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A Continent for the Taking

Africa first captivated New York Times journalist Howard W. French more than twenty-five years ago, but his knowledge of and passion for the continent has the depth of a lifetime association. His experiences there awakened him as nothing before to… read more

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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 l�se-majest�, 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 caf�, 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.

Posted at 11:46 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Independent

The British left nearly 60 years ago. But one vestige of their legacy endures � India�s love for the creator of Jeeves

MR P. S. DWIVEDI explains how to find his Delhi apartment. �Tell the taxi driver that it�s before the slum colony,� he says.

Up on the eighth floor of a concrete high-rise, I find the retired history lecturer at St Stephen�s College, part of Delhi University, and staff advisor to its Wodehouse Society, smoking a beedi, a pungent roll-up cigarette.

The apartment has a lingering odour of lunchtime curry. It�s a dashed rummy place to be talking about Bertie Wooster. I have come to explore the curious Indian obsession with P. G. Wodehouse.

Nearly 60 years after the nation�s British rulers packed their bags and legged it home, his books are on sale in most bookshops, sometimes nestling nervously between Jeanette Winterson and Virginia Woolf.

Wodehouse never wrote about India, but sells better on the subcontinent than in Britain, with pirated copies in common circulation. He is one of the most heavily requested authors at the British Library in Delhi and there are clubs and internet chatrooms devoted to him.

Educated Indians look fondly back to the antics of the St Stephen�s Wodehouse Society. Now disbanded, it ran an annual Practical Joke Week, that was abandoned only when the hoisting of the women�s basketball team�s shirts on a flagpole was deemed a silly-ass prank too far.

The club�s president in the mid-1980s, Thomas Abraham, is now president of Penguin Books India, the country�s largest Wodehouse publisher. �We�ve all grown up with Wodehouse,� he says. �It�s a phenomenon here. When one of his books goes out of print, everyone goes ballistic. My publishing counterparts in the UK are very amused.�

In a country where most books in English sell fewer than 1,000 copies and 5,000 constitutes a bestseller, the corduroy-suited Abraham estimates that his company sells up to 70,000 Wodehouses a year: part of a thriving �retro-market� that ranges from Agatha Christie to Modesty Blaise.

Most Wodehouses are bought by middle-class Indians whose public school-like �English-Medium� education arguably equips them to appreciate the author�s verbal virtuosity and literary allusions better than many Brits.

�Wodehouse�s appeal is a pure sense of linguistic delight,� says Abraham, who has read �about 82� of his 85 books. �In the 1980s there was a debate about whether he was �literary� or not, but the fact is that the books are a great read, laughaloud funny.

�It�s a whole world of clean, wholesome, escapist fun and parents here like to hand it down to their children. Today�s humour is fairly dark, but the appeal of these books for parents is: �No sex please, we�re Indian�.�

Back in 1945, George Orwell noted the books� moral uprightness in his celebrated essay In Defence of P. G. Wodehouse: �Most of the people whom Wodehouse intends as sympathetic characters are parasites, and some of them are plain imbeciles, but very few of them could be described as immoral … Not only are there no dirty jokes, but there are hardly any compromising situations.�

Orwell recalled meeting a young Indian nationalist who saw Wodehouse as a satirist of English society, �an anti-British writer who had done useful work by showing up the British aristocracy in their true colours … On the contrary, a harmless, old-fashioned snobbishness is perceptible all through his work.�

That snobbery may contribute to another, less acknowledged, reason for Wodehouse�s Indian appeal. Some educated Indians, particularly older ones, have a nostalgia for the �British days�. The books offer a chance to indulge that nostalgia, and are conveniently full of effete upper-class dimwits who conform to the Indian stereotype of their former rulers.

�Even today, if you see parodies of the British here, it�s still all �What-ho-old-chap� plummy voices,� Abraham says.

His contemporary at St Stephen�s, the writer and diplomat Shashi Tharoor, explores such ambivalent attitudes in a new collection of literary essays, Bookless in Baghdad. For him, Wodehouse�s �insidious but good-humoured subversion of the language … appeals most of all to a people who have acquired English but rebel against its heritage�.

In his eighth-floor apartment, Mr Dwivedi has other theories about the author�s puzzling appeal in a country whose intellectual life is geared more to fervour than to froth.

The books� comedy, he says, is welcomed in a culture whose own Hindi and Sanskrit literature is �sadly lacking in humour�, and the characters are endlessly intriguing in a society that finds it hard to laugh at itself.

�The way they take everything so lightly is such a change from one�s own life here,� he says. �Middle class Indians don�t like to appear foolish, even when they are. If you say something self-deprecatory, poking fun at yourself, people will think you�re an idiot and will rub it in.�

He first read Wodehouse as a child. �I couldn�t comprehend the way girls in the books would talk to their fathers about boyfriends. In our society, even if people are married, they should appear not to know each other and not be seen speaking to each other. There are still very few occasions when my wife and I have long conversations.�

He dismisses potential Indian parallels to Wodehouse�s characters: Wooster recast, perhaps, as a young sahib; Jeeves as a trusted, though wily, bearer; bleary aristocrats as bloated maharajahs: �Wodehouse�s characters are essentially harmless; the idiosyncracies of the rajahs and their sons were obnoxious.�

Aside from their literary appeal, Wodehouse�s books have created some startling Indian misconceptions about Britain.

�Until I went there for the first time in 1998, my impression had always been that it was a great seat of tradition,� Abraham says. �I thought every country house would have a butler, so it all came as a surprise. Though by and large, thanks to Trainspotting and The Full Monty, people are now aware of the other side of British life. And our notions have also been coloured by Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.�

Over an impeccably English cup of tea, he confesses a fondness for Billy Bunter and Just William, and I finally get up to leave. �Tootle-pip,� he says. �With knobs on.�

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Copyright The Financial Times February 17

On a winter-cold morning last autumn, before the leaves could summon up the energy to burn and fall, the barbarians entered the gate. A group of feisty young writers, known only to millions of readers by their blog names - Gawker, Gizmodo, Wonkette and Defamer - were in a soigne studio in New York�s Chelsea district to be photographed for the February issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

They represented the cream of Gawker Media - a mini-empire of clever, gossip-driven blogs launched in 2003 by Nick Denton, a former reporter for the Financial Times. But they were also emissaries from the blogging hordes, a raffish army of citizen journalists bent on overthrowing the old guard of the US media.

The irony was sweet: Gawker was supposed to make fun of this kind of inside-the-establishment posing. But the victory was sweeter: it was a signal moment, a benediction from a magazine that, more than any other, has become the plush chronicler of the celebrity establishment. As Vanity Fair put it in the story that accompanied the photo-spread, �With a combination of smart-ass writing and low subject matter folded into crisply designed sites, the Gawker gang is bringing some wit and nasty fun to a dour decade.� The upstart press of the 21st century seemed to have truly arrived.

Gawker made itself known early in its life when its first editor, Elizabeth Spiers, a former equity analyst, scored a frank interview with a young woman working on Wall Street, about the poor customer service ethics of cocaine dealers - an acute problem, apparently, for high-finance slaves pulling all-nighters during tax season.

�The perfect coke dealer would be like a dad,� she said: an immigrant putting his six kids through college, someone who wouldn�t muck you around. This was not the sort of information you were likely to get in The New York Times.

Gawker�s Washington DC outpost �Wonkette� scored a bigger coup when its editor, Ana Marie Cox, wrote about �Washingtonienne�, a 26-year-old Republican staffer pseudonymously blogging about her multiple sexual liaisons, including one with a married Bush administration official who gave her an envelope filled with cash in gratitude. Readers quickly worked out who the staffer, Jessica Cutler, was sleeping with, helped by the fact that Cutler - who has often spoken to the media of her 140-plus IQ - referred to her paramours using their real initials.

Buttoned-down Washington was horrified. Cutler was fired for misusing her office computer, but promptly got a six-figure book deal and an invitation to pose for Playboy in time for the 2004 election, which she accepted. As she memorably told The Washington Post, �Everyone should have a blog. It�s the most democratic thing ever.� And, indeed, having a blog seemed to be the quickest way to fame in a country obsessed with fortune.

With Gawker Media, the US seemed to be getting the tabloid values it deserved. It wasn�t for nothing that the irrepressible socialite and political chameleon Arianna Huffington called Nick Denton �the Rupert Murdoch of the blogosphere�, and then promptly created her own salon of bloggers last year - �The Huffington Post� - so that such dispossessed citizen journalists as Tina Brown, Deepak Chopra and Gwyneth Paltrow could ride the blogging wave and speak directly to the masses.

Now, at this point you might be wondering, what the hell is a blog? It turns out that even in the US, the blogosphere�s superpower, most internet users - 62 per cent according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project - aren�t exactly sure what a blog is.

So if you happen to fall into the majority, a blog is conventionally and somewhat confusingly defined as an online diary, or weblog; a more apt description is to say that it is the simplest and cheapest way to publish a type of website whose structure encourages frequent diary-like postings. The idea took off in 1996 with the Open Pages �webring�, or linked websites; but it wasn�t until sites such as blogger.com, created by Pyra Labs in San Francisco in 1999, gave people free server space and tools to create their own websites that the much more widespread blogging phenomenon began.

Chances are you have come across a blog when searching the web for a particular topic, but if you want to find ones covering a specific issue, the blogosphere has its own version of Google in www.technorati.com, a search engine that tracks blogs. Or you could go to www.truthlaidbear.com, which tracks visits to the most popular blogs. Alternatively, clicking on one blogger - say instapundit.com if you are conservative leaning, or the dailykos.com if you are liberal - will lead you to a �blogroll� of links to likeminded souls.

At the close of 2002, there were some 15,000 blogs. By 2005, 56 new blogs were starting every minute. As I type this sentence, there are, according to technorati.com, 27.2 million blogs. By the time you read this sentence, there surely will be many more.

Still, blogging would have been little more than a recipe for even more internet tedium if it had not been seized upon in the US as a direct threat to the mainstream media and the conventions by which they control news. And one of the conventions that happened to work in blogging�s favour was the way the media take a new trend and describes it as a revolution. The surge of hype about blogging was helped by the fact that many of the most prominent bloggers were high-fliers within the media establishment - such as Andrew Sullivan, a former editor of The New Republic, or Mickey Kaus of Slate, the online magazine Microsoft sold to The Washington Post Company just over a year ago.

That such established journalists were blogging gave the revolution a dose of credibility that it might not have had if it were in the hands of true outsiders. And then, just before the presidential election in 2004, blogging had its Battleship Potemkin moment, when swarms of partisan bloggers rose up to sink CBS�s iron-jawed leviathan Dan Rather for peddling supposedly fake memos about Bush�s national guard service.

This seemed to prove one of blogging�s biggest selling points - that the collective intelligence of the media�s audience was greater than the collective intelligence of any news programme or newspaper.

It also showed that blogging was irrepressible - that power was shifting from the gatekeepers of the traditional media to a more open, fluid information society that would have gladdened the heart of the philosopher Karl Popper. And it solidified the belief among conservatives that blogging was a way to take down their longstanding enemies in the once impregnable fortress of the liberal press.

As syndicated radio host and law professor Hugh Hewitt wrote in the conservative Weekly Standard last August, �It is hard to overstate the speed with which the information reformation is advancing - or to overestimate its impact on politics and culture. The mainstream media is a hollowed-out shell of its former self when it comes to influence, and when advertisers figure out who is reading the blogs, the old media is going to see their advertising base drain away, and not slowly.�

We are witnessing �the dawn of a blogosphere dominant media�, announced Michael S. Malone, who has been described as �the Boswell of Silicon Valley�. �Five years from now, the blogosphere will have developed into a powerful economic engine that has all but driven newspapers into oblivion, has morphed (thanks to cell phone cameras) into a video medium that challenges television news and has created a whole new group of major media companies and media superstars. Billions of dollars will be made by those prescient enough to either get on board or invest in these companies.�

Even the ne plus ultra of American public intellectuals, Richard Posner, senior lecturer in law at the University of Chicago, former chief judge on the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, declared blogging to be �the latest and perhaps gravest challenge to the journalistic establishment� (although it is worth noting that Judge Posner decided to publish his meditation in The New York Times Book Review rather than on his own blog).

But as with any revolution, we must ask whether we are being sold a naked emperor. Is blogging really an information revolution? Is it about to drive the mainstream news media into oblivion? Or is it just another crock of virtual gold - a meretricious equivalent of all those noisy internet start-ups that were going to build a brave �new economy� a few years ago?

Shouldn�t we just be a tiny bit sceptical of another information revolution following on so fast from the last one - especially as this time round no one is even pretending to be getting rich? Isn�t the problem of the media right now that we barely have time to read a newspaper, let alone traverse the thoughts of a million bloggers?

I suspect so, not least because the �dinosaur� businesses of the old economy have a canny ability to absorb, adapt and evolve. We are already starting to see blogs taking root in well established newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic, though few have yet gone as far as the News & Record in Greensboro, North Carolina, where, last year, editor John Robinson told his reporters to turn themselves into bloggers. He also invited readers to act as reporters, filing their own stories, and writes a regular blog himself.

Some experiments have gone awry. When the Los Angeles Times decided to try letting readers insert their own ideas into its editorials online last year, the trial ended within days after obscene pictures were posted on its site.

But as the old media wrestle with the significance of blogging, it is sobering to hear some of the heroes of the �revolution� now speak of its insignificance. Late last year, I went to the ramshackle East Village apartment of Choire (pronounced �Corey�) Sicha, a former gallery owner and now a senior editor at The New York Observer, a vibrant weekly newspaper that covers the rich and powerful of Manhattan.

Dressed in a pink shirt and blue jeans, and unshaven to the point of looking like a young Bee Gee gone preppy, Sicha is less than starry-eyed about blogging - even though it helped put him and Gawker on the media map.

�The word blogosphere has no meaning,� he said from across a folding table vast enough to support the battle of Waterloo in miniature (the apartment owes much to eBay, the Ikea of bohemia). �There is no sphere; these people aren�t connected; they don�t have anything to do with each other.� The democratic promise of blogs, he explained, has just produced more fragmentation and segregation at a time when seeing the totality of things - the purview of old media - is arguably much more important.

�As for blogs taking over big media in the next five years? Fine, sure,� he added. �But where are the beginnings of that? Where is the reporting? Where is the reliability? The rah-rah blogosphere crowd are apparently ready to live in a world without war reporting, without investigative reporting, without nearly any of the things we depend on newspapers for. The world of blogs is like an entire newspaper composed of op-eds and letters and wire service feeds. And they�re all excited about the global reach of blogs? Right, tell it to China.�

If the hype surrounding blogging sounds familiar, its only because you really have heard it all before. In Washington DC, the fiery-haired woman behind the Wonkette blog, Ana Marie Cox found the idea of blogging�s grave threats and grand promises rife with deja vu. �People said this about [fan] zines too,� she said. �People said this about the web in general as well - oh God, they probably said this about CD-roms.�

Cox (who - in the interests of disclosure - I hired to write some articles on polling for the website STATS.org) has been burnt by the promise of revolution before. She once worked for Suck and Feed - two inventive alternative publications that flourished briefly when, to borrow a phrase from the Boswell of Silicon Valley, people �were prescient enough to invest billions� in the internet.

Cox was then hired to add �voice� to a number of publications concerned that they were too dull to attract younger readers and was promptly fired for having too much youthful pitch. Her journalism career was almost at an end when Nick Denton saw her blog, the Antic Muse, and hired her to write Wonkette.

If anyone ought to be a true believer in the blogging revolution, it�s Cox; but she isn�t. �I just don�t see the �lumbering dinosaurs of mainstream media� - there�s no asteroid coming,� she said. �They may have - to push the metaphor wildly - to learn to live in an ecosphere where there is a more limited amount of. whatever it is.�

�Food?� I ventured.

�Food,� she agreed. �But there�s always going to be a New York Times. As a culture, we like to have a narrative that we kind of agree on. You and your cohorts may believe that it�s liberal elitist propaganda - or you may think it�s corporate, conservative hegemony. But there�s a sense in which it�s good to have The New York Times because we need to know that this is the dominant storyline right now. Cable news has the same function. I guess the idea is that in Jakarta somebody at their computer is going to type up a news story about what�s going on in Jakarta. But you know, I think I do want a professional reporter doing that as well.�

Cox also stands as a prime example of another under-acknowledged weakness of the blogger uprising: to make it in blogging seems to mean making it out of blogging. By the time the Vanity Fair photo spread on Gawker Media hit the store shelves in January, Cox had left Wonkette to focus on promoting her novel Dog Days, a satire on Washington DC for which she was paid $250,000. Elizabeth Spiers, too, defected from Gawker after about a year on the job, and her satirical novel will be published next year. Its title is curiously apropos: And They All Die in the End.

And if Gawker was a kind of guilty pleasure people enjoyed after the horror of 9/11 had lingered just a little too long, it is a pleasure that has begun testing readers� limits. A posting in August noted that a woman had been knocked down and killed crossing the street in front of an Urban Outfitters store: �You know we�re completely in favor of anything that suggests NYC is edgy,� wrote Gawker. �But we�d argue things have gone too far when shopping for ironic T-shirts becomes a potentially fatal extreme sport.�

The woman turned out to be an 86-year-old Holocaust survivor, which lead The New York Times to accuse Gawker of turning �everyday heartbreak� and �heinous� crimes into �inflection points for irony�.

Much as the outpouring of humour in New York in the 1920s that gave rise to the Algonquin Round Table was a temporary post-traumatic cultural reaction to the shock of the Great War, the Gawker spirit is wearing a little thin in light of a seemingly endless bloody insurgency in Iraq, a mesmerising failure of government to deal with the massive catastrophe of Hurricane Katrina, and revelations of corruption on Capitol Hill. �Satire,� said Choire Sicha, �is the most useless cultural effluvia one could possibly produce out of the cultural situation in America right now.�

In many respects, the American media in all their stuffy isolation brought the bloggers upon themselves. When I first arrived in Washington in 1993, Martin Walker, then bureau chief of The Guardian, made the acid and insightful comment that you had to be old to be allowed to have an opinion in print in the US press. In contrast to the British and European media, which had their origins in the Enlightenment and the belief that journalism was a forum for debate and argument - even philosophy, according to David Hume - the American press is a 19th century creation animated by the pursuit of fact.

Blogging - if you will forgive the cartoon philosophising - brought the European Enlightenment to the US. Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise. Which is great. But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet.

The historical lesson here is one of cyclical rebellion at the US media for being staid, dull and closed off to change. Indeed, the underground press of the 1960s was described in almost identical terms as blogging is today. �The loudest voice heard in America these days,� said the radical journalist Andrew Kopkind in 1967, is the sound of insurgents chiselling away at establishments.�

The present round of chiselling may feel exciting and radically new - but blogging in the US is not reflective of the kind of deep social and political change that lay behind the alternative press in the 1960s. Instead, its dependency on old media for its material brings to mind Swift�s fleas sucking upon other fleas �ad infinitum�: somewhere there has to be a host for feeding to begin. That blogs will one day rule the media world is a triumph of optimism over parasitism.

This is patently not the case in other parts of the world. �In a market like the US, blogs are superabundant and often irrelevant because we suffer from a glut of data and have lost our norms for creating information hierarchies,� said Anne Nelson, a media consultant and adjunct professor at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. �In authoritarian societies like Syria or China, it�s the reverse - people lack independent information and may question the imposed hierarchy. In fact, as Nasrin Alavi notes in her recent book, We are Iran, blogging is creating an information revolution where the Iranian regime has been stunningly successful at shutting down newspapers (41 over the past decade). �Thanks to the anonymity and freedom of weblogs, Iranians are at last speaking up and discussing issues that have never been publicly aired in the national media before,� Alavi wrote in the FT magazine last November. �The head of the Iranian judiciary, Ayatollah Shahroudi, recently described the internet as a �Trojan horse carrying enemy soldiers in its belly�. He�s right. The Iranian blogosphere pulses with opposition to the Islamic revolution.�

Blogging will no doubt always have a place as an underground medium in closed societies; but for those in the west trying to blog their way into viable businesses, the economics are daunting.

The inherent problem with blogging is that your brand resides in individuals. If they are fabulous writers, someone is likely to lure them away to a better salary and the opportunity for more meaningful work; if the writer tires and burns out, the brand may go down in flames with them.

To deal with the punishing treadmill of endless posting, Gawker and Wonkette each now has two editors. But the economies of scale are such that a second writer is not going to change output to the point where readership or ad revenue will double. What a second writer will do is provide security for the brand - and the means to fact-check gossip that could otherwise turn into a blog-destroying lawsuit.

As for advertising revenue, no one appears to be getting rich from blogging. According to Advertising Age, Markos Moulitsas, founder of the Daily Kos, one of the most popular blogs in the world, was making around $20,000 a month just before the last presidential election. When I e-mailed Moulitsas to ask what he was making now, he refused to say: �Really, it�s no one else�s business. I�m not a public company.�

Similarly, Gawker Media and Pajamas Media (a blog news service that includes law professor Glenn Reynolds� heavily trafficked site Instapundit) either refused to or did not respond with any figures.

�Let�s just say it�s more than a case of beer, but not enough for us to quit our jobs,� said Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, the writers behind gofugyourself.com, a wickedly inventive take-down of celebrities wearing �frighteningly ugly� clothes, which consistently draws 100,000 plus visitors a day, making it one of the most frequently visited blogs on the internet.

One blogger who would open his books suggests that fortunes are not being made by even the above-average site. Andrew Lienhard earned $1,100 last year by using Google�s ad service on his blog, jazzhouston.com, which has been running since 1996 and gets some 12,000 page visits a day.

After talking to various people in the new media world, it�s possible to estimate an income of $1,000 to $2,000 a month in ad revenue from a typical blog getting 10,000 visitors a day and playing to a national audience with a popular topic such as politics.

The problem is that few blogs do even that much traffic. According to the monitoring done by thetruthlaidbear.com, only two blogs get more than 1 million visitors a day and the numbers drop quickly after that: the 10th ranked blog for traffic gets around 120,000 visits; the 50th around 28,000; the 100th around 9,700; the 500th only 1,400 and the 1000th under 600. By contrast, the online edition of The New York Times had an average of 1.7 million visitors per weekday last November, according to the Nielsen ratings, and the physical paper a reach of 5 million people per weekday, according to Scarborough research.

That is one reason why advertisers are still sticking with the mainstream media. The other has to do with the very basic selling point of blogging. �There is a certain loss of control when it comes to advertising on blogs,� said Mark Wnek, chairman and chief creative officer of Lowe New York. �The connection the most popular citizen journalists cultivate with their devotees is through an honest, uncensored, raw freedom of expression, and that can be quite uncomfortable territory for a traditional marketer.�

The dismal traffic numbers also point to another little trade secret of the blogosphere, and one missed by Judge Posner and all the other blog-evangelists when they extol the idea that blogging allows thousands of Tom Paines to bloom. As Ana Marie Cox says: �When people talk about the liberation of the armchair pajamas media, they tend to turn a blind eye to the fact that the voices with the loudest volume in the blogosphere definitely belong to people who have experience writing. They don�t have to be experienced journalists necessarily, but they write - part of their professional life is to communicate clearly in written words.�

And not every blogger can be a Tom Paine. �People may want a democratic media,� says Cox, �but they don�t want to be bored. They also want to be entertained and they want to feel like they�ve learned something. They want ideas expressed with some measure of clarity.�

Which brings us to the spectre haunting the blogosphere - tedium. If the pornography of opinion doesn�t leave you longing for an eroticism of fact, the vast wasteland of verbiage produced by the relentless nature of blogging is the single greatest impediment to its seriousness as a medium.

To illustrate the point, I asked a number of bloggers whether they thought Karl Marx or George Orwell, two enormously potent political writers who were also journalists, would have blogged if the medium had been available to them. And almost always, the answer was, why of course, it would have given them the widest possible audience and the greatest possible impact.

