Howard W. French (http://www.howardwfrench.com)

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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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This is particularly fine work by Burrell here, a man who played in the style of and labored somewhat under the shadow of Wes Montgomery. His better records deserve careful attention in their own right, and it doesn’t take more than a single listening to understand that assimilating him to Wes is a mistake. He’s got his very unique style and touch.
With a guitar out front, the 1960s hard bop sound remains something to behold. If you have any doubts still, the opening solo by John Coltrane on the tune “I Never Knew,” tells you everything you need to know about that man’s remarkable prowess, and is worth the price of the disc alone.

Posted at 7:54 PM · Comments (0)

Less than a week after the Supreme Court upheld the death sentence for serial killer Tsutomu Miyazaki on Jan. 17, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia had not only recorded the ruling in its entry on Miyazaki, but had added an incisive note. When the Miyazaki case was dominating the headlines in 1989, he was referred to as the “Otaku Killer,” but now, says Wikipedia, Japanese media tend to refer to him only as a “child murderer.”

It’s generally agreed that the word “otaku,” which roughly describes Japanese men with undeveloped social skills and an obsession for pop culture, in particular anime and manga, did not enter the average person’s vocabulary until the Miyazaki case. Police found around 6,000 videotapes in his room as well as countless comic books. Prior to the young printing assistant’s arrest for the murder of four little girls in Saitama Prefecture, otaku was a subculture that was mostly invisible. The horrific nature of the killings demonized otaku as soon as they were defined, and until the late 1990s the label had negative connotations.

According to writer Kaoru Takamura in a recent article in the Asahi Shimbun, otaku now come out to “gather in the light of day,” most famously in Akihabara, which has become their Mecca. The otaku market, also referred to as moe, is estimated to be worth 88 billion yen a year. “Elementary school-age idols are no longer unusual,” Takamura points out, referring to businesses that hire women to dress up like maids and cartoon characters and act like little girls while otaku take their pictures. The formerly taboo interests of these men “are now consumed openly.” Takamura asks what it is we’ve learned from the Miyazaki case.

Obviously, the media no longer refers to Miyazaki as the Otaku Killer because they are afraid of offending a demographic that now represents a viable market. But how did we get from Miyazaki to moe?

In another Asahi article published just before the Supreme Court ruling, Shinobu Yoshioka, the author of a book about the Miyazaki case, paints a portrait of the killer as a blank; a man who can only connect to society by “collecting things that are popular.” Miyazaki’s introversion has been said to be as a result of a physical handicap — he was born with deformed wrists. But while this attribute certainly added to his self-consciousness, Yoshioka says that, contrary to Miyazaki’s own statements, he could find no proof that he was bullied or ridiculed as a child because of it.

In addition, Miyazaki’s profile as a sexual deviant is misleading. Some of his actions were undeniably deviant — dismembering the bodies, eating the flesh of his victims, sleeping next to the corpses, drinking blood, tormenting one girl’s parents with letters — but Yoshioka discerned nothing sexual about them. There is no evidence to support prosecutors’ claims that he masturbated in front of the corpses or media reports that said he had sex with them. In addition, every article about Miyazaki’s infamous videotape collection mentions that it consisted of child pornography and slasher movies, but according to police records only about 1 percent of the tapes could qualify as either.

Yoshioka’s own assessment is that Miyazaki suffers from a delusional persecution complex. He dismisses the lengthy psychiatric assessments as being useless, a “mess” of uncoordinated information whose contradictory conclusions were arrived at simply to fulfill the prosecution’s purpose, which was to guarantee that Miyazaki gets the death penalty. In order to do that the prosecution had to prove that Miyazaki was a monster but not mentally incapacitated. Along the way they neglected to figure out what makes him tick.

Hiroyuki Shinoda, the editor of the monthly So, conducted a 10-year correspondence with Miyazaki, which produced 200 letters and a book authored by the killer called “Yume no Naka (Inside a Dream).” Shinoda asserts that Miyazaki is incapable of acknowledging his involvement in his own trial — he acts as if it’s happening to someone else. Even after his death sentence, he casually asked Shinoda to continue taping news reports that he never watches and pick up the catalog to an annual comics convention. He’s still collecting, still an otaku.

A journalist who specializes in crimes against children was quoted in Shukan Asahi as saying that young men who saw pictures on TV of Miyazaki’s room, with its shelves of videos and comics, “thought it looked just like their rooms.” The same article mentions that the rate of child-murder cases has not increased since 1989, but the portion of those involving sexual deviance has. Moreover, pedophilia cases have shifted from criminals who sought sex with children because they could not handle sex with adults to criminals who are genuine pedophiles. Though the journalist doesn’t say all otaku are pedophiles, she does say that the greater acceptance of otaku makes it easier for those with pedophilic tendencies to “blend in” and act out their desires.

Miyazaki is not, strictly speaking, a pedophile, but the media has transformed him into an all-purpose model of one. Takamura says that all the arguments about mental capacity lead us nowhere. The important thing is to recognize how antisocial tendencies manifest themselves as murderous impulses, something that becomes more and more difficult in a world that is itself obsessed with visual information regardless of content.

We’re all otaku now.

The Japan Times: Jan. 29, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 1:30 AM · Comments (0)

I listen to Classical music on the odd occasion. There are things that absolutely captivate me in the genre, though, and this is one of them
Arvo Part, an Estonian born in the 1930s, is definitely sui generis. This music is grave and dense by turns, and then ethereal and light as a feather. The emotion this man can wring out of a single passage is more than many can muster in an entire career. I love the tintinnabulation and counterpoint that one finds everywhere in his work. Finally, though, it is the power of his climaxes that one measures this man by, and that is also where he will have won his ultimate place.

Posted at 9:55 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
January 29, 2006

I do not own a BlackBerry or a pager. I don’t chat or instant-message or text-message. My cellphone could connect to the Web if I let it, but I don’t. I don’t gamble on the Internet nor do I game on it (or on any other electronic device). And yet I’m starting to twitch.
Skip to next paragraph
Related Verlyn Klinkenborg’s The Rural Life

I have three everyday telephone numbers, not counting Skype and a calling card, and two fax numbers. I have six working e-mail addresses, as well as a few no longer in use. A couple of weeks ago I started writing a blog for The Times. Part of my job, as a blogger, is to read and approve the publication of readers’ comments. That is the equivalent of another form of e-mail. There are probably half a dozen Really Simple Syndication tools on my computer, and one or another of them is always unfurling the latest ribbon of news in the background. It is astonishing how old the morning’s headlines seem by evening.

Back in the dial-up days, computer users made brief forays onto a bulletin board or some outpost of the primitive Internet, all the while clocking connection time in order to keep costs down. Going online was like driving a Stanley Steamer — better for scaring horses and wowing the youth than for long-distance hauling. There was always a slightly neurotic edge to it. You could feel the seconds ticking away while nothing happened. But nowadays turning on the computer is synonymous with being online. Who turns the computer off? It’s rarely worth severing that digital link. For some of us, the computer has become less and less a place to work and more and more a place to await messages from the ether, like hopeful spiritualists.

I thought I was a fairly temperate user of computers. But in the past year or so I have become addicted to e-mail. I confess it. You probably know the signs. Do you tell your e-mail program to check for messages automatically every two minutes — and then disbelieve it when it comes up empty? Have you learned to hesitate before answering a new message so it doesn’t look as though you were hunched over the keyboard, waiting? Do you secretly think of lunch as a time for your inbox to fill up? But the clearest sign of e-mail addiction is simply to ask yourself, what is the longest you’ve gone without checking your e-mail in the past two months? Anything longer than a broken night’s sleep is good.

I blame my e-mail addiction, in part, on the United States Postal Service. Seeing the mail lady pull up to our rural mailbox in her red station wagon with the flashing amber light on top is one of the high points of my day, whether there is anything “good” in the mail or not. (The “goodness” of mail is another question entirely.) When you think about it, the postal system is a remarkable thing, even in this new universe of instant-delivery systems. Its genius is this: The mail comes only once a day. All that expectation gathered into a single visit! And once-a-day-ness is built right into the system. I try to imagine the mail lady bringing every piece of mail to our mailbox as she gets it. In fact, that’s exactly what she does, because the mail shows up only once a day at the local post office.

I suppose I could tell my e-mail program to check for mail on a postal schedule — once a day — although minutes are the only intervals the software understands. But that would defeat the logic of e-mail, which is meant to arrive seriatim — hence, its addictive punch. The principle of snail mail is infrequency; the principle of e-mail is frequency. The real question is, what is the frequency for?

I think of e-mail as a continuing psychology experiment that studies the effect on humans of abrupt, frequently repeated stimuli — often pleasurable, sometimes not, but always with the positive charge that comes from seeing new mail in the inbox. So far, the experiment has revealed, in me, the synaptic responses of a squirrel. It is a truism of our time that we now have shorter attention spans than ever before. I don’t think that is true. What we have now are electronic media that can pulse at the actual rate of human thought. We have the distinct discomfort of seeing our neural pace reflected in the electronic world around us.

