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

Copyright The New York Times
February 27, 2006

Mayhem in Nigeria, the fifth-largest oil supplier to the United States and Africa’s most populous country, is escalating. Since mid-December, crime and violence have regularly shut down about 10 percent of the country’s oil output. In the last week, production has been cut by nearly 20 percent — a shortfall of 455,000 barrels daily — amid kidnappings of foreign workers, arson against offshore oil installations, bombings of pipelines and lethal clashes between Muslims and Christians…

… the world needs a stable Nigeria for reasons that go beyond oil. Nigeria is crucial to all of West Africa, having often provided the military troops and negotiating forums to quell civil war and related violence in neighboring countries…

…Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to Nigeria’s troubles. A big part of the problem is that the people of the country’s oil-rich Niger Delta remain deeply impoverished, largely because of endemic corruption in distributing oil wealth and the historical indifference of oil companies to those economic inequities and to environmental devastation in the Delta. At the same time, the militants who claim to represent the Delta people have evolved into criminal gangs, adept at stealing huge amounts of oil to sell on black markets, the proceeds of which are used to buy ever more sophisticated weapons.

Some of the current violence is a backlash against the Nigerian government’s recent anti-corruption successes. But over all, Nigeria is not strong enough to solve its own problems. The Bush administration, with its good relations with Nigeria and with oil companies, is unusually well positioned to broker international arrangements that would enhance transparency in the flow of oil dollars and development in the Niger Delta.

Sub-Saharan Africa is on track to double its oil production in the next 10 years, when it will likely supply up to one-fourth of America’s imported oil, much of it from Nigeria. Now is the time for the American government to pay more attention to this region.

Posted at 4:00 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

Anomalies abound when we think about China’s economic transition. How, for example, has it achieved record-beating growth while lagging badly on institutional reforms? Although an initial pioneer in embracing market reforms, China today has fallen behind most former Soviet bloc countries, its large developing country peers (Mexico, Brazil and India) and most of its east Asian neighbours in terms of privatisation, regulation and the rule of law.

China’s movement towards democracy is even more disheartening. Since its transition began in 1979, per capita income has increased 10 times and foreign trade has exploded from Dollars 20bn (Pounds 11.4bn) in 1978 to Dollars 1,000bn in 2005; but growth and globalisation have not brought democracy. Instead of liberalising the political system, the ruling Communist party has vowed never to adopt “western-style” democracy. Even as China enters the information age, Beijing is busy closing outspoken newspapers, jailing dissidents and coercing Google and Yahoo to help police the internet.

These two anomalies - faltering institutional reforms and political stagnation - are central to understanding a “trapped transition”, a transformative phase in which half-finished reforms have transferred power to new, affluent elites who know better than their Little Red Book-waving predecessors how to resuscitate moribund communism with crony capitalism. Partial reforms have thus created a hybrid, albeit state-centred, system that allows these elites to perpetuate their privileges. In China, mixing command and control with embryonic market forces enables the Communist party to tap efficiency gains from limited reforms to sustain the unreconstructed core of the old command economy - the economic foundation of its political supremacy.

In a “trapped transition”, the ruling elites have little interest in real reforms. They may pledge reforms, but most such pledges are lip service or tactical adjustments aimed at maintaining the status quo. In economic reform, after making an excellent start in de-collectivising agriculture and privatising small state-owned enterprises, momentum has stalled. The state still owns nearly 60 per cent of fixed assets and dominates vital industrial sectors, from financial services to energy. Today, Beijing’s guiding principle is not to exit these Leninist “commanding heights” but to reinforce them. The private sector remains hobbled by government restrictions and discrimination.

Nowhere is Beijing’s tight grip on the economy more visible than in its banking reforms. Wrecked by politicisation and mismanagement, the state-owned banks have cost China the equivalent of nearly 30 per cent of gross domestic product in loan write-offs and capital injections. Yet, the most ambitious reform package to date still guarantees the state’s majority control of these banks and limits foreign ownership to 25 per cent. Notably, the party retains power to appoint managers and operate its organisational cells in the restructured banks. Foreign capital and expertise are welcome - but only if they help strengthen Beijing’s financial management and respect the party’s authority.

The “trapped transition” logic also explains China’s failure in political reform. In the 1980s, the party undertook some promising initiatives, especially legal reform and village elections. It welcomed talented professionals. But once these limited measures stabilised elite politics and improved economic management, the party lost appetite for real democratic reforms.

China has fallen into this transition trap largely because the political momentum that launched its economic reform has dissipated. Nearly 30 years ago, awakened by the Cultural Revolution nightmare, both the elites and the public rallied behind Deng Xiaoping’s “second revolution”. Today, those horrific memories have faded. The party, no longer imperilled, is smug and complacent. The broad political coalition that propelled the transition in the 1980s has crumbled. With rising inequality, endemic corruption and unrelenting authoritarian rule, segments of society have become disenchanted with the regime and its policies. Without a national reformist ethos or visionary reformers, China seems to be on a Long March to nowhere. China’s continuing economic growth merely vindicates the current policies and disproves the need for change, perpetuating the trap. Riding this momentum, the party may muddle along for some time but it is hard to imagine that China can evolve into a market democracy without a cataclysmic mid-course correction.

The writer, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, is author of China’s Trapped Transition (Harvard University Press 2006)

Posted at 1:04 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The New York Times
FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 2006

Fifty years ago on Saturday, the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave a “secret speech” at the 20th Communist Party Congress that changed both his country and the world. By denouncing Stalin, whose God-like status had helped to legitimize Communism in the Soviet Bloc, Khrushchev began a process of unraveling it that culminated in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. This great deed deserves to be celebrated on its anniversary.

But it is also a good time to ponder this question: What are we to think of a leader whose great deeds do not bring about the consequences intended? It is a question that all leaders - particularly Khrushchev’s current heir, Vladimir Putin, who has tried to bring his nation into the 21st century by wielding the autocratic hand of a 19th-century czar - ought to consider whenever they set great projects in motion.

After all, Khrushchev sought to save Communism, not to destroy it. By cleansing it of the Stalinist stain, he wanted to re-legitimize it in the eyes of people not just in the Soviet sphere but around the globe. Yet within weeks after the secret speech, at Communist Party meetings called to discuss it, criticism of Stalin rippled way beyond Khrushchev’s, including indictments not just of Stalin himself but of the Soviet system that spawned him. Others sprang to Stalin’s defense, especially in his native Georgia, where at least 20 pro-Stalin demonstrators were killed in clashes with the police.

In Eastern Europe, the unintended consequences of Khrushchev’s speech were even more shattering. A huge strike in the Polish city of Poznan in June was put down at a cost of at least 53 dead and hundreds wounded. Then, of course, the revolution in Hungary in October was smashed by Soviet forces, leaving more than 20,000 Hungarians dead.

Khrushchev also used the speech to try to buttress his position in the Kremlin. By attacking Stalin he thought he would blacken the reputation of his rivals for power - Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgi Malenkov and Lazar Kaganovich - who had been closer to Stalin than he had, while burnishing his own. But instead, he provoked a coup attempt that very nearly ousted him in June 1957. His de-Stalinization campaign was also a prime grievance among those who formed the conspiracy that succeeded in pushing him from power in October 1964.

Of course, some unintended consequences are inevitable in politics as in what Russians call “sama zhizn,” or “life itself.” Moreover, the “secret speech” was part of a reform program that included many worthy achievements that Khrushchev did indeed intend. He released and rehabilitated millions of Stalin’s victims. He allowed what became known as “the thaw,” with its partial rebirth of Russian culture. He revivified Soviet agriculture, which Stalin had ruined, and started a boom in housing construction that permitted hundreds of thousands to move out of overcrowded communal apartments.

In the midst of his ouster in 1964, Khrushchev said to his only remaining ally, Anastas Mikoyan: “I’ve done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn’t suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone and we can talk as equals. That’s my contribution.” Khrushchev was whistling past his own political graveyard. He hadn’t exactly embarked on reform to ease this way for his own exit. But he had meant to end the pattern of bloody purges as the only way to transfer political power.

Both his drive for reform and its unintended consequences cannot be understood without understanding the Communist system that shaped him. Soviet Communism had been built on a Stalinist foundation that cried out for drastic change, and Khrushchev learned (or thought he had) from the Bolsheviks’ willingness to revolutionize Soviet society that such change was possible almost overnight.

Khrushchev’s speech didn’t change his country as intended. But it did register a remarkable change in himself. Unlike most of his comrades in Stalin’s inner circle, Khrushchev somehow retained his humanity. He never forgave Stalin for making him an accomplice in terrible crimes. The secret speech was in part motivated by a sense of guilt at his own complicity. As early as 1940, when Khrushchev was Stalin’s viceroy in Ukraine, he told a childhood friend who lamented Stalin’s purges: “Don’t blame me for that. I’m not involved in that.” Of course, Khrushchev was involved in “that.” But that is the point. Apart from anything else, the secret speech was an act of repentance.

When asked in retirement what he most regretted, Khrushchev said: “The blood. My arms are up to the elbows in blood. That is the most terrible thing that lies in my soul.” In his case, it wasn’t the road to hell that was paved with good intentions, but the road from the Stalinist hell in which he had faithfully served, and which he had the courage to try to transcend.

(William Taubman, a professor of political science at Amherst College, is the author of “Khrushchev: The Man and His Era,” which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in biography)

Posted at 2:07 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright City Journal

When, as a medical student, I emerged from the cinema having watched Stanley Kubrick’s controversial film of A Clockwork Orange, I was astonished and horrified to see a group of young men outside dressed up as droogs, the story’s adolescent thugs who delighted in what they called “ultra-violence.”