�We�re sure Marx and Orwell would have blogged,� said Heather and Jessica of gofugyourself.com. �When it comes right down to it, blogs reach the greatest amount of people in the least amount of time, and they reach the very people Marx and Orwell wanted to speak to most.�

�Orwell, definitely,� said Instapundit�s Glenn Reynolds. �Marx would have had to acquire a bit more �snap�, I�m afraid, to have made it as a blogger.�

�Orwell maybe,� said Cox. �Orwell was pathologically productive. He never doubted himself, that�s for sure. And maybe he shares that trait with many bloggers.�

The question was, of course, rigged. The great critic and editor Cyril Connolly fell into despair over the prolixity of Orwell�s wartime writing: �Being Orwell, nothing he wrote is quite without value and unexpected gems keep popping up. But O the boredom of argument without action, politics without power.�

Connolly was the constitutional opposite of Orwell - a spry wit given to sloth, a portly bon vivant who masticated away his genius. But he recognised, in effect, how awful Orwell would have been as a blogger, and how he would fall into the kind of dross exemplified by the author�s �In Defence of English Cooking�: �Here are some of the things that I myself have sought for in foreign countries and failed to find. First of all, kippers, Yorkshire pudding, Devonshire cream, muffins and crumpets. Then a list of puddings that would be interminable if I gave it in full: I will pick out for special mention Christmas pudding, treacle tart and apple dumplings. Then an almost equally long list of cakes: for instance, dark plum cake.�

The point is, any writer of talent needs the time and peace to produce work that has a chance of enduring. Connolly provided that to Orwell with the influential literary magazine he co-edited, Horizon, a publication that gave Orwell the chance to write some of his most memorable essays.

As for Marx, journalism was an act of economic necessity that, initially, necessitated Engels doing all the writing. But Marx was a quick learner with a deft wit, and in his brisk biography, Francis Wheen posits that �had he but world enough and time Marx could have. made his name as the sharpest polemical journalist of the 19th century. But at his back he could always hear the nagging voice of conscience whispering, �c�est magnifique, mais c�est ne pas la guerre.� For Marx and Engels, journalism was trivial - an impediment to serious, memorable and above all influential work. �Mere potboiling,� wrote Engels of the more than 500 articles he and Marx wrote for The New York Daily Tribune, �It doesn�t matter if they are never read again.�

And that, in the end, is the dismal fate of blogging: it renders the word even more evanescent than journalism; yoked, as bloggers are, to the unending cycle of news and the need to post four or five times a day, five days a week, 50 weeks of the year, blogging is the closest literary culture has come to instant obsolescence. No Modern Library edition of the great polemicists of the blogosphere to yellow on the shelf; nothing but a virtual tomb for a billion posts - a choric song of the word-weary bloggers, forlorn mariners forever posting on the slumberless seas of news.

Trevor Butterworth is a writer based in Washington DC.

Talk to Trevor Butterworth and have your say at the blog set up to discuss this story: ftmagblog.blogspot.com

Posted at 8:46 PM · Comments (0)

February 20, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, Feb. 19 � Working six-hour days at one of this city’s busier intersections, where he cajoles pedestrians to respect the traffic signals, Li Debao has a hard-earned insight.

“Chinese people have some bad habits, and a lack of awareness of traffic rules is one of them,” said the 36-year-old crossing guard. “Two-thirds of the people ignore the rules, and simply can’t be bothered.”

In rain, snow or the merciless heat of the Shanghai summer, crossing guards like Mr. Li can be seen during daylight hours at every major intersection in this city, trying their best to hold back groaning, impatient crowds with little more than a sharply blown whistle and some well-chosen words.

Shanghai’s traffic, horrendous at peak hours and steadily growing worse with the city’s runaway growth, would be frozen in perpetual gridlock without the traffic assistants, especially given the penchant of pedestrians here to flock across the street against red lights or even dash headlong into oncoming traffic, as oblivious to what is happening at ground level as an outfielder locked in on a pop fly.

That the guards have no powers of arrest, or even the ability to issue tickets, allows many pedestrians to feel free to ignore them. What is worse, they are frequent targets of aggression from crowds of sneering and cursing pedestrians. According to the city government, they are physically assaulted at a rate of about 20 times a month.

“This is not an easy job to do,” said Mr. Li, expressing with considerable understatement the frustrations of a weaponless army of 8,000 in a pushy, adrenaline-fueled city of 17 million. “Particularly when you feel people look down upon you. We’ve even come to calling ourselves fifth-class citizens.”

The traffic assistants each have their own ways of coping, their own strategies for managing the impossible. Short of stature, and with a lively, expressive face that puts some pedestrians on guard even before she makes a gesture, Li Hong, a two-year veteran of the force who works on the city’s most famous business street, Nanjing Lu, is a study in quiet persuasion.

“Hey, you two, the intersection is going to lock up if you cross now,” she says gently to a couple of men who started out against the traffic into the street. “The light will change in just a minute. Try to wait another moment, O.K.?”

With that, the two men look at each other and return to the curb sheepishly, their hands buried deep in their pockets.

Working diagonally across the same intersection during the peak traffic flow of lunch hour, another woman, Zhou Genlan, tall and severe, waves her arms and whistles like a force of nature. “Hey you, off the bike,” she says to a man in his 30’s who is riding on the sidewalk, extending her arm and pointing her finger like Uncle Sam in the famous recruiting poster. The rider quickly dismounts.

That task accomplished, she declares to a bystander, “There is nothing harder to do than getting people to obey the rules.”

Ms. Zhou, like all of the city’s traffic assistants, is dressed in a billed cap, light brown pants and shirt, a reflective vest and thick-soled black shoes. Each agent receives two uniforms from the city each year.

Most of the people in this job, which was created by Shanghai three years ago, are in their late 40’s or into their 50’s, the country’s so-called lost generation � casualties of China’s sharp change of course from a Communist economy composed of state enterprises that provided lifetime employment to freewheeling capitalism, where layoffs and corporate restructuring are the rule, and people without higher degrees in sought-after fields are the first to go.

Take Qi Fang, formerly with a state-owned home decoration company whose closing left him in desperate need of income and security to put his high-school-age child through college. Six months after he joined the force, so did his wife, who had worked previously as a maid.

“When I started, I felt embarrassed,” Mr. Qi said, explaining how he coped with his fall in social status. “I live nearby and bump into my neighbors and former colleagues almost every day. They’ll say things like, ‘Hey Qi Fang, how did you get to be like this?’ In cold weather, I’d pull my cap down really low, like the street sweepers in the old days.”

The steady salary of about $120 a month, a shift that’s limited to six hours a day and especially benefits like health insurance have gradually helped take the sting off. Nowadays his wife works at a downtown intersection just a few blocks away.

“The first month I worked, every day I went home with very sore legs,” Mr. Qi said. “In summers you stand in the sun and burn, and in the winters the wind blows, but I’m 50, and people my age have difficulty finding jobs. Plus, we don’t have any skills, so for us, it’s O.K.”

Zhang Changhua, a 54-year-old man working at another downtown street corner, said he was satisfied with the job. “As long as citizens cooperate well with me, I feel happy,” he said. “But you always meet two or three people every day who are not rational. They don’t care how many times you plead with them, or remind them to step back to the curb, or not to go beyond the stop line. They just pretend not to see you and rush across the street ignoring the red lights, our call and whistles.”

If each of the traffic assistants brings his or her own style to the job, what seems to unite them is a deep wonder about what puts people in such a hurry nowadays, and an almost philosophical resignation about their powerlessness to do anything about it.

“You see these five fingers,” said Wu Wei, a 54-year-old agent who works in the heart of the commercial district. “Some of them are long and some of them are short, and it’s the same with the people you meet every day. Some are poor, some are scalawags, and they all have different educational levels.

“What can be done other than accepting reality?”

Posted at 2:37 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times
Published: FT February 16 2006

With the world’s second largest economy in purchasing power parity
and the
resource base to modernise its military, China is well on the road to
becoming the first new superpower of the 21st century.

Rising China is not simply going to be a remake of Japan – which
never made
it to superpower status – because Beijing, unlike Tokyo, is a
strategic
free
agent. In the geopolitical marketplace, it has become mandatory to
anticipate China’s emergence during the next 10 to 20 years in much
the
same
way as share prices will reflect the forecast performance of a company.
But
these forecasts are complicated by uncertainty regarding China’s
posture
vis-a-vis the US; as partner, competitor or adversary. In many ways,
China
is less the equivalent of Wilhelminian Germany on the eve of the first
world
war, fated to collide with the status quo powers in its quest of a
“place
in
the sun”, than of the Germany of Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s. It
is a
power erupting on to a crowded global scene but with no predetermined
outcome as to the nature of its relations and alliances.

China, by virtue of the explosive growth of its economic appetites and
production, disrupts this global scene. At the same time, it is
presenting
itself as a status quo power. Today’s China, unlike the US with its
militant
promotion of regime change in non-democratic states, has no value
system to
sell and no messianic mission to fulfil. This is becoming its great
strength
as it moves towards superpower status. It is not only the Zimbabwes,
the
Myanmars and the Sudans of the world that will flock to China’s
self-interest-driven, value-free foreign policy, but also those states
that
are seeking a counter-weight to America’s assertion of its own
democratic
mission. Jacques Chirac, the French president, may be misguided in his
vision of a multipolar world in which China would somehow deal with
France
as an equal. But as China’s economic and political leverage grows, it
is
not
only the French who will rise to the bait of a Bismarckian China
obstructing
the Bonapartist instincts of the US.

However, China’s value-free foreign policy has significant limits. In
the
long run, it will inevitably create tensions with a US – and, indeed,
a
European Union – that sees values as an integral component of
international
relations. This would come on top of the more traditional causes of
friction
between China and the US, such as the fate of Taiwan and the nature of
the
strategic order in east Asia. Yet, for China, the relationship with the
US
remains by far the most important one to get right.

In the shorter term, the policies flowing from China’s value-blind
positioning provide no clear sense of direction regarding world
challenges
such as global warming or, most acutely today, nuclear proliferation.
China
may be tempted to seize the opportunity of securing first call on
Iran’s
energy resources, thus preventing a unified stance in the United
Nations
Security Council and precipitating the breakdown of the international
non-
proliferation regime. Conversely, China might decide that the spread of
nuclear weapons – perhaps to Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan –
would run
counter to its interests and that it should therefore work with the US,
Europe and Russia in nudging Iran away from the nuclear threshold.

America will have to learn to balance its long-standing regional
interests
in east Asia with China’s ability to help or hinder at the global
level,
notably on the Iranian question. Washington, at some stage, will have
to
decide what is more important: dealing with the Iranian account (which
may
entail satisfying China on other issues) or constraining China in east
Asia
(even if this means losing China’s support on Iran in the Security
Council).

Europe, in a way, has the opposite problem. The EU thinks of China in
global
terms but neglects the regional dimension of the US–Chinese
relationship in
east Asia. The Europeans are essentially passive beneficiaries of the
strategic stability created by America’s military presence in the
Asia-Pacific region. Compromises with China, including horse-trading on
the
EU arms embargo, should not be contemplated by the Europeans without
due
consideration of America’s strategic role in east Asia. Any
miscalculation
would have dire long-term consequences for US–European relations.
However,
the corresponding strategic dialogue between the US and the EU for
dealing
with such problems hardly exists.

One hopes that in the capitals of China, the US and Europe, the full
implications of the new trade-offs are not only understood but acted
on.

The writer is special adviser at the Fondation

Posted at 12:15 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Independent

17 February 2006
Dozens of Western multinationals have made millions of pounds in profits from exploiting African bio-resources taken from some of the poorest nations on earth, with not a penny offered in return.

Pharmaceutical firms are accused of breaching the United Nations convention on biodiversity, which states that nations have sovereignty over their own natural resources, by scouring continents for samples of unique materials, from plants to bacteria.

A ground-breaking report identifies numerous materials, taken from Africa to Western laboratories, which have developed and patented products worth hundreds of millions of pounds - from a trailing plant beloved of gardeners across Europe to a natural cure for impotence and a microbe used in fading designer jeans.

In some cases companies accept that their product is based on a traditional source and yet there is no evidence the companies have compensated countries from which they took them.

“It’s a new form of colonial pillaging,” said Beth Burrows, of the US-based Edmonds Institute, the environmental group that published the report. “We have identified a number of cases that require a lot of explanation. The problem is that we have a world [where companies] are used to taking whatever they want from wherever and thinking they are doing it for the good of mankind.”

Mariam Mayet, of the South Africa-based African Centre for Biodiversity, co-authors of the report, said: “There is a total disregard and disrespect for Africa’s resources. Our findings were made after just one month of research. Imagine what we could discover with two years of research.”

Among the companies named is the British firm SR Pharma, which it says holds patents for a mycobacterium collected in Uganda during the 1970s and used to develop a treatment for chronic viral infections, including HIV.

SR Pharma’s final director Melvyn Davies confirmed his company had neither offered the product or financial compensation to Uganda. He said the drug had not made any profits for the company, although it had raised $20m (�11.5m) in funding for research.

“If you pick up a natural substance from the street, does that mean it belongs to the country in which you found it? [Our researcher] just happened to be in Uganda,” he said. “The issue is not about where the source was but the work that has been done to develop it. Should Uganda share in the profits that will be generated if [it did not invest in the development]?”

Another company mentioned in the report is the German company Bayer. It says that Bayer acquired a strain of bacteria from Lake Ruiru in Kenya, from which it has developed a drug that helps diabetes sufferers.

The patented drug is usually sold under the name of Precose or Glucobay and has generated at least $380m (�218m) in sales. And yet Kenya has received nothing in return. Bayer spokeswoman Christina Sehnert confirmed the product had been developed from the Kenyan bacteria but said that the drug was a product of biotechnology. She said. “You are not using the original. What has been patented is the bio-tech product.”

Also taken from Kenya were microbes discovered in the Rift Valley lakes in 1992 by California-based Genencor International. The microbes were used in the manufacture of enzymes used to give jeans a faded look. The exploitation of Africa’s natural resources in this manner breaches the 1992 International Convention on Biological Diversity which protects the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of genetic resources, according to Arthur Nogueira, a senior official with the convention’s secretariat in Canada.

How nations are losing out

* Canadian company Option Biotech has patented seeds of Congo’s Aframomum stipulatum for an anti-impotence drug called Bioviagra. A bottle of 24 capsules costs �17.

* A microbe from Kenya’s Lake Nakuru is owned by US company Genencor and is used to fade blue jeans. Enzymes of another microbe owned by Genencor are used in Procter & Gamble’s global detergent brands. The Kenyan government claims it is not receiving any benefits.

* Tanzania’s Usambara mountains are home to the plant Impatiens usambarensis, used by Switzerland-based Sygenta and sold as a hanging basket plant. Sygenta made �85m from it in 2004. The Tanzanian government has had no share in the profits.

Dozens of Western multinationals have made millions of pounds in profits from exploiting African bio-resources taken from some of the poorest nations on earth, with not a penny offered in return.

Posted at 8:04 PM · Comments (0)

17/02/2006

Chinese universities backed by massive injections of government funds are spending billions of dollars in wooing top foreign-educated and overseas-born Chinese, building cutting-edge research centres, and partnering the world’s best educational institutions.

HAVING IMPRESSED the world with the creation of glittering, international quality infrastructure, the erstwhile Middle Kingdom has now turned its attention to transforming its universities into world-class institutions. “Our government realises the connection between a nation’s overall power and the quality of its higher education,” says Weiying Zhang, Assistant President of Beijing University.

In this latest bid to raise China’s global prestige, its universities backed by massive injections of governmental funding are spending billions of dollars in wooing top foreign-educated and overseas-born Chinese, building cutting-edge research centres, partnering with the world’s best educational institutions, and developing new programmes taught in the international lingua franca English.

Under a central government programme started in 1998, called the 985 Project, 10 of China’s leading universities were given special three-year grants in excess of RMB 1 billion, for quality improvements. Beijing and Tsinghua universities, the top two ranked institutions, each received RMB 1.8 billion ($225 million). These grants were awarded in addition to special financial support provided by the 211 Project, a separate programme aimed at developing 100 quality universities for the 21st century.

In 2004, the second phase of the 985 Project was launched and the number of universities under its purview was enlarged to 30. Included in this second phase of special funding is Beijing Normal University (BNU), ranked 15th in the country. Its special “international department” alone receives some RMB 16 million ($2 million) annually from the centre. Han Bing, Deputy Director of the department, explains that the funds are used to hold international conferences, attract world-renowned academics as faculty, and support BNU scholars in attending conferences abroad. Dr. Han adds that BNU hosts 30-40 scholars from leading Western universities annually. Top professors are paid $40,000 a year.

At Beijing University’s Guanghua School of Management, of which Dr. Zhang is Executive Dean, full professors with PhDs from prestigious universities abroad can expect $60,000 a year. The ability to offer internationally competitive salaries is key to attracting quality academics, says Dr. Zhang.

The official national salary given to a full professor in China today as set out by the Ministry of Education (MoE) is a mere RMB 4,000 ($500) a month. But for the last few years the Government has permitted individual academic departments to supplement official salaries with private funds that the departments raise through fees, consultancies, and commercial spin offs.

Thus the Guanghua School of Management makes up the difference between official and actual salaries through the revenue it gains from its Executive MBA programme, for which it charges a hefty $35,000 a year. BNU in turn supplements salaries with the money it generates from the $2,700 a year foreign students learning Mandarin in its language programmes pay. The university has over 2000 foreign students enrolled in various courses and has academic agreements with 153 universities abroad including Princeton, which holds an annual summer school programme at the BNU campus.

As a result of its improved pay scales, the Guanghua school currently boasts some 50 “returned scholars” (Chinese nationals who return after studying abroad) and more than half of the faculty hold foreign PhDs. “These are not PhDs from any old university,” adds Dr. Zhang, himself a DPhil from Oxford. “We only look at Ivy League or Ox-Bridge educated talent.”

In fact several of the research institutes at China’s better universities have a minimum requirement of a foreign PhD for faculty members. The first such centre, called the China Centre for Economic Research (CCER) was established in 1995 at Beijing University. One of CCER’s earliest staff members, Professor Feng Lu, recalls the Herculean efforts required to persuade quality academics to return to China a decade ago. In contrast, he says, there are more than 50 applications for every vacancy advertised today.

Examples of world-renowned academics choosing China as their new homes abound. In 2004, Princeton Professor Andrew Chi-chih Yao one of America’s leading computer scientists took up a place at Beijing’s Tsinghua University to lead an advanced computer studies programme. Beijing University, in turn, successfully wooed Tian Gang, a leading mathematician from MIT, to set up an international research centre for mathematics.

“For a world class university it’s necessary to attract the best students and faculty internationally. Eventually we don’t just want the best Chinese students but the best from around the world,” says Dr. Zhang.

As a result Chinese universities are increasingly offering courses taught in English and in collaboration with internationally recognised partners. The Guanghua School of Management offers a dual degree programme in English with the National University of Singapore. In addition, undergraduate courses and an MBA programme in English wholly administered by Guanghua are also on offer. In September 2004, the University of Nottingham, Ningbo China (UNNC) began its first intake of students. The school is a branch of the U.K.’s Nottingham University and is China’s first joint-venture university with an independent campus (there are, however, over 700 foreign affiliated colleges in China). At UNCC, all students are required to speak only English during study and even in social life.

The net result of all these joint venture projects is that it increasingly makes sense for Chinese students to stay at home rather than seek more expensive but largely similar degrees in the West.

However, Dr. Zhang points out that collaboration with western partners and the promotion of English cannot in itself fundamentally transform the lacunae in China’s current educational system. For him one of the most significant reforms pioneered at Beijing University has, in fact, been the end to lifetime tenure, for decades a defining characteristic of Chinese universities.

Since 2003 professors at Beijing University are no longer promoted on the basis of seniority but with an eye to their research and publication records instead. If a new lecturer cannot make it to Associate Professor within six years, he or she is asked to leave. “This was the only way to change the orientation of our faculty towards academic research,” explains Dr. Zhang.

India and China

The combined results of these efforts are already paying off. Despite the common perception that Indian higher education with its IITs and IIMs is superior to the Chinese, China’s universities in fact beat India’s in almost every international ranking. According to the well-regarded Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) Academic Ranking of World Universities, China has two universities in the top 300, while India has none. China features eight times in the top 500, India only thrice. The SJTU rankings are compiled on the basis of university alumni and staff winning major academic prizes, the publication of highly cited research articles published in prestigious academic journals, and articles indexed in major citation indexes.

According to Subarno Chatterji, an English literature professor at Delhi University with a DPhil from Oxford, there are no special incentives in India to attract top quality academics from abroad. Salaries remain fixed at government-funded institutions by the University Grants Commission at Rs.50,000 a month for full professors and there is “little concerted or organised interface between academia and the corporate world.” Dr. Chatterji is currently contemplating leaving India to teach at Miyazaki University in Japan. “They pay their academics very well,” he says.

According to Calla Weimer, a Fellow at the Economic department at the National University of Singapore, “The NUS Economics Department increasingly sees China as a competitor in attracting and retaining good faculty, but the same does not hold for India.” She adds: “While Chinese economists are being lured back to universities in their home country, Indians seem more content to remain in Singapore.”

The long strides China has taken towards literacy and basic education have put India to shame for years. For example in 2000, only 47 per cent of all children in India had managed to complete grade 5 of primary schooling as opposed to 98 per cent of Chinese children. But China’s remarkable recent renaissance in higher education means that even elite education in India is falling behind the standards being set to the north of the Himalayas.

In 1978 only about 1.4 per cent of the Chinese population was enrolled in higher education. Today the figure is close to 20 per cent. Currently some 20 million students are studying in various kinds of higher educational institutions in China.

That China has a considerable distance to go before its aspirations to create truly world-class universities becomes a reality is evident. The absence of critical thinking hampers the development of academic debate. China is, in fact, still to produce a Nobel Prize winner.

According to Michael Pettis, a professor at the Guanghua School of Management and former adjunct professor at Colombia University, “the fundamental problems with Chinese education, an intensive focus on rote learning and inability to develop arguments,” remain despite the large inflows of university funding from the centre.

Adds Dr. Zhang, “We still suffer from too much governmental control and have little leeway to implement reforms without cumbersome permissions and procedures.” Chinese universities are unable for example to develop new programmes or curricula without prior governmental approval. “We have been able to improve our hardware considerably,” says BNU’s Dr. Han. “But as is always the case in China, the software takes longer.”

� Copyright 2000 - 2006 The Hindu

Posted at 2:53 PM · Comments (0)

Sent by a friend as a remark on social change.

From Housekeeping Monthly, 13 May, 1955.
-Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have be thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they get home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.

-Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.

-Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.

-Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Run a dust cloth over the tables.

-During the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.

-Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet.

-Be happy to see him.

-Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.

-Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.

-Don’t greet him with complaints and problems.

-Don’t complain if he’s late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.

-Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or lie him down in the bedroom.

-Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.

-Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.

-Don’t ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.

-A good wife always knows her place.

Posted at 9:49 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times, 27 January 2006

In an article published in 2003 called �Can India overtake China?� Tarun Khanna of Harvard Business School and I argued that India�s domestic corporate sector � strengthened by the country�s rule of law, its democratic processes and relatively healthy financial system � was a source of substantial competitive advantage over China. At that time, the notion that India might be more competitive than China was greeted with wide derision.

Two years later, India appears to have permanently broken out of its leisurely �Hindu rate of growth�� an annual gross domestic product increase of around 2 to 3 per cent � and its performance is beginning to approach the east Asian level. From April to June 2005, India�s GDP grew at 8.1 per cent, compared with 7.6 per cent in the same period the year before. More impressively, India is achieving this result with just half of China�s level of domestic investment in new factories and equipment, and only 10 per cent of China�s foreign direct investment. While China�s GDP growth in the last two years remained high, in 2003 and 2004 it was investing close to 50 per cent of its GDP in domestic plant and equipment � roughly equivalent to India�s entire GDP. That is higher than any other country, exceeding even China�s own exalted levels in the era of central planning. The evidence is as clear as ever: China�s growth stems from massive accumulation of resources, while India�s growth comes from increasing efficiency.

The microeconomic evidence also casts India in a better light. While India�s stock market has soared in recent years, the opposite has happened in China. In 2001, the Shanghai Stock Market index reached 2,200 points; by 2005, half the wealth wiped out. In April 2005, the Shanghai index stood at 1,135 points. This sharp deterioration occurred against a backdrop of GDP growth exceeding 9 per cent a year. It is difficult to find another country that has this strange combination of superb macroeconomic performance and dismal microeconomic performance. It is a matter of time before the two patterns converge.

Why, then, is India gaining strength? Economists and analysts have habitually derided India�s inability to attract FDI. This single-minded obsession with FDI is as strange as it is harmful. Academic studies have not produced convincing evidence that FDI is the best path to economic development compared with responsible economic policies, investment in education and sound legal and financial institutions. In fact, one can easily think of counter examples. Brazil was a darling of foreign investors in the 1960s but ultimately let them down. Japan, Korea and Taiwan received little FDI in the 1960s and 1970s but became among the world�s most successful economies.

An economic litmus test is not whether a country can attract a lot of FDI but whether it has a business environment that nurtures entrepreneurship, supports healthy competition and is relatively free of heavy handed political intervention. In this regard, India has done a better job than China. From India emerged a group of world-class companies ranging from Infosys in software, Ranbaxy in pharmaceuticals, Bajaj Auto in automobile components and Mahindra in car assembly. This did not happen by accident.

