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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 nybooks
Volume 52, Number 18 · November 17, 2005

Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to
the East
by Clyde Prestowitz

Basic Books, 321 pp., $26.95
China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and
the World
by Ted C. Fishman

Scribner, 342 pp., $26.00
1.

The “rise” of China has suddenly become the all-absorbing topic for
those professionally concerned with the future of the planet. Will the
twenty-first century be the Chinese century, and, if so, in what sense?
Will China’s rise be peaceful or violent? And how will this affect the
United States, the current “hyperpower”? In fact, China has been
“rising” for some time (after several hundred years of “fall”), but for
many years its claim to notice was obscured by more exciting events.
Attention in the 1990s concentrated on the fall of Soviet communism,
“globalization,” the spread of democracy, and the high-tech revolution.
These developments, which left America as the world’s sole economic and
political superpower, seemed to belie Paul Kennedy’s prediction in 1987
of relative US decline and “more of a multipolar system.”[1]

The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, together with the
concurrent collapse of the high-tech bubble, exposed America’s
fragility, but this was masked by the hyperactivity of the Bush
administration. The “war on terror” planted American armies in
Afghanistan and Iraq; the Clinton surpluses were succeeded by the Bush
deficits to shore up the economy and finance the military operations.
However, as the Iraq escapade foundered and the deficits ballooned, the
sense of relative decline reasserted itself. Unlike in 1987, there was
now a clear candidate for the succession: China. This was especially so
as the US economy became dependent on China’s bankrolling its huge
trade
deficit. The dream of an “American century” receded, to be replaced by
the nightmare of a “Chinese century.”

Focus on China is overdue. For the last quarter of a century its
economy
has been growing by over 9 percent a year, increasing eightfold.
However, it is not just this long-sustained hyper-growth rate that
amazes and alarms the observer. It is the size of the economy which is
growing. China’s population is officially estimated at 1.3 billion, but
is probably larger—one fifth of all the people in the world. This makes
its rise much more important than that, say, of Japan in the 1960s.
From
the economic point of view its cheap labor is much more abundant, so
its
cost advantage will not quickly be eliminated. The size of an economy
obviously matters, too, in measuring power. The Chinese economy, in
terms of the purchasing power of the Chinese people, is about two
thirds
the size of the US economy.[2] If it continues to grow at 9 percent a
year, it will overtake the US by 2041. Lee Kwan Yu of Singapore
believes
that the rise of China will shift the balance of power back to the East
for the first time since Portuguese caravels arrived there in the
sixteenth century.

China’s growth, simply because of its size, is bound to create problems
both for itself and others. From the Chinese leadership’s point of
view,
the main problem is how to maintain social cohesion amid the vast
socio-economic upheavals going on. Apart from the environmental
degradation and rampant corruption, China’s pell-mell, and largely
uncontrolled, economic growth is disturbing its domestic stability in a
profound way: there is a huge floating population without settled jobs
or abodes, and a development and income gap between the coastal and
inland areas which is as big as between the United States and North
Africa. According to one estimate, 30 percent of China’s urban
workforce, or 200 million people, is currently unemployed or
underemployed. The livelihood of another 100 million agricultural
workers is threatened as World Trade Organization rules increase
China’s
dependence on foreign food supplies. The specter of chaos frightens the
rulers in Beijing.

In international relations, the issue is whether China’s impact on the
world will be peaceful or violent. The debate here follows disciplinary
lines. “Those who focus on economics tend to see partnership,
cooperation and reasons for optimism despite ten-sions, while security
experts are more pessimistic and anticipate strategic conflict as the
likely future for two political systems that are so different,” writes
one commentator.[3] Both views can claim some evidence in their favor.
On the one hand, the concessions China made to foreign investors and
corporations in order to gain entry to the WTO show a readiness to play
by the established rules of the game. It has embarked on a “charm
offensive” premised on its “peaceful rise.” On the other hand, its
voracious appetite for oil and raw materials opens up a familiar
geopolitical struggle for control of their supply. Its bid for Unocal,
the ninth-largest oil company in the United States, had to be withdrawn
in the face of congressional opposition. As the only country likely to
counterbalance the economic and political weight of the United States,
China is being wooed by those who want insurance against American
domination; in turn it plays host to such unsavory characters as Robert
Mugabe, president of Zimbabwe, and Islam Karimov, the brutal president
of Uzbekistan. The slogan of the “peaceful rise” is challenged by
Chinese nationalists in the Foreign Office and military establishment
and their affiliated scholars, who argue that it encourages Taiwan to
bid for independence.

However, the theory that economic relations are the peaceful form of
international relations, and geopolitics is the warlike form, is much
too simple. The growth of China’s exporting power—in ten years its
exports to the US have risen from $35 billion to $200 billion a
year—has
already produced a “bra war” with Europe and tensions over currency
with
the US. (The recent 2.1 percent revaluation of the renminbi has not
quelled American accusations that China is deliberately undervaluing
its
currency to gain export advantage.) Moreover, economics and politics
cannot be so easily separated. China is both an engine of globalization
and a rising military power, a “Wal-Mart with an army.” The US worries
that the expansion of China’s economic presence will be accompanied by
the expansion of its military presence. Changes in the international
distribution of global wealth, even if peacefully achieved, are bound
to
have implications for the distribution of global power. If China rises
economically, America falls politically. The historically minded recall
the years of Anglo-German trade rivalry which preceded World War I.

Concern about China’s impact on the world is heavily influenced by the
nature of its regime. India, which has recently been growing as fast as
China, and which will soon have even more people, hardly fills the West
with the same foreboding, because it is a democracy, and, as we are
continually told, democracies “never go to war with each other.”

The success of the Chinese Communist Party in retaining political
control over China has dimmed the sense of Western triumphalism induced
by the collapse of the Soviet empire. Twentieth-century communism,
unlike nineteenth-century Marxism, promised economic development at the
price of political freedom— “electrification plus the Soviets” in
Lenin’s telling phrase. Wherever it triumphed, a single-party state was
established, and the economy was collectivized and centrally planned.
When the Communist economy failed, the Communist system was dismantled—
completely in Russia and Eastern Europe. In China, the Communist
Party’s
paramount leader Deng Xiaoping adopted a different strategy. He
realized
that in order to save the Communist dictatorship, he had to create an
economic system that worked. From 1978 onward, he started
decollectivizing the economy. In Russia, Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed
Communist Party rule in a failed effort to create a “humane” communism;
in China Deng saved Communist rule by embracing capitalism.

So far his formula has worked brilliantly. Not only have tens of
millions enriched themselves, as Deng told them to do, but absolute
poverty, defined as living on $1 a day or less, has fallen from 64
percent to 17 percent of the population. In politics, information is
controlled, dissent is ruthlessly suppressed, and continuity with the
takeover of 1949 is asserted. The motto is: “We will give you freedom
to
make money, but politics is off limits.” Mao Zedong, exposed by Jung
Chang and Jon Halliday in Mao: The Unknown Story as brutally and
cynically responsible for the death of millions, remains China’s
leading
icon. His giant portrait dominates Tiananmen Square; his face still
appears on yuan notes. He has even been rebranded to serve business
needs as a kind of Chinese Colonel Sanders, advertising food products
outside the restaurants in Hunan, his home province. There has been no
official repudiation of Mao’s legacy, even one like the limited
denunciation of Stalinism which Khrushchev undertook in 1956.

A Westerner will doubt that this duet of Party dictatorship and
economic
freedom can continue. Although Party monopoly over the public sphere is
maintained, control over the budget has been largely decentralized to
provincial and municipal levels. Optimists say that democracy will come
incrementally, starting with provincial elections, as the middle class
grows. Fiscal devolution could crack the monolith. Pessimists argue
that
the loss of control accompanying precipitous economic growth and the
decline in state revenues could set off either a new bout of
“warlordism” or force a paranoid regime into a new bout of political
repression that will make Tiananmen Square seem like a vicar’s tea
party. Whatever choices may be allowed in provincial elections, no new
party will be allowed to present its case. Had China’s growth been
slower, its political prospects might be more benign.
2.

For instant expertise on China all that is required is “a rush of
statistics, an occasional nod to history, a Confucian aphorism or two
and, hey presto, we can all grasp the vast meaning of the Middle
Kingdom’s re-emergence as a global power.”[4] This is certainly the
impression conveyed by Clyde Prestowitz, a former trade official in the
Reagan administration. Though the title of his book, Three Billion New
Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East, suggests
a
focus on Asia, it is really a “wake-up call” to America. His thesis,
chattily if not wittily expressed, is that the virtually endless supply
of labor in China and India, combined with the negation of time and
distance by the Internet and global air delivery, portend the ruin of
American manufacturing and a long-term decline in American living
standards. Already America is living beyond its means.

