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

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A Continent for the Taking

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

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The link above is to a small, downloadable version of a forthcoming book about Kyoto by Stuart Isett.
I know this work for having pored over it, in rapture, and for having traveled a fair amount with Stuart on assignment.
This is sublime photography and black and white at its best.

Posted at 2:04 AM · Comments (0)

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a warning
about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The
disease is contracted through dangerous, high-risk behavior. The
disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced “gonna re-elect him.”
Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the
previous four years.

Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social
personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic disease
overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new
information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept
responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado,
uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history,
tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing
behavior. Naturalists and epidemiologists are amazed at how this
destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found
in Texas.

Posted at 10:25 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Published: April 28, 2006
EVER since Chad gained independence 46 years ago, it has been a world-class model of political dysfunction. In the 1970’s, Chad’s president, François Tombalbaye, compelled civil servants to renounce Western customs, undergo a tribal initiation rite known as yondo and profess belief in a nationalist creed he called Chaditude. He was executed in 1975. In the 1980’s, a rebel leader named Hissène Habré led an army to the presidential palace and seized power. He became known as the “African Pinochet” and murderously pursued opponents for nearly a decade.

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Sam Weber
In 1990, Mr. Habré was chased out by an armed faction led by Chad’s current president, Idriss Déby. Now Mr. Déby is facing his own rebellion.

Americans might dismiss this numbing cycle of coups as esoteric history belonging to a troubled and distant country. They shouldn’t. The C.I.A. armed Mr. Habré for years, and since 2003, the United States military has been training and equipping Mr. Déby’s army, making his fight to stay in office our fight, too.

Last year, Chad took part in a vast, international military exercise organized by the United States — the largest exercise of its kind in Africa since World War II, according to the Defense Department. This summer, American forces will continue to advise Chadian soldiers, and Congress is expected to allocate $500 million for a five-year program to train and equip several Saharan armies — including Mr. Déby’s.

The military hopes these initiatives will help contain the threat of terrorism by bringing order to the Great Desert and its borderlands. For centuries, the Sahara has been a lawless realm, and with millions of Muslims living across the region in isolated communities, counterterrorism officials fear that Islamic militants may seek sanctuary there.

But dispensing military aid to Chad now — with Mr. Déby fighting hundreds of rebels backed by Sudan — seems reckless. It puts American military equipment and expertise in the hands of a desperate dictator. Worse still, it risks pouring additional fuel into the human furnace of Darfur, and it may well come to impede the careful diplomatic work required to solve that crisis.

So far, American officials have made much of Sudanese assistance to the rebels, framing the recent conflict in Chad as an outgrowth of the tragedy in Darfur. There is some truth to this. But the violence in Chad also has its own political narrative. During his 16 years in power, Mr. Déby has ruled Chad brutally. His security forces have committed torture, rapes, summary executions and mass killings.

Mr. Déby is a member of the Zaghawa — a northern tribe making up roughly 5 percent of Chad’s population — and last year the State Department described his regime as a Zaghawa oligarchy shielded by a security and intelligence apparatus that violates human rights with impunity. In 2004, Mr. Déby altered Chad’s Constitution to grant himself another term in office. Elections are scheduled for next Wednesday. There is little likelihood they will be fair.

Only one compelling argument exists for giving Chad military aid, and it follows from the logic of lesser evils. Many of the refugees fleeing Darfur are Zaghawa, and Mr. Déby has taken them in. If his regime collapses, tens of thousands of people will once again be at the mercy of Sudan’s janjaweed marauders, and the genocide may spread.

This argument, though, is complicated by another unsettling development. In recent months, scores of Chadian soldiers have defected to the rebel militias. If the defections continue, they raise the horrific possibility that American military equipment and expertise could end up going to men aligned with the janjaweed. In that case, our military assistance to Chad, far from containing political anarchy, would only add to it.

Raffi Khatchadourian traveled to Chad in 2005 for the International Reporting Project at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

Posted at 10:45 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

THURSDAY, APRIL 27, 2006

BOSTON Last year in Britain I went to hear Simon Schama of Columbia University lecture about his book, “Rough Crossings,” which has just been published in the United States. The British-born professor’s tale was music to British ears, but could make an American a little uncomfortable.

His story is the story of thousands of blacks in the 13 American Colonies who rallied to the British lines during the Revolutionary War because they believed that is where freedom lay. It is a tale not often told in the United States, where, if blacks are mentioned at all, it has most often been in the context of blacks and whites together fighting against the tyranny of King George.

In America, Crispus Attucks, who fell to British bullets in the Boston Massacre of 1770, is celebrated here while Newton Prince, a Boston barber who testified on behalf of the British soldiers who shot Attucks, is not. The “redcoats” were acquitted, with the help of their lawyer, John Adams. Prince, however, was tarred and feathered by indignant Bostonians.

When the war came, Prince, not surprisingly, joined the British side. Later, when the British began to actively recruit blacks by promising them freedom, thousands followed Prince into the king’s service - not only slaves, but freed men too.

The Continental Congress was ambiguous about blacks on the American side, even though many African-Americans had died for the American cause at Bunker Hill and in Rhode Island. General Washington said he needed all the men he could get, but in 1776 Congress told him that although he could keep the freed blacks he already had, he could not recruit any more. Slaves were to be excluded altogether.

Although it was mostly in the slave economies of the South that whites objected to black soldiers fighting on their side, Northerners were not much better. New Hampshire excluded “lunatics, idiots, and Negroes” from their militias. In contrast, the British offered unambiguous freedom. As a result, hundreds of American blacks fought to keep America British.

While the Patriots’ rhetoric railed against the sins of George III, many American blacks decided that the English king, as Schama put it, was their “enemy’s enemy, and thus their friend, emancipator, and guardian.” For blacks, our “vaunted war for liberty was… a war for the perpetuation of servitude,” Schama said.

One can say that the offer of freedom was a cynical move to undercut the American cause, and that slavery still existed elsewhere in the British Empire. But when the British lost the war, and the Americans demanded their slaves back, the British lived up to their obligations and evacuated the black men, women, and children who had rallied to their side - along with white loyalists - to resettle them in Canada. One black man even changed his name to “British Freedom.” But the blacks who sailed away with the American “Tories” didn’t find the promised land in Canada.

Later, the British would take many of those who wanted to resettle in Africa to Sierra Leone, where their descendants live to this day.

The Founding Fathers of the United States knew well the double standard embedded in the liberty they preached. Patrick “give-me-liberty-or-give-me- death” Henry admitted that he might be against holding slaves in principle, but “I’m drawn along by the general inconveniency of living without them.”

Schama wondered aloud how his book would be received in America. For although there are plenty of books critical about this or that aspect of American history, by in large the Founding Fathers have been deified in this country. Schama joked that he would not look good in an orange Guantánamo jumpsuit.

Do we Americans glorify our Founding Fathers too uncritically? Certainly, a great many biographies have been worshipful. Thucydides and Herodotus, the fathers of history, did not “whitewash the past,” Schama said. The story of the Peloponnesian wars “is the story of a cock-up,” he said.

Do we, as a nation of immigrants, need whitewashed founding legends to unite us? Do Americans, in these morally ambiguous times of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and the secret prisons into which our prisoners disappear without trial or hope, long for heroes and heroic times? Perhaps Americans feel a need to hang on to the glory days of our national youth, when all our leaders were brilliant, brave, and beyond reproach, even if it is not always entirely true.

(H.D.S. Greenway’s column appears regularly in The Boston Globe.)

Posted at 4:55 PM · Comments (0)

Wednesday, April 26, 2006 - Copyright Slate

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, 89, died Tuesday. She was born in Scranton, Pa., but she’s best associated with New York City, where she worked as a journalist, and later, with her adopted home, Toronto (she became a Canadian citizen). She was an activist, a widely published writer, and an original thinker. In the weeks to come, much will be written about her central role in shaping our ideas—and our ideals—of urbanism. The praise will be deserved. During the 1960s, a time when the reigning orthodoxy was urban renewal, which generally took the form of urban demolition, she championed a more evolutionary, humanist, and small-scale approach to city planning.

Though neither a designer nor an urban economist, Jacobs wrote what is undoubtedly the most influential book on city planning of the second half of the 20th century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The first sentence is characteristically direct: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.” Jacobs criticized what she considered the utopian and misguided theories of Modernism, and she also rejected the other chief urban theories that had influenced 20th century planning: the monumental City Beautiful and the countrified Garden City movement. She was not nitpicking. This was a frontal attack on the idea that cities could be designed at all.

Jacobs’ own prescription, inasmuch as she had one, was based on an appreciation of the vitality of traditional urban neighborhoods, in particular Greenwich Village in New York, where she lived. Lively and interesting street life, a diversity of uses, residential areas intensified by parks and squares and public buildings, a mixture of old and new buildings, and the importance of what she called districts—areas with a functional and recognizable identity—these were the ingredients of successful urban neighborhoods. Compared with the ambitious and innovative ideas of architects and planners, it sounded ridiculously simple, not to say simplistic.

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When The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, the professional urbanists were not amused. In his New Yorker column, titled “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” Lewis Mumford, a chief spokesman for the importance of planning, called the book a “mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” Even seven years later, the leading architectural and urban academic of that time, John Burchard, would condescendingly refer to Jacobs’ book as an “entertaining expression of a point of view [that] had a transitory acclaim.”

Transitory? Death and Life, which is still in print, went on to change the way that succeeding generations of architects and planners thought about cities. “Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration,” she wrote, “with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.” The second half of her statement never quite came true—the suburbanization of America, which she chose largely to ignore, was too advanced and too powerful. But the current revival of many American downtowns, the converted lofts, the restored historic districts, and the residential real-estate booms in cities like New York, Boston, and San Francisco attest to the essential correctness of her vision.

That vision of the urban good life had wide appeal, but the supply of old cities that offered the requisite mix of street life, architecture, and diversity was limited. The lively city districts that Jacobs championed, including her beloved Village, have become exclusive enclaves, closed to all but the extremely wealthy. She always considered the amenities of city life to be everyday and widely available goods. Little could she have imagined then that they would become luxuries instead.

Witold Rybczynski’s last piece for Slate looked at the new generation of skyscrapers. Andrew Blum visited malls designed to look like vibrant, Jane Jacobs-esque city streets.

Posted at 9:18 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Boston Globe

| April 23, 2006

THREE YEARS OF FIGHTING in the Darfur region of Sudan have left an estimated 180,000 dead and nearly 2 million refugees. In recent weeks, both the UN and the US have turned up the volume of their demands to end the violence (which the Bush administration has publicly called genocide), but they’ve been hard pressed to turn their exhortations into action. The government in Khartoum has scuttled the UN’s plans to take control of the troubled peacekeeping operations currently being led by the African Union, and NATO recently stated publicly that a force of its own in Darfur is ”out of the question.” Meanwhile, refugee camps and humanitarian aid workers continue to be attacked, and the 7,000 African Union troops remain overstretched and ineffective.

But according to J. Cofer Black, vice chairman of the private security firm Blackwater, there is another option that ought to be on the table: an organization that could commit significant resources and expertise to bolster the African Union peacekeepers and provide emergency support to their flagging mission.

A few weeks ago, at an international special forces conference in Jordan, Black announced that his company could deploy a small rapid-response force to conflicts like the one in Sudan. ”We’re low cost and fast,” Black said, ”the question is, who’s going to let us play on their team?”

Private security companies like Blackwater have thrived in Iraq, where the US military has relied on them for everything from guarding convoys to securing the Green Zone. But these companies recognize that the demand for their services in Iraq will eventually diminish, and Blackwater, for one, is looking for new markets. It’s not alone in seeing peacekeeping as a growth area. Competitors such as Aegis and Dyncorp have also realized that while conflicts like the one in Darfur may not bring them profits on the order of Iraq, there’s no shortage of them. And if such companies are able to help the international community succeed in peacekeeping, it could improve the image of an industry that hasn’t enjoyed much support from the press or the public.

Private military companies have had a hard time convincing the international community that privatizing peacekeeping would be as good for Darfur, and for the rest of the world, as for their industry. In part that’s because of the mixed reputation their work in Iraq has earned them and because the explosive growth of the industry has raised fears that security contractors working for the US government in Baghdad (and post-Katrina New Orleans) could become bona fide armies for hire. But the discomfort also has deeper roots, in the complicated history of private intervention in these kinds of conflicts. When Kofi Annan was UN undersecretary general for peacekeeping, he explored the option of hiring the South African private military company Executive Outcomes to aid in the Rwandan refugee crisis. He ultimately decided against the option, declaring that ”the world is not yet ready to privatize peace.”

The world still appears to be unready-and representatives of private military companies believe that’s shortsighted. ”When traditional peacekeepers can’t provide an adequate response because of their home country obligations, there’s an alternative that should be openly and frankly discussed. And that’s a private professional group,” says Chris Taylor, Blackwater’s vice president for strategic initiatives. As he sees it, his company could provide the necessary security inplaces like Darfur ”so that traditional NGOs and aid agencies could do the work they can’t do [now].”

The UN and others clearly have legitimate questions about whether private military companies can do what they claim. But the industry, agitating to led a hand where the international community has dragged its feet, has raised some legitimate questions of its own. When the world’s governments and multilateral organizations have proven as ineffectual as they have in Darfur, should they turn to the private sector for help? In the absence of a viable alternative, is the international community’s aversion to what some call ”mercenarism” stronger than its will to fight genocide?

Private contractors have been providing logistics in low-intensity conflicts in African nations for years, and conducting training operations as well. Dyncorp, for example, is currently involved in what is by most accounts a very successful mission in Liberia, helping train the army and national guard in the aftermath of Liberia’s long and bloody civil war.

Indeed, while the industry has grown and matured in Iraq due to the US military’s unprecedented reliance on contractors there, it’s actually in Africa that early private military companies first did significant work.

In the mid and late ’90s, the South African firm Executive Outcomes and British firm Sandline International offered direct combat support to the governments of Angola and Sierra Leone. In Angola, 500 ex-special forces officers working for Executive Outcomes conducted sophisticated airstrikes and commando operations to help the Angolan military retake its diamond mines and oil fields from the rebel group UNITA. In Sierra Leone, Executive Outcomes and later Sandline were hired to combat the RUF insurgency. With targeted helicopter attacks and ground assaults, both firms dominated tactically, but fighting broke out soon after their respective contracts ended.

The legacy of these operations, as a result, is mixed. On the one hand, the firms’ tactical prowess efficiently and effectively stopped the fighting, saving thousands of lives and leading to the return of over a million refugees. But the benefits were not long-lasting.

What companies like Blackwater are proposing to do in Darfur today is very different from the combat missions of a decade ago. ”We have no interest in offensive operations,” says Taylor flatly. Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, the industry’s trade association, agrees: ”[Executive Outcomes] and Sandline were supporting offensive combat operations. I don’t think that’ll happen again, and certainly not that way.”

Today, private military companies are offering defensive services-they propose to secure refugee camps and vulnerable villages, guard humanitarian aid agencies and NGOs, or, depending on the requirements of the contract, assist peacekeepers like the African Union troops in Darfur. ”Security work is more about avoiding violence, it’s not about inflicting violence,” says Joe Mayo, formerly with the security and training firm Triple Canopy, and now an independent consultant to the industry. ”A good day for a security guy is when nothing happens.”

Aid agencies and NGOs in Darfur haven’t had many good days lately. The beleaguered African Union peacekeeping force has few resources to spend defending an NGO like Save the Children, and the ability of such organizations to continue working in the area is very much in question. ”You can’t expect people to work in conflict zones without protection,” says Christopher Kinsey, a scholar with the Joint Services Command at King’s College London and author of the forthcoming book ”Corporate Soldiers and International Security” (Routledge), ”especially as noncombatant immunity is no longer respected.” Kinsey believes there’s a legitimate role for private military companies in humanitarian operations.

There’s little question that companies like Blackwater could be more effective operationally than the African Union, which has been hampered by its peacekeepers’ lack of command and control experience. Private military companies boast a roster of former special forces officers and law enforcement officers who are accustomed to volatile conflict and post-conflictareas like Sudan.

Blackwater also subjects all of its personnel to an impressive array of extra training-whether they’re training to work in Baghdad or the firm’s North Carolina headquarters. They take classes in international humanitarian law, leadershp, ethics, regional awareness, and ”customs and traditions.” They’ve recently approached Amnesty International about teaching human rights education classes. And the International Peace Operations Association boasts that its code of conduct was written by human rights lawyers.

The industry also claims that it’s far cheaper than its multilateral or military counterparts. ”We offer the ability to create a right-sized solution-which creates a cost savings right off the bat,” says Taylor. By contrast, Brooks notes, ”NATO is insanely expensive; it’s not a cost-effective organization. Neither is the [African Union]. Private companies would be much, much cheaper. When we compared their costs to most UN operations, we came up with 10 to 20 percent of what the UN would normally charge.”

But while many would agree that there’s an enormous need for the peacekeeping services that companies like Blackwater are willing and able to supply, that does not mean there’s a market. ”The question isn’t their operational ability,” says David Isenberg, senior analyst at the British American Security Information Council, ”they’ve demonstrated an ability at least equivalent to a decently run UN operation. It’s a question of political will.”

As the industry is the first to admit, this political will remains elusive. ”The political dimension to this discussion is far more difficult than the tactical dimension,” says Taylor. In 2003, a consortium of for-profit companies was formed to try to supplement the UN mission in Congo with everything from aerial surveillance to ”armed rapid deployment police.” It was never adopted. Asked whether the UN’s official position on using private security contractors has changed, UN spokesman Farhan Haq replied, ”The one-word answer is no.”

Such an answer may suggest a reflexive discomfort with privatizing force. But it also represents some nuanced, widely shared concerns. The first, and most common, is accountability. And it isn’t merely hypothetical, considering the alleged involvement of private contractors in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the recent conviction of the military contractor Custer Battles for government contract fraud in Iraq, and earlier, in Bosnia, the involvement of Dyncorp contractors in a forced prostitution ring.

”There are some legitimate reasons to be skeptical,” allows Isenberg. ”How do you ensure oversight, compliance with international humanitarian law, follow the rules of warfare, rules of engagement, comply with the Geneva Conventions, and the whole bureaucratic panoply of rules that come into play?” Particularly when you’re trying to preserve fast, flexible, and inexpensive deployment.

Compounding the problem of accountability is the fact that private companies are of course not just out to save the world, but to make money. Assuming an industry made up of rational actors, eager to maximize profits, can loyalty to a particular firm-or a particular client-be maintained? Can standards? What happens when there are conflicts of interest? The industry claims that it would only accept contracts from legally recognized bodies, but what if this body were an unsavory regime?

Without uniform regulation of the private military industry, the answers to these questions largely depend on one’s faith in the market’s power to encourage good behavior. As Kinsey sees it, the industry actually takes corporate responsibility quite seriously. ”It’s not because the companies are being altruistic,” he says. ”It’s beneficial in the long term for them to conduct themselves responsibly.”

More fundamentally, many believe that the international community has a special responsibility to take on problems such as Darfur-and that outsourcing humanitarian interventions to the private sector is just another way of sidestepping the hard political debates that should take place in public.

But the abstract ideal of an engaged international community might seem a rarefied consideration in light of the realities on the ground.
<>”This came up a long time ago. People were saying that if we use private sector in the Congo, the international community will never get its act together,” says industry spokesman Doug Brooks. ”But that was 3 million dead Congolese ago. The international cmmunity isn’t going to wake up no matter how many people you kill. I think that it would be a good idea for the international community to get its act together. But we’ve got to find another way.”

Rebecca Ulam Weiner is a fellow at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Posted at 12:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Posted Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Hey, Johnny and Joan Deadline: Are you paranoid that grand juries will demand to see your notes? Just a little wiggy about lawyers in civil cases subpoenaing the paper trail you assembled for your last big story? Fretting over the possibility that the NSA or other government snoops might have placed you under surveillance? Frightened that a court or agency will discover the identities of your confidential sources after obtaining your phone log or your e-mail?

Then you’ve come to the right column.

The man can’t subpoena that which does not exist. So, as long as you’re prepared to defy a court order and go to jail on a contempt charge, here are some privacy techniques proven in the field by mobsters, spies, al-Qaida, and tobacco companies.

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Don’t Write Down Anything: Anything committed to paper or to a computer file can 1) end up out of your legal control; and 2) be subpoenaed. When your source ventures into sensitive national-security areas, think about putting your pencil down and learn to rely on memory. Or take cryptic notes that won’t identify your source to any outside reader and won’t help the prosecutor narrow his subpoena list.

Destroy Your Notes After Publication: If you can’t break yourself from taking copious notes, burn them the day your story appears. This tip will not necessarily improve your journalism. For instance, I’ve been saved countless times by ancient notes at the bottom of a drawer in my home office, and I continue to drop my notebooks there in hopes of writing the n + 1 story based on them. Notes also help protect you in libel suit defenses. If you decide to destroy your notes, make sure to 1) do it before the subpoena arrives so you can’t be charged with destroying evidence; and 2) be consistent, as a judge may decide to make your life miserable if he learns that you destroy notes about national-security stories on a tight schedule but preserve notes from other stories willy-nilly.

Use the Company’s Computer System Selectively: If you intend to protect your notes, don’t use your publication’s computer system. Just as Time Warner surrendered e-mails in the Plame investigation after exhausting all legal appeals, your boss will do the same. Keep your notes to yourself, and don’t compose early drafts of your story on the company’s computer or e-mail system, because those drafts might contain information you want to keep from the government. Give your editors your final draft of the story.

Encrypt Your Files: If you must keep voluminous notes, encrypt your files and then delete them with an industrial-strength program after publishing (the ones other people use for porn). Because you never know when a subpoena for your computer’s hard disk might be served, and nobody knows for sure whether the NSA can break commercially available encryption, the ultraparanoid may want to encrypt and save all files to an external thumb drive and destroy them upon publication. Imagine how smug you’ll feel when the IT police cart your computer away and all your sensitive data are safe in your pocket.

Use E-mail Judiciously: Unless you’ve encrypted your e-mail or use some anonymizer software, assume that everything you send can be intercepted and read. Some ISPs have been known to surrender e-mail without a search warrant, so don’t expect them to protect you. If you must use e-mail to contact sources, make sure to use e-mail accounts that don’t scream “MEMBER OF THE PRESS.” You don’t want your White House or Pentagon source to be reading his BlackBerry in close quarters where somebody might spot that he’s just gotten e-mail from the nytimes.com or newsweek.com domains. Don’t be lulled into using your office or home computer to send e-mail from your “secret” e-mail as records of all your Web activity are routinely saved to the system for the government’s prying eyes.

Beware of the Office Telephone: Prosecutors and defense attorneys love to subpoena phone logs to establish that a source and a reporter have conversed. There’s no law that says that a company must set up its phone system so that every incoming and outgoing call is perfectly logged, so news organizations should disable this function on their phone systems if they haven’t already. If your source must call you, have him cover his tracks by dialing the switchboard number and asking to be transferred to your extension.

Use Prepaid Cell Phones: If you must make phone calls, do like Tony Soprano and use a prepaid cell phone purchased with cash. If prosecutors succeed in subpoenaing your sources’ phone logs, the logs won’t automatically identify you as the sources’ contact. Destroy the phones after a decent interval. Given al-Qaida’s affinity for prepaid cell phones, they might not be 100 percent secure. For all we know, the cell-phone companies may share information on these with the government or otherwise crimp their security. Beware. (If you can’t afford prepaid cells, try pay phones.)

Get a Skype Account: If you desire 256-bit encryption protection for your phone conversations, get a VOIP phone system such as the one offered by Skype. Make sure your source does, too. But remember: While these calls may be extraordinarily difficult to tap, they do generate easily subpoenaed phone logs.

Skulk Around: Never meet a sensitive source at a location where you must sign in or show an ID. How stupid are you? Try underground parking garages at night.

Practice the Art of Conversation: The modalities of language are such that your source can tell you valuable things without actually saying them, which means he’ll be able to defeat the polygraph at Langley (if it comes to that), and you’ll be able to give truthful testimony to a grand jury if you agree to testify and outwit the prosecutor. Cough once for yes, twice for no, three times for maybe. In the overkill department would be a veiled message that states: “Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusters, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life. Until then, you will remain in my thoughts and prayers.”

Write in a Stealthy Manner: Obviously, the more sources on the record, the greater the reproducibility and reliability of a story. But reporters on the national-security beat could give sources better cover by writing in an oblique manner. The current American Journalism Review quotes Washington Post reporter Sue Schmidt as saying that at the Post, “now we might not say something is classified information or [from] a State Department source” when it is. Alas, taking the word “classified” out of a story is sort of like dressing Halle Berry in an awning: Will anybody want to look at it? Another way for reporters to protect sources is to write from assertion rather than citing current and former intelligence officials. I acknowledge that most of the “remedies” in this article will dilute quality journalism, but what else are you going to do?

You’re Only As Good As Your Source: If preserving a source’s anonymity is the reporters’ goal, it makes no sense for the reporter to take care in his tradecraft while the source stumbles around like Homer Simpson. FBI official Mark Felt, who was recently outed as Bob Woodward’s “Deep Throat,” was a remarkably self-protective source whose cagey leaks advanced Woodward’s reporting but didn’t lead back to the source (see the previous discussion of the art of conversation). Distribute this article to naive sources.

Create Diversions: Think Ocean’s Twelve.

A Manhattan Project To Create a Neuralizer: “Nothing can expunge knowledge from a journalist’s mind,” says attorney Bruce Brown of Baker & Hostetler. After all the documents and notes are destroyed and all the phone calls and e-mails are adequately masked, a subpoenaed reporter’s brain will still contain the information the prosecutor wants. If the American Society of Newspaper Editors would only fund the development of a “neuralizer,” such as was used in the movie Men in Black, reporters could reliably shed every memory about sources after the story goes to press.

Posted at 10:24 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

April 24, 2006; Page A14

Before and after each Sino-American summit, Beijing offers a triple
spin: China is an equal of the U.S., the U.S. needs China even more than
China needs the U.S., and the two powers are fundamentally like-minded.
Left out are a few points. Chinese come to the U.S. and read scathing
criticisms of President Bush in American newspapers. Americans go to
China and never read a word of criticism of President Hu Jintao in “China
Daily.” The Chinese state creates a lock-step view of events within
China and the world that is completely different from our own marketplace
of ideas.

Asymmetry marks access and availability of information in the U.S. and
China: 100,000 Chinese students are on our campuses (enormously more
than the Americans on Chinese campuses), and they have extraordinary
access to information, whereas many sensitive materials are withheld from
Americans in China. Hundreds of prominent Americans who know a lot about
China are pro-Beijing and are publicly critical of U.S. policy toward
China. That is their right. But there is no equivalent community of
specialists in China that is pro-American and criticizes Beijing’s policy
toward the U.S. — nor could there be.

The professions in China are not autonomous: Journalists, professors,
most lawyers and clergy for licensed religious organizations are all
beholden to the party-state. Hence many cultural exchanges between China
and the U.S. are flawed projects since Chinese journalists, judges and
other professionals are not independent.

Time and again an American leader speaks in China after a promise from
Beijing that his remarks will be transmitted unaltered to the Chinese
public, only to find sensitive parts have been cut. “People’s Daily,”
reporting the joint press conference between President Clinton and
President Jiang Zemin in 1998, omitted Mr. Clinton’s words on freedom, Tibet
and the Tiananmen tragedy of 1989. Vice President Cheney’s speech in
Shanghai in April 2004 was gutted of key passages about democracy after a
promise to transmit it in full. And so on. The Chinese people cannot
know what they do not hear. And they are unaware of how much they do not
know.

Just as Beijing uses divide-and-rule at the national level to try to
split Japan, Australia and other allies from the U.S., it does the same
at the level of the individual writer, journalist or academic. The
Chinese try to pick favorites and isolate critics of Beijing. They dangle
access (as they do with businessmen); they intimidate potential critics.
In the mid-’90s, National Geographic invited me to write an article on
the Three Gorges Dam project. Some months after the photographer and I
began, Beijing refused me a visa to travel to the dam area. National
Geographic was in a bind; inevitably, they chose another writer to whose
views Beijing would have less objection, a quiet victory that remained
unknown to readers of the published article.

Another Chinese method is to plant themes in American minds by
repetition and infiltration. “The U.S. is trying to hold China back” says
Beijing. Taking 25% or more of its exports is a strange way of holding China
back. “A Cold War mentality in the U.S. is damaging U.S.-China
relations” says Beijing. In truth, North Korea, China’s only ally, is the
conspicuous Cold War relic that is gravely unsettling to northeast Asia.
“Japanese militarism is the great danger in Asia” says Beijing. Never mind
that China has fought wars on four flanks in the last half-century,
during which Japan’s military has killed not one non-Japanese in combat.

To help plant these themes, Beijing draws into its sphere Americans
with good knowledge of China and readiness to agree with Chinese policies.
All the statements listed above are embraced by prominent business,
media and academic figures involved with China. New is the amount of money
China has available for its manipulation. The corruption of power was
familiar in earlier years of the PRC; the corruption of money becomes
evident today. Beijing is bold with its open wallet. It is true that
Beijing’s behavior in the face of the international flow of information has
improved in the post-Mao era. But the Leninist basis of the Chinese
regime remains. President Clinton, while in office, twice referred to
China as a “former communist country.”

This only sets us up for disillusionment. Far from being like-minded,
China fends the U.S. off, undermines it across the globe, and desires
its decline in East Asia. Beijing will not “help” Washington over North
Korea since its interests (propping up Pyongyang) differ from U.S.
interests (solving the nuclear weapons issue by reunification of Korea under
Seoul).

What should we do about the situation? Our overall China policy can
(and does) blend full engagement with participation in preserving an
equilibrium in East Asia that discourages Beijing from expansionism. No
contradiction exists between these twin stances. There are two Chinas,
after all: a command economy that sags, and a free economy that soars; a
Communist Party that scratches for a raison d’?re, and 1.3 billion
individuals with private agendas. Being wary of authoritarian China while
engaging with emerging China is a logical dualism.

Beyond that strategy, we should, above all, avoid wishful thinking
about the Chinese state. We should be aware of the asymmetry in cultural
exchanges. We should resist the Chinese divide-and-rule policies by a
stance of solidarity with those whom Beijing singles out for attack or
exclusion. We should talk back every time the Communist Party mocks the
freedoms of the U.S. or denies the repression of its own rule.

Far better to have cordial relations with Beijing than the
confrontations of the ’50s (Korean War) and ’60s (Indochina Wars). But in the
absence of a common enemy and with a yawning gap between democracy and
dictatorship, the relationship cannot be cozy. “Avoid politicizing the
issues” between the two countries, Hu Jintao said last week, but the
fundamental issues are political. It is good that Beijing finds common ground
with Boeing and Microsoft; but less common ground exists between
Beijing and the American democracy. One worries at times that authoritarian
China has an advantage over the U.S. It can take the long view, hide
plans it does not want revealed, pull the strings of Chinese public
opinion, set the agenda of international organizations while doing little to
implement their decisions, win access to American society while closing
doors within China, and deceive non-Chinese about all this by its
political theater. Yet ultimately an authoritarian regime is not stron!
g. China today is no match for the U.S. in any realm except
population, and as long as it remains a dictatorship it will never equal the U.S.
as a power and influence in the world.

The average life span of the European Leninist regimes that collapsed
between 1989 and 1991 was only a few decades; the Chinese communist
regime is now 57 years old, 17 years short of the Soviet Union, the longest
running authoritarian regime of modern times. Democracies sound
raucous, but the U.S. and Australia, to take two, have been stable for a
period that runs into centuries. The oxygen of freedom prevents many evils.
Our quarrel over the manipulation of news and views is not with Chinese
culture or people, but with the Communist Party state. It manipulates
because that was its political upbringing. It strokes the feathers of
sycophants and ditches independent spirits because that has been the
Leninist way in every country where a Communist Party has held a monopoly
of power.

Political systems do matter. Washington and Beijing could hardly be
more different on the fundamental issue of freedom.

Mr. Terrill, associate in research at Harvard University’s Asia Center,
is the author of “The New Chinese Empire” (Basic Books, 2004).