Amid all that is wasteful, distracting, irrelevant and downright evil about e-mail, there is also this. We carry dozens of people, sometimes hundreds, around with us in our heads. They pass in and out of our thoughts as quickly as thought itself. E-mail is a way to gather these people — so many of them scattered across the globe — into the immediacy of our lives in a way that makes even a phone call feel highly formalized. It is the nearness of e-mail, the conversations it creates, that is addicting as much as the minute-by-minute stimuli. I try to remember that when I am getting twitchy, when I start wondering whether the mail server is down again. I tell myself that I’m just listening for a chorus of voices, a chorus of friends.

Posted at 6:14 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Associated Press

China’s skies have darkened over the past 50 years, possibly due to haze resulting from a nine-fold increase in fossil fuel emissions, according to researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The researchers, writing in this month’s edition of Geophysical Research Letters, found that the amount of solar radiation measured at more than 500 stations in China fell from 1954 to 2001 despite a decrease in cloud cover.
“Normally, more frequent cloud-free days should be sunnier and brighter but this doesn’t happen in our study,” said Yun Qian of the energy department’s
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state.
“The pollution (that) resulted from human activity may have created a haze which absorbs and deflects the sun’s rays,” Qian, the study’s lead author, said in an e-mail interview Friday.
Air pollution! is widespread in China. Antiquated factories billow smoke,
many residents still use coal to heat their centuries-old houses, and a
sharp increase in car ownership has bathed the motorways in exhaust fumes.
Using data from more than 500 weather stations in China, researchers found
the amount of sunlight hitting the ground has fallen by 3.7 watts per square
yard in each of the last five decades amid a nine-fold increase in fossil
fuel emissions, the study said.
The cloud cover data used in this study was obtained from the China
Meteorological Administration through a bilateral agreement with the U.S.
Department of Energy on global and regional climate change, the researchers
said.
Herbert G. Fabian, who studies urban pollution and transportation issues for
the Asian Development Bank, said the study’s conclusion “makes sense” but
that more information is needed.
“There really is (an) air pollution problem and a haze problem in China
be! cause (of) dust storms and pollution,” said Fabian, who was not connected
to the study. “But we can’t say conclusively that the reduction in sunlight
is due to haze.”
The study also said haze appears to have masked the impact of global warming
by reflecting sunlight back into space and cooling the Earth’s surface.
“The haze may have masked the effects of global warming across large parts
of China, particularly in the central and eastern regions, where daily high
temperatures have actually been decreasing,” Qian said. “This may seem like
good news, but any success China has in curbing emissions will accelerate
the effects of global warming in those areas when the cooling mask is
lifted.”

Posted at 11:19 AM · Comments (0)

This is a quite extraordinary interview with Archbishop Desmond Tutu from NPR. Highly recommended.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5177023

Posted at 9:39 AM · Comments (0)

22/01/2006 - Copyright Arts Telegraph

Howard Jacobson reviews Oedipus Revisited: Sexual by Shere Hite.

I am prepared to believe that no book is so inconsequential that it cannot bring enlightenment to somebody, but this one gets close. If there is a person, however, who still needs to be told that a woman doesn’t especially enjoy sexual intercourse in which she is treated as a wastebin or a punchbag, has more chance of reaching orgasm as a result of subtle clitoral stimulation than incessant vaginal pounding, and is the better partner for a little intimacy, he or she is unlikely to be a reader of this book.

Whatever brutalities continue to be visited on women by men of a fundamental cast of mind, we can be sure the society that gives them sanctuary will not be familiar with the work of Shere Hite.

For the rest of us, Oedipus Revisited is a visit too many. We are no longer strangers to theories of patriarchy and the economically possessive penis, the demeaning intentions of pornography, and a woman’s right to be pleasured in a way that pleases her.

If I say its author is guilty of preaching to the converted, I don’t only mean that we have long since capitulated to these findings - it’s not true, for example, as Shere Hite claims, that society begrudges women their vibrators and their climaxes, or that Hollywood, when it shows sex, shows only vaginal penetration: considerately performed cunnilingus is all but de rigueur in the modern cinema - I also mean that the work reads as though it is designed to be delivered from the pulpit.

No doubt it is the doom of all sexual behaviourists to sermonise even as they roam over our private parts. That is what gives studies into human sexuality their invariable tone of bathos.

Such big ambitions (in this case nothing less than the restoration of pre-societal harmony, globalisation with heart, and world peace); such small protuberances of flesh to rest them on. But even by the usual pietistic standards of sexology, Shere Hite is unrelentingly religiose. Hers is a sort of sexual millenarianism - prophesying that the hour is at hand for a ‘real revolution in sexuality’, warning that ‘Women may have hardly begun to show who they are sexually.’

In the meantime men are alienated, anxious, and unsure. That this is hardly surprising given the revolution women are planning for them is not germane to Shere Hite’s researches. The problems she identifies are the familiar ones: boys being taught to reject their feelings for their mothers as ‘unmanly’, their subsequent ambiguity in the matter of devotion and attraction, the militarism encoded into their idea of sex, anxiety about penis size, and - the main thrust of the book - a fixation on intercourse at the cost of all ‘the new and better ways’ in which people might enjoy one another’s bodies.

Where this book means to break new ground is by readdressing these matters from a man’s point of view. ‘Stop bashing boys,’ it warns - an injunction I take to be aimed at man-demonising feminists as well as patriarchs. But the well-meaningness is swallowed up in ignorance.

For all the 10,000 male respondents to her exhaustive questionnaire - not one of whom sounds as though he has been anywhere but Baltimore, or done anything but watch baseball - Shere Hite evinces no understanding of what it’s like to have a penis (that it can be harder to keep down than to get up, for example), to love a woman while enjoying the company of your own sex, to desire where you do not love and vice-versa, and to desire in ways you do not always welcome, in short to be subject to all the contradictory emotions which attend the sexual life of a man.

The play-with-yourself-for-a-brighter-future agenda might help women who have been brought up to live in shame and to hide from themselves, but it doesn’t cut the mustard for a sex that sometimes plays with itself too much.

I cannot myself take anyone seriously as a philosopher of sex for whom masturbation becomes cut and dried once we accept it does not make us blind. Religion had its own reasons for scaring us off our sexual parts, but the dangerous self-absorption which Kant and Rousseau wrote about, the ‘secret feeling of futility and humiliation’ described by D.H. Lawrence, have not disappeared suddenly from an act about which men still feel equivocal.

Remove the influence of priests and fathers from sex and it does not at a stroke become unproblematic.There is nothing to be said for blitheness in the face of feelings which every honest person must admit to being, at the very least, vexatious, and often too perplexing ever to resolve.

Clitoral satisfaction for every woman on the planet, by all means. But no, that will not make the world a more peaceful or intelligible place.

Posted at 1:52 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wilson Quarterly

When China first intrigued America, in the late 18th century, we desired its tea and silk. The American missionaries and traders who reached Canton and other ports did not trouble to reflect on what China might want of us—nothing more than the Christian gospel and gadgets and tobacco, they seemed to assume. In the years since, Americans seldom have had occasion to ponder the question. The historical pattern was that America influenced China, and that unequal dynamic climaxed in the World War II alliance with Chiang Kai-shek’s shaky Kuomintang government against the fascist powers. In the 1940s it was presumed that China desired simply to recover from Japanese occupation, poverty, disunity, and corruption.

When “our China,” the Nationalist regime of Chiang, went up in a puff of smoke at the end of the 1940s and the Communists took over Beijing, China became The Other. In the acrimonious years after Mao Zedong’s triumph in 1949, China was beyond our influence. But we knew what China wanted: Mao had warned that he would “lean to one side,” and soon he declared, “The Soviet Union’s today is China’s tomorrow.” We were the “imperialists,” and Mao was against us.

After Moscow and Beijing quarreled in the early 1960s and the Vietnam War escalated later in the decade, what China wanted became more complex. In the so-called Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, Mao’s realm seemed irrational to the United States—and also to Moscow and most of the world. Yet, in 1971, Beijing indicated to President Richard Nixon its desire to lean to the American side to counterbalance the (assumed) coming eclipse of the United States by a rising Soviet Union.

Today, China’s goals have again become hard to read; yet understanding them has never been so urgent. In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the worldwide spread of democracy, China embodies an enigma: economic success under a Communist regime. The world knows what the United States stands for: free markets and democracy wherever possible. And it knows what Osama bin Laden wants: a return to the Caliphate. But China’s goals are less clear. What do the post-Mao, post–Soviet Union, money-minded Chinese want? The question puzzles—and worries—many Americans.

Despite its enhanced influence in the past few years, Beijing still tends to behave reactively rather than pursue distinctive goals beyond China’s borders. This comforts some people; they see China as a cautious, even conservative, power. And, to an extent, it is. But that’s not the whole story. Beijing indeed behaves defensively in three fundamental respects: It sees itself as recovering from economic backwardness; it copes in quiet frustration with its relative weakness as compared with the strength of the United States; and it participates in a great number of international organizations for the limited purpose of keeping their agendas from inconveniencing China. This defensive behavior may suggest that Beijing is uncertain about whether to seek to return to a past imperial primacy in Asia, the “Middle Kingdom,” or to join what people other than the Chinese style the “international community.” It may, of course, be simply that China is playing for time, hiding plans that for now seem too hard to pull off.

