficit in 2005, possibly 25 percent larger than last year’s. Our economy’s international debt position - accumulated from many years of tolerating larger and larger trade deficits - began compounding ferociously in the last five years. Our net foreign indebtedness is now more than 25 percent of gross domestic product and at the current pace will reach 50 percent in four or five years .

For years, elite opinion dismissed the buildup of foreign indebtedness as a trivial issue. Now that it is too large to deny, they concede the trend is “unsustainable.” That’s an economist’s euphemism which means: things cannot go on like this, not without ugly consequences for American living standards. But why alarm the public? The authorities assure us timely policy adjustments will fix the matter.

Reporters and editors typically take cues from the same influential sources and learned experts in business, finance and government. If the news media decided to cast these facts as the story of the world’s only superpower losing ground in global competition and becoming financially dependent on strategic rivals like China, the public would take greater notice. But governing elites would regard such clarity as inflammatory. America’s awesome trade problem is instead portrayed as something else - an esoteric technical dispute about currency values, the dollar versus the Chinese yuan. The context is guaranteed to baffle and benumb citizens.

The possibility that the United States can no longer afford globalization, at least not as it now functions, is what opinion leaders do not wish to discuss. A few brave dissenters have stated the matter plainly and called for significant policy shifts to stop the hemorrhaging. Warren Buffett, the legendary investor, says the United States is destined to become not an “ownership society,” but a “sharecropper society.” But his analysis, and others like it, are brushed aside.

An authentic debate might start by asking heretical questions: Why is the United States one of the few advanced economies that suffers from perennial trade deficits? Why do new trade agreements, despite official promises, always leave the United States with a deeper deficit hole, with another wave of jobs moving overseas? How do the authorities explain the 30-year stagnation of working-class wages that is peculiar to America? Are we supposed to believe that everyone else is simply more competitive or slyly breaking the rules? In the last three decades, American policymakers have succeeded in closing the trade gap with only one event - a recession.

The American predicament is shaped by operating dynamics grounded in the global system, singularly embraced by Washington because Washington originated most of them. At the outset, these practices were both virtuous and self-interested for the United States - encouraging industrialization in poor countries, binding cold war allies together with trade and investment, furthering the global advance of American business and finance. With its wide-open market, America played - and still plays - buyer of last resort for world exports. Its leading companies and banks gained access to developing new markets, often by sharing jobs, production and technology with others. American policymakers also got to run the world.

The utopian expectations behind this arrangement turned out to be wrong, judging by empirical evidence rather than theory. But why wrong? American political debate is enveloped by the ideology of free trade, but “free trade” does not actually describe the global economic system. A more accurate description would be “managed trade” - a dense web of bargaining and deal-making among governments and multinational corporations, all with self-interested objectives that the marketplace doesn’t determine or deliver. Every sovereign nation, the United States included, uses its vast arsenal of policies to pursue its national interest.

But on the crucial question of how policy makers define “national interest,” Washington stands alone. Western Europe, whatever its problems, manages economic policy to maintain modest trade surpluses. Japan manages to insure far larger surpluses in recessions (its export income subsidizes inefficient domestic employers). China strives to acquire a larger, more advanced industrial base at the expense of worker incomes and bank profits. Germany and Japan, despite vast differences, both manage to keep advanced manufacturing sectors anchored at home and to defend domestic wage levels and social guarantees. When they do disperse production and jobs overseas, as they must, they do so strategically.

By contrast, Washington defines “national interest” primarily in terms of advancing the global reach of our multinational enterprises. Elites are persuaded by the reigning orthodoxy that subsidiary domestic interests will ultimately benefit too. The distinctive power of America’s globalized companies is reflected in trade patterns. Nearly half of American exports and imports are not traded in open markets - the price auction idealized by neoclassical economics - but within the companies themselves, moving materials and components back and forth among their far-flung factories. A trade deficit does not show on the company’s balance sheet, only on the nation’s. In recent years, much of the trade deficit has reflected the value-added production and jobs that companies moved elsewhere.

The United States is thus especially vulnerable to the downward pressures on working-class wages that exist on both ends of the global system. American producers are generally free - and even encouraged by Washington - to shift production to low-wage locations. Companies regularly use this cost-cutting technique as a competitive weapon without regard to the domestic consequences. The practice works for companies and investors, but not so well for a nation.

INDEED, the cumulative effects of retarding labor incomes worldwide repeatedly threatens stagnation or worse for the entire system. Workers, to put it crudely, cannot buy what the world can make. Too much capital leads to the speculative “bubbles” that bounce around the world, visiting financial crisis on rich and poor alike.

At a different moment in history, American leadership might have stepped up to these disorders and led the way to solutions. If globalization is to continue without encountering more crisis and random destruction, governments must together shift the balance of power so labor incomes can rise in step with rising productivity and profits. If the United States is to avert its own reckoning, it must take decisive action to draw firm limits on its exposure to trade deficits, that is, resign its position as the open-armed buyer of last resort. In effect, Washington would also reform its own national interest imperatives so that they more closely resemble what other nations already embrace. Ultimately, American remedial action may protect the global system from its own crisis - the moment when trading partners discover they have just lost their best customer.

But to describe plausible remedies is to explain why none are likely. The webs of mutual interests connecting government, corporate boardrooms and Wall Street are too deeply woven, as are habits of thought among policy makers and politicians. So I do not expect anything fundamental will be altered in time. We are going to find out if the dissenters are right.

William Greider, the national affairs columnist of The Nation, is the author of “One World, Ready or Not.”

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UP FRONT | LATIN AMERICA - COpyright The Miami Herald

Latin Americans are flocking to Chinese language classes to take advantage of growing economic ties between Beijing and the region.

The 14 Peruvians learning to speak Chinese are used to spelling Spanish words exactly as they are pronounced. So they struggled in class recently as they studied a character and tried to pronounce pi-jiu — beer.

”Our teacher tells us we have to think like we’re in the Cave Era, reading hieroglyphics,” said Margarita Ramírez, a student at San Marcos University. “There are so many characters. The pronunciation is so different, especially zh, which is a nightmare.”

Once considered too difficult and virtually useless by many Latin Americans, Chinese is quickly becoming the second language of choice for a growing number of people in the region as Beijing’s economic boom has dramatically increased trade and investments with the mostly Spanish-speaking continent.

`THE FUTURE’

Three to five times more Latin Americans are studying Chinese today compared to five years ago, according to an unscientific survey conducted by The Herald in six countries.

”It’s the language of the future for commercial and industrial transactions and for foreign trade,” said Zelma Wong, the administrator who decided to begin offering Chinese at San Marcos. “In 10 years, China will be a world power. That will mean economic development for Peru.”

Not a day passes in Latin America, it seems, without news of a major Chinese investment in the region, a visit by a high-ranking Chinese government or trade official or a trip by a Latin American official to China.

Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo just returned from China. Other Latin American presidents who preceded Toledo include Colombia’s Alvaro Uribe, Argentina’s Néstor Kirchner and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. And last year, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a 12-day visit to Brazil, Argentina, Chile and Cuba and signed agreements that might lead to investments of at least $30 billion.

”China might be the strongest force driving business in Latin America,” said Ricardo Amorim, who heads Latin America research for the German bank, WestLB. “China is the strongest buyer of minerals and agricultural commodities … [and] that trend is likely to increase for the next couple of decades.”

Savvy Latin Americans who earlier might have studied English or French are now studying Chinese — to be well positioned to profit from the growing economic ties with Beijing and perhaps even Chinese tourism.

”People who know Chinese will have more business opportunities,” said Aldo Lezama, a 23-year-old economics student now studying the language at San Marcos. “You’ll have an advantage over the person who doesn’t speak the language.”

MORE STUDENTS

Since the Buenos Aires Central University for Languages in Argentina began offering Chinese last summer, 800 students have registered, said program coordinator María Chao. “Now we’re waiting for even more.”

Monica Cohen, who works for a private language school in Buenos Aires called IdiomasyCursos.com, said interest in her Chinese classes also has skyrocketed recently. At times, she said, the school was receiving more inquiries about Chinese lessons than English — usually the most popular language to study. The school now has about a dozen Chinese language students, compared to none less than a year ago.

At the Chilean-Chinese Cultural Institute in Santiago, director Sergio Patricio said that there are now 180 students enrolled in language classes compared to 23 two years ago.

”We see mostly two types of students,” Patricio said in a telephone interview, “businessmen who do business with Chinese companies and university students, who see it as a plus in the job market to be able to speak Chinese.”

BUSY TEACHERS

In the Bolivian capital of La Paz, Heriberto Quispe, who learned Chinese as an exchange student in 1993 in the city of Hangzhou, said he began teaching the language early this year and now has to turn away potential students.

Eva Wong, a Chinese teacher who immigrated from Hong Kong to Lima with her parents 15 years ago, said she has gone from two students five years ago to more than 100 today.

”I don’t have any more time to teach,” she said.

She kept her humor as her students at San Marcos struggled with the language as well as the culture. At one point, Wong explained that the word mijou described an alcoholic drink.

”Sake!” one student shouted out. ”That’s Japanese,” Wong shot back. “I’m Chinese.”

Two universities in Bogotá began offering Chinese lessons this year. And in Lima, the University of Callao also began offering Chinese this year after administrators realized that the university was buying more and more machines from China for its engineering departments.

”We started with one class, added another and are likely to add a third,” said Humberto Tordoya, a University of Callao administrator.

Herald special correspondent Mei-Ling Hopgood contributed to this report from Buenos Aire

Posted at 11:40 PM · Comments (0)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: July 19, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

XINCHANG, China, July 18 - After three nights of increasingly heavy rioting, the police were taking no chances on Monday, deploying dozens of busloads of officers before dusk and blocking every road leading to the factory.

Protesters, who say the pharmaceuticals factory at Xinchang pollutes their water, were blocked on Monday by police barricades. There is rising discontent in China with the authorities’ failure to respond to grievances.

But the angry residents in this village 180 miles south of Shanghai had learned their lessons, too, they said, having studied reports of riots in towns near and far that have swept rural China in recent months. Sneaking over mountain paths and wading through rice paddies, they made their way to a pharmaceuticals plant, they said, determined to pursue a showdown over the environmental threat they say it poses.

As many as 15,000 people massed here Sunday night and waged a pitched battle with the authorities, overturning police cars and throwing stones for hours, undeterred by thick clouds of tear gas. Fewer people may have turned out Monday evening under rainy skies, but residents of this factory town in the wealthy Zhejiang Province vow they will keep demonstrating until they have forced the 10-year-old plant to relocate.

“This is the only way to solve problems like ours,” said a 22-year-old villager whose house sits less than 100 yards from the smashed gates of the factory, where the police were massed. “If you go to see the mayor or some city official, they just take your money and do nothing.”

The riots in Xinchang are a part of a rising tide of discontent in China, with the number of mass protests like these skyrocketing to 74,000 incidents last year from about 10,000 a decade earlier, according to government figures. The details have varied from incident to incident, but the recent protests all share a common foundation of accumulated anger over the failure of China’s political system to respond to legitimate grievances and defiance of the local authorities, who are often seen as corrupt.

A sign of the leadership’s growing concern over the increasing turbulence can be seen in a proliferation of high-level statements about the demonstrations.

In a nationally televised news conference this month, Li Jingtian, deputy director of the Communist Party’s organization bureau, complained that “with regard to our grassroots cadres, some of them are probably less competent, and they are not able to dissipate these conflicts or problems.”

In another widely remarked statement, Chen Xiwen, an economics vice minister who oversees agricultural affairs, saluted the Internet’s role in allowing the central government authorities to learn of unrest more quickly and praised demonstrating farmers for “knowing how to protect their rights.”

The people of Xinchang were reluctant to speak openly about the uprising, since they would be subject to immediate arrest if they were identified. But from conversations with numerous residents, many of whom took part in the protests, it was possible to put together a detailed picture of the events that unfolded.

In Xinchang, as with many of the recent protests, the initial spark involved claims of serious environmental degradation. An explosion at the Jingxin Pharmaceutical Company this month in a vessel containing deadly chemicals reportedly killed one worker, and previous leakages contaminated the water supply for miles downstream, said villagers and one chemical plant worker who was injured in the accident.

Villagers say they appointed a small group of representatives to present demands for compensation, including free health examinations and medical care for people who live near the plants, which produces a strain of antibiotics called quinolones.

When they sent a group on July 4 to demand an audience with factory officials, they say, security guards beat the representatives.

The next day, the villagers returned in larger numbers and managed to grab a security officer, whom they acknowledge beating. In the meantime, as word spread of the beating of the village representatives and of the worker’s death in the explosion, villagers raised the stakes, demanding the outright closing of the factory, which they had complained about for years.

“Our fields won’t produce grain anymore,” said a 46-year-old woman who lives near the plant. “We don’t dare to eat food grown from anywhere near here.”

Her husband, a former machine operator, said he had to quit working recently because of persistent weakness and nausea. When local officials posted a notice saying they would reopen the plant a few days after the fatal explosion there, he had been one of the first demonstrators to arrive on the scene, charging the gates and bursting into the factory with a small crowd of fellow protesters.

“They are making poisonous chemicals for foreigners that the foreigners don’t dare produce in their own countries,” the man said. Explaining why he had been willing to rush into the plant, despite signs warning of toxic chemicals all about, he said, “It is better to die now, forcing them out, than to die of a slow suicide.”

Local officials in Xinchang were able to buy some time in the conflict by temporarily suspending operations at the plant, sending teams door to door in many of the neighborhoods surrounding the factory to urge residents not to harbor troublemakers or outsiders and promising to consider the villagers’ grievances carefully.

Tensions spiked again, though, on Thursday when the city posted a notice saying production would resume at the plant the next day. It warned that an explosion could take place inside the factory unless the chemical processes already begun were allowed to run for another week.

Sensing a ruse, the villagers refused, demanding a guarantee in the form of a security deposit of more than $2 million to allow the plant to start up again temporarily. “We don’t trust them,” said a man who lives near the plant. “They have told us lies many times before and have never addressed our problems.”

The next day and each day since, the villagers have massed by the thousands outside the factory’s gates, smashing the company’s sign, wrecking a guard post and smashing windows with stones. The factory, meanwhile, has remained closed.

In many of China’s other recent riots, word has spread fast among organizers and protesters by way of mobile phone messages, allowing crowds to mass quickly and helping demonstrators to coordinate tactics and slogans.

In Xinchang, however, residents say new technology, like the cellphone, has played little part. Instead, many residents say they were moved to action after years of unhappiness about industrial pollution by copies of newspaper headlines from Dongyang. That city, a mere 50 miles away, was the scene this spring of one of China’s biggest riots, in which more than 10,000 residents routed the police in a riot over pollution from a pesticide factory.

Despite tight controls on news coverage of the incident, the riot in Dongyang, where the chemical factory remains closed months later, has firmly entered Chinese folklore as proof that determined citizens acting en masse can force the authorities to reverse course and address their needs.

“As for the Dongyang riot, everyone knows about it,” a man in his 20’s exulted. “Six policemen were killed, and the chief had the tendons in his arms and legs severed. Perhaps they went too far, but we must be treated as human beings.”

Posted at 4:30 PM · Comments (0)

July 18, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

JINGBIAN, China - As a truck driver hauling crude from private wells sprouting up all over this arid countryside, Gao had a bird’s-eye view of the oil boom that was sweeping this county in the 1990’s. After years of hesitation, he did what tens of thousands of other folks were doing: collected his savings and contributions from every friend and relative he could, and drilled a well.

The total investment was $84,000, a princely sum in northern Shaanxi Province, a hardscrabble moonscape of dusty, yellow-earth hills at the edge of the Gobi Desert. But it seemed worth it when the black crude began to flow - until the day in 2003 when the government seized Mr. Gao’s well and thousands of other private wells, paying a fraction of their value.

What followed has been called one of the most important legal battles ever fought in modern China, as investors like Mr. Gao - he would not identify himself further - banded together in a class action to challenge the seizures, and to push the country’s Communist government as never before to respect its own rules, broadly redefined in 2003, giving private property legal status equal to that of the state.

China first allowed its citizens to sue the government in 1990. But this case is special. It is by common estimate the largest suit ever brought against the government, has drawn major domestic media attention, and involves oil, which China now avidly seeks around the globe.

Many of the investors have been detained; the authorities have invoked laws against illegal assembly and disturbing the public order. Lawyers have been banned from talking to the press and the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, Zhu Jiuhu, is under arrest.

For those in China who urge a strong, transparent justice system, the prospectors’ demand for better compensation or restitution of their wells goes to the heart of the question of what sort of society China is to become: one of full property rights and equal protection before the law, or one of arbitrary decisions imposed by fiat and without appeal.

“If common people have to accept whatever unpredictable changes the government makes, then our litigation code may as well be abolished, because that would mean the public is not allowed to sue the government,” said one person close to the case, who withheld his name to avoid arrest. “Why don’t we just abolish the profession of law altogether?”

Li Heping, who represents the plaintiffs’ lawyer, said the judicial system itself was at stake. “Lawyers believe that Mr. Zhu has always acted within the law,” Mr. Li said. “He never imagined that what he did could be regarded as breaking the law. If he is prosecuted, China’s legal system will mourn.”

Mr. Zhu’s wife said he was formally arrested on June 22, after weeks of detention in Jingbian, during which the authorities denied holding him.

Northern Shaanxi’s oil boom was made possible by sweeping changes in 1994 by the Oil Ministry and the China National Petroleum Corporation that allowed private citizens to prospect and produce oil in a 417-square-mile region in the province.

But a few months after Mr. Gao struck oil, Beijing rescinded private prospecting rights. The plaintiffs say they were never told.

“Local governments actually encouraged investors to drill more oil wells between January and November 2000, and signed lots of long-term investment contracts,” wrote one, Feng Bingxian, who is in hiding and answered a reporter’s questions through a computer messaging service. He argued his case before a legal seminar at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People last year. “In the year 2000 alone, over 2,000 wells were drilled,” he wrote, “which is about a third of the total number of wells in the area.”

In 2003, when the provincial government seized the private wells, it offered a total of $242 million. Many investors said that would cover only about a third of their outlays, and accused local officials of profiteering and conflicts of interest.

Beijing has so far said nothing publicly about the dispute. But in May, the mayor of one oil-rich town in northern Shaanxi told reporters that allowing the private investments had been “a beautiful mistake.” Asked what this meant, Liu Xuming, another city official, said: “At first our government was too poor to produce oil, and that’s why private investment was sought. But that decision is not in the same spirit as central and provincial government policy now.”

Until the government seizure, Mr. Gao’s story of striking it rich resounded with notes familiar from earlier oil booms, in places like west Texas and California.

After his well was dug - 750 yards deep - he camped there, following the hypnotic nod of his derrick and worrying about losing everything.

But two days after he turned his pump on, oil began to gush in a rich flow that amounted to 21 tons a day. Mr. Gao’s face, scarred from a life of hard work, still lights up when he recalls the moment. “I screamed, I washed my hands in the oil, and I drank all night, but I couldn’t get drunk,” he said. “I was too happy.”

Nowadays, he is tracked by the police and debt collectors. He and two other small-oil-well investors met a reporter at a dingy flophouse in a one-unpaved-street town miles from his home. Before he would speak, Mr. Gao handed over a statement professing “love for the party, love for the country and support for Hu Jintao’s reforms.”

“If you could come to my home, you’d see what a mess I am in,” he said. “There are debt collectors everywhere. All our appliances have been sold, and the family can’t even gather for the spring festival.”

Posted at 5:01 PM · Comments (0)

July 17, 2005

SECTION: News; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1080 words

Dealing with the dictators While the west is attaching strings to its poverty-relief aid efforts in Africa, China is rushing to do business with the troubled continent in a bid to increase its influence, writes Gavin Du Venage

It may seem unfair to blame China for Zimbabwe’s “Operation drive out rubbish” - President Robert Mugabe’s campaign to destroy the shacks that shelter up to 300,000 of the country’s poorest people.

But even as the haze from thousands of burned shelters still hangs in the air over the country’s cities, many hold Beijing responsible.

The demolition campaign began unexpectedly in May. Massed phalanxes of police swooped on unsuspecting shack-dwellers, forcing them onto the streets and destroying their homes. Few managed to save their meagre belongings and this, it seems, may have been the point.

“It has been mentioned in many, many circles around here for months now that one of the prime reasons for ‘Operation drive out rubbish’ was in response from complaints from some Chinese businesses that local traders were hurting them,” says Richard Tren, co-author of a study released last week into the consequences and motives behind the brutal campaign.

Mr Tren, along with Bulawayo’s outspoken Catholic Archbishop, Pius Ncube, and US academic Roger Bate from the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, published the study that links the recent arrival of thousands of Chinese entrepreneurs to the campaign.

They point to the fact that police paid special attention to homes with market gardens or whose owners had begun selling goods from their premises. In several instances, large suburban homes were also targeted. For instance, police recently raided a plush home in the exclusive northern suburb of Greystone Park in the capital, Harare.

The owner, Rebecca Chanakira, had begun raising chickens to supplement her income and had her entire flock of 3,000 birds confiscated.

Zimbabwe has always had a tiny Chinese community, many of whom regard themselves as Zimbabweans. But in recent years President Robert Mugabe has allowed Chinese businesses to set up en masse. Mr Tren says at least 10,000 have arrived in the past couple of years to set up small shops, factories and other concerns.

“Of course the person ultimately responsible for the clean-up campaign is Mugabe,” Mr Tren says. “But there’s clear evidence that it is his ‘Look East’ policy that is a major factor in its planning.”

Mr Tren adds that Chinese farmers are also now reported to be setting up on tobacco farms abandoned by white owners who were driven off a few years ago to make way for landless blacks.

It has been in Mr Mugabe’s interests to court China. He has received fighter planes, military hardware and even lavish knick-knacks for his fabulous Saddam Hussein-style palace. In a rare interview with a western media outlet last year, Mr Mugabe defended the US$ 9 million construction bill for his new home.

“You say it’s lavish because it is attractive,” Mr Mugabe said. “It has Chinese roofing material, which makes it very beautiful, but it was donated to us. The Chinese are our good friends, you see.”

Mr Mugabe is not the only African tyrant wanting China’s friendship.

Earlier this month, the Group of Eight industrialised nations pledged to boost aid to Africa by about US$ 25 billion a year, provided the beneficiaries combat corruption and adhere to basic human rights’ principals.