URL for this article:

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Posted: 2006-04-23
Within the past few weeks two of America’s leading newspapers have watched staff-written blogs blow up in their faces. First, Ben Domenech left Washingtonpost.com after outside bloggers uncovered numerous examples of plagiarism in his past work. And last week, the Los Angeles Times suspended the blog of Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Hiltzik (interviewed by OJR just before the scandal broke) after he was discovered to have posted comments under false identities on his and other blogs.
Can newspapers do blogs right? I e-mailed that question to several prominent online journalists. All have experience with “traditional” media and either blog or oversee bloggers in their work. Their edited responses follow:
Anthony Moor, OrlandoSentinel.com

I’m not sure we know yet what “right” is when it comes to blogs. We’re in an R&D phase here, for lack of a better term, when it comes to incorporating blogs into our “traditional” Web content. There are going to be missteps. We know that blogs are a powerful software tool for self-service, instant publishing with a built-in tagging capability that plugs us into the conversation online. We also know that blogs are fostering a new kind of editorial voice in our writing: intimate, off-the-cuff and breezy.
Now, how that powerful new force on the Internet intersects with our mission to provide accurate and credible information to our audience is what we’re figuring out. We don’t have to do what bloggers v.1.0 are doing now to incorporate blogs effectively into what we do, and I think we shouldn’t try.
What makes us journalists is our ability to gather facts, synthesize, and write about the world around us — and those are not necessarily the requirements of blogging. As long as we couple our essential skills as journalists with this new medium, I think we CAN shape blogs into a valuable new asset for newspapers.
Look, the analogy is this: When software became widely available to easily manipulate photos into photo illustrations, the public-at-large found a myriad of uses for it. And news organizations suffered some notable missteps as they began using it too. Now, however, we’ve learned how to incorporate this power into our journalism without giving up the essential things that make what we do journalism.
Xeni Jardin, BoingBoing.net and National Public Radio

Newspapers will get it right when the people responsible for designing and launching blogs for them take the time to understand the culture, the process, the dynamics and the sociology of blogs. It’s important that newspapers not launch blogs for the sake of launching blogs. There had to be a purpose to other than to have the ability to tell the world that you have a blog.
What’s the point of interacting with your audience? Is the point just to leave snippy comments on the blogs of your critics? Or is the point of interacting to provide bits and pieces and nuances of information that traditional newspaper reporting doesn’t lend itself to?
I feel like way too often it is done as a gimmicky thing. Not to name names, but some companies launch blogs because there’s someone at the company who monitors search engine traffic, and one day that person recognizes, “Hey there are a lot of people searching about babies — I think we need to have a baby blog.”
Just because the traffic shows a lot of traffic, and potential for advertising revenue, they lanuch a blog and hire some inexperienced copy writter to fill it with stuff. It’s just an excuse to have something to sell ads against. I don’t think the Los Angeles Times created its blogs as an excuse to sell banner ads against, but too often in situations like this there’s disjointed thinking. There’s this idea that you stick a blog up there, you stick unmoderated comments up there, you don’t give your reporters who are totally unfamiliar with this medium any guidance, and you’re going to expect it to turn out well?
I think the fact that people make such an unnatural distinction between blogging and writing for a newspaper is part of the problem. Behave in your blog as you would in the paper.
Lisa Stone, BlogHer.com

Of course they can. Blog, wiki and audio technologies are just like the printing presses used to publish newspapers — tools that a broad spectrum of thinkers are using to get their word out. Period. Just like in traditional newspapering, some of these blogs, wikis and podcasts are superior, others are bird-cage liner.
Newspaper blogs that work are carefully planned, openly executed exercises in public conversation about news and information. These blogs allow comments and turn into 24/7 townhall meetings about everything from the headlines to how well the paper is doing to deliver and discuss the news. Newspapers that blog well embrace the community and use the blogs as an extension of their op-ed pages. There are dozens of examples, from MSNBC’s oft-ignored Bloggermann (one of the national media’s best blogs) to brave local daily sites taking important baby steps such as Madison.com and FresnoBee.com.

Newspaper blogs that don’t work tend to dismss blogs as, in Alex S. Jones’ famous words, the sizzle rather than the steak — as useless chatter rather than as an extension of the newspaper’s journalism that deserves the same care, feeding and standards of accuracy and ethical behavior. How can newspapers expect to survive if they keep mooning their readers like this? Answer: They won’t.
The problems of failing standards of accuracy and ethical behavior among the nation’s leading newspapers are not limited to blogs. As someone who grew up on newspapers and will never give them up, the past five years have been agonizing to behold, from Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg, to Ben Domenech and Michael Hiltzik. America’s newspapers have the opportunity to leverage blogs as credibility-building exercises — but the first thing we need to do is to stop architecting our own demise. To avoid meltdowns like this, newspapers need to do exactly what exceptional blogs do: For God’s sake, assume the position of the reader and behave accordingly. Readers want to know what they’re getting, who they’re getting it from and how, so that they can trust their sources — that’s you. Here are two easy steps:

Step 1: No more rookie maneuvers. Call in a blog expert with a journalism background and have this outside person walk you through community scenarios to test what your newsroom (and management) can tolerate and what you cannot. If nudie pictures on your wiki are a no-no, you have a choice to make: (a) Don’t publish the wiki, and/or (b) Don’t publish the wiki without human and/or technical filters. But you have to have someone advising you who knows how wikis behave. Or, say, if you don’t want a blogger to violate fair use acts on this blog or in previous blogs, (a) Check out their personal records, and (b) Say so and sign them to agreement that says so.

Step 2: Repeat Step 1 in an open conversation with your readers and ask them to behave according to these guidelines too. Publish your community guidelines and ask readers what they want and why. Edit your guidelines accordingly.

Step 3: Integrate blogs into the newsroom’s efforts. Starting slow is fine — but the best blogs are a team effort. In a newsroom unused to community conversation, to groaning when readers write and call-in, is to make it part of the journo’s job description — and their editor’s too. That means a conversation with the community via blogging (including Steps 1 and 2) needs to be embraced by the people at the top of the newsroom hierarchy.
Bob Cauthorn, CityTools.net

I think it’s going to be difficult for newspapers to do blogs right because their DNA continues to be trapped in the “we talk, you listen” mode. Fundamentally, staff-written blogs are nothing different than what newspapers do now — simply spilling more of the same voices onto the public streets.
Sure, staff-written blogs have a fragile patina of interactively because some accept comments. Scuffing off that patina doesn’t take much.
1) Under the best case, newspaper blog comments are enfeebled interactivity. Only fractional percentages of readers comment on staff-written blogs. Maybe the public has simply given up on the idea of newspapers listening or caring. Consider the case of the Guardian’s staff blogs. The Guardian is one of the best online newspapers in the world and its commitment to the staff blog borders on the fanatical. They throw substantial resources at it. And yet, if you look closely at the number of comments per post (realize in many cases comments are more than a week old) and then you consider the total traffic on the site, you must conclude that the supposed interactivity of the Guardian’s blogs has failed utterly. I mean we’re talking less that 1/10 of one percent of all readers who are moved to comment! (FYI, I did a quick study of this last fall because the Guardian folks had a hissy over my post attacking the concept of staff blogs.)
2) Even if you get a few comments, the moment they turn hostile to the newspaper, suddenly the commitment to interactivity wavers. It’s happened a number of times. And indeed, the Hiltzik incident specifically highlights this. Today’s newspapers are sufficiently thin-skinned that the idea that people might use comments to attack the writers doesn’t go down well. So you either stop comments, or you remove the accounts of critics, or — as in the case of Hiltzik — you create deceptive online personas to respond to the attacks. It’s the “we talk, you listen” attitude taken to the extreme: Even if the public talks back, the media requires the last word! It’s a fatal appetite on the part of the modern newspaper. Some sociologists have pointed out that modern America can exert power on the global stage, but it no longer exerts authority (for authority comes from the nexus of wisdom, restraint, morality and cleaving to higher purposes). Newspapers are in a similar boat — they’re still powerful institutions but their authority is in shambles. OK, let’s get this straight: So we let the public speak and when a tiny number do we come rushing in with fake personas to defend the paper against attacks. We never let anyone else get the last word. That’s wrong and it’s stupid and it’s going to kill papers. Instead of stifling criticism, newspapers should embrace it and learn from it and grow wise.
(Incidentally, The fact that the LA Times perceives the Hiltzik’s actions as a violation of ethics is a *very* good thing. One of the dirty little secrets of newspaper blogs is that many, many of the comments come from unidentified staff members. I applaud the LAT for this move. It’s high time to stop this deplorable practice.)
So if newspapers blogs are not *really* about interacting with the community — and I challenge anyone to demonstrate they’ve been successful at that goal — what makes them different? They just offer the same voices you read all the time.
This is *exactly* what my beef with staff blogs is about and why I’ve been trying to get newspapers to change the approach. Jon Stewart put it nicely when he said mainstream media blogs “give voice to the already voiced.”
Look, it’s easy to get this right: don’t have staff members blog and instead bring in the legitimate outside voices. There are many ways that a mainstream media organization can do this — make a blog about *outside* blogs, point some of your traffic to outside voices (even those who, gasp, criticize you!), invite some of the best outside bloggers in your community to post right on your pages. Give selected bloggers early access to your stories — particularly enterprise stories — so that they can have same-day reactions. (Make sure these are bloggers you can trust not to jump the publication, obviously.) In other words, genuinely and sincerely embrace *outside* voices. Allow the community to have a stake in what you are doing once more.
As stand it stands right now, newspapers keep shouting louder in a room that, increasingly, is emptying around us. Maybe, before the last reader departs we can convince people to stay by letting them know we want to talk *with* our community, not *at* them.
Chris Nolan, Spot-On.com

This is a pretty big set of issues that really, I think, go to the heart of what’s wrong with newsroom culture these days. Suffice it to say that the contempt that a lot of folks on the floor feel for people working online really has to stop. The problem is that guys like Ben Domenech and Michael Hiltzik aren’t exactly helping to make that argument. I’m not entirely sure that’s anyone’s “fault” as much as it is the result of having the news business open up to its audience at a time when newsrooms are in crisis and readers are better informed than they’ve ever been — thanks to the Internet.
The idea that the Post of the L.A. Times have somehow screwed up royally by hiring folks who cut corners isn’t the end of the world as we know it. It’s a series of mistakes. It’s done. We’ve learned a few things — among them, there should be an intermediate step between running your own website and writing for a big newspaper.
Newsroom editors and writers need to spend a lot more time reading and watching the talent that’s out here on the Web. Lots of folks sitting in newsrooms are going to have to get over the fact that people outside the building really do know what they’re doing much of the time. Just as online folks are going to have to stop cutting corners and claiming that they represent a new form of “media” free of all basic rules and constraints that’s some how superior to what’s being done in the ink-and-paper format. The way you produce your story has nothing to do with what the story says to the reader.
Fundamentally, the rules of the reporting game — be fair, be honest, represent the reader as you do your job, limit the harm you do as you do it, and always be aware that there’s someone on the other side of the story — are not going to change. Part of what’s going on with Domenech and Hiltzik is that those lessons are being meted out in a very public fashion. This, by the way, is how those things used to get taught by foul-mouthed city editors who thought nothing of yelling at new reporters. I knew a few of those guys … didn’t you?
Nick Denton, Gawker Media

Reporters, trained to put aside opinion, make uninteresting bloggers. And it’s notoriously hard to manage, in parallel, a daily news cycle and regular updates for breaking news.

Posted at 8:40 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Wired

A light snow is falling outside the windows of Cyrus H. McCormick School in southwest Chicago, but the second graders in Room 203 are not distracted from their lesson. May Cheung, an energetic teacher from Hong Kong, holds a cup to her lips and asks, “Wo he shemma?” (What am I drinking?) A forest of arms go up. “Cha! Cha!” (Tea!) An hour later, Cheung has kindergartners counting to 27 in Mandarin as she hands out Chinese New Year hong bao, the red envelopes that promise wealth, abundance, and good fortune. For most of the kids in this Mexican-American neighborhood, Mandarin is their third language - after Spanish and English.

The children at McCormick are part of the largest grade school Chinese program in the US. Seven years ago, after a post-college stint teaching English in China, Robert Davis wandered into the offices of the Chicago Public Schools and convinced the director to start a comprehensive Chinese language program and hire him to manage it. Now 3,500 Chicago kids, from kindergartners to 12th graders, learn Mandarin. “The days of everybody trying to be American are over,” Davis says. “When you do business with or go to other countries, be prepared to work on their terms.”

Far from Chicago - 6,597 miles to the west, to be exact - Ma Jianfei is pointing at a huge map on the wall of a plush meeting room in an otherwise dreary building in Beijing. Ma is the deputy director general of the National Office for Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language, better known as Hanban, and the map chronicles his success exporting Mandarin around the world. The map shows that the hottest markets for Mandarin are Thailand and South Korea, where all elementary and middle schools will offer Chinese by 2007. Europe, particularly France and Germany, is also doing well, thick with yellow circles (teachers), red triangles (test facilities), and blue squares (language centers).

There aren’t many shapes in the US yet, but Ma is working on that. For the past two years, Hanban has been collaborating with the College Board, the nonprofit that runs the SAT and the Advanced Placement program; in 2007, high school kids across the US will be able to take the first ever AP exam for Chinese language and culture (this year they’re prepping for the test in new College Board-accredited classes). In October, Ma was in the American heartland, inking an agreement to open a Confucius Institute, a center for Chinese language learning and cultural studies, at the University of Kansas. It’ll be the sixth in the US, the 41st in the world. Soon there will be 100 such institutes worldwide.

Mandarin Chinese is already the most popular first language on the planet, beating out English by 500 million speakers. And it’s the second-most-common language on the Internet. Now, just as China requires students to learn English, Beijing wants to make Chinese the must-take language for English speakers - and everyone else. Ma figures there are currently 30 million people around the world learning Chinese as a second language. Hanban aims to increase that to 100 million over the next four years.

It’s an audacious goal, and the government is backing it by funding - to the tune of nearly $25 million a year - the teaching of Chinese as a foreign language. Last year, Hanban sent 1,042 volunteer teachers to France, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Mauritius, Nigeria, Colombia, and 16 other countries. This year, it will top that number.

Hanban provides schools, centers, and Confucius Institutes with seed money, textbooks, and game-based learning software. College kids and adults play Great Wall Chinese, while middle school students get a game called Chengo Chinese, which Hanban developed through a partnership with the US Department of Education. Nearly 15,000 American kids in 20 states helped beta-test the game, and it’s now used in Mandarin classes offered through the accredited Michigan Virtual High School.

Beijing isn’t doing anything different from what the British or the Americans or the French have done - sending emissaries abroad to spread its language and culture. It’s not the first time the Chinese have pushed their native tongue, either: In the 17th and 18th centuries, imperial China brought several Chinese languages to much of Southeast Asia. But this 21st-century push is more global in scope, as befits an emerging world power. “This is the linguistic equivalent of sending a person to the moon,” says Oded Shenkar, a professor at the Ohio State University and author of The Chinese Century.

Chinese bureaucrats take their evangelism seriously. The country is “merging into the world,” Zhang Xinsheng, China’s deputy minister of education, explained to reporters before the first World Chinese Conference last June. The event attracted diplomats and teachers from 65 countries - all there to partake in China’s efforts to export Mandarin. “China, as the mother country of the language, shoulders the responsibility of promoting [the language] and helping other nations to learn it better and faster.”

Chinese authorities also see spreading Chinese as an important part of the country’s “peaceful rise,” says Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York foreign-policy think tank. This was the philosophy articulated in 2003 by China’s president, Hu Jintao. China wants to emerge as a global power without threatening global security. “I think the Chinese have been very careful and thoughtful about assuaging the fears of the rest of the world,” says Economy. “There’s a benign element of the language work: to help educate.”

One of the people most responsible for providing that help is Zhang Yi. Over the past three years, she’s been to South Africa, Thailand, Japan, and Canada on business - not bad for a 24-year-old government employee. Trained as a lawyer, she coordinates Hanban’s volunteer teacher program, selecting, training, sending, and supporting the agency’s pool of 10,000-plus volunteer instructors. Like missionaries, these full-time teachers receive no pay, only a small stipend from Hanban. Most are young women who sign on to see the world - and sow the seeds of Chinese along the way.

As a young cosmopolitan Beijinger, Zhang Yi celebrates Christmas and prefers coffee over tea, so when we meet one frigid evening in Haidian (China’s Silicon Valley), she picks Starbucks. Zhang marvels at the remarkable popularity of her native language outside China - it’s something European newspapers like to call “Chinese fever,” or hanyu re. Zhang sees evidence of Chinese fever all the time. In Bangkok, her waiters spoke Chinese. In Jakarta, she helped a Korean traveler who couldn’t speak Indonesian or English, only Chinese. She recently had dinner with three professors from Beijing who had just been in Cuba, where they met students who were learning Chinese. Zhang is delighted to see the language taking hold in all these places. “That’s why we are feeding the fire,” she says.

Back in Chicago, Robert Davis is fanning the flames, but he isn’t asking for volunteers. He wants teachers who’ll stay, not leave after a year or two. So Hanban gave him $70,000 to build a Confucius Institute at Walter Payton College Prep; it also sends him free software and books. This spring, the new institute will begin providing grade school instructors with teaching materials and lesson plans, and it will offer how-to seminars for parents who want to help their kids with Chinese homework.

If Hanban exports Chinese around the world, then the main American importer is Gaston Caperton. He looks like Bill Clinton - though thinner - and speaks, once he gets talking, with an unchecked southern accent.

Caperton caught his own version of Chinese fever on his third visit to the country in 1994, when he was governor of West Virginia and traveling to China as part of an international trade mission. Expecting to return to the raw, poor country he’d seen in the 1980s, he instead found people drinking Coca-Cola and using com puters, and the hotel was as lavish as any in the West.

Normally you’d find him in New York at the College Board, where he’s president and unofficial promoter for Chinese-language education. But ever since the AP Chinese course was established, he’s been on the road, trying to solve the shortage of qualified Chinese teachers in the US by prodding American universities to offer certification programs and persuading elementary schools and colleges stateside to offer more Chinese language classes. He’s recently been in Beijing, meeting with Hanban officials about their volunteer-teacher program. But today he’s in Shanghai with his wife, Idit Harel Caperton. She spent the fall teaching software engineering at a university here and is a consultant and major investor (along with MIT’s Nicholas Negroponte) in a language software company based in China.

The College Board is among the few organizations that can have national impact in a public school system where most decisions are made at the local level. So Gaston Caperton hopes that the Chinese AP will spur interest in the language in high schools - and even trickle down to elementary schools. “The future is in Asia, and we have to know Asian languages,” he says. The point is to keep the US competitive. Learning Chinese isn’t just a way for Americans to get jobs in China, but for them to do business with Chinese companies and compete with Mandarin speakers from other countries.

Hanban contacted Caper ton in 2004. At first, the Chinese government was frustrated by the fragmented US public school system. “They said to me, ‘In China, we made English the second language,’” Caperton says. “‘So why don’t you just make it happen in the US?’”

Caperton is working to spread Chinese however he can. After becoming president of the College Board in 1999, he urged the organization to offer courses and exams in more languages. Given the importance of standardized tests, decisions by the College Board inevitably filter down to high schools and even elementary schools. Hanban also wanted to import the curriculum they’d developed directly into US schools. But Caperton persuaded them to abandon their one-size-fits-all approach. The Chinese were “aggressive” about helping, he says. After speaking for a few moments, Caperton backtracks and changes aggressive to progressive. What’s the difference? “Progressive is moving forward and up. Aggressive is simply getting what you want.”

Alexander Feldman saw this behavior firsthand when, as the US government’s coordinator for international information programs, he was touring a new library at the State Institute for Islamic Studies of North Sumatera in Indonesia. On the third floor, an “American corner” was stocked with books, magazines, and computers with Internet access. Feldman suggested to the university’s chancellor that videoconference equipment be installed in the empty space next to the corner. That’s a good idea, the chancellor said. But about a month after the American corner was built, the Chinese were here and proposed a Chinese corner, which would sit right next to yours and have more resources than yours, he said. “There is a bit of friendly competition,” Feldman mused later. “Competition is a good thing, both in business and in public diplomacy.”

Michael Erard (erard@lucidwork.com) wrote about kosher tech in issue 12.11.

Posted at 4:40 PM · Comments (0)

This is a very well written and entertaining look at the work of the master. Highly recommended.

Posted at 12:03 PM · Comments (0)

Book Reviews

Monday 24th April 2006

A S Byatt on a brief and bleak morality tale for our times

Everyman
Philip Roth Jonathan Cape, 182pp, £10
ISBN 0224078690

Philip Roth is the great recorder of Darwinian Man - “unaccommodated man”, who is no more than “a poor, bare, forked animal”, as old King Lear observed. Roth has understood what it means to be a conscious creature, driven by sexual desire towards the death of the body, nothing more. He called an earlier novel The Dying Animal, taking his title from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”, in which the poet describes his soul as “sick with desire/And fastened to a dying animal …”

Roth’s characters inhabit a truly post-religious world, in which we do not have immortal souls, only sick, lively desire, and the dying of the animal. The title of this new, bleak tale is taken from a mediaeval morality play in which Everyman, the human soul, is called by Death to appear before God’s judgement seat. He is deserted by his strength, discretion, beauty, knowledge and five wits, leaving only his Good Works to speak for him at the end. Hugo von Hofmannsthal reworked the play in 1911 for the Salzburg Festival, where it is still performed. Timor Mortis conturbat me is an ancient cry, but it sounds different in a world where the Four Last Things - death, judgement, heaven and hell - have been reduced to one, or maybe one and a half. Roth’s characters are defensive and defiant of possible judgement of their manifest failings. Saul Bellow’s Herzog was in an agony of despair at the meaninglessness of a world without a spiritual dimension, where only human feelings were available in the face of human cruelty and decay. An earlier Roth character, David Kepesh, hero of The Professor of Desire and of The Dying Animal, is apparently more robustly grim. He sees sex as “the revenge on death” - desire as a confrontation of mortality. If there is no more, he will not try to make up more. Desire and death is what we are.

Roth’s Everyman is a brief and uncompromising account of one man’s death. He is nameless, though his family, wives, children and lovers are named. The book opens with his funeral, and ends with the moment of his death on the operating table. In between, with a blunt and steady progress, the reader sees through his eyes the slow dissolution of his body, marked by a series of increasingly drastic and invasive surgical “interventions”, starting with a boyhood hernia and moving through bypasses and prostheses, patchings-up of his heart and veins. It is not told in a straight line - his three marriages, his rejecting sons, his kind-hearted daughter, his bouts of sick and violent desire are woven backwards and forwards, so that the description of his love for his wise and good second wife, Phoebe, comes much later in our reading than his betraying of her trust, and her honest anger. He follows his instincts, which lead to entanglements (and a third marriage) with impossible women. He is self-justifying - he sees his conduct as that of a normal human being, an everyman, which perhaps it is. The nearest he comes to judgement is a summing-up of himself, early in the book: “He was not claiming to be exceptional. Only vulnerable and assailable and confused. And convinced of his right, as an average human being, to be pardoned ultimately for whatever deprivations he may have inflicted upon his innocent children in order not to live deranged half the time.”

Pardoned by whom, in a Darwinian world? By himself, or his messed-about family? Does the word have any meaning? Is there a judge? Are the readers judges? We do judge, irascibly even, and then are made to feel an undignified pity.

The body - his body, everyman’s body - is the solid certainty in the story. As an old man in retirement he goes to live in the Starfish Beach retirement village on the Jersey coast. He tries to become the painter he thinks he has always wanted to be, and teaches art to a class of retired people. He thinks that if he should ever write an autobiography he would call it The Life and Death of a Male Body, and gives the title to a series of his own abstract paintings. But the class is full of bodily pain in the elderly, and painting comes to lose its meaning. He broods on his own youth, “the longing for the best of boyhood, for the tubular sprout that was then his body and that rode the waves … ” - and so on for a perfect, lyrical passage on healthy naked skin and the “advancing, green Atlantic”. This vision of youth comes late in the book and is moving because so much thick and obtrusive pain and mess has preceded it and surrounds it.

Roth’s writing looks uncompromisingly straightforward but is subtle and clever. Consider the sentence describing Every-man’s idea of the suicide of a member of his class, in unbearable arthritic pain. He imagines her swallowing the pills, “slowly swallowing them with her last glass of water, with the last glass of water ever”. Her last glass, and then the last glass. The end of a person, the end of the world. The end of the tale is also completely imagined. Roth has earlier described the ante-room of the operating theatre, full of human beings in flimsy gowns and paper slippers, reading newspapers and gossiping about the news, facing perhaps the last breath.

Roth works with things, not with symbols or metaphors, but he chooses them craftily. Everyman’s father is a diamond merchant, and takes pleasure in a woman’s finger, slipped into a ring with a bright stone, an earthly thing that is “imperishable”. Quick visions of these imperishable stones are set against the crumbling flesh and bones all the way through the tale, and at the end, as the unhero goes into unconsciousness, he has a vision of the planet - “the billion-, the trillion,- the quadrillion-carat planet Earth”. His desire is renewed, he is ready to set off again, but that is the end. He does not wake. A human story for our times.

A S Byatt’s most recent book is The Little Black Book of Stories (Vintage)

Posted at 11:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The San Jose Mercury News
April 7, 2006

A recent report from Duke University that critiques
the supposed gap between the number of American
science and engineering (S&E) graduates and those of
merging economies — especially China’s — has led to
false reassurance that the U.S. lead in science and
technology is not under threat from China. It would be
a grave mistake to drop our concerns about China’s
competitive challenge.
First, the Duke report simply claimed that China’s
true number of science and engineering bachelor
degrees was 351,000, rather than the widely reported
600,000. Coupling this with an upward adjustment for
American graduates still left China producing 214,000
more such degrees than the United States.
Moreover, undergraduates are only part of the concern.
China’s production of those with doctorates has
increased rapidly. By 2003, China’s homegrown science
and engineering doctorates numbered almost half of the
U.S. total.
Chinese were also earning large numbers of doctorates
abroad. In 2001, the number of Chinese S&E doctorates
earned in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United
States equaled 72 percent of the total of S&E
doctorates earned by American citizens and permanent
residents.
Since 1975, China has increased its global share of
S&E doctorates from zero (courtesy of the Cultural
Revolution) to 11 percent, not counting doctorates
earned overseas. During the same three decades, the
U.S. global share has fallen from half to roughly 22
percent.
More worrisome than the aggregate numbers is American
universities’ reliance on foreigners who earn
doctorates. In engineering, foreigners account for
over half of America’s doctorates, and in computer
science just under half.
If foreign-born holders of doctorates continued to
stay in the United States, we wouldn’t have to worry.
Unfortunately, there are many signs that it is
becoming much harder to retain them.
One need only look at the flow from Taiwan, one of the
former main sources of American S&E doctoral degrees,
to see what could happen. Up until 1994, Taiwanese
earned more science and engineering doctorates in the
United States than members of any other foreign
nationality. By 2000, their numbers had plummeted
because economic and educational opportunities at home
were more appealing.
The Taiwanese didn’t just stop coming to America. They
also began to leave. As Taiwan’s tech sector boomed in
the 1990s, huge numbers of Taiwanese technologists
(estimates range as high as 100,000) left America for
home and took their technical skills with them.
Our two current biggest foreign sources of
technologists, China and India, appear to be following
Taiwan’s path. China has begun to lure back large
numbers of technologists. China’s central and local
governments offer free office space and other benefits
to attract technologists home. These inducements are
working. A 2005 survey of the Chinese American
Semiconductor Professionals Association’s members
showed that the vast majority regard China as the most
likely future work destination, and they rated
Shanghai higher than even Silicon Valley on career
potential. India’s recruitment efforts have also
started to bear fruit.
The challenge is not simply keeping up the numbers of
technologists in America. China by many measures has
improved its technological capabilities. On the
Georgia Institute of Technology’s Index of
Technological Capability, China has more than doubled
its index score over the past decade. China now ranks
fourth behind the United States, Japan and Germany.
This rapid ascent is not surprising given China’s
increasing investments. China’s research and
development spending as a percentage of gross domestic
product has tripled to 1.3 percent in the last decade,
even while its GDP has ballooned. Few emerging
economies spend even 1 percent of their GDP on
research.
U.S. patents invented in China are also on the rise.
Information-technology patents from corporations’
Chinese technologists have risen from 134 in 1997-2001
to 482 during 2002-04. As a first step to meet this
challenge, we should increase federal spending on
basic and exploratory research. Our R&D spending has
been flat at 2.6 percent of GDP for four decades, but
the share of federal spending has declined from
two-thirds to one-quarter.
Given that corporations now de-emphasize basic
scientific research, the federal government should
further support the basic research that could maintain
our lead at the cutting edge of technology.
Increased federal funding would also address the issue
of the falling share of investment in certain
disciplines. With spending flat, the rising share
commanded by biomedicine has meant a falling share
spent on engineering and physics.
Federal support may also play a direct role in
increasing interest in pursuing a science education.
Since the 1950s, the number of undergraduate S&E
majors in America has risen and fallen in line with
federal research funding, as Professor Henry Rowen of
Stanford University has pointed out.
Before meeting China’s challenge, we first must
recognize it. Complacency in reaction to “good” news
that China is producing fewer S&E graduates than
commonly thought is not the answer.

Douglas B. Fuller is a postdoctoral fellow at the
Stanford Project on Regions of Innovation and
Entrepreneurship (SPRIE) at Shorenstein APARC.

Posted at 11:21 AM · Comments (0)

In a money game, men who were shown pictures of lingerie or sexy women accepted disadvantageous deals more often than did men who were shown nonsexual pictures. Men with higher testosterone levels, inferred from ring fingers that were long relative to their index fingers, did worse on the test. Interpretations: 1) Duh. 2) This is what evolution designed men to do. 3) Nevertheless, we can struggle to overcome it. 4) Researchers are having trouble finding images that mess up women the same way. What does that tell you? (For Human Nature’s take on male-female differences in a punishment game, click.

Posted at 6:03 AM · Comments (0)

I’ve been on a real Cormac bend for the last year. This is the fourth of his books I’ve read during that time, having admittedly discovered him late. The first part of the novel, involving Billy and the wolf, constitutes some of the best Cormac work I’ve read, and some of the best modern prose I’ve read.
The rest of the book is first rate, too, although it can’t quite sustain the exalted high of the first 100 or so pages.
I’ll provide a sample when I’m back home. Highly recommended.

The briefest of passages, just to give you a sense of the great and delicate care with language here:
“Gray sky, gray land. All day he slouches north on the wet and slouching horse through the sandy muck of upcountry roads. The rain went harrying over the road before him in the gusts of wind and rattled over his slicker and the hooftracks oozed shut behind him. In the evening he heard again the cranes overhead, passing high above the overcast, balancing beneath them the bight of the earth’s curve, earth’s weather. Their metal eyes grooved to the pathways which God has chosen for them to follow. Their hearts in flood.”

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April 19, 2006
Hundreds of Solomon Island rioters targeting Chinese
businesses in an angry reaction to the election of a new government
have
left the business district of the capital Honiara in ruins.
As Chinatown in central Honiara was destroyed the new
government of Prime Minister Snyder Rini was in hiding.
”It’s very very sad,” leading Chinatown businessman John
Lamani told Fairfax .
“This is the backbone of the government’s money. People who
didn’t go looting are saying ‘well, where will you buy your next bag of
rice, or food or sugar’. It’s all gone, looted, burnt.”
A 110-strong detachment of Australian soldiers and police
were
expected to be flown in from Townsville last night and government
sources told Fairfax that Governor General Nathaniel Waena would
declare
a state of emergency once they had arrived.
A platoon of 46 New Zealand soldiers are already there
guarding ex-militants serving murder sentences. New Zealand has 35
police with a regional police force.
In the rioting two New Zealand police officers, five Solomon
Islanders and 17 Australian police were hurt in the rioting. None
suffered life threatening injuries.
A New Zealand police spokeswoman Sarah Martin said one of the
New Zealanders needed stitches over his right eye and was under
supervision in hospital for concussion. The other had glass fragments
flushed out of his eye and had suffered minor cuts.
The New Zealand High Commissioner, Brian Sanders, said
yesterday he could see smoke still billowing over Chinatown .
“That reflects that a good part of Chinatown has been
destroyed last night and a good part of it is still burning this
morning. A lot of looting is still going on in Chinatown .”
Hotels owned by leading Chinese businessman Sir Thomas Chan,
the Honiara and the Pacific Casino, were targeted. He is president of
Mr
Rini’s political grouping.
Mr Sanders visited the Pacific Casino Hotel where about 150
guests were staying.
“Some of them ( New Zealand guests) were at the hotel when it
got trashed which was not a good experience at all. They’re pretty
exhausted after getting woken up in the middle of the night with people
coming down the hall trying to break open your room.”
Auckland businessman Ray Vuksich was in the Pacific Casino.
“It was unbelievable. They were trying to get up the stairs
with machetes and batons,” he told NZPA.
The downstairs rooms were gutted, some burned, others simply
trashed.
“It was terrifying. They were waving their machetes around.
Women
were screaming.”
He said there appeared to be real hate of the Chinese.