The film had been controversial in Britain; its detractors, who wanted it banned, charged that it glamorized and thereby promoted violence. The young men dressed as droogs seemed to confirm the charge, though of course it is one thing to imitate a form of dress and quite another to imitate behavior. Still, even a merely sartorial identification with psychopathic violence shocked me, for it implied an imaginative sympathy with such violence; and seeing those young men outside the theater was my first intimation that art, literature, and ideas might have profound—and not necessarily favorable—social consequences. A year later, a group of young men raped a 17-year-old girl in Britain as they sang “Singing in the Rain,” a real-life replay of one of the film’s most notorious scenes.

The author of the book, Anthony Burgess, a polymath who once wrote five novels in a year, came to dislike this particular work intensely, not because of any practical harm to society that the film version of it might have caused but because he did not want to go down in literary history as the author of a book made famous, or notorious, by a movie. Irrespective of the value of his other work, however, A Clockwork Orange remains a novel of immense power. Linguistically inventive, socially prophetic, and philosophically profound, it comes very close to being a work of genius.

The story, set in the England of the near future (the book was published in 1962), is simple. The narrator, Alex, a precocious 15-year-old psychopath who has no feeling for others, leads a small gang in many acts of gratuitous, and much enjoyed, violence. Eventually, caught after a murder, he goes to prison, where—after another murder—the authorities offer to release him if he submits to a form of aversive conditioning against violence called the Ludovico Method. On his release, however, he attempts suicide by jumping out of a window, receiving a head injury that undoes his conditioning against violence. Once more he becomes the leader of a gang.

In the final chapter of the book’s British version, Alex again rejects violence, this time because he discovers within himself, spontaneously, a source of human tenderness that makes him want to settle down and have a baby. In the American edition—which Stanley Kubrick used—this last chapter is missing: Alex is not redeemed a second time, but returns, apparently once and for all, to the enjoyment of arbitrary and antisocial violence. In this instance, it is the British who were the optimists and the Americans the pessimists: Burgess’s American publisher, wanting the book to end unhappily, omitted the last chapter.

Burgess had been a schoolteacher (like William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies) and evidently sensed a stirring of revolt among the youth of his country and elsewhere in the West, a revolt with which—as a deeply unconventional man who felt himself to be an outsider however wealthy or famous he became, and who drank deep at the well of resentment as well as of spirituous liquors—he felt some sympathy and might even have helped in a small way to foment. And yet, as a man who was also deeply steeped in literary culture and tradition, he understood the importance of the shift of cultural authority from the old to the young and was very far from sanguine about its effects. He thought that the shift would lead to a hell on earth and the destruction of all that he valued.

He marks the separateness of his novel’s young protagonists from their elders by their adoption of a new argot, as well as a new form of dress. Vital for groups antagonistic toward the dominant society around them, such argots allow them to identify and communicate with insiders and exclude outsiders. Although I worked in a prison for 14 years, for example, I never came to understand the language that prisoners used as they shouted to one another across landings and between buildings. It was their means of resisting domination. In the French banlieues, les jeunes use an argot derived from words spelled and pronounced backward—and completely incomprehensible to educated speakers of French. People of Jamaican descent in Britain use a patois when they want not to be understood by anyone else. The connection between argot and criminal purposes has long been close, of course; and the importance that Burgess ascribes to the new argot in A Clockwork Orange suggests that he saw youthful revolt as an expression more of self-indulgence and criminality than of idealism—the latter, shallower view becoming orthodoxy among intellectuals not long after A Clockwork Orange appeared.

Burgess’s creation of a completely convincing new argot more or less ex nihilo is an extraordinary achievement. Nadsat (Russian for “teen”), as its speakers call it, is a mixture of anglicized Russian words—particularly provocative at the height of the cold war—and Cockney rhyming slang. As a linguistic invention, it is the equal of Orwell’s Newspeak. Alex, the narrator, though cold-blooded and self-centered, is intelligent and expresses himself with great force. A vocabulary that is entirely new and incomprehensible at the beginning of the book becomes so thoroughly familiar to the reader at the end that he forgets that he has ever had to learn its meaning: it seems completely natural after only a hundred pages. On the very first page, when Alex describes his gang’s intention to do a robbery, he says:

[T]here was no real need … of crasting [robbing] any more pretty polly [money] to tolchock [hit] some old veck [man] in an alley and viddy [see] him swim in his blood while we counted the takings and divided by four, nor to do the ultra-violent on some shivering starry [old] grey-haired ptitsa [woman] in a shop and go smecking [laughing] off with the till’s guts.
Of course, the lack of real “need” does not prevent Alex and his gang from robbing in a cruel and violent way, for their cruelty and violence is an end in itself, joyfully engaged in. Not for Burgess was the orthodox liberal view that economic deprivation and lack of opportunity cause crime.

The gang’s solipsistic and dehumanizing argot reflects this cold-bloodedness. Sexual intercourse, for example, becomes “the old in-out-in-out,” a term without reference to the other participant, who is merely an object. The gang attacks a schoolteacher carrying books home from the library, for no reason other than a free-floating malevolence and joy in cruelty:

Pete held his rookers [hands] and Georgie sort of hooked his rot [mouth] wide open for him and Dim yanked out his false zoobies [teeth], upper and lower. He threw these down on the pavement and then I treated them to the old boot-crush, though they were hard bastards like… . The old veck [man] began to make sort of chumbling shooms [sounds]—“wuf waf wof”—so Georgie let go of holding his goobers [jaws] apart and just let him have one in the toothless rot with his ringy fist, and that made the old veck start moaning a lot then, then out comes the blood, my brothers, real beautiful.
I doubt that a lack of feeling for others has ever been expressed more powerfully.

Burgess intuited with almost prophetic acuity both the nature and characteristics of youth culture when left to its own devices, and the kind of society that might result when that culture became predominant. For example, adults grow afraid of the young and defer to them, something that has certainly come to pass in Britain, where adults now routinely look away as youngsters commit antisocial acts in public, for fear of being knifed if they do otherwise, and mothers anxiously and deferentially ask their petulant five-year-old children what they would like to eat, in the hope of averting tantrums. The result is that adolescents and young men take any refusal of a request as lèse-majesté, a challenge to the integrity of their ego. When I refused to prescribe medicine that young men wanted but that I thought they did not need, they would sometimes answer in aggrieved disbelief, “No? What do you mean, no?” It was not a familiar concept. And in a sense, my refusal was pointless, insofar as any such young man would soon enough find a doctor whom he could intimidate into prescribing what he wanted. Burgess would not have been surprised by this state of affairs: he saw it coming.

When Alex and his gang enter a pub—they are underage, but no one dares challenge them—they spread fear by their mere presence.

Now we were the very good malchicks [boys], smiling good evensong to one and all, though these wrinkled old lighters [people] started to get all shook, their veiny old rookers all trembling round their glasses, and making the suds [drink] spill on the table. “Leave us be, lads,” said one of them, her face all mappy with being a thousand years old, “we’re only poor old women.”
Intimidation of the aged and contempt for age itself are an essential part of the youth culture: no wonder aging rock stars are eternal adolescents, wrinkled and arthritic but trapped in the poses of youth. Age for them means nothing but indignity.

Alex’s parents (one of the things Burgess didn’t foresee is the rise of the single-parent family) are afraid of him. He comes home late and plays his music very loud, but “Pee and em [Father and Mother] … had learnt now not to knock on the wall with complaints of what they called noise. I had taught them. Now they would take sleep-pills.” When Alex’s father wants to know what he does at night—Alex is only 15—he is apologetic and deferential: “ ‘Not that I want to pry, son, but where exactly is it you go to work of evenings?’ … My dad was like humble mumble chumble. ‘Sorry, son,’ he said. ‘But I get worried sometimes.’ ”

When in a symbolic reversal of the direction of authority Alex offers his father some money (robbed, of course) so that he can buy himself a drink in the pub, his father says: “Thanks, son… . But we don’t go out much now. We daren’t go out much, the streets being what they are. Young hooligans and so on. Still, thanks.”

In 1962, the idea that the young would someday impose upon old people in Britain a de facto after-dark curfew was still unimaginable, but Burgess, seeing the cloud no bigger than a man’s hand on the horizon, imagined that outcome very vividly. With a prophet’s imagination, he saw what would happen when the cloud grew until it covered the sky.

With like prescience, Burgess foresaw many other aspects of the youth culture to come: the importance that mind-altering drugs and an industrialized pop music would play in it, for example. (Burgess did not, however, suggest that high culture was necessarily ennobling in itself. Alex, much superior in intelligence to his followers, is a devotee of classical music, listening to which, however, increases his urge to commit violence. No doubt Burgess had in mind those Nazis who could listen with emotion to Schubert lieder after a hard day’s genocide.)

Burgess foresaw the importance that the youth culture would attach to sexual precocity and a kind of disabused knowingness. In a remarkable rape scene, Alex meets two ten-year-old girls who, like him, are skipping school, in a record shop, where they are listening to pop music with suggestive titles such as “Night after Day after Night.”

They saw themselves, you could see, as real grown-up devotchkas [girls] already, what with the old hipswing when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded groodies [breasts] and red all ploshed on their goobers [lips]… . [T]hey viddied [saw] themselves as real sophistoes… . They had the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair—a like dyed strawy. Well, they would grow up real today… . No school this afterlunch, but education certain, Alex as teacher.
Their education that afternoon consists of repeated rape by an already experienced 15-year-old.

It would not have surprised Burgess that magazines for ten- or 11-year-old girls are now full of advice about how to make themselves sexually attractive, that girls of six or seven are dressed by their single mothers in costumes redolent of prostitution, or that there has been a compression of generations, so that friendships are possible between 14- and 26-year-olds. The precocity necessary to avoid humiliation by peers prevents young people from maturing further and leaves them in a state of petrified adolescence. Persuaded that they already know all that is necessary, they are disabused about everything, for fear of appearing naive. With no deeper interests, they are prey to gusts of hysterical and childish enthusiasm; only increasingly extreme sensation can arouse them from their mental torpor. Hence the epidemic of self-destructiveness that has followed in the wake of the youth culture.

