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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

Nov 30, 2005

By Rui Xia

With much publicity and drum-beating in local media, China announced last month the completion of one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects in its history: the Qinghai-Tibet (or Qingzang) Railway (see map below), which connects enclosed, remote Tibet with the rest of China via the city of Golmud, in Qinghai province.

The actual tracks have all been laid, officials said, although there will be another 15 months of experiments and checks before the line opens to commercial traffic in 2007.

A rail line linking Tibet with lowland China has long been an ambition of the Chinese Communist Party, but the project faced many hurdles, including technical, financial and political obstacles, and has been delayed again and again over the past 30 years. Railway engineers from Switzerland checked the terrain during the 1990s and declared the line “mission impossible”, but in 2001, Beijing embarked on the project again, with the assistance of Russian scientists, and began laying the tracks, which are expected to dramatically change the face of Tibet.

A few statistics show the staggering scale of the project: The new line runs 1,142 kilometers, mostly through almost uninhabitable wilderness at more than 4,000 meters above sea level, with 30 kilometers of tunnels and 286 bridges. The highest mountain pass en-route is over 5,000 meters above sea level. Over 70,000 workers, mainly Han Chinese from inland areas, were recruited for the project, laying rail through some of the world’s highest, most difficult terrain - encompassing mountain ranges afflicted by dust and thunderstorms, heavy snowfalls, earthquakes and landslides, and covered in a thick layer of permafrost. It’s little wonder, then, that Beijing depicts the US$3.1 billion railway as one of the country’s greatest-ever engineering achievements.

The thick ice
But all is not quiet on the western front. This jaw-dropping accomplishment raises many questions about the economic, political and environmental future of Tibet, as well as doubts about the long-term feasibility of operating a railway on such inhospitable terrain. The main technical challenge for China’s railway engineers was permafrost (earth which remains frozen year round). About half the length of the railway was built over permafrost zones, in which the uppermost layer (called seasonal frost) thaws in summer. The many bridges with foundations sunk deep into the ice are meant to overcome this problem by keeping the rail line stable throughout the seasons and changes in ground level.

Another technique, invented specifically for the Qingzang project, is the “slab-stone ventilation system” developed by Chinese scientist Zhang Luxin, in which parts of the line are built on large slabs intended to allow cool air to circulate and thus prevent the upper layer of permafrost from thawing. “The technique sounds like a logical way to deal with permafrost,” says Norwegian Railway museum researcher Hans Schaefer, who’s been taking repeated trips to China to research the Chinese rail system, “but it [has] never [been] done before and we’ll just have to wait and see whether it works”.

Other railways were built on ice in Siberia and Scandinavia, Schaefer explains, but due to the southern location and high altitude of Tibet, the scorching summer sun causes a much greater amount of the seasonal frost to thaw than is the case in these northern areas, which can bring changes of up to 2 meters in ground level. Even with all the technological efforts, it has been reported that the railway is already unstable, and will require a continuous and enormously costly maintenance effort to remain open.

Environmentalists have expressed unease with the railway and its manner of dealing with permafrost. Tibet is one of the regions most affected by global warming. With or without a railway, the plateau is melting away, as a recent Greenpeace report put it, which will make the railway even harder to maintain by exacerbating the seasonal melting problem.

Admittedly, the Chinese government has been paying much attention to the environmental issues, for example, by planting vegetation on the barren land to cool the ground and prevent the permafrost receding, and also taking care to build underpasses under the railroad to allow animals to migrate across the track. The main fear of environmentalists, however, is the influx of people and goods the railway is expecting to bring into Tibet, a tide that may place heavy socioeconomic pressure on the roof of the world.

Taming the wild
The rail link between China and Tibet will bring with it many economic and cultural changes: welcomed by some, and feared by others. Lhasa, the capital city of Tibet and once the sacred seat of the Dalai Lamas, now contains more shops, high-rises, roads, and Han people - the ethnic Chinese who, despite Beijing’s denials, are now estimated to constitute an absolute majority in the city. There is no denying that Lhasa’s economic situation has improved greatly during the past few years: more businesses are being opened, greater numbers of tourists pass through and more money is flowing in, especially in government subsidies.

The question is, to whom is all the money going? Government statistics from 2003 show Tibet to be the second-ranking province in China when it comes to wages of state workers. This includes cadres in the local government, and also the railway workers, both skilled and unskilled.

These workers are mainly Han Chinese. Despite government efforts to qualify more Tibetans, about 80% of ethnic Tibetans still live in the countryside, and an additional quarter are still nomads. For these people, argue Tibetan human rights activists, the rail link simply means further marginalization, and less job opportunities.

“On the surface, it looks like Tibet is going to benefit from the railway,” said one Tibetan intellectual who asked to remain anonymous, “but in fact, I believe it’ll hurt the Tibetan people. Already, fluency in Chinese is almost essential for getting a job in Lhasa and other towns in Tibet. Chinese immigrants are taking over jobs traditionally done by Tibetans, so the economic situation for many Tibetans not only hasn’t improved, it has worsened, and is expected to worsen further with the great wave of Han immigration that will start with the completion of the railway.”

She is a frail, soft-spoken woman, a graduate from one of China’s finest universities who speaks passionately for the Tibetan people. “The few cities in Tibet appear to be prosperous, but go only fifty kilometers out of Lhasa, and living conditions are appalling by any standard. Not enough money is allocated for education; Tibetan youths are being marginalized and discriminated against in their own country. They face a grimmer future than ever.”

The key problem, she says, is that of participation. “Just as they’re building underpasses for animal migration under the railway, the government is trying to make us Tibetans walk down a certain, narrow path. Ever since the Chinese occupation [began] in 1950, Tibetans were never asked whether, or in what way, they want to see their country developing. Even now, with more economic freedom and more money coming in, the human rights situation in Tibet is still very bad. This year, some people in Lhasa were detained for the sole ‘crime’ of watching a Dalai Lama lecture on DVD. Tibet needs real autonomy, not just economic benefits,” she concludes.

This view, however, is hardly shared by all in Lhasa. Small business owners, Han and Tibetans alike, are looking at the railway with mixed feelings of anticipation and suspicion. The railway is expected to bring many tourists and business people to Lhasa, helping local small enterprises and providing more job opportunities. Prices of goods will probably go down with easier, cheaper shipment.

“Many people believe the railway will accelerate the current opening-up and globalization trends in Tibet,” said Arthur Holcombe, president of the US-based Tibet Poverty Alleviation Fund. “This will mean an increasing flow of lower cost consumer and durable goods to Tibet, making them available to broader segments of the Tibetan population living in urban and rural areas. The railway is also likely to stimulate increased growth and job opportunities along its route in such places as Amdo, Nakchu and Damshung Township areas, as well as in Lhasa,” Holcombe added.

The big winner, it seems, will be the growing middle class in Lhasa, although many Lhasa residents worry about the modern ailments the rail link may bring in along with its benefits. Crime and prostitution, already mushrooming at the other end of the rail track, in Qinghai province, are winding their way into the once pristine plateau. Air pollution, so far unheard of, is expected to rise with the coming of more factories and cars. Whilst even the Dalai Lama’s administration in India acknowledges the need for infrastructure development in Tibet, many feel the rights and wishes of common people are not being fully addressed.

Is the economic miracle going west?
In spite of all the efforts, it is debatable whether truly large-scale investments will ever reach Tibet. Many analysts argue the area is simply too remote, too backward and distant from major industrial centers to attract investors. The only industry universally expected to leap forward is tourism. The “roof of the world”, with its stunningly beautiful landscape and unique Buddhist culture, has certainly got a lot to offer to both foreign and Chinese sightseers, and the railway, once operational, will definitely make the trip much easier.

The ride, China railway’s brochures promise, will be a luxurious one with private toilets and showers in each car, and windows offering panoramic views of the Kunlun mountain range. The cars, to be built by Bombardier Transportation of Canada (which has attracted criticism for its participation in the project), will even be pressurized to protect lowland passengers from altitude sickness, and outfitted with UV-protection systems to prevent sunburn. No doubt, many middle-class Chinese, who are enthusiastic travelers inside their own country, and have more money than ever to spend on vacations, are looking forward to the trip.

Another benefit, almost certainly more important from the government’s point of view, is easier access for military troops to secure both Tibet itself and the borders with India and Nepal. Tighter military control, alongside Chinese immigration prompted as the Chinese version of “go west, young man”, might finally integrate Tibet, for decades a thorn in China’s side, into the fast modernizing mainland.

Of course, many foreign journalists, as well as “free Tibet” activists, see this, rather than economic development, to be the main objective behind the mammoth rail project. Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya, author of The Dragon in the Land of Snows, said in a 2002 interview: “Tibet’s natural economy faces westwards towards south Asia; Beijing wants to tie it firmly eastwards with China and to encourage more migration from the interior”.

But this is not the whole story, either. As in other areas of western China, one of the main objectives of the Qingzang rail link is improving access to some of the natural resources buried under the frozen land. Tibetan uranium, especially, is important for China’s future nuclear programs. Oil, gold, and other minerals will be loaded on the rail cars to be shipped east to the booming coastal economy. It seems that, yet again, investments in the west mainly contribute to the already flourishing east, leaving millions of local residents in wretched poverty with an ever-slimmer chance of improvement.

The Chinese-educated Tibetan woman feels the pain of her people, but sees little chance for any change. “The Tibetans have been weakening ever since the Fifties. They’re losing their culture and traditional way of life, and are offered little in return. I’d like to see China adopting the Dalai Lama’s ‘Middle Path’ philosophy, and moving towards real dialogue and real autonomy for Tibet, but I don’t see this happening under the current regime.”