Unlike the United States, which trumpets its goals, China does seem to keep its intentions under wraps. If you read the speeches of President Hu Jintao, who is also Communist Party chief and head of the military, or those of his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, “peace and development” seem to be the goals of Chinese foreign policy. The phrase reveals but also misleads. Peace and development are means rather than ends for Beijing’s foreign policy. To say they are China’s goals is like saying Hu Jintao’s purpose tomorrow is to put on his trousers and brush his teeth.

China is unusual in today’s world because it is part empire and part modern nation. A modernizing Marxist-Leninist party state has been built upon a very old and successful tradition of governance and the imperial mentality that went with it. This extends autocratic empire into an era otherwise done with multinational empires. Communist China, astonishingly, inherited the borders of the Qing empire at its grandest, including Tibet, southern Mongolia, and the Muslim west that was once East Turkestan. But a modernizing China is torn: Hold on to empire for the sake of Chinese glory? Or yield to a postimperial politics made natural by the new society and economy visible in today’s Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Beijing?

The impulse to transmute the old Middle Kingdom into a hegemony based, this time, not on Confucian ethics but on economic power, is still there, but two forces cut against it. International economic and cultural interdependence will at some point collide with political paternalism. And the United States, Japan, India, and other powers may not permit a neo–Middle Kingdom.

Because China remains an authoritarian state, we cannot know what the Chinese people want. Still less can we assign a direction to the future of Chinese civilization, saying, for example, that it will “clash” with Islam or Western civilization. We can answer the question about China’s goals only in terms of the actions of the current Beijing party-state. What are the nine male engineers who make up the Standing Committee of the Politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seeking for China? We can discern perhaps six goals in their actions.

China pursues a foreign policy that maximizes stability at home. This is true of many other nations as well, but acutely so of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Control of the populace has seldom been taken for granted by post-1949 Beijing, as indeed it could not be taken by Chinese rulers through the 150 years of foreign pressures and domestic troubles that marked the decline of the Qing dynasty. From the beginnings of the PRC to the present, Beijing has been wary of losing its grip on its far-flung realm.

China’s three largest provinces, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia, were historically not Chinese territory, and their rooted inhabitants differ in religion, language, culture, and typical livelihood from Chinese people. Dealing with minorities who may prefer independence to rule by Chinese has led Beijing to employ semicolonial methods. In Tibet, higher education is open only to Chinese speakers, the vast west of the PRC is all on Beijing time, and the Muslim Uyghur population in Xinjiang has been purposely diluted by Chinese internal immigration, to cite just a few examples. In addition, the claim of the CCP to be the fount of truth as well as power creates numerous forbidden mental zones that must be policed. Any philosophical heterodoxy is treated, with or without justification, as a political threat to the CCP. The regime trusts you with your money but not with your mind.

In 1998, Jiang Zemin gave a startling 20 speeches on World War II during a visit to Japan. The Japanese chief cabinet secretary eventually said in frustration, “Isn’t that all behind us?” But Japan’s past transgressions will never be “all behind us” so long as the imperial state in Beijing feels a need to legitimate itself with the Chinese people by shouting “Japanese militarists!” Insecurities of this sort shape foreign policy. Thus, dealings with South Asia are intended to weaken the links between Tibet and the Tibetan government in exile in India—much as dealings with Central Asia are intended to dampen the hopes of Uyghur separatists in Xinjiang. The same eye to domestic control guides policy toward Mongolia, Korea, Thailand, and other neighbors. In sum, the PRC is a diverse semi-empire, with many inhabitants sharing racial, religious, or historical links with peoples just across one of China’s borders. And the PRC is an authoritarian regime that, as if in response to self-induced nightmares, often acts like a state afraid of its own citizens.

The first goal, then, is internal stability.

A second goal of Beijing’s foreign policy is to sustain China’s economic growth. As Marxism fades and no official public philosophy replaces it, an improved standard of living and pride in the nation have come to legitimate a regime that never faces an election. The economic achievements in the quarter-century since Deng Xiaoping took the reins in the post-Mao era are certainly worth protecting. The economy has quadrupled in size, and its yearly growth continues at eight to nine percent (by government figures). Foreign trade has increased by a factor of 10 overall; recently, the volume of foreign trade has been expanding by 25 percent annually. The post-Mao economic surge is fueled by foreign money, and urban coastal areas benefit most from the trade, technology, and managerial skill generated by this investment. Farmers did well in the initial rounds of the reform period, but they have since lagged badly behind city dwellers, some 15 percent of whom enjoy characteristic trappings of contemporary middle-class life: cell phones, Internet access, cars, homeownership, and international vacations.

Beijing is crafting foreign policy to sustain the economic growth that keeps its legitimacy intact. Hence China’s bow to stringent demands by the United States and others when it joined the World Trade Organ ization in 2001; hence its relatively transparent juggling act over the yuan-dollar exchange rate; and hence its restraint this past June when Australia allowed a defecting Chinese diplomat to be accepted as a resident in Australia. (China relies increasingly on Australian liquefied natural gas, coal, and iron ore.) It was surely in part to avoid damage to China’s huge exports to the American market that Beijing suspended the provocative missile tests it had staged off the shores of Taiwan to show its displeasure with a pro-independence candidate in the island’s 1996 presidential election. (President Bill Clinton had dispatched two aircraft carriers to the vicinity.) And in 2001, after a collision between U.S. and Chinese military planes near Hainan Island, Beijing abruptly switched off its initial “antihegemonic” rhetoric and returned the distressed American crew—again to protect the key bilateral relationship that furthers China’s economic modernization.

The third goal of Beijing’s foreign policy is to maintain a peaceful environment in China’s complicated geographic situation. The PRC is the only country in the world that has to deal with 14 abutting neighbors, seven of which share borders of more than 600 miles, and four others close by China’s extraordinarily long coastline. In its first 30 years, the PRC went to war on all five of its flanks. In the Korean War, it suffered more than a million dead and wounded. The PRC fought India in 1959 and 1962. It sent 320,000 engineering and anti-aircraft troops to help Ho Chi Minh win the Vietnam War. In 1969, putative socialist brothers Moscow and Beijing took to the sword at the Amur and Ussuri rivers in the northeast. In 1979, Deng’s China attacked Vietnam to “teach Hanoi a lesson.”

To China’s credit and Asia’s relief, Beijing in the 1980s adopted a new foreign policy of omnidirectional smiles, labeled a “policy of peace and independence.” Fighting no war after 1979, Beijing soon smoothed relations with the Soviet Union, mended the shattered fence with Indonesia, stunningly recognized South Korea and stuffed a cloth down North Korea’s angry throat, established a shared gatekeeper role with Moscow in Central Asia, joined international agencies by the month, and eventually became more enmeshed with the United States (except in military relations) than at any time in Chinese history. In a striking change from what was true for most of the PRC’s history, Beijing today has no enemies.

Caution to gain time continues. In today’s ongoing six-party talks on the Korean peninsula, Beijing, in its own opaque fashion, pursues a policy (not in American interests) of keeping the peace by clinging to the status quo. A divided Korea, however hair-raising Pyongyang’s gyrations may continue to be, is better for China than a united Korea of uncertain orientation. In Central Asia, Beijing likewise opts for “talks” on border demarcation and “splittist” issues that sweep problems under the carpet and sustain the status quo.

By the turn of the 21st century, it had become clear that Beijing was moving beyond omnidirectional smiles to lay the groundwork for a Chinese version of the Monroe Doctrine in East Asia. This fourth goal of the PRC is, of course, unstated. China bids to replace the United States as the chief influence in East Asia. Unfortunately, the Washington-led projects in Afghan istan and Iraq may have distracted the Bush administration and the American public from the preparations Beijing is making for future dominance, when they ought to pay close attention to these moves.

Goal four is built on China’s enhanced reputation in the aftermath of the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis, which left it undisturbed, and on its two decades of economic success. More concrete, if still negative, aims are coming into view. On a few global issues where Chinese and American interests coincide, or Beijing cannot effectively resist U.S. policy, it goes along with the United States, “abstains,” or opposes Washington with a limp wrist. But in Asia, Chinese leaders are doing much to frustrate and exclude the United States. They drive a wedge between Japan and the United States at every opportunity. They whisper in Australian ears that Canberra would be better off looking only to Asia and not across the Pacific. In December, a milestone will be reached when an East Asia summit convenes in Malaysia without U.S. representation, thanks in part to Chinese pressure. Beijing sees the summit as a step toward forming an East Asian organization that will not include the United States.

In the Southeast Asian theater, the overture to a Chinese Monroe Doctrine can be heard unmistakably in Burma (Myanmar) and several other countries. Burma receives substantial Chinese aid, including funds for important infrastructure projects. The Burmese leaders are nervous about Sinicization of northern Burma, where ethnic Chinese live and trade. But like the tribute Burma traditionally paid to the Chinese court in centuries past, the smiles toward Beijing are an insurance policy. The result is that Burma has entered China’s sphere of influence, as has Laos. Thailand and even Malaysia could be future candidates.