In essence, Prestowitz tells the familiar tale of Western capital
investing abroad to relieve squeezed margins at home. Outsourcing,
contracting, and eventually offshoring were ways to reduce American
corporate costs and increase sales in face of Japanese competition and
the pressure of consumerism. Outsourcing begat offshore manufacturing.
In the 1980s Motorola, Intel, and Texas Instruments began to transfer
the labor-intensive side of their manufacturing to Malaysia, Singapore,
and Taiwan. Sears Roebuck contracted with textile factories in Japan to
get the best deals for their customers. East Asia became a buying
center
for US retailers and an assembly line for US manufacturers.

China, Prestowitz writes, was interesting for two reasons: “endless
cheap labor to produce low-cost products for export, [and]…the
potential to become the world’s largest market.” Retailers and
manufacturers switched to China because its prices were cheaper.
Building and equipping factories cost less, and low-cost labor can be
substituted for machinery. Today China produces two thirds of the
world’s photocopiers, shoes, toys, and microwave ovens, half of its DVD
players, digital cameras, cement, and textiles, 40 percent of its
socks,
one third of its DVD-ROM drives and desktop computers, a fourth of its
mobile telephones, TV sets, steel, car stereos, and so on. It exports
30
percent of the world’s electronic goods. In Prestowitz’s fevered
imagination the United States is the Dr. Frankenstein who raised the
monster destined to devour it.

India started too late to challenge China in manufacturing, but
software, IT services, and medicine were virgin territory. India’s key
asset was a huge pool of inexpensive but highly trained, talented,
English-speaking workers, many of them educated to a high level abroad.
In 1984, Rajiv Gandhi decided that India should develop a software
export industry; coincidentally, Texas Instruments began satellite data
link services from Bangalore, preparing the way for on-line access to
global clients. With the development of the Internet, and later
broadband, in the 1990s, the proportion of software work “offshored” to
India increased dramatically. General Electric realized that the
operations of its call centers and much office work could be
transferred
to India at a fraction of the cost elsewhere. Airlines could offset
rising fuel costs by offshoring ticket bookings and repairs.

Prestowitz describes how in Wipo Spectramind, a twenty-four-hour call
service outside Delhi, “accent neutralization” is taught to give
callers
the feeling that their calls are being answered in Kansas City. The
collapse of the high-tech bubble in 2001 provided further cost-cutting
incentives. “Medical tourism” flourishes as Indian private hospitals
provide hip replacements and heart and eye surgery at a fraction of
Western cost. (The Apollo Hospital in Chennai—Madras of old—does heart
surgery for $4,000 as against $30,000 in the US.)

The US government helped Asia’s rise by embracing a laissez-faire
ideology and floating the dollar. As a White House economic adviser
quipped: “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference? They’re
all chips.” Prestowitz claims that, entranced by market fundamentalism,
American policymakers misunderstood the sources of American innovation.
US technological leadership was built not on market forces, but on an
unnatural collaboration between defense and government in a “military
industrial complex,” the product of two world wars. For example, IBM
grew on the basis of government grants for the B-52 guidance system.
The
shift to laissez-faire in the 1980s, followed by the end of the cold
war, dissolved this “ecosystem of interrelated companies, universities,
government institutions, bankers, and, yes, lawyers.” After 1973
Americans stopped worrying about international trade, because they
could
print as many dollars as they wanted to pay for imports. “We handed
China the money they are using to try to buy Unocal,” said Prestowitz
in
a recent interview. Prestowitz’s point is that “nobody is taking an
interest in the health of the long-term economic structure of the
country because America’s ideology says it is wrong to do so.”

So what is to be done? Prestowitz says that the United States must
abandon laissez-faire. It must renounce its crazy ambition to flood the
world with dollars and instead develop a more limited dollar sphere
consisting of the North American Free Trade area plus its trade with
Japan. “For the United States, this deal would marry Japan’s surpluses
with US deficits and create a dollar zone in trade balance with the
rest
of the world. It would also serve to keep Japan in the US orbit and
prevent it from slipping into China’s.” Domestically, the US must
restore fiscal discipline by cutting defense spending and raising taxes
on consumption. It needs an energy policy which makes it independent of
Middle East oil (“Just applying the mileage regulations to SUVs would
significantly reduce US oil dependence”). It needs to upgrade its
physical infrastructure, promote manufacturing “ecosystems” like
Silicon
Valley, reform Social Security to encourage labor flexibility, and
boost
educational performance by restoring classroom discipline and fully
funding students studying science and engineering. In short, it needs
an
active “competition” policy. Prestowitz rejects the free trade model of
globalization as harmful to US interests. He is a modern mercantilist:
trade freely with your friends, and strategically with everyone else.
In
a world of sovereign states, this is not a bad rule.

Ted Fishman, a journalist and former commodities trader, covers much of
the same ground in China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower
Challenges America and the World. There is the same touristic flavor: a
trip down the Huangpu River in Shanghai reveals the garish skyscrapers
and low nightlife of the new moneyed metropolis, where “nerdy Western
engineers can find girls so hot their friends at home would laugh.” The
main difference is that Fishman emphasizes the indigenous sources of
China’s rise. Without Deng’s decision to “open up” China, American CEOs
could not have solved their problems by relocating production to it.

Readers will learn about the working of the hukou, or passbook,
sys-tem,
by which Mao Zedong kept rural labor on the land and out of the cities;
about the origins of Deng Xiaoping’s “Household Responsibility System”
of 1980, which revolutionized agricultural productivity by replacing
collective farms with a system of family plots; about how the “township
and village enterprises” (TVEs) grew up to fill the ideologically gray
area between public and private enterprise; about the extensive
migration from countryside to towns, where the private economy was born
“with a wink and a nod from the central government”; and about
Shenzhen,
China’s first Special Economic Zone, grown from a marshy fishing
village
to a city of ten million in twenty-five years. China, writes Fishman,
“is an infinite jumble of hybrid businesses” that “conflate the
sectors,
often in impossibly complex, opaque ways.” Almost all business “is
conducted by words, handshakes, and occasionally by written but
extralegal contracts.”

Fishman tells of the orgy of city-building; of the forced demolitions
and evictions to make way for new buildings and hydroelectric projects;
of female workers exploited in textile and electronic factories who
dream of returning to their villages; of the encroaching deserts; of
pollution so intense that the “Asian Brown Cloud” wafts over to the
Pacific coast of the US; of China’s great road- and railway-building
program; of the spread of HIV, the abortion of unwanted girls, and much
else. But his central theme is the same as Prestowitz’s: countless US
businesses are being hammered by the low “China price,” which includes
counterfeiting and piracy. Jobs for many more millions of US workers
will disappear. Nothing, he believes, will stop the Chinese juggernaut,
for China is already building “the critical masses of companies that
catalyze the creative ferment that leads to rapid innovation.” Fishman
foresees US– Chinese rivalry growing: “it is a slow power game, but it
is afoot.”

Prestowitz’s and Fishman’s books are about the impact of China on the
economy of the West. But what about the West’s impact on China? To what
extent are Chinese society and politics being transformed by China’s
integration into the global economy, and what might this tell us about
the future of the relationship between West and East? These topics will
be discussed in a second article.

—This is the first of two articles.
Notes

[1] Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (Random House,
1987), p. 534.

[2] Output data in national currencies must be converted to a common
currency to compare the size of economies. If the conversion is done at
market exchange rates (MERs), the Chinese economy is only the eighth
largest in the world, one tenth the size of the US economy, and not
likely to overtake it until between 2040 and 2050. However, data
converted according to exchange rates are not good measures of the
relative size of economies because they take into account only
internationally traded goods and services and are distorted by
short-term currency fluctuations. That is why economists are
increasingly using purchasing power parity (PPP) converters, which
measure the relative purchasing power of different countries’
currencies
with regard to the same “basket” of goods in each one. This can be a
much higher GDP for a developing country. On a PPP basis China’s GDP in
2006 will be $8,877 billion; on an MER basis $2,172 billion.

[3] Steve Lohr, “Who’s Afraid of China Inc.?” The New York Times, July
24, 2005.

[4] Philip Stephens, Financial Times, July 1, 2005.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18437

Posted at 9:35 PM · Comments (0)

The confusion surrounding the weekend plane crash in Nigeria - when officials at first confidently said that many people had survived, before later back-tracking - shows how difficult it is to get accurate information in Africa’s most populous country, writes the BBC’s former Nigeria correspondent Anna Borzello.
It may seem astonishing to anyone who hasn’t visited Nigeria that a plane on a main commercial route can disappear, and for nearly a day no-one knows where it has gone.

How can an aircraft come down in a crowded part of the country without news of the crash spreading to the cities within half an hour?

How can officials confidently tell reporters there are survivors, when everyone is dead?