Sudan, with one of the world’s most repressive regimes, is not expected to meet G8 criteria. The Sudanese government stands accused of everything from sponsoring civilian massacres to backing militias that use rape as a weapon of war. People living in Sudan’s conflict zones are so poor they eat leaves to survive.

The government in Khartoum is unlikely to receive much aid, despite the dire position of its people, until it can convince donor nations it is serious about ending the civil war and, especially, stopping atrocities against civilians.

Beijing, meanwhile, has not let Sudan’s human rights’ violations deter it from investing heavily in the country’s oil sector, nor selling the Sudanese weaponry, despite western protests.

In West Africa last week, PetroChina International, the oil trading unit of China’s largest oil producer, and Nigeria’s National Petroleum Corporation signed an oil supply pact that will result in the sale and export of 30,000 barrels of crude a day to China to help power the expanding economy.

Nigeria may be a democracy these days, but Transparency International, the Berlin-based non-governmental organisation established to expose and prevent corruption, this year named Nigeria as the world’s most corrupt country among 90 nations assessed.

Western oil companies are now under severe pressure from governments back home and rights organisations to ensure that oil royalties they pay do not end up in the hands of corrupt officials.

PetroChina is unlikely to come under similar scrutiny and analysts are predicting that China’s stake in Nigeria’s lucrative oil industry may be about to rocket.

“The G8 stipulations for aid are very good, they will promote good governance and therefore sustainable development,” says Lyal White, Asia specialist at the South African Institute for International Affairs. “China of course makes no stipulations and this is a problem.”

Mr White says China’s investments in Africa have become so aggressive it has even started speaking to regimes that cling to diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

“We keep hearing of talks with Chad and the possibility of investments there, in spite of the country’s relationship with Taiwan,” he says.

China’s scramble for Africa is not all negative, however, at least, not when compared with the colonial forerunners that began the original exploitation of the continent’s resources. “The Chinese are willing to work the dregs,” Mr White says. Mineral concessions worked to exhaustion or oil wells now abandoned as unprofitable are all game for Chinese companies.

“They are prepared to go in and start operations in places that the French, British and Americans have long since given up on,” he says.

They are building roads and power lines and opening up communications in areas that western competitors regard as too remote to be worth the effort.

Whatever the benefits Chinese investment is bringing, it is unlikely to be very much different from colonial-era exploitation that has weighed so heavily on Africa in the past.

A new scramble for Africa may be under way, and although the winners are yet to be decided, it’s almost a sure bet the losers will be Africa’s long -suffering people.

Copyright © 2005 The South China Morning Post

Posted at 1:24 AM · Comments (0)

July 17, 2005

SECTION: News; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 1080 words

Dealing with the dictators While the west is attaching strings to its poverty-relief aid efforts in Africa, China is rushing to do business with the troubled continent in a bid to increase its influence, writes Gavin Du Venage

It may seem unfair to blame China for Zimbabwe’s “Operation drive out rubbish” - President Robert Mugabe’s campaign to destroy the shacks that shelter up to 300,000 of the country’s poorest people.

But even as the haze from thousands of burned shelters still hangs in the air over the country’s cities, many hold Beijing responsible.

The demolition campaign began unexpectedly in May. Massed phalanxes of police swooped on unsuspecting shack-dwellers, forcing them onto the streets and destroying their homes. Few managed to save their meagre belongings and this, it seems, may have been the point.

“It has been mentioned in many, many circles around here for months now that one of the prime reasons for ‘Operation drive out rubbish’ was in response from complaints from some Chinese businesses that local traders were hurting them,” says Richard Tren, co-author of a study released last week into the consequences and motives behind the brutal campaign.

Mr Tren, along with Bulawayo’s outspoken Catholic Archbishop, Pius Ncube, and US academic Roger Bate from the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, published the study that links the recent arrival of thousands of Chinese entrepreneurs to the campaign.

They point to the fact that police paid special attention to homes with market gardens or whose owners had begun selling goods from their premises. In several instances, large suburban homes were also targeted. For instance, police recently raided a plush home in the exclusive northern suburb of Greystone Park in the capital, Harare.

The owner, Rebecca Chanakira, had begun raising chickens to supplement her income and had her entire flock of 3,000 birds confiscated.

Zimbabwe has always had a tiny Chinese community, many of whom regard themselves as Zimbabweans. But in recent years President Robert Mugabe has allowed Chinese businesses to set up en masse. Mr Tren says at least 10,000 have arrived in the past couple of years to set up small shops, factories and other concerns.

“Of course the person ultimately responsible for the clean-up campaign is Mugabe,” Mr Tren says. “But there’s clear evidence that it is his ‘Look East’ policy that is a major factor in its planning.”

Mr Tren adds that Chinese farmers are also now reported to be setting up on tobacco farms abandoned by white owners who were driven off a few years ago to make way for landless blacks.

It has been in Mr Mugabe’s interests to court China. He has received fighter planes, military hardware and even lavish knick-knacks for his fabulous Saddam Hussein-style palace. In a rare interview with a western media outlet last year, Mr Mugabe defended the US$ 9 million construction bill for his new home.

“You say it’s lavish because it is attractive,” Mr Mugabe said. “It has Chinese roofing material, which makes it very beautiful, but it was donated to us. The Chinese are our good friends, you see.”

Mr Mugabe is not the only African tyrant wanting China’s friendship.

Earlier this month, the Group of Eight industrialised nations pledged to boost aid to Africa by about US$ 25 billion a year, provided the beneficiaries combat corruption and adhere to basic human rights’ principals.

Sudan, with one of the world’s most repressive regimes, is not expected to meet G8 criteria. The Sudanese government stands accused of everything from sponsoring civilian massacres to backing militias that use rape as a weapon of war. People living in Sudan’s conflict zones are so poor they eat leaves to survive.

The government in Khartoum is unlikely to receive much aid, despite the dire position of its people, until it can convince donor nations it is serious about ending the civil war and, especially, stopping atrocities against civilians.

Beijing, meanwhile, has not let Sudan’s human rights’ violations deter it from investing heavily in the country’s oil sector, nor selling the Sudanese weaponry, despite western protests.

In West Africa last week, PetroChina International, the oil trading unit of China’s largest oil producer, and Nigeria’s National Petroleum Corporation signed an oil supply pact that will result in the sale and export of 30,000 barrels of crude a day to China to help power the expanding economy.

Nigeria may be a democracy these days, but Transparency International, the Berlin-based non-governmental organisation established to expose and prevent corruption, this year named Nigeria as the world’s most corrupt country among 90 nations assessed.

Western oil companies are now under severe pressure from governments back home and rights organisations to ensure that oil royalties they pay do not end up in the hands of corrupt officials.

PetroChina is unlikely to come under similar scrutiny and analysts are predicting that China’s stake in Nigeria’s lucrative oil industry may be about to rocket.

“The G8 stipulations for aid are very good, they will promote good governance and therefore sustainable development,” says Lyal White, Asia specialist at the South African Institute for International Affairs. “China of course makes no stipulations and this is a problem.”

Mr White says China’s investments in Africa have become so aggressive it has even started speaking to regimes that cling to diplomatic ties with Taiwan.

“We keep hearing of talks with Chad and the possibility of investments there, in spite of the country’s relationship with Taiwan,” he says.

China’s scramble for Africa is not all negative, however, at least, not when compared with the colonial forerunners that began the original exploitation of the continent’s resources. “The Chinese are willing to work the dregs,” Mr White says. Mineral concessions worked to exhaustion or oil wells now abandoned as unprofitable are all game for Chinese companies.

“They are prepared to go in and start operations in places that the French, British and Americans have long since given up on,” he says.

They are building roads and power lines and opening up communications in areas that western competitors regard as too remote to be worth the effort.

Whatever the benefits Chinese investment is bringing, it is unlikely to be very much different from colonial-era exploitation that has weighed so heavily on Africa in the past.

A new scramble for Africa may be under way, and although the winners are yet to be decided, it’s almost a sure bet the losers will be Africa’s long -suffering people.

Copyright © 2005 The South China Morning Post

Posted at 1:24 AM · Comments (0)

Music of the hemispheres: Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals is an interesting but inconclusive examination of the evolution of our musical abilities, writes Peter Forbes

Saturday July 2, 2005
The Observer

The Singing Neanderthal by Steven Mithen

The Singing Neanderthals
by Steven Mithen
240pp, Weidenfeld, £20

“Useless … quite different from language … a technology not an adaptation”. This is Steven Pinker’s view of the importance of music in human evolution. Needless to say, Steven Mithen takes the opposite view. For him, the proto-language, the communication system of pre-humans, was as much musical as linguistic, just as baby talk (important evidence for Mithen) is more musical than adult speech. At the moment, the evidence for a decision between these two views is inconclusive but Mithen builds his passionate case from recent work on the language of humans and apes and from the fossils of early man (Mithen is a professor of early prehistory at Reading).

Article continues
The crux of the relationship between language and music is the mystery of perfect pitch. This is the ability, possessed by only one in 10,000 of the adult population, to name any note they hear being played or to sing a named note on request. Although the incidence of perfect pitch is higher among musicians than in the general population, it is still rare even among them. The odd thing is that many more babies and small children than adults seem to have perfect pitch. As Mithen says, music has been oddly neglected in psychological studies, though one theory has it that we are all born with perfect pitch but lose it unless it is reinforced by music lessons between the ages of three and six. Why would we lose something so useful?

Because for most of us who are not to going to be musicians it isn’t useful at all: it interferes with learning language. In learning language we have to recognise words from the stream of sound even though they come in different accents and pitches. Perfect pitch would be like a digital scanner that could only read letters presented in the correct typeface.

Sadly, there are cases, documented by Mithen, of severely autistic children with little or no language skills but supreme musical ability (musical savants). Perfect pitch is associated with their language difficulties. The contortions of perfect pitch show just how complex is the relationship between music and language. It has been known for a long time that many people with language difficulties can sing perfectly happily. In the mildest cases, stammerers can usually sing fluently. Some people who have lost their language through brain lesions retain their musical ability and vice versa. It was once thought crudely that language was a left-hemisphere phenomenon and music right, so that if the left hemisphere were damaged, the music function would be unimpaired. But it is more complicated than that. There is relative localisation; tunes are processed separately from language but the words of a song still have to be retrieved from the language word store. Nevertheless, the words of songs are usually easier to retrieve than those of tuneless poems.

Half of the book is concerned with the roots of music in our pre-human past and half with the evidence from neurophysiology and psychological experimentation on humans and primates. Much is still unprovable conjecture but there are some suggestive insights. One such is the connection between music and walking upright. Some seek the essence of music in pitch, melody, or harmony, but the first essential was surely a regular rhythm. Chimpanzees can’t keep a regular beat but it’s hard to imagine a human being who could stride in perfectly regular paces never discovering music that beats four to the bar.

So in love with the idea of early man’s musicality is Mithen that he ends with a strange call to arms. “So listen to JS Bach’s Prelude in C Major and think of australopithecines waking in their treetop nests … with Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue imagine them satiated with food and settling to sleep amid the security of the trees.” Bach is conventionally cited to show how far we’ve come from our animal origins and Kind of Blue is the epitome of urban cool - seduction music rather than music to help a greasy tribe sleep off a gross feast. In the end, Mithen’s quest to prove Pinker wrong has led him to an equally reductive attitude towards music.

· Peter Forbes’s The Gecko’s Foot: Bio-inspiration, Engineered from Nature is published by Fourth Estate in August.

Posted at 12:46 PM · Comments (0)

By JOHN DEUTCH
Published: July 15, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

Cambridge, Mass.

AMERICAN foreign policy should be guided by two general principles: the first is advancing our security and political interests; the second is encouraging prosperity and responsive government for all people. It may be that with our encouragement and example, many countries will choose to adopt democracy and a market economy, presumably adapted to their own culture. Of course, others will follow a very different road for some time, perhaps indefinitely, as ethnic differences, poverty and historical and religious traditions affect and constrain choices.
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America embarks on an especially perilous course, however, when it actively attempts to establish a government based on our values in another part of the world. It is one matter to adopt a foreign policy that encourages democratic values; it is quite another to believe it just or practical to achieve such results on the ground with military forces. This is true whether we are acting alone, as is largely the case in Iraq, or as part of an international coalition.

It seems that many in the Bush administration believed that an invasion to topple Saddam Hussein would result in a near spontaneous conversion of Iraq, and with luck much of the Middle East, to democracy. But the notion of intervening in foreign countries to build a society of our preference is not just a Republican or conservative failing. The corresponding Democratic or liberal failing is the view that America has a duty to intervene in foreign countries that egregiously violate human rights and a responsibility to oppose and, where possible, remove totalitarian heads of state. This Democratic rhetoric quickly moves from “peacekeeping” in a country torn by strife to “peacemaking” and to “nation-building.”

The Clinton administration’s intervention in Bosnia in the mid-1990’s is an example of just such a failing: moving from an initial, laudable objective of stopping the Serbian “ethnic cleansing” of Bosnians to a fantastical goal of creating a “multiethnic” society with peaceful coexistence among three groups - Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs - that have a history of enmity.

We should not shirk from quick military action for the purpose of saving lives that are in immediate danger. For example, the decision not to intervene early to prevent mass murder in Rwanda was a major failure. But we should not be lured into intervention that has as its driving purpose the replacement of despotic regimes with systems of government more like our own. It is not that the purpose is unworthy, but rather that it is unlikely to succeed.

Moreover, in trying to achieve regime change or nation-building, we tend to rely on military force rather than diplomacy, trade and economic assistance. The American military, the best in the world, is built to fight and win wars; we can ask the Marine Corps to defeat Republican Guard divisions or destroy rebel strongholds in Falluja, but maintaining local security, brokering political alliances and running local water systems, hospitals, power plants and schools are not major parts of its mission or training. Reshaping our military to take on the activities that the Pentagon euphemistically calls “stability and security” operations will come at a cost - both in terms of potentially compromising the war-fighting capacity of our troops and in diverting the resources needed to support the civic action that underlies nation-building.

If we want to influence the behavior of nations, we would be better served by combining diplomacy with our considerable economic strength. Even North Korea saw the advantages, for a period of time, of constraining (albeit selectively and temporarily) its nuclear weapons activities for the economic benefits that accompanied the “agreed framework” of 1994. More recently, Libya backed off its secret pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, apparently on the sole expectation of economic benefit. The demise of the apartheid regime in South Africa after an embargo showed what sometimes can be done by collective economic action.

So where does that leave us on Iraq? There is a widespread view, even among many who opposed the invasion, that we have a responsibility to keep our troops in place until certain minimum conditions are achieved: some degree of security for the Iraqi people; a reasonable start on stable and representative self-government; and partial reconstruction of the civilian infrastructure. Prompt withdrawal is considered unthinkable by most Republicans and Democrats, because it is difficult to envision a pullout that leaves a peaceful Iraq in its wake and doesn’t invite further unrest in the region.

So the expectation is that we will be in Iraq for several more years, perhaps with a somewhat reduced presence, but spending considerable money (more than $1 billion per week) and sacrificing lives ( one dozen to two dozen deaths and serious casualties per week), while working to achieve those minimum objectives required for withdrawal.

THIS conventional view, however, ignores two important questions. The first is, how much are American interests in the Arab world being harmed by our continued presence in Iraq? Second, how much does the United States’ presence in Iraq reduce our ability to deal with other important security challenges, notably those posed by North Korea, Iran and international terrorism? Those who argue that we should “stay the course” because an early withdrawal from Iraq would hurt America’s global credibility must consider the possibility that we will fail in our objectives in Iraq and suffer an even worse loss of credibility down the road.

I do not believe that we are making progress on any of our key objectives in Iraq. There may be days when security seems somewhat improved or when the Iraqi government appears to be functioning better, but the underlying destabilizing effect of the insurgency is undiminished. When, after the fall of Baghdad, the decision was taken to disband the Iraqi Army, an impossible security situation was created: a combination of hostile ethnic factions supported by demobilized, but armed, military and security units with surrounding nations actively supporting them.

The insurgency cannot be overcome easily by either United States military forces or immature Iraqi security forces. Nor would the situation be eased even if, improbably, the United Nations, NATO, our European allies and Japan choose to become seriously involved.

Our best strategy now is a prompt withdrawal plan consisting of clearly defined political, military and economic elements. Politically, the United States should declare its intention to remove its troops and urge the Iraqi government and its neighbors to recognize the common regional interest in allowing Iraq to evolve peacefully and without external intervention. The first Iraqi election under the permanent constitution, planned for Dec. 15, is an appropriate date for beginning the pullout.

Militarily, we should establish a timetable for reducing the scope of operations that has enough flexibility so as not to provide a tactical advantage to insurgents. We should also plan on continuing measures like no-flight zones, border surveillance, training for Iraqi security forces, intelligence collection and maintenance of a regional quick-reaction force.

Economically, we should define what amount of assistance we are prepared to extend to Iraq as long as it stays on a peaceful path. It would be best if this aid was but one facet of a broader set of economic initiatives to benefit Arab states that advance our interests.

Of course, these measures cannot guarantee a secure and democratic Iraq free of external domination. But they could be first steps of a strategy to pursue America’s true long-term interests in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.

John Deutch, deputy secretary of defense from 1994 to 1995 and director of central intelligence from 1995 to 1996, is a professor of chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Posted at 10:18 PM · Comments (0)

By SCOTT SNYDER
Special to The Japan Times

WASHINGTON — Despite efforts during last month’s summit between South Korean President Roh Moo Hyun and President George W. Bush in Washington to speak with “one voice” about the health of the alliance and to improve policy coordination toward North Korea, the summit saw the emergence of a potentially serious new area of divergence between American and South Korean allies: the role and future of Japan.

South Korean criticisms of Japan are particularly sensitive for the Bush administration in view of the perception in Washington that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi has been one of America’s most faithful and consistent supporters following 9/11 — providing logistic support in Afghanistan and sending Japan’s Self-Defense Forces to Iraq. But where Washington perceives loyalty and a Japan that is stepping up to the plate as a partner in achieving global stability, Seoul sees a rightward shift in Japanese politics and the prospect of Japan’s renewed remilitarization.

The emergence of Korean and Chinese tensions with Japan over Japan’s textbooks, renewed tensions over the disputed Tok-do/Takeshima islands, and Koizumi’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine, Japan’s memorial to its war dead, are background issues that have recently pushed hot buttons in Seoul and Beijing, but they have barely registered as dire matters for American policymakers focused on Japan’s near-term strategic cooperation in the global war on terrorism and the longer-term need to balance against a rising China.

An indication of Washington’s sensitivity to the South Korean critique of a strong U.S.-Japan alliance is the reaction to Roh’s “balancer” comments and subsequent explanations.

American objections centered less on criticisms of the idea that South Korea might play a constructive role in mitigating Sino-Japanese tensions than on the concept’s appearing to place South Korea in a neutral, equidistant position vis-a-vis China and Japan, despite the fact that both South Korea and Japan are important allies of the United States.

For its part, South Korean sensitivities were revealed in South Korea’s thin-skinned reaction to an alleged comment by Japan’s Vice Foreign Minister Shotaro Yachi that Washington was willing to share some sensitive intelligence with Japan but not with South Korea.

At this stage, the patience of most Washington policy analysts for South Korean criticism of Japan is quite limited. If South Korean leaders want to make a case against Japan, it should be an even-handed, unemotional case built on logic that appeals to American interests rather than one that argues that history will inevitably repeat itself.

That said, the U.S. has a powerful interest in encouraging the management of differences in East Asia, especially between its Japanese and South Korean allies. Close relations between and among the U.S. and its alliance partners are critical to the realization of our shared goals and interests. The need for effective coordination of American, Japanese and South Korean policies toward North Korea is a case in point.

Equally important for this administration, Japan and South Korea share America’s democratic values, the expansion of which are necessary if a lasting and stable peace is to be secured across the East Asian region.

The shift in U.S. defense strategy embodied in the Global Posture Review underscores the American need for a positive Japan-South Korea relationship. The GPR assumes that American forces may be called upon to respond to a variety of contingencies in the East Asian region, requiring flexibility in deployments but also requiring a regionwide view of the U.S. presence, not just the traditional perspective that managing the U.S. presence in Asia requires management of parallel bilateral alliance commitments to Japan and South Korea in isolation from each other.

From this perspective, it is in the U.S. interest for South Korea and Japan, as primary alliance partners of the U.S., to work effectively with each other.

Washington policymakers should take seriously the security anxieties South Korea is expressing about Japan, even if those issues are not perceived as immediate dangers from Washington’s perspective. The controversy over Japan’s treatment of history threatens peace in the region as well as the ability of South Korea and Japan to effectively work with each other as fellow democracies and U.S. allies.

While the U.S. has little interest in forcing itself into the middle of South Korea-Japan disputes, it should consider playing a behind-the-scenes role that facilitates a more frank consideration of ways that Japan can deal effectively with the history issue in ways that will both respect those soldiers who fought and died for Japan and forthrightly acknowledge Japan’s historical excesses.

Such efforts are necessary to stabilize the foundation for a more regionalized, alliance-based approach to a U.S. security presence in the region and to lay the foundation for the consolidation and expansion of shared democratic values, transparency, and expanded economic prosperity, which are the prerequisite for assuring a truly stable East Asian community.

Scott Snyder is a senior associate at the Asia Foundation and Pacific Forum CSIS. The comments here represent his personal views.

The Japan Times: July 14, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 10:16 PM · Comments (0)

HONG KONG Confusion and double standards reign on both sides of U.S.-Southeast Asia relationships. The same week that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was snubbing the Association of Southeast Asian Nations by declining to attend its upcoming annual meeting of foreign ministers in Vientiane, Laos, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong of Singapore was in Washington signing a new strategic framework agreement with the United States.

Although she has not said so explicitly, Rice’s decision appears to be a warning to Asean that America’s relationship with the group will be downgraded should it allow Myanmar to take over the chairmanship of the group next year.

It is a timely gesture that may concentrate the minds of Asean members still hoping that Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, will rescue them from their predicament by declining the chairmanship. That remains a possibility but goes against the grain of the assertive Myanmar boss, Than Shwe, particularly now that the more flexible former Prime Minister Khin Nyunt is locked away in jail. Shwe’s recent release of some 250 political prisoners, including some prominent members of the National League for Democracy, seems aimed at mollifying Asean and giving the impression that with Khin Nyunt out of the way there can be real progress toward democracy.