“They’ve totally burned down Chinatown . There’s
nothing left.”
A joint Australian, New Zealand and Pacific Island military
and police force Regional Assistance Mission in Solomon Islands (RAMSI)
occupied the Solomons in August 2003 in a bid to end ethnic conflict
which drove the country to bankruptcy.
Many RAMSI vehicles were destroyed in the rioting.
Solomon Islands Police Commissioner Shane Castles told state
broadcasting that 120 police and armed military personnel would fly in.
Mr Castles said Mr Rini was being kept under maximum
security.

“In terms of the security of the prime minister and the
former
prime minister, they are being kept at a secured location, and I am
satisfied that adequate resources and sufficient security is at their
disposal,” Mr Castles said.
The Solomons held general elections earlier this month and on
Tuesday its 50 member Parliament met in secret session to elect a new
prime minister after incumbent Sir Allen Kemakeza said he did not want
a
second term. The post instead went to his deputy, Mr Rini, 57. He was
implicated in the collapse around the ethnic unrest in the late 1990s
when he approved up to SI$80 million in remissions, giving Asian
logging
firms tax breaks while allowing tax free entry on beer, cigarettes and
vehicles for people linked to militants.
As news of the result got out of the building, protesters
tried to storm Parliament, prompting police to fire tear gas at them.
Speaker, and founding prime minister Sir Peter Kenilorea, was
critical later of the use of tear gas.
”They should (have) allowed time for us to keep talking to
the protesters at the parliament house and not to use tear gas on them,
because it would simply aggravate the situation and it would simply
take
the parliament situation, or scene, out to the streets,” he told ABC
Radio.
Mr Lamani, who publishes the daily Solomon Star, was
emotional
saying the old town had gone, and for the first time ever his newspaper
had not appeared yesterday. He never missed an issue through the ethnic
conflict.
“The Old Chinatown area has been put up in flames. They burnt
all the Chinese buildings, the shops. And they are still doing it now.”
He watched as people deliberately went at the Chinese
businesses.
“They were saying the Chinese were the ones who financed the
politicians… people do not want the last government, they wanted
change….
“A lot of children and a lot of women were present. What they
did was that people would walk up and smash the doors and windows, open
up the shops and let people walk in and loot the place.”
Mr Lamani said the crowd was united in opposition to Mr Rini:
“they hated this man, they wanted somebody else.”
Solomon Government spokesman Johnson Honimae estimated up to
90 percent of Chinatown had been destroyed, although he said the
looters
cashed in on the political turmoil.
“They had no political interests whatsoever, they just took
the chance.”
Mr Honimae agreed that the bulk of the looting was aimed at
the around 1000 Chinese living on Honiara .
“It’s this new wave of Chinese that have really agitated the
situation.”

Posted at 1:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
THURSDAY, APRIL 20, 2006

SHANGHAI During his visit to the United States, China’s Hu Jintao will work hard to convey a message that is emerging as a central theme of his presidency: His country is not a threat to the United States; indeed, it doesn’t even wish to be seen as a challenger.

In the recent past, China’s leaders have struggled over how best to convey this thought, issuing tortured slogans like “peaceful rise,” for example, that are adopted and dropped with equal ambivalence.

The message coming from Beijing these days is that the country’s leadership is so preoccupied with domestic problems that it has neither the time nor the inclination to challenge America’s lingering pre-eminence.

A word to the wise: don’t believe it.

It is absolutely true that China’s own problems consume most of its energy, and will continue to for the foreseeable future.

Whether the country’s rickety system can muddle through is anything but a foregone conclusion. It is increasingly outpaced by change on the ground, and by colossal problems of every kind - from the environment and energy to an ever more sophisticated and freethinking citizenry.

In the meantime, though, and regardless of the answer, no amount of stealthy diplomatic posturing can obscure the fact that China is growing more powerful and more assertive by the day, and in the process, a new world order is being shaped.

Lest anyone suspect hostility in this rebuttal of China’s new line, one hastens to add that this is exactly the way it should be. China obviously constitutes a huge slice of humanity. It has an exceptionally long history of power on the world stage, against which the last two centuries of relative weakness are a mere blip. And like any fast- rising power, its re-emergence will change the rules of the game.

The devil, as they say, is in the details, which is why one might hope for more candor from the country’s leaders, both toward the outside world and toward their own people. They are still spoon-fed a saccharine-laced and ultimately dangerous form of history that paints their China as the eternal innocent: happily self-contained and fair and courtly toward others.

For all of Hu’s denials, though, the outlines of China’s challenge to the United States are already beginning to take shape, and they are nothing less than sweeping.

In keeping with the emphasis on stealth, the first element in China’s recent playbook is to stay out of the way while the United States undermines its own position in the world.

“China is becoming attractive to developing countries not only because of what China is doing, but because of the what the U.S. is doing,” said Zheng Yongnian director of research at the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham in Britain. “It is quite natural for them to like China if they don’t like what America is doing. They want an alternative, in the same way as countries looked to the Soviet Union during the Cold War.”

The Soviet parallel, however, ends there. Zheng said that in this phase of its development, the most effective way for China to counterbalance the United States is to have pro-American policies, hence the calming rhetoric.

The United States has “overwhelmingly emphasized military force, which creates a zero sum game, which many people cannot accept,” Zheng said. China, by contrast, is doing what Washington once excelled at, emphasizing economic multilateralism: embracing regional and international organizations, signing trade pacts and becoming an ever bigger player in the foreign aid game.

China’s advice to the world’s poor resembles its strategy at home: “development first, politics later.” This stress on the overwhelming importance of stability - no matter how undemocratic, corrupt or environmentally irresponsible the regime - has even led to the coining of a phrase, the Beijing Consensus. This highlights the contrast with the so-called Washington Consensus that emphasizes elections, free trade and accepting the guidance of the U.S.-dominated World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

Beijing has carefully avoided endorsement or even explicit mention of any Beijing Consensus, determinedly keeping its head down while plowing forward. And the fruits of this approach are becoming ever more obvious: Prime Minister Wen Jiabao has just visited the South Pacific strongly boosting ties there, where Washington and Australia seem in decline.

President Hu will fly on to Nigeria, the most important country in another neglected region. And China’s appeal now stretches deep into the United States’ own backyard, Latin America.

Maintaining plausible deniability of the coming challenge is merely a passing phase, however.

Washington is making a mistake to think of China’s rise mainly in military terms, for there is far more to it than that. One senses Beijing is serious about wanting to avoid disastrous wars and ruinous arms races. Its challenge, instead, is to another key source of American power, the international system.

What it proposes as a replacement for the status quo is sometimes called tian xia, or under the heavens. It is an obscure sounding but remarkably simple scheme that places all the nations of the world in a rules-based system that is not strictly egalitarian but would be governed by rules. Note to the United States: there is no room for a global hegemony.

As it evolves on a spectrum somewhere between Nazi Germany and contemporary Scandinavia, China will use its growing muscle in trade and finance to draw developing countries, particularly authoritarian ones attracted by its corporatist capitalism, into its embrace.

So when do the masks drop? When does the challenge become explicit?

“My feeling is that they are waiting for a situation where they feel secure enough,” said Wang Fei-Ling, a professor of International Affairs at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. “A settlement of things in the Western Pacific, or China’s becoming strong enough economically so that it no longer matters what Washington might think, or a democratic change in China itself, which would settle the legitimacy issue. Any of these three things would give them great confidence, and fuel a need to speak out more.”

Posted at 10:58 AM · Comments (0)

Published: April 14 2006 Copyright The Financial Times

I will write about my friends,

the story of each of them,

I see in it, I see myself,

a tragedy like my own tragedy,

I will write about my friends,

about the prison that sucks the years of the prisoners,

about the time devoured by the columns of magazines,

about doors that don’t open,

about desires slaughtered at birth,

about the huge prison cell,

and about its black walls,

and about the thousands of female martyrs,

buried without names,

in the cemetery of tradition.

From a poem by Nizar Kabbani, cited in The Girls of Riyadh

It is possible for most adolescents in the world not only to think, dream or anguish about their first date but also to have one, probably followed by a second, maybe a few more. In Saudi Arabia you can do the dreaming and worrying, but you may very well end up with no more than one date, especially if you are a girl, and you are likely to have little more than a walk-on part in it.

Marriages are for the most part arranged, and it is not unusual for a couple to meet for the first time after their parents agree to the union. So much in Saudi social life seems to be built around the idea that girls and boys should not meet, even to prepare themselves for marriage. There are no cinemas or concerts or parties to go to. Single young men, thought to be disruptive, aren’t allowed to go to the mall on Thursday, “family night”, the busiest night of the week, and they must eat in separate sections at restaurants. So they sit in their cars outside, blocking traffic. The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice, religious policemen who wear long beards and refuse to look at a woman’s face, keep an eye on them and intervene if the mall’s security guards let them slip in. The young men sit and wait for a glimpse of a woman entering or leaving. They are unlikely to see any more than her eyes, the rest of her shape and form dispossessed, hidden beneath a robe. If they get so much as a look, one of the men may write his phone number on a piece of paper and throw it out the window, hoping she will have the courage to pick it up. Some stick their phone numbers on their car windshields in the hope of getting a call.

Determination and technology, however, have made life a little easier for young Saudis. Satellite television bombards them with images of the way other people live. Mobile telephones and internet chat rooms have made it less painful to get to know each other, once families have signed off on wedding plans. A common way to flirt is to turn on the wireless bluetooth facility on your mobile phone, allowing messages to be sent to other bluetooth-enabled phones within reach, even when the number is not known.

Into this clash of centuries comes a novel that captures it all. Written as a series of e-mails, The Girls of Riyadh records the trials and tribulations of four high-society city girls. They wear expensive designer clothes, sprinkle their speech with American jargon, make references to Sex and the City, and sometimes drink champagne. But under it all they continue to live in their Saudi world, smothered by the severe interpretation of Islam that prevails, where their most natural feelings are denied expression. Though the lifestyles of Sadeem, Gamrah, Mashael (nicknamed Michelle) and Lamees are more elite and far more liberal than many other Saudis, their experience is the experience of Saudi youth.

The Girls of Riyadh is written by Rajaa al-Sanie, a 25-year-old dental student who comes from a family of professionals, has lived most of her life in Riyadh and attended King Saud University. A kind of Arab Bridget Jones’s Diary, the novel is popular across the Arab world and a bestseller at book fairs all over the Middle East. Published in Beirut last September, it was officially banned from distribution in Saudi Arabia until last month, a prohibition that created even more excitement. In Saudi Arabia itself, tens of thousands of copies have been circulating - from the internet or the black market. It is being read by men as much as women, its impact has been debated in newspapers and on television, and Rajaa has become a celebrity.

In an exchange of e-mails with me, Rajaa insists that The Girls of Riyadh is not based on her own life or that of her friends, but rather on stories that she’s heard. “I hate to disappoint you, but I have not found true love,” she says. She started writing it six years ago as a hobby, and she plans to write more novels as she continues her postgraduate dental studies in the US.

In the book, three of the girls have relationships that go badly wrong, frustrated by conservative families and conservative men. The girls meet (sometimes bringing a boyfriend) in the house of Um Nuwayyer, a friendly neighbour who shares their secrets and advises them. Um Nuwayyer’s son is gay. Her husband left her to live with his second wife, after beating up his son. Homosexuality is only one of the taboos the author confronts in her book. Another is the hostility that even the least conservative of Sunni Wahabi society feels towards the minority Shia Muslims. Lamees refuses to heed her sister’s advice and becomes friendly with Ali, a Shia. But the affair ends when the religious police find them together in a cafe. “Poor Ali. He was a nice guy and, frankly, if he weren’t a Shia, she would have loved him,” says the narrator, who is portrayed as a friend of the four girls.

Perhaps more shocking, is that Rajaa dares to show that Saudi girls are keen to meet boys, despite the oppressive social barriers. “At the entrance to the mall, the girls followed a group of boys, who stood hesitant before the security guards. The defeated boys dispersed, except one, who walked towards Michelle. It seemed to him that she and Lamees were brave girls looking for adventure. He asked if he could go in with them as a member of the family in exchange for 1,000 riyals. Michelle was shocked by his defiance but quickly agreed.”

Funny and tragic, silly and serious, the book is written in a mix of colloquial and classical Arabic. Some readers have dismissed it as cheap melodrama. Others say it is a revealing study of one of the world’s most secretive societies.

Read an extract from Rajaa al-Sanie’s book The Girls of Riyadh
Click here

Rajaa did not intend it to be a social or political message. “I hate it when people think I was trying to deliver a message. In the Arab world, most writings are tarnished with motives or political messages that turn them into propaganda and I hate for my book to be categorised as such. I leave it to the reader to come to his own conclusions.” Maybe so. But many Saudis saw in the book a passionate cry for an end to religious interference in people’s lives. “The book also exposed society,” a Saudi man and fan of Rajaa told me. “It says you can’t stop people from loving, that telephones and the internet have facilitated this, that parents might leave girls at the doors of university but they might get picked up by boys.”

Rajaa says she did not expect her book, which will be published in English later this year, to cause such a furious reaction. Yet she starts every chapter with a fictionalised account of the responses to her weekly mail, some conveying gentle praise, others spitting outrage. But as Abdelaziz al-Qassim, a young reformist expert in Sharia law, tells me, the most surprising thing about the book is that it provoked a debate, instead of a vicious religious backlash. True, Rajaa was vilified by conservatives writing in internet chat rooms but there was no official condemnation of her work. “She put the behaviour of the girls of Riyadh on the table - and it just went by,” says al-Qassim. “Four years ago there would have been a huge scandal and she could have been sent to jail.”

In some way The Girls of Riyadh reflects the changing times. It is part of the struggle between the religious forces that have taken Saudi Arabia into cultural xenophobia, and the more liberal voices who have wanted to liberate society in recent years. Until the attacks of September 11 2001, the al-Saud royal family had given clerics virtually a free hand in controlling Saudi society, while its own members went about governing the kingdom and living their own, often ostentatious lives. But having discovered that this policy had created young fanatics, the government has been trying, slowly and sometimes grudgingly, to curtail the powers of the clergy.

The succession in August last year of King Abdullah who, even at 82, seems to want more relaxed social rules, has reinforced this trend. His labour minister and close adviser Ghazi al-Gosaibi, himself a poet with several books banned in Saudi Arabia, endorsed Rajaa’s book with a comment printed on the back cover: “This book deserves to be read - I expect a lot from this novelist.” Islamists were furious that a figure so close to the king could hold such views. One prominent activist, Mohsen al-Awaji, used al-Gosaibi’s support for the book as part of a scathing attack on the minister in an article published on the internet. Al-Awaji was harshly punished and briefly thrown in jail, an over-reaction it is difficult not to feel disappointed by.

The government is steering social relaxation -it wants to sponsor more cultural events, and more books are now allowed in, including some that discuss religious beliefs other than Wahabism. But cinemas and concerts are still banned and if you’re a woman you still aren’t allowed to drive a car (which means that if you’ve got one, you have to be alone in it with a man, usually a foreigner, called your driver).

Even if Rajaa insists it is not her intention to change all that, she can claim to have made a small contribution to young Saudis’ war of liberation. “Everyone is amazed that I dare to write this, and blames me for breaking taboos that we are not used to discussing in our society with such frankness,” writes the narrator in The Girls of Riyadh. “But doesn’t everything have a beginning? I may find a few believers in my cause today and I may not, but I doubt that I will find many opponents half a century from now.”

Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East edito

Posted at 4:55 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

Published: April 17, 2006
Concord, Mass.

THE arraignment of Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, at the United Nations-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in Freetown is a welcome development in Africa’s struggle against injustice, warlord impunity and the criminalization of state power. But Mr. Taylor’s forthcoming war crimes trial should not be transferred to The Hague, as Liberia’s president and the court itself have requested.

Such a transfer would defeat a principal purpose behind the establishment of the special court in Sierra Leone — namely, to teach Africans, firsthand and in their own countries, the fundamentals of justice and to drive home the democratic principle that no one is above the law. The special court has the potential to help raise West Africa’s standards for accountability, transparency, fairness and the humane treatment of defendants.

In countries where might makes right, demonstrating the proper administration of justice can be an unbeatable nation-building tool. This is a key part of what the special court was set up to do and has done quite well in Sierra Leone since it commenced operations in late 2002.

Sierra Leone is still unstable, reeling from the consequences of a civil war that Mr. Taylor fueled by providing arms and training to violent insurgents. We continue to suffer from poor governance, profound poverty and superstitious beliefs — the very weaknesses Mr. Taylor exploited in crafting his plunder of Sierra Leone and Liberia. If impunity and the criminal abuse of state power are not contained, progress in several parts of Africa, including Sierra Leone, will be stymied for years to come.

On the other hand, witnessing the proper administration of justice will render us Africans better able to protect our rights and more reliant on democratic principles, rather than on superstitious beliefs. Our leaders, seeing one of their own called to account for his crimes before the bar of justice in Sierra Leone, may come to understand that there are consequences for abusing power.

Popular perception in Africa is that conditions abroad are far superior to those at home. Spiriting the real kingpin among those charged with war crimes away to Europe, while his fellow accused are held back to be tried locally, would send a message to Mr. Taylor’s admirers that the whole world deems Mr. Taylor too big a fish to be tried locally. To such people, Mr. Taylor’s transfer abroad would seem like favoritism rendered to one of the most brutal of warlords out of perverse respect for the extreme horrors he perpetrated.

In order to drive home the true benefits of properly administered justice, Mr. Taylor and his fellow defendants should be held in the same humid place of detention, given the same food and tried by the same judges in the same courthouse nearest the scene of his crimes. All this should take place in plain view of Mr. Taylor’s victims.

Mr. Taylor’s lawyer, Vincent Nmehielle, wants the court to believe that his client would like to be tried in Sierra Leone. Those of us who are familiar with Mr. Taylor’s tactics know better. He is hoping that if he pretends to prefer being tried in Sierra Leone, the court will deny his request and be more motivated to ship him to Europe instead.

A practiced escape artist, Mr. Taylor knows he is better off in Europe than in Sierra Leone, where thousands of people would happily administer vigilante justice. Any escape from the protection of the United Nations detention center in Freetown would be a death sentence.

True, fears that Mr. Taylor’s trial in Freetown could cause instability in Sierra Leone, Liberia and elsewhere in the region have substantial merit. There are thousands of former combatants, including many Taylor loyalists and admirers, walking the streets and byways of Sierra Leone, Liberia and Ivory Coast. Some even hold public office in Liberia. Many of these people are disenchanted with the status quo, and it is quite possible that they could turn again to violence.

But the solution is not to rob Africans of the experience of seeing real justice administered to their most powerful tormentor. Potential instability should be addressed not by pandering to thuggish elements but by tightening security in both Sierra Leone and Liberia, under a robust United Nations peacemaking mandate.

There are already enough forces in the area to accomplish this. In 2000 and 2001, the United States spent $100 million to train at least seven battalions of a West African multinational armed force to help secure the peace in Sierra Leone. In addition, there are British-trained security forces in Sierra Leone and 15,000 United Nations peacekeepers in Liberia. The international community should further let it be known that if any group seeks to interfere with the trial by orchestrating violence in support of Mr. Taylor, its leaders will be subject to indictment themselves.

The benefits of trying Mr. Taylor in Freetown far outweigh the costs of activating internationally trained security forces to help maintain short-term stability in the region. And rather than concerning itself with trying Mr. Taylor in Europe, the world should get active in securing a suitable place for the long-term incarceration of Africa’s most notorious warlord should he be convicted.

Sierra Leone may not be stable enough to provide such a place on its own today. But the only way it will get there is if its people are permitted to see justice done at home.

John E. Leigh served as Sierra Leone’s ambassador to the United States from 1996 through 2002.

Posted at 4:45 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate
Posted Friday, April 14, 2006, at 12:44 PM ET

Download the MP3 audio version of this story here, or sign up for Slate’s free daily podcast on iTunes.

Compared to sitting in a classroom or language lab, learning a foreign tongue from a podcast doesn’t feel much like work. In the case of Chinesepod, a free daily podcast from Shanghai with lessons in Mandarin Chinese, language study is actually fun. When I tell people I listen to Chinesepod, they say, “Oh, I’d really love to do that in Spanish/French/Japanese, but I see all these language podcasts on the Web and I don’t know how to choose.” Here’s a piece of advice: Find ones that sound like Chinesepod.

As in most podcasts, the hosts are the biggest attraction. Chinesepod is hosted by Ken Carroll, an Irishman who founded a high-profile English school in Shanghai as well as Chinesepod’s parent company, and Jenny Zhu, who gained some visibility as Maria Shriver’s translator at the recent Special Olympics. They get right to business (they don’t chatter self-referentially about the Web site or the podcast) and they’re certainly likable. Because the lessons are predetermined but the accompanying banter isn’t, you get to hear Ken and Jenny genuinely interact in both English and Chinese, which is not only interesting but also takes on a frisson of actual social danger—Jenny, the native speaker, is Ken’s employee, which makes each lesson an episode of a subtly plotted soap opera. Will Jenny insult Ken’s Chinese? Will Ken stop moping that listeners have complained about his Mandarin tones?

They produce one lesson a day. Each is pegged at one of four difficulty levels and lasts between 10 and 15 minutes. Depending on which level you choose, you’ll hear more or less Chinese. The “Newbie” episodes contain a lot of English, the “Advanced” lessons hardly any. They’re organized around a single theme, from basic newbie topics like “colors” or “comparing cities” to culturally richer material such as asking for favors, buying tea, or flirting. After a brief welcome to Chinesepod from Ken and a hello from Jenny, the material for the day is presented in brief dialogues that, among their charms, avoid the usual absurd banality of most language lessons (“The sky is up. The floor is down.”) Then Ken and Jenny discuss items in the lesson (mostly in English but dropping in Chinese asides as a nod to more advanced listeners), elaborating on the grammatical patterns, repeating new words, and focusing on the tones. The only downside is that Ken insists on translating every word of the dialogues; there are more creative ways of matching new words with meanings.

Continue Article

There’s also a weekly feature, co-sponsored by the Shanghai Daily, of buzzwords in the news. You learn useful terms like “bu gamao” (literally “not having the flu” but here meaning “not interested”) or “fang gu dz” (literally “flying a pigeon” but used to mean “to get stood up”). The idioms and slang are cute, worth telling to your friends even if they’re not studying Chinese. The cultural immediacy is a relief—most other foreign language multimedia products seem as if they’ve been lost in the mail for, oh, say 25 years.

The podcasts are free, but you can purchase transcripts and additional exercises in written Chinese. Ken and Jenny don’t cover the written language in the podcasts. But for someone like me, who’s interested mostly in listening and speaking, this separation is an asset. There’s also a lot to love for someone (again like me) with a language fetish: In one lesson Ken and Jenny discussed a few phrases in Shanghaiese, Cantonese, and Mandarin. And in the lesson on Internet vocabulary, Jenny dropped the English word “e-mail” into a Mandarin sentence, then explained that even though there’s a Chinese word for e-mail, everyone says “e-mail.” I appreciate these tastes of the global linguistic soup.

For a comparison, I listened to a few other foreign language podcasts (in Russian, Spanish, and Japanese) to see if my enthusiasm for Chinesepod was misguided. It’s not. Doing everything as well as Chinesepod does is difficult, or at least rare. Other podcasts suffer from annoying hosts, language that isn’t challenging or current enough, or boring lessons that smell like a musty classroom. It’s as if they’ve chosen to do a podcast so they don’t have to deal in person with those pesky students.

A few of the other podcasts do have qualities to recommend them: Spanish Phrase of the Day is quick and to the point, and the phrases are useful; an episode of A Spoonful of Russian started with a cute intro from the host’s assistant, a little girl named Emily. I also liked Japancast, where I heard one host explain the Japanese in snippets of anime she played.

Still, too many other podcasts sound as if the hosts are working their way through a textbook or a dictionary. Such pedantry defeats the point of doing a podcast. On A Spoonful of Russian, for example, the woman simply reads lists of words. Granted, doing more with the language can be a challenge, but what’s so hard about getting two witty, educated people together to talk about talking? (Somebody, please give the blogger LanguageHat a microphone.) The stilted, scripted conversation between the hosts of Japanesepod 101 was so painful, I couldn’t listen much past the introduction. Others lack a fundamental understanding of a podcast’s limits. I could like Larry Keim, a junior-high Spanish teacher who videocasts his lessons, but he has an inordinate fondness for conjugating verbs.

It’s fortunate that a user-centered podcast exists in Chinese, a language that’s increasingly important in world affairs. No offense to French speakers, but I’d be disappointed if the cutting edge of podcast pedagogy was coming from a language whose primacy has passed. Too bad there isn’t a Chinesepod equivalent in Arabic, something friendly and colloquial that U.S. soldiers could crank up before going on patrol.

Posted at 4:42 AM · Comments (0)

(Filed: 16/04/2006)

Loud and brash, in gawdy garb and baseball caps, more than three
million of
them flock to our shores every year. Shuffling between tourist sites or
preparing to negotiate a business deal, they bemoan the failings of the
world outside the United States.

The reputation of the “Ugly American” abroad is not, however, just some
cruel stereotype, but - according to the American government itself -
worryingly accurate. Now, the State Department in Washington has joined
forces with American industry to plan an image make-over by issuing
guides
for Americans travelling overseas on how to behave.

Under a programme starting next month, several leading US companies
will
give employees heading abroad a “World Citizens Guide” featuring 16
etiquette tips on how they can help improve America’s battered
international image.

Business for Diplomatic Action (BDA), a non-profit group funded by big
American companies, has also met Karen Hughes, the head of public
diplomacy
at the State Department, to discuss issuing the guide with every new US
passport. The goal is to create an army of civilian ambassadors.

The guide offers a series of “simple suggestions” under the slogan,
“Help
your country while you travel for your company”. The advice targets a
series of common American traits and includes:

? Think as big as you like but talk and act smaller. (In many
countries,
any form of boasting is considered very rude. Talking about wealth,
power
or status - corporate or personal - can create resentment.)

? Listen at least as much as you talk. (By all means, talk about
America
and your life in our country. But also ask people you’re visiting about
themselves and their way of life.)

? Save the lectures for your kids. (Whatever your subject of
discussion,
let it be a discussion not a lecture. Justified or not, the US is seen
as
imposing its will on the world.)

? Think a little locally. (Try to find a few topics that are important
in
the local popular culture. Remember, most people in the world have
little
or no interest in the World Series or the Super Bowl. What we call
“soccer”
is football everywhere else. And it’s the most popular sport on the
planet.)

? Slow down. (We talk fast, eat fast, move fast, live fast. Many
cultures
do not.)

? Speak lower and slower. (A loud voice is often perceived as bragging.
A
fast talker can be seen as aggressive and threatening.)

? Your religion is your religion and not necessarily theirs. (Religion
is
usually considered deeply personal, not a subject for public
discussions.)

? If you talk politics, talk - don’t argue. (Steer clear of arguments
about
American politics, even if someone is attacking US politicians or
policies.
Agree to disagree.)

Keith Reinhard, one of New York’s top advertising executives, who heads
BDA, said: “Surveys consistently show that Americans are viewed as
arrogant, insensitive, over-materialistic and ignorant about local
values.
That, in short, is the image of the Ugly American abroad and we want to
change it.”

The guide also offers tips on the dangers of dressing too casually, the
pluses of learning a few words of the local language, use of hand
gestures
and even map-reading.

Of course, US foreign policy - and perceptions of it - currently has
the
biggest impact on the image of Americans abroad. President George W
Bush
recognised this when he appointed Ms Hughes, a close confidante, to
head
the country’s public diplomacy push. But Mr Reinhard and his colleagues
are
convinced that individual Americans can also make a difference.

They also want to highlight the positives in foreigners’ impression of
the
US as a land of opportunity, freedom, diversity and “can-do spirit” by
boosting business and domestic travel to America.

“In many parts of the world, America is not getting the benefit of the
doubt right now. People prefer to dump on us instead. But for many
people,
corporate America is their main point of contact, and that’s where we
come
in.”

Business for Diplomatic Action, which was formed in 2004, has already
distributed 200,000 -passport-sized guides tailored to college students
going abroad.

The group’s next target is to raise funding for a colourful pictorial
World
Citizen’s Guide For Kids for children on school or youth group trips.
However, a spokesman for the National Tourism Agency for Britain said
last
night: “Americans have a certain reputation which, for the majority, is
undeserved. These guidelines sound like good common sense but they’re
not
something the majority of our American visitors need. As tourists,
they’re
out to enjoy themselves and have a good time. We continue to welcome
them.”

Posted at 5:13 AM · Comments (0)

create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Posted at 12:42 AM · Comments (0)

Thursday April 13, 2006
Copyright The Guardian

China is about to adopt its 11th five-year plan, setting the stage for the continuation of probably the most remarkable economic transformation in history, while improving the wellbeing of almost a quarter of the world’s population. Never before has the world seen such sustained growth; never before has there been so much poverty reduction.
Part of the key to China’s long-run success has been its almost unique combination of pragmatism and vision. While much of the rest of the developing world, following the Washington consensus, has been directed at a quixotic quest for higher GDP, China has again made clear that it seeks sustainable and more equitable increases in real living standards. China realises that it has entered a phase of economic growth that is imposing enormous - and unsustainable - demands on the environment. Unless there is a change in course, living standards will eventually be compromised. That is why the new plan places great emphasis on the environment.

Many of the more backward parts of China have been growing at a pace that would be a marvel, were it not that other parts of the country are growing even more rapidly. While this has reduced poverty, inequality has been increasing, with growing disparities between cities and rural areas, and coastal regions and the interior. This year’s World Bank world development report explains why inequality, not just poverty, should be a concern, and China’s plan attacks the problem head on. The government has for several years talked about a more harmonious society, and the plan describes programmes for achieving this.

China recognises, too, that what separates less developed from more developed countries is not only a gap in resources, but also a gap in knowledge. So it has laid out plans to reduce that gap.

China’s role in the world and the world’s economy has changed. Its future growth will have to be based more on domestic demand than on exports, which will require increases in consumption. Indeed, China has a rare problem: excessive savings. People save partly because of weaknesses in government social-insurance programmes. Strengthening social security (pensions) and public health and education will simultaneously reduce social inequalities, increase its citizens’ sense of wellbeing, and promote consumption.

If successful, these adjustments may impose enormous strains on a global economic system that is already unbalanced by America’s huge fiscal and trade imbalances. If China saves less - and if, as officials have said, it pursues a more diversified policy of investing its reserves - who will finance America’s trade deficit of more than $2bn a day? This is a topic for another day, which may not be far off. With such a clear vision of the future, the challenge will be implementation. China is a large country, and it could not have succeeded as it has without widespread decentralisation. But decentralisation raises problems of its own.

Greenhouse gases, for example, are global problems. While America says that it cannot afford to do anything about it, China’s senior officials have acted more responsibly. Within a month of the adoption of the plan, new environmental taxes on cars, petrol and wood products were imposed: China was using market-based mechanisms to address its and the world’s environmental problems. But the pressures on local government officials to deliver economic growth and jobs will be enormous. They will be sorely tempted to argue that if America cannot afford to produce in a way that preserves our planet, how can they? To translate its vision into action, the Chinese government will need strong policies, such as the environmental taxes already imposed.

As China has moved toward a market economy, it has developed some of the problems that have plagued the developed countries: special interests that clothe self-serving arguments behind a veil of market ideology. Some will argue for trickle-down economics. And some will oppose competition policy and corporate governance laws. Growth arguments will be advanced to counter strong social and environmental policies. Such allegedly pro-growth policies would not only fail to deliver growth; they would threaten the entire vision of China’s future.

There is only one way to prevent this: open discussion of economic policies to expose fallacies and provide scope for creative solutions to the challenges facing China. George Bush has shown the dangers of excessive secrecy and confining decision-making to a narrow circle of sycophants. Most people outside China do not fully appreciate the extent to which its leaders, by contrast, have engaged in extensive deliberations and consultations as they strive to solve the enormous problems they face.

Market economies are not self-regulating. They cannot simply be left on autopilot, especially if one wants to ensure that their benefits are shared widely. But managing a market economy is no easy task. It is a balancing act that must constantly respond to economic changes. China’s plan provides a road map for that response. The world watches in awe, and hope, as the lives of 1.3 billion people continue to be transformed.

· Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate, is professor of economics at Columbia University and the World Bank’s former chief economist
© Project Syndicate

Posted at 12:27 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published April 13, 2006

SHANGHAI, April 12 — Wu Zigfried Zhiqiang grows animated as he clicks through a PowerPoint presentation of the Shanghai of the future, and for anyone who thinks his city is the last word on post-modernism, with its needle-spire towers and kitschy skyscrapers, he suggests that the surprises have just begun.
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Ryan Pyle for The New York Times

The Nantang district of residences near Suzhou Creek, of interest to preservationists, is scheduled to be replaced by new development.
Enlarge This Image
Ryan Pyle for The New York Times

The North Bund district is being demolished to create Shanghai’s new passenger ship terminal along the banks of the Huangpu River.

“On the one hand you will see something like New York’s financial district, and on the other, you will see new industrial infrastructure: one of the biggest ports, one of the biggest automobile factories, the biggest shipyards,” said Mr. Wu, who is the project designer for the 2010 World Expo, a vast undertaking that is driving much of the change. “You cannot find these things in New York.”

Within the next four years, Shanghai, the backdrop of so much upheaval and so many rebirths since it became the prized treaty port for European powers in the mid-19th century, will be utterly transformed once again. But critics say it will lose as much, in texture and vibrant community life, as it stands to gain in dazzling, futuristic projects. The notion of what warrants conservation has been highly restrictive, amounting to several hundred buildings in a city of 18 million and to parts of 12 districts, like the leafy and increasingly gentrified former French Concession neighborhood.

Mr. Wu, a 46-year-old urban designer, describes how China’s greatest city is racing to be greater still, aiming for the top as it ascends the hierarchy of world cities, with one eye on longtime champions like New York, and another on its fraternal rival, Beijing.

Like China’s capital, which is undergoing a crash rebuilding program in time for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Shanghai is using its role as host of the World Expo to shift what had already been a hugely ambitious remake into high gear. By the standards of recent urban development projects in the West — the so-called Big Dig in Boston, say — the scale of what the city is undertaking is astounding.

Along the western banks of the Huangpu River, site of the historic Bund thoroughfare, a 2,000-plus-yard-long stretch of the waterfront is being razed and redeveloped. The essence of the Bund, a virtual museum of Western architecture, flush with classical, Gothic and Art Deco landmarks, will be preserved, but densely inhabited neighborhoods at its edge are already being demolished.

This fresh development zone in the heart of central Shanghai, facing the newly minted skyscrapers of the Pudong district across the river, and every bit as attention-grabbing, will extend more than 700 yards inland at its widest point, with sleek halls and pavilions and green spaces.

Nearby, there will also be a modern passenger ship terminal and the world’s fastest commercial train service, a high-speed magnetic levitation line from Shanghai’s international airport, will be extended to Hangzhou, a city 100 miles to the southwest. The airport, meanwhile, is adding a second terminal whose futuristic design by the Xian Dai Architectural Design Group, is to complement the original terminal, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu.

Mr. Wu said that the architectural layout of the riverside project would take advantage of seasonal winds to assist climate control and that a water purification project aims to make the river water that flows through a 1.8-mile canal safe enough for swimming.

If the Expo seems intended to dazzle — and it is — the project is merely the central nugget of a far larger undertaking, one that will leave very little of this huge city untouched. Shanghai already boasts 4,000 skyscrapers, nearly twice as many as New York, and plans to add 1,000 more in the next decade. Elevated expressways are being built to channel above-ground traffic, and a gigantic push is under way to expand the subway system.

Many feel, though, that what Shanghai is losing is even more vital than what it will gain. Shanghai was China’s first, and remains its most distinctive, experiment in modern urbanism, and conservationists say that much of what made it so special in the last century will soon fall victim to the wrecking ball.

The severe damage begins at the very edge of the Bund, in the crowded neighborhoods peopled by generations of workers who have migrated here during more than a century’s worth of economic booms. They have fashioned what has come to be Shanghai’s signature urban lifestyle: walkup apartment buildings, often connected by a network of lanes, and an extraordinarily rich street life steeped in street cuisine, open-air produce markets and the ever-present bicycle.

Many of these neighborhoods, often starting just a couple of blocks in from the grand riverfront, or at its northern and southern ends, are already being demolished. Another area facing destruction soon, the north bank of Suzhou Creek, is of prime interest both to big developers and to historians and preservationists. The buildings there are of uneven architectural interest, though many are considered precious. But the area is considered a vital matrix of Shanghai’s authentic lifestyle.

Chen Guang, an architect who belongs to a civic group involved in conservation efforts makes clear how precarious the situation is, both for the city’s old neighborhoods and for those who wish to preserve them. “Our group is comprised of people who share an interest in protecting old neighborhoods,” he said, “although we don’t use the word protect in our name, even if this what we dearly hope to do.”

By the time of the World Expo, in 2010, Mr. Chen estimates, only five percent of the old neighborhoods existing in 2003 citywide will remain. “Suzhou Creek is a bit special for us, though, because of its special status in Shanghai’s history, and it has many units that are still intact. Suzhou Creek is a complete entity unto itself, in the same way that the Bund is a unit.”

The city’s plans call for the leveling of much of the creek’s north bank and building green promenades in place of the old tenements and brick-walled lanes. In Shanghai, as in the rest of China, where development proceeds largely by fiat, such things can happen with astounding speed. While rules have recently been amended to help residents bargain for better compensation from developers, there is no real choice about moving.

There have been no public hearings, and no votes on the matter. Even budget estimates are hard to come by. Shanghai’s eviction of hundreds of thousands of mostly low-income people from the city center has caused occasional protests, and there have been persistent reports of large-scale, high-level corruption involving politicians and developers.

Shanghai is building no new housing for low-income residents in the city’s core. “Shanghai is a 100 percent private market,” said Cheng Yun, chief researcher at the Shanghai offices of Centaline Property Consultants, a Hong Kong real estate company. “There is no social development in the central city. This is unique in the whole world, and it is not healthy.”

The city’s approach to public information about real estate is also unusual by the standards of most nations. The press is barred from reporting on ties between officials and developers, and even detailed maps showing patterns of demolition and redevelopment are as closely held as secret documents.

The concerns of many of those forced out are much more down-to-earth. “We have to move to an area which is far away from here, a suburban area, and we don’t want to go there,” said Zhu Yumei, 57, a woman who has lived her whole life on the north bank of Suzhou Creek. City officials say that they are mindful of the need to preserve a slice of the old town, but that working block by block with residents in buildings that have suffered decades of decay is impractical.

They contend that although less pronounced than in many Western cities, the hollowing of the central city is part of a broader regional trend. “From Singapore to Tokyo, Asian cities are experiencing this emptying out,” said Tang Zhiping, a senior city planner. “It’s more appropriate to compare Shanghai to places like these.”

For others, though, that is precisely the fear, that in a few short years Shanghai will have become just another in a group of largely anonymous Asian megacities in its haste for sleek modernity.

Zheng Shiling, the dean of urban planners here, and a man who has worked hard to lobby city officials on the importance of historic preservation, said: “Government officials like to be promoted according to their achievements, and that means having something to show. So this is an approach for government officials, not an urban planning approach.”

In the 1960’s, Mr. Zheng said, building new things in Chinese cities was revolutionary. Now it is conservation that is radical. “Once the reform period started, we wanted to have everything at once,” he said. “We were constructing modernization, but without a clear mind of modernity.”

Posted at 2:06 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Le Monde diplomatique
——————————————————————————-

April 2006

___________________________________________________________

North Korea, for all its nuclear ambitions, is close to economic
disaster, and is short of food, fuel and the simplest material
goods. To pay its debt to Russia (which Moscow will not cancel),
it exports a migrant labour force to be cruelly exploited in
Russia’s far eastern wild west.

by Alain Devalpo
___________________________________________________________

The man with the face wizened and marked by years of toil
said: “I’m not afraid to tell you my story, because it’s
true.” He looked like a native of the vast forests of
northern Russia. But he wasn’t. “I am from Nampo in North
Korea,” he began, struggling to find words. “I was a
chauffeur; I worked for the state for 10 years but then I was
taken ill. I ended up with no money, so I decided to try my
luck at the logging camps in Russia. I got here at the
beginning of 1995. They sent me to the camp at Tynda” (1).

North Korean lumberjacks have been hacking at the taiga
forests of eastern Russia for decades. There are many of them
in the Amur region north of Khabarovsk (2). The Far East is
home to only 5% of Russia’s people, yet it covers 33% of the
federation’s enormous area, and workers are hard to find in
this human desert. For historical and geographical reasons,
the area has always had close ties with communist North
Korea, ties that survived the fall of the Soviet system.
There are frequent official meetings and good transport
links: the railway between the countries has reopened and
there is a weekly flight between Vladivostok and Pyongyang.

“There were three waves of North Korean worker immigration
during the 20th century,” explained Larisa Zabrovskaya, a
historian who is based in Vladivostok. The first started with
the end of the second world war and the liberation of Korea,
when Soviet fish-treatment factories called on North Korean
manpower. In the 1950s there were about 25,000 of these
workers and their families living in the Soviet Union.

“The second wave took place after a secret meeting between
Leonid Brezhnev and Kim Il-sung (3) in Vladivostok in 1966,”
said Zabrovskaya. “The two leaders decided to install
lumberjacks in timber camps, between 15,000 and 20,000 of
them in any year.”

In those days mostly prisoners, both criminals and opponents
of Kim Il-sung’s regime, headed for the inhospitable lands
where there was no need for barbed wire to fence in would-be
escapees. That is no longer the case, said Zabrovskaya: “In
recent years, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, has met
twice with Vladimir Putin. They discussed North Korea’s debt,
which dates from the days when the Soviet Union was
supporting its North Korean ally.” Putin remained
intransigent: cancelling North Korea’s debt was out of the
question, despite its economic situation: “To pay off the
debt, Pyongyang said it would keep sending workers.”

But there is no longer any need to send the state’s
prisoners: “People leave for the camps or to work on building
sites voluntarily. According to the customs, more than 10,000
North Koreans with work visas cross the border each year.”
Everybody knows that they go as a result of a bilateral
agreement. But the truth about their working conditions is a
closely guarded secret.

To pick up fragments of information, you have to talk to
South Korean Christian pastors who work in the region. Out of
ethnic solidarity, some of them have linked with the
followers of juche (the North Korean ideology of autarky, or
total state self-reliance, invented by Kim Il-sung). You also
have to get around the Russian authorities, whose
surveillance has intensified since 2004, when two former
workers took refuge in the United States and South Korean
consulates in Vladivostok.

We arranged to meet our witness under the cover of a church,
in the heart of an area teeming with babushkas (4) on their
way home from the banya (Russian public baths). There he told
his tale: “Working hours vary from camp to camp. I was
working way up in a remote camp, for 16 or 17 hours every day
of the week. Those employed at the main camp, on distribution
or other jobs, worked only 12 or 14 hours. Counting New Year,
Kim Il-sung’s birthday, Kim Jong-il’s birthday and the
anniversary of the founding of the party, we used to get one
week’s holiday a year. In winter it’s very cold, at night the
temperature can reach -60C. Your hands, feet and face all
freeze. But the hardest thing was the food. They only gave us
150gm of rice and a bowl of soup per meal. That was all.”

Anything for a job

To recruit lumberjacks, the Pyongyang authorities dangle the
possibility of riches in foreign currency. The workers can
sign contracts for three years or more in Russia. North
Korea’s economic crisis is such that there is no shortage of
takers. All are party members and carefully vetted. “To come
to Russia, there are a number of requirements,” one said.
“You have to be in good physical condition. You have to have
references from party officials. Only married men with
families [who stay home as hostages] are allowed to come.”
Many will do anything to get the job: “My health was bad, so
I had to pay money to be selected.”

The lumberjacks’ stories were as heavy as taiga timber. Not
getting out of the way fast enough when trees are coming down
is a hazard of the job. Often there are accidents which lead
to broken limbs, sometimes needing amputation. There are
doctors at the camps, but medicines are often unavailable or
out of date. A lumberjack said: “If you can pay, you get
better treatment. I’ve been injured three times. Once, numbed
by the cold, I was working too slowly and a trunk fell down
on my chest. I was lucky not to die. Another time I hurt my
leg and couldn’t work for a month, so I didn’t get paid.”

The lumberjacks are not allowed to seek treatment in Russian
hospitals: the camps are self-contained and contact with
outside is forbidden. Though they are cut off from
neighbouring villages, some workers do manage to trade with
the Russians in secret. They have to get around the Korean
security services, the Powibo, at the camps. Our informants
said that breaking the rules leads to severe punishments, and
for trying to escape, the punishment is solitary confinement.

The companies in charge of the camps agree with the Russian
and North Korean authorities about how much wood to chop. The
best wood, from the lower part of the trees, is for Russia.
Medium-grade wood goes to North Korea. The rest is exported
to China or Japan. “Instead of a salary, I received coupons,”
said our informant. “They’d told me I’d be able to exchange
them, but I’ve never been able to buy anything with them. I
used to send them back to my family at home. But workers who
went back to Korea told me that the shops where you were
supposed to be able to exchange the coupons were always
empty.”

On their way to the camps, the lumberjacks may glimpse
Vladivostok through the train window. This great port looking
out over the Sea of Japan was closed to foreigners for much
of the Soviet period. After being plunged into chaos by the
fall of the Soviet Union, its regeneration has turned it into
a hive of building sites; it is short of workers, and Chinese
and North Korean labourers are welcome. In 2004 the regional
government registered 262,775 arrivals from China (most were
tourists) and 13,294 North Koreans (who were definitely not
on holiday).

“I’ve met more than 100 construction workers in Vladivostok
and they all said they were from Pyongyang,” a church pastor
said. “I was surprised, so I looked into it. It turns out
that the companies prefer to recruit people from the capital
because they find it less of a culture shock to work in town.
They adapt better. And that helps limit escape attempts.”

Cheap and hardworking

There are six companies, employing around 3,000. The local
press describes the Koretsky (Koreans) as “quick, cheap and
hardworking”. “They agree not to be paid until the work is
finished,” a businessman explained. Individuals employ them
to put up a wall or repaint a flat. Everyone in Vladivostok
knows that the Koreans hardly live well; they often sleep on
the sites and they work very hard. But everyone also says:
“At the end of the day, they’re making money.”

That is not always true, such is the perversity of Kim
Jong-il’s regime. The employment companies do not offer paid
work. Their job is to take the passports when the labourers
arrive, keep an eye on them in their residences and collect a
tax. It is up to the workers to find their own employers,
through contacts or classified ads. Whether they find work or
not, they have to pay 250 a month to the companies, a lot of
money in a region where salaries are much lower than in
Moscow (a university lecturer in Vladivostok earns 125 a
month).

Only through numbingly hard work on several sites
simultaneously can a Korean labourer pay off his debt, make
ends meet and put a little aside. Some give up. “It’s too
hard. After three years’ work I want to go back to Korea,”
one said. He had signed a contract for five years. He lives
in a single room with three companions and, despite all his
efforts, has not managed to save anything. He is trying not
to lose hope: “As soon as I’ve got a bit of money, I’ll go
back to Korea and then try to make it to Malaysia or Kuwait.
They say you can earn more there.”

In the timber camps, on building sites, and on Russian farms,
these labourers experience profound disillusionment. The
North Korean regime they supported has offered them hell and
made them call it paradise. Some decide that running away is
the only solution, despite the consequences for their
families back home. One man, on discovering that a year and a
half of drudgery had earned him no real cash, decided to
leave: “I ran away one night, around two or three o’clock in
the morning. There were four of us. It was impossible to take
a train from a station near the camp, because they’re not
supposed to sell us tickets. So we had to bribe one of the
camp’s drivers to take us to a town further away where we’d
be able to get on a train”.

One of the four could speak a little Russian. They stuck
together just for survival: “We always travelled together. We
went down towards the Chinese border where there are uranium
mines. We worked for a year on a building site at a mine. In
1999 we came to Vladivostok to try and make it to South
Korea. I’ve been hiding in and around Vladivostok for six
years now. I’m always afraid of getting caught by the
police.”

Koreans’ features make them vulnerable in a region whose
police are already on the lookout for illegal Chinese
immigrants. How many are hidden across Russia? The pastors
estimate some 2,000, spread out along the 11,000km
trans-Siberian railway between Vladivostok and Moscow.

According to the United Nations convention on the status of
refugees, our informant should be allowed to demand asylum.
The Kremlin does not agree (5). Should an escapee be caught
by the Russian police, he is certain to be deported back to
North Korea, the inner circle of hell.
________________________________________________________

Alain Devalpo is a journalist

(1) A medium-sized town in the Amur region.

(2) Khabarovsk, 1,200km north of Vladivostok, is the official
capital of Russia’s Far East region.

(3) Respectively, Soviet leader 1964-1982 and founder of the
Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea, which he ruled
from 1948 until his death in 1994. Kim Il-sung was succeeded
by his son, Kim Jong-il.

(4) Russian for grandmother.

(5) China’s policy is harsher: informing on North Korean
refugees is encouraged, while helping them carries a
seven-year prison sentence.

Translated by Gulliver Cragg

________________________________________________________

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED © 1997-2006 Le Monde diplomatique

Posted at 11:20 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Wall Street Journal
April 10, 2006; Page A1

WARRI, Nigeria — The list of people with big influence over the $2 trillion-a-year global oil market has long been an exclusive one, topped by Saudi princes and American presidents. This year, someone calling himself Jomo Gbomo emailed his way into the club.

Since January, the obscure Nigerian rebel group that he claims to speak for has battled Nigeria’s military, blown up oil facilities and kidnapped foreign oil workers. All the while, Mr. Gbomo (pronounced BO-mo) has fired off emails to the international media taking responsibility for the attacks or threatening new ones — and often roiling global oil prices in the process. (See a timeline of attacks and emails.)

“All pipelines, flow stations and crude loading platforms will be targeted for destruction,” he wrote hours before a violent attack in mid-February that helped drive oil prices in New York up by more than $1 a barrel. A later email to The Wall Street Journal that also lists the sender as Jomo Gbomo declares: “The fact that we have influenced the price of world oil, no matter how little, and caught the attention of the foreign media indicates we are on the right track.” The email’s author says that name is a pseudonym. The real identity of the writer is a mystery.

The media-savvy guerrilla group’s emergence as a market mover points to a mounting problem for the U.S. and other big oil consumers: maintaining energy security in an era of scarce oil resources and ever-longer supply lines. With today’s tight oil markets, even small disruptions — or the threat of them — can jolt the world economy, leading to higher costs of gasoline, airline tickets and other goods for consumers everywhere. (See related article.)

That dynamic is giving new power to rebels, terrorists and ornery governments. Al Qaeda is targeting oil facilities in Saudi Arabia, the world’s No. 1 exporter. A foiled terrorist attack there helped send prices up more than $2 a barrel in February. Some Iranian officials have threatened to block the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf if the United Nations imposes sanctions over Tehran’s suspected nuclear-weapons program. Now even Mr. Gbomo’s small group, armed with little more than machine guns and an email account, has realized that it, too, can use oil as a weapon on the global stage.

Mr. Gbomo’s group, the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, or MEND, wants local control of the region’s oil wealth, along with the release of two imprisoned delta leaders. It hopes that by shaking up world markets it can bring international pressure on Nigeria’s government to respond to its demands.

Oil sabotage is a longstanding insurgency tactic. Joseph Stalin organized strikes by oil workers in the Caucasus in the early 1900s to weaken the czar. But the number and widening geographic scope of attacks and threats today has the oil industry and governments scrambling to safeguard the world’s oil supply.

Sen. Richard Lugar, Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is pushing a bill that would lead to coordination with big, new oil consumers like China on developing emergency stocks and other measures to handle major oil disruptions. The European Union is considering rules to bolster security at energy installations with costly tools like fences and sensors. The International Energy Agency, a Paris-based energy watchdog, estimates it will take $3 trillion in spending over the next 25 years on new oil infrastructure to insulate the world from shocks.

Under the Carter Doctrine of 1980, the U.S. committed to defending its interests in the Persian Gulf, the source of almost two-thirds of world oil reserves. That led to a military mobilization in the region that cost the U.S. some $20 billion a year since the 1980s, according to a relatively conservative estimate by Amy Myers Jaffe, an energy-security expert at Rice University.

Since then, as the U.S. has diversified its energy sources, the challenge of protecting supplies has grown. The list of unstable oil-exporting regions now includes West Africa, Central Asia and South America.

Africa is particularly worrisome, given its growing supply role and political instability. The continent now pumps just over 10% of global oil output, and Houston consultancy IHS estimates it will provide about a third of the world’s new oil by 2010. Nigeria alone accounts for 3% of today’s global supply. Yet far from evolving into a hedge against Mideast turmoil, the region has become a risky new chokepoint.

Oil has been a source of discord in the Niger Delta almost since it was discovered here in 1956 by Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Ethnic minorities have fought Nigeria’s federal government, and each other, over oil benefits. Ransom kidnappings and smuggling flourish. Endemic corruption means little oil wealth reaches communities near the wells. Warri, the western delta’s oil capital, is a crime-ridden sprawl of rutted streets and cinderblock shops.

For security, Shell and other oil companies long relied on government forces that they subsidized. Shell also used cash to keep the peace, putting locals on the payroll for nonexistent jobs or doling out payments to community leaders. In 2003, Shell banned such practices, and now relies largely on funding development projects — about $25 million in 2004 — to generate good will.

Shell executives declined to discuss most details of their security procedures in Nigeria or elsewhere, citing safety concerns for staff. “We continue to take necessary measures to ensure the safety and security of staff, contractors and the people in the communities where we operate,” Shell said in a statement.

The surge in oil prices since 2003 has turned the long-simmering delta from a local nuisance for the oil industry into an international economic flash point. Growing demand whittled away the world’s spare capacity of idle oil wells that producers can tap in a crunch. The U.S. invasion of Iraq further crimped supplies. Around that time, Niger Delta rebels began playing the global oil game.

‘All Out War’

In September 2004, Mujahid Dokubo-Asari, a delta warlord whom the Nigerian government had accused of oil smuggling, declared “all out war” on the government. Annkio Briggs, a senior aide to Mr. Asari at the time, says the warlord’s comments were carefully crafted and timed to move global prices. Carried by news agencies, the remarks helped push New York futures prices above $50 a barrel for the first time.
[Mujahid Dokubo-Asari]

“We were aware of the price of oil, and we were aware that it was dependent on supply and demand, and we were aware that supplies had to be stable,” says Ms. Briggs in an interview. “We looked around at other countries that were big producers, and we could see anytime there was a crisis the price of oil would go up, so it didn’t take a lot of intelligence or mathematics to figure it out.”

After a temporary peace with Mr. Asari, the Nigerian government arrested him last September on treason charges. Asari loyalists demonstrated in Port Harcourt, the delta’s biggest city. In late December, unknown militants blew up a critical Shell pipeline.

Shortly after that, the group calling itself MEND made its first appearance. On Jan. 11, three speedboats packed with rebels attacked a Shell facility off the Nigerian coast. They engaged a Nigerian navy boat, forcing it to retreat, and then machine-gunned a Shell-chartered support vessel. No one was injured, but the rebels boarded the boat and kidnapped four foreign contractors. In a separate but coordinated attack, gunmen also blew up a Shell pipeline.

Afterward, the first email from Mr. Gbomo surfaced, claiming responsibility for the attacks on behalf of MEND. “We are capable and determined to destroy the ability of Nigeria to export oil,” he wrote in the email, sent to reporters. In New York the next day, oil prices soared more than $1 on the kidnapping news, before retreating by the session’s close.

The incident rattled big oil companies, which have invested billions of dollars in Nigerian offshore oil production that once seemed insulated from turmoil on land miles away. Shell worried that boat trips to its large field called EA, about nine miles offshore, were no longer safe, and shut down production there.

The U.S. Navy has stepped up deployments in the waters off Nigeria. The U.S. has also given Nigeria a handful of old Coast Guard vessels, and American soldiers have trained Nigerians on small-boat tactics in the delta’s creeks. But Nigeria’s army and navy remain ineffective “Right now, I don’t know how far offshore [the rebels] can go,” says Brig. Gen. Elias Zamani, former commander of a Nigerian military unit fighting the militants here.

Details about MEND and its self-described spokesman are scarce. Mr. Gbomo doesn’t give interviews in person and declines to provide information on his own age, location or background, except to say that he is male and is part of the “nerve centre” of MEND. In recent weeks, he has sent out detailed field reports after attacks to more than a dozen local and foreign reporters. These accounts, along with his threats of future attacks that actually do pan out and his knowledge of the movement of hostages, appear to corroborate his assertion that he is close to the leadership of MEND. But the extent of the connection couldn’t be verified.

The Niger Delta is home to numerous youth gangs whose loyalties shift between political, ethnic or tribal leaders. Experts say that MEND has brought new cohesion to that mix. Its attacks have so far prompted Shell to evacuate hundreds of staff from the western delta and to shut down roughly 455,000 barrels of daily production, about a fifth of Nigeria’s total output. “MEND seems to show much more sophistication using Nigeria’s contribution to the energy market to advance its goals,” says a Western official who has studied the group. “We hadn’t really seen this targeted activity before.”

Mr. Gbomo does reply to emailed questions, although it’s not clear from where. Internet cafes are plentiful in the Niger Delta. Mr. Gbomo’s emails, which all come from the same Yahoo account, carry an electronic tag that suggests they were sent via a computer in South Africa. But they could have originated elsewhere. U.S. officials believe there’s a clear link between Mr. Gbomo and the MEND attacks, but it’s unclear if law enforcement officials have tried to follow his email trail.

Umbrella for Militant Groups

In one recent exchange, Mr. Gbomo described MEND as a new umbrella for several militant groups that have been fighting in the delta for years. He said MEND’s forces number in the hundreds. “We are not communists or even revolutionaries,” he wrote. “Just a bunch of extremely bitter men.”

Chief W.O. Okirika, a community leader in the delta who has had contact with MEND leaders, says the group consists of local residents who want the government to start distributing oil wealth to the community. If the government doesn’t, he says, “the militancy of the youth will increase and the pipeline attacks will escalate.”

Four days after its first attack, on Jan. 15, MEND raided a Shell oil-pumping station in the delta, exchanging heavy fire with soldiers guarding it. Fourteen soldiers and two caterers working for Shell were killed, either shot or drowned, according to Shell and the Nigerian military.

In emails to reporters afterward, Mr. Gbomo demanded the release of Mr. Asari, the imprisoned rebel leader, and a local delta governor recently jailed on corruption charges. He promised “a series of very significant attacks” and called for all oil workers to leave the area. The next trading day in New York, prices leapt more than $2 a barrel. Newswires quoted traders and analysts blaming the price spike on the Nigerian unrest, as well as growing concern about Iran’s standoff with the West.
[Flash Points]

At the rebel base camp, the kidnapped foreign contractors from the Jan. 11 attack slept on mattresses and were provided bottled water, cigarettes and tins of sardines, according to a later account from one of the hostages, Nigel Watson-Clark. The rebel group’s apparent leader preached to the hostages about the delta’s destitution. Mr. Watson-Clark, an old West Africa hand, came away persuaded that the group was different than the typical Nigerian kidnapping ring out for ransom.

“They made it perfectly clear that they weren’t interested in money,” he said in a telephone interview from his home in the U.K. late last month. “The main demand was that all [foreigners] would have to leave the Niger Delta, and they had to have some sort of control over their resources.” After 19 days, MEND released the hostages unharmed.

Then, on Feb. 15, helicopter gunships under the command of Nigerian Gen. Zamani opened fire on several suspected smuggling barges near Warri. Community leaders said the raid killed villagers and damaged homes. Gen. Zamani denied that, but was relieved of his command last month.

Three days after the helicopter attacks, just past midnight in Nigeria, Mr. Gbomo sent an email to journalists warning of a MEND reprisal. A few hours later, gunmen swarmed a barge near an oil-export terminal run by Shell and kidnapped nine employees of Willbros Group Inc., a Houston contractor. On the next day of trading in New York, prices jumped more than $1 a barrel.

Mr. Gbomo sent out digital photos of the hostages, surrounded by masked men brandishing machine guns. In late February, he arranged for a group of reporters to board speedboats and rendezvous with several boatloads of gun-toting MEND members. In a second, similar meeting, the group surprised reporters by turning over one of the hostages, Macon Hawkins, a 69-year-old Texan with diabetes. They freed the rest over several weeks. After they released the last three hostages in late March, oil prices dropped 10 cents a barrel on the news.

But in a mass email after the release, Mr. Gbomo said MEND wasn’t backing down. Caring for the hostages had tied down 800 men who could be better used attacking oil facilities, he said. “Oil companies and their workers should not be deceived into a false sense of relief,” he wrote. Financial newswires flashed his comments, helping send crude up almost $2 a barrel the next day.

—Christopher Rhoads contributed to this article.

Posted at 12:46 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2006

SEOUL While the world may be used to identifying China with the cute panda bears or mystic dragons, best-sellers in the People’s Republic now strongly advocate a new national totem of the wolf and the wolf pack’s blood-thirsty, aggression-oriented, force-worshipped spirit of predators as the essence of a renaissance of Chinese civilization.

Even though Beijing repeatedly asserts its peaceful acceptance of the existing world order, worries about its growing power are becoming more and more pronounced. As some Chinese strategists have already realized, Beijing needs to effectively address international suspicions to rise further.

A peaceful ascent seems - officially at least - to be Beijing’s sincere wish. But neither the Chinese people nor the world should trust words alone. The Chinese are no more or less peace-loving, nor more or less trustworthy, than any other nation. The only reliable assurance is that the rising Chinese power become structurally constrained, first of all internally.

When external constraints (like U.S. power) are weakening or fading, or becoming too costly, it is the internal constraints on Chinese power that must provide the assurance.

Authoritarian political corporatism with Chinese characteristics has helped to balloon the Chinese economy in the past two decades while maintaining sociopolitical stability. Such a system, however, is at odds with those of the United States and its allies.

Ultimately, Beijing has to convince the world that its internal politics will never be imposed beyond its borders. Alternatively, China could fundamentally assure the world that it is transforming structurally by developing effective internal constraints on its own political power based on well protected individual rights and property rights, freedom of speech, democratic governance, diversified civil society, and genuine rule of law.

Unfortunately, some early signals from the rising Chinese power have been rather unsettling.

Nourished by carefully censored media and tightly controlled education, a whole generation of angry youth has emerged with one-sided views of the world that are often laughably ignorant and frighteningly arrogant.

Philosophically, there is a considerable effort to advance the Chinese view of world order based on the so-called tianxia (under-the-sun) system, a notion that the whole world should be united and governed like an orderly and harmonious family with layers and ranks under one centralized ruler, a benevolent dictator, a “son of heaven” whose rule is based on “earning people’s hearts” with ethics rather than law.

The long stagnation and despotism under the Chinese world order in East Asia before the late 19th century are thus pretentiously repackaged as China’s alternative to the Western-dominated, Westphalian system of international relations.

None of these thoughts or attempts are in themselves undesirable or alarming. The real danger is the absence of opposing views or critical thinking more representative of the 1.3 billion Chinese and their interests.

The much-needed voices of balance and restraint are often systematically suppressed, harshly punished or simply eliminated. In March 2006, for example, a rare essay thanking Japan for its $30 billion- plus official aid to China since 1979 was deleted only two days after it was posted on a major Chinese Web portal, while hundreds of postings attacking the essay and its authors gave a dangerously misleading image of an unappreciative and extremist nation.

Much more than wishful words is urgently needed to head off a repeat of the historical tragedies of many past rising powers.

For a start, the Chinese people must not be misled about their own history any longer; there must be a marketplace for competing ideas, open discourse, and judicious reasoning. Only by facing its own record truthfully can a government become accountable.

For the best interest of the Chinese people and, ultimately, world peace, Beijing must give assurances that its rise will be peaceful, first by establishing credible internal constraints.

Fei-Ling Wang, professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is currently visiting professor at Yonsei University. His most recent book is “Organizing through Division and Exclusion: China’s Hukou System.”

Posted at 12:40 PM · Comments (0)

Tuesday, April 11, 2006 - Copyright The South China Morning Post

Buddhism can contribute to healing community divides and help believers deal with major changes in Chinese society, State Administration for Religious Affairs director Ye Xiaowen said yesterday.

Mr Ye was quoted by Xinhua as saying other religions such as Christianity and Islam could also contribute to the building of a harmonious society, but Buddhism, which pursued an idea of harmony that was close to that in the Chinese outlook, could make a “distinctive contribution”.