Reading the report of the crash on the BBC News website, all the frustration I used to feel trying to get to the bottom of stories in Nigeria came flooding back.

I was reminded of the time, about a year ago, when onlookers crowded onto a Lagos beach, convinced a plane had just plunged into the water killing all on board.

There were eye-witnesses, the story ran on CNN, and a police helicopter whirred overhead.

But the aviation authority said it had no record of a flight plan, and the wreckage was never found.

After a few days, the story was simply forgotten.

Fractured picture

So why is it so hard to get information in Nigeria?

Part of the reason is that the country is hugely complex and has many different centres of power.

In Uganda, which is a far smaller and more centralised society, information always seems to flow towards one point.

But in Nigeria it ends up fracturing, trickling down byways and getting lost in tiny tributaries.
No one person ever seems to be in overall control, or to have the whole picture.

Journalists have to piece everything together from multiple sources but even tracking down those sources is a struggle.

Some press officers are happy to talk, others never turn on their phones. Few seem to believe that Nigerians have a right to information.

Media spin

Even when there is someone willing to give an account of events, it is often to push their own agenda.

I was told before I left for Lagos that it would be a difficult place to report
Complicated stories become even more tangled as all the parties try to spin events to their advantage.

The oil-rich Delta region is particularly difficult, because so much money is at stake.

I travelled to a village with two colleagues last year to cover the alleged fatal shooting of eight civilians by soldiers guarding an oil installation.

We talked to grieving relatives and local officials, saw the fresh earth of new graves and were briefly detained by the military.

Our stories prompted a two-month investigation by the Anglo-Dutch oil company Shell, which concluded that there had been no killings.

And yet at the end of all this, not everything we were told added up. My colleagues and I are still not certain how many - or if any - people died.

Poor communications

To add to this media manipulation, there is also the most basic impediment to accurate reporting - an inadequate infrastructure.

Mobile phones work but they can be erratic and they have limited range outside urban areas.

The country is vast, but road blocks slow down movement and travel is inadvisable after dark.

If something happens in a rural area it can take several days for the news to reach the main city, Lagos.

It arrives in a distorted Chinese whisper form and requires another (often fruitless) day’s efforts to confirm it.

And, as my trip to the Delta village demonstrated, on-the-site reporting doesn’t always make the story clearer.

Nigeria is so vast, so multi-layered and varied, so utterly complex and so totally eventful, that there is never enough time to tackle more than a fraction of stories.

I was told before I left for Lagos that it would be a difficult place to report.

What I had not anticipated was how hard it would be to ever know exactly what was going on.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/world/africa/4372458.stm

Published: 2005/10/24 16:44:17 GMT

© BBC MMV

Posted at 8:47 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH and NORIMITSU ONISHI
Published: October 31, 2005

SHANGHAI, Oct. 26 - At a call center in Dalian, in northeast China, young workers speaking flawless Japanese answer customer service calls for a Japanese insurance company. In western Japan, a new commercial Chinatown is rising in Kobe City’s rebuilt port area.

Rather than the gaudy restaurants of the old Chinatown, the new one contains nondescript office buildings leased to Chinese companies focusing on everything from biotechnology to that most traditional form of Japanese attire, the kimono.

At a time of rising political tensions, heightened by a growing nationalism, China and Japan are more intertwined economically than they have ever been. In their breadth and intensity, the ties have begun to surpass those between the United States and Japan, whose economic relationship has often been called the most important in the world.

The ties offer a counterpoint to rapidly deteriorating diplomatic relations, which reached another low point on Oct. 17 when Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan visited the Yasukuni Shrine, the nationalist memorial to Japan’s war dead, and China immediately called off high-level talks.

Tensions will probably keep rising with Asia’s transformation: China, which had lost its historical role as the region’s economic and political leader to Japan in the last century and a half, is hungry to reclaim it.

“In the last few years, things have grown black and white between us,” said Toshio Hori, general manager of the Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank branch in Shanghai, China’s biggest city and an increasingly vital commercial artery to Japan. “On the political and diplomatic side, things are pessimistic, but on the economic side, the relationship is growing stronger and stronger.”

The possibility that ill will could lead to conflict is lessened by the reality that both countries would have a lot to lose:

¶Sharply increased trade with China has lifted the Japanese economy out of a lost decade of feeble growth and recurring recession, while cheap imports from China have driven costs down significantly for Japan’s long-suffering consumers.

¶More than 150,000 Chinese students attend Japanese universities and language schools, and a million Chinese people work in Japanese companies.

¶Shanghai, officially home to 20,000 Japanese, may actually house as many as 100,000, which would make it the largest overseas Japanese community.

¶Japanese investment totaling $31.5 billion is enabling China to learn the formidable industrial skills of its neighbor.

China’s ascension has been so fast that Japan must now contemplate a true rivalry, with the Chinese economy not only outstripping the Japanese in size, but perhaps matching it in sophistication before long.

The uncertain new relationship between the countries, one rich in promise and in lingering suspicions, is on full view today in this city.

Sixty-three years after Japanese troops stormed ashore, Shanghai is dotted with neighborhoods of Japanese residents. Japanese-language magazines cater to the wealthy Asian expatriates with everything from restaurant reviews to sex club listings, and the membership directory of the Japanese chamber of commerce reads like a who’s who of the Japanese corporate world.

The comfortable veneer of life overseas was suddenly stripped away in April, however, when a large protest march against visits by Mr. Koizumi to the Yasukuni Shrine, which honors Japanese forces responsible for atrocities throughout Asia, degenerated into a riot. Crowds pelted the Japanese Consulate with stones.

Mr. Koizumi’s landslide victory in the general elections in September suggests that the official relationship between China and Japan will remain rocky. However, a breakthrough could occur after Mr. Koizumi retires next year.

Mr. Hori of Tokyo-Mitsubishi Bank, who is also chairman of the Japanese chamber of commerce in Shanghai, said his worst fear was another protest, perhaps even nationwide. Still, he added, “it is meaningless to think Japanese companies would withdraw and go somewhere else, like Vietnam.”

“The relationship is too big for that already,” he said.

Among students at the Dalian University of Technology, many of whom will be vying for jobs at Japanese companies, there is a strong sense of pragmatism. “History problems are history problems, but I think you have to be realistic,” said Zhang Shuai, a 22-year-old engineering student.

Here and there, the same kind of pragmatism can be found in Japan, in sharp contrast to the anxious, sometimes hysterical public discussion of a rising China. Like the rest of the heavily industrialized Kansai region of Japan, Kobe, the port city that was devastated by an earthquake 10 years ago, has been economically depressed for years.

Sensing opportunity in China’s rise, the city government has invested heavily in attracting Chinese businesses and promoting trade with China, especially the Shanghai region.

One businessman, Chen Jianjun, 43, is the founder of a biotechnology consulting firm, Shanghai Rundo Biotech Japan, in Kobe. After completing a graduate degree in Japan, Mr. Chen worked at Nestlé before going out on his own. Now he advises Japanese pharmaceutical companies on conducting clinical trials and marketing in China, giving him a broad perspective on the countries’ problems. “China and Japan are close to each other but have a distant relationship,” he said. “Each does not understand the other well.”

That plaint is echoed by businesspeople from each country, pragmatists who basically want to make money. In Japan, business tends to support Mr. Koizumi for leading domestic economic change, but cringes at his government’s antagonistic policy toward China. Businesspeople fear that after Mr. Koizumi retires next year, an even more nationalistic leader may replace him.

The gap in understanding extends to schools and universities. Even though more Chinese students are choosing Japanese universities over American ones, they are often surprised that their Asian neighbors are in many ways more foreign than the Americans.

“I think Chinese people understand American people better,” said Gao Ruihong, 35, a Chinese student at Kobe University. “People hold parties at home and invite their friends and neighbors in China or the United States. I came to Japan nine years ago, but I have seldom been invited to friends’ homes.”

But like most of her classmates, Ms. Gao was optimistic. “The relationship between Japan and China will become closer in the future,” she said, “and I’d like to act as a bridge between the two countries.”

For many in Shanghai’s large Japanese community, the best way to build a better future between the countries appears to be in taking advantage of huge opportunities for prosperity today.

“We don’t know what will happen to this market in the future, but we know that our development will depend on what happens here to a large extent,” said Satoshi Tachikake, director of operations for Mazda in Shanghai. Japanese car companies arrived late in China compared with their European and American rivals, but today no one is investing more heavily in China than Japan.

Shanghai’s official Japanese school has 2,214 students, a tenfold increase from a decade ago, and is expanding faster than ever. “We have zero space now,” said the principal of the school, Kazuyuki Taichi, smiling as he displayed the model of a new school that is near completion.