Although it has many flaws, India�s financial system did not discriminate against small private companies the way the Chinese financial system did. Infosys benefited from this system. It was founded by seven entrepreneurs with few political connections who nevertheless managed, without significant hard assets, to obtain capital from Indian banks and the stock �market in the early 1990s. It is unimaginable that a Chinese bank would lend to a Chinese equivalent of an Infosys.

With few exceptions, the world-class manufacturing facilities for which China is famous are products of FDI, not of indigenous Chinese companies. Yes, �Made in China� labels are still more ubiquitous than �Made in India� ones; but what is made in China is not necessarily made by China. Soon, �Made in India� will be synonymous with �Made by India� and Indians will not just get the wage benefits of globalisation but will also keep the profits � unlike so many cases in China.

Pessimism about India has often been proved wrong. Take, for example, the view that India lacks Chinese-level infrastructure and therefore cannot compete with China. This is another �China myth� � that the country grew thanks largely to its heavy investment in infrastructure. This is a fundamentally flawed reading of its growth story. In the 1980s, China had poor infrastructure but turned in a superb economic performance. China built its infrastructure after � rather than before � many years of economic growth and accumulation of financial resources. The �China miracle� happened not because it had glittering skyscrapers and modern highways but because bold economic liberalisation and institutional reforms � especially agricultural reforms in the early 1980s � created competition and nurtured private entrepreneurship.

For both China and India, there is a hidden downside in the obsession with building world-class infrastructure. As developing countries, if they invest more in infrastructure, they invest less in other things. Typically, basic education, especially in rural areas, falls victim to massive investment projects, which produce tangible and immediate results. China made a costly mistake in the 1990s: it created many world-class facilities, but badly under-invested in education. Chinese researchers reveal that a staggering percentage of rural children could not finish secondary education. India, meanwhile, has quietly but persistently improved its �educational provisions, especially in the rural areas. For sustainable �economic development, the quality and quantity of human capital will matter far more than those of physical capital. India seems to have the right policy priorities and if China does not invest in rural education soon, it may lose its true competitive edge over India � a well-educated and skilled work-force that drives manufacturing success.

Unless China embarks on bold institutional reforms, India may very well outperform it in the next 20 years. But, hopefully, the biggest beneficiary of the rise of India will be China itself. It will be forced to examine the imperfections of its own economic model and to abandon its sense of complacency acquired in the 1990s. China was light years ahead of India in economic liberalisation in the 1980s. Today it lags behind in critical aspects, such as reform that would permit more foreign investment and domestic private entry in the financial sector. The time to act is now.

The writer, associate professor of International Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, is author of Selling China (Cambridge University Press, 2003 and Chinese edition, 2005).

Posted at 12:36 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian
Monday February 13, 2006

Guardian
More than four-fifths of the wetlands along northern China’s biggest river system have dried up because of over-development, the state media reported yesterday in the latest warning of the dire environmental consequences of the country’s economic growth.

Fifty years ago, the Haihe river and its tributaries formed an ecologically rich area that included 1,465 square miles of wetlands. But in the years since, the expanding mega-cities of Beijing and Tianjin have sucked much of it dry. The Xinhua news agency reported that the wetlands have shrunk to 207 square miles.

Conservation officials blamed the decline on excessive exploitation of the Haihe - one of China’s most polluted waterways - and damming of the major tributaries.

Last month, water conservation was identified as a national priority in the government’s five-year plan. Supplies for China’s 1.3bn population are less than a quarter of the world average. The situation is even bleaker further north, such as on the Liao river delta, in north-east China’s Liaoning province, where farmers regularly harvest the dried-up reed beds. The near-permanent drought is worsened by the expansion of urban city populations and the encroachment of desertification.

The annual water shortage in the basin of the Haihe and two other major rivers - the Yellow and the Huaihe - is estimated to be more than 15bn cubic metres at present. By 2010, this shortfall is expected to rise to 28bn cubic metres. With reservoirs drying up, the authorities have turned to increasingly desperate measures, including cloud-seeding and ever deeper “mining” of ground water.

So much has been extracted that the water resources ministry says more than 90 rivers, including the Yellow, run dry for part of the year and 70% of water supplies are contaminated.

Compared with the 1950s, 1,000 lakes have disappeared and the nation’s wetlands have shrunk by 26%.

The extent of the dry-up was apparent last spring, when a week-long blaze destroyed 6,667 hectares of wetland in the giant Zhalung nature reserve. No one had imagined a fire would be a problem in what historically was a marshy area.

Posted at 1:06 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

[from the February 27, 2006 issue]

Translated from the original French by Charlotte Mandell.

Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left.

I know, of course, that the term “left” does not have the same meaning and ramifications here that it does in France.

And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic “left” in the United States, in the European sense.

But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.

And the fact is that nothing remotely like it has taken shape on the other side—to the contrary, through the looking glass of the American “left” lies a desert of sorts, a deafening silence, a cosmic ideological void that, for a reader of Whitman or Thoreau, is thoroughly enigmatic. The 60-year-old “young” Democrats who have desperately clung to the old formulas of the Kennedy era; the folks of MoveOn.org who have been so great at enlisting people in the electoral lists, at protesting against the war in Iraq and, finally, at helping to revitalize politics but whom I heard in Berkeley, like Puritans of a new sort, treating the lapses of a libertine President as quasi-equivalent to the neo-McCarthyism of his fiercest political rivals; the anti-Republican strategists confessing they had never set foot in one of those neo-evangelical mega-churches that are the ultimate (and most Machiavellian) laboratories of the “enemy,” staring in disbelief when I say I’ve spent quite some time exploring them; ex-candidate Kerry, whom I met in Washington a few weeks after his defeat, haggard, ghostly, faintly whispering in my ear: “If you hear anything about those 50,000 votes in Ohio, let me know”; the supporters of Senator Hillary Clinton who, when I questioned them on how exactly they planned to wage the battle of ideas, casually replied they had to win the battle of money first, and who, when I persisted in asking what the money was meant for, what projects it would fuel, responded like fundraising automatons gone mad: “to raise more money”; and then, perhaps more than anything else, when it comes to the lifeblood of the left, the writers and artists, the men and women who fashion public opinion, the intellectuals—I found a curious lifelessness, a peculiar streak of timidity or irritability, when confronted with so many seething issues that in principle ought to keep them as firmly mobilized as the Iraq War or the so-called “American Empire” (the denunciation of which is, sadly, all that remains when they have nothing left to say).

For an outside observer it is passing strange, for instance, that a number of progressives needed, by their own admission, to wait for Hurricane Katrina before they got indignant about, or even learned about, the sheer scale of the outrageous poverty blighting American cities.

For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas, it is simply incomprehensible that more voices weren’t raised long ago, in the name of no less than the force of “the Enlightenment,” to denounce the ridiculous fraud of the anti-Darwinian supporters of “intelligent design.”

And what about the death penalty? How can it be that there isn’t yet, within the political parties, especially the Democratic Party—which everyone knows will never budge on the question without decisive internal pressure—a trend of opinion calling for the abolition of this civilized barbarity?

And Guant�namo? And Abu Ghraib? And the special prisons in Central Europe, those areas where the rule of law no longer applies? I know, of course, that the press has denounced them. I know you have journalists who, in a matter of days, accomplished what our French press still hasn’t finished forty years after our Algerian War. But since when does the press excuse citizens from their political duties? Why haven’t we heard from more intellectuals like Susan Sontag—or even Gore Vidal and Tony Kushner (with whom I disagree on most other grounds) on this vexed and vital issue? And what should we make of that handful of individuals who, after September 11, launched the debate about the circumstances in which torture might suddenly be justified?

And I’m not even talking about Bush. I won’t even mention Bush’s gross lies about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, except for the sake of assembling the conclusive evidence. I know, of course, that you denounce him—but mechanically, I am almost tempted to say ritualistically. And yet the United States nearly impeached Nixon because he had spied on his enemies and lied. They impeached Clinton for a venial lie about inappropriate conduct. How is it, then, that it took so long to draw a parallel between those lies and a lie about which the least you can say is that its consequences were anything but venial? How is it that so few “public intellectuals” have been found, within the confines of this formidable, impetuous American democracy, who can bring up the idea of impeaching George Bush for lying?

Some will retort that the “public intellectual” is a European specialty, that we shouldn’t blame Americans for their infidelity to a tradition that is not their own. What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible? Or of that golden age of civil rights awareness, when great writers enunciated what was right and good and true?

Others will object that the massive, resounding mobilization of civil society is not an American custom. All you need to do to convince yourself of the untruth of this is remember the 1960s and the movement for civil rights, then for the rights of minorities in general, which were the honor of the country and did not stem, let it be emphasized, from any of the major political parties.

Still others will wax ironic about the disease of writing up petitions, a French specialty, warded off by American pragmatism. Here the objection is more serious; and I know the fatuity that can exist in the mania for nonstop political engagement in the name of myriad causes—but aren’t you afflicted, my American friends, with the radically opposite sickness? Hasn’t the ethics of sobriety won once too often, with you, over the ethics of conviction? And how could one not yearn for a petition that would address our common nausea when faced with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind, nearly deaf old man, pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin execution chamber in California?

I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is waiting for this. Everywhere, in the innermost reaches of America, you can meet men and women who hope for great voices capable of echoing their impatience in a momentous way. If I were an American writer, I would try to ponder the lessons of the totalitarian century and those of democracy, Tocqueville-style, all at once, in the same breath, and with the same rigor.

Posted at 12:36 AM · Comments (0)

Monday, Feb. 13, 2006 - Copyright Slate

The recycling of global capital works in strange ways. Every day, the developed world sends dollars and euros to the developing world in exchange for commodities, natural resources, and manufactured goods. And every day, the cash makes a round trip as foreigners buy assets in the United States and Europe.

The good folks in the West are generally happy to sell real estate to nouveau riche Arabs and Asians. After all, cash-flush foreigners generally pay top dollar. In 2004, Lakshmi Mittal, the acquisitive Indian steel baron, dished out $128 million for a residence in London. (And few of the bienpensant clucked when Mittal rented out Versailles for his daughter’s wedding.) There’s no clash of cultures and civilizations when it comes to real estate. Would you like to buy Pebble Beach? How about Rockefeller Center?

But when the purchase involves a corporation that produces an essential industrial product, that we-are-the-world comity disappears. Since January, when Mittal announced a hostile bid for Luxembourg-based steel company Arcelor, the French and Luxembourgians (Luxembourgeoisie?) have reacted harshly. On Jan. 29, Arcelor’s board rejected Mittal’s offer as unacceptable in every way. Arcelor’s Runyonesque CEO, Guy Dolle, has sniffed that his steel is “perfume” while Mittal’s product is like “eau de cologne.” Thierry Breton, France’s finance minister, fretted over the potential clash of civilizations that would ensue if Mittal were to emerge victorious. (Never mind that Mittal’s company has its headquarters in Rotterdam, is owned by a man whose primary residence is in London, and has steel-making operations in the United States and Germany�but not in India.) In response, India’s minister of commerce and industry, Kamal Nath, flung back: “This is an era of globalization, cross-border investment and liberalization, not one in which investors are judged by the color of their skin.” Touch�!

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There is, as Nath suggests, a fair amount of nativism at work in the opposition to some of these deals. It’s fine if those foreigners with the strange names and cuisines want to buy industrial castoffs. Few in the United States cared when a Chinese firm bought IBM’s personal-computer business, which could no longer compete with Dell. And nobody squawked when Mittal bought International Steel Group, which had been cobbled together from a bunch of bankrupt steel companies. But now that overseas industrialists are starting to buy the good stuff, there’s concern. Orascom, the Egyptian wireless phone company, last year bought a big stake in Italy’s Wind. As the Wall Street Journal noted, in 2005, “companies from the Middle East, Latin America, Asia and other regions spent more than $42 billion on deals” in Europe, more than twice the 2004 figure. Western government officials and corporate executives are generally skeptical about the ability of Indians to manage sophisticated global steel companies, or of Egyptians to manage sophisticated global wireless-phone companies, or of Gulf Arabs’ ability to manage sophisticated global logistics companies.

This prejudice is misplaced, even stupid. The consolidators emerging out of India, the Middle East, and Latin America are far more cosmopolitan and savvy than their European and American counterparts. The managers and entrepreneurs behind companies like Mittal, or Mexico’s cement giant Cemex, or Egypt’s Orascom, are the best and brightest those countries have to offer. They are buying companies run by Europeans and Americans who are, in many cases, certainly not the best and the brightest. Otherwise, their firms wouldn’t be in such poor shape that they might need a foreign bailout. Egyptian managers may not inspire confidence. But then again, Italy hasn’t exactly been a paragon of business genius, what with Parmalat, Fiat, and various banking scandals.

Americans shouldn’t get too smug about the Europeans’ outrage. We exhibit the same bias when our interests are challenged. We saw a variant of the nativist investment strain when the Chinese oil company CNOOC was bidding on Unocal. (Although, as is the case with everything else, Americans tended to see the deal through the lens of national security, not culture.) Today, the shareholders of Britain’s P&O, which controls port operations in Newark, Miami, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, accepted a takeover bid from Dubai’s DP World. I’m sure it will give some pause that a company controlled by an Arab government will run operations at several key U.S. ports.

But perhaps it won’t. Americans are, in general, blas� about foreign ownership of U.S. assets. Where would we be if foreigners wouldn’t buy our debt, after all? And, in recent years, a series of acquisitions of prime U.S. assets by a group of people we consider to be unsophisticated in the ways of management�Europeans�have worked out quite well. Chrysler, which was acquired by Germany’s Daimler several years ago, is clearly the best off of the U.S. automakers.

Besides, many of these foreign entrepreneurs aren’t exactly strangers. Along with dollars and Hollywood movies, management education is a great American export. One of the objections raised by Europeans against Mittal is that he has elevated his son Aditya�an arrogant, 30-year-old Wharton graduate�as the heir apparent.

So, Mittal is willing to place his future in the hands of a young, hotheaded heir with an MBA and global ambitions? Who are we to judge?

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Copyright The New York Review of Books
1.

Gabriel Garc�a M�rquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera ends with Florentino Ariza, at last united with the woman he has loved from afar all his life, cruising up and down the Magdalena River in a steamboat flying the yellow flag of cholera. The couple are seventy-six and seventy-two, respectively.

In order to give unfettered attention to his beloved Fermina, Florentino has had to break off his current affair, a liaison with a fourteen-year-old ward of his, whom he has initiated into the mysteries of sex during Sunday-afternoon trysts in his bachelor apartment (she proves a quick learner). He gives her the brushoff over a sundae in an ice cream parlor. Bewildered and in despair, the girl commits unobtrusive suicide, taking her secret with her to the grave. Florentino sheds a private tear and feels intermittent pangs of grief over her loss, but that is all.

Am�rica Vicu�a, the child seduced and abandoned by an older man, is a character straight out of Dostoevsky. The moral frame of Love in the Time of Cholera, a work of considerable emotional range but a comedy nonetheless, of an autumnal variety, is simply not large enough to contain her. In his determination to treat Am�rica as a minor character, one in the line of Florentino’s many mistresses, and to leave unexplored the consequences for Florentino of his offense against her, Garc�a M�rquez drifts into morally unsettling territory. Indeed, there are signs that he is unsure of how to handle her story. Usually his verbal style is brisk, energetic, inventive, and uniquely his own, yet in the Sunday-afternoon scenes between Florentino and Am�rica we pick up arch echoes of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: Florentino undresses the girl

one article of clothing at a time, with little baby games: first these little shoes for the little baby bear,…next these little flowered panties for the little bunny rabbit, and a little kiss on her papa’s delicious little dickey-bird.

Florentino is a lifelong bachelor, an amateur poet, a writer of love letters on behalf of the verbally challenged, a devoted concertgoer, somewhat miserly in his habits, and timid with women. Yet despite his timidity and physical unattractiveness, he has during half a century of surreptitious womanizing brought off 622 conquests, on which he keeps aides-m�moires in a set of notebooks.
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In all of these respects Florentino resembles the unnamed narrator of Garc�a M�rquez’s new novella. Like his predecessor, this man keeps a list of his conquests as an aid to a book he plans to write. In fact he has a title ready in advance: Memoria de mis putas tristes, memoir (or memorial) of my sad whores, rendered by Edith Grossman as Memories of My Melancholy Whores. His list reaches 514 before he gives up counting. Then, at an advanced age, he finds true love, in the person not of a woman of his own generation but of a fourteen-year-old girl.

The parallels between the books, published two decades apart, are too striking to ignore. They suggest that in Memories of My Melancholy Whores Garc�a M�rquez may be having another go at the artistically and morally unsatisfactory story of Florentino and Am�rica in Love in the Time of Cholera…

The hero, narrator, and putative author of Memories of My Melancholy Whores is born in the port city of Barranquilla, Colombia, around 1870. His parents belong to the cultivated bourgeoisie; nearly a century later he still lives in the decaying parental home. He used to make a living as a journalist and teacher of Spanish and Latin; now he subsists on his pension and the weekly column he writes for a newspaper.

The record he bequeaths us, covering the stormy ninety-first year of his life, belongs to a specific subspecies of memoir: the confession. As typified in the Confessions of Saint Augustine, the confession tells the story of a squandered life culminating in an inner crisis and a conversion experience, followed by spiritual rebirth into a new and richer existence. In the Christian tradition the confession has a strongly didactic purpose. Behold my example, it says: behold how through the mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit even so worthless a being as I can be saved.

The first ninety years of our hero’s life have certainly been squandered. Not only has he wasted his inheritance and his talents, but his emotional life has been remarkably arid too. He has never married (he was engaged long ago, but walked out on his bride at the last minute). He has never been to bed with a woman whom he has not paid: even when the woman has not wanted money he has forced it on her, turning her into another of his whores. The only enduring relationship he has had has been with his house servant, whom he mounts ritually once a month while she does the laundry, always en sentido contrario, a euphemism which Grossman translates as “from the back,” thus making it possible for her to claim, as an old woman, that she is still virgo intacta.

For his ninetieth birthday, he promises himself a treat: sex with a young virgin. A procuress named Rosa, with whom he has long had dealings, ushers him into a room in her brothel where a fourteen-year-old girl lies ready for him, naked and drugged.

She was dark and warm. She had been subjected to a regimen of hygiene and beautification that did not overlook even the incipient down on her pubis. Her hair had been curled, and she wore natural polish on the nails of her fingers and toes, but her molasses-colored skin looked rough and mistreated. Her newborn breasts still seemed like a boy’s, but they appeared full to bursting with a secret energy that was ready to explode. The best part of her body were her large, silent-stepping feet with toes as long and sensitive as fingers. She was drenched in phosphorescent perspiration despite the fan…. It was impossible to imagine what her face was like under the paint …but the adornments and cosmetics could not hide her character: the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips. I thought: A tender young fighting bull.

The first response of the experienced rou� to the sight of the girl is unexpected: terror and confusion, an urge to run away. However, he joins her in bed and halfheartedly tries to explore between her legs. She moves away in her sleep. Drained of lust, he begins to sing to her: “Angels surround the bed of Delgadina.” Soon he finds himself praying for her too. Then he falls asleep. When he awakes at five in the morning, the girl is lying with her arms opened in the form of a cross, “absolute mistress of her virginity.” God bless you, he thinks, and takes his leave.

The procuress telephones to jeer at him for his pusillanimity and offer him a second chance to prove his manhood. He declines. “I can’t anymore,” he says, and at once feels relieved, “free at last of a servitude”�servitude to sex, narrowly understood�”that had kept me enslaved since the age of thirteen.”

But Rosa persists until he gives in and revisits the brothel. Again the girl is sleeping, again he does no more than wipe the perspiration off her body and sing: “Delgadina, Delgadina, you will be my darling love.” (His song is not without dark undertones: in the fairy story Delgadina is a princess who has to flee the amorous advances of her father.)

He makes his way home in the midst of a mighty storm. A newly acquired cat seems to have turned into a satanic presence in his house. Rain pours through holes in the roof, a steam pipe bursts, the wind smashes the windowpanes. As he struggles to save his beloved books, he becomes aware of the ghostly figure of Delgadina beside him, helping him. He is certain now that he has found true love, “the first love of my life at the age of ninety.”

A moral revolution takes place within him. He confronts the shabbiness, meanness, and obsessiveness of his past life and repudiates it. He becomes, he says, “another man.” It is love that moves the world, he begins to realize�not love consummated so much as love in its multiple unrequited forms. His column in the newspaper becomes a paean to the powers of love, and the reading public responds with adulation.

By day�though we never witness it�Delgadina, like a true fairy-tale heroine, goes off to the factory to sew buttonholes. Nightly she returns to her room in the brothel, now adorned by her lover with paintings and books (he has vague ambitions to improve her mind), to sleep chastely beside him. He reads stories to her aloud; now and again she utters words in her sleep. But on the whole he does not like her voice, which sounds like the voice of a stranger speaking from within her. He prefers her unconscious.

On the night of her birthday an erotic consummation sans penetration takes place between them:

I kissed her all over her body until I was breathless…. As I kissed her the heat of her body increased, and it exhaled a wild, untamed fragrance. She responded with new vibrations along every inch of her skin, and on each one I found a distinctive heat, a unique taste, a different moan, and her entire body resonated inside with an arpeggio, and her nipples opened and flowered without being touched.

Then misfortune strikes. One of the clients in the brothel is stabbed, the police pay a visit, scandal threatens, and Delgadina has to be spirited away. Though her lover scours the city for her, she cannot be found. When at last she reemerges in the brothel, she seems years older and has lost her look of innocence. He flies into a jealous rage, storms off.

Months pass, his rage dwindles. An old girlfriend offers wise advice: “Don’t let yourself die without knowing the wonder of fucking with love.” His ninety-first birthday comes and goes. He makes peace with Rosa. The two agree they will jointly bequeath their worldly goods to the girl, who, Rosa claims, has in the meantime fallen head over heels in love with him. Joy in his heart, the sprightly swain looks forward to “at last, real life.”

The confessions of this reborn soul may indeed have been penned, as he says, to ease his conscience, but the message they preach is by no means that we should abjure fleshly desires. The god whom he has ignored all his life is indeed the god by whose grace the wicked are saved, but he is at the same time a god of love, one who can send an old sinner out in quest for “wild love” (amor loco, literally “crazy love”) with a virgin�”my desire that day was so urgent it seemed like a message from God”�then breathe awe and terror into his heart when he first lays eyes on his prey. Through his divine agency the old man is turned in no time at all from a frequenter of whores into a virgin-worshiper venerating the girl’s dormant body much as a simple believer might venerate a statue or icon, tending it, bringing it flowers, laying tribute before it, singing to it, praying before it…

…Measured by the highest standards, Memories of My Melancholy Whores is not a major achievement. Nor is its slightness just a consequence of its brevity. Chronicle of a Death Foretold (1981), for instance, though of much the same length, is a significant addition to the Garc�a M�rquez canon: a tightly knit, enthralling narrative and at the same time a dizzying master class in how multiple histories�multiple truths�can be constructed to cover the same events.

Yet the goal of Memories is a brave one: to speak on behalf of the desire of older men for underage girls, that is, to speak on behalf of pedophilia, or at least show that pedophilia need not be a dead end for either lover or beloved. The conceptual strategy Garc�a M�rquez employs toward this end is to break down the wall between erotic passion and the passion of veneration, as manifested particularly in the cults of the virgin that are such a force in southern Europe and Latin America, with their strong archaic underlay, pre-Christian in the first case, pre-Columbian in the second. (As her lover’s description of her makes clear, Delgadina has something of the fierce quality of an archaic virgin goddess about her: “the haughty nose, heavy eyebrows, intense lips…a tender young fighting bull.”)

Once we accept a continuity between the passion of sexual desire and the passion of veneration, then what originates as “bad” desire of the kind practiced by Florentino Ariza upon his ward can without changing its essence mutate into “good” desire of the kind felt by Delgadina’s lover, and thus constitute the germ of a new life for him. Memories of My Melancholy Whores makes most sense, in other words, as a kind of supplement to Love in the Time of Cholera, one in which the violator of the trust of the virgin child becomes her faithful worshiper.
2.

When Rosa hears her fourteen-year-old employee referred to as Delgadina (from la delgadez, delicacy, shapeliness), she is taken aback and tries to tell her client the girl’s humdrum real name. But he does not want to listen, just as he prefers that the girl herself should not speak. When, after her long absence from the brothel, Delgadina reappears wearing unfamiliar makeup and jewelry, he is outraged: she has betrayed not only him but her own nature. In both incidents we see him willing upon the girl an unchanging identity, the identity of a virgin princess.

