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A Continent for the Taking

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

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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, AUGUST 30, 2005

TOKYO Japanese citizens keep $3 trillion in postal savings and insurance, but for decades politicians serving vested interests have been able to siphon off these public funds. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi sees postal reform as crucial to stemming Japan’s endemic corruption. So when his reform legislation was blocked in Parliament, Koizumi took a gamble and decided to take the issue to the people.

Postal reform legislation had squeaked by in the lower house of the Diet, Japan’s Parliament, in July, but was convincingly defeated in the upper house on Aug. 8, in no small part because of defections from within Koizumi’s own Liberal Democratic Party. So Koizumi promptly dissolved the lower house and called for elections on Sept. 11.

In this political game of chicken, Koizumi didn’t blink. He wasted no time in ousting the dissidents from the LDP and is backing pro-postal reform candidates to unseat them. This intra-party family feud has dominated the election coverage, with three small new parties emerging that include ousted LDP members.

Koizumi is serious about postal privatization, but the defeat of his legislation provided a good excuse to get rid of colleagues he has dubbed “the forces of resistance.” Koizumi’s term as party president ends in September 2006 and he wants to be remembered as the man who smashed the factions that have dominated the LDP since its inception in 1955. He sees the factions as representing the vested interests that have long had their snouts in the public trough, drawing off funds for roads and bridges to nowhere.

Japan has a supplementary budget called the Fiscal Investment and Loan Program, or FILP, which dwarfs the official budget. In addition to dubious sand and gravel contracts, this opaque budget subsidizes many state-owned enterprises that are awash in red ink. FILP spends money that the government borrows from the $3 trillion in postal savings and insurance, helping explain why Japan’s public debt as a percentage of gross domestic product is more than 150 percent. Privatizing the postal system is about fiscal discipline and who decides how this $3 trillion is invested, loaned and spent.

Koizumi has deftly managed the news media so that he is contesting the election on his own terms. Koizumi has been able to assume the reform mantle, a major asset in a country where polls indicate that more than half the people say they favor reform.

But the devil is in the details. People on the street and in the rice paddies seem confused about the implications of postal reform. The news media have been content to focus on the theater of politics orchestrated by Koizumi. Those who initially claimed that this election would lead to a significant political realignment and a system where principles trumped expediency have sensibly gone silent.

Koizumi benefits from the lack of clarity concerning postal privatization, since his plan has been so watered down that it is uncertain whether much will actually change. As with the 1985 privatization of Japan National Railways, NTT and Japan Tobacco, the process will be gradual. Privatization à la Japonaise minimizes disruptions and allows time for adjustment. Economists and business people want more dramatic measures, but they don’t have to face elections.

The good news is that postal privatization is already under way and postal savings are no longer invested at the whim of the Ministry of Finance. Habits and inclinations persist, but postal czars in the future will grow less inclined to fund white elephant projects that show little prospect of plausible returns.

Koizumi is frequently criticized for presiding over a Japan where there are growing gaps between “haves” and “have nots” and for introducing a sharp-elbowed version of enterprise capitalism based on the U.S. model. Advocates of maintaining the status quo argue that public spending is beneficial, generating jobs, improving infrastructure and lessening rural-urban income disparities. Naturally they skirt the issues of wasteful spending and endemic corruption that have left this status quo irredeemably tarnished.

But the ready-mix politics of the LDP’s “construction state” are giving way to new priorities and needs. In Japan’s rapidly aging society, voters are increasingly interested in improving medical care, pensions and social welfare services for the elderly and working mothers. Koizumi is draining the trough for pork-barrel projects and patronage while repositioning the LDP, whose capacity for reinventing itself is legendary.

For now it looks like the voters are behind Koizumi, if for no other reason than that the economy is recovering. In response to Koizumi’s gamble of dissolving Parliament and calling elections, they are gambling that the consequences of reform are preferable to the discredited ways and means of the status quo.

(Jeff Kingston, director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan, is the author of ”Japan’s Quiet Transformation.”)

Posted at 3:30 PM · Comments (0)

The Internet, long proclaimed a conduit for democratization, is meeting its match in China. While Western libertarians believe China is fighting a losing battle as protestors and dissidents increasingly organize online, the Chinese leadership is betting its dual strategy of censorship and development will ultimately succeed.

The Internet provides an unprecedented ability to create, access and exchange information. Unlike other mass communication mediums, cyberspace allows for the multi-directional and (theoretically) borderless free flow of information. These characteristics imply that it cannot be controlled like traditional forms of media. Or can it? Technological libertarians maintain that autocratic leaders face a zero-sum dilemma: embrace information technology and sacrifice political power, or suppress it and pay the economic price.

The Chinese leadership, however, appears undeterred. From modest beginnings of about 2,000 Internet users in 1993, the number has surged to more than 94 million in 2005, the second-largest population online after the United States. China also boasts the world’s largest number of mobile phone subscribers, the second-largest personal computer market and the third-largest number of personal computer users.

Contrary to popular thinking, Chinese leaders do not need to block all Internet content in order to reap major economic and political benefits.

An OpenNet Initiative report on Chinese Internet filtering revealed a sophisticated system of control combining technological checks and social persuasion. Access to some websites is intermittently blocked while others may be accessible but filter certain keyword searches. Provincial and local governments hire employees to scan e-mail and chat rooms for sensitive discussions.

Self-censorship is “encouraged” with myriad regulations placing responsibility on the user, from Internet content (ICPs) and Internet service providers (ISPs), cybercafes and website creators, down to the individual subscriber. Businesses are pressured to endorse a self-regulation pledge. Even foreign companies like Yahoo! have signed in order to gain access to China’s burgeoning IT market.

China’s experiment in Internet management is literally paying off. Information technology is driving China’s development - from military modernization to domestic business competitiveness on a global scale. E-commerce is exploding in China; it’s expected to reach $6.5 billion by 2007.

The political advantages may be even greater. On one hand, e-government is improving the efficiency and effectiveness of central administration. On the other, the Internet may be used to promote the party line. In July, to counter the Pentagon’s report on the People’s Liberation Army, the Chinese government posted a censored version of the document and organized online chats with military analysts.

Nationalistic sentiments have also found voice online during such incidents as the 1999 North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade and the anti-Japanese demonstrations in April. Such protests can divert attention from thorny domestic issues. Some potentially damaging local news stories circulated online have forced the central government to be more forthright with information - often with positive results.

From greater access to educational and cultural cyber content, to online dating, chatting, shopping and games, the Chinese are enamored with the Internet. Few want to chance participation in politically risky behavior such as browsing dissident websites or posting controversial messages in chat rooms. A study funded by the New York City-based Markle Foundation found a majority of respondents said when the Internet provides more opportunities for citizens to criticize government policies, they trusted online content, and supported some Internet restrictions.

So far the Chinese government is staying one step ahead of the game. China Telecom has enlisted China’s Huawei Technologies, US companies Cisco Systems and Juniper Networks, France’s Alcatel and Sweden’s Ericsson to upgrade its backbone network ChinaNet, the country’s largest and most extensive. Called the ChinaNet Next Carrying Network or CN2, the system will connect more than 200 cities with China’s international access network, further establishing domestic mechanisms of control.

China is not alone. Although the Internet developed without much regulation, governments around the world are adapting and cyberspace monitoring is increasing.

Singapore implemented the world’s first Internet censorship regulations in 1995. Now China is serving as an archetype for other countries that wish to restrict online usage while reaping its benefits. From Australia to Zimbabwe, Saudi Arabia to Vietnam, governments have been establishing more Internet controls.

OpenNet Initiative studies have revealed infrastructure and regulations akin to China’s in place in countries such as Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Kyrgyzstan. Utah recently passed a filtering law targeting content harmful to minors.

Not all filtering and surveillance is inappropriate, but it does raise questions over the fine line between legitimate and illegitimate controls. Consider e-mail authentification programs currently under development in the US. Ostensibly being created to combat spam, they will permit the identification and tracking of e-mail senders. How might China and other like-minded governments adapt such technology?

China’s experience challenges the view that the Internet is an irrepressible instrument for democracy. Yet while the Chinese government is successfully harnessing information technology to maintain its political monopoly, the Internet is also contributing to China’s political transformation. It remains a positive force for economic development, improved quality of life and better governance.

Tamara Renee Shie, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University. Author of: “The Tangled Web: Does the Internet Offer Promise or Peril for the Chinese Communist Party?” Journal of Contemporary China 13, 40 (August 2004), PP. 523-540. The opinions expressed in this piece are those of the author alone and do not reflect NDU, Department of Defense, or US government policy.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved

Posted at 11:08 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 24, 2005

It was only a matter of time before one of the modern rags-to-riches soccer superstars ran for office as president of a country.

George Weah, who left behind life in a shack on a former Liberian mangrove swamp to score goals and make his fortune on three continents, is back in Liberia to put himself forth as the leader who will raise his homeland out of bloodshed and poverty.

It is a big task, but George Manneh Weah is a big man.

“I don’t need political experience,” he tells the crowds, “to give you schools. I don’t need political experience to give you lights, and water, or to see that the roads are bad.”

And this man of many abodes, with a family home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is like a magnate to the poor. He came through poverty, he carries titles like Unicef goodwill ambassador, he donates to the building of schools and clinics, and at one time he literally clothed Liberia’s national soccer team when it had no kit to call its own.