Mr. Taichi, who came to Shanghai just before the April protests, expressed surprise at what he found on arriving in China. “I expected to see another transition from Communism,” he said, not a booming city as big as Tokyo. “It’s difficult to make Japanese, even your own brothers and sisters, understand that Japan’s development depends on China and China’s development depends on Japan. They are under the influence of the media back home, which is always blasting away at China.”

Eriko Yamamoto, 26, believes that Japan can reinvigorate itself by building closer ties to China. After quitting her full-time job with Hitachi in Tokyo, she came to Shanghai recently to study at the China Europe International Business School.

“Initially I thought I should go to China and try things out, and if things didn’t work here I could always go home,” Ms. Yamamoto said. “But here I discovered if you have a bit of money you can do just about anything. In Japan, you don’t have that feeling. There is a sense of so many rules.”

Posted at 1:48 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: October 28, 2005

SHANGHAI, Oct. 26 - When Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor who is recognized as one of the United States’ top computer scientists, was approached by Qinghua University in Beijing last year to lead an advanced computer studies program, he did not hesitate.

It did not matter that he would be leaving one of America’s top universities for one little known outside China. Or that after his birth in Shanghai, he was raised in Taiwan and spent his entire academic career in the United States. He felt he could contribute to his fast-rising homeland.
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Graphic China’s Boom in Higher Education
China’s Boom in Higher Education

“Patriotism does have something to do with it, because I just cannot imagine going anywhere else, even if the conditions were equal,” said Dr. Yao, who is 58.

China wants to transform its top universities into the world’s best within a decade, and it is spending billions of dollars to woo big-name scholars like Dr. Yao and build first-class research laboratories. The effort is China’s latest bid to raise its profile as a great power.

China has already pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees fivefold in 10 years.

“First-class universities increasingly reflect a nation’s overall power,” Wu Bangguo, China’s secondranking leader, said recently in a speech here marking the 100th anniversary of Fudan, the country’s first modern university.

The model is simple: recruit top foreign-trained Chinese and Chinese-American specialists, set them up in well-equipped labs, surround them with the brightest students and give them tremendous leeway. In a minority of cases, they receive American-style pay; in others, they are lured by the cost of living, generous housing and the laboratories. How many have come is unclear.

China is focusing on science and technology, areas that reflect the country’s development needs but also reflect the preferences of an authoritarian system that restricts speech. The liberal arts often involve critical thinking about politics, economics and history, and China’s government, which strictly limits public debate, has placed relatively little emphasis on achieving international status in those subjects.

In fact, Chinese say - most often euphemistically and indirectly - that those very restrictions on academic debate could hamper efforts to create world-class universities.

“Right now, I don’t think any university in China has an atmosphere comparable to the older Western universities - Harvard or Oxford - in terms of freedom of expression,” said Lin Jianhua, Beijing University’s executive vice president. “We are trying to give the students a better environment, but in order to do these things we need time. Not 10 years, but maybe one or two generations.”

Nonetheless, the new confidence about entering the world’s educational elite is heard among politicians and university administrators, students and professors.

“Maybe in 20 years M.I.T. will be studying Qinghua’s example,” says Rao Zihe, director of the Institute of Biophysics at Qinghua University, an institution renowned for its sciences and regarded by many as China’s finest university. “How long it will take to catch up can’t be predicted, but in some respects we are already better than the Harvards today.”

In only a generation, China has sharply increased the proportion of its college-age population in higher education, to roughly 20 percent now from 1.4 percent in 1978. In engineering alone, China is producing 442,000 new undergraduates a year, along with 48,000 graduates with masters’ degrees and 8,000 Ph.D’s.

But only Beijing University and a few other institutions have been internationally recognized as superior. Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then China’s leader, officially began the effort to transform Chinese universities, state financing for higher education has more than doubled, reaching $10.4 billion in 2003, the last year for which an official figure is available.

Xu Tian, a leading geneticist who was trained at Yale and still teaches there, runs a laboratory at Fudan University that performs innovative work on the transposition of genes. On Aug. 12 his breakthrough research was featured on the cover of the prestigious journal Cell, a first for a Chinese scientist.

Beijing University drew on the talents of Tian Gang, a leading mathematician from M.I.T., in setting up an international research center for advanced mathematics, among other high-level research centers. Officials at Beijing University estimate that as much as 40 percent of its faculty was trained overseas, most often in the United States.

The president of Yale University, Richard C. Levin, interviewed in Shanghai, where he was the featured guest at Fudan’s centennial celebration in late September, also had high praise for China’s students.

“China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and it is safe to say it has more than 20 percent of the world’s best students,” he said. “They have the raw talent.”

But Mr. Levin also noted that China’s low labor costs simplified the effort to upgrade. He said he had been astounded by the new laboratories at Jiaotong University in Shanghai, which he said could be built in China for $50 a square foot, compared with $500 a square foot at Yale.

Some critics say that the country is trying to achieve excellence in too many areas at once and that the plans of the 30 or so universities selected for heavy state investment duplicate efforts, sacrificing excellence. Even Mr. Levin tempered his enthusiasm with a warning that the “top schools have expanded much too fast and are diluting quality.”

In many cases, though, the toughest criticism comes from people who have worked in the system.

“It is important for different universities to have different qualities, just like a symphony,” said Yang Fujia, a nuclear physicist and former president of Fudan. “But all Chinese universities want to be comprehensive. Everybody wants to be the piano, having a medical school and lots of graduate students.”

Mr. Yang, who leads a small experimental university in Ningbo, also criticized the lack of autonomy given to many Chinese researchers.

“At Princeton one mathematician spent nine years without publishing a paper, and then solved a problem that had been around for 360 years,” Mr. Yang said, a reference to Andrew J. Wiles and his solution to Fermat’s last theorem in the early 1990’s. “No one minded that, because they appreciate the dedication to hard work there. We don’t have that spirit yet in China.”

Similarly, Ge Jianxiong, a distinguished historical geographer at Fudan, said Chinese culture often demands speedy results, which could undermine research. “In China projects are always short-term, say three years,” he said. “Then they want you to produce a book, a voluminous book. In real research you’ve got to give people the freedom to produce good results, and not just the results they want.”

Mr. Ge added that education suffered here because “it has always been regarded as a tool of politics.”

Dr. Yao said he had expected to concentrate on creating a world-class Ph.D. program but had found surprising weaknesses in undergraduate training and had decided to teach at that level. “You can’t just say I’ll only do the cutting-edge stuff,” he said. “You’ve got to teach the basics really well first.”

But the biggest weakness, many Chinese academics indicated, is the lack of academic freedom. Mr. Yang, the former president of Fudan University, warned that if the right atmosphere was not cultivated, great thinkers from overseas might come to China for a year or two, only to leave frustrated.

Gong Ke, a vice president of Qinghua University, said universities had “the duty to guarantee academic freedom.”

“We have professors who teach here, foreigners, who teach very differently from the Chinese government’s point of view,” he added. “Some of them really criticize the economic policy of China.”

Li Ao, a writer in Taiwan, visited Beijing University in September and gave a speech calling for greater academic freedom and independence from the government. The next day, after reportedly coming under heavy official pressure, he delivered a far tamer version elsewhere. .

The Chinese government also censors university online bulletin boards and discussion groups, and recently prevented students at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou from conversing freely with visiting elected officials from Hong Kong.

Students here are not encouraged to challenge authority or received wisdom. For some, that helps explain why China has never won a Nobel Prize. What is needed most now, some of China’s best scholars say, are bold, original thinkers.

“The greatest thing we’ve done in the last 20 years is lift 200 million people out of poverty,” said Dr. Xu. “What China has not realized yet, though, if it truly wants to go to the next level, is to understand that numbers are not enough.

“We need a new revolution to get us away from a culture that prizes becoming government officials. We must learn to reward real innovation, independent thought and genuine scholarly work.”

Posted at 1:46 PM · Comments (0)

A SHORT HISTORY OF MYTH
(Canongate £12; offer £10.80. 0870 1608080) www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

IN 1922, T. S. ELIOT DEPICTED THE spiritual disintegration of Western culture in The Waste Land. In the legend of the Holy Grail, inhabitants of the wasteland live inauthentic lives, blindly following social norms without the conviction that comes of deeper understanding.

How could people put down creative roots in the “stony rubbish” of modernity, when they are familiar only with “a heap of broken images” — isolated and unassimilated shards of the mythical wisdom of the past? As he confronted the sterility of his civilisation, Eliot’s narrator concluded: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Only if we piece together these broken insights and recognise their common core can we reclaim the wasteland in which we live.

In our rational society, we have lost touch with the mythical underpinning of our culture. Today “myth” often describes something that is not true. A politician accused of a peccadillo will say that it is a “myth”, that it never happened.