The world in which youth culture predominates and precocity is the highest achievement is one in which all tenderness is absent. When Alex and his gang attack the teacher, they find a letter in his pocket, which one of them reads out derisively: “My darling one … I shall be thinking of you while you are away and hope you will remember to wrap up warm when you go out at night.”

Such simple and heartfelt affection and concern for another person are extinct in the world of Alex and his droogs. Alex is incapable of putting himself in the place of anyone else, of “changing places in fancy with the sufferer,” as Adam Smith puts it. Self-absorbed, he is self-pitying but has no pity for others. When he is arrested after the brutal murder of an old woman, he calls the policemen who have arrested him “bullies” and accuses them when they laugh at him of “the heighth of … callousness.” Alex is quite incapable of connecting his own savage behavior with the words that he applies to the police. I was reminded of a case of murder in which I gave testimony recently: the young murderer kicked his girlfriend’s head so hard that he broke her jaw in many places and forced her tongue through the back of her throat, and her stomach filled with blood—and a neighbor heard him laugh as he kicked. A policeman, after listening to his lies and evasions for two days, accused him of having no remorse for his deed. “You ’ave no feelings,” the murderer rejoined. “I pity your poor wife”—just like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, but without the intelligence and the taste for classical music.

In the world of Alex and his droogs, all relations with other human beings are instrumental means to a selfish, brutal, hedonistic end. And this is the world that so many of my patients now inhabit, a world in which perhaps a third of the British population lives. It is also the world in which having a baby is the fulfillment of a personal human right, and nothing else.

But Burgess was not merely a social and cultural prophet. A Clockwork Orange grapples as well with the question of the origin and nature of good and evil. The Ludovico Method that Alex undergoes in prison as a means of turning him into a model citizen in exchange for his release is in essence a form of conditioning. Injected with a drug that induces nausea, Alex must then watch films of the kind of violence that he himself committed, his head and eyelids held so that he cannot escape the images by looking away from them—all this to the piped-in accompaniment of the classical music that he loves. Before long, such violence, either in imagery or in reality, as well as the sound of classical music, causes him nausea and vomiting even without the injection, as a conditioned response. Alex learns to turn the other cheek, as a Christian should: when he is insulted, threatened, or even struck, he does not retaliate. After the treatment—at least, until he suffers his head injury—he can do no other.

Two scientists, Drs. Branom and Brodsky, are in charge of the “treatment.” The minister of the interior, responsible for cutting crime in a society now besieged by the youth culture, says: “The Government cannot be concerned any longer with outmoded penological theories … . Common criminals … can best be dealt with on a purely curative basis. Kill the criminal reflex, that’s all.” In other words, a criminal or violent act is, in essence, no different from the act of a rat in a cage, who presses a lever in order to obtain a pellet of food. If you shock the rat with electricity when it presses the lever instead of rewarding it with food, it will soon cease to press the lever. Criminality can be dealt with, or “cured,” in the same way.

At the time that Burgess wrote A Clockwork Orange, doctors were trying to “cure” homosexuals by injecting them with apomorphine, a nausea-inducing drug, while showing them pictures of male nudes. And overwhelmingly, the dominant school of psychology worldwide at the time was the behaviorism of Harvard prof B. F. Skinner. His was what one might call a “black box” psychology: scientists measured the stimulus and the response but exhibited no interest whatsoever in what happened between the two, as being intrinsically immeasurable and therefore unknowable. While Skinner might have quibbled about the details of the Ludovico Method (for example, that Alex got the injection at the wrong time in relation to the violent films that he had to watch), he would not have rejected its scientific—or rather scientistic—philosophy.

In 1971, the very year in which the Kubrick film of A Clockwork Orange was released, Skinner published a book entitled Beyond Freedom and Dignity. He sneered at the possibility that reflection upon our own personal experience and on history might be a valuable source of guidance to us in our attempts to govern our lives. “What we need,” he wrote, “is a technology of behavior.” Fortunately, one was at hand. “A technology of operant behavior is … already well advanced, and it may prove commensurate with our problems.” As he put it, “[a] scientific analysis shifts the credit as well as the blame [for a man’s behavior] to the environment.” What goes on in a man’s mind is quite irrelevant; indeed, “mind,” says Skinner, is “an explanatory fiction.”

For Skinner, being good is behaving well; and whether a man behaves well or badly depends solely upon the schedule of reinforcement that he has experienced in the past, not upon anything that goes on in his mind. It follows that there is no new situation in a man’s life that requires conscious reflection if he is to resolve the dilemma or make the choices that the new situation poses: for everything is merely a replay of the past, generalized to meet the new situation.

The Ludovico Method, then, was not a far-fetched invention of Burgess’s but a simplified version—perhaps a reductio ad absurdum, or ad nauseam—of the technique for solving all human problems that the dominant school of psychology at the time suggested. Burgess was a lapsed Catholic, but he remained deeply influenced by Catholic thought throughout his life. The Skinnerian view of man appalled him. He thought that a human being whose behavior was simply the expression of conditioned responses was not fully human but an automaton. If he did the right thing merely in the way that Pavlov’s dog salivated at the sound of a bell, he could not be a good man: indeed, if all his behavior was determined in the same way, he was hardly a man at all. A good man, in Burgess’s view, had to have the ability to do evil as well as good, an ability that he would voluntarily restrain, at whatever disadvantage to himself.

Being a novelist rather than an essayist, however, and a man of many equivocations, Burgess put these thoughts in A Clockwork Orange into the mouth of a ridiculous figure, the prison chaplain, who objects to the Ludovico Method—but not enough to resign his position, for he is eager to advance in what Alex calls “Prison religion.” Burgess puts the defense of the traditional view of morality as requiring the exercise of free will—the view that there is no good act without the possibility of a bad one—into the mouth of a careerist.

The two endings of A Clockwork Orange—the one that Burgess himself wrote and the truncated one that his American publisher wanted and that Kubrick used for his film—have very different meanings.

According to the American-Kubrick version, Alex resumes his life as violent gang leader after his head injury undoes the influence of the Ludovico Method. He returns to what he was before, once more able to listen to classical music (Beethoven’s Ninth) and fantasize violence without any conditioned nausea:

Oh, it was gorgeosity and yumyumyum. When it came to the Scherzo I could viddy myself very clear running and running on like very light and mysterious nogas [feet], carving the whole litso [face] of the creeching [screaming] world with my cut-throat britva [razor]. And there was the slow movement and the lovely last singing movement still to come. I was cured all right.
Kubrick even suggests that this is a happy outcome: better an authentic psychopath than a conditioned, and therefore inauthentic, goody-goody. Authenticity and self-direction are thus made to be the highest goods, regardless of how they are expressed. And this, at least in Britain, has become a prevailing orthodoxy among the young. If, as I have done, you ask the aggressive young drunks who congregate by the thousand in every British town or city on a Saturday night why they do so, or British soccer fans why they conduct themselves so menacingly, they will reply that they are expressing themselves, as if there were nothing further to be said on the matter.

The full, British version of A Clockwork Orange ends very differently. Alex begins to lose his taste for violence spontaneously, when he sees a happy, normal couple in a café, one of whom is a former associate of his. Thereafter, Alex begins to imagine a different life for himself and to fantasize a life that includes tenderness:

There was Your Humble Narrator Alex coming home from work to a good hot plate of dinner, and there was this ptitsa [girl] all welcoming and greeting like loving… . I had this sudden very strong idea that if I walked into the room next to this room where the fire was burning away and my hot dinner laid on the table, there I should find what I really wanted… . For in that other room in a cot was laying gurgling goo goo goo my son… . I knew what was happening, O my brothers. I was like growing up.
Burgess obviously prefers a reformation that comes spontaneously from within, as it does in the last chapter, to one that comes from without, by application of the Ludovico Method. Here he would agree with Kubrick—an internal reformation is more authentic, and thus better in itself because a true expression of the individual. Perhaps Burgess also believes that such an internal reformation is likely to go deeper and be less susceptible to sudden reversal than reformation brought from outside.

Burgess also suggests the somewhat comforting message, at odds with all that has gone before, that Alex’s violence is nothing new in the world and that the transformation of immature, violent, and solipsistic young men into mature, peaceful, and considerate older men will continue forever, as it has done in the past, because deep inside there is a well of goodness, man having been born with original virtue rather than original sin (this is the Pelagian heresy, to which Burgess admitted that he was attracted). There is a never-ending cycle:

[Y]outh is only being in a way like it might be an animal. No, it is not just like being an animal so much as being like one of these malenky [small] toys you viddy being sold in the streets, like little chellovecks [men] made out of tin and with a spring inside and then a winding handle on the outside and you wind it up grrr grrr grrr and off it itties [goes], like walking, O my brothers. But it itties in a straight line and bangs straight into things bang bang and it cannot help what it is doing. Being young is like being like one of these malenky machines.
My son, my son. When I had my son I would explain all that to him when he was starry [old] enough to like understand. But then I knew he would not understand or would not want to understand at all and would do all the veshches [things] I had done … and I would not be able to really stop him. And nor would he be able to stop his own son, brothers. And so it would itty on to like the end of the world.
And this, surely, is partly right. Four centuries ago, Shakespeare wrote:

I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.
And certainly it is true that criminality, statistically speaking, is an activity of the young and that there are few prisoners in the prison in which I worked who had been incarcerated for a crime committed after age 35. There seems to be a biological dimension to common-or-garden wrongdoing.