Why would he not be a credible political head of state in the October election? If Ronald Reagan could make American president, if Arnold Schwarzenegger can be governor of California, who is to say that a well-traveled soccer star has less intellect, or attracts less popularity, than a Hollywood “great”?

Weah knows the odds. He is one of 27 candidates for the job in Liberia. But then he was one of 13 children, abandoned by his parents and raised by his grandmother.

Barefoot shantytown soccer was where he found himself. As a child he was blessed. He always could move swiftly, and shoot ferociously. He was a legend in his own boyhood, leapfrogging from teams called Young Survivor of Clartown, then Bongrange Company and next, Mighty Barole and Invincible Eleven.

Those Liberian junior teams give the flavor of his youth; the names hide a troubled adolescence from a growing menace, on and off the dirt pitches. He departed Liberia for the richer pastures of Tonnerre de Yaoundé in Cameroon - and his good luck was that Claude le Roy, a Frenchman coaching the Cameroon national squad, recommended Weah to Arsène Wenger.

Wenger, now the Arsenal manager, was at that time gaining coaching experience with Monaco. He took the explosive, untutored African talent to the opulent ministate of Monaco and, as with the grooming of Eliza Doolittle, he taught him airs and graces and not simply how to develop his natural talent.

Monaco couldn’t hold Weah, and Wenger wouldn’t hold him back. He moved on to Paris Saint-Germain, then to AC Milan where he replaced the irreplaceable Marco van Basten.

Among the accolades came the European, African and World player awards in 1996, and on one ceremony in Milan, Weah called his former mentor Wenger to the stage and handed over his award to “the man who taught me to persevere, to live a decent life and to play fair.”

It seemed spontaneous. It was done in the same breathtaking way that Weah had that year collected the ball near his own penalty area and outpaced, outwitted seven men of Verona until, with handsome, elegant, brutal finality he shot past the goalkeeper.

Statistics give you an inkling of what that goal drew out of him. He covered 85 meters in 14 seconds, with the ball. He took just 30 strides. And none of us has any idea of whether he knew where he was going or how he would finish it off.

In the summer of 2002, we saw a more calculating side to Weah, the first inkling of politics. At the congress of the governing body of world soccer, FIFA, in Seoul, Sepp Blatter, the European, was in competition with Isa Hayatou, the African for the presidency.

Weah, by then converted to Islam and enjoying the riches of playing for the Al Jazira club in the United Arab Emirates, spoke on the congress floor - against the Cameroonian Hayatou.

“Blatter has been a true friend to football and Africa,” he said, “I guarantee he will have the support of my own country.”

He went on, heatedly, to praise the “Goal Program” through which FIFA, in Blatter’s first four-year term as president, handed out millions of dollars for building projects.

“Hayatou has been at the helm of affairs for 12 or 14 years,” Weah said. “But African football has remained in a pathetic state of affairs. He is contesting the election for personal gain, something which will not help African football.”

That withering intervention in FIFA politics cut to the jugular as precisely as Weah’s goal against Verona.

Weah was emerging as more than a soccer player. He personally funded the Liberia team through a World Cup campaign, he worked with Unicef on issues like AIDS prevention and vocational training for former child soldiers.

His villa in Monrovia was torched during Charles Taylor’s regime. He took French citizenship and lately has been living with his American wife and three children, one of them adopted, in the United States.

And now, he’s back home, leading the Congress for Democratic Change Party.

Reports from Monrovia suggest that Weah will score a win in the poll on Oct. 11, and that the soccer wanderer will then have to deliver on his promises to rebuild a country fractured by 14 years of civil war.

His family is concerned for his safety, but he appears compelled to convert sporting popularity into a catalyst for change where he came from.

In modern international sport, only Imran Khan, the cricketer, has managed to cross the threshold into politics - though many have predicted that Lance Armstrong, the cyclist, even though he was again accused on Tuesday of taking performance-enhancing drugs, will try for U.S. office, following the lead of such sportsmen politicians as Bill Bradley, Jim Ryun, Jack Kemp, Jim Bunning and Steve Largent.

To the young electorate in Liberia, the stature of Weah, a 38-year-old whom they call King George, might well be reason to trust him rather than the ex-soldiers and career politicians seeking their vote.

Posted at 6:54 PM · Comments (0)

One of the year’s best-sellers has been Donald Richie’s tokyo journals: 1947-2005—first edition sold out, paperback out in a few weeks. The 494-page selection from nearly 60 years of expatriation is, however, only half of the journals. Before these unpublished entries go to their final resting place in the Donald Richie Collection at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Metropolis prevailed upon the author to share a few final tidbits.

Nov 3, 1983
With Akira Kurosawa
Courtesy of Donald Richie

Movie lunch. Nagisa Oshima in full kimono—an inward look, eyes close together as though peering at each other. With him I always feel that there is a transparent barrier, like a pane of glass. Not only me from him, but him from the rest of the world. Today he did not have much to say because he never does in company, only when he is with a single person or with the millions on the tube. Today he was in company and other directors were there. Kihachi Okamoto, in black, looking just like Godard now that his eyes have gone bad. He too said not a word, but Masahiro Shinoda talks enough for anyone. Now grey and a bit plump he still has that boyishness that allowed us always to refer to him as the Boy Scout. Since he speaks a kind of English it was this language that he was using today, but he was thinking Japanese. I heard sentence after sentence beginning with: We Japanese. On the other side of the room, his wife, Shima Iwashita. Lots of makeup these days and each time I see her in a kimono more beautiful than the one before. She always looks as though she has a secret. Perhaps it is the little-cat way in which she holds her mouth; perhaps it is because her dark eyes always seem to know much more than she is saying. At the other table [Teruyo] Nogami instead of [Akira] Kurosawa, who could not come. But she, right-hand woman deluxe, is Kurosawa. He is something she puts on like a suit. Against the wall [Kazuo] Miyagawa the cinematographer, always small and smart—dapper. Bows like a little boy, hands held to sides. Perhaps the finest eye in all of cinema and at a party he acts like one of the help—no waiter ever gave a smarter bow. Non-movie folk too. Next to me, Issei Miyake. Talk about boyishness. He has a rare gift. It is as though he stepped into you. His laughter, his stories, his attitude toward himself (he treats himself like a deplorable but still presentable younger brother)—impossible not to like him. Anything this spectacular is a construct but it is one that he now not only believes in, he has also become it. Much of his success (clothes are clothes and that is all) must come from this unusual gift he has. Afterwards, some milling before departure. Again I notice that film directors rarely talk to each other. Oshima, Okamoto, Shinoda—they kept apart. In fact the only time I saw one approach another was when Oshima walked up to Kurosawa at one of the parties and introduced himself. They had never before met. One can understand why they do not usually meet. Directors can only talk shop. And if we have directors talking then each can only talk about his new film.

May 17, 1989
Black Rain, Shohei Imamura, 1989

Went to see [Shohei] Imamura’s Black Rain again. This time, knowing what would happen, remembering the power, I am relatively unswayed and can pay attention to the construction. Before, immersed in the story, I did not realize just how many doors are open and shut, just how many windows are peered through. Interior architecture encloses and delineates this film. As in [Yasujiro] Ozu, the fact that domestic architecture confines also serves to shape these people. How free is the great outside, the paddy—and the big fish jumping? Perhaps a symbol but, more, a big happy fish. No doors and windows for him. And the sick girl forgets herself in wonder at this great jumping creature. This is what art is made of, I think, a concern for parallels and balance and enclosure and freedom, contrast, opposites, but not many. Just two or three, enough to make a container to hold the strongest of emotions.

June 4, 1989
Equinox Flower, Yasujiro Ozu, 1958

Coming back from Karuizawa in the train, looking out of the window, contented, humming, I suddenly remember the final scene of Equinox Flower of Ozu where Shin Saburi is doing just this. To be sure he is going to see a married daughter and I am coming from seeing a son married, but the effect is the same. Also the contentment—something I felt by proxy over 20 years ago and am now feeling in reality myself.

Dreams, Akira Kurosawa, 1990 (¥3,129)
Courtesy of Warner Home Video

Feb 5, 1990
The new Kurosawa film, Dreams. Sententious to an extreme. Old folks in the film (Ryu Chishu himself at least eighty, made up as an “old man”) tell us we are destroying our nature. So we are, but such bold statements will not make us stop. Still, the film is beautiful and oddly innocent. And the spectacle of Kurosawa’s moral earnestness is in itself impressive.

With Masahiro Shinoda
Courtesy of Donald Richie

June 25, 1990 Learned that I had made a serious mistake in translation. For all these years I have been translating Ozu’s Higanbana as “Equinox Flower.” Well, that is what it means if you use the dictionary. But now I discover that the higanbana is the spider lily. Maybe the mistake was all for the best, however. Imagine going to a nice quiet Ozu film called Spider Lily.
More serious the earlier mistake, discovered but uncorrected: translating Kurutta Ippeiji as “A Page of Madness.” Neither Joe Anderson nor I knew that this is an idiom for “a page out of order.” However, it could have been worse. I remember poor Ivan Morris to the day of his death cringing at having translated the name of the actress Isuzu Yamada as “Yamada of the Thousand Bells.”