To judge by her words - and the sad look in her eyes - it seems like the thud of the coming trains is also an announcement of a new era for the Himalayan region, and possibly the beating of funeral drums for traditional Tibet.

Rui Xia is a Western teacher and freelance writer living in China. Rui Xia is her unofficial Chinese name.

(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

Posted at 10:38 PM · Comments (0)

SLOW LANE - Copyright The Financial Times

BYLINE: By HARRY EYRES

BODY:

My first proper camera is still sitting in a drawer somewhere in the old family home. I can’t bring myself to throw it away, maybe because it was so obviously built to last. This virtually indestructible, far from lightweight apparatus is a Zenit single lens reflex made in Russia in the early 1970s. Everything about it is solid, slow and manual: you need a separate light meter, and then you have to set the aperture and the shutter speed and focus, all by hand.

This wouldn’t be the camera of choice if you wanted to capture a leaping gazelle or the fleeting expression on a face. I used to take mainly landscape photographs, in black and white (certain people commented rather sharply on the absence of human interest in my prints). But the whole process, of hunting or just stumbling on the right combinations of light and scenery, then of developing and printing, again slowly and by hand, using a prewar Leica enlarger, gave me, as a teenager, hours of the most intense pleasure.

I was lucky to have a father who was an excellent amateur photographer and could induct me in the various skills and pleasures of the craft. We had a darkroom at home, a secret, hidden-away place off a back passage, with its distinctive smell of photographic chemicals and leather golfclub covers. That special moment when the image starts to appear on the white paper, as it floats in the developing tray, was as magical to me as witnessing the lights going down in a theatre or finding that the notes and my fingers had finally gelled in a passage of Mozart or Schubert.

There was a time in my life (late teens) when I thought of myself as a photographer. I now see it as part of the process of becoming an artist - and by that term I don’t mean a demigod with special privileges, but merely a person for whom inspiration, the contact with the muses or what Plato called the musical element, is an essential part of what it means to be a human being. With the Zenit, or its replacement, an Olympus OM10, in hand, I felt inspired in the most unlikely places - a school playing field or a London bus. Photography was exhilaration.

In time (perhaps because I realised that I was not that good a photographer, nothing like as good as my talented, over-modest father) I transferred that feeling to writing poetry. But I have never forgotten or ceased to be grateful for what photography, one of the great democratic arts of the 20th century, gave me: the permission to live life, aesthetically, to the full.

If I felt that permission had been granted, I certainly never took it to the extremes pushed by the amazing Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. Araki is probably best known for his erotica, including the truly strange images of kimono-clad (or unclad) women trussed with ropes, in the tradition called Kinbaku. To call these images pornographic, it struck me as I went round the huge and wonderful Araki exhibition at the Barbican in London, is somehow to miss the point. Western pornography has developed, on the whole, in a direction that mimics the ever-increasing functionalism of late industrial life. Western porn may work, functionally (and economically), but, in a peculiarly grim way, it has lost touch with Eros. Araki, on the other hand, is a genuinely and frankly and joyously erotic artist in a long Japanese tradition.

In the end though it wasn’t Araki’s erotica that stayed longest with me. He has said that, “photography is going to and fro between life and death”. You might think that life, the raunchy, Rabelaisian, multifarious life of Tokyo’s red light district where Araki grew up and resides, predominates in his work over death, but the two poles are always present. None of his photographs are more moving than those taken over the winter of his wife’s mortal illness and death in 1990.

In some quite mysterious way, Araki’s images of his balcony, the family cat, a cardboard cut-out girl, the local streets and metro station become imbued with a desolating grief. The trick is one of absence: you sense something is left out, and what is there (the cat with its head bowed) stands for something else. Surprisingly, I was made to think of the poems Thomas Hardy wrote after his first wife’s death, especially “The Walk”, where he speaks of the difference made to everything by the knowledge of irrevocable absence.

But what is also striking is the way these photographs constitute a personal diary. Araki is able to record not just the external features of his life but the gamut of his feelings, from desire to grief to a meditative sense of infinitude, conveyed in a recent series of skyscapes. Araki is a Shakespeare of the camera, avid for and open to all kinds of experience. He shows that far from being a pathetic attempt to preserve unlived moments in aspic, photography can be a way of living with the utmost intensity.harryeyres@care4free.net. See www.ft.com/eyres for more columns

Posted at 11:00 PM · Comments (0)

The New York Times
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 2005

KATMANDU, Nepal Last week, Nepal’s Maoist rebels and a coalition of opposition parties agreed on a program to try to end direct rule by King Gyanendra. The accord was the latest twist in this tiny Himalayan kingdom’s decade-long civil war, which took a bizarre turn almost five years ago: On June 1, 2001, the drug-abusing crown prince, Dipendra, murdered nine of the royal household, including his parents, before taking his own life.
Conspiracy theories abound, with a focus on the two factions that benefited from the catastrophe: the faction led by Dipendra’s uncle Gyanendra, who inherited the crown, and the one led by the Maoists.
Since the murders, the new king has twice declared a state of emergency followed by the inevitable suppression of free speech. Trafficking in drugs and women has increased enormously, and rural Nepalese have streamed into the Katmandu Valley, creating a refugee crisis.
All this is on my mind as I venture back to Katmandu for the first time in three years. I had prepared for arrival in a dysfunctional wasteland, yet I find the capital as lively and diverse as I’ve seen it in more than 20 years of visiting. There is one exception: Nobody seems willing to talk about the future.
Pradeep is an economics student I meet at Swayambhunath, the Monkey Temple. While I’m trying to figure out a way to persuade him to open up, a slapstick comedy unfolds: as a tourist reaches into her handbag and takes out an apple, a monkey moving at warp speed grabs the fruit in two tiny hands. The tourist lets out a little scream of shock, by which time the monkey has retreated.
“You see,” says Pradeep, laughing, “you want me to speculate on the future of my country, which is one of the poorest in the world, while that wealthy Westerner cannot control the future long enough to get an apple from her bag into her mouth. There is no certainty but change.”
I had forgotten how Buddhist the thinking can be here. From Swayambhunath, I walk back down the mountain and find a cab that will take me to Pashupatinath. On the Bagmati River, Pashupatinath is considered by many to be the second-holiest site in Hinduism, after Benares. I come here whenever I can to see a pal I made many years back….

…Suman, my taxi driver back to the guest house, is a history student when he is not driving a cab. Finally, I have found someone who is prepared to speak his mind. He points out that Nepal has seen worse crises: At times the monarchy’s feuds with pretenders have reduced the kingdom to a few hundred square miles of the Katmandu Valley, but this is an exceptionally resilient country. “You have been trekking here?” he asks. “Then you have used the thousands of miles of steps my people have carved out of the Himalayas by hand. This is the land of Shiva, the most powerful of the gods. When do you have to be at the airport?”
“In about two hours.”
“I will drive you. I will give a discount of 50 rupees, but you will listen.”
“OK,” I say, after I fetch my bag from the guest house. “What?”
Suman says, “Eight years of communist insurrection but we ordinary Nepalis only went crazy once - do you know why? I will tell you. We went crazy after King Birendra was murdered because at first we were sure it was a coup. Why? Because King Birendra was saving us from democracy and the people knew it.”
“Saving you from democracy?”
“Certainly. If we are not very, very careful, democracy in Nepal will mean urban feudalism, the country will be run by the same half-dozen families as run it now, who will join forces with Indian and Chinese businessmen. The people would not be able to find freedom in the countryside anymore. Why do we have to go through the robber baron period - because you did?
“King Birendra understood this and wanted full democracy to come slowly, after all the proper institutions were in place. Our beloved king was our only defense against capitalists and communists both.” Suman has grown so excited he suddenly turns self-conscious. “Are you shocked?”
I think about that. “No, Suman,” I say, “I just wish I could patch you through to the White House.”

For the entire article please see the link below.

(John Burdett is the author of ”Bangkok 8” and ”Bangkok Tattoo.”)

Posted at 9:33 PM · Comments (0)

I’m starting this today — fresh from Amazon. It’s a highly touted and brief first novel by a sharp and privileged young Nigerian author who spent much of his youth at elite schools in the US. More on it very shortly.

2-19-06 - I finished this today at the gym, weeks after I’d first picked it up. It’s a slim volume and a quick read, but I’d put it down in favor of other stuff. My feeling is that this should have been a short story, but was stretched to book form — albeit a very short book.
There is one chapter that I found absolutely compelling, about the rebel army fighter’s youth in his village, having to flee his home when civil war broke out and his family was dispersed and his father killed.
The ending, too, is poignant and powerful.
The rest of the book, though, didn’t move me so much as wear me out. I didn’t find the language terribly convincing, and the mannerisms, placing nearly every verb in the gerund, annoying.

Posted at 1:41 AM · Comments (1)

Posted at 1:37 AM · Comments (0)

Jutting south from Mount Fuji into the Pacific, the Izu Peninsula has something of a holiday air about it. The warm Kuroshio current flowing northward lends the peninsula a mild climate, and its position close to the suture lines of shifting tectonic plates means that rugged Izu has no lack of geothermal springs.

News photo
The Susquehanna is a quarter-size replica of one of Commodore Matthew Perry’s “Black Ships”; a bust of Perry (below) stands by Shimoda Harbor.
News photo

At the northeastern end of the peninsula is Atami — a hot-spring resort and dirty-weekend spot par excellence for those in the capital. Moving down the peninsula from Atami, you pass a string of spas, clutches of small museums and other diversions, one is which is called the Banana and Alligator Park. Then you reach, near the southern tip, the port of Shimoda.