When we hear of gods walking the earth, of dead men striding out of tombs, or of seas parting to allow a favoured people to escape, we dismiss these stories as demonstrably false. In our historical writing, we are concerned above all with what actually happened but when people wrote about the past in the pre-modern period they were chiefly preoccupied with the significance of an event. A myth was an occurrence that, in some sense, had happened once, but which also happened all the time. Mythology pointed beyond history to what was timeless.

Mythology is not an early attempt at historical writing and its stories were never regarded as merely factual. In the pre-modern world, there were two recognised ways of arriving at truth, which the Greeks called mythos and logos. Both were considered essential and neither as inferior to the other. They were complementary modes of acquiring knowledge, each with its own distinct sphere of competence.

People used logos (“science; reason”) to function efficiently in the external world: this type of thinking was essential to the organisation of society or for the development of technology. Logos is pragmatic; it must correspond to objective facts. But it could not answer questions about the value of life nor mitigate the pain and sorrow that is an inescapable part of the human condition. That was the job of mythos. If a beloved friend died or if people witnessed an appalling natural disaster, they found that they did not simply want a rational explanation.

Instead they developed mythical narratives which, like poetry or music, brought comfort that could not be expressed in purely logical terms. They also gave voice to more elusive and mysterious aspects of life that have always been part of human experience. Like art, mythology was the product of the creative imagination; it transfigured our fragmented, tragic world and helped to glimpse new possibilities.

Mythology can be seen as an early form of psychology. The stories of gods or heroes descending into the underworld, threading through labyrinths and fighting with monsters brought to light the mysterious workings of the psyche and showed people how to deal with their turbulent inner world. When Freud and Jung began to formulate the quest for the soul, they instinctively turned to classical mythology to explain their insights.

A myth was not true because it was factual but because it was psychologically effective. If it forced people to change their minds and hearts, gave them hope, and compelled them to live more fully, it was valid, because it told us something important about how humanity worked.

A myth was a programme for action. The myth of the hero, which is remarkably similar in nearly all cultures, showed people what they must do to tap into their own heroic potential. The myth of Demeter and Persephone suggested that a disciplined confrontation with our mortality could lead to spiritual regeneration. A myth is a guide; it tells us what we must do to live more intensely. If we do not apply it to our own situation and make the myth a reality in our own lives, it will remain as incomprehensible as the rules of a board game, which often seem confusing and boring until we start to play. If we do not attempt to implement its directives, we cannot assess its truth.

Myth is therefore more than history. It could be understood only in the context of spiritual and psychological transformation. Before the modern period, there was no more conflict between mythology and reason than between reason and art. But during the 19th century, logos achieved such spectacular results in the West that mythos was discredited and reason regarded as the only respectable way of arriving at truth. Even religious people began to assume that the myths of their religion were historical and that their scriptures were literally true.

Our modern alienation from myth is unprecedented, because human beings have always been myth-makers. There is a moving, and even heroic, asceticism in the rejection of myth, but purely linear, logical and historical modes of thought have debarred us from the wisdom that enabled men and women to draw on the full resources of humanity. The most developed and ethically intelligent myths taught people that compassion and abandoning egotism were beneficial and helped them to cultivate a sense of the earth as sacred, instead of merely being a resource. These are attitudes that are sorely needed today. Tragically, because of our lack of mythical expertise, the myths that did emerge in the 20th century were narrowly racial, ethnic, and egotistic, exalting the self by demonising the other. We cannot counter bad myths by reason alone, because undiluted logos cannot deal with such deep-rooted, unexorcised fear and hatred. We cannot completely cancel out the rational bias of our education but we can acquire a more educated attitude to mythology.

Religion used to provide the context for some of the best mythological thinking, but in our time, painters, poets, dramatists and novelists rather than religious leaders have stepped into the vacuum and attempted to reacquaint us with the wisdom of the past. This new Myth series will continue that priestly mission.

Eliot’s poem was prophetic. Mythology — like religion — is an art form. In their attempt to find an antidote to the sterility and heartless cruelty of some aspects of modernity, writers have turned to mythological themes. Like a great myth, a poem, a novel or a play can teach us to see the world differently; show us how to look into our hearts and see our world from a perspective beyond our self-interest; and bring fresh insight to our lost and damaged world.

The Myths is a series published by Canongate Books, with 33 publishing houses, “in the most ambitious simultaneous worldwide publication undertaken”. In each book, a world class writer retells a myth. The first three — Karen Armstrong’s A Short History of Myth, Jeanette Winterson’s Weight and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad — are published next week.

Posted at 12:39 PM · Comments (0)

Friday, October 28, 2005

The Daily Cardinal
Howard French speaks at Vilas Hall Thursday about his experiences in Africa as a New York Times correspondent.
Howard French, Chin correspondent for Th New York Times, spok Thursday about hi tenure in Zaire, th Congo and Niger, and how the U.S government neglects the possibilit of African democracy. UW-Madison students and faculty ha the opportunity to learn more abou these geopolitical currents in Vila Hall.

His recent book, A Continent for the Taking: the Tragedy and Hope of Africa, substantiated much of the discussion.

French’s presentation advocated a renewed policy on U.S. involvement in economic and democratic development in Africa. He stated how U.S. media and public opinion tend to focus primarily on disaster, despair and hopelessness there.

French related how many democratic movements have sprung up in Africa since the end of European imperialism in the 1960s, particularly after the Cold War.

“The popular 1992 coup of Mali’s dictatorship is a great example of the hope for African citizens,” French said.

French outlined several ways in which the U.S. government could take a progressive stance toward Africa, one of which is supporting a modern health-care system.

“Africa has the largest problem with infectious diseases that are mostly curable,” he said. He pointed out that U.S. companies could benefit from private investment in disease prevention, while the positive impact would improve global perceptions of U.S. policies.

French asserted the majority of U.S. opinion holds that progress in Africa is hopeless, adding that Africa is seen as a distant, corrupt place that is not interwoven in American history.

“The reality is that a significant part of America was built upon African labor,” he said. “We have an obligation to help Africa build.”

Joyce Endeley, a professor at the University of Buea in Cameroon, who recently gave a speech for UW-Madison’s African Studies program, thanked French for his speech.

“It is truly an awakening of citizens of both countries,” she said.

Posted at 2:19 AM · Comments (0)

China clamps down on environmental monitoring group

By David Eimer in Beijing

Published: 28 October 2005

In a sign of China’s growing unease over the growing influence of environmental activists, police in Hangzhou in eastern China’s Zhejiang province have arrested a local man who attempted to set up his own environmental monitoring group.

Tan Kai, who is thought to have helped informally organise an organisation called Green Watch, was detained along with five others on 19 October after opening a bank account to collect funds for the group.

China’s leaders are worried about the role played by environmental activists in protests about the devastation wreaked on rivers and farmland by severe air and water pollution.

Outrage over polluting industry is now one of the major causes of rural unrest and the authorities fear a repeat of what happened in eastern Europe in the 1980s, when conservation groups were allowed to operate in relative freedom an! d swiftly progressed from campaigning for environmental protection to demanding wider political reform.

“We are surmising that they [the activist group] were detained because they are not established as an organisation, but were still trying to raise funds,” said Stacy Mosher, communications director of the New York branch of Human Rights in China.

“In China, you cannot legally fundraise until you are set up as an organisation, which requires a deposit of ¥30,000 (£2,100), an enormous sum for most Chinese.

“It’s a catch-22, because unless you have very deep pockets to begin with, you have no way of reaching out to local or foreign organisations who might want to contribute.”

Mr Tan is believed to have helped found Green Watch this summer after witnessing the successful protests mounted by villagers in Huaxi, near Dongyang city in Zhejiang, against chemical plants that had polluted their water supply, rendered their land unfit for raising rice and veget! ables and caused babies to be born dead or deformed.

In April, after unsuccessfully petitioning officials in both Beijing and Dongyang, the villagers mounted one of the most audacious challenges to the government’s authority in recent years.

They set up roadblocks into Huaxi and blocked access to the chemical plants, forcing them to shut down production. When more than a thousand police attempted to remove the roadblocks, a pitched battle ensued, in which 33 police were injured.

The protests forced Dongyang to re-locate the plants, as well as inspiring protests in nearby Xinchang in July, and highlighted the collusion between local authorities and the polluting industries in many such cases.

Ms Mosher said: “Local governments and the pollution-producing companies are connected with each other on a very large scale by different kinds of interests.”

Posted at 2:08 AM · Comments (0)

Sun Oct 30, 2005 2:23 PM GMT

ABUJA (Reuters) - Looters rushed to the site of a plane crash in Nigeria last week, removing cash and jewels from among body parts and smouldering wreckage, a Nigerian newspaper reported on Sunday quoting local police.