But a quietistic message—cheerful insofar as it implies that violence among young men is but a passing phase of their life and that the current era is no worse in this respect than any past age, and pessimistic in the sense that a reduction of the overall level of violence is impossible—is greatly at odds with the socially prophetic aspect of the book, which repeatedly warns that the coming new youth culture, shallow and worthless, will be unprecedentedly violent and antisocial. And of Britain, at least, Burgess was certainly right. He extrapolated from what he saw in the prime manifestation of the emerging youth culture, pop music, to a future in which self-control had shrunk to vanishing, and he realized that the result could only be a Hobbesian world, in which personal and childish whim was the only authority to guide action. Like all prophets, he extrapolated to the nth degree; but a brief residence in a British slum should persuade anyone that he was not altogether wide of the mark.

A Clockwork Orange is not completely coherent. If youth is violent because the young are like “malenky machines” who cannot help themselves, what becomes of the free will that Burgess otherwise saw as the precondition of morality? Do people grow into free will from a state of automatism, and, if so, how and when? And if violence is only a passing phase, why should the youth of one age be much more violent than the youth of another? How do we achieve goodness, both on an individual and social level, without resort to the crude behaviorism of the Ludovico Method or any other form of cruelty? Can we bypass consciousness and reflection in our struggle to behave well?

There are no schematic answers in the book. One cannot condemn a novel of 150 pages for failing to answer some of the most difficult and puzzling questions of human existence, but one can praise it for raising them in a peculiarly profound manner and forcing us to think about them. To have combined this with acute social prophecy (to say nothing of entertainment) is genius.

Posted at 12:11 AM · Comments (0)

Christopher Ross Fourth Estate, 262pp, £14.99

For most of 1998, I read nothing but the works of Yukio Mishima. The following year, having consumed everything available in English translation, I moved to Tokyo to learn Japanese, the better to read the rest: 40 novels, 20 volumes of short stories and almost that number of plays. I stayed in Japan for five years, as did Christopher Ross, the author of Mishima’s Sword.

Mishima - real name Kimitake Hiraoka - called himself “beauty’s kamikaze”. My commonplace book contains dozens of Mishima entries, each as dazzling as sunrise on Mount Fuji’s snowcap, and as chill and distant. Here are the musings of Kiyoaki, the young minor aristocrat in Spring Snow: “Would he be able to die young - and if possible free of all pain? A graceful death - as a richly patterned kimono, thrown carelessly across a polished table, slides unobtrusively down into the darkness of the floor beneath. A death marked by elegance.”

Here is Mishima’s death, as retold by Ross: “Four inches of metal enter his belly and he slowly forces the edge from left to right and then up at the end, to open a flap of skin. Blood floods the floor. A coil of greyish-pink protrudes from the wound. A lavatory stink pervades the room.” Neither elegant nor graceful, Mishima’s act of harakiri was not unobtrusive, either. The author had once suggested to a journalist that he film the disembowelment. They never did manage to arrange that, but a couple of hours before his death Mishima rang two reporters and tipped them off that “something is going to happen”.

What happened was this: on 25 November 1970, Mishima and four members of his private militia, the Shield Society, drove to the regional headquarters of the Ground Self-Defence Force and took General Kanetoshi Mashita hostage. Around midday, Mishima went on to the balcony to deliver a “last appeal” to the troops in the courtyard below. He urged them to attack the Diet, Japan’s parliament, where the emperor was in attendance, but as he spoke the soldiers shouted furiously. Mishima returned to the general’s office and there committed ritual suicide. At the time of his death, he was Japan’s most famous literary figure, thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize.

Ross stands in a long line of westerners who have tried to make sense of Mishima’s extraordinary death. He approaches his subject through a passion, shared with his subject, for Japanese swords and the art of iaido - swordsmanship. Martial-arts enthusiasts are an occupational hazard of expatriate life in Japan. Every second western man you meet is a wage-slave English teacher by day but, by night, a cat-footed warrior disciple. They pepper their conversation with obscure Zen and martial terminology, and are convinced of the superiority of all things Japanese. At times, Ross sounds worryingly like them (he doesn’t eat western fast food, he tells us, yet makes an exception for Japanese burgers). However, his keen observation and inquisitive mind soon draw you in.

Mishima’s Sword resembles a bento, those beautiful lacquered lunch boxes in which delicacies nestle side by side in separate compartments, each a feast in miniature. Ross intersperses a history of bushido (the warrior code) with instructions on how to tie a loincloth or carve up a corpse, interviews with swordsmiths, and a hilarious account of a trip to an S&M club to meet one of Mishima’s lovers.

Repeatedly rebuffed by the author’s family, Ross instead pursues Mishima’s sword, used to behead him after he slit his belly with an armour-piercing knife. The young cadet whose task this was swung and failed three times, first hacking Mishima’s back, then the carpet, and finally dealing a blow that got stuck on Mishima’s jawbone, the impact hard enough to chip the blade. A second cadet, more steady-handed, had to take the sword and strike the author’s head from his shoulders.

After a series of dead ends in his search, Ross receives a phone call out of the blue - from a man who claims to have the sword. Swearing secrecy, Ross is driven to the man’s house. There, he is shown a short, rusted, chipped blade. It is not the epiphany he had hoped for: he has no way of knowing if the sword is the real thing; he can take no photographs and ask no questions. He suspects it is a set-up to hasten his departure from Japan.

The western fascination with Mishima and our desire to “understand” his death baffle the Japanese. I used to hunt for first editions of his work in Jimbocho, Tokyo’s second-hand book district. They were always labelled in English and priced astronomically, and my exasperated Japanese partner would tell me that Mishima was “ridiculous” and “not worth it”. Ross describes how, as he sat reading in a coffee shop, a salaryman at an adjacent table spoke up: “Mishima is the past. Not now. Not today. Not tomorrow either.” Ross wondered if the man was drunk. I doubt it.

My own quest to get closer to Mishima ended in failure. Eighteen months of full-time language study gave me nowhere near the fluency required to read his elegant archaisms. Ross finds that the author’s sword is as elusive and ambiguous as the man himself. Maybe Mishima wanted his death to make a political statement; perhaps he viewed it as his final work of art. The books do both better, every time.

Victoria James works for ITN

Posted at 4:56 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Counterpunch

Foreign Minister Taro Aso’s Dirty Secret

Japan’s “top priority” in new talks with North Korea opening Saturday, February 4, in Beijing, will be the case of 15 of its citizens abducted to Pyongyang between 1977-83. But absent from Tokyo’s agenda will be another unresolved disgrace: decades of enforced removal to Japan for work-slavery of a million Koreans — including 12,000 laborers compelled to work under grotesque conditions in coal mines owned by a firm still run by the family of Japan’s foreign minister, Taro Aso.

The kidnappings of Japanese men and women to teach their language at North Korean spy schools could eventually total 70, it is suspected. The outrage, constantly covered by the Japanese media, continues to upset people and is an international scandal by any standards. The older, but incomparably worse mistreatment of Koreans over three decades, is hardly mentioned in Japan, and the foreign minister’s connection remains taboo. Yet in other countries such an episode would be regarded as intolerable in such an important government official.

The Korean pit workers were systematically underpaid, overworked, underfed and confined in penury. They suffered chronic ill-health, frequent death from insanitary conditions or work accidents, were under 24-hour watch by brutal secret police, yet still managed to escape out of desperation. Only with Japan’s 1945 defeat in war were they finally released, to be sent home uncompensated. Neither they nor their surviving families have since received a penny in personal reparations, despite pleas from both Koreas.

Aso cannot argue that a generation separates him from such family odium, for he shares Japan’s national lack of atonement for the brutalities and atrocities committed against Asian people during its imperial war of aggression from 1931-45. Even in his remarks before becoming foreign minister last October and since, he displays unfeeling insensitivity to Korean feelings — as well as expressing unabashed racial supremacy. (Last year in a remark echoing 1930s fascism, Aso described Japan as “one nation, one civilization, one language, one culture, and one race, the like of which there is no other on this earth.”)

He ran the Aso Cement Company, as the former Aso Coal Mines was then called, in Fukuoka prefecture in the southern island of Kyushu from 1973-79, when he entered politics. During that time never addressed its terrible corporate legacy of peonage labor. He remains connected to the company today. In 2001 it entered a joint venture with the French cement manufacturer, Lefarge, but remains under the management of his younger brother, Yutaka Aso. Only last December, the French ambassador in Tokyo presented Yutaka with the Legion d’Honneur at a ceremony where honored guests were foreign minister Taro Aso and his wife.

It seemed a fitting tribute to a family steeped in the finest traditions of Japan’s recent history. Aso prominence goes back to his great-great grandfather, Toshimichi Okubo, a samurai and one of five powerful nobles who led the 1868 overthrow of the centuries-old shogunate era that ushered in modern times. His great grandfather Takakichi founded the Aso mining firm in 1872 and at one time it owned eight pits in Kyushu’s rich Chikuho coal fields and was the biggest of three family corporations mining an area that produced half of Japan’s coal.

As the scion of landed gentry, Aso graduated from the university that traditionally educates the imperial family, spent time in London at its university, joined what was then Aso Industries, and quickly became a director before moving to the top. Completing the aristocratic tradition, he was part of the Japanese rifle shooting team in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.

Following his samurai ancestor, a grandfather was Shigeru Yoshida, prime minister of Japan five times between 1946 and 1954, and an autocratic conservative who, conveniently for the Aso family, conducted a 1950s purge of “reds” in the coal mining unions. Taro Aso’s wife adds to the family’s power luster as the daughter of Zenko Suzuki, Liberal Democratic Party (conservative) prime minister from 1980-82. There is even a royal link. Aso’s sister Nobuko married Prince Tomohito of Mikasa, the emperor’s cousin, who recently hit the headlines over his opposition to the proposal — for an imperial family starved of male heirs — to allow a woman to occupy the chrysanthemum throne. Tomohito suggested continuing the male line through concubines, an imperial tradition that would move Japan back several centuries.