It should, however, be hard even for Asean partners to believe such fables. There are probably at least another 1,400 political prisoners, and Aung San Suu Kyi remains under house arrest. Myanmar, like China, is adept at well-timed releases to placate international protesters - but nothing changes. Meanwhile, Asean states should also note the rumblings of instability following the purge of Khin Nyunt and his allies.

Some Asean defenders of its hands-off policy toward Myanmar’s oppression of opposition voices claim that Washington is hypocritical. They point to the lack of American criticism of the oppression in Singapore of opposition leaders and the absence of a free media there. They contrast Lee Hsien Loong’s warm reception by President George W. Bush, spreader of global democracy, with the treatment of critics of the Singapore system.

Singapore may be no Uzbekistan; and the U.S. military presence in the region is favored by all Asean members, apart from Myanmar, though they may not say so publicly. But there are concerns among some neighbors about the extent of Singapore’s intelligence links to the United States, and Singapore’s use of this relationship for political purposes in the region. Singapore’s utility to American strategic and commercial interests have led to Washington keeping rather quiet about the city state’s lack of political freedom.

Western media and academics, say critics, undermine their principles by preferring not to risk losing Singapore’s market by “interfering” in its domestic politics. More than any other Asean country except Thailand, Singapore has also been in the forefront of commercial cooperation with the Burmese generals who export Myanmar’s resources and invest in the safety of Singapore property and bank accounts.

The issue of double standards cannot, however, hide Asean’s dilemma over Myanmar and the fact that Asean needs the United States at least as much as the United States needs Asean. An Asean chaired by a Myanmar that is not merely oppressive but has no concept of a modern economy is almost meaningless - it becomes a group defined by geography and nothing else.

The meeting of foreign ministers in Laos, meanwhile, is to focus on security issues, including North Korea and terrorism. What the Asean members have to contribute on North Korea is not quite clear. The six parties directly concerned with North Korea will all be represented in Vientiane, except Pyongyang. They have enough work to do without bothering with Asean.

As for the “war on terror,” in Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, it can be abused for political purposes. Talk of international cooperation can hide the fact that most problems are domestic and not cross-border. There is scope for more bilateral cooperation, for example between Malaysia and Thailand, but even that can raise questions. Much trumpeted arrests of supposed Thai Muslim plotters based on evidence from Singapore proved so weak that the Thai government decided last week not to appeal after the case was thrown out by the court.

If Asean is not prepared to sideline Myanmar and focus on making regional economic cooperation work its relevance looks set to diminish. The United States needs to maintain its interest in Southeast Asia, but that should not mean pandering to Asean’s illusions about the group’s importance.

Posted at 6:14 PM · Comments (0)

Alexandra Harney in Beijing and Demetri Sevastopulo and Edward Alden in Washington
>Published: July 14 2005 21:59 | Last updated: July 15 2005 00:03

China is prepared to use nuclear weapons against the US if it is attacked by Washington during a confrontation over Taiwan, a Chinese general said on Thursday.

“If the Americans draw their missiles and position-guided ammunition on to the target zone on China’s territory, I think we will have to respond with nuclear weapons,” said General Zhu Chenghu.

Gen Zhu was speaking at a function for foreign journalists organised, in part, by the Chinese government. He added that China’s definition of its territory included warships and aircraft.

“If the Americans are determined to interfere [then] we will be determined to respond,” said Gen Zhu, who is also a professor at China’s National Defence University.

“We … will prepare ourselves for the destruction of all of the cities east of Xian. Of course the Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds … of cities will be destroyed by the Chinese.”

Gen Zhu is a self-acknowledged “hawk” who has warned that China could strike the US with long-range missiles. But his threat to use nuclear weapons in a conflict over Taiwan is the most specific by a senior Chinese official in nearly a decade.

However, some US-based China experts cautioned that Gen Zhu probably did not represent the mainstream People’s Liberation Army view.

“He is running way beyond his brief on what China might do in relation to the US if push comes to shove,” said one expert with knowledge of Gen Zhu. “Nobody who is cleared for information on Chinese war scenarios is going to talk like this,” he added.

Gen Zhu’s comments come as the Pentagon prepares to brief Congress next Monday on its annual report on the Chinese military, which is expected to take a harder line than previous years. They are also likely to fuel the mounting anti-China sentiment on Capitol Hill.

In recent months, a string of US officials, including Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, have raised concerns about China’s military rise. The Pentagon on Thursday declined to comment on “hypothetical scenarios”.

Rick Fisher, a former senior US congressional official and an authority on the Chinese military, said the specific nature of the threat “is a new addition to China’s public discourse”. China’s official doctrine has called for no first use of nuclear weapons since its first atomic test in 1964. But Gen Zhu is not the first Chinese official to refer to the possibility of using such weapons first in a conflict over Taiwan.

Chas Freeman, a former US assistant secretary of defence, said in 1996 that a PLA official had told him China could respond in kind to a nuclear strike by the US in the event of a conflict with Taiwan. The official is believed to have been Xiong Guangkai, now the PLA’s deputy chief of general staff.

Gen Zhu said his views did not represent official Chinese policy and he did not anticipate war with the US.

Additional reporting by Richard McGregor in Beijing

Posted at 6:10 PM · Comments (0)

July 15, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times
All Rock, No Action
By JEAN-CLAUDE SHANDA TONME

Yaoundé, Cameroon

LIVE 8, that extraordinary media event that some people of good intentions in the West just orchestrated, would have left us Africans indifferent if we hadn’t realized that it was an insult both to us and to common sense.

We have nothing against those who this month, in a stadium, a street, a park, in Berlin, London, Moscow, Philadelphia, gathered crowds and played guitar and talked about global poverty and aid for Africa. But we are troubled to think that they are so misguided about what Africa’s real problem is, and dismayed by their willingness to propose solutions on our behalf.

We Africans know what the problem is, and no one else should speak in our name. Africa has men of letters and science, great thinkers and stifled geniuses who at the risk of torture rise up to declare the truth and demand liberty.

Don’t insult Africa, this continent so rich yet so badly led. Instead, insult its leaders, who have ruined everything. Our anger is all the greater because despite all the presidents for life, despite all the evidence of genocide, we didn’t hear anyone at Live 8 raise a cry for democracy in Africa.

Don’t the organizers of the concerts realize that Africa lives under the oppression of rulers like Yoweri Museveni (who just eliminated term limits in Uganda so he can be president indefinitely) and Omar Bongo (who has become immensely rich in his three decades of running Gabon)? Don’t they know what is happening in Cameroon, Chad, Togo and the Central African Republic? Don’t they understand that fighting poverty is fruitless if dictatorships remain in place?

Even more puzzling is why Youssou N’Dour and other Africans participated in this charade. Like us, they can’t help but know that Africa’s real problem is the lack of freedom of expression, the usurpation of power, the brutal oppression.

Neither debt relief nor huge amounts of food aid nor an invasion of experts will change anything. Those will merely prop up the continent’s dictators. It’s up to each nation to liberate itself and to help itself. When there is a problem in the United States, in Britain, in France, the citizens vote to change their leaders. And those times when it wasn’t possible to freely vote to change those leaders, the people revolted.

In Africa, our leaders have led us into misery, and we need to rid ourselves of these cancers. We would have preferred for the musicians in Philadelphia and London to have marched and sung for political revolution. Instead, they mourned a corpse while forgetting to denounce the murderer.

What is at issue is an Africa where dictators kill, steal and usurp power yet are treated like heroes at meetings of the African Union. What is at issue is rulers like François Bozizé, the coup leader running the Central Africa Republic, and Faure Gnassingbé, who just succeeded his father as president of Togo, free to trample universal suffrage and muzzle their people with no danger that they’ll lose their seats at the United Nations. Who here wants a concert against poverty when an African is born, lives and dies without ever being able to vote freely?

But the truth is that it was not for us, for Africa, that the musicians at Live 8 were singing; it was to amuse the crowds and to clear their own consciences, and whether they realized it or not, to reinforce dictatorships. They still believe us to be like children that they must save, as if we don’t realize ourselves what the source of our problems is.

Jean-Claude Shanda Tonme is a consultant on international law and a columnist for Le Messager, a Cameroonian daily, where a version of this article first appeared. This article was translated by The Times from the French.

Posted at 12:26 AM · Comments (0)

By MAYUMI NEGISHI
Staff writer

The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry granted Teikoku Oil Co. rights Thursday to explore in disputed waters in the East China Sea near Chinese drilling platforms.

News photo
A chinese drilling pla tform site over the pinghu oil and gas field in disputed waters in the East China Sea a few kilometers from where Teikoku Oil Co. plans to test drill.

METI, with tacit approval from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, gave Teikoku the go-ahead to drill in three areas totaling 400 sq. km in waters midway between Okinawa and mainland China.

Teikoku will begin exploring the area within six months, measuring the size of any natural gas or oil deposits in the three areas and assessing the profitability of retrieving the resources.

Two of the three areas run alongside the Chunxiao and Duanqiao gas fields, where China has drilling rigs in place and reportedly is ready for full-scale production.

Experts question both whether it is necessary or profitable for a Japanese firm to drill in the area.

“The sites are too far from mainland Japan. Unless the deposits are huge and high-grade, the shipping costs alone would mean a loss to Teikoku,” said Li Zhidong, an associate professor at Nagaoka University of Technology’s management and information system science department and a visiting researcher at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan. “Teikoku would have to sell whatever they drill to China.”

Teikoku was the only company to respond when the government asked in April for energy companies to renew their applications for drilling rights in the area.

Three other companies along with Teikoku applied in the 1960s and 1970s for exploratory rights in the area, but METI put the applications on hold for over 30 years, partially out of fear of offending China as the demarcation line between the exclusive economic zones was not agreed upon.

Officials at the three other firms said concerns about security and profitability prevented them from reapplying.

U.S. oil company Unocal and Dutch company Shell withdrew from a joint East China Sea gas project with Beijing last September, hinting that cost-efficiency might be a challenge for Japanese firms as well.

Economy, Trade and Industry Minister Shoichi Nakagawa told reporters Thursday that granting test-drilling rights was “in the national interest.”

“It is not for me to say how China will respond. China is preparing to tap an undersea gas vein that may straddle our two countries’ exclusive economic zones,” Nakagawa said.

The two countries have not been able to agree on the dividing line between China and Japan’s EEZs. Japan says it is the median line between the two coastlines, while China claims its EEZ extends to the edge of the continental shelf, encompassing Taiwan and near to Japan.

Teikoku plans to test drill just inside Japan’s claimed boundary. China’s platforms are just on its side of the line.

Thursday’s decision, however, constitutes the last move Japan can make to show China it means business, Li said.

“Now is the time for the two sides to come to the table and truly negotiate for joint development of the area,” he said.

The Japan Times: July 15, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 11:41 PM · Comments (0)

By Henry Samuel in Paris
(Filed: 15/07/2005)

President Jacques Chirac celebrated Bastille Day yesterday by insisting that France had no need to “envy or copy” Britain.

Whether the point of comparison was food, health, education or science, France was in far better shape than its old rival, he said.
Jacques Chirac in Paris
President Jacques Chirac, surrounded by Republican Guards, waves to the crowds lining the Champs Elysées

Mr Chirac, embattled by a run of crushing defeats and record low ratings in the polls, had clearly decided that the best form of defence was attack.

“I have a lot of esteem for the British people and for Tony Blair,” he said. “But I do not believe that the British social model is a model that we should copy or envy.”

In his annual Bastille Day television interview he did concede that unemployment was lower in Britain than in France, where it is running at more than 10 per cent. But in public health and tackling poverty the French were “much better placed than the British”, he said.

France put a higher percentage of its national wealth into education and scientific research than Britain, Mr Chirac added - “So I don’t envy their model.”

His remarks were in stark contrast to recent comments by his popular interior minister and bitter rival, Nicolas Sarkozy, who extolled the “Anglo-Saxon model” Mr Chirac so reviles.

Mr Sarkozy even dared to ask out loud whether it was “France that is wrong and the world that is right”.

Mr Chirac’s response was not only a rebuff to Mr Sarkozy but also part of a concerted campaign to restore French pride at a time of national soul-searching and gloom.

His tub-thumping included French cuisine, which he said undoubtedly played a part in the nation’s exceptionally high life expectancy.

An interviewer, referring to Mr Chirac’s recent disparaging comments about British food, asked whether he really did consider it the world’s worst.

“No, no, I did not say that,” he replied, a factually correct answer as far as it went, as he had put British cooking second from bottom, above Finland.

Next in Mr Chirac’s litany of praise came his country’s birth rate, the highest in Europe with Ireland’s, and its status as the world’s “second agricultural power”.

He reiterated his refusal to make “the slightest concession” on the Common Agricultural Policy, which the Prime Minister argues is in need of urgent reform because it takes up 40 per cent of the EU budget.

Behind all Mr Chirac’s macho chest-beating hides a man struggling to salvage his reputation. More and more, the French are wondering how he can carry on as president for two more years when the polls show that fewer than one person in three trusts him.

Asked whether he was worried that France was tired of him, Mr Chirac said: “It is up to the French to decide, not me.” He said he had carried out his duties as he thought best.

He even left his options open about running for a third term in 2007, saying that he would respond “at the appropriate time”.

Mr Chirac’s international credibility has suffered serious damage since French voters’ rejection of the European constitution, his bruising clash with Mr Blair over Europe and the failure of Paris to win the race to hold the Olympic Games in 2012. But he remained bullish.

“When I am outside France, I absolutely do not feel on the defensive,” he said. “I feel sure of myself.”

The president played down reports that Mr Sarkozy had tartly suggested scrapping the traditional July 14 interview because most people would be “at the beach”.

The annual television appearance was “without doubt of interest,” Mr Chirac ruminated. “It is always good to launch debates.”

Before the interview, the president and guests, including Sir John Holmes, the British ambassador to France, observed two minutes’ silence in memory of the victims of the London bombings last Thursday.

“No country is sheltered from terrorist attacks,” Mr Chirac said.

He was flanked at the Bastille Day military parade on the Champs Elysées by his guest of honour, President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, of Brazil.

Thousands of people lined the streets as French jet fighters roared over, leaving a trail of red, white and blue, followed by Brazilian Tucano aircraft trailing the yellow and green of Brazil’s flag to mark the year of “Brazil in France”.

Security was tight to ward off any possible terrorist attacks, with more than 5,000 police officers patrolling the capital.

Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (0)

The End of Europe - Copyright The Washington Post

By Robert J. Samuelson

Wednesday, June 15, 2005; Page A25

Europe as we know it is slowly going out of business. Since French and Dutch voters rejected the proposed constitution of the European Union, we’ve heard countless theories as to why: the unreality of trying to forge 25 E.U. countries into a United States of Europe; fear of ceding excessive power to Brussels, the E.U. capital; and an irrational backlash against globalization. Whatever their truth, these theories miss a larger reality: Unless Europe reverses two trends — low birthrates and meager economic growth — it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

Ever since 1498, after Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened trade to the Far East, Europe has shaped global history, for good and ill. It settled North and South America, invented modern science, led the Industrial Revolution, oversaw the slave trade, created huge colonial empires, and unleashed the world’s two most destructive wars. This pivotal Europe is now vanishing — and not merely because it’s overshadowed by Asia and the United States.

It’s hard to be a great power if your population is shriveling. Europe’s birthrates have dropped well below the replacement rate of 2.1 children for each woman of childbearing age. For Western Europe as a whole, the rate is 1.5. It’s 1.4 in Germany and 1.3 in Italy. In a century — if these rates continue — there won’t be many Germans in Germany or Italians in Italy. Even assuming some increase in birthrates and continued immigration, Western Europe’s population grows dramatically grayer, projects the U.S. Census Bureau. Now about one-sixth of the population is 65 and older. By 2030 that would be one-fourth, and by 2050 almost one-third.

No one knows how well modern economies will perform with so many elderly people, heavily dependent on government benefits (read: higher taxes). But Europe’s economy is already faltering. In the 1970s annual growth for the 12 countries now using the euro averaged almost 3 percent; from 2001 to 2004 the annual average was 1.2 percent. In 1974 those countries had unemployment of 2.4 percent; in 2004 the rate was 8.9 percent.

Wherever they look, Western Europeans feel their way of life threatened. One solution to low birthrates is higher immigration. But many Europeans don’t like the immigrants they have — often Muslim from North Africa — and don’t want more. One way to revive economic growth would be to reduce social benefits, taxes and regulations. But that would imperil Europe’s “social model,” which supposedly blends capitalism’s efficiency and socialism’s compassion.

Consider some contrasts with the United States, as reported by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. With high unemployment benefits, almost half of Western Europe’s jobless have been out of work a year or more; the U.S. figure is about 12 percent. Or take early retirement. In 2003 about 60 percent of Americans ages 55 to 64 had jobs. The comparable figures for France, Italy and Germany were 37 percent, 30 percent and 39 percent. The truth is that Europeans like early retirement, high jobless benefits and long vacations.

The trouble is that so much benevolence requires a strong economy, while the sources of all this benevolence — high taxes, stiff regulations — weaken the economy. With aging populations, the contradictions will only thicken. Indeed, some scholarly research suggests that high old-age benefits partly explain low birthrates. With the state paying for old age, who needs children as caregivers? High taxes may also deter young couples from assuming the added costs of children.

You can raise two objections to this sort of analysis. First, other countries are also aging and face problems similar to Europe’s. True. But the aging is more pronounced in Europe and a few other nations (Japan, for instance), precisely because birthrates are so low. The U.S. birthrate, for example, is 2.1; even removing births to Hispanic Americans, it’s about 1.9, reports Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. Second, Europeans could do something about their predicament. Also, true — they could, but they’re not.

A few countries (Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands) have acted, and there are differences between Eastern and Western Europe. But in general Europe is immobilized by its problems. This is the classic dilemma of democracy: Too many people benefit from the status quo to change it; but the status quo isn’t sustainable. Even modest efforts in France and Germany to curb social benefits have triggered backlashes. Many Europeans — maybe most — live in a state of delusion. Believing things should continue as before, they see almost any change as menacing. In reality, the new E.U. constitution wasn’t radical; neither adoption nor rejection would much alter everyday life. But it symbolized change and thereby became a lightning rod for many sources of discontent (over immigration in Holland, poor economic growth in France).

All this is bad for Europe — and the United States. A weak European economy is one reason that the world economy is shaky and so dependent on American growth. Preoccupied with divisions at home, Europe is history’s has-been. It isn’t a strong American ally, not simply because it disagrees with some U.S. policies but also because it doesn’t want to make the commitments required of a strong ally. Unwilling to address their genuine problems, Europeans become more reflexively critical of America. This gives the impression that they’re active on the world stage, even as they’re quietly acquiescing in their own decline.

Posted at 10:34 PM · Comments (0)

war stories
Korea Moves
How did we finally get back to the negotiating table?
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, July 13, 2005, at 3:52 PM PT - Copyright Slate

After a 13-month hiatus, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal are set to resume the week after next. Why are they starting up now, as opposed to a year ago? What pushed or lured Washington and Pyongyang—the key but most resistant parties—back to the negotiating table?

The short answer is that they both found a face-saving way out of their deadlock—perhaps because they realized it was about to morph into a suicidal game of highway chicken.

The longer answer tells a more complicated tale of mutual obstinacy, misguided morality, internecine squabbling, well-founded fear, and loopy paranoia—so much so that the short answer’s optimism is beclouded by the mere posing of a further question: Do the revived talks have a ghost of a chance of succeeding? In other words, will they result in North Korea’s nuclear disarmament?

For well over a year now, the North Koreans have been saying they would turn in their nukes if the United States did two things: provide energy assistance and pledge not to attack their territory.

The crucial development is that over the last few weeks the Bush administration—prodded and abetted by South Korea and China—has done just that.

It started on May 13 with a secret meeting in New York between the State Department’s top two officials on Korean affairs and North Korea’s top two diplomats at the United Nations. The North Koreans said they would rejoin the nuclear talks if the Bush administration dropped its “hostile policy” toward their regime. The U.S. officials assured them this could happen.

Soon after, the State Department approved a travel visa for Li Gun, the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s top official on U.S. affairs. (He had been requesting such a visa for many months.) The official reason was to let Li attend a conference. The real reason was to hold a second meeting, just last week, to confirm the deal at a higher level.

After that session, Christopher Hill, the assistant secretary of state for Asian affairs, flew to Beijing to meet with Kim Kye Gwan, North Korea’s deputy foreign affairs minister, and to set the date. Meanwhile, South Korea chimed in with the second of North Korea’s conditions—a promise of vast amounts of electricity. (South Korean companies are also drawing up contracts for huge and potentially lucrative projects to develop the North’s mines and other untapped resources.)

And so the six-party talks were on again—delegates from the United States, China, Russia, Japan, and the two Koreas gathering in Beijing the week of July 25.

Why did it take so long for the Americans and the North Koreans to agree on something that seems so simple?

In the case of the United States, the Bush administration’s top national security officials—Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush himself—just didn’t want an accord with North Korea, didn’t want even to sit down and talk. Kim Jong-il is an evil dictator; he’d broken an agreement by resuming his nuclear program; merely negotiating with him would be rewarding him for bad behavior; signing a treaty with him would legitimize and perpetuate his reign. Bush’s policy in the first term was to wait for Kim’s regime to collapse and, in the meantime, to take a look at the war plans.

Then three things happened. First, Kim’s regime didn’t collapse. Cheney tried to convince the Chinese to cut off aid, which might have done the trick; but they didn’t want millions of North Korean refugees to pour across their borders. Second, the Joint Chiefs told President Bush that the war plans were too risky; nobody knew where all the targets were, and Kim Jong-il had thousands of artillery rockets a few minutes away from Seoul; if he retaliated, hundreds of thousands of South Koreans could die. Besides, the South Korean government announced that it would not endorse—or allow its territory to be used for—a U.S. airstrike or invasion.

In other words, “regime change” wasn’t happening, and war didn’t look like a real option. Meanwhile, North Korea’s nuclear reactors kept churning out plutonium—and, possibly, A-bombs.

The third thing that happened was the start of Bush’s second term. His first secretary of state, Colin Powell, had favored stepped-up negotiations with North Korea, but he was beaten down—on this and other issues—by Cheney and Rumsfeld. He was also riled by his own undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton, who acted as Cheney’s spy at Foggy Bottom and did everything he could to undermine any effort to get serious talks rolling.