The aircraft, operated by Nigerian airline Bellview, crashed in a marsh in Ogun State on October 22 shortly after taking off from Lagos on its way to the capital Abuja. All 117 people on board were killed.

Officials initially deployed helicopters and cars full of emergency workers to a site 150 km (100 miles) further north in Oyo state, only to find nothing there. It took 15 hours for authorities to identify the correct location.

The Punch newspaper said that in the meantime, looters from nearby areas combed the wreckage, taking personal effects belonging to the victims. They searched frantically for foreign currency in the belief that people rich enough to travel by plane would routinely carry large amounts of cash on them.

“Some people even stripped some of the body parts, that was callous,” the newspaper quoted Ogun State police chief Tunji Alapinni as saying.

The majority of Nigeria’s 140 million people live in extreme poverty and a lack of job prospects and resources has fostered a high crime rate. Armed robbery, racketeering and money-making scams are common.

Posted at 2:06 AM · Comments (0)

Wed Oct 26, 2:54 PM ET

JAKARTA, Indonesia - As students bustled in and out of her Mandarin
language school, teacher Yue Xiaoyan said a desire to learn Chinese was
awakening in the world.

“More and more people are starting to realize that Chinese is a really,
really important language,” Yue said.

From Jakarta to Vancouver and on to New Delhi and Chicago, surging
interest in studying the Chinese language is just one gauge of the
greater magnetic pull that China exerts after two decades of galloping
economic growth. China is wielding more clout around the globe, shaping
up as a counterweight to the United States in fields as divergent as
diplomacy, trade and language.

China’s negotiators are chalking up numerous free-trade accords with
other countries, yanking the momentum from the United States, while
Chinese leaders travel the globe to red-carpet welcomes from trading
partners pulled by China’s growth locomotive.

Economic vitality is at the heart of China’s ascendancy, adding luster
to a nation that was stagnant and impoverished only a generation ago.
Now, China launches men into space, fields a modern military, finances
some of the world’s daring architecture and jostles for influence in
the
international market of ideas.

It still doesn’t come close to challenging the United States in “soft
power,” that combination of cultural and economic vibrancy, marketing
pizzazz, diplomatic heft and idealistic vision that made the last
century one of American pre-eminence around the globe. But in odd and
disparate corners, from the NBA courts, where Yao Ming dribbles and
other players sport Chinese tattoos, to the Eiffel Tower illuminated in
red to honor the Chinese New Year, the Middle Kingdom’s influence is
growing.

China’s rise coincides with a decline in favorable public opinion
toward
the United States, particularly in Asia, that’s seemed stark since the
2001 terrorist attacks and the American invasion of Iraq two years
later.

“There is a lot of discontent about U.S. dominance in the Asia-Pacific
region and around the globe. In some areas, China is seen as a
balancing
force and a nonthreatening one,” said Anne-Marie Brady, a China expert
at New Zealand’s Canterbury University. “Any power that can stand up to
the United States gets sympathy from many countries.”

China isn’t seeking a confrontation with the United States, but it’s
jousting for influence in some of the far corners of the world. It’s
also leveraging its economic growth to kindle global enthusiasm for
studying the standard Chinese dialect, which the majority of Chinese
speak.

A subsidiary of the Education Ministry aims to set up 100 Chinese
language institutes around the world, which it calls Confucius
Institutes, and staff them with native Chinese teachers. The goal is to
quadruple the number of foreigners studying Chinese to 100 million by
2010. So far it’s set up 32 institutes in 23 countries.

While promotion of the standard Chinese dialect underscores the
sophistication of China’s public diplomacy, in other areas the nation’s
“soft power” lags. It’s failed to leverage the panda bear, the Great
Wall or anything else into a powerful global symbol. China has few
companies, cultural icons, movies or brand names with the ubiquity of
MTV, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola or Microsoft.

East Asia neighbors South Korea and Japan outpace China at creating
global companies and pop music stars. Chinese acupuncture and kung fu
have been around for decades without taking off in the West as Japanese
sushi, karaoke and “lean management” techniques have in recent years.

In Europe, where store shelves sag with Chinese-made imports, average
people are unlikely to be able to name any famous Chinese cultural
figures, with the exception of Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong actor and
director.

“Hardly anybody can name a Chinese writer,” said Steve Tsang, a China
scholar at St. Antony’s College, part of England’s Oxford University.

China’s diplomacy has proved effective, even strikingly successful, in
other arenas. As U.S. trade talks limp, China is in free-trade
negotiations with Australia, South Korea, Pakistan and a handful of
other nations. Late last year, it struck a free-trade agreement with
Thailand, Malaysia and eight other Southeast Asian nations.

By boosting trade and avoiding sensitive issues, Beijing has cast
itself
as a benign alternative to Washington. Even energy-rich Canada and
Australia, longtime U.S. allies, increasingly are turning to China.

In a move that shut out the United States in a major East Asian forum
for the first time, China endorsed the idea of holding an East Asia
Summit, which will be attended by the 10 member countries of the
Association of Southeast Asian Nations plus China, Japan, South Korea,
India, Australia and New Zealand. The first meeting is in Malaysia in
December.

In another achievement, China now mounts an alternative to the annual
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. China’s Boao Forum, which
draws a thousand business and political figures each year, has become a
major event in Asia to network and discuss the region’s future.

Many foreigners come because they envy China’s economic success, but
few
leave inspired by its ideals.

“What is appealing about China to Southeast Asia is not the cultural or
political systems. It’s mainly economic,” said Sheng Lijun, a China
expert at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore.
“People
have the impression that they are successful now because they are
adopting the Western system: capitalism.”

Only moving away from strict one-party control might broaden China’s
“soft power” and deepen its allure to foreigners, perhaps even drawing
prominent foreigners to send their sons and daughters there for study
instead of Japan or the West.

“If you do not have a good political system at home, you cannot attract
support from your neighbors,” said Yan Xuetong, a political scientist
at
Beijing’s Tsinghua University. “If China wants to increase its soft
power, it must have political reform.”

In some ways, China’s global clout is climbing just as foreign
influences pour through its own borders. Many urban Chinese hunger for
foreign films and music and chafe at the tight lid on the Internet.

“All the bands I see coming to Beijing are Taiwan bands or bands from
Hong Kong,” said Brady, the New Zealand scholar. “I think the Chinese
are being very much affected by globalization.

“Their great fear is cultural invasion and invasion of political views
that are different.”

Copyright © 2005 KnightRidder.com

Posted at 12:41 AM · Comments (0)

This book will change your view of Japan’s kamizake pilots utterly, and has a great deal to say about nationalism and the manipulation of public opinion in general. Fantastic scholarship and well-written. Highly recommended.

Posted at 12:04 AM · Comments (0)

This is an audio file from the radion program, The World:

http://www.theworld.org/

Posted at 10:54 PM · Comments (0)

By Howard W. French The New York Times
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2005