All the while, Beijing fosters a perception of China as the equal of the United States—a precious fifth goal. Consider Jiang Zemin’s visit to America in 1997. “American negotiators preparing for the visit,” reported The New York Times, “have said they were perplexed by the way their Chinese counterparts seemed extremely particular about the details of protocol and symbol.” These included the size and color of carpets, the positioning, in photos of Jiang, of Harvard University’s Veritas emblem and Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, and the style and design of the ties worn by Jiang and President Clinton. All such details were plotted to further an image of the PRC as being on a par with the United States. A Times editorial after the visit must have heartened Beijing: “[Jiang] used his appearances with Mr. Clinton to present himself as a statesman who could meet on equal terms with the leader of the world’s richest and most powerful country.”

The next year Clinton went to China, and Beijing pulled similar strings to punch above its weight. It negotiated fiercely to have Clinton not stop in Japan en route, the better to showcase his China visit, and to stretch the visit to eight days so that it would exceed the historic seven days Nix on spent in China in 1972. In a secret speech after the trip, the Chinese premier expressed delight that Clin ton “made no stopover in Japan on his way to China … with the result that Japan has lost face.” The Chinese official press pounced on any morsel of comment from outside China that Clinton and Jiang had met as equals. It declared that the “two leaders together” (forget Europe, Japan, and India!) had made Asia “more stable” and the “world more peaceful.”

Goal six of China’s international policy is to “regain” territories that Beijing feels rightfully belong within the PRC. The list of such territories runs from areas of trumpeted intent to ones of secret hope and includes Taiwan and a large number of islands in the Yellow Sea, South China Sea, and East China Sea. In the case of Taiwan, Beijing awaits an opportunity that will consist of some combination of a favorable (to Beijing) evolution in Taiwan’s domestic politics, U.S. fatigue at the strain of supporting Taiwan, greater PRC capacity to transport troops and materiel quickly across the 100-mile Taiwan Strait, and a Japan more malleable to China’s wishes than it is at present. In the case of the Spratly Islands, spread across crucial Southeast Asian sea routes and claimed in part by six countries, Beijing awaits sufficient naval capacity to “resume” control; the islands are essentially uninhabited but are rich in oil and other resources. Not a few Vietnamese, Koreans, Thai, and Indians also expect China, when it is able, to lay claim to parts of their territory that were once Chinese.

Of China’s aspirations for territories on its northern flank, Mao said this in 1964: “About 100 years ago, the area to the east of Lake Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other areas have been Soviet territory. We have not yet presented our account for this list.” In due course, the account could be presented. By 1973, Mao had augmented the roster of territories he felt had been stolen by Moscow. Out of the blue, during a conversation on other topics with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, he complained that “the Soviet Union has carved out one and a half million square kilometers from China.” In the 1960s and 1970s, the same Communist Party that now rules in Beijing claimed as Chinese territory parts of today’s Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Should Russia’s hold over its far east weaken, and the movement of Chinese people to live and trade in border areas continue, China may “present its account” for a portion of Siberia.

A rising power does not always attain its goals. For modern authoritarian states, success has mostly been shortlived. Thus, the goals of all three fascist powers, which caused World War II, were abruptly canceled by 1945, and the foreign-policy goals of the Soviet bloc disappeared without trace in 1991. The prospects that China will achieve its six foreign-policy goals depend, I believe, on the Chinese political system and on how other powers react to China’s ambitions.

The next Chinese drama will probably unfold not in foreign relations but at home: A middle-class push for property rights, rural discontent, the Internet, 150 million unemployed wandering between village and city, and a suddenly aging population bringing financial and social strains will dramatize some of the contradictions of “market Leninism.” Traveling one road in economics and another in politics makes it difficult to arrive at a stipulated destination. How China resolves the contradictions between its politics and its economics will determine how strong a role it is to play in the world.

The current rise of China, like the rise of Germany and Japan beginning in the late 19th century, displays high purpose, a sense of grievance, and heightened nationalism. But the rise of nations can have diverse outcomes. The United Kingdom, for example, eventually accepted with equanimity the rise of the United States in the Western Hemisphere. By contrast, the rise of Germany and Japan culminated in two world wars and the destruction of the two countries’ political systems—to be replaced by totally new polities and totally new international behavior. Democracy, not civilizational traits or any vast difference in relative national economic levels between today and the 1930s, makes Germany and Japan well-behaved powers in our era. Having great influence, which both now do, is not the same as being a threat to others, which both once were. China’s future role in the world will be substantially determined by what happens to its out-of-date political system during the next two decades.

It is sometimes overlooked that rising to the position of successful new hegemon, in any region during any epoch, presupposes three factors: the intention to be number one on the part of the rising power, the capacity to achieve that goal, and the acceptance of the new pretender by other affected powers. Beijing has the intention. The capacity is not clearly beyond it. But non-Chinese acquiescence?

East Asia retains a memory of the Chinese Middle Kingdom. Every Vietnamese and Korean knows about the age-old hauteur of the Chinese imperial court toward China’s neighbors. For better and for worse, some 60 million Chinese reside in East Asia outside the PRC, reminding Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and other host countries of the primacy of Chinese civilization in the region; in some cases, the state of coexistence remains strained. Half the population of Taiwan is flat-out opposed to Beijing’s intent to “resume” rule of their island, according to polls; in a 2002 survey, 38 percent saw themselves as Taiwanese, 8 percent as Chinese, 50 percent as both.

China has spent decades in the self-proclaimed role of victim: “carved like a melon” after the Opium War, bullied by the “imperialist” West, and so on. Its initial success as a hegemon would quickly present problems both of image and of practical consequence. China would learn, as the United States has done painfully, that an ascendant king of the jungle feels the bites of other beasts edged aside. A Japan that saw China eclipse the United States, its major ally, whose primacy in East Asia explains six decades of Japanese restraint, would surely challenge China. Once again, as for five decades after 1894, China and Japan would vie—and possibly fight—for control of the region.

An authoritarian China—nervous about control over its own Chinese people and without a comfortable grip on its internal non-Chinese semi-empire—probably lacks the moral appeal to lead Asia. It can be argued that the traditional Chinese empire of centuries past was a stabilizing force, but in the 21st century, any bid by China for extension of its empire, or even for a long continuance of its present multinational realm, is more likely to be destabilizing.

Empire and Communist autocracy were tightly related in the Soviet Union. There’s the same interconnection in China, which, like Russia, is a landmass that did not have an empire but was one. The breakup of the Soviet Union ended the Cold War as much as did the cracking of the Communist Party’s monopoly on political power in Moscow. What Zbigniew Brzezinski said of Moscow is true of Beijing as well: “Russia can be either an empire or a democracy, but it cannot be both.”

Moscow, under pressure, is redefining its national interest as it leaves behind decades of Communist empire. China has hardly begun this process. The Chinese leaders must ask whether they could smoothly rule a society as distinct from the PRC as today’s Taiwan. They might ponder whether having Tibet as a state associated with China—under China’s shadow, to be sure, but sovereign—might be better than everlasting tension between Lhasa and Beijing. These questions have not been asked because China is still in transition from Communist empire to modern nation, and pulled between what it wants and what it really needs. National myths (a victimized China) are beguiling; the beckoning national interest (a prosperous China) seems more compelling.

Additional questions arise about China’s capacity to be the new global hegemon. Today’s Beijing cannot project its power far; in the tsunami disaster of December 2004 it could not do so even to South and Southeast Asia. Problems would surely arise in Africa and Latin America, beginning with language and including race and religion and culture, if China sought to have the impact in those regions that Europe and the United States have had. There is also some doubt that China is philosophically equipped for world dominance of the kind that Britain once enjoyed through sea power, or that the United States now enjoys through business dealings, military power, popular culture, and ideas about free markets and democracy. The Maoist sense of mission was certainly strong, like the Protestant-derived Anglo-American sense of mission. Yet without communism’s sharp edge, Chinese nationalism lacks a message for the world. The United States under President George W. Bush bristles with a message, even as it controls almost no non-Americans. The PRC today has no message, but is assiduous in its control at home and ambitious for a sphere of influence.

I speak of China as ambitious. Is China not rather a conservative power? Each proposition has passionate adherents, yet the two have a yin-yang relation. The expansionist claims of Beijing are transparent and unique among today’s powerful nations. But the Beijing regime, while a dictatorship, is a rational dictatorship. It can count the numbers. It is often patient in fulfilling its goals. Equipped with a growing cadre of younger, well-trained officials, Beijing does not, like the Ming and Qing courts, deceive itself with beautiful fictions to hide the gap between reality and China’s preferred worldview. China, in sum, is an ambitious power that, if faced with countervailing power, will act prudently in its long-term strategy. It surely knows that a formidable list of powers—the United States, Japan, Russia, India—has many reasons for denying China the opportunity to be a 21st-century Middle Kingdom. China was not as weak as it seemed when it was the “sick man of Asia.” It may not be as endurably strong as it now seems to those who fear or admire it.

Ross Terrill, associate in research at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, is the author of Mao (1999), China in Our Time (1992), and Madame Mao (2000). His most recent book, The New Chinese Empire, winner of the 2004 Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is currently available in paperback.

Posted at 1:30 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Independent

Published: 27 January 2006
China, China, China. The country’s prospects, its relations with the rest of the world and its impact on the world economy run through proceedings here at the World Economic Forum like a stick of Brighton rock. Just a little noticed footnote at these meetings of business and political leaders four or five years ago, it is now all pervasive. Everyone’s talking about it, no one can ignore it, and like it or not, from China’s impact on finite world resources to climate change and the laws of supply and demand, it is transforming the way we live with a speed barely imaginable just a few years ago.