The first impression of Shimoda today is that of a pleasant, sleepy little town — an impression that doesn’t fit so readily with the fact that a century and a half ago it was the focal point of Japan-U.S. relations. Adroitly using gunboat diplomacy, Commodore Matthew Perry of the U.S. Navy forced the signing of the Kanagawa Treaty in March 1854, ending the national seclusion that Japan had imposed upon itself for more than two centuries.

Perry had demanded that ports be opened to American vessels, and Shimoda was one of the two selected. After signing that treaty, Perry sailed down the Izu Peninsula to see Shimoda, which had been appointed as the site of the first U.S. consulate in Japan, and there he signed an additional treaty guaranteeing freedom of movement for Americans in the town.

As might be imagined, intruder Perry was not a popular figure in Japan at the time. When he first arrived in the country, the Japanese begged him to go away again. Contemporary portraits of him, as displayed in Ryosenji Temple, where Perry signed the Shimoda Treaty, were at pains to convey the impression that he was not so much human as a devil, and a very ugly one at that. Impressions, of course, change with time.

Now, Shimoda — which holds a Black Ships Festival every May, marking the arrival of the first Americans — has coopted Perry into its own public image, and looks on the commodore with much fonder eyes.

The modern image of the man, as portrayed in a bust atop the Perry monument beside the harbor, displays a statsemanlike person of great dignity and intelligence. No longer a demon.

News photo
Willow trees, cafes and galleries line Perry Road in Shimoda; the distinctive cross-cutting namako-kabe style (below) is evident on buildings on Perry Road.
News photo

Of all the links with Perry, the most conspicuous in Shimoda is the Susquehanna, modeled on one of the seven ships that brought Perry and his fellow 1,264 Americans to the port. The Susquehanna is used to ferry tourists on cruises around the harbor, and the vessel has a jolly leisure-boat vibe about it, with tourists trooping about and kids shouting. So it is difficult, then, viewing this craft, to get any notion of the tremendous fear that Perry’s ships inspired among the Japanese. Weighing 127 tons, today’s Susquehanna is just one-quarter the size of the original ship of the same name, yet the largest Japanese vessels in Perry’s day weighed only 100 tons. The Japanese had never seen such enormous ships, and Perry’s bristled with firepower. To ensure there was no doubt about his message, Perry fired a thundering 17-gun salute before setting off from his ship to begin negotiations on the Shimoda Treaty.

Connecting the harbor with Ryosenji is the quiet thoroughfare known as Perry Road, which skirts past some of Shimoda’s older buildings. Though the justification for the name of this street rests, according to the pamphlet published by the Shimoda tourist office, on the limp claim that “Perry is said to have once walked” along it, a pleasant old character does hang over the Perry Road district. Plants adorn window boxes; willows droop lazily into the waterway; shops sell antiques and curios; streets are lit by old-fashioned lamps. In evidence here are buildings with namako-kabe, a distinctive architectural feature of southern Izu. Though namako-kabe translates unappealingly as “sea-slug walls,” these walls are in fact rather handsome affairs and consist of dark tiles arranged in diamond patterns, with white plaster used to seal the joints. The rounded lines of the plaster are thought to resemble sea slugs and hence supply the name.

News photo
Shimoda Castle

If Perry Road is the best place for a stroll in Shimoda, the finest view is to be had from Mount Nesugata, which is reached by cable car from the town. From the top of this hill, Shimoda’s superb natural harbor, which would certainly have delighted Perry, stretches grandly into view. At the summit of Nesugata stands the Renjo Photo Memorial Hall, which traces the history of photography back to the days when a camera was not something that came with the cell phone but was a strapping contraption the size of a small trunk. And if you and your beloved wish to have a photo of yourselves standing in front of a faux stained-glass window — he dressed in braided uniform looking like a 19th-century admiral of the fleet, she in a blue ballroom dress looking like a frumpy extra in a palace scene from “Doctor Zhivago” — you really have come to the right spot.

Shimoda’s time in the limelight was brief. The treaties of 1854 contained no provisions for commerce. It was not until the signing of additional treaties, four years later, that several Japanese cities, including Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka, were opened to international trade. These treaties also provided for diplomatic exchanges, and with them Shimoda’s importance slid into rapid decline.

And so Shimoda has remained as the place we see today, which is an attractive quiet port of around 30,000 people nestled among hills and built on a winding river that feeds into the long sleeve of its harbor. Sitting upon one of those hills is the town’s pint-size castle, which adds an additional historical dimension to the town. Shimoda may no longer have the importance it once did, but, as is often the case, some of the pleasanter places are those that history has edged neatly onto the sidelines.

The Japan Times: Nov. 25, 2005
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 12:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Der SPiegel

Rebiya Kadeer is fighting to bring the Chinese leadership before an international human rights tribunal. She accuses the regime of repressing the Uighurs, a Muslim minority in northwest China.

Ablikim walks through the city of his childhood, looking for a place where he can feel safe talking about his mother. Ablikim is the son of Rebiya Kadeer, China’s most famous dissident.

AP
Rebiya Kadeer
It’s already late in the afternoon and the cold air is beginning to drift down from the nearby mountains. At first Ablikim decides on a snack bar, then a museum. He feels watched wherever he goes.

Earlier in the day, he had called a friend to ask him to translate. He used his mobile phone, but the friend declined, fearing that the police would be listening in on the conversation. “They’ll arrest my parents and harass my sister,” said the friend, “no one will help us.”

Most Uighurs are “chicken-hearted,” says Ablikim.

He finally decides on a restaurant that belongs to his family. It isn’t open yet, and the heat is off and only a few lights are on. A cut of raw meat glistens in a glass display case. The walls are paneled halfway up, and the room looks like someone’s halfhearted attempt to transform a bleak East bloc cafeteria into something cozy and inviting.

Ablikim eats nothing. It’s Ramadan, he says. As he orders a cup of tea, a man walks in: gray suit, dark blue turtleneck sweater, about 50 years old.

The man looks around the room. All the tables are empty. Then he sits down, two tables away.

Ablikim pushes his chair closer to the table. “Secret police,” he whispers.

The man has turned his back on Ablikim. He looks as if he were studying the menu. It’s completely quiet.

The police recently established a special unit, says Ablikim. It’s called “Office 307.” By this point he is speaking so quietly that he’s almost inaudible. The only purpose of “Office 307,” says Ablikim, is to monitor his family.

Ablikim wears his black hair short. He is clean-shaven and is wearing olive-green trousers and an American fleece jacket, probably the only one in all of Urumchi (Urumqi). Following him can’t be terribly difficult. When he stands up, the man in the turtleneck sweater also gets up from his table. He walks out onto the street, takes a few steps and turns around a few times. Then he waits.

Ablikim hails a cab. He wants to show me the prison where his mother was held.

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The cab traverses Urumchi’s outlying districts on a three-lane highway, passing a scene of run-down prefab-concrete apartment buildings and windowless, abandoned houses and factories. Handicapped people sell laundry detergent and grapes by the roadside. Two and a half million people live in Urumchi — Chinese and Uighurs — and all road signs are in Arabic and Chinese. Kazakhstan is only a few hours by car, Mongolia lies to the east and Beijing is 2,400 kilometers (1,492 miles) away. The temperature in winter drops to below -40°C (-40°F).

A dark blue VW Santana with tinted windows follows the taxi at a distance.

Ablikim tells the driver to turn onto a path, then to turn around and return to the road on the same path. But the VW continues to bump along behind the cab.

That evening, the police pick up Ablikim for questioning. They interrogate him for five hours, and then they let him go.

A mother’s mission

Fourteen-thousand kilometers (8,701 miles) away, on the other side of the earth, Rebiya Kadeer sits in a small ground-floor apartment in Vienna, Virginia. It’s a warm, late-summer morning in the eastern United States, and the patio door is open. Kadeer, Ablikim’s mother, wears a black suit and a white scarf. Her voice sounds a little hoarse. The Koran sits on a bookshelf, flanked by videocassettes like “Gladiator” and “Titanic.”

She plans to drive to Washington this morning to meet with Tom Lantos, a powerful Democratic congressman from California. Lantos, the chairman of the Human Rights Caucus, helped secure Kadeer’s release from prison. Now she wants him to help her protect Ablikim and her other children.

A photo of a man wearing a white shirt hangs in Lantos’ office. He stands, his arms outstretched, facing a tank on Tiananmen Square. But today Lantos doesn’t have time to meet with Kadeer, and so she meets with Hans Hogrefe, his office manager, instead. He looks pale. He probably doesn’t get outside much; after all, there are so many ethnic groups in the world who are being persecuted. Hogrefe has reserved 20 minutes of his day for Kadeer.

“Has anything changed in the current situation?” he asks.

Until now, Kadeer says, there had been only accusations and charges. “But now they are simply taking people off the street and locking them up.”

Hogrefe says he admires her attitude, and then he stands up again. “Our door is always open to you,” he says.

“Hans is a good man,” Kadeer says outside, beaming.

She arrived in the US capital six months ago. When she was released in March, after five and a half years in prison, Chinese officials made Kadeer an offer: If she would agree to stop agitating against the government, she could become one of the richest women in China.

And if she refused?

If she refused, she would have to live with the fact that she would be leaving her businesses and her family behind in Urumchi.

Rebiya boarded the next plane to the United States, leaving four of her sons and one daughter behind in Urumchi. The Chinese government confiscated the children’s passports, turning them into hostages of their policies. Kadeer knows that she may never see her children again, but she is convinced that she had no other choice. Her imprisonment has turned her into a symbolic figure.

