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

• home
• diary
• writings
• sounds
• snippets
• reading table
• on photography
• public speaking
• photos

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

Buy from Amazon

Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

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.

Posted at 6:03 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
THURSDAY, JANUARY 26, 2006
Click here to find out more!
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 on sensitive political and social issues.

The paper irritated censors last year, among other ways, when an internal memo was leaked and published on the Web detailing a rewards system linking journalists’ salaries to their approval ratings among the country’s leaders.

China’s leaders seem keenly aware that their country is poised at a hugely important moment.

Their anxiety can be seen in the handling of recent unrest in villages like Dongzhou and Panlong, in Guangdong Province, where massive police force was deployed.

In the first instance, in December lives were lost on a still unacknowledged scale when the security forces opened fire on a crowd. This month’s big protest was less disastrous - villagers say two people were killed - but the corpse of a 13-year-old girl was rapidly destroyed to protect an official story line that said she had succumbed to a heart attack.

As in faraway Shanghai, the issue in both instances was the takeover of land for development with scant compensation offered to the little people and no recourse for effective, legal opposition. The Shanghai authorities have to handle things gingerly because their city is on the world stage. Out in the provinces, the witnesses are easily cowed, bought or otherwise silenced, kept at a distance behind yet another of China’s walls.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who often impresses audiences with a palpable humanity and decency, particularly compared to a collection of mostly stiff and colorless cohorts at the top, put his finger on the land issue, easily one of the country’s most dangerous fault lines: in a remarkably blunt speech last week, he warned against “historical errors.”

“In some areas, illegal seizures of farmland without reasonable compensation and resettlement have provoked uprisings,” said Wen, in a cool understatement. “This is still a key source of instability in rural areas and even the whole society.”

“Historical error” is polite Communist Party jargon for “blowing it big time,” and Wen’s expression of alarm may be just enough to keep the verdict open on the absolute power versus absolute corruption equation, for now.

It will be action, and not words, though, that determines things. Can China overcome its fear of a rules-based system in which people in power and the institutions they run are subject to legal reproach? Can corruption issues be aired in this country in a way that doesn’t bring the entire edifice crashing down? Even in open, democratic societies, the record of the powerful policing themselves is not a good one. But one senses that without breaking down walls, gradually relaxing restrictions on expression, China’s leaders will be digging themselves a hole.

Posted at 5:40 PM · Comments (0)

You get to say that twice when you live in this part of the world (China, to be precise). The lunar New Year is upon us, and having gone to Laos for the solar version, I’ll be Shanghai-bound for the next 10 days or so, working on personal projects of various types.
One of them is to document certain facets of this city, which will be relatively empty and very subdued, as Chinese families chill out together and offices and commerce shut down. Another goal is to document the crush of travelers rushing to their homes in the provinces, or back to Shanghai at the end of the holiday.
I’ll be posting pix from this soon.

Posted at 10:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Foreign Policy

January/February 2006

The rest of the world complains that American hegemony is reckless, arrogant, and insensitive. Just don’t expect them to do anything about it. The world’s guilty secret is that it enjoys the security and stability the United States provides. The world won’t admit it, but they will miss the American empire when it’s gone.

Everybody talks about the weather, Mark Twain once observed, but nobody does anything about it. The same is true of America’s role in the world. The United States is the subject of endless commentary, most of it negative, some of it poisonously hostile. Statements by foreign leaders, street demonstrations in national capitals, and much-publicized opinion polls all seem to bespeak a worldwide conviction that the United States misuses its enormous power in ways that threaten the stability of the international system. That is hardly surprising. No one loves Goliath. What is surprising is the world’s failure to respond to the United States as it did to the Goliaths of the past.

Sovereign states as powerful as the United States, and as dangerous as its critics declare it to be, were historically subject to a check on their power. Other countries banded together to block them. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France in the late 18th and early 19th century, Germany during the two world wars, and the Soviet Union during the Cold War all inspired countervailing coalitions that ultimately defeated them. Yet no such anti-American alignment has formed or shows any sign of forming today. Widespread complaints about the United States’ international role are met with an absence of concrete, effective measures to challenge, change, or restrict it.

The gap between what the world says about American power and what it fails to do about it is the single most striking feature of 21st-century international relations. The explanation for this gap is twofold. First, the charges most frequently leveled at America are false. The United States does not endanger other countries, nor does it invariably act without regard to the interests and wishes of others. Second, far from menacing the rest of the world, the United States plays a uniquely positive global role. The governments of most other countries understand that, although they have powerful reasons not to say so explicitly.

Benign Hegemon
The charge that the United States threatens others is frequently linked to the use of the term “empire” to describe America’s international presence. In contrast with empires of the past, however, the United States does not control, or aspire to control, directly or indirectly, the politics and economics of other societies. True, in the post-Cold War period, America has intervened militarily in a few places outside its borders, including Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. But these cases are exceptions that prove the rule.

These foreign ventures are few in number and, with the exception of Iraq, none has any economic value or strategic importance. In each case, American control of the country came as the byproduct of a military intervention undertaken for quite different reasons: to rescue distressed people in Somalia, to stop ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, to depose a dangerous tyrant in Iraq. Unlike the great empires of the past, the U.S. goal was to build stable, effective governments and then to leave as quickly as possible. Moreover, unlike past imperial practice, the U.S. government has sought to share control of its occupied countries with allies, not to monopolize them.

One policy innovation of the current Bush administration that gives other countries pause is the doctrine of preventive war. According to this doctrine, the United States reserves the right to attack a country not in response to an actual act of aggression, or because it is unmistakably on the verge of aggression, but rather in anticipation of an assault at some point in the future. The United States implemented the doctrine in 2003 with the invasion of Iraq.

Were it to become central to American foreign policy, the preventive war doctrine would provide a broad charter for military intervention. But that is not its destiny. The Bush administration presented the campaign in Iraq not as a way to ensure that Saddam Hussein did not have the opportunity to acquire nuclear weapons at some point in the future, but rather as a way of depriving him of the far less dangerous chemical weapons that he was believed already to possess. More important, the countries that are now plausible targets for a preventive war—North Korea and Iran—differ from Iraq in ways that make such a campaign extremely unattractive. North Korea is more heavily armed than Iraq, and in a war could do serious damage to America’s chief ally in the region, South Korea, even if North Korea lost. Iran has a larger population than Iraq, and it is less isolated internationally. The United States would have hesitated before attacking either one of these countries even if the Iraq operation had gone smoothly. Now, with the occupation of Iraq proving to be both costly (some $251 billion and counting) and frustrating, support for repeating the exercise elsewhere is hard to find.

America the Accessible
The war in Iraq is the most-often cited piece of evidence that America conducts itself in a recklessly unilateral fashion. Because of its enormous power, critics say, the policies that the United States applies beyond its borders are bound to affect others, yet when it comes to deciding these policies, non-Americans have no influence. However valid the charge of unilateralism in the case of Iraq may be (and other governments did in fact support the war), it does not hold true for U.S. foreign policy as a whole.

The reason is that the American political system is fragmented, which means there are multiple points of access to it. Other countries can exert influence on one of the House or Senate committees with jurisdiction over foreign policy. Or countries can deal with one or more of the federal departments that conduct the nation’s relations with other countries. For that matter, American think tanks generate such a wide variety of proposals for U.S. policies toward every country that almost any approach is bound to have a champion somewhere. Even Sudan, which the U.S. government has accused of genocide, recently signed a $530,000 contract with a Washington lobbyist to help improve its image. Non-Americans may not enjoy formal representation in the U.S. political system, but because of the openness of that system, they can and do achieve what representation brings—a voice in the making of American policy.

Because the opportunities to be heard and heeded are so plentiful, countries with opposing aims often simultaneously attempt to persuade the American government to favor their respective causes. That has sometimes led the United States to become a mediator for international conflict, between Arabs and Israelis, Indians and Pakistanis, and other sets of antagonists. That’s a role that other countries value.

The World’s Government
The United States makes other positive contributions, albeit often unseen and even unknown, to the well-being of people around the world. In fact, America performs for the community of sovereign states many, though not all, of the tasks that national governments carry out within them.

For instance, U.S. military power helps to keep order in the world. The American military presence in Europe and East Asia, which now includes approximately 185,000 personnel, reassures the governments of these regions that their neighbors cannot threaten them, helping to allay suspicions, forestall arms races, and make the chances of armed conflict remote. U.S. forces in Europe, for instance, reassure Western Europeans that they do not have to increase their own troop strength to protect themselves against the possibility of a resurgent Russia, while at the same time reassuring Russia that its great adversary of the last century, Germany, will not adopt aggressive policies. Similarly, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which protects Japan, simultaneously reassures Japan’s neighbors that it will remain peaceful. This reassurance is vital yet invisible, and it is all but taken for granted.

The United States has also assumed responsibility for coping with the foremost threat to contemporary international security, the spread of nuclear weapons to “rogue” states and terrorist organizations. The U.S.-sponsored Cooperative Threat Reduction program is designed to secure nuclear materials and weapons in the former Soviet Union. A significant part of the technical and human assets of the American intelligence community is devoted to the surveillance of nuclear weapons-related activities around the world. Although other countries may not always agree with how the United States seeks to prevent proliferation, they all endorse the goal, and none of them makes as significant a contribution to achieving that goal as does the United States.

America’s services to the world also extend to economic matters and international trade. In the international economy, much of the confidence needed to proceed with transactions, and the protection that engenders this confidence, comes from the policies of the United States. For example, the U.S. Navy patrols shipping lanes in both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, assuring the safe passage of commerce along the world’s great trade routes. The United States also supplies the world’s most frequently used currency, the U.S. dollar. Though the euro might one day supplant the dollar as the world’s most popular reserve currency, that day, if it ever comes, lies far in the future.

Furthermore, working through the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the United States also helps to carry out some of the duties that central banks perform within countries, including serving as a “lender of last resort.” The driving force behind IMF bailouts of failing economies in Latin America and Asia in the last decade was the United States, which holds the largest share of votes within the IMF. And Americans’ large appetite for consumer products partly reproduces on a global scale the service that the economist John Maynard Keynes assigned to national governments during times of economic slowdown: The United States is the world’s “consumer of last resort.” Americans purchase Japanese cars, Chinese-made clothing, and South Korean electronics and appliances in greater volume than any other people.

Just as national governments have the responsibility for delivering water and electricity within their jurisdictions, so the United States, through its military deployments and diplomacy, assures an adequate supply of the oil that allows industrial economies to run. It has established friendly political relations, and sometimes close military associations, with governments in most of the major oil-producing countries and has extended military protection to the largest of them, Saudi Arabia. Despite deep social, cultural, and political differences between the two countries, the United States and Saudi Arabia managed in the 20th century to establish a partnership that controlled the global market for this indispensable commodity. The economic well-being even of countries hostile to American foreign policy depends on the American role in assuring the free flow of oil throughout the world.

To be sure, the United States did not deliberately set out to become the world’s government. The services it provides originated during the Cold War as part of its struggle with the Soviet Union, and America has continued, adapted, and in some cases expanded them in the post-Cold War era. Nor do Americans think of their country as the world’s government. Rather, it conducts, in their view, a series of policies designed to further American interests. In this respect they are correct, but these policies serve the interests of others as well. The alternative to the role the United States plays in the world is not better global governance, but less of it—and that would make the world a far more dangerous and less prosperous place. Never in human history has one country done so much for so many others, and received so little appreciation for its efforts.

Inevitable Ingratitude
Nor is the world likely to express much gratitude to the United States any time soon. Even if they privately value what the United States does for the world, other countries, especially democratic ones, will continue to express anti-American sentiments. That is neither surprising nor undesirable. Within democracies, spirited criticism of the government is normal, indeed vital for its effective performance. The practice is no different between and among democracies.

Anti-Americanism has many domestic political uses. In many parts of the world, the United States serves as a convenient scapegoat for governments, a kind of political lightning rod to draw away from themselves the popular discontent that their shortcomings have helped to produce. That is particularly the case in the Middle East, but not only there. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder achieved an electoral victory in 2002 by denouncing the war in Iraq. Similarly, it is convenient, even comforting, to blame the United States for the inevitable dislocations caused by the great, impersonal forces of globalization.

But neither the failure to acknowledge America’s global role nor the barrage of criticism of it means that the officials of other countries are entirely unaware of the advantages that it brings them. If a global plebiscite concerning America’s role in the world were held by secret ballot, most foreign-policy officials in other countries would vote in favor of continuing it. Though the Chinese object to the U.S. military role as Taiwan’s protector, they value the effect that American military deployments in East Asia have in preventing Japan from pursuing more robust military policies. But others will not declare their support for America’s global role. Acknowledging it would risk raising the question of why those who take advantage of the services America provides do not pay more for them. It would risk, that is, other countries’ capacities to continue as free riders, which is an arrangement no government will lightly abandon.

In the end, however, what other nations do or do not say about the United States will not be crucial to whether, or for how long, the United States continues to function as the world’s government. That will depend on the willingness of the American public, the ultimate arbiter of American foreign policy, to sustain the costs involved. In the near future, America’s role in the world will have to compete for public funds with the rising costs of domestic entitlement programs. It is Social Security and Medicare, not the rise of China or the kind of coalition that defeated powerful empires in the past, that pose the greatest threat to America’s role as the world’s government.

The outcome of the looming contest in the United States between the national commitment to social welfare at home and the requirements for stability and prosperity abroad cannot be foreseen with any precision. About other countries’ approach to America’s remarkable 21st-century global role, however, three things may be safely predicted: They will not pay for it, they will continue to criticize it, and they will miss it when it is gone.

Michael Mandelbaum is the Christian A. Herter professor of American foreign policy at The Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and author of The Case for Goliath: How America Acts as the World’s Government in the Twenty-First Century (New York: PublicAffairs, 2006), from which this article is adapted.

Posted at 8:51 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Culture Cult

Has the UK run clean off the rails? First there was Theodore Dalrymple’s catalog of horrors in Our Culture, What’s Left of It, with its report of foul language and fouler habits across wide stretches of the British Isles. Now comes Lynne Truss’s “big systematic moan” (her own words) — Talk to the Hand: the Utter Bloody Rudeness of Everyday Life.

People don’t bother to say please and thank you any more; they disregard one’s personal space and violently react to small remonstrances; there’s disrespect for older people, disrespect for professional people, disrespect for property, and a general collapse of civility in a boorishly bare-skinned tats and Eff-Off world.

But then Ms Truss resorts to a cliché. The surrounding rudeness is seen less as a product of civilized decadence—of hell-bent amoral egos accountable neither to God nor man—and more as a throwback to tribal ways. Talking about the declining use of verbal appeasements like “sorry”, she says we use them to avoid “being brained by a screeching savage wielding a bleached thigh-bone.”

The image is indelible—especially for anyone who may have seen the new King Kong with its travesty of tribal life—but the figure of speech is overwrought.

Surprising though it may seem, it can reasonably be argued that in nine out of ten of the archaic societies recorded by anthropologists there was less screeching and more politeness, less boorishness and more decency and dignity, than you’ll find in some western societies today. And as Lewis Mumford suggested fifty years ago in The Transformations of Man—a book and writer we shall be returning to—due respect should be paid to the courtesies of an older world we have irretrievably lost.
Tripping with Ms Truss: the Mohave

Thinking she might appreciate a quick look at Archaic Man, I invited Ms Truss to take a Time Machine trip back into the past—our first stop being the Mohave Indians in the southwest c. 1920.

To our astonishment, when we arrived in Indian Territory sitting side by side we found that this was strongly disapproved of. The Mohave in 1920 took seating etiquette very seriously: unrelated people of opposite sex were not supposed to share the rear seats of either cars or Time Machines. How could this be, we wondered? As a resolutely modern woman Ms Truss found it faintly absurd—one of her fondest memories was being bundled in the back of a Ford.

But that was exactly the point. As our informant explained, even if a Mohave wife is devoted to her husband, and even if a Mohave man is elderly or senile, unrelated men and women should not share the same car seat because “thoughts or daydreams about travelling with a member of the opposite sex induce amorous desires.”

Nor should a woman talk to any man she meets along the way. “A good woman does not walk with men, nor does she ride with them in a wagon or in a car, unless the man happens to be her husband or a close relative.”

The Mohave view seemed to be that given the fact of a strong sexual interest between men and women—something everyone knows about, and has known about for thousands of years—desire should be subdued rather than excited if everyday life is to be free of needless fuss. They would probably have felt that continuous 24/7 pornovision (all things considered, and making due allowance for variations of personal taste) was not the way to go.
Tripping with Ms Truss: Fiji

Dr Dalrymple somewhere describes people in Britain as “grazing” rather than “dining” at dinnertime. A sort of listless foraging in the refrigerator is now normal—indeed, whole decades have passed since some families sat down together at table for an evening meal. Of course they may not even have a table to sit at. “We eat like animals” said one Londoner.

But they didn’t eat like animals in Fiji circa 1930. Arriving in the evening just as dinner was about to be served we found everyone had bathed and dressed and was neatly attired. When Ms Truss and I turned up wearing shorts, chaos ensued. A Fijian dinner was a formal occasion; shorts were a despised informal dress used by Europeans during working hours; everyone felt insulted, and we had to hastily move on to another village.

Polite behavior in Fiji in olden times was referred to as “chiefly ways”, and such ways were to be distinguished from rude and boorish manners—the “ways of the low-born”. Egalitarians find this provoking, and the democratic Ms Truss took hot exception to such an ideal of well-bred and genteel behavior. “Sod Emily Post” she cried, “and good riddance!”

But that missed the point. It was obvious during our visit that the distinction between chiefs and commoners in daily life was small. But the manners and morals of the chiefs were supposed to be exemplary; acceptance in Fijian society always meant that due respect should be shown for chiefly ways; and these chiefly ways were expected of everyone.

* * *

The Australian anthropologist Ian Hogbin once wrote that

Etiquette consists in the rules which regulate the behavior of members of a society towards one another, but which have no further sanction than public opinion. The violation of these rules calls forth disapproval or ridicule, but the offender is not punished by any form of social machinery.

Yet what would he have said about the fate of the Reverend Baker? In 1867 the sanctions for violating etiquette were severe. In Fiji as in many other cultures a person’s head was specially respected, and a chiefly head was sacred. You were never supposed to stand higher than the head of the chief; “walking small” and bowed over was obligatory in his presence; and as for anyone actually touching a chief’s head, whether by accident or design, that was risky indeed.

When the Reverend Thomas Baker arrived in a Fijian village in 1867 he was received with the greatest hospitality, and so far as we know the night he spent there was comfortable. Next morning, when seated on the floor of the chief’s house with his host, he produced a comb, attended to his hair, and without giving the matter a moment’s thought laid the comb on the mat before him. The chief then picked up the comb and stuck it in his own hair. Some items like this were treated as communal property; and in any case Mr Baker should have understood that it was a compliment for a prestigious host to adopt a visitor’s comb as his own.

But he didn’t. Rudely snatching back the comb from the chief’s hair, the Reverend Baker sealed his own fate. For this outrage he was promptly knocked on the head, and dragged away, reappearing some time later as Missionary Pie. “We ate everything but his boots” a villager said.

* * *

“There!”, cried Ms Truss triumphantly. “You’ve only been telling me about the manners of the missionized and enlightened. That’s exactly what I was talking about—the screeching savage with his bleached bone club. And that’s what it was like in Fiji as recently as 1867. Don’t tell me about civility before civilization!”
Tripping with Ms Truss: the Aborigines

She had a point. So where could we find Archaic Man untouched by time, yet plainly more decent, companionable, sensitive to social usages and generally well-mannered than the unspeakable modern urban-dwellers both she and Dalrymple describe?

Dr Dalrymple in particular dwells on domestic settings where both incest and the molestation of children by their own parents is common, where aimless promiscuity prevails among teenagers, and where unmarried fathers abandon their infants as soon as they’re born. As for the universal Eff-Off world of Ms Truss… but let’s not go there. Where could one find an ancient people where family values prevailed and both sexual scruple and genuine delicacy of feeling were pervasive—and also where no white man had trod?

How about Australia? After years exploring the far north of the country Donald Thomson wrote that “nowhere are good manners and good taste more important than among the Aborigines”.

And if the evidence of Thomson’s opinion is felt to be insufficient on its own, there’s the personal memoir of Mahkarolla (helpfully recorded by the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner in his book A Black Civilization) about growing up in Arnhem Land around 1900. In the short excerpts below Mahkarolla tells of his childhood and how he learned the difference between right and wrong; about the role of fathers in a child’s development and about his early feelings of moral shame; about a trip he made when the first white men came to his territory and how, to his embarrassment, he was seduced by a woman in another tribe:

childhood

Before we were circumcised we little boys played spear-fighting games, talked about sneaking up and killing a man, and we threw clay mud balls at each other. Later we played being grown men and women with the little girls. We made little fires on the beach. We went out just like our fathers and pretended to spear fish, and the little girls went into the bush and brought home fruit and vegetables. We made little bark huts just like our fathers’ and mothers’. The girls would come and lie beside us as our wives and we were their husbands.

When we were little boys, other boys who were bigger teased us about the wives we were going to marry. This made me feel very ashamed. Girls joked the same way. They also became ashamed. I think I always knew it was wrong to play with a girl of the Yiritcha moiety. I knew it was wrong because I was a Yiritcha myself. I knew it was wrong to play husband and wife with my sister because my future wife should come from the other side of our clan.

adolescence

When I was bigger we boys always made fish spears and carried them with us. We hunted birds and fish. We learned then to carry our baskets over our shoulders, under our arms, just like grown men do, just as our sisters learned to carry their baskets over their foreheads.

When a boy has been circumcised he sleeps with other boys and the unmarried men and he stays away from his father’s and mother’s camp. It is not good for young people around where married people are. They learn too much. They see women too much. Sometimes today (i.e. about 1925) you see boys sitting down in a camp with the women. They are not learning the right way to live properly. They should be in their own camp and eating and sleeping there.

women

We stayed a while in the country of Cape Don Tommy. I did not know the language. One night one of their women made a large bark hut and fixed a fire in front of it and put paper bark on the ground to lie on. She told me I could go inside. I went inside, thinking there would be another boy with me.

When I went into that hut the woman crawled on top of me and put her legs around mine so I couldn’t move. I was still young. I did not know what she wanted. I thought she was holding my legs that way and someone would come up and spear me. I could not talk her language and she did not understand Macassar.

I wriggled loose from her and ran outside. I found Cape Don Tommy. I said, What does that woman want? It turned out that girl was his half-daughter. He said, I think she wants you for a sweetheart.

I said, I don’t like that. In my country we don’t make sweethearts that way. We don’t make sweethearts before everyone in the middle of the camp. Boys and girls sneak away from the camp and do it there so that the old people can’t see us and we won’t be ashamed.

parenthood

I like my children. If a father and mother do not take care of their sons and daughters all the women everywhere start gossiping about them. They say that they are wild, that maybe they have evil spirits in their heads, and they say they are no good.

We men talk the same way too. We do not like to see children mistreated. My little son is just the same as my spear-thrower. He is just the same as my right arm. I think it is a good thing for a man to have a lot of children. It makes his tribe bigger and stronger. And when a man gets old they provide all the things he needs. If he has trouble—and all men have trouble—he does not have to go to his mother’s people or his wife’s people for help. He can look after himself.

* * *

“That’s all very well”, said Ms Truss, “but I know for a fact there was lots of fighting among those tribes, and your fine Mr Mahkarolla was probably in the thick of it, spear in hand. Or bone club in hand as the case might be. We’re not talking peace and lovey-dovey relationships: we’re talking non-stop feuds and war!”

Though not the whole picture, this was broadly true. War between the Arnhem Land clans may not have been as intense as that described by Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo, but it was common. Yet a more complete view of the situation shows a people just as aware of the dangers of military conflict as today’s politicians—facts as relevant now as they were in the Stone Age.

Lloyd Warner tells on pages 486-487 how he was invited to attend a council of elders to discuss “the perplexities of the great war in which their various clans were involved.” After a long period of peace there had been a sudden and violent provocation. Fighting erupted, and now things were running out of control. Although some men urged peace and negotiations, others were for an all-out battle—“a spear-fight to end all spear-fights.”

At the end of the council most men favored war, and under pressure Mahkarolla finally voted for war too. But he could see no hope in this policy. Warner writes that when the two of them walked back to camp together Mahkarolla spoke as follows:

When I was a boy I saw a spear fight to end all spear fights. Many men were killed. It was no good. We must not have it again. My people did not stop fighting. As you see, we are fighting today just as we did before. Spear fights do not end spear fights.
Altruism and equity

Within the community both altruism and equity were central values. In a paper by the anthropologist L. R. Hiatt discussing the Gidjingali, (neighbors of the Arnhem Land Aborigines described by Lloyd Warner), with whom Hiatt has worked for much of the past fifty years, he analyses the vocabulary in which these concepts are expressed.

In the case of altruism, distinct terms indicate either “a disposition to look after others, particularly by sharing goods and possessions”, and a contrary disposition to harm others, or act in an unfriendly manner. Neighborliness, concern for a relative or friend, kinship love that fulfils responsibilities, was conveyed by the term Gurrurta, while guburrmaymba connoted “an ideology of amity and mutual aid.”

Outsiders were always outsiders, aliens, and potential enemies. But within the group—say on the average from 50 to 150 people—a “good” person was one who cared for and looked after others, and who responded ungrudgingly to requests for aid.

Equity as a Gidjingali value might be seen as even more fundamental, its origins lying in the wider metaphysical field of what is glossed in English as “custom-law”. Hiatt describes this as “the realm and deeds of the ancestral spirits responsible for introducing shape and structure to the cosmos.”

First and foremost among the consequences of their actions was an equitable distribution of land among patrilineal descent groups. Hardly less important were marriage rules inhibiting the monopolisation of women by aggressive and powerful males.

[The term] joborr provides a foundation for the rights of all men and women: joborr rrenyja, ‘stand on the law’.

Political rights and influence are widely distributed among adults, and in public life there are no formal hierarchies of power and control. Wana negiya, ‘make oneself big’, is an expression of disparagement.
But weren’t they cannibals?

They? But we probably all were once. Evidence for prehistoric cannibalism in the form of bones with cut marks, or bones broken open to get at the marrow, strongly indicates that men have been cooking and eating each other for tens of thousands of years. We must all be glad that with the rise of civilization it declined, but there is probably no-one alive today without genes from some cannibal ancestor of long ago.

As for the Aboriginal case, it’s absurd to mention it in the same breath as cannibalism among the New Zealand Maori, the Fijians, or the Tupinamba in Brazil at the time the Portuguese arrived. True, so-called ritual or burial cannibalism was widely practised among Australian Aborigines, when “portions of a deceased person were eaten by relatives as part of the mortuary process, with strict rules followed as to who might partake.” But so far as we know human flesh was never eaten in Australia for its own sake as an enjoyable and sought-after food—as “long pig” in the revealing Polynesian phrase—and human beings were not killed for that purpose.

Like the club-wielding savage of Ms Truss, the “cannibal” invoked by many civilized folk is a rhetorical cliché meant to cause discomfort. When it occurs, as anthropologist Kenneth Maddock said some years ago, it is often during a struggle for moral ascendancy using “the politics of embarrassment”, the aim being “to soften up your opponents by making them feel bad about themselves or their ancestors.” It is meant to shame your adversary, though of course those who practised it in times gone by felt no shame whatever since they were fulfilling a religious obligation. On this question the anthropologist L. R. Hiatt wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald in 1997:

The assumption of shamefulness needs to be challenged. In many parts of Australia, Aborigines recovered the bones of recently-buried relatives and kept them until the pain of bereavement abated.

Sometimes, as in the case of small children, they refused to part with the bodies. In rare circumstances, as when young warriors or women fell in the course of battle, their anguished kin first attacked their own bodies and then ate the flesh of the deceased.

An eyewitness account of such an event was given in the 19th century by a Victorian Assistant Protector named C. W. Sievewright and was published in The Victorian Historical Magazine, 1928, pp 168-70.
But isn’t this romantic primitivism?

Not really. Romantic primitivism imagines that we can somehow go back to the past. But there is absolutely no way, metaphysically, politically, or economically, that we can recover the world we have lost.

Or it believes that tribal cultures should be preserved in amber. But they cannot—and the attempt to do so has met with failure everywhere. It should also be emphasized that the dysfunctional ruins of politically driven attempts at preservation, now visible throughout much of northern Australia, can be seriously misleading about the way things worked in the past.

Or, again, it supposes that such cultures were morally admirable, and appropriate models for us all. But many were not, and some were being destroyed by ineluctable processes of degeneration and decay—processes not dissimilar to the more decadent features of western civilization today. Read Jan van Baal on the Marind-anim of New Guinea and see what you think.

It should also be fairly clear that such politeness and order as did exist was upheld by the fear of ostracism in small communities, many of which suffered continual conflict and dissension from sorcery; while attitudes toward strangers, as among the Gidjingali described by L. R. Hiatt above (and attitudes toward strangers are the main concern of Ms Truss), were always warily xenophobic.

* * *

Yet this should not prevent us taking a realistic historical view of Archaic Man, or showing a measured appreciation for the manners and morals of a pre-industrial social order that served humanity well enough for thousands of years. Lewis Mumford, in the second chapter of his 1957 The Transformations of Man, suggests that we need to retain and conserve some ethical elements from the closed tribal cultures of the past, while adapting them to the open and ever-changing civilization we have today:

Archaic Man is the conservator of life: he guards the future by holding tight to the past and, above all, to his ancestors. Both in religious cult and in the looser form of general tradition, he worships his ancestors and seeks their guidance when confronted by life’s situations, on the sound supposition that the same difficulties must have occurred before.

He does not for a moment imagine that the wisdom of the race is embodied in the experience of a single lifetime, still less that his own individual fragment of experience would be sufficient to keep him straight. Archaic Man, flinching from the new and the untried, is happy to live in the fashion of his forebears, to maintain the level they had reached, to pass on to his children, unimpaired, the heritage his parents passed on to him.

Hence his respect for age; for only the old have lived long enough to take in the whole heritage and to hand it on. The wisdom of the Elders binds the present to the past and so prevents the future from falling short of the past.

In case of conflict or doubt, it is in the council of the Elders that the living past speaks and lays down, with the least necessary alteration, the ‘eternal’ way. Custom and law, education and work, government and morality, are not separate departments of life: they are aspects of the whole—intuitively grasped because vividly lived—and only within this whole has each separate life its significance.

* * *

The ancestors, the burgeoning family, and the household gods, the holy ritual, the cycle of vegetation and reproduction—these constitute the realities of archaic culture. A collective routine devoted to the nourishment and enhancement of every aspect of life; so that no part of human existence grew out of proportion to the other parts.

All the goods of this life, however, fell within the charmed circle of the small community; and men paid a price for this security. The enclosed community produced the enclosed personality, and vice versa. Kindness was a quality one showed to the kinsman, and then by extension to the neighbour: truth, honesty, friendliness, forbearance, abstention from rape or murder, applied only to those within the community, not to those outside.

This long apprenticeship in isolation left its mark, and even now tends to thwart a wider unity. We still associate stability and security with enclosure, and before the prospect of an open world we timidly shrink back with a kind of agoraphobia.

Yet so central has this archaic culture been, so successful in providing norms for human development, that it has preserved itself under successive waves of civilization, right down to the present. In other forms than those created in Neolithic times, its I-and-thou relationship must be carried into every wider community, if that community is to endure.

Sources: Mohave Etiquette, by George Devereaux. Etiquette and Social Sanction in the Fiji Islands, by Dorothy M. Spencer. Donald Thomson’s place in Australian anthropology, by Nicolas Peterson. A Black Civilization, by W. Lloyd Warner. “Cannibalism”, by Kenneth Maddock (Radio talk) Edward Westermarck and the Origin of Moral Ideas, by L. R. Hiatt. Dema, by Jan van Baal (Description and analysis of Marind-anim culture, South New Guinea). The Transformations of Man, by Lewis Mumford.

More complete bibliographic data available on request.

January 2005

Science and consensus

Two heads good, three heads better

Roger Sandall

One man’s experience is nothing if it stands alone.

C. S. Peirce

Steven Weinberg’s article discussing Einstein’s mistakes in last month’s Physics Today was characteristically measured and respectful. But to anyone interested in the zig-zag progress of science—its diligent and unceasing course corrections—a more dramatic and revealing article about Einstein had already appeared in the same journal last September.

This was Daniel Kennefick’s account of Einstein’s first experience of anonymous peer review. It was an ordeal he had never been exposed to in Europe, and when he encountered it in America the great man didn’t like it one bit.

The unprecedented situation arose in 1936 when Einstein sent a paper to The Physical Review. Kennefick explains that at that time the Review was rapidly becoming “the world’s premier journal of physics”, and editor John Tate took an austere view of his responsibilities. Nobody—not even the most distinguished contributor—could expect to be favored or indulged.

When a paper on gravitational waves arrived from Einstein, Tate invited a reviewer to comment; the reviewer’s anonymous comments were damaging; and Einstein, “in high dudgeon”, refused to publish in The Physical Review ever again.

The paper and its details are here of little concern. Einstein shared authorship with another physicist named Nathan Rosen, and together they suggested that gravitational waves, which by the 1930s most scientists thought must exist in principle, were an illusion. But Percy Robertson, the reviewer invited to comment on their paper, was not convinced.

Well, this is a job! (wrote Robertson to the editor.) If Einstein and Rosen can establish their case, this would constitute a most important criticism of the general theory of relativity. But I have gone over the whole thing with a fine-tooth comb (mainly for the good of my soul!), and can’t for the life of me see that they have established it.

After explaining why this was so, Robertson went on to recommend that his criticisms be submitted to the authors for their consideration. Alternatively, he suggested that Tate might go ahead and publish it as it stood, since the spin-off and general controversy might be beneficial anyway: “Such a paper would be certain to give rise to a lot of work in this field of gravitational waves, which might be a good thing—provided they didn’t flood you out of house and home.”

In the event the editor decided not to publish, but to send Einstein and Rosen the anonymous reviewer’s comments. Einstein angrily replied:

Dear Sir,

We (Mr Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the—in any case erroneous—comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

This he proceeded to do in 1937 in the Journal of the Franklin Institute—but not before taking on board the reviewer’s “erroneous” corrections (having been later persuaded that they were needed), and radically altering both his argument and its conclusions.

The two heads of Einstein and Rosen may or may not have been better than one in arriving at their original defective formulation. But three heads were certainly better than two in establishing where Einstein and Rosen went wrong, and the whole episode is a good example of the process of intellectual winnowing, by other minds, through which scientific error is detected and truth established—little by little, step by step, on the path to eventual consensus.

The new cynicism

Mistakes in science bring howls of glee from its enemies—some of whom evidently see science as a mistake in itself. A school of critics dubbed The New Cynics by Susan Haack believe scientific work to be riddled with error, if not downright absurdity. Their prophet was the famous Paul Feyerabend. From his pad in Berkeley he promised to free us from “the tyranny of… such abstract concepts as ‘truth’, ‘reality’, and ‘objectivity’’ and went so far as to claim that scientists were little better than practitioners of voodoo.

Others like Bruno Latour argued that science was mainly about academic egos, rivalry, and power. Now, writes Haack, “New Cynics like Harry Collins assure us that ‘the natural world has a small or non-existent role in the construction of scientific knowledge’”, while Kenneth Gergen maintains that the validity of theoretical propositions in the sciences, “is in no way affected by factual evidence.” (In no way? There has to be something wrong there.)

In Haack’s Defending Science Within Reason (2003) this admirable philosopher of science administers a dose of intellectual sanity and moderation, steering a course between The New Cynics and The Old Deferentialists (always down on their knees in awe before scientific achievements). She plainly feels it is time to move on, and that the stormy 20th-century disputes about verification versus falsification, or about induction versus deduction—along with the competing extravagances of academic logicians on the one hand and politically driven sociologists of science on the other—should be expeditiously relegated to the archives.

Taking her stand as a “critical common-sensist” Haack calls for compromise and pragmatism. Like John Dewey she is more fond of the notion of inquiry than of truth, and although Dewey’s “warranted assertability” does not make a direct appearance in the argument (or not that I noticed), she gives an entire chapter to the concept of “warrant” itself. Common-sensism also maintains that “scientific inquiry is continuous with the most ordinary of everyday empirical inquiry”, and a range of opinion is marshalled to support this view.

Back in the 19th century T. H. Huxley had said that science was little more than trained and organized common sense, while Dewey wrote that “scientific subject-matter and procedures grow out of the direct problems and methods of common sense.” The Nobel-winning physicist Percy Bridgman argued that “there is no scientific method as such… the most vital feature of the scientist’s procedure has been merely to do his utmost with his mind.” For his part Einstein himself made a contribution similar to Huxley’s: “the whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.”

In his usual distinguished style George Santayana wrote in Reason in Science: “Science is common knowledge extended and refined. Its validity is of the same order as that of ordinary perception, memory, and understanding. Its test is found, like theirs, in actual imitation, which sometimes consists in perception and sometimes in intent. The flight of science is merely longer from perception to perception, and its deduction more accurate from meaning to meaning and from purpose to purpose.”

* * *

All of which stands intriguingly at odds with the views of other scientists (cited in Science and the Greeks last August) who prefer to emphasize the discontinuity of science and common sense. In the opening chapter of his 1992 book The Unnatural Nature of Science (a chapter with the title “Unnatural Thoughts”) Lewis Wolpert gave this point of view perhaps its most categorical expression: “Both the ideas that science generates and the way in which science is carried out are entirely counter-intuitive and against common sense — by which I mean that scientific ideas cannot be acquired by simple inspection of phenomena and that they are very often outside everyday experience. Science does not fit with our natural expectations.”

…scientific thinking differs from everyday thinking not only in the concepts used but in what constitutes a satisfactory explanation: common sense thinking about motion, for example, is not concerned with the spelling-out in detail of the relationships between terms such as force and velocity — each involving strictly defined and quite difficult concepts — but can be satisfied with vague statements.

A further difference is the purpose behind scientific thinking and the thinking of everyday life. In everyday life one is primarily concerned with usefulness, whereas science is concerned with a rather abstract understanding.

This is exemplified by Sherlock Holmes when he turns to Watson, who has been castigating him for not knowing about Copernicus and the solar system, and says, ‘What the deuce is it to me if you say we go round the sun. If we went round the moon it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or my work.’

In fact one of the strongest arguments for the distance between common sense and science is that the whole of science is totally irrelevant to most people’s day-to-day lives. One can live very well without knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, cell theory and DNA, and other sciences…

Doing science (in contrast to doing cooking) requires one to remove oneself from one’s personal experience and to try to understand phenomena not directly affecting one’s day-to-day life, one’s personal constructs. In everyday life one requires no construct as to why bodies fall when dropped or why children may or may not resemble their parents; it is sufficient that they do so. Common sense provides no more than some of the raw material required for scientific thinking.

Posted at 8:39 PM · Comments (0)

Wednesday January 25, 2006
Copyright The Guardian

Google, the world’s biggest search engine, will team up with the world’s biggest censor, China, today with a service that it hopes will make it more attractive to the country’s 110 million online users.

After holding out longer than any other major internet company, Google will effectively become another brick in the great firewall of China when it starts filtering out information that it believes the government will not approve of.

Despite a year of soul-searching, the American company will join Microsoft and Yahoo! in helping the communist government block access to websites containing politically sensitive content, such as references to the Tiananmen Square massacre and criticism of the politburo.

Article continues
Executives have grudgingly accepted that this is the ethical price they have to pay to base servers in mainland China, which will improve the speed - and attractiveness - of their service in a country where they face strong competition from the leading mandarin search engine, Baidu.

But Google faces a backlash from free speech advocates, internet activists and politicians, some of whom are already asking how the company’s policy in China accords with its mission statement: to make all possible information available to everyone who has a computer or mobile phone.

The new interface - google.cn - started at midnight last night and will be slowly phased in over the coming months. Although users will have the option of continuing to search via the original US-based google.com website, it is expected that the vast majority of Chinese search enquiries will go through mainland-based servers.

This will require the company to abide by the rules of the world’s most restricted internet environment. China is thought to have 30,000 online police monitoring blogs, chatrooms and news portals. The propaganda department is thought to employ even more people, a small but increasing number of whom are paid to anonymously post pro-government comments online. Sophisticated filters have been developed to block or limit access to “unhealthy information”, which includes human rights websites, such as Amnesty, foreign news outlets, such as the BBC, as well as pornography. Of the 64 internet dissidents in prison worldwide, 54 are from China.

Google has remained outside this system until now. But its search results are still filtered and delayed by the giant banks of government servers, known as the great firewall of China. Type “Falun Gong” in the search engine from a Beijing computer and the only results that can be accessed are official condemnations.

Now, however, Google will actively assist the government to limit content. There are technical precedents. In Germany, Google follows government orders by restricting references to sites that deny the Holocaust. In France, it obeys local rules prohibiting sites that stir up racial hatred. And in the US, it assists the authorities’ crackdown on copyright infringements.

The scale of censorship in China is likely to dwarf anything the company has done before. According to one internet media insider, the main taboos are the three Ts: Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen massacre, and the two Cs: cults such as Falun Gong and criticism of the Communist party. But this list is frequently updated.

In a statement, Google said it had little choice: “To date, our search service has been offered exclusively from outside China, resulting in latency and access issues that have been unsatisfying to our Chinese users and, therefore, unacceptable to Google. With google.cn, Chinese users will ultimately receive a search service that is fast, always accessible, and helps them find information both in China and from around the world.”

It acknowledged that this ran contrary to its corporate ethics, but said a greater good was served by providing information in China. “In order to operate from China, we have removed some content from the search results available on google.cn, in response to local law, regulation or policy. While removing search results is inconsistent with Google’s mission, providing no information (or a heavily degraded user experience that amounts to no information) is more inconsistent with our mission.”

Initially, Google will not use Chinese servers for two of its most popular services: Gmail and blogger. This is a reflection of the company’s discomfort with the harsh media environment - and the subsequent risks to its corporate image.

In an attempt to be more transparent than its rivals, Google said it would inform users that certain web pages had been removed from the list of results on the orders of the government. But its motivation is economic: a chunk of the fast-growing Chinese search market, estimated to be worth $151m (£84m) in 2004. This is still small by US standards, but with the number of web users increasing at the rate of more than 20 million a year, the online population is on course to overtake the US within the next decade.

Julian Pain of Reporters Without Borders - a freedom of expression advocacy group that also has its website blocked in China - accused Google of hypocrisy. “This is very bad news for the internet in China. Google were the only ones who held out. So the Chinese government had to block information themselves. But now Google will do it for them,” he said. “They have two standards. One for the US, where they resist government demands for personal information, and one for China, where they are helping the authorities block thousands of websites.”

Local bloggers were already wearily resigned to the change. “What Google are doing is targeting commercial interests and skirting political issues,” said one of the country’s most prominent, who writes under the name Black Hearted Killer. “That by itself is no cause for criticism, but there is no doubt they are cowards.”

Posted at 10:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: January 24, 2006
SHANGHAI, Jan. 23 - It was only a matter of time before money transformed that most intimate of private domains, love and marriage, as it has almost everything else in this booming country. And it stands to reason that the shock of the new would be felt first here in Shanghai, the throbbing heart of Chinese capitalism.

Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
Su Jie, right, with a friend in Shanghai. Ms. Su, who is 23, says understanding is more important than money when it comes to men.

Ryan Pyle for The New York Times
He Xin, a lawyer in Shanghai, has been retained by billionaires looking for brides. Mr. He claims to have started “lifestyle law” in China.
It all began with an advertiser and a lawyer, sitting around with a friend who had made his fortune in auto parts, distraught over his recent divorce and unable to find a suitable new bride. Place an ad, said the ad man, half in jest, but the lawyer took him seriously, and put an announcement in a newspaper about a billionaire seeking a virgin bride.

In China’s currency, the yuan, a billionaire’s worth shrinks substantially, to about $125 million. But that is still a lot of money, enough in this case to attract a flash flood of 600 applications, complete with photos and detailed personal information. That was whittled down to 100 candidates, of whom 20 were interviewed and one was selected, finally producing man and wife.

That first virgin bride advertising campaign, which occurred two years ago, has given rise to a mini-industry: hundreds of supposedly super-rich lonely-hearts and hordes of young women, often professing to be virgins, hoping to meet well-heeled men. The lawyer, He Xin, a 25-year-old Shanghai resident, said he had already been approached by more than 50 billionaires and has been retained by several of them, including three for whom he has found brides, in a process that he said took about three months from start to finish. Along the way, Mr. He has found a bride for himself - a woman who was passed over by one of his clients.

Today, Mr. He proudly claims that his work for billionaires has spawned a new line of law in China, lifestyle law, a personalized service catering to people with means. Not incidentally, it has spawned a debate, too, about rapid social change in China, and especially about the changing place of women in society. Since the beginning of the economic reform era, 27 years ago, perhaps no area of Chinese life has undergone more change than the mores of dating, love and marriage.

For centuries, Chinese practiced arranged marriages, complete with dowries, leaving little place for Western-style notions of romance. During the long decades of hard-line Communism, these practices were updated with an infusion of Maoist social control methods. Work brigade commissars, rather than parents and clans, decided who could date and marry and who could not. Neighborhood committee bosses even had a say in the matter. Only recently has the idea of living together unmarried gained limited social acceptance in China.

In a breathtakingly short period of time, though, sexual and romantic opportunities have sprung up everywhere in a society that still thinks of itself as conservative in such matters. Prostitutes work openly in almost every hotel in China. The Internet has made possible everything from online dating to nude Web-cam dancing, sprouting a vocabulary all its own, like M.B.A., or married but available. And, unsurprisingly, divorce rates in big cities like Shanghai are skyrocketing.

When the newspaper Nanfang Zhoumo, or Southern Weekend, published a report recently about billionaires seeking brides, online discussion groups were flooded with commentary from readers, often focusing on the matter-of-fact comments of one woman who applied but was passed over by a billionaire. “Isn’t the purpose of saving our virginity to get a good price?” she asked.

Many readers deplored the woman’s response, condemning people like her as little better than prostitutes.

“I’m also a well-educated woman with a good figure, too, but I hate this kind of thing,” wrote one reader. “People’s beauty derives from their inner qualities, not their virginity. Those girls have sold themselves like cheap merchandise.”

Others ridiculed the billionaires. “If they think they can get a pure-hearted girl this way they are really mistaken,” wrote another commentator. “To me, the way people are taking virginity as a commodity these days is such a sad thing.”

In an interview, however, another young woman who had replied to a billionaire’s ad but was passed over offered a stout defense of her choice, one that amounted to a brief for personal and sexual freedom. “Things are different from before because everyone has a right to choose,” said the applicant, Wang Yue, who said that in a physical relationship, feelings could always be developed later. “If Americans can be liberal, why can’t Chinese?

“It’s very easy for me to support myself,” she added. “Without men, my life wouldn’t be hard. But if I’m standing on a giant’s shoulder, I can see farther.”

The confusion over love, sex and marriage is probably a passing phase, one expert says. “China is a society in transition, and for the last 20 years, people have been basically going after material things,” said Yang Xiong, an expert of youth culture at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. “Give it another 20 years, and I would say very few people would pursue billionaires just for their money. Right now this seems like a fresh topic for discussion, but in 10 years nobody will give a damn.”

Even in a China that is becoming more money-driven by the day, Shanghai, with its glitter and flash, has a very special reputation. Simultaneously, its people are often sneered at as soulless materialists and deeply envied by other Chinese. The women of the city, in particular, are often spoken of as being driven consumers and the most demanding of wives.

In several days of interviews among young women here, though, it became evident that the billionaires out to buy love have their work cut out for them. One after another, young women said the verdict of their hearts was more important than the cost of their wardrobe or the weight of their purse.

“I have to take time to see if a man is quite suitable for me or not, because life is a long course,” said Su Jie, 23, a flight attendant who was eating a Korean barbecue lunch with a girlfriend. “I can make money for myself, maybe not so much, but enough. It’s more important to me that we understand each other.”

Ryan Pyle, my frequent collaborator, took the pictures for this article, as for so many of my recent pieces in China. You can see more of his work here: www.digitalrailroad.net/ryanjpyle

Posted at 4:36 PM · Comments (0)

Published: January 22, 2006 Copyright The New York Times
EVEN by the elevated standard of the New York art world, the rumor was exceptional: a tin of negatives buried in Africa for three decades that, when opened, revealed the work of a photographer who was neither “outsider” nor “indigenous” but spectacularly modern. And so the bejeweled and bohemian showed up at the Gagosian Gallery the evening of Oct. 18, 1997, wearing Fulani bracelets beneath their Charvet cuffs, blouses referencing Matisse referencing North African fabrics, Xhosa men in dinner jackets.