The old man’s inflexibility, his insistence that his beloved adhere to the form in which he has idealized her, has a looming precedent in Hispanic literature. Obeying the rule that every knight errant must have a lady to whom to dedicate his feats of arms, the old man who calls himself Don Quixote declares himself servitor to the Lady Dulcinea of Toboso. The Lady Dulcinea has some tenuous relation to a peasant girl from the village of Toboso on whom Quixote has had an eye in the past, but essentially she is a fantasy figure he has invented, as he has invented himself.

Cervantes’s book begins as a send-up of the chivalric romance but turns into something more interesting: an exploration of the mysterious power of the ideal to resist disillusioning confrontations with the real. Quixote’s return to sanity at the end of the book, his abandonment of the ideal world he has tried so valiantly to inhabit in favor of the real world of his detractors, strikes everyone around him, and the reader too, with dismay. Is this what we really want: to give up the world of the imagination and settle back into the tedium of life in a rural backwater in Castile?

The reader of Don Quixote can never be sure whether Cervantes’s hero is a madman under the spell of a delusion, whether on the contrary he is consciously playing out a role�living his life as fiction�or whether his mind flickers unpredictably between states of delusion and self-awareness. There are certainly moments when Quixote seems to claim that dedicating oneself to a life of service can make one a better person, regardless of whether that service is to an illusion. “Since I became a knight errant,” he says, “I have been valiant, well-mannered, liberal, polite, generous, courteous, bold, gentle, patient, [and] long-suffering.” While one may have reservations about whether he has been quite as valiant, well-mannered, etc., as he claims, one cannot ignore the quite sophisticated assertion he makes about the power a dream may have to anchor our moral life, or deny that since the day Alonso Quixana took on his chivalric identity the world has been a better place; or, if not better, then at least more interesting, more lively.

Quixote seems a bizarre fellow at first acquaintance, but most of those who come into contact with him end up half converted to his way of thinking, and therefore half quixotic themselves. If there is any lesson he teaches, it is that in the interest of a better, more lively world it might not be a bad idea to cultivate in oneself a capacity for dissociation, not necessarily under conscious control, even though this might lead outsiders to conclude that one suffers from intermittent delusions.

The exchanges between Quixote and the Duke and Duchess in the second half of Cervantes’s book explore in depth what it means to pour one’s energies into living an ideal and therefore perhaps unreal (fantastic, fictive) life. The Duchess poses the key question politely but firmly: Is it not true that Dulcinea “does not exist in the world but is an imaginary lady, and that your grace [i.e., Quixote] engendered and gave birth to her in your mind?”

“God knows if Dulcinea exists in the world or not,” replies Quixote, “or if she is imaginary or not imaginary; these are not the kinds of things whose verification can be carried through to the end. [But] I neither engendered nor gave birth to my lady….”

…In the case of Memories, the debt to Yasunari Kawabata, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1968, is conspicuous. In 1982 Garc�a M�rquez wrote a story, “Sleeping Beauty and the Airplane,” in which Kawabata is specifically alluded to. Seated in the first-class cabin of an airplane crossing the Atlantic beside a young woman of extraordinary beauty who sleeps throughout the flight, Garc�a M�rquez’s narrator is reminded of a novel by Kawabata about aging men who pay money to spend nights with drugged, sleeping girls. As a work of fiction the “Sleeping Beauty” story is undeveloped, no more than a sketch. Perhaps for this reason, Garc�a M�rquez feels free to reuse its basic situation�the no longer young admirer side by side with the sleeping girl�in Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

In Kawabata’s “House of the Sleeping Beauties” (1961) a man on the brink of old age, Yoshio Eguchi, resorts to a procuress who supplies drugged girls for men with specialized tastes. Over a period of time he spends nights with several of these girls. The house rules forbidding sexual penetration are mainly superfluous, since most of the clientele is old and impotent. But Eguchi�as he keeps telling himself�is neither. He flirts with the idea of breaking the rules, of raping one of the girls, impregnating her, even asphyxiating her, as a way of showing his manhood and his defiance of a world that treats old men like children. At the same time he is attracted by the thought of taking an overdose and dying in the arms of a virgin.

Kawabata’s novella is a study of the activities of eros in the mind of a sensualist of an intensive and self-aware kind, acutely�perhaps morbidly� sensitive to odors and fragrances and nuances of touch, absorbed by the physical uniqueness of the women he is intimate with, prone to brood on images from his sexual past, not afraid to confront the possibility that his attraction toward young women may screen desire for his own daughters, or that his obsession with women’s breasts may originate in infantile memories.

Above all, the isolated room containing only a bed and a living body to be handled or mishandled, within limits, as he pleases, unwitnessed and therefore at no risk of being shamed, constitutes a theater in which Eguchi can confront himself as he really is, old and ugly and soon to die. His nights with the nameless girls are filled with melancholy rather than joy, with regret and anguish rather than physical pleasure:

The ugly senility of the sad men who came to this house was not many years away for Eguchi himself. The immeasurable expanse of sex, its bottomless depth� what part of it had Eguchi known in his sixty-seven years? And around the old men, new flesh, young flesh, beautiful flesh was forever being born. Were not the longing of the sad old men for the unfinished dream, the regret for days lost without ever being had, concealed in the secret of this house?

Garc�a M�rquez does not so much imitate Kawabata as respond to him. His hero is very different in temperament from Eguchi, less complex in his sensualism, less inward-looking, less of an explorer, less of a poet too. But it is in what goes on in bed in the respective secret houses that the true distance between Garc�a M�rquez and Kawabata must be measured. In bed with Delgadina, Garc�a M�rquez’s old man finds a new and elevating joy. To Eguchi, on the other hand, it remains an endlessly frustrating mystery that unconscious female bodies, whose use can be bought by the hour and whose floppy, mannequin-like limbs can be disposed as the client wishes, should have such power over him that they bring him back to the house again and again.

The question regarding all sleeping beauties is of course what will happen when they awake. In Kawabata’s book there is, symbolically speaking, no awakening: the sixth and last of Eguchi’s girls dies at his side, poisoned by the drug that sent her to sleep. In Garc�a M�rquez, on the other hand, Delgadina seems to have absorbed through her skin all the attentions that have been poured on her, and to be on the point of waking, ready to love her worshiper in return.

Garc�a M�rquez’s version of the tale of the sleeping beauty is thus much sunnier than Kawabata’s. Indeed, in the abruptness of its ending it seems deliberately to close its eyes to the question of the future of any old man with a young love, once the beloved is permitted to step off her goddess pedestal. Cervantes has his hero visit the village of Toboso and present himself on his knees to a girl chosen almost at random to be the embodiment of Dulcinea. For his pains he is rewarded with an earful of pungent peasant abuse flavored with raw onion, and quits the scene confused and discomfited.

It is not clear that Garc�a M�rquez’s little fable of redemption would be sturdy enough to bear a conclusion of this kind. Garc�a M�rquez might take a look too at the Merchant’s tale, the sardonic story of cross-generational marriage in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and in particular at its snapshot of the couple caught in the clear dawn light after the exertions of their bridal night, the old husband sitting up in bed in his nightcap, the slack skin of his neck quivering, the young wife beside him consumed in irritation and distaste.

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Copyright The New Statesman

”A work of malignant charlatanry” is how Robert Irwin describes Edward Said’s Orientalism in this book-length response to that flawed classic. As negative comments on Said go, this is pretty mild stuff. A man whose New York office was once firebombed by Zionists, and whose books were banned in the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Yasser Arafat, was no stranger to waspish, vindictive assaults. In fact, what is striking about For Lust of Knowing is how unspiteful it is. The book is refreshingly free of the suave malice of the senior common room. Instead Irwin comes across as a genial, rather unworldly, upper-class English scholar, struggling to preserve his public-school values of fairness and decency in the face of what he sees as Said’s barbarous slur on oriental studies.

Irwin is not the kind of commentator to dismiss Said as “a dandy and a Manhattan bon viveur”, as the pompously self-opinionated Ernest Gellner once did. On the contrary, he praises him with an agreeable old-school courtesy wherever praise seems due. He shares Said’s belief, for example, that US media coverage of Palestinian affairs has been “biased, ignorant and abusive”, and acknowledges his unswerving rejection of terrorist violence. Incredulous though he is at the idea that orientalism is in cahoots with western imperialism, he is quick to register the odd spot of anti-Islamic prejudice in Middle Eastern scholarship. He also jovially admits that the 16th-century Frenchman Guillaume Postel was not only the first true orientalist but a complete lunatic.

It would be hard to imagine any such generosity of spirit from the smug US Middle Eastern observer Thomas Friedman, who, despite writing a column for the New York Times, has about as much a sense of literary style as a rhino. Or, indeed, from a right-wing orientalist scholar such as Bernard Lewis, who has written that the destruction of the World Trade Center was one of the most wicked acts in human history. Why such coy understatement? Why not just confess straight out that the joint crimes of Stalin, Mao and Hitler, not to speak of Hiroshima and Attila the Hun, are utterly eclipsed by it?

Even so, Irwin packs a considerable punch. He is a formidably erudite orientalist, and one still determined to describe himself as such. In these PC days, when “orient” is taboo, this is a bit like calling oneself a fatso. There is no doubt that he pinpoints a good deal of slipshod scholarship and factual error in Said’s revered text. It is also true that this would come rather more convincingly from someone who could produce an accurate factual account of Gramsci and post-structuralism, rather than the grotesque travesty of them to be found here. But there is a sense in which it does not matter all that much, since Irwin and Said are for the most part simply talking past each other.

For Said, orientalism signifies a whole cultural discourse, one that habitually represents the east as indolent, treacherous, passive, inscrutable, devious, feminised and inferior. He is speaking of an ideological formation pervasive throughout western history. Irwin, by contrast, believes in his gentle, ivory-tower way that orientalism “is mostly a story of individual scholars”. He gives the impression that he could recognise an ideological formation about as readily as he could identify Green Day’s greatest hits. He thus dooms his study to partial irrelevance from the outset. It is like trying to refute the charge that Christianity has been a hugely destructive force for social evil by producing an admiring study of St Thomas Aquinas.

Astonishingly, there is scarcely a single reference to the stereotypical features of so-called orientals in all of Irwin’s 400-odd pages. The book makes not one concession to the central truth of Said’s account - that demeaning images of the east and imperialist incursions into its terrain have historically gone hand in hand. Instead, For Lust of Knowing sets out to give us a potted history of western orientalism, one that occasionally remembers it is supposed to be a critique of Edward Said and then promptly forgets it again. (It was, one imagines, the idea of a smack at Said that attracted a mass-market publisher such as Penguin to this book, rather than the Cook’s tour of obscure German philologists it has been landed with.)

Perhaps Irwin’s intention is to demonstrate how splendidly disinterested oriental studies have been, despite Said’s rancorous charges to the contrary. What he actually succeeds in showing is just how closely such scholarship has been entwined with that branch of ideology known as religion. In fact, one Christian orientalist after another boned up on the Koran only to learn how to discredit it. If the whole discipline is as innocent of politics as Irwin would have us believe, why did one Jewish scholar spend seven years researching Said’s background in order to query his credentials on Palestine?

The political problems of the Middle East, Irwin believes, were in Said’s view “ultimately textual ones that could be solved by critical reading skills”. Anyone who reads Orientalism with as few critical skills as this has about as much title to speak of factual inaccuracies as Jeffrey Archer. It is hard to see quite what such a dreamer was doing sitting on the Palestinian National Council from 1977 to 1991. In fact, the usual charge against post-structuralists - that they hold there is nothing outside the text - applies with a far greater force to Irwin himself. For this is an author who has much to say of minor medieval scholars but exceedingly little of the crusades. Scholars, he remarks, tend not to go on crusades, a comment that the briefest of visits to many an oriental studies or political science department in the United States would rebut. His book has no more than a few pages on western imperialism, and is silent on the current debacle in Iraq. Given the way that this has rekindled a rabid Islamophobia in the west, all Irwin needs to do to recognise the broad truth of Said’s thesis is turn on the television set.

Writing about history tends to proceed in three stages. First, a particular truth is generally accepted - say, that the west has by and large treated the east pretty shabbily, or that the inhabitants of Scunthorpe have behaved brutally to the citizens of Grimsby. After a while stage two sets in, as revisionists spring up to challenge this received wisdom. In doing so, they almost invariably engage in the same set of moves. First, they produce evidence that not all Scunthorpians have been cruel to Grimsbyites. Second, they show that some Grimsbyites have regularly brutalised people from Scunthorpe. Third, they point out that in some respects the population of Grimsby had it coming. Fourth, they remind us not to judge these ancient animosities by our own modern-day liberal standards. Finally, they insist that the whole affair has been grossly exaggerated, and that it is time to draw a line under these events, turn our faces to the future and move on.

Almost every one of these strategies is deployed in For Lust of Knowing to defend orientalism from the charge of complicity with imperial power. Yet it is impossible to avert the arrival of stage three: the realisation that, when every due reservation has been made, every factual error corrected and every exception noted, stage one was pretty much true all along.

Terry Eagleton’s most recent book is Holy Terror (Oxford University Press)

Posted at 5:25 PM · Comments (0)

FRIDAY 10 FEB 2006 - Copyright GUARDIAN NEWSPAPER (NIGERIA)

“DID you get the text message I sent to you yesterday?” “No. I have been busy. No time to read text messages.”
“You better read it. Someone sent it to me too. It has to do with this outbreak of bird flu in the Northern part of the country. The thing has been confirmed. So for God’s sake, don’t eat chicken o. If your Madam still has frozen chicken in her fridge, let her go and throw it away. I have already told my wife, no more consumption of chicken in the house until further notice. And I mean it”
“In my case, I am going to place a ban on the consumption of any type of bird. Turkey, chicken, bush meat, whatever. Anything that flies, or has wings or can be remotely associated with a bird. Banned”
“In this country, you never know what people are up to. Government has directed that all the affected birds should be destroyed and that the farmers will be compensated.”
“They will have to monitor the process very carefully. I hope they have the capacity to do so. I don’t trust our people.”
“Same here. I can’t put anything past Nigerians. I won’t be surprised if some of these guys who sell chicken suya find a way of getting those birds. They will sautee the thing, add groundnut oil and spices and before you know it, you are consuming a deadly meal.”
“They say the kind of bird flu found in Nigeria is the pathogenic one.”
“I don’t want to know what it is, whether it is pathogenic or benign or… What I know is that I am not going to take any risks. Do you know one fellow was even making a joke out of it? He said the Western world is merely making so much fuss over nothing. He said when he was young, it was a common thing for birds to have flu. The Yoruba call it kooli. The only thing, according to him, is to make sure you kill the bird before it passes out completely. Once there is still blood flowing in its veins, you can actually eat the bird and nothing will happen. He says such chickens actually taste good. I listened to him. I pitied the fellow. This is somebody who is supposed to be educated but he never really left the village.”
“Many Nigerians are like that. They don’t believe that there is death until they experience it. That is why HIV is spreading… Poor poultry farmers. They are going to lose a lot of money.”
“How does that affect me and my family?”
“It is not like that. There are many Nigerians who earn a living from poultry farming, and selling birds. Take all these fast food joints. The trade in chicken and scotch eggs and chicken pie is perhaps one of their major sources of income.”
“Are you there? Let them sell something else. If they like let them sell dog meat. In fact thank you for reminding me, I will add eggs to the list of banned items in my house.”
“Eggs are not affected. Don’t go about raising false alarm.”
“What is the difference? Is it not birds that produce eggs? Look: government has to do a lot of public enlightenment. I am worried about the ordinary people who are not likely to be bothered one way or the other. They are the ones who are likely to say that kooli is not a new thing and they will go and eat birds infected by what is that thing…”
“HN15”
“Sounds like HIV of the birds. In fact the way the CNN was reporting the incident in Kaduna, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone comes up with the theory that avian flu originated from Africa.”
“I listened to that report too and I was a bit disturbed. CNN added a touch of drama to it that was curious. I thought they even made the point that in a month’s time many Nigerians will be migrating towards Europe for holidays. I also read somewhere that many Nigerians live close to a poultry.”
“They have started again o. Before you know it now, embassies will start insisting on bird flu test as a condition for issuing visas.”
“You can take that for granted, especially if you go there looking like you just left a fast food joint. You know in international relations, there is always a strong sub text to every gesture. Those people in CNN know that many Nigerians eat a lot of chicken. To remove chicken from the menu is like cutting off the only source of protein for many families.”
“A friend of mine says the World Bank is providing grants for any efforts at controlling the spread of avian flu. He wants us to form an NGO and make some money.”
“Money. That is all you can think of?”
“What’s your problem? If you can make some dollars just because birds are dying, what’s wrong with that? Besides, it is not as if this thing is killing human beings like that. Across the world, only 85 persons have died from it, and just because they are saying the strain of bird flu that has shown up in Nigeria is the deadly type does not mean every part of Nigeria is affected.”
“In fact, if I have my way, I will advise that the whole of the North should be quarantined. They should not allow any chicken to escape from the North across the Niger please.”
“You are looking for trouble. This is a public health issue. It affects all of us as Nigerians. It is for government to rise up to the challenge and where it lacks the capacity to contain the situation, it should seek external help. I have told you, the World Bank is giving out money; there is a trust fund put together by the international donor community to fight bird flu.”
“As long as it is not a loan. Nigeria must not take any loan please.”
“By the way, did you watch the Super Eagles match against Senegal?”
“I did, but to tell you the truth I think the performance of the Eagles at the Nations Cup was not bad at all. Those boys met as a team for the first time in Egypt. And yet they managed to finish in third place. We have something to show not because football administration in Nigeria is good, but in spite of the politics of the Football Association, NFA.”
“But the quality of play was very poor. We had brilliant individual players, but not quite a team. Bonfere Jo had to complain that the Eagles were playing African football, kick and follow, just running all over the pitch.”
“Let Bonfrere Jo go and sit down. We are talking about results. Kick and follow. The Eagles kicked and followed the ball, and they ended up in third place. The people who didn’t kick and follow: Togo, Angola, Tunisia, Ghana, what did they do?”
“I see you like the Eagles. And I thought you said earlier that you are going to stay away from anything that looks or sounds like a bird?”
“Go and sit down. The point is that we need to do something about sports administration. As far as I am concerned, Eguavoen and Siasia have shown that they have real potentials as football coaches. Let the country send them for training. Let us look for others like them and send them abroad to have the relevant exposure.”
“Football analyst, Baba!.”
“When they won’t allow us to comment on politics, we can at least talk about football.”
“Who says you can’t comment on politics?”
“The people who have captured power; the people who are sending text messages around. I actually received a text like that begging me to support Obasanjo for another term to ensure continuity. Haven’t they sent it to you yet? That is what they are now using the GSM to do.”
“This could be the handiwork of mischief-makers who want to embarrass government?”
“But look at Thabo Mbeki, the South African President”
“Oh yes. Some Nigerian copy-cats have been lobbying the man to amend his country’s constitution to allow him stay in office for a third term. The man simply put his feet down and said he will not do such a thing. His party has no plans to amend the Constitution, and that once he completes his second term in 2009, he will vacate the Presidency.”
“That is a sensible man. That is how a responsible leader should behave. I salute Thabo Mbeki.”
“You know when the man sacked his Vice President a few months ago, I thought he did so because he did not want the man to succeed him. But do you know that today, Jacob Zuma still stands a chance of becoming President after Mbeki?”
“Mbeki has shown that he is a man of character.”
“He is an educated man, very polished. He simply told the sycophants who were beginning to preach the gospel of continuity to him to shut up and perish the thought”
“That is a man who knows what he is doing and what he wants.”
“You can say that again. Here in Nigeria, we don’t always know what is good for us. Even NEPA is threatening to increase tariffs by 60 per cent. The management wants to charge appropriate rates in line with market forces.”
“PHCN, not NEPA”
“What is the difference between Never Expect Power Always and Power Withholding Company of Nigeria? NEPA should stop talking about tariffs. They should talk about quality service delivery. Seven years down the line, the energy sector reform is yet to bear fruits and so much money has been spent.”
“Wasted. That is the word. And those guys in charge of power supply and distribution, they have no shame at all. I don’t know of any company that relies on NEPA for its operations. Every other family owns a generator…what are we talking about?”
“One of these days, Nigerians would have to troop out in protest against PHCN or whatever they are called.”
“In fact, I feel like staging a protest of my own. I have suffered so much in their hands, I can’t even tell the story.”
“The media should start something. Cartoonists can do caricatures about NEPA.”
“You know cartoonists are in trouble at the moment in the world. Some Danish cartoonists working with a newspaper called Jylands-Posten went and drew cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, and that has become a big issue in Europe now. From Denmark to Georgia, it has led to a clash of civilisations and a major confrontation between the West and Islam.”
“Please, I don’t want to touch that subject. In this matter, you don’t know what you would say and you would extend the Danish problem to Nigeria, so I beg don’t even go there at all.”
“Why? But let’s talk about it. This is about free speech and the culture of tolerance.”
“Na lie. No be me and you. Go and find someone else…”

Posted at 10:17 PM · Comments (0)

The iPod served these three songs up in a 12 hour period, playing on random, as usual. For two of them, I was walking around Osaka in the winter rush hour, shooting pictures, and these women stopped me in my tracks — all three albums are equally up to snuff):

Cassandra Wilson - I’ve Grown Accustomed to his Face (Blue Skies; 1990)
Cesaria Evora - Xandinha (Cesaria; 2003)
Madeleine Peyroux - Between the Bars (Madeleine Peyroux; 2004)

Madeleine, whose Billy Holliday things wears thin sometimes, has nonetheless, an immense talent. What she does with the following lyrics blows your socks off:

Drink up, baby
Stay up all night
Things you could do
You won’t but you might

The potential you’ll be
You’ll never see
Promises you’ll only make
Drink up with me now
And forget all about
Pressure of days
Do what I say
And I’ll make you okay
And drive them away
Images stuck in your head

People you’ve been before
That you don’t want around anymore
That push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I�ll keep them still

Drink up, baby
Look at the stars.
And I’ll kiss you again
Between the bars
Where i’m seeing you there
With your hands in the air
Waiting to finally be caught

Drink up one more time
And I’ll make you mine
And keep you apart
Deep in my heart
Separate from the rest
Where I like you the best
Keep the things you forgot

The people you’ve been before
That you don’t want around anymore
That push and shove and won’t bend to your will
I’ll keep them still

Posted at 12:44 AM · Comments (0)

An excerpt from Slate:

Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make a newspaper columnist. Most columnists start off with a bag full of ideas and endless energy. But the job begins to weigh on even the most talented journalist. He starts writing columns about columns he’s written, about his kids, or about the deaths of relatives. He composes columns as open letters to world leaders�or writes from inside their heads. He quotes cab drivers. His columns become more assertion than argument. Finally, he starts picking silly, protracted fights with other media machers.

Kristof, a Times columnist since November 2001, can do better than this. If he’s run out of gas, why doesn’t he re-enlist as a reporter?

Posted at 10:31 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Harper’s Magazine

Letter from China

Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and Wandering Home. His last article for Harper’s Magazine, “The Christian Paradox,” appeared in the August issue.

On the flight from Newark to Beijing, I read the following small item in the China Daily:

According to media reports, several air conditioner installers have fallen to their deaths in the last couple of days in Beijing alone.

As the sweltering summer heat sweeps the country, sales of air conditioning units are booming. This has naturally led to strong demand for installation services.

The spurt in installation service demand has left many firms understaffed, so some are temporarily recruiting untrained installers to cash in. [Some] even refuse to provide safety belts to installers in order to save costs.

The article—evoking as it did a hazy urban sky filled with plummeting
air-conditioner installers—coincided perfectly with my mental image of
China, so I tore it out and filed it away. I’d done the same thing a
hundred times before, creating for myself a carefully imagined China
full of smog-blackened cities where people wore gas masks against the clouds of coal smoke; savagely Dickensian factories where young women were paid slave wages; a heedless and rapidly expanding consumer class hell-bent on buying cars and appliances with no regard for the environmental costs of their consumption, I wanted to see it for myself, to indulge in the kind of disaster tourism that makes one gaze agape at the sheer can’t-take-your-eyes-off spectacle of it all, like the visitors who flocked to Niagara to watch boats filled with zoo animals wash over the falls.
And then come home with bead-shaking cautionary tales about what this combination of heedless growth and ecological unconcern meant for the future of the world. That was the plan, anyhow.