She wants to help the persecuted Uighurs, and she wants to haul the Chinese government before an international human rights tribunal. She is one woman against China, a mother of 11 children against one of the most powerful countries on earth.

Her family is fighting a regime that persecutes, tortures and kills its opponents. More people are executed in China each year than in all other countries combined.

Is she afraid for her children?

Kadeer says she is concerned but not afraid. She knows what the situation is like in her homeland because her fourth-eldest son Alim fills her in every evening on the phone.

She sits in a Greek restaurant in Vienna, a few blocks from her new home. She wants to talk about what the Chinese have done to her family.

Kadeer was one-year-old when Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. He said that he wanted China’s various ethnic groups to join him in creating a new country.

At the time, Rebiya’s parents ran a small farm, and they also owned a hair salon, a restaurant and a Turkish bath house. By communist standards, they were part of the bourgeoisie. Besides, they were Uighurs, members of an ethnic minority related to the Turks. The Uighurs are mainly Muslims, a people for whom Allah carries more weight than Mao, and a people who can look back on thousands of years of history. They didn’t want a new country. Instead, they dreamed of having their own country one day: East Turkestan.

REUTERS
A camel rests on a barren hill in China’s Xinjiang Province.
When the communists established the Uighur province of Xinjiang in 1955 — an entity covering an area of 1.6 million square kilometers (about 618,000 square miles) and rich in oil and natural gas, iron ore and uranium — they seized her parents’ property and forced the family to move from Altai in the north, where Rebiya was born, to the Tarim basin bordering the desert in the south.

She says she was 14 when a man asked for her hand in marriage. He was the deputy director of a small bank and 12 years her senior. He promised to take care of her. Rebiya accepted his proposal.

They married a year later, and at 17 Rebiya bore her first child. During a hospital stay, she shared a room with a woman who complained about her Uighur husband, a man, she claimed, who never thought of her, only of his people, and was in prison as a result.

Kadeer, impressed by the unknown husband’s self-sacrifice, offered to help the woman.

A political marriage made in heaven

She pauses at this point in her story to order another cup of tea and slice of strawberry cake. She says: “I want to tell you a story that sounds like a fairy tale.” It’s a story that will explain everything — her fight, her resolve and her confidence.

It’s the story of her life.

Her first marriage failed when she was 28. It was 1976, she had openly criticized the government in Beijing, and her husband could no longer stand the resulting pressure.

After her divorce, she wrote a list of ten conditions that her future husband would have to fulfill. Most of all, it had to be love at first sight — for both partners. He had to have been in prison for defending his convictions, and he could not have betrayed anyone while in prison. He also had to be willing to fight for the liberation of his country.

She received a visit from a friend a short time later. He told her that he knew of a man who could fulfill her requirements. “But he is poor,” the friend said. “He cannot feed your children. Do you stand by your conditions?”

“Where is he?” Rebiya asked.

She flew to Artux, a small city in the western part of the province. There she discovered that the man lived in a village, and so she continued her journey by donkey. When she finally stood facing the man, she fell in love at first sight. “My name is Rebiya Kadeer,” she said. “I am 29 years old. I have come here to marry you. Nine of my ten conditions are fulfilled. Only one remains open: Do you love me?”

The stranger asked her to tell her story. He had recently been released from prison and was suspicious of this woman. When she had finished, he asked her whether she was an agent of the Chinese government.

Rebiya slapped him and rode away.

She laughs when she tells this story.

Six months later, the friend brought her a book: 260 poems about Kadeer, written by the stranger she had slapped. It was the same man who had been married to Rebiya’s roommate in the hospital — the couple had since separated. The poet and the rebel were married in 1977.

Kadeer opened a laundry business in Urumchi, sold fruit, vegetables and leather goods, and even conducted business across the border in Kazakhstan. She knew that financial means were necessary to survive a fight. She opened a department store and a second one a short time later, renting store space to merchants. That was how she became wealthy.

She soon made her way to the top of the local chamber of commerce, first in Urumchi and then in Xinjiang Province.

By 1992, Rebiya Kadeer had become such a respected businesswoman in China that she was elected to the National People’s Congress.

Taking on the regime

In 1997, she felt so strong that she decided to challenge the regime. She planned to give a speech before the People’s Congress, an opportunity for which she had been waiting for years.

DER SPIEGEL
Map: Xiajiang Province
She submitted a copy of her speech to party leaders and told them that she wanted to talk about all the things the Chinese have done for the Uighurs. The party functionaries were relieved. They told her that she would speak at the beginning of the party congress, just after the president and party chairman and the chairman of the Politburo.

A day before the congress, Kadeer secretly met with the two interpreters who would be translating her speech into Chinese and showed them the real text of her speech. The two interpreters were afraid. “I am a woman,” she told them, “and you are men. You won’t have any difficulties. After all, you’re just translating what I say.”

Chinese policies in Xinjiang are false and unjust, she said before the congress, in the Great Hall of the People, with 4,800 delegates listening attentively. The Chinese government, she continued, must respect the Uighurs’ religious freedom, put an end to its arbitrary arrests and stop executing political prisoners. She demanded respect for the Uighurs’ history, literature and language. That day, Kadeer wore a white fur jacket and a “doppa,” the Uighurs’ traditional head dress. A few delegates were in tears by the time she returned to her seat.

The speech was a declaration of war.

Kadeer has kept a photo that was taken just after her speech. It depicts Jiang Zemin, the then-president and head of the Communist Party, shaking her hand and smiling. Zemin is surrounded by China’s power elite, including Prime Minister Li Peng and the defense minister — a small, delicate woman in a white fur jacket, surrounded by an army of predators, of old men wearing dark suits and horn-rimmed glasses.

They appear to be congratulating Kadeer, but what they are really doing is forming a barrier between her and the delegates and their questions.

Hu Jintao, then the fifth-ranking member of the ruling hierarchy and now China’s president, is visible in the background. “A very good speech,” Hu told her. “But you must discuss your problems with us. We can solve all problems.”

“The normal procedure is to approach them after giving a speech,” says Kadeer, “but they came to me, and it was because I was right.”

Four weeks later, she was banned from the People’s Congress and her passport was revoked.

In August 1999, just before she was scheduled to meet with a delegation from the US Congress at a hotel in Urumchi, the police arrested her.

A judge sentenced her to eight years in prison for “dissemination of state secrets.” Her crime? Attempting to send magazines to her husband, who had since fled into exile in the US, magazines that were widely available in China.

When her case was tried, there was no audience and she had no legal representation. “We will crush you like a snake,” the chief of police told her.

“And I will emerge from prison like an eagle,” Kadeer replied.

Books were banned in prison, and she was not allowed to receive visitors for two years. She talked to herself, recited verses of the Koran and made plans. Sometimes she screamed.

Persecuting the family

Ablikim, her fifth-eldest son, was arrested on the same day as his mother and was sentenced, without trial, to two years in a prison camp. There he was forced to work 20-hour days, and on several occasions he witnessed guards beating other prisoners with a baseball bat. He knew that prisoners in China are tortured with electroshocks, and that one of the preferred methods to torture a man is to insert horsehairs into his penis.

Kadeer’s sons have been managing the two department stores since she moved to Washington. The businesses are in a section of the city where only Uighurs live, on a street where merchants pushing two-wheeled carts sell dates and pomegranates, dog pelts and dried snakes — which are considered an aphrodisiac.

The family had to take out a loan of 9 million Yuan to build the department stores. When the police searched the business this spring and confiscated the family’s business records, the balance of the loan suddenly turned into 15 million Yuan.

Without her political activities, Kadeer’s life story would have been one of the many success stories in a new China. But she refused to play by the rules of the game.

The Uighurs in Xinjiang admire Kadeer, calling her “mother of the Uighurs,” but they don’t support her — at least not openly.

In late August, when Kadeer had just returned to the US from a visit to Germany, the head of the Communist Party in Xinjiang gave a press conference in which he accused her of having met with terrorists in the European country, and claimed she planned to sabotage festivities marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region. In response, Rebiya’s son Alim called the party leader a liar in an interview with Radio Free Asia.

On the evening after the interview, the police paid a visit to Alim, just as he was on the phone with his mother in Washington. Alim put down the receiver but didn’t hang up, so that she could hear everything.

They demanded that he sign a document stating that Rebiya Kadeer owed taxes to the Chinese state. When he refused, they threatened to punish him. “You’ll see what we do with you,” they said.

Alim and Ablikim would prefer to leave China. They could try to make their way to Taiwan, but Rebiya doesn’t want her children to flee the country. She still hopes for a legal solution. But it’s not entirely clear that she has anything to offer the government in Beijing.

Her problem is that she makes life more difficult for her sons with each new public appearance. But she believes that her children can only live safely in Urumchi if the world knows more about them.

While she describes her vision, her husband, the poet, sits outside on the patio of their small apartment in Virginia and smokes thin Chinese cigarettes. His handshake is soft and he wears his white hair combed back. He says that he aged ten years during his five years in prison. He and his wife still agree on their goals, but they argue over how to achieve them.

For years, he was the more unyielding of the two, and this made him influential. But their roles have been reversed ever since Kadeer was released. When she travels, he stays at home writing a history of the Uighur people, a book he wants published when the Uighurs gain their independence. But he has yet to find a publisher.

When Chinese President Hu Jintao announced his intention to visit Washington earlier this year, Kadeer saw her chance to remind him of the suffering of her people. Hu had planned to meet with President George W. Bush in early September to discuss North Korea and China’s booming export economy. Kadeer, for her part, planned to assemble a group of Chinese political exiles to stage a demonstration against Hu, the world’s third most powerful man, directly across from the White House.