SHANGHAI When Andrew Chi-chih Yao, a Princeton professor who is recognized as one of the United States’s top computer scientists, was approached by Tsinghua University in Beijing last year to lead an advanced computer studies program, he did not hesitate.
Why would a leading scientist at one of America’s top universities leave a prestigious program for a university that is little known outside of China? One reason is loyalty to the country where he was born, although he spent his academic career in the United States and was raised in Taiwan.
“Patriotism does have something to do with it, because I just cannot imagine going anywhere else, even if the conditions were equal,” he said.
China wants to transform its top universities into the world’s best within a decade, and is spending billions of dollars to woo big-name scholars like Yao and to build first-class research laboratories. The effort is China’s latest bid to raise its profile as a great power.
China has already pulled off one of the most remarkable expansions of education in modern times, increasing the number of undergraduates and people who hold doctoral degrees fivefold in 10 years.
“First-class universities increasingly reflect a nation’s overall power,” Wu Bangguo, China’s second-ranking leader, said recently in a speech here marking the 100th anniversary of Fudan University, the country’s first modern post-secondary institution.
China’s model is simple: recruit top foreign-trained Chinese and overseas-born ethnic Chinese to well-equipped labs, surround them with the brightest students and give them tremendous leeway.
China is focusing on science and technology, areas that reflect the country’s development needs, but also reflect the preferences of an authoritarian system that restricts free speech. The liberal arts often involve critical thinking about politics, economics and history. The government has placed relatively little emphasis on achieving world-class status in these subjects. Yet, many Chinese say - most often indirectly - that the limits on academic debate could hamper efforts to create world-class universities.
“Right now, I don’t think any university in China has an atmosphere comparable to the older Western universities - Harvard or Oxford - in terms of freedom of expression,” said Lin Jianhua, the executive vice president of Peking University. “We are trying to give the students a better environment, but in order to do these things we need time. Not 10 years, but maybe one or two generations.”
Nonetheless, the new confidence about entering the world’s educational elite is heard among politicians and university administrators, students and professors. Young Chinese visit the top campuses as if on a pilgrimage, posing for photographs before the arching stone gates they dream of entering as students.
“Maybe in 20 years, MIT will be studying Tsinghua’s example,” says Rao Zihe, director of the Institute of Biophysics at Tsinghua University, an institution that is renowned for its sciences and is regarded by many as China’s finest university. “How long it will take to catch up can’t be predicted, but in some respects we are already better than the Harvards today.”
In only a generation, since 1978, China has roughly 20 percent of its college-age population in higher education, up from 1.4 percent. In engineering alone, it is producing 442,000 undergraduates a year, along with 48,000 graduates with master’s degrees and 8,000 doctorates.
But only Peking University and a few other top Chinese institutions have been internationally recognized as superior. Since 1998, when Jiang Zemin, then China’s leader, officially started the effort to transform Chinese universities, state financing for higher education has more than doubled, reaching $10.4 billion in 2003, the last year for which an official figure is available.
Xu Tian, a leading geneticist who was trained and still teaches at Yale, runs a laboratory at Fudan University that performs innovative work on the transposition of genes. On Aug. 12, his breakthrough research was featured on the cover of the prestigious journal, Cell, a first for a Chinese scientist.
Peking University drew on the talents of Tian Gang, a leading mathematician from MIT, in setting up an international research center for advanced mathematics, among other high-level research centers.
Officials at Peking University estimate that as much as 40 percent of its faculty was trained overseas, most often in the United States.
The president of Yale University, Richard Levin, interviewed in Shanghai, where he was the featured guest in late September at Fudan’s centennial celebration, also had high praise for China’s students.
“China has 20 percent of the world’s population, and it is safe to say it has more than 20 percent of the world’s best students,” he said. “They have the raw talent.”
Levin also noted how China’s low labor costs simplified the effort to upgrade. He said he had been astounded by the new laboratories at Shanghai Jiaotong University, the city’s second-most prestigious university, which he said could be built in China for $50 a square foot, or 0.09 square meters, compared with $500 a square foot at Yale.
Some critics say that the country is trying to achieve excellence in too many areas at once, and that the plans of about 30 universities selected for heavy state investment have far too little differentiation, wasting money on duplication and sacrificing excellence. Even Levin tempered his enthusiasm with a warning that the “top schools have expanded much too fast and are diluting quality.”
In many cases, however, the toughest criticism comes from people who have worked in the system.
“It is important for different universities to have different qualities, just like a symphony,” said Yang Fujia, a nuclear physicist and former president of Fudan University. “But all Chinese universities want to be comprehensive. Everybody wants to be the piano, having a medical school and lots of graduate students.”
Yang, who now leads a small experimental university in Ningbo, founded with the help of the University of Nottingham, also criticized the lack of autonomy given to many Chinese researchers.
“At Princeton, one mathematician spent nine years without publishing a paper, and then solved a problem that had been around for 360 years,” he added, a reference to Andrew Wiles and his solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem in the early 1990s. “No one minded that because they appreciate the dedication to hard work there. We don’t have that spirit yet in China.”
Similarly, Ge Jianxiong, a distinguished historical geographer at Fudan, said Chinese culture often demands speedy results, which can undermine research. “In China, projects are always short-term, say three years,” he said. “Then they want you to produce a book, a voluminous book. In real research, you’ve got to give people the freedom to produce good results, and not just the results they want.”
Ge added that education suffers here because “it has always been regarded as a tool of politics.”
Yao said he had expected to concentrate on creating a world-class Ph.D. program, but had found surprising weaknesses in undergraduate training and had decided to teach at that level.
“You can’t just say I’ll only do the cutting-edge stuff; that’s not a workable solution,” he said. “You’ve got to teach the basics really well first.”
But the biggest weakness, many Chinese academics indicated, is the lack of academic freedom. Yang, the former president of Fudan, warned that if the right “atmosphere” was not cultivated, great thinkers from overseas might come to China for a year or two only to leave, frustrated.
Gong Ke, a vice president of Tsinghua University, said universities had “the duty to guarantee academic freedom.”
“We have professors who teach here, foreigners, who teach very differently from the Chinese government’s point of view,” he added. “Some of them really criticize the economic policy of China.”
Li Ao, a well-known Taiwanese writer, called for greater academic freedom and independence from the government in a September speech at Peking University. The next day, after reportedly coming under heavy official pressure, he delivered a far tamer version of the speech at Tsinghua University, where media coverage was tightly controlled.
The Chinese government also censors university online bulletin boards and discussion groups, and recently prevented students at Zhongshan University in Guangzhou from conversing freely with visiting elected officials from Hong Kong.
Students here are not encouraged to challenge authority or received wisdom. For some, this helps explain why China has never won a Nobel Prize in any category. What is needed most now, some of China’s best scholars say, are bold, original thinkers.
The greatest thing China has done in the past 20 years is to lift more than 200 million people out of poverty, Xu said. “What China has not realized yet, though, if it truly wants to go to the next level, is to understand that numbers are not enough.
“We need a new revolution to get us away from a culture that prizes becoming government officials. We must learn to reward real innovation, independent thought and genuine scholarly work.”

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

Posted at 12:29 PM · Comments (0)

Pranab Bardhan
YaleGlobal, 25 October 2005

China and India, still desperately poor. Chinese children in a village pick garbage (above); An Indian child in a slum (below).
BERKELEY: The media, particularly the financial press, are all agog over the rise of China and India in the international economy. After a long period of relative stagnation, these two countries, nearly two-fifths of the world population, have seen their incomes grow at remarkably high rates over the last two decades. Journalists have referred to their economic reforms and integration into the world economy in all kinds of colorful metaphors: giants shaking off their “socialist slumber,” “caged tigers” unshackled, and so on. Columnists have sent breathless reports from Beijing and Bangalore about the inexorable competition from these two new whiz kids in our complacent neighborhood in a “flattened,” globalized, playing field. Others have warned about the momentous implications of “three billion new capitalists,” largely from China and India, redefining the next phase of globalization.

While there is no doubt about the great potential of these two economies in the rest of this century, severe structural and institutional problems will hobble them for years to come. At this point, the hype about the Indian economy seems patently premature, and the risks on the horizon for the Chinese polity – and hence for economic stability – highly underestimated.

Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. Of course, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people above poverty in China has been historic. Thanks to repeated assertions in the international financial press, conventional wisdom now suggests that globalization is responsible for this feat. Yet a substantial part of China’s decline in poverty since 1980 already happened by mid-1980s (largely as a result of agricultural growth), before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in the 1990s. Assertions about Indian poverty reduction primarily through trade liberalization are even shakier. In the nineties, the decade of major trade liberalization, the rate of decline in poverty by some aggregative estimates has, if anything, slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a minor player in world trade, contributing less than one percent of world exports. (China’s share is about 6 percent.)

What about the hordes of Indian software engineers, call-center operators, and back-room programmers supposedly hollowing out white-collar jobs in rich countries? The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers – one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come.

Even in China, now considered the manufacturing workshop of the world (though China’s share in the worldwide manufacturing value-added is below 9 percent, less than half that of Japan or the United States), less than one-fifth of its labor force is employed in manufacturing, mining, and construction combined. In fact, China has lost tens of millions of manufacturing jobs since the mid-1990s. Nearly half of the country’s labor force remains in agriculture (about 60 percent in India). As per acre productivity growth has stagnated, reabsorbing the hundreds of millions of peasants will remain a challenge in the foreseeable future for both countries. Domestic private enterprise in China, while active and growing, is relatively weak, and Chinese banks are burdened with “bad” loans. By most aggregative measures, capital is used much less efficiently in China than in India, even though in terms of physical infrastructure and progress in education and health, China is better poised for further economic growth. Commercial regulatory structures in both countries are still slow and heavy-handed. According to the World Bank, to start a business requires in India 71 days, in China 48 days (compared to 6 days in Singapore); enforcing debt contracts requires 425 days in India, 241 days in China (69 days in Singapore).

China’s authoritarian system of government will likely be a major economic liability in the long run, regardless of its immediate implications for short-run policy decisions. In the economic reform process, the Chinese leadership has often made bold decisions and implemented them relatively quickly and decisively, whereas in India, reform has been halting and hesitant. This is usually attributed to the inevitably slow processes of democracy in India. And though this may be the case, other factors are involved. For example, the major disruptions and hardships of restructuring in the Chinese economy were rendered somewhat tolerable by a minimum rural safety net – made possible to a large extent by land reforms in 1978. In most parts of India, no similar rural safety net exists for the poor; and the more severe educational inequality in India makes the absorption of shocks in the industrial labor market more difficult. So the resistance to the competitive process of market reform is that much stiffer.