“As a responsible country, China has a distinctive thinking and forward-looking policy in promoting world harmony. Religious power is one of the social forces China can draw support from,” he said.

Mr Ye, who is also president of the Religious Culture Communication Association of China (RCCAC), said Buddhism could help believers cope with the fast-changing society, now plagued by a huge wealth gap and increasing social unrest.

“Under globalisation and increasing opening up, China’s development cannot proceed without that of the world and China’s harmony cannot go without the world’s tranquility,” he said.

“China will work hard to build a harmonious society internally while calling for the building of a harmonious world externally.”

His comments come as organisers prepare for the first World Buddhist Forum this week in Zhejiang province , an event co-organised by the Buddhist Association of China and the RCCAC, and due to run from Thursday to Sunday.

The Reverend Chan Kim-kwong, executive secretary of the Hong Kong Christian Council, said Mr Ye made the comments to highlight the World Buddhist Forum. “He has been to Hong Kong to promote the forum before. He wants to continue to support it by making such comments,” Mr Chan said.

Tam Wai-lun, associate professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Department of Cultural and Religious Studies, agreed with Mr Chan’s assessment. “The reason why he highlighted Buddhism is related to the forum,” Professor Tam said.

He said the central government was at ease with Buddhism because it had less contact with outside forces, which were often seen by authorities as splitting and meddling in China’s internal affairs.

Professor Tam said it was nothing new for the central government to draw support from religion to help strengthen its rule. “The Chinese government has been using a united-front attitude to tackle religion in the country,” he said.

Posted at 1:29 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright - The Progressive
April 2006 Issue

Now that most Americans no longer believe in The The Progressive war, now that The The Progressivey no longer trust Bush and his Administration, now that The The Progressive evidence of deception has become overwhelming (so overwhelming that even The The Progressive major media, always late, have begun to register indignation), we might ask: How come so many people were so easily fooled?

The The Progressive question is important because it might help us understand why Americans—members of The The Progressive media as well as The The Progressive ordinary citizen—rushed to declare The The Progressiveir support as The The Progressive President was sending troops halfway around The The Progressive world to Iraq.
A small example of The The Progressive innocence (or obsequiousness, to be more exact) of The The Progressive press is The The Progressive way it reacted to Colin Powell’s presentation in February 2003 to The The Progressive Security Council, a month before The The Progressive invasion, a speech which may have set a record for The The Progressive number of falsehoods told in one talk. In it, Powell confidently rattled off his “evidence”: satellite photographs, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare. The The Progressive New York Times was breathless with admiration. The The Progressive Washington Post editorial was titled “Irrefutable” and declared that after Powell’s talk “it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.”

It seems to me The The Progressivere are two reasons, which go deep into our national culture, and which help explain The The Progressive vulnerability of The The Progressive press and of The The Progressive citizenry to outrageous lies whose consequences bring death to tens of thousands of people. If we can understand those reasons, we can guard ourselves better against being deceived.

One is in The The Progressive dimension of time, that is, an absence of historical perspective. The The Progressive oThe The Progressiver is in The The Progressive dimension of space, that is, an inability to think outside The The Progressive boundaries of nationalism. We are penned in by The The Progressive arrogant idea that this country is The The Progressive center of The The Progressive universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.

If we don’t know history, The The Progressiven we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and The The Progressive intellectuals and journalists who supply The The Progressive carving knives. I am not speaking of The The Progressive history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from The The Progressive much-admired Founding FaThe The Progressivers to The The Progressive Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about The The Progressive past. If we don’t know that history, The The Progressiven any President can stand up to The The Progressive battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that The The Progressive nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must The The Progressiverefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.

But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to The The Progressive country, and how The The Progressivey turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty The The Progressive responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against The The Progressive mendacity of our high officials.

We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to The The Progressive nation about The The Progressive reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon The The Progressive American soil,” but that Polk, and The The Progressive slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.

We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about The The Progressive reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate The The Progressive Cubans from Spanish control, but The The Progressive truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that The The Progressive island could be open to United Fruit and oThe The Progressiver American corporations. He also lied about The The Progressive reasons for our war in The The Progressive Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” The The Progressive Filipinos, while The The Progressive real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in The The Progressive far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.

President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about The The Progressive reasons for entering The The Progressive First World War, saying it was a war to “make The The Progressive world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make The The Progressive world safe for The Progressive Western imperial powers.

Harry Truman lied when he said The The Progressive atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”

Everyone lied about Vietnam—Kennedy about The The Progressive extent of our involvement, Johnson about The The Progressive Gulf of Tonkin, Nixon about The The Progressive secret bombing of Cambodia, all of The The Progressivem claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really wanting to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at The The Progressive edge of The The Progressive Asian continent.

Reagan lied about The The Progressive invasion of Grenada, claiming falsely that it was a threat to The The Progressive United States.

The The Progressive elder Bush lied about The The Progressive invasion of Panama, leading to The The Progressive death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country.

And he lied again about The The Progressive reason for attacking Iraq in 1991—hardly to defend The The Progressive integrity of Kuwait (can one imagine Bush heartstricken over Iraq’s taking of
Kuwait?), raThe The Progressiver to assert U.S. power in The The Progressive oil-rich Middle East.

Given The The Progressive overwhelming record of lies told to justify wars, how could anyone listening to The The Progressive younger Bush believe him as he laid out The The Progressive reasons for invading Iraq? Would we not instinctively rebel against The The Progressive sacrifice of lives for oil?

A careful reading of history might give us anoThe The Progressiver safeguard against being deceived. It would make clear that The The Progressivere has always been, and is today, a profound conflict of interest between The The Progressive government and The The Progressive people of The The Progressive United States. This thought startles most people, because it goes against everything we have been taught.

We have been led to believe that, from The The Progressive beginning, as our Founding FaThe The Progressivers put it in The The Progressive Preamble to The The Progressive Constitution, it was “we The The Progressive people” who established The The Progressive new government after The The Progressive Revolution. When The The Progressive eminent historian Charles Beard suggested, a hundred years ago, that The The Progressive Constitution represented not The The Progressive working people, not The The Progressive slaves, but The The Progressive slaveholders, The The Progressive merchants, The The Progressive bondholders, he became The The Progressive object of an indignant editorial in The The Progressive New York Times.

Our culture demands, in its very language, that we accept a commonality of interest binding all of us to one anoThe The Progressiver. We mustn’t talk about classes. Only Marxists do that, although James Madison, “FaThe The Progressiver of The The Progressive Constitution,” said, thirty years before Marx was born that The The Progressivere was an inevitable conflict in society between those who had property and those who did not.

Our present leaders are not so candid. The The Progressivey bombard us with phrases like “national interest,” “national security,” and “national defense” as if all of The The Progressivese concepts applied equally to all of us, colored or white, rich or poor, as if General Motors and Halliburton have The The Progressive same interests as The The Progressive rest of us, as if George Bush has The The Progressive same interest as The The Progressive young man or woman he sends to war.

Surely, in The The Progressive history of lies told to The The Progressive population, this is The The Progressive biggest lie. In The The Progressive history of secrets, withheld from The The Progressive American people, this is The The Progressive biggest secret: that The The Progressivere are classes with different interests in this country. To ignore that—not to know that The The Progressive history of our country is a history of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor—is to render us helpless before all The The Progressive lesser lies told to us by people in power.

If we as citizens start out with an understanding that The The Progressivese people up The The Progressivere—The The Progressive President, The The Progressive Congress, The The Progressive Supreme Court, all those institutions pretending to be “checks and balances”—do not have our interests at heart, we are on a course towards The The Progressive truth. Not to know that is to make us helpless before determined liars.

The The Progressive deeply ingrained belief—no, not from birth but from The The Progressive educational system and from our culture in general—that The The Progressive United States is an especially virtuous nation makes us especially vulnerable to government deception. It starts early, in The The Progressive first grade, when we are compelled to “pledge allegiance” (before we even know what that means), forced to proclaim that we are a nation with “liberty and justice for all.”

And The The Progressiven come The The Progressive countless ceremonies, wheThe The Progressiver at The The Progressive ballpark or elsewhere, where we are expected to stand and bow our heads during The The Progressive singing of The The Progressive “Star-Spangled Banner,” announcing that we are “The The Progressive land of The The Progressive free and The The Progressive home of The The Progressive brave.” The The Progressivere is also The The Progressive unofficial national anThe The Progressivem “God Bless America,” and you are looked on with suspicion if you ask why we would expect God to single out this one nation—just 5 percent of The The Progressive world’s population—for his or her blessing.
If your starting point for evaluating The The Progressive world around you is The The Progressive firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every oThe The Progressiver nation on Earth, The The Progressiven you are not likely to question The The Progressive President when he says we are sending our troops here or The The Progressivere, or bombing this or that, in order to spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to some God-forsaken (literally) place in The The Progressive world.
It becomes necessary The The Progressiven, if we are going to protect ourselves and our fellow citizens against policies that will be disastrous not only for oThe The Progressiver people but for Americans too, that we face some facts that disturb The The Progressive idea of a uniquely virtuous nation.

The The Progressivese facts are embarrassing, but must be faced if we are to be honest. We must face our long history of ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off The The Progressiveir land by means of massacres and forced evacuations. And our long history, still not behind us, of slavery, segregation, and racism. We must face our record of imperial conquest, in The The Progressive Caribbean and in The The Progressive Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And The The Progressive lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not a history of which we can be proud.

Our leaders have taken it for granted, and planted that belief in The The Progressive minds of many people, that we are entitled, because of our moral superiority, to dominate The The Progressive world. At The The Progressive end of World War II, Henry Luce, with an arrogance appropriate to The The Progressive owner of Time, Life, and Fortune, pronounced this “The The Progressive American century,” saying that victory in The The Progressive war gave The The Progressive United States The The Progressive right “to exert upon The The Progressive world The The Progressive full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Both The The Progressive Republican and Democratic parties have embraced this notion. George Bush, in his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2005, said that spreading liberty around The The Progressive world was “The The Progressive calling of our time.” Years before that, in 1993, President Bill Clinton, speaking at a West Point commencement, declared: “The The Progressive values you learned here … will be able to spread throughout this country and throughout The The Progressive world and give oThe The Progressiver people The The Progressive opportunity to live as you have lived, to fulfill your God-given capacities.”

What is The The Progressive idea of our moral superiority based on? Surely not on our behavior toward people in oThe The Progressiver parts of The The Progressive world. Is it based on how well people in The The Progressive United States live? The The Progressive World Health Organization in 2000 ranked countries in terms of overall health performance, and The The Progressive United States was thirty-seventh on The The Progressive list, though it spends more per capita for health care than any oThe The Progressiver nation. One of five children in this, The The Progressive richest country in The The Progressive world, is born in poverty. The The Progressivere are more than forty countries that have better records on infant mortality. Cuba does better. And The The Progressivere is a sure sign of sickness in society when we lead The The Progressive world in The The Progressive number of people in prison—more than two million.

A more honest estimate of ourselves as a nation would prepare us all for The The Progressive next barrage of lies that will accompany The The Progressive next proposal to inflict our power on some oThe The Progressiver part of The The Progressive world. It might also inspire us to create a different history for ourselves, by taking our country away from The The Progressive liars and killers who govern it, and by rejecting nationalist arrogance, so that we can join The The Progressive rest of The The Progressive human race in The The Progressive common cause of peace and justice.

Howard Zinn is The The Progressive co-author, with Anthony Arnove, of “Voices of a People’s History of The The Progressive United States.”

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Copyright The Financial Times
April 7, 2006

China’s rapid growth in the past decade has brought it front and centre into the global economy. It has become the “world’s factory”, the base for off-shore manufacturing for leading companies worldwide. Now experts believe China will move upstream into design and innovation by expanding its science workforce, improving its universities and attracting the world’s top technology companies.

But China’s remarkable growth is the product of only a handful of propulsive regions, which attract the lion’s share of its talented people, generate the bulk of its innovations and create most of its wealth. To interact effectively with this rising economic star the west will have to recognise that China is the most extreme example of the “spiky” nature of globalisation. Even as globalisation causes economic activity to decentralise - giving rise to the increasingly “flat world” chronicled by Thomas Friedman, New York Times columnist - it simultaneously concentrates innovation, talent and wealth in a small number of peaks or spikes.

Outside manufacturing, China’s most notable achievements have come in technology. In 2004, China’s Lenovo acquired IBM’s ThinkPad brand of notebook computers and a growing number of US, European and Japanese companies have opened Chinese innovation centres. Yet China ranks just 36th of 45 countries on the Global Creativity Index, an indicator I developed to measure a country’s progress on the three Ts of economic growth: technology, talent and tolerance. On technology, China is 28th, on a par with Croatia and Ukraine but behind India. Its technological prowess is extremely concentrated. Just six regions - Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Shenzhen, Shenyang and Guangzhou - produce the majority of Chinese innovations.

In talent, China is equally spiky. It ranks last of all countries measured, with only 1.5 per cent of its population holding a bachelor’s degree or above - compared with 6 per cent in India and about 20 per cent in the US, Europe and Japan. While the top 10 Chinese regions account for just 16 per cent of its population, they house nearly half of its talent-producing universities, according to a study I conducted with a George Mason University graduate student, Tairan Li.

China is incredibly uneven when it comes to the openness of its culture. Shanghai and Beijing are buzzing cosmopolitan centres. Shanghai, an urban agglomeration the size of Los Angeles with 18m inhabitants, is determined to transform itself into a world-class creative centre by investing in culture, fostering a bustling restaurant and nightlife district and establishing a social climate that values individualism and self-expression. In doing so it is pulling further away from its Chinese counterparts. As a nation, China scores among the bottom of the pack, alongside Romania and Ukraine and behind India, on the global self-expression scale of Ronald Inglehart, Michigan University professor. This may prove China’s biggest roadblock to further growth in the creative economy.

Indeed, China is a tale of two economies: innovative, rapidly growing cosmopolitan peaks line its east coast, set apart from a vast, rural interior where more than three-quarters of a billion people toil in pre-industrial conditions. According to Gallup surveys, incomes in China’s top 10 urban regions are more than five times those of the rural sector - and are diverging further every day. A Chinese student of mine summed it up succinctly: “In Shanghai, regular middle-class people live better than in the United States. While in the countryside just outside the city they live in what can only be described as pre-civilised conditions.” Almost half of China’s population lives on less than Dollars 2 a day and 800m farmers cannot afford to see a doctor.

The uneven nature of the Chinese economy is registering in the nation’s politics. China’s countryside was the scene of more than 87,000 riots and demonstrations in 2005, more than quadruple the number a decade ago. The government is now scrambling to develop programmes to spur rural development.

As it readies itself for the future, China must address the uneven nature of its economic advance, allowing growth to continue while responding to the concerns of the millions being left behind. The west must recognise China as the latest expression of globalisation’s spiky side, a phenomenon whose economic, social and political perils are just beginning to manifest.

The writer is the Hirst professor of public policy at George Mason University and author of The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent (HarperBusiness)

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April 11, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

XINZHUANG, China — This winter, Liu Xianhong’s life was changed for the second time by her infection with AIDS.

The first time was seven years ago, when she discovered that she, along with her newborn son, had contracted the disease through an infusion of contaminated blood given to her during childbirth.

Then late last year, her story was publicized by a leading Chinese journalist, turning one woman’s quest for compensation into a national cause célèbre for a new class of advocates who are using the country’s legal system to fight for social justice.

Ms. Liu’s experience, all but unimaginable as recently as two or three years ago, is increasingly common in China, where a once totalitarian system is facing growing pressure from a population that is awakening to the power of independent organization. Uncounted millions of Chinese, from the rich cities of the east to the impoverished countryside, are pushing an inflexible political system for redress over issues from shoddy health care and illegal land seizures to dire pollution and rampant official corruption.

Ms. Liu first sought help in November, after hearing rumors that she was about to be arrested here in her hometown in this dismal region of northern China for protesting her infection at the local Communist Party headquarters. She was brought to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the country’s most famous site, by the politically aware employee of the blood bank in Xingtai who first publicly accused it of distributing contaminated blood to her and more than a thousand others.

There, amid the crowds of people who show up from all over China each morning to watch the flag-raising ceremony — and provide a measure of anonymity — Ms. Liu met Hu Jia, one of China’s leading advocates for people with AIDS. It was the 32-year-old woman’s introduction to the world of nongovernmental organizations, or NGO’s, which are fighting for better treatment of people with the disease.

In the space of a few weeks, she returned to Beijing twice more for meetings that were scheduled and rescheduled in different locations, to avoid detection by the police. It was through those meetings that she met one of the country’s most aggressive investigative reporters, Wang Keqin, who brought her case to the attention of China’s rising advocate class, who began championing her cause.

China’s leaders seem to be of two minds in confronting the trend. Predictably enough, many warn of the dangers an independent civil society poses to the authority of the state. But there are others who now recognize, however tentatively, that the government cannot deal effectively with every issue without contributions from advocates, civic organizations and intellectuals.

That ambivalence was illustrated clearly this past winter. In February, Mr. Hu, the advocate, was detained and held without explanation for six weeks. But on March 1, Beijing introduced stricter nationwide regulations governing the collection and distribution of blood products by the banks, a development that advocates attribute at least partly to their work.

“Two years ago, if you raised issues, the government basically ignored you,” said Wan Yanhai, the director of Aizhixing, a nongovernmental organization based in Beijing, which petitioned the Justice Ministry on the blood contamination issue. “Nowadays, there will be feedback.”

How the state will resolve the ambiguities is uncertain. In the opinion of some experts, however, it is already too late to turn back the clock.

“This is the way things happened in Taiwan, too,” said Merle Goldman, emerita professor of Chinese history at Boston University and the author of the recently published book, “From Comrade to Citizen: the Struggle for Political Rights in China.”

“In the early 50’s they started to have village elections, which went from the village level and kept moving up. Then they started having NGO’s, and then other independent groups and finally independent parties. The government would periodically crack down on them, but they kept coming back.”

A similar pattern is clearly evident in the scandal surrounding the blood bank. When Mr. Wang wrote the articles that gave it renewed nationwide attention in late November, censors barred major online news services from mentioning them.

But the information made its way around China anyway, as Mr. Wang and countless others e-mailed copies of the stories to people with interests in social issues, including the lawyers who eventually took up the matter.

When Ms. Liu first began protesting last fall, the police in Xingtai beat her, her husband and several other relatives in an effort to quiet them, she said. Later, when she formed her own organization, known simply as the Care Group, the local government declared it illegal and threatened to seize its assets, the Chinese media reported. But she persevered, and she was not thrown in jail, as might have happened only a few years ago. In the capital, where she traveled for the last time in early January to attend a meeting with advocates, NGO members and lawyers involved in seeking compensation for the Xingtai AIDS patients, the gathering had to be repeatedly rescheduled.

In some cases, the rescheduling was because hotels and conference halls were warned by the police not to permit the group to use their facilities. In one instance, the police insisted that the group provide in advance a written agenda of the meeting, along with the names of all the participants.

In addition, the Beijing Judicial Department, which accredits and disbars lawyers, warned those attorneys who had pledged to help the Xingtai AIDS patients to stay away from the meeting. But other lawyers took their places.

In the end, to evade the police, the meeting was held with only an hour’s notice.

“The idea is not to have a couple of figures leading the way to change,” said Jiang Tianyong, a Beijing lawyer who has been involved in the AIDS case. “The idea is to have many, many people playing different roles, each taking his own responsibility. What’s different from the past is that once, if you cracked down on someone, there would be a time of quietness. Nowadays, if they knock someone out, another person or several others step forward.”

This resilience is as much in evidence among nongovernmental organizations as it is among lawyers. Those organizations have become critical players in driving social change and reform. Officially, there are about 280,000 of them registered in China, an extraordinary number considering there were virtually none as recently as the early 1990’s. Some experts estimate there are now two million to eight million such groups, many of them very small and most of them simply ignoring government registration requirements.

“There are many NGO’s, and most tend to be nonconfrontational,” said Mr. Wan, the the director of Aizhixing in Beijing. “We prefer to be critical and nonconfrontational, but sometimes you become confrontational if you have to.”

Armed with a wealth of new contacts and information, Ms. Liu returned home from Beijing with a more advanced treatment regimen for her disease and a lawyer who quickly filed suit seeking compensation. Yet, there are few, if any, outright victories in this arena, and the success of her court action is far from assured.

More often, the advocates calculate their progress by inference. While Ms. Liu is still fighting in the courts, at least four other Xingtai AIDS patients have received compensation, either in court awards or negotiated settlements. Recently, the government made a major concession in another case of blood contamination, allowing hemophiliacs to pursue compensation claims in court, and a senior health official stated publicly that nongovernmental organizations are making a significant contribution to the AIDS issue.

Meanwhile, Ms. Liu has decided that the role of simple victim no longer suits her, so she has begun assisting others through her Care Group, which she started this year with two men whose wives were killed by contaminated blood from the Xingtai bank.

“I saw people from a dozen different places in China with these kinds of difficulties,” said Ms. Liu, sitting in her barely furnished and freezing cold living room here, her son, Zhu Mengchang, by her side. “I realized that the people in these other places were far better organized than we were. They’d been in contact with the outside world, and had received a lot of assistance.”

For Mr. Hu, the small victories that Ms. Liu and others are winning represent the first stirrings of an irresistible tide of change.

“I live in Beijing, and three weeks ago there was almost no green,” he said in an interview after his release from detention. “Now it is green every day. You wouldn’t notice it if you were living it day to day, but the greenness is blooming everywhere now. It is the same with civil society, or with NGO’s. Now there is a citizens’ consciousness to participate, a willingness to defend their rights. Call it civic power.”

Posted at 4:13 PM · Comments (0)

Magisterial tenor work by Dexter Gordon. His solo here, long and loose-jointed is one of the most joyful I’ve ever heard on the instrument.

Posted at 5:51 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Kansas City Star

Let’s start here: Babe Ruth does not have the home-run record. Period. We’re about to start a confusing enough baseball season that will be clouded and blurred more every time Barry Bonds hits a home run. We don’t need to add to the madness.

Babe Ruth should be a nonfactor in all this. He was a great pitcher, great hitter and force of nature. He was a drunken, hot-dog stuffer who ran around on skinny legs, may or may not have called his shot and was sometimes chased on trains by naked women with knives. He’s an enduring character in American sports. But when it comes to home runs, he’s No. 2, and he has been for a long time.

John Kerry was No. 2. John Landy was No. 2. Elisha Gray was No. 2.

Every time someone talks about “Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth” or “Bonds breaking Ruth’s record” - and people do all the time - they’re snubbing Hank Aaron, the man who matters most in all this. They’re ignoring the strong, complicated, thoughtful and sometimes tortured man who mashed 755 home runs through the marches and fire hoses of the civil-rights movement. Hank Aaron still has boxes and bags filled with the death threats and racist letters he received.

Every mention of Babe Ruth’s “record” is an insult to Hank Aaron.

We’ve been here before. Aaron hit his 715th home run in Atlanta on April 8, 1974. Up to the homer, he had received almost a million letters, most of them supportive, some of them death threats. He hit the home run off Al Downing. Jimmy Wynn chased the ball to the wall. Tom House caught it in the bullpen. Two kids from the University of Georgia ran the bases with him.

That was the end of the Babe’s hallowed home-run record. Move over, Babe. Aaron was alone. Immediately after though, (as Aaron himself pointed out, not without bitterness) many people suddenly started referring to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak as baseball’s most hallowed record. Others talked about how Ruth set his record in many fewer at-bats and would remain the home-run champ. Too many tried to disregard and cheapen what Aaron did. Unimaginably, the commissioner of baseball, Bowie Kuhn, did not even go to the record-breaking game.

We like to say that was the times.

Well, have times changed so much? Thirty-two years later, Barry Bonds begins what will undoubtedly be the most bewildering and controversial record chase in baseball history … and people still talk about Babe Ruth. The Babe is very much the news. And I have to say it: Who cares about Babe Ruth? It is Hank Aaron’s record under assault here, nobody else’s. Nothing happens when Bonds passes Ruth’s number, nothing of consequence. Babe Ruth was passed long ago.

What we should be talking about here - the one bit of clarity in the madness - is just how amazing Hank Aaron was. Ruth hit his home runs when they played only in the daytime, when pitchers finished about half the games they started and, shamefully, when black and Latin players were barred from the major leagues. Bonds has hit his home runs in an era juiced by shrunken ballparks, shrunken strike zones, body armor and, most shamefully, steroids.

And Hank Aaron? He spent the first half of his career in Milwaukee, with the Braves, where he played ball in County Stadium, a hitter’s pit. He routinely hit 20-30 points higher on the road, in 12 years he banged 30 more home runs on the road. The Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, to Fulton County Stadium. It was a home-run hitter’s paradise. But Aaron would become, by far, the most prominent black athlete in the American South in the same year that James Meredith was shot on a civil-rights march into Mississippi.

The Hammer hit. In the years from 1955 (when he was a 21-year-old kid still trying to remember to not hit cross-handed) to 1974 (when he was a toughened 40-year-old man who had read too many bigoted letters to be sentimental anymore), Aaron averaged 36 homers per season. Pitching dominated many of those seasons. The mound was higher. Ballparks were large. Strike zones were more or less from head to toe. Racism was still rampant. The Hammer hit.

Every baseball era has its own nature, of course, and I don’t know what Babe Ruth would have done with modern weight rooms and plane travel any more than what Barry Bonds would have done in an era without closers, lefty specialists, Dominican pitchers and the outright abuse of the intentional walk.

Aaron fell in the middle, after segregation, before designer steroids. He had his advantages, too. I’m certainly not saying that Aaron was better than Ruth, who hit .370 or better five times and in 1920 hit more home than any other team in the American League and had an 0.87 ERA in two World Series.

I also can’t say Aaron was better than Bonds - whose numbers if you are one of the few who can somehow separate them from the steroid shadows, are almost beyond imagination. Before 35, he was one of the great power-speed combinations ever. Since he turned 35, though, Bonds has a .533 on-base percentage, and he has hit 263 home runs, more than 50 per full year even though pitchers refuse to challenge him. Aaron never hit 50 homers in a season.

What I am saying is that Hank Aaron still has more home runs than either one. It’s an injustice to forget that.

The next few months will be wild. Nobody knows for sure how far baseball will go in its steroid investigation. Everyone will rant and scream opinions about Bonds - those who think he should be thrown out of the game, those who think that the game has always been tolerant of cheaters, and even a few stragglers who hold on to the dream that he did nothing wrong. People will argue about race and the media and baseball tradition and the sanctity of record books and the science of steroids. Questions will fly. I doubt we’ll get many answers.

People will also bring up Babe Ruth. They already do. They should stop. This season has nothing at all to do with Ruth. In many ways, it’s not about Barry Bonds either.

No, to me, this season is about a proud 62-year-old man who still lives in Atlanta, who hit more home runs than anyone because of stubbornness and will and astounding durability and a consistency unmatched in the annals of baseball history. Hank Aaron is the Home Run King. I don’t think we can say that enough times. In my mind, that won’t change no matter what happens this season.

Posted at 10:43 PM · Comments (0)

Published: April 8 2006 03:00 Copyright The Financial Times
In 1926, Aldous Huxley reported that Shanghai was “life itself - dense, rank, richly clotted”. Today, the adjectives - also once used for Cairo, Damascus, Bombay, Calcutta and Benares - evoke not so much a place as the prejudices and fears of the straw-hatted European traveller in the pre-war years - someone fastidiously upholding the aesthetic norms of his bourgeois civilisation that, unbeknown to him, was soon to go up in flames.

To such a traveller, defying the heat and dust in his white suit, the first sight of Shanghai’s waterfront, the Bund, dominated by the customs house clock tower and the HSBC dome, or of Bombay heralded by the Gateway of India, was usually reassuring. Here, in the heart of the bewildering Orient, was something he could hold on to.

To be an Indian in Shanghai is to know a similar sensation of familiarity, if tinged with unease. It is also to be inevitably reminded of Bombay, the city most complicit with Shanghai in 19th-century inequity. Both port cities began to flourish after the British bullied China into opening up its markets to India-grown opium. The political and economic networks of British imperialism created a native class of comprador traders in the two cities, attracted to them a cosmopolitan cast of businessmen and adventurers and set them apart from their vast, steadily impoverished hinterlands.

During a recent stay I often gazed upon the Bund from a stylish new hotel in the Pudong. The architecture before me was more eclectic than that in colonial Bombay. It was also more pompous. But then the British abroad were always prone to self-aggrandisement in stone and their European rivals, trying hard to keep up, conjured even greater fantasies of grandeur.

The imposing solidity was once meant to awe the natives into obsequiousness. But things had changed dramatically in the last half century. The natives now not only “swarmed”, as the European traveller might have said, in the buildings on the Bund, they had also erected their own grand monuments on the once-desolate mud flats of the Pudong. Still, as in Bombay, it was hard to appreciate the architecture, colonial as well as post-colonial, for its own sake. I couldn’t rid myself of the feeling that what I saw was a façade and that behind it lay another country and a history that still shaped, in significant ways, the present.

In 1921, Gandhi claimed that Bombay’s big buildings hid “squalid poverty and dirt”. He was referring to the dubious sources of the city’s wealth. But it wasn’t just the trade in contraband goods but a kind of institutionalized brutality and callousness that underpinned daily life in both cities. As Shanghai’s great chronicler Lynn Pann describes it, in 1935 alone, the municipal corporation in Shanghai collected more than 5,000 corpses of poor people from the pavements of the International Settlement.

The British claim to represent civilised western values in India somewhat limited the potential for exploitation in Bombay and the deaths by starvation. But no such commitment to civilisation was deemed necessary in Shanghai, where modern capitalism assumed its most rapacious forms, and where an axis of gangsters, politicians and foreign businessmen effectively ruled the city until the communist takeover in 1949. Bombay had its sadistic police officers but there were more of them in Shanghai, where Sikh policemen imported from India were always ready to fire upon unruly Chinese.

Chinese and Indian thinkers and activists in the early 20th century could see that their richest and most glamorous cities were incompatible with nationalist pride. In 1921, while exhorting Indians to economic self-sufficiency and a ban on foreign imports, Gandhi asked Bombay to be “ready to lose what she has”. The same year the Communist party of China was born in Shanghai and began to feed upon the rage and frustration of the labouring poor and the anti-imperialism of the enlightened middle class. Not surprisingly, development on the socialist model, and the eradication of poverty in the countryside, preoccupied the post-colonial elites of India and China.

Consequently, both Shanghai and Bombay lost much of their power and prestige to inland, bureaucratic cities such as Beijing and Delhi, and had to wait many decades for the ideological moment when the creation of wealth in the cities was deemed more important than the removal of poverty. In recent years, a new form of globalisation, in which India and China are no longer subject countries but players on an apparently levelled field, has revived both Bombay and Shanghai. Originally created by global capitalism, neither metropolis has needed to undergo the brutal and traumatic modernisation suffered recently by such cities as Beijing, Xian, Bangalore and Delhi. However, the national experience of the past half century has given a markedly different character to the two cities once bound by empire.

In previous decades, historical amnesia and real-estate sharks helped destroy many of Bombay’s fine old buildings. Shanghai, on the other hand, was a beneficiary of the odd communist feeling for the past that also preserved Prague and helped rebuild Warsaw. Many of its European-era buildings have survived. Wearing the distinguished mantle of old age and decay, they now face their greatest danger from developers wishing to fill their grand spaces with the sterile sparkle of shopping malls.

In post-Mao China, Shanghai quickly regained its role as the engine of Chinese modernity. It took an early lead in this regard over Bombay, India’s window on the west. Visiting the city in 1983, soon after Deng Xiaoping launched his economic reforms, Jan Morris complained of inefficiency, drabness and a general aesthetic collapse. Nothing was further from my own experience this autumn with hotels, restaurants, taxis, public parks, and museums in Shanghai, which make the power and wealth of the new Chinese civilisation appear an undeniable reality.

Jinmao Tower looms gracefully on the Pudong and already seems to possess the solidity and iconic status of the Rockefeller Center in New York. The shiny cathedrals of consumerism on Nanjing and Huaihai Road, and the boutiques and cafés of Xintiandi persuade more quickly than the shopping malls of suburban Bombay that they are here to stay. Shanghai’s film studios produce cinema of arguably greater quality than those of Bollywood. New art galleries and nightclubs open almost every week. Modern Shanghai has its own trendy writers, if not of the stature of Lu Xun, Mao Dun and Eileen Chang, and they prefer to explore the fresh possibilities of individual freedom - sex, drugs and rock music - available in the metropolis rather than recount a painful recent history of arbitrariness and destitution in the countryside.