Kadeer had planned to give a speech, a speech about America. But then Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans and Hu cancelled his visit to the US capital.

Kadeer followed Hu to New York, where he was scheduled to visit the United Nations a few days later. She and a group of Tibetan exiles and members of the persecuted Falun Gong sect held a demonstration in front of the UN headquarters.

The protestors waved American flags and the colors of East Turkestan, and Kadeer held up a sign that read “Freedom for East Turkestan.”

She isn’t sure whether Hu noticed.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Posted at 9:48 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Der Spiegel

They earn little and have even less say. Yet waves of willing workers continue to deluge the country’s industrial regions.

The global factory is gearing up for a change of shift. The streets of Dongguan are still relatively deserted — filled only by the rising heat and swirling dust. Trucks rattle along the multilane thoroughfares, thousands every hour. They keep the supplies coming for the plants that line the streets, mile after mile, like gigantic military compounds.

Then, suddenly, Dongguan explodes into life. It’s the same bustling picture every day, morning and night: Workers, most of them women, stream in from every direction, with uniforms in every color of the rainbow. Laminated company IDs dangle from their necks — IBM, Siemens, Nokia, Duracell, Sanyo — to name but a few of the major international brands that have set up shop here.

Most of the workers look like schoolgirls. Holding hands, some are returning to their hostels exhausted, while others dutifully head off to the night shift. Outside the factories, the flags of the world have been hoisted to announce where the employers come from and what their employees are producing: cables for Germany, batteries for the United States, computer components for Japan, cellphones for Finland, clothing for France, toys for Hong Kong, shoes for Taiwan. There is almost nothing that this city of 1.5 million and its roughly 5 million migrant workers cannot supply.

Dongguan is only a small part of the Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which is booming like scarcely any other region on the planet. Export plants are mushrooming from the red earth all along the highway that leads to the nearby industrial center of Shenzhen. Here, as everywhere in China, international corporations have turned the battle cry of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ 1848 Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite!” into its opposite: “Producers of the World, Unite!”

Where communism meets capitalism

Here, in China, nominally still communist but in reality a hub of unbridled capitalism, the corporations of the world have found a bottomless reservoir of cheap — and eager — workers. Here they can operate largely unfettered by all those niggling social benefits that, from a management perspective, make products so prohibitively expensive: high wages, well-paid overtime, occupational health and safety regulations, maternity leave, free trade unions, and the right to strike.

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Like many other German companies, the electronics producer Wickmann from North Rhine-Westphalia knows how to make the most of this situation. Some 200 Chinese workers have the company logo — “Weiwen Dianqi” in the local language — emblazoned on their light blue jackets. For 500 to 700 yuan a month, roughly €48 to €68, they produce electrical fuses: nine and a half hours a day, six days a week. Overtime pays 3.5 yuan per hour. “It might actually be less,” says one worker, “because we don’t really know how our wages are calculated.”

They can rest assured that the company calculates very carefully. Wickmann plans to relocate its production altogether to China by the middle of next year. At the main plant in Germany, which still employs some 240 people, the first will soon be getting their marching orders. The company says the high cost of production in Germany and the rising value of the euro against the dollar make products 40 percent more expensive on the Asian market. “We can’t absorb that kind of shock,” managing director Matthias Huber recently noted.

The new El Dorado for German craftsmanship is located in a small alleyway in Changping. Only a village a few years ago, it is now part of Dongguan’s urban sprawl. At the end of the street, close to the pink-and-blue-tiled Wickmann plant, stands the drab factory hostel.

Migrant workers or slave workers?

Despite the wretched conditions, the German company is considered almost exemplary in this Chinese neighborhood. There are certainly worse jobs in south China, much worse. At Tyco, a U.S. company across the street, the work is so grueling that after just three days on the job, four young women from Hunan packed their bags, grabbed their washing bowls and headed for the bus stop. “We’re going home,” one of them says, frantically counting out her fare.

The four women belong to the roughly 120 million migrants who have moved south from poverty-stricken rural provinces like Sichuan, Hunan or Guangxi in search of work. They were prepared to sacrifice their youth and health, but not under these conditions.

Their dream of a better future has vanished now, as has the 1,000 yuan they paid a job broker. They could have earned 800 yuan a month, including overtime, for soldering wires onto small circuit boards. “But the work is too hard, especially on the eyes,” a young girl complains. The minimum working age in China is 16. Though she is underage, she was forced to labor like the adults. “The pace was too much,” she says.

The four Chinese women are leaving. But, all over the country, millions of other migrant workers continue to slave away. Their numbers are swelling every day: About 800 million Chinese live out in the rural areas, and an estimated one-sixth do not have work.

They all want a piece of the prosperity that globalization promises to bring to their country. That’s why they bow to the fate of wage slavery for a few years — in hopes of a brighter future. Few of them have electricity or running water in their villages back home. They have watched neighbors spending their savings from the new jobs, first to buy television sets and then to build homes or open small restaurants and shops. A desire to share in the new affluence drives them into China’s wealthy coastal areas.

An economic power at all costs

The Chinese leader who initiated the biggest migratory wave in his country’s history is omnipresent in the Pearl River delta: Deng Xiaoping. The Communist Party head, who died in 1997, smiles down from propaganda billboards as big as houses, cheering the huge country on to maintain his legacy.

For his successors, Deng’s teachings often come down to the single mantra with which he freed China from decades of ideological torpor in 1978: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white,” Deng proclaimed, “as long as it catches mice.”

Deng’s pragmatism powers the brute force with which the political elite surrounding President Hu Jintao are catapulting China’s 1.3 billion people into the industrial age. China wants to become an economic power at all costs. And consign to the past the humiliations it has suffered from foreign subjugation since 1842.

Personal well-being and environmental protection have fallen by the wayside during this patriotic leap into the future. Whether more than one million farmers are being resettled at the Three Gorges Dam, or an army of migrant workers is being redeployed from the fields into the factories — what counts is “fazhan” — the incessantly trumpeted “development.”

The strategy, which simultaneously cements the power of the communist leadership, is paying off with breathtaking growth that has reached an average annual rate of 9 percent. The reform course steered by Deng and his successors has lifted some 300 million Chinese out of abject poverty. Per capita income in China has quadrupled since 1990 to well above $1,000.

The effects of this dramatic revolution are reverberating throughout the world. The abundance of cheap goods “Made in China” may well quicken the pulses of Western bargain hunters. But few consumers are aware of the price they will pay for this windfall: the loss of their own prosperity and, increasingly, of their own jobs.

A free hand for employers

The Chinese economic miracle is working, thanks to investors like the Wickmann electronics company which can no longer afford German labor. In Dongguan, Wickmann’s management has a much freer hand than back home. According to its workers, the company provides insurance benefits for white collar workers only — a blatant violation even of China’s social laws.

“I don’t know why,” one young woman says. “Maybe you have to stay with them longer. Three years is what I’ve heard.” But does anyone really care?

The Chinese women at least have valid employment contracts at Wickmann: a luxury in the Pearl River delta. “Anybody who is laid off here can expect one month’s base wages as severance pay,” says one of the women in the company’s blue uniform: “390 yuan” — 180 less than the legal minimum wage. Wickmann grants its employees seven days off three times a year: to mark the Spring Festival and the national holidays on May 1 and October 1. But the women say that only three days of each week are paid.

Wickmann Chairman Horst Hübner paints a different picture. “We pay the legally required minimum wage of 565 yuan. We insure 90 percent of our employees and provide paid vacation. We comply with the laws.”

Even in China, Dongguan has a reputation as a sweat shop. Not that workers automatically fare better in other areas. Such as Wenzhou, which produces some 75 percent of the world’s disposable lighters. Or Yiwu in Zhejiang Province,where cheap Chinese workers churn out Christmas decorations and toys for western consumers. Including Germans.

Or in Ningbo, with its mammoth garment factories. At Youngor, China’s largest shirt manufacturer, some 6,000 seamstresses produce fashions for Pierre Cardin and Nike — in piecework. At the BenQ factory in Suzhou near Shanghai, a workforce of 10,000 builds TFT monitors and other technical equipment for the Taiwanese electronics specialist. And then attaches the logos of HP, Thomson and other global brands.

The hidden side of Shanghai’s glitz

AP
Booming Shanghai: The glittering facade of the world’s factory
Western executives who fly in to China by the hundreds every day train their blinkered sights only on the glittering façade of this global factory. Yet a few yards away, in the backstreets of Shanghai’s neon-lit commercial center, they could readily meet the true heroes of China’s boom: modern-day coolies, who work their hands to the bone every day in the cement dust of construction sites and then collapse into bed exhausted every night. Or the children of migrant workers, who are forced to beg because officials deny them residency permits and thus the right to attend school. In Shanghai alone, half of the eight million workers are migrants.

But western investors walk on by, oblivious to the squalor. Their attention is fixed on new production sites, where labor is even less of a cost factor. The number of businesses outsourcing production to China grows daily. A recent headline read “Rowenta vaporizes Erbach.” The venerable brand from southern Germany’s Odenwald region is planning to manufacture its low-end irons in China — for a fraction of the previous cost.

Posted at 9:34 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Los Angeles Times

In the shadow of a rusting gold-mining factory here, hundreds of sweaty young men slog knee-deep in chocolate pools of sludge. Some heave mud-filled buckets up the slopes of vast open pits, while others strike gray boulders with steel mallets. They pick. Stop. Look for anything that shines. Then pick again.