Condoleezza Rice, a secretary of state who has Bush’s ear and trust, turns out to be interested in at least engaging in these talks. Chris Hill, her appointee as assistant secretary for Asian matters, is a professional diplomat; working for Richard Holbrooke, he negotiated with Slobodan Milosevic over the Balkans and thus knows that sometimes you have to meet with evil people in the interests of national security. And Bolton, while waiting for his possibly doomed appointment as U.N. ambassador, is out of the loop on arms-control matters.

And so, for the moment, Rice has stopped calling North Korea an “outpost of tyranny” and recently acknowledged its status as “a sovereign state.” A few days ago, President Bush referred to the loathsome dictator as “Mr. Kim Jong-il,” an honorific that North Koreans—rightly or wrongly—took as a sign of respect.

As for the North Koreans, their main obstacle this past year was a long-standing negotiating principle never to make the first move, no matter how small. Kim Il Sung—Kim Jong-il’s father and predecessor—saw his country as a “shrimp among whales.” The only way to survive was to play the bigger powers off one another, to keep them constantly off guard, and to use his own isolation as a strong point.

The country has always been impoverished, due mainly to the Kims’ primitive style of communist rule. So, they have long sought nuclear weapons as a bargaining lever—to put North Korea on the same playing field as the larger powers. In 1993-94, Kim Il Sung started to reprocess plutonium and possibly to build a few A-bombs. President Bill Clinton nearly went to war over the issue. At the last minute, the two reached an accord, called the Agreed Framework. North Korea would stop reprocessing and lock its fuel rods in a storage pool that international inspectors would constantly monitor. The United States would finance two light-water nuclear reactors, for North Korean electricity, and would take steps toward establishing diplomatic relations.

The Agreed Framework gradually unraveled. The United States never supplied the reactors, never established diplomatic relations. North Korea kept the fuel rods locked up but started a covert program to build bombs through enriched uranium, an alternative to plutonium. Soon after Bush took office, U.S. intelligence detected this program; State Department officials confronted the North Koreans, who admitted the activity. Bush proclaimed the end of the Agreed Framework; the North Koreans kicked out the inspectors, unlocked the fuel rods, and reprocessed all 8,000 of them into plutonium.

That was in late 2002. In January 2003, perhaps realizing things had gone too far, the North Koreans tried to replicate the negotiations of a decade earlier, offering to lock the rods back up if the United States kept its side of the bargain on energy aid and diplomatic relations. Bush was having none of it. And that’s where we’ve been ever since.

In the last six months, the Bush administration has softened; officials have offered to reopen all discussions if North Korea first agreed to come back to the talks. But the North Koreans stayed hard, insisting that Bush had to agree first to drop his hostile policy. Kim Jong-il, like his father, was not going to take the first step.

Then Bush’s courting of Beijing paid off. Chinese President Hu Jintao told the North Koreans that he would like to make a state visit to Pyongyang—but that he couldn’t until they returned to the talks. Kim, like his father, values state visits as tokens of legitimacy, at home and abroad. He dropped the no-first-moves rule to win potentially much larger gains.

And so here we are. The dark side of this story is that if it took so much trouble to get these talks back in motion, how far can they go without collapsing? North Korea’s negotiating style is absurdly willful and deceptive. (For more on this, see Scott Snyder’s brilliant book Negotiating on the Edge.) There are ways to deal with this style, but they’re all slow; Clinton’s team endured 50 agonizing sessions to hammer out the Agreed Framework. Will Bush be so patient? Condi Rice is, for now, on the ascendancy in the Bush bureaucracy, but does Cheney—even sans Bolton—have some obstructions up his sleeve? And how far is Rice willing to go to make a deal? Finally, North Korea is the most closed society on earth. Weapons, missiles, and laboratories are said to be hidden in tunnels. A handful of nukes may already have been made. Assuming the best of intentions on both sides (which is quite an assumption), how will any disarmament accord be verified?

The boat is boarding, but it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

Article URL: http://slate.msn.com/id/2122648/

Posted at 10:13 PM · Comments (0)

SUKETU MEHTA
Published: July 12, 2005 - Copyright The New York Times

ACCORDING to a confidential memorandum, I.B.M. is cutting 13,000 jobs in the United States and in Europe and creating 14,000 jobs in India. From 2000 to 2015, an estimated three million American jobs will have been outsourced; one in 10 technology jobs will leave these shores by the end of this year. Stories like these have aroused a primal fear in the Western public: that they might soon need to line up outside the Indian Embassy for work visas and their children will have to learn Hindi.

Just as my parents had to line up outside the American consulate in Bombay, and my sisters and I had to learn English. My father came to America in 1977 not for its political freedoms or its way of life, but for the hope of a better economic future for his children. My grandfathers on both sides left rural Gujarat in northwestern India to find work: one to Calcutta, which was even more remote in those days than New York is from Bombay now; and the other to Nairobi. Mobility, we have always known, is survival. Now I face the possibility that my children, when they grow up, will find their jobs outsourced to the very country their grandfather left to pursue economic opportunity.

The outsourcing debate seems to have mutated into a contest between the country of my birth and the country of my nationality. Of course I feel a loyalty to America: it gave my parents a new life and my sons were born here. I have a vested interest in seeing America prosper. But I am here because the country of my ancestors didn’t understand the changing world; it couldn’t change its technology and its philosophy and its notions of social mobility fast enough to fight off the European colonists, who won not so much with the might of advanced weaponry as with the clear logical philosophy of the Enlightenment. Their systems of thinking conquered our own. So, since independence, Indians have had to learn; we have had to slog for long hours in the classroom while the children of other countries went out to play.

When I moved to Queens, in New York City, at the age of 14, I found myself, for the first time in my life, considered good at math. In Bombay, math was my worst subject, and I regularly found my place near the bottom of the class rankings in that rigorous subject. But in my American school, so low were their standards that I was - to my parents’ disbelief - near the top of the class. It was the same in English and, unexpectedly, in American history, for my school in Bombay included a detailed study of the American Revolution. My American school curriculum had, of course, almost nothing on the subcontinent’s freedom struggle. I was mercilessly bullied during the 1979-80 hostage crisis, because my classmates couldn’t tell the difference between Iran and India. If I were now to move with my family to India, my children - who go to one of the best private schools in New York - would have to take remedial math and science courses to get into a good school in Bombay.

Of course, India’s no wonderland. It might soon have the world’s biggest middle class, but it also has the world’s largest underclass. A quarter of its one billion people live below the poverty line, 40 percent are illiterate, and the child malnutrition rate exceeds that of sub-Saharan Africa. There’s a huge difference between the backwater state of Bihar and the boomtown of Bangalore. Those Indians who went to the United States, though, have done remarkably well: Indians make up one of the richest ethnic groups in this country. During the technology boom of the late 1990’s, Indians were responsible for 10 percent of all the start-ups in Silicon Valley. And in this year’s national spelling bee, the top four contestants were of South Asian origin.

There is a perverse hypocrisy about the whole jobs debate, especially in Europe. The colonial powers invaded countries like India and China, pillaged them of their treasures and commodities and made sure their industries weren’t allowed to develop, so they would stay impoverished and unable to compete. Then the imperialists complained when the destitute people of the former colonies came to their shores to clean their toilets and dig their sewers; they complained when later generations came to earn high wages as doctors and engineers; and now they’re complaining when their jobs are being lost to children of the empire who are working harder than they are. My grandfather was once confronted by an elderly Englishman in a London park who asked, “Why are you here?” My grandfather responded, “We are the creditors.” We are here because you were there.

The rich countries can’t have it both ways. They can’t provide huge subsidies for their agricultural conglomerates and complain when Indians who can’t make a living on their farms then go to the cities and study computers and take away their jobs. Why are Indians willing to write code for a tenth of what Americans make for the same work? It’s not by choice; it’s because they’re still struggling to stand on their feet after 200 years of colonial rule. The day will soon come when Indian companies will find that it’s cheaper to hire computer programmers in Sri Lanka, and then it’s there that the Indian jobs will go.

Of course, it’s heart-wrenching to see American programmers - many of whom are of Indian origin - lose their jobs and have to worry about how they’ll pay the mortgage. But they are ill served by politicians who promise to bring their jobs back by the facile tactic of banning them from leaving. This strategy will ensure only that our schools stay terrible; it’ll be an entire country run like the dairy industry, feasible only because of price controls and subsidies.

But we have a resource of incalculable worth right here to help us compete: the immigrants who’ve been given a new life in America. There are many more Indians in the United States than there are Americans in India. Indian-Americans will help America understand India, trade with it to our mutual benefit. Just as Arab-Americans can help us fight Al Qaeda, Indian-Americans can help us deal with the emerging economic superpower that is India. This is the return of the gift of citizenship.

And just in case, I’m making sure my children learn Hindi.

Suketu Mehta is author of “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.”

Posted at 9:17 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 17, 2005

Aided by the Internet and the market economy, intellectuals are speaking out and paying a price

Beijing

A year ago Jiao Guobiao was a little- known professor, quietly teaching journalism and advising graduate students at Peking University.

Then the former journalist decided to write a scathing, online attack against the Communist Party’s Propaganda Department. Mr. Jiao said the department’s officials were as powerful and self-righteous as the Roman Catholic Church of the Middle Ages. “Anyone who touches them will get burned,” he wrote.

“What is the stumbling block in the cultural development of Chinese society?” he asked. “It is the Central Propaganda Department.”

Thanks to the long arm of the Internet, Chinese and English versions of the essay were soon being read around the world, propelling the gentle-mannered scholar into the international spotlight. At first the government took no action. But when classes resumed last September Mr. Jiao’s courses were abruptly canceled, and soon afterward, the university told him that he could no longer advise graduate students.

He was fired in April — right after leaving China to take a fellowship at the National Endowment for Democracy, in Washington.

Mr. Jiao is the latest casualty in the Chinese government’s war against academic dissent, a campaign that has caught many scholars by surprise. Shortly before a new, younger generation of Chinese leaders took office in 2002, intellectuals in Beijing were hoping that Hu Jintao, who is now the country’s president, would be a force for reform.

Since taking the reins of power, however, the new regime has launched a bitter attack on freedom of expression. Newspapers have been shut down, books banned, journalists and dissidents imprisoned, and scholars brought under increased pressure to toe the official line. The political situation is the worst it has been in years, many scholars say.

“I’m very pessimistic,” says Xu Youyu, a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “I’m sure that these harsh policies are not just for a short time.”

An Intellectual Shift

The crackdown comes as a growing number of academics around the country are speaking out, in part thanks to new channels of expression like the Internet that the government finds difficult to control. Scholars are also abandoning research in the humanities in favor of the social sciences, and are thus more likely to be critical of their own society. Mr. Xu says that change dates back to the student protests of 1989, when Chinese soldiers opened fire on student activists and citizens.

“The bloody massacre shocked us,” Mr. Xu says. “We realized we needed to study something more productive. There were too many things in Chinese society that could be resolved by the social sciences but not the humanities.”

While Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s discussed Hegel, Sartre, Heidegger, and Marx, in the 1990s they turned their attention to market economics, constitutional democracy, public policy, and social equality, he says. To prove his point, Mr. Xu pulls a scholarly journal from the 1980s from his bookshelf and runs his index finger along the names of a half-dozen contributors who have since switched fields. Mr. Xu himself focused on the philosophy of linguistics before switching to political philosophy after 1989.

“In the past, Chinese scholars and intellectuals were focused on ‘isms,’” says Mr. Xu, “but in recent years, they are paying more and more attention to practical matters, issues that are much more important to China’s modernization.”

Free speech was given a big boost in China in recent years by the commercialization of the news media and the advent of the Internet, two channels that gave scholars unprecedented ways to disseminate their opinions. Newspapers and magazines once controlled by the government are now scrambling to attract readers. The Beijing News, which has won a large readership with its bold reporting, devotes an entire page each day to articles written by prominent intellectuals.

However, nothing has been as important as the Internet. “It’s almost revolutionary,” says Jiang Wenran, associate professor of political science at the University of Alberta, in Canada, and a native of China. “Without the Internet, how could they speak out?”

Anything important that has been written can be found online, and that, says Mr. Jiang, “gives intellectuals confidence that they have a voice and can use it to express their opinions.”

Academics have also set up numerous Web sites, though they have had to exercise caution. Some sites voluntarily shut down every year before the anniversary of the May 4th Movement, marking the 1919 student demonstrations on that day in Beijing against the Treaty of Versailles, and the 1989 crackdown that grew out of the student protests in Tiananmen Square. If they did not take that self-imposed break, China’s vigilant Internet police — said to number in the tens of thousands — might take more drastic action, forcing them to shut down permanently.

The sites normally reopen several weeks later. One popular site is xiancheng9.com, which was shut down by the government recently. (The numeral 9 referred to the ninth edition of the site, since eight previous ones were shut down.)

“It’s a very sophisticated game,” says Mr. Xu.

Wang Yi, a professor of law at Chengdu University, says economic development has also been a boon for academics. He notes that scholars can now get financial backing from nongovernment sources, both at home and abroad, and from the growing number of privately run newspapers and magazines. “Traditionally, intellectuals could have only survived in universities,” he says. “In the past, the government was the only market for academic research, but now the economic reliance of intellectuals on the government has fallen.”

Mr. Wang says he meets people from within China and abroad who have heard his name, either on the Internet or on such broadcasting services as the Voice of America, BBC, and Radio France, which beam news into China. “Even in my rural village, retired people are listening to overseas broadcasts,” he says.

Despite the latest crackdown, scholars agree that the government has generally treated university-based academics more leniently than independent critics, who are routinely arrested and jailed or roughed up. Rarely are academics jailed these days. After Liu Junning, another scholar at the social-sciences academy, gave a lecture in which he criticized the former top Communist leader Jiang Zemin, he lost his job, He was later allowed to resume work.

Banned from the Classroom

Mr. Jiao, the fired Peking University scholar, believes that academics have not been as bold as critics like Liu Xiaobo and Yu Jie, two of China’s most outspoken political commentators. They were detained in December and their computer files and papers were seized.

Mr. Xu came under pressure for being one of 65 signers of an open letter calling for a re-evaluation of the 1989 democracy movement, but he kept his salary and his job. However, like other outspoken scholars, he has not taught classes for years. That might not sound like much of a punishment to many American scholars, who often seek reduced teaching loads so they can focus more on research. But in China, such tactics are designed to isolate scholars.

In some cases, universities attempt to transfer scholars to obscure departments. Mr. Jiao held onto his prestigious university job for awhile, refusing to move to the staid classical-texts research department. He says the university’s president put pressure on him to stop speaking out. “You can’t let the president lose face,” he says.

Wang Yi, the Chengdu law professor, was not allowed to teach classes for 18 months. He says the government is afraid that people like him “might spread unhealthy concepts among students.” He does not know why he was allowed to return to the classroom in March. “The cost will be higher for them if you leave,” he says. “They can control you better if you remain in the system.” If he were not assigned to a danwei, or official government work unit, he says, he could “write 24 hours a day.”

Intellectuals attracted a new wave of attention in September 2004, when Southern People’s Weekly, a Guangdong magazine, published a list of 50 public intellectuals that included both establishment and nonestablishment figures in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and elsewhere. Among them: the economist Mao Yushi, the legal expert He Weifang, the environmentalist Liang Congjie, the exiled poet Bei Dao, and Cui Jian, the grandfather of Chinese rock. News of the list sped around the world via the Internet until it was banned; newspapers were ordered to stop discussion of the term “public intellectuals”; and periodicals were prohibited from publishing essays by Wang Yi, Jiao Guobiao, and others.

The magazine said it hoped more of China’s intellectuals — who it said had been pushed to the fringes of society by a market economy — would take an independent stand. It said that while China had as many intellectuals “as there are hairs on a cow,” those who were willing to stand up for the truth had become “the rarest of rarities.”

That same month, the government shut down the popular Yita Hutu bulletin-board service at Peking University, a channel for students and teachers to exchange ideas. Strategy and Management, a monthly magazine that carried articles by leading thinkers, was closed after publishing an article critical of the North Korean regime by a researcher at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences.

On November 15, Shanghai’s conservative Liberation Daily continued the attack in an article that borrowed from the rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). It argued that the value of an intellectual “lies in serving society and the masses.” Ten days later the People’s Daily, the party mouthpiece, reprinted the article verbatim, giving it the party seal of approval. According to senior Chinese journalists, the propaganda department then issued a ban on news reports on “public intellectuals,” as well as articles by leading liberal commentators. The Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, a group that fights for press freedom, called the decree “sanctions from another age.”

In March restrictions were placed on other bulletin boards at major universities around China, restricting access to campus users and forcing participants to register their true identities.

Suicide, or Castration?

Intellectuals are well aware of the danger of speaking out in China, which has a long history of persecuting scholars.

Paul Ropp, a Clark University historian who is working on a book on dissent, says that throughout Chinese history the Confucian literati — members of the scholar class who held positions in the imperial bureaucracy — believed it their sacred duty to rectify abuses in government, even at the cost of their own lives. He cites the case of the Han historian Sima Qian (145-85 BC), who was given the option of committing suicide or facing castration for criticizing Emperor Han Wudi. (He chose castration.)

“It is too seldom recognized that all of these traditions have survived to the present day in the Chinese popular consciousness,” Mr. Ropp says.

Intellectuals suffered bitterly when they were brutally denounced during the 1957 anti-rightist movement and the Cultural Revolution. During those “10 years of chaos,” as China now calls the period, universities were closed throughout the country, books destroyed, and intellectuals persecuted and killed. Mao even once gushed about his mistreatment of intellectuals, boasting that he’d outdone the infamous Qin Shihuangdi, who buried hundreds of Confucian scholars alive in 215 BC.

“Well, and what was so remarkable about Qin Shihuangdi?” Mao is said to have asked a Communist Party gathering. “He executed 460 scholars. We executed 46,000 of them.” The remarks were reportedly greeted with laughter.

In an article published in Foreign Affairs last year, Orville Schell, a China specialist and dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California at Berkeley, lamented the lack of free discussion in China today. He recalled a time — a century ago — when Chinese scholars reveled in a heady period of intellectual discourse. “Dipping back into the Intellectual ferment that marked the first half of the 20th century and comparing it to the stilted public dialogue today, it is easy to feel wistful for a time in China when debate was common, ideas and discussions mattered, and thinkers were open to the world and able to speak freely,” he wrote.

Some Chinese scholars working abroad are optimistic that the current trend will not last long. “Under Jiang Zemin it was not all that free, and there were still limits on how much you could say,” says Jiang Wenran, the Alberta political scientist. He insists that the amount of publications and information available today are “absolutely astounding” and are no comparison with the relative void of 10 years ago.

Jiang Wenran believes President Hu and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao are focusing on issues that threaten China the most. “It’s about regime survival,” he says. “If they can deal with rural and urban issues, the rest doesn’t matter. Intellectuals won’t rebel, but farmers and workers will.”

‘I Want to Write’

Despite the harassment, Chinese intellectuals continue to speak out via the media and the Internet, and while abroad. Recent months have seen a barrage of open letters and astute commentaries on issues the party would prefer to keep under wraps.

During his last days in Beijing, just before he was fired, Mr. Jiao reflected on his own reasons for speaking out, in a coffee shop on the Peking University campus.

“My career is not as important as this,” he said, his voice rising. “A lot of people can teach, but not many can talk like this, write like this, or express these opinions.”

He pulled out two Chinese language books on Martin Luther that he had just borrowed from the library. Tapping one book with his finger, he asked why the 16th-century theologian stood up against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church.

“It’s the same logic,” he said, not waiting for an answer. “Some people can accept such things, and some can’t. I’m the type who can’t accept.

“I want to write, speak out, and criticize.”

Posted at 12:44 AM · Comments (0)

Tuesday, July 12, 2005 at 08:20 JST
TOKYO — Discrimination in Japan is “deep and profound,” with government leaders lacking recognition of the depth of the problem and the public having a “strong xenophobic drive,” a U.N. special rapporteur said Monday in wrapping up a nine-day visit in Japan.

Doudou Diene of Senegal, appointed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights, called for stronger political will at the highest level to combat the issue, for Japan to enact a national law condemning racism as is obligatory under international conventions, and to improve its public education about minorities in the country.

“It will be a long-term task to change people’s mentality and it must be done through education,” said Diene, special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

During his stay since July 3, Diene met with officials of both national and local authorities to determine the extent Japan is complying with its international human rights obligations. He also visited communities of minorities such as the aboriginal Ainu, the “burakumin,” formerly social outcasts in feudal Japan, and people of Korean and Chinese descent.

From these meetings, Diene concluded there was a clear gap between the perceptions of the reality of discrimination between government officials and the minority communities.

Japan has liaisons nationwide that aim to eliminate discrimination against the “burakumin” and the Diet passed a law in 1997 to help preserve Ainu traditions and culture.

But citing cases in which the “burakumin” were listed by private groups and discriminated against in employment, Diene criticized the lack of government action to combat such practice and said, “I find this shocking and terrible.”

“Japan has no comprehensive national law against discrimination,” Diene said at a news conference. “I strongly recommend such a national law be drafted not only based on international instruments Japan takes part in, but that the minorities concerned have to be consulted.”

A spokesman of the Justice Ministry, which Diene visited last Wednesday, declined to comment on the special rapporteur’s remarks but said a human rights protection bill is under deliberation in parliament.

Describing the discrimination against the Ainu, “burakumin,” and Korean and Chinese residents as being “deeply rooted” in historical and cultural aspects, Diene urged the Japanese government to set up an organ at the national level to promote equality for minorities.

Having examined samples of Japanese junior high school textbooks provided to him by the education ministry, Diene said Japan must ensure that the roles and contributions of minorities to the country be taught accurately and appropriately so that Japanese people have the right perception.

Without specifically naming Japan, Diene also criticized the current global trend in which xenophobic sentiment stemming from measures to combat terrorism and illegal immigration has “slowly made its way into the platforms of democratic parties.”

Diene said he had requested a meeting with Tokyo Gov Shintaro Ishihara, known for his nationalistic views and controversial remarks against foreigners, but was denied an appointment.

But the special rapporteur gave a positive appraisal of the Japanese government’s cooperation with his visit and said this indicated “in a positive way” that Japan is willing to accept recommendations to tackle the problem.

Diene said he shared his preliminary findings with the Japanese government Monday morning and will wait for Japan’s response before completing a final report to be submitted to the Commission on Human Rights next March.