The two cities also deal differently with their hinterlands. Bombay has many empowered ethnic and religious xenophobes, often supported by its affluent classes, but they cannot keep at bay the destitute and hopeful immigrants from the rest of India. Together they contribute to the squalor of the city, which is as obvious now as it was during Gandhi’s time, although it also speaks of a messily democratic country where slum-dwellers form a sizeable electoral base no politician dares lose. In a throwback to Shanghai in the 1930s, a kind of mafia capitalism still flourishes in Bombay. Gangsters, politicians and businessmen together rule the city. In the recent past, their in-fighting has plunged large neighbourhoods into violence.

Shanghai, on the other hand, seems more orderly and remarkably free of poor people. One day on the Bund I found a beggar - the only one I saw in several walks around the city - and he was so melodramatically seedy that I half-wondered if he had been put there by the tourist board as a reminder of the city’s sordid imperial past.

The neon lights of Pudong skyscrapers throb luridly at night, making the “peaceful rise” of China appear, apart from everything else, an occasion for lovers of kitsch. But things are not so peaceful behind the glittering surfaces. The soil is subsiding in newly built-up Pudong; chemical poisons contaminate river waters elsewhere in China; and aggrieved peasants hold hundreds of demonstrations every week.

None of this seems to worry the hundreds of thousands of Chinese cheerfully moving through the shopping malls and the waterfront park in Shanghai. One feels in these great crowds, overwhelming even to an Indian, not so much life itself, dense, rank or clotting, as the poignancy of the desires of the Chinese people for a better life. It is always a shock to remember the immense suffering China has known in the previous century and it seems petty to begrudge the Chinese shoppers a bit of consumerist self-indulgence.

But, watching the old waterfront, or the lights of Pudong from the terrace at M on the Bund, you still feel the presence of an even greater and much more restless Chinese mass in the inscrutable countryside, cruelly shut out from the new urban prosperity their labour and taxes have contributed so much to. It is hard not to wonder if it is always true, in unfree and free nations alike, that, as Walter Benjamin put it, every step towards civilisation is also a step towards barbarism.

Pankaj Mishra is the author of the acclaimed ‘An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World’. He was a guest of the Pudong Shangri-La in Shanghai

Pudong Shangri-La, 33 Fu Cheng Road, Shanghai, tel: +86 21-6882 8888

Posted at 3:21 PM · Comments (0)

Coyright The Financial Times

Published: April 7 2006

For the third time in the past 24 hours, I fish out my passport and trudge up toward the machinegun-toting gatekeepers of the Palais de la Nation, Democratic Republic of the Congo. My mission: to have lunch with President Joseph Kabila. The day before I only made it into the compound waiting room - a five-hour stew. This morning, I managed to breach both metal detectors only to find that the president was not ready for our scheduled 10.30am �Brunch with the FT�. It is now 1pm and brunch has become lunch. Will the third time be the charm?

At 34, Kabila is one of the world�s youngest heads of state, in his sixth year at the helm of what is potentially one of the richest countries but is, in reality, one of the poorest. Emerging from a vicious war involving nine nations that left 4 million dead, the country is a vast swathe of untouched jungle sitting on some of the largest untapped mineral reserves on the planet and has enough fertile land to feed all of west Africa if cultivated. In 2001 Joseph, not yet 30 at the time, replaced his father as president after Laurent-Desire Kabila was assassinated by a bodyguard. Now he is gearing up for the nation�s first democratic election in 45 years, scheduled for June. Right now, I am hoping that he rewards persistence.

A white Nissan Pathfinder screeches to a halt behind me. The driver rolls down his window. I recognise Kudura Kasongo, Kabila�s press secretary. There are four people in the back seat, all ready to shoot, two with cameras and two with machineguns. Kasongo�s mood is nothing like his pink tie. �Where were you?� he says, looking both agitated and incredulous at the same time. �We went to your hotel. We were looking everywhere. We are going to be late.� I jump in with my photographer and notice a stray ammunition clip at my feet, as we speed away for the president�s private residence.

We make it through the first set of guards on a leafy boulevard. But a second set does not like the look of my photographer, a casually dressed 18-year-old named Eddy Kabaka whom I recruited the night before in a disco/bakery called the Acropolis. I give Eddy my blue blazer to put on over his shirt, which makes him look a little more official. The guards give in and two men in typical secret-service costume meet us at the bottom of a driveway. We are ushered through a metal detector into a spartan marble-floored anteroom, adjacent to the president�s office.

There is one more gatekeeper, the primus pilus of gatekeepers; the Dick Cheney of the Congo, but without an official title. Augustin Katumba Mwanke is sitting, legs crossed, in a leather office chair beside a glass coffee table. Despite being disgraced in a UN expert panel report in 2002 for corruption in the resource sector, he is still the president�s closest adviser. Wearing black leather sandals, he has a diminutive, casual grandfatherly stature and looks like the chauffeur in Driving Miss Daisy. Kasongo makes the introductions, being careful to convey that Mwanke is a person of high importance.

Before much can be said, Kasongo waves at me and takes off. I guess I am supposed to follow. By the time I gather my notebook and tape recorder, he is already halfway down the path of heptagon-shaped red bricks leading from the whitewashed crescent-shaped mansion to the edge of the garden overlooking the swollen Congo river with Congo-Brazzaville on the other side.

I make haste around the helicopter pad and catch up with Kasongo just short of where five leather office chairs have been set up for our lunch. Jungle birds are squawking. A little disoriented, I scan around for the food. There doesn�t appear to be any. Suddenly, as if out of thin air, a young man in Nike Airs and creased dark blue jeans is standing to my right with his hand extended. I�m trying to figure out who this guy is. Kasongo genuflects and introduces me to �His Excellency, the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo�.

In the photos of him that hang in public places all around the capital, Kinshasa, the president has a shaved head and a thin wisp of a moustache. In person, he sports more hair all around, including a slightly unruly growth above his upper lip complete with what could almost be called handlebars. Like most figures of power, Kabila is shorter in person, standing a good inch or two below my 5ft 11in. His only flashes of flamboyance are a silver-coloured Corum watch on his right wrist and a pink short-sleeved button-up shirt that hangs comfortably off his broad shoulders, untucked.

We take our seats, separated by a less-than-intimate eight-foot gap. Eyeing my tape recorder, Kabila says: �Are you sure it�s sensitive enough?� I assure him it is.

The presidential photographers and my Eddy dart about taking shots. I exchange niceties with Kabila, debating whether or not to tell him that the last time someone from my family met a leader of this country was in 1960, when my great uncle David sat down with Patrice Lumumba, the first and only elected prime minister. Shortly after that, Lumumba was kidnapped and assassinated in still mysterious circumstances. I decide to keep that to myself.

I break the ice on safer ground, saying I had seen a big picture of his late father, Laurent Kabila, at the Palais de la Nation, and note that they look quite alike - except that Joseph would need about 30 more kilos. �I�m trying to lose 10 kilos,� he says, laughing. That explains why there is no food. Instead, we are having tea: Teashop Regular Fine Black Tea. Kabila takes one scoop of sugar and no powdered milk. I, on the other hand, heap on the powdered milk, hoping to quell my growling stomach.

Kabila suddenly breaks out of his Buddha posture and turns to his left with sombre scrutiny. His eyes are tracking Eddy, who is manoeuvring behind him to snap some wide shots. I wonder if he is thinking about how al-Qaeda agents masquerading as a TV crew took out the leader of Northern Alliance opposition forces in Afghanistan just before September 11 2001.

Kasongo makes a meaningful hand gesture and Eddy and the other photographers scatter. I try to move my chair closer. Kabila gets up to help me drag it over.

I quote the former US ambassador to the Congo, Aubrey Hooks: �Kabila is very quiet and reserved. Those are good qualities for peace and transition but maybe not for what�s ahead.� Kabila is listening carefully now. Leaning forward, he asks, �Can you repeat that?� I repeat it. Kabila pauses, leans back in his chair, crosses his arms and, with a slight smile of defiance, responds. �Well, time will tell,� he says. �Back in 2001 they didn�t believe that Kabila could manage what he promised. I proved them wrong. I always intend to prove wrong my adversaries.�

I note that adversaries are sometimes good teachers. He nods. What about Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator ousted from power in 1997 by Kabila�s father? What can he learn from Mobutu�s reign? Without hesitating, Kabila answers: �A lot. A lot. First of all, don�t silence democracy. Let democracy thrive. That�s one. Two, never ever take, never ever believe, never ever try to believe that the nation belongs to you. You belong to the nation. And everything else belongs to the people. And three, always know when you have to go, when you have to quit.�

A tiny beetle-bug is crawling up my right arm and Kabila leans forward to give it a flick. The blow of his middle finger sends it hurtling, banished by presidential decree.

The Congo rainforest, as a carbon sink, could raise a billion dollars a year under the Kyoto protocol. Does the president plan to take advantage of this? His answer surprises. �Irrespective of the cash, I am very much an ecologist. The protection of the environment is one of the main areas we have to focus on.� He notes that one benefit of the war was protecting the forests from illegal exploitation. �Maybe that was a good thing.�

�I didn�t know you were an ecologist,� I say. �I�m not an ecologist, but I love nature. We should do more to protect what is left of the wildlife, what is left of nature.� A full chorus of birds chirps and caws like an orchestra, as if on cue.

I decide to shake up my line of questioning to see if the birds are really listening. �What�s the worst thing you have ever seen with your own eyes?� He pauses to reflect. �When you see a scene of a village after a massacre… that�s a very bad thing.� The birds are silent. �It will always haunt you; you will always have that image with you for a very, very, very long time to come, if not forever.� He speaks so softly that I can barely hear. �You have said before that there is no peace without justice,� I say. He corrects me. �There is no long-term peace without justice. Justice is not just getting some fellow, putting him in prison and then that�s it. Justice is also for people to recognise, to accept they broke the ethic.�

What about justice from Belgium, which is accused of widespread atrocities, including enslavement and mutilation, under King Leopold at the turn of the 19th century? �It is still a subject that�s on the table. A subject that one way or the other will have to come back until it�s settled in a gentleman�s way.�

I have a very personal question to ask. �There was a rumour you were married a couple of weeks ago.� Kabila lets out a tremendous sigh. �This town lives on rumours. No, but this is my wish.� The silence of the birds is deafening.

Kasongo gives a five-fingered signal. I am starting to learn the gestural language of the press secretary, and I take it I have five minutes left so I move to wrap up. �Is it true you have a PlayStation?� I ask. He deadpans. �I bought one, but my younger brothers, they confiscated it.�

Toby Heaps is editor of Corporate Knights, a corporate responsibility magazine based in Canada.

President Joseph Kabila�s private residence, Kinshasa

2 x teashop regular fine black tea

1 x jar of powdered milk

1 x pot of granulated

sugar sachets

no biscuits

no lemon

Posted at 2:43 PM · Comments (0)

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

SHANGHAI, April 8 — After nearly 30 years of trying, the world’s most famous rock band finally made it to the world’s largest country, as the Rolling Stones brought their show to a small stage in China’s biggest city.

Mick Jagger sang in China on Saturday. In the Rolling Stones’ first performance in China, some songs were censored.

The concert on Saturday, a late addition to the band’s Biggest Bang world tour, was the product of long negotiations and numerous compromises: from the venue, a diminutive 8,000-seat indoor arena, to the songs allowed by Chinese censors.

The five songs reported to have been banned were “Brown Sugar,” “Beast of Burden,” “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” “Honky Tonk Women” and “Rough Justice,” a song from the Stones’ new album. The first four were also left off the Chinese version of the band’s greatest hits album when it was released here in 2003.

The band had scheduled a show here and in Beijing to support that album in 2003, but that part of the tour was called off because of worry over the rapid spread of the SARS illness.

The sold-out performance on Saturday brought together cosmopolitan Shanghai at its richest, in more senses than one. With the cheapest seats going for about $40 — and most priced at 5 to 10 times more, well above monthly salaries for most people here — the cost ensured that well-heeled foreigners dominated the crowd.

Mick Jagger, the group’s lead singer, acknowledged as much in a news conference the day before with a comment meant to address two of the most delicate issues surrounding the event, the heavily foreign audience and the restricted song list.

“I am pleased the Ministry of Culture is protecting the morals of expatriate bankers and their girlfriends,” Mr. Jagger said, adding that he had 400 other songs to choose from, so “it doesn’t really matter.”

Many people were displeased with the ticket prices, and the effect on the audience mix, nonetheless.

“It’s actually tragic if you think about it: a foreign performance borrowing Chinese land, but Chinese people cannot come because of price or other issues,” said Chu Meng, 23, who attended the concert. “It is ironic, I should say. I saw some foreigners cover themselves with the Chinese flag, and I don’t feel comfortable about it.”

Even if the Stones can’t always sing what they want, they still bring high energy to the stage. This show was no exception, and they launched into it with brio, with the choice of songs like “Bitch,” played early in the act, seemingly to make the point that censorship was pointless.

For one of their signature hits, “Wild Horses,” the Stones shared the stage with Cui Jian, 45, a pioneer of Chinese rock who, unlike many of the fans, both knew the lyrics and did not miss a beat in his rhythm guitar accompaniment. “This is the 20th-year anniversary of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll,” the Chinese star said after the song. “We have an appointment. In the near future, they will be back, and we’ll rock again in Beijing.”

“This is their cultural revolution,” said a California businessman and longtime resident who gave his name as Dan, and who rocked in the aisles with his Chinese wife, Bo. “This kind of thing has to spread beyond Shanghai and a few other places still, but that’s what we’re seeing, a real transformation of this country.”

The rock ‘n’ roll era all but bypassed China, which was in the throes of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution during the music’s heyday. Although Whitney Houston and Elton John and a variety of other pop music stars and acts have performed here in recent years, the Stones are by far the biggest rock act to appear in China, and their concert will be the first to be broadcast in the country after censors screen it.

Truth be told, the group may have arrived here both far too soon and far too late. The Chinese government protects few things so zealously as culture, with one result being that few here knew anything about the group. And for many of those who are more familiar, an increasingly hard-to-impress niche of the population that is savvy in an up-to-the-minute way about Western culture in all its variety, the Rolling Stones are old hat.

“I’ve never listened to their songs,” said Shen Yichen, a 16-year-old girl who was accompanied by her parents. “Maybe listening like this for the first time is more authentic.”

Before the show, her father, equally unfamiliar with the music, downloaded a song. “I don’t know what song it was,” said the father, Shen Shiji, 46. “Maybe it was a song paying tribute to Dylan.

“I don’t know if it’s their lyrics that make people like them,” he added, “but listening to the melody, it wasn’t so beautiful.”

A popular blogger here, Wang Xiaofeng, is typical of the group for whom the Stones are a relic of another era. “For most Chinese rock ‘n’ roll fans, the Rolling Stones are not even as attractive as a domestic pop singer, or the Super Girl contestants,” he said, referring to a television show that resembled American Idol. “In the eyes of fans, the Rolling Stones have more meaning as a rock ‘n’ roll symbol than as a kind of music. They are as unfamiliar as they are familiar.”

Posted at 12:48 PM · Comments (1)

Saturday, April 8, 2006; A01

SEOUL, April 7 — Chang Ye Eu, a sinewy 19-year-old, doesn’t know the difference between a field goal and a first down. But when she heard that Pittsburgh Steelers wide receiver and Super Bowl most valuable player Hines Ward was returning this week to the nation of his birth, she could not fight back tears of joy.

A Korean-African American, Ward won instant fame here following his Super Bowl success, becoming a national hero as well as a rare inspiration for Chang and tens of thousands of other mixed-race Koreans who have faced deeply entrenched discrimination.

On Ward’s triumphant return to South Korea, thousands of adoring fans have followed him, and President Roh Moo Hyun has feted him at the presidential palace. The visit has evolved into far more than one man’s quest to explore his roots.

In a country that is 99.5 percent ethnic Korean, Ward’s visit has sparked a broad reexamination of social prejudices against mixed-race Koreans, particularly those who, like Ward and Chang, are the children of Korean women and U.S. servicemen stationed here.

His achievements, Chang said, have offered Koreans like her a self-validating glimpse of their potential. “He has a Korean mother and an African American father,” Chang said. “I thought, wow, there’s someone like me, and look, he is successful! I wondered whether biracial kids could ever hope to make it to the top. But he did it.”

Editorials in major newspapers are calling for new attitudes toward mixed-race Koreans and running front-page stories highlighting egregious cases of discrimination. Lawmakers have proposed legislation to protect the rights of mixed-race Koreans. Government authorities are considering changes to school textbooks that describe South Korea as a “nation unified by one bloodline” to one that is “a multiethnic and multicultural” society.

“I want to meet with the mixed kids” of South Korea, Ward said when he arrived in Seoul this week, accompanied by his mother, Kim Young Hee, an Atlanta resident. “I want to give them my encouragement, because I know we all had something to overcome.”

In 1975, Kim married Ward’s father, an African American serviceman serving in South Korea. Ward was born in Seoul, and shortly afterward the young family moved to Georgia to begin a new life there.

But Ward’s parents separated before his second birthday, and his father was awarded custody. The courts deemed his mother, who had stayed on in the United States, unfit to raise a child because of her financial instability and weak command of English.

Six years later, his father sent him to live with her. At first, Ward said, he felt ashamed of her and things Korean. “I didn’t want my friends to see me with my mom,” he said at the airport. “She was just different.”

But as he grew up, he said, mother and son formed a strong bond — and Ward developed a profound respect for her and his Korean origins. Kim worked a series of minimum-wage jobs to support her son, always insisting that he concentrate on his studies as well as football.

“I think my mom had to overcome much more than what I had to,” he said. “To come from Korea to America, to really not depend on anyone, just kind of worked her tail off to get to where she’s at. I love my mom for who she is.” Ward’s loyalty to his mother has been played big in the Korean press, which has linked it to Korean Confucian values that stress filial piety.

Racial discrimination in South Korea is basically xenophobia, said Yoon Young Chul, a professor of journalism and sociology at Seoul’s Yonsei University. “For thousands of years, Korea has been repeatedly invaded by surrounding neighboring countries,” he said. “So to protect ourselves, the concept of pure bloodlines was considered vital to the survival of the Korean race. So feelings toward anyone who is not purely Korean have been extremely negative — and unacceptable.”

No one knows how many racially Korean-American children are among South Korea’s 49 million people. But the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, a social service organization, has registered about 35,000 mixed-race children, not all of them with American parents.

South Korea is increasingly being forced to grapple with mixed marriages, which have risen sharply as rural women move into the cities, leaving fishermen and farmers to find brides from other parts of Asia.

In South Korea, 15 percent of babies born last year were from mixed marriages, and the rate is likely to double by the year 2020, meaning that one in three newborns would be a “mixed-blood” child, according to the Pearl S. Buck Foundation.

All interracial Koreans tend to face social stigma, but many people here say the children of inter-Asian marriages experience the least hostility. Those with a Caucasian parent face discrimination, but the harshest treatment is reserved for sons and daughters of African American or dark-skinned parents — largely because they tend to be the most physically different.

Chang is hoping that the new generation of biracial children will have an easier time than she has.

“At school, kids refused to sit next to me,” she said in the Seoul gym where she now plays on a corporate-sponsored women’s basketball team. “They would say awful things to me like, ‘I’m going to turn black if I come too close you!’, acting as if my skin color was contagious.”

She began to cry quietly. “It was painful,” she said.

Chang entered the spotlight alongside Ward this week as her struggle with racism in South Korea became the focus of national media coverage. She is thrilled that a debate on the issue has opened — and that she is going to meet Ward at a restaurant in Seoul this weekend. But she remains unsure whether the publicity will lead to change.

Even now, she said, she hears whispers behind her back — the ones about her curly black hair, and those guessing at her nationality and parentage.

Now, she said: “Everyone’s asking me how I feel. I used to pray that there not be any more biracial kids born in Korea. But now we’ve got Hines Ward. He is our hope and my vision. Like he said, I believe that love has no color. I just hope that this will last.”

Faiola reported from Tokyo.

Posted at 1:13 AM · Comments (2)

This passage from Adams, paraphrasing Louis Pateur, says it all: “chance favors the prepared mind.”
A fascinating, extended essay on visualizing scenes when taking pictures in order to get the ideal exposure.

Posted at 11:24 AM · Comments (0)

(There’s some really funny stuff in here…)

V S Naipaul hasn’t been well. Feeling more comfortable with Indian doctors and medical provision than with the National Health Service, he has been in New Delhi for several months for treatment and recovery. Now he’s back in England and says he’s writing again.

I visit him in his Wiltshire cottage and the following interview is conducted in short periods over two days.

He’d like me, he says, to follow his own method of interviewing, which is to take notes in longhand as the subject speaks: he doesn’t trust tape-recorders. I don’t trust them either, and so have brought two with me, pocket-size, and made sure they have fresh batteries. I place them in the least obtrusive position on the dining table, at which we sit.

Augustus, the cat, periodically appears outside on the window sill as we speak, and demands to be let in. He is a more than usually imperious fellow and insists on attention from Vidia, who has a way of commanding him to sleep. He surprisingly obeys, curling up at our feet.

This is our second extended interview, again for the Literary Review. The first, in August 2001, was controversial: his comments on E M Forster, John Maynard Keynes and James Joyce were considered provocative. As we begin, I suggest that we stay off politics in this interview and he agrees.

Would you say luck has any part to play in the career and success of a writer?

I worked so hard for so many things. The luck came at the beginning when I was trying to get started. That day in the Langham Hotel, the BBC building where I was working, if it hadn’t occurred to me to write about the street in which I grew up in Port of Spain in Trinidad, I might have floundered for many years. If the people in the room - the freelancers’ room in the BBC - hadn’t encouraged me, I might never have got started. I felt I was doing it in my own way. It wasn’t all easy going - the book I was writing wasn’t published for four years. England had different ideas of writing then - from what I was doing. This has gone on right to this day.

Would you say you were writing outside the tradition of English literature?

That’s Leavis and Cambridge and all that - and it’s not important. What’s important is that England didn’t understand what I was doing. If it were my own territory it would be different, but I have no territory. England has not appreciated or acknowledged the work I have done. My task was to open up a territory of readership. It was very slow - too slow for me.

Were you conscious of trying to open up this territory of readership?

I always wrote for the smallest audience: my wife (Pat, and now Nadira), someone I knew at the BBC, my publishers and my editor at Deutsch.

Surely a book like Among the Believers, which entailed travels through the Muslim world, was written for a universal audience?

Since writing is a process of learning, writing that book was a process for me. It found a readership after it was published. It got into a lot of trouble in places like Harvard and MIT. There are some very wise people in these places who, in their wisdom, had no need to go to a country to find out what was going on there. They already knew what was to be known. I can’t stress this strongly enough - everything I discovered and wrote was done for myself. I didn’t know what on earth I was doing at MIT, but I had accepted their invitation to speak about the book and I found they were very concerned about Iran. I remember talking about the Iranian love of blood. When a man fell bleeding in a religious demonstration, people went and dipped their hands and pieces of cloth in his blood. The people I was with refused to believe it. This couldn’t happen. Oh God! How wise they were! There was an American paper which was going to serialise the book in three parts, but they cancelled.

Why?

They would have been told by the Wise People that it must be stopped. Twenty years later it may seem that these ideas were to be given to a waiting world - but they still had a hard time.
Even in the first book, Miguel Street, I was experimenting. I wanted it to be simple, new and pictorial - every sentence.

Did your experience of writing change as you went on?

My idea of writing developed as I wrote. I still have no big idea of writing. My only idea is that if you are doing non-fiction it should be truthful. The people about whom you write should themselves be able to see the truth of it. After the book we’ve spoken about, Among the Believers, was published, people wrote from Iran to say I’d missed the point. I had written about driving in Tehran. It’s dangerous and precarious. The car I was in returned from every journey with the scrapings of paint from other cars. And they picked on the same observation when I read extracts to a Harvard audience. They didn’t like that at Harvard at all. Harvard said it was ‘colonial’ to write the truth.

Do you think you met particularly bigoted or silly people at these universities? The Wise Ones?

I don’t think so. I think these universities have passed their peak. The very idea of the university may be finished. In Oxford, for a long time, they were producing divines. Then it took a turn and the University began to produce smart people. The idea of learning came quite late, in the early nineteenth century perhaps, and it went on some way into the twentieth. Now, apart from sciences, there seems to be no purpose to a university education. The Socialists want to send everybody to these places. I feel that these places ought to be wrapped up and people should buy their qualifications at the Post Office.

Not including scientific qualifications?

No, those must remain. But the Humanities - they seem to me to be worthless disciplines.

Though you just said that your ideas of writing developed as you yourself wrote, in the past you’ve spoken and written about the function of writing in a culture, for example in Russia …

… and in France. These ideas have themselves developed. They didn’t come to me from the start. I was too ignorant. Say when I began to read Maupassant I was too ignorant to appreciate him fully. Some wisdom is needed, some experience is needed before you see a culture and you see the writers more clearly. If you were talking to me twenty-five years ago I would have said Balzac was the greatest French writer. Now I say Maupassant - a very great man. I began to reread Balzac and had a certain amount of trouble with it. I was disappointed - with myself really. I came across the Maupassant stories, all the stories - 1,100 pages. They were in chronological order and quite well translated. It was an education. In the beginning he writes very carefully, not wishing to put a foot wrong. In the middle he is more secure. He does things instinctively and well, and then, near the end of his life, his thoughts are about death, and the pieces get shorter and they are very, very affecting. There is a character in a Chekhov play who talks about Maupassant and says his talent is almost supernatural, and I have to agree with that, because in nearly every story there is a complete life that is being displayed. And there are so many stories. You wonder where he got the material and it seems so natural and easy. When you read, you can analyse it and see his method. It’s very precise geographically and he always gives people a name - very important. There is a line of emotion in his writing, which varies as he writes so you follow the emotion of the writer rather than the banality of how the narrative is going to end. There’s no one like him, I think. There is the brutality of his short life. He began writing when he was thirty, and then in ten years it was almost all over. He was in pain, then mad, so everything he did was done in ten years. He must have worked all the time and yet with a kind of ease. It is a supernatural talent. And when you read, you ask yourself what is the country that’s giving him all this wonderful material and you have to see, after a while, that it isn’t a country that’s giving him the material. He, by his vision, is creating a country. It’s strange. When we read Maupassant at school he seemed very provincial, very French. That is still true, but the work is for everybody. This can’t be said of English writers. (We can leave Dickens out of that consideration.) English writing is very much of England, for the people of England, and is not meant to travel too far.

Which writers would you say particularly fall into this Englishness?

Hardy. An unbearable writer.

Why?

He can’t write. He doesn’t know how to compose a paragraph, no gift of narrative. I would say that the Romantic feminine fiction has that quality.

Even the great ones? Jane Austen?

What trouble I have with Jane Austen! Jane Austen is for those people who wish to be educated in English manners. If that isn’t part of your mission, you don’t know what to do with this material.
There was a conference at Bath a few years ago and I was invited. I was a very bad conference guest - I didn’t say a word. But they gave me a copy of Jane Austen’s novel set in Bath - Northanger Abbey. In my recent illness I’ve been looking at books I haven’t read before so I picked it up.
I thought halfway through the book, Here am I, a grown man reading about this terrible vapid woman and her so-called love life - she calls it ‘love’, having seen this fellow once. I said to myself, What am I doing with this material? This is for somebody else, really. It’s for someone down the road, not for me.

Are you then surprised that people make so much of her?

Yes, it purely depends on political power in the world. If you come from England when your country is important, then this kind of nonsensical writing becomes important for you. If the country had failed in the nineteenth century no one would have been reading Jane Austen. The books would have been about failure. They would have demonstrated the reasons for failure. I don’t want to be confused, in what I am saying about Jane Austen, with people from the Wise places, the Very Wise People who say that she represents a great hypocrisy, writing in this way about affairs of the heart and young people while there are the slaves toiling in the plantations of the Caribbean. What hypocrisy! That’s the kind of thing the Wise People do say. And it’s very foolish, because if they knew a bit more, beyond their little disciplines, they would know that the slave trade, the British slave trade, was abolished in 1807 and this wish to talk about sensibility, etc, was part of the climate that made this abolition of the trade possible and later, very quickly, in 1834, made the abolition of slavery itself possible. The idea of refinement, manner, that was the climate.

So Jane Austen has some effect?

She didn’t have an effect, she was part of it. She reflects it. If we compare it with the ancient Romans, they were able to talk about the good life while encouraging and having the most brutal kind of slavery all around them. It never occurred to them to question the life around them. Cicero made jokes about slaves being treated badly or people in the arena dying horribly. There were different cruel tasks at different times of day. A criminal would be sent out without any weapons to fight an armed man. So there was no fight really and that was a simple kind of excitement for the crowd. It was Seneca who got as far as saying you must remember that the slave is a man. He never got much further than that. Roman slavery was brutal. England was the first country to abolish slavery. We must bear that in mind. We don’t have to read Jane Austen’s novels, but we must recognise that those manners and that sensibility which she writes about were part of the enlightenment that brought about the end of slavery.

Why do you exempt Dickens from your judgement on English writers?

I read some of the very early essays a short time ago: Sketches by Boz - they were good. There’s so much rubbish in Dickens. Wordiness, too many words, repetitiveness. He was trying to do something, but by God the African never had a worse enemy. In one of his essays…

Which essay?

I can’t recall. The Wise People will tell you, if they haven’t abolished it. He hated black people. Strange, eh?

Do you judge the British writers of the twentieth century in the same way?

That’s very interesting. It’s true of Waugh. The idea of an international readership doesn’t enter until quite late. H G Wells, writing his early short stories, is not writing for people outside. He is taking a lot of the cliches of imperialism and making the stories - good writer though he is. If you read the stories from the 1890s they have African voodoo and Indian priests, etc. He hasn’t been out of the country, he is just dealing in received ideas. Russell was universal, even though he didn’t write fiction. He wrote very simply, very clearly, explaining philosophical ideas.

He had a vast readership in English-speaking India.

The History of Western Philosophy? Yes. But people don’t have to write for the world. They must write for themselves, for their friends.

Doesn’t that deny books their significance?

No. No. In great periods, what writers write for themselves travels. Very often it travels because the world is so retarded generally it has very little of its own to look to. I don’t mean people having a message for the outside world. The writer, by the nature of the interests expressed in the book, can win the attention of other people. Take American writing. Mark Twain is universal, in that anybody can read his work and find matter, whereas Fitzgerald is local to America. In Twain’s work we can find humour, a tone of voice that appears to talk to all people, and then there’s his attitude to his material. He is not exalting his material. You see your recent Indian writers exalt their material: they are writing about daddy and mammy and chacha (uncle) and chachi (aunty) and they are exalting their material. Critics reading their books, poor innocent critics reading Indian books, might come to the conclusion, ‘My God! X, Y or Z comes from a very grand Indian family, we didn’t know about this!’

We don’t only find this in Indian writers.

You only have to look at that dreadful American man Henry James. The worst writer in the world actually. He never went out in the world. Yes, he came to Europe and he ‘did’ and lived the writer’s life. He never risked anything. He never exposed himself to anything. He travelled always as a gentleman. When he wrote English Hours about what he was seeing in England - written for an American magazine - this man would write about the races at Epsom and do it all from a distance. He never thought he should mingle with the crowd and find out what they were there for, or how they behaved. He did it all from the top of a carriage or the top of a coach. A lot of his writing is like that. And he exalts his material because he thinks that this subject matter he has alighted on - the grandeur of Europe and the grandeur of American new money - is unbeatable. Elizabeth Hardwick said to me about Henry James many years ago, ‘What’s he going on about? These people he is talking about are just Americans!’ It has the effect that young American people still think they can ‘do a Henry James’ - come to Europe and write a book like Henry James.

You couldn’t say the same about Hemingway, whom young Americans also try to follow. He did mingle with people.

Hemingway didn’t know where he was, ever, really. He was so busy being an American and that was his subject matter. You wouldn’t have any idea, from Hemingway or Fitzgerald and their stories or writings about Paris, that Paris was in the most terrible way between the wars. They just talked about the cafes, the drinks and oysters and things like that. They don’t see the larger thing outside. I find it very difficult to read that kind of writing or to take it seriously. It’s for other people - people down the road…

We’ve come across them before…

This idea of Gay Paris and all of that, that’s what they wrote about. The catastrophe of the wars, the death of men - they weren’t aware of that. Nowadays they don’t go to France to write about it any more. Because when a place is OK, as France now is, it is very hard to know how to write about it. It’s easier to go to places where you can stand out against the local people more easily. You go to India, you go to Nepal. There’s a whole crowd of them. You can scarcely get into the travel agents for these people pushing their way into writing books. You don’t know. The books are sent to me in any number every month. They wouldn’t be sent to you because you’ve not written about India in that way.