The miners have gathered in this northeastern village of the Democratic Republic of Congo because they believe years of runoff from the now-shuttered Belgian-built processing plant above them enriched the soil below. On an average day, a miner can unearth nuggets worth $5 to $10.
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FOR THE RECORD:
Congo mining —An Oct. 17 article in Section A about mining by Congolese villagers referred to coltan as a granite. Coltan, which is used in electronics, is more precisely described as a mineral.
“It’s a game of chance,” says mud-splattered miner Jean-Claude Takinga, 29, rising from the brown pit after a backbreaking nine-hour shift that yielded gold flecks worth $20. “Once I found $800 worth and used it to buy a house. The next day you find nothing.”

Until recently, this mining area was off limits, first controlled by the state-owned minerals company, then occupied by Ugandan soldiers, then passed between outlaw militias who used the mining proceeds to buy guns.

Now the foreign army is gone. The militias are lying low. And the central government has little authority in this part of the country.

Finally, villagers say, it’s their turn. “This is our field now,” Takinga says.

This is the closest that most Congolese have ever come to reaping the benefits of the land beneath their feet, for more than a century more of a curse than a blessing.

One of Earth’s richest sources of valuable minerals, Congo is believed to hold one-third of the world’s cobalt reserves and two-thirds of its coltan, a black granite widely used in cellphones and Sony PlayStations. The nation also straddles one of the world’s most lucrative copper belts and was once the No. 1 producer of diamonds.

But the Congolese have watched helplessly as billions of dollars in minerals were systematically pillaged by foreigners and despots, beginning with 19th century colonialists.

Belgium’s King Leopold II used Congo as his colonial piggybank in the late 1800s. Beginning a few years after the country’s 1960 independence, the mines funded strongman Mobutu Sese Seko’s 32-year dictatorship. In 1998, Congo’s envious neighbors launched a bloody four-year war, seizing key mining towns and carting away piles of the nation’s natural resources.

“Congo is like the Garden of Eden,” says miner Serge Utibeli, 26. “God put everything here for us. But it’s also why so many outsiders come to create trouble and take it away.”

Since 2003, a transitional government aided by United Nations peacekeeping troops has improved stability in some of the key northeastern mining towns.

Though rebel militias remain a threat, the lull has cleared the way for an estimated half a million Congolese to rush back to the mines, hoping to scrape together enough minerals to survive another day.

“It’s probably the freest it has ever been,” says Baudio Matata, 49, who has been a miner since he was a boy, starting out working for a state-owned company and then prospecting for himself in the 1980s, when Mobutu liberalized mining laws. It was easier to find gold in the 1980s, he says, but government agents usually seized large finds. Violence and war in the 1990s made mining too dangerous, and those who worked were forced to hand over profits to soldiers or rebels.

“Nowadays it’s harder to find the gold, but I get to keep what I find,” Matata says, waving a small plastic bag containing his day’s take, worth about $6.

Nearly all the small-scale mining is still done by hand, with broken shovels, plastic buckets and homemade hammers. With little else, hundreds of villagers in a remote valley about an hour from Mongbwalu have literally moved a mountain, shovelful by shovelful, over the last two years, excavating a massive red-dirt pit 100 yards deep and 200 yards across. It takes a line of 40 men to toss buckets of dirt and rocks from the bottom of the hole to the top.

George Kubuli, 25, hauling dirt in pink pants and flip-flops, says he doesn’t see much of the 50 grams of gold a day that a manager of the Lafolie mine says it can yield.

“Don’t talk to him,” a supervisor interrupts. “He has work to do.”

At the bottom of the deep pit are gray dolerite rocks containing tiny flecks of gold. Broken rocks are tossed up the same line of men and carried to a tent, where another row of workers pulverizes the stones by striking them with steel poles. To pass the time and make the work less monotonous, the laborers pound and sing in a rhythm that can be heard a mile away.

About 250 miles to the south, in the pastoral highlands near Goma, boys as young as 9 help pan for minerals in the Mumba River, earning money to help their families pay primary school fees. “I’ve already made $10, which I used to buy a goat,” says 14-year-old Asifiwe Barindikije.

Miners there, working in teams of two or three, divert the river into short troughs built of rock and clay, where mud is sifted by hand to isolate the heavier sands containing coltan, cassiterite and manganese.

A middleman makes the arduous three-hour drive from nearby Goma twice a week to buy bags of the sand and rocks.

Faustin Habyambere, 27, says he earns about $5 a day and knows that the middleman, in turn, sells the minerals for about twice that to buyers across the border in Rwanda.

“I don’t care where it goes,” Habyambere says. “Before, I was a farmer, but this pays better.”

Congolese government officials, however, are increasingly frustrated by the export of their nation’s minerals to neighboring countries, much of it done illegally without paying taxes.

“Our loss is enormous,” said Stephen Kitz, a general director at the Office of the Gold Mines of Kilo-Moto, a state-owned extraction company. Kilo-Moto once employed 5,000 people and mined gold worth more than $100 million a year, but today it is nearly bankrupt.

The first stop for the minerals is usually neighboring Uganda or Rwanda. Uganda has few gold mines of its own, yet it has exported an average of $55 million in gold a year since 2000, according to a recent U.N. report. Likewise, tiny Rwanda exports five times as much cassiterite, a black rock used to make tin, as it claims to produce. From these two countries, the U.S. receives much of Congo’s coltan. Brussels gets the diamonds, Switzerland the gold.

In the town of Goma, on the border with Rwanda, there’s little evidence that residents benefit from mining proceeds. Roads remain covered with hardened lava from a deadly 2002 volcanic eruption, and the lack of running water forces residents to make daily treks to Lake Kivu, where they fill jerrycans and do their wash.

“These people are still being pillaged,” says Kevin D’Souza, a mining engineer with resource consultant Wardell Armstrong in London. “That’s the tragedy. It hasn’t changed since the days of King Leopold.

“Nobody even knows how much wealth is being mined and where it’s going. It’s hemorrhaging through various channels.”

Congo’s own mining infrastructure is a shambles. Factories, like the one in Mongbwalu, were closed and looted, leaving no place inside the country to process raw materials. Kitz estimates that $250 million is needed to rebuild the industry.

Sloppy, short-sighted extraction techniques have destabilized most underground mines. Quarries such as Lafolie are reinforced with little more than tree trunks and palm fronds. Elsewhere, cave-ins and falling rocks kill or maim miners every week.

The once-thriving Makala mine, carved into a Mongbwalu hillside in 1948, is one of the most dangerous. Belgians tried to hide the site by burying it and, according to locals, set explosives inside to ward off poachers and destabilize miles-long corridors.

Nevertheless, scores of young men pass through the rusted, moss-covered gates each day, sometimes working in the dark for a week at a time. Inside, they torch the rock to make it smooth and easier to cut, but the fires can suck up all the air and release lethal gases that send miners fleeing. So many are hurt that they’ve set up a committee that collects 15% of everyone’s haul in return for a promise to pay hospital, or funeral, costs in case of an accident.

“I know it’s dangerous, but what choice do I have?” says miner Kasongo Banza, who also runs the collection fund. “If I don’t do this, I don’t eat.”

Although fighting has subsided in the northeast, militias and rebel groups keep a tight grip on mining activities in some areas.

In Mongbwalu, U.N. troops set up camp this year and the mayor was reappointed, but residents know the real authority still rests with the Nationalist and Integrationist Front, or FNI, whose headquarters sits atop a hill overlooking the town.

FNI militiamen show up several times a week at the key mining spots, charging miners $1 each time the workers enter the mines and an additional $12 a week. They even demanded $9,000 in “protection money” from AngloGold Ashanti, a South African mining company under contract with Kilo-Moto.

After Human Rights Watch accused the corporation of funding a “murderous armed group,” AngloGold Ashanti’s chief executive, Bobby Godsell, said he would halt payments to the militia.

Few of the miners complain about the fees they are charged.

“It’s natural to pay,” says Jayerombi Uwechi, 24, squinting at the sun as he emerges from a day inside the partly flooded Adidi mine. “They control the area. We’ve always had to pay whoever’s in control.” The illegal tax, he adds, is better than when the city was controlled by Ugandan soldiers, who sometimes forced people to work in the mines without pay, beating those who refused.

Gold miner John Alio, 27, says he’s just grateful that the minerals provide him with a daily living. He says he can’t imagine his country without them.

“Even if I could trade the minerals for peace, I wouldn’t,” Alio says. “I would never want to give them up.”

Posted at 5:26 PM · Comments (0)

Sunday, November 27

He shouldn’t have been there. Ahmat Soubiane knew he’d eventually have to pack up his wife and four young daughters and leave the official diplomatic residence. He wasn’t the Republic of Chad’s ambassador to the United States anymore; the house no longer was his. After five years in the post, he had been recalled for expressing opposition to his boss, Chadian President Idriss Deby.

But he’d stayed — for 16 months. By law, the Soubianes had become squatters. So they were braced for trouble. And one afternoon, it came.

Someone started banging on the door. They heard the sound of wood cracking as someone kicked it in. And suddenly the place was swarming with people.

There was Mahamoud Adam Bechir, the new ambassador from Chad, along with his driver, his cook, his charge d’affaires. And there was Bechir’s lawyer, as well as a squad of young men who broke down the door.

The politics of Chad, a landlocked country virtually in the middle of Africa’s Sahara, had been visited upon a quiet cul-de-sac in Montgomery County’s Hampshire Green community, the official home of the Chadian ambassador. That July day, Soubiane and Bechir, the dueling diplomats, faced off for 12 hours at the residence, surrounded by officers of the Secret Service, the Diplomatic Security Service, Montgomery County police and State Department officials.