The “watch out for China” narrative offers something to every American. Liberals can be repulsed by China’s destruction of the environment and conservatives can portend the rising hegemon of the East. Americans from across the political spectrum can frown upon China’s dismal disregard
for personal freedom—jails filled with Falun Gong devotees, always Tiananmen hovering in the background. The problem with actually reporting about a place, however, is that you start collecting stories, and they never quite fit. It’s not that any of these angles are wrong—there are countless
well-documented stories of nightmarish factory conditions, human-rights violations, local corruption, and environmental folly—but even taken together they don’t come close to adding up to China. And they allow us to ignore what might be most crucial about the emerging nation: the ways
it is starting to resemble our own…

Before showing me his factory, Bao wanted us to visit the Hua Xin Li Dress
Co., Ltd., which was by Chinese standards a venerable firm. It had opened
its doors in 1987, right around the time that Deng Xiaoping had begun to
allow any such enterprise. From a home factory with five or six employees,
it had grown into a medium-sized enterprise with several hundred workers. “‘First Quality and Prestige Supreme’ is our aim,” says the company’s brochure; on the day we visited they were churning out slightly garish yellow dress shirts for the Eastern European market. The factory was
three stories tall, and on each floor young women, and a few young men, in white company T-shirts sat, four abreast, in front of new sewing machines imported from Japan. It was a hot day, but big fans moved plenty of air around. There was a busy hum, but not a din. The women worked fast, especially the button-sewers at the end of the room, but not frantically. A large red banner hung over the middle of each room reading, in Chinese, “The Customer Is God and the Market Decides Everything.”

What “the market” had decided was that these women would earn about 10,000 yuan a year ($.50 an hour).(n1) Two thirds of them commuted from the surrounding villages. The rest came from the provinces and lived behind the factory, in a dormitory with a water pump and a clothesline out in the
courtyard. I cannot tell you if this was a hard life or even an acceptable life, but later, as we drove away from the factory, we did pass field after field of those men and women with bent-over backs…

Seeing the sheer volume of industrious labor in those few factories began
my education. But it was only toward the end of my four-week visit, in
the city of Yiwu, that I really began to understand not only the scale of
China’s manufacturing enterprise but the force of the momentum behind
it.

I’d taken a packed and sweltering train from Shanghai to Yiwu, which despite being home to more than a million people didn’t even appear in my 900-page tourist guide to China. Yiwu is home to the International Trade City, where you can see sights every bit as awesome as the terracotta
warriors of Xian or even the Great Wall. The place is only two-fifths complete, but the two huge buildings already standing—they each look like the Empire State Building laid on its side and mated with a fleet of aircraft carriers—demonstrate the unavoidable truth that anything that
can be made can be made cheaper in China.

Take, for instance, the “Suitcases and Bags, Including School Bags” section of the International Trade City, There are about eight hundred 10 x 12 stalls, each representing a different factory, each showing its wares to buyers in the hope they’ll order lots of ten or twenty or thirty thousand. There are stalls with duffel bags, change purses, wallets of every kind. Fanny packs, metal lunchboxes, jewelry cases. It’s a kind of headquarters of dubious English: “I dream of being the best basketballer in the
town.” “Durable Performance Based on the 58’s 123-45 Vintage Spirit.” “My grandfather has white hairlike snow.” I stared for a long time at a backpack that said “All Things Grow with Love” before I figured out that it looked weird because it was grammatically correct.

“Suitcases and Bags, Including School Bags,” took up only half a floor. The story above was entirely devoted to “Hardware Tools and Fittings,” which is another way of saying pretty much everything on earth: knife blocks, car jacks, chaise lounges, surge protectors, lint rollers, jumper cables,
karabiners, bike pumps, rubber bands, cheese graters. One stall had thousands of those Lance Armstrong “Livestrong” bracelets in a rainbow of colors. Lucky rabbit’s feet, singing birthday cards, nail clippers, safety pins, ratchet sets, thigh exercisers, bathroom scales, toilet-bowl deodorizers, plaid wheelchairs, feather dusters, meat-pounding mallets. Dozens of models of magnetic patriotic ribbons for the backs of American cars (“Freedom Is Not Free”). Pruning shears, putty knives, carafes,
egg cups, cake-decorating nozzles, depilatory machines, giant martini glasses, immersion heating coils, disposable cameras, hip flasks, sake sets, mortar and pestles, cereal dispensers (like you see on the buffet at the Motel 6), rolling pins, exit signs, sander belts, key rings, rubber gloves.

In the “Regular Toys” section of Building 1 there are hundreds of stalls offering variations on those weird squishy rubber balls: skull-shaped balls whose eyes pop out when you squeeze, “yucky maggot balls.” Not to mention boogie boards, plastic hand grenades, squeaky mallets, bow-and-arrow
sets, toy pianos, “small chef ovens. After twenty minutes of walking you emerge into the “Electric Toys” section. (“Does thinking the son and daughter become the scientist? Then start growing from the electronic toy bricks! Train pilot! Look for the Bill Gates!”) And then the “Inflatable Toys”
section, and then, biggest of all, the “Fabric Plush Toys.” The next floor is divided between artificial flowers and hair ornaments—you suddenly realize that there are 3 billion women on this planet, many o( whom would probably be happy to have ribbons in their hair. And above that, miles of kitsch—the “Tourism Crafts” section, which could stock every gift shop on earth, with light-up Virgin Marys, “African” carvings, novelty bottle openers, refrigerator magnets by the millions. And on the top floor,
the stalls that bring the world Christmas. Groves of artificial trees blinking with LEDs, squads of Santas playing electric guitars and riding exercycles and spinning hula hoops. Tinsel tinsel tinsel.

Once I’d been to Yiwu, sights I’d seen earlier made mote sense. Chunming, for instance, was a tiny rural town in the hills of Sichuan. We’d spent the night before in Chengdu, the provincial capital, which is larger than New York City. Chunming was an hour’s drive away, but it was the usual
world apart. Most of the men worked up the hill at a makeshift coal mine, trying to avoid the cave-ins and explosions that claim a hundred miners a week around the country. The place was pretty bleak.

With my translator, a young environmental journalist named Zhao Ang, I wandered up to the first house we came to. The place was actually pretty big, a series of interlinked and crumbling courtyards. It had belonged to the local landlord until 1949, when it was expropriated in the wake of the Communist victory and given to seven or eight families to share. A few pigs slept in the room next to the kitchen. There was one girl we could talk to here, Zhao Lintao (no relation). She was twelve years old, and proudly spoke the English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When we asked her about her life, though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. The government was taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no more money. Her sister had already given up and dropped out.

Multiply that story by half a billion and you will begin to understand why the biggest migration in the history of the planet is underway in China, why there are always more bodies to sit behind those sewing machines. Tens of millions of people leave desperately poor farms every year to work at
the factories that feed Yiwu. By one estimate the country needs to add an urban infrastructure equivalent to Houston every month just to keep pace. More than a hundred cities in China have populations that top a million. And even so, the countryside still bulges.

What struck me about China, in fact, was not so much the teeming cities as that teeming countryside. China has a third of the planet’s farmers and one fourteenth of its farmland. In places, the average farm plot is a sixth of an acre—smaller than many American houses. About 800 million people,
roughly 65 percent of China’s population, are crowded onto those tiny farms. And on average they are earning one third the income of city dwellers. It is easy to see why the United Nations predicts that by
2030, 60 percent of Chinese will live in the cities. With a massive effort, that number might be held down to 50 percent. But since about 1 percent of Americans currently work as farmers, down from 39 percent a century ago, we should be able to understand this tide…

Although the lowlands were covered in corn (and when you walked the rows you discovered that they were carefully interplanted with potatoes, something that doesn’t happen on a tractor-planted Iowa industrial farm), the hills were essentially bare—without trees, eroding, a mess. In 1958,
the Great Helmsman declared the Great Leap Forward. The people were to stop raising crops and start making steel in their back yards. Making steel required heat, which required wood, which required deforestation, and since not making steel would have been a had idea, the hills were soon bare.
The chaos of the Cultural Revolution led to a lot of tree-cutting too, and even the recovery from Mao took its toll—in 1979, when the “household responsibility system” was inaugurated and authorities divided communal land into individual plots, some people were afraid their neighbors would cut down “their” trees and so they axed them first.

Grasslands disappeared like forests. With newly prosperous urban markets for meat, the number of livestock swelled. American environmentalist Lester Brown, a longtime student of China, says that there are 339 million goats and sheep in the country, compared with 7 million in the United States.
“I’ve been in areas where the farmers have to put human clothes on their mohair goats to keep them from grazing one another,” he told me. “There’s nothing to eat.” Without roots to hold the soil, much of the countryside has simply turned to sand. Deserts advance by hundreds of miles annually, and the dust storms of April and May are now a recognized Beijing season, just like spring and fall. Think Dust Bowl circa 1934—only in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and with no vacant California left for the refugees…

Please buy the December issue of Harpers or consult your library for the complete article — a highly recommended read.

Posted at 10:00 AM · Comments (0)

Wednesday, February 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EST

“The Muslim Fury,” one newspaper headline screamed. “The Rage of Islam Sweeps Europe,” said another. “The clash of civilizations is coming,” warned one commentator. All this refers to the row provoked by the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper four months ago.
Since then a number of demonstrations have been held, mostly—though not
exclusively—in the West, and Scandinavian embassies and consulates
have been besieged.

But how representative of Islam are all those demonstrators? The “rage
machine” was set in motion when the Muslim Brotherhood—a political, not a religious, organization—called on sympathizers in the Middle East and
Europe to take the field. A fatwa was issued by Yussuf al-Qaradawi, a
Brotherhood sheikh with his own program on al-Jazeera. Not to be left behind, the Brotherhood’s rivals, Hizb al-Tahrir al-Islami (Islamic Liberation
Party) and the Movement of the Exiles (Ghuraba), joined the fray. Believing that there might be something in it for themselves, the Syrian Baathist leaders abandoned their party’s 60-year-old secular pretensions and organized attacks on the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus and Beirut.

The Muslim Brotherhood’s position, put by one of its younger militants,
Tariq Ramadan—who is, strangely enough, also an adviser to the British home secretary—can be summed up as follows: It is against Islamic
principles to represent by imagery not only Muhammad but all the prophets of Islam; and the Muslim world is not used to laughing at religion. Both claims, however, are false.

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or
anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some
Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued “fatwas” against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was
further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten
Commandments—which include a ban on depicting God—as part of its
heritage.
The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that
a ban on images is “an absolute principle of Islam” is purely political.
Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but
sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an
absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits
of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous:

A miniature by Sultan Muhammad-Nur Bokharai, showing Muhammad riding
Buraq, a horse with the face of a beautiful woman, on his way to Jerusalem for his M’eraj or nocturnal journey to Heavens (16th century); a painting
showing Archangel Gabriel guiding Muhammad into Medina, the prophet’s capital after he fled from Mecca (16th century); a portrait of Muhammad, his face covered with a mask, on a pulpit in Medina (16th century); an Isfahan miniature depicting the prophet with his favorite kitten, Hurairah (17th
century); Kamaleddin Behzad’s miniature showing Muhammad contemplating a rose produced by a drop of sweat that fell from his face (19th century); a painting, “Massacre of the Family of the Prophet,” showing Muhammad watching as his grandson Hussain is put to death by the Umayyads in Karbala (19th century); a painting showing Muhammad and seven of his first followers (18th century); and Kamal ul-Mulk’s portrait of Muhammad showing the prophet holding the Quran in one hand while with the index finger of the other hand he points to the Oneness of God (19th century).

Some of these can be seen in museums within the Muslim world, including the Topkapi in Istanbul, and in Bokhara and Samarkand, Uzbekistan, and Haroun-Walat, Iran (a suburb of Isfahan). Visitors to other museums, including some in Europe, would find miniatures and book illuminations depicting Muhammad, at times wearing his Meccan burqa (cover) or his Medinan niqab (mask). There have been few statues of Muhammad, although several Iranian and Arab contemporary sculptors have produced busts of the prophet.

One statue of Muhammad can be seen at the building of the U.S. Supreme Court, where the prophet is honored as one of the great “lawgivers” of mankind.

There has been other imagery: the Janissaries—the elite of the Ottoman
army—carried a medallion stamped with the prophet’s head (sabz qaba).
Their Persian Qizilbash rivals had their own icon, depicting the head of Ali,
the prophet’s son-in-law and the first Imam of Shiism. As for images of
other prophets, they run into millions. Perhaps the most popular is Joseph,
who is presented by the Quran as the most beautiful human being created by God.

Now to the second claim, that the Muslim world is not used to laughing
at religion. That is true if we restrict the Muslim world to the Brotherhood and
its siblings in the Salafist movement, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al
Qaeda. But these are all political organizations masquerading as religious ones. They are not the sole representatives of Islam, just as the Nazi Party was not the sole representative of German culture. Their attempt at portraying
Islam as a sullen culture that lacks a sense of humor is part of the same
discourse that claims “suicide martyrdom” as the highest goal for all true believers. The truth is that Islam has always had a sense of humor and has never called for chopping heads as the answer to satirists. Muhammad himself pardoned a famous Meccan poet who had lampooned him for more than a decade. Both Arabic and Persian literature, the two great literatures of Islam, are full of examples of “laughing at religion,” at times to the point of
irreverence.

Again, offering an exhaustive list is not possible. But those familiar
with Islam’s literature know of Ubaid Zakani’s “Mush va Gorbeh” (Mouse and
Cat), a match for Rabelais when it comes to mocking religion. Sa’adi’s eloquent soliloquy on behalf of Satan mocks the “dry pious ones.” And Attar
portrays a hypocritical sheikh who, having fallen into the Tigris, is choked by
his enormous beard. Islamic satire reaches its heights in Rumi, where a
shepherd conspires with God to pull a stunt on Moses; all three end up having a good laugh.

Islamic ethics is based on “limits and proportions,” which means that
the answer to an offensive cartoon is a cartoon, not the burning of
embassies or the kidnapping of people designated as the enemy. Islam rejects guilt by association. Just as Muslims should not blame all Westerners for the poor taste of a cartoonist who wanted to be offensive, those horrified by the spectacle of rent-a-mob sackings of embassies in the name of Islam should not blame all Muslims for what is an outburst of fascist energy.

Mr. Taheri is the author of “L’Irak: Le Dessous Des Cartes” (Editions
Complexe, 2002).

Posted at 9:50 AM · Comments (0)

Sunday, February 5, 2006 - Copyright The Washington Post

Never mind the usual puffery about what this month’s Winter Olympics are all about. Sure, there’s the beauty of sports, the spirit of friendly competition, the dedication of great athletes and all that. But the Winter Games are about a few other things as well: elitism, exclusion and the triumph of the world’s sporting haves over its have nots.

What the Winter Games are not is a truly international sporting competition that brings the best of the world together to compete, as the promotional blather would have you believe. Unlike the widely attended Summer Olympics, the winter version is almost exclusively the preserve of a narrow, generally wealthy, predominantly Caucasian collection of athletes and nations. In fact, I’d suggest that the name of the Winter Games, which start Friday, be changed. They could be more accurately branded “The European and North American Expensive Sports Festival.”

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Throughout most of the Winter Olympics’ history, the parade of participating nations has been a short one. Until as recently as 1994, fewer than a third of the planet’s countries took part. This year, in Turin, Italy, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) expects delegations from about 85 countries, an all-time high, but still barely 43 percent of the world’s total. Even that exaggerates the extent of participation. Many of the nations in the Opening Ceremonies will be represented by tokens, some consisting entirely of sports bureaucrats, not athletes. Ethiopia, a nation of 73 million, will send its first “team” to a Winter Olympics this year — a single skier.

As always, the biggest delegations, and the big winners, will come from a familiar pool. In the history of the winter competition, dating from its inception in 1924, competitors from only six countries — the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany (East, West and combined), Norway, the United States, Austria and Finland, in that order — have won almost two-thirds of all the medals awarded. Only 17 countries have ever amassed more than 10 medals during the past 19 winter Olympiads. Only 38 countries have won even one medal.

This had turned the Winter Olympics into a remarkably insular competition. The Czech Republic (and Czechoslovakia before it) has won more medals than China, home to about one-fifth of humanity. Norway, a nation with a population smaller than metropolitan Washington, has won three times as many winter medals as the nations of Asia, Latin and South America, Australia and Polynesia, the Middle East and the Caribbean Basin combined.

By contrast, the all-time list of summer winners is long and deep, extending to athletes from 143 countries, including such places as Tonga, Paraguay and Burundi. The Summer Games have medal hogs, too, but nothing like winter ones. The top six in the summer — the United States, the Soviet Union/Russia, Germany, France, Britain and Italy — have swept up slightly more than half the medals since the modern games started in 1896.

Obviously, the climate and terrain in, say, Indonesia or Aruba aren’t highly conducive to molding superstar aerial skiers and biathlon champions. But it’s not just the presence or absence of snow and ice that determines Winter Olympics success, or even participation. If it were, some of America’s best ice skaters and speedskaters wouldn’t live and train in Southern California or Florida. If it were, athletes from countries like Peru, Chile, Nepal, Morocco, Afghanistan and Ethiopia — all blessed with soaring, snow-covered mountains — would be marching en masse in the Opening Ceremonies and fighting for the medal stand.

Instead, the more telling factors are economic. Would-be Winter Olympians need years of training, coaching and competition if they’re going to make it to the Games. All of these things require massive sums of money. A bobsled (or bobsleigh, in official IOC-speak) costs about $35,000, to say nothing of what it costs to build an Olympic-caliber bobsled run. A pair of speedskates might be relatively cheap, but how many countries have speedskating rinks? Most nations, even those with plenty of snow and cold, simply can’t afford such extravagances.

Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? Those lovable underdogs endeared themselves to many with their participation in the 1988 games in Calgary (the four-man team was the subject of the 1993 Disney movie “Cool Runnings” and finished a surprisingly high 14th in 1994). Less well-known is what happened — or didn’t happen — to the Jamaicans in the 2002 games in Salt Lake City: They didn’t show up. The team ran out of funding and had to stay home.

Unlike the Winter Games, the Summer Olympics level many of the advantages of national wealth, as well as favorable geography and climate. It takes all the usual things to become a Summer Olympian — heart, outsized talent and the ability to devote most of your waking hours to your sport — but the barriers to entry are much lower. Athletes from the poorest African and Caribbean nations have developed into some of the world’s greatest athletes with shockingly minimal, or even nonexistent, facilities and equipment.

In winter sports, by contrast, the rich keep getting richer. Nations wealthy enough to host a Winter Olympics tend to be those that win most of the medals (17 of the 20 Winter Olympics have been held in Western Europe, Canada or the United States). And hosting the Games tends to ensure future success; the expensive facilities left behind — the ski jumps, skeleton runs, half-pipes, etc. — become training grounds for the next generation of Olympians.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympics, recognized some of these global sporting inequities more than a century ago. De Coubertin objected to the creation of a separate Winter Olympics for many years, dismissing winter sports in 1921 as “the snobbish play of the rich.” It wasn’t until 1924 — some 28 years after the first modern Olympics — that the IOC retroactively recognized something called the “International Week of Winter Sports” in Chamonix, France, as the first Winter Olympics.

So why perpetuate an event that could just as easily be contested as a series of disaggregated annual championships? The reason, of course, is money and TV. And here again, it’s a small world. The Winter Olympics might collapse were it not for the financial support of American broadcasters and their (mostly) American advertisers. Like the teams themselves, the audience for the Winter Olympics is predominantly North American and European, accounting for about two-thirds of all worldwide viewing during the Salt Lake City Games of 2002, according to the IOC. This is just fine by the Olympics’ “worldwide” sponsors — companies like Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Panasonic and Visa — whose biggest markets are in these places, too. Indeed, with NBC paying about half of all the fees for TV rights the IOC collects, American sponsors and broadcasters call the tune. In 1994, facing sponsor “fatigue” from same-year Summer and Winter Olympics, the IOC decided to stagger the two seasons’ Games, so that the Winter Olympics now take place two years after the summer ones.

This is not to suggest that Winter Olympians aren’t dedicated and superb athletes. They are, of course. But the pool of actual and potential competitors in, say, luge or curling (or skeleton or biathlon or bobsledding or freestyle moguls skiing) is ludicrously small and will probably remain so for years to come. The Winter Olympics simply aren’t, and probably can’t be, a truly global sporting contest.

So please, in the next few weeks, spare us the hokum about the nations of the world joining together in a symbolic celebration of the human spirit. Some nations and some human spirit maybe, but unfortunately, all too precious little.

Author’s e-mail: farhip@washpost.com

Paul Farhi is a staff writer in the Post’s Style section.

Posted at 1:41 PM · Comments (0)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: February 9, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times

SHANGHAI, Feb. 7 � For months now, the news about the news in China has been awful. Carrying out its vow to tighten controls over what it calls “propaganda,” the government of President Hu Jintao has busied itself closing publications, firing editorial staffs and jailing reporters.

More noticeably, the government has clamped down on the Internet, closing blogger sites, filtering Web sites and e-mail messages for banned words and tightening controls on text messages. Last year, Yahoo was criticized for revealing the identity of an Internet journalist, Shi Tao, who was subsequently jailed. [On Wednesday, the Committee to Protect Journalists said court documents posted on a Chinese Web site showed that Yahoo had done the same in 2003, resulting in the jailing of another writer, Li Zhi.]

Against this grim backdrop, the news that Google had agreed to apply censors’ blacklists to its new Chinese search engine might have seemed like the ultimate nail in the coffin for freedom of information in this country. Chinese Internet mavens were outraged at Google for collaborating in the government’s censorship effort. “For most people, access to more diversified resources has been broken,” said Isaac Mao, a popular Chinese blogger, in a typical sentiment. “The majority of users, the new users, will only see a compressed version of Google, and can’t know what they don’t know. This is like taking a 30-year-old’s brain and setting him back to the mind of a 15-year-old.”

Some threatened that Internet companies that toed the government line would regret it someday. “Doing the bidding of the Chinese government like this is like doing the bidding of Stalin or Hitler,” said Yu Jie, a well-known dissident writer. “The actions of companies that did the bidding of Stalin and Hitler have been remembered by history, and the Chinese people won’t forget these kinds of actions, either.”

Whether Chinese will hold a long-term grudge is arguable. But Web specialists are far more confident that the government will fail in its efforts to reverse a trend toward increasingly free expression that has been reshaping this society with ever more powerful effects for more than two decades.

Last year, China ranked 159th out of 167 countries in a survey of press freedom, Reporters Without Borders, the Paris-based international rights group, said. But rankings like this do not reflect the rapid change afoot here, more and more of which is escaping the government’s control.

A case in point is the Chinese government’s recent effort to rein in bloggers who tread too often into delicate territory, criticizing state policy or detailing official corruption. In December, the government ordered Microsoft and its MSN service to close the site of Michael Anti, one of China’s most popular bloggers.

Although Mr. Anti � who is also an employee of the Beijing bureau of The New York Times � had his site closed, any Chinese Web surfer can choose from scores of other online commentators who are equally provocative, and more are coming online all the time.

Microsoft alone carries an estimated 3.3 million blogs in China. Add to that the estimated 10 million blogs on other Internet services, and it becomes clear what a censor’s nightmare China has become. What is more, not a single blog existed in China a little more than three years ago, and thousands upon thousands are being born every day � some run by people whose previous blogs had been banned and merely change their name or switch Internet providers. New technologies, like podcasts, are making things even harder to control.

“The Internet is open technology, based on packet switching and open systems, and it is totally different from traditional media, like radio or TV or newspapers,” said Guo Liang, an Internet specialist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “At first, people might have thought it would be as easy to control as traditional media, but now they realize that’s not the case.”

If the Internet is at the center of today’s struggle over press freedom, it is only the latest in a series of fights that the government has so far always lost. Under the veneer of resolute state control, one sector after another, including book publishing, newspapers and magazines, has undergone a similar process of de facto liberalization, often in the face of official hostility. The first wave came in book publishing, where beginning in the 1980’s censors found themselves unable to suppress books that were critical of state policy or expressed divergent views on ideological matters. A big part of the reason for the weakening of the censors was the introduction of a market economy, where publishers had to seek profits to support their activities. Turgid, politically correct books that delighted the censors sold poorly, so profit-seeking publishers sought to get bolder, often provocative writing into print.

Changes in the news media have also been driven by profit motives. With the state ending its subsidies for most publishing companies, publications have sought ways to build readership. Saucy entertainment and sports journalism have been big hits for many magazines and newspapers.

Others, though, have hit on the idea of public affairs, uncovering corruption and writing about environmental problems and social inequality. As the readers’ appetite for this kind of news has grown, the government has been hard pressed to force the genie back into the bottle.

Newspapers have been closed, reporters and editors jailed � even killed, like Wu Xianghu, a newspaper editor who died last week after being beaten by the police, who reportedly were incensed by an article he published on abuses of power in their ranks. Still, the trend has not been reversed.