No. You think the writing of these Europeans or Englishmen is consciously dedicated to standing out from the population?

People do the expatriate novel not only about India, but also - in the old days - about Italy, about Greece, Mexico and Latin America. They themselves begin to be defined by the background so they don’t have to do any more work.

Explain.

Take Graham Greene and Our Man in Havana. He doesn’t have to define his people, his lead expatriate characters. They are defined by what they see around them - Captain Segura, the police, and the general seediness of the place. When I was reviewing books in 1958-63, those little expatriate books came in all the time. People who want to put words in italics: senores and senoras, so it looks like real writing.

This exaltation of the material, the pretences in Indian writing - is this a recent trend, or was it always so?

No. I don’t think R K Narayan exalted his material or that Mulk Raj Anand, writing in the Thirties and later, did. I think it’s occurred with the latest crop of writers, who have been encouraged by all kinds of foolish people to do these family sagas, and it’s so bad for India, the encouragement of this rubbish. Because writing isn’t that. It shouldn’t be about cracking yourself up so that people on the outside say, ‘We knew Indians were grand people after all. Kipling didn’t say so, and others didn’t say so, but here we have the evidence.’
You know and I know there’s no such thing as Indian grandeur. Here these boys are doing it, all in a great rush since the Nineties, and it’s as bogus as hell. It really implies that they have never looked outside their little tawdry family circle.

Why do you think this trend has taken hold of Indian writing?

The instinct to boast is prevalent among people who’ve suffered. They boast easily. (I have a lot of boasters in my family.) Or perhaps that’s too grand a way of looking at it, actually. Put it this way: it makes it easier to have a point of view if you can boast like that. There’s only one Indian writer, in my little experience, who has not boasted. I am thinking of Bond - Ruskin Bond. I am talking now of his autobiography, which is called Scenes from a Writer’s Life.

Why do you find him fascinating - or at least free of this bogus attitude?

I have read nothing like that from India or anywhere else. It’s very simple. Everything is underplayed, and the truths of the book come rather slowly at you. He is writing about solitude, tremendous solitude. He himself doesn’t say it. He leaves it all to you to pick up. I haven’t read another book about solitude from India. In a way, from this great subcontinent full of people, to write a book about solitude is quite an achievement. I was very moved by his book. He comes from a kind of darkness. There is a darkness all around him: a broken family in the background. There’s a love for the father. He stays with the father after the family breaks down. He is quite a little boy. His father has a stamp collection. It’s a serious stamp collection, a great family possession. Typical of Bond that he should put in a letter from his father, just saying ‘the last letter from my father’ - just prints it. Very affecting, very educated and sensitive, the letter. And then he just says: ‘Two weeks later my father died.’ That’s the way he does it. After his father’s death he looks for the stamp collection and he never finds it. It pains one to read about it. He does it in the Bond way, in a sentence or two. His father was in the RAF - fell ill somewhere near Calcutta, and probably died in the hospital. And the stamp collection was never found. Dead men’s effects, you can do what you want with them because there’s no family coming to look at them either.

Tragic?

Yes, but the writer doesn’t make much of it. There’s a sentence in the book which tells you what the book’s about: ‘I was alone, I was lonely, but I was not afraid.’ Whereas other Indian writers have their elaborate family structure to write about, Bond has nothing, just a few individuals here and there. Very few. So he’s an orphan actually.

Does that give him a unique standpoint in India?

I think so. But there’s some personal quality there. His father called him Ruskin after the English social commentator and critic. He prints some letters at the back of the book from Diana Athill, that very gifted woman who was at Andre Deutsch and made Deutsch an important publisher. Her point is that he can take this paring-away of inessentials too far. He must understand that you’ve got to give the reader time to sink into a new mood or a new setting. This is his way of writing, though. He doesn’t, as it were, make a meal of events like the death of his father. The book ends with a little letter to his dead father. He tells his father about the ride to the old school and how it’s changed. He says he had a dream about a friend of his. I think he appears as a big man and the friend was still small, and he asks: ‘I wonder when I dream of you I will be a big man or a child?’ Very moving.

He has, by and large, been ignored as an Indian writer. The attention has gone recently to the imitators and boasters. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know the fiction but I think this autobiography is quite extraordinary. He has a kind of small following in India…

(see the link below for the entire interview)

…Will you tell me what you are writing now?

I can’t begin to write again till I am well. You can’t write if you are not well. That’s why I exercised so much those years, to keep myself fit for writing. If I become well again - I am on my feet now - I might want to write. My writing has always been dependent on energy - travelling, moving around. You can say that the books radiate energy. Do you think that’s true, Farrukh? If I can get well, properly well - I am seventy-three and something, and you might feel what’s the point of getting well if there’s such a short time to go? There’s a story about old folk at a memorial service, I think in Paris, one of these French occasions. I think it was for Malraux. Freezing weather, freezing weather. A couple of old men there. One of them said, ‘This has been going on for so long, we don’t have to go home - we just stay here.’

You didn’t actually tell me what you are writing.

Let’s leave it like that.

Posted at 2:21 PM · Comments (0)

I last signed into this space during Chinese New Year, which doesn’t make this much of a diary, does it?. There’s simply too much to do.
It’s a weak excuse, I know, but I do continue to update the other sections of the site almost daily, and would like to think there’s a rich variety of stuff to read and to look at.
In the latter category, visual content, there’s been a big leap forward lately, with my pictures having been published in a growing number of places. As of today, the most recent is The International Herald Tribune, which has run an online slide show with my April 6, 2006 column from Shanghai. Click to read more.
I’ve also been profiled for my photography by an online magazine called the Daily Shooter. You can find that article here: Click to read more.
Stay tuned…

Posted at 10:22 AM · Comments (1)

For a web slide show produced for this article by the International Herald Tribune, please visit this URL: http://www.iht.com/slideshows/2006/04/05/asia/web.0405shanghai.php?index=0

Letter from Shanghai - Copyright The International Herald Tribune
Howard W. French
THURSDAY, APRIL 6, 2006

SHANGHAI Come to Shanghai. Come to Shanghai, now! No, this is not a travel industry advertisement, nor a paid promotion of any kind. It is a warning, and those who don’t heed it soon will forever miss what has made this arguably Asia’s greatest city, as its leaders gird to complete a breakneck and all-but- declared bid for the title of the world’s greatest.

The remaking of this city, which is well under way, ranks as one of history’s greatest urban transformations. With 4,000 already, it has nearly double the number of skyscrapers as New York, and another 1,000 are due to rise within the next 10 years - all within a single generation.

The overall result is sure to be stunning. “The future Shanghai will have smooth transportation, a beautiful central city, with charming historical and cultural depth, but it also needs to be energetic,” said Tang Zhiping, a senior city planner.

In another era, Shanghai was China’s one international city, its window on the world, and its principal port. In many ways, it remains the country’s showcase, outshining even Beijing - although officials here find it impolitic to come right out and say it - which is undergoing a massive transformation of its own.

The reason you must come to Shanghai now, if cities remotely interest you, is that the work here not only constitutes one of the world’s great urban transformations, it also involves one of history’s great disappearing acts. An old city of organic communities, with intimate, walk-up buildings and extraordinarily rich street life, is being replaced, almost in the blink of an eye, by a new city of expensive high-rises, underground parking garages, and lifestyles based on sheltered, closed-door individualism.

Last year alone, 8.51 million square meters, or 91.6 million square feet, of property was demolished here. From 1990 to 2000, a decade of what could be called wholesale clear-cutting, another 25 million square meters of property were demolished. What is left of old Shanghai is under imminent threat, and - like a rain forest whose perimeter has been logged, drying it out and degrading the ecosystem - extraordinarily fragile.

By China’s ancient standards, Shanghai is a relatively young place, dating “only” to a fourth-century river town settlement. The city that is being destroyed today is far younger still, a relic of the 19th century mingling, often under unpleasant circumstances, but with an unexpectedly delightful legacy, of East and West.

The result was China’s first expression of modern urbanism. As recently as the early 1990s, during a visit here, Eric Lye, then the dean of architecture at the University of Hong Kong, declared that “in China, there is only one city, Shanghai.”

Though huge, Beijing was, historically speaking, more of an imperial village, developed for the convenience of Manchu rulers. Precious in its own right, if for entirely different reasons, especially its unique old world feeling, that city was ravaged in a previous Chinese wave of mania for the modern, beginning with Mao Zedong’s assumption of power in 1949.

In a famous speech from Tiananmen Square, he scanned the horizon and proclaimed that it should be filled with factory chimneys.

Soviet-inspired planners finished off much of the old city back then, and the real-estate gold rush that began in the 1990s has all but completed the job.

Shanghai benefited from being left alone. The city’s roots in the global capitalism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries put it in bad odor among the Communists in Beijing. Their cure for Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism was to let the city stagnate, which in the long run meant that what was old was simply left to molder.

Walk the old neighborhoods today, beyond the Bund, which is where too many tourists end their explorations, and you will be transported to another era, when workers were flocking to Shanghai from all over China in a previous wave of globalization, in hopes of finding industrial jobs and tasting, for the first time, a modern lifestyle.

One sometimes hears the superficial complaint that Shanghai is not the “real” China, because of the abundance of old European architecture and fantastic postmodern architecture, but a walk of this kind will give you as Chinese a feeling as you can find anywhere in this country.

Soon, though, this kind of experience will be all but gone. The city’s approach to protecting what is truly unique about Shanghai smacks of tokenism: the preservation of a few hundred buildings deemed historic, with 12 diminutive districts dwarfed amid canyons of skyscrapers, elevated highways or other new developments.

A forerunner to another misguided approach is the much-touted development known as Xintiandi, an ersatz old town surrounded by luxury high- rises with pretentious names.

The Dutch author Ian Buruma has written about how this phenomenon of destroying the old and replacing it with sanitized imitations has swept much of Asia, with disastrous results, calling Singapore, for example, “Disneyland with capital punishment.”

One after another, the remaining old communities, full of life and atmosphere, are being razed, sending their low-income residents to rebuild their lives far from the central city. To be sure, one of China’s signal achievements in the reform era has been to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Through this approach, though, many others are simply moved out of sight, helping sustain the idea of a China miracle.

“They just want things that superficially seem modern, but in my mind it’s not modern,” said Zheng Shiling, a veteran urban designer who has been deeply involved in the remake of Shanghai, quite often as a brake and a grating conscience for the planners and developers. “I’m always urging people to think more deeply about modernity.”

On Tiantong Road, in the heart of one of Shanghai’s menaced old neighborhoods, Jing Lun, a 78-year-old man whose neighborhood is set to be cleared soon, put his concerns differently. “This is my home,” he said. “It’s where I grew up, and now they say you have to move.”

Posted at 10:11 AM · Comments (1)

Copyright The Financial Times

Published: April 3 2006

Amid all the squeals in Washington at the yawning US trade deficit with China, one strikes a specially resonant political chord: that unfair Chinese competition is annihilating US manufacturing industry and “stealing American jobs”. The assertion is so common it has assumed the status of fact. Yet it is almost entirely false.

For a start, the bilateral imbalance may be overstated. After ironing out the wide discrepancies between both sides’ data, Oxford Economics, a consultancy, finds China’s share has hovered at about a fifth of the total US merchandise deficit since 1995. That suggests the former is as much a result as a cause of the latter’s growth. Heaping all the blame on China would be off the mark, even if US manufacturing were dying.

But by most measures, it is in rude health. The US is still the top manufacturing nation, producing almost a quarter of global output, the same as in 1994, while Japan’s share has shrunk. Adjusted to reflect steady falls in the prices of manufactures relative to other goods and services, US output has doubled since 1985 and its share of gross domestic product has changed little in half a century.

True, more output is from plants owned by non-US companies, some of which have displaced indigenous production. That may fuel popular perceptions of national decline, particularly because greenfield factories usually shun the old rust belt. But corporate nationality is irrelevant to overall economic welfare, except insofar as foreign-owned plants often out-perform locally owned ones.

What of China as “job thief”? US manufacturing employment is in long-term decline, just as it is in other rich countries. But that is chiefly because of impressive productivity gains. Had none occurred since 1970, almost 40 per cent of all US jobs would – in theory – be in manufacturing, three times today’s level. But the comparison is meaningless because standing still would have consigned US manufacturers to competitive oblivion.

Of course, Chinese competition has claimed some US manufacturing jobs. But Oxford Economics puts the losses from 2000 to 2010 as low as 500,000 – no more than the US labour force sheds each week. Their disappearance is also partly a statistical illusion. Many manufacturing jobs are actually in services, such as finance and marketing, which yield far higher returns. As companies have disaggregated or outsourced operations, official employment data have re-allocated swaths of workers to the services sector.

If US manufacturing is stronger than many Americans believe, China poses a weaker challenge than is often supposed. Its output is still less than half that of the US – and many of its industries are suffering a severe profits squeeze. Indeed, to call China a manufacturing economy is something of a misnomer. In reality, it is the world’s biggest final assembly shop, with minimal local value-added.

As a forthcoming report* by the Institute for International Economics and the Center for Strategic and International Studies points out, on average two-thirds of the value of Chinese products is imported – and much more in some industries. Furthermore, China’s much-ballyhooed “high-tech” exports are a quirk of customs classification: most are low-margin electronics products, such as DVD players. According to Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey, the management consultancy, China still lags far behind the US in precision engineering industries.

Many big-ticket Chinese exports are of things no longer made in the US or that have never been made there. A large renminbi revaluation would merely shift Chinese production to even lower-cost locations elsewhere. Increases in China’s still low productivity levels will have a similar effect as higher wages make low-skilled, labour-intensive output increasingly uncompetitive.

At the same time, more sophisticated activities will spring up to replace it. That has already happened in steel, where China’s capacity has exploded in the past few years. It will soon be repeated in the car industry as investment pours into local production of the lower-cost components China needs to export vehicles profitably in volume.

That is a prospect to strike fear into Detroit. But the main reason is not because Chinese car companies are likely to develop overnight into super-competitive Toyota clones. It is because decades of mismanagement and failure to produce what the market wants have pushed US carmakers to the edge of the abyss. It will not take much to tip them over.

Moving steadily up-market is a natural, indeed inevitable, feature of economic development. The biggest worry for the US – and other rich nations – is not that China will follow the same path but that their own economies will stop doing so. There is no intrinsic reason why that should happen and few signs of it as yet. But if it does happen, they will have only themselves to blame.

*China: The Balance Sheet www.iie.com

Posted at 8:35 PM · Comments (0)

I read the first three chapters on my excercise bike at the gym tonight. Hessler has a real gift, call it easy on the eyes. I was actually in the mood to read a novel this week, but the one I had in mind didn’t fall into grasp quite so readily, and Oracle Bones was staring at me, inducing guilt from my bedside table, as it has been for weeks. (I’d received a review copy and put off starting into it when I learned someone was already doing the review for the Times.)
It promises to be a quick read, and I can already suggest it heartily. Rich, insightful, different from the run of the mill, and deilghtfully readable.

Posted at 1:07 AM · Comments (0)

Do you want to hear someone take a standard and make you want to cry? Do you want to hear the song remade? Every wondered where the emotional bottom of a song you thought you knew well really lies? “The Amazing Bud Powell”. That’s the name of the record, and it says it all.

Posted at 12:45 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Guardian Online

April 3, 2006 10:48 AM

I was very sorry not to be in Ghana on March 29 2006, when a solar eclipse was observed in many parts of the country.

Eclipses have a tremendous hold on the imagination of our people, and I was not surprised to read in the Ghanaian Times newspaper that police had had to be called in to protect the premises of Pepsi Cola in Accra, Ghana, after thousands of people had congregated there to exchange crown tops, taken off soft drinks, for solar eclipse goggles.

The belief was that with those glasses, the solar eclipse could be watched safely. Pepsi Cola had advertised in the local media that whoever brought in three bottle tops would get a pair of glasses. But the company had underestimated the interest the eclipse would create in the populace and it had run out of glasses by the time many people turned up.

If Pepsi Cola knew what I knew, it would not have toyed with the Ghanaian people’s attitude towards the eclipse. An eclipse is taken extremely seriously by Ghanaians and other Africans. Many do not regard eclipses, especially a total eclipse of the sun, as a mere phenomenon of astrophysics. Some have invested the occurrence with a metaphysical significance of which the architects of Stonehenge would approve.

In the countdown to the March 29 eclipse, an Islamic “scholar”, Mallam Muniru Hamidu, was given enormous publicity when he declared that the world was “coming to an end” because it is written in the Qur’an that when the end of the world comes nigh, “God would cause the sun and the moon to come together.”

Of course, it is not only in the Qur’an that apocalyptic prophecies about the end of the world have been made. The Bible too has things to say about the signs that will precede the return of Jesus Christ to the world, to judge the “quick and the dead”. One of the signs is the descent of darkness in the daytime.

What those people who continue to trot out these prophecies each time there is an eclipse fail to explain is why it is that although both the Bible and the Qur’an have been with us for hundreds of years, during which eclipses have regularly come and gone, we are still here. I suspect that each time the world doesn’t end after an eclipse, the false prophets disappear underground. By the time they reappear to make new apocalyptic prophecies - if they ever do - no one would remember what they had said about a previous armageddon that hadn’t happened.

The biggest total eclipse of the sun in west Africa is generally thought to have occurred in 1919, but I remember that when I was a tiny schoolboy, a major one took place - on May 20 1947. A few weeks before the time, we heard vague rumours that “darkness would descend on the earth” in the daytime. The rumours grew until everyone began to talk about “the coming darkness”.

At Asiakwa, in rural Ghana, where I was in junior school, there wasn’t a single person who could properly explain to us the scientific basis of “the darkness” that was going to come. But I noticed that, as the date got nearer, the bigger boys in our school became rather secretive and detached from the rest of us. They moved about in small clusters, and were observed to be indulging in fasting and much washing of their hands and faces. Occasionally, they were caught murmuring incantations. I learnt later that these came from a mysterious, illustrated book on occultism called The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses, imported from a remote place called India.

One of my older cousins told me this book contained diagrams and charts, which could be used to invoke spirits into the world from “out there”. There were also “talismans” in it, which could be ordered and used to attract girls, or to play better at football. He warned me that because of these magical powers, the book was “dangerous” and that was why its contents had been taken out of the Bible. In fact, many of those who ordered the book did not receive it because the post office had put it on a prohibited list and used to seize it. It could only arrive if it was cleverly disguised as a comic book or something. This was because the authorities believed that if one tried to use it and made mistakes, one could go mad. Also, if one glanced at certain charts in it without saying the correct incantation at the right time, one would go blind.

My cousin piled the fright on to my impressionable mind: even holding the book could cause harm, he claimed; one needed to purify one’s hands with an imported liquid called “Florida water”, before handling the book. There was also another imported liquid, called “olive oil”, with which one must “anoint’ one’s face and hands before using the book. This was the same oil, my cousin added that was used by the prophet Samuel in the Bible to anoint King David and King Solomon. Samson was also anointed with that oil and that was why he became so strong.

But my dread of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses was as nothing compared to what I felt when I was told that there was another book that was even more advanced in occultism, called The Eighth and Ninth Books of Moses. Eighth and Ninth? It was supposed to contain the original charts that God drew for Moses, showing where he should stand to receive the words to be written on the tablets of the Ten Commandments. The Ten Commandments? The fire on the mountain that didn’t burn itself out? Moses hiding his face so that he wouldn’t see God and die? Holy Moses. My child’s imagination boggled.

An interesting fact about the big boys who ordered these books from India was that they did this although all of them had undertaken the arduous task of memorising huge chunks of the catechism of the Presbyterian church, in order to be “confirmed” into the church. When one was asked to recite these catechism passages - in front of the whole church congregation - and one stumbled on the words, one would not be confirmed. In our small community, this amounted almost to excommunication; the disgrace was immense and was comparable only to what accrued to a young girl who got pregnant before she could be confirmed. Many grils died at confirmation time as a result of the terrible stigma of failing to be confirmed: they tried to abort their pregnancies, using all sorts of unsafe methods.

You may have heard that west Africa is festooned with religion at the moment. Indeed, anything goes in the place - many people are regular churchgoers, but give them a serious personal crisis and, hey presto, they would be off like a shot to consult fetish priests and priestesses, as well as other “spiritualists”. Much money changes hands during these consultations and it is little wonder that some of the richest people in west Africa are dealers in the occult, including “evangelists” luxuriantly sprouted by the so-called “charismatic” churches.

The big boys who went in for occultism had two wishes that were foremost in their minds: first, that beautiful girls would look favourably on them and also desist from becoming pregnant if and when they allowed themselves to be successfully wooed. (Unwed motherhood in the Presbyterian church, as I have already suggested, was a fate worse than death.)

The boys’ second dearest wish was that the questions that “came” in that year’s dreaded school leaving examination, known as “hall” (because it was held in a big hall that was able to sit hundreds of pupils from all the schools in a district) would be questions whose answers the boys had “chewed” by heart beforehand.

Well, with all this mystical subtext going on, May 20 1947 dawned upon us. It was like any other day, bright and sunny. We went to school as usual. Lessons went on. But we would steal occasional glances out of the windows every now and then to see whether any “darkness” was “coming”. We saw nothing.

Sometimes, one of us invented an excuse: “Please, Teacher, I want to go and collect my exercise book from my brother in class three.” We all knew he was going out to take a closer look at the sky. But the teacher wouldn’t have a clue.

When the boy returned to the classroom, he shook his head slightly. We got the message: “No darkness here.” After about 30 minutes, another boy would repeat the exercise. Again, there would be nothing for him to report.

Twelve noon - more dreaded than any other hour - came. Still nothing.

We finished school. Our anxiety was heightened by the fact that we were excused from coming back for the afternoon session - ”because of the rumours being circulated about the impending descent of darkness, which could cause trouble in the school,” our teacher announced.

When we got home, we found that things were unusually quiet there too. Tension filled the air. We ate our lunch without the usual admixture of frolicking and squabbling.

After lunch, my mother, unusually, took us all by the hand and led us to the palace of my grandmother, the Queen Mother. This lady, Nana Afia Boatemaa, was a woman of extraordinary presence. She was quite stout and her fearsome appearance was accentuated by the way she bunched her hair into three clumps and left it bare. Her nickname, which could only be used by her own sisters, was Puaa (“She-of-the-weird-hairdo”). Unusually for a woman in our society, she had actually been our chief before stepping down and giving that powerful office to a man.

When we got to the palace, we saw that not only her relatives (like us) had gathered there but also a lot of other people who wouldn’t be seen dead at the palace under normal circmcumstances, due to the fact that if one misbehaved there, one could be fined a pot of palm wine on the spot. As the Queen Mother’s relatives, we went and sat close to her. It was as if she was a mother hen who would spread her wings over us to protect us if something untoward happened.

We sat and waited. One o’clock came and went. Nothing happened. So, a few people were emboldened to pooh-pooh aloud the whole idea of darkness coming in the daytime.

Soon, it was two o’clock. Then 2.30. Still nothing.

But, shortly before three, things began to turn eerie. The sunshine began to fade into a moonlight sort of haze. Chickens, clucking anxiously, began to troop back into the house from the streets and crept into their roosting places. Absolutely weird. An owl in a nearby bush was heard to hoot.

And then, most frightening of all, real darkness began to close in. Soon, all went completely dark.

At this, all the chilkdren in the palace spontaneously let out a huge, hysterical wail. No one told us to stop, and so we continued crying. For indeed, the older people, instead of comforting us, had also panicked and were saying things like, “Ei, so it is true!” When we the kids realised that the grown-ups had no answer to what was happening, we cried even louder.

Then the Queen Mother showed us why she was so respected. She had a brainwave and calmly ordered her drummers to beat their drums. I have never seen drummers go about their business with so much gusto. Their drumming drowned our hysterical cries and carried them into a plane of sound transmuted into a quest for answers. And somehow, the familiarity of the drums’ deep sounds calmed our nerves.

After about three minutes of total darkness - which seemed like eternity, of course - the sky began gradually to lighten. The drummers, encouraged that their efforts were beginning to bear fruit, went at it with even greater strength. Soon, the sun was out and shining again - as if it hadn’t ever gone anywhere. The chickens came clucking out of their sleeping places, cocks chased hens about, and they all ran outside to look for insects to eat.

We looked at the faces of the grown-ups. But they looked on the ground and avoided our eyes. It had been a close thing and the relationship between grown-ups and children had changed for ever. But we didn’t know it at the time.

There were several sequels to this unusual day. We heard, for instance, that some men who were sexually dysfunctional had collected themselves together and exposed their manhood to the darkness for the duration of the eclipse. They were expecting to be able to get their “pecker up” after going through the humiliation of having the state of their sexual performance advertised for all in the village to see.

We also heard that, whilst the drummers in the Queen Mother’s palace had been belting out their sounds, the Queen Mother’s own fetish priestess had, at the first sign of darkness, run with fright into the church building, where an impromptu service was being conducted by the Presbyterian minister. She would be resigning from her job forthwith and joining the church, formerly her worst enemy. The circular received from church headquarters which had enabled the church to forecast the darkness settled it for her. Her own fetish - a powerful deity that was supposed to dwell in the stream from which we got our drinking water - had signally failed to give her any inkling that darkness was about to hit the world.

The irony of us Bible-toting schoolchildren being “saved” by the Queen Mother’s drums, while the fetish priestess who should have been dancing in front of the drums went, instead, to attend a church service for the first time in her life, was not lost upon us. Eclipse day was, indeed, a day on which eveything was turned upside down.

Posted at 11:56 PM · Comments (0)

April 3, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
Shanghai Journal

By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, March 28 — Song Tiping, a peasant from rural Jiangsu Province, and Bernie Kearsley-pratt, an Australian executive, would not at first glance seem to have much in common, and they do not, except for one thing: both were drawn here by the unlikely financial promise of garbage, towering mountains of refuse that attest to this city’s status as a raging boomtown. And now they spend their days in a cat-and-mouse game, Mr. Song joining throngs of poor Chinese scavenging in the trash and Mr. Kearsley-pratt, who manages Shanghai’s largest municipal dump, trying to keep them out.

The Australian, who works for a French company that is helping manage this city’s garbage, says his difficult job is made all the harder — indeed on some days he himself would say impossible — by the cruel fact that even in the heartland of a booming China, peasants can make far more money collecting plastic trash bags, tin cans and the rubber soles of shoes than they can as farmers or ordinary day laborers.

Most days Mr. Song, who came to Shanghai seeking a way to pay the hefty tuition fees for his eldest daughter, who had been admitted to one of the country’s best high schools, spends several hours dodging monstrous earthmoving equipment in the landfill, one of the largest in Asia, to pick trash.

Were it not for dangers of the job, like being crushed by a bulldozer, inhaling noxious gases while wading knee-deep in fetid refuse or being beaten by warring gangs of scrap pickers for the mere prize of an unbroken bottle, it might even be considered a good job.

“We worked really hard as laborers before, doing 12- to-15-hour days for a mere few hundred yuan,” about $35, Mr. Song said. “You have to work even if you are sick or tired. Here we are working for ourselves, and there is a lot more freedom — four to five hours a day, plus we can earn a lot more.”

Each morning, on average, 6,300 tons of garbage arrives by barge from the central city. Mr. Kearsley-pratt’s company, Onyx, won an international bidding competition in 2003 to replace an old municipal landfill next door, which had observed almost no environmental precautions, with a state-of-the-art dump — a fenced-in area slightly larger than New York’s Central Park. To do so, Onyx has invested millions of dollars in heavy equipment, environmental measures and training.

The plan was for a plant that would safeguard the water table and produce enough natural gas to power a small city — in short, the cleanest, safest, most modern landfill imaginable — until the scavengers showed up. They came in ones and twos, like Mr. Song and his wife, and in roving gangs, organized according to their place of origin in the poor and far-flung Chinese countryside. Now, according to all sides in what appears to be a mounting dispute, what they have is one fine mess.

“Everyone has a big challenge when they come to China,” Mr. Kearsley-pratt said. He warmed to his subject slowly, talking about how no living-room couch, no matter how abused, would ever make it from a Shanghai curbside to his dump, because someone needier than the owner would quickly haul it away.

Finally, he got to the meat of the problem: the scavengers who descend each day upon his dump like freebooters on a diamond mine. “As soon as you tip the truck there will be 40 or 50 people running all about the machines — quite big machines,” he said. “I don’t have the statistics, but quite a few people have been crushed like this.”

Under the circumstances, tempers sometimes flare. With darkness approaching, as crews of Mr. Kearsley-pratt’s workers in hard hats and orange jumpsuits rushed to lay enormous sheets of blue tarpaulins over a flat field of freshly laid garbage to discourage the pickers from coming onto the grounds at night, a female scavenger in her 50’s approached a group of foreigners taking pictures of the scene.

“We are just trying to make a livelihood, to eat,” she shouted. “Unless you have come to help us survive, we don’t want your attention.”

All about, as Mr. Kearsley-pratt looked on helplessly, scavengers were loading their day’s haul onto pushcarts, onto rickety wagons hitched to the back of motorcycles to be sorted out offsite and sold to buyers who specialize in different kinds of refuse, whether rubber, plastic, aluminum or tin.

“Last year my daughter was admitted to high school and we have to pay 10,000 yuan for her registration,” Mr. Song said. In addition to that, the equivalent of $1,250, he said, he also has to pay $125 for his second daughter’s school. “We don’t know where else to get jobs to support our daughters’ education,” he said, “and if not for this, there is no hope for us.”

Zuo Xilian, another garbage picker, said he was working his way through college while supporting a 60-year-old father in fragile health. “Don’t be surprised, it’s normal,” said Mr. Zuo, 23, who is from Anhui Province.

The landfill’s management has thought about sitting down with the scavengers to cut a deal that would allow them to keep picking without endangering themselves or the dump’s operations. But the potential bonanza of the trash has proved, like a gold rush, impossible to manage. The dimensions of the problem are on clear display most days, when 120 huge trucks per hour, freshly loaded with garbage from the barges, rumble down the plant’s access road with squadrons of trash pickers on motorbikes following in their wake.

The city is vague about its plans for dealing with the trash pickers, saying only that they will be “phased out” eventually. “Right now, we don’t have a city regulation on scavenging,” said Wu Xiwei, an official of the city sanitation bureau.

Zhu Feixiang, 46, a scavenger who lives on the edge of the dump on a trash-strewn plot with sheep and dogs and more old plastic bags than you’ve ever seen, doubts the city will stop him or any others. “They can call the police, but it’s not against law or regulation to pick garbage,” he said. “We don’t steal. We don’t rob. We only make a living. Besides, recycling garbage benefits the nation.”

Mr. Zhu, who leads a band of trash pickers from Anhui Province that other scavengers describe in fearsome terms, stopped raking the garbage blowing around in his yard to contemplate that for a moment. “Plus, we’re dirty and we stink, so the police would never take us in,” he said.

Posted at 4:05 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post

see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stationmaster/62643964/

Thursday, July 7, 2005

If you no longer marvel at the Internet’s power to connect and transform the world, you need to hear the story of a woman known to many around the globe as, loosely translated, Dog Poop Girl.

Recently, the woman was on the subway in her native South Korea when her dog decided that this was a good place to do its business.

The woman made no move to clean up the mess, and several fellow travelers got agitated. The woman allegedly grew belligerent in response.

What happened next was a remarkable show of Internet force, and a peek into an unsettling corner of the future.

One of the train riders took pictures of the incident with a camera phone and posted them on a popular Web site. Net dwellers soon began to call her by the unflattering nickname, and issued a call to arms for more information about her.

According to one blog that has covered the story, “within days, her identity and her past were revealed. Requests for information about her parents and relatives started popping up and people started to recognize her by the dog and the bag she was carrying,” because her face was partially obscured by her hair.

Online discussion groups crackled with chatter about every shred of the woman’s life that could be found, and with debate over whether the Internet mob had gone too far. The incident became national news in South Korea and even was discussed in Sunday sermons in Korean churches in the Washington area.

Humiliated in public and indelibly marked, the woman reportedly quit her university.

Using the Internet as a tool to settle scores is hardly new. Search for any major retailer and you’ll probably also find some kind of www.that-store-stinks.com Web site, with complaints about products or service.