Their test of wills reached a negotiated end a couple of days later in talks brokered by State Department officials. Bechir, who’d presented his credentials to the White House, took up residence in the official Chadian home. Soubiane, his wife, Zarga, and their four daughters — Amina, 13; twins Izza and Iman, 12; and 6-year-old Souad — found refuge in the home of a friend in Columbia.

They had relocated. But the Soubianes’ life was still in limbo. And the battle was far from over.

* * *

As boys in primary school, Soubiane and Deby had been chums. Later, they became comrades in the struggle against the Chadian dictator Hissene Habre, whose government stands accused of arresting, torturing and killing thousands of ethnic citizens during the 1980s.

Such brutality happened amid anti-Habre forces as well, and Soubiane experienced it firsthand. During the struggle in the mid-1980s, he was tortured while imprisoned by an opposition group in the mountains of northern Chad, and then fled to Libya.

Meanwhile, Deby had emerged as a rebel nationalist who wanted to unify and democratize Chad. So when Deby led the overthrow of Habre in 1990, a jubilant Soubiane joined their victory ride into N’Djamena, the Chadian capital.

Soubiane helped craft the country’s constitution. Deby appointed him interior minister, then a regional governor. Soubiane’s commitment to democracy was spurred by those experiences, he says. Deby named him ambassador to the United States in 1998.

Soubiane, 49, sits for an interview wearing gray slacks, blue blazer and white shirt. He speaks softly, slowly, his English deeply accented by the Arabic and French that are his more familiar tongues. His bearing is formal, befitting a diplomat, a politician, as he methodically describes his falling out with his old friend.

“We fought together. We came to power together. And we had a commitment to build democracy,” Soubiane says.

But in 2003, he believed that Deby was moving away from democracy.

Deby was in his second term, facing the end of his rule, when Soubiane learned that the president was pressing for a constitutional amendment that would scrap presidential term limits.

Soubiane wrote a letter urging the ruling party in Chad and the president himself not to do so. Of all provisions in new democracies, term limits are among the most important, Soubiane says.

“All the countries who respect this point go on to development,” he says.

Human rights advocates and the State Department expressed their concern at the constitutional change, which one U.S. official said “opens the door for him [Deby] to stay in power.”

Deby’s response was to fire Soubiane and order him home.

Soubiane especially regrets no longer being part of the talks on Chad’s newfound oil wealth. As ambassador, he had served as a negotiator with the World Bank on the oil pipeline project that has made Chad the newest “petro-state” in Africa. Soubiane expresses pride in the formula his country created with the bank to spend revenue wisely and avoid the waste and corruption that have afflicted Africa’s other petro-states.

But Chad this year was ranked one of the world’s two most corrupt countries, along with Bangladesh. The country has a frightening record of human rights abuses — extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions — under Deby’s regime. Soubiane knows all this. Indeed, he had been part of the Deby government.

Yet there is a certain naivete about Soubiane as he expresses his surprise at what happened to him in the United States after he defied Deby.

Nothing happened. That was the rub. It seemed to make no difference. He heard nothing, he says, from those people who propose democracy for other countries. He expected, at least, for his asylum application to be decided.

“Where are these people who every day are talking about democracy and good governance?” Soubiane asked. “I sacrifice my position. I sacrifice my family. I sacrifice my privilege to step up and to say [of Deby], ‘This is wrong.’ “

In July, Chadian presidential term limits were, indeed, scrapped.

And the new ambassador broke down the door.

* * *

The Soubianes have no income, no jobs, no legal papers, no right to leave the United States pending their asylum application. They are living in donated housing in Columbia, and the girls are worried about their safety and struggle to fit into their new schools.

To Soubiane, it seems that the only people standing with his family are the ordinary people who have learned of their plight and have stepped forward to help them.

Like Bob D’Angelis. He knows nothing of Chad, but he does know a thing or two about helping students in distress.

He is a student support official with Howard County schools and was alerted to a potential problem earlier this fall. A couple of new students at Harpers Choice Middle School were highly emotional and prone to crying. It was the Soubiane twins, Izza and Iman. They were attending Harpers Choice along with their older sister, Amina.

Iman wrote a poem that seemed to reflect her lasting fear of the men behind the door, the men who came to evict them.

How would I know who is behind the door?

How would I know what could happen?

How would I know what to do?

Why should I be punished? Why should I be the problem? …

For the complete article, please see the link below.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 5:21 PM · Comments (0)

Gonzo’s gone, but journalism hasn’t been the same since
Marc Weingarten
Crown: 326 pp., $25

By Robert S. Boynton, Special to The Times

New Journalism is dead. Long live New Journalism!

Has ever a literary movement’s demise been more frequently hailed than New Journalism’s? “Whatever happened to the New Journalism?” wondered Thomas Powers in a 1975 issue of Commonweal. In 1981, Joe Nocera published a postmortem in the Washington Monthly, blaming its demise on the journalistic liberties taken by Hunter S. Thompson. Regardless of the culprit, less than a decade after Tom Wolfe’s 1973 New Journalism anthology, the consensus was that New Journalism was dead.

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And yet, as Marc Weingarten shows in “The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight,” the movement thrived (he calls it “the greatest literary movement since the American fiction renaissance of the 1920s”), survived and has even achieved a measure of respectability. “Once a rear-guard rebellion, its tenets are so accepted now that they’ve become virtually invisible,” Weingarten writes. “The art of narrative storytelling is alive and well; it’s just more diffuse now, spread out across books, magazines, newspapers, and the Web.”

Weingarten takes the reader on an enjoyable romp through New Journalism’s most famous works, telling the “story behind the story” of John Hersey’s “Hiroshima,” Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” and Norman Mailer’s “The Armies of the Night.” Along the way, Weingarten drops nuggets that may enrich our readings of these classics (Capote “never tape- recorded any conversations and never jotted anything down in a notebook during the entire six years it took for him to research the story”; Mailer picked up his third-person narrative technique from “The Education of Henry Adams,” which he read as a Harvard freshman). As a narrative history of an important journalistic movement, Weingarten’s book might be paired with Carol Polsgrove’s “It Wasn’t Pretty, Folks, but Didn’t We Have Fun?,” an excellent history of Esquire magazine in the 1960s.

Surprisingly, the writer who seems to have had the most influence on the movement was the New Yorker’s Lillian Ross, whom several others in the book cite as their inspiration. It is sometimes forgotten that long before Tom Wolfe proposed nonfiction that reads “like a novel,” Ross was doing just that in her pieces on John Huston and Ernest Hemingway in the early 1950s. “I don’t know whether this sort of thing has ever been done before, but I don’t see why I shouldn’t try to do a fact piece in novel form,” she suggested to her editor.

The standard interpretation of New Journalism is that it was a writer-centric movement in which renegades like Thompson and Wolfe pushed the form almost to the breaking point. While this is true, Weingarten’s book provides evidence that it was as much, if not more, of an editor’s movement than a writer’s. His portraits of Clay Felker (founder of New York magazine), Harold Hayes (Esquire), Warren Hinckle (Ramparts and Scanlan’s) and Jann Wenner (Rolling Stone) make it clear that the linchpin of the movement was a group of visionaries who were willing to take serious financial and editorial risks. They didn’t merely provide a venue for Wolfe & Co., they were the catalyst that encouraged New Journalists to experiment in the first place. As important as individual writers and articles were, the enduring cultural influence of Rolling Stone (Wenner envisioned it as combining “the professionalism of Time and the hipness of the underground press with stories that would run as long as the New Yorker’s”), Esquire and New York was far greater.

If these editors played a crucial role in the movement’s success, they also bear some responsibility for its failings. As the recent outpouring of praise for the late Hunter S. Thompson shows, we have a tendency to deify these writers, imputing a level of professionalism to their work that most of them never would have.

It is often forgotten that they were, for the most part, a bunch of young writers who were making things up as they went along with a free-spiritedness that occasionally led them astray. With the public’s opinion of journalism at an all-time low, we are still living with the legacy of these corrupt practices. Weingarten is too generous to Thompson’s erratic work, which he characterizes as “journalism as bricolage.” “Back in New York, Hunter had to file the story for Scanlan’s, but he couldn’t recall most of what had transpired,” Weingarten observes of Thompson’s “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved.” Similarly, the composites used in New York magazine by Gail Sheehy and George Goodman (who published under the nom de plume of “Adam Smith”) had a deleterious effect on journalism’s reputation. “New Journalism is rising,” the Wall Street Journal wrote, “but its believability is declining.”

So what really “killed” New Journalism? I would say it was the twin evils of all magazine journalism: service and sensationalism. As Weingarten notes, by the early 1970s, magazines like New York were beginning the long slide down toward “Top 10” service features and puffy lifestyle stories. The 1977 appearance of “Star Wars” on the cover of Rolling Stone suggested that, from then on, most magazines would function as little more than “press organs for movie stars.” The journalistic form with which writers like Wolfe chronicled postwar consumerism eventually succumbed to it.

Robert S. Boynton is the author of “The New New Journalism” and teaches magazine journalism at New York University.

Posted at 12:47 PM · Comments (0)

Beijing

The 20-year-old Peking University sophomore sat down at her computer
one day in late April and posted a poem on a university Internet bulletin board. She then walked to the top of a university building and leapt to her death. Her family later found the poem on the university Web site:

I Made a List
Put reasons to live on the left side
Reasons to die on the right
I wrote many on the right
But found little to write on the left
Not willing to imagine
Continuing to live like this for decades.