Courtesy of Association Saydou Keita, Bamako; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and JM Patras
A portraits made in the 1950’s by Seydou Keïta of Bamako, Mali, of middle-class subjects.

The Ghosts of Seydou Keita

Forum: Artists and Exhibitions

Courtesy of Association Saydou Keita, Bamako; Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; and JM Patras
A 1949 self-portrait of Mr. Keïta, who died in 2001, at about 80.
As accustomed as they were to art-world rumors, as familiar as they had become with exaggerations in the photo market, they could not help but be impressed. They saw mural-size black-and-white portraits in which the intricate designs of tribal costumes were set against backdrops of arabesque and floral cloths, the subjects disappearing into dense patterning that suggested Vuillard. A number of the photographs sold immediately, at prices of up to $16,000, and by the end of the evening, many in the crowd stood childlike in front of their limousines, waiting to catch sight of the photographer whose images they would never forget.

He finally appeared, old and regal.

The show was uniformly well received. Margarett Loke, writing in The New York Times, described Seydou Keïta as “the man who brought renewed vitality to the art of photographic portraiture.” An article in Artforum praised the show, noting that the photographs “were very successful with sophisticated New Yorkers.”

Not long after the exhibition, I received a phone call from a man I knew as Ibrahim. He had something to show me. A trader from Mali, Ibrahim would frequently appear at my door with garbage bags of fetish figures that he had brought back from his trips to Africa. The objects that I did not buy he took to others, and at the end of the day, to a mini-storage facility in Chelsea where West African traders do business, play music and entertain their relatives.

That day Ibrahim carried no bags. After a few minutes of conversation, he reached into his pocket and extracted a small piece of paper. On the front was the image of a young African woman. The contrast and density of the blacks and whites were minimal, the light modest, and the patterns on the costumes barely visible.

I turned the photograph over. “Keïta Seydou, Photographe Bamako - Contra en face prison civile Bamako (Sudan Français)”. And then a date: “3 Avr 1959.”

I was confused. This photograph was nothing like the colossal high-contrast portraits that I had seen at the gallery. But this, Ibrahim explained, was an original. This was what Mr. Keïta’s modest photography studio made. I was later told that there were only a handful of such prints. (I bought it for several hundred dollars and went on to buy other prints; they are no longer a part of my collection.)

The story of this discrepancy - how a pocket-size print, sold for a few dollars in a neighborhood shop in West Africa, became a wall-size photograph that sold for $16,000 in an upscale SoHo gallery - begins in colonial Mali in the 1930’s and continues into the future: a new show of Mr. Keïta’s work opens at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea on Friday.

It is a story that includes screaming fights, a lawsuit and charges of theft, forgery and perjury. It survives the photographer himself, who died in 2001. And it touches on the broadest channels of human history, from colonialism to capitalism to revolution to race. But it also involves a conflict of the most rarefied sort - a philosophical disagreement over the nature of photography and the concept of authenticity.

IN the 1930’s, Seydou Keïta, who was then young, uneducated and working in his father’s carpentry shop, received a Brownie camera (producing a 6-by-9-centimeter negative) from his uncle. In 1948, Mr. Keïta (pronounced kay-EE-tah) set up a commercial studio in downtown Bamako, across from the city’s prison and down the street from the train station. He was poor, so he made prints, using a 5-by-7-inch view camera, by placing the negative directly against the photographic paper, used his bed sheet as a backdrop, and photographed outdoors using available light.

Despite this, his portraits were a success.

Unlike his predecessors, who had photographed Africans to encourage missionary work or justify colonization, or as erotica, Mr. Keïta made photographs of Africans for their own personal use, and he revealed them as they had not been seen before: wearing Western suits and bow ties (his own), sitting on motorbikes or holding radios, or cradling a single flower, a reference to the Symbolists taught in Mali’s French schools. For the others, it was a mixture of Western dress and African poses, African dress and Western poses - people defining themselves at the uneven edge of modernity.

Okwui Enwezor, a scholar of photography and curator of a 1996 exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that included Mr. Keïta’s work, maintained that in the amount of information he conveys about his middle-class subjects, in the controlled complexity of the portraits and the high level of quality maintained over a great volume, his work is “comparable to the portraiture of Rembrandt.” What makes this all the more astounding, he added, is that Mr. Keïta was “working outside any aesthetic discourse” - that is, he was uneducated in the history of art and photography. Mr. Keïta claimed that when he set up his studio, there were only four other studio photographers in Mali.

Following that nation’s independence in 1960, he was told to close his studio and work for the government. When he resisted, he once recounted, a general visited his studio. Mr. Keïta closed up shop, locking his roughly 7,000 negatives in a tin and burying them in his yard.

Fifteen years later, near the day when he retired from government, someone broke into his studio and stole his photography equipment. To support himself, he began to fix mopeds, converting his studio into a repair shop.

It was there, in 1990, that he met Françoise Huguier, a French photojournalist. Ms. Huguier arranged for a small number of Mr. Keïta’s photographs to be exhibited outside of Africa, where they came to the attention of Jean Pigozzi, heir to the Simca car fortune and one of the world’s pre-eminent collectors of contemporary African art. In 1992 Mr. Pigozzi sent André Magnin, the curator of Mr. Pigozzi’s African collection, to Bamako to find the photographer, and Mr. Magnin returned with 921 negatives.

He made prints from those negatives, which appeared a couple of years later at an exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and then in 1997 at a solo show at the Scalo Gallery in Zurich, accompanied by a book called “Seydou Keïta: An African Photographer.” Walter Keller, curator of the Scalo show and editor of the book, said the prints at both those shows were 20 by 24 inches - bigger than the originals (5 by 7 inches) but not yet enormous. By the time the new prints reached the Gagosian exhibition four months later, some had grown to 48 by 60 inches.

Mr. Magnin sold the prints he made to Mr. Pigozzi and to other collectors, galleries and museums. Mr. Enwezor credits him with bringing Mr. Keïta to the attention of the world.

Mr. Keïta, however, was not pleased. Jean-Marc Patras, a well-known agent for African artists and musicians, said that Mr. Keïta believed that Mr. Magnin was making unauthorized prints and signing them. “I absolutely deny these accusations,” Mr. Magnin said. “Seydou Keïta was involved in every decision, was aware of every print made, and signed every print that has his signature. We were also very careful about giving him an accounting of the money that we received for the prints.”

Mr. Pigozzi said on Tuesday that without André Magnin’s and his efforts, Mr. Keïta “would have been totally forgotten.” They published an important book, he continued, and got his work into the collections of major museums. “Also with our help, Keïta was able to finally make a lot of money by selling his prints in a very orderly way,” Mr. Pigozzi said, adding that Mr. Patras, however, had managed to make a mess of things.

At the time of the Gagosian show, Mr. Keïta met with Sean Kelly of the Sean Kelly Gallery in New York. “Keïta,” he said, “was not pleased with what Pigozzi and Magnin were doing with his photographs, which is why Keïta approached me.” But it wasn’t until 2001 that the photographer severed his ties with them.

A relative of Mr. Keïta, Kader Keïta, a former diplomat who was present for a meeting between Mr. Keïta and Mr. Magnin, said: “Seydou was furious about the possibility that Magnin was forging Seydou’s signature. Seydou also wanted the negatives back.” He assigned the exclusive rights to sell his photographs to Mr. Patras. The negatives were not returned. Mr. Patras went to work on an exhibition of Mr. Keïta’s photographs at the Sean Kelly Gallery. Weeks before the exhibition was scheduled to open in 2001, Mr. Keïta flew to Paris to confront Mr. Magnin, Mr. Patras says. But within days of his arrival, Mr. Keïta was dead at around 80.

see the complete article at the link below for a very rewarding read.

Posted at 11:45 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright PR Week USA Jan 23 2006

Jack Shafer is the prolific media critic for Slate, where he intelligently thrashes the more ludicrous elements of the journalism world.

PRWeek: How do you envision the future of the newspaper industry?
Shafer: I see it as a long, steady, and profitable decline. And this is a decline that started in 1920 when radio arrived… the newspaper industry has gotten used to having quasi-monopoly positions in most of the major markets, and now that they have competition, they are screaming like spanked little children about their losses.

PRWeek: Where do you see it hitting a plateau?
Shafer: I don’t know. I’m really bad at predictions. Every prediction I’ve ever made has turned out to be false. But if you go back and you look, people said that radio was dead when TV arrived. And people said that AM radio was dead when FM arrived. And people said not long ago that the broadcast networks were dead because cable had arrived, and videotapes. And the fact is that every one of these mediums repositions itself, and retools itself, and refuses to die. They’re sort of like your grandfather or your grandmother, where they have so many fucking ailments that you can’t believe that they’re still living, and then pretty soon, the next thing that you hear, they’ve gone off to Bermuda for a three-week vacation. So I would pin a date to it, but I’m almost certain to be wrong.

PRWeek: Any New Year’s Resolutions?
Shafer: Pick more scabs.

Posted at 1:07 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Japan Times

Japan today is a kerai state.

Since the end of World War II, now more than 60 years ago, the country
has played “Follow the Leader” so assiduously, and with such diligence,
that the prospect of it rethinking its historical and cultural position
and adopting an independent stance appears to be all but untenable.

A kerai is a person whose services are retained by a lord or master. In
addition to meaning “retainer,” though, it can also mean “follower.”

The lord or master in this case is the United States. And though many
people may think that Japan’s participation in the American invasion of
Iraq is the first time it has cooperated with the U.S. in a foreign war,
the story actually goes back more than half a century.

Japan is the country that may have gained the most from the Korean War
— and without having to send troops into action. Through a system of
procurements from the U.S. government, Japanese companies received more
than $3.5 billion during the three years of the war from 1950-53. This
more than anything was what put old zaibatsu (industrial and financial
conglomerates) like Mitsubishi, Mitsui and Sumitomo back into business.
By the time the war ended, Japan was producing goods at prewar levels.

The lesson learned by Japan was that there’s a fortune to be made out of
war — especially if you let someone else deal and you play your cards
right. “Boys, be followers!” was taken up as not only the motto but also
as the working philosophy of the Japanese.

Misery on a colossal scale
Japan had waged war itself for 15 years in Asia and the Pacific, and the
result was misery on a colossal scale. No more. From now on, let the
other guy run up the hill through muck and bullets; we’ll sew the seams
on his uniform and polish his gun for him, thank you very much.

The war in Vietnam gave Japan its second windfall as kerai to the U.S.
American troops stationed in Japan played a major role in the
belligerency, and much equipment was either ordered from Japanese
companies or repaired here by them. Masses of American troops passed
through Japan for R&R. Again, the Japanese economy benefited immensely
from the kerai role. The Japanese were having their cake, baked in the
U.S., and eating it too.

While this symbiotic relationship did prove beneficial to Japan’s
economy in postwar decades, the situation has now radically changed.
Being a loyal retainer to a master (Bush’s America) that has clearly
overextended its power carries no advantage whatsoever. When the master
falls, you are brought down with him.

Japan was able to carry off its role as America’s kerai in the 1950s,
’60s and ’70s due to the weakness of Asian countries at the time.
Vietnam, the Koreas and China had experienced decades of horrendous
civil war. They were countries divided within themselves. Opposing the
American superpower that emerged in Asia in 1945 took all their strength.

But now South Korea and China in particular have joined the First World
Club. South Korea’s economy is the world’s 11th largest; and China is
running close to Britain as number four. Both South Korea and China see
eye to eye in perceiving Japan as the adversary of the future. A Japan
that postures itself as a facilitator of American policy in Asia is a
Japan that can neither counter the political and cultural power of these
two countries, nor stand shoulder to shoulder with them.

Last year, a good friend who is a diplomat in Japan’s Foreign Ministry
complained to me, saying, “What are we supposed to do? If we do identify
more with China, then we will lose our ‘in’ with America.”

Wary of American intentions
This struck me as a very clear statement of a loyal retainer. Only such
a dutiful retainer would not consider the possibility of standing on his
own and creating a position for himself. This makes it easy, in the long
run, to avoid responsibility for any mishap by saying, “We were neither
the initiators nor the instigators.”

However, the South Korean and Chinese governments are pouring enormous
amounts of money and effort into propagating their cultures and
languages overseas — the Koreans through the Korea Culture & Contents
Agency, and the Chinese with their newly formed Confucius Institutes
around the world. They are happy to have Americans as their eager
consumers, and are even willing to accept the U.S. as a cultural and
technological trendsetter — but they are ever wary of American
intentions. Western missionaries once opened the door to Western guns
and Western domination; now America’s quasi-religious fervor for
democracy is no more than a front for American control of resources.

My friend in the Foreign Ministry was wrong. Japan will not lose its
“in” with America if it adopts a more independent stand; if it begins to
see itself as a country that can mediate between Western and Eastern
interests. Such a stand would only enhance Japan’s historical place as a
country that has deep roots in both Asia and the West.

There is nothing standing in the way of Japan becoming a nation with an
independent foreign policy based on the knowledge that the people here
have a foot in two worlds — East and West — both of which exist and
flourish brilliantly in the one country. If there is a confrontation
between China and the U.S. years from now, who would be better placed to
use the good offices of mediation than Japan?

The major thing preventing Japan from creating a rapprochement with
China is the failure on the part of the Japanese to see themselves — to
trust themselves — as masters of their own fate.

The Japan Times: Jan. 22, 2006

Posted at 1:34 AM · Comments (0)

Heinrich Harrer

Jan 19th 2006
Copyright The Economist

Keystone

WHEN Heinrich Harrer gazed for the first time on Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, in 1946, he noticed especially the roof-pinnacles of the Potala Palace, gleaming with gold. After 21 months on the run from a British prison camp, having crossed 65 mountain passes and 1,000 miles of territory more than 16,000 feet high, it seemed like a glimpse of Paradise. He had travelled by yak and on foot; he was now verminous and starving, in rags of sheepskin, crippled with sciatica from sleeping on frozen ground, and without a rupee to his name. But gold shone ahead of him.

He little knew that up on that roof, from time to time, a boy of 11 would wander up and down. The youngster had an excellent collection of field glasses and telescopes, and these he would train on the town, watching people. When his subjects—for he was their god, and they his worshippers—realised he was observing them, they would try to remove themselves from his field of vision. But, if only from a distance, the young Dalai Lama would try to catch them. His life otherwise was study and prayer, in dark rooms, with few visitors. The roof was his window on the world.

Tibet at that time was completely closed to foreigners. A foreigner like Mr Harrer—an Austrian mountaineer, fetching up in Lhasa with flowing beard and hair, speaking Tibetan like a peasant—was particularly suspect. But having got there with such effort, he could not bear to leave. Gradually, his life and that of the child-god began to intersect. At religious ceremonies, as the Dalai Lama processed through ecstatic crowds and colonnades of statues made of butter, he would dart sly smiles at Mr Harrer, seeing a figure every bit as exotic as himself.

Mr Harrer, a champion skier and, since his village boyhood, happiest on snow and ice, built a skating rink below the palace. There the Lhasans, delighted and mystified, learned the art of “walking on knives”. The Dalai Lama, who could not see the rink through his telescope, sent a request for a cine-film of the skaters. Then he asked for a cinema. Mr Harrer built him one, running the projector off an old Jeep engine, and discovered at his first proper audience with the living Buddha that the boy had already dismantled and re-assembled it, all by himself.

Over the succeeding months Mr Harrer became his photographer, his teacher and his friend. He taught him maths, geography, science, and what Churchill and Eisenhower had done. As Mr Harrer recorded and slowly understood Tibet, accustoming himself to barley porridge, searing cold and the virtue of stoical patience, the Dalai Lama with avid curiosity pieced the outside world together—until, in 1950, the Chinese invasion of Tibet put an end both to his political innocence and to Mr Harrer’s seven-year sojourn there.

They had been, he said later, the happiest years of his life. They had also been unintended. Mr Harrer had gone to Kashmir in 1939 on quite different business, to scout out a “killer mountain” called Nanga Parbat for a possible assault by his team of German and Austrian climbers. He had been arrested instead, on the eve of war.

His purpose in Kashmir had not been entirely unpolitical. He was already a hero in Austria for having made, with three others, the first successful ascent of the infamous north face of the Eiger in 1938. The conquering of the mountain had coincided with Austria’s absorption into Nazi Germany, a highly symbolic display of united dominance and strength. Hitler himself had congratulated him. Keyed up by that, Mr Harrer longed to be picked for a Himalayan expedition. To make himself more eligible, he joined the Nazi party and the Styrian SS, and was hired to teach SS officers skiing.
On the White Spider

The Dalai Lama knew nothing of his teacher’s past. Mr Harrer did not wish to tell him. He might have told no one, had not the book he wrote of his experiences, “Seven Years in Tibet”, been made in 1997 into a Hollywood epic, with Brad Pitt starring as himself. This drew attention, then investigation. Nothing remotely evil was ever attributed to Mr Harrer; he said he had worn his SS uniform only once, at his wedding.

The witch-hunters ensured that the rest of his life was tainted by this episode. But Mr Harrer’s passion was mountains, and it was this passion alone that had ever got him into trouble. The most dangerous moment of his life—the moment after which, he said, he felt privileged to remain alive at all—saw him dangling on the 7,000-foot vertical face of the North Wall of the Eiger, no crampons on his boots, with the surface continually melting in the sun and rocks cascading past him. He was on the White Spider, a network of sheer ice on which nine mountaineers had died not long before. There was no shelter or hiding place; he was continually exposed. And far below, in the meadow from which the mountain rose, a crowd of telescopes was trained on him.

He later said he felt nothing but contempt for those who had observed him, safe and distant, like indifferent gods. He was to feel quite differently about the god, with his long hair and glowing, excited smile, who tried so hard to observe him through his telescope in Lhasa.

Posted at 6:52 PM · Comments (0)

There are nice nuggets in this elegantly written meditation on the pleasures of being away from “home.” It sometimes feel more like a magazine article, or rather a collection of magazine pieces, padded with rather long quotations from Flaubert and Proust and other “grands.” It might very well be that for all I know, but that’s to take nothing away from the stronger bits.

“Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in acouther country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curttains in their homes?”

The chapter on exoticism is particularly strong… A good, quick read.

Posted at 11:49 PM · Comments (0)

I’ve got a few books that try in one volume to make sense of the world’s languages. Although A History of World Languages, by Steven Roger Fischer, a sllimmer volume, does a creditable job, this book is formidable. I was particularly impressed by the scholarship on Asian languages, and the history of Chinese, and especially Indian cultural and linguistic influence far and wide. Most books of this type skimp on their non-Western content.

Posted at 11:38 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Associated Press

SHANGHAI, China - Land conflicts, fluctuating crop prices and backward
conditions in the countryside are threatening China’s stability and its food
supply, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said in unusually blunt comments published Friday.

Wen’s warning underscored rising concerns over lagging economic growth in
rural China, home to at least two of every three Chinese. Stagnating rural
incomes have created an underclass of impoverished farmers lacking
affordable access to basic public services such as health care and
education.

One of the greatest threats to stability stems from seizures of farmland for
property development and other construction projects, Wen said the text of a
speech carried in major state-run newspapers.

Disputes over compensation for land seizures have provoked thousands of
protests among farmers outraged over the loss of what they view as their
most fundamental asset. Incomes in rural areas average about $300 a year,
compared with urban incomes of $1,000.

“In some areas, illegal seizures of farmland without reasonable compensation
and resettlement have provoked uprisings,” said Wen, the third-ranking
official in the Communist Party hierarchy. “This is still a key source of
instability in rural areas and even the whole society.”

In the most recent incident, police clashing with hundreds of protesters
reportedly clubbed a teenage girl to death Saturday in Sanjiao, a village in
Guangdong province.

State media have denied that anyone was killed or that police used violence during the protest over land seizures. But numerous accounts by villagers
and Hong Kong media reported the girl’s death and said police attacked
protesters with electric batons.

> The violence came a month after authorities opened fire into a crowd of
> protesting villagers in Dongzhou, also in Guangdong province. The government
> said three people were killed, while villagers put the death toll at up to
> 20.
>
> Such protests have grown increasingly widespread and violent in recent
> years, despite the central government’s demand for local officials to end
> abuses and resolve conflicts peacefully.
>
> Even the abolition of centuries-old farm taxes, ostensibly a huge relief for
> farmers barely getting by, could fail if local authorities boost so-called
> “arbitrary fees,” Wen said, referring to a wide variety of charges imposed
> for activities from pig raising to using rural roads.
>
> Since taking office three years ago, China’s leaders have stressed their
> commitment to improving incomes and living conditions for the rural
> population that helped bring the Communists to power in 1949.
>
> But it is unclear how much progress has been made, given rampant corruption
> and vested interests at the local level, where officials can often reap huge
> profits from lucrative property deals.
>
> Wen warned that such problems threaten China’s ability to feed its 1.3
> billion people, despite bumper harvests that raised grain production to an
> estimated record 484 million tons last year.
>
> Production this year could suffer from unstable grain prices, unpredictable
> climate and shrinking arable land, Wen warned. He called for keeping grain
> prices steady, while curbing “excessive” increases in the prices of farming
> materials, such as fuel, fertilizer and seeds.
>
> He renewed the government’s promise to boost spending and improve working
> conditions, including protecting migrant workers who are often denied fair
> wages. The government must also improve rural public schools, hospitals and
> cultural facilities, Wen said.
>
> “In the final analysis, we must protect the democratic rights and provide
> material benefits to rural citizens,” he said. “Improving rural quality of
> life and ensuring social fairness and justice are extremely important and
> urgent tasks.”
>
>
>

Posted at 11:04 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Chronicle of Higher Education

Following the 2002 midterm Congressional elections, Democrats were blue about their party’s future. With the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks still uppermost in the American public mind, and with President Bush enjoying record-high job-approval ratings, most voters favored Republican candidates and voiced conservative opinions in polls. Several pundits proclaimed that the GOP was now America’s “permanent majority” at the national level, becoming so at the state level, and even resurrecting itself in some cities where Democrats had long reigned supreme.

Supposedly this political realignment was, if anything, long overdue. Since the early 1970s, public opinion had been trending conservative. By the early 1990s, lower taxes, tougher crime policies, and traditional moral values all consistently polled popular majorities. Southern voters began bolting from the Democratic Party in 1964 when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act. Nixon’s law-and-order “Southern strategy” iced the break. In 1980 and again in 1984, Reagan attracted one in four votes cast by Democrats. In 1994 Newt Gingrichled Republicans ended Democrats’ 40 years at the House’s helm.

In 2002 here it supposedly was: the long-predicted shift to Republican Party dominance and conservative ideological hegemony. Two years later, Bush’s bigger-than-expected win over Sen. John F. Kerry ostensibly confirmed that conservative Republicans had become America’s ruling class.

Besides, the 2004 election results supposedly revealed deep culture-war differences concerning religion that sealed the Republicans’ permanent majority status. About two-thirds of people who attended church regularly (weekly or more) voted for Bush. As the analysts John C. Green and Mark Silk have documented, the small plurality of Americans who chose “moral values” as “the one issue that mattered most” to their presidential vote in 2004 — so-called “moral values” voters — put Bush safely over the top in the South, the Mountain West, and the Midwest. Millions more evangelical Christians voted in 2004 than had voted in 2000.

But what a difference a year makes. According to the Washington chattering class, Bush and the Republicans’ governing majority are suddenly but surely in decline. Many among the selfsame talking heads who were only recently talking Republican realignment, conservative hegemony, and Bush’s lasting Reagan-like legacy, are now talking conservative crack-up, the lame-duck president’s political meltdown, and the Democrats’ winning back the House in 2006.

All the pundits point to much the same reasons for this apparent reversal in conservative Republicans’ political fortunes: rising popular sentiment against the U.S. occupation of Iraq; news-media spotlights on the bungled federal response to Hurricane Katrina; prosecutorial probes into alleged misdeeds by high-profile Repub-lican leaders; revolts by conservatives against the president’s second pick for the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers; and retreats by the White House on Social Security privatization and several other domestic-policy priorities.

There is only one problem with this latest conventional political wisdom. It is, like the conventional political wisdom that immediately preceded it, almost completely wrong in virtually every respect.

Today’s true big political picture is mostly gray shades against a purple (red mixed with blue) canvas. Conservative Republicans, beset by deep ideological divisions, are not even close to becoming the country’s permanent ruling class. Neither the post-Reagan Republican Party in general, nor the present Bush White House in particular, ever actually rode so high politically.

Just the same, neither the GOP nor the president is in any definite long-term political trouble. Conservative Republicans, even without permanent-majority clout, are still more potent politically than liberal Democrats, and likely to remain so. Centrist and neoprogressive Democrats could credibly compete for power with conservative Republicans, but they must first pry their party’s presidential nomination process and key leadership posts from the old-left hands that still primarily control them. Despite strenuous efforts to do so since the mid-1980s by various New Democrat groups, the party is still led mainly by its liberals. Not even the New Democrats have ever really reached out to the culturally conservative and anti-abortion Democrats who have been defecting to the Republican Party since the Reagan years.

True, Bush won over two-thirds of regular churchgoers, but Kerry won two-thirds of voters who said they never went to church. Together the “churched” (a sixth) and the “unchurched” (a seventh) constituted less than a third of the total electorate. As the political scientist James Q. Wilson, of UCLA and Pepperdine University, stated in his November Tanner Lecture at Harvard, “religion makes a difference, but very religious and very irreligious voters are only a minority of the electorate.” Amen, and as studies by the Stanford political scientist Morris P. Fiorina have shown, even on most hot-button issues, the electorate is far less polarized than ideological elites on each side would like them to be.

The political pundits are wrong, but your high-school civics teacher was right: Thanks to federalism, separated powers, checks and balances, staggered elections, and myriad other constitutional contrivances, the party in power has to govern by the ABC’s — forging interparty alliances, striking bargains with officials in other branches and at other levels of government, and effecting compromises that usually induce less loyalty from the winners than enmity from the losers.

Especially when, as today, national political elites are ideologically polarized into partisan camps, unified party government is constitutionally conditioned to be a splendid curse for the party in power. Once that party is “in control” in both Congressional chambers and in the White House, the ABC’s rudely awaken latent intraparty divisions and spark new, high-stakes internal battles over both ideas (who believes what) and interests (who gets what).

Historically the Democrats’ New Deal coalition — Southern whites, northern blacks, union members, Catholics, Jews, and disparate others — had pretty much fallen apart by the time Nixon resold himself to America in 1968. But the Republicans’ grand old “Main Street and Wall Street” coalition has always been a true political witch’s brew, bound to bubble and boil over whenever the GOP and its conservative base — that is, bases, plural — control both Congressional chambers plus the White House.

In an early October 2005 cover story, “What’s Gone Wrong for America’s Right,” The Economist magazine listed the contemporary GOP’s conservative cleavages: small-government conservitives versus big-government conservatives, conservatives of faith versus conservatives of doubt, insurgent conservatives versus establishment conservatives, business conservatives versus religious conservatives, and neoconservatives versus traditional conservatives.

Exhibit A is the libertarian Cato Institute’s edited volume assessing what Republicans have wrought since taking back the House in 1994 and achieving unified party control under George W. Bush. As the small-government conservatives see it, 10 years after the “Republican revolution,” Bush-led Washington and the Republican Party have backslid into “business as usual.”

Cato’s best-known analyst-activist, Stephen Moore, says it all in his chapter’s subtitle, “The Triumph of Big Government.” In a section headed “Republicans Break the Bank Under President Bush,” Moore notes that nondefense discretionary spending rose 34 percent during Bush’s first term, which is “exactly the opposite of what was promised by Republican leaders when they came to power in the 1990s.” The Bush “spending spree,” as Moore dubs it, started before 9/11 and “is spread across many federal agencies, whether they have a security function or not.” And don’t blame only the Democrats: “Bush has not vetoed a single bill. … If Bush is displeased with big spending in Congress, he has shown no sign of it.”

The libertarians lambaste more than Bush’s budgets. Health-care policy, Michael F. Cannon says, has been the Republican revolution’s “mitigated disaster.” Republicans defeated Clinton’s universal health-insurance plan, but they have yet to rein in federal spending on Medicaid; and in 2003 Bush backed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act, affording prescription-drug coverage to qualified senior citizens starting in 2006. Bush’s landmark No Child Left Behind law, argues David F. Salisbury, “greatly increased federal education spending and perpetuated funding for most of the old federal education programs, many of which are ineffective and wasteful.” According to Jerry Taylor, “the Republican revolution has left virtually no footprints on the environmental code or on federal land holdings.” On foreign policy and national security, avers Christopher A. Preble, there are now “serious divisions within the party.” Preble charges that both the first and second Presidents Bush, Gingrich, and other Republican revolutionaries have proved unwilling “to part with the military-industrial complex that had expanded during the cold war.” He labels our present national government a “warfare-welfare state.”

In the second chapter, Richard K. Armey, former Republican House majority leader, offers the “Armey Axiom” that “Freedom Works,” advising that “America will prosper and create unlimited opportunity if we have limited government and reward the hard work and initiative of citizens.” Armey’s political advice is simple: “When We Act Like Us, We Win.”

Really? Cato’s president, Edward H. Crane, is Armey’s ideological twin, but he acknowledges that Republicans have won elections while straying far from the small-government gospel. Reagan, complains Crane, won big in 1984 by running on a platform “with no substance” and returned to office with no “mandate for cutting the government.”

“Today,” he writes, the GOP is led intellectually “by neoconservatives and other Republicans who are explicitly pro-big government.”

Why is small-government conservatism so little honored by Republican policy makers even now that they control the Congress and the White House? Even a nonlibertarian like me can be moved by certain libertarian ideas and values (especially each April 15). The simple truth, however, is that most citizens, including most who are registered as Republicans, carp about taxes but, when push comes to shove, wanteven demandmost of what “big government” does and delivers. No national politician can stay in office long or get things done legislatively if he or she always talks or routinely votes the way a committed libertarian should.

To wit: Republicans have won seven of the last 10 presidential elections. Nixon, Ford, Reagan in 1984, and the two Presidents Bush read little from the libertarian liturgy. Only Reagan in 1980 talked a small-government line, and he received just 51 percent of the vote in a three-way race. As Crane notes, in 1980 Reagan promised to abolish the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. That promise got big applause before certain conservative audiences, but Reagan never really pushed hard to get rid of those agencies, and they are still very much with us today.

After delivering his 1981 tax cuts, Reagan did not retire his anti-big-government and bureaucracy-bashing rhetoric. During his two terms, however, federal-government spending as a percentage of gross domestic product changed little, military spending skyrocketed, and there were no big reductions in the federal civilian work force (those occurred in the mid-1990s under Clinton). When Reagan left office in 1989, the Federal Register was slimmer, but the federal government’s regulatory reach was, if anything, far greater than it had been in 1980. In 1984 the less libertarian-sounding Reagan won in a landslide (59 percent to 41 percent).

In the mid-1990s, often downbeat and divisive Republican revolutionaries lost what little ground the upbeat and avuncular Reagan had gained for the small-government cause. The public liked the Contract With America, but not its policy fine print. As I predicted in more than a half-dozen lectures I gave in early 1995, once people heard a gavel-wielding Gingrich talk about cutting major social programs, they balked. When Clinton called Gingrich’s bluff about “shutting down” the federal government, the only remaining question was when, not whether, the small-government moment would quickly pass into House history footnotes.

George W. Bush has never hidden his differences with libertarians. His very first campaign speech, on July 22, 1999, articulated what he believed as a “compassionate conservative.” Speaking before inner-city clergymen and women in Indianapolis, “economic growth,” Bush preached, “is not the solution to every problem.” He labeled as “destructive” the idea that government is bad and called explicitly for increasing government support for Medicaid and other federal programs. He also rebutted the notion that government needs only to step aside for families and communities to flourish. In particular he stressed that, when it comes to addressing poverty and urban blight, it “is not enough to call for volunteerism. Without more support — public and private — we are asking” local community-serving groups, both religious and secular, “to make bricks with-out straw.”

Bush, like Reagan before him, is a true believer in tax cuts. In 2001 he put tax cuts first on his agenda, and the administration has been quick to court groups with grass-roots networks dedicated to lowering taxes. But the president also proceeded, both before and after 9/11, to try to make good on his pledges of activist domestic government: more federal aid to Title I schools; bipartisan initiatives to expand volunteer-mobilization programs, including Clinton’s AmeriCorps program; fresh federal funding for best-practices programs that benefit at-risk urban youth; and much more. To many libertarian leaders’ dismay, in 2004 Bush ran mainly on Iraq, homeland security, and his record as a compassionate conservative.

Libertarians aside, the GOP’s most interesting but least well-understood intraparty political schism is among its religious conservatives. On the one side are what some political scientists term the party’s religious purists. Essentially the purists want to push for policies that challenge constitutional church-state limits and to nominate as federal judges those whom only an activist opposed to abortion or gay rights could love. On the other side are its religious pragmatists. Essentially the pragmatists want government to be more faith-friendly while remaining pluralistic; and, though they are mostly for restricting abortions and against same-sex marriage, they want traditional family values to be promoted less through pitched battles over federal judgeships and more through bipartisan “fatherhood” or “healthy marriage” initiatives and the like.

If Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson are correct, religious pragmatists in the Republican Party don’t have a prayer. In Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, the two political scientists argue that the GOP is dominated by religious, libertarian, and other conservative ideological extremists who vary only according to their media savvy. The young authors are progressives, but they wage their case as public intellectuals with expert research skills. Like or agree with its thesis or not, their pithy, well-written book is certainly worth reading.

To Hacker and Pierson, the Republican religious base is synonymous with the “Christian right.” They cite a study indicating that in 1994 no fewer than “31 state Republican parties” were “significantly shaped by the Christian right,” led back then by the Christian Coalition. “The story of the Christian right,” they argue, “is the story of many conservative activist groups.” Those groups have graduated from mobilizing conservatives to take over local school boards. Rather, as “conservative activism has shifted toward national politics, it has also focused increasingly on the recruitment and certification of aspirants to elected office.”

The Christian right, as depicted by Hacker and Pierson, is a conservative first cousin to libertarian Republican anti-tax lobbies (for example, the authors give Grover G. Norquist’s influential Americans for Tax Reform ample treatment). The groups “share three key characteristics that increasingly define the organizational base of the GOP: They are radical; they focus on guiding and disciplining Republicans in Congress, not mobilizing large numbers of citizens; and they are effective.” The third chapter, “New Rules for Radicals,” concludes with broad generalizations: “Republicans are running the show in American politics. They are doing so in opposition to the moderate center of public opinion.”

Off Center devotes several pages to “Fissures in the Republican Facade.” Still, Hacker and Pierson arguably underplay the rifts within the party’s conservative base and underestimate the gaps between far-right rhetoric and center-right Republican policies. Some GOP libertarians may be “radical,” but, as the Cato chorus painfully croons, they have hardly proved highly “effective” in getting federal policies to mirror their ideological preferences. Ditto for the so-called Christian right. Reagan repeatedly promised, but did not deliver, strong action to roll back abortion. Bush in 2004 initially embraced a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage; then, shortly before Election Day, he declared that he supported “civil unions.” In 2005 the White House did nothing to follow up on the issue one way or the other, and so it often goes.

In truth, too many leaders and activists in both parties are way “off center.” It takes at least two to do the ideological polarization tango. If Hacker and Pierson ever revise the book’s section on “Increasing Transparency and Accountability” in Congress, I would vote for two proposals only slightly more quixotic than several they have already embraced.

First, cut Capitol Hill staff sizes in half and require that all standing Congressional-committee staff members be nonpartisan civil servants. The most partisan and ideological Republicans — and Democrats — in Congress are not the elected members themselves but their respective culture-war-mongering, inside-the-Beltway staff members. Second, cut the number of presidential political appointees in half, following the advice that former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker’s commission on national public service gave over a decade ago.

Given intraparty divides, White House staff members inevitably spend much time anticipating criticisms or soothing disappointments that emanate from this or that group on the right (when Republicans are in charge) or on the left (when Democrats are in office). Frustrating though it may be to a quirky, pro-life, pro-poor, Catholic, New Democrat, academic, political moderate like me, the center is a lonely place to be in Washington, and as things stand, no president, Republican or Democratic, can govern squarely from the center.

If you can’t beat the pundits, join them. Here are four parting predictions: When in political trouble, Bush has a proven presidential knack for binding an intraparty conservative coalition, finding the public center, and occupying it with novel policy ideas and actions that leave Democrats either divided or nonplussed. His 2006 State of the Union Address will begin to reverse his 2005 political slide.

Unified Republican government will continue to split conservatives, but most political media mavens will continue to peddle the usual pat stories about left-right, red-blue partisan warfare and miss the more interesting intraparty stories.

A New Democrat will win the presidency in 2008, but not by much, not with coattails that carry Democrats into majority status in Congress, and not for reasons reflecting any new realities or fundamental shifts in the body politic.

And finally, the pundits will nonetheless dress the next Democratic presidential victory in some silly new conventional wisdom (“New Blue Nation”? “The Bush Backlash”?) that will be widely forgotten, save by academic nerds or curmudgeons like me, before the decade is out.

John J. DiIulio Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, served as first director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. He is co-author, with Meena Bose, of Classic Ideas and Current Issues in American Government, just published by Houghton Mifflin.

Posted at 4:57 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright New York magazine

French celebrity intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy has certain things he wants to say to America, and he wouldn’t mind saying them on The Daily Show. “Jon Stewart for me is the best,” he says. “There is nothing equivalent in France. I often read that in America there is nothing similar to BHL. So it could be a good combination.”

If you’ve never heard the initials BHL, which is what Lévy tends to go by, if you’ve missed his appearances on Charlie Rose or this year’s Vanity Fair best-dressed list, he’s hoping that will change with the publication this month of his new book, American Vertigo. In it, he travels the United States “in the footsteps of Tocqueville.” The trip was the idea of the Atlantic Monthly, which serialized his observations and hired a young assistant to chauffeur him down the open road because BHL doesn’t drive. (“It’s my infirmity,” he apologizes.) The book, his 30th and the first to be published in the United States before France, is a somewhat expanded collection of those dispatches.

“The trip was under three shadows,” BHL explains. “The shadow of the war in Iraq, the shadow of an election, and the shadow of Katrina,” although the hurricane hadn’t struck at the time he wrote the book. “The anti-ci-pated shadow of Katrina, as you see. I was in New Orleans four or five months before Katrina, and I more or less foresee what is going to happen.”

BHL, 57, is not a man particularly encumbered by modesty. When he comes downstairs from his room at the Carlyle—where he’s stayed whenever he’s been in town for the past 30 years—he’s wearing a black velvet jacket and a white shirt unbuttoned, as is his habit, to display his tanned chest. A self-described “Baudelairean,” he is adamantly libertine, with a long history of mistresses. He’s also clearly rich—his father owned a large lumber concern, and BHL owns a palace in Morocco and is married to the extraterrestrially beautiful actress Arielle Dombasle.

As a sort of Parisian amalgam of Susan Sontag and Warren Beatty, he’s sometimes referred to in France as—trailing Nietzsche here, not DC Comics—“Superman” by admirers and detractors alike. In his daughter Justine Lévy’s 2004 novel, Nothing Serious, the main character, Louise—a writer who wants desperately to please her father, “BHL”—gets addicted to amphetamines, which she’d seen him take to write more quickly. On them, she becomes “Superlouise,” with “direct access to Dad’s cortex.” (BHL denies it’s a tell-all: “My daughter is a writer. The more she reveals, the more she hides.”)

At 29, Bernard-Henri Lévy took the first major step toward becoming BHL when he published a book, called Barbarism With a Human Face, attacking his fellow intellectuals’ fascination with Marxism. It established the patterns of his life and notoriety: anti-totalitarian, internationalist, atheist, and what he calls “anti-anti-American.” (He later wrote a book about how the French are “wired for Fascism.”) In 2002, he went to Pakistan and wrote a book called Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, about the Wall Street Journal reporter, which is how he caught the attention of the Atlantic, which was looking for a suitable Frenchman to do a post-9/11 Tocqueville.

“It is not a book of philosophy,” BHL says, between digging for cashews out of the bowl of mixed nuts. “Because it’s journalism, it is literature, it is funny—I hope you laugh sometimes. But it is a philosophical work in spite of being journalistic, comic, and so on. C’est un geste philosophique—a philosophical gesture.” He set out to uncover America’s “crisis of identity. The most powerful country in the world does not know what it is, it feels itself in a deep trauma, a deep neurosis. It was interesting to go behind the curtain.” A van full of French filmmakers followed him the whole trip, so there’ll be a documentary as well. Synergie!

American Vertigo, while somewhat adhering to the “footsteps of Tocqueville,” careers around, allowing him to drag the ironies out of Cooperstown (which he describes as a church), a suburban Chicago megachurch (“neo-paganist”), an anti-Semitic Indian leader, the Mall of America (“a church,” again), John Kerry (“a European at heart”), and a big retirement community (it reminds him of apartheid). He visits with clueless Hollywood liberal Sharon Stone (whom he manages to observe crossing her legs) and finds Las Vegas strippers mechanically standoffish (“the wretchedness of Eros in the land of the Puritans”). In Michigan, he marvels at the solidity of the American identity among Arab immigrants. (The book was finished before the riots broke out in Paris: “We have our crisis there, sure,” he says. “You had your riots in the nineties.”) In Dallas, at the assassination site of JFK, he wonders, “What is a myth that you no longer believe in that still functions?”

And amid all that is what seems to be his conclusion: that America is a curious sort of empire—not at all like Rome at its zenith or decline—with a particular character of individualism that he hopes will cause the country to do the good it could do in the world. He’s disappointed that we aren’t living up to our noblesse oblige responsibilities. “The reason I am so angry against neoconservatives is that they spoiled the very idea of intervention,” says the self-described Wilsonian. And he’s flabbergasted that the American left can be so accommodating to the puritanism of the right. There is, in fact, for a secular blue-stater, little in this book to disagree with: It has, at times, the reinforcement-of-a-worldview pleasures of a well-argued Frank Rich column, or, for that matter, The Daily Show.

So is his goal with American Vertigo to become BHL in America, a branded public intellectual? “No comment,” he says, punching my shoulder lightly. “What I would like is if I could participate in the ideological intellectual debate here and contribute in a slight way.”

Still, he’s not going to move here. This is, after all, a man with many mistresses, and this country is just one of them. But, in the end, what did he like best about the U.S.?

“Everything, my dear. I will tell you. Sometimes in your private life you have a mistress you love, love being with. You spend time to time in a grand hotel, with good room service, great champagne, and you separate—and when you are really in love with her, you inevitably think, Could I wake up with her, near her every morning? And then you try it. This is exactly what I did in America. America was a great mistress. I had a great fuck with America. It was like a weekend in the Hotel du Cap.”

Posted at 6:55 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 18, 2006

HONG KONG By exaggerating the importance of Iran’s nuclear developments, the West is showing up the waning of its power in that region, despite the presence of some 200,000 allied troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the influence of China and India rises.

The situation now has three possible outcomes, none favorable to the West.

First, after a lot of huffing and puffing, a diplomatic dance continues which makes little headway and reveals that the West has few cards it can play.

Second, the United States launches an attack whose economic consequences can only be guessed at, but which does the kind of global diplomatic damage to the U.S. that the British/French Suez invasion did to those nations.

Third, after effectively blocking Security Council sanctions, China, India and Russia quietly lean on Iran to stop being provocative and make just enough conciliatory noises to allow the “crisis” to subside, but not to significantly retard its nuclear program.

As the major prospective customers for Iran’s oil and gas, China and India have a huge vested interest in not seeing this issue escalate, via the Security Council, into an oil crisis.

They are in a position to influence Tehran partly because of their status as future customers, but equally because of the perception that they are not a threat and share anti-imperialist sympathies.

Both India and China developed nuclear capabilities in the face of Western attempts to sustain a West/Soviet duopoly. While no existing nuclear power wishes to see their number increased, India and China appear to accept Iran’s eventual acquisition of such weapons as inevitable - and non alarming.

There is no doubt that Iran has been dissembling about its nuclear program. It scarcely needs nuclear power and ultimately wants to have the ability to build nuclear weapons.

But then most countries lie about their nuclear programs. While Iran may well be in breach of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it signed, so are other countries. India and Israel refuse to sign.

In Washington, Iran’s nuclear ambitions are viewed with such alarm that the normally level-headed Senator John McCain has said that a nuclear Iran would be worse than a war to prevent it. Most of Asia, by contrast, seems to follow the view of the Chinese and Indians that possible American reaction is as far more dangerous than Iran’s developments.

There is some parallel with North Korea, whose nuclear ambitions are viewed with more alarm in far-away Washington than in nearby Seoul. Many South Koreans who detest the Pyongyang regime barely conceal a grudging admiration for intransigent nationalistic stance on the nuclear issue.

Likewise, Iranians who detest the clerical regime (including hundreds of thousand of exiles who have prospered in the West) find little fault with its nuclear program. A democratic Iran would, like India, have just as much demand for nuclear independence as any other major country.

The election of the worryingly crude and ignorant Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has raised the level of Iranian rhetoric. But Ahmedinejad is clearly frowned on by his more diplomatic predecessors, Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani, not to mention by liberal and democratic Iranians. And the nuclear program appears to have broad support within and without the clerical regime.

Iranian grudges against the West are deep and well founded - the British oil grabs, the deposing of Reza Shah I, the British-Russian wartime hegemony, the CIA-engineered overthrow of secular nationalist Mohammed Mossadeq in 1952, the arming and encouragement of the 1980 Iraq invasion which cost more than a million Iranian lives.

Just as leadership in that patriotic war against Saddam Hussein probably saved the oppressive clerical regime from self-destruction, so Western pressure now to deprive Iranians of what they see as their national rights are likely to sustain the clerical grip.

The hypocrisy of the West is obvious, not just in the special dispensation it gives to an expansionist, nuclear Israel, but also to Pakistan, a country which may be aligned with the West but is inherently unstable and, unlike Iran, a major source of Taliban-trained fanatics and al Qaeda-following suicide bombers.

India meanwhile was recently rewarded by the United States with a nuclear cooperation agreement despite India’s refusal, for reasons of national sovereignty, to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty. So much for a consistent non-proliferation policy.

For sure, the more countries that have nuclear weapons, the greater than danger of use. But Western bullying, regime-change policies, threats of war and selective condemnation of nuclear ownership are even better reasons for Tehran to want nuclear technology than the fact that Iran is surrounded by those who do.

If the West wants to get its way on this, it must offer Iran some juicy carrots instead of its traditional stick.