Oct 17, 1990
With Leza Lowitz, editor of The Japan Journals
Courtesy of Donald Richie

I introduce a program of the films of Shuji Terayama I chose for International House. When you look at these short films you look into his mind. His mythology is there, beautiful, distant, wrong end of telescope, the past animated. And I remember him with his odd searching gaze, his rueful little-boy smile, his sickly complexion—for the kidneys that killed him had gone bad in childhood. In the first film the naval officer father takes off his pants, then his fundoshi, and staggers drunk and naked about the old farmhouse, and in the last Terayama sits in his director’s chair, back to camera, as the play of shadows is dismantled, and then gets up without a backward glance and leaves. And in an hour and a half I have encompassed a life.

Den’en ni Shisu, Shuji Terayama, 1974

Feb 12, 1991
Party for the prize-winning of Sakura no Sono [The Cherry Orchard]. The all-girl cast is there, and since the film was made half a year ago and they are now about 18 years-old each, looking different—one changes fast at that age. I go up to the one I like best, the one who played Yuko, and begin a conversation. Yuko is ready for it—at a big party, talking to a real foreigner. Then some battle-axe appears, takes part in the talk, kills it—her mother. Talk to another young actress, the one who played the bad girl. Maybe she really is bad. Nineteen and hard as nails. “Huh?” she says when I congratulate her on her difficult role. “What are you talking about? It was a piece of cake.” I see she also stands apart, eats by herself, has nothing to do with the other girls, but does have a roving eye for executive types. Maybe this is a case of life imitating art.

Feb 23, 1992
With Marco Muller, now artistic director of the Venice Film Festival, and Nagisa Oshima; (top) with director Keisuke Kinoshita, Italian actor and screenwriter Adriano Aprà and critic Tadao Sato at the 1984 Pesaro Film Festival

Memorial service for film documentarist Shinsuke Ogawa at Athenée-Française. The auditorium is gotten up with rice sheaves, spring flowers, reminiscent of the mountains of Yamagata where he lived and made long films on rice farming after finishing his series of documentataries on the “radicals” getting in the way of the eventual construction of Narita Airport.

I sat with Nagisa Oshima who later gave an emotional memorial speech. He is good at that. I heard him give one equally tearful a few years ago for the still living Kurosawa. At the service lots more speeches, telegrams read, a two-hour performance of his uncut last footage—about snow apparently.

I remember the talkative, volatile, opinionated and occasionally irresistible Ogawa in Milan. One of his favorite films was Miraculo a Milano of De Sica. Particularly he loved the final scene where the cast flies off on broomsticks over the spires of the cathedral. And there he stood, I remember, on that cold afternoon in front of the cathedral, saying: “I cannot believe it. It was right here they took off. I don’t believe it. I am here. Really here.”

The Cherry Orchard, Shun Nakahara, 1990

July 2, 1992
Took Dick Cavett to lunch. Being with him can be demanding. He never forgets anything. Can reach in and produce a minor actor of [the] ’30s and his one famous line of dialogue. Or, one idea will attract another and he goes sprinting off into the distance. Or, determined to interest and amuse, a string of one-liners files on, empty jokes betraying his night-club-circuit, talk-show background.

Talking of his beloved Setsuko Hara—safely distant, however: he took flowers, heard her coming to the door, dropped the flowers, turned, fled—he wanders to a consideration of Ozu’s audience, sees correspondence to guests at party, remembers party at John Lindsey’s, remarks on quality of present mayor, then wonders (loose connection) about the Hindu goddess Kali and from there to Amaterasu-o-mikami, and did I know that Setsuko Hara played her in that awful Toho movie? What was its name? Oh, yes. Dick is consistently interesting and also consistently tiring, because you have to trot beside him to keep up. Not that trotting is not good for you.
Then he stopped stock still, spoke of his analyst and for the first time told me the details of his years of depression. He tried to make me feel it, its awful texture, and he succeeded. He communicated that coarsely woven and hopeless state.

May 6, 1993
The Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa, 1957

In Sydney I am doing a seminar on Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood. The students and I are watching it—after I have introduced it and before I lecture on it. We reach the part where Washizu has been given his little country palace and his lord appears with his procession—pretty little building set in the summer paddies, soldiers idling, farmers working, [Toshiro] Mifune coming on the run.

And suddenly, in my memory, everything turns real: the summer breeze of Izu, the lazy sun of an early afternoon, the stale smell of water standing in the rice fields. For a moment it is that day in 1956, 37 years ago, and I am standing there, 33 years old myself. See—just to the left of the camera, just out of range. Here comes Mifune running, and there stands my younger ghost, right of that pillar, just off screen.

Ah, there is that young soldier who smiled at me and who I was too busy to go talk to and whom I never forgot. And the summer sun beats down and the fresh breeze of Izu bathes my face, and then the story continues and the film ends and the lights go up and the students open their notebooks and I stand up and began talking about the influence of the Noh.

July 8, 1996
A party for Tadao Sato upon the completion of his four-volume Japanese film history. There was Sachiko Hidari. She has aged elegantly, and tends to be grand. Looking at a nearby actress somehow different appearing, she said: “She has had something done to her face. One of those things where they make new holes for the ears and pull everything up.” I mention that the director of her own latest film is there. “Where, where? I must snub him. He understood nothing about me. Nothing.”

Oshima’s wife [Akiko Koyama] is there with news that her husband [who had suffered a major stroke] is now in a wheelchair and is genki, if you can be that in a wheelchair. The director of Violated Angels, Koji Wakamatsu, is there, now even more grey, even more affable. Since his old films were at the Haiyuza last week and my old ones are there this week, we talk of the brave days of 1965.

Nobuhiko Obayashi is the master of ceremonies and manages to snare me into making a speech. I say whatever comes into my head, talk about the singular fact that you can really trust Sato as a film critic, something rare in Japan; you always know he is speaking for himself and not for his old sensei, or for some film company, or for his country. No one listens—not to me nor to any of the other speakers. Once eating begins the ears are stopped. Me too. I put away large quantities of lobster and caviar and uni and don’t hear a word from anyone.

Nov 3, 1997
To see a 1936 [Mikio] Naruse film, Kimi to Iku Michi (“The Road to You,” the title might be rendered), which no one had seen since its premiere. Toho had finally been prevailed to make a screening print. And there in the audience was a dapper gentleman in his ’80s who was introduced as Hideo Saeki, one of the actors in the film. He was interviewed on the stage and told us a bit about making [it] and then said that, of all the actors and technicians who worked on that film, only he survived. He hoped, he said, that they were all up their watching today, and then he broke into tears. It was very sudden, the way that real, wrenching sorrow has, surprising in its vehemence. Then the film begin and what no one had seen in 60 years was before us—including Hideo himself at 20, strong, athletic, handsome.

Oct 31, 1998
To the opening of the Tokyo International Film Festival. There I found Non-chan [Teruyo Nogami]. We sat together and talked about Kurosawa. He had his last script all done and even had the money for it but kept putting it off because he said that he would have had to direct it from a wheel chair and that that was just too mitomonai—maybe “unseemly” would be the best translation.

A tall, young man came up to talk with her and I was introduced. Kurosawa’s grandson. When he left I told her that I had met him before, when he was four or so, at one of his grandfather’s birthday parties. She said he probably wouldn’t have remembered me. This led us to talk about gone and vanished friends. I said we were just about the last left. And she smiled and quoted a poem about two leaves, the last left on the old tree.

The funeral mood was maintained by the minute of silence as we all stood and observed the death of Kurosawa. After that Armageddon, two hours and half of mindless noise and violence, so crudely made that there was no tempo, no pace, no suspense. All the scenes seemed four seconds long and even the narrative barely survived. It was a feature-length music video with Bruce Willis in it. It seemed lively but this was really the galvanized jerkings of a corpse.

June 2, 1999
With Michael Rayns to the National Film Center to see Gosho’s Where Chimneys are Seen. Since it was shot largely on location, there unreels 1953 Tokyo. The Ueno plaza with its statue of Saigo where I walk almost every Sunday—how small the trees were, and how empty the view. I see the old Nikkatsu Theatre down there, long gone, long forgotten. One of the scenes is right in front of where I now live. It is filled with construction and the lake seems smaller. Also there seems to be no Benten Temple, now the principal ornament of my view. The present structure was postwar I knew, but more than eight years postwar? What moves me most are the people—that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful and hopeful crew that I can never forget, even now that they are extinct.