She was one of 17 college students in Beijing who committed suicide in the first seven months of this year. In September a freshman at a
university in Guangdong province, in southern China, jumped from the seventh floor of a campus building. He had earlier complained to classmates about the poor quality of campus life, saying that the food was bad and that he was even unable to launder his own clothes. “I’m very sorry I cannot live up to your expectations,” the student told his parents in a suicide note.

With harsh competition for a spot at the best universities, Chinese
college students today face conflicting and stressful demands. Products of China’s one-child policy, they are often pampered and protected at home, only to face appalling living conditions — unheated dormitories, poor food, inadequate washing facilities — on campus. They also find their intellectual and physical freedom curtailed, even as they struggle to gain independence. Few students take advantage of university counseling, which is only just becoming available on many campuses.

As a result, students are increasingly rebelling against the system,
and psychological problems and suicide are on the rise. The situation is a far cry from the student days of their parents, a generation raised on the cradle-to-grave “iron rice bowl,” or system of guaranteed lifetime employment under Communism. While this is China’s first generation of college students to enjoy previously unknown freedoms — their parents had their courses of study and jobs chosen for them — the pressures that accompany these freedoms can be overwhelming.

“People are more and more concerned about the younger generation,” says Myra Lu, a senior at the Communication University of China, in Beijing. “China has really changed a lot. Twenty years ago, my mom never would have imagined that her daughter would live the life she’s living today. We feel
we’ve grown up with society, and we didn’t have enough time to react, no time to think.”

Fang Xin, a Peking University psychologist who has been working with
college students for 12 years, says that students today are “victims of a changing society” in which parents put extraordinary pressure on their only child to succeed.

“Parents tell their children if they work hard they’ll get into a
better university, and if they graduate from a better university they’ll get a
better job, and if they get a better job, they’ll earn more money,” she
says.

Ms. Fang predicts the problem will get worse, saying that the students
who
need help the most don’t realize it, and never come to the
psychological-counseling center. When she held a special online
counseling session following the suicide of the young woman, only 67 of the university’s 25,400 students took part.

“I think the number of suicides will increase,” she says, adding that
the trend is “contagi us.”

Suicide is the main cause of death among people ages 20 to 35 in China, according to a July report by the ministry of health. Doctors cite exam stress, career worries, and relationship problems as the main reasons, according to news reports. In Beijing, 20 cases of suicide were reported last year.

Locking the Gates

In many ways, Chinese students today live similarly to their
counterparts in the West. The pedestrian mall beside Fudan University, in Shanghai, is lined with bookstores, coffee shops, clothing stores, and small eateries. The bookstore shelves are piled high with Western works — in translation and in the original language — including Simone de Beauvoir’s biography,
Orwell’s 1984, the recent bestseller The Da Vinci Code, and Francis
Bacon’s Essays.

One summer morning, just inside the main gate of the university, two
students are lost in a kiss beneath a towering statue of the late
Chairman
Mao Zedong. A few yards away, students lie on the grass beside a small
lake, reading textbooks or just chatting. A student wearing dark
black-framed glasses and a T-shirt that says Linkin Park paces back and
forth while memorizing a stack of notecards.

But the similarities to the West soon stop. Chinese students — both
undergraduates and graduate students — must maneuver through a
plethora of
regulations and restrictions that students in Western countries would
find
suffocating.

Most university campuses in China are walled and gated to keep
strangers
out and, on occasion, students in. Students are required to live in
dormitories, where doors are locked at a set time each evening. When
thousands of anti-Japanese demonstrators marched through Beijing’s
university district earlier this year, anxious students could only
watch
from a distance. Gates at the leading universities in the city’s
Haidian
district were locked to prevent students from joining the protest.

Secret Exodus

Dormitory conditions are dismal. Normally, a half-dozen students are
crowded into one small room, with toilet facilities down the hall. Hot
water turns off at 11 p.m. And with no showers in the dormitories,
students
have to walk to a shower facility elsewhere on campus.

“The summers are too warm, and in the winters the heat goes on too
late,
and you have to use a lot of blankets,” complains Zhu Ying, a senior at
Capital Normal University, adding that the public showers are a
10-minute
walk away, a long trek on bitter winter nights in Beijing.

Lights in rooms go off at 11 p.m. (a new government regulation
rescinded
that policy, but colleges have been slow to comply), so students move
to
the lit hallway to do late-night work, sitting on stacks of books and
using
chairs as makeshift desks.

“We have six students in one room and three desks,” says Rui Ming, a
student at Nanjing University. “The space between my desk and bed is so
narrow, I have to stand sideways to let someone pass by.”

The conditions have led to an undercover exodus from college
dormitories in
recent years, despite government regulations requiring students to live
on
campuses. No one knows for sure how many students have moved off
campus, as
they must still pay for their dorm rooms, but students generally put
the
figure at about 10 percent — some say as high as 20 percent.

Chinese universities also have strict rules regarding relations between
male and female students. Some institutions even forbid men from
entering
women’s dormitories and vice versa. “The guard at our building has such
a
keen eye that even a male fly would not be able to sneak in,” the
official
China Daily quoted a Shanghai student as joking.

Students take the restrictions seriously, and for good reason. One
student
was kicked out of Shanghai University earlier this year after it was
learned that his girlfriend spent the night in his room caring for him
when
he was ill.

Last year a university in Chengdu, in Sichuan province, expelled two
students who were caught on a hidden video camera while kissing on an
empty
classroom floor one evening. Although the girl produced a doctor’s
certificate proving that she was still a virgin, the university
insisted
that the incident was an “illicit sexual act” and refused to back down.
A
court case to force the institution to reinstate the students failed.

Students are critical of such policies. “It’s not the school’s
business,”
says Laura Liu, a graduate student in journalism at Fudan University,
in
Shanghai. “You can’t regulate things like this. Students have a right
to
have a boyfriend or girlfriend.”

When two Beijing students were found murdered in their off-campus
apartment
last year, universities adopted an “I told you so” attitude.

Students point in turn to the case of Ma Jiajue, a senior at Yunnan
University, in southwestern China, who last year hacked four of his
roommates to death in their dorm room. Mr. Ma, who was very bright,
came
from a poor farm family. He felt discriminated against and suffered
from
periods of deep depression. He was executed in June 2004.

It’s a Joke

Chinese students also face a good deal of political indoctrination. In
the
summer before their freshman year, all students take part in obligatory
military training for about two weeks. Students speak fondly of this
experience, in the way that soldiers describe the camaraderie created
in
boot camp.

“Standing in the sun for hours isn’t pleasant,” says Daisy Li, a
student in
Shanghai. “But by the end of the training, we had formed good ties with
the
trainers. Some girls have tears in their eyes when they leave.”

University students must also take courses each year in basic communist
philosophy, including Marxism, Mao Zedong’s thought, and theories of
Deng
Xiaoping. Few students — or professors — appear to take those
courses
seriously.

“It’s a joke,” says Ms. Lu. “I don’t know why we have to take it. One
student pretends to listen to the teacher and the rest sleep, listen to
music, or completely skip the class. We just memorize the night before
the
exam.”

Students tell of teachers who are aware of the unpopularity of the
courses,
and who use the time to teach Chinese history or Western philosophy.

Some observers worry that China’s pampered “little emperors” are
arriving
on university campuses ill-prepared for the real world. Most new
students
have never been away from home before, never held a job, and have not
had a
romantic relationship.

“They were overprotected by their parents, and when they get into
university they’re not used to dealing with things on their own,” says
Ms.
Liu, the Shanghai graduate student.

Some worried parents move to university cities with their college
children
to take care of them; some families go so far as to hire “nannies” to
take
care of their university-age sons and daughters.

In the case of the Guangdong student who committed suicide this fall,
the
Chinese news media reported that the young man’s parents had planned to
rent a house near the campus to be close to him while he was at the
university. But when his mother told the young man the family could not
afford the rent, and would instead deliver home-cooked meals to him
each
day, the distraught student committed suicide.

Ms. Fang, the Peking University psychologist, blames parents for
spoiling
their children and being overly protective.

“They’re 18 years old, but their psychological age is just 8 or 9,” she
says of students today. “This is because Mom is always telling them,
‘You
needn’t do anything. I’ll wash your clothes, I’ll cook for you.’”

Last year, Nanjing University of Science and Technology began offering
16
types of free hotel-like services in its dorms, including room
cleaning,
morning wake-up calls, the posting of mail, and even putting air in
bicycle
tires. The new services were seen as an attempt to keep students from
moving off the campus. But the venture led to a nationwide debate.

The Beijing Youth Daily welcomed the decision, saying the new services
would “free students from mundane trivial matters, allowing them to
focus
more on academic study.” But the People’s Daily concluded that hotel
services would actually encourage laziness and a dependent mentality
among
students, and accused “overbearing parents” of having kept their
children
“far from daily chores at home.”

Loosening Its Grip

The Ministry of Education has recently begun to take steps to relax its
grip on university life. It has appeared to back down on the
requirement
that all students live on campus when it vaguely altered the wording of
the
prohibition, implying that students might be allowed to choose where
they
want to live.

The ministry also lifted the decades-old ban on students’ getting
married,
a move welcomed by a China Daily commentator. “It is as if an old lady
is
reluctantly loosening her grip on her naughty grown-up children,” the
commentator wrote, adding that the move was “a trend that should be
encouraged.” The author went on to say that excessive supervision by
schools and parents limited the opportunity for students to learn from
their mistakes.

Some universities were quick to capitalize on the changes. Suzhou
University announced that pregnant students would be able to obtain a
one-year maternity leave — a first. Fudan University