Posted at 10:51 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian

A smoky haze blurs the frontier between the world’s mightiest forest and its biggest threat: the humble soya bean. The four-month burning season in the Amazon is when the giant trees felled to make space for crops are reduced to ashes. Even after being slashed and burned, the trunks of the tauari and macaranduba are so huge that their embers glow for more than two years. Some are left to burn where they stand, creating giant pillars of charcoal stretching 30m into the sky.
You cannot see the wood for the beans in an ever-widening expanse of the Amazon, and it is increasingly thanks to China. Brazil’s boom crop and China’s growing appetite are clearing more forest than logging, cattle farming and mining. It is one of the more remarkable developments of a globalised world in which Brazil is rapidly becoming the takeaway for the workforce of the world.
Travelling from Beijing to a farm in the heart of the Amazon showed how far China’s reach has extended. It took five flights and nearly three days to reach Santarem, followed by a two-hour drive.
The farmers had also come a long way and at great risk to be here. The Bonettis are from Italian stock. Just as their forebears gave up everything to move from Europe to the new world, they too quit their jobs two years ago and sold their land in the south of Brazil so that they could join the soya gold rush far in the north. They now live in an Amazonian wilderness, where the father, a former computer programmer, hunts wild boar to eat while his wife keeps their child from roaming into a jungle of tarantulas and jaguars.
Legally their position is tenuous, as the government has granted no approval for clearance of land in this area.
But for the pioneers it is a risk worth taking. Amazonian land is cheap. An area the size of a football pitch costs $300. But how could they be sure the soya boom would continue? “Because of China”, said Mr Bonetti, whose name has been changed to protect him.
The confidence of the families who are moving to newly cleared land near Santarem reflects a giant shift that is taking place in the global food trade as Brazil becomes a leading supplier of protein for China. Since 1995 satellite images show that the Amazon has shrunk by 1.7m hectares a year - equivalent to a forest almost the size of Israel being turned into farmland every 12 months. During the same period China has lost more than 6m hectares of arable land to cities, factories, roads and deserts. Self-sufficient in most food and energy commodities 15 years ago, China must now import millions of kilocalories to fuel its workers just as it needs lakes of international oil to keep its production lines running. Most of the protein comes in the form of soya beans from Brazil, which are used to fatten pigs, poultry and fish that end up on the tables of the world’s most populous country.
> Even by China’s standards, the growth has been phenomenal. Since 1995 soya
> bean imports from Brazil have increased 10,685%. The pulses are now by far
> the most important item on the bilateral balance sheet, last year worth
> $2bn, more than a third of Brazil’s sales volume to Beijing.
> According to Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, this could herald
> the formation of an axis that will dominate the world food market. For
> years, he said, the most important trade route for food was between the US -
> the world’s biggest exporter of grain, soya and meat - and Japan, the main
> importer. But last year Brazil became the top exporter and China the top
> importer of soya.
> Along with rising demand for the beans in Europe and a poor crop in the US,
> this contributed last year to the second-biggest deforestation of the Amazon
> in history. Loggers and farmers have already cleared 600,000 hectares and
> tens of thousands more are added every month.
> According to Ibama, the Brazilian state environmental agency, only 2% of the
> deforestation is authorised. But with only six inspectors to cover an area
> three times bigger than the UK, there is little they can do. “There is no
> such thing as sustainable management of forests. It is all predatory,” said
> Nielson Vieira at Ibama’s Santarem office. “All we can do is minimise the
> damage.”
> As in China, the losers are local farmers, who are priced or pushed off
> their land. Maria dos Santos, of the smallholders union in Santarem, said
> 500 families had been relocated, a fifth of them by force.
> All over Amazonia, China’s footprint is getting bigger. Near the northern
> port of Belemon, an alumina plant is being built to process raw materials
> for China’s producers. Inland, Chinese merchants are negotiating timber
> deals in Manaus. To the east, forests are being chopped down to provide the
> charcoal needed for pig-iron exports. The world’s biggest iron ore producer,
> Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, has signed a $1.5bn deal with Baosteel of
> Shanghai to build a mill with a capacity of 8m tonnes of steel sheet a year.
> Brazil’s state oil firm Petrobras is building a pipeline with a $1bn
> investment from China’s Sinopec. And the Brazilian embassy is about to
> almost double the number of diplomats it stations in Beijing.
> The two countries are discussing what could be an even more significant deal
> - the transfer of biofuel technology, which uses sugar cane, soya and other
> crops to produce petrol substitutes such as ethanol.
> Largely thanks to soya, south American exports to China have grown 570%
> since 1999. In the process China has overtaken Argentina, Japan and Britain
> to become the second most important destination, after the US, for Brazilian
> goods.
> With economic clout has come political influence. Brazil’s left-leaning
> president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has courted Beijing to offset US
> influence. Last year he headed a 450-member trade mission to China, where he
> said the two countries could form a relationship unhindered by colonial
> animosities. “We are two giants without historical, political or economic
> divergences, free to think only about the future.”
> The story is the same across the region. Argentina has seen a 122% surge in
> trade. Peru has received cash for its energy and food sectors. Chile, the
> world’s biggest copper producer, reports that China overtook the US last
> year as the main copper buyer. Most contentious has been Beijing’s courtship
> of Venezuela, which has the biggest oil reserves outside the Middle East.
> Such developments have not gone unnoticed in Washington. “I believe we
> should be cautious and view the rise of Chinese power as something to be
> counterbalanced, contained and perhaps go so far as to consider China’s
> actions in Latin America as the movement of a hegemonic power into our
> hemisphere,” Dan Burton, a Republican congressman from, told a House foreign
> relations subcommittee.
> The soya barons are so convinced that demand will continue to grow that they
> are planning to clear millions more hectares. “We don’t trust China as a
> partner,” said Pio Stefanello, a plantation owner and Brazil’s leading
> distributor of soya seeds. “But it is a huge contributor to growth. They are
> big consumers for everything.”

Posted at 4:09 PM · Comments (0)

January 19, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

Panlong Journal

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
PANLONG, China, Jan. 17 - By day this small village in the midst of China’s industrial heartland seems to be a picture of normalcy: children play in their yards, workers in uniform sweep the tidy streets and a red flag flutters proudly above an elementary school with a facade bearing a poster of the hero of Chinese economic reform, Deng Xiaoping.

But as evening approaches the streets fall eerily quiet, and if you look carefully at the cars that drive by every few minutes you see that they are filled with police officers, both uniformed and, unmistakably, plainclothes. Track down a resident, if you can find one, and that impression is confirmed.

“You’d better be gone before dark,” one man told a stranger. “Pretty soon the police will be everywhere, and no one will dare go outside.”

In an immediate sense this community, not long ago pure farmland and now the paved-over scene of runaway industrial sprawl, has experienced an extraordinary trauma in the last week. Villagers say two residents were killed, including a 13year-old girl, amid the muscular suppression of a local demonstration by policemen using electrified truncheons that resemble cattle prods.

Seen in another light, though, one that must be deeply worrying for the country’s authorities, Panlong is anytown China, merely the latest example of protests and riots spreading through the countryside against injustices inflicted on those left behind by China’s economic takeoff.

Just as the protests are becoming more and more common, so is the use of overwhelming force to put them down. A major threshold was crossed early last month in the village of Dongzhou, about two hours from here by car, where residents estimate that as many as 30 people were killed by paramilitary security forces that fired on demonstrators.

Beijing has said little about the events in Dongzhou, allowing the unconvincing bare-bones account of provincial authorities to stand, along with their verdict that any violence was the fault of the peasants. The fervent hope in Beijing must be that villagers around the country do not come together on common issues.

In a series of interviews on Tuesday, people here made it clear that there was a broad awareness of the events in Dongzhou and of the discontent simmering in much of rural China. But they are fatalistic about their power to win redress for their grievances against the government.

“We live in this society and we just have to accept this reality,” said a villager named Shen, who like several others who agreed to speak, gave only his family name, for fear of retribution from the authorities. “We have no land left. Our land has already been taken away with a compensation of only 700 yuan per person every year.” That amount is the equivalent of about $90.

The strands that come together in Panlong are so typical of rural protests as to be very nearly generic.

There are small people dispossessed of their land to make way for industries or development projects.

There are fruitless efforts to seek help, from city hall to the provincial administration and all the way to the capital. There is environmental destruction on a huge scale and the loss of long-held livelihoods.

When a spark ignites the people’s discontent, there are police state tactics to suppress the protests and enforce a silence over the details. Ultimately there are brass knuckles, jail and, lately, death for those who refuse to take the hint and desist.

“People here have tried everything you can think of to get the problem solved before this happened,” said a resident who gave his name as Chen. “They talked to the village committee, the township and municipal governments. One of them even went to Beijing. But nothing is done - the village officials just simply ignore them.”

Mr. Chen described the peak of the protests, on Saturday night, when the deaths occurred. “It was like a war, so real and so brutal,” he said. “I did not see who started it, but I saw policemen were beating the villagers and the villagers were fighting back with stones and firecrackers.”

Since then, villagers said, many residents are being forced to report each morning to the police, who detain them until late in the evening, when they are allowed to return home until the next morning.

As with so many recent rural protests, Panlong’s problems began with land. Many villagers told stories of having been deceived by corrupt local officials who they said had enriched themselves by selling off rights to the villagers’ farmland.

“Two years back, one day some villagers were asked to attend a routine meeting,” said a 42-year-old farmer who gave his name as Fang. “They went and they paid 10 yuan for participation fees, and they signed in as usual. Later, when we discovered our land was being sold, we asked the village committee to explain what’s going on, and they answered that we had signed the contract. Suddenly we remembered that meeting, and everyone understood that we had already been cheated.”

Although there have been small protests over land issues going back to the early 1990’s, villagers said trouble broke out in earnest early last week after a speech by the Communist Party secretary for Guangdong Province, Zhang Dejiang. Mr. Zhang said land issues must be resolved equitably in the province.

Brandishing his words, villagers began a sit-in and later obstructed traffic, demanding that the matter of compensation for their land be reopened. A particular focal point for the protests was the Minsen garment factory, the land for which villagers said had been acquired through corrupt deals with local political figures in Sanjiao, the town that encompasses the village of Panlong.

“The Sanjiao town area is the darkest place I had ever been to, although it is one of the richest places in the country,” said one man, who spoke bitterly about the construction of palatial homes by officials connected to land deals.

“I’m a son of the senior government official,” the man added. “I’m actually risking too much to meet you. I could just shut up and have a happy life, but we’ve got to do something so the next generations have a better and cleaner place to live.”

Posted at 2:42 PM · Comments (0)

These are excerpts of excerpts of John Fowles’ (The French Lieutenant’s Woman and The Magus) diaries, published in the Jan. 2005 edition of Harpers.

3 January 1966
Night at a hotel by London Airport. The sound of the jets boiling up into the darkness. Going further than this world, and somehow this seems beautiful, this new power of voyage; though in reality it is uglier than any other way of traveling in the history of man.

4 January
To Boston. New England is sharp cold, but in a brilliant clear sunlight. At dusk it is a black and orange city, very artic and attractive in color, though a mess architecturally. Flowers from Ned Bradford, whiskey from Julian — we feel enveloped by the Roman generosity to favored guests. Once again the Roman qualities of America overwhelm one: everything based on power, on mean gold rather than the golden mean. America is in a way the inability to think of gold metaphorically.

24 January
Up to New York and cold, and straight on to London. Cold and wet and grey… I need the sea, the darkness at nights; in a way I even need the coldness, the damp, all the living problems this old bitch of a place poses. One must retreat at my age into what one is; stop running after the dream images; condense; protect what the age assaults or ignores.

Posted at 11:55 PM · Comments (0)

The most brutal U.S.-backed dictator you’ve never heard of-Hissene Habre of Chad-has just been indicted in Belgium on charges of mass murder and torture. His indictment was a decisive breakthrough in a judicial chess game pitting the former central African dictator against a Chadian torture victim who did not give up and a New York “dictator hunter” at Human Rights Watch.

Souleymane Guengueng, a modest and deeply religious civil servant who watched hundreds of his cellmates perish from torture and disease during two years in Habre’s prisons, took an oath before God that if he ever got out of jail alive, he would bring his tormentors to justice. When Habre fell in 1990 and fled to Senegal, Guengueng used his considerable charm to persuade still-frightened victims to form a group to prepare a case against the former dictator. Habre is thought to have killed tens of thousands of people in this former French colony. However, the government that’s been in power ever since has brought on many of Habre’s henchmen and given up on his extradition, while the former tyrant has lived in quiet luxury in Senegal.

Then, after former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London, Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch took an interest in the Habre case. Brody, whose legal brief helped persuade the House of Lords to strip Pinochet of his immunity, was looking to extend the “Pinochet precedent” to other abusive tyrants. Brody sent two secret missions to Chad to meet Guengueng and gather evidence. In a carefully timed surprise operation, Brody and Guengueng-together with a coalition of Chadian, Senegalese, and international activists-filed charges against Habre in Senegal in January 2000. Within a week, Habre was under house arrest, charged with crimes against humanity.

Back in 1981, Ronald Reagan saw Habre, then a local warlord, as a man who could be used to help contain the ambitions of Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, Chad’s expansionist northern neighbor. By then, Habre had already earned a reputation for extreme brutality, once kidnapping a French anthropologist in 1974 and then murdering the man the French government sent to negotiate her release. Even so, Washington could not pass up a chance to “bloody Qaddafi’s nose,” as Alexander Haig reportedly put it.

Habre’s march on Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, in 1982 was buoyed by generous covert U.S. support. Once Habre took power, the United States later provided him with tens of millions of dollars in military aid each year and gave financial and logistical support to his secret police while it engaged in torture and other atrocities. The United States also used a clandestine base in Chad to train captured Libyan soldiers whom it was organizing into an anti-Qaddafi force that was said to be armed by another Qaddafi enemy as well: Saddam Hussein.

To build the case against Habre, Brody and Human Rights Watch’s Olivier Bercault made frequent trips to Chad. Once, they stumbled onto the abandoned archives of Habre’s personal Gestapo, the feared “DDS.” Tens of thousands of documents strewn on the floor detailed how Habre’s regime attacked rival ethnic groups and organized the repression of political opponents. They also describe U.S. training programs for DDS agents, including a course outside of Washington that was attended by some of the DDS’ most feared torturers. These files are now in a searchable database and a CD-ROM compiled by Human Rights Watch in New York.

Habre used some of the millions he had stolen from Chad’s treasury to get the case in Senegal dismissed. But by then, Brody, Guengueng and their colleagues had already filed charges against Habre in Belgium, whose anti-atrocity law allowed its courts to hear cases from all over the world. A Belgian judge took up the case and carried out a landmark mission to Chad, where he interviewed witnesses and visited Habre’s prisons and mass graves together with Guengueng and other former detainees. Meanwhile, Brody got the United Nations to persuade Senegal’s president to keep Habre under guard pending an extradition request from Belgium.

When the ambitious Belgian law crumbled under a U.S. attack in response to charges brought against senior U.S. officials, Guengueng and Brody dashed to Brussels. In meetings with cabinet ministers and legislative leaders, they won a grandfather clause for the Habre prosecution, convincing the authorities that Belgium could not abandon the Chadian victims to whom it had given hope.

Now, nearly fifteen years after Habre was deposed and five years after he was first arrested in Senegal, a Belgian judge has indicted Habre and is seeking his extradition from Senegal, whose president has said that he has no objections to handing him over to Belgium. Habre’s extradition would be a wake-up call to dictators in Africa and elsewhere, warning them that if they commit similar atrocities, they could also be brought to justice one day. As well as serving as another feather in Brody’s dictator-hunting cap, bringing Habre to justice would allow Souleymane Guengueng to fulfill his oath.

Posted at 11:18 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

TUESDAY, JANUARY 17, 2006

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf’s inauguration as the president of Liberia marks a watershed in the country’s tumultuous history. Twenty-five years of misrule and civil war under Samuel Doe, Charles Taylor, and successive interim governments have left the country in ruins. Nearly 300,000 Liberians lost their lives, average income is one-eighth what it was in 1980, and large majorities of the population subsist in dire poverty.

Since United Nations and U.S. troops ousted Taylor in 2003, a fragile peace has taken hold, supported by 15,000 UN peacekeepers. With free and peaceful elections under their belts, Liberians are feeling new optimism and hope. Markets here are bustling, stores are freshly painted and open for business, and newspapers and radios feature lively debate.

The new government is a clear break from a past characterized by rule by force, extensive corruption, and a culture of impunity. Sirleaf, the first African woman elected head of state, has been an outspoken champion of accountability, transparency, and good governance for decades, a stance that landed her in jail twice and was a hallmark of her opposition to past governments and campaign for the presidency.

Already change is underway. She has instituted a code of conduct and full financial disclosure for senior officials, and endorsed a program that will install internationally recruited financial controllers in several state enterprises and create a strong anticorruption commission. Her government plans to publish financial accounts on the Web, make it easier for whistleblowers to report infractions and rewrite Liberia’s outdated constitution to firmly establish participatory democracy, decentralize power and install robust checks on the executive.

Recovery from deep conflict in Africa is not easy, but we know it is possible. Mozambique was destroyed by civil war in the 1980s, but its democratically elected government led the way to peace, stability and a doubling of income in a dozen years. Sierra Leone suffered a blood bath in the 1990s, but the 1999 peace agreement and 2001 elections brought stability and economic growth of 7 percent a year. Rwanda’s genocide was followed by a recovery that few could have imagined.

But Sirleaf faces a daunting task. Liberia’s recovery will depend mainly on Liberians themselves, but it will require strong international support, just as in Mozambique, Sierra Leone and Rwanda.

West Africa’s civil wars have spawned widespread smuggling of diamonds, transshipment of drugs and easy money laundering opportunities for global terrorist groups. Liberia’s historic moment provides the U.S. administration a chance to show it is serious about supporting nascent democracies, creating stability in a volatile region and providing economic opportunities for Africa’s poorest countries.

First, the United States must continue its crucial role in the demobilization of combatants and commit to long-term rebuilding of Liberia’s police and army. The new government must be able to maintain and enhance security to begin to recover.

Second, the administration should support rapid and comprehensive forgiveness of Liberia’s debts, which were mainly undertaken and wasted by the rapacious Doe government. It makes no more sense to stick today’s Liberians with the bill, including 20 years of accumulated interest, than to force today’s Iraqis to pay Saddam Hussein’s bills.

Third, and perhaps most urgent, Congress should approve supplemental funding of $50 million to $100 million to support the new government. Unfortunately, Congress recently cut the administration’s initial request for Liberia, a short-sighted step that sent the wrong signal to a struggling democracy and old ally at a crucial turning point.

These funds would build critical infrastructure, put kids back into schools, and continue vital training for security forces. It would give Liberians their best chance of securing peace and basic freedoms.

(Steve Radelet is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. Jeremy Weinstein is assistant professor of political science at Stanford University. They are advising President Sirleaf on Liberia’s economic strategy. This article first appeared in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 10:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Review of Books

Knopf, 423 pp., $26.95
1.

Sometimes a game is more than a game. In 1969, for example, when Czechoslovakia beat the Soviet Union in the ice hockey finals in Stockholm, less than one year after Soviet tanks crushed the Prague Spring. The exhausted Czech players were in tears as the Swedes cheered “Dubcek! Dubcek!” and thousands of Czechs, defying the authorities, danced in the streets. On a night like that, when a humiliated people enjoy a moment of pride, revenge can taste sweet.

Sometimes people can get carried away by the joy of vengeance even if much less is at stake. In the summer of 1988, when the Dutch soccer team became European champions, more people turned out to celebrate in Amsterdam than on the day of liberation in 1945. The point was not the championship itself—who still remembers the final against the Soviet Union? The real cause for joy was the victory over Germany, in the semifinal, in Munich of all places. Better late than never. During the war the Dutch had little to cheer about.

There are times when the humiliation of defeat runs so deep that a display of valor has to be manufactured, or at least helped along a little. In the 1950s, a wrestler named Riki Dozan brought millions of demoralized Japanese males to their feet by beating much larger, meaner, brawnier foreigners in the ring. That he was actually a Korean was conveniently left unsaid, as was the fixing that made sure these fights, which invariably began with Riki stoically bearing the brunt of dirty foreign tricks, had a happy ending.

In post–World War I Germany, as we now know from David Margolick’s absorbing book Beyond Glory, the role of Riki Dozan was played by a handsome, dark-haired boxer named Max Schmeling. Still smarting from defeat, and plagued by political turmoil and economic hardships, the Germans were in need of a hero. Schmeling turned out to be their man. In 1927 he beat the Belgian Fernand Delage for the European light heavyweight championship, and the following year he knocked out the Italian Michele Bonaglia. At that moment of national ecstasy, eight thousand fans in the stadium stood up and sang “Deutschland über Alles.”

Then more than now, and perhaps in Germany more than anywhere else, boxing was a kind of yardstick for virility, individual but also collective. The cult of Schmeling as the modern German hero went well beyond the proletarian fight fans. George Grosz did an oil painting of him in his Berlin studio, which had a pair of boxing gloves hanging on the wall. Grosz liked to depict himself too, in photographs and drawings, adopting manly boxing poses. Bertolt Brecht was a boxing fan, who made friends with fighters and promoters. It is harder to imagine Thomas Mann leaving his study for a visit to the ring, although he may secretly have fancied the idea, but his brother Heinrich was a friend of Schmeling’s.

Schmeling, always a man to relish adulation, was an extraordinary survivor who changed deftly with the times. In the 1920s and 1930s he frequented a place called the Roxy-Bar, where artists rubbed shoulders with sportsmen, and he wrote in a guest book: “Artists, grant me your favor— boxing is also an art!” This probably endeared him to the café crowd of Weimar Berlin, but he also personified a kind of bodily perfectionism which many Germans at the time tried to cultivate—all that naked preening on Prussian lakes and Baltic beaches.

Boxing was not a traditionally German sport. Germans in the nineteenth century went in more for calisthen-ics and martial drills. Boxing was an individualistic pursuit par excellence, which fascinated Brecht, despite his leftist politics, and George Grosz, who loved everything American that was fast, jazzy, and urban. Grosz’s box-ing enthusiasm was in tune with his Amerikanismus.

Even after Schmeling was adopted by the new regime after 1933 and turned (with his own cooperation) into a Nazi poster boy, he never lost his glamour for the old Weimar bohemians. One of the fascinating bits of information provided by Margolick’s account of the legendary fights between Schmeling and Joe Louis is the list of people who congratulated him on his first victory against the Brown Bomber in 1936. Even as almost all black people, Jews, white liberals, and also some nonliberals in America were in deep sorrow over Louis’s defeat, even as the Nazi press was crowing over this great racial triumph over the Negro Untermensch, Schmeling received congratulatory telegrams from the Führer himself, naturally, but also from George Grosz, Marlene Dietrich, and Ernst Lubitsch, all of whom were living in the US at the time.

But then Schmeling was a very canny operator. While hobnobbing in Berlin with the Nazi elite—he and his wife, Ondra, were frequent guests at the homes of Joseph and Magda Goebbels —Schmeling made sure he retained his Jewish manager in New York, the indefatigable, cigar-chomping Joe “Yussel” Jacobs. As long as Schmeling won his fights and brought in enough foreign currency for the Fatherland, the Nazis were prepared to overlook this indiscretion.

In fact, as Margolick points out, it would have been hard to take part in professional boxing in the US at the time without dealing with Jews—they effectively ran the show. “In America,” writes Margolick, “Jews were all over boxing, not just as fighters and fans but as everything in between: promoters, trainers, managers, referees, propagandists, equipment manufacturers, suppliers, chroniclers. No major ethnic group in American history ever so dominated an important sport.” The only thing lacking was Jewish heavyweights. There were flyweights, like Benny Leonard, who was a counterpart of Riki Dozen for Jewish kids tired of getting beaten up by bigger Irish or Italian boys.

There was one apparently Jewish heavyweight, Max Baer, who wore the Star of David on his trunks. But in fact he wasn’t Jewish at all. His pretense was a clever marketing ploy to bring in the crowds. Baer sometimes claimed that his father was Jewish, but as Margolick says, “reports that the old man raised pigs in California did not bolster his case.”

At any event, the fact that Schmeling and Louis were brought together at all, for two legendary fights at Yankee Stadium, was owing to the tireless efforts of two Jewish promoters, Joe Jacobs and Mike Jacobs. They were unrelated and very different kinds of men. Yussel was loud, a snappy dresser, a ladies’ man, a charming Broadway rogue, who remained entirely loyal to his man, even though Schmeling sometimes treated him quite shabbily, while Mike Jacobs was a dour businessman who barely bothered to come and see the fights he had set up. His only fit of passion described in Margolick’s book came just before the second Schmeling–Louis bout, in 1938, which went ahead even though many Jews had opposed it, as an unseemly contest that would enrich a Nazi. Mike dropped into Louis’s dressing room and, according to one account, told the Brown Bomber to “murder that bum and don’t make an asshole out of me.”

Max Schmeling vs. Joe Louis: it had everything to make it one of those games that was more than a game. It was promoted as a fight between the United States, the world’s biggest democracy, and Nazi Germany. But above all it was seen as a racial contest, described in the German papers as a battle between superior Aryan will and brute Negro force. And not just in the German papers. One of the best things about Margolick’s book is the rich variety of quotes and an-ecdotes he has culled from the Amer-ican press, which was often no less prejudiced. Even articles that praised Louis, such as one published in the Herald Tribune in 1935, mentioned that there was “something of the jungle in the way Louis fights….”

Anti-Americanism, in Nazi Germany, was mixed up with racism anyway. Even some common anti-Semitic slurs were aimed at Louis. According to one journal, Louis only cared about money, unlike the noble Schmeling. Louis was shallow and materialistic, like all Americans. Honor, patriotism, heroism, these were German quali-ties which the “primitive nature-boy” could never hope to understand. The Nazi press, sometimes deftly egged on by Schmeling, who was neither a party member nor unusually racist, made it seem as though Schmeling represented the great white hope for Americans as well.

A writer in the German boxing journal Box-Sport reported that Schmeling had become the “knight in shining armor” for white Americans, “the bulwark against the black danger.” And so he was, at least for a number of Americans, particularly in the Southern states, but also in Yorkville, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where German-Americans toasted their hero with foaming steins. When Louis walked toward the ring on those two feverish nights in the Bronx, in 1936 and 1938, wrapped in his blue and red silk gown, to face Hitler’s favorite boxer, he bore the hopes of millions on his shoulders but also the contempt of bigots from Berlin all the way to the heartland of the US.
2.

Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were probably the greatest boxers of the twentieth century, but in public image and temperament they could not have been more different. Where Ali was deliberately outrageous and provocative, Louis was quiet and self-effacing to a fault. Not, apparently, a very demonstrative man by temperament, Louis also had a counter-model he was told never to emulate: Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion, whose victory, in 1910, against “The Great White Hope” James Jeffries set off nationwide race riots and lynchings. Johnson was a raffish figure, who liked to flaunt his relations with white women, and got into all kinds of trouble. But his behavior made life more difficult for talented young black boxers.

Born as Joe Louis Barrow in rural Alabama, the son of a sharecropper, Louis moved with his family to Detroit in 1926. When his father, who ended up in a mental asylum back in Alabama, lost his job, the family often went hungry. Joe did not shine at school and had a speech impediment that made him sound like a bumbler. But he had huge hands, quick reflexes, and plenty of ambition. And in the early 1930s he began to make a name for himself on the amateur circuit, winning Golden Gloves tournaments and getting into the papers as a strong, poker-faced puncher. His first mentor was a Detroit racketeer named John Roxborough, who dressed Louis in fine suits and taught him table manners. When Louis decided to go professional, he was introduced to another tough manager, Jack Blackburn, who had once been a first-rate black boxer.

But Blackburn knew the odds against a black fighter. He had seen too many hopefuls come and go, used as fodder for inferior white contenders in matches that had been fixed. Drawing on many interviews with Blackburn in newspapers and magazines such as Liberty and The Ring, Margolick retells the story of Blackburn’s first encounter with Louis. “You were born with two strikes on you,” Blackburn recalled telling Lewis. “That’s why I don’t fool with colored boys! They’re too hard to sell since Jack Johnson went and acted like he did. I can make more sugar training white fighters, even if they’re only half as good.”

Still, Louis had a mighty punch, and he promised he wouldn’t act like Jack Johnson. “I ain’t goner waste any of your time,” he told Blackburn, and he didn’t. Blackburn relented and taught Louis what he needed to know, except for one thing which was difficult to impart. Louis, apparently, was just too nice, or as Blackburn put it to a reporter, “he didn’t have any blood in his eye.” He lacked the killer instinct. Blackburn said that he’d told Louis: “You just gotta throw away your heart when you pull on those gloves, or the other fella’ll knock it out of you.” Joe Louis, Blackburn said, “ain’t no natural killer. He’s a manufactured killer.”

Manufactured or not, Louis cultivated the public image that would allow him to succeed. Always polite, soft-spoken, friendly, and dignified, he wasn’t tempted to go out with white women, was chivalrous in victory, and never drawn to the taunting of opponents that was part of Johnson’s and later Muhammad Ali’s style. Margolick observes that Louis outside the ring seemed a passive man, even a bit dull. He speculates that Louis “had few deep feelings of his own, but… had an ability to generate intense passions in others. He was the perfect vehicle for everyone else’s dreams; he could be, and was, whatever someone wanted him to be.”

The truth is that we really don’t know what was going on inside Joe Louis’s mind. Perhaps he disguised his feelings. His placid image—the Germans called him “Loamface”—and soft, halting speech made it easy for people to dismiss him as a stupid man. This is normally what people think of dominated races anyway, partly because the colonized and downtrodden often feign stupidity as a form of silent defense and protest against being bossed around. When you are under the thumb of people who think they are better than you, it rarely pays to display cleverness; it will usually be held against you.

It is therefore not surprising that even among his admirers there was a consensus that Joe, in the words of the Atlanta Journal, was “not constructed for thinking.” Lest one think that this kind of comment was confined to Southerners, Margolick also quotes a reporter from Boston who likened dinners at Joe Louis’s training camp to “feeding time at the zoo.” While Blackburn, “the simian-faced Negro with a knife scar along one cheek,” was happy to talk about boxing, Joe just “made guttural grunts which filtered through his food in thick blurbs, and focused the full beam of his attention to chewing.” These were reporters who presumably wanted the Brown Bomber to win.

It took the black writer Richard Wright to see just how important Joe Louis was to black people. This is what he wrote about the celebrations on the South Side of Chicago, after Louis defeated Max Baer in 1935 to become the first black heavyweight champion since Jack Johnson:

They seeped out of doorways, oozed from alleys, trickled out of tenements, and flowed down the streets: a fluid mass of joy…. Four centuries of oppression, of frustrated hopes, of black bitterness, felt even in the bones of the bewildered young, were rising to the surface. Yes, unconsciously, they had imputed to the brawny image of Joe Louis all the balked dreams of revenge, all the secretly visualized moments of retaliation, AND HE HAD WON! Good Gawd Almighty! Yes, by Jesus, it could be done! Didn’t Joe do it?… Joe was the concentrated essence of black triumph over white. And it came so seldom, so seldom. And what could be sweeter than long nourished hate vicariously gratified? From the symbol of Joe’s strength they took strength, and in that moment all fear, all obstacles were wiped out, drowned.

The fact that Joe Louis was not an intellectual and was not taken up by artistic Bohemia may actually have been an advantage. As Samuel Chotzinoff, the music critic of The New York Post, put it, when he described Louis’s feats as “sweet recompense” for past wrongs and a bleak future: “Booker T. Washington and Duke Ellington are all right in their way, but they do not represent Might.”
3.

It is a sad reflection on the relations between white and black people that ethnic pride was so predicated on physical prowess. The stress on brawn rather than brains did nothing to break down the old stereotypes of blacks as jungle people. It would be odd to pretend that physical strength is not a vital aspect of any sporting contest, but the source of national pride, even in sports, is subject to change. When the French soccer team became world champions in 1998, the “multi-ethnic” complexion of the French team, led by Zinedine Zidane, the son of Algerian immigrants, was hailed by many in France as a sign of national superiority—a note of triumph that looks sadly ephemeral now.

The ideal of ethnic or national virility had been in the air at least since the end of the nineteenth century. Fascism was obsessed with racial virility, and this obsession was exported and taken up by Hindu chauvinists in India, militarists in Japan, nationalists in China. Cleverness, as in “the clever Jew,” was rarely meant as a compliment. German “racial hygiene,” developed by Nazi doctors and other murderous theorists, was not aimed at creating a race of brilliant thinkers but of heroic supermen—the type represented by the outsized musclemen sculpted by Arno Breker. That few of the Nazi leaders came anywhere near this physical ideal was evident. But Schmeling, despite his dark hair, did.

This made his victory over the younger Joe Louis in 1936 all the more galling. Margolick retells the story of this sorry affair very well, again through a variety of contemporary voices. Louis seemed listless in his training camp, sometimes barely bothering to go through his paces. Perhaps the adulation following his victory over Max Baer had gone to his head. He often slipped away from the training camp to play golf. Whenever he appeared in public, he was surrounded by crowds that treated him like a god. Thousands of worshipers came to his training camp in New Jersey, from Harlem, Atlantic City, and farther afield, just to see their man dodging and jabbing to the music of a live ringside band, which played such numbers as “I’m Sorry I Made You Cry.” Joe Louis keys, statues, and flashlights were on sale. Ralph Matthews, of the Baltimore Afro-American, joked that “an enterprising salesman could catch Joe Louis’s perspiration in cologne bottles and peddle it at two bucks an ounce.” All this was not good for the champ’s concentration.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 6:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Australian

January 13, 2006

THROUGHOUT history and across cultures, the arts of homo sapiens have demonstrated universal features. These aesthetic inclinations and patterns have evolved as part of our hardwired psychological nature, ingrained in the human species over the 80,000 generations lived out by our ancestors in the 1.6 million years of the Pleistocene.

The existence of a universal aesthetic psychology has been suggested, not only experimentally, but by the fact that the arts travel outside their local contexts so easily: Beethoven is loved in Japan, Aboriginal art in Paris, Korean ceramics in Brazil, and Hollywood movies all over the globe.

Our aesthetic psychology has remained unchanged since the building of cities and the advent of writing some 10,000 years ago, which explains why The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer, and the Epic of Gilgamesh, remain good reading today.

We haven’t lost Pleistocene tastes for fat and sweet foods, nor have we lost our ancient tastes for artistic entertainment.

The fascination, for example, that people worldwide find in the exercise of artistic virtuosity, from Praxiteles to Renee Fleming, is not a social construct, but an evolutionary adaptation; the worldwide interest in sports comes from a similar source.

Displays of virtuosity make audiences’ hair stand on end, regardless of their specific cultural context. It’s no surprise this is a universal aspect of human nature: over thousands of generations, hunter-gatherer bands that exercised dexterity, and encouraged it by admiring it, would have survived better than their less skilful cousins against predators and the rigours of a hostile environment.

Darwinian psychology has other interesting applications to aesthetics. Consider landscape painting and calendar art. Studies of landscape preferences repeatedly show a human liking for alternating copses of trees and open spaces, often hilly land, with animals, water, and a path or river bank that winds into an inviting yet mysterious, bluish distance.

This preference for the landscapes of the Pleistocene era, which has been experimentally verified as a cross-cultural constant today, shows up in the painting of early European artists, such as Albrecht Altdorfer and Salvador Rosa, and is found today on calendars in kitchens and offices worldwide. It is very marked in 19th century Australian landscape painting, the result of European artists taming their new vistas. It can be seen in the design of public parks from New York to Kyoto to Melbourne.

Cross-cultural studies also show persistent themes in drama and story-telling. When Aristotle described the basic plot points of Greek tragedy, he may have thought he was only speaking for his culture. Not so. The themes of family breakdown (“She killed him because she loved him”) are also found in Chinese fiction and Mexican soap operas.

What often arouses our interest is hate-filled struggle between people whom we’d expect to love each other - the mother who murders her children to get back at her husband, the two brothers who fight to the death - struggles which clearly threaten the survival not just of individuals, but, more essentially, of their genes. Stories of adventure, of overcoming evil, injustice and obstacles to love, are found everywhere. Usually, they involve beautiful young women, strong men, children needing protection, wise old people. The universality of these themes and situations are of particular interest to Darwinian literary theorists.

The Darwinian origin of art is a subject of much dispute. It’s unlikely that the arts came about at one time or for one purpose: they evolved from overlapping interests based on survival and mate selection, and explore and make use of emotions experienced even by our pre-hominid ancestors.

The usefulness of the arts for survival is demonstrated by the universal human tendency to reconstruct reality in the imagination.

The rehearsal of dangers and conflicts in fiction is a way of learning about the world without having to take actual risks. Those of our ancestors who derived pleasure from fictional “practice” for real life gained an evolutionary edge: they were better prepared to deal with the real world as they found it. The arts also echo the sexual display that accompanies Darwinian selection.

The heavy, glorious tail of the peacock has no intrinsic survival value in the wild. To the contrary, it slows peacocks down and makes them more visible to predators. The peacock’s tail is a product of peahen choices: females choose males with the biggest, most perfectly formed tails. Much of the human personality was similarly formed by women and men choosing clever, affectionate, kind, and skilful mates in the Pleistocene. This too would permeate not only the arts as a “show-off” demonstration of virtuosity, but our large-brained capacity to creatively use memory and language to levels far beyond mere survival requirements.

How we scan visually, how we hear, our sense of rhythm, the pleasures of artistic expression and in joining with others as an audience: all of this and more will in time be illuminated by Darwinian aesthetics.

Though it is possible to identify persistent themes and subjects in the arts, human beings everywhere are also inclined to enjoy what’s new.

This craving for novelty is itself a fascinating area of empirical research. There is a tendency, for example, for all artistic genres to develop in the direction of greater emotional content in time. Music moves from baroque to classic to romantic, with modulations becoming more striking, emotions stronger, orchestras larger. Movies go from merely illustrating stories to becoming more graphically exciting.

These patterns toward increasing violence and emotional content can be put down largely to satiation: the process by which we simply get tired of anything we consume and crave more excitement from it.

Such cycles tend to have natural conclusions, with film producers periodically returning to the calm formality of Jane Austen after pushing the boundaries of sex and violence. Such episodes can be charted and studied with perhaps less precision, but certainly more fascination, than can the tides and cycles of ocean currents.

Darwinian aesthetics have hardly got off the ground, and much work remains to be done. Nevertheless, I’ve already seen a stiff, knee-jerk resistance to the very idea among older academics in the humanities. It’s odd that the very academics who express outrage that religious conservatives want to keep Darwin out of high school biology classes in the US are themselves unwilling to admit Darwin into their own seminars. Aesthetics approached with intelligible, scientifically valid research techniques would clearly be a threat to the reigning orthodoxies.

But there’s no cause for greying humanists to worry. Culture, the central idea of the humanities as they now exist, makes an enormous contribution to the meaning of art and Darwinian aesthetics has no desire to deny it. Indeed, Darwin saw human beings as culture-creating animals. Darwinian aesthetics only denies that culture is the whole story of art.

The most complete explanation of great works of art will address form, narrative content, ideology, how the work is taken in by the eye or mind, and indeed, how it can produce life-transforming pleasure. Darwinian aesthetics are about understanding the deepest nature of our apprehension of beauty. Some of this will always remain a mystery, of course, and there is no harm in that either.

Denis Dutton teaches the philosophy of art at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. He is editor of the online website, Arts and Letters Daily, and is writing a book on Darwinian aesthetics.

Posted at 3:40 PM · Comments (0)

January 17, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, Jan. 16 - A week of protests by villagers in China’s southern industrial heartland over government land seizures exploded into violence over the weekend, as thousands of police officers brandishing automatic weapons and electric stun batons moved to suppress the demonstrations, residents of the village said Monday.

The residents of the village, Panlong, in Guangdong Province, said that as many as 60 people were wounded and that at least one person, a 13-year-old girl, was killed by security forces. The police denied any responsibility, saying the girl died of a heart attack.

Villagers said that the police had chased and beaten protesters and bystanders alike, and that villagers had retaliated by smashing police cars and throwing rocks at security forces in hit-and-run attacks.

Residents said Monday that the village had been sealed off, with the police monitoring roads into the area to check identification and bar access to outsiders. News of the violence appears to have been blocked in China.

The residents of Panlong said their anger had been set off by a government land acquisition program that they had been led to believe in 2003 was part of a construction project to build a superhighway connecting the nearby city of Zhuhai with Beijing. Later, the villagers learned the land was in fact being resold to developers to set up special chemical and garment industrial zones in the area.

The clash in Panlong was the second time in just over a month in which large numbers of Chinese security forces, including paramilitary troops, were deployed to put down a local demonstration. The earlier protest, 240 miles north in the village of Dongzhou on Dec. 6 over the construction of a power plant, was one of thousands recently in rural China over the environment and land use, with little relief available through the country’s legal system.

The protests coincided with reports that the secretive North Korean leader, Kim Jong Il, was visiting the province to see the country’s booming industrial region. The visit, though never publicly confirmed by Beijing, is a poorly kept secret, and some residents said his presence in the area over the weekend might have contributed to the nervousness of the security forces.

In Panlong on Saturday, the sixth day of protests, “the police arrived at 8 p.m., and then started beating people from 9 p.m., trying to disperse the crowd,” said a schoolteacher who spoke from the village by telephone, giving her name only as Yang. “When this happened, the crowd got very angry and lots of people picked up stones on the ground and threw them at the policemen. After being attacked, policemen were furious. They just beat up everyone, using their batons.”

Villagers said the demonstrations had begun as silent sit-ins but grew more boisterous by the day, as more people joined in. Eventually, they said, as many as 10,000 police officers were deployed, roughly twice the number of protesters at the peak of the demonstrations, according to some estimates.

In December, in the protest in Dongzhou, residents say as many as 30 people were killed when security forces opened fire on crowds of villagers demonstrating against the construction of a coal-fired power plant in their midst. The provincial authorities have acknowledged three deaths, but blamed the villagers for attacking the police. Meanwhile, Chinese authorities have restricted access to the village and have apparently ordered news organizations to sharply limit their coverage of the incident.

Unlike the events at Dongzhou, an out-of-the-way fishing village, the latest confrontation was in a rural enclave in the midst of some of China’s biggest and fastest-growing industrial cities.

The region that immediately surrounds Panlong is among the most heavily industrialized anywhere. It was the laboratory and launching pad for the economic reforms put in place by the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, which are credited with reviving China and turning it into a global economic powerhouse in the space of a generation.

Panlong is a short drive from Shenzhen, Dongguan and Zhuhai - all large and booming cities virtually created from scratch during China’s economic takeoff, which began in so-called special economic zones as part of the country’s sweeping economic changes. It is also not far from Guangzhou, the provincial capital, or from Hong Kong, whose investments helped fuel the area’s takeoff. The region is not only the scene of some of China’s fastest-growing industries, including high-tech manufacturing, textiles and furniture, much of which is exported to the United States, but it is also the scene of some of the country’s worst pollution.

For most of the year, visibility over the scrubland plains of the area is so poor that, beyond a few hundred yards, all detail is lost behind a thick gray curtain of eye-stinging haze. Water supplies in the area are equally imperiled by the pollution. The situation has become so bad that even residents of Hong Kong, whose economy is highly dependent on the adjacent region’s growth, rue the environmental monster they have helped create.

Increasingly, their ambivalence is shared by rural dwellers in the area, though they were some of the first people to benefit from the opening up of the country to foreign and private investment.

“We have many special zones in this area, and each of them attracts investment,” said a man who lives in a village adjacent to Panlong who was interviewed by telephone and gave his name as Hou. “The economic deals set in the past were not favorable, and many zones here have had smaller protests before, but the people were not united.”

“Now,” he continued, “there are uprisings everywhere.”

Posted at 7:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Vanity Fair

In William Faulkner’s story “Raid,” set in Alabama and Mississippi in the closing years of the Civil War, a white family becomes aware of a sudden, vast, nighttime migration through the scorched countryside. They can hear it and even smell it before they can see it; it’s the black population voting with its feet and heading, so it fervently believes, for the river Jordan: “We couldn’t see them and they did not see us; maybe they didn’t even look, just walking fast in the dark with that panting, hurrying murmuring, going on … “

Northern Uganda is centered on the headstreams of the Nile rather than the Jordan, and is a strange place for me to find myself put in mind of Faulkner, but every evening at dusk the main town of Gulu starts to be inundated by a mass of frightened humanity, panting, hurrying, and murmuring as it moves urgently through the crepuscular hours. Most of the “night commuters,” as they are known locally, are children. They leave their outlying villages and walk as many as eight kilometers to huddle for safety in the towns. And then, in the morning, often without breakfast and often without shoes, they walk all the way back again to get to their schools and their families. That’s if the former have not been burned and the latter have not been butchered. These children are not running toward Jordan and the Lord; they are running for their lives from the “Lord’s Resistance Army” (L.R.A.). This grotesque, zombie-like militia, which has abducted, enslaved, and brainwashed more than 20,000 children, is a kind of Christian Khmer Rouge and has for the past 19 years set a standard of cruelty and ruthlessness that—even in a region with a living memory of Idi Amin—has the power to strike the most vivid terror right into the heart and the other viscera.

Here’s what happens to the children who can’t run fast enough, or who take the risk of sleeping in their huts in the bush. I am sitting in a rehab center, talking to young James, who is 11 and looks about 9. When he actually was nine and sleeping at home with his four brothers, the L.R.A. stormed his village and took the boys away. They were roped at the waist and menaced with bayonets to persuade them to confess what they could not know—the whereabouts of the Ugandan Army’s soldiers. On the subsequent forced march, James underwent the twin forms of initiation practiced by the L.R.A. He was first savagely flogged with a wire lash and then made to take part in the murder of those children who had become too exhausted to walk any farther. “First we had to watch,” he says. “Then we had to join in the beatings until they died.” He was spared from having to do this to a member of his family, which is the L.R.A.’s preferred method of what it calls “registration.” And he was spared from being made into a concubine or a sex slave, because the L.R.A. doesn’t tolerate that kind of thing for boys. It is, after all, “faith-based.” Excuse me, but it does have its standards.

Talking to James about the unimaginable ruin of his childhood, I notice that when I am speaking he stays stock-still, with something a bit dead behind his eyes. But when it comes his turn to tell his story, he immediately starts twisting about in his chair, rubbing his eyes and making waving gestures with his arms. The leader of the L.R.A., a former Catholic acolyte in his 40s named Joseph Kony, who now claims to be a spirit medium with a special mission to impose the Ten Commandments, knows what old Fagin knew: that little boys are nimble and malleable if you catch them young enough, and that they make good thieves and runners. Little James was marched all the way to Sudan, whose Muslim-extremist government offers shelter and aid—such an ecumenical spirit!—to the Christian fanatics. There he was put to work stealing food from neighboring villages, and digging and grinding cassava roots. Soon enough, he was given a submachine gun almost as big as himself. Had he not escaped during an ambush, he would have gotten big enough to be given a girl as well, to do with what he liked.

I drove out of Gulu—whose approach roads can be used only in the daytime—to a refugee camp nearer the Sudanese border. A few Ugandan shillings and a few packets of cigarettes procured me a Ugandan Army escort, who sat heavily armed in the back of the pickup truck. As I buckled my seat belt, the driver told me to unbuckle it in spite of the parlous condition of the road. “If you have to jump out,” he said, “you will have to jump out very fast.” That didn’t make me feel much safer, but only days after I left, two Ugandan aid workers were murdered in daylight on these pitted, dusty highways. We bounced along until we hit Pabbo, where a collection of huts and shanties huddle together as if for protection. In this place are packed about 59,000 of the estimated 1.5 million “internally displaced persons” (I.D.P.’s) who have sought protection from the savagery of the L.R.A. Here, I had the slightly more awkward task of interviewing the female survivors of Joseph Kony’s rolling Jonestown: a campaign of horror and superstition and indoctrination.

The women of Uganda are naturally modest and reserved, and it obviously involved an effort for them to tell their stories to a male European stranger. But they stood up as straight as spears and looked me right in the eye. Forced to carry heavy loads through the bush and viciously caned—up to 250 strokes—if they dropped anything. Given as gifts or prizes to men two or three times their age and compelled to bear children. Made to watch, and to join in, sessions of hideous punishment for those who tried to escape. Rose Atim, a young woman of bronze Nubian Nefertiti beauty, politely started her story by specifying her primary-school grade (grade five) at the time of her abduction. Her nostrils still flared with indignation when she spoke, whereas one of her fellow refugees, Jane Akello, a young lady with almost anthracite skin, was dull and dead-eyed and monotonous in her delivery. I was beginning to be able to distinguish symptoms. I felt a strong sense of indecency during these interviews, but this was mere squeamish self-indulgence on my part, since the women were anxious to relate the stories of their stolen and maimed childhoods. It was as if they had emerged from some harrowing voyage on the Underground Railroad.

Very few people, apart from his victims, have ever met or even seen the enslaving and child-stealing Joseph Kony, and the few pictures and films of him are amateur and indistinct. This very imprecision probably helps him to maintain his version of charisma. Here is what we know and (with the help of former captives and a Scotland Yard criminal profiler) what we speculate. Kony grew up in a Gulu Province village called Odek. He appointed himself the Lord’s anointed prophet for the Acholi people of northern Uganda in 1987, and by the mid-90s was receiving arms and cash from Sudan. He probably suffers from multiple-personality disorder, and he takes his dreams for prophecies. He goes into trances in which he speaks into a tape recorder and plays back the resulting words as commands. He has helped himself to about 50 captives as “wives,” claiming Old Testament authority for this (King Solomon had 700 spouses), often insisting—partly for biblical reasons and partly for the more banal reason of AIDS dread—that they be virgins. He used to anoint his followers with a holy oil mashed from indigenous shea-butter nuts, and now uses “holy water,” which he tells his little disciples will make them invulnerable to bullets. He has claimed to be able to turn stones into hand grenades, and many of his devotees say that they have seen him do it. He warns any child tempted to run away that the baptismal fluids are visible to him forever and thus they can always be found again. (He can also identify many of his “children” by the pattern of lashes that they earned while under his tender care.) Signs of his disapproval include the cutting off of lips, noses, and breasts in the villages he raids and, to deter informers, a padlock driven through the upper and lower lips. This is the sort of deranged gang—flagellant, hysterical, fanatical, lethal, under-age—that an unfortunate traveler might have encountered on the roads of Europe during the Thirty Years’ War or the last Crusade. “Yes,” says Michael Oruni, director of the Gulu Children of War Rehabilitation Center, who works on deprogramming these feral kids, “children who have known pain know how to inflict it.” We were sitting in a yard that contained, as well as some unreformed youngsters, four random babies crawling about in the dust. These had been found lying next to their panga-slashed mothers or else left behind when their mothers were marched away.