The Japan Journals: 1947-2004 is published by Stone Bridge Press. www.stonebridge.com

Copyright Metropolis Japan Today

Posted at 6:34 PM · Comments (0)

August 28, 2005
IN THE SPRING OF 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family’s first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country’s best butterfly hunting.
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On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: ”Lolita.”
The summer over, Nabokov continued work on the scandalous tale of the middle-aged Humbert Humbert’s love for 12-year-old Dolores Haze. He spent long hours in the libraries of Cornell University—where he had become a professor of Russian literature—reading psychological case studies so as to more effectively impersonate the tones and torments of a madman. He rode around in schoolbuses in order to get the feel of American children’s slang. Despite his efforts, the diabolically difficult task he had set himself frustrated Nabokov so much that one day in 1950 he decided to put an end to his suffering and took the unfinished manuscript and note cards to the incinerator behind his house. His wife caught him just in time.
When the 54-year-old Nabokov at last finished ”Lolita” in 1953, it was his 12th novel and his third in English. He presented it to a publisher and was told that the book was excellent, but that if he published it they would both go to jail. He remained tight-lipped on the subject of his new work, and decided to publish it under a pseudonym. With time, however, it became clear to him that nothing was more likely to attract the attention of the censors than anonymous publication, and agreed to publish the work under his own name.
”Lolita” appeared in two pale green volumes from the Paris-based Olympia Press in September 1955. Few readers took notice of the foreign publication until December, when Graham Greene, writing in the London Sunday Times, included the book by the virtually unknown Nabokov in his list of the three best he had read that year. John Gordon, a conservative Scottish editor, examined the unexpected entry in Graham’s list and shortly thereafter denounced it in the Sunday Express as ”the filthiest book I have ever read,” adding that it was ”sheer unrestrained pornography.” Sales soared, interest increased, and when, after much fearful hesitation on the part of publishers, the work was published in an American edition in 1958, it spent six months as No. 1 on the bestseller charts.
”Lolita” was a disturbing book—both in its manner and its matter. Its matter is the relationship—sexual and other—of a European professor and his pubescent American stepdaughter, who he calls by the pet-name Lolita. The book’s manner is more difficult to describe. Its form is a faux first-person memoir written, in the words of the dubious European in question, ”first in the psychopathic ward for observation, and then in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion.” Nabokov’s narrator composes the text in 56 days, at a feverishly brilliant pace. He takes personal, narrative, and linguistic liberties (his native language is French) which are as surprising as they are amusing. He shows brilliance in virtually every respect. The name he elects to write under is Humbert Humbert.
…
In 1958, ”L’Affaire Lolita,” as the French had christened it, was just beginning its long career. The following year, Nabokov wrote a screenplay based on his novel for Stanley Kubrick and James Harris. The 1962 film propelled Kubrick’s career and its success allowed the Nabokovs to retire to Switzerland.
But stranger forms of reception were already underway. As Kubrick was beginning to film, an Israeli guard in a Jerusalem prison gave a copy of ”Lolita” to Adolf Eichmann, who was awaiting trial. An indignant Eichmann returned the book two days later, calling it ”a very unwholesome book.” The sulphurous halo of Nabokov’s novel was still burning brightly in the popular consciousness of 1960 and it seems that Eichmann’s guard gave the book to him as an experiment—a sort of litmus test for radical evil: to see whether the real-life villain, he who impassively organized the transport towards certain death of countless innocents, would coldly, or even gleefully, approve the various and vile machinations of Nabokov’s creation.
The incident nicely encapsulates the debates which have animated the book’s reception in the past 50 years. Many gifted readers have found ”Lolita” a beautiful and rending tale of love and loss. And many gifted readers have found it a shameless apology for sin and style irrespective of moral content.
A hint as to how best to read it is offered in a foreword to the novel. Therein ”John Ray Jr., PhD” explains how Humbert Humbert’s manuscript, titled ”Lolita, or the Confessions of a White Widowed Male,” came into his possession and why he has agreed to see it into print. He warns that in reading one will be ”entranced with the book while abhorring its author.” The forward was written by none other than Nabokov himself (over the course of the novel this becomes clear—but not so clear that an English press as late as 1979 was fooled and published an edition with the foreword replaced by one commissioned from Nabokov enthusiast Martin Amis). What has so fascinated and divided readers is how one should react to the novel. Or, in other words, how to be ”entranced with the book while abhorring its author.”
The author in question, however, is not Nabokov, but his mesmerizing creation Humbert Humbert. In interviews and essays Nabokov was careful to underline that Humbert was a ”scoundrel” and a ”rogue.” But Nabokov was also careful to underline that Humbert was not only a scoundrel and a rogue. ”In his last stage he is a moral man,” wrote Nabokov of the turn in Humbert’s thinking which takes place at the end of the novel, ”because he realizes that he loves Lolita like any woman should be loved. But it is too late, he has destroyed her childhood.”
Lolita is the story of Humbert Humbert’s ”nymphelepsy”—and, more particularly, his love for a particular ”nymphet.” A nymphet is not just any young girl, and not just any lovely young girl. Discerning one, as Humbert ecstatically explains, requires an artistic sensitivity—and leads one to the heart of his undertaking.
”A normal man given a group photograph of school girls or Girl Scouts and asked to point out the comeliest one,” Humbert tells us, ”will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them. You have to be an artist and a madman, a creature of infinite melancholy, with a bubble of hot poison in your loins and a super-voluptuous flame permanently aglow in your subtle spine (oh, how you have to cringe and hide!)…”
Humbert prides himself on this artistic sensibility, and more and more compares his love for Lolita to that of an artist for the elusive image he is trying to realize in a given work of art. With startling refinement and real cunning Humbert begins then to lead his readers down a dangerous path.
…
One of Lolita’s finest readers and first defenders, Lionel Trilling, wrote as early as 1958 that in reading the book, ”we find ourselves the more shocked when we realize that, in the course of reading the novel, we have come virtually to condone the violation it presents…. we have been seduced into conniving in the violation, because we have permitted our fantasies to accept what we know to be revolting.”
Humbert’s seductive force comes in large part from his freakish rhetorical gifts—and also in large part for one of the seductive comparisons he repeatedly evokes. Just as an artist is first and foremost responsible to his or her own inspiration, Humbert describes himself as first and foremost responsible to his passion. He is soon so consumed by the kindling of his own senses that despite his powers of perception and despite his sensitivity, he acts with callousness and coldness to the nymphet he claims to so ardently love. The lesson he learns he learns ”too late.”
It is this lesson learned too late which spurs him to a special undertaking—the writing of his ”confession.” Nabokov has Humbert compose a memoir in which he narrates not from the point of view of the regret and repentance which is his own at the time of writing, but from that of the euphoria and haunted rapture which preceded it. He writes from the perspective through which he had gradually persuaded himself that what he was doing to young Lolita could be explained, could be justified, was not so bad after all.
This device allows for the fine pattern of remorse running along the blade of his ”conspiratorial dagger,” as he cryptically calls it, to remain for a time invisible. When it ceases to be so, and when he ceases to recreate and relate his coldness for the sake of what he calls ”retrospective verisimilitude,” the reader can at last understand why he had chosen to call that dagger ”conspiratorial” in the first place.
Against whom was it turned? Against whom did he conspire? ”Tum-tee-tum. And once more—TUM!,” wrote Nabokov in his 1934 novel ”Despair,” told from the perspective of an earlier murderer and madman who thinks himself an artist. ”I have not gone mad. I am merely producing gleeful little sounds. The kind of glee one experiences upon making an April fool of someone. And a damned good fool I have made of someone. Who is he? Gentle reader, look at yourself in the mirror.”
Bertrand Russell once noted that there is nothing so useful to a democracy as the immunization against eloquence, and Humbert’s memoir should be seen in a similar light. What he ultimately tells his readers is: What I have done is monstrous, let no amount of eloquence ever convince you that such acts are anything but. Look at them for what they are. Look at them for the pain they cause.
Stated somewhat differently, the most brilliant American novel of the 20th century, now a round and ripe 50 years old, tells us that the artist cannot live in the world as he lives in the world of words—and that this is a lesson worthy of expressing in the world of words.
Leland de la Durantaye is an assistant professor of English and American literature and language at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2005 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 1:12 AM · Comments (0)

TOKYO - Copyright The Financial Times

Deaths exceeded births in Japan by 31,000 in the first six months of this year, raising the prospect the number of people in the world’s second biggest economy has started shrinking two years earlier than expected.

In the six months to June, the Health Ministry reported that the number of deaths totalled 568,671 against 537,637 births.

The ministry also said it was possible the full-year figure could fall. That would be two years before the population had been expected to peak, at 127m, in 2007.

Excluding the war years, when Japan suspended its population census, this was the first decline since records began. If current trends continue, the population will shrink for the rest of the century, with the severest estimates suggesting it could drop to 45m by 2100. The problems that a declining population may pose for Japan’s pension system, tax base and labour market are emerging as an important theme of next month’s general election. Immigration is negligible in Japan.

In an interview with the FT, Heizo Takenaka, economy minister, said changing demographics was Japan’s biggest challenge.

“From now on, the total population of Japan will start falling,” he said. “That means if we don’t create a system in which the private sector can carry more responsibility, the burden on taxpayers and on the state will become unsustainable.”

Mr Takenaka, who is also minister for postal reform, said privatising the post office, the world’s biggest financial institution, was a litmus test for whether Japan’s citizens understood the urgency of the challenge.

“This is a choice between big and small government,” he said, adding that in decisive moments of its history, such as after the war and following the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan had shown a remarkable ability to embrace swift change.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan has also stressed the population issue, saying a declining labour force that needs to support ever greater numbers of retirees will necessitate a root-and-branch overhaul of pension provision.

In its manifesto, the party proposes simplifying the pension system by merging several public schemes. It would also raise consumption tax - probably by three points to 8 per cent - to help pay for retired people. It is also proposing big cuts to state spending, particularly on public works.

The DPJ specifically addresses the task of encouraging couples to have more children. In parts of Tokyo, the birth rate has dropped to 0.7 children per woman, against 2.1 needed to maintain the population.

The opposition party is proposing a substantial increase in payments to families with children, regardless of income. It is also promising to improve funding for childcare, the scarcity of which is seen as a big obstacle to increasing births.

Last year, the number of Japanese men shrank for the first time, presaging a fall in the population as a whole.

Posted at 7:16 PM · Comments (0)

TOKYO

Deaths exceeded births in Japan by 31,000 in the first six months of this year, raising the prospect the number of people in the world’s second biggest economy has started shrinking two years earlier than expected.

In the six months to June, the Health Ministry reported that the number of deaths totalled 568,671 against 537,637 births.