There are a myriad different perceptions of the phenomenon being aired by participants at Davos, the Swiss alpine resort which hosts the WEF annual meeting each year, far too many to rehearse at length here. Yet perhaps one of the most striking comes from Larry Summers, a former US Treasury secretary and now president of Harvard University. He describes the integration of this vast new pool of cheap labour into the world economy as one of the three great economic events of the last millennium - on a par with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution.

If the level of excitement, apprehension, confusion and even fear being generated by the Chinese phenomenon here in Davos is anything to go by, he may even be right.

Much the same thing was said five years ago about the internet, and they presumably cannot both be one of the three. Yet looked at together and as complementary influences, as they should be - for it is the internet, above all else, which is drawing previously closed national economies into an increasingly interdependent world - the claim is perhaps an accurate one.

More on China and India later, but first, what have people been saying about their impact on the world’s largest economy, the United States? Is the symbiotic relationship that exists between China and the US, a cornerstone of world economic growth in recent years, remotely sustainable?

The pessimistic view is, as ever, best represented by Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley. He has been cautioning about the growing size of America’s current account deficit for more than five years, and his warnings have become something of a feature of these events. Every year he warns in suitably apocalyptic terms that the twin towers of America’s trade and budget deficits are about to come tumbling down, with calamitous consequences for the world economy. Yet somehow or other, we seem miraculously to escape the predicted disaster and 12 months later Mr Roach is back, not to swallow his words, but to claim that if the situation looked bad a year ago, it looks even worse today.

Listening to Mr Roach this time around, I thought for one dreadful moment that he was about to change his tune, or at least ease his position a little. On the old rule of thumb that when the last bear turns bullish, it is time to sell, this seemed an extraordinarily bad omen for the health of the global economy.

Of course, Mr Roach said, the avoidance of crisis in 2005 didn’t mean the problems had gone away. Investors had drawn the wrong lessons from the failure of his forecast of a disorderly unwinding of trade imbalances. It would be dangerous for them to sit back and think everything was fine.

Yet he seemed curiously unwilling again to forecast turmoil in financial markets. Did this mean he accepted that the emergence of China and India had transformed traditional economic analysis of the sustainability of these imbalances?

That would be going too far, and just to underline the point that there has been no blinding flash on the road to Damascus, Mr Roach predicted that 2006 would be “the year to look out for the end of the great US spending binge”, with possibly recessionary consequences. So that’s a relief, then. We can sleep easy, confident in the knowledge that there is at least another year of decent growth to come.

The law of averages alone might suggest that eventually Mr Roach will be proved correct, yet these imbalances needn’t necessarily end badly, and so long as it suits Asia to sustain them, then there is every possibility they won’t.

More likely, as more optimistic participants here suggest, the imbalances will unwind only gradually, with relatively limited impact on financial markets. The very strength of the BRICs mean that the world is better able to cope with a US slowdown than it has been in the past.

Mr Roach warns of the dangers of complacency, and on that at least there is near unanimity. Yet China has almost as much interest in the durability of a strong US economy as does the US itself. It is impossible to believe China would risk growth and exports with a precipitous withdrawal of support for the US dollar. The more measured view, expressed by Laura Tyson, dean of the London Business School, that America faces a slower rate of growth, but essentially another “goldilocks” year, seems about right.

China: who needs the US consumer?

One of the star turns at this year’s Davos is Zeng Peiyan, the vice-premier of the People’s Republic of China. To listen to his reassuringly upbeat message, anyone would think the world is about to be cured of all known ills. Yet anyone who doubts that China will soon be one of the world’s two big superpowers, perhaps the biggest, need only look at a choice few of his statistics and claim to be convinced otherwise.

Over the past 27 years, China has grown at an average rate of 9.6 per cent per annum, reaching a GDP of $2.2trillion last year. This already makes China one of the largest economies in the world.

However, with more than one billion souls, China is still outside the top 100 in the league table of the world’s richest nations in terms of GDP per head. In its next five-year plan, from 2006 to 2010, China aims to double this number to more than $2,000 per capita.

At the same time, better social security, improved health cover and easier access to credit should reduce the country’s extraordinarily high savings ratio - currently standing at more than 40 per cent of average income - to more normal levels.

The resulting increase in domestic demand should enable economic growth to become self-sustaining, reducing Chinese reliance on the export boom to America and elsewhere which has supported growth to date.

Mr Peiyan also claimed that China was capable of meeting most of its energy needs from internally generated resources.

Plans greatly to expand the supply of nuclear, clean coal, hydroelectric and renewable forms of energy are already well in hand. On Mr Peiyan’s analysis, there will come a time, possibly quite soon, when China will be able to dispense with the American consumer as the main driver of growth. Who knows, the trade imbalance may eventually even reverse. It’s not as implausible as it might seem.

India: the choice for global investors

China ¾s one thing, but don’t forget India, whose contingent here in Davos dwarfs the Chinese presence and is not afraid to champion India’s supposed advantages over China as a destination for global capital, not just in the hi-tech industries - China will do the hardware, and India the software, runs the cliché - but in the manufacturing and knowledge-based industries alike.

One of the many advertisements trumpeting India’s attractions which bedeck the town reads: “India, the preferred democracy for global investors.” If that’s not a side swipe at China, I don’t know what is. Many investors will find it hard to disagree. India’s got its drawbacks in overbearing bureaucracy, still high levels of corruption, and generally poor levels of universal education, but the cultural and linguistic affinity is much higher, and India shares many of the same traditions as the West - a similar business culture, a belief in the rule of laws, and a respect for intellectual property rights which seems to be virtually non-existent in China.

Social conscience takes a back seat

What, no Africa, no climate change, no poverty relief?

Well, there’s a bit of that, but after complaints from some business executives last year about how the WEF agenda was being hijacked by do-gooders, there is a much heavier emphasis on business this time around. Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, flies in today to try to rekindle interest in the development story. Yet as business leaders wrestle with the challenge of broadband, China and India, he’s going to find it an uphill struggle. Social conscience has again sunk low on the list of priorities.

At least Bono, the Irish rock star, has the right idea. Create a business opportunity which appeals to consumers interested in Third World issues, as he might do with his new brand called “Red”, and companies are more than eager to step up to the plate. The reason China and India are growing so strongly, while most of the African subcontinent is not, is because these are societies that have collectively decided to do something about their predicament by creating a business-friendly environment. The rest follows naturally.

Posted at 6:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Voice of America
27 January 2006

Nairobi

State-run China Radio International Friday launched
its FM station in the Kenyan capital. The move is
seen as a way for the Asian country to have a greater
influence in Africa.

The station is transmitting 19 hours of programming in
English, Kiswahili (the language widely spoken in East
Africa) and standard Chinese.

China Radio International director Wang Gengnian said
in a statement the station will broadcast the latest
news from China and around the world and “the latest
on friendly exchanges between China and Kenya.”

Kodi Barth is a journalism lecturer at the United
States International University in Nairobi and writes
a column about the media in one of Kenya’s daily
newspapers. He tells VOA that he believes the new
radio station is connected with China’s increasing
economic activities and interests in Kenya and the
rest of East Africa.

Barth says Kenyans may initially tune into the station
out of curiosity, but will have trouble competing with
Voice of America, the British Broadcasting Corporation
(BBC), and other foreign heavyweights.

“Historically Kenyans seem to identify with the BBC,”
he said. “I think they occupy a market that’s hard to
beat, maybe because of Kenya’s history with Britain.
The Voice of America also, Kenyans tend to turn to VOA
when they’re looking for what they regard as
independent analysis of their country. Now I don’t see
that happening with the Chinese radio, maybe because
Kenyans haven’t perceived the Chinese as interested in
democratic space or independent views.”

China has been steadily increasing its influence and
economic activity in Africa over the past years. The
Trade Law Center for Southern Africa estimates trade
volume between China and African countries in 2005 at
over $37 billion (U.S.), a record high and a sharp
increase over the previous year’s less than $30
billion (U.S.). Much of this was due to increased
exports of oil to China, particularly from Sudan.

The Trade Law center adds that in the period, China
imported more goods and services from African
countries than it exported to them and that Chinese
investment in Africa is also expanding rapidly.
Official statistics show that in the first 10 months
of 2005, Chinese companies invested a total of $175
million in African countries. Investments went into a
wide range of areas, including trade, resource
development, transport, agriculture and processing of
farm products.

Kenya and China signed a number of agreements during
Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki’s trip to China in August
last year.

Posted at 11:50 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Friday, January 27, 2006; C01

Sly Stone, the reclusive, long-vanished funk-rock pioneer whose potent recordings in the late 1960s and early ’70s defined the era and altered the course of popular music, may be about to strut back into the public eye.

According to several friends and associates, discussions are well underway about a Sly and the Family Stone reunion performance at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 8 in Los Angeles.

It would be Stone’s first live performance since 1987, and his first major public appearance since Jan. 12, 1993, when Sly and the Family Stone were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It would also mark the first time since 1971 that the band has played in its original configuration. (Drummer Greg Errico quit the group that year and was soon followed by bass player Larry Graham.)