Despite the fine lineage, it does not seem to have turned Aso into a gentleman. He not only ignores his company’s history, but has insulted the Korean people who sacrificed so much for his family’s fortune.

By force of arms, Japan annexed the entire peninsula in 1910 and ran it as a colonial property for 35 years, with the people serving as inferior citizens and servants of their imperial masters. In 1939 as Tokyo’s grip tightened in the escalating war, its parliament passed a law forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese names, penalizing those and their children who declined to do so. Yet not long before he became foreign minister, Aso referred to these forced name changes as “voluntary” and further suggested that the Republic of Korea’s people had fared better under Tokyo’s iron heel.

Perhaps Aso’s attitude derives from having at the family’s disposal thousands of servile Koreans for so many years. The exact history of this time is not officially recorded — certainly not in the Aso-Lafarge version, where the years from the 1930s to 1950s are blank. But three local amateur historians in the Fukuoka prefecture of Kyushu, Eidai Hayashi, Takashi Ohno, and Noriaki Fukudome, assisted by a Korean living in Japan, Kim Guan-yul, have put together the relevant facts and figures to present a shocking picture, much of it recorded in their various books.

Although Tokyo did not pass until 1939 the National General Mobilization law that forced all colonial subjects, including those in Taiwan and Manchuria in China, to work wherever it suited Japan, the historians found that well before that year, Korean laborers were being shipped to Aso mines in Kyushu. Precise numbers are unknown, but it was several thousands, especially after a famous strike of 400 miners at an Aso mine in 1932. In the years after 1939, the historians calculate, the numbers in the Chikuho region swelled to over a million — their figure is 1,120,000 — although Tokyo’s official government number is only 724,287. The miners’ task was to descend into difficult seams to dig coal shipped exclusively for military use.

They were paid a third less than equivalent Japanese laborers. For the Koreans it amounted to about 50 yen a month, but less than 10 yen after mandatory confiscations for food, clothes, housing and enforced savings for unmarried workers. Young single men were thus fined to prevent them joining the large numbers that frequently escaped, but even then, the “savings” often remained unpaid and just missing from their pockets. All workers toiled underground for 15-hour days, seven days a week, with no holidays at all.

Their “housing” was cramped and dirty dormitory huts with six to seven tiny rooms in each, and single men living and sleeping on one tatami mat, measuring three by six feet. There was no heating and no running water. Lavatories were in earthen pits. A nine-foot high wooden fence topped with electrified barbed wire ringed the outside. So they were prisoners, scrutinized by their keepers, the hated kempei-tai secret “thought” police who terrorized both Japan and its colonies during the fascist period.

But the kempei-tai did keep statistics, which the three historians obtained. They found that in March of 1944, Aso mines had a total of 7,996 Korean laborers of whom 56 had recently died, and a staggering 4,919 had escaped. Across the province of Fukuoka, the total fugitives amounted to 51.3 per cent but at Aso Mines it was 61.5 per cent because conditions there were “even worse”, said Fukudome.

Most workers suffered malnutrition, as they received only a handful of rice a month supplemented by inferior cereals. No meat was provided, for what is a more carnivorous people than the Japanese, who to this day prefer fish.

What of the dead? In the Chikuho region, where the last Aso mine closed in the late 1960s, the Hoko Buddhist temple still stands. Here a lonely priest tends hundreds of nameless graves where the remains of the dead Koreans lie. Elsewhere hundreds more resting places are mostly unmarked, according to the historians.

But this is Confucian country, where the remains of ancestors is a deeply important matter. It is here that international relations have intervened. In 2004 the Seoul parliament voted unanimously, with one exception, to form the Truth Commission on Forced Mobilization Under Japanese Imperialism, headed by its chairman, Dr Jeon Ki-ho, and composed of eight others, including two government ministers. It began inquiries early last year and toured 234 cities in 16 Korean provinces to find survivors or their families, conducted hearings, and took evidence from many witnesses. Dr Jeon also visited Japan to investigate and clarify what he boldly called its “atrocities”.

In what at first appeared to be a political master stroke, the Koreans also reported that they had compiled a list of 2,600 Japanese companies that exploited forced Korean labor, and would have knowledge of the remains of those who died. One firm prominently on the list was Aso Mines, but the company has declined to answer the request. A spokesman says only that the firm could not investigate the whereabouts of the remains, adding in what may have been an accidental truth, that “even if we could”, the records were not available. “There were dozens of mining companies in Kyushu at the time and all used forced labor,” said spokesman Akira Fujimoto.

The commission, which is also investigating the scandal of “comfort women”, the insulting euphemism that describes thousands of Asian women forced into sex slavery to service the imperial warriors of Japan’s army, has yet to issue its promised report. So far Japanese media have almost entirely ignored its proceedings.

A major argument of those seeking redress from a shamefully reluctant Japan, is that while it has made numerous “apologies” of varying sincerity, none amounts to proper atonement. And atonement includes financial compensation of which, it is estimated, Japan has paid one per cent of Germany’s disbursements.

One example of a glib apology came from Taro Aso himself in December last year, on the 40th anniversary of normalization of diplomatic ties between Japan and South Korea. He said: “Japan seriously takes to heart the sentiments of South Korean people involving the past and will sincerely deal with various issues originating from the past from a humanitarian standpoint. We believe that in the process of making such efforts, mutual understanding and a relationship of trust for building a future-oriented Japan-South Korea relationship will be reinforced.”

Note that this does not contain the all-important word “apology” and of course there is no mention of atonement or anything on the vital issue of reparations. Here, the argument Japan uses constantly is that the normalization treaty signed in 1965 agreed on what was to be paid — a paltry $800m, but this was mainly for grants and low interest loans. Nothing went to personal payments for injury or harm suffered. Perhaps most important, in 1965 much knowledge about the extent of Japanese atrocities was still unknown. Two examples: Neither its biological warfare attacks in China through its notorious Unit 731, nor the vast army of “comfort women” were public information then.

Meanwhile, the world is left with Japan’s foreign minister and his “sincere dealings” over his nation’s unresolved war crimes. From his record there can be little expectation he will help to clear the shame. He eagerly supports the Yasukuni war shrine visits in Tokyo that have caused severe disruptions to its foreign relations with China and the Koreas, in particular, since prime minister Junichiro Koizumi made his fifth trip there last October. Just the other day, Aso made this worse by urging the emperor to visit, something the imperial household has sensibly avoided since the 1970s.

What makes nonsense of claims by Aso and Koizumi is that they are just paying their respects to war dead, like a US president intoning a prayer at Arlington national cemetery. However, Yasukuni shrine is shinto, so the souls of its 14 class A war criminals enshrined there are regarded as “kami”, which means gods. One is wartime premier General Hideki Tojo, who approved Unit 731 among other crimes, and another the general in charge at the Rape of Nanking, where in 1937 Japanese soldiers hideously butchered over 300,000 mainly civilian Chinese in a seven-week bestial rampage.

In the Beijing “normalization” talks with Japan, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea may well raise the question of the enforced laborers, while the Japanese emphasize the abductions. Just two days before the talks began, its media identified a North Korean kidnapper wanted for extradition. The war of propaganda continued.

But for any semblance of what is normal in our modern world — in a nation like Germany for instance — surely there are minimum requirements? Would not one of these be a foreign minister with hands clean of vile associations with a war atrocity, especially one so dangerously close to another kind of abduction, but on a mass scale?

Christopher Reed is a journalist who lives in Japan. His email christopherreed@earthlink.net.

Posted at 10:51 PM · Comments (0)

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Pope Benedict XVI has named Bishop Joseph Zen a cardinal at his weekly general audience at the Vatican.
This will make Zen, an outspoken democracy and religious rights advocate, the only cardinal representing China in a vote-casting position in the Vatican’s electoral college.

The expected announcement, which also saw 14 other bishops named as cardinals, places Zen in a relatively powerful position inside the Roman Catholic leadership, allowing him input into the Pope’s handling of matters related to Hong Kong, China and Taiwan.

Zen spent the day in retreat but after the announcement at 7.15pm local time, and also at the Vatican in Rome, he said he was “very happy” and that his appointment “shows the pope is concerned with China.”

Zen, first ordained as a priest on February 11, 1961, in Hong Kong, said he might be asked to move to Rome.

The appointment will be official when Pope Benedict calls a “consistory”- a formal meeting of the Sacred College of Cardinals - to actually create the positions on March 25, the Catholic World News service said.

Hong Kong’s last cardinal was John Baptist Wu who died in September 2002.

In 1996, Zen became the ninth bishop to preside over the Hong Kong Diocese and is known for his ability to bring a message of democracy to his followers and to the Hong Kong public.

He was a key figure in the two mass July 1 marches that political analysts say precipitated the resignation of former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa last year.

Tung’s replacement, Donald Tsang, has also had run-ins with the forceful prelate, especially over the failure of the constitutional reform package, for which administration leaders partially blamed Zen.

But after the announcement, Tsang released a statement saying: “As a Catholic, I wholeheartedly congratulate the bishop on his new appointment as the cardinal. Cardinal Zen has delivered dedicated service in the Hong Kong Catholic Church over the past few decades.”

Zen was one of three Asians named cardinals during the ceremony Wednesday. Nicholas Cheong Jin Suk, the archbishop of Seoul, became South Korea’s second cardinal and Manila’s Archbishop Gaudencio Rosales was also elevated.

The naming of Zen as cardinal fills one of 12 empty slots in the Vatican’s electoral college of 120, according to church news source Catholic Online.

In addition to his duties as bishop, Zen teaches philosophy and theology, as he has since 1971, at the Holy Spirit Seminary College in Hong Kong.

Zen was born in Shanghai on January 13, 1932, and has been a priest for 45 years.

Posted at 10:46 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Howard W. French
WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 2006
SHANGHAI Call it displacement, call it rise and fall, or trading places, or what have you, there is something hugely important taking place in East Asia - a palpable shift in the relative positions of Japan and China.