The ministry also said it was possible the full-year figure could fall. That would be two years before the population had been expected to peak, at 127m, in 2007.

Excluding the war years, when Japan suspended its population census, this was the first decline since records began. If current trends continue, the population will shrink for the rest of the century, with the severest estimates suggesting it could drop to 45m by 2100. The problems that a declining population may pose for Japan’s pension system, tax base and labour market are emerging as an important theme of next month’s general election. Immigration is negligible in Japan.

In an interview with the FT, Heizo Takenaka, economy minister, said changing demographics was Japan’s biggest challenge.

“From now on, the total population of Japan will start falling,” he said. “That means if we don’t create a system in which the private sector can carry more responsibility, the burden on taxpayers and on the state will become unsustainable.”

Mr Takenaka, who is also minister for postal reform, said privatising the post office, the world’s biggest financial institution, was a litmus test for whether Japan’s citizens understood the urgency of the challenge.

“This is a choice between big and small government,” he said, adding that in decisive moments of its history, such as after the war and following the oil shocks of the 1970s, Japan had shown a remarkable ability to embrace swift change.

The opposition Democratic Party of Japan has also stressed the population issue, saying a declining labour force that needs to support ever greater numbers of retirees will necessitate a root-and-branch overhaul of pension provision.

In its manifesto, the party proposes simplifying the pension system by merging several public schemes. It would also raise consumption tax - probably by three points to 8 per cent - to help pay for retired people. It is also proposing big cuts to state spending, particularly on public works.

The DPJ specifically addresses the task of encouraging couples to have more children. In parts of Tokyo, the birth rate has dropped to 0.7 children per woman, against 2.1 needed to maintain the population.

The opposition party is proposing a substantial increase in payments to families with children, regardless of income. It is also promising to improve funding for childcare, the scarcity of which is seen as a big obstacle to increasing births.

Last year, the number of Japanese men shrank for the first time, presaging a fall in the population as a whole.

Posted at 7:16 PM · Comments (0)

Dacapo (Sept. 9)

“Tomoko-chan,” who comes across as a young lady of good breeding,
awaits
Hiroshi on the sofa, motionless and expressionless. The air
conditioning is
set to a cool 21 degrees, but Hiroshi still can’t keep from perspiring.
Does
his discomfort stem from nervousness? Or is it just revulsion at the
clammy
sensation of “Tomoko-chan” ‘s silicone skin?

“Where’s my libido when I need it?” Hiroshi moans.

A 21-year-old student, Hiroshi was enlisted by Dacapo to report on a
visit
to “LaLa,” a newly opened shop in Tokyo’s Akihabara district that rents
private rooms furnished with a bath, toilet and, one other item …
life-size female “mannequins.”

Businesses renting sex dolls have been springing up rapidly over the
past
two years, and may currently number over 100 in the Tokyo area alone.
Most
specialize in home delivery, but LaLa’s stable of 17 latex ladies do
their
entertaining on the premises.

“Tomoko,” whose proper designation is “Dutch wife,” boasts a solid
torso and
limbs as opposed to being inflatable. “She” stands 150 cm tall and
weighs 28
kg. To purchase one of her kind outright would cost 600,000 yen; but at
LaLa, the pleasure of her company may be obtained at the rate of 12,000
yen
for 90 minutes.

“On a really good day, we might get as many as 30 customers ,” the
store’s
manager tells Dacapo. “Our patrons range in age from teens to men in
their
60s. For the most part they appear to be quiet, timid types, who
probably
feel more at ease with a doll than a young chick.

“Some bring along shopping bags with a couple of extra costumes. I
suppose
they enjoy dressing up the dolls and taking snapshots.”

Upon entering LaLa, Hiroshi received an instruction sheet that reads,
“Your
doll will not make remarks or engage in ‘selfish’ activities, but won’t
say
anything else, such as ‘It hurts,’ either. Her body is more delicate
than
that of a real human. Bending the joints or fingers in an unnatural
manner
can result in breakage to the skin, so please handle her gently.”

After watching an erotic DVD to get himself in the proper frame of
mind,
Hiroshi set about to the task of seduction.

“After I undressed her, I was upset to see that her head hadn’t been
properly screwed on,” he grumbles.

Did the earth move, for Hiroshi at least?

“Well, I felt something,” he admits. “But it gave me something of a
guilt
trip, and I was asking myself, ‘What am I doing here?’ and I guess at
that
point I got completely turned off.”

Takuya, Hiroshi’s classmate, found his doll — a prim, bespectacled
type
dressed in a stewardess uniform and named Alice — a bit more
congenial.

“There was no problem in the missionary position, but with some of the
others we tried I had to hold her up, and since she was quite heavy my
arms
got tired. “I kept thinking of previous enjoyable experiences, and was
finally able to go all the way.”

Still, the dolls’ overall impression clearly leaves something to be
desired.

“It made me realize how futile it can feel to convey love that doesn’t
get
reciprocated,” Takuya philosophizes.

Considering that LaLa’s rates are the same as shops featuring real
females,
Dacapo concludes that the doll rental business, which requires extra
effort
on the part of customers, really has its work cut out.

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

Posted at 1:34 AM · Comments (0)

A cosmic thinker from way back, which all by itself makes him a rarity among prominent public figures, he is also a man of the cloth, which endows his utterances with special gravitas. What gives his observations unusual resonance, moreover, is that he voices them on his very own television show, which commands a loyal and attentive audience of some one million souls.

Unlike many of his fellow preachers who confine themselves to more traditional admonishments of flawed morality and human foible, Mr. Robertson demonstrates scant reluctance to identify with admirable specificity the divine retribution that is destined to issue from sinful behavior. He has warned, for example, of natural disasters wreaking their havoc on Orlando, Fla., because of the congeries of gay visitors to Disney World. And, while there have been the usual meteorological explanations for the inordinate number of hurricanes that have lashed the state, we wonder.

Not surprisingly for a man who sought the presidency, Mr. Robertson has an abiding interest in affairs of state, and his views on that score can also be refreshingly unorthodox. Take his latest pronouncement on Hugo Chavez, the pesky president of Venezuela. As Mr. Robertson explained, Chavez is a bee in our bonnet, a chum of Fidel Castro and, with malice aforethought, is turning his oil-rich country into a “launching pad for communist infiltration and Muslim extremism” in our backyard. So why not just take out the bugger?

A man with a keen appreciation of balance sheets and income statements, Mr. Robertson pointed out that eliminating Mr. Chavez would be a “whole lot cheaper than starting a war” to get rid of the rogue. And he added reassuringly that a little assassination wasn’t apt to interrupt oil shipments.

Needless to say, the shilly-shalliers at the State Department were appalled at the straight-from-the-shoulder proposal and were quick to go public with a rousing denunciation of it as “inappropriate.” After consulting with Defense Department lawyers, Donald Rumsfeld somewhat regretfully opined that it would be illegal.

Predictably, Mr. Robertson’s suggestion prompted a paroxysm of harrumphing from lily-livered liberals and the like (if you don’t like, just leave it at from lily-livered liberals). Jesse Jackson urged the FCC to launch an investigation as it did after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during the half-time show at the Super Bowl on the grounds that “This is even more threatening to hemispheric stability than the flash of a breast on television during a ballgame.”

A close call, we’d say.

The fuss proved sufficiently discomforting for Mr. Robertson to cause him to recant. Which, frankly, we feel is a shame. Not that we believe dispatching Mr. Chavez is a particularly compelling priority. But the concept of effecting regime change on the cheap appeals to us.

Certainly, even the most cursory spectator of the global political scene can rattle off the names of at least a dozen no-good-niks who would be ideal candidates for the coup de grâce. And they don’t even have to be mass murderers or ethnic cleansers; blamed nuisances would do fine. And we needn’t worry too much about world opinion: We could always outsource the work. If the administration is right and everything is going to be hunky-dory in Iraq, there’ll be a lot of idle assassins hanging around street corners in Baghdad who’d be only too happy to pick up a few bucks. Or, we could insource the job to the Mafia, whose business, thanks to the zeal of prosecutors and the eagerness of capos to spill the fava beans, isn’t the killer it used to be.

Come to think of it, the approach is fraught with possibilities right here in the good old USA. It might be a quite useful device for our own polity as a kind of permanent term limit for especially deserving office holders. It also might prove an extremely efficacious tool for corporate governance as a means of getting rid of crooked CEOs, a quick and irrevocable way to enhance shareholder value (avoiding those costly golden handshakes, etc). And it holds particular promise for our own beloved Wall Street, where capital crimes are committed every day and the perpetrators live to crow about it.

Thank you, Mr. Robertson.

Copyright Barrons

Posted at 2:54 AM · Comments (0)

August 15, 2005

Remember Japan? Back in the early 1980s the Land of the Rising Sun was, once again, the world’s most feared invader. But instead of military might, the new Japan was rallying behind industrial muscle and corporate audacity. Icons such as the Rockefeller Center and MGM Studios were being scooped up like so many billion-dollar baubles. As Japanese cars and televisions flooded the market, Westerners marvelled at the country’s technological wizardry and its phalanx of tireless workers whose labour was only stopped short by karoshi — Japanese for death by overwork. Who could compete with that? At the time, it seemed, a new world was dawning and Japan would be its champion. It all seemed inevitable, right up until it fell apart.