As songwriter, producer, bandleader and singer, Stone dazzled the world of pop music more than 35 years ago with a string of superlative anthems — timeless songs, including “Dance to the Music,” “I Want to Take You Higher,” “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” “Family Affair” and “Everyday People” (whose lyric “Different strokes for different folks” became a slogan for the Woodstock generation). By the early ’70s, though, he had developed an all-consuming cocaine addiction, and he soon faded from the spotlight. Speculation on the whereabouts and condition of Sly Stone has been a pop pastime for decades.

Ron Roecker, a spokesman for the Recording Academy, wouldn’t confirm that the reunion is on the Grammy-night schedule, which already includes an all-star tribute to Sly and the Family Stone. The tribute — featuring John Legend, Maroon 5, will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith, among others, performing a medley of Sly classics — was announced yesterday by the academy. (All the artists appear on a Sly and the Family Stone tribute album that will be released the day before the Grammys.)

“The facts are what we put in the press release,” Roecker said. “As far as anything else, it’s all just rumor. But we do believe that he is attending the Grammy Awards.”

He added: “It seems like the right time for him. We’re thrilled that we’ll be able to do this.”

Stone’s manager, Jerry Goldstein, could not be reached for comment.

Nor could Stone himself — no surprise, given that he stopped speaking to the media in about 1987.

But sources close to the band said rehearsals are scheduled to begin next week in Santa Monica, Calif. They cautioned, however, that the reunion could implode at any point, given Stone’s long history of erratic behavior.

Still, that there’s talk at all about a Sly Stone coming-out party is a surprise.

“He’s been in seclusion for so long, he’s like J.D. Salinger,” said Greg Zola, who is producing and directing “On the Sly: In Search of the Family Stone,” a documentary about the elusive musician and his band mates. “He was so famous for a period of time, but he’s just not around anymore. A lot of people who you’d think are in the know actually think Sly Stone is dead.”

Stone’s younger sister, Vaetta, acknowledges as much on her Web site, where she’s selling T-shirts that say, simply: “Sly Lives.”

“I don’t think Sly has been hurting from his underground status — I think he likes the mystique,” said Rickey Vincent, author of “Funk: The Music, the People, and the Rhythm of the One” and host of a funk radio show in the San Francisco Bay area. “But it would be nice to see him make a triumphant return — to be treated the way Carlos Santana was at the Grammys a few years ago, and the way George Clinton was treated at the Grammys.”

Clinton thinks so, too.

A funk legend himself, Clinton was forced to rethink his approach to music after hearing Sly and the Family Stone’s landmark 1969 album, “Stand!”

“He’s my idol; forget all that peer stuff,” Clinton said. “I heard ‘Stand!,’ and it was like: Man , forget it! That band was perfect. And Sly was like all the Beatles and all of Motown in one. He was the baddest thing around. What he don’t realize is that him making music now would still be the baddest. Just get that band back together and do whatever it is that he do.”

In its heyday, from roughly 1968 through 1971, Sly and the Family Stone created revolutionary music, an intoxicating mix of psychedelic pop, pulsating funk and social commentary. Among the first fully integrated groups on the American music scene, with blacks and whites and men and women together onstage, the seven-piece San Francisco band played the world’s biggest venues while cranking out hit after cutting-edge hit.

Stone was an innovator whose work inspired Motown to find its social conscience, helped persuade Miles Davis to go electric, and ultimately laid out a blueprint for generations of black pop stars, from Prince and Michael Jackson to OutKast, D’Angelo and Lenny Kravitz.

“There’s black music before Sly Stone, and there’s black music after Sly Stone,” said Joel Selvin, author of “Sly and the Family Stone: An Oral History” and a San Francisco Chronicle music critic for the past 30 years. “He completely changed what black music was. I mean, he changed Motown! Before Sly, the Temptations were ‘I’m Losing You.’ After Sly, they were ‘Ball of Confusion.’ It’s a black and white moment.

“The album ‘Stand!’ summed up the times, with the humanitarian sentiments, in a perfect sloganeering way. ‘Dance to the Music,’ ‘There’s a Riot Goin’ On’ — these were revolutionary documents. And Sly’s statements last. They sound as good today as they did when they were recorded. There’s really nobody like Sly Stone in the history of black music.”

Posted at 12:15 AM · Comments (0)

*Boston Globe*
26 January 2006

BEIJING (Reuters) - China is preparing to “strike
hard” against rising public unrest, a senior police
official said according to state media on Thursday,
highlighting the government’s fears for stability even
as the economy booms.

An unnamed top official of China’s Ministry of Public
Security told a Wednesday meeting that China faced a
long period of dangerous social discontent, Xinhua
news agency said.

“For a considerable time to come, our country will be
in a period of pronounced contradictions within the
people, high crime rates, and complex struggle against
enemies,” the official said.

“Contradictions within the people” is a Maoist term
used to describe domestic social unrest.

China was suffering many “major sudden incidents” — a
term Chinese officials use to cover riots, protests
and accidents — the official added.

“Unpredictable factors affecting social stability will
increase, and trends in protecting social stability
don’t allow for optimism,” said the official.

He also said that “terrorism is a real threat against
our country” and urged officers to guard against
attacks.

China says that its biggest terrorist threat comes
from Xinjiang, the far western region dominated by the
largely Muslim Uighur people who share a language and
culture similar to Central Asian countries.

Uighur groups have campaigned for independence from
China, and a few have had links with Islamic
extremists in Afghanistan and Central Asia.

Last week, China’s Ministry of Public Security put the
total number of “mass incidents” — riots,
demonstrations and smaller protests — at a total
87,000 last year, up 6.6 percent from 2004.

The latest unusually grim police diagnosis of China’s
social strains comes less than a week after Premier
Wen Jiabao was reported as warning that corrupt land
seizures in the countryside were stoking protests and
riots.

“Some locales are unlawfully occupying farmers’ land
and not offering reasonable economic compensation and
arrangements for livelihoods, and this is sparking
mass incidents in the countryside,” Wen said in a
speech published on January 20.

Wen said the continued “reckless occupation” of
farmland threatened “the stability of the countryside
and whole economy and society.” He promised stricter
land controls and improvements to farmers’ rights and
income.

HARSH RESPONSE

But the police official promised a harsher and more
traditional remedy.

Summoning harsh rhetoric that has languished in recent
years while the government promoted “rule of law,” the
official promised to “strike hard against all sorts of
terrorist activities and resolutely protect state
security and social stability.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, regular “strike hard”
campaigns were used to fight crime and threats to
order by mobilizing police and courts to catch and
quickly try and sentence many thousands of citizens.

In recent years, legal reformers have criticized such
campaigns as contrary to China’s official embrace of
rule of law and human rights.

But on Thursday, a meeting of law and order officials
announced a new campaign against the “sabotage
activities of cult organizations,” Xinhua said in a
separate report.

China calls the Falun Gong, a spiritual sect banned in
1999, a “cult” that threatens the government.

The meeting also called on officials to “strictly
prevent destructive activities by terrorist forces and
domestic and foreign hostile forces and elements,” the
report said.

Xinjiang authorities arrested more than 18,000 people
there for crime, including national security offences,
the region’s official newspaper said last week.

Posted at 9:49 AM · Comments (0)

“Il ne faut pas confondre le uu avec le oo.
Il faut distinguer vitesse et precipitation!”

You can feel warm any time of the year when you spin this disc. Aurlus doesn’t just front great bands, which he always does — usually with Diplo on guitar. He’s a major league clown, too, clever as all hell with his lyrics. … “Enigme!”

Posted at 11:26 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Prospect

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad is a senior lecturer in the department of religious studies at Lancaster University and author of “Eastern Philosophy” (Weidenfeld)

Kumarila claims that something that is called an “I” exists, established by the fact that an I is constantly present in thinking. Sankara, however, argues that this only shows that there is subjectivity —the presence of consciousness—not that there is an object named “I.” The apparent existence of an objective self is an illusion, created by the logic of the grammatical use of “I” in language.

Strange names, certainly. Strange thoughts? Anybody who has read philosophy in the west will not think so—provided that Kumarila (7th century) is replaced with Descartes (17th) and Sankara (8th) with Kant (18th). The point is not the polemical one about whether it was Indians or Europeans who had these thoughts first (the ancient Greeks and early Islamic thinkers are also in the running). The point is not that the Indians deserve study because they thought like Europeans. The point is simply that, for many reasons, the Indian thinkers are unknown to contemporary western philosophy, and are likely to remain so. The same is true of Chinese thinkers.

Even a very brief survey of Indian and Chinese thought shows that these traditions address a wide range of issues which, whether or not they overlap with those asked in western philosophy, are of interest to anyone concerned with the large questions of human existence. But the very idea of “eastern philosophy” is beset with problems.

First, eastern philosophy lacks the simple advantage, enjoyed by western philosophy, of having arisen from its own tradition of intellectual practice. Questions about the unity and identity of western philosophy have often been asked, but those who questioned were generally considered to come from within the tradition itself. The unity of the discipline—and its westernness—remains intact in popular introductions and in most university departments, even if some of the most fundamental concerns of the Greek philosophers are utterly different from that of western philosophy of the past 500 years.