Sure, you can see this shift in the statistics, which show Chinese trade to be ever more critical for Japan - 21 percent of Japanese total commerce, ahead of trade with the United States. Japanese trade with China, meanwhile, is huge, but shrinking as a portion of the Chinese booming overall trade.

To truly appreciate what is going on, though, you’ve got to feel it, and that is best done through the lives of the two countries’ second cities: Shanghai and Osaka.

These are no ordinary second cities, mind you. Little prepares the uninitiated Westerner for either the gigantism or the dynamism of urban life in this region, and Shanghai and Osaka each sit perched near the summit of this game.

But while Shanghai is still growing, perhaps too fast for its own good, Osaka, the motor of Asian miracles past, has been stuck in the mud for at least a decade, and the scent of stagnation hangs unmistakably in the air.

The new dynamic in the region first struck me almost between the eyes, as it were, on a recent flight from Shanghai to Osaka. I got onto the plane early, and was seated near the rear, affording a view of the entire boarding. Later, two young women got in, sitting on the far side of the plane, dressed in the height of style, but tastefully.

Surely Japanese, I guessed, going in part on a rule of thumb based on old and increasingly outdated prejudices. An author, Neal Stephenson, once summed this up in his 1999 novel, “Cryptonomicon,” which divided East Asia up into the people who wear good suits and those who wear bad ones, Japan being in the first group, mainland China in the latter.

I’d forgotten about the young women with the subtly tinted hair and expensive shoes and handbags until the immigration line at Osaka airport, where they stood ahead of me in the line for foreigners speaking animatedly in Shanghainese.

Wandering Osaka the next couple of days, what struck me was the quiet.

Besides the wild, horn-cranking traffic of Shanghai, what I discovered was missing was the sound of construction, all but inescapable in the economic capital of mainland China, where work crews are everywhere, leveling beautiful old neighborhoods and erecting bristling forests of skyscrapers such as exist nowhere in Japan or even the United States.

Not that there are no cars in Osaka. Like most things in Japan, the traffic is orderly, never overwhelming, and China truly has a great deal still to learn. What intrigued me, though, were the huge lines of black taxicabs outside of the main Osaka train and subway station every night waiting vainly for customers.

I approached a driver in the waiting line, Yuji Yamamoto, and introduced myself as an American living in Shanghai, producing a grand reaction, something akin perhaps to what someone from small town middle America might have gotten after returning home from Europe on a great ocean steamship a century ago.

“It seems like all the business has gone to Shanghai, and all the business people are going there, too,” said Yamamoto, who is 58.

“From the stories I’ve heard, Shanghai sounds like an extraordinary city. A lot of Japanese people go and it seems never come back.”

I wanted to know how business was in Osaka, and asked him. “It’s just as you see it,” he said. “You can wait here for three hours and not get a customer. People aren’t spending money anymore.”

A longtime Japanese friend from Osaka also plied me with questions about Shanghai, with the same wonder-struck look about her. When I finished describing what living in Shanghai was like, with its hurried, unsentimental and relentless change, she thought for a moment before speaking. “That reminds me of stories my parents told me of growing up,” she said. “Everything was looking up. Everything was changing so fast, and things were good.

“I guess the people in Shanghai are living out my parents’ generation now.”

The Japanese government does not yet seem aware of the shift that is well under way, or perhaps this is a defining element of the schtick of the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, feigning ignorance of the relative decline of Japan as part of a bid to belatedly get his country to punch above its weight.

The same cannot be said of the people of Osaka, and presumably many others all over Japan. Asked how the mood could be so glum in Osaka if Japanese economic growth numbers have recently been healthy again, a man met on a train had an interesting answer. “There’s only two places growing in Japan, Tokyo, because of the financial sector, and Nagoya, because of the auto industry,” said Shinji Suzuki, an insurance broker. “When you go to Nagoya, you can feel the prosperity even before you leave the station. The rest of the country is just flat.”

If he is right, Tokyo and Nagoya, home to Toyota, are the last cities of the old Japan, the place that beat the world for so many years in so many fields. The rest of the country now looks to China with a mixture of awe, fear and for those in the right businesses or with a sense of adventurous enterprise, limitless opportunity.

There are so many Japanese in Shanghai that the city supports more magazines in that language than a big American city can boast in English. The entrepreneurs and opportunity- seekers, meanwhile, were on full display on my return to Shanghai from Japan, where it took a full hour to clear immigration, not for lack of efficiency, but because of the immense crowds, dominated by Japanese brought aboard 30 daily flights to the city.

It’s certainly not scientific, but there were no such crowds when I landed in Osaka. What there were, surprisingly for someone who lived several years in Japan and wondered why tourism was so scarcely developed, were welcome signs and tourism literature - in Chinese.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Posted at 8:41 AM · Comments (2)

There’s a brilliant photo essay on the proliferation of blond female anchors and other personalities on American television on slate.com this week by Jack Shafer, the media critic. Highly recommended.

Posted at 10:06 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

Japan’s relations with China are at a lower point than at any time since the two countries normalised relations in 1972 and they are getting worse. Leaders in Japan who argue otherwise are trying to fool the public, or they are fooling themselves.

The spiralling downward of political relations comes amid unprecedented growth in their economic relationship. Japan’s two-way trade with China now exceeds its trade with the US. But economic interests will not necessarily put a brake on deteriorating political relations. What Japanese refer to as “cold politics, hot economics” in their relations with China cannot be a permanent state of affairs. Sooner or later, political tensions will have adverse economic consequences.

The question is whether the two countries can construct a relationship in which they accommodate each other’s power or whether they move down a road to increasing tension. The path of confrontation is not inevitable but it is easy: if China and Japan do nothing to make relations better, they will get worse. Accommodation is not impossible but it is difficult: it demands diplomatic skill and imagination. Most important, it requires the courage of leaders in both countries to resist the temptation to use confrontation to mobilise domestic support.

Moving away from confrontation requires China and Japan to forge a grand bargain. On the Japanese side this must begin with a decision to forego further prime ministerial visits to the Yasukuni shrine. Defusing the Yasukuni issue will not necessarily improve relations with China but it is the precondition for doing so.

Junichiro Koizumi, Japanese prime minister, may protest that he goes to Yasukuni simply to pay respect to young men who were drafted and died doing their best for their country. But Yasukuni is more than a shrine to honour those who died in war. It glorifies the Japan of old that sent these young men to the battlefields. Mr Koizumi cannot visit there without giving encouragement to the minority of rightwing nationalists, of whom he is decidedly not one, who want to keep that twisted version of history alive.

But if the Chinese want him to stop, they have to be prepared to meet such an action with a positive response. There is scant incentive for Japan to forego prime ministerial visits to Yasukuni if all it elicits from China are complaints that the issue of controversial history textbook revisions, allegedly insufficiently sincere Japanese apologies for wartime brutalities and so on remain. The era in which China could exploit Japanese war guilt is past. All China can accomplish by continuing to harp on history is to stoke the fires of Japanese nationalism.

Japanese leaders worry that if they accede to China’s demand on Yasukuni, the Chinese will take that as a signal to step up pressure on the Senkaku Islands dispute, natural gas exploration in the East China Sea and other issues. The problem is that the Japanese have chosen the wrong issue on which to take a stand. What country is going to defend Japan’s leaders’ insistence on making pilgrimages to a shrine dedicated to glorifying Japan’s militarist past? This is becoming more than a China or Korea problem for Japan. It is on its way to becoming a global public relations disaster.

Japan is making a huge mistake if it jsimply digs in its heels. No, there will not be war. The Chinese will not tell Japanese businessmen to invest their money elsewhere, although Japanese businessmen are looking to diversify their risks by doing exactly that, especially in India and Vietnam. But it will push Japan and China further down the road to confrontation, aggravate nationalist tendencies in both countries and destroy the hope that younger generations will put the past to rest.

China is taking a grave risk in insisting that Japan simply capitulate to its demands if it wants to reduce tensions. It is in China’s interest to have the world believe it is engaged in a “peaceful rise”. But how can China convince the world its power is benign if it is taking a confrontational and uncompromising stance toward Japan?

East Asia needs a regional order in which China, Japan and India are rivals economically and competitors for political influence, and where the US remains a balancer against any country seeking hegemony. What it must try hard to avoid is a regional order in which China and Japan are at each other’s throats and other countries are forced to take sides.

The US and other countries need to impress on Chinese and Japanese leaders the importance of seeking accommodation. If the will to strike a grand bargain is there, the modalities will not be difficult to identify. They would include joint scholarly committees to review textbooks, encouragement of so-called second-track dialogues on contentious territorial issues, more extensive cultural exchange programmes, high-level meetings that emphasise positive measures to improve relations and the like. If the political will does not exist, all countries in the region will pay a high price for Chinese and Japanese intransigence, none more so than China and Japan themselves.

The writer is professor of political science at Columbia University and visiting professor at Tokyo’s Graduate Research Institute for Policy Studies. His thoughts, expressed here, inspired a recent speech by Singapore’s senior minister

Posted at 2:53 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The New Yorker
Issue of 2006-02-27

It is the year 100,000 B.C., and two hunter-gatherers are out hunter-gathering. Let’s call them Ig and Og. Ig comes across a new kind of bush, with bright-red berries. He is hungry, as most hunter-gatherers are most of the time, and the berries look pretty, so he pops a handful in his mouth. Og merely puts some berries in his goatskin bag. A little later, they come to a cave. It looks spooky and Og doesn’t want to go in, but Ig pushes on ahead and has a look around. There’s nothing there except a few bones. On the way home, an unfamiliar rustling in the undergrowth puts Og in a panic, and he freezes, but Ig figures that whatever is rustling probably isn’t any bigger and uglier than he is, so he blunders on, and whatever was doing the rustling scuttles off into the undergrowth. The next morning, Og finally tries the berries, and they do indeed taste O.K. He decides to go back and collect some more.