Editors, like Li Datong of a recently closed Beijing newspaper supplement, Bing Dian, officially owned by the Communist Party Youth League, have begun to use the courts to challenge government efforts to silence them. But many frustrated reporters have simply moved to blogs, which give them an outlet to write about what they are not permitted to in their day jobs.

“Symbolically, the government may have scored a victory with Google, but Web users are becoming a lot more savvy and sophisticated, and the censors’ life is not getting easier,” said Xiao Qiang, leader of the Internet project at the University of California, Berkeley. “The flow of information is getting steadily freer, in fact. If I was in the State Councils information office, I certainly wouldn’t think we had any reason to celebrate.”

Posted at 9:03 PM · Comments (0)

By Zuzanna Kobrzynski, Melonyce McAfee, Sonia Smith, and Blake Wilson
Updated Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006, at 4:53 PM ET

New York Times Magazine, Feb. 12
In addition to cultural mandates that inflate the importance of bearing sons, disease might also be a factor in lopsided birth rates in developing Asian countries. An article looks at research indicating that a Hepatitis B-carrying parent may have less chance of having a girl. “Yet others fear that such findings are based on flimsy data and could help governments turn a blind eye to gender discrimination,” according to the writer. (Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt covered the Hepatitis B angle in Slate last year.) � The cover piece profiles Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, an Iraq war dissenter who wants to make a run for the GOP ticket in 2008. Hagel isn’t shy about expressing his views, which often clash with the party line. “Now�33 months before a presidential election, two years before the first primaries�his chances aren’t merely discounted; he’s seldom even mentioned in Republican circles, as if he has been sidelined by his independence on Iraq,” the author writes.�M.M.

Posted at 7:41 AM · Comments (0)

A must see. Slate has done a great service running Magnum stuff on all sorts of topics daily. :

http://todayspictures.slate.com/20060207/10.html

Posted at 9:14 AM · Comments (0)

Tuesday, 07 February 2006 - Copyright THE GHANAIAN TIMES

I never cease to marvel at the poetry that can be found in the Akan language, especially in the proverbs and other pithy sayings that enrich it.

I am not talking about the sayings themselves and the enormous wisdom buried in them. As a writer, I am more interested in the craftsmanship that can be unearthed from them.

If you are interested in poetry, you will know that some of the tools used by those who write poetry are rhyme, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia and metaphor.

For a literate poet writing his verse, it is a fairly straight-forward task; he writes down one line and then goes on to write down another, and if he wants to use rhyme, for instance, he can see the word at the end of the first line, and try to find a word for the end of the second line that rhymes with it. Are you still with me?

What I mean is that typical verse in rhymed English would probably go like this:
Newspapers, oh political newspapers!
Who, pray, can follow all their capers?

Now look at this other verse:
Kurotwiamansa
Nam seseaa
Ase Ma seseaa
Ase woso biribiribiribiri.
(The leopard treads through the thicket
Making it shake biribiribiribiri. Praise-singer�s verse extolling the capabilities of the Okyenhene, King of Akyem Abuakwa).

If you are observant, you will notice two things from the above, first, there is no way I could translate the onomatopoeic word, biribiribiribiri, into English. Try as I have, I couldn�t even get close. Yet in Twi, it conveys its meaning perfectly: you can almost hear the thicket shaking biribiribiribiri as the heavily-built leopard threads its way through it. It�s the same idea as Otuu mmirika kirikirikirikiri koka kyeree no se yese ommera seesei aa! [He ran kirikirikirikiri to go and inform the chap that he was wanted immediately.] Again, you can practically hear the noise made by the guy�s feet as he ran kirikirikirikiri to carry out his mission. Perfect onomatopoeia, I would have thought. Also, please note how the two onomatopoeic words sound so musical; all good poetry must sound like music. That’s why poetry uses so many tools — I haven’t touched on metre yet; it is metre that gives poetry the rhythm that gives it the musical quality that makes it sound so different from ordinary speech.

The second thing to notice about the first verse is that some of the lines rhyme. The second and third lines rhyme, while the first line also almost rhymes with the second and third. In fact, in technical terms, it can pass for as an �imperfect rhyme�, which is acceptable in terms of what is known as �poetic licence�.

Now I ask you: how did the poet know how to rhyme the passage when he could neither read nor write?
Even more remarkable is the use of alliteration and assonance in these lines:
Nam seseaa
Ase
Ma
Seseaa
Ase
Woso
Bibirbiribiribiri.

In case you may think that the way the poet employs these unusual tools of versification is an accident, let me quote to you, another verse that uses alliteration and assonance, in addition to rhyme, to make itself memorable:
Sasaboronsam mmiensa,
Yennamfonom mmiensa,
Yeyere nom mmiensa,
Yeenom nsa
Na yeama wo nsa.
[Three Sasaboronsam (demons)
They have three friends
And three wives too;
They drink wine
And they give you wine.] - (As told to me by my friend Enoch Alomanu, who heard it from a palm wine bar in Kumase and was so impressed by it that although he is a native Ewe speaker himself, he remembered it to relay it to me!).

If you are interested in these things, read the talking drum passages in R S Rattray�s works on Asante culture and the compilations of Asante Apae and other sayings made by Prof. J H Nketia. If you are well-versed in the art of versification, believe me you will be amazed at the sheer technical brilliance that you will discover in those verses, especially the way rhyme, alliteration and assonance in particular are employed to such great effect in them.

But there is a fourth element to good poetry which I have not yet touched upon: imagery and metaphor.
In one of the praise-sayings that the late Okyeame Akuffo of Akropong compiled and applied to Dr Kwame Nkrumah, he described Nkrumah as :Kwame a onnsuro hwasu;
Kwame a oworow kawa fi ne mmati so! (Kwame [who is so hard-working that] he doesn�t fear the morning dew [on the weeds that crisscross the paths to his farm]; Kwame who takes off his ring from the shoulder-end of his arm!)

Do you see the images flashing in front of your eyes? Getting up early in the morning, walking barefoot into your farm at a time when no-one else has used the path…. And as for the second one, how can anyone even try to take a ring off from the shoulder-end of his arm? It means no matter how impossible the task might have seemed, Nkrumah would have tackled it. Of course Akuffo ‘liberated’ that verse from a King’s collection, but I for one am glad he ‘stole’ it for Nkrumah, because otherwise I would probably never have heard it!

The reason why I am tasking your grey matter like this today is that we have just lost one of the people who, being illiterate, yet possessed such a command of language that they could be considered wordsmiths of the first order. She was my aunt - my mother, in fact, for in Akan culture, your mother�s sisters and all her female cousins - that is the daughters of her mother�s sister(s) - are all known as your �mothers�.

This multiple-mother situation is very fortunate for the Akans, for what it means is that if one�s natural mother passes away, the void in one�s life is automatically filled; well, at least, in the formal sense of the word. No-one can replace one�s natural mother, of course, but it is comforting to know that one immediately gets a replacement mother when one�s natural mother goes. You see, one is simply not allowed to feel that one is an �orphan�, because, of course, an orphan can develop self-pity, which doesn�t make for a well-adjusted personality. And the society would much rather have well-adjusted personalities. Therefore, most women regard it as a sacred duty to be given the responsibility of bringing up the children of a dead relative. In fact, if one does not measure up to the task, one would be commonly calumnised as an onipa bone (a bad person). Such charactisations are very effective in our very small communities, where everybody more or less knows everybody else’s business, and so people take trouble not to court such opprobrium unto themselves.

If the new mother makes the mistake of messing up the task of looking after the orphan(s), no-one will actually call her and abuse her, except family elders. But the rest of the society will take the woman to task by raining veiled and indirect abuse (akutia) on her until she finally gets the message and mends her ways.

It is not only after the death of your natural mother that these other mothers assume their responsibility towards you. They act as a backup to Team One - your mother and father - that is raising you. If you are hungry and you go to the home of any of the other mothers and there is food, you would be given some to eat.

Why were we always hungry as kids? I have come to the conclusion that we were often so hungry because our food takes so long to prepare. For instance, the morning meal, ampesie (boiled plantain, yam or cocoyam eaten with a stew) takes about an hour to prepare, and the main meal of the day, fufuo and soup, could take anything up to two hours to cook. Part of the process (pounding the fufuo) is pretty laborious and many kids try to avoid it by inventing all sorts of excuses to stay away from home whilst the pounding is taking place! It doesn’t always work, for mothers are up to these tricks, and many a boy who thinks he is ‘too-clever’ will often come home to find a cold, half-pounded ball of fufuo waiting for him. Sometimes, he wouldn’t find anyone available to ‘drive’ [turn the fufuo in the mortar] for him, and he would have to do walantu-walansa or ‘self-driving’ (this is known as awor-ka!)

So, then, although there would be food in our own house, we were almost always ready to partake in meals that didn�t originate from our mother�s pot. However, we had to make sure that the family members we did this to were very close, as going around other people�s homes to deplete the size of their meals was frowned upon. Anyone who made a habit of that was typecast as an ahwa (a term that describes a creature who is even more beneath contempt than what is known as a �sponger� in English). At its very worst, a reputation as an ahwa would induce people to hide their food when one�s voice was heard, or if a nasty telltale in the house one was about to �pass by� saw one and ran to sound the alarm —: Oreba oh! — that one was coming.

I was lucky, because I had three houses, apart from my own, where I was guaranteed a share of any meal that was going, without running the risk of being stigmatised as an ahwa. One of these was run by my mother�s mother�s sister�s eldest daughter, Maame Afia Kyeraa, a beautiful woman, almost as softly spoken as my own mother, and kindness itself. The tragedy of her life was that she couldn�t bear any children of her own, and she took my mum�s many kids - of whom I was the eldest - as her own children. Of course, I took full advantage of the situation.

Sadly, her barrenness made her try out several husbands, some of them outside our town. Because of this, she was regarded as pretty �sophisticated� for our society. One of the husbands she married was a goldsmith, with whom she travelled to some far-away, dangerous place known to us only as �Mines�. She liked me very much and I could, as a child, discuss things with her which I couldn�t talk to my own mother about.

One day, when I was about four or five, I confided to her that I wanted to go to Aburokyire (England). She pooh-poohed the idea but I kept nagging at her with it. So, one day, she dressed me up nattily, called one or two of her sisters together and told them, “Kwadwo says he wants to go to England. Let�s take him there.”

I was so excited! We took the road that led from Asiakwa to Kyebi. We walked for about half a mile and then saw a maize farm near the road. As soon as we passed the farm, Maame Kyeraa said, “We have arrived in England”.
“What?” I asked incredulous.
“Ah, you said you wanted to go to Aburokyire, didn�t you?”
“Yes!” I replied.
“Now what is that growing in the farm over there? Is it not aburoo (maize)?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Now, this place where we are, is it not aburokyire - to the back of, or behind the corn field?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then what are you on about? You wanted to come to aburokyire and we have brought you to aburokyire. So! Now, let�s go back home.” And we trooped back home!

Now, Maame Kyeraa was a stark illiterate, yet somehow, she had managed, in her mind, to deconstruct the word Aburokyire into its two etymological components, aburroo and akyire, and floored me with the witty outcome.
Would a person with literary education have been quite as intellectually resourceful? I wonder.

� Cameron Duodu is a freelance journalist based in London.

Posted at 11:42 PM · Comments (0)

Friday, Feb 03

Milloy: “Part of being white means being ‘The Voice of Metro’”: There’s an interesting and meaningful discussion taking place on the Washington Post’s internal critique board about race and how it fits into the Post’s news coverage and their newsroom. Cou
But what I’d really really like is to read about what it means to be white at the Post. And I dont mean read about it in the New Republic, either, with blind quotes from white reporters. White people, I’ve discovered, are as defensive of their identity as black people are sentitive about theirs. But exactly what does being white mean? Priviledge? Mo money? Or maybe its just not being black? Bet this would be a better newspaper if we knew more about that race wall between us. Would love to know what you’re thinking Len & Phil (and Don and Bo). Stop peeping and start participating..

The conversation was instigated, it seems, by Cheryl Thompson’s (Metro Projects Reporter) critique on January 31:

A1: The first thing I noticed when I picked up today’s paper was the three white women on the front page. Not much diversity there…

Metro:…Coincidence? Every photo accompanying a story on the Metro front in the Maryland edition featured a white male. If we want to improve circulation, then we need to improve our diversity of photos and stories. I live in Montgomery County in one of the most diverse zip codes in the region, where more than one in five of the 58,000-plus residents is foreign born, as Dee Cohn and Pam Constable pointed out in a story several years ago. Our paper—all sections—should reflect the diversity of our communities…

Business: There’s a black guy in a photo on the Biz front! Oh, wait. My bad. It’s the cop escorting Kenneth Lay and his wife into federal court. Really, we need to do better.

Many more then chimed in on this subject, especially in response to the all-white roster of finalists for Metro’s voice contest.

The entire discussion raises some serious questions for not only the Post, but journalists everywhere and is worth a full read. More after the jump…

More from the boards:

Debbi Wilgoren: Just to play devil’s advocate to Cheryl’s smart and funny critique: Yes, three pictures of white women on A1, but also very strong (and well deserved) placement for the African American history museum story, and lesser but still A1 placement for Annie Gowen’s really interesting piece on the Washington area’s Salvadoran community. Plus, those three pictures are of real — albeit white — people, not, for example, government officials in suits. And the two feature photos (not including the mug of Wendy Wasserstein in the keybox) are played nice and big. Would it have been better to have a person of color under the cherry blossoms? Quite possibly. But is this an old-boy’s-club front page? Not hardly.

Martha McNeil Hamilton: Better a police officer than someone facing spending the rest of his life in prison. I hope you turned to page two and the photo of Fed Vice Chairman Roger Ferguson with a story about how he and others guided the Federal Reserve Board on 9/11.

Courtland T. Milloy : Three women, Cheryl, Martha and Deb speaking out on race and the newspaper today. I like that. Two other favorites, Fred B and Peter P did it, too, a few days ago. I really like that. But what I’d really really like is to read about what it means to be white at the Post. And I dont mean read about it in the New Republic, either, with blind quotes from white reporters. White people, I’ve discovered, are as defensive of their identity as black people are sentitive about theirs. But exactly what does being white mean? Priviledge? Mo money? Or maybe its just not being black? Bet this would be a better newspaper if we knew more about that race wall between us. Would love to know what you’re thinking Len & Phil (and Don and Bo). Stop peeping and start participating.

Keith Richburg: Lyndsey’s story on Metro’s search for a new voice to say “doors opening” and “doors closing” was a terrific piece, really enjoyable and well written, and would have been on A1 on any other day; In fact, I might have voted for holding our SOTU package to two just to get it out there as a reader.

As great as that story is, I have one problem with it: Why are all
the 10 finalists to be the voice of Metro all, apparently, white? Did someone at Metro decide they didn’t want a “black-sounding” voice or an ethnic voice to say “doors opening” or “doors closing?” (Okay, maybe Jon Garcia counts as Hispanic). Is that a comment on the suburban reach of Metro? And—more importantly—why was that point not made in the story, since it seemed so glaringly obvious from the photo that it jumped out at me and grabbed me by the throat the second I picked up my Metro front. What a wonderful chance we missed, I think, to write about how in our diverse region, the Metro powers-that-be think that the “Voice Of Metrorail” must be a generically Caucasian voice.

Jonathan Yardley: I emphatically second Richburg’s comment on the Metro competition. Those ten lily-white faces leaped out at me, too. We do the same thing all the time in this newspaper of course, so maybe we’re just inured to this incredible insensitivity about the region’s complex racial and ethnic mix, but this one stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. I suppose it’s too late to do anything else in the news columns, but it would be nice to see a snippy, impertinent little editorial on the subject in tomorrow’s paper.

Marc Fisher: Keith is far from the only reader to note the lack of black finalists in the Metro voice contest; I’ve received a bunch of emails and calls
on this today, all from folks identifying themselves as white and all wondering why Metro, which serves a very mixed rider base, would not want a greater variety of backgrounds in the finalist group. The readers shared Keith’s suspicion that there was a preference in the selection process for white-sounding voices. But as someone who listened to the samples without seeing photos or knowing anything about the finalists other than what they sounded like, I should add that my aural stereotypes told me that at least one and possibly two of the group were black. Not the case. Might be interesting to ask
Metro’s judges how they heard those voices, and why.

Cheryl W. Thompson: Were all the Metro judges white? And what does black sound like? Just wondering…

Courtland T. Milloy: Thank you, Mr. Richburg. In yesterday’s posted comment, I asked: What does being white at the Post mean? Today, I learn that part of being white means being “The Voice of Metro.” Metro rail, that is, not
Metro’s rail, right?

Neely Tucker: on the race front, with a shout out to courland “dr. love!” milloy: last week i was part of post panel at georgetown univ. with mr. vargas (“beyond race”) and then part of another panel at a dc library branch in georgetown about the post’s front page.

the mostly minority participants at the former were convinced the post is part of the white, racist mainstream media (query: “do you guys have code words you use in the paper to talk about black people without calling them black?”). there was a sentiment that the media had done a great job in the old civil rights days (when, ironically, the media hired very few minorities), but had since gone to seed.

race was not the subject of the second panel, but when it was, several speakers in the the mostly white crowd volunteered their observations that we were “patronizing” to blacks and minorities, we dared not criticize oprah, with the inference it was because she was black and female. there was a sentiment that we were great back in the old watergate/bradlee days (when, ironically, we did far fewer investigations and had a smaller staff), but we had since gone to
seed.

just mention that, in case you needed a bit of uplift.

Posted at 9:53 PM · Comments (0)

This is a well-told, no-nonsense account of the development of civil society in China — in the face of official hostility and opposition of all kinds.
Goldman starts the tale at the death of Zhou Enlai, linking the outpouring of sympathy and implicit criticism of the government at the death of Mao’s deputy with subsequent manifestations of independent speech, thought and association. These have ebbed and flowed ever since, but the overall trend has remained powerfully in favor of greater consciousness of citizens’ rights.

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This thin volume from Penguin on the 17th century Japanese poet is a fantastic gem that brings the landscape to life, gives meaning to solitude and poignancy to quiet.
Basho’s works are readily accessible and full of warmth and insight.

“Shed of everything else,
I still have some lice
I picked up on the road -
Crawling on my summer robes.”

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From Nick Kristof’s column in the 2/07/06 editions of the New York Times - see the link below for the entire article.

According to the Tyndall Report, which analyzes the content of the evening newscasts of the broadcast networks, their coverage of Darfur actually declined last year. The total for all three networks was 26 minutes in 2004. That wasn’t much � but it dropped to just 18 minutes during all of 2005.

ABC’s evening news program had 11 minutes about Darfur over the year, NBC’s had 5 minutes, and CBS’s found genocide worth only 2 minutes of airtime during the course of 2005.

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WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 1, 2006 Copyright The New York Times

PARIS Henri Cartier-Bresson wasn’t always more famous than those he photographed, but by midcareer he was certainly as renowned as many of the literary, artistic, fashion and movie figures before him. How did this affect the power relationship between recorder and recorded in what Cartier-Bresson liked to call a “duel without rules?”

A new show of his portraits, running through April 9 - his first solo exhibition at the Cartier-Bresson Foundation here since his death at 95 in August 2004 - touches on this question in its very subtitle, “The Inner Silence of a Consenting Victim,” borrowed from one of the photographer’s phrases.

Of inner silence, there is plenty. Even when posed, people seem caught in moments of reflection. But there is also external silence: chatty though he could be in private, it is hard to imagine Cartier-Bresson engaging in light banter before getting down to business. Of the 85 portraits in the show, only a couple of anonymous women offer faint smiles.

In that sense, perhaps the duel is over who sets the rules: the photographer decides when to press the shutter, but the subject can decide how much he or she reveals.

Martine Franck, Cartier-Bresson’s widow, accompanied her husband to just one - probably atypical - portrait session, that of the poet Ezra Pound in Venice in 1971, a year before his death at 87.

“There was a tremendous, heavy silence,” recalled Franck, herself a photographer. “Pound didn’t say a word. He just seemed to condemn the world with his eyes. We were there for about 20 minutes. I stayed to one side. I huddled in a corner. Henri took seven pictures.”

What Pound felt is impossible to know. Years earlier, he had been interned for mental illness, and in 1960, he lapsed into long periods of depressive silence and stopped writing. And yet, in the image selected by Cartier-Bresson, Pound’s wild hair, burning eyes and tense hands seem to speak volumes about an old man raging against the dying of the light.

In most cases, consent was implicit in a person’s agreement to sit for a portrait. Here, contact sheets would presumably offer some evidence of how these sessions progressed. Nonetheless, the pictures in this show illustrate how Cartier-Bresson often staged his portraits, either through stylized composition or by using props.

Thus, a large cross appears above the head of the painter Georges Rouault. With Andr� Breton, photographed behind a desk covered with “primitive” art, an obsidian Maya face mirrors Breton’s profile. Alberto Giacometti lies in bed beneath a painting of the Virgin and Child. The composer Igor Markevitch’s folded hands repeat those in a painting behind him.

With some subjects, Cartier-Bresson said he tried to go unnoticed while they worked. “When I went to see Matisse, I’d sit in a corner without moving,” he recounted. “No one spoke. It was as if I didn’t exist.”

Cartier-Bresson was only 35 when he photographed Matisse. That same year, 1943, he visited another painter, Pierre Bonnard.

“Bonnard’s nephew told him that two dealers wanted to photograph him,” Franck said, “and Bonnard said, no, because ‘little’ Cartier-Bresson was coming and he needed to earn his living. Henri had just escaped from a German labor camp.”

The picture of Bonnard in this show suggests that he had little interest in being photographed. In contrast, in other portraits, the calm, even passive expression of the sitters suggests they felt totally at ease in the photographer’s presence.

But Cartier-Bresson, who coined the phrase “the decisive moment,” also caught people off guard. Of an appointment he had with the French physicists Ir�ne and Fr�d�ric Joliot-Curie in 1944, Cartier-Bresson recalled: “I rang the bell, the door opened, I shot, I then said good morning. It wasn’t very polite.”

How natural can a portrait ever be? The image of the philosopher Roland Barthes in this exhibition shows him almost consuming the lens. “Very often (too often in my view) I was aware of being photographed,” Barthes observed. “So from the moment I feel I am in the camera’s eye, everything changes: I begin to pose, I immediately create a different body, I change even before the image.”

In the late 1960s, Cartier-Bresson abandoned the photojournalism that had taken him around the world and devoted himself to his first love, drawing. But he continued to do portraits. And by then, his “victims” - the actress Isabelle Huppert; Franck; his daughter, M�lanie; several friends - were definitely consenting.

By then too, of course, the “duel” was over: the importance of the portrait was now its photographer, not his subject.

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Copyright - Slate
Posted Monday, Feb. 6, 2006

Small children do many things better than adults. My 5-year-old son is better at getting attention from women than I am, he is better at falling asleep in improbable places, and he is better at getting his way. But there’s one skill every small child has that adults rightly envy: They’re brilliant language-learners. Any kid, with no formal instruction whatsoever, is capable of near-perfect pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar in a language that was utterly foreign to them not long before. Even the best teenage or adult foreign-language students sound clunky by contrast.

Some new software, though, promises to make us all kids again. The program, called Rosetta Stone, represents a novel approach to language-learning. Rosetta Stone uses no English-language instruction�in fact, no instruction at all. There are no vocabulary lists, conjugation tables, or translation drills. Instead, it mimics language immersion by associating language with pictures. Rosetta Stone doesn’t put it this way, but the program asks you to learn like a child.

Rosetta Stone software is available for 28 different languages, from Spanish to Swahili. I tested out the Danish version. It’s a language of moderate difficulty for English speakers, but since it’s a Germanic language�a cousin to English�its vocabulary and grammar are not as distant as, say, Chinese. I know German, so it could give me a bit of help, but Danish and German aren’t close enough to make it too easy. And I hoped to surprise my visiting Danish girlfriend. (If you want to play along, check out this free demo. You can purchase either an online or home version of the Rosetta Stone software. The Danish course I tested costs $195. Alternately, a one-month subscription is $49.95, and three months will set you back $89.95.)

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The interface is incredibly simple. A written word appears and is pronounced by a native speaker. The user picks a matching picture from four images below. A correct answer gives a pleasing chime and a check mark. A wrong answer brings a muted air horn of disapproval and a red X. Other drills are similar. Sometimes you see the picture and choose from four written words; sometimes you choose from four spoken words. The key is that from the first exercise, you don’t associate “flyvemaskine” with the English “airplane.” You immediately associate “flyvemaskine” with an actual airplane, cutting out the mind-cluttering step of translation.