In October, the Lord of the Flies was hit, in his medieval redoubt, by a message from the 21st century. Joseph Kony and four other leaders of the L.R.A. were named in the first arrest warrants ever issued by the new International Criminal Court (I.C.C.). If that sounds like progress to you, then consider this. The whereabouts of Kony are already known: he openly uses a satellite phone from a base across the Ugandan border in southern Sudan. Like the United States, Sudan is not a signatory to the treaty that set up the I.C.C. And it has sponsored the L.R.A. because the Ugandan government—which is an I.C.C. signatory—has helped the people of southern Sudan fight against the theocracy in Khartoum, the same theocracy that has been sponsoring the genocide against Muslim black Africans in Darfur. Arrest warrants look pretty flimsy when set against ruthless cynicism of this depth and intensity. Kony has evidently made some kind of peace with his Sudanese Islamist patrons: in addition to his proclamation of the Ten Commandments, he once banned alcohol and announced that all pigs were unclean and that those who farm them, let alone eat them, were subject to death. So, unless he has undergone a conversion to Judaism in the wilderness, we can probably assume that he is repaying his murderous armorers and protectors.

I had a faintly nerve-racking drink with Francis Ongom, one of Kony’s ex-officers, who defected only recently and who would not agree to be questioned about his own past crimes. “Kony has refused Sudan’s request that he allow his soldiers to convert to Islam,” said this hardened-looking man as he imbibed a Red Bull through a straw, “but he has found Bible justifications for killing witches, for killing pigs because of the story of the Gadarene swine, and for killing people because god did the same with Noah’s flood and Sodom and Gomorrah.” Nice to know that he is immersed in the Good Book.

The terrifying thing about such violence and cruelty is that only a few dedicated practitioners are required in order to paralyze everyone else with fear. I had a long meeting with Betty Bigombe, one of those staunch and beautiful women—it is so often the women—who have helped restore Uganda’s pulse after decades of war and famine and tyranny and Ebola and West Nile fever and AIDS. She has been yelled at by Joseph Kony, humiliated by corrupt and hypocritical Sudanese “intermediaries,” dissed by the Ugandan political elite, and shamefully ignored by the international “human rights” community. She still believes that an amnesty for Kony’s unindicted commanders is possible, which will bring the L.R.A. children back from the bush, but she and thousands like her can always be outvoted by one brutalized schoolboy with a machete. We are being forced to watch yet another Darfur, in which the time supposedly set aside for negotiations is used by the killers and cleansers to complete their work.

The Acholi people of northern Uganda, who are the chief sufferers in all this, have to suffer everything twice. Their children are murdered or abducted and enslaved and then come back to murder and abduct and enslave even more children. Yet if the Ugandan Army were allowed to use extreme measures to destroy the L.R.A., the victims would be … Acholi children again. It must be nightmarish to know that any feral-child terrorist who is shot could be one of your own. “I and the public know,” wrote W. H. Auden in perhaps his greatest poem, “September 1, 1939”:

What all schoolchildren learn,Those to whom evil is doneDo evil in return.

And that’s what makes it so affecting and so upsetting to watch the “night commuter” children when they come scuttling and scampering into town as the sun departs from the sky. These schoolchildren have not yet had evil done to them, nor are they ready to inflict any evil. It’s not too late for them, in other words.

I sat in the deepening gloom for a while with one small boy, Jimmy Opioh, whose age was 14. He spoke with an appalling gravity and realism about his mother’s inability to pay school fees for himself and his brother both, about the fatigue and time-wasting of being constantly afraid and famished and continually on the run. In that absurd way that one does, I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. His unhesitating answer was that he wanted to be a politician—he had his party, the Forum for Democratic Change, all picked out as well. I shamefacedly arranged, along with the admirable John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group, to get him the meager sum that would pay for his schooling, tried not to notice the hundreds of other eyes that were hungrily turned toward me in the darkness, wondered what the hell the actual politicians, here or there, were doing about his plight, and managed to get out of the night encampment just before the equatorial rains hit and washed most of the tents and groundsheets away.

Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens’s latest book, Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, is part of the HarperCollins Eminent Lives series. His collection Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays was recently published by Nation Books.

Posted at 10:00 AM · Comments (0)

(These dispatches are from the fantastic Indian journalist, M.J. Akbar and are highly recommended.)

In the name of the warlord
M.J. Akbar

Mogadishu (Somalia), Jan. 10: On December 2, 2005, His Excellency Eng.
Hussein Mohammad Farah Aideed, deputy prime minister (politics and
security), minister of interior, Transitional Federal Government of the
Somali Republic, called, by appointment, on Indias high commissioner in
Nairobi, Mr Surendra Kumar. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, tie and
leather-strap sandals. The Eng. before his name was similar to Dr:
Engineers now like to be known that they are thus qualified. In Somalia the
preferred title of Hussein Aideed is General, a claim by hereditary right.
His father, General Mohammad Farah Aideed, became the worlds most famous
warlord, immortal in local lore and deified by Hollywood, when, in 1993, he
broke American will by downing two Black Hawk helicopters and killing 18
American Marines whose bodies were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu,
capital of Somalia. A reward of a million dollars was placed on his head,
and he was nicknamed, for some obscure reason, Yogi the Bear. The father did
not die in an American prison, but in his own city. His son was living in
America, and had trained to become a reserve Marine. When his father died,
he returned to Somalia to inherit the title and the loyalty of his fathers
militia, though not the respect that his father commanded. Neither father
nor son believed that the term “warlord” was appropriate. Aideed means “one
who rejects insults”.
He seemed sincere, said Mr Kumar. Hussein Aideed promised peace would
finally come to Somalia in about six months, thanks to the latest deal
brokered by mostly well-meaning (or simply fed-up) neighbours. He asked for
Indian assistance in demining southern Somalia, building roads, assisting in
healthcare and training the police.
Uniforms and guns for the police would not be unwelcome. Since there is
nothing called a police force in Somalia at the moment, perhaps Hussein
Aideed wanted arms and training for his own force. Mr Kumar was diplomatic
in his response; the visitors charm was not sufficient to reduce the hosts
scepticism. The news is that India is not in any hurry to arm and train
anyone, or rebuild roads, which are controlled by AK-47-wielding bands who
laugh as they collect their tax on any vehicle brave enough, or desperate
enough, to travel. The government of Hussein Aideed used to be based in
Nairobi until the Kenyans exhausted their patience and told them to go.
Somalia is not a country in search of a government. It is a government in
search of a country.
From the air, Mogadishu is entrancing, lean and stretched out against the
Indian Ocean, a city of two million in a country of seven. It begins in the
greenery of banana trees in the south, curves along the pristine beaches
untouched by the large waves that break much before the shore. The city ends
where the sand rises to cliff height in the north before spreading into the
arid and endless desert.
We flew into an airport in the north on Saturday in a Red Cross plane. The
Red Cross is now the only international organisation with a national
presence in Somalia, working to bring a touch of contemporary concern to a
land that has been driven back into a pre-industrial past by criminal greed
and mindless violence.
Drop The breeze cools the midday sunshine and throws sand into our eyes as
step off. The airport was built by Osman Hassan Ali Atto, warlord and
politician, to ferry khat, a local nerve-soother. When the international
airport closed down, its fortunes boomed. Wisely, Mr Atto decided to share
such fortunes with a fellow warlord. The commerce is limited but it is a
commercial hub of sorts.
In 1998, two Red Cross officials disembarked at this airport from a similar
plane and wandered off to answer a call of nature behind a nearby sand dune,
a reasonable need after a two-and-a-half hour flight. They were lucky. The
rest of the group was kidnapped by gunmen who appeared over a small hill,
and held hostage for 10 days. Somalia is now one of two regions where the
Red Cross uses armed guards, rather than the humanitarian credibility that
keeps it safe elsewhere. The only other place is Chechnya.
There are three structures at this airstrip, nearly indistinguishable from
the colour of the surrounding desert. The first, about 10 feet wide with a
sloping tin roof, is both the cafeteria and the bank: you can get a soft
drink while you change foreign exchange for Somali shillings. There was a
time when a dollar fetched 30,000 shillings, but the rate has stabilised at
15,000.
Warlords print the Somali currency. There is an advertisement of a cellphone
company on the second hut, which is possibly an office. The third structure
on an airstrip devoid of any human habitation for miles is a mosque, an
Ottoman crescent atop its minaret.
A small craft of Aviation Sans Frontiers is waiting to take off when we
land: the two NGO planes constitute the business of the day. A man near the
tarmac with a cap, a piece of cloth wrapped around both ears, a
football-referee whistle in one hand and a tasbeeh (prayer beads) in the
other is the air traffic clearance authority. Each item has a function.
The cap is for the sun. The cloth is for the sand. He keeps in touch with
the pilot with the whistle. He keeps in touch with God with the prayer
beads.
Our plane is refuelled while we wait. Three skinny, industrious men, two of
them in the trademark lungi, kick-roll dented drums from a Dyna 350 semi
towards the plane. A wheelbarrow, carrying a hose and a small engine,
accompanies them. The drums contain the fuel. Each is opened, with some
effort, by a metal strip that fits into a groove in the cap and twists the
cap around. On end of the hose goes into the drum, the other into the plane.
The engine is pulled into a gurgle. Oil begins to flow up.
They travel about a hundred metres or more ahead, obscured by a windscreen
of powdery desert dust: nine men on the back of a powerful Toyota, their
legs dangling over the side, each with an AK-47 of varying power, and enough
ammunition to start a small war. In the centre is a mounted heavy
machine-gun, manned by a burly brother in a bandana, with dont-fool-with-me
in his eyes and a pistol in his belt. In local parlance, they constitute a
“technical”. No self-respecting warlord travels with less than four
“technicals”. Since this one has been hired to protect us, I suppose this
“technical” is on the side of the angels, but loyalties are variable in a
cash-and-carry business.
We drive over sand and rock towards the worlds largest, or perhaps only,
ghost city. An occasional man sleeps under a desert shrub. Lonely men squat
on the edge of the track, waiting for nothing, their faces drained of all
expectation. Women, in rare ones or twos, are defined by the bright colours
of their dress, principally a dramatic red interspersed by a soothing
yellow. The rest is silence in a vast emptiness, broken only by the periodic
and minimal radio exchanges between our SUV and our “technical”.
Drop Suddenly, to our left, appears a huge scrapyard, a crazy museum of
twisted, shattered metal, carcasses of cars, machines, yesterdays homes,
anything that could be pillaged. It is owned by Bashir Raghe, a warlord. A
minute later we see a large ship sitting impassively offshore. This is the
scrap metal trade, a lucrative byproduct of a destruction-economy, and yet
another fortune for warlords to kill over. “Do you know where the scrap is
headed?” asks a friend whom I shall leave unnamed. I dont. To India.
To the right, in another minute, is what seems to be a mirage: a pink villa
from an Italian seashore. Who lives there? A businessman. What is his
business? He owns a bone factory.
A destruction-economy has more than one byproduct.
So far, I note, I have seen seven beneficiaries of this economy: the
warlords; Japanese vehicle manufacturers (all registrations in Dubai or
Sharjah); the Russian armaments industry; Belgian pistol-makers;
telecommunications equipment makers; shipowners and Indian scrap merchants.
Add an eighth, I am told. Coca-Cola. There is a flourishing Coca-Cola
factory in the south of the city. Life goes better with Coca-Cola,
particularly amidst death.
The first sight of Mogadishu is unreal. It is like seeing ruins from the
wrong end of time.
The jagged edges of Romes or Ammans amphitheatre symbolise the
achievements of 2,000 years ago. In Mogadishu, you see the ruins of a
flourishing 20th century city in an environment that has regressed 2,000
years. Only a few of the shell-shocked homes seem inhabited; strangely there
is utter silence even among the sparse patches of life.
I am given a guided tour of devastation: here what was once an enclave of
diplomatic homes or an embassy row during the era of the Soviet-supported
President Siad Barre, there nothing where once the Indian embassy existed.
Every hundred paces is dull repetition of what used to be. The true sadness
of Mogadishu is not what it has become, but what it once was, and what it
could have been.
The radio crackles. We cannot go to the Italian cathedral built when they
colonised this part of Somalia. The “technical” has reported that a
gunbattle is going on in front of the cathedral. And so, without any fuss,
we turn left a little before the gunbattle and drive into what was once the
pride of the city: the main street, full of banks, businesses, government
offices, cars, pedestrians, restaurants, bars and hotels. The street ends at
the embankment. A majestic hotel sweeps in a classic Italian curve to our
left, architecture that once hummed to the music of hundreds of rooms. It
has now been blasted apart, shattered by tank battles that destroyed this
street and city.
We get off at the embankment, which is broken at one place leaving a large
gap. One tank, unable to brake, crashed through at this point. The tank lies
on the rocks of the ocean shore, rusted, its turret tilted up, still
searching for an enemy of the same colour and blood. It is as distressing a
memory as the Fascist pillar nearby that has survived on the promenade from
the time of Mussolini.
We are at the Hammaruin. We change guard. Literally. Our gunmen are all
smiles as they wave goodbye; their replacements smile more broadly as they
welcome us. But they dont smile at one another.
This is the dividing line between the north and south of Mogadishu. Militia
from the north cannot enter the south, and naturally vice versa. In the
ocean, a handful of children chatter and skip over the rocks, the shallow
water being their only entertainment. On the street, from a comer, young men
with nothing to do but clutch triggers at their nerve-ends watch as we
switch vehicles and guards. A gun is part of the normal dress code of normal
young men.
Engineer Hussein Aideed, leader of the United Somali Congress/Somali
National Alliance, is yet to reach middle age. His mother, Asli Dhubat, his
fathers first wife, took him to the United States as a teenager. He joined
the US Marine Corps Reserves in 1987, became a corporal and told the
Associated Press in Somalia: “Once a Marine, always a Marine”. He has, he
believes, a wonderful idea for Somalias future.
There are no passports in Somalia; even Kenya does not recognise a warlord
passport any more. Hussein Aideed told ambassador Surendra Kumar that he was
negotiating with an Indian IT company to create e-passports. The cost was
estimated at $25 million. He had worked it out. An account would be opened
in a prestigious international bank; 80 per cent of the passport fee
deposited in this account would go to pay for the initial cost and 20 per
cent would be sent on to Somalia. This would eventually pay the $25 million.
It seems a great idea for California.
…………………………………………………………

Battle Wounds
By M.J. Akbar reports from Somalia

Mogadishu (Somalia), Jan. 11: Where do you find war? In a graveyard or a
hospital. There are no stories in a graveyard. A hospital, on the other
hand, has too many.
The director of Medina Hospital was in Mecca. It seemed the appropriate
place for Sheikh Don to be. He had left for Dubai en route to Haj by the
south city airport on a Russian Antonov: an extremely enterprising private
airline now ferries those who can afford the minimum fare of $250. There is
even an occasional flight to Paris. Where there is a will there is a way.
The south city airport, unlike its poor cousin in the north, is protected by
anti-aircraft guns.
Medina Hospital was built by the Germans for the local police and has proper
buildings, lovely trees in the spacious compounds, a high water reservoir
and space for 500 beds. About 65 always add a few for battle casualties
function now.
Our guide is Dr Ali the White, a jovial Somali who refuses to get depressed
by his difficulties. Instead, he breaks into song when he learns that I am
an Indian. Thankfully, it is not Mera joota hai Japani… but the rather
surprising Meri muhabbat jawan rahegi, sada rahi hai sada rahegi. May I add
that he got the tune right.
I am not brave enough to face anothers pain and the visit to the wards was
acutely discomforting. The relatives around each bed looked stoic as they
fanned their loved child, or simply waited. There are few old men or women
in hospital. That is the meaning of war.
The most important doctor is the chief surgeon, which tells the story. Dr
Hassan Osman is legitimately proud that one of the techniques he has devised
for immediate operations is now quoted in medical journals. The wounded come
from as far away at Diinsoor, which is 500 km away. That is reputation in a
war zone.
The police disappeared from Medina in 1991, when the remnants of government
crumbled. It was partially reopened in 1992 with the help of Medicins Sans
Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders). Patients were treated under trees.
There was no water or power. A hospital is perhaps the only thing that
brings clans together in wartime. The elders got together and contacted the
Red Cross in 1999, which stepped into desolation. In 2000 a generator
arrived, which purrs quietly in a large shed and turns Medina into an island
unrecognisable from its environs: a full drug store, surgical equipment,
doctors who are taken to one annual conference, nurses and, perhaps most
important, community involvement. It was the community that paid for the new
tiles in one ward and painted the buildings.
If Medina is a marvel then Keysaney is a miracle. This hospital in the north
was a prison outside the city, on the shore, making it, as someone wryly
observed, the “most secure hospital in the world”. When the Siad Barre
regime collapsed the prison emptied.
Compared to Medina, the facilities are rudimentary, the facilities minimal.
The strength of Dr Ahmed Muhammad Ahmed, a devout young man who prays five
times a day, and his colleagues is inspiring. This is the only hospital for
he north, and has treated more than 55,000 patients in over a decade. Add
more than 100,000 outpatients. That is the meaning of war. The Red Cross
turned this prison into a hospital in November 1991. There are four wards,
including one for VIPs, which means it has curtains. Dr Ahmed showed me with
shy pride the apparatus he had set up to recycle a bullet victims blood
back into the patient.
The one thing you cant get in a bloodstained country is blood.
The main hall at Keysaney doubles up as an English classroom for the staff
in the evenings, thanks to Dr Ahmed. The sentences chalked on the blackboard
are instructive in more ways than one. A: Do you think you can get me to
Victoria by half-past? B: We should be OK if the lights are with us. A:
Youve still got five minutes to spare. A: Pounds 6.40 please. The last
sentence was: I go to a private institute which is called Oxford.
You find both war and aspiration in Dr Ahmeds fly-blown hospital.
The unsentimental fortitude of doctors is remarkable. Dr Ahmed takes nothing
for granted, and everything in his stride. Dr C. Oscar Avogadri has just
joined the Red Cross team for Somalia. He is an Italian who spent some time
in Nepal but, much to his relief, did not understand cricket otherwise he
might have spent eight hours on a weekend watching the game instead of doing
something better. Pascal Hundt, head of the Somalia division, is Swiss,
imperturbable, practical and measures a day by how much he has got done,
whether stocking medical supplies or injecting capital into the rural
economy by financing 5,000 goats, or telling impoverished representatives of
a betrayed people that he cannot change the rules. He is already planning
for a famine that looms ahead.
The price of war is poverty. Somalis do not have the individual or
collective resources to fight a famine. The destitution is utter. Clothes
are old, slippers tattered, food basic. There are no shops, apart from the
occasional medical (what else?) store, or a utility outlet. There is no
state, and therefore no state service. Water and electricity must be
purchased from entrepreneurs; travel rights from the gun-toting militias.
The thin elite owns generators. For visitors with foreign exchange and a
hotel room there is excellent fruit juice and lobster from the Indian Ocean.
For the nomad, or the citizen, life hovers at subsistence level. Measure
incomes on a simple scale. The best paid are top-of-the-line gunmen, who get
a hundred dollars a month. Fifty dollars will fetch you a bullet-sprayer (a
bullet costs 30 cents). Most of the gunmen dont have shoes either.
There may be no money for food, but there is always enough money for war.
My friend remembers this fact with a hint of awe: the only time the price of
food collapsed was in 1991, when the Americans came, leading an
international effort to fight famine and starvation, restore governance and
leave behind a semblance of civil society. A 50-kg bag of rice that cost
$450 during famine was available for nine dollars. (The current price is
$50.)
So what was the mistake that the worlds most powerful country made in the
worlds weakest country?
Cultural insensitivity is too boring an accusation. A diplomat who was in
and out of Somalia at that time, and lives in Nairobi, has more relevant
analysis. The Americans were not interested in peacekeeping; they wanted
something that they called peace-building. They wanted an architecture that
would stabilise the country around a democratic polity. It was another
honourable intent, that came unglued when it hit warlords. Every warlord was
convinced that only he could become President of the Somali Republic. In a
bid to challenge the lords, American soldiers raided the home of the most
powerful, Aideed. That was the end of both peacekeeping and peace-building.
The American position on the country is: Somalia missed the bus a decade
ago; it will not be given another chance.
There are others ready to take a chance, or provide one. The last spot on
our tour of Medina Hospital was the newly-painted canteen for families of
patients, another stray sign of normalcy in an abnormal world. The doctors
left me alone: clearly no one senior ever ventured into a public canteen. If
they wanted coffee outside office they sat on benches in the shade of trees.
Even Dr Ali the White left me. I wandered in. The painting was fresh; the
walls sparkled with schoolchild paintings of the usual variety, animals,
scenery et al. To my right, in a panel, were two highrise buildings. On top
of one was a legend: New York. A similar masthead on the other was filled
with black. Two airplanes were exploding against the upper stories of both
buildings. In the space between the towers, in small lettering, was a
phrase. Since I can read Arabic, I knew what it said. Al Qaeda.
Perhaps someone reading this will get into a pother, and that painting, done
by someone doing community service for the hospital in a canteen the senior
staff did not enter, will be erased. That is not the point. The point is
what is happening to the community in Mogadishu, living on the deserted,
rubble-strewn streets around Medina.
I could not resist the question as I said goodbye to Dr Ali the White.
Surely that could not be his real name. No. His name was Dr Ali Muallim.
Then…? “Oh,” he said with a big grin, “white because I am so black. Just
reverse!” Just reverse. It seems a good metaphor for Mogadishu.
………………………………………………………….

Faith fills vacuum in land of clans
By M.J. Akbar reports from Somalia

Mogadishu, Jan. 13: Fear is rational. As long as one is anonymous death can
only be an accident. It is superfluous to fear an accident in a minefield:
the mine has nothing personal against you. It became different when my
friend said, while we were dining on the terrace of the Shamo Hotel and
Residence Plaza, a heavenly breeze blowing from the Indian Ocean, the stars
of the southern hemisphere dominated by Mars to my left and the Orion belt
to the right of my occasional gaze: “This is an oral society.”
We were at the hotel where a few months ago Kate Peyton of the BBC had been
shot dead.
So far, I felt far more protected by anonymity than the “technicals”. The
Red Cross does not advertise its travel plans. Unlike the United Nations
(when it is around, and it disappeared from Somalia in March 1995), which
believes in the power of the press release, the Red Cross appreciates the
virtues of silence. But by now word would have spread that a journalist was
in tow: this is an oral society. A big boy might want to know why he had not
been lined up for an interview. Press coverage is good for the self-esteem
of a warlord trying very hard to look like a peacelord.
Kate Peyton made a number of mistakes. The crucial one was that she walked
out of the single entrance-exit, across the compound and out of the gate to
get into a car that was meant to take her to the Sahafi Hotel (Journalists
Hotel, so named in honour of the media flock that constituted its last crowd
during the battles of 1993). Unlucky. A single shot, which is rarely fatal,
got her. She was rushed to Medina Hospital, but her moment had come.
Our technicals, as well as our Land Cruiser, is inside the compound.
Everyone sleeps behind walls. Zakaria, the young waiter, speaks excellent
English. The only other guest is a Chinese resident who is often on his
cellphone: mobile phones are the most successful business in Somalia and any
international call costs only 30 cents since there are no licence fees and
very little advertising. A young and fair Arab is with him, perhaps his
partner. In an adjoining room a radio sparkles to life, and a tall waiter
begins to dance with abandon, his tray twirling on his fingertips. From the
roof, Mogadishu is peaceful, quiet and patchily lit. There are no
mosquitoes. The ocean breeze has driven them away. The moon is seven nights
old, and stars unaffected by the gauze of industrial pollution. I switch on
television in my room after dinner, and am pleasantly surprised by B4Music.
And so to bed listening to Rabbi in Mogadishu, and up with Dev Anand and
Hare Rama Hare Krishna and Ishq tera garam masala. Dawn always, and
illogically, seems so much safer than night.
Ten warlords are the principal arbiters of Mogadishu, but they do not
control the only guns on the street. The nippiest guns now belong to the
Sharia courts, possibly because they are the youngest, perhaps because they
are motivated by more than money.
The south of the city has twice the life of the north, which means what it
means. The old fish market is still dead. The office buildings are still
stark, wounded and empty. A donkey cart stands at the entrance of a lane,
selling water. A battered Fiat, looking as old as Mussolini, chugs by: it is
the first personal civilian vehicle I see and has no number plates. A
choking and lonely jeep is sign of some public transport. Then appears the
first traffic jam: a truck and two donkey carts struggling to negotiate the
rubble in front of a vegetable market just after the mosque.
There is a loudspeaker on the minaret of the Shaikh al-Sufi mosque. As the
name suggests, Islam was spread by Sufi mendicants and dervishes in Somalia.
There is no hard line on Somali sand. Women, their heads covered in bright
cloth, are a normal part of public life, and show as little hesitation as
men when they spread a cardboard sheet or cloth and offer namaz at the call
of the muezzin. A sign outside the mosque shows the way to a madrasa, the
largest in the city. A little later we are overtaken by a Toyota with three
young men at the back. They race ahead, oblivious of the rubble or carts or
even a technical like ours. “Sharia police,” explains my friend.
Their sense of power is evident in their speed, and the slight adolescent
jeer in their eyes. They are too young to care. Older gunmen in technicals,
with bullet belts slung across the shoulder coursing down expanding bellies,
take care to travel in large bands. They have something to care about: their
salaried lives. Fifty dollars a month gets you a technical or a fake
passport, probably Ugandan.
Col. Abdullahi Yusuf, president of the Transitional Federal Government (TFG)
since October 14, 2004, has often said that he is going to destroy “Islamic
terrorists” in Somalia. Col. Yusuf was part of the problem for so long that
he has, by the consensus of neighbours and grudging acceptance of nominated
members of Parliament, been made part of the solution in the hope that there
will be one. But it took him five months to enter Somalia after he became
President, and then relocate the capital to Jowhar. His Prime Minister, Ali
Muhammad Gedi, was greeted with bomb blasts that almost killed him when he
tried to address a public rally in Mogadishu last May. He returned to
Nairobi a trifle hastily.
Sheikh Hassan Dahir Aweys henna-streaked beard is familiar to anyone in
Mogadishu, as are his calm, softly-delivered sermons. He lives near his
mosque and was the most prominent leader of the Ittehad Islamiya. Ever since
Washington put this organisation on its terror list after 9/11, everyone
prefers to be known as a former leader. His security includes a truck with
an anti-aircraft gun but I doubt if that would be sufficient protection if
the CIA decided to pick him up. America has no official presence in Somalia,
but an anti-terrorist task force of 2,000 is based in Djibouti, a Somali
region in the north that was given separate independence because it was
under French rule. (A parallel event in India would have made Pondicherry a
separate nation.) Sheikh Aweys makes no effort to hide his conviction that
Somalia can only be saved by a conversion into an Islamic state, that
America has launched a war against Muslims all over the world, and that the
CIA has Somali warlords on its payroll who pass on information as well
kidnap any suspect on Americas wanted list. It is popular belief that CIA
agents regularly visit their employees in Mogadishu, arriving by secret
aircraft. Sheikh Aweys believes that Colonel Yusuf makes the noises he does
in order to get Western support for his notional government.
The Islamic movement in Somalia predates the current troubles, said Dr Ahmed
Mohammad Hassan, president of the Somali Red Crescent Society and old enough
to have seen it all. We met in Nairobi, where he lives. The clergy was the
first, he pointed out, to protest against the “scientific socialism” of the
pro-Soviet Siad Barre, in January 1975. Barre publicly executed 11 respected
clerics in revenge.
The clans, principally an alliance between Ali Mahdi and Mohammad Aideed
(who, incidentally, served as ambassador to New Delhi for five years), drove
out Barre in January 1991 and then spent the next year killing each other in
thousands in the battle of succession. That was when famine devastated
hundreds of thousands of Somalis who wanted a government rather than a civil
war.
Who fills the gaps left by a withered state?
The Muslim Brotherhood came to a famished people in 1991 through effective
relief work across the length of a long country in places like Merca,
Kismayo, Dobley, Lugh, Berbera and of course Mogadishu. In June 1992 they,
along with Ittehad Islamiya, instigated an insurgency in Puntland,
eventually defeated by the Yusuf clan. In mid-1994, a council for the
implementation of Sharia law was created with Sheikh Sharif Muhidin as its
chairman, in Mogadishu North. It was the first experience of law in a
country that had become lawless and helpless, and established a positive
image of the clergy.
A clans power over people emerges from its role as a provider of essential
necessities of life: security (in times of crisis, even food security),
kinship, justice, and an economic net without too many holes. What happens
when the credibility of such a powerful, traditional institution is savaged?
Over the last fifteen years, this essential fact of Somali society has
indulged in spectacular self-destruction. The mosque is perhaps the only
institution that provides a community net, education, justice that is
implemented and a growing revenue system that can create a safety net. The
mosque was always the sole source of salvation in the afterlife for a deeply
religious people. It has now become the predominant source of salvation in
this life as well.
The future of both the clans and the mosque began when Siad Barre fled in
January 1991. Only one of the two will find the horizon.
…………………………………………………………

Byline for January 15, 2006
A Somalia Notebook
M.J. Akbar

Drop

How many guns make a warlord? 25 technicals, so about 250 armed men with
Russian AK-47s and Belgian pistols make you a lord, and you can go up the
hierarchy to viscount or marquis or earl or proper baron if you include a
couple of anti-aircraft guns and artillery pieces. But there are no kings in
Somalia. A top of the line AK-47 costs between 400 and 500 dollars; many of
the weapons are below the line. I picked up one, while we were lunching off
chunks of dry roast camel in a dhaba, lent to me by a young man in a shy
smile and a lungi. It was heavy, a little less than ten kilograms. I gave it
back after making appropriate noises, carefully avoiding even passing
contact with the trigger. At a rough glance, my benefactor had about a
million and a half Somali shillings worth of ammunition in his belts: a
dollar fetches three bullets.

Drop

Three great symbols of modern civilisation are available in Somalia: the
AK-47, Coca Cola and the mobile phone. Three mobile phone companies,
Nationlink, TelecomSomalia and Hormut, ensure proper competition. An
international call costs only 30 American cents. They also double up as
money-transfer operations and one of them (defunct after landing up in the
suspect category) sent Washington into paroxysms after 9/11 with a word that
previously did not exist in a western dictionary but was perfectly
understood in much of Asia, hawala. Americans were in Somalia a decade
before 9/11 but never picked up this word. Maybe that is why they never
stayed. You have to understand Somalia to stay in Somalia.

Drop

War is a great boon to technology. A cruise liner defended itself against
heavily armed Somali pirate boats last year with the LRAD, Long Range
Acoustic Device. It emits a sound from a long range that the human ear
cannot tolerate and has proved a brilliant answer to pirate guns. So as long
as pirates are human they can be driven. I am told that the device is being
used in Iraq to disperse unwanted crowds. For more details on LRAD check
Google. The Almighty, Omnipotent Google knows all.

Drop

Their present having been stolen, Somalis take comfort in the past. Ancient
Egyptians imported cinnamon, frankincense, tortoise shells and “slaves of a
superior sort” from Somalia and conceded that Somali civilisation matched
their own. If the Magi were kings from Africa, then it is at least plausible
that the one carrying frankincense for the infant Jesus came from Somalia.
Ibn Batuta, the 13th century Tunisian traveller who did not waste time on
inconsequential places, found Maqdashaw a “town of enormous size” where “a
single person ? eats as much as the whole company of us would eat ? and they
are corpulent in the extreme”. The only parallel I can think of is a
Kashmiri enjoying his wazwan in front of us mere mortals, but of course the
Kashmiri is not corpulent. The waters of Chashm e Shahi keep him slim.

Drop

How many clans make a nation? The Arabs found 39 when Mogadishu became one
of their principal trading colonies in the tenth century. This was the
breakdown: Mukri (12), Djidati (12), Akati (6), Ismaili (6) and Afifi (3).
The Mukri, who also had a dynastic ulema, were in the ascendant when Ibn
Batuta visited the port. The nation state is a recent idea. Nomadic Somalis
lived across a far wider region than their present borders, including
Ethiopia and Kenya. European colonisation came only towards the end of the
19th century. The British came to the north because, as they put it, they
wanted guaranteed meat supplies for their garrison in Aden. The Italians
wanted the fruit groves of the south. The French were tempted, typically, by
temptation and occupied Djibouti. The clans did not wait to be conquered.
They took the easy way out and sold their rights, most often for less than a
hundred dollars. The treaties were remarkable for their three-point
simplicity. Point 1: All rights are yours. Point 2: I get 70 or 100 dollars.
Point 3: You have the last word in all disputes. Neighbours could hardly
resist exploiting such weakness. In 1891 Emperor Menelik II, founder of
modern Ethiopia, wrote to European powers: “Ethiopia has been for 14
centuries a Christian island in a sea of pagans. If Powers at a distance
come forward to partition Africa between them, I do not intend to remain an
indifferent spectator.” He did not. He sent word to Amir Abdullahi, ruler of
the historic city of Harar and pivotal to Muslim east Africa, to accept his
suzerainty. The Amir, heir to a dynasty of 72 generations, sent presents and
a helpful suggestion, that Menelik should accept Islam. Menelik promised to
conquer Harar and turn the principal mosque into a church. The Medihane Alam
Church, in front of the Galma Amir Abdullahi, or the old palace, is evidence
that Menelik kept his word.

Drop

The mosque was converted but not the people. While Ethiopia proudly and
correctly claimed to have become Christian at the time of Constantinople,
lands like Kenya changed only during the wave of missionary activity that
accompanies colonisation in the 19th century. As Jomo Kenyatta, first
President of independent Kenya, famously said, “When the missionaries came
to Africa, they had the Bible in their hands and we had the lands? We closed
our eyes to pray and when we opened them, we had the Bible in our hands and
they had the lands?”

Drop

Harar has the feel of a city that has travelled a long way through history
but now has nowhere left to go.
UNESCO has recognised Harar, about 450 kilometres east of Addis Ababa
through land rich in the local addiction, chat (or khat), a mildly
intoxicating but stimulating leaf that is chewed slowly, as a heritage city.
There is some excitement among the educated elite that UNESCO may do more
for Harar than all the rulers since the defeat of Amir Abdullahi at the
battle of Chelenko in 1887. There is hope but not too much trust. As a
sociologist who did his post-graduate studies at the Tata Institute of
Social Sciences in Mumbai some twenty years ago, told me over mercato in the
lovely café in the courtyard of the city, “We have been living too long on a
diet of pledges.”
Little was done for the people, who are of Somali origin, but bitter wars
were fought over them. In the Seventies, Siad Barre of Somalia invaded
Ethiopia to take back the Ogaden region, where Harar is. Talk that Ogaden
possessed huge reserves of oil and gas might have encouraged the invasion.
Siad Barre’s tanks penetrated deep into the desert before they were defeated
by Cuban soldiers who acted as mercenaries of the Soviet Union (Ethiopia had
a Marxist-Leninist regime then, a fact that merely Socialist Siad Barre
forgot). Hararis remember the Cubans as a wild lot, shooting donkeys
playfully even after being told how valuable these pack animals were. A few
Cuban faces in a traditional and conservative society are more evidence that
“liberators” make their own rules.
The elders, gradually losing their eminence as a new anger slowly seeps
through the young, are resigned to stagnation, and the eyes flicker with old
zeal only when they dream that Menelik’s church will once again become a
mosque in their lifetime. The people, as elsewhere in Ethiopia, can be
strikingly good-looking. The girls wear embroidered head scarves or, rarely,
the hijab with jeans. The boys are in the ubiquitous football T-shirt. One
bearded young man had EBAMA, San Jose, California, Badr 2004 written on his
T-shirt. It stood for Ethiopian Bay Area Muslim Association. Had he lived in
America, I asked. No, he said. Few leave Harar. Those who go send T-shirts
along with cheques, but do not return.

Drop

The mansion in which the Lion of Judah, Haile Selassie, was born is in the
old city, called Jubal, and was built by an Indian. You walk down a narrow
stone alley full of shops and tailors with Singer sewing machines. Indians,
particularly Bohras from Mumbai, dominated commerce during Muslim rule in
Harar. Haile Selassie was born here because his father, Menelik’s brother,
was made governor after the defeat of Amir Abdullahi. UNESCO has allocated
funds for the restoration of the mansion, but ten families have made it
their home and will not move. The most interesting occupant is a healer.
He sits, erect, on a mattress at the centre of one end of a spacious drawing
room on the ground floor. His fame is recorded for posterity in a notebook
where his literate patients describe their miraculous recovery, and attach
passport-size photographs to add a face to their identity. He is 52 and
learnt his skills from his father, whose picture is framed on the high wall
behind him, above a carpet with a drawing of the holy mosque at Kaaba, and a
much-extended string of prayer beads which he uses for dhikr, a Sufi form of
devotion, at night. A woman enters, kisses his extended hand twice while he
continues talking to us, and joins another with a child in a corner. There
is a telephone on a table, and two small tape-players, one broken. The
telephone rings once during our visit, and is picked by an aide lounging on
the side who, we realise later, also speaks English. A notice board
indicates that the healer cures all the tough diseases, including
gynaecological problems, but, alas, back pain is not on the list. He assures
me that he can repair nerves that wrack your back as well, and there has
been a cancer patient or two who has gone home happy. He explains that he
uses herbs and plants, and not shaman-style magic. Perhaps he tells
villagers, who crowd around him in the mornings since they have to return by
nightfall, something different; perhaps he is equally candid with them. He
asks about herbal medicines in India and I include Tibet’s fame in my
response.
The notice outside affirms that the healer does not accept fees, but
donations for the cause are not unwelcome. I do not use his expertise, but
my donation is not unwelcome either.

Posted at 3:18 PM · Comments (0)

SUNDAY, JANUARY 8, 2006 - Copyright Bloomberg and The International Herald Tribune

Roger Ebert put it well: “I suspect that the more you know about Japan and movies, the less you will enjoy ‘Memoirs of a Geisha.”’ So began the Chicago Sun Times critic’s review of a film that has created more hard feelings than buzz in Asia.

It’s not the reception that the U.S. director Rob Marshall had anticipated; he thought completing the first big-budget Hollywood production with an all-Asian cast would endear him to Asian audiences.

Yet Japanese have been put off by the casting of Chinese in main roles and have made claims of cultural insensitivity. Chinese are angered that Zhang Ziyi and Gong Li appear in a film that romanticizes Japan during World War II - and that Zhang did a love scene with a Japanese man. Americans, meanwhile, seem indifferent, if tepid box-office receipts are any guide.

The dustup offers insights for Asian governments trying to get along, corporate executives struggling to compete and investors grappling to make sense of it all.

The film at the center of this controversy isn’t a very good one. A highly simplified adaptation of Arthur Golden’s 1997 novel, it is the tale of a poor fisherman’s daughter who is sold into quasi-slavery in Kyoto in 1929 and who, against all odds, eventually becomes the city’s reigning geisha.

The subtleties of Golden’s book, its almost Flaubertian attention to detail and historical context, are lost in the film. It is less about Japan or the stillness, grace and traditions of one of its most rarefied cultural icons, than about exotically dressed women hissing and backstabbing to become Kyoto’s premier geisha and win the men they love.

At first glance, the film seems like a Jane Austen tale with some Charles Dickens tossed in. The end product plays more like “Desperate Housewives” in kimonos.

Even so, “Memoirs of a Geisha” has become an unlikely flash point in relations between China and Japan.

Asia’s economic boom is fraught with risks including power struggles, high energy prices, terrorism, pollution and economic competition from the West. Sadly, the leaders of Japan and China can’t even get in a room to talk without trading recriminations over World War II. Just like Marshall, the film director, these leaders are focusing on theatrics rather than the real story.

Japanese qualms with “Memoirs of a Geisha” miss a bigger point. Yes, a film with so specific a setting should star Japanese. While many seethe that major roles went to Zhang, Gong and the Malaysian actress Michelle Yeoh, Marshall also has a point. His casting decisions reflect a dearth of internationally known Japanese actors who can speak English.

After all, Hollywood would not have made the film unless it catered to the lucrative U.S. market, which frowns on subtitles. One reason there are few globally known Japanese actors is that Japan’s large domestic market creates few incentives for film studios and actors to search for audiences or projects abroad.

There is a lesson here for Japan Inc. Japanese are ravenous consumers and, until now, a market of 127 million people seemed big enough. As sales soared in the heady 1980s and stayed reasonably brisk during the recession-plagued 1990s, companies were slow to look abroad.

Take the cellphone industry, an area in which gadget-crazy Japan is hard to beat. Yet you can’t use the vast majority of the phones or their functionality overseas. That insularity is a problem as Japan’s population rapidly ages and competition escalates from South Korea and other countries. The real story behind the “Memoirs of a Geisha” ruckus is that corporate Japan needs to think more globally.

Japan’s economy is recovering, as the 40 percent rally in the Nikkei 225 stock average last year suggests. Yet the nation will have to look to new markets to ensure its prosperity.

Chinese critics are missing the point, too. That actresses from China are in such demand should be reason to celebrate the nation’s prominence in culture, as well as economics. Instead, nationalism is spoiling this moment in the spotlight.

When it comes to Asia’s past, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Japan needs to go further to apologize for its atrocities and its prime minister should stop visiting a Tokyo shrine that honors some convicted war criminals among the war dead.

China is not blameless, either, as its government foments a volatile nationalism that increasingly unnerves neighbors in Asia.

Finally, there is a lesson here for investors. While it may come as a surprise to some people, Chinese, Japanese and South Koreans don’t tend to think that they look alike. Hollywood’s “who would know the difference” mindset in casting films is comparable to how some investors view Asia. Some see it as an undifferentiated collection of nations that are hard to get their arms around.

Asian economies are incredibly diverse. Those who think that China’s rise is a repeat of Japan’s do so at their own peril. The same is true of India’s development versus China’s.

Foreign filmmakers can take artistic license with their casting decisions. They are free to make assumptions about Asians’ appearances. Such oversimplification is not an option for those looking to make money in the region. Respecting the vast differences that exist here may help investors find the Hollywood ending they seek.

Posted at 3:08 PM · Comments (0)

Jan 12th 2006

Copyright The Economist
Yao Wenyuan, the last of the Gang of Four, died on December 23rd, aged 74

FROM the age of 15 Yao Wenyuan kept a diary, in preparation for writing his memoirs later. He knew his life might be important. At his trial in 1980, one particular entry was read out to him: “Why can’t we shoot a few counter-revolutionary elements? After all, dictatorship is not like embroidering flowers.”

Of the awful quartet who unleashed and directed Mao Zedong’s bloody Cultural Revolution, Mr Yao was the only one who had grand literary pretensions. Jiang Qing, Mao’s fourth wife, wrote operas; Zhang Chunqiao was a political thinker; Wang Hongwen, an organising type, had been an official in a textile mill. Yet credit for China’s descent into hell always went to Mr Yao and what was to become his most famous piece of writing: “On the New Historical Beijing Opera ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ ”.
Advertisement

The title hardly sang; and as seminal works go, this one, published in November 1965, was especially obscure. It was not even Mr Yao’s idea; Madame Mao and Zhang had put him up to it. They knew that Chairman Mao was fascinated by the story of Hai Rui, a Ming dynasty official who had criticised the emperor to his face and had been sacked. A popular play about him, “Hai Rui Dismissed from Office” had been playing at the Beijing Opera for four years. But it was dangerously counter-revolutionary. Looked at through pure Maoist glasses, the emperor was Mao and Hai Rui was his defence minister, Peng Dehuai, who had been sacked in 1959 for openly criticising the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s disastrous effort to collectivise industry and agriculture. Fearlessly, Hai Rui spoke up for the peasants:
You pay lip service to the principle
that the people are the roots of the state.
But officials still oppress the masses
while pretending to be virtuous men.
They act wildly as tigers
and deceive the emperor.
If your conscience bothers you
you know no peace by day or night.

If a counter-blast were needed to such subversive cant, Mr Yao’s credentials were perfect. His base was Shanghai, a city that was friendlier to Mao in the early 1960s than Beijing was. He was the son of a left-wing writer from Zhejiang province, a leading light in Proletarian Writers for Purity and the editor of Liberation Daily, Shanghai’s main newspaper. His history was solid orthodoxy. In the mid-1950s, when other angry young writers were beginning to edge away from China’s communist revolution, Mr Yao had enthusiastically joined a state-run campaign to purge a famous writer, Hu Feng, from the writers’ league for “subjectivism” and “self-reflection”—in other words, for thinking that idealistic individuals, as well as parties, could make revolutions. When more than 100 writers were brought down with Hu, many to be isolated in remote corners of China, Mr Yao exulted.

He fancied himself as Balzac to Mao’s Napoleon, wielding his “golden” pen to smite the bourgeois individualists and “right deviationists” who might get in the chairman’s way. When the Hai Rui business came up, he was happy to be useful. He took himself away to a sanatorium, pretending to be ill, in order to write his 10,000 words of diatribe against the play—words so tedious that the Beijing People’s Daily published them as “Academic Research”. There were said to be ten drafts, three of which Mao wrote himself. The central thrust, however, was Mr Yao’s: “If we do not clean up [this poison], it will harm the people’s cause.”

It was nothing but a placeman’s rant, but it unleashed the whirlwind. More articles followed, attacking public figures in the name of party purity. A Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution took shape, especially on university campuses, where students were recruited for a new “shock force”, the Red Guards. From January 1967 factories, banks and power plants were seized nationwide, while the Red Guards and the army sought out, terrorised or simply killed all deviants from orthodoxy.

What role Mr Yao played in all this is difficult to say. He was in charge of propaganda: so the hate-filled articles, the staged “free debates”, the “big-character” posters and banners and cartoons, may have had some origin with him. So may the use of Mao’s quotations, handily bound in a little red book. But it seemed to some that Mr Yao was a puppet, not a master; that he went along happily, even sadistically, for the ride, and was swept up in the horror.

On Mao’s death, in 1976, the Gang of Four’s already waning primacy ended with arrest and disgrace. At his trial, Mr Yao was mostly silent, managing only to stutter that the words in his diary did not represent his views. He received the lightest sentence of the four, 20 years in Qincheng prison.

There he was glimpsed occasionally, a small, very bent figure in an all-grey Mao suit. He still kept his diary, and was said to be writing a book. So much self-reflection he could manage. China’s rulers could not, and cannot. They had no interest in what he might write or say; after his release they allowed no one to speak to him, and even his death, announced two weeks late, was an embarrassment. China still has no way of coping with the trauma that Mr Yao’s article helped unleash: one which Mao, a national hero, inspired, and in which millions joined.

Posted at 6:10 PM · Comments (0)

Jan 12th 2006
Copyright The Economist

An ancient map that strongly suggests Chinese seamen were first round the world

THE brave seamen whose great voyages of exploration opened up the world are iconic figures in European history. Columbus found the New World in 1492; Dias discovered the Cape of Good Hope in 1488; and Magellan set off to circumnavigate the world in 1519. However, there is one difficulty with this confident assertion of European mastery: it may not be true.

It seems more likely that the world and all its continents were discovered by a Chinese admiral named Zheng He, whose fleets roamed the oceans between 1405 and 1435. His exploits, which are well documented in Chinese historical records, were written about in a book which appeared in China around 1418 called “The Marvellous Visions of the Star Raft”.

Next week, in Beijing and London, fresh and dramatic evidence is to be revealed to bolster Zheng He’s case. It is a copy, made in 1763, of a map, dated 1418, which contains notes that substantially match the descriptions in the book. “It will revolutionise our thinking about 15th-century world history,” says Gunnar Thompson, a student of ancient maps and early explorers.
Advertisement

The map (shown above) will be unveiled in Beijing on January 16th and at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich a day later. Six Chinese characters in the upper right-hand corner of the map say this is a “general chart of the integrated world”. In the lower left-hand corner is a note that says the chart was drawn by Mo Yi Tong, imitating a world chart made in 1418 which showed the barbarians paying tribute to the Ming emperor, Zhu Di. The copyist distinguishes what he took from the original from what he added himself.