He will also present a summary of his findings in an interim report to the U.N. General Assembly this autumn. It was the first time a U.N. special rapporteur on racism has visited Japan. (Kyodo News)

Posted at 11:29 PM · Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

By HOWARD W. FRENCH - Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, July 9 - When officials drew up the blueprints for the redesign of this city in the early 1980’s, nary a skyscraper punctuated the low-slung horizon, whose buildings mostly dated from the decades of Western control early in the last century.

The hugely ambitious plans called for Shanghai to be built anew. And among the top priorities in a city previously dominated by bicycles was avoiding the most common plagues of the automobile age - unmanageable traffic and unbearable pollution.

To that end, enormous sums were spent on spectacular bridges, elevated highways and a brand-new subway system. But today, glance out the window of one of this city’s 3,000 high-rises around 6 p.m., when snarling masses of horn-honking cars tend to congeal in gridlock, and it is hard to escape the impression that Shanghai, at least for now, is losing its bet.

As people in this richest of Chinese cities have grown more and more affluent, they have displayed an American-style passion for the automobile. But for Shanghai, as for much of China, getting rich and growing attached to cars have increasingly gone hand in hand, and have produced side effects familiar in cities that have long been addicted to automobiles - from filthy air and stressful, marathon commutes to sharply rising oil consumption.

China accounts for about 12 percent of the world’s energy demand, but its consumption is growing at more than four times the global rate, sending Chinese oil company executives on an increasingly frantic search for overseas supplies. The country’s top environmental officials have warned of ecological and economic doom if China continues to follow this pattern. But in cities like Shanghai, where automobiles account for 70 percent to 80 percent of air pollution, nothing seems capable of stopping, or even slowing, the rapid rise of a car culture.

This is not for lack of trying. In one attempt to slow the growth of automobile traffic, the city has raised the fees for car registrations every year since 2000, doubling them over that time to about $4,600 per vehicle - more than twice the city’s per capita income. Many drivers illegally register their cars in other cities, where the fees are much lower, and the result is a never-ending cat-and-mouse game with the traffic police.

The traffic efforts have been coupled with a major expansion of the public transportation system, which comprises gleaming new subways and the world’s fastest train, a magnetic levitation vehicle that zips to the airport in under 10 minutes.

The steep growth in automobile traffic here, however, seems to mock the city’s efforts. The original blueprints for a major expansion of Shanghai’s road network, drawn up two decades ago, predicted that Shanghai would pass the threshold of two million cars in 2020. In fact, that figure was reached last November.

“The estimates we made 20 years ago have been proven wrong,” said Li Junhao, chief engineer of the city’s Urban Planning Administration Bureau, in something of an understatement. “The development of Shanghai has been beyond our imagination.”

Even interim traffic estimates here have fallen far short. Two years ago, the city government rushed orders for the construction of a new, elevated loop expressway for central Shanghai, because other elevated expressways were already saturated at peak hours. “Just one year after some roads were completed, they reached vehicle flow volumes that were forecast for 15 to 20 years from now,” said Yang Dongyuan, a professor at the School of Transportation Engineering and vice president of Tongji University.

Meanwhile, the city is expanding its subway grid well beyond the 310 miles of track first planned. Two new lines are being added to the original 15, along with another 192 miles of track. Even so, the subway system, gleaming and clean though it is, is one area where traffic has failed to meet projections, with less than half the expected ridership on some lines. The reason, experts say, is that there are not enough trains, resulting in overcrowding, which further encourages people to ride in cars.

To be sure, Shanghai’s failure to master the challenge of the automobile reflects a mixture of forces, both economic and cultural. Foremost is the city’s economic performance, which has been fast even by Chinese standards, and has outstripped even the most optimistic projections.

Add to this a flourishing consumer culture that equates car ownership, however costly, with personal freedom, prestige and success.

In this regard, Yu Qiang, a 31-year-old salesman, is a model citizen of sorts. Mr. Yu spent more than $20,000 last year to buy his first car, a Chinese-made Buick, so that he could drive to work each morning instead of relying on public transportation.

Because of heavy traffic, the seven-mile commute usually takes a full hour. It includes dropping his 5-year-old son off at kindergarten and his wife, who teaches, at her school.

“A new subway line will be completed to my neighborhood later this year, and I’m hoping many other people will ride it so that the traffic will get better,” Mr. Yu said. “I’ll keep driving my car, though. It’s more comfortable because I can listen to music, use the air-conditioner, and it’s not crowded.”

Mr. Yu then made a comment that sounded like a city planner’s nightmare and a car salesman’s dream. “In China everybody wants to have a car, and I’m just one of them,” he said. “We think of it as changing our lives.” As for the traffic implications, he added, smiling, “The government has a lot to do to improve the traffic, and I believe they will do it.”

Posted at 11:15 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The South China Morning Post - Friday, July 8, 2005

BEHIND THE NEWS

DOUG NAIRNE

Copyright ©2005. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
buy scmp photos

Taiwanese soldiers guard a Patriot anti-missile battery at a base in Wanli, Taipei county. Agence France-Presse photo
Taiwan’s recent decision to fork out US$752 million on an early warning radar system will buy the island only about six minutes of extra reaction time to a mainland missile attack, according to defence analysts.

By the time it is confirmed that missiles are streaking across the 180km-wide Taiwan Strait, the defenders will have about enough time left to telephone the island’s president and warn him he is going to have a bad day.

Taiwan’s anti-missile defences will benefit from early warning radar, and could shoot down some of the incoming warheads. But they could stop only a small mainland attack.

Even if plans to buy six US-made Patriot Pac-3 anti-missile batteries were approved, only about two thirds of Taiwan would be covered. The anti-missile batteries would have to cope with hundreds of inbound missiles and aircraft, and could quite quickly be overwhelmed.

Many analysts believe the new radar system will be of little use in stopping - or even deterring - a mainland attack.

“To my mind, this radar system will not have a significant impact on the balance of power,” said Robert Karniol, Asia Pacific editor of Jane’s Defence Weekly. “This is another case where the US pressured Taiwan’s military to spend vast sums of money on defence items that they do not need and do not want.”

Taipei has mulled over the need for early warning radar since the 1996 missile crisis, when Beijing test-fired missiles near the island in a bid to intimidate Taiwanese into voting against pro-independence candidate Lee Teng-hui. Since then, the People’s Liberation Army has been adding more - and better - missiles to its arsenal.

Sale of the early warning radar technology was approved by the US in 2000, in a move seen as a consolation prize after the rejection of a request for four Arleigh Burke-class destroyers equipped with the Aegis battle-management system. But there have been ongoing reports of opposition to the deal in Taiwan. Defence officials were quoted in media reports recently as saying the radar is controversial due to the system’s vulnerability to attack, the short warning time it offers and its high price.

In February, Jane’s Defence Weekly reported that one of the two American defence contractors bidding on the programme had withdrawn due to concerns about the deal and that Taiwan’s military was seriously re-evaluating the need for an early warning radar of the type being offered by the US.

The system, to be operational by 2009, will be provided by the US firm Raytheon. It reportedly will be based on a modified version of the AN/FPS-115 Pave Paws radar that forms a defensive ring against ballistic missile attack around North America.

According to the US Air Force, the Pave Paws radar can detect targets more than 5,000km away and is powerful enough to monitor objects in outer space.

The US radar installations are housed in vulnerable, 30-metre concrete towers that analysts say would be pounded into rubble almost immediately during a mainland attack. Those who support the project say the radar would have served its purpose by detecting the initial attack, even if it was destroyed soon afterwards.

A spokesman for Taiwan’s Defence Ministry said that even with the system’s limitations, the early warning radar would play an important role in the island’s overall defence by boosting the effectiveness of its anti-missile weapons, especially the Patriot batteries.

The threat to Taiwan comes from more than 450 land attack missiles the mainland has deployed in coastal areas across the strait. During a war, the missiles would be used ahead of an invasion to destroy airfields, communications facilities and other infrastructure vital to Taiwan’s defence.

The missile threat is a keystone of Beijing’s strategy to deter moves towards independence. While Taiwan could defend itself against an invasion by troops, it does not have an effective way to keep the mainland from blasting it into submission with long-range missile strikes.

The PLA has already been in the market for anti-radar weapons to destroy systems like the planned Taiwanese radar network. One deal - for an upgraded version of the Israeli-made Harpy, an unmanned aerial vehicle specially designed to attack radar installations - was recently cancelled at the last minute due to intense pressure from the US.

Karniol said the most effective way for the US to help Taiwan defend itself would be the politically sensitive route of assisting the island with its own missile programme, so it could hit back at the mainland if it was attacked.

“Although it is useful for Taiwan to have a ground-based air defence network, what it really needs is counterstrike ability so it can attack China’s missile launchers to stop an attack,” he said.

“There are two ways to stop a missile attack: when the missiles have been launched and are in flight or when they are on the ground before launch. It is much easier to destroy them on the ground.”

Raytheon spokesman Guy Shields declined to comment on criticism of the deal, saying the company did not respond to comments from defence analysts and would “not get into politics”.

“This is a very capable system. It will give the Taiwan Air Force the capability to detect, track and assess ballistic and cruise missiles, as well as aircraft and surface ships,” Mr Shields said. “Specific capabilities are classified for obvious reasons.”

Some analysts believe the real motivation for purchasing the radar is the hope it will be integrated into a US-backed ballistic missile defence network. Legislators from the ruling Democratic Progressive Party have said they hope the radar purchase will draw Taiwan into a closer military alliance with the US and its regional allies.

As the PLA modernises and closes the qualitative gap with Taiwan’s military, many see the island’s best hope for deterring an invasion as being closer links to the US.

“There is a great potential for assisting the US with this radar system,” said Andrew Yang, a Taiwan-based defence expert. “This radar can easily be integrated into the US regional early warning system.”

Mr Yang said he was not aware of any plans for Taiwan to link into a US radar network, but acknowledged that the ability to do so would be a valuable card for Taiwan to play if tensions between Beijing and Washington heightened. Radar based in Taiwan could give more accurate information about missile launches in mainland China than existing US systems in the region.

If the Raytheon radar system does eventually plug Taiwan into a US defence network, the US$752 million price tag may seem like a bargain. If not, it may account for the most expensive six minutes of the island’s history.

Posted at 12:24 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright The New York Times
July 10, 2005

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

DATIAN, China - As a crowd formed around a rare foreign visitor in this town’s open-air market, the conversation turned quickly from the price of dried fish and fresh fruit to how many dialects people here could muster.

Hoisting her cherubic 6-month-old daughter, Lin Jinchun, a 29-year-old dumpling seller, claimed that she could speak two, drawing a quick counterclaim of three from her mother, Lin Guimei.

What was the third dialect? someone asked. “Putonghua,” the mother answered, counting the standard national language of China as if it were just another minor tongue. Meanwhile others, shouting above the din, chimed in that they could speak four, five or even six tongues.

As seen by many outsiders, China is a behemoth: the world’s most populous country with a galloping economy and a more or less unified culture. But if Putonghua - Mandarin - is one of the world’s most heavily spoken languages, in many parts of China it is lost in the mazes of local dialects.

In recent years migrant labor, which has brought about huge population movements from the hinterlands to China’s prosperous eastern cities, has obliged millions of Chinese to learn more Mandarin, but by official estimates even today barely half of the population can speak the official dialect.

China has 55 ethnic minorities, many of them with cultural roots in neighboring countries. The linguistic diversity among these minorities, however, pales in comparison with the variety of tongues spoken among China’s Han, the ethnic group that makes up more than 90 percent of the population. The Han speak as many 1,500 dialects, with the bulk of those concentrated in the southern half of the country.

The official view here is that all of the tongues spoken by Han are variants of one language, Chinese. But in a country with a traumatic history of civil war and fragmentation, many specialists say this theory may have more to do with politics than with linguistic reality. Many of the Han dialects are almost entirely mutually incomprehensible, more distinct than languages from disparate regions of Europe.

“No one can clearly answer the question how many dialects there are in China,” said Zhang Hongming, a professor of Chinese linguistics at the University of Wisconsin who is in China doing fieldwork. “The degree of difference among dialects is much higher than the degree of difference among European languages. In Europe they call them languages, but in China we share a culture, so the central government would like to consider that one language is shared by many different peoples. It is simply a different definition.”

Linguists say the Wu dialect widely spoken in Shanghai, to take one prominent example, shares only about 31 percent lexical similarity with Mandarin, or roughly the same as English and French.

The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like “goodbye” in the Wu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.

For China, the consequences of this linguistic fragmentation are immense. Although no one in government says that local languages should be eliminated, there is a growing awareness that the country’s national construction cannot be considered complete until all Chinese can speak a common language, which remains a distant goal.

Indeed, a government survey published last year said only 53 percent of the population “can communicate in Putonghua.” In recognition of this fact, broadcasters commonly include subtitles - the meaning of Chinese characters is stable, even as spoken dialects vary - on television programs here to help people overcome comprehension problems.

A 2001 national language law decrees that Mandarin be used in all mass media, government offices and schools, and bars the “overuse” of dialects in movies and broadcasting.

Even by the standards of China’s complicated language matrix, Fujian Province stands out for its richness, a dense thicket of tongues laid down by waves of migration over time from central China.

“We have an expression, that if you drive five miles in Fujian the culture changes, and if you drive 10 miles, the language does,” said Zhang Zhenxing, a linguist from Fujian at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. “In recent years, because of economic growth things have been getting better, but there are still an extraordinary number of dialects in Fujian.”

If Fujian Province can be said to have a Babel, tiny Datian County can stake a pretty solid claim. In this 800 square miles of rural central Fujian, where fields of rice and tobacco grow in the shadow of tall mountains, no fewer than five dialects are spoken in addition to Mandarin.

To drive a few miles down the road from one village to another is indeed to plunge into a new linguistic universe. Things can be as confusing for someone from the next town as they are for the total outsider.

In one village near the county seat, where an old Daoist shrine sits high above the roadside, a man who said he spoke southern Min, one of Fujian’s most widely spoken dialects, tried to exchange words with some boys who said they also spoke southern Min. A few words from each side, however, sufficed to show they were mutually unintelligible.

Chen Wenxian, a shopkeeper in his late 20’s in another village, grimaced with incomprehension when a driver pulled up and inquired about the price of shoes in his glass display case. The two switched into heavily accented but mutually comprehensible Mandarin.

Mr. Chen, slouched in his chair behind his counter, shrugged when asked the name of the village’s language. Consultations with a cluster of family members did not unearth a name either.

“It’s just what we speak here,” he said. Asked if he could understand the language in the next village, a short distance down the road, he said: “I have no idea what they speak. Those people talk too fast.”

Posted at 11:27 PM · Comments (0)

Continent out of focus

Copyright The Guardian Weekly

Call me naive, but I thought it was possible that 2005 could achieve even more than a historic breakthrough deal on debt relief and aid for Africa. The conjunction of this key political moment with a huge cultural festival, Africa 05, seemed to hold the promise of achieving one of those lasting shifts in public understanding of Africa.

What seemed within grasp was the start of a new relationship between the neighbouring continents of Europe and Africa - at last. Could Britain open a new page in its long engagement with Africa, finally drawing a line under the colonial themes of “saving” and “civilising” the continent? The wealth of African creativity evident everywhere - art, music, sculpture, film - would reinject into the public sphere a perception of the immense ingenuity, resourcefulness and reflective inquiry of Africans. It would shatter the myth of Africans as powerless victims at the mercy of western generosity and do-goodery.

It would help us to put back into the political landscape a sense of African agency. It would correct the media myth that the fate of millions of Africans is passively lying in the hands of eight men in Gleneagles, and make clear that, given half a chance, Africans can shape the circumstances of their daily lives - and their often-precarious survival - far more powerfully and effectively than the G8.

The hope was that people would get to see more of Africa than starving black babies on their screens. We would get to hear about Africans much like ourselves - with the same hopes, fears and aspirations; we would, finally, begin to identify with them as human beings. That shift of perception offered a radical potential for a more equal engagement between Europe and Africa - the kind of sustained long-term relationship necessary to deal with the huge challenges to our species of climate change and Aids.

You may say that was ludicrously naive. And I begin to fear that you are right. What we are seeing now in this unprecedented media focus on Africa is a very old theme. In 1787 the slogan of the Quaker abolitionists was “Am I not a man and a brother?” But the radicalism of this rallying cry was belied by the image on the Anti-Slavery Society’s seal of the African slave - he was on his knees. His liberty and dignity was ours for the giving, not his for the taking. The relationship at this G8, more than 200 years later, is similarly framed: African as supplicant to the (mostly) white men.

An entire continent has been reduced to a “scar on the conscience of the world”, stripped of its dignity and left more powerless than at any intervening point since 1787. The images we saw of Africans at Live8 last weekend were the dying, the starving and the desperately impoverished. Postcolonialism in a globalising economy is proving even more humiliating for Africa than colonialism: its huge wealth in natural resources sequestered in secret bank accounts; its commodities commanding ever-smaller prices; its vicious wars with the exported arms of the industrial world; its government policies dictated from Washington and Geneva. Even its suffering exploited to jerk us into attention and to supply our emotional self-gratification. To the partying Hyde Park crowd, Kofi Annan said “thank you”. But for what?

Tony Blair’s Africa agenda is yet another _expression of what Professor John Lonsdale, the Cambridge historian of Africa, described in a lecture last week as “the self-righteously civilising mission of the past two centuries” of Europe towards its neighbour. He concluded that “it is a construction that infantilises not only Africans, unable to fend for themselves, but us too, like babies demanding the instant gratification of self-importance”.

What the past few weeks have reinforced in popular perception is the absurd simplification of an entire continent so that it is explicable in terms of just four adjectives: picturesque, pitiful, psychopathic and, above all, passive. This is the formula used by such TV interlocutors as Bob Geldof and Rolf Harris. In the Geldof episodes I forced myself to watch, I heard only two Africans speak - a few whispers from a frightened child, a few words from a wizened elder - and none in Harris. Sumptuous maybe, but these BBC programmes were riddled with stereotypes - setting suns, crowds of smiling children, inexplicable crazed violence - and had little new to say.

The lost opportunity that 2005 may come to represent is not for want of trying. Visit the near-empty galleries of the Crafts Council’s Africa exhibition to marvel at the beauty and skill of the basket-making, the beaten silver, the woven clothes; visit the British Museum’s Africa galleries to admire the beauty of El Anatsui’s woven tapestries of bottle tops. Africa 05’s director, Augustus Caseley-Hayford, is bitterly frustrated at the refusal of the mainstream media to engage - a kind of wilful incomprehension that he can only see as racism.

It is almost as if the West can’t accept African agency: we want the simplification of the four Ps because it so neatly caters for our fears, derived from the colonial history of the “dark continent” of Joseph Conrad fame. Is this the price that has to be paid for an instant of western attention?

The West, in its rapacious and impatient greed, destroys with contempt or indifference all that it can’t appropriate for its own aggrandisement. Africa exposes - like no other continent - the hubristic arrogance of the western industrialised countries that dominate the globe and are forcing an entire species into one model of human development - a model with catastrophic shortcomings.

Now is precisely the point at which we need to learn about the genius of Africa’s own history of development, which, Lonsdale suggests, lies in the extraordinary resilience and self-sufficiency to survive and adapt in habitats not always conducive to human life. The resilience is derived in part from an investment in relationships (rather than things); partly it lies in the qualities of self-disciplined willpower that sustain individuals against all the odds. These are skills we’ve forgotten or may never have had, but the coming centuries suggest we’ll need to learn them from Africans.

If we recognised the immensity of this achievement of human endeavour over thousands of years, it might help to dismantle the self-satisfied superiority by which the West lays claim to a monopoly on concepts of progress and development. We - Africans and westerners - might begin to reframe the debate and ask ourselves if it isn’t the grossly polluting G8 that is a scar on the conscience of the world.

Posted at 12:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The South China Morning Post

BYLINE: The SCO is taking steps to tighten its grip on security and energy deals in the region, writes

BODY:
A fresh salvo was fired this week in the ongoing “Great Game” of international power play when the Shanghai Co-operation Organisation (SCO), a security alliance dominated by China and Russia, urged the US and its allies to set a timetable for troop withdrawal from Central Asian republics.

In a reference to a term coined in the 19th century to describe the heated rivalry between Russia and Britain as the two powers competed for influence among Central Asian rulers, analysts say that in the new game, the rules are the same and only the players are different.

“Central Asia is a chessboard for competing interests,” says Alexander Neill, head of the Asia Security Programme at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies in London. “It has huge energy resources and when you look at China’s multilateral engagement, the SCO is clearly something they’re concentrating on in order to compete with American interests in the region … it’s a game of energy strategy more than anything else.”

Formally created in Shanghai in June 2001 as a security forum to combat terrorism, the SCO’s member states include China and Russia, as well as the Central Asian republics of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Since 2001, it has evolved into an economic, energy and security forum. At this week’s meeting in Kazakhstan’s capital of Astana, Iran, Pakistan, India and Mongolia were permitted to attend with observer status, a possible sign of ambitious expansion plans for the organisation.

In a joint declaration, SCO members said: “We support and will support the international coalition, which is carrying out an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan, and we have taken note of the progress made in the effort to stabilise the situation. As the active military phase in the anti-terror operation in Afghanistan is nearing completion, the SCO would like the coalition’s members to decide on the deadline for the use of the temporary infrastructure and for their military contingents’ presence in those countries.”

America and France have troops based in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

Formerly part of the Soviet Union, Central Asia is seen by Russia and China as their backyard. Ruled by authoritarian leaders who are routinely criticised by human rights observers, the region is also home to extremist Islamic groups.

The comparatively recent American presence, in the form of oil money and troops - while initially welcomed by Central Asian states as part of the “war on terror” and a counterbalance to Russia’s own designs on its former provinces - now appears to be under threat.

After last year’s “orange revolution” in Georgia - when president elect Viktor Yanukovych was forced to step down in the face of popular protests and allegations of electoral fraud - and this year’s unrest in Kyrgyzstan, when president Askar Akaev fled the country to Russia, the suspicion is that America is trying to overthrow the area’s traditionally dictatorial and pro -Russian leaders.

Talking at the conference, Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov suggested that outside forces were at work “to create instability and undermine the region economically in order to impose their own development model”.

After a massacre in eastern Uzbekistan in May this year, when government troops reportedly killed hundreds of protesting civilians, America and other western countries called for an independent inquiry.