You will be surprised how quickly you learn words even in a difficult language. After 20 minutes with Lesson 1, I walked down the street and found myself saying “car,” “cat,” “dog,” “boy,” and “woman” in my new language. After basic words, Rosetta Stone starts teaching basic relationships. “A car and a cat.” “A boy in a car.” “A boy on a table.” Then come a few verbs. Instead of being given grammar lessons, you are deriving the grammar from your linguistic stimulus�as a child does. (Don’t hold your breath on perfect pronunciation, though. Unless you have a good microphone and are very patient, the bit of software that tests your accent against a native’s is erratic and frustrating (at least on my computer).

But the Rosetta Stone approach has its drawbacks. Page 1 of the typical language book goes like this:

Pierre : Bonjour. Je m’appelle Pierre.
Mary: Bonjour. Je m’appelle Mary. Je suis am�ricaine.
Pierre: Enchant�.

This Lesson 1 stuff is obviously useful�if you want to deploy your new language, the first step is greeting people. While Rosetta Stone’s initial vocabulary list includes “elephant,” “airplane,” and “boat,” it doesn’t have “hello.” Each lesson focuses on grammar building blocks, and there is no time for pleasantries. After maybe a dozen hours with Rosetta Stone, I have a vocabulary of about 200 words. I can say, “The man is wearing a white shirt and the women are wearing black coats.” I can’t say “I” or “you.” I can tell my girlfriend, “There is not a man on top of that house,” and, “the yellow car is bigger than the red car.” I can’t ask, “Are you hungry?”

Granted, if you’re doing well with basic grammar, it’s not hard to pick up “How are you?” The bigger problem with Rosetta Stone is that the picture sets and grammar lessons are the same across all languages. Considering that verbs are fiendishly difficult in one language, adjectives tricky in another, and prepositions a pain in a third, this can be problematic. Arabic, for example, has a dual number, meaning you have to learn different forms for “he walks,” “they [two people] walk,” and “they [more than two people] walk.” But there is no lesson for this in Rosetta Stone. If you’re learning Arabic and don’t know there is a dual, you’ll wonder why the verbs change from picture to picture, not knowing to think about the number of people.

Rosetta Stone’s head of marketing acknowledged that the program can’t encompass every facet of every language. But he argues that Rosetta Stone is still the fastest way to get you away from a computer. It’s mostly a confidence thing�typical language-learners get tripped up by embarrassment, not lack of skill. Rosetta Stone’s technique, if a bit tedious sometimes, makes it so you almost can’t help but learn. The constant repetition, starting with basic nouns and building with tiny, accumulating lessons, makes it different from a program that tries to get you communicating straight away.

No computer program can change the fact that, for whatever reason, learning a language is hard for adults. Rosetta Stone seeks to emulate a child’s learning, but it’s possible that the brain has changed to make this much harder as an adult. In The Language Instinct, Harvard psycholinguist Steven Pinker guesses this is because learning language was evolutionarily necessary only in childhood. The brain is a metabolic hog that uses a disproportionate share of the calories we consume�it doesn’t make sense to keep around equipment, like the language-learning circuitry, that we won’t need later on.

Rosetta Stone will help you build vocabulary and confidence, but it’s best used alongside traditional tools like the dreaded Je m’appelle Pierre. Children have a supple language instinct. Adults need to rely on their advantage in cognitive horsepower.

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The New York Sun January 24, 2006 Copyright 2006 The New York Sun

January 24, 2006

Kim Jong Il reminds me of Mao Zedong. The Chinese dictator, when he was alive, lived behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, so that very few knew anything about his life and his world, including where he lived or where he was. When Mao flew, every other plane in China was grounded.
When his special train moved, the country’s railway system was thrown into chaos as other trains were not allowed to be anywhere near his.

“Throughout his reign, he lived in his own country as if in a war zone,” wrote Jung Chang and her husband Jon Halliday of the Chinese communist monster in their “Mao: The Unknown Story.” Wherever Mao might set foot, the grounds were swept by Russian mine detectors and Chinese soldiers walking shoulder-to-shoulder as human minesweepers.

One episode described in “Mao” was particularly telling. On the eve of his inauguration as China’s supreme leader, deep fear was lurking in the recesses of Mao’s mind. Madame Mao told a visiting friend that the chairman was all right, “except he would tremble when he saw strangers.”
The visitor was puzzled as Mao looked well. Mao then interjected: “You are an old friend, not a stranger.” Ms. Chang and Mr. Halliday said, “It seems Mao knew that his terrorization had produced not only mass conformity, but quite a few would-be assassins.”

The “Dear Leader” from North Korea also seems to be suffering from the same paranoia. Mr. Kim’s recent visit to China, his fourth since 2000, was so secretive that it was not confirmed by Beijing and Pyongyang until after his train had left China.

Like father, like son. Mr. Kim, like his father Kim Il Sung, the founding
father of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, is thought to have
an aversion to flying and has almost always traveled by train under tight
secrecy on his rare visits abroad. The stealth underscores Mr. Kim’s
insecurity. Shortly after his last trip to China in April 2004, an
explosion took place on a railway line used by him.

Mr. Kim, paying an “unofficial” visit to China from January 10 to 18,went
to six cities and met with the entire top Chinese leadership, according
to China Daily. Mr. Kim toured the southern city of Shenzhen, right north
of Hong Kong, where, as a special economic zone, capitalism was first
allowed after the death of Mao. Mr. Kim was said to be greatly impressed
by the result of China’s reform and opening-up policy. It gives hope to
some that North Korea might follow its big brother’s footsteps. The
Chinese message to the North Korean guest, I think, is more likely to be:
“Don’t worry about opening up the economy. Look, we still can keep a
tight lid on politics.”

Another southern city that Mr. Kim paid a visit to was Zhuhai, adjacent
to the former Portuguese colony of Macau. Last September, the U.S.
Treasury Department ordered all American financial institutions not to do
business with Banco Delta Bank in Macau. The bank was accused of
spreading counterfeit money printed in North Korea and laundering money
earned through drugs and weapons of mass destruction. The fake $100
bills, called “supernotes,” are considered the highest-quality forgeries
in the world. Macau authorities later seized the bank and supposedly put
a stop to its dealings with Pyongyang.

In this, perhaps, lies the real reason for the visit. Hurt by American
sanctions, Pyongyang must turn to its only close ally for help. Mr. Kim
was quoted by the Chinese state press thanking Chinese leaders “for
rendering disinterested assistance” to North Korea “each time it faced
difficulties.”

China has become the main source of fuel and consumer goods for North
Korea, estimated to supply at least 40% of its food and 90% of its oil.
After the visit of the Chinese Communist Party chief, Hu Jintao, to
Pyongyang last October, North Korea was reportedly to have received as
much as $2 billion in aid.

Interestingly, just when Mr. Kim was leaving China, the assistant
secretary of state, Christopher Hill, the top American negotiator in the
six-party talks, made a brief and apparently unscheduled return trip to
Beijing at the end of a visit to the region. Song Min-soon, the South
Korean negotiator, was also reported to have made an unannounced visit to
Beijing around the same time. Mr. Hill, trying to revive the stalled
talks, declined to confirm or deny that he had met any North Korean
official.

The six-party talks, involving America, China,Russia, Japan, and the two
Koreas, perhaps not unexpectedly, do not seem to be moving toward the
goal of disarming Pyongyang. “In an epoch it is supposed to dominate,
America has been reduced to relying on China - the other side’s best
friend - to craft a solution critical to its future. What kind of policy
is that?” asked Gordon Chang, author of the newly-released “Nuclear
Showdown: North Korea Takes On the World.”

Skeptical of Beijing’s effort in pushing its North Korean friends to give
up the nukes, last year I had a chance to ask Mr. Hill what he thought
China could do more to help. He said, “We need to solve it and the
Chinese understand that better than anybody.” The hope is that Beijing
will decide to become a stakeholder and impose the right solution on
Pyongyang. But don’t bet on it.

China, if it wishes to, could almost unplug and switch off North Korea
overnight. Considering a controlled crisis in the Korean Peninsula is an
issue for the Yankees only, Beijing is going through the motions to help
Washington, hoping to get something in return: Taiwan. Mr. Chang said
that the Chinese have repeatedly suggested that for China to give up
North Korea, America has to agree to abandon Taiwan. “That deal, which
envisions the destruction of an emerging democracy, is too cynical to
contemplate,” he wrote.

Being resolute remains America’s best tool in dealing with North Korea. I
agree with Mr. Chang’s suggestion: “If China believed that America was
about to resort to force, it would do most anything to prevent regional
conflict, perhaps even apply real pressure on Pyongyang.” In February
2003,China cut off oil for three days. In June 1994, China voiced the
possibility of stopping food and oil supplies. Both times, North Korea
took the hint and softened its position afterward.

Mr. Liu is a former Washington-based columnist of Hong Kong’s Apple
Daily.

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Monday, February 6, 2006 - Copyright The Washington Post

Five years ago China recruited Gavriel Salvendy, an American scientist from Purdue University, to set up a department of industrial engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing.Salvendy didn’t speak Chinese — “not a word, apologies” — but that didn’t matter. In the department he created, 75 percent of the lectures and 100 percent of the textbooks are in English.

Tsinghua is China’s top science university, and it had global ambitions even before Salvendy arrived. Professors were rewarded with $700 bonuses every time they published in an international journal, which they did slightly more than 800 times in 2001. Salvendy turbocharged this system by extending bonuses to graduate students. By offering a ridiculously small sum — $125 — he created a powerful incentive, because the standard pay for a research assistant at Tsinghua is around $60 a month. Pretty soon, students were churning out work that appeared as papers co-authored with professors. By 2005, Tsinghua’s international-journal count had jumped eightfold.

Feeding the Oil Addiction
� Editorial | Few administrations have done more to feed America’s oil addiction than this one ? and the same can be said for this Republican Congress.

* Dionne: Another Bush Deficit: Ideas
* Holbrooke: The Next Secretary General
* Broder: A Nervous GOP Makes Its Choice

OPINIONS SECTION: Froomkin, Toles, More

Salvendy has no doubt that Tsinghua scientists will soon be claiming Nobel Prizes, but the trickier question is what this means for the United States. The U.S. science establishment, led by the big research universities and high-tech companies, has just persuaded President Bush to ramp up math and science spending. Part of the rationale for this new “American Competitiveness Initiative” is that it’s needed to defend U.S. economic leadership. But while generous math and science funding should be a government priority, the invocation of the threat from China is mostly spurious.

Science and math advocates have been harrumphing about national competitiveness for at least a quarter-century. In the early 1980s the National Science Foundation predicted “looming shortfalls” of scientists and engineers, and the National Commission on Excellence in Education declared, “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” But the American economy went from strength to strength over the next decades, while supposedly more technical countries such as Japan and Germany foundered.

This hasn’t stopped the science lobby from making the same arguments again. According to the recent report from the National Academies that inspired the administration’s new competitiveness initiative, “the scientific and technical building blocks of our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.” Further, the link between technological decline and economic decline is certain, since “85% of measured growth in US income per capita is due to technological change.”

This is embarrassingly flimsy. When economists ay that technological change drives living standards, they don’t mean that scientific ingenuity achieves this by itself. What matters is the way science is diffused through an economy: the availability of venture capital, the flexibility of workers, the quality of corporate leadership, the competence of government policy, the reliability of public infrastructure — all help to determine how science is absorbed. The United States scores well in nearly all these areas, which is why it’s defied alarmist predictions for a quarter of a century and will continue to do so.

The science lobby should also stop pretending that countries compete the same way companies do. Firms such as Toyota and Ford really do go head-to-head against each other; if Toyota has superior technology, it will steal Ford’s customers — and Ford may even disappear. But if China produces Nobel-quality science, it won’t put the United States out of business; rather, Chinese discoveries will help American scientists discover more, too. Equally, Toyota doesn’t sell cars to Ford workers, so there’s no benefit to Ford’s people if Toyota’s quality advances. But China does sell to Americans, so whatever makes it more productive has some upside for the United States as well.

In short, the “China threat” argument ignores the ways that competition between countries, unlike companies, is a positive-sum game. Moreover, to the extent that Chinese institutions — firms or university laboratories — compete against American ones, the alarmists underestimate U.S. strengths.

In the race to turn scientific ideas into businesses, the United States is hard to beat. There’s no dividing wall between academic labs and commerce, and scientists surf from one world to the other on waves of money and cultural approval. Harvard’s Richard Freeman, an economist who has studied the market for scientific talent, recounts a conversation with a physicist who’d collaborated with foreigners. “Ah, so you are helping them to catch up with us,” Freeman commented. “No, they are helping us keep ahead of them,” came back the answer: Because of the superior U.S. business environment, the research was being turned into a company in the United States.

Equally, in the competition to retain the best research scientists, the United States has a lead that tends to reinforce itself. Because nearly all the world’s top universities are American, the world’s top researchers flock here; provided enough visas are available, it’s hard to see why this would change. The story of Gavriel Salvendy, which some might see as an omen of America’s declining status, is in fact more subtle. Salvendy has long recruited star Chinese graduate students to Purdue, where he still does most of his research. Of the 18 Chinese who have completed PhDs under his supervision at the Indiana campus, 15 have stayed on in the United States.

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Posted 2006-01-30 - Copyright The New Yorker

One afternoon last February, Guy Clairou picked up his two-and-a half-year-old son Jayden, from day care and walked him back t their house in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario They were almost home. Jayden was stragglin behind, and, as his father�s back was turned, pit bull jumped over a back-yard fence an lunged at Jayden. �The dog had his head in it mouth and started to do this shake,� Clairoux� wife, JoAnn Hartley, said later. As she watche in horror, two more pit bulls jumped over th fence, joining in the assault. She and Clairou came running, and he punched the first of th dogs in the head, until it dropped Jayden, an then he threw the boy toward his mother Hartley fell on her son, protecting him with he body. �JoAnn!� Clairoux cried out, as all thre dogs descended on his wife. �Cover your neck cover your neck.� A neighbor, sitting by he window, screamed for help. Her partner and friend, Mario Gauthier, ran outside. neighborhood boy grabbed his hockey stic and threw it to Gauthier. He began hitting on of the dogs over the head, until the stick broke. �They wouldn�t stop,� Gauthier said. �As soo as you�d stop, they�d attack again. I�ve neve seen a dog go so crazy. They were lik Tasmanian devils.� The police came. The dog were pulled away, and the Clairouxes and on of the rescuers were taken to the hospital. Fiv days later, the Ontario legislature banned th ownership of pit bulls. �Just as we wouldn�t le a great white shark in a swimming pool,� th province�s attorney general, Michael Bryant had said, �maybe we shouldn�t have thes animals on the civilized streets.
Pit bulls, descendants of the bulldogs used in the nineteenth century for bull baiting and dogfighting, have been bred for �gameness,� and thus a lowered inhibition to aggression. Most dogs fight as a last resort, when staring and growling fail. A pit bull is willing to fight with little or no provocation. Pit bulls seem to have a high tolerance for pain, making it possible for them to fight to the point of exhaustion. Whereas guard dogs like German shepherds usually attempt to restrain those they perceive to be threats by biting and holding, pit bulls try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on an opponent. They bite, hold, shake, and tear. They don�t growl or assume an aggressive facial expression as warning. They just attack. �They are often insensitive to behaviors that usually stop aggression,� one scientific review of the breed states. �For example, dogs not bred for fighting usually display defeat in combat by rolling over and exposing a light underside. On several occasions, pit bulls have been reported to disembowel dogs offering this signal of submission.� In epidemiological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous.
Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don�t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world�s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us (even though many young men are perfectly good drivers), and doctors use generalizations when they tell overweight middle-aged men to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight middle-aged men won�t experience heart trouble). Because we don�t know which dog will bite someone or who will have a heart attack or which drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by generalizing. As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, �painting with a broad brush� is �an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.�
Another word for generalization, though, is �stereotype,� and stereotypes are usually not considered desirable dimensions of our decision-making lives. The process of moving from the specific to the general is both necessary and perilous. A doctor could, with some statistical support, generalize about men of a certain age and weight. But what if generalizing from other traits�such as high blood pressure, family history, and smoking�saved more lives? Behind each generalization is a choice of what factors to leave in and what factors to leave out, and those choices can prove surprisingly complicated. After the attack on Jayden Clairoux, the Ontario government chose to make a generalization about pit bulls. But it could also have chosen to generalize about powerful dogs, or about the kinds of people who own powerful dogs, or about small children, or about back-yard fences�or, indeed, about any number of other things to do with dogs and people and places. How do we know when we�ve made the right generalization?

In July of last year, following the transi bombings in London, the New York Cit Police Department announced that it woul send officers into the subways to conduc random searches of passengers� bags. On th face of it, doing random searches in the hunt fo terrorists�as opposed to being guided b generalizations�seems like a silly idea. As columnist in New York wrote at the time, �Not just �most� but nearly every jihadi who has attacked a Western European or American target is a young Arab or Pakistani man. In other words, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty what an Al Qaeda terrorist looks like. Just as we have always known what Mafiosi look like�even as we understand that only an infinitesimal fraction of Italian-Americans are members of the mob.�
But wait: do we really know what mafiosi look like? In �The Godfather,� where most of us get our knowledge of the Mafia, the male members of the Corleone family were played by Marlon Brando, who was of Irish and French ancestry, James Caan, who is Jewish, and two Italian-Americans, Al Pacino and John Cazale. To go by �The Godfather,� mafiosi look like white men of European descent, which, as generalizations go, isn�t terribly helpful. Figuring out what an Islamic terrorist looks like isn�t any easier. Muslims are not like the Amish: they don�t come dressed in identifiable costumes. And they don�t look like basketball players; they don�t come in predictable shapes and sizes. Islam is a religion that spans the globe.
�We have a policy against racial profiling,� Raymond Kelly, New York City�s police commissioner, told me. �I put it in here in March of the first year I was here. It�s the wrong thing to do, and it�s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country. Look at the diversity here. Who am I supposed to profile?�
Kelly was pointing out what might be called profiling�s �category problem.� Generalizations involve matching a category of people to a behavior or trait�overweight middle-aged men to heart-attack risk, young men to bad driving. But, for that process to work, you have to be able both to define and to identify the category you are generalizing about. �You think that terrorists aren�t aware of how easy it is to be characterized by ethnicity?� Kelly went on. �Look at the 9/11 hijackers. They came here. They shaved. They went to topless bars. They wanted to blend in. They wanted to look like they were part of the American dream. These are not dumb people. Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.�

For the complete article, please see the link below.

Posted at 1:57 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times - THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2006

WASHINGTON Everywhere I go people tell me China and India are going to blow by the United States in the coming decades. They’ve got the hunger. They’ve got the people. They’ve got the future. We Americans are a tired old power, destined to fade back to the second tier of nations, like Britain did in the 20th century.

This sentiment is everywhere - except in the evidence. The facts and figures tell a different story.

Has the United States lost its vitality? No. Americans remain the hardest working people on the face of the earth and the most productive. As William W. Lewis, the founding director of the McKinsey Global Institute, wrote, “The United States is the productivity leader in virtually every industry.” And productivity rates are surging faster now than they did even in the 1990s.

Has the United States stopped investing in the future? No. The United States accounts for roughly 40 percent of the world’s research and development spending. More money was invested in R&D in this country than in the other G-7 nations combined.

Is the United States becoming a less important player in the world economy? Not yet. In 1971, the U.S. economy accounted for 30.52 percent of the world’s gross domestic product. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of Japan, China, India and the Asian tigers. The United States now accounts for 30.74 percent of world gross domestic product, a slightly higher figure.

What about the shortage of scientists and engineers? Vastly overblown. According to Duke School of Engineering researchers, the United States produces more engineers per capita than China or India. According to The Wall Street Journal, firms with engineering openings find themselves flooded with resumes. Unemployment rates for scientists and engineers are no lower than for other professions, and in some specialties, such as electrical engineering, they are notably higher…

Please look for the complete article at nytimes.com

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Copyright The Wall Street Journal
February 2, 2006

Recent reported police killings of protestors in the southeast Chinese villages of Panlong and Dongzhou raise serious questions about China’s struggle for a more sophisticated strategy to contain mounting unrest. For now, mass protests don’t threaten the government’s survival, but the specter of chronic unrest is haunting Beijing’s leaders and affecting vital policy initiatives, including relations with the U.S.

Since Tiananmen Square, China’s leaders have fought to avoid having to face the stark choices that produced that massacre — major concessions or bloody suppression. But by the late ’90s, police statistics showed that rising numbers of citizens were taking their resentments into the street, with the number of protests — officially called “mass incidents” — increasing from 8,700 in 1993 to 74,000 by 2004. Enraged at massive layoffs, plundered pensions, confiscated land and corrupt officials, many Chinese hope protests will attract the attention of senior Party leaders and thereby frighten local bureaucrats into making concessions. This often happens, prompting even more protests as word spreads that officials are caving in to demands.

In 1998, Beijing began groping for better carrots and fancier sticks. No longer able to prevent protests, officials concluded they could contain unrest by minimizing the police violence that risked turning small, peaceful protests into mass movements or riots. Police were increasingly instructed to “be cautious in using force,” cordon off nonviolent protests, and wait until later to round up organizers. China also redoubled efforts to quash activist social organizations, using informants and intimidation to turn organizers against each other. As a carrot, local Party officials and police were ordered to keep a sharp eye out for grievances and try to resolve them before frustration spilled into the streets. Even the new term for demonstrations, “mass” rather than “counterrevolutionary” incidents, is a modest Marxist nod to the legitimacy of many protestors’ grievances.

Beijing hopes it can persuade the great majority of apolitical citizens that the Party can provide economic growth and clean, responsive autocracy, while using disciplined repression to drive a wedge between average citizens and the minority who try to promote systemic change. Beijing also encourages angry citizens to blame local officials, rather than the system itself, for abuses. But as Dongzhou and Panlong illustrate, the government is still far from making its new strategy work. Citizens who dare use the legal petitioning system to resist official abuses frequently suffer detention and beatings at the hands of local officials. In Dongzhou as elsewhere, officials failed miserably to address citizens’ problems, and demonstrations raged on for months before turning violent.

Efforts to professionalize policing are proving uneven. Unable or unwilling to contain protests peacefully, police attack with tear gas, belts, batons and stun guns — further enraging demonstrators. Local officials have deployed hired thugs rather than uniformed police to harass protestors. In Dongzhou, where citizens protested the confiscation of good farming land for a power plant, 20 demonstrators perished when police fired what were officially described as “warning shots.” In Panlong, local officials claimed that a 13-year-old girl allegedly beaten to death by police had actually suffered a heart attack.

There are signs that peaceful resistance is rising, though such trends are hard to monitor. Some dissidents have circumvented efforts to censor Internet discussions of the Panlong case by discussing a classic story of another young girl slain by former Nationalist Government troops. Others have posted messages bearing witness to the Dongzhou killings simply saying, “I know.”

Other forms of resistance are less passive. While police insist that the overwhelming majority of protests remain peaceful, police statistics indicate that violent social-order offenses — brawling, armed fights, obstruction of public work — are rising sharply, and violent and confrontational protests are also reportedly increasing. Dongzhou reflected an increasing toughness in protestors, as they continued their petitioning despite detentions of their leaders, multiple tear-gassings and even violent scuffles with police.

In Zhejiang province last April, police tried to suppress elderly demonstrators who were trying to shut down chemical factories they claimed were killing crops, causing stillbirths and turning local water “the color of soy sauce.” But police actions backfired, sparking a riot that left up to 50 police wounded.

In Mao’s time, attacks on police were virtually unheard of, with an average of just 36 officers dying annually in the line of duty. Since 1990, more than 7,000 have died on duty and nearly 1,000 were reportedly killed (and 30,000 injured) in deliberate attacks. That average — about 67 police killed per year — outstrips by 10 the number of officers “feloniously slain” in the far more heavily armed U.S. in 2004, according to FBI figures.

Fear of exacerbating instability is already shaping Beijing’s responses to problems, rendering many seemingly bold diplomatic departures more superficial than substantial. For example, China can organize the Six Party Talks and deliver North Korea to the table. But many of Beijing’s senior experts privately admit that its fear of instability and refugee flows to its northeast — where protest rates are among the highest — severely limit Beijing’s willingness to pressure Pyongyang. China can officially free up exchange rates, but fear of unemployment and unrest is a major reason the renminbi still trades in a very narrow band. In Central Asia, China’s fear of Muslim unrest is causing it to back repressive regimes and could even backfire by bringing it into conflict with pro-reform Muslims. And perhaps the most ominous question is how Beijing’s fear of nationalist demonstrations might limit its flexibility in easing tensions with Taiwan and Japan.