Now, Ig is clearly a lot more fun than Og. But Og is much more likely to pass on his genes to the next generation of hunter-gatherers. The downside to Ig’s fearlessness is the risk of sudden death. One day, the berries will be poisonous, the bear that lives in the cave will be at home, and the rustling will be a snake or a tiger or some other vertebrate whose bite can turn septic. Ig needs only to make one mistake. From the Darwinian point of view, Og is the man to bet on. He is cautious and prone to anxiety, and these are highly adaptive traits when it comes to survival.

We are the children of Og. For most of the time that anatomically modern humans have existed—a highly contested figure, but let’s call it a million years—it has made good adaptive sense to be fearful, cautious, timid. As Jonathan Haidt, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, puts it in “The Happiness Hypothesis” (Basic; $26), “bad is stronger than good” is an important principle of design by evolution. “Responses to threats and unpleasantness are faster, stronger, and harder to inhibit than responses to opportunities and pleasures.” This is a matter of how our brains are wired: most sense data pass through the amygdala, which helps control our fight-or-flight response, before being processed by other parts of our cerebral cortex. The feeling that a fright can make us “jump half out of our skin” is based on this physical reality—we’re reacting long before we know what it is that we’re reacting to.

This is one of the reasons that human beings make heavy weather of being happy. We have been hardwired to emphasize the negative, and, for most of human history, there has been a lot of the negative to emphasize. Hobbes’s description of life in the state of nature as “nasty, brutish and short” is so familiar we can forget that, for most of the people who have ever lived, it was objectively true. Most humans have had little control over their fate; a sniffle, a graze, or a bad piece of meat, let alone a major emergency such as having a baby—all were, for most of our ancestors, potentially lethal. One of the first people to be given penicillin was an Oxford policeman named Albert Alexander, who, in 1940, had scratched himself on a rose thorn and developed septicemia. After he was given the experimental drug, he began to recover, but the supply ran out after five days, and he relapsed and died. That was the world before modern medicine, and it would have been familiar to Ig and Og in a crucial respect: one false move and you were dead.

We can’t be sure, but it seems unlikely that our prehistoric forebears spent much time thinking about whether or not they were happy. As Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, argues in his heavyweight study of the subject, “Happiness: A History” (Atlantic Monthly Press; $27.50), the idea of happiness is not a human universal that applies across all times and all cultures but a concept that has demonstrably changed over the years. When your attention is fully concentrated on questions of survival, you don’t have the time or the inclination even to formulate the idea of happiness. You have to begin to feel that you have some control over your circumstances before you begin to ask yourself questions about your own state of mind.

People who have scant control over their lives are bound to place tremendous importance on luck and fate. As McMahon points out, “In virtually every Indo-European language, the modern word for happiness is cognate with luck, fortune or fate.” In a sense, the oldest and most deeply rooted philosophical idea in the world and in our natures is “Shit happens.” Happ was the Middle English word for “chance, fortune, what happens in the world,” McMahon writes, “giving us such words as ‘happenstance,’ ‘haphazard,’ ‘hapless,’ and ‘perhaps.’ ” This view of happiness is essentially tragic: it sees life as consisting of the things that happen to you; if more good things than bad happen, you are happy.

“Call no man happy until he is dead” was the Greek way of saying this. It was only when someone had passed beyond the vicissitudes of chance, and reposed honorably in the grave, that one could finally render the verdict. The original challenge to this idea came from classical Athens, the first place where men were free and self-governing, and, not coincidentally, a culture in which a great emphasis was placed on ideas of self-reliance and self-control. Socrates seems to have been the earliest person to think critically about the conditions of happiness, and how one could be happy, and in doing so he caused a shift in the way people thought about the subject. Socrates made the question of happiness one of full accord between an individual and the good: to be happy was to lead a good life, one in keeping with higher patterns of being.

That basic idea gained considerable traction in the next two millennia; in one way or another, the philosophical investigation of happiness from Aristotle to Erasmus and on to Luther was concerned with the alignment of individual conduct and the heavenly order. McMahon explores the broad range of these ideas while pointing out the strong continuities among them. At the time the Beatitudes were written down, with their mysterious promise of blessing for the weak and the poor, “the emphasis is on the promise of future reward”; by the time of Luther, in the sixteenth century, “the experience of happiness on earth … was an outward sign of God’s grace.”

The next big turning point in the history of happiness came with the Enlightenment, and its vision of the world as a rational place, which might be governed by laws analogous to the newly discovered Newtonian laws of physics. In the words of the historian Roy Porter, the Enlightenment “translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’ ” With this came a new emphasis on the legitimate pursuit of pleasure. In classical and Christian thought, pleasure was seen as, at best, a distraction from the worthwhile pursuit of virtue. The Enlightenment gave pleasure much better press. “If pleasure exists, and we can only enjoy it in life, then life is happiness,” argued Casanova, who was in a position to know.

This is the understanding of happiness with which the modern world begins; it is vividly captured in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence, which asserts as self-evident a right to “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” To non-Americans, talk of “the pursuit of happiness” can seem an amazing mixture of the simpleminded and the unexpectedly complex. What seems simple is that happiness is so straightforward that we all have a right—a right!—to seek it; what seems complex is the idea that what we’re entitled to is, indeed, a pursuit, something strenuous and not necessarily successful. Some Marxists have thought that the right to pursue happiness was a last-minute substitution for a previously drafted right to property, but McMahon makes short work of that conspiracy theory. He points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive … the ‘pursuit of happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”…

…Philosophers have expounded on happiness for a long time, but only relatively recently have psychologists taken much of an interest. The study of “positive psychology,” as it is called, was launched by Martin Seligman, of the University of Pennsylvania, in the late nineteen-nineties, and began with the realization that the study of psychiatry had a huge bias toward every form of illness. “The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the basic reference work of the psychiatric profession, was (and is) a chronicle of everything that could possibly go wrong with the human mind, from psychosis to schizoaffective disorder to mania—a harrowing catalogue. But where was the study of the mind when it was working satisfactorily? Where was the study of a healthy emotional life and successful adaptation to circumstances? In short, what had psychology to say about happiness? Haidt is a member of the positive-psychology school, and his book, which has in its packaging some of the trappings of self-help, is much more intelligent than it looks from the outside. One of the key questions—going straight to the heart of the Enlightenment ambition for us to be happy here and now, in this life—is whether happiness is a default setting of the brain. That is to say, are we, left to our own devices, and provided with sufficient food and freedom and control over our circumstances, naturally happy?

The answer proposed by positive psychology seems to be: It depends. The simplest kind of unhappiness is that caused by poverty. People living in poverty become happier if they become richer—but the effect of increased wealth cuts off at a surprisingly low figure. The British economist Richard Layard, in his stimulating book “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” puts that figure at fifteen thousand dollars, and leaves little doubt that being richer does not make people happier. Americans are about twice as rich as they were in the nineteen-seventies but report not being any happier; the Japanese are six times as rich as they were in 1950 and aren’t any happier, either. Looking at the data from all over the world, it is clear that, instead of getting happier as they become better off, people get stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: their expectations rise at the same pace as their incomes, and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of reach.

According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances; we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point, and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller.” Contrary to everything you might think, “in the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you,” Haidt writes. Consider the opposing examples of winning the lottery or of losing the use of your limbs. According to Haidt, “It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think… . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.”…

For the entire article please see the link below.

Posted at 1:17 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Feb. 21, 2006

BEIJING — When Zhao Jing moved his blog to Microsoft’s popular MSN Spaces site last summer, some users worried the Chinese government would block the entire service. The censors had blacklisted the last site where the young journalist had posted his spirited political essays, and he seemed unwilling to tone down his writing at the new address.

But Zhao, better known by the pen name Anti, told fellow bloggers not to worry. If the government objected to his blog, he predicted, Microsoft would “sell me out” and delete it rather than risk being blocked from computer screens across China.

He was right. Four and a half months after he began posting essays challenging the Communist Party’s taboo against discussing politics, Zhao published an item protesting the purge of a popular newspaper’s top editors. Officials called Microsoft to complain, and Microsoft quickly erased his blog.

The December incident sparked outrage among bloggers around the world, and in Washington, members of Congress vowed to scrutinize how U.S. firms are helping the Chinese government censor the Internet. But the reaction inside China’s growing community of Internet users was strikingly mixed.

Many rallied to support Zhao, but some objected to his “Western” views and said he deserved to be silenced. Others, especially those with a financial stake in the industry, said they worried Zhao’s writing could lead officials to impose tighter controls on blogging. And a few said they were pleased that Microsoft had been forced to comply with the same censorship rules that its Chinese rivals obey.

The story of Zhao’s blog — and the ambivalence it met in cyberspace — demonstrates that those trying to use the Internet to foster political change in China must contend not only with the censors but also with the apathy, fear and mistrust of their fellow citizens. The case also highlights the competing ethical and commercial pressures on companies seeking to profit from the Internet in China, including U.S. firms such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Google.

With as many as 16 million people in China writing blogs, the Internet has provided a platform for citizens to express their views, shattering the Communist Party’s monopoly on the media. The state still controls newspaper, magazine and book publishing, but the proliferation of sites that let users publish and even broadcast audio and video online have undermined the party’s ability to restrict who can address the public and attract an audience.

Many have used the Internet to produce essays, books and even underground films that question the party’s authority. But surveys show most Internet users are members of the urban elite who are benefiting from China’s booming economy and have avoided writing about politics.

As a result, people using the Internet to pursue change often encounter resistance, both from those hostile to their views and from others who sympathize but worry that pushing too hard could imperil the freedoms already gained on the Web.