The map was bought for about $500 from a small Shanghai dealer in 2001 by Liu Gang, one of the most eminent commercial lawyers in China, who collects maps and paintings. Mr Liu says he knew it was significant, but thought it might be a modern fake. He showed his acquisition to five experienced collectors, who agreed that the traces of vermin on the bamboo paper it is written on, and the de-pigmentation of ink and colours, indicated that the map was more than 100 years old.

Mr Liu was unsure of its meaning, and asked specialists in ancient Chinese history for their advice, but none, he says, was forthcoming. Then, last autumn, he read “1421: The Year China Discovered the World”, a book written in 2003 by Gavin Menzies, in which the author makes the controversial claim that Zheng He circumnavigated the world, discovering America on the way. Mr Menzies, who is a former submariner in the Royal Navy and a merchant banker, is an amateur historian and his theory met with little approval from professionals. But it struck a chord: his book became a bestseller and his 1421 website is very popular. In any event, his arguments convinced Mr Liu that his map was a relic of Zheng He’s earlier voyages.

The detail on the copy of the map is remarkable. The outlines of Africa, Europe and the Americas are instantly recognisable. It shows the Nile with two sources. The north-west passage appears to be free of ice. But the inaccuracies, also, are glaring. California is shown as an island; the British Isles do not appear at all. The distance from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean is ten times greater than it ought to be. Australia is in the wrong place (though cartographers no longer doubt that Australia and New Zealand were discovered by Chinese seamen centuries before Captain Cook arrived on the scene).

The commentary on the map, which seems to have been drawn from the original, is written in clear Chinese characters which can still be easily read. Of the west coast of America, the map says: “The skin of the race in this area is black-red, and feathers are wrapped around their heads and waists.” Of the Australians, it reports: “The skin of the aborigine is also black. All of them are naked and wearing bone articles around their waists.”

But this remarkable precision, rather than the errors, is what critics of the Menzies theory are likely to use to question the authenticity of the 1418 map. Mr Menzies and his followers are naturally extremely keen to establish that the 1763 copy is not a forgery and that it faithfully represents the 1418 original. This would lend weighty support to their thesis: that China had indeed discovered America by (if not actually in) 1421. Mass spectrography analysis to date the copied map is under way at Waikato University in New Zealand, and the results will be announced in February. But even if affirmative, this analysis is of limited importance since it can do no more than date the copyist’s paper and inks.

Five academic experts on ancient charts note that the 1418 map puts together information that was available piecemeal in China from earlier nautical maps, going back to the 13th century and Kublai Khan, who was no mean explorer himself. They believe it is authentic.

The map makes good estimates of the latitude and longitude of much of the world, and recognises that the earth is round. “The Chinese were almost certainly aware of longitude before Zheng He set sail,” says Robert Cribbs of California State University. They certainly assumed the world was round. “The format of the map is totally consistent with the level of knowledge that we should expect of royal Chinese geographers following the voyages of Zheng He,” says Mr Thompson.

Moreover, some of the errors in the 1418 map soon turned up in European maps, the most striking being California drawn as an island. The Portuguese are aware of a world map drawn before 1420 by a cartographer named Albertin di Virga, which showed Africa and the Americas. Since no Portuguese seamen had yet discovered those places, the most obvious source for the information seems to be European copies of Chinese maps.

But this is certainly not a unanimous view among the experts, with many of the fiercest critics in China itself. Wang Tai-Peng, a scholarly journalist in Vancouver who does not doubt that the Chinese explored the world early in the 15th century (he has written about a visit by Chinese ambassadors to Florence in 1433), doubts whether Zheng He’s ships landed in North America. Mr Wang also claims that Zheng He’s navigation maps were drawn in a totally different Chinese map-making tradition. “Until the 1418 map is scientifically authenticated, we still have to take it with a grain of salt,” he says.

Most forgeries are driven by a commercial imperative, especially when the market for ancient maps is booming, as it is now. The Library of Congress recently paid $10m for a copy of a 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemuller, a German cartographer. But Mr Liu says he is not a seller: “The map is part of my life,” he claims.

The consequences of the discovery of this map could be considerable. If it does indeed prove to be the first map of the world, “the history of New World discovery will have to be rewritten,” claims Mr Menzies. How much does this matter? Showing that the world was first explored by Chinese rather than European seamen would be a major piece of historical revisionism. But there is more to history than that. It is no less interesting that the Chinese, having discovered the extent of the world, did not exploit it, politically or commercially. After all, Columbus’s discovery of America led to exploitation and then development by Europeans which, 500 years later, made the United States more powerful than China had ever been.

Posted at 5:47 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright World Hum

Many Travel Stories Begin as an Attempt to Impress Pretty Women

A. Once you have walked across the small Pyrenean nation of Andorra, you should proceed to Barcelona. Here, you will look for a nightclub called L’Arquer. According to your guidebook, L’Arquer contains a fully functioning archery range, and you are intrigued by the idea that one can shoot bows and arrows inside a nightclub. As with Andorra, you are attracted by L’Arquer because you find it charming that such a place exists.

B. In actuality, of course, L’Arquer will not likely live up to your expectations. The archery range, for example, will probably be in a separate, cordoned-off area, and your fantasies of chugging beers while shooting arrows over crowds of drunken revelers will not come true. For this reason, you will not look very hard for L’Arquer, and you will end up settling for a pub called Shanghai. This way, L’Arquer will remain perfect in your imagination—unlike Andorra, the memory of which has now been tainted with jagged brown ridges, chintzy souvenirs and drunken Scotsmen.

C. In the Shanghai pub, you will meet a Canadian woman named Lisa, who has come to Spain for two weeks of vacation. Eventually, she will ask you what you’re here for, and you will tell her that you just walked across Andorra. Lisa isn’t exactly sure what Andorra is, so the implicit gag (that Andorra is in fact a very small country, quite easy to walk across) is lost on her. Instead, she asks a neutral question: “How was it?” You reply that it was quite interesting.

D. After this, there will be a pause, which implies that Lisa wants you to elaborate. This is when the real Andorra story begins. What immediately follows the pause will not be the final and definitive story, but it will set the tone for how you’ll remember Andorra in the future. This is where you begin to pick and choose, to play games with reality, to separate the meaningful from the mundane and hold it up for display. Later, when you are writing the story down, you will add details of history and culture—but for now you just want to hold Lisa’s attention, because she has clear blue eyes and a captivating smile.

E. Skipping over the actual details of the hike, you tell Lisa about the Festa Major celebration in Andorra la Vella. Here, a group of mentally handicapped Andorrans singled you out from the crowd and cheerfully bullied you into joining them in a Catalan dance called the sardana. You choose to reveal Andorra through this story because it’s funny and self-deprecating, and you want to single yourself out to Lisa as a charmed person who is instinctively adored by retards.

F. The story goes fairly well upon first telling, save the fact that: (a) Lisa seems faintly offended when you use the word “retards”; and (b) You flub the phrasing near the end of the story, inadvertently implying (to Lisa’s ears) that you were insensitive to the mentally handicapped Andorrans while you were dancing with them. You make a mental note to sharpen the clarity of your phrasing, since you were not, in fact, acting insensitive when it actually happened.

imageII. Historical Details Make it Look Like You Know What You’re Talking About

A. After you have left Spain and returned to your home, you will decide you need to know more facts about Andorra before you properly begin to compose your story. Reference books and websites tell you that Andorra has 67,000 residents, only 33 percent of whom are Andorran citizens. Andorra has an area of 180 square miles. This is half the size of New York City, but two-and-a-half times larger than Washington, DC. Since you don’t want to make your hike sound too easy, you will use the Washington comparison when composing your Andorra story.

B. You’ll try to spruce up basic facts by clumping them together in a telling manner. Start by saying that Andorra has no airports, no trains, and no independent universities. Mention that Andorra’s small army has not fought a war for 700 years, and that most of its ammunition consists of blank bullets used for public ceremonies. Point out that, while Andorra has a National Automobile Museum, it did not have substantial roads until the middle of the 20th century. If possible, say: “More like a neighborhood than a country, Andorra’s tourism boom has transformed it into a peaceful suburb of ski runs, luxury hotels and duty-free shopping.”

C. Touch on the history of Andorra, but—since this is primarily a travel story—try to deal with it in a concise manner. Write: “Andorra is the lone remaining legacy of Charlemagne’s ‘March States,’ which were created to keep Muslim Moors out of Christian France in the 9th century.” Then jump forward a few centuries to describe how, in the 1200s, a local power struggle between a French count and a Spanish bishop led to a compromise that made Andorra nominally sovereign. “Called the ‘Pariatges,’” you will write, “this treaty plays French and Spanish influences off one another, and has ensured Andorra’s independence for centuries.”

D. Mention that, to this day, power is officially shared by the president of France and the bishop of Urgell in Spain. Say: “Thus, Andorra has the current distinction of being the only nation in the world to have two heads of state—neither of whom live in Andorra.”

III. Editors Are Impressed By Tidy Narrative Formulas

A. Now that you have prepared the historical facts, you must choose a manner of storytelling. Were you writing a book about Andorra, you might begin your story from a personal or emotional premise. You might say, for example, that your lover has just left you, and you resolved to walk across Andorra in an effort to heal your pain. Or, you might say that your home was lacking in good taste or authenticity, and you walked across Andorra to discover an older and more genuine way of life. Or, you might say that you’ve been fascinated with Andorra since childhood, and to walk it’s breadth would be to actualize a lifelong dream.

B. You are not, however, writing a book. Nor did you go to Andorra to heal your pain, seek a more genuine way of life, or actualize a lifelong dream. Rather, your Andorra sojourn was an extension of a trip to Paris, where you were teaching a seminar in (of all things) travel writing. As you walked across Andorra, in fact, your backpack contained a folder full of student papers. Every so often, you took these papers out and wrote things like: “Show how the villagers act, don’t tell.” Or: “Establish that you are inside the castle before you introduce the janitor.” Or: “Describe what the geishas looked like.” Or: “Don’t give away the samba dancer’s secret at the beginning.” Or: “Tell me more about the one-legged man with the sausage.”

C. Regardless of what happened to you in Andorra, you must choose a template.

(1) You could, for example, present yourself as a connoisseur who traveled to Andorra to sample Formatge de tupí (a local specialty consisting of cheese fermented with garlic and brandy in an earthenware container).

(2) You might present yourself as an avid hiker or skier, who came to compare the slopes of the Andorran Pyrenees with those of the French Alps. (“They are not as tall or dramatic,” you might say, “but the casual lack of crowds lends a certain appeal.”)

(3) If you are good at humor, you could present yourself as a hapless wanderer in a tiny land full of baffling cultural differences and bizarre local folktales (be sure to mention the legend of L’Auvinyana, a feisty Andorran peasant who made her fortune as a prostitute in Barcelona and returned to her homeland, dressed in velvet and ostrich plumes, to seduce lumberjacks at gunpoint).

(4) Another option is to follow in the footsteps of a famous historical, literary, or mythical traveler, making comparisons and contrasts as you go.

imageD. You are pleasantly surprised to find that a famous literary-historical traveler named Richard Halliburton walked across Andorra in 1921. “I wasn’t sure whether the vaguely familiar word Andorra meant a fish or a fruit,” Halliburton observed in his book “The Royal Road to Romance,” “until one day I ran across it by accident on the map, and found it was nothing edible, but an independent republic of six thousand people and one hundred seventy-five square miles, all lost for ten hundred years in the tops of the Pyrenees.” Inspired, Halliburton traveled to the French border, rented a donkey named Josephine (which he promptly renamed Hannibal), and spent the next few days hiking the breadth of Andorra.

E. Thus, much as modern wanderers seek to follow the trail of Marco Polo across Asia, you decide that your Andorra journey took place in the footsteps of Richard Halliburton.

IV. When Bogged Down in Description, Trot Out Some Colorful Characters

A. Think back to the beginning of your Andorra experience. Like Richard Halliburton, you started on the French side, in a village called L’Hospitalet. You hiked all day, slept your first night at Pedoures Lake, then crossed into Andorra at Ruf Peak, which is 8,500 feet high. From there, you hiked down the Vall d’Incles into the heart of Andorra. As usual, you have difficulty describing this hike, because you feel there is a sameness to describing mountains.

B. You want to just say: “There were a few pines and far-off forests of beech-trees on some of the mountainsides. I climbed up and up and crossed another high Col, and I saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes.” This seems such a simple and appropriate way to describe hiking in the Pyrenees. Unfortunately, it happens to be a direct quote from Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” which you read on a series of bus rides from Paris to L’Hospitalet.

C. You don’t want to resort to the usual clichés, however—the “jagged ridges,” the “crystal clear lakes,” the “quaint chateaux perched on hillsides”—so you check your notebook. Here, you have scribbled observations from the hike, such as “Yellow frogs, brown spiders, orange butterflies,” and “French hikers carry what appear to be ski poles,” and (to your own chagrin) “Crystal clear mountain lakes perched below jagged brown ridges.”

D. In general, you are insecure about this first portion of your Andorran journey, because all you have is background and description, and (as you told your students) travel stories work better when they include characters and dialogue. Thus, you should hurry your narrative hike to the ski-resort town of Soldeu, where you met a retired Scottish ski instructor named Morrie. Morrie was very friendly, very colorful, and (by the end of the night) very drunk. Morrie clapped you on the back, bought you beers, and took you on tours of recently built hotels and bars. Morrie pointed to the local elite and said: “Look at that bugger. A generation ago he and his family were dirt farmers. Now they own half the hotels in Soldeu.”

E. In one pub, Morrie introduced you to a number of British, Spanish and Argentine ski instructors. In your notebook, you wrote: “Ski instructors arm-in-arm, singing along to ‘Stuck in the Middle With You,’ by Stealers Wheel.” Beside this entry, in the margin of your notebook, you later added: “This could almost be the Andorran national anthem.”

F. As it turned out, the ski instructors didn’t know much about Andorra (“I think it became a country because France and Spain didn’t want it,” one Brit suggested). The best information you learned from these folks was that Andorra always wins lots of medals in the “Little Country Olympics.”

imageG. Now that you’ve have a chance to confirm this, you are pleased to learn that there actually is a Little Country Olympics (officially called the “Games for the Small States of Europe”), which pits Andorra against Cyprus, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco and San Marino. The Vatican, you are somewhat disappointed to note, does not field a team.

V. Be Sure to Contrast the Purity of the Past With the Superficialities of Today

A. Since the Little Country Olympics is a tangent at best, you go back to your notes and scan for details about the hike from Soldeu to Canillo. “Trail to Canillo actually a thin path following a stream near the highway,” your notebook reminds you. “Ski lifts and power wires. SUVs with French tags choking the highway.” There is not much drama here, so you decide to mention smuggling.

B. Write: “Twisting down from the mountains, this trail is the legacy of Andorra’s time-honored smuggling tradition. Due to her location between two larger neighbors, Andorra has always profited from monopolies and embargoes on both sides.” Illustrate this with an example—say, the French match monopoly of the 1880s, when almost 2,000 pounds of matches were smuggled over from Spain each year.

C. Point out that the smuggling trade has given way to a somewhat bland trade in tourist souvenirs and duty-free goods. Say: “If a country expresses itself through its souvenirs, it’s hard to tell what Andorra thinks it is.” Describe how one can buy Scotch whiskey, Barcelonan newspapers and even figurines of doobie-smoking Rastafarians (which, to your eye, look “disturbingly Sambo-like”) in Canillo.

D. Imply that the superficialities of duty-free souvenirs in Canillo distressed you, and that you then had to find something authentic and redeeming. A church is always good for this. Our Lady of Meritxell would be ideal, since this is home to the patron saint of Andorra, who reputedly keeps her country safe from war and invasion. Unfortunately, you never visited this church.

E. Briefly consider pretending you went there, since you can easily patch together an account from tourist literature.

F. Choose instead, out of dull conscience, to describe St. Joan de Caselles, a 12th century Romanesque church that you actually did visit. Include the following phrases when describing the church: “rectangular nave with a wooden ceiling”; “semicircular apse with a Lombard-style bell-tower”; and “16th century Italian-German renaissance-style altarpiece, which includes scenes from the life of St. John.” Embellish the sense of history this evokes.

G. Since the hike from Canillo to Andorra la Vella is largely suburban, make a quick transition to the capital. Use this 1921 Richard Halliburton quote: “There, on the hillside, was Andorra City, climbing slightly above the verdant floor of this sunlit garden—the most pathetic, the most miserable capital city of any nation in the world.”

H. Contrast above passage with the comparative modernity of contemporary Andorra la Vella. Mention luxury hotels, Spanish tourists driving Opel station wagons, and French middle-class shopaholics, who swarm the duty-free stores.

VI. Don’t Forget to Talk to a Local

A. Since it is bad form to write a story about Andorra without producing an actual Andorran, it is now time to bring out Ms. Roser Jordana. Mention that she was a small, sharp, no-nonsense woman. Recall how her pearls and rhinestones glittered as she fielded phone calls and answered your questions in the office of tourism.

imageB. As it is somewhat lame for the Andorran in the story to be from the bureau of tourism, boldly bring this irony into the foreground. Say: “Andorra’s tourist economy has turned the nation into a country of visitors. So much so, in fact, that the first true Andorran I meet heads up the office of tourism in Andorra la Vella.”

C. Scan your notes from Ms. Jordana’s personal tour of the Andorran parliament house. Condensing facts, write: “About the size of a large dining room, the Andorran parliament chamber seats representatives from each of the country’s seven parishes. Before the days of roads, this small building doubled as a hostel, and representatives would often sit in the kitchen to eat their sack lunches and discuss politics.”

D. Though your notes say as much, it’s best not to mention that Marc Forne, the current General Syndic of the Andorran parliament, looks a lot like the father from the 1980s American sitcom “Family Ties.”

VII. Public Festivals are the Holy Grail of Any Travel Story

A. Festivals always lend color and climax to a travel story, so you should segue into the Catalan Festa Major, which you had the good fortune to experience on your second day in Andorra la Vella. Establish the scene: orchestras and fireworks; a medieval market; Spanish wine for a dollar a bottle; rowdy parades with huge-headed Catalonian “giant” puppets.

B. Describe the traditonal sardana dances in a square near the park: the old Andorrans dancing in perfect step-step-step; the Spanish oom-pah band under the gazebo; the pretty young women in short skirts, singing. Mention that, because of geographical access, Catalan Spain has had a stronger influence over Andorra than France.

C. You have no choice now but to deal with the mentally handicapped Andorrans. Recall how they began their sardana with inspiring concentration, but soon shook free of their minders and flapped across the plaza with ecstatic abandon. Each of them wore a nametag, so you know that it was a hefty fellow named “Gordoneau” who fixed you in his small-eyed gaze and yanked you out onto into the plaza to join the dance—which by that point was rapidly disintegrating into a gleeful mosh-pit.

imageD. Jigging and swirling across the plaza, you slowly came to realize that the spectators regarded you and Gordoneau with the same bemused stare. When Gordoneau stopped at a plastic table and took a sloppy gulp of some stranger’s beer, the old Andorran sitting there merely flinched and smiled up at you, as if you might do the same.

E. You think back to how you tried to explain this instant to Lisa two days later in Barcelona: how there was a wonderful freedom in the notion that—loosed of all expectations—anything you do in Andorra might be forgiven in advance. You intended no moral or quip-joke by saying this; you meant only to imply that one takes one’s epiphanies where one can find them, and you were happy to be invited for a glimpse into Gordoneau’s world.

F. You’ve since forgotten how long the dance went on before the harried minders corralled Gordoneau and his companions back into neat lines. No doubt it lasted mere minutes, but you realize that any accomplishment is relative, and that Andorra was somehow more knowable for the experience. What, after all, did Hillary know of Nepal? What did Armstrong know of the moon? More than most of us, perhaps—but neither of them had the chance to dance with Gordoneau along the way.

VIII. End With a Tidy Generalization, or Perhaps a Knowing Wink

A. Since esoteric digressions make editors nervous, you must find a more conventional way to end your story. Uncertain how else to proceed, you search the Internet for one last detail that might sum up what you experienced in Andorra.

B. Stumbling upon a random webpage about traditional Catalan nativity scenes, you read about a peculiar figure called the “caganer.” The caganer is a harlequin of sorts, a grizzled old man who squats—trousers at his ankles, stogie in mouth—casually defecating in the background of the nativity. A sociologist, Xavier Fabregas, is quoted: “The caganer reminds us that even in the midst of the greatest mystery of humanity, the birth of the Redeemer, there are these ineluctable and physiological necessities.”

C. It occurs to you that a travel writer is not unlike the caganer within his own narrative—an odd character, always squatting in the background, casually presuming the observer will ignore the fact that these brightly colored surroundings have been painted and positioned well after the events they represent.

D. Thus, from this metaphorical squat, you will write about how you packed your bags, bade farewell to Andorra la Vella, and made for the Spanish border.

E. You will write: “I know that I have only experienced the slightest taste of Andorra, but there is a certain joy in concise goals and knowable quantities—of entire nations that can be strolled across in the course of a long weekend.”

* * * * * *

Rolf Potts’ last feature story for World Hum was Signs of Confusion; he regularly writes the Ask Rolf column for the site. Potts is the author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel, and his writing has also appeared in National Geographic Adventure and Slate.

Art by Jeff Wilson. He can be reached at jeffrey [at] backhousestudios [dot] com.

Posted at 5:41 PM · Comments (0)

(This came to me by email.)

some tips: sunsets and starvation are good

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title.
Subtitles may include the
words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘
Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such
as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note
that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’
means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your
book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47,
prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an
African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and
dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin
people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short
people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise
descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people
who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read
your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands,
savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about
all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and
unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their
souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and
beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along
with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make
sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching,
and describe how you learn to enjoy it?because you care.
Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans
(unless a death is involved), references to African writers or
intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering
from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the
reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that
your lib eralism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how
much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t
live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love?take
advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm
virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a
bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be
pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to
leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your
important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants,
diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or
corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes
you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-
year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with
children, and alwa ys involving you in his complex domestic dramas.

The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-
grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy
eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who
steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to
qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of
development, always using his government job to make it difficult for
pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation
Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing
politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal
champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the
country.

Among your characters you must always include T he Starving African,
who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the
benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and
pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly
helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the
dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about
herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable)
suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a
rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her
Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz
around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them,
bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death.
Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international
celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include childre n of Tory cabinet
ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about
exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders.
Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African
characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do
in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe
or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic,
larger than life?but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or
resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently
raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any
kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And
especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in
which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as
the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel
queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the
West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show
dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex
characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly)
and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values:
see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good
feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say
anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack
people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always
take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public -school accents.
Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any
short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with
good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or
chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).
After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are
Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to
invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and
this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist.

Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works
magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had
a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving
Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how
much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their
game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And
sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There
is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical?Africa is
the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora
and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When
your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous
peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been
severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil
nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang
out.
Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about
rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

Posted at 6:47 PM · Comments (0)

January 14, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

FUYANG, China - When Jin Guilian’s family took him to a county hospital in this gritty industrial city after a jarring two-day bus ride during which he drifted in and out of consciousness, the doctors took one look at him and said: “How dare you do this to him? This man could die at any moment.”

The doctors’ next question, though, was about money. How much would the patient’s family of peasants and migrant workers be able to pay - up front - to care for Mr. Jin’s failing heart and a festering arm that had turned black?

The relatives scraped together enough money for four days in the hospital. But when Mr. Jin, 36, failed to improve, they were forced to move him to an unheated and scantily equipped clinic on the outskirts of Fuyang where stray dogs wandered the grimy, unlighted halls.

China’s economic reforms have turned an almost uniformly poor nation into an increasingly prosperous one in the space of a mere generation. But the collapse of socialized medicine and staggering cost increases have opened a yawning gap between health care in the cities and the rural areas, where the former system of free clinics has disintegrated.

In the last several years China has experimented with reforms aimed at improving health care for peasants. The most important is an insurance plan in which participating farmers must make an annual payment of a little more than a dollar to gain eligibility for basic medical treatments.

Many peasants have complained that even the dollar payment is too big a burden and that in any event the coverage the plan theoretically provides is inadequate.

The government, which under President Hu Jintao has made rural living standards a top priority, has recently announced an expansion of this experiment, with increased fees and increased coverage, but it has yet to make an impact on the health crisis.

As a result, according to the government’s own estimates, in less than a generation a rural population that once enjoyed universal, if rudimentary, coverage is now 79 percent uninsured.

The near total absence of adequate health care in much of the countryside has sown deep resentment among the peasantry while helping to spread infectious diseases like hepatitis and tuberculosis and making the country - and the world - more vulnerable to epidemics like severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, and possibly bird flu.

The failure of the government to provide decent health care for peasants has reinforced the idea of China as two separate nations: one urban and increasingly comfortable, the other rural and increasingly miserable.

Every year hundreds of millions of rural Chinese, like the Jin family, face the clash between health and poverty, knowing that if they treat their illnesses they will lack the money needed for marriage, education and, sometimes, food.

Even the official Chinese news media are regularly filled with accounts of the desperate choices people are forced to make over health care, of brothers who must draw lots to see whose serious disease will be treated because their family cannot afford to treat both, or of a father who sells a kidney to treat an ill son.

“There’s basically no safety net at all for medical care in the village I live in,” said Yang Yunbiao, a worker with a Chinese independent organization in Fuyang that aids poor sick people. “Our village has a lot of aged people with disease who are unable to get treatment, just staying at home in bed with barely enough to eat. They are shut in and can’t work, and their disease and poverty have taken away their dignity.”

In Mr. Jin’s case, the best doctors could do was to administer oxygen and an antibiotic drip. But the new locale did have one sure merit: with their savings nearly exhausted, of all the places the Jin family had taken their brother in a 500-mile trek from Guangdong Province, it was the cheapest, costing what for them was still an exorbitant fee of about $15 a day.

“We don’t want to go anywhere else,” said Jin Guibin, an elder brother who spoke at the patient’s bedside in his frigid room. “If he dies, he’ll die here. If he recovers, he’ll recover here. We don’t have any other means.”

That China finds itself in this situation today is as remarkable as the country’s economic takeoff and, paradoxically, is inseparably related to it. Until the beginning of the reform period in the early 1980’s, China’s socialized medical system, with “barefoot doctors” at its core, worked public health wonders.

From 1952 to 1982 infant mortality fell from 200 per 1,000 live births to 34, and life expectancy increased from about 35 years to 68, according to a recent study published by The New England Journal of Medicine.

Since then, in one of the great policy reversals of modern times, China has dissolved its rural communes, privatized vast swaths of the economy and shifted public health resources away from rural areas and toward the cities. Public hospitals were urged to charge commercial rates for new drugs and most procedures, and today the salaries of health care workers are typically linked to the amount of income they generate for their hospitals.

More than half of urban residents, by comparison, enjoy some kind of coverage, which is supplied by their employers.

The recent emphasis on profit, meanwhile, has led doctors and other well-trained health care workers to abandon the countryside, with a result that peasants are left at the mercy of unqualified caregivers and outright charlatans who peddle expensive, improperly prescribed drugs and counterfeit medicines.

“From the liberation to the Cultural Revolution, conditions in the rural areas were fairly good,” Dr. Wang Weizhong, a physician and member of the National People’s Congress from Jilin Province in the northeast, said of the period from 1949 to the 1970’s. “There were township clinics in every area, and there was no problem getting at least small illnesses treated everywhere.”

Dr. Wang insisted that the government was working hard with its recent health care reforms to address the problems, but agreed that the old public health system that once protected peasants “had dissolved.”

Unable to afford proper care, the first recourse of most peasants when they fall ill is to take whatever drugs they can find on the market to relieve their symptoms and hope that their ailment goes away. Often, of course, they merely get worse or, if their illness is communicable, spread it to others. Once a peasant’s illness becomes debilitating, his relatives can face a double catastrophe: the serious decline of a breadwinner, and medical bills steep enough to bankrupt the family.

“I’ve visited many villages that are really very poor, and reading the doctors’ records you can see people unable to pay the clinic only two yuan or five yuan,” or 25 to 60 cents, said He Congpei, an expert on health care in rural China with the Amity Foundation, a Chinese independent organization that promotes rural health care and development.

“Maybe it is the beginning of something simple that if taken care of in time wouldn’t be a problem,” Mr. He said. “But these people are too poor to pay even five yuan or two yuan.”

The story of Jin Guilian, the migrant worker with heart problems who was taken home to Anhui Province by his family from Guangdong, 500 miles to the south, displays all of those weaknesses in the public health system and more.

Seeking employment, Mr. Jin set out from his village in Anhui, one of eastern China’s poorest provinces, when he was in his early 20’s. Living with an uncle in Heilongjiang Province in the far northeast, he collapsed one day while hauling wood. He was taken to a hospital but left without treatment for lack of financial means.

That was the first of several incidents pointing to what doctors eventually diagnosed as congenital heart disease, a condition that has gone untreated. Some doctors have urged his brothers to arrange valve surgery, which they say would cost about $10,000, in a big city like Shanghai.

Ever desperate for work, Mr. Jin later made his way to Shantou, a city in Guangdong, not far from Hong Kong. There he got a job working as an orderly in a large hospital for about $6 a day. From those meager earnings, about $30 a month had to be paid to the hospital for the privilege of holding the job.

It was at the Shantou hospital that Mr. Jin recently fell gravely ill. But as “just a migrant laborer,” he said from his bed in the Fuyang clinic, he was denied treatment by his employer of 10 years. “Although I worked there, I knew that I’d have to pay a deposit to get treated,” he said. Unable to afford that, he left the hospital for a neighborhood clinic, where he was put on a simple saline drip.

He summoned his family, and when they saw him, visibly weak and with his blackened arm, they decided that his chances would be better if he returned home. Asked whether he regretted not having his brother treated earlier, Jin Guixiu, another brother of the patient, grew emotional.

“How can I not regret, but what good would that do?” he said. “For villagers the problem is not enough money. This is my brother, and if I had enough money of course I would treat him.”

* Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Posted at 4:24 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Stratfor.com

11 January 2006

The “Chinese miracle” has been a leading economic story for several years now. The headlines are familiar: “China’s GDP Growth Fastest in Asia.” “China Overtakes United Kingdom as Fourth-Largest Economy.” “China Becomes World’s Second-Largest Energy Consumer.” “China Revises GDP Growth Rates Upward — Again.” Everywhere, one can find news articles about China, rising like a phoenix from the economic debris of its Maoist system to change and challenge the world in every way imaginable.

But just like the phoenix, the idea of an inevitable Chinese juggernaut is a myth.

Moreover, Western markets have been at least subconsciously aware of this for a decade. More than half of the $1.1 trillion in foreign direct investment that has flowed into China since 1995 has not been foreign at all, but money recirculated through tax havens by various local businessmen and governing officials looking to avoid taxation. Of the remainder, Western investment into China has remained startlingly constant at about $7 billion annually. Only Asian investors whose systems are often plagued (like Japan’s) by similar problems of profitability or (like Indonesia’s) outright collapse have been increasing their exposure in China.

Once the numbers are broken down, it’s clear that the reality of China does not live up to the hype. While it is true that growth rates have been extremely strong, growth does not necessarily equal health. China’s core problem, the inability to allocate capital efficiently, is embedded in its development model. The goals of that model — rapid urbanization, mass employment and maximization of capital flow — have been met, but to the detriment of profitability and return on capital. In time, China is likely to find itself undone not only by its failures, but also by its successes.

The Chinese Model

Until very recently, China’s economic system operated in this way:

State-owned banks held a monopoly on deposits in the country, allowing them to take advantage of Asians’ legendary savings rate and thus ensuring a massive pool of capital. The state banks then lent to state-owned enterprises (SOEs). This served two purposes. First, it kept the money in the family and assisted Beijing in maintaining control of the broader economic and political system. Second, because loans were disbursed frequently and at subsidized rates — and banks did not insist upon strict repayment — the state was able to guarantee ongoing employment to the Chinese masses.

This last point was — and remains — of critical importance to the Chinese Politburo: they know what can happen when the proletariat rises in anger. That is, after all, how they became the Politburo in the first place.

The cost of keeping the money circulating in this way, of course, is that China’s state firms are now so indebted as to make their balance sheets a joke, and the banks are swimming in bad debts — independent estimates peg the amount at around 35-50 percent of the country’s GDP. Yet so long as the economic system remains closed, the process can be kept up ad infinitum: After all, what does it matter if the banks are broke if they are state-backed and shielded from competition and enjoy exclusive access to all of the country’s depositors?

This system, initiated under Deng Xiaoping in 1979, served China well for years. It yielded unrestricted growth and rapid urbanization, and helped China emerge as a major economic power. And so long as China kept its financial system under wraps, it would remain invulnerable.

But the dawning problem is that China is not in its own little world: It is now a World Trade Organization member, and nearly half of its GDP is locked up in international trade. Its WTO commitments dictate that by December, Beijing must allow any interested foreign companies to compete in the Chinese banking market without restriction. But without some fairly severe adjustments, this shift would swiftly suck the capital out of the Chinese banking system. After all, if you are a Chinese depositor, who would you put your money with — a foreign bank offering 2 percent interest and a passbook that means something, or a local state bank that can (probably) be counted on to give your money back (without interest)?

The Chinese are well aware of their problems, and perhaps their greatest asset at this point is that — unlike the Soviets before them — they are hiding neither the nature nor the size of the problem. Chinese state media have been reporting on the bad loan issue for the better part of two years, and state officials regularly consult each other as well as academics and businesspeople on what precisely they should do to avert a catastrophe.

The result has been a series of stopgap measures to buy time. Among these, the most far-reaching initiative has been a partial reform of the financial sector. The government has founded a series of asset-management companies to take over the bad loans from the state banks, thus scrubbing them free of most of the nonperforming loans. The scrubbed banks are then opened up so that interested foreign investors can purchase shares.

So far as it goes, this is a win-win scenario: Foreign banks get access to assets in-country before the December jump-in date, and the state banks avoid meltdown. In addition, a measure of foreign management expertise is injected into the system that hopefully will teach the state banks how to lend appropriately and — if all goes well — lead to the formation of a healthy financial sector. At the same time, the deep-pocketed foreign companies come away with a vested interest in keeping their new partners — and by extension, the Chinese government — fully afloat.

The only downside is that central government, through its asset-management firms, assumes responsibility for financially supporting all of China’s loss-making state-owned enterprises.

But this rather ingenious banking shell game addresses only the immediate problem of a looming financial catastrophe. Left completely untouched is the existence of a few hundred billion dollars in dud loans — linked to tens of thousands of dud firms for which the central government is now directly responsible.

Which still leaves for China the unsettled question: “Now what do we do?”

Two Opposing “Solutions”

As can be expected from a country that just underwent a leadership change, there are two competing solutions.

The first solution belongs to the generation of leadership personified by Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin, and could be summed up as a philosophy of “Grow faster and it will all work out.” It could be said that during Jiang’s presidency, while the leadership certainly perceived China’s debt problem, they — like their counterparts in Japan — felt that attacking the problem at its source — the banking system — would lead to an economic collapse (not to mention infuriate political supporters who benefited greatly from the system of cheap credit).

Jiang’s recommendation was that everyone should build everything imaginable in hopes that the resulting massive growth and development would help catapult China to “developed country” status — or, at the very least, raise overall wealth levels sufficiently that the population would not turn rebellious. In the minds of Jiang and his generation of leaders, the belief was that only rapid economic growth — defined as that in excess of 8 percent annually — could contain growing unemployment and urbanization pressures and thus hold social instability at bay.

The second solution comes from the current generation of leadership, represented by President Hu Jintao. This solution calls for rationalizing both development goals and credit allocation. The leadership wants to eliminate the “growth for its own sake” philosophy, consolidate inefficient producers and upgrade everything with a liberal dose of technology. Key to this strategy is a centrally planned effort to focus economic development on the inland areas that need it most — and this entails tighter control over credit. Hu wants loans to go only to enterprises that will use money efficiently or to projects that serve specific national development goals — narrowing the rich-poor, urban-rural and coastal-interior gaps in particular.

There are massive drawbacks to either solution.

Regional and local governors enthusiastically seized upon Jiang’s program to massively expand their own personal fiefdoms. And as corporate empires of these local leaders grew, so too did Chinese demand for every conceivable industrial commodity. One result was the massive increases in commodity prices of 2003 and 2004, but the results for the Chinese economy were negligible. China consumes 12 percent of global energy, 25 percent of aluminum, 28 percent of steel and 42 percent of cement — but is responsible for only 4.3 percent of total global economic output. Ultimately, while the “solution” espoused by Jiang’s generation did forestall a civil breakdown, it also saddled China with thousands of new non-competitive projects, even more bad debt, and a culture of corruption so deep that cases of applied capital punishment for graft and embezzlement have soared into the thousands.

Yet the potential drawbacks of the solution offered by Hu’s generation are even worse. In attempting to consolidate, modernize and rationalize Jiang’s legacy, Hu’s government is butting heads with nearly all of the country’s local and regional leaderships. These people did quite well for themselves under Jiang and are not letting go of their wealth easily. Such resistance has forced the Hu government to reform by a thousand pinpricks, needling specific local leaders on specific projects while using control of the asset management firms as a financial hammer. After all, since the central government relieved the state banks of their bad loan burden, it now has the perfect tool to strip power from those local leaders who prove less-than-enthusiastic about the changes in government policy.

Or at least that is how it is supposed to work. Local government officials have become so entrenched in their economic and political fiefdoms that they are, at best, simply ignoring the central government or, at worst, actively impeding central government edicts.

Hu’s team is indeed making progress, but with the problem mammoth and the resistance both entrenched and stubborn, they can move only so fast for fear of risking a broader collapse or rebellion. And this does not take into consideration Beijing’s efforts to strengthen the Chinese interior — where the poorest Chinese actually live. Complicating matters even more, Hu’s strategy relies upon the central government’s ability to wring money out of the wealthy coastal regions to pay for the reconstruction of the interior.

That has made the coastal leaders even more disgruntled. However, they have come upon a fresh source of funding, replacing the traditional sources of capital that now are drying up as a result of the personnel changes in Beijing: the underground lending system, which was spurred by the official government monopoly over banks in years past. The central government now estimates that the underground banking sector is worth 800 billion yuan, or some 28 percent of the value of all loans granted in country.

Dealing with Failure — And Success

The question in our mind is which strategy will fail — or even succeed — first. If Jiang’s system prevails, then growth will continue, along with the attendant rise in commodity prices — but at the cost of growing income disparity and environmental degradation. The likely outcome of such “success” would be a broad rebellion by the country’s interior regions as money becomes increasingly concentrated in the coastal regions long favored by Jiang. And that is assuming the financial system does not collapse first under its own weight.

Local rebellions in China’s rural regions have already become common, but two of are particular note.

In March, the villagers of Huaxi in the Zhejiang region protested against a local official who had used his connections to build a chemical plant on the outskirts of town. When rumors of police brutality surfaced, some 20,000 villagers quite literally seized control of the town from 3,000 security personnel. Before all was said and done, the villagers invited regional press agencies in to chronicle events in the town that had told the Politburo to go to hell, and started burning police property and parading riot control equipment before anyone who would watch. They actually sold tickets to their rebellion. Huaxi marked the first time local officials actually lost control of a town.

Then, in December, protests erupted against a local official in Shanwei, who had similarly lined his pockets with the money that was supposed to have been made available to farmers displaced by his expanding wind-power farm. The local governor figured that since he was investing not just in an energy-generating project in energy-starved China, but a green energy project, that he would have carte blanche to run events as he saw fit. He was right. When the protests turned violent, government forces opened fire — the first authorized use of force by government troops against protesters since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989.

Such events are, in part, evidence of a degree of success for the strategy espoused by Jiang’s generation. The grow-grow-grow policy results in massive demand for labor by tens of thousands of economically questionable — and typically state-owned — corporations. This, in turn, draws workers from the rural regions to the rapidly expanding urban centers by the tens of millions. The dominant sense among those who are left behind — or those who find their urban experiences less-than-savory — is that they have been exploited. This is particularly true in places like Shanwei, on the outskirts of urban regions, when urban governors begin confiscating agricultural land for their pet projects.

But for all the complications created by Jiang’s solution to China’s economic challenges, it is Hu’s counter-solution that could truly shatter the system. In addition to dealing with all the corrupt flotsam and high-priced jetsam of Jiang’s policies, Hu must rip down what Jiang set out to accomplish: thousands of fresh enterprises that are unencumbered by profit concerns. A steady culling of China’s non-competitive industry is perhaps a good idea from the central government’s point of view — and essential for the transformation of the Chinese economy into one that would actually be viable in the long term — but not if you happen to be one of the local officials who personally benefited from Jiang’s policies.

The approach of Hu’s generation is nothing less than an attempt to recast the country in a mold that is loosely based on Western economics and finance. Even in the best-case scenario, the central government not only needs to put thousands of mewling firms to the sword and deal with the massive unemployment that will result, it also needs to eliminate the businessmen and governing officials who did well under the previous system (which did not even begin to loosen its grip until 2003). And the only way Beijing can pay for its efforts to develop the interior is to tax the coast dry at the same time it is being gutted politically and economically.

The challenge is to keep this undeclared war at a tolerable level, even while ratcheting up pressure on the coastal lords in terms of both taxation and rationalization. But just as Jiang’s “solution” faces the doomsday possibility of a long rural march to rebellion, Hu’s strategy well might trigger a coastal revolution. As the central government gradually increases its pressure on the assets and power of China’s coastal lords, there is a danger that those in the coastal regions will do what anyone would in such a situation: reach out for whatever allies — economic and political — might become available. And if China’s history is any guide, they will not stop reaching simply because they reach the ocean.

The last time China’s coastal provinces rebelled, they achieved de facto independence — by helping foreign powers secure spheres of influence — during the Boxer Rebellion. This resulted, among things, in a near-total breakdown of central authority.

Posted at 1:58 AM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French The New York Times

THURSDAY, JANUARY 12, 2006 - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SHANGHAI When Zhu Yonghong, a Hangzhou journalist, posted an item on his Web site related to the recent sacking of the editor of one of the capital’s most aggressive newspapers, and the subsequent walkout by much of the reporting staff, he trod a fine line.

Using allusive language that referred to a ”Prague Spring,” and to the Milan Kundera novel ”The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” he invited his readers to contemplate recent events in China on his Web site ? something the newspaper editors would never allow in their pages.

But he did so with a warning against speaking too directly, or straying into forbidden political territory; for example explaining how the Prague Spring ended, in 1968, with an armed attempt (that ultimately failed) by the Soviet Union to restore Stalinism to a liberalizing client state.

All Zhu’s precautions were in vain. After objections from the administrator, he moved his blog to another Web provider, and finally changed his tune altogether. Interviewing him by telephone this week bore a painful resemblance to talking with a prisoner of war who had just emerged from a terrifying session in a tiny, dark cell, with water steadily falling on his head one drop at a time ? in other words, from a brainwashing.

Gone was any hint of inflection or irony ? except perhaps the unintended. ”I think the Chinese government welcomes diversified information because they’ve got their own Web site and bulletin boards to broadcast information,” he said. ”The government hopes for the media to push reform.” The Chinese government is ”not neutral or uneasy” about the emergence of the Internet as an alternative source of news, he added for good measure. ”It welcomes it.”

In Zhu’s curious new upside-down universe, welcoming things sometimes means wiping them out, as happened to the site of another well-known blogger who wrote about the events at The Beijing News, Zhao Jing, or Michael Anti by pen name, only to have his site shut down. Anyone who remembers bombing villages in order to save them will instantly savor the perversity of this logic.

Tiny short-term victories in China’s own national domestic pacification campaign obscure a larger truth. In today’s world, the effort to corral 1.3 billion Chinese and to sharply restrict their freedom of _expression is a fool’s game. The best that can be said about it is that it is an enormous waste of energy. The worst is that the increasingly desperate efforts of censors are deeply harmful to China itself, not because they are a setback to any American pipe dream that China will become Westernized through the magic of capitalism, but harmful to China in an absolute sense, in the country’s own terms. By now almost everyone knows the theory that like many places before it, as China grows richer and per capita incomes rise, its citizens will demand a greater say in how they are governed, including first of all the freedom to speak and associate freely.

Nobody knows how or even whether this theory will be borne out, as it already has in countries all around China’s perimeter, like South Korea and Taiwan. What can safely be said is that in China a lively frontier of social and intellectual ferment that foreshadows the direction of the society as a whole is presently occupied by journalists and other kinds of commentators in the new media, and their numbers only stand to grow.

I still have powerful memories from the discovery as a child of the tyranny of literacy. Riding in the back of the family car on trips, once I had learned how to I found there was no way to avoid reading billboards and road signs that popped into view.

In the end, Beijing will not prove any more capable of stopping people from thinking and communicating their thoughts in real time about matters that are important to them, especially not in the age of the Internet. One small caveat: if somehow they can, they’ll destroy the country in the process, and gut much of the breathtaking progress made here in the last generation. Smart and talented people will always prefer to live in and wager their futures on places where they can think and speak freely. But just because emigration represents the ultimate option to China’s best and brightest, who will always be welcome in the universities and corporate labs and boardrooms of the world, does not mean resistance here will fizzle. For whatever the bad news of the week or month in terms of civil liberties in China, Big Brother is actually already shrinking, and the space for personal _expression is expanding ? constantly. By the standards of just five years ago, the availability of information and commentary on the Internet here is mind-boggling.

This is no thanks, of course, to the Chinese government, which is openly hostile to liberalism and to the ideology of individual freedom that goes with it. No thanks go either to shameless big American companies, like Microsoft, Yahoo and others, which help Beijing police the Internet while disingenuously proclaiming that their presence here, whatever their practices may be, is a net positive. I recall virtually identical language from multinationals lusting for profits in South Africa during the anti-apartheid struggle.

There is an East Asian _expression that explains what’s at work here and why the censor’s job is such a fool’s game. Usually used in a pessimistic context, it goes: ”The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.”

But if in the Internet age the nails are people with information and opinions who are eager to purvey them, in a fast-moving China, where people are getting richer and thirstier for knowledge, and computers with broadband connections abound, can hammers be made quickly enough?

Don’t expect the hammers to give up, but the nails are pretty tough, and they’re already popping up all over the place. One of them spoke to us, too, and it didn’t sound like the water torture had worked.

Constantly faced with censors’ warnings and service blackouts, Wang Yi bounced his blog around to four different Internet hosts before confronting the problem head-on, threatening to sue. ”I went there with a number of the most prominent rights lawyers,” he said. ”We told the company that we would make a big case. Regardless of whether we win, we want you to pay a big price morally.” Service was restored that afternoon.

Posted at 10:23 AM · Comments (0)

We’re told that the nation’s economy is in its best shape in a decade. While this is “roho (good news),” other things are happening in this country that are not so hot. Literally.

According to sources, many eligible Japanese men are in the throes of what’s become known as “Renai Ken-o Sho (Dislike of Love Relationships)” and, consequently, the number of loving couples has plummeted to probably the lowest in the last decade. Single women are complaining that the dating scene has never been so barren, and those fortunate enough to have boyfriends live in fear of the extremely high turnover rate: “Kyo no kanojyo wa ashita no moto-kano. (Today’s girlfriend is tomorrow’s ex-girlfriend).”

Yes, there is less relationship-security now than ever before, and it’s all the result o the Japanese male’s seeming reluctance to get close, get committed and become that most coveted of conditions: “jyounetsuteki (passionate).”

Out-of-love epidemic
“Korewa mohaya byokidane (this has officially become an epidemc)” says editor Michiyo on this out-of-love trend. This is her story: After three whole years of nurturing warm, friendly relations with a “doryo (colleague),” Michiyo confessed her love one morning after an all-night, “futarikiri (just-the-two-of-us) drinking stint. Instead of taking her in his arms and declaring likewise (as she had envisioned) he looked acutely embarrassed, turned away and muttered: “Sou yuno, nashini shiyoyo (Let’s not go there).”

Shocked, Michiyo’s professional antenna went up: This colleague had to be part of a bigger disease eating away at the hearts and minds of the nation’s men. It should be noted that Michiyo is smart, attractive and sexy — she owns eight pairs of skin-tight, pin-heel boots that, when combined with her collection of skin-tight Earl jeans, makes her look like a “wasei Kyameron (the Japanese Cameron Diaz),” the kind of look that, it might be assumed, would attract suitors.

Let’s not go there? What was the guy thinking?