Though departments of religious studies, literature, geography, political science and others in the humanities increasingly recognise that the world is not the west, in philosophy the rest of the world does not yet exist. Asian traditions tend to be confined to religious studies or area studies, where philosophy competes with anthropological, political and historical approaches to the study of Asian traditions—and this despite a shift in how philosophy itself is taught, away from canonical writers towards key concepts.

For much of the 20th century, Asian thinkers simply accepted this reality. Instead of carrying out original thinking, many Indian intellectuals indulged in endless discussions about what they could identify in Indian thought that mapped on to western philosophy. Was it darsana (a view), the traditional name given to the different groups of thinkers and texts associated with some common tenets? Or was it anviksiki (another visual metaphor, special seeing), a term used by some thinkers to describe analytic exploration of general questions? Indian philosophy had the acute existential crisis of asking whether it even existed. Chinese thought, too, struggled to reconceive its existence, especially as the madness of Mao threatened to sweep away all memory of Chinese philosophy in its homeland.

It is only in the past decade or two in these countries that there has been any real attempt to “do” eastern philosophy on its own terms and, sometimes, with the purpose of engaging with issues made important in western thought. But if eastern philosophy is philosophy at all, it is not so in any way directly comparable to that discipline in the west. The Greek tradition, recovered in Christian Europe after the rupture of the dark ages, combined with the Judeo-Christian tradition to form the western philosophical inheritance. (Medieval Islamic thought sustained the Greek inheritance, but the turning away from Greek categories to concentrate on the Koran is part of the reason it would now be strange to consider Islamic philosophy part of the western tradition.) Even when, with the proliferation of philosophical thinking in the modern west, mutual incomprehension occurs between different styles and systems—especially across the great 20th-century divide between analytic and continental philosophy—there is still a solid foundation of commonality. Western philosophy of many different stripes focuses on the same canonical texts, from Plato to Kant.

By contrast, there is mutual ignorance between the Indian and Chinese thought-worlds. By “India” I mean that broad region now encompassed by the term “south Asia,” with a heartland in the Indo-Gangetic plain, extending east to what is now Bengal and west to Afghanistan. Indian philosophy is the thought of the culture pre-dating and standing outside Indian Islam: the traditions now identified within the religious categories of Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. China is a less problematic category, although modern China includes many ethnicities that do not have a common past with the demographically and politically dominant Han people. Chinese philosophy is the heritage of the Han.

The interpreters of Confucius and the Hindu sacred texts, the Upanishads, know as little about each other as they do about Plato. In fact, there is evidence that there might have been historical contact between ancient Indian and Greek thinkers. The many independent similarities between Greek and Indian thought has led some people, especially Sinological scholars, to think that the great distinction is actually between Chinese and Indo-European philosophical cultures. Certainly, the common linguistic inheritance of Greek and Sanskrit suggests the Greek and Indian traditions share a common language in a way that Chinese does not. In any case, the fundamental concerns, conceptual frameworks and goals of the Indian and Chinese traditions are utterly different.

What then is Indian and Chinese philosophy, and what reason is there for studying it? The origins of philosophy in India and China lie in figures who were primarily interested in offering solutions to problems of existence. In India, the Upanishads sought to liberate human consciousness from its limitations and fragility. The Buddha and Mahavira, founders of Buddhism and Jainism respectively, diagnosed life as consisting in an intrinsic state of suffering, and offered therapeutic methods for coming to terms with and eventually mastering the root causes of that suffering. But none of these teachings was generally considered to constitute an assurance about an eventual state of religious grace. People had to ponder their meaning and significance—a state of inquiry that is philosophical, in that it seeks to analyse various puzzles about the ultimate nature of the world and offers a narrative to take us through it. In China, the baseline is Confucius, who sought to teach people the norms of civilised conduct through the observance of morally relevant rituals drawn from different cultural sources, at a time when China was still politically fragmented. All subsequent Chinese thinkers accept the need to understand and follow proper conduct, but they vary hugely on what that conduct is: among the Daoists, Laotze sees proper conduct as lying not in social ceremony, but in a life lived in coherence with natural forces and flows, while Zhuangzi suggests that there can be no account of proper conduct, merely lives of spontaneous and equipoised action. The determination of the way (Dao)—the path itself as well as the manner of walking it—orients Chinese philosophy.

The issues in Indian philosophy are much more like those of classical and early modern western thought: they see a world and set out to give persuasive accounts of the entities and processes that underlie its appearance. Indian philosophy is profoundly metaphysical. It follows a framing, teleological narrative that shares features with some thinkers of the western tradition, both Christian and secular. Indian philosophers agree that our ordinary life is defective; our experience is marked by suffering, our understanding is marked by severe limits to knowledge, our conduct falls short of its ethical requirements, and we live in fear of our mortality. We therefore need to inquire into the conditions of existence in order to realise how things really are, and in doing so, our cognitive life is transformed, enabling us eventually to attain some ultimate state of freedom. By contrast, Chinese philosophy is ametaphysical, concerned with the world as it is encountered, and neutral to the relationship between reality and appearance.

Moreover, despite the formal commitment to some ultimate end, there is a good deal of Indian philosophy which is purely technical and given over to intellectual puzzles and challenges, whereas Chinese philosophers almost always appear to be working only for the purpose of improving human behaviour.

In Indian philosophy, as in western philosophy, there are many competing accounts of ontology—the division of the world into its conceptually basic components. There is also a long and sophisticated history of philosophy of language (having its origins in the formalisation of Sanskrit grammar in the 4th century BC) concerning the capacity of linguistic units to convey meaning, the relationship between language and sound and so on. Although logic did not develop a symbolism in Indian philosophy as it did in western thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it had, especially in the Nyaya system, a rigorous and fully developed linguistic formalism by the 15th century—an achievement still waiting to be used effectively in contemporary western philosophy.

Chinese thinkers were capable of using sophisticated logical moves in their arguments, but apart from some elements in the school of Mohism and during a brief period of early Chinese Buddhism, the study of logic itself was thought frivolous. And Chinese theories of language are not about representation but function: how can the proper use of titles relate to how people behave according to them? How, if at all, can terms for ethical and political behaviour be standardised across time? Since the person who was most influential in guiding proper conduct was the king, the understanding and following of his way (Dao) was considered important by many thinkers, giving practical political philosophy a central place in Chinese civilisation. Consider one example of this pragmatism: while western and Indian sceptics express doubt over whether we can ever systematically grasp the way things really are, the Chinese (especially Zhuangzi) ask whether we can ever affirm or discard one way of acting over another. Scepticism is directed at the determination of action rather than the justification of claims.

There are a few areas where Indian philosophy does have more in common with China than with the west. Sharp analysis of the nature and foundations of conduct have characterised the history of western thought. By contrast, Indian ethical philosophy is like Chinese in probing our intuitions through storytelling—whether in small anecdotes or in epic compositions—rather than argument; this is particularly striking given the analytic debates that mark other areas of Indian philosophy.

There is also an interesting divide between western and eastern ideas on the nature of the self. Because the idea of an identifiable yet immaterial soul had such a strong grip on western thought for many centuries, the questioning of it from David Hume onwards resulted in radical notions of the constructed nature of personhood: Hume’s “bundle theory” had it that a person (say me, Ram-Prasad) is not some non-physical entity located in the body but the contingent result of birth, psychological traits, environmental influences, social duties and so on. But this idea was accepted by Indian philosophy from very early on. Hindu thinkers never thought that “Ram-Prasad” was essentially a metaphysical being with a physical garb (this is how much of the western tradition would have understood Ram-Prasad—as a soul in a body). Rather, they thought that the core nature was an impersonal consciousness which, while giving life and continuity to this person called Ram-Prasad, was ultimately not that person at all; it could and would have other lives, as other persons (or even non-persons, if animating a cow or other creature). When the Buddha denied the need for an atman (the self), he was saying that there was no need to appeal to the idea of such an impersonal, conscious being in order to explain the apparent unity and continuity of constructed persons. The modern western debate over whether personhood—the integrity of particular individuals—is metaphysically given or constructed through the life-course is therefore beside the point in classical Indian debates. The question of selfhood is enriched by Chinese traditions too. Here, there is no interest in what lies behind the human being. Rather, the concern is how potential humanness is fully realised, leading to a long history of discussion over the role of biography, historical antecedents and narrative authority in the formation of identity—discussions that are at the forefront of some western debates today.

The east/west divide on the self extends to political individualism. In different ways, both the major eastern traditions conceive of the individual in very particular terms. The responsibilities, entitlements and authority of individuals depend on their specific natures: people are not interchangeable in their rights and duties. If asked whether an individual either can or should do something, the classical Chinese or Indian would answer that it depended on that particular person’s nature. X might be heard in the royal court on account of his birth, personality and status, while Y, in the same official position, would not be accorded the same power. This particularity of the individual contrasts with that great modern western idea, “generic” individualism. Under this notion, individuals are interchangeable; it does not matter who one is in biographical and psychologically specific terms. It is the general idea of the individual that is important, not the particularities of specific people. The rule of law, the formality of political institutions and the claim to universal rights have flown from this paradoxical idea of generic individualism, in which each person is equally like every other. In both classical Chinese and Indian thought, there is a contrasting “microindividualism”: each individual in a sociopolitical collective has specific burdens and freedoms. In China, this led to an organic communitarianism in which each individual, by doing exactly what was specific to themselves, contributed in his or her own special way to a larger entity—the Middle Kingdom. The particularity of each individual was significant to the extent they contributed to the polity as a whole, and therefore each individual was insignificant apart from that whole. In different ways, Confucian and Daoist thinkers subscribed to this idea, and it may help to explain why economic success has not prompted major demands for democracy in modern China. In India, this microindividualism, based on dharma—the nature and duty of each person—was supposed to lead to a social order in which there was clear differentiation of labour and functional expertise. The actual result was an explosion of multiple values evident in Indian democracy today. The implication in Indian and Chinese thought is of an infinite diversity of individualisms, a situation which generates many problems of equality and universality, but also suggests possibilities for political theories on how to live with fundamental difference.