The Internet firms empowering Chinese confront different problems. To build audiences, they often push the censors’ limits by offering users an extra bit of news or freedom. But because they need government licenses, there is also an incentive for them to curry favor with the censors. In addition, U.S. firms such as Microsoft must face critics who say they have a duty to do more than their Chinese rivals to promote freedom.

After Zhao’s blog was deleted, he posted a message online cursing Microsoft and the young Chinese programmers who are helping the Communist Party censor the Internet. But a few weeks later, he moderated his criticism of Microsoft, still expressing anger but also noting that MSN Spaces remains China’s most lightly censored blog site.

“In this political system, everyone has to compromise,” Zhao said. “It’s not black and white. Many of the people who delete my essays are also my friends.”

Taking On Microsoft
Blogging arrived in China in the summer of 2002 as a response to censorship, but not by the government. Fang Xingdong, the author of a book that attacked Microsoft’s market dominance as a threat to national security, said he created one of the country’s first blogs after an essay he wrote about Microsoft disappeared from chat forums.

Although Microsoft denied it, Fang concluded the company had pressured the sites to erase his essay. When he posted it on his new blog, he realized he was using technology that could change China.

“The more I thought about it, the more excited I was,” said Fang, now the chairman of Bokee, China’s largest blog service provider. “I felt I had seen the future of the Internet… . Each individual would have the power to fully express his creativity.”

Fang said he believed, then as now, that big corporations like Microsoft presented the greatest threat to freedom of speech on the Internet, not government censors. But when he launched his firm, he said, he devoted meeting after meeting to persuading party officials to accept blogging.

“At the time, they thought, ‘If everyone can publish, wouldn’t we lose control?’ ” Fang said. “But I argued that a blog is like a person’s home, and very few people would put something inappropriate in their home.”

Fang’s company, and others like it, expanded quickly as millions of Chinese embraced blogs as a channel to express themselves and an alternative to the bland fare on state media. Pioneers using pen names such as Mu Zimei, a young reporter who detailed her sexual escapades online, and Meizi, a housewife who described the meals she prepared daily, attracted huge audiences, demonstrating the potential of the Internet to render the party’s culture czars irrelevant.

Like most journalists, Zhao Jing dismissed the blogosphere at first. But near the end of 2004, the slim, fast-talking native of southern China began to see it as a potential medium for journalism.

Zhao, 30, was a news junkie, a former computer technician who got his start in newspapers when an editor spotted a political essay he posted on an Internet bulletin board. He picked the pen name Anti because he believed it reflected his contrarian spirit, and in 2003, he was one of the few Chinese reporters to travel to Iraq to cover the war.

But the Communist Party shut down his newspaper, the 21st Century World Herald, after it published a retired official’s call for political reform, and Zhao was summoned home before the war began. Despondent, he quit and turned to the foreign press, working briefly as a researcher in the Beijing bureau of The Washington Post before moving to the local office of the New York Times.

He launched his blog in December 2004 with high hopes. “Most blogs were diaries or entertainment, but I wanted to do something different,” he said. “I wanted to produce a high-quality blog about politics, like a column, with each entry good enough to publish in a newspaper or magazine.”

Zhao polished his writing before posting it. He gave each entry a strong headline and an eye-catching photo. In the beginning, he spent $60 a month to buy ads on Google that would appear when users searched for information on hot political issues.

“Anti’s Daily Thoughts on Politics and Journalism” tackled a variety of subjects, from public attitudes in Jordan toward the war in Iraq, to the growth of democracy in Taiwan, to the state of Chinese journalism. Zhao generally refrained from topics sure to upset the censors. But his political views were clear.

“I thought of myself as a salesman, and what I was selling was the concept of democracy,” he said. “People think discussing politics is dangerous, but I wanted them to relax, to see it was normal and that it’s not so sensitive.”

By July, Zhao said, his blog was getting 7,000 visitors a day.

Then, in August, he posted a copy of a letter by an editor at the China Youth Daily who had attacked a plan to muzzle the paper’s reporters. Hours later, the government blocked access to his blog, and every other blog on Blog-City, the overseas site where he had set up his page.

Zhao posted a message apologizing to his fellow bloggers for cutting them off from their readers in China. Then he moved to MSN Spaces.

A Joint Venture
Microsoft has struggled in China. Piracy of its software is rampant, and much of the public sees the company as a foreign bully. Analysts believe it is losing money here. When it launched its free blogging platform last May, part of the Chinese version of its MSN.com portal site, it hoped to turn things around.

The site was the result of years of negotiations with Chinese officials. Microsoft lined up the Beijing Youth Daily, a state-owned newspaper, and others to provide content. Just before the launch, it struck a partnership with a state-owned investment firm in Shanghai run by Jiang Mianheng, the son of former president Jiang Zemin. The joint venture marked one of the first times a foreign-invested firm had obtained a license to provide Internet content in China.

Free speech advocates quickly attacked Microsoft for preventing Chinese bloggers from using words such as “freedom” and “democracy” in the titles of their blog entries. But MSN Spaces was a hit, and in less than five months, surveys showed it was overtaking Fang Xingdong’s Bokee as the most popular blog site in China.

Bloggers flocked to the site because of its superior software, which made it easy to include slideshows and was linked to Microsoft’s popular instant-messaging program. But Zhao said he chose MSN Spaces because it seemed less heavily censored than its Chinese competitors.

While Chinese firms used filters to stop bloggers from posting entries with prohibited keywords, Microsoft applied its filter only to the titles of entries. And while Chinese sites often erased politically sensitive content, Microsoft didn’t appear to be deleting much. Meanwhile, other foreign blog sites, like Google’s Blogger, had been blocked by the government.

“Anti’s Blog” thrived at its new address. Zhao continued to write about Taiwan, opposing independence for the island but praising its democracy. He mocked North Korea, picking apart propaganda photos from President Hu Jintao’s visit to Pyongyang. He examined the success of a Chinese television program modeled after Fox’s “American Idol,” comparing it with an experiment in democracy.

But as his audience grew, Zhao exercised more restraint. He worried about the censors. He also knew that swaying China’s Internet users would be difficult.

“With more readers, I needed to be more reasonable,” he said. “I always said I supported democracy, but I tried to explain it in a sensible way. Otherwise, people would start calling me a traitor or an American running dog.”

Occasionally, though, Zhao said he felt he had to speak out, no matter how sensitive the subject. He attended and described the funeral of the ousted party leader who opposed the Tiananmen Square massacre. He defended a teacher fired for discussing the Communist Party’s violent past with her students. He wrote about the death of an exiled Chinese journalist.

‘Huge Obstacle’
Soon Zhao’s blog was receiving an average of 15,000 visitors every day, and he was becoming a controversial figure on the Web.

In December, a college senior in the eastern city of Yanghzou posted a tirade calling Zhao a “huge obstacle to the development of Chinese blogging culture” and attacking him for moving his blog to MSN Spaces instead of a Chinese site.

The student, Zhang Ming, also called on the government to protect the country’s own Internet firms, to be more vigilant about monitoring and censoring Microsoft’s site and to investigate the “illegal services” it offered.

“Anti has become an ad for the fake freedom offered by foreign blog service providers, as if the existence of Anti implies that freedom of speech is preserved,” he wrote.

The essay was featured on Bokee, and Zhao responded by demanding the firm clarify whether it shared the student’s views. Bokee then deleted Zhang’s essay.

But Fang, the Bokee chairman, also expressed concern about Zhao. “I understand his views, but I don’t agree with his methods,” he said. “If you use blogging as a political tool, you could destroy the development of blogging in China. When people like Anti come out, there’s a lot of pressure on us. They’re pursuing freedom, but it results in less freedom.”

One popular Shanghai blogger, who declined to be identified, compared Zhao to an airline passenger who stands up and curses hijackers. “He makes the other passengers uncomfortable and nervous,” the blogger said. “What he is saying might be right, but it makes the situation unpredictable, and perhaps more dangerous for everyone.”

The situation came to a head in late December after the party replaced the top editors of the Beijing News, a scrappy tabloid that Zhao admired for its aggressive reporting. Zhao said he knew it was risky to write about, but decided he could not stay silent.

He expressed disgust on his blog and urged readers to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper in protest.

One day later, on Dec. 30, the Shanghai Municipal Information Office, an arm of the party’s propaganda department, called Microsoft’s joint venture.

Zhang Xiaoyu, a senior official in the agency, said the government told Microsoft to remove Zhao’s blog because it contained comments on the news, and only Chinese Web sites with licenses could publish such material. He said bloggers were barred from writing about “political, economic, military or diplomatic news.”

Microsoft, which by then was hosting 3.3 million blogs in China, deleted Zhao’s blog the next day. A company official said the Internet laws are vague and selectively enforced, and managers were caught off-guard by the request. He said Microsoft decided to comply because it came from an agency with regulatory authority.

Many bloggers rallied to support Zhao, and several used their Microsoft blogs to post copies of his next essay blasting the computer engineers who help censor the Internet. “These political forces are approaching day by day, nibbling at our space, our ideals,” wrote one, a Beijing journalist. Isaac Mao, co-founder of one of China’s first blogging firms, suggested a boycott of Microsoft.

Others defended Microsoft, saying the Chinese people should blame the censors, or themselves, for doing nothing to fight them.

Microsoft launched a policy review, then announced it would take down blogs only when it received notice from the government. By contrast, Chinese Internet firms often censor themselves without waiting for the authorities to call.

Microsoft also said it would disclose the government order when it removed a blog. The company has taken down at least four blogs since then, including one in which the offending material appeared to be a discussion of its new policy.

Meanwhile, a Microsoft executive called Zhao and offered to send a CD with a backup of his deleted blog. Zhao, who now writes on an overseas site the government tries to block, said he was happy to receive the call, but surprised to learn it involved another compromise: Microsoft said it could only send the disc to an address outside China.

Researcher Greg Distelhorst contributed to this report.