Mr Karimov refused, and subsequently curbed America’s flying rights from its airbase near the capital of Tashkent. Enter China. Only a week after the massacre Mr Karimov was being feted in Beijing, his security policies supported, and a US$ 600 million oil and gas joint venture signed.

Critical of other countries when they raise issues such as human rights, Tibet or Taiwan - all issues Beijing says are internal affairs - China does not knowingly tie its trade deals to preconditions on political reform or human rights improvements.

In recent years China has been adept at filling the vacuum left by western companies either forbidden to, or unwilling to do business in countries that have become international pariahs. Those countries include Sudan, Zimbabwe, Nepal and Myanmar.

This week’s announcement by the SCO appears to be the next move in China’s game of chess. Taking advantage of a rise in anti-American sentiment among Central Asian leaders, China, along with Russia, is hoping to woo regional statesmen into signing firmer security and energy deals.

Behind this is not only China’s own strategic concerns in keeping Central Asia free of US troops - a concern that some speculate stems from the idea that America is trying to create a containment circle to control a rising China - but also from China’s insatiable energy needs.

Already consuming 5.5 millions barrels of oil a day, 30 per cent of which is imported, the US Energy Information Administration estimates China’s demand will rise to 11 million barrels a day by 2025.

Although the majority of imported oil is currently shipped on tanker, the ongoing construction of pipelines across China and into Central Asia may soon change this. “China definitely wants to secure resources now heading west, and divert them to head eastwards,” says Mr Neill.

In part, the success of this policy will depend on what the SCO can become. Greeted with some scepticism by western observers when it first began, the organisation has since mushroomed.

Having taken over the presidency this year, it seems likely that China will press to include the four nations granted observer status at this week’s conference. “They don’t want to give the impression that the SCO is a home -grown baby … the Chinese are playing a game to tidy up their international image and will try and create a major movement … though not necessarily at the expense of creating leverage against Asean or Apec,” says Mr Neill.

Chinese observers concur. “We see the SCO as a possible forum for ironing out differences in Asia,” says Mei Renyi, an expert on Sino-US relations at the Beijing Foreign Language University. “As long as it helps to bring peace and stability in the area, we would like to see the SCO continue. How it develops will depend on how the incorporation of observer nations develop.”

One thing is clear - America will not be invited to sit at this table.

Posted at 12:16 AM · Comments (0)

The Art World’s Newest Love: Contemporary Chinese Works

By KAREN MAZURKEWICH
Copyright THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
July 8, 2005; Page W1

Patricia Tang has been an avid collector of master drawings for more than 30 years, and can quickly tick off 18th- and 19th-century favorites like Edgar Degas and John Constable.

But collecting drawings by these European masters simply lost its edge over time. “The artists at auction were the same over and over again,” she says.

The artists Ms. Tang is most excited about these days are of a more recent vintage — from late 20th-century China. “These people are alive, there’s a lot of energy there,” says Ms. Tang, a New Yorker who has invested just under $100,000 in works by conceptual artist Gu Wenda and multimediaist Xu Bing.
[‘The Sun,’ by Yue Minjun, was painted in 2002 and recently sold for $185,000 at auction.]
‘The Sun,’ by Yue Minjun, was painted in 2002 and recently sold for $185,000 at auction.

The art world’s latest discovery is modern China. In Beijing and Shanghai, more than 30 galleries dealing primarily in contemporary Chinese artists have opened in less than a decade, selling to local and international clientele. In New York, Sotheby’s auction house recently opened a contemporary Chinese art department. And the city’s Max Protetch Gallery, traditionally associated with big-name architects, has added four edgy Chinese artists to its roster, including Hai Bo, a 43-year-old artist known for re-staged photos, and Zhang Xiaogang, 46, who paints wide-eyed portraits.

Recent sales at Christie’s auction in Hong Kong also signal the shift in the market. In late May, the auction house sold $60 million worth of contemporary and modern Asian, predominantly Chinese, art — almost triple the amount sold last year. The top lot, a triptych by China’s East-West fusion specialist Zhao Wuji, sold for $2.3 million, setting a world record for a Chinese oil painting.

Just a few years ago, only a handful of China’s artists were registered on the secondary international art market, according to Josh Eldred, vice president for marketing of online auction database Artfact. Today, he says, collectors around the world have discovered the works of some of China’s most well-respected artists. In just five years, prices of canvases by modernists such as Zhu Dequn and Fu Baoshi have shot up as much as 500%. “This represents a dramatic growth over a short period of time,” says Mr. Eldred. “It’s growing faster than traditional [art] markets.”
EYE ON CHINA
[Eye on China]
See a list of some of the best-known contemporary Chinese artists0 and how their works did at some recent sales.

While prices for many artists are rising steeply, one of the reasons for the interest is that much of the art is still relatively affordable compared with Western art. Works from 1980s U.S.-based artists such as Richard Prince and Eric Fischl sell in the $300,000 to $2 million range, but a painting or sculpture from a Chinese artist of the same era, such as Li Shan, can go for as little as $5,000. Another selling point: The images are pretty easy for art lovers outside China to relate to — Mr. Li, one of the pioneers of the so-called “Mao Goes Pop” movement, is famous for depictions of the former Chinese chairman on Mark Rothko-like colorfields.

While there has long been an active market for antique Chinese furniture, the country’s traditional art market — notably delicate ink-brush paintings using techniques dating back thousands of years — has had less appeal to foreign art buyers. But in the 1980s, as China began opening up and artists were publicly allowed to experiment for the first time, international collectors began taking note: Xu Bing distorted traditional calligraphy and inserted it into landscapes (he now does multimedia installations and is a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award winner); Wang Guangyi played on images of American consumer brands (becoming another of the “Mao goes pop” artists), while ink brush artist Li Jin turned out humorous, unflattering self-portraits.

Now, however, some gallery owners and collectors wonder if speculation is outpacing reality. When he moved to the U.S. from China in 1998, photographer and performance artist Zhang Huan could rarely find a buyer willing to pay more than $100 for one of his photos, which depict scenes like male bathers standing waist-deep in water. In May, Mr. Zhang’s “Family Tree” series (showing the artist’s face covered with Chinese characters) sold for $96,000 at Christie’s contemporary auction in Hong Kong. Prices for such pieces at the spring auctions were high both for top-of-the-line works and “mediocre” ones, says Henry Au-yeung, director of Grotto Fine Art in Hong Kong. “There are some lesser artists who are getting triple their high estimate,” he says.
[Gu Wenda’s ‘United Nations-China Monument: Temple of Heaven’]
Gu Wenda’s ‘United Nations-China Monument: Temple of Heaven’

Those kinds of hikes are making collectors such as New Jersey-based John Fernandez a little nervous. In the past three years, Mr. Fernandez and his wife Carmen have spent about $1 million on contemporary Chinese works, buying directly from galleries in China via the Internet or through galleries in New York and London. To finance the purchases, they sold off works in their collection by ’80s artists Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. But at Christie’s spring auction in Hong Kong, the couple lost out in bidding on every Chinese painting they were interested in, even though they often bid twice the high estimate. The owner of a commercial poster and printing company, Mr. Fernandez says it is like betting on a runaway train. “Keith Haring and Basquiat [were] moving at 50 miles per hour and I flipped it for something moving at 100 miles per hour.”

Dozens of those artists are surfacing in auction catalogs in Hong Kong and China. China Guardian, the nation’s largest auction house, says sales of Chinese paintings have almost tripled since 2003, with spring sales hitting a record high of $44.5 million. (More than 60% of these artworks are from artists who worked in the 20th century). In the past year in Shanghai, two new private museums and one public museum opened solely for contemporary art — generally works produced after the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 — while Beijing’s art districts, which didn’t exist a decade ago, now include about 22 registered galleries. Many are betting that newly-flush Chinese will soon move on from buying luxury items like designer handbags and fancy cars to collecting works of art.

Beijing entrepreneur and collector Zhang Haoming has been so active snapping up works by local artists, local curators refer to him as “the Chinese Saatchi,” after Charles Saatchi, one of the United Kingdom’s leading contemporary art collectors. Mr. Zhang recently opened “Beijing Art Now,” a gallery and restaurant, next to the Workers’ Stadium, which is aimed at attracting a crowd of hipsters. To get his hands on two paintings by artists Guo Wei, 45, and Guo Jin, 41, Mr. Zhang recently bought out an entire gallery — 21 works — in Chengdu in Sichuan Province. It was worth it, says Mr. Zhang. “These are important artists.”

Undervalued Art

Collector Christopher Tsai also thinks that the Chinese art market is still worth pursuing. A hedge fund manager in New York, he has spent over $250,000 on Chinese artists since 2002, and believes the investment already has appreciated. He points to the $19,500 he spent last year on a series of photos by Zhang Yuan. A similar, though larger, series sold at Christie’s in June for $100,000. “I’m trying to build a portfolio of Chinese art like I manage my clients,” says Mr. Tsai, 30, who believes Chinese art is undervalued — especially compared with markets such as Mexico. “Some contemporary Mexican artists sell for $1 million,” he says. “Yet the GDP of Mexico is half of that of China.”
[One of Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodlines series’]
One of Zhang Xiaogang’s ‘Bloodlines series’

Such interest has helped transform the Chinese cultural landscape. Today, the flow of talent has reversed: Rather than fleeing China in search of freedom of expression, many Chinese artists are heading back to the mainland in search of commercial recognition.

In China in the 1980s, for example, conceptual artist Gu Wenda’s bold ink paintings playing on the slogans of the Cultural Revolution landed him on the government’s blacklist. Fearing the young artist was trying to push a political message, propaganda officials closed down several of his shows. Tired of the persecution, Mr. Gu following the path of many oppressed artists — he emigrated.

Since then Mr. Gu’s fortunes have changed along with that of China’s modern-art market. In 1998, Mr. Gu sold a panel, featuring calligraphic work constructed from hair, at auction for $16,000. Today, collectors from New York to Shanghai pay upward of $50,000 for similar pieces. “I can’t keep up with commissions from collectors,” says 50-year-old Mr. Gu. The artist divides his time between a comfortable brownstone in Brooklyn that he shares with his wife, interior designer Kathryn Scott, and studios in Shanghai and Xian.

“From the early 1980s to the early ’90s many artists immigrated to the U.S. but now I don’t see many,” says Mr. Gu, who spends at least two to three months a year in China. “That’s because so many curators, critics and buyers go to China to buy art and visit artists, it makes [no sense] for them to move to the U.S. or other countries.”

Next Wave

The hype around the ’80s pop artists also is inspiring a younger generation of Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaotao, 35, and Zhang Fazhi, 29, to try their hand, too — though many are addressing issues of urban decay rather than politics in their work. The 35-year old Mr. Zhang, for example, is known for colorful canvases of rotting strawberries or discarded condoms — and is already getting $20,000 a painting. The younger Mr. Zhang, who graduated from university three years ago, paints garish pictures against the backdrop of opera model sets, and sells the largest pieces for $10,000. These artists are now being featured in galleries from Oakland, California, to Beijing.

These emerging talents are likely to get support from collectors such as Howard Farber. With Western heavy weights like Georgia O’Keefe and Max Weber forming the bulk of his collection, Mr. Farber, 67, switched tracks in 1997 while wandering through a gallery in Hong Kong. He not only decided to collect Chinese (selling off Americans to finance the move) he started a business advising companies on purchasing Chinese works.

It’s “another way to play China,” says Mr. Farber, a New Yorker, who is still amazed at the turn of events. “I never thought my Georgia O’Keefe would be replaced by a Gu Wenda.”

Posted at 9:34 PM · Comments (0)

July 7, 2005

For the most part, conservatives and libertarians have cheered the decline of the liberal media establishment over the past two decades.

But if that liberal establishment falls completely - if reporters are threatened with jail for doing their jobs - there will be occasion for second thoughts, as we are reminded that the ultimate enemy of freedom is the unchecked power of the state.

Beginning in 1969, with Vice President Spiro Agnew’s attack on “nattering nabobs of negativism,” the right has seen the press - epitomized by two liberal icons, The New York Times and CBS News - as a foe more powerful than the Democratic Party. It was the liberal media, after all, that energized Watergate, smeared the entrepreneurial Reagan ’80s as the “greed decade,” and helped derail the Gingrich Revolution of the mid-’90s.

Often the right felt helpless against the Main Stream Media (MSM) as it frog-marched the country to the left, particularly on social issues such as gay rights and abortion.

But a long-simmering backlash had been set in motion. In 1970, “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” debuted on, ironically, CBS. The anchorman character, Ted Baxter, was simultaneously handsome, stupid, full of himself and not very nice. Yet, because the shoe fit so nicely, Baxter established the popular paradigm of the TV “news” figure - obsessed with ratings and oblivious to the truth. The fictional Ron Burgundy (from the 2004 movie “Anchorman”) and the nonfictional Jon Stewart (from “The Daily Show”) owe much to the original Baxter character.

While other works, such as “All the President’s Men,” mythologized reporters, a major movie such as “Network,” which trashed behind-the-scenes executives as well as on-air talent, further cemented the negative perception. And that was before the wave of scandals - Janet Cooke, Tailwind, Jayson Blair.

So when new technologies - cable TV, 800 numbers for nationwide talk radio, the Internet - made it possible to create alternatives to the MSM, as bloggers call it, just about everyone rushed in to fill a huge, unsatisfied demand, especially for populist conservatism. In addition to millions of bloggers, thousands of talkers, list-servers and other spielers began to blast the MSM.

Without question, the new media in aggregate are much more representative of the true ideological diversity of the country. So what’s not to like?

Only this. The decline of the MSM has led to the rise, in terms of relative power, of the federal government. And while the institutional Right might be happy about that as long as George W. Bush is president, surely everyone who leans starboard will feel differently when, say, President Hillary Rodham Clinton sits atop the commanding heights of state power. If a right-leaning Federal Communications Commission can use “decency” as a hammer against Howard Stern today, what’s to stop an imaginative lefty lawyer from smashing Rush Limbaugh tomorrow?

But the immediate flashpoint is the case of Valerie Plame, the “outed” CIA agent and wife of a former diplomat critical of U.S. policy on Iraq. In a nutshell, two reporters, Judith Miller of The New York Times and Matt Cooper of Time magazine, were threatened with jail for not revealing their sources and telling a federal prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, what they learned about Plame from the White House - perhaps from Mr. Big himself, Karl Rove.

The two reporters had tried to invoke traditional “shield” privileges, but Fitzgerald aims to pierce that shield. And the public, for its part, has seemed uninterested in the case. In an era of downsizing and market segmentation, no MSM entity has the resources to wage a long struggle against the government. Cooper has agreed to testify, while the sturdier Miller has gone to jail.

Thus the new landscape: The government is bigger and stronger than ever. The media are fragmented. It’s a perfect formula for the government’s divide-and-conquer strategy. So the state can curl its fist anytime it wishes, confident it can smash any single one of us, one by one by one.

James P. Pinkerton’s e-mail ad- dress is pinkerto@ix.netcom.com.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

Posted at 12:23 AM · Comments (0)

Dexter Gordon; Carlos Santana: NaS

Posted at 12:06 AM · Comments (0)

6 July 2005

Japan’s invasion on China 60 years ago retarded
China’s social development for half a century, leaving
Chinese great pains never to be forgotten, said a
Chinese history researcher in Beijing on July 5.

Dr. Bian Xiuyue, researcher on modern history with the
Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Japan’s
invasion on China during 1931 and 1945 wreaked havoc
on the Chinese people, causing great casualties,
economic and cultural losses and more importantly,
“retarded China’s social modernization process for as
long as 50 years.”

From 1937 to 1945 alone, when the Chinese waged the
war against Japanese invasion, the Japanese army
killed tens of millions of Chinese in more than 4,000
slaughters.

“Japanese atrocities happened on almost two thirds of
the Chinese territory and covered most of the 14 years
from the time Japan started the war to its defeat,”
Bian said.

He said over 250 killing methods were used by Japanese
troops on Chinese, many women and children.

He estimated the war caused the loss of a population
of 50 million.

Most part of China, except Tibet and Xinjiang, was
directly under the Japanese scourge and bombarded by
Japanese warplanes, he said.

He said the research showed that the war brought about
100 billion US dollars of direct and 500 billion
dollars of indirect economic losses to China.

“Of course, losses investigation of the war were not
adequate both in war time and space coverage given
limitations under the warring state,” he said. “It is
almost impossible to get a precise answer on the
damages and calamities by Japan’s invasion.”

He stressed that the academic circle should keep on
studying the impact of the war and how it set back
China’s social progress.

“I can say without any exaggeration that China was
hurt most in the world Anti-Fascist War. No other
country like China suffered so heavy losses and paid
so high prices for the war.”

“Although China renounced war compensation from Japan,
it doesn’t mean the nation will forget the calamities
and losses we suffered. The Chinese will never forget
Japanese army’s war crimes and inhuman atrocities.”

Copyright People’s Daily

Posted at 11:44 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright John Dolan ( dolan@exile.ru )

“Mao: the Unknown Story” by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday
Random House 2005
See it on Amazon.com…
When I watched the second Addams Family movie, I knew there’d be a “blockbuster biography” of Mao coming soon. The key scene comes as the Addams are trying to decide what to name their baby. Rejecting other, overexposed dictators like Stalin and Hitler, they pick “Mao.”

That was it, the writing on the sten-gazeta: time for some enterprising literary entrepreneur to grind out a big fat book showing us all what a monster the Great Helmsman really was.

Even so, it’s a shock to see how mechanically Jung Chang and her husband, Jon Halliday, have carried out their assignment — and how eagerly the reviewers have endorsed the product. Every critic from Santa Barbara to Glasgow has joined the “Down with Mao!” chant, waving this big green book in an elbow-destroying parody of the Red Guards who used to whack capitalist roaders with Mao’s little red one.

You don’t even need to read it to get the point. It’s all there in the first paragraph, with the book’s key claim awkwardly jammed into the first sentence: “Mao Tse-Tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader. He was born into a peasant family in a valley called Shaoshan, in the province of Hunan, in the heartland of China.”

If you know this sort of tweedy British bio, you expect the subject’s date and place to form the predicate of that first sentence, ie “Mao…was born into a peasant family…”. Instead, the claim about his death-toll shoves its way in, and the details of his birthdate and birthplace are delayed to the second sentence.

The key claim, “70 million dead,” is interestingly phrased. As the sentence makes clear, we’re in a competition for biggest death-toll: “…more than any other twentieth-century leader.” And the competition is being rigged in Mao’s favor (so to speak). First comes the qualifier “…in peacetime…” Hitler (and to a lesser extent, Stalin) did most of their killing in wartime, so this cleverly sinks their bids for biggest pile of skulls. And sticking to raw numbers — rather than, say, percentage of national population killed — ensures that Mao easily outdistances hardworking ethnocides unlucky enough to work with small nations, like that eager little Mao-wannabe, Pol Pot.

The book really is that simple. It wants you to believe that Mao was right up there with the big killers, and that he and his stooges were totally responsible for everything that went wrong in 20th-century China, from the military successes of the Japanese in the 1930s to the famines of the 1960s.

The fact that the authors are willing to warp their first paragraph so painfully to insert that claim makes me suspect that they don’t really expect most readers to read the rest. It’s a common design: an ideologically-charged claim which is backed by a huge mass of evidence the reader is not really required or expected to read.

Jung and her shadowy co-author have ruthlessly warped every other strand of their narrative to reinforce the key claim that Mao is to blame for everything. The biggest warp of all is their outrageous whitewash of pre-revolutionary China. If you’ve read Jung Chang’s bestseller, Wild Swans, you’ll be surprised to find her depicting early 20th-century China as a peaceful paradise. That’s not the way she told it when describing her grandmother’s life: her feet broken and bound at age 2, then sold as a sex slave to a local warlord.

The pre-revolutionary China Jung described in Wild Swans was the one you meet in every other reliable account: chaotic, cruel, a battleground for treacherous local warlords, with no rules extending beyond the family, and absolute submission to the patriarch’s whims within it.

That’s not the picture of China circa 1916 you get in this story. Instead Jung sketches a ridiculous image of tranquility, as happy countryfolk go about their business, ducking the occasional crossfire:

“The provinces were controlled by army strongmen…who became semi-independent warlords. Over the following decade, they fought spasmodic wars, which disrupted life in civilian life in combat zones. But otherwise the warlords left most people relatively unaffected.”

Since the 70 million deaths Jung attributes to Mao were almost entirely from famine, one might reasonably inquire how many Chinese died from famine under the benign neglect of the warlords and the real architects of China’s anarchy: the British Empire.

The horrors inflicted on China by the British in the 19th century are hard to exaggerate. Take the opium wars of the 1830s and 40s. The British produced a huge opium crop in their India colony and demanded the right to sell it in China. When the Qing Dynasty rulers, appalled at the speed with which addiction was spreading through China, attempted to stop the intentional addicting of their people, the British actually fought a war defending their right to peddle drugs at prices of their choice. British warships and soldiers acted as enforcers for self-righteous dealers. With a huge population of unproductive addicts and millions of families bankrupted by drug debts, the peasantry was in no shape to handle natural disasters. When rainfall failed in North China in the 1870s, tens of millions of Chinese peasants died — a much larger percentage of the population than under Mao. The official British line, first adopted during the Irish famine of the 1840s, was that no help at all should be provided to alleviate famine, because it might set a bad precedent and make the poor feel they were entitled to help.

The Empire’s argument was the same one Mao was to use in explaining the famines of the late 1950s and early 60s: it was all due to bad weather. But when you compare the effective famine relief offered by the Chinese rulers during earlier famines, such as the 1740s, when similar weather problems destroyed crops in the same areas of North China, it’s obvious that the 19th century famines were no more “natural” than those which depopulated huge areas of Ireland and India under the malign neglect of the Raj.

In this respect, it’s interesting that Jung and Halliday’s book has zoomed to #4 on Amazon.UK, but is only around 6,000th on Amazon’s US site. It’s hard to believe that British readers are really so desperate for 800 pages on modern Chinese history. It’s much more likely that there are a lot of Tories desperate for someone to shoulder the blame for yet another of the Empire’s crimes. The Tories know that a reckoning is coming at last for what they did to the tropics, and they’re staging preemptive strikes whenever possible.