And this would seem to be the collective Japanese female wail. They just don’t know what men are thinking, or want anymore. Before, it had been so simple. Men wanted women and that was all there was to it. It was the guy’s job to deduce the workings of the female mind.

Now, the tables have turned. Men are constantly shying away and looking embarrassed while women lay bare their hearts and fling them at their reluctant, shuffling feet. “I sense a nation-wide wave of ‘don-biki (a great, pulling away)’ on the part of men” analyzes Michiyo. “They actually act affronted when women confess. They act like little girls, they act like ‘otome (virgins)!’ “

It’s true. The widespread “ren’ai ken-o” goes hand in hand with the widespread otome-ization of the Japanese male. Ten years ago the media gasped when young men were discovered to shave their legs and buy skin-care products. Today the focus is on young men who see sexual relationships as something “kimoi (disgusting)” and who seem to have little interest in venting their physical desires with actual partners. They live for “shigoto (jobs)” and “shumi (hobbies).” Above all, they value their privacy.

Heavy burden
Behind the “shoshika (low birth rate)” phenomenon (which has mostly been palmed off as the fault of the nation’s women), is this to consider: Japanese men are less interested in love, let alone such an “omoni (heavy burden)” as marriage and “kosodate (child-rearing).”

Michiyo did an informal survey among the single men in her department, and reports that six out of eight replied that the reason they choose to avoid ren’ai altogether is because they cannot see any merit in being with women. “Onnanoko wa mendoudashi, renraku shinakya-naranaishi, purezento toka okane kakarushi … (Girls are a hassle, they expect me to call, I have to buy them gifts and that would cost money)” was one 34-year-old male’s sum-up. He would rather deploy his funds and time in other ways, ways that would be infinitely more rewarding than in a “kocchini nanno tokuni naranai (There’s no profit to be gained)” love relationship.

Girls of Nippon, we live in glacial times.

The Japan Times: Jan. 10, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 2:34 PM · Comments (0)

Dec. 2005/Jan. 2006

Copyright Technology Review

This article was a feature story in Technology Review’s December 2005/January 2006 print issue. It has been divided into three parts for presentation online. This is part 1; part 2 will appear on Tuesday, January 10, and part 3 on Wednesday, January 11.

China is an economic catastrophe waiting to happen. China is poised to become the world’s largest economy by 2025. Both these statements are true. They provide the context we must understand in order to evaluate rightly what the Chinese are attempting to do in the sciences.

When Deng Xiaoping came to power in the early 1980s, China was a Third World country, its vast population mired in poverty, trapped by massive economic failures and structural rigidities. Deng decreed that China must have the benefits of capitalist modes of investment and competition. He declared, also, that the foundation of economic and so of national greatness is science and technology.

A quarter-century later, the dynamism of the Chinese economy is without precedent — steel, automobiles, toys, textiles, household appliances, on and on. Official statistics put the year-on-year growth of gross domestic product at 7.5 percent in 2001, 8.3 percent in 2002, 9.3 percent in 2003, 9.5 percent in 2004. Some Western economists think the real rates have been significantly higher. In any case, agreement is general that China’s economy will soon outstrip that of the United States.

Yet its problems are on the same colossal scale. China has 1.3 billion people, predicted to peak at 1.4 billion in 2025 — and 900 million are still rural and extremely poor. Corruption is widespread in provincial governments, in state-owned industries, within the Communist Party. The banking system is reported close to collapse. Social discontent is erupting: the government has admitted to tens of thousands of protests a year.

Poverty is not confined to the countryside. In the main streets and glossy shopping malls of Beijing in summer, slim young women are stepping out in gauzy short dresses and frivolous shoes, but a block or two away are ancient alleyways — in Beijing called hutong — lined with low crumbling buildings, rows of minute cavelike shops open to the street with no lights lit, middle-aged and older men and women sitting idle, smoking, sullen on the stoops.

Pollution is pervasive, environmental degradation devastating. Smog in Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities reduces visibility most summer days to less than half a mile: when you drive along one of the elevated highways that cut through Shanghai, office and apartment towers emerge spectrally from the haze and then dissolve away. Seventy-five percent of China’s lakes are said to be polluted; the lower reaches of major rivers run dry many days of the year.

The problem most publicized is energy. China is already second only to the United States in energy use. Domestic oil or natural-gas supplies are negligible. China has abundant coal, of which it is the largest global consumer, mining and burning a quarter of the world’s yearly output — at disastrous cost, some 6,000 miners killed underground in 2004 alone.

Even sophisticated and knowledgeable Westerners bring ideological preconceptions to their view of China. The most common is that economic growth requires laissez-faire capitalism, ideally on the Anglo-American model — and will inevitably lead to democratic reforms. But Chinese capitalism is not like, and will not necessarily approach, the Western model. It is under state control — often erratic, to be sure, yet always threatening. The steel industry, the automotive industry, and the others were created from the top down. Goals are still set from on high, in five-year plans, and in detail.

The men at the top are a new generation, intelligent, determined, relatively young. No question that they have learned from history — but not the lessons Western observers would like them to learn. Hu Jintao is paramount leader. He and his colleagues have attacked what they call “neoliberalism,” specifically, laissez-faire policies. They admit no correlation between economic growth and any flowering of democracy. What had looked like a gradual relaxation of controls over press and television reporting has been reversed, sharply and increasingly.

For the entire three-part series see the link below.

Posted at 12:12 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Salon

I currently subscribe to 15 China-related blogs on my blog-reader. Most of them are filters that point to hundreds of other sources of information. Add in a couple of Google News alerts on specific Sino-related topics, and my daily info-dump on the Middle Kingdom is staggering.

Indeed, there are plenty of days when I experience what is likely a common woe in the blogosphere — that sense of guilt that derives from the sight of a huge number of unread items listed in my reader. On some days, just to get on with life, the only option is to mark everything as “already read” and move on. This always makes me feel like less of a man, but so be it. I can take the shame.

But then there are days like today, when I take the time to follow the links and am rewarded with an avalanche of insight so rewarding that even now, after more than 10 years of using the Net to troll for information about China, I am boggled.

A Google News alert pointed me to a 55-page paper on the current Chinese semiconductor market from PricewaterhouseCoopers. China Digital Times linked to a three-part Technology Review series on China’s efforts to promote basic science. SimonWorld reproduced a Stratfor report analyzing the potential for economic catastrophe in China, and billsdue led me to a New York Times article on the growing worldwide demand for Chinese-language studies.

Taken together, these articles and reports add a considerable amount of nuance and raw information to the ongoing narrative of China and globalization. The semiconductor paper, a follow-up to an even more comprehensive analysis published by PricewaterhouseCoopers in December 2004, supports a key observation numerous analysts made to me when I was reporting on the Chinese chip market last year. Chip consumption in China for products aimed at the domestic market continued to surge in 2004, encompassing 40 percent of China’s total demand for chips. That’s significant growth, testament to the growing maturity of China’s domestic economy. But the gap between what China consumes and what it produces continues to grow — from 2003-04 that disparity went from $7.7 billion to $25.8 million. What this means is that, far from disemboweling the rest of the world’s chip industry, China’s hunger for chips is good for everyone — especially top-of-the-line American chip and chip equipment makers.

The overall stats for Chinese chip growth continue to amaze, but much of what is produced domestically is still second-tier, behind the cutting edge of modern chip technology. Which leads to the next question. A great deal of attention and concern have been devoted to the sheer number of engineers and scientists graduating from Chinese universities — with the omnipresent subtext being that if the U.S. doesn’t get its act together, it will be eclipsed by a new technological power. But how much progress is China really making in bringing its scientific establishment up to the standards set by the U.S., Japan and Europe? That’s the question that Horace Judson investigates in his illuminating three-part series for Technology Review. He provides an excellent overview, with a lot of firsthand reporting, but the nut is this: China’s scientists are hampered by their Confucian hierarchical heritage, which does not allow for the kind of questioning independence at the core of the Western scientific ethos. China’s leaders know this, however, and the process of globalization in which young Chinese engineers and scientists go to the West for advanced educations and then come back to China, indoctrinated in a different value system, is ongoing. But it will most likely take generations for long-term change to set in.

Can China wait that long? Stratfor analyses tend to emphasize the apocalyptic downside to whatever they are focusing on, and while the current piece “dissecting the Chinese miracle” is a welcome antidote to China-taking-over-the-world hype, it may also go overboard in its predictions of wide-scale rebellion and chaos. But the points it makes are well worth mulling. Chinese economic growth has been staggering, but there are fundamental structural problems in China that in the long term appear well nigh insolvable. Not least is the ongoing and accelerating tension developing between local regions and the central government. Under Premier Jiang Zemin, local leaders were encouraged to promote growth at all costs. Under Zemin’s successor, Hu Jintao, the emphasis has been targeting development that will grapple with the growing disparities between rural and urban regions. Can Hu rein in the provinces? Can China continue to grow fast enough to outrun increasing social instability? It’s a high-stakes race.

But then, finally, there comes what to me is the most intriguing of all the new info-nuggets I gathered today. In Howard French’s New York Times piece on the growing popularity of Chinese-language studies, there is this paragraph:

“In a 2003 survey of American high schools, the College Board found that 50 said they would like to add advanced placement courses in Russian, about 175 said Japanese and 240 said Italian — and 2,400 said they would prefer Chinese.”

That’s some grass-roots attention to globalization right there, folks. People know: It’s time to study up.

And that’s your China update for today.

Posted at 12:04 PM · Comments (0)

Beautifully descriptive writing, full of history and gems of observation by Gargan. Highly recommended for anyone interested in the region.

Posted at 4:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright 2005 Harper’s Magazine Foundation
Harper’s Magazine

November 1, 2005

James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, A Death in the Family, & Shorter Fiction, edited by Michael Sragow. Library of America, 2005. 818 pages. $ 35. James Agee: Film Writing and Selected Journalism, edited by Michael Sragow. Library of America, 2005. 748 pages. $ 40.

If he had been born a few years later, and if he hadn t died at the age of forty-five, James Agee (1909-55) might have had a chance of grabbing Terry Southern’s spot—the literary maverick’s spot, right next to Dylan Thomas—on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. Of course Agee, who was more talented and more tortured than Southern, didn’t live long enough to hang out on the set of Easy Rider or to wear huaraches and beads, but both men were unclassifiable writers with jumbo-size personalities who ended up in Hollywood. Agee made his own kind of proto-counterculture.

On the page, Agee was a chameleon. He won a Pulitzer Prize in 1957, posthumously, for his novel A Death in the Family. He wrote the kaleidoscopic text (Walker Evans supplied the photographs) for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), one of the least anodyne nonfiction works of the twentieth century, praised by Lionel Trilling as “the most realistic and important moral effort of our generation.” In Hollywood, Agee collaborated with John Huston on the screenplay for The African Queen and with Charles Laughton on The Night of the Hunter, the film that sent a demonic Robert Mitchum crashing through the brush with “L-O-V-E” tattooed on one set of pitiless knuckles, “H-A-T-E” tattooed on the other. In the 1940s, writing for The Nation, Agee was the rowdiest and most agile film critic alive—and this country’s first towering one. He also happened to be an accomplished poet: his first and only collection of poems, published when he was twenty-five, was chosen for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Agee contained bickering multitudes.

Off the page, Agee was even more unruly. He was married three times, had four children, and took multiple lovers. His bruised intensity led Dwight Macdonald to compare him to James Dean, and he had a kind of genius for immoderation and overkill. Nearly every writer chain-smoked and drank hard in Manhattan in the decades before and after World War II, but Agee’s iron-man capacities crossed over into barfly legend. He was an insomniac with a gift for generous, whiskey-fueled conversation: he could talk until final call. Once it arrived, he’d roam the city, pounding on the doors of alarmed friends, looking for that congenial soul who might get him through until dawn. “Many a man or woman has fallen exhausted to sleep at four in the morning bang in the middle of a remarkable Agee performance,” Walker Evans recalled, “and later learned that the man had continued it somewhere else until six.” Sometimes those sleepy souls were Diana and Lionel Trilling, and they weren’t amused. “It was dangerous to invite agee to our apartment for a visit,” Diana said, “because he never went home.”

Agee’s doomed quality, his appetite for destruction, was balanced by an almost complete lack of pretension. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, he grew up in a lower-middle-class family and went, as a boy, by his easily mocked middle name: Rufus. His father died when Agee was six, in a single-car accident on a deserted rural road—an event Agee would ruminate over in his novel A Death in the Family. After attending an all-male Episcopal boarding school in Tennessee, Agee managed to get into Exeter and in 1928 arrived at Harvard, where he began to publish a series of precocious poems and stories. About the latter, Clive James would note how “the emotional wisdom that other men must strive to attain seems to have been present in Agee as a gift.”

After Harvard, James Agee probably would have become a fiction writer, but another kind of success got in his way. As the president of the Harvard Advocate, he put together a special issue, a canny parody of the young Time magazine, which caught the eye of Time’s co-founder, Henry Luce. When Agee graduated in 1932, Luce—on the advice of Dwight Macdonald, who had already begun a correspondence with Agee—hired him as a staff writer at Fortune, Luce’s new magazine. It was the middle of the Depression, and Agee felt lucky to have a paycheck. “He was grateful,” Macdonald wrote later, “but shouldn’t have been.” Agee would spend most of his adult life writing brilliant but unsigned pieces for Fortune and Time, while fighting, often in vain, to carve out time for his own work.

Once Agee arrived in New York, he quickly became, as one colleague put it, “a sort of hippie a generation prior to the hippie era.” In a buttoned-down period, Agee rarely cut his hair, almost never wore a tie, and often held his dress pants up with a piece of rope. When Luce sent a memo ordering Agee to clean himself up, Agee went out and bought an absurd roll-brimmed hat with a green feather in it, crammed it onto his head, and kept it there. Once, to tweak the finicky Walker Evans, he dragged a goat up and into the photographer’s Upper East Side apartment.

But all this manic exuberance had a dark, depressive side. As Laurence Bergreen reported in his 1984 biography of Agee, a colleague once walked into Agee’s Fortune office in the Chrysler building and found the writer dangling from a window ledge 600 feet above the pavement.

James Agee died young, and he didn’t stay pretty. “Vanity wasn’t in him,” John Huston said. “I doubt whether he had any idea of what he looked like, or whether he ever looked in a mirror except to shave.” His teeth had gone bad, and he couldn’t be bothered to fix them. He had put on weight. Agee had had his first heart attack at the age of forty-one, at a resort ranch in California, while working with Huston on The African Queen. It was a jolt, but it barely slowed his addictive intake; he all but ignored doctor’s orders to knock off the smoking and the booze. In the final months of his life, he was reeling from as many as seventeen small heart attacks a day, which he helplessly tried to ward off by popping nitroglycerin tablets.

When his battered heart finally did give out, on May 16, 1955, in the back seat of a Manhattan taxicab, Agee was already a cult figure. But the veneration was based as much on romantic notions of his perceived failure—his “pained incapacity,” in John Updike’s phrase—and on his spectacular flameout as on anything else. Updike and others felt that Agee, a Southern boy steeped in the oral tradition, had simply talked more, and talked better, than he had written. Publishers seemed to agree, at least for a while. At the time Agee died, not one of his books was in print.

Fifty years later, the Library of America has arrived with two thick, elegant slabs of Agee’s best work a chance to see him plain. It makes sense that the Library of America invited a film critic, the estimable Michael Sragow of the Baltimore Sun, to compile and edit these books; Agee had been obsessed with the movies since he was a kid in Knoxville and his father took him to Charlie Chaplin’s films, which were considered somewhat disreputable at the time. Clive James noted that, for the rest of his life, Agee would write like “a frustrated director: the page was a wrap-around screen with four-track stereophonic sound.”

It’s a good bet that Agee—the young, angry Agee, at least—would have shuddered at these books. “Official acceptance,” he declares in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, “is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas… It is a disease.” The combined cover price of these editions, $ 75, would have horrified the hillbilly in him; they can’t be bought by a full day’s pay at minimum wage. The older Agee, who worried that his critics were right, might have welcomed them—but only, I suspect, after yanking out the dainty ribbon bookmarks that the Library of America has laid into the bindings.

…

Without Fortune magazine, however, Agee would not have left us his cracked masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was for Fortune that Agee traveled to Alabama with Evans, in the summer of 1936, to report on poor white sharecroppers. What Agee experienced in Alabama was, he recognized, too intense to be prettified and distilled for Fortune’s clubby, well-to-do subscribers, and he filed a rambling story he was sure the magazine would not print. It didn’t. Agee took the material back and worked on it for the next five years. His manuscript grew—metastasized is probably the better term—into a 470-page burnt offering that became a blistering forerunner of the New Journalism of the 1960s and ’70s.

Agee’s magpie sensibility in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—the volatile blend of reportage, satire, political dissent, Joycean wordplay, and autobiography—push the book past the usual boundaries of genre and style. It’s a document that reads, to contemporary eyes, as if the author had packed Henry David Thoreau, Bob Dylan, Jacob Riis, Karl Marx, and Dave Eggers onto the back of a flatbed truck and sent them all careering over a cliff.

The scorching prose is balanced by the cool, almost alien detachment of Evans’s accompanying photographs. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is sui generis: part pratfall, part sustained howl of pity, insult, and rage.

Agee wanted the book to hurt, and he hectored readers right from the beginning:

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of

the most extreme loudness possible, and

sit down and listen to a performance of

Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or of

Schubert’s C-Major Symphony. But I

don’t mean just sit down and listen. I

mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can

get it. Then get down onto the floor

and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker

as you can get it and stay there,

breathing as lightly as possible, and not

moving, and neither eating nor smoking

nor drinking. Concentrate everything

you can into your hearing and into your

body. You won’t hear it nicely. If it hurts

you, be glad of it… Is what you hear

pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable

in polite or any other society?

Lionel Trilling jammed his ear close to Agee’s speaker and called Let Us Now Praise Famous Men “a great book.” Almost everyone else who read it tended to file it under: What the hell was that?

“The very blood and semen of journalism … is a broad and successful form of lying,” Agee writes in Famous Men. He had particular antipathy for most of the products of the documentary movement of the 1930s, believing that photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White, to give just one example, turned the rural poor into roadside attractions, freak-show novelties for elite consumption. And he wasn’t any easier on himself or his colleagues at the magazine. When he describes his car running off the road and getting stuck in a ditch, Agee scorns it as worthless as “a new dealer, a county dietitian, an editor of Fortune, or an article in the New Republic.”

The book features, right at the front, a dramatis personae—one that includes Agee himself (as a “spy”) and Evans (as a “counter-spy”), along with Blake, Celine, Jesus, and Freud as “unpaid agitators.” Agee wanted the thing to be anything but a refined literary production. “If I could do it,” he wrote, “I’d do no writing at all here”:

It would be photographs; the rest would

be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton,

lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces

of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates

of food and excrement. Booksellers

would consider it quite a novelty; critics

would murmur, yes, but it is art; and

I could trust a majority of you to use it

as a parlor game. A piece of the body

torn out at the roots might be more to

the point.

One finishes Famous Men having been alternately bored (Agee includes endless lists of the family’s possessions), charmed (who else would note a dog’s resemblance to Andre Gide?), and exasperated by his mythopoetic idealizing of what he saw as the purity and honesty of these sharecroppers’ blighted lives. He repeatedly pokes his finger in the reader’s chest—“she has suffered at your hands”—but offers few plausible solutions to the problem he describes. His book isn’t political; it’s penitential. In his attempt to describe the intractable social injustices he perceived in the Deep South, Agee, the guilty Manhattan liberal, all but nailed himself to a cross of his own devising.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men has always appealed to connoisseurs of literary failure. In its missteps and even in its occasional idiocies, it is a book that is more interesting and valuable than dozens of congenial “classics.” Agee may have been guilty of tossing off, in Roland Barthes’s words, an “explosion of language during which the subject manages to annul the loved object under the volume of love itself,” but his words still feel alive and wriggling on the page. The book is the most singular literary testament to what Greil Marcus has called “the old, weird America” that’s left in this country.

When it was issued in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sold a miserable 600 copies. The book would find its audience later, when it was republished in 1960 and the roiling culture had caught up with this anarchic narrative. Young civil-rights workers in the South carried the book around like a buzzing secular bible. It was a kind of talisman, as Robert Coles has written, “a sign, a symbol, a reminder, an eloquent testimony that others had cared, had gone forth to look and hear, and had come back, stood up, and addressed their friends, their neighbors, and the entire nation.” It couldn’t have hurt that the book probably reads beautifully after you’ve swallowed a tab of LSD.

Agee left Fortune in 1939 to work for Time, where he shared an office in the magazine’s book-review department with another manic night owl, Whittaker Chambers. (Later, during the topsy-turvy years of the Alger Hiss case, Agee would loyally stand by his friend, even though his own politics ran hazily to the far left.) Agee’s book reviews, some of which are reprinted in these Library of America editions, were smart but unmemorable. He found his real critical voice in the fall of 1942, at the age of thirty-two, when he became Time magazine’s film reviewer. Agee’s film pieces, like everything else in Time, were unsigned and larded with the magazine’s painful neologisms—“cinemactress,” “Hollywoodians,” “cinemaddicts”—but they were vivid enough to attract the attention of Margaret Marshall, The Nation’s culture editor, who offered him a signed film column in the magazine later that same year. At The Nation, Agee joined a stable of critics that included Clement Greenberg on art and Diana Trilling on books, and it was here that his stuff began to attract a crowd. W. H. Auden would soon call his column “the most remarkable regular event in American journalism today.”

Agee’s film reviews are jittery performance art; they show him at his funniest and most alert. David Thomson has observed that Agee wrote “like someone who had not just viewed the movie but been in it—out with it, as if it were a girl; drinking with it; driving in the night with it.” His reviews leaned closely into the reader’s ear: this was the shaggy genius in the next seat talking, not the foghorn drone of opinion handed down from above.

Agee was never the guy to go to if all you wanted was a reliable taste-tester. He overpraised too many stinkers. He called Story of G.I. Joe an “eternal work of art” and declared that the color combat scenes in the documentary The Fighting Lady would be “the envy of good poets and painters for the rest of time.” Agee also fell too hard for tiny moments in otherwise forgettable films. As Dwight Macdonald recalled, Agee would always badger him (and readers) with questions such as: “But didn’t you notice the beginning of the fourth reel—that great scene where he picks up his toothbrush?” And he tended to be all for a movie or all against it, sometimes in the same review. Agee didn’t straddle fences; he leapt wildly back and forth over them.

But it’s still enormous fun to watch him uncork his enthusiasms and complaints. He liked comic movies more than sophisticated ones, and scorned Hollywood’s earnest “prestige” products. He wrote that the 1943 film version of For Whom the Bell Tolls “has all the suspense of a clothesline swaybacked with wetwash.” Of Ingrid Bergman’s performance in the same movie, he observed: “She seems never to have dreamed that a young girl who has seen death and suffered gang rape cannot in all reason bounce into her role looking like a Palmolive ad.” And here’s what he said after being forced to sit through the 1947 film Tycoon: “Several tons of dynamite are set off in this movie; none of it under the right people.”

A good deal has been written, as Paul Fussell does in Wartime, about the “intellectual damage wrought by the war”; about how, under the guise of keeping morale high, critical discourse all but vanished during the early 1940s in this country. Fussell, apparently, missed Agee. For the first half of his tenure at The Nation, Agee was a wartime critic, and he was merciless about the nauseating sentimentality and the “sugartit treatments of death” in American war movies. He deplored the way audiences were incited to laugh at dying German soldiers, and how the Japanese were referred to as “cockroaches.” Disgusted with Hollywood, he offered some advice: “Write your congressman, if he can read.”

In 1949, Agee delivered one final, beautiful piece of film journalism: a long essay for Life magazine called “Comedy’s Greatest Era,” in which he lovingly dissected and celebrated the art of many of the all-but-forgotten silent-film comedians—Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton, Ben Turpin—whom he’d grown up watching in Knoxville’s theaters. The piece generated a huge reader response and led to the resurrection of careers. But by that time Agee had already left The Nation for Hollywood to do something he’d long dreamed of doing: writing screenplays.

In California, Agee befriended two of his longtime heroes, John Huston and Charlie Chaplin. Agee visited Chaplin on the set of Limelight and wrote a sprawling treatment for Chaplin’s tramp character, set in a post-nuclear holocaust New York, which was never made. With Huston, Agee helped write The African Queen, based on C. S. Forester’s novel, before Agee’s first heart attack forced him to drop out of the project. The early, easygoing parts of the movie were, to a large extent, Agee’s; the hack ending—Katharine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart’s ludicrous attack on the German warshil—is the work of other men.

Agee wasn’t, at least in the beginning, a natural screenwriter. He piled on too much detail, and he all but directed the film from behind his typewriter. (In her book Picture, Lillian Ross quotes Huston pleading with Agee: “Oh, Christ, Jim. Tell me something I can understand… You can’t have symbolism within symbolism.”) Sragow provides only one of Agee’s screenplays: The Night of the Hunter. The choice is inspired in one regard—it’s a lean piece of work that retains the relentless drive of Davis Grubb’s 1953 novel, so that you almost want to read it aloud. On the other hand, there’s debate about whether the final screenplay was quite what Agee intended: the film’s director, Charles Laughton, is said to have ruthlessly trimmed Agee’s kudzu verbiage.

Save Agee’s fiction for last. It will come as a shock, as it seems to be written by a different, more calibrated man. The work certainly bears out Dwight Macdonald’s contention that Agee’s gifts included “such odd ones, for intellectuals, as reverence and feeling.” Sragow includes two of Agee’s early Harvard stories, which are more than juvenilia: they’re polished and agonized semiautobiographical performances. The two novels are even more autobiographical. The Morning Watch, published in 1951, is set in a religious boarding school not unlike the one Agee attended in rural Tennessee after his father’s death. It’s a slim book—a novella, really—set on the early morning of Good Friday. Agee’s hero, the twelve-year-old Richard, doesn’t just want to stay up in chapel until dawn to suffer alongside Jesus in his final hours; he intends to pray and mourn and self-flagellate more than everyone within 600 miles, and we are made witness to his tortured interior monologues.

The Morning Watch has long been out of print, and its republication here should win it new admirers. The book can be off-putting in its insularity and its ostentatiously liturgical language: if you removed from it words such as “shame,” “contrition,” “humility,” “self-loathing,” “repentance,” “anguish,” and “remorse,” the rest would collapse into a heap of perfumed twigs. Yet it is brave and often lovely in its attempt to climb inside the head of a questioning youth, to remake the arguments for and against faith that bright religious children must make, alone, in their own fractured minds. At its best, The Morning Watch is a supreme act of literary conjuring: Agee summons up the religious baggage of his own childhood one last time, to all but banish it.

Nevertheless, Agee’s reputation as a novelist is likely to continue to rest primarily on A Death in the Family. This semiautobiographical coming-of-age story continues to pop up on high school reading lists; it’s Agee’s most approachable book, his To Kill a Mockingbird, and is cited, to this day, in studies of bereavement. The novel’s ringing first sentence, lifted from a prose poem called “Knoxville: Summer 1915” that he originally published in 1936, is among the most memorable in postwar American fiction: “We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennessee in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child.”

Agee worked on the novel, off and on, during the last years of his life, but it ultimately had to be pieced together by a friend and editor, David McDowell, from fragments left behind. McDowell did some canny commercial work on the manuscript, placing “Knoxville: Summer 1915” at the front of the book and dropping in the bits that didn’t quite fit into the narrative as italicized interludes. Had Agee lived to see it through the editing process, the book would almost certainly have been quite different. According to Michael Lofaro, a careful Agee scholar who will oversee the publication of a revised edition of A Death in the Family in 2007, Agee planned to begin the novel with a frightening nightmare scene. Sragow gives us the familiar 1957 edition here, which is probably wise; Lofaro’s version, which is almost certainly more accurate, seems unlikely to displace the already published edition of A Death in the Family in the public imagination.

Dwight Garner is senior editor of the New York Times Book Review. He is at work on a biography of James Agee, to be published by Little, Brown.

(Editor’s note - Anyone interested in the subject should read this fantastic essay in its entirety in Harpers magazine’s November issue.)

Posted at 4:29 PM · Comments (0)

Essential reading for understanding the sacking of Nanking by the Japanese and the ongoing animosity between Japan and China. Rabe, a Nazi who was stationed in China at the start of the war, writes in a simple and unaffected manner about what he saw and what he did, ultimately to try to save the unarmed Chinese around him from rape and murder at the hands of the Japanese imperial army troops.

Posted at 3:11 PM · Comments (0)

January 11, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, Jan. 10 - Conquering the world is not supposed to be easy, but that’s exactly how things must look some days to Xu Lin, head of the government’s new effort to promote the Chinese language overseas.

Ms. Xu is creating a global network of Chinese cultural centers, called Confucius Institutes, to teach foreigners throughout the world a language with a forbidding reputation for difficulty. But far from having to round people up, Ms. Xu is finding they are beating down her door.

“There is a China frenzy around the world at the moment,” she said. “The launch of this program is in response to the Chinese language craze, especially in neighboring countries.”

For decades, people in those countries have viewed China with deep suspicion. But now mastering Chinese as a door to lucrative business opportunities, or simply as a matter of popular fashion, is suddenly all the vogue - not only there but in the United States and Europe as well.

Just as new, though, is the decision of the Chinese government to ride the wave, not just capitalizing on the newfound chic that surrounds the language but determined to perpetuate it as a way of extending Chinese international influence and good will toward the country.

For some, the choice of a slightly fusty name like Confucius Institute, which evokes images of anything but a rising new power, might seem odd given Beijing’s increasing penchant for high-tech imagery and slick public relations. Yet the carefully selected label speaks volumes about the country’s soft power ambitions.

Among other things, using the name of the country’s oldest and most famous philosopher avoids reference to the official ideology, which remains Marxism. Confucius, who was an educator and quasi-religious figure, also stands for peace and harmony, values that China insistently proclaims today, hoping to disarm fears about its rapid rise.

Judging by the reactions of its long-wary neighbors, the effort appears to be paying off. Indonesia, which for three decades banned the teaching of Chinese because of Beijing’s support for Communist rebels, recently lifted the prohibition. Vietnam, which has long had strained ties with Beijing, has accepted a Confucius Institute amid a boom in Chinese language instruction. In South Korea, an American ally that fought alongside the United States in a war against China’s troops a half century ago, Chinese has reportedly outstripped English as the most popular foreign language among students.

“Chinese is as popular in Korea today as English is in China,” Ms. Xu said enthusiastically.

Although Chinese language studies may be most advanced in neighboring countries, where the ability to understand the Mandarin dialect has traditionally been considered a mark of cultivation, they are making huge strides farther afield. Eleven Confucius Institutes are up and running, in Europe and Africa as well as Asia.

One center is already operating in the United States, at the University of Maryland, and five others are expected to open soon in Honolulu, Kansas City, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Twelve more are under discussion.

Even before that first center opened, the College Board, the body that administers advanced placement exams, added Chinese to its list of foreign language tests, the first time an East Asian language has been included in its testing.

In a 2003 survey of American high schools, the College Board found that 50 said they would like to add advanced placement courses in Russian, about 175 said Japanese and 240 said Italian - and 2,400 said they would prefer Chinese. “We had no idea there was such an incredible interest out there,” Tom Matts, a College Board official, told CNN.

Ms. Xu said that “education officials from several states, actually several dozen states, have sent us requests” to help them establish Chinese language programs.

In many respects, China’s Confucius Institutes seem like a throwback to the 1950’s and 1960’s, when the United States, the Soviet Union and leading European countries were competing intensely for international prestige and influence. Moscow distributed magazines like Soviet Life through its embassies, and others promoted their languages through cultural organizations like the Alliance Française, the Goethe Institute and the Cervantes Institute.

As China becomes a major economic and military power and its diplomacy becomes more assertive, Beijing is also working harder at winning friends and influencing people. Indeed, taken together with China’s recent launches of manned space flights, and the huge push to build world-class universities and to produce prize-winning scientific research, some have called the language initiative part of this country’s “Sputnik moment,” after the first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957.

But where Sputnik fed a sense of alarm in the United States and elsewhere about the rise of an aggressive new superpower, the Confucius Institutes are intended to do almost the opposite, elevating the country’s prestige while easing anxieties over the arrival of a new power.

“They are using Chinese culture to create a warmer, more positive image of Chinese society,” said Nancy Jervis, vice president of the China Institute, a nonprofit Chinese-language study group that will be home to a Confucius Institute in New York City. “That’s probably why the State Council has funded them, and why they’ve given a fair amount of money in turn to the College Board.”

China’s re-entry into the contest for global influence reflects the broader strategy of a nation that is still poor by many measures but is moving fast and making a big impression. The approach often involves advancing with frugal means through lots of hustle and word of mouth.

“The British Council spends over 3 billion pounds a year,” or more than $5 billion, Ms. Xu said, adding that China is spending only about $12 million on the Confucius Institutes. Instead of building expensive new headquarters in each city, the institutes team up with local partners, taking space in their buildings or getting foreign governments to pay for their housing. Instead of sending teachers who will instruct foreigners directly, the institute sends teacher trainers who can help upgrade the skills of local Chinese teachers.

“The vision for this sort of thing has existed in China for a very long time,” said Wu Yongyi, deputy dean of the International College of Chinese Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai, who has been involved in overseas language instruction missions since the 1980’s.

Mr. Wu said China worked hard to promote its language among third world nations from the 1960’s to the 80’s, when he got his start teaching in Africa and elsewhere overseas.

Today, about 90,000 foreign students come to China every year to study the language, he said, with 30 million more people around the world studying Chinese.

“After China’s economic reforms started, we discovered we had an urgent need for communication, and we found that it’s not enough that we learned foreign languages,” he said. “Communications could be better if other people could speak Chinese. We need two-way communications, and now that our economy is strong, we can support this.”

Posted at 3:08 PM · Comments (0)

A crotchety, conservative take on the fate of the traditional media.
The entire piece, which seems to trail off into the same kind of predictability the author condemns in the daily press can be found at the link below.

Copyright Commentary

“Clearly,” said Adam to Eve as they departed the Garden of Eden, “we’re living in an age of transition.” A joke, of course—but also not quite a joke, because when has the history of the world been anything other than one damned transition after another? Yet sometimes, in certain realms, transitions seem to stand out with utter distinctiveness, and this seems to be the case with the fortune of printed newspapers at the present moment. As a medium and as an institution, the newspaper is going through an age of transition in excelsis, and nobody can confidently say how it will end or what will come next.

To begin with familiar facts, statistics on readership have been pointing downward, significantly downward, for some time now. Four-fifths of Americans once read newspapers; today, apparently fewer than half do. Among adults, in the decade 1990-2000, daily readership fell from 52.6 percent to 37.5 percent. Among the young, things are much worse: in one study, only 19 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four reported consulting a daily paper, and only 9 percent trusted the information purveyed there; a mere 8 percent found newspapers helpful, while 4 percent thought them entertaining.

From 1999 to 2004, according to the Newspaper Association of America, general circulation dropped by another 1.3 million. Reflecting both that fact and the ferocious competition for classified ads from free online bulletin boards like craigslist.org, advertising revenue has been stagnant at best, while printing and productions costs have gone remorselessly upward. As a result, the New York Times Company has cut some 700 jobs from its various papers. The Baltimore Sun, owned by the Chicago Tribune, is closing down its five international bureaus. Second papers in many cities have locked their doors.

This bleeding phenomenon is not restricted to the United States, and no bets should be placed on the likely success of steps taken by papers to stanch the flow. The Wall Street Journal, in an effort to save money on production costs, is trimming the width of its pages, from 15 to 12 inches. In England, the once venerable Guardian, in a mad scramble to retain its older readers and find younger ones, has radically redesigned itself by becoming smaller. London’s Independent has gone tabloid, and so has the once revered Times, its publisher preferring the euphemism “compact.”

For those of us who grew up with newspapers in our daily regimen, sometimes with not one but two newspapers in our homes, it is all a bit difficult to take in. As early as 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville noted that even frontier families in upper Michigan had a weekly paper delivered. A.J. Liebling, the New Yorker’s writer on the press, used to say that he judged any new city he visited by the taste of its water and the quality of its newspapers.

The paper to which you subscribed, or that your father brought home from work, told a good deal about your family: its social class, its level of education, its politics. Among the five major dailies in the Chicago of my early boyhood, my father preferred the Daily News, an afternoon paper reputed to have excellent foreign correspondents. Democratic in its general political affiliation, though not aggressively so, the Daily News was considered the intelligent Chicagoan’s paper.

My father certainly took it seriously. I remember asking him in 1952, as a boy of fifteen, about whom he intended to vote for in the presidential election between Dwight Eisenhower and Adlai Stevenson. “I’m not sure,” he said. “I think I’ll wait to see which way Lippmann is going.”

The degree of respect then accorded the syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann is hard to imagine in our own time. In good part, his cachet derived from his readers’ belief not only in his intelligence but in his impartiality. Lippmann, it was thought, cared about what was best for the country; he wasn’t already lined up; you couldn’t be certain which way he would go.

Of the two candidates in 1952, Stevenson, the intellectually cultivated Democrat, was without a doubt the man Lippmann would have preferred to have lunch with. But in the end he went for Eisenhower—his reason being, as I recall, that the country needed a strong leader with a large majority behind him, a man who, among other things, could face down the obstreperous Red-baiting of Senator Joseph McCarthy. My father, a lifelong Democrat, followed Lippmann and crossed over to vote for Eisenhower.

My father took his paper seriously in another way, too. He read it after dinner and ingested it, like that dinner, slowly, treating it as a kind of second dessert: something at once nutritive and entertaining. He was in no great hurry to finish.

Today, his son reads no Chicago newspaper whatsoever. A serial killer could be living in my apartment building, and I would be unaware of it until informed by my neighbors. As for the power of the press to shape and even change my mind, I am in the condition of George Santayana, who wrote to his sister in 1915 that he was too old to “be influenced by newspaper argument. When I read them I form perhaps a new opinion of the newspaper but seldom a new opinion on the subject discussed.”

I do subscribe to the New York Times, which I read without a scintilla of glee. I feel I need it, chiefly to discover who in my cultural world has died, or been honored (probably unjustly), or has turned out some new piece of work that I ought to be aware of. I rarely give the daily Times more than a half-hour, if that. I begin with the obituaries. Next, I check the op-ed page, mostly to see if anyone has hit upon a novel way of denigrating President Bush; the answer is invariably no, though they seem never to tire of trying. I glimpse the letters to the editor in hopes of finding someone after my own heart. I almost never read the editorials, following the advice of the journalist Jack Germond who once compared the writing of a newspaper editorial to wetting oneself in a dark-blue serge suit: “It gives you a nice warm feeling, but nobody notices.”

The arts section, which in the Times is increasingly less about the arts and more about television, rock ’n’ roll, and celebrity, does not detain me long. Sports is another matter, for I do have the sports disease in a chronic and soon to be terminal stage; I run my eyes over these pages, turning in spring, summer, and fall to see who is pitching in that day’s Cubs and White Sox games. And I always check the business section, where some of the better writing in the Times appears and where the reporting, because so much is at stake, tends to be more trustworthy.

Finally—quickly, very quickly—I run through the so-called hard news, taking in most of it at the headline level. I seem able to sleep perfectly soundly these days without knowing the names of the current presidents or prime ministers of Peru, India, Japan, and Poland. For the rest, the point of view that permeates the news coverage in the Times is by now so yawningly predictable that I spare myself the effort of absorbing the facts that seem to serve as so much tedious filler.

Am I typical in my casual disregard? I suspect so. Everyone agrees that print newspapers are in trouble today, and almost everyone agrees on the reasons. Foremost among them is the vast improvement in the technology of delivering information, which has combined in lethal ways with a serious change in the national temperament.

The technological change has to do with the increase in the number of television cable channels and the astonishing amount of news floating around in cyberspace. As Richard A. Posner has written, “The public’s consumption of news and opinion used to be like sucking on a straw; now it’s like being sprayed by a fire hose.”

The temperamental change has to do with the national attention span. The critic Walter Benjamin said, as long ago as the 1930’s, that the chief emotion generated by reading the newspapers is impatience. His remark is all the more pertinent today, when the very definition of what constitutes important information is up for grabs. More and more, in a shift that cuts across age, social class, and even educational lines, important information means information that matters to me, now.

And this is where the two changes intersect. Not only are we acquiring our information from new places but we are taking it pretty much on our own terms. The magazine Wired recently defined the word “egocasting” as “the consumption of on-demand music, movies, television, and other media that cater to individual and not mass-market tastes.” The news, too, is now getting to be on-demand.

Instead of beginning their day with coffee and the newspaper, there to read what editors have selected for their enlightenment, people, and young people in particular, wait for a free moment to go online. No longer need they wade through thickets of stories and features of no interest to them, and least of all need they do so on the websites of newspapers, where the owners are hoping to regain the readers lost to print. Instead, they go to more specialized purveyors of information, including instant-messaging providers, targeted news sites, blogs, and online “zines.”

Much cogitation has been devoted to the question of young people’s lack of interest in traditional news. According to one theory, which is by now an entrenched cliché, the young, having grown up with television and computers as their constant companions, are “visual-minded,” and hence averse to print. Another theory holds that young people do not feel themselves implicated in the larger world; for them, news of that world isn’t where the action is. A more flattering corollary of this is that grown-up journalism strikes the young as hopelessly out of date. All that solemn good-guy/bad-guy reporting, the taking seriously of opéra-bouffe characters like Jesse Jackson or Al Gore or Tom DeLay, the false complexity of “in-depth” television reporting à la 60 Minutes—this, for them, is so much hot air. They prefer to watch Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show on the Comedy Central cable channel, where traditional news is mocked and pilloried as obvious nonsense.

Whatever the validity of this theorizing, it is also beside the point. For as the grim statistics confirm, the young are hardly alone in turning away from newspapers. Nor are they alone responsible for the dizzying growth of the so-called blogosphere, said to be increasing by 70,000 sites a day (according to the search portal technorati.com). In the first half of this year alone, the number of new blogs grew from 7.8 to 14.2 million. And if the numbers are dizzying, the sheer amount of information floating around is enough to give a person a serious case of Newsheimers.

Astonishing results are reported when news is passed from one blog to another: scores if not hundreds of thousands of hits, and, on sites that post readers’ reactions, responses that can often be more impressive in research and reasoning than anything likely to turn up in print. Newspaper journalists themselves often get their stories from blogs, and bloggers have been extremely useful in verifying or refuting the erroneous reportage of mainstream journalists. The only place to get a reasonably straight account of news about Israel and the Palestinians, according to Stephanie Gutmann, author of The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, is in the blogosphere.

Posted at 5:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal
Bamako, Mali

Black man, white skin | Having suffered so much in his youth because of the stigma of the condition, Salif Keita is using his fame as a singer to improve the fortunes of other albinos.

BAMAKO, Mali Salif Keita says that when he was born in a village south of here, his father recoiled in horror and expelled both Salif and his mother. “What is this thing?” the father wondered aloud.

The reason: Keita now one of the most popular African singers, with several hit albums and a big international audience is a black man with white skin.

Like millions of people around the world, Keita has a genetic condition known as albinism, which deprives skin, hair and sometimes eyes of pigmentation.

In North America and Europe, albinos lead relatively normal lives. But for albinos here in Africa, so starkly diverse in appearance from their neighbors, life is complicated by prejudice and illness. Albinism in parts of Africa is estimated to affect as many as one in 1,000 people.

In many traditional African cultures, including Mali’s, albinos are seen as bearers of bad luck. Many are abandoned at birth or even slaughtered in ritual sacrifice.

“We are different. When people see us on the street, they usually spit on the ground in disgust,” Keita says. “What can be worse than this?”

Then, there is the relentless African sun, from which the albinos’ pigment-less skin offers little protection.

“Skin cancers among the albinos here usually start in adolescence,” Dr. Somita Keita, head of the dermatology department at the Mali University clinic, explained as a 9-year-old albino girl, splattered with black sunburn blotches, waited outside. “An albino who survives to the age of 40 or 50 isn’t something we often get to see here,” he said.

A rare survivor

The 56-year-old musician who is not related to Somita Keita is one of the rare survivors. He is a world-music star who packs concert halls in Paris and Rome, and who plans to tour the U.S. this year.

Keita also is the best-known albino in Africa. Having suffered so much in his youth, he’s using his fame and wealth to improve the fortunes of other albinos.

“My goal is to make sure that albinos are treated like normal people,” Keita says sipping a tiny glass of sweet Malian tea in Moffou, a culture center that he built on the outskirts of Bamako, the capital of Mali.

Returning from a European concert tour, he brought 1,500 tubes of sunscreen, a simple treatment helpful in preventing skin cancer but that, because it is expensive, remains beyond the reach of most Malian albinos.

With his youngest daughter, Natenin, born an albino in late 2005, Keita whose albino sister died of cancer at the age of 24 says he feels duty bound to focus his energies on fellow albinos’ plight.

He already lent his prestige to an association known as SOS Albinos, which has united thousands of albinos in Mali and prompted the creation of similar bodies across Africa. Now, he says he will channel 10 percent of all his royalty income into a new foundation to help albino children.

While the new foundation still awaits approval by Mali’s cumbersome bureaucracy, the sheer force of Keita’s example and his passionate defense of albino rights already has brought change.

Ibrahim Djire, one of whose nine children, Djouma, 13, is an albino, says he was struck by how attitudes have improved in his neighborhood of Lafiabougou, a sprawl of walled cinder-block houses on the edge of Bamako.

“Before, people would be afraid, they would say that albinos’ presence makes them vomit. But now my daughter goes to school, she even has friends here in the neighborhood,” says Djire, whose skin is black. “The fact that Salif is an albino influenced people a lot. He’s very well-known, and the fact that he’s fighting discrimination so hard has transformed mentalities.”

Djouma, whose translucent white hair is braided in traditional African style, nodded in agreement. “In school, there is no more difference.”

Among several people interviewed in the area, most said they were fans of Keita’s music and accepted albinos. Only one, Kader Coulibaly, 48, expressed the opinion that albinos are dangerous carriers of disease, and said that he would never let his children come near an albino.

Early dreams dashed

Born into a noble family tracing its lineage to Mali’s medieval emperor, Keita yearned to be a schoolteacher. But, in 1969, just a day before he was to graduate from teachers’ college here, he was told that he wouldn’t be receiving a diploma.

“They said that the children would be too afraid of me because of my skin color,” Keita recalls. “But, at the same time, they were very happy to hire real whites as teachers.”

As a result of that setback, music became Keita’s career choice, and he has spent much of his adult life establishing his fame in Europe. For U.S. audiences, his best-known performance is the song “Tomorrow” from the 2001 movie “Ali” about the boxer Muhammad Ali.

“Salif is our ambassador. When people listen to him, they forget that he’s an albino and then they accept the difference, realizing that we albinos, too, can achieve something,” says Thierno Diallo, a university professor here and chairman of the SOS Albinos association.

Albinos in many parts of Africa are in special danger because of animist customs that ascribe magical powers to potions made from sacrificed albinos. Around Africa, parents hide their albino children ahead of elections and important sports competitions, fearing that they will be abducted and killed.

In 2000, during an election campaign, an albino teenager, Mamatou Koita, disappeared from a boarding school just outside Bamako. The main suspects were never arrested.

Then, in November, a child, Soumaila Doumbia, 4, was found dead in the same municipality, in the well of the village of Sinsina, a cluster of mud houses. The body appeared to have been mutilated, authorities say.

“What we were told is that his tongue was cut off to sprinkle a fetish with blood that would bring good luck in the land dispute that some of the villagers of Sinsina have with the village nearby,” says Cheick Amadou Koita, who is leading the investigation.

“There are atrocious things going on with albinos here, crimes against humanity,” says Keita, the singer. “But it’s all hidden from sight, and the government couldn’t care less.”

While praised by the international community as one of Africa’s most democratic, the Malian government is reluctant to acknowledge that its albino citizens face special threats.

“The exclusion or discrimination of albinos just doesn’t exist in Mali. Maybe the albinos have complexes and they feel that they are excluded, but we are the society, not them, and it’s up to us to judge this, not up to them. This is a false problem,” says Baba Toumany Kane, spokesman for the government agency combating discrimination against the disabled and other minorities.

Posted at 6:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Monday, January 9, 2006; E02

Tiger Woods did not play in the PGA Tour’s season-opening Mercedes Championships over the weekend. Why? He’s, uh, tired.