Fast-forward 20 years and the world is facing a new Asian deluge. If Japan was a surging tide, then China is a tsunami. The globe’s most populous country turned manufacturing juggernaut has a one-two punch of low-cost labour and homegrown national champions taking the world by storm. Its economy, which has been growing above nine per cent for a decade, has already surpassed Japan’s in size, and is expected to overtake the U.S. by 2040. Its voracious appetite for energy and resources has sent commodity prices skyrocketing and its cheap manufactured goods power consumer spending around the globe. With its sheer drive for material success, after centuries of deprivation, China seems unstoppable. But is it? Or is it just history repeating itself?

At its apex, Japan’s economy crumbled like a house of cards. The yen, which had been kept weak to promote exports, was engineered upward to rein in fast growth, igniting a speculative real estate bubble. When it burst, the banks, which had lent money to companies based on their real estate equity, were left virtually bankrupt. Trillions in personal and corporate wealth disappeared overnight. The implosion revealed structural rot beneath the economy’s seemingly ironclad exterior. The upshot was 15 years of stagnation that Japan is only just now emerging from.

China is, in many ways, following in the footsteps of Japan’s early success. Nobel prize-winning economist Robert Mundell recently compared China’s ramp-up to Japan’s beginnings as a low cost manufacturer in the 1950s and ’60s. And now, like Japan was in the 1980s, China is focused on expanding into international markets and on developing its own technology for sale to the world.

But other similarities are more disturbing. Andy Xie, chief Asia economist with U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley, points to the US$350 billion in speculative “hot money” that has poured into China in recent years on the expectation that its currency, the renminbi (or yuan), would appreciate. Much of that money has been parked in real estate as the recently privatized housing market goes through an unprecedented boom. In Shanghai, prices skyrocketed by 28 per cent last year, with sleek condo towers, office high-rises, hotels and malls being thrown up at a breakneck pace. The vacancy rate officially stands at 2.7 per cent, but anecdotal evidence suggests up to 40 per cent of the new space sits empty.

Speculators just got their first whiff of the potential payoff after the Chinese government bowed last month to mounting international pressure to revalue the renminbi, abandoning its decade-old peg to the U.S. dollar. China’s central bank has pledged to keep a tight rein on the currency, which was tweaked a mere 2.1 per cent and will now trade within a narrow band against a basket of international currencies. But Bridgewater Associates, a U.S. asset manager, estimates that with the renminbi now unleashed, a 25- to 30-per-cent gain is “inevitable” over the next three years.

If currency traders are right, the revaluation heightens the risk of a massive exodus from real estate, as speculators look to cash in. Observers fear that could, in turn, push the country’s already shaky banking sector into a tailspin. “The revaluation of the renminbi enhances the possibility for a tremendous amount of property to hit the market, and prices will go into a free fall,” says Ken DeWoskin, a well-known sinologist, and a partner at U.S. accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers in Beijing. “It’s the most significant crisis on the horizon.”

Still, many don’t believe China is headed for a Japanese-style collapse. “We talk about it behind closed doors,” says one Beijing-based adviser to the government, who preferred not to be identified. “But the consensus is, it won’t happen here.” There are plenty of differences between the two economies. Unlike Japan’s insular economy, China has become the leading destination for foreign investment, sucking in US$260 billion in the past five years. Foreign multinationals account for nearly 60 per cent of its exports. China also has a cheap and flexible workforce. And, unlike many other developing countries, it has virtually no external debt and a high savings rate.

Even with all those advantages, however, China is still vulnerable, in part because its phenomenal success has blinded many in the government and the ruling Communist party to rising economic and political risks. “Many of the new generation of leaders are overly confident,” the government adviser says. “They’ve gone from a planned economy to a market economy and they have never gone through a recession or severe economic downturn. It’s hard for them to imagine China could ever go through an economic curve like every other country in the world. They don’t appear to be bracing themselves for the real potential problems.”

And the problems, like everything in China, are mind-bogglingly huge. At their heart is a dysfunctional, corrupt and virtually bankrupt financial system. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the country’s banks have racked up as much as US$800 billion in bad loans, mostly doled out to weak state-owned enterprises that churn out cheap, inferior products in a thinly veiled effort to keep millions employed in the absence of a social safety net.

The government in Beijing has tried to clean up the banks’ books and present a semblance of financial order by offloading US$325 billion in bad debt to state-run asset management companies. But, like the banks, these groups are headed by Communist party officials, and they’ve shown little interest in disposing of the loans. Instead, they prefer to swap the bad assets among themselves at inflated prices financed by central bank loans. Reminiscent of Japan’s failure to settle ailing accounts in the 1990s, the Chinese asset managers have dumped less than a third of their bad debts since 1999, collecting just 20 cents on the dollar.

While all that debt languishes in murky obscurity, a new crop is being groomed. The government, anxious to lure more foreign investment and bulk up production capacity, has been on a frenetic building spree — investing in high-speed railways, power generation and state-of the-art airports. New steel mills, concrete plants and aluminum smelters have sprouted up like weeds, while five-star hotels gather dust in provincial backwaters alongside deserted golf courses.

The level of capital investment, equivalent to half of China’s gross domestic product, is not only highly inefficient, but unprecedented, says DeWoskin. “No other economy in the world has reinvested in the economy to such a degree. It’s a situation that is fundamentally not sustainable.” In addition to some US$500 billion in bad loans generated as of 2003, as much as another US$300 billion is in the pipeline, says Mike Harris, a partner at PwC in Beijing. “It’s pretty frightening if you think about it.”

So far, Beijing has solved its problems by throwing more money at them. Flush with a whopping US$711 billion in foreign currency reserves, the government recently spent US$60 billion bailing out three of the country’s biggest banks, and is expected to put up another US$15 billion to revive the moribund stock market, among the world’s worst performing exchanges and currently limping along at an eight-year low. More money is expected to flow to dozens of brokerages teetering on the edge of insolvency after dabbling in shady financing schemes.

But the bills keep mounting. Standard & Poor’s, the U.S. rating agency, estimates it would cost as much as US$190 billion just to clean up two of the country’s largest banks. Then there is some US$314 billion in provincial and local government debt, and mounting military budgets. Add another US$250 billion in rising petroleum and energy costs needed to feed China’s unbridled growth, and the stash of foreign currency starts to look “inadequate,” as DeWoskin says. “Pressure is building for some kind of adjustment,” he adds. “What we don’t know is if it’s imminent or if things can keep going for another 10 years.”

Nicholas Lardy, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics in Washington, has been predicting China’s financial downfall for years. Given the country’s already heavy fiscal burden, a slew of new non-performing loans coupled with a downturn in the economy could be the last straw. “The question is, when the economy goes through a downturn, how many loans are going to go bad?” says Lardy. “Will it be manageable, or a massive tsunami that the banks can’t handle?”

And there is little doubt that there will be a downturn eventually. The government is trying to hold things together until after the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. But there are indications that the delicate balancing act of government-subsidized production is beginning to teeter under the strain of overcapacity and ballooning inventories. Foreign investment is down, costs are rising, and profits are being squeezed as consumer prices on everything from cellphones to air conditioners continue to drop.

Market watchers believe real growth going forward should be in the six- to seven-per-cent range. While that is still more than double what Canada can expect to see, it’s a sudden deceleration for China and a definite cause for concern to the government, observers say. (Although the official growth rate was 9.5 per cent in 2004, economists estimate the real number was somewhere between 11 and 15 per cent.) Such a slowdown opens up a whole new set of concerns for the ruling Communist party, whose grip on power is a result of two central precepts: creating wealth and keeping a lid on the always latent threat of social unrest. With 12 to 15 million people entering the workforce each year, the party needs to keep the economy humming at a minimum seven-per- cent growth. “China works on a bicycle theory,” explains Yuen Pau Woo, chief economist at the Vancouver-based Asia Pacific Foundation. “You have to keep going forward. If you don’t, you fall off the bicycle and you may not be able to get back on again.”

To keep the economic wheels spinning and attract more foreign capital into its wobbly financial sector, Beijing has been working hard to clean up its four largest banks — adopting Western-style management and accounting practices in preparation for their debut on international stock markets. Foreign banks like HSBC and Bank of America, anxious to get in on China’s US$1.5 trillion in banked savings, have been buying in at every opportunity. But again, some see more pitfalls than potential.

Many of the banks’ balance sheets are inflated by dubious bonds that are not guaranteed by the government. So, if the economy does hit a soft spot and the banks are forced into bankruptcy, foreign investors would be left holding the bag for billions in losses. In the words of Elliot Wilson, a financial journalist with the Hong Kong-based Standard newspaper, investing in Chinese banks is “like a man betting his kid’s college fund on a three-legged horse.”

The real wild card, though, is corruption. The financial system is rife with tales of skulduggery involving billions of dollars and top bank officials. The former chairman of the China Construction Bank is serving a 12-year jail sentence for graft, and his successor stepped down in March, under investigation by the party for “violation of discipline.” Some of the more startling stories include a bank manager who disappeared with US$100 million in cash, and another scheme involving 69 people charged with stealing US$894 million in bank funds.

Many are hopeful the threat of an economic slowdown will force the party to speed up much-needed reforms, but others remain skeptical. The government is relatively untested when it comes to stick-handling delicate fiscal matters, and its ability to make quick, informed decisions is bogged down by a glacial adherence to consensus-building and a generation of leaders born of the immensely destructive Cultural Revolution.