Why has western philosophy—with the partial exception of Schopenhauer—been so uninterested in all this? Partly because the idea of an eastern philosophy lay in the framing of it as the Other of western rationality. But a significant role has been played by Asians themselves, looking for self-expression in a Europeanised world. The leading eastern philosophers of the early to mid-20th century were men like S Radhakrishnan and DT Suzuki who, confronted with the powerful association of western philosophy with colonial dominance, argued that their cultures possessed unique insights absent in the west. In their different ways, Radhakrishnan with the Indian system of Advaita Vedanta and Suzuki with Zen Buddhism, argued that it was the greatness of the Asian philosophies that they went beyond the rationality of western philosophy. Eastern thought was not to be defined by its lack of what western philosophy had, but rather by its transcendence of it. Eastern philosophy was based on experience that mere reason could not capture; its insights came of practices like meditation, and pointed to what lay beyond language and thought. Radhakrishnan, in particular, was quite sophisticated in his knowledge of both Indian and western texts, but as the first Indian to hold a professorship (in eastern religions and ethics) at Oxford, he had to find some way of asserting the importance and originality of Indian philosophy that did not challenge the master narrative of western philosophy. Suzuki had the additional aim of justifying Japanese nationalism in ways that nevertheless took note of the power of the west. In the decades that followed, lesser figures, east and west, tended to recycle this view of the east as the place where philosophy was the west’s anti-philosophy. When the 1960s counterculture emphasised this trend—Allen Ginsberg, for example, exhaling “om” and “shiva” in public performance of his poetry—it is small wonder that western philosophers, willing to take only such time as unscholarly books demanded, settled on the conclusion that eastern philosophy was just so much irrational twaddle.

Unfortunately, into this pas de deux of misrepresentation entered a third party: the modernising intellectual elites of China, India and Japan. In their different ways, these elites confronted a break with the past. Their interpretations of significant questions had been culturally broken: in China by the decline of the empire and the subsequent revolution; in India by colonialism and its aftermath (and, some would argue, by the earlier political dominance of Islam); and in Japan by the catastrophic failure of military hypernationalism. In all these cultures, the past became a treacherous place. In China, communism attempted to wipe out all memory of Old China. In India, postcolonial theorists saw in the classical past only patterns of elite hegemony that had been reinterpreted by the British. And in Japan, there was reluctance to return to the thinkers who had been potently invoked so recently by a brutal, expansionist military-imperial regime.

Many Asian scholars emerging on the international scene therefore tended to be wary of applying their intellectual skills to the philosophy of their tradition. This wariness has been compounded by the culturally loaded interpretations offered by new nationalistic ideologues: here Sankara is attached to a hegemonic exercise in the conception of a Hindu nation, there Confucius is named as the originator of a profoundly undemocratic nation state.

Questioning the nature and identity of western philosophy is, of course, part of philosophy—from conceptual challenges by Nietzsche, Heidegger and Wittgenstein to political ones by students wanting courses not dominated by the canon of Dead White European Males. Such challenges simply get assimilated into a tradition that has had the political benefit of historical continuity. The disquiet of academic elites in Asia about the nature of their philosophical inheritance goes much deeper.

Other challenges remain to the proper redevelopment of Asian philosophies. In India, the Sanskrit-language work of the traditionally trained pandits is dying for lack of prestige and funding. In China, the wild excesses of the cultural revolution destroyed texts and killed thinkers, and the government is still cautious about philosophy. But it should not need arguing that there is value in these traditions, and that they presuppose intellectual rigour in the pursuit of problems they consider to be of such value. In any case, circumstances are changing as China and India find their own cultural spaces for creative yet traditional philosophy. India has had the better time of it politically, as intellectual freedom has allowed new ways of reimagining culture and tradition. But that very freedom has also brought challenges, as polemically extreme formulations from left and right crowd out more rigorous efforts at reinterpreting classical thought. Despite its edgy relationship with free thought, the Chinese state has benefited from the consequences of economic progress; in China and abroad, funds are found to support the unremunerative but time-consuming task of doing original philosophy.

Asian traditions of thought do not form a coherent historical tradition and Asian elites are ambivalent about their nature and worth. But for all the failures of Indians, Chinese and others to take up the study of their own philosophical past, it is perhaps odd that western philosophy, despite its own problems, has rarely sought to renew itself by looking to the east. Aesthetic dimensions of life—art, architecture, music, cinema—seem to flow more readily across cultures than philosophical ones. Once notions of racial and cultural superiority waned, many fusions took place between western and other cultures: consider Hollywood cinema since the early 1990s, English literature since Rushdie, Seth and others, the recent breakthrough of modern Indian art on to western markets. Philosophical thought remains the exception. Why? It may be that there is something in the very nature of such intellectual activity that makes it difficult for cross-cultural communication. Unless there is agreement on what the issues are and that these issues are to be tackled using mutually intelligible methods, perhaps philosophical cultures do not fuse.

It is an inescapable fact that contemporary globalisation took off at a time peculiarly marked by the domination of the place called the west. We cannot wish away that predominance. When the intellectual traditions of India, China or elsewhere come to take their place in an emerging global tradition of thought, they must start with the only global terms of discourse available to them: those of western philosophy. So I have had to use the categories of western philosophy in presenting Indian and Chinese thought; but as with the English language, use does not in itself indicate subordination. It may be that terms from non-western traditions will also become keys of analysis in a future global tradition of thought, but those of western philosophy, their uses conceived in many novel ways, will continue to be used, as they are bequeathed to a global successor. But to give thus, western philosophy must first also receive, even if on its own terms. Parochialism and fear of the unknown on the part of western philosophers, and a loss of nerve on the part of Asian thinkers, stand in the way of that reception.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2006
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SHANGHAI The other day, an acquaintance pointed out something I’d scarcely noticed on a frequently traveled route through this city: steel benches had been removed from the sidewalk in front of one of central Shanghai’s premier hotels.

It seemed like idle chatter at first. Then came the payoff in the form of a hard-bitten observation by a Chinese person who knew his own society. “The city government must be getting ready for an important meeting across the street. If they are so afraid, they shouldn’t hold their meetings in the heart of the business district.”

For months now, the site in question, on Nanjing Lu, directly across the street from the majestic, Soviet-designed Shanghai Exhibition Center, where the city’s leaders often meet, has been gradually transformed into a sort of Democracy Wall. This is the place where Shanghai residents come these days to air their grievances, usually over property issues, like being railroaded out of the central city as a result of cozy deals between local officials and big developers. And sure enough, a few days after the friend’s comment, a big meeting of city leaders was convened there.

Over time, the site has become an ever-bigger headache for the police, whose job seems to be keeping the discontented out of the view of the city’s leaders, as well as the investors, celebrities, well-heeled tourists and big shots of every stripe who flock to the hotel, drawn by the inescapable hype about Shanghai, the world’s latest gleaming global city on the hill.

The police have mostly done their job, it must be said, with a fair amount of efficiency and grace, gently shooing away the motley knots of stubble-bearded and gray-haired pensioners, and ushering those who continue to complain into white police vans for what one assumes is a brief arrest or detention. But the crowds have grown undeterred, driven by the unfathomable murkiness that surrounds the razing of old neighborhoods and the building of high-rent skyscrapers to replace them.

Other methods have been tried to banish this problem - not the problem of corrupt or unjust real estate practices, mind you, but rather the expression of disgruntlement and dissent. State censors, for one, have warned Chinese media off of the topic, and lawyers who have dared to take on the city and the developers have themselves been arrested. Now, if the benches, favored resting spots of the old pensioners during their low-key protests, have to go, it’s because someone decided that enough is enough.

The verdict is still out in China - barely - on whether absolute power corrupts absolutely. Beyond dispute, though, is the striking fondness of those in power here for barricading themselves behind high walls. And walls can come in all kinds of forms, both structural and metaphorical, as the Nanjing Lu sidewalk saga shows.

Another wall, usually invisible, wheeled into view again this week with the news that Google had agreed to help China police the Internet as part of an agreement to allow the company to base some of its search engine servers in China. Henceforth, Chinese users will be treated, if that’s the word, to a sterilized version of Google’s services aimed at keeping out what the authorities call “unhealthy information.”

Gone will be entries on the Tiananmen massacre, and Tibet and much news about Taiwan. The word “democracy” is a no-no, too.

The Google agreement came on the same day that the authorities closed Bing Dian, or Freezing Point, a weekly newspaper that specialized in reporting o