The world’s best golfer is in the midst of a six-week break — what, suddenly he’s on President Bush’s schedule? — because, as he said on his Web site: “I just need some time away from the game. I need a break.” He needs a break? From golf? What does a golfer do on vacation — go to work? Geez. It’s golf , aka The Easiest Job in the World Other Than Being Prince Harry.

Woods also mentioned the “stress” that began with last year’s Tour Championship.

Stress? It’s not like he’s carrying his own clubs.

If I can read between the lines here — and I am paid good money (well, not good money, but a fair amount of cash) to read between the lines — two factors are driving Woods away from the fairway at the moment:

Age and marriage.

Woods just turned 30 last month. Sure, Vijay Singh is still out there banging away every week at 42 and many golfers peak in their 30s, but Woods isn’t so sure.

Tiger might be right on this one: It’s all downhill from here.

(In my 20s, I could watch six, eight, sometimes even 10 hours of TV in a row. These days, I fall asleep halfway through Chris Berman’s “Two-Minute Drill.”) Mozart had little left after 30. Michael Jackson, Gale Sayers, Howard Hughes, Annie Oakley, Orson Welles, Marco Polo, George Gershwin, Eli Whitney, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry VI, Secretariat, Alexander Graham Bell and Jerry Mathers all did their best work before they turned 30.

Woods already has joint-and-muscle woes; two years ago, he underwent arthroscopic surgery on his left knee. Frankly, if I were Tiger, I’d retire and spend my time fixing Charles Barkley’s swing, or maybe set a more realistic goal, like working for world peace.

But if he were to quit, Woods would have to spend more time at home — and there, my friends, is where the problem lies, and it’s deeper than any greenside bunker.

Woods married model Elin Nordegren in October 2004. A little more than a year later, he is talking about “stress.” Trust me, the stress isn’t coming from the 17th hole at Augusta National, it’s coming from a wife, like many wives, who wants to know why he needs to play golf every weekend . Why do you think Michelangelo took more than four years to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Because every time he went home, it was nag nag nag from his wife Michelangela. Heck, he could’ve finished that job inside of six months, but he had to get out of the house.

Meanwhile, Woods thought he was hooking up with this bodacious babe; instead, she’s a ball-and-chain.

Here is a typical after-dinner exchange between Tier and Elin:

TIGER : I’m going to go play some golf in the morning.

ELIN : I thought we were going to Ikea tomorrow.

TIGER : Oh, right.

(Did you ever see the film “Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius”? Jones wa Tiger before Tiger. He tells his wife he wants to go to the British Open, she tells him he’s taking out the trash. He was done playing competitive golf by age 28.)

It is unclear how many tournaments Woods will play this year. His first appearance will come later this month at the Buick Invitational. (He says no to Mercedes and yes to Buick; I think I know what kind of car he drives.) Obviously, he’ll try to add to his total of 10 major championships.

Beyond that, who knows? Woods already has a bad knee and a nagging wife. If your body was breaking down and your spouse wanted you around more, what would you do if you wanted to keep your competitive side alive? I have two words for Tiger: Poker Night.

Posted at 5:53 PM · Comments (1)

Copyright 2005 The Economist Newspapers Ltd.

December 24, 2005

ENOS BANKS tells a cracking yarn about ketchup. One day, he spilled a splurge of it on his shirt. For fun, he persuaded his brother in law to shout angrily and shoot through the window. When their two wives came rushing in, they saw Mr Banks lying there covered in what looked like blood. “My wife passed out,” chuckles Mr Banks, “and my brother-in-law’s wife shook him till his [false] teeth rattled.”

Mr Banks lives in a trailer in eastern Kentucky, amid the majestically forested Appalachian mountains. He is in his early 60s and has no job—he used to work as a driver for a coal-mining firm, but left after a heart attack 25 years ago. He wears a cowboy hat and talks with an accent that outsiders find nearly impenetrable. He is clever with his hands. When the price of petrol soared this year, he grafted a chainsaw engine onto a bicycle to make a moped.

He is a loud, jovial man, but suspicious of the young folk who live nearby. There is a drug problem in the mountains, and Mr Banks was recently burgled for the painkillers he takes for a bad back, hip and ankle. But he is ready for any mugger. He walks with a walking-stick-cum-rifle, with a plastic cap on the end of the barrel to keep out the dirt. If someone attacks him, he is ready to “shoot them plumb between the eyes.” And if he runs out of bullets, he has a big knife strapped to the contraption with duct tape.

When Americans hear the words “poor” and “white”, they think of someone like Mr Banks. He has half a dozen cars in varying states of disrepair parked outside his trailer, car-parts everywhere and a pile of crushed Pepsi cans below his porch.

He “draws” $521 a month in supplemental security income (a form of cash assistance for the elderly, poor and disabled). He laments that the authorities deduct $67 a month because he won $3,600 on the slot machines. Why, he asks, won’t they take account of all the money he has lost gambling? It is a fair question. If middle-class America had this problem, accountants would surely find a way round it. Mr Banks also complains that he cannot draw food stamps. In order to qualify, he would have to sell his truck, which he cannot bear to part with. Mr Banks would probably be surprised to hear that, thousands of miles away in central Africa, there lives a prominent surgeon whose monthly income is roughly the same as his. Mbwebwe Kabamba is the head of the emergency department at the main public hospital in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. After 28 years as a doctor, his salary is only $250 a month, but by operating on private patients after hours, he ekes it out to $600 or $700.

Given the lower cost of living in Congo, one might guess that Dr Kabamba is better off than Mr Banks. But the doctor has to support an extended family of 12, whereas Mr Banks’s ex-wife and three sons claim public assistance. Indeed, the reason Mr Banks split up from his wife, he says, is because they can draw more benefits separately. She still lives in the trailer next door.

Why juxtapose the lives of a poor man in a rich country and a relatively well-off man in a poor one? The exercise is useful for two reasons. First, it puts the rich world’s wealth into context. A Congolese doctor, a man most other Congolese would consider wealthy, is worse off materially than most poor people in America. That, in itself, is striking.

The second purpose of the exercise is to shed light on some ticklish questions. What is the relationship between wealth and happiness? And what is the significance of relative poverty? Mr Banks makes $521 a month in a country where median male earnings are $3,400 a month. Dr Kabamba earns $600 a month in a country where most people grow their own food and hardly ever see a bank note. The two men’s experiences could hardly be less similar. But which of the two would one expect to be happier?

Before trying to grapple with these questions, take a look at the places where the two men live. Eastern Kentucky was where President Lyndon Johnson stood by a shack in 1964 to launch a “national war on poverty”. Since then, Appalachia has had tons of government cash and seen real improvements in living standards, but it retains large and stubborn pockets of distress. Mr Banks lives in one. His trailer stands in a hollow near a disused coal mine in Perry county, where the official poverty rate is 24.5%.

The region is poor partly because it is remote. Steep slopes and heavy rain can make it hard to get around. Julie Zimmerman, a professor of sociology at the University of Kentucky, notes that Appalachian folk sometimes make appointments with the proviso that “I’ll be there, God willing and the creek don’t rise.”

Another problem is that the region’s mineral wealth has corrupted local politics. For decades, argues Mil Duncan, another of the many sociologists to have pondered Appalachian poverty, coal bosses exerted an unhealthy influence, and politicians won support through patronage. The 13 coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have consistently worse poverty than the others, notes Justin Maxson, director of the Mountain Association for Community Economic Development, a local microfinance group. “Corruption by public officials has been a significant contributor to poverty in the region,” he adds.

Congo is also remote, and its politics have also been corrupted by mineral wealth. But corruption in Kentucky consists of mining firms leaning on local officials to go easy on environmental regulations, or school boards appointing their members’ relatives to sinecures. In Congo, it means half a dozen armies and dozens of militia groups fighting over the country’s gold and diamond mines between 1998 and 2003, leaving perhaps 3m dead.

Sporadic fighting continues in the east of the country, but this does not directly affect Dr Kabamba, who lives in the west. Still, the soldiers in Kinshasa, where he works, are a menace, because they rob civilians to supplement their wages. Dr Kabamba is shaken down about twice a month by men in uniform.

Dr Kabamba’s hospital is healthier than it was during the war, or under Mobutu Sese Seko, the leopardskin-hatted crook who ruled Congo until his overthrow in 1997. There are no medicines unless patients can pay for them, and many of the sick lie huddled on the ground. But it used to be worse. In the early 1990s, patients who could not pay were sometimes held hostage for weeks until their families found cash to free them.

Dr Kabamba’s income fluctuates with his country’s fortunes. His $250-a-month salary is a fivefold increase from last year, and the fact that it is paid only two months in arrears is an improvement too. The cause of his good fortune is that Congo was given a huge debt write-off when the civil war ended in 2003, so there is more money around. What do Dr Kabamba’s wages buy? He has a four-bedroom house with a kitchen and living room, which would be ample if there weren’t 12 people under his roof. His home would be deemed unacceptably overcrowded in America. Even among the 37m Americans officially classed as poor, only 6% live in homes with more occupants than rooms.

Having seen how doctors live elsewhere, Dr Kabamba would quite like running water and a regular power supply. His family fetches water in jars and the electricity comes on maybe twice a week. Air-conditioning would be nice, but “that’s only for VIPs,” says Dr Kabamba. In America, three-quarters of poor households have air-conditioning.

Dr Kabamba earns enough to feed his children, but not as well as he would like. The family eats meat about twice a month; Dr Kabamba calls it “a great luxury”. In America, poor children eat more meat than the well-to-do. In fact, they get twice as much protein as their government says is good for them, which is why the Wal-Mart near Mr Banks sells such enormous jeans.

“Poverty” describes two quite different phenomena: utter penury, of the sort experienced by the billion or so souls who subsist on $1 a day or less; and the situation of people in rich countries who are less well off than their compatriots.

For the first group, finding enough to eat is a daily struggle, and a $2-a-day job hand-washing mineral ore in a river is a lucky break. Shortly before meeting Dr Kabamba, your correspondent interviewed a group of Congolese ore-washers who were delighted to have found such lucrative work.

European countries tend to use relative measures of poverty. A household with an income less than 50% or 60% of the national median counts as poor. This has the perverse result that if the country gets richer, the poverty rate can still rise, as long as incomes at the top and in the middle rise faster than those at the bottom.

America, more sensibly, uses an absolute standard. The “poverty threshold”, created in the mid-1960s, was based on an estimate of how much an adequate diet might cost, multiplied by three. This figure is adjusted for inflation each year, but is otherwise unchanged. So the fact that, according to the Census Bureau, the share of Americans in poverty rose between 1974 and 2004, from 11.2% to 12.7%, ought to be a cause for shame.

But it is not, because American poverty statistics are misleading. For one thing, the poor rarely stay that way. In 1996-99, only 2% of Americans were poor every month over the full four-year period. And life appears, by most measures, to have improved. Poor people today live longer, spend longer in education and are more likely to have jobs. Fewer live in substandard houses, more have cars, fridges, boomboxes and other necessities that were luxuries a couple of generations ago.

How, then, to account for the apparent rise in poverty? It is partly a matter of definition. Some non-cash benefits, such as food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid, are excluded from the calculation. And the raw data must be wrong. Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank, notes that while reported annual income for the poorest fifth of households in 2003 was $8,201, their reported expenditure was $18,492. Nobody can explain this vast discrepancy.

All one can say is that whereas the poor in Kinshasa complain about the price of bread, the poor in Kentucky complain about the price of motor insurance. Fair enough—they need to drive to work.

Granted, the poor in America do not starve. But their relative poverty can hurt in other ways. To be poor in a meritocracy implies failure. Eastern Kentucky is one of America’s least meritocratic enclaves, but failure still carries a stigma. Though few Americans say that the poor have only themselves to blame, many believe it. Many of the poor believe it, too.

For a Congolese peasant, there is no shame in living in a hut made of sticks. Everyone you know does too. In America, by contrast, the term “trailer” denotes more than a mobile home, and the people who live in one know it. They are also acutely aware of how richer folk live, because they watch so much television. A typical poor household in America has two televisions, cable or satellite reception and a VCR or a DVD player.

Dr Kabamba, though hard up, enjoys the respect that doctors receive in all societies. Perhaps more, for people can see that he does an essential job under the toughest of conditions. That his hospital still functions despite years of war, corruption, economic decline and the occasional “grand pillage” by unpaid soldiers is, he sighs, “almost a miracle”. His compatriots might add that it is almost a miracle that Dr Kabamba, whose skills would allow him to emigrate, has chosen not to.

Those who know Dr Kabamba treat him with deference. When your correspondent was detained by the police outside his hospital, for the crime of appearing to possess a wallet, one telephone call to the doctor was enough to fix the problem. The officers even apologised.

Mr Banks, by contrast, though outwardly cheery, has no illusions about how other Americans see people like himself. Of the officials who hand him his monthly cheque, he says: “Some are okay, but some act like the money’s coming out of their own pockets.” His great-niece, Rosie Woolum, tells a story about growing up in the hollows. She was the girl on the school cheerleading team who could not afford shoes. A teacher who lived nearby could have offered her a lift home after practice, she says, but never did. So she had to wait a couple of hours for her mother. At the time, she did not understand why her better-off neighbours shunned her. Now that she has a good job (running a project that provides health care for the homeless), she finds they no longer do.

It is hard to guage the pain of relative poverty because no one knows how to measure happiness. Simply asking people “Are you happy?” only gets you so far. The answers people give depend in part on cultural factors. Few English or Japanese will offer anything more ecstatic than a “mustn’t grumble”, but that does not necessarily mean they are glummer than say, Americans, 86% of whom told Gallup this year that they were “completely” or “somewhat satisfied” with their jobs.

Indirect evidence of unhappiness is equally hard to gather, since so many potential proxies, such as drug abuse and wife-beating, are hushed up. Nonetheless, for what it is worth, when your correspondent asked Ms Woolum and three of her local social-worker colleagues to share their life stories, those stories shared a common thread.

All four women had been beaten by husbands or boyfriends, most of whom had problems with drink or drugs. One recalls being knelt on so that her arms were pinned to the floor and punched repeatedly in the face. Another says she was stabbed. Without excusing the abuse, the women assume that it had something to do with their menfolk’s sense of frustration at the poor hand life had dealt them. As the last of the quartet puts it: “He wasn’t happy. We got hit.”

Happily, all four have escaped their abusers. Ms Woolum reckons that the welfare reforms of the 1990s have, indirectly, made local women more assertive. “Welfare is more demanding. [To receive it], women have to get out and work, so we’re getting out into a different environment.” This, she argues, fosters self-reliance and self-respect, so “Women don’t take it as much now.”

Both Dr Kabamba and Mr Banks feel bitter about the state of politics in their respective countries. Dr Kabamba resents the fact that Congo is run by a mob of unelected thieves and warlords, who for the most part only pretend to care about good governance so they can continue milking western donors. The country was promised an election by June this year, but the ruling class somehow never got around to organising it. They now promise to have one next year—they held a constitutional referendum this month—but Dr Kabamba is not holding his breath. He takes such a dim view of the probity of Congolese politicians that he once turned down a job in the cabinet. In his spare time, he is the leader of one of Congo’s many opposition parties, but no one is tipping him to be the next president. He is neither rich nor ruthless enough.

Mr Banks, for his part, expresses an intense dislike of President George Bush. “If someone shoots that sonofabitch, I’ll celebrate,” he says. Some of his complaints echo those of the coastal intelligentsia—he thinks the president should create more manufacturing jobs, for example. But some of his gripes are of the sort rarely aired in the New York Times.

For example, he berates Mr Bush for allowing too many foreign doctors into the country. In eastern Kentucky, as in Congo, those with marketable skills often leave as soon as they graduate. Unlike Congo, however, Kentucky can attract doctors from poorer parts of the world, such as South Asia. Mr Banks does not think much of these immigrant medics. He fears they may give him the wrong medicine, perhaps deliberately, and threatens to “shoot them plumb between the eyes” if they try. He is not serious about this threat, one assumes, but his sense of grievance is no less real for being incoherent.

The point of this article is neither to mock Mr Banks nor to praise Dr Kabamba. Both have their virtues and flaws, and your correspondent cannot reliably judge which is the happier. But here are two concluding observations. First, if poor Americans were to compare their standard of living with what is normal elsewhere in the world, let alone in Congo, they would see they have little cause for discontent. Then again, were Americans not so incurably discontented with their lot, their great country would not be half as dynamic as it is.

Posted at 5:01 PM · Comments (0)

January 7, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

BURG, Switzerland

ALBERT Hofmann, the father of LSD, walked slowly across the small corner office of his modernist home on a grassy Alpine hilltop here, hoping to show a visitor the vista that sweeps before him on clear days. But outside there was only a white blanket of fog hanging just beyond the crest of the hill. He picked up a photograph of the view on his desk instead, left there perhaps to convince visitors of what really lies beyond the windowpane.

Mr. Hofmann will turn 100 on Wednesday, a milestone to be marked by a symposium in nearby Basel on the chemical compound that he discovered and that famously unlocked the Blakean doors of perception, altering consciousnesses around the world. As the years accumulate behind him, Mr. Hofmann’s conversation turns ever more insistently around one theme: man’s oneness with nature and the dangers of an increasing inattention to that fact.

“It’s very, very dangerous to lose contact with living nature,” he said, listing to the right in a green armchair that looked out over frost-dusted fields and snow-laced trees. A glass pitcher held a bouquet of roses on the coffee table before him. “In the big cities, there are people who have never seen living nature, all things are products of humans,” he said. “The bigger the town, the less they see and understand nature.” And, yes, he said, LSD, which he calls his “problem child,” could help reconnect people to the universe.

Rounding a century, Mr. Hofmann is physically reduced but mentally clear. He is prone to digressions, ambling with pleasure through memories of his boyhood, but his bright eyes flash with the recollection of a mystical experience he had on a forest path more than 90 years ago in the hills above Baden, Switzerland. The experience left him longing for a similar glimpse of what he calls “a miraculous, powerful, unfathomable reality.”

“I was completely astonished by the beauty of nature,” he said, laying a slightly gnarled finger alongside his nose, his longish white hair swept back from his temples and the crown of his head. He said any natural scientist who was not a mystic was not a real natural scientist. “Outside is pure energy and colorless substance,” he said. “All of the rest happens through the mechanism of our senses. Our eyes see just a small fraction of the light in the world. It is a trick to make a colored world, which does not exist outside of human beings.”

He became particularly fascinated by the mechanisms through which plants turn sunlight into the building blocks for our own bodies. “Everything comes from the sun via the plant kingdom,” he said.

MR. HOFMANN studied chemistry and took a job with the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories, because it had started a program to identify and synthesize the active compounds of medically important plants. He soon began work on the poisonous ergot fungus that grows in grains of rye. Midwives had used it for centuries to precipitate childbirths, but chemists had never succeeded in isolating the chemical that produced the pharmacological effect. Finally, chemists in the United States identified the active component as lysergic acid, and Mr. Hofmann began combining other molecules with the unstable chemical in search of pharmacologically useful compounds.

His work on ergot produced several important drugs, including a compound still in use to prevent hemorrhaging after childbirth. But it was the 25th compound that he synthesized, lysergic acid diethylamide, that was to have the greatest impact. When he first created it in 1938, the drug yielded no significant pharmacological results. But when his work on ergot was completed, he decided to go back to LSD-25, hoping that improved tests could detect the stimulating effect on the body’s circulatory system that he had expected from it. It was as he was synthesizing the drug on a Friday afternoon in April 1943 that he first experienced the altered state of consciousness for which it became famous. “Immediately, I recognized it as the same experience I had had as a child,” he said. “I didn’t know what caused it, but I knew that it was important.”

When he returned to his lab the next Monday, he tried to identify the source of his experience, believing first that it had come from the fumes of a chloroform-like solvent he had been using. Inhaling the fumes produced no effect, though, and he realized he must have somehow ingested a trace of LSD. “LSD spoke to me,” Mr. Hofmann said with an amused, animated smile. “He came to me and said, ‘You must find me.’ He told me, ‘Don’t give me to the pharmacologist, he won’t find anything.’ “

HE experimented with the drug, taking a dose so small that even the most active toxin known at that time would have had little or no effect. The result with LSD, however, was a powerful experience, during which he rode his bicycle home, accompanied by an assistant. That day, April 19, later became memorialized by LSD enthusiasts as “bicycle day.”

Mr. Hofmann participated in tests in a Sandoz laboratory, but found the experience frightening and realized that the drug should be used only under carefully controlled circumstances. In 1951, he wrote to the German novelist Ernst Junger, who had experimented with mescaline, and proposed that they take LSD together. They each took 0.05 milligrams of pure LSD at Mr. Hofmann’s home accompanied by roses, music by Mozart and burning Japanese incense. “That was the first planned psychedelic test,” Mr. Hofmann said.

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 4:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SUNDAY, JANUARY 1, 2006

NEW YORK The recent police killing in China’s Guangdong Province of as many as 20 villagers who were protesting the government’s seizure of land for a power plant is symptomatic of an emerging pattern of rural unrest that challenges the very legitimacy of the Chinese state and the development path on which it has embarked.

China’s fabulous growth since the 1980s was achieved through environmental destruction and social and economic polarization which now threaten its continuation. This paradox puts the state in near panic as it tries to hold down the resulting widespread unrest in the countryside. While rural strife is not new - in 1994, I witnessed thousands of peasants in Henan Province fight a local government militia over unpopular taxation and state policies - its scope and frequency have increased greatly.

Rural unrest is the biggest political problem China faces today, even though lethal violence in such events is rare. In 2004, according to official estimates, there were 74,000 uprisings throughout the country - a result of widening gaps between rich and poor, and between urban and rural areas, and between the rapidly growing industrial east and the stagnating agricultural hinterlands.

Guangdong - a booming epicenter of foreign direct investment, with thousands of new factories of global as well as Chinese corporations - embodies these inequalities most intensely. It is not surprising that the province has become a focus of resistance to development as peasant lands are overrun with industries.

Peasant land loss is a time bomb for the state. While avoiding full land privatization and, until recently, massive landlessness of the rural majority, Beijing still allows unregulated rural land development for new industries and infrastructure. Land seized from peasants reduces their minimal subsistence base, leaving them with what is called “two-mouth” lands insufficient to feed most families, thus forcing members of many households to join China’s 200 million migrants in search of work across the country.

In many areas where I have carried out research, some households have lost even these small subsistence lands, swelling the ranks of China’s landless peasants, who number a staggering 70 million according to official estimates.

Peasants are losing their land to roads, power plants, dams, factories, waste dumps and housing projects for wealthy city-dwellers escaping urban pollution and small apartments. Compensation for land seizures is minimal and not nearly enough in a rural society where collective welfare mechanisms no longer exist because of post-Mao reforms.

Such circumstances - combined with unresponsive local governments - force residents to take desperate means to try to limit the resulting increase in vulnerability. On Dec. 6, peasants in Dongzhou, Guangdong, blocked access to a power plant after years of petitions and peaceful protests had failed to get them promised compensation for their confiscated lands.

The Chinese state is very clear on the rural roots of the 1949 revolution, ones emanating from massive inequality and social insecurity. But there is a new clarity now for peasants and rural workers, who have seen the state increasingly side with the newly rich over the past two decades, often at a direct cost to themselves, their families and communities.

This harks back to the period prior to China’s 1949 revolution when enormous numbers of landless peasants formed the core of the largely rural movement led by Mao and others. Following their victory, it was the redistribution of land to the poorest peasants that gave the Communist Party its greatest enduring legitimacy in rural areas. It is the loss of this legitimacy that lies at the heart of the most recent strife.

Beijing could use the violence in Guangdong as an opportunity to address the structural roots of the larger unrest - environmental, social and economic. Instead the state is opting to characterize the killings as the mistake of an overly zealous local police officer rather than a systematic attempt to contain rural discontent by any means.

The dilemma for China is not a public relations one, nor is it about how to cope with this one particular set of events. Unless overall policies are altered to address the needs of China’s vulnerable rural majority, Beijing will surely face more protracted and violent challenges from the victims of the country’s development “success.”

(Joshua Muldavin, a professor of geography and Asian studies at Sarah Lawrence College, New York, is writing a book on the environmental and social impacts of China’s development path.)

International Herald Tribune, Paris, 1 January 2006, web edn.,

Posted at 1:10 PM · Comments (1)

Letter from China

Copyright Harper’s (December 2005)

On the flight from Newark to Beijing, I read the following small item in the China Daily:

According to media reports, several air conditioner installers have
fallen to their deaths in the last couple of days in Beijing alone.

As the sweltering summer heat sweeps the country, sales of air
conditioning units are booming. This has naturally led to strong demand for installation services.

The spurt in installation service demand has left many firms under
staffed, so some are temporarily recruiting untrained installers to cash in … [Some] even refuse to provide safety belts to installers in order to save costs.

in their back yards. Making steel required heat, which required wood, which required deforestation, and since not making steel would have been a bad idea, the hills were soon bare. The chaos of the Cultural Revolution led to a lot of tree-cutting too, and even the recovery from Mao took its toll - in 1979, when the “household responsibility system” was inaugurated and authorities divided communal land into individual plots, some people were afraid their neighbors would cut down “their” trees and so they axed them first.

Grasslands disappeared like forests. With newly prosperous urban markets for meat, the number of livestock swelled. American environmentalist Lester Brown, a longtime student of China, says that there are 339 million goats and sheep in the country, compared with seven million in the United States. “I’ve been in areas where the farmers have to put human clothes on their mohair goats to keep them from grazing one another”, he told me. “There’s nothing to eat”. Without roots to hold the soil, much of the countryside has simply turned to sand. Deserts advance by hundreds of miles annually, and the dust storms of April and May are now a recognized Beijing season, just like spring and fall. Think Dust Bowl circa 1934 - only in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and with no vacant California left for the refugees.

The government has responded with tree-planting campaigns. On my way up to the Chao River, I was confronted with a grand vista - hundreds of brown hills that seemed to have broken out in a kind of acne. As I got closer, I saw that each white spot was in fact a small semicircular niche, maybe three feet round and two feet high, built of carefully stacked whitewashed stones - they were planters for trees, designed to catch water and nurture individual seedlings. I could see hundreds of thousands of them, the work of almost unimaginable man-hours. Pile all the rocks in one place and you’d have the pyramids.

When it comes to trees and erosion, the government seems also to have replaced the classic Communist sloganeering with stuff that sounds like it was written by bureaucratic Greenpeacers. One huge billboard I saw said, “Carefully operate the policy of the central government on forest management”. Carved in ten-foot-tall chalk letters on one mountainside:
“Keep the sand here and the water clean to make our area wealthy and
serve Beijing!” The point, I guess, is that they’ve noticed they have a problem.

Which is not to say that they’re necessarily solving it. Just as the
Great Leap Forward produced great heaps of utterly useless pig iron,
Maoist-style tree-planting has its critics. I’d earlier watched a
Powerpoint presentation by Jiang Gaoming of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences demonstrating that in one project after another three out of four trees had perished. “It’s a foolish policy”, Jiang had said. “It emphasizes construction, not protection”. On the other hand, Jiang’s solution to the dust storms was to speed up the migration to the cities so there’d be fewer peasants out grazing their stock on fragile soil.

Certainly all the activity had yet to make much difference to the Chao River, which was dry in spots and a narrow, sudsy channel across a wide, empty bed in others. We drove through one small town where farmers had hung a banner across the road: “For our children, give us back our clean water. Stop the gold mine!” Soon after was the mine itself. Farmers had clearly rioted there the day before, barricading the entrance with paving stones and splashing paint across the walls.

Still, the farther up the winding river we ventured the greener things got. We were climbing now - five, six, seven thousand feet up. The road was petering out, into rutted dirt and then into tracks, and then - well, at some point Zhao and I got out to walk while Zhang looked for some way to get through. We reached a village so remote that I was rewarded with a shriek from a small girl unused to tall white guys wandering around. We talked with an old man smoking a handmade pipe. Seven years ago, he said, the sand was very bad in this valley. Then the government paid them 4,000 yuan to fence a lot of it off from the animals. The grass had come back
within a year or two, he said - and indeed now it was a sea of grass, worked entirely by men on horseback.
It’s questionable, though, whether such changes will make any real
difference to the encroaching desertification. Although the country’s south is saturated, always trying to fend off flood, China’s north is simply parched. As the flow of the Chao and other rivers has been siphoned off by the cities growing alongside them, Beijing has been drawing more and more of its own water from an underground aquifer - half or more of the water it uses comes from underground, and as a result the water table is sinking by meters every year. “Some northern cities will simply be out of water in eight or ten years”, Ma Jun, author of China’s Water Crisis, the one great environmental book China has yet produced, told me over lunch in Beijing one day. The earth subsides into sinkholes in dozens of places every year now, and fissures yards wide suddenly
appear like earthquake faults. National Geographic recently came for a look and decided the country was committing “ecological suicide”. To deal with the crisis, China’s leaders have dusted off a plan that Mao dreamed up in 1952: construct 800-mile-long canals to carry water from the south to the north. That’s an almost unimaginable idea, roughly comparable to putting Lake Superior in an aqueduct in order to let Phoenix keep watering its lawns. But it’s a sign of the depth of the challenge that environmentalists, like Ma cross their fingers and hope for the best.
“People in the north have been using water in a crazy way for the last fifty years because they knew it would someday flow from the Yangtze”, he said. “Now the time has come for the promise to be realized”.

But the problem, he quickly added, is that the extra water will probably just be used to fuel a new round of rapid growth. One of the million reasons the Chao has run dry is that Beijing has thirteen ski slopes in the surrounding mountains, all of them relying on manmade snow. And they’ve just opened a fourteenth, this one entirely indoors.

When we’d reached the head-waters of the Chao, we crossed a few valleys and drove back to Beijing along the equally dry White River - another of the city’s main tributaries. But this time we were more interested in power than in water. Along the way we passed one new high-tension line after another. These massive, still-shiny steel towers crossed the mountains in the same lovely undulating ripples as the Great Wall; indeed we hiked to one ruined section of the wall to get a better look at the power lines, which represent an engineering feat on the same heroic/insane scale. In 2004, China added fifty billion watts of generating capacity to its electric grid. In 2005, it will have added another 65 billion watts. You can do the math any number of ways - they’re adding two New Englands to their electric system annually, or half of India, or a Brazil. No power grid on earth has ever grown anywhere near that fast. Almost all of the new power comes from coal, which China has in cheap abundance; Party officials have announced ambitious plans to build two nuclear reactors every year until 2020, but even if they manage to pull it off, only about four percent of their electricity will come from atomic reactors. Essentially, China is going to burn coal - it will have passed the two-billion-ton mark this year. And even with that utterly unprecedented growth in supply, the country is stretched to the breaking point - twenty-four of thirty-one provinces had power shortages in 2004. “In some provinces plants operate only three or four days a week”, said Yang Fuqiang, the Beijing-based vice president of the Energy Foundation. “You get five or six or seven percent loss in local GDP”. In late July the Beijing authorities announced that the 4,689 local factories “will arrange week-long summer vacations for their employees in the coming four weeks” to save power, and then offset the holidays by “adopting a temporary six-day week schedule in the coming fall”.

The explanation for this surge is relatively simple, and it has
everything to do with those farmers streaming into the city: Yang,
hunched over his computer in a Beijing office where the thermostat is
turned to 82 to save energy, says the best guess is that more than twenty
million people come to the cities every year. There they make enough
money to start consuming power - in the city people get, say, small
refrigerators or even air conditioners. And they get jobs making shower
curtains and spatulas and suitcases, which also take some energy. And
building even simple concrete huts for them requires all sorts of
resources - five percent of China’s fuel may go to producing cement
alone. China makes more steel than any nation on earth - not primitively,
a la Mao, in the back yard, but it still takes energy.

Oh, and cars. Ten years ago there weren’t any. “Driver” was an occupation
- you took Party officials around in a big black sedan. Today, China is
the world’s number-three car market. Demand is surging - vehicle sales
grew ten percent in the first half of 2005 - and automakers expect to
sell 5.6 million vehicles by year’s end. Visiting the big car markets in
Beijing is like going to a ball game in the United States - you park
blocks away at a gas station where attendants wave you in; sidewalk
vendors sell Cokes to the gawkers. (And teams of young men with big
wooden clubs roam the car lot, looking for criminals.) It’s a fascinating
place to drive, because almost everyone is a tyro. The traffic patterns
are unlike anywhere else in the world - people weave in and out
constantly, merging from side streets without stopping - but crashes are
relatively uncommon because speeds are low. Five years ago, you suddenly
realize, these people were riding bikes.

Again, it’s not as if the Chinese haven’t noticed there are big problems
that come with this kind of growth. By some estimates, eight or ten
percent of the country’s GDP is wasted dealing with pollution and the
health effects it causes. In an interview of rare candor, Pan Yue, the
country’s deputy environment minister, told Der Spiegel that the
country’s economic “miracle will end soon because the environment can no
longer keep pace. Five of the ten most polluted cities worldwide are in
China; acid rain is falling on one third of our territory; half of the
water in China’s seven largest rivers is completely useless.” But without
that level of growth, there’d be no way to absorb the endless influx from
the countryside. How are you going to keep people down on their sixth of
an acre once they’ve heard that city dwellers eat meat!

Only with a level of repression that the post-Mao Chinese probably
wouldn’t tolerate, a level of repression that would shake the country’s
power structure. (And if that power structure fell, the democracy that
replaced it would have many virtues, but controlling migration wouldn’t
be one of them.) That’s why the country is busy building cars - because
automaking, road-building, tire-patching, bumper-fixing, and gas-pumping
are ways to build an economy. What’s good for Shanghai Automotive, or so
the thinking goes, is good for China.

And so the country is trying to muddle through. On the one hand, it must
keep growing fast enough to absorb all that restless labor - the
newspapers are already full of reports about college graduates unable to
find jobs, and then there are those people pushed out of work in the vast
and useless state heavy industries. And on the other hand, it must keep
resource and energy use enough in check that China doesn’t simply crash
and burn. The official goal is to quadruple the size of the economy by
2020 while only doubling energy use - a target that’s probably
unattainable due to the huge growth in electric generation in the last
couple of years. But devoted teams of Western planners arrive regularly
with new schemes. Yang Fuqiang, whose Energy Foundation is funded
primarily by the Hewlett and Packard fortunes, has managed to assemble an
advisory council that includes twelve of the country’s most senior
officials. A vice premier comes to council meetings, listening carefully
as plans are outlined for new building codes that would make apartments
fifty percent more efficient than in the past, or price reforms that
would end energy subsidies for heavy industry, or appliance standards -
by 2030, according to Yang, “better household appliances alone would mean
thirty fewer coal-fired power plants”.

And the government has adopted most of these schemes, at least on paper.
It has pledged to provide ten percent of the power with renewable
resources in the next fifteen years - windmills are being built left and
right, which is more than we can say. And some of what the Chinese are
doing we couldn’t even begin to imagine. In Shanghai, for instance, if
you want a new car you not only have to go buy it, you have to bid for a
license plate - in an effort to control the growth in autos, the city
allows only about 6,000 new plates a month, and in June’s auction they
went for more than $4,000 apiece. Not only that, but they’ve built a
remarkably good subway system, designed to persuade people to hold off
buying cars. “Look, if you have a cheap, low-end metro, then the people
who need to wear business clothes to the office simply won’t take it”, Ma
Jun said. “And those are exactly the people with enough money to buy a
car”. The Shanghai metro has plasma screens on every car, delivering a
continuous English lesson; the weekend I was riding the metro the screens
were endlessly explaining the phrase “home field”.

In 1997, when the world was negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, the US
Senate, by a vote of 95-0, passed a resolution that forbade any American
involvement in a pact that limited American emissions - “unless the
protocol or other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled
commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Developing
Country Parties within the same compliance period”. Although the
resolution didn’t cite China in particular, the testimony made it clear
that China (and to a lesser extent India) was the nation everyone had in
mind. Kyoto would give them a “free pass”. Their economy would be allowed
an “advantage” if the Chinese didn’t sign on. It’s an argument still in
circulation - John Kerry, who voted for the original resolution, said
during last year’s presidential campaign that he thought Kyoto should be
renegotiated to make the Chinese start reducing their energy use. More
than any other argument, this idea of “fairness” has derailed American
participation in the only international attempt to do anything about the
biggest environmental problem our species has yet faced.

It used to be said that the point of travel was to see your own home more
clearly. So let’s look. When you’re standing in Shanghai, at the city’s
urban-planning exhibition, admiring the basketball-court-sized model of
the city’s future plan, with every skyscraper and apartment complex
carefully detailed, you just viscerally know that there are two countries
that really count right now. You just viscerally know that this is the
story that will define the future. China and the United States are now
the world’s biggest consumers of raw material, and of food, and of
energy. Are they therefore morally equivalent?

That’s not just a rhetorical question - it’s a deeply practical one. And
answering yes has a certain straightforward appeal. Sometime between 2025
and 2030, China will pass the United States as the largest carbon emitter
in the world - already it produces sixteen percent of the world’s CO2
compared with our 25 percent. That is, they are now joining us in the
task of undermining the planet’s physics and chemistry.

The longer I looked, however, the less alike the two nations seemed. Take
cars, for instance. Cars define America - their proliferation is the
single physical item that makes our continent’s civilization unique. We
have nearly the same number of cars as we have people. In China the
number of automobiles is growing fast. But if the Chinese sell six
million cars this year, that will be eleven million less than the United
States - in a population more than four times as large.

In fact, the size of China’s population queers every discussion of
numbers. If you’re interested in global warming, it doesn’t make moral
sense to divide up the atmosphere by nations - if it did, then there’d be
nothing wrong with Luxembourg producing as much waste as America. If you
think about it for even a minute, the only unit that works is people -
Zhao Ang, my translator, has as much right to the sky as I do, which is
to say as much right to a car or a big house. And measuring by people, in
2025 or 2030, when China passes the United States as the world’s largest
carbon emitter, the average Chinese will still be producing only a
quarter as much carbon as the average American. And of course it goes
deeper than that - the reason the atmosphere is filled to the danger
point with carbon is because we’ve already been filling it for two
centuries, burning coal and oil to get rich while the Chinese have been
staying poor. As Ma Jun - a daring environmentalist who’s taken big risks
to write his books - told me one day, “Nearly eighty percent of the
carbon dioxide has come from 200 years of the industrial world. Let’s be
realistic. Those historic burdens have to be shouldered by those
countries that have enjoyed the benefits.” In any just scheme, it’s not
morally required of the Chinese to help solve global warming, any more
than it’s your kids’ responsibility to work out the problems in your
marriage.

This does not mean that the Chinese should burn all their coal. (After
all, they’ll have to deal with a wrecked world, just like your kids will
have to deal with a broken home.) What it means is that we face an actual
tragedy. The world, as it turns out, cannot afford two countries behaving
like the United States. It lacks the atmosphere (and it also may lack the
resources, as this summer’s scramble for control over oil makes clear. We
can’t let the Chinese buy Unocal, because we need its reserves for us).
And the reason it’s an actual tragedy is because, right now, a rapidly
growing China is actually accomplishing some measurable good with its
growth. People are enjoying some meat, sending their brothers to school,
heating their huts. Whereas we’re burning nine times as much energy per
capita so that we can: air-condition game rooms and mow half-acre lots,
drive SUVs on every errand, eat tomatoes flown in from Chile. I
understand that our country has people living in poverty, some of whom
are now losing their jobs to Chinese competition, but that’s simply our
shame - we have all the money on earth, and we haven’t figured out how to
spread it around. China has hundreds of millions of people too poor to
have clean water, and they sense that a few decades of burning coal might
do something about that.

Which is why it seems intuitively obvious when you’re in China that the
goal of the twenty-first century must somehow be to simultaneously
develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop
those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we’re
able to meet somewhere in the middle, with us using less energy so that
they can use more, and eating less meat so that they can eat more.
(Indeed, baby steps toward such transfers of technology and wealth are
enshrined in the Kyoto formula.)

One name for this kind of statistical mean is “Europe” or “Japan”, whose
citizens use half the energy of Americans. (And indeed the Chinese would
almost certainly be willing to head in that direction. While I was there,
for instance, they adopted new mileage standards for cars based on
European standards - their showrooms are filling fast with tiny cars,
like the Chery QQ, that come with 0.8-liter engines. ) But try to imagine
the political possibilities in America of taking Chinese aspirations
seriously - of acknowledging that there isn’t room for two of us to
behave in this way, and that we don’t own the rights to our lifestyle
simply because we got there first. The current president’s father
announced, on his way to the parley in Rio that gave rise to the Kyoto
treaty, that “the American way of life is not up for negotiation”. That’s
what defines a tragedy.

Here’s another way to say it. On my last night in Shanghai, after about a
month of touring the country, I ended up strolling the Bund, the strip of
old European banking houses that faces the Huangpu River. On the other
bank, in the Pudong District that China has made its great urban
showpiece, huge towers rose in neon splendor - the Jinmao Tower, with the
highest hotel on earth taking up its top thirty-four floors; the Oriental
Pearl TV tower, its great kitschy globes glowing pink against the sky,
the Aurora building, with its vast outdoor TV screen showing ad after ad.
The vista was a little less grand than usual - the temperature had topped
95 degrees that day, so the government had decreed a power cut - but it
was still enough to draw tens of thousands of spectators, content just to
stand there in the dark and look. Many, perhaps most, were new arrivals
from the countryside, in shabbier clothes and with ruddier faces than the
city folk; they posed for pictures along the railing with the promise of
the country glowing behind them.

I don’t think in the end it’s a real promise - I’m not sure China can
escape the horrible environmental contradictions of its own growth (the
soil is subsiding even in Pudong as Shanghai overpumps groundwater). I’m
not sure globalization makes sense for the globe even if makes sense for
China (in fact, I’m almost sure it doesn’t - that 95-degree day was not
unique; both China and the planet were suffering through the hottest year
on record while I was there). I’m not sure that if the Chinese someday
got as rich as we are they’d be any happier than us. That’s why meeting
in the middle makes so much sense. But in moral terms I am completely
sure that that vista across the Huangpu River is filled with a kind of
hope for the people who nightly drink it in, and that that hope is, for
now, essentially innocent.

The only neon spectacle I’ve ever seen that compares is Vegas, with its
pyramids and dancing waters. But what is Vegas? It’s the search for some
kind of new stimulus for the jaded. Some thicker meat and pricier
alcohol, for people who’ve been packing away meat and alcohol for
decades. Some attempt to figure out what more might mean when you’ve
already had too much. Whatever else it is, China’s not like that at all.

Notes

{1} At the moment, the exchange rate is at around eight yuan to the
dollar. But for an approximate number, it works to just drop the last
digit - 10,000 yuan is something like a thousand dollars.

{2} Ikea’s slogan, which in the modern economy almost passes as humane,
is “Low Price, But Not at Any Price”.

{3} No one knows for sure how effective the one-child policy has been.
One demographer estimates that China has as many as 37 million uncounted
children, hidden at least in part because local officials don’t like to
report bad news. But total population growth is not the main force
driving China’s problems. And however cruel the legislation was, most
people I talked to, in the cities anyhow, seem to have internalized it as
an indisputable fact of life.

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the
author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home. His
last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The Christian Paradox”, appeared in
the August issue.

Posted at 11:18 PM · Comments (0)

This wicked little bit of satire comes via the excellent China Digital Times website run by Xiao Qiang, at Berkeley:

By Xiao Qiang :: 2006-01-07, 10:33 PM :: Information Revolution

The following satirical post is from a Chinese blog “The Eighth Continent of Lian Yuan (? ??????): (Translated by CDT, links are added by CDT):

1?It has been said that this (mining accident) is a New Year’s gift to the Chinese government from the American government.
2?This gift has a status equal to “Ping Pong Diplomacy” in the history of US-China relations.
3?In return, China will give two pandas to the US at an appropriate time.
4?One will be called “Kuangkuang” (Kuang = Mining), another will be called “Nannan” (Nan = Accident)
5?Mr. Tang Jiaxuan will publish a new book titled “China’s mining safety conditions are the best in the world.”
6?China will build a “Monument to Killed American Miners” at an appropriate place.
7?Mr. He Zuoxiu will use calligraphy to write on the Monument “They were unfortunately born in America.”
8?Xinhua News Agency will receive the Pulitzer Prize for the world’s most comprehensive and in depth reporting on this mining accident.
9?China, North Korea and Iran held an emergency meeting on the American mining accident.
10?The three parties at this meeting reached the following unanimous conclusion: There are no mining accidents in China. There is no starvation in North Korea. And Iran does not have nuclear ambitions.

Posted at 4:09 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright 2005 The Conde Nast Publications Inc.
All Rights Reserved

HEADLINE: Cormac Country;
Cormac McCarthy would rather hang out with physicists than other writers. He doesn’t do blurbs, book tours, or even Oprah. But with the publication of his blood-spattered new novel, No Country for Old Men, he gives his rst interview in 13 years-since All the Pretty Horses turned him from cult gure into literary star

The parking lot at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, features rows of vehicles typical of American academia-S.U.V.’s and minivans, a few older-model BMWs and Mercedeses, a Toyota Prius, and an inordinate number of Subarus and Hondas. At this unique think tank, where an elite caste of scientists from around the world converge for days or months to analyze interdisciplinary problems in physics, biology, computer science, archaeology, linguistics, and economics, many of the cars also carry wilted bumper stickers (defoliate the bushes) left over from the last election.

Standing out from the crowd is a red Ford F-350 diesel pickup with Texas plates. Equipped with a Banks PowerPack that boosts the 7.3-liter engine to more than 300 hp, it has a stripped-down profile in back, like a wrecker’s, with no winch. Should everyone else be left floundering in two feet of snow, a common winter event in the hills above Santa Fe, it’s a good bet this rugged conveyance could bull its way through and, if need be, haul other cars down the hill to safety.

The owner of the truck, the novelist Cormac McCarthy, would also seem not to belong here. He is the lone fiction writer at the institute, and his books, although they constitute one of the towering achievements in recent American literature, are often horrifically violent. Blood Meridian, ranked by Harold Bloom with the greatest novels of the 20th century, is a philosophic Western about a band of maniacal killers. At once brutally spare in terms of motivation and operatic in its soaring language, the book is based on documented events from southwestern history and is calmly realistic about the centrality of war, suffering, risk, and bloodshed in human existence. Even McCarthy’s “Border Trilogy,” begun in 1992 with All the Pretty Horses, the cause of his status as a best-selling author after decades as a cult figure, is not without graphic scenes of torture and sanguinary gunplay.

His grisly, male-dominated literary universe can hardly be said to overlap much with the hygienic concerns of scientists, especially not this international, predominantly liberal group, with whom the novelist, a quiet 72-year-old southern conservative, shares little in either background or education. (He never finished the University of Tennessee, whereas virtually all the academics here have at least one Ph.D.)

But at a place that prides itself on fostering brainy, unconventional thinkers-the S.F.I. is perhaps best known as the hub for complex-systems theory-McCarthy is actually right at home. He has been a mainstay among the rotating researchers for more than four years, and during that time if you strolled through the terraced-style headquarters, past the glass atrium and computer terminals, you were likely to hear him tapping away in his office on a blue Olivetti Lettera 32 portable typewriter. Indeed, his presence here, along with his anachronistic machine, makes him perhaps the maverick among mavericks.

“There isn’t any place like the Santa Fe Institute, and there isn’t any writer like Cormac, so the two fit quite well together,” says his friend Murray Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize winner in physics and one of the founding eminences of S.F.I.

Geoffrey West, a British high-energy physicist turned biologist who is also the institute’s interim president, believes strongly that “people define the success of projects here. Cormac is the kind of extraordinary character we like to encourage. Even though we have no formal artist-in-residence program, he functions in this way. He interacts with everyone.”

On any given day-and he comes to S.F.I. most days, even on weekends- the unsalaried McCarthy can be seen engaged in discussions with researchers about their specialties. If asked, he often looks over their texts before publication. But he has no official duties. “I have only two responsibilities,” he says. “To eat lunch and attend afternoon tea.”

Dressed in western attire (cowboy boots and jeans and a crisply pressed shirt), McCarthy is a courtly, soft-spoken man and a good listener. His is the unhurried manner of one who has never found reason to doubt his own worth or abilities. He regularly attends the workshops at S.F.I., where the topic may be the evolution of prion proteins or mammalian muscle adaptations or lying and deception or bounded inferences for decision-making in games. As a result, he often serves as a clearinghouse for those who want to know what everyone else is up to.

“I find it easier to talk to Cormac about what J. Doyne Farmer is doing”-Farmer is the economist-physicist-gambler celebrated in Thomas A. Bass’s best-selling book The Eudaemonic Pie-“than to talk to Doyne himself,” says the Russian linguist Sergei Starostin.