For a hilarious recent example of the genre, see W. H. Deedes’ review of recent African history in — naturally — the Telegraph. It turns out, according to Professor Deedes, that it was losing the British Empire that doomed Africa! (“Don’t Blame It All on the West,” W. F. Deedes, Telegraph June 1 2005) At least Deedes managed to make his point in a page.

Jung and her husband — whose publications are few and strange, with no indication that he has any standing as a scholar of modern Chinese history — tell the same story over and over. And there are some disturbing lapses in accuracy, as in the assertion that there was “a KGB station already established in Shanghai” in Mao’s youth. Since the KGB didn’t exist at the time, I have my doubts on that one.

The vilification technique Jung uses on Mao is pure Lytton Strachey, as tweaked and updated by Paul Johnson: plenty of dirty detail about Mao’s nasty hygiene, lust, lack of compassion and laziness. God, those Thatcherites sure got a lot of mileage out of the bitchy bio Strachey invented in Eminent Victorians. The poor old sod would be miserable to find that the ideological heirs of his Victorian targets put his prose style to more use than he ever got out of it.

Some of the accusations are dubious, particularly Jung’s claim that Mao was lazy. He got a lot done, after all, but the authors insist on portraying him as a bookworm whose idea of a good time was lying in bed reading, occasionally ordering up a concubine to give his eyes a break. On behalf of lazy, self-indulgent book pigs everywhere, I was offended by the implication that there’s something wrong with this blissful life. What, are we supposed to admire workaholic, no-fun dictators like Stalin? If you’re going to rule a billion people, concubines and beds specially designed for reading seem like the least you could do for yourself. A little light reading, some sex, the occasional public humiliation and torture of former rivals — surely that’s what we all crave.

Mao’s love life comes in for a great deal of soap-opera treatment. He was a pig, no doubt, abandoning wife after wife, joking about how easy it was for Wife #3 to give birth in the middle of a battle during the Long March. But in the process of revealing the horror of the combat-zone birth, Jung does something that happens far too often in a biography which aspires to canonical status: she undermines a bigger historical claim in order to score wholly superfluous points on Mao. In this case, her bigger argument is that the entire legend of the Long March is a Mao-invented lie. There was little or no combat; Chiang let the Communists pass unhindered; the hardships were a myth.

Well, maybe…but the scene in which Madame Mao #3 has her head splattered with shrapnel is pretty convincing corroboration that it wasn’t exactly a drive to Disneyland.

Jung’s a good storyteller. I had no problem reading to the end of this one, and that’s impressive. But I don’t trust the book or its author at all. Jung’s hatred of Mao is perfectly reasonable, given the family history she told in the (much better) Wild Swans. But it disqualifies her as Mao biographer. What you take away from the book is that Mao was a rather amiable, lethal pig, something like a cross between Homer Simpson and the Leader in Dick’s story, “Faith of Our Fathers.” He was a strange man, with a gift for poetry and an obsession with death he seems to have cadged from decadent German philosophy texts he happened to stumble on, in translation. He liked talking about cataclysms — and making them happen.

But as the book settles in my memory, and I test it against what I know of pre-Mao China, it gets harder and harder to accept that Mao is what went wrong. Travelers’ accounts of China 400 years before Mao was born stress the huge number of corpses strewn about the countryside, the babies thrown in Peking’s canals every morning to be scooped up by special custodians.

Stalin was maybe the worst possible outcome for 20th-c. Russia but it’s not so easy to believe that Mao was the worst thing that could have happened to China.

This book is a triumph of timing. It needs to exist. It needs to be big and outraged, in order to fulfill its role as a preemptive defense for the Tories. And Lord, how they have climbed all over themselves to praise it. Simon Sebag Montefiore, who is perhaps the most vile reviewer on the planet (with honorable mention going to A. N. Wilson) has called Mao “…a triumph…a mesmerising portrait of tyranny, degeneracy, mass murder and promiscuity, a barrage of revisionistbombshells, and a superb piece of research.” If Simon likes it, beware — be very, very ware.

John Dolan is the author of the novel Pleasant Hell. To order see our homepage or look the book up.

Posted at 11:26 PM · Comments (0)

The biggest nerd in high school — who’s now a reputable Chinese scholar — used to tote around the ancient bible of military strategy. Could Sun Tzu make me successful, too?

Copyright Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

July 4, 2005 | There was this kid in our high school named Peter K. who was a total nerd. And I mean total nerd: Peter K. achieved a purity of nerdiness that was rare to behold, even in a high school that boasted its fair share of nerds, myself included. What differentiated Peter K.’s nerdiness from my own was its lack of shame. I skulked and squirmed my way through high school, fearing to speak of my nerdier obsessions, and on occasion dropping friends who threatened, in their fellow nerdiness, to relegate me publicly to nerddom, or conversely, in their lack of nerdiness, to highlight my ineluctable nerditude. Peter K., on the other hand, was the sort of nerd who in sunny unawareness would publicly expostulate upon his nerdsome pursuits, blind to the smirks his nerdiose declamations provoked.

Peter K.’s nerdfulness was all the more piquant for its lack of any physical symptom. Blond, freckled, with fair skin and striking blue eyes, neither short nor tall, not lacking in athletic coordination, untainted by acne and unexceptional in his choice of dress, with the solid oval face of a Dutch farmer, Peter K. in fact bore a peculiar resemblance to Andrew E., the viciously sarcastic Mod who was arguably the coolest kid in school. The collective repression of this fact was part of the invisible force that bound the school together. It was sort of quantum. There was no clear reason why Peter K. should be a nerd and Andrew E. the coolest kid in school; they might have switched places as easily and instantaneously as a quark flipping from strange to charmed. If in fact that is what quarks do.

The white-hot core of Peter K.’s arbitrary nerdité was his study of the Chinese language. Chinese was not even offered at our school: several times a week, Peter K. would head off to another school in the area to take his weird language class, waiting lonely at the bus stop, ignoring the caustic gazes of the other, normal kids crossing the street for a sandwich on their free period. Peter K.’s Chinese was like a disease. It was invisible and horrible, warped and infectious. Sometimes we would ask him to say something in Chinese, like you ask the kid with six toes to take his shoe off, and out it would come, twisted and hysterical, his voice suddenly possessed by the mad tonal screech of a million Red Guards pissing on their professors, of flying kung fu masters, imperial eunuchs and Communist hordes swarming across the Yalu.

Today, the remorseless logic of life being what it is, Peter K. is a respected professor of Chinese studies at a mid-rank American university, appearing periodically on Chinese television shows to offer what I take to be intelligent opinions on the state of Chinese-American relations, in what I take to be flawless Mandarin. I caught him by sheer foul luck on CCTV when I was in Shanghai last year. I meanwhile am a struggling journalist attempting to cobble together some shred of credibility as an Asia hand, living in Hanoi, and gamely wrapping my lips around the cruel tonality of Vietnamese. Had I started when Peter K. did, perhaps I would be somewhere by now. (And what of Andrew E.? His name, Googled, returns a windswept silence.) But here’s what I am no longer sure of: Do I remember Peter K. walking through the student lounge holding a copy of Sun Tzu’s “Art of War”? I think I remember this, but it may be a chimera. It would be too perfect, right? The nerdiness of war strategy, of ancient war strategy, with its musty D&D reek, wedded to the nerdiness of Peter K.’s unspeakable tongue.

And, the remorseless logic of life being yet more what it is, Sun Tzu’s “Art of War” is these days a business-management tome, the kind of book read by anti-nerds — the sociable, not overtly stupid, popular kids, the guys who were good at baseball, uninspired but diligent in class, took a job on Wall Street after college, and now prod each other in the arm on the subway to work: “Dude, you gotta read Sun Tzu’s “Art of War.” It’s awesome. What do you think about shorting Nokia?” It’s the kind of book read by the world’s Andrew E.’s, its George W. Bushes.

And why not? Maybe “The Art of War” is awesome. Maybe it can explain to me what strategic errors I’ve made over the past 20 years. Maybe it harbors secret lessons about how to be a cruel, determined warrior king, the kind of guy who always wins — the kind of guy who rules our country today, in fact. Maybe Peter K. knew exactly what he was doing carrying that thing around. If in fact he ever did carry it around.

Plus, it’s really short. And you can read it on the Internet, for free. So when I was invited to contribute to this series, I thought, why not take the easy way out? Or as Sun Tzu puts it, “In war, the way is to avoid what is strong and to strike at what is weak.” A man after my own heart!

A bit of background: Sun Tzu was supposedly a general of King Ho Lu of the state of Wu in the late sixth century B.C. The first independent reference to Sun Tzu, however, does not appear until 122 B.C., so it’s unclear to what extent the author is apocryphal. According to legend, Sun Tzu earned Ho Lu’s admiration by training his concubines to drill in perfect formation; he had to cut off the head of the chief concubine when she refused to take his orders seriously. This doesn’t present the guy in a terribly positive light.

“The Art of War” consists of 13 chapters. Some are of the general philosophical kind that one could imagine treating as life lessons or business strategems: “Laying Plans,” for example, or “Weak Points and Strong.” Others are rather more specific — “The Use of Spies” is probably applicable to business life, but not so useful for, say, freelance writers; the chapter “Attack by Fire” will prove unhelpful to most readers, unless perhaps they are planning a large barbecue. (One helpful reminder: Stand on the windward side, not the leeward.)

Another off-putting factor in the book is its somewhat arbitrary numerological bent, which seems to be common to a lot of Chinese philosophy. A year ago, I took several lessons with a Vietnamese doctor who has become an expert in her country’s traditional medicine, which is largely based on Chinese philosophy, and one of the things that seemed odd was that everything appeared to be based on the number “five.” There are five organs, five colors, five elements, and so on and so forth. The various diseases are diagnosed by superimposing all these five-pointed systems on each other and drawing little lines between them. It ends up looking like something produced by a Wiccan with a spirograph.

Anyway, early on in the first chapter, “Laying Plans,” it turns out that the art of war is governed by, you guessed it, “five constant factors.” These are 1) the Moral Law; 2) Heaven; 3) Earth; 4) the Commander; and 5) Method and Discipline. But under exegesis, the five constant factors start to seem kind of interesting. The Moral Law, for example, is important because it “causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler.” You wouldn’t expect to find such a bottom-up attitude toward political hegemony in an ancient Chinese text. And then these five constant factors lead Sun Tzu to the following table of points to consider before entering battle:

13. (1) Which of the two sovereigns is imbued
with the Moral Law?

(2) Which of the two generals has most ability?

(3) With whom lie the advantages derived from Heaven
and Earth?

(4) On which side is discipline most rigorously enforced?

(5) Which army is stronger?

(6) On which side are officers and men more highly
trained?

(7) In which army is there the greater constancy
both in reward and punishment?

14. By means of these seven considerations I can forecast victory or defeat.

This was where I, as a freelance journalist, started to get interested. Particularly in the parts about “discipline” being “rigorously enforced,” about personnel being “highly trained,” and about “constancy both in reward and punishment.” I, it must be admitted, am utterly unable to enforce discipline, whether on myself or on anyone who has ever had the misfortune to work for me. I currently have one employee, a terrific young woman named Trang, who translates for me and does her best to organize my chaotic schedule and budget, and I am utterly failing her by not maintaining any semblance of rigor in our joint enterprise. Perhaps, I thought, if I myself had a greater “constancy both in reward and punishment”?

As the book went on, I started to find more and more material that seemed personally applicable to my style of strategic planning and management, or lack of same. “Now the general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought,” writes Sun Tzu. “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.” Yes, I thought — what ever happened to my plan, laid out at the beginning of the year, to sketch out project plans for each article I planned to write, with necessary interviews, outlines and dates? Why don’t I make more calculations? “There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.” Sure, this is something our president ought to have considered before invading Iraq, but it’s a lesson for me too — why do I take so long to finish simple pieces? Who do I think benefits from all those hours of unnecessary fiddling with sentence order and diction?

The more of Sun Tzu I read, the more clearly an image began to form within my mind of the writer I might become under his influence, a cross between Robert Redford in “All the President’s Men” and Chow Yun-Fat in “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”: the freelance journalist as general of the armies of an ancient Chinese city-state. I would be constantly prepared for action, having studied carefully the terrain in which I was operating. I would know which magazines might be interested in a particular field, how much they paid per word, and what the personal intellectual proclivities of the editors were. I would know how many interviews were necessary to execute a particular type of piece, and what sorts of questions I needed to ask to elicit the relevant material. I would lie in wait for subject matter to present itself, and then, like lightning, I would strike. “Energy may be likened to the bending of a crossbow; decision, to the releasing of a trigger.”

When recalcitrant sources retreated behind walls of obfuscation and denial, I would know how to tease them out into concrete and provocative statements. “If we wish to fight, the enemy can be forced to an engagement even though he be sheltered behind a high rampart and a deep ditch. All we need do is attack some other place that he will be obliged to relieve.” Or I would simply abandon the engagement, cut off my interview peremptorily, leaving the stunned official gasping in his office, and find a more pliable source elsewhere. “You may advance and be absolutely irresistible, if you make for the enemy’s weak points.”

This, of course, was all well and good; but I needed something more specific. How was I going to implement these ideas? How would I transform myself into a journalistic warrior? I sat down to sketch out a plan.

Pretty quickly, however, I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to apply any of Sun Tzu’s rather opaque observations to the problems that were actually facing me at the moment. In particular, I had a long series of articles I had promised to do on a particular topic that were proving far too complex to undertake. Sun Tzu would probably have advised me to abandon this subject, hide out in the mountains, and take up the campaign at a more favorable moment. But this wasn’t really an option; I was already past deadline. What was I supposed to do?

I looked for a verse that might apply most closely to my present situation; at last, I found one. “Amid the turmoil and tumult of battle, there may be seeming disorder and yet no real disorder at all,” it began. “Amid confusion and chaos, your array may be without head or tail, yet it will be proof against defeat.” Now, this was me — disorder, confusion and chaos! So, what was the key? How could I make myself proof against defeat? Sun Tzu continued:

17. Simulated disorder postulates perfect discipline,
simulated fear postulates courage; simulated weakness
postulates strength.

18. Hiding order beneath the cloak of disorder is
simply a question of subdivision; concealing courage under
a show of timidity presupposes a fund of latent energy;
masking strength with weakness is to be effected
by tactical dispositions.

I found this advice unsettling. It wasn’t clear to me why I should be “simulating” disorder for some unnamed observer or enemy. Who was the enemy here? What was the point of “concealing courage under a show of timidity?”

Then, abruptly, a rather different image began to form, an image drawn not from “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” but perhaps from “Kung Fu Hustle” or “48 Hours.” It was the image of a wimpy, uncoordinated loser, clumsily miming a martial-arts stance and trying to stare down a bully. The image of a hopeless nerd, powerless against his enemies, pretending that he was only “concealing courage under a show of timidity,” “masking strength with weakness.” I’m not really timid and weak — just wait till I show you my kung fu moves! You’ll be sorry then!

This, I realized, was why Peter K. had been carrying around “The Art of War.” It wasn’t the key to his eventual professional success. It had just been a nerd’s lonely defense against overwhelming power, a weakling’s fantasy of hidden strength. If, that is, Peter K. ever had carried the book around in the first place.

And who, I wondered, had the historical Sun Tzu been? Probably some desperate freak living in a cheap rented room in Kaifeng, scribbling away at this manuscript, pretending for posterity that he was the greatest general of Wu. While, on the dusty fields of Jiangsu, the real generals of Wu and Yueh hurled men and chariots against each other in wheeling agonies of bronze and blood.

I am not, in fact, the first to have this idea. Lionel Giles, who published the authoritative translation of “The Art of War” in 1910, notes in his introduction that a 12th century Chinese literary scholar named Yeh Shui-Hsin thought Sun-Tzu couldn’t have been a real general. Yeh wrote that Sun Tzu was more probably “some private scholar.” “The story that his precepts were actually applied by the Wu State, is merely the outcome of big talk on the part of his followers,” continued Yeh, who was a pretty skeptical guy for the 12th century. “The story of Ho Lu’s experiment on the women, in particular, is utterly preposterous and incredible.”

Giles disagrees, but for my money, Yeh was right. The real Sun Tzu was probably … a total nerd.

So much for “The Art of War.”

- - - - - - - - - - - -

About the writer
Matt Steinglass writes for the Boston Globe and other publications, and for the children’s television show “Arthur.” He lives in Hanoi.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, JULY 6, 2005

LONDON Not long ago I wrote an enthusiastic review of “Mao: The Untold Story,” the new biography by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. The June issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, in which my review appeared, was promptly barred from China.

The same fate has befallen other publications containing similar reviews, and a BBC interview with Jung Chang herself (she is the author of the global best seller “Wild Swans”) was blocked.

Mao Zedong died in 1976. Why is it that almost 30 years later, in a China where freedom of speech is said to be on the rise, attacking the Chairman remains taboo?

Chang’s and Halliday’s biography is a nothing-is-sacred act of demolition. Chang says of Mao, “He was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did.” The authors assert that Mao was responsible for upwards of 70 million peacetime deaths, including at least 37 million in the 1959-1961 famine that arose from Mao’s harebrained economic policies.


These are scarcely new facts within China. If 70 million people died before their time and many more millions suffered during the Cultural Revolution, there must be hundreds of millions of Chinese who know about Mao’s depredations.

Indeed, in 1981 the Party published an official judgment in which it said the Chairman bore the main responsibility for the epochal tragedy of the Cultural Revolution, and admitted, too, that from the late 1950s the Chairman had made mistakes and misjudgements.

But the Party concluded that Mao remained a great Marxist revolutionary. The Cultural Revolution, therefore, remains out-of-bounds for serious research in China.

And here we discover the ultimate inviolability of Mao, whose enormous portrait still gazes down onto the sacred center of China, Tiananmen Square.

Proper research within China would reveal what is already well known to China specialists in the West, and is highlighted in Chang’s and Halliday’s biography: Mao did not merely throw the switch to start the Cultural Revolution, he micro-managed some of its worst acts. And, like Stalin, Mao needed always to know the grisliest details of persecution, whether of his old colleagues or mere officials and scholars.

Then there is the myth of Mao before 1949 - the hero of the Long March who in 1934-35 led the ragtag Red Army to safety at Yanan, the guerrilla headquarters from which Mao fought Chiang Kai-shek and organized the eventual Communist victory in 1949.

As has been shown by Chang and Halliday and earlier scholars, the myth was fed by Mao to the hero-worshipping American journalist Edgar Snow in 1936 and is largely a lie.

On the Long March itself - and this is a Chang-Halliday scoop - the most heroic moment, the crossing by daredevil Red soldiers of a blazing bridge over a gorge, with Chiang Kai-shek’s forces at the other end, never happened.

Indeed, it appears that Chiang Kai-shek allowed the Reds to escape.

All that was long ago. Why, then, protect the Chairman now? Because without Mao a black hole would gape beneath the feet of the Communist Party. After all, in 1956, after Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, Lenin remained. Without Mao, his heirs - for that is what they are - would be left dangling in an ideological void.

There must, therefore, be no void. Every Chinese student from primary school on receives regular lessons in what is called “political education.” In this curriculum the history of the Communist Party - its triumphs over imperialism, exploitive capitalism, landlordism, and Chiang Kai-shek - are celebrated, as are the Party’s eradication of starvation, prostitution, venereal disease and opium.

Who was the begetter of all this? Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, Teacher, and Reddest Red Sun in our Hearts; the near-god who on Sept. 21, 1949, proclaimed that the “Chinese people have stood up.”

So to demolish the Chairman would be catastrophic for the present leadership. These leaders, after all, continue to emphasize that “the Communist Party makes mistakes but only the Communist Party can correct them.”

But what if the Party itself is a mistake and Mao a yet greater one? China’s leaders are determined to prevent that thought from getting loose in the minds of hundreds of millions of Chinese.

(Jonathan Mirsky was formerly the East Asia editor of The Times of London. )

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JAGDISH BHAGWATI and IBRAHIM GAMBARI

BYLINE: By JAGDISH BHAGWATI and IBRAHIM GAMBARI - Copyright The Financial Times

We can draw comfort from the fact that marginalised Africa is, at last, at centre stage: Kofi Annan, the United Nations secretary-general, attended the African Union summit in Tripoli yesterday, and the Group of Eight summit this week features Africa prominently on the agenda. But why is this important? And what should be done to turn our enhanced sense of urgency into action?

The excellent report of the Commission on Africa is titled “Our Common Interest”. Perhaps this is why we should aid Africa. Princeton Lyman, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria, recently argued that there is “a growing recognition that you just can’t leave an entire continent behind … without a lot of problems that come back to harm us”. But these “enlightened self-interest” arguments for extending a hand to Africa are a bit of a stretch. They are similar to tenuous arguments used since the 1960s to sell the idea of aid to the electorates of rich countries - that communism would spread unless poverty were reduced. Today communism has been replaced by terrorism.

When we look at Africa today, it is simply our common humanity that we must affirm. Africa, unique among continents in the postwar period, has not progressed but gone backwards in many ways. It contains 32 of the world’s 48 poorest countries. It has the lowest primary school completion rates of any continent today while life expectancy has declined from 50 to 46 years since 1990. Since the 1980s, per capita income has fallen by 13 per cent and the number of people estimated to be living in “extreme poverty” has doubled. Compounding these tragic numbers are the images that incessantly flash across our screens: of slaughter in Darfur, the genocide in Rwanda, the civil wars in Ethiopia, Angola and Liberia, the collapse of governance and human rights in Zimbabwe, and the masses of malnourished and hapless refugees in camps.

Writing in 1760, Adam Smith observed that a “man of humanity” in Europe, while losing sleep over the loss of his little finger, would “snore with the most profound security” through the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren in China since he had not seen them. Today, this is impossible for he cannot avoid seeing the famine, the plague and the poverty. As we  witnessed with the outpouring of  public and private money for tsunami relief, the men and women - indeed, their children - have pushed governments and civil society organisations into asserting their common humanity in Africa.

But when we get down to the task of assisting Africa, the very afflictions that compel us to help are likely also to produce the pessimistic belief that nothing can be done to produce any real results. We must transcend that despair by reminding ourselves of the ways Africa has changed for the better.

One way is the manner in which Africans manage their own affairs.  Perhaps the greatest change in governance has come in the shape of the  African Union. African governments have established the African Peer Review Mechanism, signed by 23  countries and with three more in the queue, that provides for periodic and impartial reviews of governance in the member countries.