For protests to threaten the regime’s survival would require several conditions that do not yet exist. These include a major public split in the Party leadership, a massive failure of the security forces, or the rise of a Solidarity-style dissident organization. Alternatively, popular resistance might be galvanized by a major symbolic issue or event, such as corruption, anti-Japan or -Taiwan nationalism, or perhaps the violent deaths of protestors. It is this last scenario that the new security strategy was designed to prevent. Dongzhou and Panlong demonstrate just how far Beijing still has to go.

Mr. Tanner is a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation.

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Copyright Agence France-Presse

These are dark days for China�s media as the communist government, increasingly nervous about social unrest, intensifies control over what can and cannot be reported to the public, shutting down newspapers and sacking journalists who question its authority.

But analysts and journalists say that the tighter it controls the media, the bigger the problem the government is creating for itself by removing one of the few checks on rampant corruption, abuse of power and social injustice, the very factors feeding public dissatisfaction with one-party rule.

�Under such an authoritarian regime, corruption will thrive, people�s interests will be sacrificed and there will only be more suffering,� said Gao Yu, a journalist who was labelled an �enemy of the people� after the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown and has spent a total of seven years in prison.

In the past year, outspoken media organisations have been silenced one after another as more publications and internet websites are closed, and editors and journalists sacked or jailed.

Most recently, the senior editor of Beijing News, or Xinjing Bao, was sacked in December, not long after the head of its sister paper in Guangdong province, Southern Metropolitan News, was removed. Both papers had reported on such sensitive topics as armed suppression of protests and official corruption.

Earlier this month the government closed an influential supplement called Bingdian, or Freezing Point, that had been published for 10 years by China Youth Daily. The supplement was accused of �breaching news propaganda discipline� after an article challenged the official view of foreign occupation of China in the late 19th century.

The government has tightened control of the internet, closing down websites carrying postings by intellectuals and, by jailing people who have used the internet to access or distribute information critical of the government, created a new class of �cyber-dissident�.

According to the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists, China was the world�s leading jailer of journalists last year for the seventh consecutive year, with 32 imprisoned � of which 15 were internet writers.

The controls have been successfully, and controversially, extended to foreign internet service providers, with both Yahoo and Google drawing international criticism for complying with Chinese government censorship requirements.

Last April, Yahoo handed over email account details of journalist Shi Tao, who was later sentenced to 10 years in prison for �divulging state secrets abroad.�

Google has come under fire for launching a self-censored search service in return for the right to operate in China.

Journalists say the Chinese leadership is only too aware of the volatile social situation and fears that free and in-depth reporting of unrest would unleash further discontent.

According to official statistics, the number of �public order disturbances� in China rose by 6.6 per cent to 87,000 last year.

Official corruption remains rampant in China despite many government anti-graft campaigns and is often cited by state media as a major source of public discontent.

Journalists who expose social conflicts or probe sensitive political issues can find themselves on the wrong side of authorities who want to hide any scandal.

�There are many sensitive stories that you can�t report and you know you have to avoid,� said a journalist who declined to be named for fear of retribution.

The Chinese government accused New York Times researcher Zhao Yan of �divulging state secrets� shortly after the paper reported the resignation of former president Jiang Zemin from his top military post. Zhao has been in detention since September 2004.

Political observers said official media censorship tightened in 2004 ahead of the fourth plenary session of the Communist Party�s elite Central Committee, where caution against ideological liberalisation was a key theme.

Paris-based Reporters Without Borders ranks China 159th on a list of 167 countries in its global press freedom index.

�So many issues have never been reported,� Vincent Brossel, the rights group�s Asia Pacific spokesman, said. �It�s creating a sort of distortion and I think it is dangerous in the long-term for the Chinese society.�

Lu Yuegang, a veteran editor who worked at the defunct Bingdian, said this suppression would only lead to more corruption and abuse of government power, sacrificing the country�s long-term social stability.

�Without checks and balances, what sort of a society will this be?� he asked. �If power is not restricted … if people don�t learn about the truth, what kind of a country is this?�

Gao Yu, who won UNESCO�s Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom award in 1997, agreed. �You can�t rely on [President] Hu Jintao and [Premier] Wen Jiabao to save the people, you need supervision by the media,� she said.

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February 1, 2006

It was a long time coming.

”I played for the Red Sox,” Tommy Harper said. ”I coached for the Red Sox. I’ve worked in the front office for the Red Sox. And full disclosure: I still work for them. But I never thought I was a part of Red Sox Nation.

”There’s a difference between playing for the Red Sox and working for the Red Sox and feeling a part of the Red Sox family. I never felt a part of the Red Sox family — until now.”

This was yesterday morning, in the auditorium of the John F. Kennedy Library, where Harper, who at 65 has lost a few steps but still holds the Sox record for stolen bases in a season (54), was celebrating the memory of Jackie Robinson with 200 kids from Umana/Barnes Middle School in East Boston. Jackie would have been 87 today if diabetes had not cut his life short in 1972, three years after Harper, who as a kid growing up in Oakland dreamed of dancing off the bag with the same defiant daring he saw Robinson display, stole 73 bases for the expansion Seattle Pilots and dedicated the American League stolen base title to the man who broke baseball’s color line.

It is ancient history to these kids sitting in the auditorium, but Harper experienced some of the same outrages that tested Robinson’s mettle and manhood. Like the bus rides from Tampa to Fort Myers with the Cincinnati Reds, when the white players would shower after the game, pile onto the bus, and be taken out for a nice steak dinner, while the black players, including future Hall of Famer Frank Robinson, would be given cab fare, told to fend for themselves, and given a time to meet the bus for the long ride back to Tampa.

”Frank said, ‘This is the last time we’re doing this,’ ” Harper said. ”The way Frank handled things, this is the way I’d choose to handle things. I learned from the way Frank handled himself. He said, ‘We’re not all going to make statements about this. Let me do it. Let me go to the front office. We don’t need the newspapers.’

”Frank went to the front office and said, ‘We’re not going.’ The next year, we went to the restaurant. I don’t know what he told the front office, but it changed.”

That was in the 1960s. It was in 1972 when Harper, newly acquired from the Milwaukee Brewers, had an encounter that would cast a pall over his career with the Red Sox. He was in spring training in Winter Haven, Fla., and saw some business cards sticking out from the top of some players’ lockers, but not his.

”I asked Reggie Smith,” Harper said, referring to his African-American teammate, ” ‘What are these?’ He said, ‘Cards to get in the Elks Club.’ I said, ‘Where’s ours?’ He said, ‘We don’t get one.’ “

Harper never said a word about it when he played for the Sox. More than a decade later, when he was coaching for the team, a Globe reporter, Michael Madden, asked him about the Elks, who had maintained a whites-only policy. Harper told his story, and within a year he was fired by the team and wound up working in an auto body shop on Brookline Avenue. He filed an anti-discrimination suit that was settled out of court for a few hundred thousand dollars. It would be more than a decade before he returned, as a member of Jimy Williams’s staff, and now he works in the team’s community relations department.

But for years, the Elks Club experience would be the defining moment of his time spent in a Sox uniform.

”What people never understood,” Harper said yesterday, ”is I never had a problem with the Elks Club. I don’t have a problem with where you want to eat or what club you belong to. My problem was with the Red Sox. How can you let a man come in and distribute cards on a segregated basis, and still call me a teammate? Wait. You can’t call me a teammate or tell me I’m part of the Red Sox family when you let a man in who is segregating us.”

Funny thing is, Harper said, people assumed he’d gone running to Madden with the story, even as the reporter insisted he was the one who initiated the topic. ”They accused me of doing it for money,” said Harper. ”I didn’t use anyone for money.”

It is the kind of story that long has saddled the Sox with a shameful racist legacy, taking its place with Jackie Robinson’s sham tryout, the distinction of being the last big-league team to integrate, its word-of-mouth status as a team where black players didn’t want to play.

Sure, Harper said, the Sox ratcheted up their minority hiring, but only, in his view, under the threat of legal action and public pressure. ”So they hired a few people,” he said. ”It doesn’t mean anything. Fine, but it’s how you’re treated that counts.”

But on this morning, as Pat Williams, the former Orlando Magic executive who cut his teeth in baseball, told the kids about the lessons he drew from Robinson’s life — lessons of courage and self-discipline, character, competition, and leadership — Harper declared that at long last, the Sox are emerging from the shadows of their past.

”When John Henry, Tom Werner, Larry Lucchino bought the team, yes, there was a definite change,” he said. ”There are changes that maybe you can’t see, but I see. There’s a different attitude. There’s a feeling of genuineness. Nobody had to pressure John Henry to change things. He didn’t need anyone to tell him to change. He changed things because he wanted to.”

Harper mentioned how Luis Alicea is climbing up the ladder as a minor league manager. He noted how DeMarlo Hale is coming back to the organization, as the first African-American third base coach in the team’s history. It’s not just with uniformed personnel. He hears it when he walks around the ballpark, talking to other employees of color, ”just your average workers.” He hears it from the fans. He tells of walking out the center-field gate and having the female usher, who did not recognize him, ask him how he enjoyed the game and wish him a good night. Small changes, perhaps, but the cumulative effect is profound.

”I know where this team has been,” he said. ”I know where it is now, and I know in the future where it is going to be. There’s progress being made, and the reason I like it, the Red Sox are not out there saying, ‘Look at what we’ve done, we’ve done this, we’ve done that.’ No, no, no.

”Things are being done because these are good people. It’s inclusive. I don’t think a black person could come now to the ballpark and not have a good experience. The total experience. As a black person, yes, I do feel a difference. I can’t put a finger on it. But it’s not because they hired this guy or that guy. No, it’s not that. It’s not numbers. It’s how well you’re treated.”

There is much still to be done. The Sox, like so many teams in big league baseball, are underrepresented in the front office. Another former Sox player, Ellis Burks, vowed at the winter meetings to one day return as the team’s first black manager. Fewer African-Americans are playing the game, and there are few black faces in the stands.

But if there was a message Harper wanted to impart to those kids in that auditorium, it was this: ”Even though I experienced racial slurs in my career, I’m still here. It didn’t stop me, it didn’t stop Jackie Robinson. These young people, they’ll come in contact with that stuff, too — you’re not going to eliminate it fully — but they can’t let it stop them from their goals.”

A few months ago, Harper was in his living room, watching on TV, when he heard John Henry, agonizing over Theo Epstein’s departure, question whether he was fit to own the Red Sox.

”John Henry is a very private person,” Harper said. ”I know how much that all hurt him. But I’d like to say to John Henry, who was asking, ‘Am I deserving of owning the team?’, in my eyes, yes. Yes, yes, yes.”
� Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

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2006-02-06 Copyright The New Yorker

One afternoon last February, Guy Clairou picked up his two-and-a half-year-old son Jayden, from day care and walked him back t their house in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario They were almost home. Jayden was stragglin behind, and, as his father�s back was turned, pit bull jumped over a back-yard fence an lunged at Jayden. �The dog had his head in it mouth and started to do this shake,� Clairoux� wife, JoAnn Hartley, said later. As she watche in horror, two more pit bulls jumped over th fence, joining in the assault. She and Clairou came running, and he punched the first of th dogs in the head, until it dropped Jayden, an then he threw the boy toward his mother Hartley fell on her son, protecting him with he body. �JoAnn!� Clairoux cried out, as all thre dogs descended on his wife. �Cover your neck cover your neck.� A neighbor, sitting by he window, screamed for help. Her partner and friend, Mario Gauthier, ran outside. neighborhood boy grabbed his hockey stic and threw it to Gauthier. He began hitting on of the dogs over the head, until the stick broke. �They wouldn�t stop,� Gauthier said. �As soo as you�d stop, they�d attack again. I�ve neve seen a dog go so crazy. They were lik Tasmanian devils.� The police came. The dog were pulled away, and the Clairouxes and on of the rescuers were taken to the hospital. Fiv days later, the Ontario legislature banned th ownership of pit bulls. �Just as we wouldn�t le a great white shark in a swimming pool,� th province�s attorney general, Michael Bryant had said, �maybe we shouldn�t have thes animals on the civilized streets.
Pit bulls, descendants of the bulldogs used in the nineteenth century for bull baiting and dogfighting, have been bred for �gameness,� and thus a lowered inhibition to aggression. Most dogs fight as a last resort, when staring and growling fail. A pit bull is willing to fight with little or no provocation. Pit bulls seem to have a high tolerance for pain, making it possible for them to fight to the point of exhaustion. Whereas guard dogs like German shepherds usually attempt to restrain those they perceive to be threats by biting and holding, pit bulls try to inflict the maximum amount of damage on an opponent. They bite, hold, shake, and tear. They don�t growl or assume an aggressive facial expression as warning. They just attack. �They are often insensitive to behaviors that usually stop aggression,� one scientific review of the breed states. �For example, dogs not bred for fighting usually display defeat in combat by rolling over and exposing a light underside. On several occasions, pit bulls have been reported to disembowel dogs offering this signal of submission.� In epidemiological studies of dog bites, the pit bull is overrepresented among dogs known to have seriously injured or killed human beings, and, as a result, pit bulls have been banned or restricted in several Western European countries, China, and numerous cities and municipalities across North America. Pit bulls are dangerous.
Of course, not all pit bulls are dangerous. Most don�t bite anyone. Meanwhile, Dobermans and Great Danes and German shepherds and Rottweilers are frequent biters as well, and the dog that recently mauled a Frenchwoman so badly that she was given the world�s first face transplant was, of all things, a Labrador retriever. When we say that pit bulls are dangerous, we are making a generalization, just as insurance companies use generalizations when they charge young men more for car insurance than the rest of us (even though many young men are perfectly good drivers), and doctors use generalizations when they tell overweight middle-aged men to get their cholesterol checked (even though many overweight middle-aged men won�t experience heart trouble). Because we don�t know which dog will bite someone or who will have a heart attack or which drivers will get in an accident, we can make predictions only by generalizing. As the legal scholar Frederick Schauer has observed, �painting with a broad brush� is �an often inevitable and frequently desirable dimension of our decision-making lives.�
Another word for generalization, though, is �stereotype,� and stereotypes are usually not considered desirable dimensions of our decision-making lives. The process of moving from the specific to the general is both necessary and perilous. A doctor could, with some statistical support, generalize about men of a certain age and weight. But what if generalizing from other traits�such as high blood pressure, family history, and smoking�saved more lives? Behind each generalization is a choice of what factors to leave in and what factors to leave out, and those choices can prove surprisingly complicated. After the attack on Jayden Clairoux, the Ontario government chose to make a generalization about pit bulls. But it could also have chosen to generalize about powerful dogs, or about the kinds of people who own powerful dogs, or about small children, or about back-yard fences�or, indeed, about any number of other things to do with dogs and people and places. How do we know when we�ve made the right generalization?

In July of last year, following the transi bombings in London, the New York Cit Police Department announced that it woul send officers into the subways to conduc random searches of passengers� bags. On th face of it, doing random searches in the hunt fo terrorists�as opposed to being guided b generalizations�seems like a silly idea. As columnist in New York wrote at the time, �Not just �most� but nearly every jihadi who has attacked a Western European or American target is a young Arab or Pakistani man. In other words, you can predict with a fair degree of certainty what an Al Qaeda terrorist looks like. Just as we have always known what Mafiosi look like�even as we understand that only an infinitesimal fraction of Italian-Americans are members of the mob.�
But wait: do we really know what mafiosi look like? In �The Godfather,� where most of us get our knowledge of the Mafia, the male members of the Corleone family were played by Marlon Brando, who was of Irish and French ancestry, James Caan, who is Jewish, and two Italian-Americans, Al Pacino and John Cazale. To go by �The Godfather,� mafiosi look like white men of European descent, which, as generalizations go, isn�t terribly helpful. Figuring out what an Islamic terrorist looks like isn�t any easier. Muslims are not like the Amish: they don�t come dressed in identifiable costumes. And they don�t look like basketball players; they don�t come in predictable shapes and sizes. Islam is a religion that spans the globe.
�We have a policy against racial profiling,� Raymond Kelly, New York City�s police commissioner, told me. �I put it in here in March of the first year I was here. It�s the wrong thing to do, and it�s also ineffective. If you look at the London bombings, you have three British citizens of Pakistani descent. You have Germaine Lindsay, who is Jamaican. You have the next crew, on July 21st, who are East African. You have a Chechen woman in Moscow in early 2004 who blows herself up in the subway station. So whom do you profile? Look at New York City. Forty per cent of New Yorkers are born outside the country. Look at the diversity here. Who am I supposed to profile?�
Kelly was pointing out what might be called profiling�s �category problem.� Generalizations involve matching a category of people to a behavior or trait�overweight middle-aged men to heart-attack risk, young men to bad driving. But, for that process to work, you have to be able both to define and to identify the category you are generalizing about. �You think that terrorists aren�t aware of how easy it is to be characterized by ethnicity?� Kelly went on. �Look at the 9/11 hijackers. They came here. They shaved. They went to topless bars. They wanted to blend in. They wanted to look like they were part of the American dream. These are not dumb people. Could a terrorist dress up as a Hasidic Jew and walk into the subway, and not be profiled? Yes. I think profiling is just nuts.�

For the full article, please see the link below.

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Copyright The New York Times

It is a mystery worth exploring: Yao Ming, the best-known athlete from a country of 1.3 billion people and the top vote-getter among N.B.A. All-Stars, is the name on the back of the third best-selling jersey in China.

Whither Yao?

It sounds like an extraordinary reversal of conventional wisdom. Yao was regarded as a phenomenon, an athletic symbol of China’s rise as a world power, an unstoppable force of marketing in China and a basketball bridge to the United States.

What, then, does it mean that Yao ranks third in Chinese jersey sales behind Tracy McGrady, his Houston teammate, and Allen Iverson, in figures compiled from the start of the season through Dec. 31?

Not to disparage McGrady and Iverson, but they are not Chinese, nor do they stand 90 inches high. So does their ascending appeal in China mean that Yao has lost his power to wow? Is he surrendering his cachet to the littler men?

Ric Bucher, the author of “Yao: A Life in Two Worlds,” said yesterday that Chinese fans were discerning and knew the pecking order of stardom in the N.B.A. “They take a tremendous amount of pride in Yao, but they also recognize that he’s not the best player in the N.B.A,” Bucher said.

Nor is he the best player on the Rockets. That’s McGrady.

Bill Duffy, Yao’s agent, said: “Yao is a fixture there, but there’s a newness about someone like McGrady and an appreciation of his ability. When he was with Orlando, they probably didn’t know much about him.”

This, then, is not about the fall of Yao, even if this is the first time his jersey has ranked below No. 1 in China. This is about the global marketing of a league that will have 270 N.B.A. games carried this season on 24 Chinese TV networks � 69 of them featuring the Rockets.

“We don’t believe this is a coincidence,” said Sal LaRocca, senior vice president for global merchandising at the N.B.A. “The Rockets are heavily televised, and Tracy McGrady is highly identifiable.” Iverson, LaRocca said, “is a case unto himself.”

“He continues to be immensely popular around the world,” LaRocca added.

It does not hurt McGrady in China to be associated with Yao, and for Chinese viewers to see him amass nearly 27 points and 7 rebounds a game. Yao, in a season that has been shortened by injuries, is averaging 19.7 points and 9 rebounds.

Making promotional tours of China last summer did not hurt McGrady or Iverson. McGrady was there with his sneaker maker, Adidas, with its vast retail presence in China, and Iverson was there for Reebok, which produces his long-popular signature shoe line.

According to an Associated Press report, 800 pairs of a special-edition McGrady shoe sold out in Chinese stores in one day last summer.

And it did not hurt McGrady’s exposure to the Chinese fan base to have joined the Rockets in time for the China Games in 2004, when Houston played Sacramento in exhibition games in Beijing and Shanghai.

Bucher recalled during those exhibitions how well informed the fans were, offering players applause in direct proportion to their place in the N.B.A. universe. “The subtleties were impressive,” he said.

China is a consequential and growing market for the N.B.A. It is the league’s fifth-largest outlet for licensed products. Currently, LaRocca said, the licensed jersey sales number in the low hundreds of thousands.

And here is where Yao may not be getting his due, LaRocca said, because of counterfeiting of Yao’s tops. If the only Yao jerseys worn in China were licensed by the N.B.A., he may still be No. 1.

“If you think about it, and this is speculation,” LaRocca said, “if you were making an unauthorized product in China, it would be a Yao product.”

Jerseys in Yao’s supersized dimensions � a size 54 with four inches of extra length � are not manufactured for the Chinese market (though they are in the United States). The popularity of McGrady and Iverson’s jerseys, apart from their skills and performance, might have something to do with their size, especially the 6-foot Iverson’s, being closer to the average fan’s.

“Historically, most people identify with guards,” LaRocca said.

Only three big men � Yao, Shaquille O’Neal and Kevin Garnett � rank in the top 10 of Chinese licensed jersey sales. Only two � O’Neal and Tim Duncan � are in the top 10 over all; further down on that list, Yao is 25th. Being No. 3 in Chinese sales may be surprising, but it is not a shabby performance for Yao, who remains a huge force in his native country through his endorsement of Pepsi, his video games and his Web site. “His brand generates business far beyond jersey sales,” Duffy said. “It’s iconic.”

Yao’s sartorial appeal in China, at least through the prism of sleeveless jersey sales, is not likely to deviate throughout his career, LaRocca said.

“He’ll be at or near the top,” he said, “as long as he’s in the league.”

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

SUNDAY, JANUARY 29, 2006

DAVOS The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is a poor reflection of the world. But it is a useful mirror of the West’s received wisdom about the world.

This year the main theme, in conversations as well as in formal sessions, was shock and awe at the economic growth of China and India and their impact on everything from copper prices to the global motor industry to office jobs in North America. A mix of admiration and fear accompanied this vision of two Asian elephants threatening to invade Western pastures.

The likes of Google paraded the obsequious inclinations of Western companies still dreaming of vast profits from the land of a billion people. But this was not accompanied by much willingness to accord the non-Western world more say in the way the world is run, whether at the International Monetary Fund or in determining how to respond to the desires of Iran to assert its rights to nuclear development.

The obsession with China and India was, to this observer at least, rather bizarre. Both have been growing apace - albeit it as different speeds - and gradually integrating into the world economy for more than a decade. Nothing much has happened of late to suggest that a critical mass has just been reached which must cause the West to feel panicky. Both may continue to grow rapidly for two more decades. That will change the balance of economic power in the world. But what’s new about that?

Most striking at Davos was the lack of representation of the East Asian countries that have done most to alter that balance of power over the past 40 years - and continue to do so. The economies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan have spawned the companies that have challenged Western domination of almost every industry. These are the companies that account for most of the products being exported from China, be they shoes, toys or laptops.

The low profile at Davos of these East Asian innovators and of their cousins from prospering Southeast Asia, who collectively own of $1.5 trillion in Western debt, stood in sharp contrast to the India/China obsession. So too did the absence of countries such as Indonesia, Bangladesh and Thailand.

Perhaps the representation was skewed because this year Davos - whose dates are decided by the organizers - coincided with the Lunar New Year, when half of East Asia is totally closed and the rest operates at half speed. Perhaps it was because of tight-fisted attitudes on the part of Asian companies and governments that do not regard the World Economic Forum’s annual fest as a good investment.

Whatever the cause, the result was unfortunate.

A discussion of the future of the global financial architecture, for example, fielded the established Western luminaries - Jean-Claude Trichet of the European Central Bank, Rodrigo de Rato of the International Monetary Fund, Andrew Crockett, formerly of the Bank for International Settlements and now with JP Morgan, and Timothy Geithner, head of the New York Federal Reserve. But in the absence of any of the Asian owners of most of the world’s foreign exchange reserves, debate was minimal. Indeed, without the presence of Noriel Roubini, a sparky academic from New York known for his expertise on the Asian crisis, there would have been no debate at all, just a grudging acceptance that some changes at the margin the way the financial world is run were necessary.

A discussion on Iran involved Americans, Brits and one very open minded Iranian academic. The Westerners took it as read that “the world” was worried about Iran and determined to bring it to heel. The phrase “the international community” - code for received Western opinion - was on parade. That was the sort of position that could only be sustained by not having any Indians or Chinese, let alone Arabs, Africans or Brazilians, on the panel. It is easy to be sure when you think you are the world, even if you simultaneously fear the emergence of new economic powers.

There was what promised to be a very interesting and necessary session drawing attention to the pandemic of chronic diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, which are shortening tens of millions of lives, particularly in the developing world. But with experts and audience alike almost all from the West, the discussion never progressed much beyond marginal issues in North America and Europe such as soft drinks and junk food in schools.

Davos does provide many opportunities to meet, to discuss, to learn, even to initiate. Africa generally gets a slightly better hearing than at most international gatherings. But it badly needs to change its list of panelists if it is to be more than a window on trans-Atlantic thinking.

Posted at 1:27 PM · Comments (0)

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