During informal get-togethers in the dining areas, McCarthy joins in by drawing on his extensive reading in 20th-century physics, the philosophy of mathematics, and animal behavior. In his office are manuscripts or galleys from friends in various arcane fields, such as Harvard’s Lisa Randall, a leading string theorist. They send him their latest papers because they’re curious to know what he thinks, and they know he likes to keep up on their research.

“He has a long-standing interest in a great many things and he knows an immense amount about them,” says Gell-Mann. “I’m sure during some of the workshops, when the language becomes technical, he is at sea. But even then, if he weren’t so shy, he could probably ask penetrating questions.”

What McCarthy gains from immersion in this rarefied environment is unclear to some at S.F.I. His books show no sign of being shaped by high-flown scientific thought. Most of his characters can barely read. But when pressed about this puzzle, he returns the compliments of his colleagues.

“I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet,” he says, sitting with a coffee in an S.F.I. lounge. “It’s sobering how investigations into physical phenomenon are done. It makes you more responsible about the way you think. You come to have a lot less tolerance for things that are not rigorous.”

Dining with McCarthy can be rigorous and a pleasure. He likes punctuality (“If you can’t know where a man is going to be when he says he’s going to be there, how can you trust him about anything else?”) but will linger over a meal for hours if the conversation suits him. This is usually best supplied by him. His knowledge of the natural world is vast and includes many of the Latin names of birds and animals. He can discourse on Harris’s hawks (“the only raptor that hunts communally”) or on poker (Betty Carey, the former high-stakes player, is an old friend) or on how gun manufacturers rifled their barrels before the invention of metal lathes. Only in his disdain for contemporary architecture, or for the modern world in general, can he sound off-key and crankish.

One of the few topics about which he will not willingly articulate an opinion is his own fiction. He is far from being an antisocial recluse on the order of Salinger or Pynchon. But it is impossible to imagine him chatting with Oprah or Charlie Rose. He doesn’t do book tours, readings, signings, or blurbs. Just once before in his life, in 1992, prior to the release of All the Pretty Horses, has he granted an interview. Only because he has a new book coming out this summer from Knopf has he reluctantly consented to a second.

No Country for Old Men-his first novel since Cities of the Plain, the final volume of “The Border Trilogy”-is likely to further confound McCarthy’s critics, as well as his friends at S.F.I. In some ways it doubles back to the carnage of Blood Meridian and to the relentless dread of his two earlier masterpieces, Outer Dark and Child of God. Punctuated minimally, as is his style-don’t get him started on the “idiocy” of semicolons-the book rockets along, with the bodies piling up, until there are probably more corpses than commas.

More present-day than any of his other books, the novel concerns a character named Llewelyn Moss, who when out hunting antelope in the desert comes upon a drug deal gone awry: a pile of money and dead Mexicans in a truck. By deciding to take the cash for himself, Moss sets off a chase across Texas and the Southwest as the drug dealers, their hired guns, and their “legitimate” business overseers seek to retrieve their property. Following the trail of blood and acting at times as narrator is one Sheriff Bell.

But the character most readers won’t soon forget is the drug dealer and killer Anton Chigurh, pronounced “sugar.” He is, says McCarthy, “pretty much pure evil.” We are introduced to this phantom-like psychopath upon his escape from prison. Cruising the interstate in a stolen highway-patrol car, he stops an unsuspecting civilian. As always in McCarthy’s books, quotation marks are unnecessary.

What’s the problem, officer? he said.

Sir would you mind stepping out of the vehicle?

The man opened the door and stepped out. What’s this about? he said.

Would you step away from the vehicle please.

The man stepped away from the vehicle. Chigurh could see the doubt come into his eyes at this bloodstained figure before him but it came too late. He placed his hand on the man’s head like a faith healer. The pneumatic hiss and click of the plunger sounded like a door closing. The man slid soundlessly to the ground, a round hole in his forehead from which the blood bubbled and ran down into his eyes carrying with it his slowly uncoupling world visible to see. Chigurh wiped his hand with his handkerchief. I just didnt want you to get blood on the car, he said.

Some of McCarthy’s fans may be surprised by the flat-out speed of the plot; his novels commonly unwind at a far more wayward and leisurely pace. No Country for Old Men has the structure of genre fiction and film; the late Don Siegel or the young Quentin Tarantino might have directed. But the book’s streamlined screenplay qualities-it was written in a burst, in about six months-did not hurt it in the eyes of Hollywood. Rights were snapped up with a pre-emptive bid by producer Scott Rudin in what McCarthy’s literary agent, Amanda Urban, calls “a substantial deal.” (Blood Meridian is also a Rudin property, now being developed with Ridley Scott.)

The novel allows McCarthy to write again about violence and the people who choose to live in a state of constant peril. He has known more than a few drug dealers (“some of them lovely, gracious people, very well educated”) who are no longer among the living.

“If you’re in the drug business, you know when you get up that morning that there’s some chance somebody’s going to get killed,” he says. “Maybe it’ll be you. Maybe by you. People who are not prepared to face that are not going to be in that business. Being a drug dealer is like operating a machine gun in wartime. You’re in a line of work where you’re not going to live long.”

He isn’t sure what attracts him to the theme of violence, although he regards as “not serious” writers who don’t address the issue of death. His backwoods or frontier characters experience it in various abrupt, painful ways that most of his readers know little about.

“Most people don’t ever see anyone die. It used to be if you grew up in a family you saw everybody die. They died in their bed at home with everyone gathered around. Death is the major issue in the world. For you, for me, for all of us. It just is. To not be able to talk about it is very odd.”

No Country for Old Men, one of four or five McCarthy novels that exist in various drafts, was simply the first that he was ready to part with. “He asked me, ‘Which one do you want first?’” says Gary Fisketjon, his editor at Knopf for the last 14 years. “I said, ‘Whichever you want us to publish first.’ It would be foolish to express a preference.” Fisketjon sees his role at this stage as one of “looking for small inconsistencies. If it is as Cormac wants it, that’s how it stays.”

Success has allowed McCarthy to live comfortably, a condition he seldom enjoyed during his early career. Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he grew up as the son of a well-off attorney in Knoxville, Tennessee, but has spent his life avoiding long-term stability of any kind. Before he dropped out of the University of Tennessee for the second time, his writing had been praised by his teachers, and he had even won an award or two. But he does not talk much about his early efforts. His favorite answer when asked why he became a writer is to quote Flannery O’Connor’s response: “Because I am good at it.”

His first novel, The Orchard Keeper, published in 1965, proved he was more than good. He had submitted it blindly to Random House’s legendary Albert Erskine, editor of William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison, and Erskine was impressed enough to edit McCarthy’s first five novels. But none sold more than 3,000 copies in hardcover, and he barely scratched out a living during his 30s and early 40s, when he wrote his books in a series of hovels in New Orleans, on the island of Ibiza, and in and around Knoxville. However vexing his devotion to a penurious writer’s life may have been for his first two wives, McCarthy seems never to have lost heart.

“Something would always turn up,” he says, recalling blithely the months he spent without electricity in a house in Tennessee. “I had no money, I mean none. I had run out of toothpaste and I was wondering what to do when I went to the mailbox and there was a free sample.”

Fortune smiled on McCarthy again, in 1981, when Saul Bellow, Shelby Foote, and others recommended him for a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius grant. He calls winning the award “the most profound experience of my life.” It wasn’t so much that the $236,000 allowed him to leave Tennessee (and his second wife) for the Southwest, where he spent the next five years researching and writing Blood Meridian. More crucial, from his perspective, were the annual meetings of the MacArthur fellows (“They’ve been discontinued, but I think I’m the only one who went to every one”), where he hung out with mathematicians, biologists, and world-class physicists such as Gell-Mann.

“What physicists did in the 20th century was one of the extraordinary flowerings ever in the human enterprise,” says a reverent McCarthy, who would much prefer to befriend a scientist than another writer. “They changed reality. And most of them were just kids.”

The discipline of science, where rank depends on brains rather than money or fashion, appeals to McCarthy’s own aristocratic temperament. Fame and security seem never to have been uppermost in his mind. Until All the Pretty Horses became a best-seller, and it and several of his other books suddenly turned into hot film properties, the author lived behind a shopping center in El Paso, in a tiny stone cottage on Coffin Street (the perfect address for this lover of Moby Dick). His thousands of books were in storage, and his backyard contained pickup trucks in various states of health. Twice divorced, he had a large circle of friends but was on his own.

McCarthy is now married to a woman several decades younger than himself named Jennifer Winkley. They have a six-year-old son, John, whom his father describes as “the best person I know, far better than I am.” Home is a large two-story adobe in the chic Tesuque section of Santa Fe, where their neighbors include Ali MacGraw and other movie stars. The front yard has a gigantic nest woven out of branches and twigs, an art project of Jennifer’s; the backyard has S.U.V.’s and pickups as well as John’s scattered toys. The living room and basement are dominated by McCarthy’s library of books, most of them finally out of boxes.

He seems settled here and yet not. He dotes on his son, whose bedroom is stuffed with books, maps, and models. One has the sense that he wants to atone for his shortcomings as a parent earlier in life. He seldom saw his first son, Cullen, after his first marriage dissolved. One night he brings John (and his plastic dinosaurs) to dinner after they have spent the day skiing. A traditionalist, McCarthy worries how well reading and writing are taught in this easygoing New Age enclave. He likes to complain about Santa Fe (“a theme park”) and the people who have gathered here from the coasts. “If you don’t agree with them politically, you can’t just agree to disagree-they think you’re crazy,” he exclaims. He talks of moving back to Texas, where Jennifer’s parents can help with child raising in a more congenial city.
…

Posted at 2:37 PM · Comments (2)

I recognize that it (China) is becoming a considerable threat.”

— Foreign Minister Taro Aso

For as long as I have been in the China-watching business (more than 40 years now), there has always been a China “threat.” It began with the 1950-53 Korean civil war, which initially had nothing to do with China.

Even so, Beijing was blamed and, as punishment, the United States decided to intervene not only in Korea but also in China’s civil war with Taiwan, and later threaten a move against China by sending troops close to China’s borders with Korea. When China reacted to that move by sending in its own troops, the China-threat people moved into high gear.

The next China threat was supposed to operate via the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia. Coping with it meant the West had to prop up a range of incompetent, corrupt rulers in the area, and intervene cruelly to suppress revolts by local Chinese against discrimination in Malaya and then in Sarawak.

It also meant that the U.S., Britain and Australia had to work very hard and covertly to prevent the 1959 election of an intelligent Chinese, Lee Kwan Yew, to the Singapore premiership. Lee was then seen, amazingly, as a front for those dreaded Chinese Communists.

The China-threat lobby moved into overdrive over Vietnam in the early 1960s. There a clearly nationalist-inspired civil war supported more by Moscow than by Beijing was denounced by Washington and Canberra as the first step in planned Chinese “aggression” into Asia.

In Moscow in 1964, I had to accompany an Australian foreign minister, Paul Hasluck, in a foolish, U.S.-instigated bid to persuade the Soviet Union to side with the West against those aggressive Chinese. Hasluck gave up only after a bemused Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin, told him point-blank that Moscow was doing all it could to help North Vietnam, would continue to give help, and that it would like to see Beijing doing a lot more.

In 1962, as China desk officer in Canberra, I had to witness an extraordinary attempt to label as unprovoked aggression a very limited and justified Chinese counterattack against an Indian military thrust across the Indian-claimed border line in the North East Frontier Area. Threat scenarios then had China seeking ocean access via the Bay of Bengal.

The London Economist even had Beijing seeking to move south via Afghanistan.

Then came the allegations that China was seeking footholds in Laos, northern Thailand and Myanmar — all false. U.S., British and Australian encouragement for the 1965 massacre of half a million leftwing supporters in Indonesia was also justified as needed to prevent China from gaining a foothold there.

So too was the U.S. and Australia’s 1975 approval for Indonesia’s brutal takeover of East Timor.

Since then we have seen Beijing’s claims against Taiwan condemned as aggressive, despite the fact that every Western nation, including the U.S., has formally recognized or accepted China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan. China’s efforts to assert control over Tibet are also branded as aggression even though Tibet has never been recognized as an independent entity.

And so it continues to the present day. With the alleged Soviet threat to Japan having evaporated, we now have an army of Japanese and U.S. hawks — Foreign Minister Aso included — ramping up China as an alleged threat to Japan and the Far East.

Much is made of Beijing’s recent increases in military spending. But those increases began from a very low level; until recently its military were more concerned with running companies and growing their own vegetables.

And Beijing faces a U.S.-Japan military buildup in East Asia that is avowedly anti-China and that spends a lot more than China does.

Of course, if the Chinese military were placing bases and sending spy planes and ships close to the U.S. coast, and were bombing U.S. embassies, the U.S. role in that buildup might be justified. But so far that has not happened.

Tokyo’s claims to be threatened by China in the East China Sea are equally dubious. So far, the only shots fired in anger in that area have been Japan’s, in a legally dubious huntdown and sinking of a North Korean vessel.

Tokyo makes much of China’s challenge to Japan’s claimed EEZ (exclusive economic zone) median line of control in the East China Sea (Beijing says the EEZ border should be based on the continental shelf extending close to the Ryukyu islands and proposes joint development between the two claim lines).

But international law on EEZ borders still does not firmly support Japan’s median line position. And the recent Australia-East Timor agreement on joint development of continental shelf oil/gas resources in the Timor Sea, and the 1974 Japan-South Korean agreement for joint development in the East China Sea continental shelf, both strongly suggest that Beijing’s joint development proposal is not entirely unreasonable.

But no doubt these details will be dismissed as irrelevant. Our powers-that-be need threats to justify their existence. As we saw during the Cold War, and more recently over Iraq, once they declare that such and such a nation is a threat, it becomes impossible to stop the escalation. The other side naturally has to show some reaction. The military-industrial- intelligence complex then seize on this as the pretext further to expand budgets and power. Before long the media and a raft of dubious academic and other commentators are sucked into the vortex.

Then when it is all over and the alleged threat has proved to be quite imaginary, the threat merchants move on to find another target. But not before billions have been spent. And millions have died.

Gregory Clark is vice president of Akita International University and a former Australian diplomat. A translation of this article will appear at www.gregoryclark.net

The Japan Times: Jan. 7, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

Posted at 10:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Los Angeles Times

Carson Hom’s family has run a thriving fortune cookie and almond cookie company in Los Angeles County for 35 years.

And for much of that time, it was a business that required two languages: Cantonese, to communicate with employees and the Chinese restaurants that bought the cookies, and English, to deal with health inspectors, suppliers and accountants.

But when Hom, 30, decided to start his own food import company, he learned that this bilingualism wasn’t enough anymore.
FOR THE RECORD:
Cantonese dialect —An article in Tuesday’s Section A about the decline of the Cantonese dialect in North America’s Chinese communities identified Cantonese speaker Victor Law as an accountant. He is a pharmacist.
He checked out the competition at a recent Chinese products fair in the San Gabriel Valley and found that he couldn’t get much further than “hello” in conversing with vendors.

“I can’t communicate,” said Hom, whose parents are from Hong Kong. “Everyone around used to speak Cantonese. Now everyone is speaking Mandarin.”

Cantonese, a sharp, cackling dialect full of slang and exaggerated expressions, was never the dominant language of China. But it came to dominate the Chinatowns of North America because the first immigrants came from the Cantonese-speaking southern province of Guangdong, where China first opened its ports to foreigners centuries ago.

It is also the chief language of Hong Kong, the vital trading and financial center that became China’s link to the West.

But over the last three decades, waves of Mandarin-speaking mainland Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants have diluted the influence of both the Cantonese language and the pioneering Cantonese families who ran Chinatowns for years.

The surging Chinese economy today has challenged Cantonese further. Because Mandarin is China’s official language, entrepreneurs like Hom have been forced to adapt, often learning the hard way that business can’t be done with Cantonese alone.

Many Cantonese speakers are racing to learn Mandarin any way they can — by watching Chinese soap operas, attending schools, paying for expensive immersion courses and even making more Mandarin-speaking friends. This is no cinch. Although Cantonese and Mandarin share the same written language, they are spoken as differently as English and French.

At the same time, few people are learning Cantonese. San Jose State University and New York University offer classes, but they are almost alone among colleges with established Cantonese communities. The language is not taught at USC, UCLA, Pasadena City College, San Francisco State or Queens College in New York, to name a few.

With the changes, some are lamenting — in ways they can do only in Cantonese — the end of an era. Mandarin is now the vernacular of choice, and they say it doesn’t come close to the colorful and brash banter of Cantonese.

“You might be saying, ‘I love you’ to your girlfriend in Cantonese, but it will still sound like you’re fighting,” said Howard Lee, a talk show host on Cantonese language KMRB-AM (1430). “It’s just our tone. We always sound like we’re in a shouting match. Mandarin is so mellow. Cantonese is strong and edgy.”

Cantonese is said to be closer than Mandarin to ancient Chinese. It is also more complicated. Mandarin has four tones, so a character can be intonated four ways with four meanings. Cantonese has nine tones.

Beginning in the 1950s, the Chinese government tried to make Mandarin the national language in an effort to bridge the myriad dialects across the country. Since then, the government has been working to simplify the language, renamed Putonghua, and give it a proletarian spin. To die-hard Cantonese, no fans of the Communist government, this is one more reason to look down on Mandarin.

Many say it is far more difficult to learn Cantonese than Mandarin because the former does not always adhere to rules and formulas. Image-rich slang litters the lexicon and can leave anyone ignorant of the vernacular out of touch.

“You have to really listen to people if you want to learn Cantonese,” said Gary Tai, who teaches the language at New York University and is also a principal at a Chinese school in Staten Island. “You have to watch movies and listen to songs. You can’t learn the slang from books.”

Popular phrases include the slang for getting a parking ticket, which in Cantonese is “I ate beef jerky,” probably because Chinese beef jerky is thin and rectangular, like a parking ticket. And teo bao (literally “too full”) describes someone who is uber-trendy, so hip he or she is going to explode.

Many sayings are coined by movie stars on screen. Telling someone to chill out, comedian Stephen Chow says: “Drink a cup of tea and eat a bun.”

Then there are the curse words, and what an abundance there is.

A four-syllable obscenity well known in the Cantonese community punctuates the end of many a sentence.

“I think we all agree that curse words in Cantonese just sound better,” said Lee, the radio host. “It’s so much more of a direct hit on the nail. In Mandarin, they sound so polite.”

His colleague, news broadcaster Vivian Lee, chimed in to clarify that the curse words were not vindictive.

“It’s not that Cantonese people are less educated. They’re very well educated. The language is just cute and funny. It doesn’t hurt anyone,” said Lee, who does the news show on the station five days a week. “The Italians need body language. We don’t need that at all. We have adjectives.”

To stress a point or to twist a sentence into a question, Cantonese speakers need only add a dramatic ahhhhhhh or laaaaaaa at the end.

Something simple like, “Let’s go” becomes “C’mon, lets get a move on!” when it’s capped with laaaaa.

By comparison, with Mandarin from China, what you see is what you get. The written form has been simplified by the Chinese government so that characters require fewer strokes. It is considered calmer and more melodic.

Take the popular Cantonese expression chi-seen, which means your wires have short-circuited. It is used, often affectionately, to call someone or something crazy. The Mandarin equivalent comes off to Cantonese people sounding like “You have a brain malfunction that has rendered your behavior unusual.”

The calm tones of Mandarin are heard more and more around Southern California’s Chinese community.

Even quintessential Hong Kong-style restaurants, including wonton noodle shops, now have waitresses who speak Mandarin, albeit badly, so they can take orders. Elected officials in Los Angeles County, even native Cantonese, are holding news conferences in Mandarin.

Some Cantonese speakers feel besieged.

Cheryl Li, a 19-year-old Pasadena City College student whose parents are from Hong Kong, is studying to become an occupational therapist and volunteers at the Garfield Medical Center in Monterey Park, where most of the patients are Chinese.

Recently, she was asking patients, in Mandarin, what they wanted to eat. When one man thought her accent was off, he said, “Stupid second-generation Chinese American doesn’t speak Mandarin.”

Li responded angrily, “No! I was born here. But I understand enough.”

“We’re in the minority,” she added, reflecting on the incident. “I’m scared Cantonese is going to be a lost language.”

Still, Li is studying Mandarin.

There are places where Cantonese is protected and cherished.

At a cavernous Chinese seafood restaurant in Monterey Park, members of the Hong Kong Schools Alumni Federation gathered in a back room to munch on stir-fried scallops, pork offal soup and spare ribs.

It was a regular monthly meeting of the group and a sanctuary for Hong Kong Chinese people who take comfort eating and joking with fellow Cantonese speakers.

“I just can’t express myself as freely in Mandarin,” said Victor Law, an accountant who left Hong Kong to attend college in the U.S. 34 years ago. “That’s why we have this association. I feel like we’re the last of a dying breed.”

For Law, it’s not just the language but many Cantonese traditions that are on the decline. He says it’s now hard to find a mah-jongg game that uses Hong Kong rules instead of Taiwanese rules, a distinction concerning how many tiles are used.

“I’m not ready to be a dinosaur,” said Amy Yeung, president of the alumni group.

To the trained ear, it was instantly apparent that this was a gathering of Cantonese speakers. The room was deafeningly loud with everyone talking. Even serious discussions were punctuated with wise cracks.

When Yeung announced that members could get seats and walk the red carpet at an Asian film festival, the room erupted in unison in the most common way a Cantonese person expresses astonishment.

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

Near the end of the night, Yeung had important news. A mother in Hong Kong called to say she was moved to tears by a scholarship the federation had given to her daughter to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“She told me to tell you all, ‘Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I didn’t know there were such good people in the world,’ ” Yeung said.

The room fell silent for a moment. Sensing the awkwardness and, God forbid, self-congratulatory tone of the story, Law blurted, “Does she know how to cook?”

Everyone laughed and another successful meeting came to an end.

The alumni association can afford to lament. Many of them speak Mandarin already. But many Cantonese speakers are finding out now that they have to learn Mandarin or risk being left behind in business or even within their families.

To learn Mandarin, Joyce Fong sits in her favorite black leather massage chair in front of her living room TV and goes through Chinese soap operas on DVD. Some are about ancient Chinese dynasties. Others focus on the story of a single mother. And a few are South Korean programs dubbed into Mandarin.

The 67-year-old retiree says she has to pick up the language if she hopes to be able to communicate with her 9- and 5-year-old grandsons in China.

The boys had been living with their parents in the Bay Area, but the family decided to move to China a year ago so that Fong’s son, Gregory, could take a job at a university and also raise his children immersed in Chinese culture.

Although the grandchildren will also speak English, they will primarily use Mandarin at school, Fong said.

“I want to encourage them. I tell them, ‘Grandma is trying to learn Mandarin too,’ ” said Fong, who immigrated to the U.S. from Hong Kong 53 years ago and is socially involved in L.A. Chinatown through her family association.

Walnut City Councilman Joaquin Lim grew up in Hong Kong and immigrated to the U.S. in the 1960s. For decades in California, he found he could get by with English and Cantonese.

But that changed when he decided to get into politics a decade ago.

Running for the school board in his suburban community, Lim quickly realized that most of his Chinese constituents in the eastern San Gabriel Valley were newcomers who didn’t speak Cantonese.

So Lim had his Mandarin friends speak to him in their mother tongue. He watched movies in Mandarin and listened to Mandarin songs. By the time he ran for City Council in 1995, he felt comfortable enough with the language to campaign door-to-door and talk to Mandarin residents.

But there’s always room for improvement — as Mandarin speakers are quick to remind him when he gives speeches. A few months ago, he was speaking to the Chinese language media at a news conference announcing a task force to improve health standards in Chinese restaurants.

As he spoke in Mandarin, fellow task force member Anthony Wong interrupted him in mid-sentence to correct his grammar.

The ethnic Chinese reporters chuckled, acknowledging that his Mandarin was a work in progress.

Lim recently spoke at a graduation ceremony in Cal Poly Pomona for government officials from central China who took a four-week course in American administrative practices.

Lim thought it went well. But the leader of the Chinese delegation had a slightly more reserved review: “It’s much better than most Cantonese-speaking people.”

Posted at 10:02 PM · Comments (0)

Friday January 6, 2006
Copyright The Guardian

Today, 159 years after the first modern nation in Africa was established by freed American slaves, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf will be inaugurated as its first woman president. She will also be the continent’s first female elected head of state. The challenges she will face are immense. Liberia has just emerged from 15 years of civil war, in which its people have been butchered and demoralised; there is no electricity in parts of the capital, Monrovia; water-supply systems have been almost universally destroyed, and schools looted or burned down; and hospitals and clinics exist in name only.

Article continues
Johnson-Sirleaf has spent most of her working life with international organisations, such as the World Bank and UN development programme, and private financial institutions, including Citibank in New York. She intends to use her experience to negotiate finance deals that can put the Liberian economy back on its feet. She will also encourage the million Liberian refugees dispersed across west Africa to return home and help create an efficient government.

Johnson-Sirleaf was imprisoned in the 1980s by one of Africa’s most brutal dictators, Samuel Doe. Doe’s successor, Charles Taylor, charged her with treason and jailed her. After her election victory last November, she told me: “I have been kept going all these years by my irreversible commitment to democracy and the social and economic development of Liberia.”

One of her tasks is to bring on board George Weah, the football superstar she beat in the presidential run-off. He had attracted the support of many of the young and jobless who, in the civil war, acted as hired guns. They have now been disarmed by the UN, and some look to Weah to fill their pockets with his football dollars. Johnson-Sirleaf recognises the danger they could pose to the nation’s rebuilding. “My priority will be to educate our young people and provide them with opportunities for reintegrating,” she explains.

She has calmed the disappointed Weah, whose election petition against Johnson-Sirleaf - claiming fraud in some areas - nearly rekindled violence in the country. It is expected that Weah will have a seat in her new cabinet.

Johnson-Sirleaf is aware that her performance will be used as a marker that will either push or halt the progress of women throughout Africa. A Unicef report a month ago estimated the number of young women who undergo genital mutilation in Africa and the Middle East at about 3 million a year. Worse still, their traditional child-rearing role often prevents African women from entering politics in large enough numbers to change such odious practices.

Only Uganda and Mozambique have set aside seats for women in parliament, but even there men try to manipulate the process so that they can keep out “strong” women. And because it is men who control the budgets, health services throughout Africa are still inadequate - even in Nigeria, an oil-rich country, one in every 18 women is likely to die from pregnancy-related causes.

Johnson-Sirleaf could be forgiven if she concentrated solely on Liberia’s problems. But her style is to confront problems wherever she sees them. Many Liberians believe she was spared, when ministers of the William Tolbert government were executed in the coup of April 1980 that brought Doe to power, because she had begun to fight corruption from within the finance ministry.

She will need firm principles to withstand the international carpetbaggers who will flock to Liberia, ostensibly to help resuscitate the economy but in reality to pocket huge profits. She will also have to use her financial expertise to balance Liberia’s need for massive overseas investment against the tendency of donor organisations to dictate the national interests of recipient countries.

And there is serious concern in Liberia that, with her background, Johnson-Sirleaf’s economic policies will be wedded to free-market principles. Charging school fees, demanding an “economic” price for water, electricity and phones, as well as neglecting the poor, would be disastrous. She must not devote herself to the interests of the few in the vain hope that the benefits of their wealth will trickle down to the huge numbers who wallow in poverty.

Can she do it? I believe so. She is 67 and has six grandchildren whom she adores and whose presence will always be a reminder that her country can’t be plunged into another political debacle that could threaten their young lives.

· Cameron Duodu is a Ghanaian novelist and journalist
duodu@homechoice.co.uk

Posted at 3:14 PM · Comments (0)

January 3rd, 2006 - Copyright The Village Voice

Foreign is as foreign does. There really is no difference between any two cultures, except that they’re totally different. An example: In The Joys of Engrish (just out from Penguin/Tarcher), Steven Caires puts together a humorous compendium of misused English phrases found mostly in Asia. Caires has a popular website (engrish.com) that I will admit to visiting monthly. Some of the Engrish examples, however, are not actually incorrect usages or spellings, but funny juxtapositions of things that shouldn’t belong together. The oxymoron “Fight Peaceful” probably wouldn’t be funny enough for Jay Leno, were it not found on a T-shirt in Japan. The key is irony: We presume that the double entendres are lost on Asians.

Hollywood especially loves unironic Engrish. No other industry makes its own language speak so proudly in foreign accents. We Americans have enormous respect for actors who can convincingly fake foreignness (“Meryl Streep has never used the same accent twice!”). This has nothing to do with authenticity. If we can love Missouri native Don Cheadle playing a Rwandan, then we can love Mickey Rooney playing a Japanese landlord. If we can love Hank Azaria playing an Indian convenience store owner, then by God, we can love Hungarian ?migr? Peter Lorre playing a Japanese spy.

At least in the movies and TV shows mentioned above, though, the characters would have in fact spoken English in their represented settings. This is what makes Memoirs of a Geisha so audaciously stupid: It’s set in Japan (where, believe it or not, English is not the official language), with an almost entirely Chinese starring cast performing completely in heavily accented English. The only Japanese you hear is unsubtitled Foley meant to historicize the story, with an incessant wooden flute playing a bad appropriation of Kitaro. The movie’s credibility is a lose-lose situation for those filmgoers with any respect for Asia. To begin with, a lot of people are complaining about the fact that the actors are Chinese. According to the New York Post, one Chinese blogger said Ziyi Zhang’s playing a Japanese courtesan is a national insult and that “hacking her to death would not be good enough.” (What would happen to James Gandolfini if he portrayed Chairman Mao in a biopic?)

But my damage is the fact that these women were cast on the condition that they would be handicapped of their talent for natural speech. Everyone’s in raptures about how hell-raiser Gong Li says, “I shall destroy you,” and later leaves the geisha house in flames, but that is nothing compared to her psychotic break in Raise the Red Lantern, where even the subtitles were truer to her Mandarin. Taking the natural speech from the actresses’ performances in order to give them a bigger fan base is an irony paralleled in one of the movie’s premises: that reclaiming the innocence of a girl by kidnapping and making her a geisha is the only way to make that innocence more valuable. If this sounds turgid and wrong (after all, the original book was in English, so it’s natural the film would be too, right?), let’s put it this way: The equivalent of the Memoirs production in Japan would be Pearl Harbor starring Russian actors playing American soldiers and speaking really poor Japanese.

And it really is poor English that’s spoken in most of the movie, regardless of whether anyone is too impressed with the actresses’ ability to memorize sounds to care. It gives new meaning to the climactic pickup line in Jerry Maguire, “You had me at hello,” as in I didn’t understand a word you said after that. Half of Ziyi Zhang’s dialogue was totally lost on me, and I found myself mouthing along with Gong Li’s lips in a desperate attempt to capture her lines when my perfect hearing failed me. I will admit to being impressed with rival geisha Pumpkin, played by Youki Kudoh, who does a flawless imitation of a tipsy Tara Reid, oblivious to the boob hanging out of her dress.
Village Voice Online Store

After I got used to the ESL pace of the story, my difficulty in following the dialogue turned into incredulity at the story. To sum up, the movie is an apology for sexism with two essential conflicts: the rags-to-bitches catfight for geisha supremacy, and the ill-fated love between Ziyi Zhang’s Sayuri and Ken Watanabe’s Chairman (who turns out to have been a pedophile: His initial attraction to Sayuri was when she was the ripe age of nine). Throughout, the film muses on what a geisha is exactly. Apparently, a geisha is not a hooker, but you can only become a geisha by selling your virginity. I guess the thinking is that if you only sell sex once you’re … not a hooker?

The worst part of Memoirs is still that Ziyi Zhang speaks a slow and crude English that she learned in half a year. But even if God’s wrath upon the Asian denizens of Babel is broken Engrish, at least it’s not total silence. The Harajuku Girls are a quartet of dancers (at least one of whom is from California) on Gwen Stefani’s solo music tour. They pose as avatars of the Tokyo neighborhood famous for being a spectacle of fashion and consumerism. Rumor has it that they were contractually obliged by Gwen Stefani (or her PR gurus) not to speak English while on tour, despite being fluent in the language. Love, Angel, Music, and Baby are, like the geishas in Memoirs, simply empty roles of Asian women who aren’t allowed to speak openly. I hope that there is no doubt, but just to be clear, silencing people is the epitome of taking away their autonomy and subjectivity, even if Gwen Stefani thinks her silent Japanese fashionistas are part of an awesome and empowering counterculture. This raises the question: Why would an American entertainer who presumably knows cultural diversity (Stefani hails from a part of the O.C. not 10 minutes from my own provenance, where? unlike in the TV show?close to half the population is nonwhite) make such stupid demands specifically for Asian roles? What would be so wrong with Asian women speaking normally?

Maybe it’s a thing with bigwig white musicians who are attempting to straddle the cultural divides of urban America. In a New York Times Magazine cover-feature interview with Beck in March, the Los Angeles darling of white funk recounted how difficult it was to find a Japanese woman to speak fucked-up English on “Hell Yes,” a track off his album Guero. Apparently everybody his producers’ assistants solicited in the local L.A. sushi bar scene spoke pitch-perfect English, so Christina Ricci ended up standing in to do a rendition of Engrish. (According to producer John King, “She was sounding so good and it was so funny to all of us that we just kept feeding her lines.”) I don’t see the point of either the story itself or its recounting in one of the world’s highest circulating newspapers. Have we come so far from the days of Long Duk Dong that now only Engrish can represent serious Asian roles?

As I ponder the limits of ridiculousness in Asianica, I begin to feel less and less offended. While there was in fact a moment when I worried Edward Said (who coined, defined, and criticized the term and concept of Orientalism) was turning in his grave for today’s broadly defined Oriental, I realized soon thereafter the poetic justice. Things like Memoirs of a Geisha and The Joys of Engrish and the Harajuku Girls are, in the end, just kitschy, clich? bird droppings of consumerism? the equivalent of a mini bamboo tree that had sex with a kimono, gave birth to Mishima, and then got a tattoo in Chinese and put on cowboy boots before heading to Pearl River. No real harm done. Said could give two squirts about this stuff. He’s got more important things to turn in his grave about, like the fact that Zizek and Derrida got movies before him.

Anne Ishii is director of marketing and publicity for Vertical Inc.

Posted at 10:28 AM · Comments (0)

Read in Laos, on the heels of No Country for Old Men. This is incomparable stuff, a dense and vivid depiction of the original sin behind the American Dream: absolutely craven violence and money lust.
I can’t believe I never read this before, having already read McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. This is his most essential work.

An excerpt, using the author’s punctuation:

The judge wrote on and then he folded the ledger shut and laid it to one side and pressed his hands together and passed them down over his nose and mouth and placed them palm down on his knees.
Whatever exists, he said. Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.
He looked about at the dark forest in which they were bivouacked. He nodded toward the specimens he’d collected. These anonymous creatures, he said, may seem little or nothing in the world. Yet the smallest crumb can devour us. Any smallest thing beneath yon rock out of men’s knowing. Only nature can enslave man and only then the existence of each last entity is routed out and made to stand naked before him will he be properly suzerain of the earth.
What’s a suzerain?
A keeper. A keeper or overlord.
Why not say keeper then?
Because he is a special kind of keeper. A suzerain rules even where there are other rulers. His authority countermands local judgments.
Toadvine spat.
The judge placed his hands on the ground. He looked at his inquisitor. This is my claim, he said. And yet everywhere upon it are pockets of autonomous life. Autonomous. In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.
Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everyting on this earth, he said.
The judge titled his great head. The man who believes the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to disctate the terms of his own fate.
I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

Posted at 11:22 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve just finished a vacation trip to Laos - a first time visit to an amazing place that, pardon the cliche, seems to live in a time zone all of its own. There’s a fairly large photo gallery associated with the trip, made possible by the fact that I had nothing but free time. I shot most of these in raw format with my Canon 10D, at the urging of the peerless Stuart Isett, one of my mentors in such matters, and was very pleasantly surprised with the lattitude it offers in optmimization. There’s been a bit of a learning curve involved with this, as with all of the photographic work here. What’s already certain, though, is that I won’t go back to working in JPEG. I’ve also posted a separate, smaller gallery of chromes shot with my Yashica 124G.
Laos is in the process of being “discovered,” which may (or may not) be good for the country’s economy, but will change the place forever. I’ve wanted to come here since the 1970s, when my father visited as part of a delegation investigating conditions for the US Senate as part of a medical fact-finding mission in the wake of the American bombing campaign. His most vivid memory of the place then and now is how friendly the people are. It’s true. I’m glad I was able to visit when I did.

Posted at 2:12 AM · Comments (3)

January 03, 2006

Copyright The Christian Science Monitor

BEIJING - An emotional strike by 100 journalists at this city’s most
popular and lively newspaper follows a 16-month campaign to quash a
broad range of “unapproved” public speech in areas verging on politics
or society - a campaign that includes Internet blogs, and new
restrictions on cellphones designed to smoke outsenders of renegade text
messages.

In the case of Beijing News, whose progressive editor Yang Bin was
replaced without warning last week, Chinese authorities dealt a
seemingly fatal blow to a publishing project that two years ago gave the
press some freedom to experiment.

Last June the paper reported on violent land disputes in Hebei province,
and last month, in what may have precipitated the purge, it published
tame, but independent, stories on the official coverup of a massive
benzene chemical spill in the Songhua River.

Last Thursday, in a gritty south Beijing neighborhood, nearly 100
reporters left the news offices. They began a short-lived strike - a
rarity in China - and signed a petition asking for Mr. Yang’s
reinstatement, describing the removal as a tragedy. Some wept publicly,
according to sources at the meeting.

“We were happy with our paper and the idea we had. But now the editor is
leaving and the idea will leave with him. I am very sad,” said a
journalist who spoke with foreign reporters despite the presence of
security officials and a warning that she could lose her job.

While Beijing News is often described as “radical” or “bold” - it would
not warrant that definition in a Western setting. The thick daily
tabloid is a subtle blend of eye-catching photos, pop culture, and
real-life stories about the good, bad, and ugly. Interspersed are
full-page ads for clothes and credit cards that appealed to an aspiring
urban middle class.

Editor Yang, who cut his teeth in the looser commercial media climate of
south China, brought a professional ethos that captured the imagination
of staffers. As one put it, “He asked us to be responsible, accurate,
and true. He is a model for me and a man with high standards. I would
hope that some day I could be like him.”

Yet Beijing News was mainly quite moderate, not crusading - and many
Chinese journalists say the real message behind Yang’s removal is that
even slight divergences from moderate norms may be punished. This
discourages testing the boundaries of free expression, they say, since
any paper could lose its license or leadership.

The sudden move on Beijing News is part of a systematic effort by the
central propaganda department in Beijing to more-closely police speech
and expression. In the past year, the party initiated the broadest
ideological education campaign in a decade. In part, that campaign
discourages liberality and freedom of expression. The official news
service Xinhua this week, in fact, selected this party campaign as its
No. 1 story of 2005, calling it “a massive political and ideological
education drive among more than 68 million CPC members to maintain their
moral and socialist ethical superiority, a new, great project to promote
Party construction.”

As a result, in the past year “public intellectuals” that spoke out on
social welfare or the environment have been curbed from doing so in
state media.

Last summer a set of editors resigned from the Economic Times citing a
loss of the paper’s core values. A plan by China Youth Daily to tie
reporters’ salary bonuses to the degree of praise by party officials was
narrowly scotched. Last week the monthly magazine Bai Xing, whose
readership is similar to that of Beijing News, was told to remove its
interactive web commentary, its investigative news department, and the
magazine’s slogan, “recording China in change.”

Bai Xing editor Huang Liangtian was quoted in the South China Morning
Post as saying that “we are required to focus more on culture and
lifestyle topics.”

Blogs, college message boards, and cellphone text messages have been
censured or shut down. Just Monday a new policy was announced that will
require some 200 million Chinese to provide proof of identity before
buying prepaid cellphone cards.

The controlling share of Beijing News is owned by a conservative
southern media group whose flagship is the conservative and often
cash-strapped Guangming Daily. Editors from that paper took control
after Yang and at least one other top deputy editor were forced out.
Beijing Daily staffers worried that the unusual combination of letters
to the editor - a rarity in Chinese papers - and stories about official
corruption and official apologies, would sour the public on their paper.

In the past 10 days, two Chinese journalists in prison for alleged
violations of state security laws are reportedly being prepared for
trial. The cases of Zhao Yan, an assistant for The New York Times, and
Ching Cheong, a veteran Hong Kong reporter, have languished for months,
but now may be heard within six weeks. Numerous press freedom groups,
including the Foreign Correspondents Club of China, have vigorously
protested the charges, as well as the chilling effect it has on the work
of ordinary news gathering. Mr. Ching was arrested in China while on a
trip to procure manuscripts from the late premier Zhao Ziyang, who until
his passing a year ago lived under house arrest after opposing violence
at Tiananmen square in June 1989.

“The Communist Party leaders have a strange way of celebrating the end
of the year,” noted the Paris-based Reporters without Borders. “After
announcing that Zhao Yan and Ching Cheong are to be tried, the Beijing
authorities have decided to kill off one of China’s most popular and
liberal newspapers. We affirm our solidarity with the staff of the paper.”

Beijing Daily staff members, mostly ordinary reporters, tried to mount a
serious strike at the paper, something almost unheard of in the obedient
ranks of Chinese journalists.

But after the new editors threatened immediate dismissal, there was not
enough cohesion to sustain the effort. Instead, reporters phoned and
e-mailed friends and colleagues, with one writing with traditional
Chinese heroic fatalism, “There is no way to retreat, so we won’t
retreat. The butcher’s knife is already raised … we’re going to die so
let’s make it a beautiful death.”

A more artful and indirect protest statement came on the weather page of
the paper Friday, in the form of a photograph of birds flying into the
distance. Underneath were the words, “A bird leading its flock flies
across the sky. Although the sky is not so clear, they fly far away,
carrying their goals in their hearts.”
http://www.christiansciencemonitor.com/2006/0103/p06s01-woap.htm

Posted at 8:00 PM · Comments (0)

Thursday, December 29, 2005 - Copyright The Washington Post

Andrew Weigle can fully express himself in several dozen characters or less.

That’s the amount of space he gets on his Motorola Razr phone to compose text messages, which he sends mostly to friends and, on at least one occasion, to a girlfriend to break up.

Photos
/politics Text Msg. and Rock n’ Roll
Text-based intimacy went on display during a recent Bon Jovi concert at the MCI Center, when Sprint Nextel Corp. invited the audience to send in text messages, which then scrolled across a gigantic screen behind the stage, including proclamations of love, birthday shout-outs and even several marriage proposals.
Who’s Blogging?
Read what bloggers are saying about this article.

* Blue’s News - All the carnage that’s fit to post!
* Tightly Wound
* Eugene David …The One-Minute Pundit

Full List of Blogs (33 links) »

Most Blogged About Articles
On washingtonpost.com | On the web

“It was easier to say, ‘Look, things just aren’t working out’ ” over the text message, said Weigle, 23, who lives in Falls Church. “I’m not the most verbal person when it comes to expressing emotions,” he admitted, but with text messaging, “I can put it out there and feel like I’m not saying it. I find there’s a little more freedom to say what you’re feeling.”

A generation ago, those kinds of missives came in handwritten form, taking days or weeks to arrive. Then e-mail made communication much quicker but still allowed time and space for reflection.

Now, text messaging — like its older cousin instant messaging — is giving rise to a new, electronic written culture that is truncating all of that. A text message sent via mobile phone is usually confined to 160 characters or less and takes several seconds to send. To accommodate this short form, language is acquiring acronyms — “H8” (hate), “iluvu” (I love you) and “ruok” (are you okay) — that allow text messages and other instant messages to relay information about life’s mundane details as well as its emotional brambles.

About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago, according to CTIA, the wireless industry’s trade group. After Hurricane Katrina knocked out or overloaded communications systems, one of the only ways to reach lost relatives and friends was through text messaging, which transmits in sturdy little bursts of data that can often make it through even when voice lines are snarled.

Compared with an ink-and-paper letter, messages may seem disposable. The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad — the letter “c,” for example, requires three presses of the “2” button — and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say.

“There is something different about communications that are mediated by a piece of technology; it is easier to talk about difficult subjects, and that is both good and bad,” said Amanda Lenhart, senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, who has interviewed many teenagers about how they use technology. “You don’t see the person’s upper lip tremble. You don’t hear their voice quiver. You don’t get those external, non-textual cues,” so delicate subjects might be easier to broach, if also sometimes easier to misunderstand, she said.

Text-based intimacy went on display during a recent Bon Jovi concert at the MCI Center, when Sprint Nextel Corp. invited the audience to send in text messages, which then scrolled across a gigantic screen behind the stage, including proclamations of love, birthday shout-outs and even several marriage proposals.

Robert Helsel III and his two sisters high-fived when their text message to their baby brother lit up the screen: “Todd helsel here in our harts.”

“In June 2002 our little brother was killed in a car accident,” said Helsel, an Elkton resident. Todd was 18 and a week shy of his high school graduation. “We grew up on Bon Jovi. We’ve always been huge fans; we always wanted to see Bon Jovi before we died,” Helsel said over the din of the crowd. Seeing Todd’s name appear over the stage was a kind of fulfillment of that, he said. “It was like closure. It just made it feel like he was right there with us.”

The brevity of a text message gives it a certain poetic beauty, said Washington resident Erik Lung, 34. As in enigmatic haiku, there is lots of space for reading between lines, particularly in an early-stage romance.

“You can send a quick little message saying you’re thinking of her,” the operations research analyst said. Then “you start paying attention not only to what the message says, but you care about the response time.” There’s a meta-message: The shorter the response time, the more she cares.

Text messages also feel more personal because the cell phone is always physically close, Lung said — a feature that works for and against him. He recently got into an argument with a friend, for example, who sent angry messages in all capital letters, berating him for ignoring her. “She started insulting me over text message … and it was not a good scene. It annoyed the hell out of me,” he said. “Text messaging will catch you no matter where you are.”

Photos
/politics Text Msg. and Rock n’ Roll
Text-based intimacy went on display during a recent Bon Jovi concert at the MCI Center, when Sprint Nextel Corp. invited the audience to send in text messages, which then scrolled across a gigantic screen behind the stage, including proclamations of love, birthday shout-outs and even several marriage proposals.
Who’s Blogging?
Read what bloggers are saying about this article.

* Blue’s News - All the carnage that’s fit to post!
* Tightly Wound
* Eugene David …The One-Minute Pundit

Full List of Blogs (33 links) »

Most Blogged About Articles
On washingtonpost.com | On the web

Messaging alters language and composition style, said Tom Keeney, director of messaging for T-Mobile USA. Slang has gotten more detailed and sophisticated, making it possible to say more on a tiny canvas, much like poetry, he said. “It’s almost like letters gave way to postcards. It was a way to say something on the go.”

Text messaging became popular in the United States about three years ago, coinciding with the first television season of “American Idol,” which allowed viewers to vote for contestants by sending messages to the show. Now, almost a third of the country’s 200 million cellular phone subscribers use text messaging regularly for social or business purposes.

In a recent survey, more than 60 percent of U.S. adults used text messages to tell others they missed or loved them, according to a survey by Tegic Communications, a company that makes predictive-spelling software used on most U.S. cell phones. In the same survey, 27 percent said they used them to flirt, 7 percent to ask someone for a date, and 2 percent to break up. Two percent percent proposed marriage via text.

In Europe and Asia, where text-messaging started earlier, emotional messaging is more common, according to Tegic. Among Germans, 70 percent said “I love you” or “I miss you” over text; 13 percent of Italians and 12 percent of Chinese subscribers admitted to breaking up over text.

Alexandria resident John Mallory said he has developed emotional attachments to some old text messages but occasionally must erase them to make room for new ones. “It says, ‘Your mailbox is 90 percent full,’ ” said Mallory, 24, opening his phone to read an old message. “I’m in a constant battle to pick which ones to save.”

But the saved messages can come back to bite. “I’ve had a friend in particular whose girlfriend was going through his phone and saw flirtatious text messages to an ex-girlfriend,” he said. And that was a deal breaker.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Posted at 7:49 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright © 2010 Howard W. French. All rights reserved. Reproductions of any portion of this Web site only with expressed permission.

A Glimpse of the World is a hirefrank production using Moveable Type and Gallery with XHTML and CSS. Design consulting by pixelflexmedia.

Questions, concerns or comments about the site? Drop us a line.