Many signatories are already under review. This transparency can help bring corruption into the light, thereby eradicating it. The AU has also created the Peace and Security Council aimed at the prevention, management and resolution of conflicts in the continent. The AU is also moving to double the number of its troops in Darfur to 7,000. In short, the problems of bad governance and raging conflicts are beginning to be addressed, replacing decades of neglect and despair. Civil society has also grown in many countries; Wangari Maathai’s Nobel Peace Prize last year for her environmental work was  possibly a recognition of this important development.

But effort is still needed on many fronts. This does not mean that nothing can be done unless everything else is in place. Lots of things can be done that all add up. Yet, a focus on a few strategic areas is necessary. Five are critical. First, debt relief for the very poor nations makes sense. It should be extended regardless of bad governance. Would you collect a pound of flesh from a dictator if the flesh is actually going to come from his emaciated and oppressed subjects?

Second, new aid must be used productively. Aid spent in Africa can be increased beyond its current levels in countries with good governance but a graduated - rather than substantially accelerated - increase to double current aid flows is prudent. This aid should be increased according to carefully devised projects and programmes.

Third, aid to Africa must stand firmly on two legs - the aid spent in Africa and that directed towards Africa but not spent there. Spending aid funds productively poses fewer problems in the latter case. Several programmes can be thought of immediately. Given Africa’s dire shortage of skilled labour, which handicaps all kinds of developmental efforts, a Grey Peace Corps has been suggested. This would enlist retired volunteers from a range of

professions to work in Africa in

the manner of the Peace Corps.

Very large sums of money could be spent on developing new vaccines and cures for diseases particularly afflicting Africa.

Fourth, African nations need to reduce their own trade barriers while seeking the removal of the subsidies and tariffs of rich countries in products where they have demonstrated export advantage: cotton and sugar being principal examples. A country’s own trade barriers discourage the development of its export industry; markets opened by the rich countries may then not be taken advantage of.

Finally, programmes to make the private sector the backbone of development are necessary. They include micro-credit institutions which enable the poor to borrow without collateral. But more might be accomplished through establishing clear property rights that would turn the assets of the poor, often tenuous in their legal title, into effective collateral.

Growing political will, favourable institutional changes and thoughtful policy prescriptions are changing the landscape for Africa’s future. Despair must yield to hope and hope must lead to action.

Jagdish Bhagwati is university professor, economics and law, at Columbia University and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Ibrahim Gambari is under-secretary-general at the UN and special adviser for Africa

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By Eric Waggoner - from the 7/6/2005 edition of The Detroit Weekly

http://www.metrotimes.com/editorial/review.asp?id=99176

Opening with a shy meeting between a young man and woman on an Ivory Coast dance floor and closing with a hellish eyewitness account of the Congo Wars, Howard French’s A Continent for the Taking is a rewarding combination of journalism and personal reportage. French, a senior writer for The New York Times, sustains a delicate balance between objective fact and subjective interpretation as he recounts his 25 years of reporting on African history and culture.

The remarkable power of Continent — and this is clearly a book designed to educate, enrage and enlighten — lies in its combination of aggressive research and first-person reporting. A longtime contributor to such international publications as The Economist and The Washington Post, French knows the broad general sweep of recent African history, as well as how that history has affected individual African villages and cities. As he argues in the preface to Continent, Africa remains, to a significant extent, a great cipher in the Western mind — a continent easily outlined on the map, but difficult to define in any totalizing way. In part, this is due to the immense diversity of Africa’s people and politics, but it is also an effect of the West’s tendency to fixate only on Africa’s horrors — ebola, AIDS, apartheid, genocidal dictatorships — and it is in this capacity that Continent works best, as a journalistic corrective for the Western reader. Notwithstanding the frequently harrowing subject matter, French is ultimately optimistic about the ability of everyday African people to outlast their many exploiters, both foreign and domestic.

Despite the book’s subtitle, French mostly confines his firsthand observations to the part of the continent he knows best, West Africa. That focus, however, feels less like a limitation than a concentration of the book’s themes of limitless chaos and dogged survival throughout the continent. This is the land of Mobutu’s Zaire, and its reversion to the name “Congo” under the volatile presidency of Laurent Kabila; this was the site of the massive 1995 ebola outbreak, which French covered by chartering a plane and flying into Kikwit, the city that had been ground zero for the epidemic. The chapter titles are stark and evocative — “Plague,” “Leviathan,” “Long Knives,” “Falling Apart” — but the stories contained in each are richly developed and deeply moving. In every section that offers a unique story (and history) of mismanagement or disease, French seeks out and talks at length with the Africans who instigated and opposed it — politicians, doctors, volunteer workers, dissident novelists and other activist Africans who make up the front line of defense against infection and oppression. As a reporter, French knows when his personal experiences will help flesh out the expository background for these tales. But he’s also sensitive enough to know that the stories told by native Africans are the most terrifying and the most moving parts of the book.

Indeed, this is one of the most human books on African history in recent memory. Human, because French’s focus is not on faceless biological or political horrors — the approach adopted by so much mainstream journalism — but on the men and women who caused those horrors, or who had those horrors visited upon them. At once personally sympathetic and rigorously researched, A Continent for the Taking is an affecting and important piece of journalism.

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>By Tom Plate

>LOS ANGELES —- These days, Chinese officials on the mainland seem to be developing a keen sense of humor. Just the other day, in response to a series of violent protests by farmers in rural China, a mainland official sought to explain the public embarrassments by tying them to China’s growing movement toward democracy!

What a kidder this official must be. Either he was joking, or the
joke was on him. Growing unrest in China is not a symptom of democracy but a symptom of the relative lack thereof. Beijing’s only alternative to allowing the protests to occur would have been to crack down, a foolish decision that would have set China’s international image back ten years.

So the official line about a harvest of democracy in the countryside
was at least good for a laugh, however unintentional.

But ­ whatever — the more laughs, the merrier. A truly healthy sense
of humor is going to become increasingly vital for Beijing as China’s
honeymoon period with the United States may be coming to an end.

The Chinese will probably be baffled by it. I got this sense from a
recent chat with a well-connected official from the mainland. He said
he was puzzled by the initial negative reaction to the Chinese bid to buy up Unocal (the California-based oil company), by all the fuss over Chinese imports and by all the alarmist attention in Washington to the (undervalued) Chinese currency.

After all, from the Chinese perspective, they have tried to do almost
everything right in relations with the United States. They have been
participating like responsible adults in the relevant international
organizations, have listened respectfully to United States’ arguments
about allowing their currency to become more valuable against other
currencies, and did their part on the Korean Peninsula nuclear crisis
by creating a serious venue in Beijing for negotiations.

But suddenly they feel an ominous undertow: The dynamics of the
U.S.-China relationship appear to be changing. My own explanation is
that America is beginning to experience what might be termed “China
Shock.”

Let me explain. What do most Americans know about China? Most have
never visited it, and our public schools don’t teach students much about it. So, what do they really know? They know China has a lot of people, used to be led by Mao Zedong (he is dead, right?), is still a Communist country (sort of), hasn’t invaded anyone lately, doesn’t much like dissidents or dissenting opinion, and seems to be improving its economy.

And that’s about it.

A perfect illustration of the general state of American lack of
awareness about China was reflected in the recent special issue of TIME Magazine devoted mainly to that country. Every informed business leader, academic expert, and leaders of various think-tanks I have run into told me they had a hard time basically finding anything in the special issue that they didn’t already know.

But the vast majority of Americans know very little about China
because they haven’t been there and the U.S. news media hasn’t told them much. Indeed, the TIME editorial effort itself, however meritorious, is more like a national media catch-up effort than nuanced and breakthrough reporting.

Only lately have the American people awoken to the fact that China is
no longer asleep. The best example is the current national wrestling
match over the attempt of China’s third-largest oil company to buy up
Unocal.

To the average American citizen, this is absolutely mind-blowing!
Where did the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC) find the kind of cash to offer more for Unocal than Chevron, the second largest U.S.-based integrated energy company after Exxon Mobil?

The whole thing has become a huge national eye-opener. The average
citizen had no idea something like this could happen. That’s why
America, in my view, is entering ‘China Shock,” a period of national
examination of China that could prove bumpy to Sino-U.S. relations. There are legitimate questions that can be raised about the CNOOC deal, sure, just as there are about any large business deal across national borders in this age of globalization. But what’s now called for is serious thought and analysis, not politically inspired panic and red-baiting.

What can China do to ride out the coming China Shock? For starters,
it needs to work harder to explain itself properly to the American
public. Not every U.S. politician is a model of intellectual honesty and cosmopolitanism; if China doesn’t want to become a political football, it needs to be more careful about what it says in public, more open about its failures and more forthcoming about its intentions.

It also has to be smarter about the fights it picks. From an Asian
perspective, beating up on Japan for its wartime record, prime
ministerial war-shrine visits and other issues of contention between
the two may seem like fair game. But Beijing needs to remember that Tokyo is Washington’s number-one ally in Asia. Pick on Tokyo too much, and you’re picking on Washington too. If that’s the new grand strategy of President Hu Jintao, it’s a joke ­ and a very bad one.

UCLA Professor Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on
International Policy, is a veteran U.S. journalist who has held senior positions at TIME, CBS, The Los Angeles Times and Newsday. He
established the Asia Pacific Media Network in 1998 and is now founder and director of UCLA’s Media Center. © Tom Plate, 2005. Distributed by the UCLA Media Center. July 5, 2005.

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BY RICHARD A. JOSEPH
Richard A. Joseph is professor of political science at Northwestern University and
director of the Program of African Studies. He directed the African Governance Program
at the Carter Center from 1988 to 1994
NewsDay, July 3, 2005
The annual summit of leading industrialized nations takes place later this week in
Gleneagles, Scotland, hosted by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who has placed at the
top of the Group of 8 agenda a global commitment to increase development assistance to
Africa.
The dire features of the African predicament are widely known: low growth, high poverty
rates, destructive conflicts, pervasive corruption and a declining share of global trade and
investments. Also, weak health care, education and other public services, the failure to
contain the AIDS pandemic and devastation by preventable diseases such as malaria and
tuberculosis.
Blair and the United Kingdom’s chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, backed by
rock stars Bono and Bob Geldof and their Live 8 concerts, are promoting massive
increases in financial aid. However, many African countries are not only impoverished
and indebted but already receiving a great deal of international aid.
At the core of the continent’s problems has been the failure to effectively use and
distribute resources, whether they come from inside or outside. The G-8 leaders can
double, triple or quadruple aid to the continent and strike from their books billions of
unrepayable loans. But unless such largesse can prompt fundamental transformations in
the way African institutions work, or do not work, these efforts will produce only another
decade of deep frustration.
Ultimately, whether Africa is turned around and sustains rates of economic growth
sufficient to lift its distressed populations out of poverty will depend on what happens
within the continent itself.
All over Africa, new tendrils of development are sprouting. They must be appropriately
watered, not drowned by cascades of foreign aid. As it is, in many countries grants being
received to combat HIV/ AIDS are going underutilized because the relevant public
institutions have the capacity to absorb only so much money.
Blair’s Commission for Africa is calling for increases in official development assistance
that could reach $75 billion annually by 2015. But whatever the final sums agreed at
Gleneagles, the commission has identified what really matters: “Without progress in
governance, all other reforms will have limited impact.”
How will a transformation in how these countries are managed, which would be little
short of revolutionary, occur in sub-Saharan Africa?
With few exceptions, countries evolve their own systems of governance which enable
them to build institutions that serve rather than stymie the public welfare. This vital
process can take place under quite different political systems: autocratic capitalist
regimes in Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan; liberal pluralist democracies in
Botswana, Barbados and Costa Rica; and even modernizing Communist Party rule in
today’s China and Vietnam.
Only a few African countries have experienced this fundamental transition. It is not just a
lack of aid that is hindering development in democratic Ghana and Kenya, and semidemocratic
Uganda, but a tradition of treating public and private institutions as troughs
from which resources can be endlessly siphoned.
We know from the African record that democratization is necessary but not sufficient for
advancing growth and development. Without democracy, there is little to hold rulers and
political elites accountable for how they use public resources. But while democratic
institutions can be copied from other countries, institution-building cultures do not easily
transfer.
How, it must be asked at Gleneagles and beyond, will this process be accomplished?
Alongside increased aid and reduced debt obligations, African governments can tap into
other, non-monetary resources in their campaign to reduce corruption and inefficiency.
These include cultural institutions usually identified with particular ethnicities or clans.
The strength and resilience of these institutions, and the moral power they exert, continue
to be a remarkable feature of African societies. In recent years, a profound religious
resurgence also has occurred within Africa and many religious entities have emerged.
These are institutions that, once engaged, can mobilize important constituencies.
At the same time, within the fast-growing African diasporas (at least a million strong in
the United States), individuals are imbibing institution-building behaviors that enable
them to be highly successful in their host countries. In many American cities can be
found hundreds of African professionals gainfully employed as doctors, engineers, nurses
and accountants. These economic exiles can be important change-agents if encouraged to
devote a part of their professional lives to service in their countries of origin.
A s a region, Africa lacks the important “disciplining” influence of the European Union
that induces new members to implement far-reaching institutional reforms and behavioral
changes. Despite such recent African initiatives as the New Partnership for Africa’s
Development and the African Union, it will be many years before they can exert a
comparable influence on member states.
On the other hand, the gradual liberalizing of political and economic systems that swept
away autocratic systems in many African countries, such as Ghana, Mali, Mozambique
and Zambia, has created openings for enterprising individuals to form many small
businesses and civic organizations. These often unheralded individuals are the true
pioneers of an African renaissance. They can be found in numerous government
departments, in universities and medical entities, in professional associations and other
civic organizations. They struggle mightily to build capable institutions and can be
assisted by international partnerships to enhance skills and improve operational systems.
While great pressure will be brought on President George W. Bush to fill the supply
wagons lined up to haul billions of dollars, euros and yen to Africa, the United States is
correct to insist that new aid flows be different in their impact from the huge sums of
public capital already transferred to the continent. This was the intended mission of the
Millennium Challenge Corp., created by the Bush administration to improve foreign aid
results, based on lessons of decades of development assistance.
Unfortunately, the Millennium Challenge stumbled coming out of the gates, with the
sudden resignation of chief executive Paul Applegarth just three weeks before the G-8
meeting, after several African presidents complained to Washington that they weren’t
getting increased aid fast enough.
The new agency had the right objectives: to mitigate America’s deadbeat status as a
stingy contributor to international development assistance; to provide enhanced aid to
countries with good governance and economic policies; and to support multiyear projects
designed by recipient countries themselves.
Unfortunately, the burden of having to carefully measure the worthiness of good
governance, good economic policies and locally designed projects slowed down the flow
of U.S. aid, and imposed onerous demands on weak local bureaucracies applying for the
funds.
The Bush administration needs to get a capable replacement for Applegarth quickly into
the saddle. The corporation’s errors in design and implementation can be fixed, and it can
still play an important role in development assistance.
Since global poverty, and Africa’s dire straits, never featured prominently in George W.
Bush’s presidential campaigns, his administration has largely acted in response to
external pressures. It has increased development assistance to Africa since 2000 by more
than 40 percent and agreed to cancel debts to multilateral agencies from 18 highly
indebted countries, 14 of them African. However, U.S. aid to impoverished nations
remains extremely low as a percentage of gross national product, compared with other
industrialized countries.
It would give a great deal more clout to Blair’s initiative if at Gleneagles President Bush
moved the United States to the forefront of the global effort to end extreme poverty in
Africa. To be credible, such a commitment must be backed by increased development
aid. However, Bush should resist the blandishments of those who believe that a deluge of
American dollars will fix Africa’s profound structural problems. Internally driven
transformations to improve governance and strengthen institutions must be kept at the
center of the African agenda.
Helping Africans help themselves should be the true goal of the G-8. More than that is
paternalism. Less than that, of which the United States currently stands accused, is both
immoral and harmful to our national security interests.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.

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Donors who poured billions into Uganda have hyped its progress, but President Museveni has proven to be just another corrupt despot. Will Bush support democracy — or stand by an ally?

By Blake Lambert - Copyright Salon

July 6, 2005 | KAMPALA, Uganda — In front of Parliament, traces of tear gas lingered in the air, mildly stinging the eyes of opposition demonstrators and passersby. Riot police remained at the ready, should anyone attempt to launch another protest. Inside, members of Parliament, not a few of whom had been compensated in advance for their compliance — roughly $2,800 apiece, a hefty sum — voted overwhelmingly last Tuesday to lift the presidential term limits enshrined in the country’s constitution.

The Ugandan constitution is only 10 years old, but it is already in the process of being amended. Pending another vote in Parliament later this month, it appears inevitable that President Yoweri Museveni, in power for two decades, will get yet another term. His critics say he wants to be president for life.

Museveni’s most recent power grab may sound like something George W. Bush should condemn, given the U.S. president’s push for democracy around the world. And coming only a week before the G8 summit, as Bush demands “good governance” in exchange for U.S. aid, you would think Museveni’s actions and the Parliament’s approval would merit a rebuke. But there’s a catch: The Ugandan president happens to be a staunch U.S. ally on major issues like the war in Iraq and HIV/AIDS. Museveni represents a first major test for Bush’s Africa policy and Bush’s will to confront undemocratic regimes even when they’re friendly to his administration.

Museveni, hailed as an “African renaissance” leader by Bill Clinton in 1998, now bears more than a passing resemblance to the nearly disappeared African strongmen of the past. While Museveni’s legions of sycophants and cronies celebrated the results last Tuesday in Parliament, not a few Ugandans remained less sanguine about the future of their country. “It is the spirit of what they’re doing,” said Morris Ogenga Latigo, an opposition M.P., “that is changing what is put there as an insurance against bad governance.”

Ugandans have certainly endured plenty of bad governance since the country’s 1962 independence, despite high hopes for success. Uganda experienced 15 years of violent, chaotic misrule by Idi Amin and Milton Obote, which shattered the country and bankrupted its economy. Museveni, a Marxist guerrilla leader, seized the presidency by force in 1986 and promised to provide a positive alternative to the poor leadership plaguing the continent.

To his credit, Museveni rebuilt Uganda into a functioning state by restoring peace and security to many areas, while introducing a series of economic and, to a lesser degree, political reforms. Museveni also addressed the HIV/AIDS pandemic by speaking out publicly at a time when his presidential colleagues throughout Africa remained silent.

All of that impressed the donors — the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and Western countries, including the United States — who have invested more than $11 billion in Uganda since 1986. In diplomatic and international aid circles, Uganda became widely known as an “African success” story on a continent where successes were few and far between.

Yet the success and the story are largely a creation of the donor community. Donor money has fueled economic growth and reduced poverty, built roads, put millions of children into primary school, helped the healthcare system, built democratizing institutions, and generally stabilized the country, according to economists. Despite that aid, the country is still struggling. More than two-thirds of Ugandans survive on hand-to-mouth agriculture, according to the country’s Bureau of Statistics, while less than 10 percent of the country has access to electricity. Even the number of poor people is rising after years of decline.

Critics of international aid say donors have hyped Uganda as a success story to justify their efforts. “It was not so much what was happening in Uganda, but what the international aid community wanted to project to the world, wanted to project to their key constituencies in the Western world who contribute this money,” said Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan journalist and analyst who argues that foreign aid doesn’t help the poor.

Meanwhile, a leaked consultancy report for the World Bank, obtained by Salon, indicates that corruption is endemic because Museveni’s regime is committed to staying in power no matter the cost. “Several of those closest to the president are among those alleged to have benefited from a range of questionable business deals … that would not have been possible were it not for their proximity to the head of state. The group is a mixture of family and friends,” according to the report.

That group includes two Cabinet ministers now with senior portfolios who faced Parliamentary censure in 1999 for alleged conflicts of interest, and Salim Saleh, Museveni’s half-brother, who was named by a U.N. Security Council panel of experts for illegally exploiting the Democratic Republic of Congo’s resources.

Saleh’s wife, Jovia Akandwanaho, was also named by the U.N. report for her interest in diamond exploitation; the U.S. Embassy in Uganda has declared her ineligible for a visa to the United States under a 2004 law reserved for people who have used an official position to accept bribes or enrich themselves illegally or who have offered bribes.

That’s the short list: There are corruption allegations against other Cabinet ministers and former army commanders. What festers at the top extends throughout the rural areas in the form of cash and contracts to its supporters, according to the leaked consultancy report.

“The fact that corruption is a drag on Uganda’s economy is unmistakable and probably rising,” it says. “That it has not had a greater downside effect to date is no doubt a reflection of the fact that it is largely, though indirectly and unintentionally, financed by the donor community.”

No one believes — neither donors nor Ugandans —that the regime has the will to reverse the trend. Nor are donors, including the United States, warmly embracing the prospect of a third term for Museveni. They point out there has never been a peaceful transition of power in Uganda’s history.

The leaked report warns that the prospects for political turmoil are high “barring the surprise of a graceful retirement by the president,” which now seems unlikely. However, opposition parties have exited their “legal but not free” oblivion and can now campaign, a marked change from the years of a one-party state under the banner of Museveni’s National Resistance Movement. A July 28 referendum will ask voters if they prefer a multiparty system or Museveni’s Movement. However, a 2004 Human Rights Watch report details that opposition activists are routinely tortured in secret “safe houses” around the country. The government denies the allegations.

In U.S. circles, there’s a growing feeling that the Bush administration should take a stand against Museveni. Johnnie Carson, now an official at the National Defense University and a former ambassador to Uganda, says the country is a success story turning sour. “Some argue that Museveni’s unwillingness to move aside may also be motivated by a desire to protect those around him from charges of corruption,” he said in a recent forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Professor Joel Barkan of Iowa University, who was one of three authors of the leaked World Bank report, said at the same forum that the regime has probably seen its best days. “Having celebrated Uganda’s success, the United States and the rest of the donor community should now acknowledge that the Museveni government is an increasingly corrupt and authoritarian regime that has probably overstayed its welcome,” he said. “It should also be acknowledged that the current volume of aid, and budget support in particular, sustains this situation.” Nevertheless, Uganda received more than $3 billion of debt relief from the G8, and foreign aid amounts to nearly half of its annual budget, which has been the case for several years.

Uganda presents the United States with the first African test of the Bush doctrine of promoting freedom and democracy, according to Barkan. “If the administration cannot pass the test here, where is the policy credible?” he said. “Uganda is not a ‘hard case’ like Egypt or Pakistan, where the United States might tread lightly on an authoritarian regime that is an ally in the war on terr