That raises many frightening possibilities, not just for China but for all those investors who’ve pumped billions into its rickety institutions. “If the Chinese banks collapse, the whole world economy collapses,” Wilson warns. “The world economy is very dependent on China in ways we still don’t completely fathom, and we won’t for another five or 10 years.” We do, however, know this: when Japan arrived at its day of reckoning, the rest of the world escaped relatively unscathed, and the lessons learned faded quickly. Should the same fate befall China, the pain will be spread far and wide. It’s not something we’re likely to forget.

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Copyright - The International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, AUGUST 25, 2005

LONDON No one living in China is more daring than the maverick writer Yu Jie. He recently said of the memorial to Japan’s war dead: “We criticize the Yasukuni Shrine, but we have Mao Zedong’s shrine in the middle of Beijing, which is our own Yasukuni. This is a shame to me, because Mao Zedong killed more Chinese than the Japanese did. Until we are able to recognize our own problems, the Japanese won’t take us seriously.”
For China’s Communist Party, there are two first-degree thought crimes here. First, Mao’s huge portrait still looms over Tiananmen Square and China’s current leaders claim to be his heirs. Second, Beijing regularly condemns Japanese prime ministers for visiting the Yasukuni Shrine to venerate dead soldiers, including those hanged as World War II criminals. Anti-Japanese demonstrations in Chinese cities are encouraged by the government; any other public protest risks prompt and violent suppression. Yu Jie, therefore, stepped deliberately into China’s most dangerous political minefield.
What Yu stated is true. The Japanese behaved with uninhibited cruelty during their war in China from the late 1930s to 1945 and some estimates of Chinese deaths in those years approach 20 million. But because of Mao’s ideologically driven agricultural policies, 30 to 50 million Chinese are estimated to have starved to death between 1959 and 1961 alone; in their new biography of the Chairman, Jung Chang and Jon Halliday suggest that during his rule more than 70 million Chinese died - in peacetime.
Mao challenged his comrades, metaphorically, to touch the hind end of a tiger. Few took him up on this dare. Yu Jie does it regularly. Last year he and five others wrote in a Hong Kong magazine that Mao’s body should be removed from the enormous tomb in Tiananmen Square and shipped back to his birthplace. This “would elevate the status of Beijing into that of a civilized capital, and make it fit to stage a ‘civilized Olympics’ in 2008. We certainly do not want to see the farce of the Olympic flag flying over a city in which a corpse is worshiped.”
To dispute the Party’s view on such issues often attracts severe retribution. Yu Jie has tackled them all in his characteristically blunt way. On the nationwide demonstrations in the spring of 1989 and the June 4 killings in Tiananmen, he observed: “From that day onwards I insisted on being an independent and intelligent human being and vowed to fight lies. I became an adult overnight. That night, amid tears, I could see clearly what was good and evil, what was freedom and slavery, what was darkness and light. From then on, no one could lie to me and make a fool of me any more.”
In another one of his banned books, “Rejecting Lies,” Yu confronted those whom Tiananmen frightened into compliance. “Under the pressure of ideology and the temptation of market economy, intellectuals have not become the society’s pillar in the midst of the breakdown of moral values but have become the most thoroughly corrupt bunch of people.”
Yu claims that the Party encourages anti-Japanese outrage because it dreads mass discontent. “Philosophies such as Marxism-Leninism and Communism are entirely losing their attractiveness. With the gunshots in 1989, they have collapsed like soap bubbles. Being in this situation, the Chinese Communist Party is soliciting new concepts to unify the Chinese society. Nationalism or patriotism seems operable to fill the vacuum left by Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s Communism.”
Now 30, Yu started his defiance early. In 1997, when he was a graduate student at Beijing University, he attacked the Party for snuffing out the spirit of democracy that in the early 1920s had inspired many young Chinese. One of the founders of the Chinese branch of the writers’ union PEN, he champions other writers who touch the tiger’s backside. He is a Christian, he supports America’s war in Iraq and he wishes China had a spiritual leader like the Dalai Lama. He has been arrested and detained and his computer has been searched and confiscated.
Those who heard Yu Jie last year during his brief U.S. lecture tour wonder how long he will remain at large. But in 2000, after being turned down for a job at the China Writers’ Association, Yu said: “From this moment on, the one who lives in fear will not be me, it will be those fellows who hide in the dark corners. From this moment on, I will live out in the sunlight. I will live a fuller and happier life.”
(Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist specializing in Chinese affairs.)

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2005

HONG KONG South Korea has long had a habit of thinking ahead and investing heavily in the future. So its latest goal of driving up its birth rate is a signal to other countries in the region to consider the consequences of present fertility trends. Japan and much of Europe should do the same; they fret about their own woeful fertility but either take refuge in technical fixes to pension challenges or do nothing. They decline to penalize those who expect a pension but do not contribute to the workforce of the future.
For now, South Korea’s population is still much younger than Japan’s, which started its demographic transition a decade earlier. But unless its procreation campaign succeeds, it will be in the same position as Japan, or worse, by 2035. Japan’s population is already in decline.
Whether Korea can achieve its goal, however, is quite another matter. Korean sense of racial identity may be a spur to parenthood, but it has been of scant influence in an equally ethnocentric Japan. Unusually low fertility rates now seem the reality in a neo-Confucian society that is supposed to stress family values. The fertility of East Asian urban residents is now below Europe’s lowest levels.
The outcome for Northeast Asia as a whole will have a major impact on the balance of power within the region and vis-à-vis South Asia and Southeast Asia within two generations. While education, technology, political cohesion and resources are also crucial, demographics play a major role in power equations.
Southeast Asia is, as it always was, quite different from Northeast Asia. This can be partly traced to the greater customary equality of the sexes in matters of inheritance, economic opportunity and marriage rights, which pre-dated the arrival of Islam, Christianity and Confucius and still survives to some degree from Myanmar to Bali. The pro-male sex imbalances found in China are absent in Southeast Asia.
In the short term, too, demographics will play a huge part in determining relative rates of economic growth. That spells trouble for all of Northeast Asia and Singapore, where the percentage of working-age people is now close to its peak - the 19-and-under cohorts are getting smaller, but the number of over-60s is still modest.
Even in Thailand, already only 30 percent of the population is now under 20 years of age compared with 39 percent in Vietnam, where the sharp decline in fertility is quite recent. Thailand is a lot better off than China, Taiwan and Korea, all around 27 percent but far short of Indonesia’s 39 percent, Malaysia’s 42 percent and India’s 43 percent. Youth is scarcest in Hong Kong - a mere 21 percent of the population is under 20 years old.
If today’s outlook is grim for societies long used to imagining themselves as youthful, tomorrow’s is worse. Even in Thailand, the fertility rate (births per woman of child-bearing age) is under the replacement level. As for Northeast Asia, Hong Kong is at the bottom of the table, with a rate of just 0.9, but the rest of the region and Singapore are little better. Japan’s low fertility has long been known, but Korea’s at 1.2 is now even lower, slightly worse than Taiwan’s. All their rates are now lower than Russia’s.
China’s fertility is slightly higher, but its future situation is almost certainly worse than the raw number - 1.7 - suggests, due to the 15 percent excess of boys over girls in the youngest groups and to the likelihood that any easing of the one-child policy will be offset by urbanization. Fertility rates in major Chinese cities are exceptionally low - 0.8 in Shanghai.
Could it be that after centuries of being oppressed, women in these newly industrialized Confucian societies have finally acquired economic independence and are rebelling against tradition? It may not be mere coincidence that Japan and Korea, countries where the subservient role of women has long been most apparent, now have by far the lowest fertility rates, the city-states excluded. In East Asia, educated women in Singapore are showing a marked reluctance to marry. The same applies in Hong Kong, which imports brides from the mainland, and Taiwan, which imports them from Vietnam and elsewhere.
Looking ahead, Korea’s problem might be temporarily relieved by reunification with the North, where despite food shortages, fertility is around 2. But otherwise, societies face either radical decline or radical change in birth rates. Even if immigration were socially acceptable in Japan and Korea, it would have to be on a massive scale - assuming that the goal is eventual population stability, Japan would need half a million immigrants a year to make up for its birth shortfall.
Demographic projections are notoriously unreliable. But the issue for East Asia now is whether it responds to some alarming facts by raising its fertility rate just as it previously responded to excessive population growth with declines that now look to have been too dramatic. Those declines helped spawn economic miracles, but the price of shifting from one extreme to the other has yet to be paid.

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25 August 2005
The Asian Wall Street Journal
(c) 2005 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.

This summer, I took a research team to Beijing to document police abuse against petitioners for an upcoming Human Rights Watch report. In pairs and small groups, over the course of two weeks, the victims straggled into our various meeting rooms, hidden around the city. Some were on crutches after beatings in detention, while others had lost fingers to torture. Many had the blank gaze acquired over long months of imprisonment. Together, they formed a river of internal refugees fleeing state violence. In thick local dialects, they recounted experiences of police violence, including attacks by local police who came to Beijing to prevent them petitioning.

Recently, China has announced a new program aimed at solving these problems: the state will send these petitioners back to meet with local police chiefs. The program is either naive or cynical: it is like sending sheep to meet with wolves.

To be fair, in some cases, police chiefs are honest officials who act fairly. But others are the same police chiefs formerly ordered by local officials to beat petitioners, torture them, imprison them, and stop them from getting to Beijing in the first place. In a few cases — and imagining these meetings boggles the mind — they will be the very police officers who are the subjects of the original complaints.