But inequalities (particularly rural-urban) have been increasing in China, and those left behind are getting restive. With massive layoffs in the rust-belt provinces, arbitrary local levies on farmers, pervasive official corruption, and toxic industrial dumping, many in the countryside are highly agitated. Chinese police records indicate a sevenfold increase in the number of incidents of social unrest in the last decade.

China is far behind India in the ability to politically manage conflicts, and this may prove to be China’s Achilles’ Heel. Over the last fifty years, India’s extremely heterogeneous society has been riddled with various kinds of conflicts, but the system has by and large managed these conflicts and kept them within moderate bounds. For many centuries, the homogenizing tradition of Chinese high culture, language, and bureaucracy has not given much scope to pluralism and diversity, and a centralizing, authoritarian Communist Party has carried on with this tradition. There is a certain pre-occupation with order and stability in China (not just in the Party), a tendency to over-react to difficult situations, and a quickness to brand dissenting movements and local autonomy efforts as seditious, and it is in this context that one sees dark clouds on the horizon for China’s polity and therefore the economy.

We should not lose our sense of proportion in thinking about the rise of China and India. While adjusting its economies to the new reality and utilizing the new opportunities, the West should not overlook the enormity of the economic gap that exists between it and those two countries (particularly India). There are many severe pitfalls and roadblocks which they have to overcome in the near future, before they can become significant players in the international economic scene on a sustained basis.

Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance. He is Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics.

Rights:
© 2005 Yale Center for the Study of Globalization

Posted at 5:33 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25, 2005

HONOLULU When Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro of Japan last week made his fifth visit to the Yasukuni Shrine, the protests from other Asian nations fell on deaf ears. If Koizumi’s determination is plain, so too are the consequences, and they are the real issue in the debate over Yasukuni, where Japan’s war dead are remembered. Tokyo’s readiness to stoke tensions by ignoring the concerns of its neighbors undermines its efforts to play a leading role in the region.
Koziumi pledged four years ago that he would visit Yasukuni every year if elected head of his party. He has done so, determined to keep a promise to constituents, but also to honor the country’s war dead, to reinvigorate and legitimate healthy patriotism in Japan, to underscore his government’s commitment to peace, and to push his country closer to “normalcy” in international relations.
After this week’s visit, China reacted with vitriol, saying it “hurt the feeling and dignity” of victims of Japanese aggression during World War II and that it “seriously undermined Chinese-Japanese relations.” Senior-level meetings between the two countries were canceled, as was a visit by Japan’s foreign minister, Machimura Nobutaka, to discuss the oil field dispute in the South China Sea.
South Korea’s Foreign Ministry expressed “disappointment and outrage,” while Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon canceled his visit to Japan this month and a similar fate is likely for the meeting scheduled later this year between Koizumi and South Korea’s president, Roh Moo Hyun.
Significantly, even Southeast Asians have been upset by the visit. Singapore’s Straits Times editorialized that the visit showed Japan “clearly does not value” relations with neighboring countries.
That is the most important point. There is no disputing a Japanese prime minister’s right to honor the country’s war dead or to instill a healthy patriotism in the Japanese public. But the determination to play to domestic audiences has a high and rising international price: It isolates Japan and forfeits Tokyo’s claim to a leading role in Asia.
Even Singapore, which favors deepened Japanese engagement with the region, has been forced to complain. The concern isn’t revamped militarism, but Tokyo’s seeming indifference to the consequences of its actions.
This lack of concern for foreign sentiment makes it harder for other countries, such as China, to compromise on key issues, like territorial disputes. Tokyo can expect no sympathy as it tries to rally support for its demand that North Korea address the abductee issue in multilateral negotiations. The Yasukuni visit plainly undermines the country’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
Isolated within the region, Tokyo is pushed closer to the United States. While that may help the alliance in the short-term, it could be dangerous over time. No country should ever be seen as lacking options, which encourages allies and partners to take it for granted. There is a real risk that U.S. “support” might one day be seen as “indulgence.”
While withholding judgment on the merits of shrine visits, U.S. policymakers have every reason to be concerned about the consequences of the visits and their impact on America’s ability to protect its national interests. Tokyo’s behavior could be seen as heightening tension in the region, and the United States could be blamed for encouraging it.
A U.S. administration that focuses on solving problems rather than on the history of the alliance might well be less supportive of Japan. In this context, the six-party talks on North Korea’s nuclear program are an important test, as is the upcoming World Trade Organization ministerial meeting: Japan’s reluctance to embrace agricultural reform - always a tough issue - is likely to irritate Washington. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld didn’t stop in Japan on his way to the region, reportedly the result of frustration over a lack of progress in troop realignment issues.
Koizumi has made his point; now he, and his successor, should be concerned about Japan’s standing in the region. A compromise on Yasukuni would not undermine his larger mission of rehabilitating Japan in the eyes of the world.
(Brad Glosserman is the executive director of the Pacific Forum CSIS, a Honolulu-based research institute affiliated with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.)

Posted at 9:44 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2005

SINGAPORE China’s cancellation of a fence-mending visit by the Japanese foreign minister following Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s visit to a shrine dedicated to Japan’s war dead highlights once again where the real threat to security in East Asia is emanating from.
The fact that Beijing called off Foreign Minister Nobutaka Machimura’s visit in the teeth of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s arrival in Beijing further underlines the seriousness of the rift between China and Japan, and suggests that Washington should pay more attention to the problem, which threatens to spoil the inaugural East Asian Summit in December.
Few doubted that Koizumi would find the time after his election victory to pay a visit to the Yasukuni shrine, his fifth since taking office. To stay popular, Koizumi must pander to a growing number of Japanese who want to shed the shame of their defeat in World War II.
China’s problem with Japan highlights a paradox: The same Communist Party leaders who argue that popular democracy must be broached with extreme caution, also argue that popular expressions of nationalism must be tolerated. A few demonstrators were allowed to present a petition to the Japanese embassy in Beijing over Koizumi’s shrine visit.
The potential fallout from enduring Chinese-Japanese tensions is severe. Machimura was scheduled to meet Chinese leaders to diffuse tension over disputed natural gas fields in the East China Sea. At stake is enough natural gas to fulfill Japan’s domestic needs and feed China’s energy-hungry industry. China has started exploring in the area and Japan is threatening to send in warships to bring a halt to the drilling. Before they were canceled, the Beijing talks offered hope of a compromise.
The wider region stands to lose as well. All of Asia’s leaders are scheduled to gather in Kuala Lumpur for an inaugural East Asian summit in December. The fact that China won’t let Japan’s foreign minister visit Beijing - and that South Korea’s top diplomat has canceled a trip to Tokyo over the shrine visit - doesn’t bode well for what is meant to be a display of Asian friendship and the measure of collective security it symbolizes.
The worry in other Asian capitals is that Beijing’s preoccupation with chastising Japan will weaken the commitment of its leaders to the benign regional diplomacy that has been the hallmark of President Hu Jintao’s and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s tenure. How much longer can China boast of a “peaceful rise” when it is saber-rattling with Tokyo over resources and history?
In some Southeast Asian capitals, there is already concern that Beijing is losing interest in the East Asian Summit. There has been very little in the way of official commentary out of Beijing in the run up to the December meeting; China is keeping its partners guessing as to what it wants to see achieved in Kuala Lumpur.
Some in Washington will welcome this state of affairs. Tension between China and Japan serves to reinforce the U.S. alliance with Japan and offsets Japan’s increasing economic dependence on China. The United States isn’t happy about its exclusion from the East Asia Summit and will quietly cheer any upset. Rumsfeld, who this week made his first official visit to Beijing as defense secretary, has made no secret of his desire to see China’s military rise checked; the belligerence of official Chinese rhetoric towards Japan helps justify his concerns.
This isn’t necessarily what the rest of Asia wants to see, however, and criticism of Koizumi’s shrine visit hasn’t been confined to Beijing. Taiwan, South Korea and Singapore, all U.S. allies, have also criticized the move.
Washington needs to realize that everyone wants to see China engage the region peacefully and that urgent efforts should be made to set Beijing back on this path. No one wants to see China and Japan using their considerable economic power to garner political support - which happened over Tokyo’s bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council earlier this year.
Competition between Asia’s two largest powers is bad for regional security. If America truly wishes to act as a bulwark for security in Asia, it would do well to focus on helping to mend relations between China and Japan.
(Michael Vatikiotis is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.)

Posted at 9:39 AM · Comments (0)

Published: 25 October 2005 - Copyright The Independent

China has scored a sporting own goal, as its first rehearsal for Beijing’s Olympic Games in 2008 descended into a farce of alleged match-rigging, bribery, unfair judging and doping scandals.

The week-long National Games - staged in the presence of the International Olympic Committee (