Without basic protections against retaliation, this new program could open the door to a raft of new abuses. China must engage in thorough police reform as part of any long term solution to its dysfunctional petitioning system.

There is no question that the petitioning system, a uniquely Chinese cultural-legal institution, needs some fixing. Each year, tens of thousands of farmers and others throng Beijing in the hope that some national official will intercede in their local cases. Many are victims of official corruption, forced resettlement, and police brutality. These “petitioners,” are exercising an ancient Chinese right, protected in national law, that allows anyone to submit a complaint to the government.

Many petitioners have tried their local courts first and failed to find justice. Petitioning in Beijing is the court of last resort. However, few find satisfaction there either. Many spend their life savings while waiting for an official reply to their appeals, and wind up encamped in a shantytown of Dickensian squalor known as the “petitioners’ village” where they live on scraps scavenged from the streets. Though the labyrinthine system fails many, there are few other options under China’s weak legal system, and so the numbers of petitioners continues to grow. In the first quarter of 2005, the State Council Petitions Bureau in Beijing reported an increase of more than 90% in the numbers of letters and visits compared to the same period last year.

However, petitioners complaining in Beijing can make provincial authorities look bad to their supervisors in the capital. Thus, provincial governments send plainclothes police and thugs to Beijing, where they lie in wait for petitioners from their home province. When they find petitioners, these officers — known as “retrievers” — often beat or threaten them. Sometimes, they bundle petitioners into cars and take them back home. Some are released there, while others are thrown into detention without trial.

One man we met from Henan province in central China had been petitioning for decades and been “retrieved” many times. His saga began when a local official hired thugs to kill his father over a land claim. Finding no justice in Henan, he petitioned in Beijing. There he was grabbed by provincial “retrievers” who permanently crippled his two middle fingers, and then took him to a detention center in Henan — in fact an unused army barracks. They kept him there to cook for them for a while, but after a blizzard shut down the unheated facility, the police told him he was free to go. He immediately returned to Beijing to petition, and said he had been seized in the same way and beaten multiple times. He no longer dares to leave the petitioners’ village.

His tale was extreme, but not unusual. Petitioners are often imprisoned in local detention centers for exercising their legally-guaranteed right to petition. One petitioner in her sixties told us that when she demanded to know why she was being imprisoned, “The officers said, `You’ve done nothing illegal. This is to stop you from petitioning.’”

Ironically, and tragically, many of the petitioners thus mistreated are petitioning over police abuse in the first place. We interviewed several parents who began petitioning after sons died in police custody.

It is commendable that the Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang, is ready to take action on the petitioning problem. Mr. Zhou recently announced that he would require police chief to meet with petitioners from their region. Almost immediately, he reported high success rates in resolving petitioners’ cases. But in the context of widespread police abuse, this should give pause for thought. Exactly what does Minister Zhou mean by “resolved”? How many cases have been resolved by leaving petitioners battered in jail cells or working 18-hour days in reeducation-through-labor camps?

Mr. Zhou should tell China and the world exactly what concrete steps his ministry will take to investigate and hold officials and police accountable for retaliation against petitioners. Then the whole police force should be retrained, each last officer.

Such measures are critical if there is ever to be an end to the petitioning problem. Some petitioners told our research team that they have nothing left to lose. Anything less than thorough reform will leave Beijing without a dam against a swelling river of battered, traumatized, and angry rural petitioners.

—-

Ms. Davis is a New York-based writer and author of “Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders” (Columbia University Press, 2005).

Posted at 6:50 PM · Comments (0)

September/October 2005

Summary: No country can affect China’s fortunes more directly than the United States. Many potential flashpoints — such as Taiwan, Japan, and North Korea — remain, and true friendship between Washington and Beijing is unlikely. But their interests have grown so intertwined that cooperation is the best way to serve both countries.
WANG JISI is Dean of the School of International Studies at Peking University and Director of the Institute of International Strategic Studies at the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China. This essay is an expanded and revised version of an article originally published in Zhongguo Dangzheng Ganbu Luntan, a journal of the Central Party School.

AFTER 9/11

The United States is currently the only country with the capacity and the ambition to exercise global primacy, and it will remain so for a long time to come. This means that the United States is the country that can exert the greatest strategic pressure on China. Although in recent years Beijing has refrained from identifying Washington as an adversary or criticizing its “hegemonism” — a pejorative Chinese code word for U.S. dominance — many Chinese still view the United States as a major threat to their nation’s security and domestic stability.

Yet the United States is a global leader in economics, education, culture, technology, and science. China, therefore, must maintain a close relationship with the United States if its modernization efforts are to succeed. Indeed, a cooperative partnership with Washington is of primary importance to Beijing, where economic prosperity and social stability are now top concerns.

Fortunately, greater cooperation with China is also in the United States’ interests — especially since the attacks of September 11, 2001. The United States now needs China’s help on issues such as counterterrorism, nonproliferation, the reconstruction of Iraq, and the maintenance of stability in the Middle East. More and more, Washington has also started to seek China’s cooperation in fields such as trade and finance, despite increased friction over currency exchange rates, intellectual property rights, and the textile trade.

Although there is room for further improvement in the relationship, the framework of basic stability established since September 11 should be sustainable. At least for the next several years, Washington will not regard Beijing as its main security threat, and China will avoid antagonizing the United States.

THE LONELY SUPERPOWER

To understand the forces that govern U.S.-Chinese relations, it helps first to understand U.S. power and Washington’s current global strategy. Here is a Chinese view: in the long term, the decline of U.S. primacy and the subsequent transition to a multipolar world are inevitable; but in the short term, Washington’s power is unlikely to decline, and its position in world affairs is unlikely to change.

Consider that the United States continues to lead other developed countries in economic growth, technological innovation, productivity, research and development, and the ability to cultivate human talent. Despite serious problems such as swelling trade and fiscal deficits, illegal immigration, inadequate health care, violent crime, major income disparities, a declining educational system, and a deeply divided electorate, the U.S. economy is healthy: last year, U.S. GDP grew an estimated 4.4 percent, and this year the growth rate is expected to be 3.5 percent, much greater than the corresponding figures for the eurozone (2.0 percent and 1.6 percent). Barring an unexpected sharp economic downturn, the size of the U.S. economy as a proportion of the global economy is likely to increase in the years to come.

Many other indexes of U.S. “hard power” are also on the rise. The U.S. defense budget, for example, has increased considerably in recent years. In 2004, it hit $437 billion, or roughly half of all military spending around the world. Yet as a percentage of U.S. GDP, the figure was lower than it was during the Cold War.

Further bolstering U.S. primacy is the fact that many of the country’s potential competitors, such as the European Union, Russia, and Japan, face internal problems that will make it difficult for them to overtake the United States anytime soon. For a long time to come, the United States is likely to remain dominant, with sufficient hard power to back up aggressive diplomatic and military policies.

From a Chinese perspective, the United States’ geopolitical superiority was strengthened in 2001 by Washington’s victory in the Afghan war. The United States has now established political, military, and economic footholds in Central Asia and strengthened its military presence in Southeast Asia, in the Persian Gulf, and on the Arabian Peninsula. These moves have been part of a global security strategy that can be understood as having one center, two emphases. Fighting terrorism is the center. And the two emphases are securing the Middle East and preventing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The greater Middle East, a region stretching from Kashmir to Morocco and from the Red Sea to the Caucasus, is vital to U.S. interests. Rich in oil and natural gas, the region is also beset by ethnic and religious conflicts and is a base for rampant international terrorism. None of the countries in the area is politically stable, and chaos there can affect the United States directly, as the country learned on September 11.

On the nonproliferation front, the United States’ main concerns are Iran and North Korea, two states that are striving to develop nuclear technology and have long been antagonistic toward Washington. In 2004, the United States carried out the largest redeployment of its overseas forces since World War II in order to meet these challenges.

NOT INVULNERABLE

Despite its many advantages, the United States is not invincible. The war in Iraq, for example, resulted in international isolation of a sort that Washington had not faced since the beginning of the Cold War. The invasion was strongly condemned by people all over the world and explicitly opposed by the great majority of nations. Washington split with many of its traditional allies, such as Paris and Berlin, which refused to take part in the operation. And tensions with Islamic countries, especially in the Arab world, increased dramatically.

Since then, the extent of armed resistance to the U.S. occupation of Iraq has exceeded the Bush administration’s expectations. Meanwhile, revelations of prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel in Iraq and elsewhere have undermined the credibility of U.S. rhetoric on human rights and further damaged the United States’ image in the world. U.S. “soft power” — the country’s ability to influence indirectly the actions of other states — has been weakened. The United States also faces serious competition and disagreement from Europe, Japan, and Russia on many economic and development-related issues, and there have been disputes on arms control, regional policies, and the role of the United Nations and other international organizations.

Nonetheless, the points in common between these powers and the United States in terms of ideology and strategic interests outweigh the differences. A pattern of coordination and cooperation among the world’s major powers, institutionalized through the G-8 (the group of leading industrialized countries), has taken shape, and no great change in this pattern is likely in the next five to ten years. To be sure, some of the differences between the United States and the EU, Japan, Russia, and others will deepen, and Washington will at times face coordinated French, German, and Russian opposition, as it did during the war in Iraq. But no lasting united front aimed at confronting Washington is likely to emerge.

Meanwhile, many developing countries now boast higher growth rates than those found in the industrialized world, and they have enhanced their role in global affairs by strengthening themselves and coordinating their stances on major international issues. Rich countries, however — especially the Unite