Increasingly, the Internet also is a venue of so-called citizen journalism, in which swarms of surfers mobilize to gather information on what the traditional media isn’t covering, or is covering in a way that dissatisfies some people.

But what happens when the two converge, and the Internet populace is stirred to action against individuals?

The Dog Poop Girl case “involves a norm that most people would seemingly agree to — clean up after your dog,” wrote Daniel J. Solove, a George Washington University law professor who specializes in privacy issues, on one blog. “But having a permanent record of one’s norm violations is upping the sanction to a whole new level … allowing bloggers to act as a cyber-posse, tracking down norm violators and branding them with digital scarlet letters.”

Howard Rheingold, who studies and writes about the impact of technology on the behavior of groups, said the debate should begin with an understanding that the rules of privacy have changed.

“The shadow side of the empowerment that comes with a billion and a half people being online is the surveillance aspect,” he said. “We used to worry about big brother — the state — but now of course it’s our neighbors, or people on the subway.”

With society awash in personal data that is bought and sold daily, those who would use it as a weapon have few barriers.

When hackers get mad at each other they sometimes strike back by making public online the personal information of their adversary, a practice known as “dropping docs.”

At the same time, it is easy to imagine the benefits of coordinated Internet posses to help track down those wanted for crimes, or to help solve mysteries.

It was the clarion call of one well-known blogger, for example, that led to answers about the dubious press credentials of Jeff Gannon, who attended White House news conferences and asked questions that favored President Bush and attacked Democrats.

But the mob went further, reporting and speculating on aspects of Gannon’s private life.

“Where the line is between doing what the media or the legal system won’t do is a pretty interesting question, and I don’t have the answer,” said Dan Gillmor, a former newspaper columnist who now is organizing citizen-journalism projects. “People have to think about consequences.”

In discussions with dozens of people about this story, and in reading comments on blogs, I found an intriguing common thread. The instinct of most was to accept using the Internet as a new social-enforcement tool, but to search for that point on the continuum where enough was too much.

Putting Dog Poop Girl’s picture on the Web was OK, some said, but not the clamoring for more information that followed. Others said the woman’s face and other identifying features should have been obscured more. Still others said she was entitled to no privacy at all.

But there was also this, on the blog of Don Park:

“What would I have done if I was at the scene? I would have just cleaned up the mess without saying anything… . [The] mess is cleaned up and the girl, embarrassed at the right level.”

Jonathan Krim can be reached atkrimj@washpost.com.

Posted at 10:52 PM · Comments (0)

Howard French is an accomplished writer, having been a foreign correspondent for some of the best-known news rags in the world. He is a senior staff writer and for the New York Times, and has written his own book about Africa. He is also one hell of a photographer.

Hello Howard, thank you for taking the time to do an interview for The Daily Shooter. Can you tell us about yourself?

Sure. I’m a father of two boys — one grown and the other almost grown, meaning a junior in college and a junior in high school — who has spent the last 20 years working as a reporter for The New York Times, mostly overseas.

Over that time, I’ve been based in bureaus covering Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa, Japan and China. As best I could reckon, using the Flickr world map that some people post on their page, but I’ve never managed to make appear, I’ve been to 107 countries, which sounds like a lot, but only represents about half of the globe.

I love my work, because its high demands are matched with a very high level of freedom. I decide pretty much where I am going and what I am going to write about from week to week.

In addition to what I do for the Times, I love to read and to write. One of my greatest recent pleasures involved writing, and seeing through to publication, a non-fiction book about Africa called “A Continent for the Taking”. I hope to have a novel written before too long. And a more recent dream is to do a book of photos about Shanghai, where I live.

I keep a fairly active web page ( howardwfrench.com ), where I post some of my own work, plus a log of what I’m reading, very brief assessments of some of those books, and tons of Snippets of articles that I’ve read recently that I think are worthy of note. I also post a great deal of my photography on the site from Shanghai and my travels around China and elsewhere.

By trade, you are a journalist and writer. Where and when did your interest in photography emerge?

My father and a great uncle separately introduced me to photography when I was about 10 years old. The uncle gave me an old Kodak Retina camera, whose value I regret not understanding at the time. We always had lots of cameras around the house, but the Retina had a seductive kind of complexity to it. It was a toy for mature people, basically, and that drew me to it.

Not long afterwards, my Dad built a darkroom in our basement for my older brother and me, and taught us how to develop and print film. I’ve been involved with photography on and off ever since.

What brought you to Shanghai, China?

I had worked in Japan in my immediate prior assignment, and had come to enjoy this part of the world during my four years there, and had worked hard at learning the language. For those reasons, it made sense for me to try to stay in the region, and when the possibility of a Shanghai posting presented itself, I immediately jumped on it.

Shanghai and Tokyo are totally different, but I’ve been very lucky in that each offers plenty of things to love.

Your work is predominantly street photography. I find these street portraits, especially the black and white, stunning. How do you approach your subjects and engage them in a portrait?

Thanks. There are not a lot of tricks involved. I get asked this question enough, though, to have the answer boiled down to a couple of essential thoughts.

First, be comfortable with your own project. If you look like you are sneaking around, or trying to steal someone’s image, they’ll react to you as if you are violating them. If, on the other hand, you act as if what you are doing is normal, which it is, when done properly, people will generally welcome you, or at least relax enough to let you work.

Second, be patient. You’ve got to hang around to get good stuff. For those of us who are not geniuses, getting good shots when you’re breezing through is nothing more than dumb luck.

In this regard, I’ve found using my trusty Yashica Mat-124G to be a great ally. It’s all manual all the time, which means you’ve GOT to take your time, composing carefully, getting the light right, focusing, etc. It’s completely different from using a digital SLR, and I think it helps facilitate the kind of intimacy I like. For one thing, they’re big, but not menacing when aimed.

As for approaching my subjects, ideally, I like to get some frames off before there’s been any verbal exchange. That means giving yourself time to blend in a little bit, and let the temperature drop. The shots I manage to get this way are usually, but not always, my favorites. I like the human face when it isn’t muddled by an awareness of being studied.

Do you find that getting out in the street and photographing the people helps you connect with the stories that you are writing?

Absolutely. I learned this first by working with great photographers — people like Stuart Isett (see his Flickr page), Gilles Peres, or Angel Franco of the New York Times, and many other great shooters. Their work is fundamentally about people, and that means descending into their midst, getting in close and being intimate. I’ve found that the closer I get to people the better I can write about them. Photography brings me closer to people.

Do you have any advice on the best way to shoot these kinds of pictures?

In addition to what I said above, I’d suggest two slightly contradictory approaches. Know you locale and your subject, and return there often if you are aiming for intimate street work. The other thing is follow your inspiration. I choose an area and then wander within it, without a fixed destination, and certainly without a fixed image that I want to achieve in my mind beforehand.

Have you ever had someone confront you for taking his or her picture?

It happens from time to time, but it’s rarely a big deal. Ninety percent what holds us back is our own inhibition. The other 10 percent you learn to work through. It’s possible to talk with people. You learn to disarm hot heads, to use allies within a crowd to defuse things. It’s not that hard once you plunge in.

For the technophiles in the crowd, what kind of equipment do you use? Film / Digital?

I had an accident last week in which I fell into a swamp while shooting a series about municipal garbage. I lost my Canon EOS 10D body and a couple of lenses, including my prized 35 f/2. I also damaged my Yashica, one of the loves of my life. It’s being restored, but I couldn’t wait, so I went out the next day and bought a new one for about $200. Replacing the Canon, probably with a 20D, will have to wait a bit longer. I’ve recently ordered a Rolleiflex 2.8, and naturally expect to fall in love with that, too.

I’ve been shooting Olympus OM slr cameras since I was a freelance reporter in Africa in the early 1980s. I love film in general, and I love my Olympuses. I’ve got two OM4s, an OM2n, and an OM1. These cameras have very good optics, absolutely fantastic light metering, for the 2s and 4s, and best of all, considering the kind of shooting I like to do, they are remarkably small and unobtrusive.

I like Ilford black and white films, particularly their Delta type film. I shoot a bit of Velvia now and then, but have also come to love Kodak E100 VS color transparency film. I’m planning to start shooting a lot of this in the summer, when Chinese street life reaches its peak. Coming to my curios, I have a Rollei 35B, which somehow manages fantastically saturated chromes.

Finally, I’ve got a little Casio, credit card-sized digital, the E-S500. It’s a remarkably good little camera, and believe it or not, some of my favorite shots on the Flickr site were taken with it.

Do you have a favorite picture taken by someone else? Why?

I find this question too hard to answer. Really. Favorites change all the time. I’m learning too much, and am humbled by the achievements of others in this medium, including tons of anonymous people whose work I discover every week on Skype.
I’m reading a lot about photography there days, too, and am taken with the work and lives of any number of “greats.” Their styles range all over the place: Roy Decarava, Garry Winogrand, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and on and on.

One recent book I’ve enjoyed immensely is “The Ongoing Moment,” by Geoff Dyer. It’s a broad and brilliant look at photography as an art form.

Do you have a favorite picture that you have taken? Why?

Why is it my favorite? I’ve learned a lot since I took this picture, late last year, in the far west of China, and for that reason, this was a very tough call. This trip, and the work I did on it with my Yashica Mat-124G, including this image, reawakened me to the possibilities of medium format photography, and to the power of black and white.

One can find a bit of everything here that I strive for in this format (more so than in SLR work, which even on my manual Olympuses is far quicker than a twin lens reflex): a bit of story telling, a bit of drama with the light, a strong character(s), and when it works, a sense of busy-ness or complexity in the ordering of objects. In short, this picture represents one of my first steps toward developing a style with 6x6 black and white.

What is the best part of picture making for you?

There are many terrific joys. Composing the image and then snapping it when things have lined up more or less as you wanted them to is an incomparable pleasure. So is seeing the image first pop up on the screen of my computer when I scan it.

You have traveled throughout the world, is there a place that you would like to visit (or live) that you have not been to yet?

I wasn’t taking many pictures during my most recent four year stint in Africa, and I’d love to have a chance to return, to have someone send me there on assignment, to shoot pictures. I’ve got Africa in my blood, and have been away longer now — five years or so — than any time since I first visited the continent, in 1975. I would also like to visit Eastern Europe, where I’ve never been, to Iran, to Turkey, or to just about anywhere in central Asia.

So what next?

My hope is to build a sufficient body of work on Shanghai to support a photography book about one of the world’s greatest cities and how it is being utterly transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, from a place of very distinctive and almost organic character to a place that will certainly be magnificent and may even inspire awe, but will ultimately be far less distinctive. Almost by definition, the wholesale creation of an ultra-modern city means the replacement of identity with anonymity.

Howard, thank you again for taking the time to an interview, and to make The Daily Shooter a source of inspiration for photographers worldwide. I look forward to see some more of your work on Flickr and on your website http://www.howardwfrench.com.

Good luck with you writing and your photography.

To view more of Howard French’s work, please visit A Glimpse of the World �

Posted at 1:02 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2006

WE were walking down a dirt road in a neighborhood of Bamako with the mellifluous name of Badalabougou, following the rhythmic beating of a bongo drum. Then we saw it: down an alley lined with dusty neem trees and flowering jacarandas, a few hundred wedding celebrants had gathered under a canopy made from scraps of United Nations-issue sheeting, intently watching a local percussion band play a rousing music known as deedadee.
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Ed Alcock for The New York Times

The circumcision of a child is a reason to dance in the streets of Bamako.
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Ed Alcock for The New York Times

A dancer and drummers entertain at a wedding party.
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Ed Alcock for The New York Times

A griot sings with the band of Adama (Star) Dramé and Marium Koko Dembele at the Cheval Blanc club in Badalabougou.

Lithe male dancers wearing leather headdresses, cowrie-studded orange vests, burlap shorts and iron bangles leapt and shook rice-filled calabashes known as yabbaras. A jembe fola (“he who talks with the drum”) pounded on a bongo fashioned from sheets of horsehide stretched over a gasoline can. Another percussionist banged a grooved metal cylinder called a karinyan.

Then the dancers disappeared and a petite female singer moved in, circling through the crowd and singing praises to relatives of the bride and groom. Suddenly, she began gesticulating in our direction, while guests looked on, amused.

“She is singing about you,” one told me. “She is praising you for visiting Mali.”

The band had been playing for six hours when we arrived, at 4 p.m., and the music would go on until long after dark. As the light faded, people spilled out of their houses and gravitated toward the tent. Street vendors circulated on the periphery of the crowd, selling peanuts, chewing gum, bananas, tea, firewood, sandals, toothbrushes and sunglasses. The whole neighborhood had turned out for the show.

“This band usually plays at weddings for people from Bamako who have roots in the Niamala region,” said my companion, Paul Chandler, an American record producer and schoolteacher who has lived in Bamako for several years, “but their music is free to everyone who wanders by.”

Bamako, a hot, dusty city that sprawls along both banks of the Niger River in southern Mali, near the border with Guinea, does not, at first glance, bear the markings of one of the world’s great cultural capitals. Although it is the capital of the former French colony and has a population estimated at more than a million, in many respects the city feels like an overgrown village, with a handful of high-rises along the wide and murky Niger, goats grazing at roadside and a sprawling market, the Grand Marché, filling much of downtown. Yet its musical tradition goes back at least six centuries, and public open-air performances by itinerant musicians, like the one we saw, are as much a part of life here as pickup games of le football. Moreover, during the last decade, the city has undergone a transformation.

A Malian music boom that began in the 1990’s, when the soulful vocalist Salif Keita and the singer-guitarist Ali Farka Touré achieved international stardom, has brought an influx of tourists, record producers and aspiring musicians seeking to emulate the stars’ successes. (The news of Mr. Touré’s death on March 6 from cancer resonated around the world.) As a result, Bamako has become a meeting place and incubator for West African talent, and one of the best places on the planet to hear live music.

Bars and nightclubs have sprung up, often intimate venues with thatched roofs, bare scuffed walls and a few dozen rough wooden tables and chairs, where some of the biggest names in Malian music drop by to play when they’re in town. (Several of these establishments, including Mr. Keita’s Mofu and Oumou Sangare’s Hotel Wassulu, are owned by musicians.) Such Western artists as Robert Plant, Ry Cooder, Bonnie Raitt, John Lee Hooker and the French Basque star Manu Chao have visited Bamako to jam and record with the local stars.

The city has become a cultural hothouse, in which singers and instrumentalists from Mali’s myriad tribes — the Tuaregs of the Sahara, the Sorhai of Timbuktu, the Malinkes from the border region south of Bamako, the Dogon cliff dwellers, the Wassalous near the Ivory Coast, the Peuls of central Mali — mix and fertilize one another’s art.

“The number of ethnic groups here is vast, and each culture is distinct,” said Mombé Traoré, a dreadlocked disc jockey in his 30’s known as D. J. Vieux who agreed to be my guide during several days of sampling the music scene in early February. “Everyone meets up in Bamako.”

Mali musical tradition goes back to the height of the Songhai Empire, in the early 16th century, when a caste of itinerant entertainers — oral historians called griots — emerged in the villages along the Niger River, the third longest waterway in Africa. Known as jeli in the local Bambara language, the griots developed musical narratives whose aim was to celebrate the achievements of kings and to chronicle the culture and history of their communities.

“If you think of West Africa as a body, then the griot is the blood,” I was told by Toumani Diabate, a virtuoso of the 21-string, harplike kora who won a Grammy this year when “In the Heart of the Moon,” a collaboration with Ali Farka Touré that the pair recorded in Bamako, was named best traditional world music album. “We are the guardians of West Africa’s society. We are communicators.”

Mali’s griot music has developed many permutations over the centuries, but common denominators still exist: a hypnotic, haunting melody based on a pentatonic scale, the piercing vibrato of the kora, energetic drumming and the plaintive wail of the singer-narrator. (The griot still ranks low on the social hierarchy, however: Salif Keita, a descendant of a royal Malinke family, earned his clan’s scorn when he chose the career of the griot.)

I arrived in Bamako at the end of the cool, dry season, when tourists from Europe and, increasingly, the United States converge on Mali to hike among the villages of the animist Dogon tribe, or to venture to Timbuktu and the Sahara beyond. Bamako used to be just a way station, but increasing numbers of tourists are staying a few days to check out the music scene.

Bamako remains one of the poorest capitals in West Africa (Mali has been independent since 1960). But it is also perhaps the most welcoming, and visitors find almost none of the hassles encountered in other cities in the region.

After having my credit-card number stolen at one of the best hotels in Lagos, Nigeria, and after bribing my way past roadblocks manned by drunken soldiers and club-wielding teenage vigilantes in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, I found Bamako a relief. Taxi drivers are generally honest; street hawkers back off after a single polite “non, merci”; the streets are safe after dark. And if you can speak a little French and drop the names of one or two Malian musicians, you’ll find yourself engaged in animated conversations at every turn.

At 11 p.m. on my second night in Bamako, Vieux, which my dreadlocked guide goes by, pulled up in front of my hotel on an aging Chinese moped and told me to follow him in a taxi. His peacock-blue traditional robe, a bubu, fluttered in the breeze as we rode through dark streets to Élysée, a barnlike club on the outskirts of town.

Dimly lit, it was packed when we arrived, filled with young Malian couples who danced slowly on a rough mosaic floor or snuggled on banquettes. (Mali’s men and women, despite living in an Islamic country, are relaxed about displaying affection in public.) A popular local singer, Lobi Traoré, no relation to Vieux, sang melancholy tunes in Bambara, backed by a percussion band and two electric guitars. The music, which Lobi Traoré called the “Bambara Blues,” contains striking echoes of American R & B, and, like that genre, is filled with themes of shattered romance and unrequited longing.

Lobi Traoré is not the first musician to cite parallels between the music of the Mississippi Delta and that of the Niger River. The late Ali Farka Touré, a Sorhai who grew up on the banks of the Niger south of Timbuktu, once said that the American blues were born along his bend in the river. Robert Plant found similarities between the assouf music of the Tuaregs and American blues when he played at the Festival of the Desert near Timbuktu in 2003, one of several multiple-day outdoor concerts that draw thousands to Mali each year.

The next night our destination was the Cheval Blanc, an open-air bar in Badalabougou owned by an American woman and her Malian husband, Lorelei Frizzell and Ssasi Traoré. Under a ragged thatched roof, we sat on plastic chairs at a crude wooden table, ate brochettes of beef and downed cold bottles of Castel beer while listening to a husband-and-wife band, Adama (Star) Dramé and Marium Koko Dembele.

A Dogon who grew up in the remote cliffs of central Mali, Mr. Dramé fashioned his first guitar out of tin cans, he told me during a break, and had done so well that he was recently hired as a guitarist by Mali’s National Orchestra. A Dunhill dangling from his lips, he moved effortlessly and eclectically from reggae to Led Zeppelin-style blues to Dogon melodies, accompanied by percussionists, a xylophone player and Marium’s throaty vocals.

Some of the biggest stars of the Malian music scene, including Amadou and Mariam and Habib Koité, were away at the Festival on the Niger, a three-day outdoor concert in Ségou, 150 miles northeast of Bamako. But Toumani Diabate, the kora virtuoso, had skipped the event so he could prepare for his trip to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

For the complete article, please use the link below.

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Copyright The International Herald Tribune

FRIDAY, MARCH 31, 2006

LONDON On March 15, the China Consumer Journal named Hao Jinsong one of 10 “consumer rights-defending heroes” of 2005. Last year Hao successfully sued China’s state railroad authorities for failing to provide him with proper receipts on trains, ending a long-held privilege under which the railroad ministry had avoided paying tax.

Hao represents a new breed of activists in China who believe their individual actions can bring about institutional change and who have ingenious strategies for exploring the existing space for citizen participation. In pushing for change, they carefully avoid the confrontational stance adopted by political dissidents. Instead, they pick their fights skillfully.

Since March 1 this year, rail travelers have been able to obtain formal receipts printed by the State Administration of Taxation when they purchase goods from onboard shops or buy meals in dining cars. This ends a long-standing practice whereby the Ministry of Railroads had been able to avoid strict taxation of its income, since Chinese tax bureaus depend on formal receipts to assess the profits of companies.

How much money will the ministry lose as a result of Hao’s victory? Ministry statistics showed that the railroads carried more than 4.5 billion passengers from 2000 to May 2004. If each passenger spent 1 yuan (about 12 U.S. cents) during the journey, then the railroads made more than 4.5 billion yuan of taxable sales. This means a minimum of 225 million yuan of tax from 2000 to May 2004. Even though the railroads may have paid a lump- sum tax to the government coffers by special arrangements, tax officials admit that the railroads have traditionally been undertaxed.

Hao’s victory over the Ministry of Railroads didn’t come without a tough fight. The ministry is one of China’s most powerful, and lawsuits against it have to be judged in special Rail Transportation Courts, whose operational costs and staff salaries are all paid by the railroads.

The courts quickly ruled against Hao the first time. A subsequent appeal reviewed by higher rail transportation courts also failed. Hao’s second lawsuit met the same fate, but he persisted in filing a third suit.

In addition to suing the railroads, Hao wrote to the National People’s Congress, demanding that it examine the unconstitutional nature of the rail transportation courts. Citing the clause in the Constitution that courts should be independent, Hao argued that the rail transportation courts could not be expected to give fair trails to plaintiffs suing the railroads, and should therefore be abolished.

Hao also put pressure on the railroads in other ways. While the lawsuits were under way, Hao simultaneously made complaints to the State Administration of Taxation and the Beijing Dongcheng Tax Bureau about the railroads’ tax evasion. When he did not receive a satisfactory reply, he sued both the State Administration of Taxation and the Beijing tax bureau for dereliction of duty. His lawsuits were also widely reported, generating much public attention. In June 2005, Hao won his third case.

Beijing observers speculate that the central government’s desire to curtail the rail ministry’s powers played a crucial part in this extraordinary story of an ordinary citizen beating a powerful ministry. But Hao disagrees with those who conclude that one should not be too optimistic about the ability of individuals to force changes to public policy in China. Although often praised as a champion for consumers, he has broader objectives.

A graduate law student at the China University of Political Science and Law, Hao aims to defend civil rights, not just consumer rights, and to promote citizen participation in policy- making. He has consciously sought to arm himself with knowledge of the law and to use the law to pursue his goal.

Hao’s legal challenge in the name of a consumer wanting his railroad receipts was not politically sensitive and is likely to gain support from other government agencies and the public. But Hao has also used the case to pressure other state institutions, such as tax bureaus - and even the National People’s Congress - to be more accountable.

Activists like Hao are not concerned that they will not achieve success immediately. Hao was not surprised that he lost his lawsuits initially, but he believes that multiple litigation, whereby one person repeatedly goes to court over the same issue or several people simultaneously go to court over the same issue, can create tremendous pressure for change.

Such activists are careful to use strictly legal means to advance their causes and to avoid actions that carry high political risks. While Hao has set up a Web site to offer advice to others who feel their rights have been violated, Hao has resisted suggestions to open an online forum for discussion of rights issues, since he would not be able to control the content of the discussions and extremist views aired at such a forum could easily bring trouble.

In recent years more and more people have taken similar actions. These activists have drawn inspiration from one another’s experience. In 2005, Huang Jinrong, a legal scholar, also sued the railroads for including an insurance premium in the price of train tickets without informing passengers. He simultaneously asked the China Insurance Regulatory Commission to abolish the compulsory insurance imposed on passengers by the railroads. As expected, he lost the lawsuit. Consequently, like Hao, Huang sued the insurance commission for dereliction of duty. The court has not ruled in this case, but Huang knows there is a good chance he will lose again and has planned his next move: writing to the National People’s Congress to request a review of the regulations that have justified the practice.

The motives of people like Hao and Huang who file public interest lawsuits are diverse. Some are concerned with specific issues that appear to have no immediate political implications. Others are more conscious that even though they sue as an individual consumer protesting a compulsory fee, a service, a misleading advertisement or a price hike, such issues allow them to raise fundamental questions about the unchecked power of government agencies, their monopoly of public resources and their lack of transparency.

Such litigation allows the activists to use legal methods and nonpolitical issues to promote civil and political rights, the rule of law and accountable government. These activists know change will only take place gradually, but are confident that their actions will make an impact. As the Chinese saying goes, “Dripping water wears through rock.”

Yiyi Lu is a senior research fellow at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) in London.

Posted at 12:52 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: April 1, 2006

SHANGHAI, March 31 — In China’s headlong rush to modernize, few things have been so neglected as its past.

Compared with, say, neighbors like Japan and South Korea, this much larger country has rarely done a good job preserving ancient architecture. And despite the incomparable riches of Chinese civilization, world-class museums here are few and far between.

For decades, collectors seeking a precious piece of China’s past have found overseas markets to be the best bet — like the auctions and antiques fairs of Asia Week, an annual event that has attracted droves of collectors to New York in recent days. For indignant Chinese officials and archaeologists, such sales are a testament to smugglers’ skill in funneling antiquities out of the country and into markets where they will fetch top dollar.

According to some estimates, some 300,000 to 400,000 tombs have been raided in China in the last quarter-century of accelerating capitalist-style development. Although the numbers of looted items are much fuzzier, experts say, the most valuable ones have made their way to the West, with the bulk going to the United States.

For years, China has asked the United States to join its campaign against antiquities smuggling, most recently pressing Washington to adopt a ban on imports of any art or artifact predating 1911, the end of the Qing dynasty. Progress on the issue has been slow, however, partly because of fierce objections from art dealers and collectors.

Nicole Deaner, a spokeswoman for the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs, said yesterday that China’s request was still under consideration and that there was no timetable for when a decision would be made.

Recently there has been a bit of movement on other fronts. In January, China and Italy signed a treaty providing for a new task force of Chinese special agents who will travel to Italy to receive training from the Italian military police in identifying and tracking cultural artifacts. The two countries also plan a rapid exchange of information about suspected smuggled goods. Chinese experts differ widely on the long-term prospects for controlling the trade in contraband antiques. Yet they agree that the looting of important archaeological sites has slowed somewhat over the last decade.

“It’s impossible to absolutely stop this sort of thing, but the mid-1990’s was the crazy peak for this market,” said He Shuzhong, an official of the State Cultural Heritage Administration, which has been involved in the talks with the United States on tightening import restrictions. “If you look now at the tomb-raiding problem, and you look at the new pieces on the overseas market, things are better than they were 10 years ago. Tomb raiding, although it still exists, and exists seriously in some areas, has decreased by at least half.”

Mr. He cited steps taken recently by China to rein in the trade, like new requirements that auction houses and antiques dealers reapply annually for the extension of their licenses. Motion-sensing and satellite-based technology are now used to monitor the best-known sites, and volunteers have been recruited to police them, particularly in the hinterlands.

Still, he said, the most effective remedy would be an American import ban on antiques, adding that he was “annoyed and unsatisfied by America’s reaction.”

People who do not work for the government agree that the market for illicit antiquities has dried up somewhat. “Smuggling was at its peak between the 1980’s and mid-1990’s, but now it’s relatively subdued,” said Ma Weidu, owner and founder of Guanfu, China’s first private museum of classic and antique art, in Beijing. “If you went to Hollywood Road in Hong Kong back then, you could see lots of antiquities displayed right there on the street, and they were genuine. Go there today, and you find lots of copies.”

As recently as a few years ago, he said, “no one really cared” when excavation work for a big construction project uncovered antiquities, “given the heavy emphasis on economic development.”

“Today, when a construction crew hits an ancient site,” Mr. Ma said, “the project will be paused, or forced to take a detour.”

Still, Mr. Ma estimated that 20 percent of the items he viewed in overseas auctions of Chinese rarities left the country under illegal circumstances.

Lu Jianrong, a professor in the department of heritage, culture and museum science at Fudan University, in Shanghai, said there was little ground for optimism, although he supports the treaty with Italy, which he sees as largely symbolic.

“There is obviously a deep socioeconomic background to this, because our country is in a transition period, and from the perspective of city, county or provincial leaders, the focus should be on people’s living standards,” he said.

“Antiquities are just not part of the focus,” he added, “especially in central and western China, where the living standards are just too low, and where for some, the easiest way to make a living is still to dig stuff up.”

Randy Kennedy contributed reporting from New York for this article.
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Howard French is an accomplished writer, having been a foreign correspondent for some of the best-known news rags in the world. He is a senior staff writer and for the New York Times, and has written his own book about Africa. He is also one hell of a photographer.

Hello Howard, thank you for taking the time to do an interview for The Daily Shooter. Can you tell us about yourself?

Sure. I’m a father of two boys — one grown and the other almost grown, meaning a junior in college and a junior in high school — who has spent the last 20 years working as a reporter for The New York Times, mostly overseas.

Over that time, I’ve been based in bureaus covering Central America and the Caribbean, West Africa, Japan and China. As best I could reckon, using the Flickr world map that some people post on their page, but I’ve never managed to make appear, I’ve been to 107 countries, which sounds like a lot, but only represents about half of the globe.

I love my work, because its high demands are matched with a very high level of freedom. I decide pretty much where I am going and what I am going to write about from week to week.

In addition to what I do for the Times, I love to read and to write. One of my greatest recent pleasures involved writing, and seeing through to publication, a non-fiction book about Africa called “A Continent for the Taking”. I hope to have a novel written before too long. And a more recent dream is to do a book of photos about Shanghai, where I live.

I keep a fairly active web page ( howardwfrench.com ), where I post some of my own work, plus a log of what I’m reading, very brief assessments of some of those books, and tons of Snippets of articles that I’ve read recently that I think are worthy of note. I also post a great deal of my photography on the site from Shanghai and my travels around China and elsewhere.

By trade, you are a journalist and writer. Where and when did your interest in photography emerge?

My father and a great uncle separately introduced me to photography when I was about 10 years old. The uncle gave me an old Kodak Retina camera, whose value I regret not understanding at the time. We always had lots of cameras around the house, but the Retina had a seductive kind of complexity to it. It was a toy for mature people, basically, and that drew me to it.

Not long afterwards, my Dad built a darkroom in our basement for my older brother and me, and taught us how to develop and print film. I’ve been involved with photography on and off ever since.

What brought you to Shanghai, China?

I had worked in Japan in my immediate prior assignment, and had come to enjoy this part of the world during my four years there, and had worked hard at learning the language. For those reasons, it made sense for me to try to stay in the region, and when the possibility of a Shanghai posting presented itself, I immediately jumped on it.

Shanghai and Tokyo are totally different, but I’ve been very lucky in that each offers plenty of things to love.

Your work is predominantly street photography. I find these street portraits, especially the black and white, stunning. How do you approach your subjects and engage them in a portrait?

Thanks. There are not a lot of tricks involved. I get asked this question enough, though, to have the answer boiled down to a couple of essential thoughts.

First, be comfortable with your own project. If you look like you are sneaking around, or trying to steal someone’s image, they’ll react to you as if you are violating them. If, on the other hand, you act as if what you are doing is normal, which it is, when done properly, people will generally welcome you, or at least relax enough to let you work.

Second, be patient. You’ve got to hang around to get good stuff. For those of us who are not geniuses, getting good shots when you’re breezing through is nothing more than dumb luck.

In this regard, I’ve found using my trusty Yashica Mat-124G to be a great ally. It’s all manual all the time, which means you’ve GOT to take your time, composing carefully, getting the light right, focusing, etc. It’s completely different from using a digital SLR, and I think it helps facilitate the kind of intimacy I like. For one thing, they’re big, but not menacing when aimed.

As for approaching my subjects, ideally, I like to get some frames off before there’s been any verbal exchange. That means giving yourself time to blend in a little bit, and let the temperature drop. The shots I manage to get this way are usually, but not always, my favorites. I like the human face when it isn’t muddled by an awareness of being studied.

Do you find that getting out in the street and photographing the people helps you connect with the stories that you are writing?

Absolutely. I learned this first by working with great photographers — people like Stuart Isett (see his Flickr page), Gilles Peres, or Angel Franco of the New York Times, and many other great shooters. Their work is fundamentally about people, and that means descending into their midst, getting in close and being intimate. I’ve found that the closer I get to people the better I can write about them. Photography brings me closer to people.

Do you have any advice on the best way to shoot these kinds of pictures?

In addition to what I said above, I’d suggest two slightly contradictory approaches. Know you locale and your subject, and return there often if you are aiming for intimate street work. The other thing is follow your inspiration. I choose an area and then wander within it, without a fixed destination, and certainly without a fixed image that I want to achieve in my mind beforehand.

Have you ever had someone confront you for taking his or her picture?

It happens from time to time, but it’s rarely a big deal. Ninety percent what holds us back is our own inhibition. The other 10 percent you learn to work through. It’s possible to talk with people. You learn to disarm hot heads, to use allies within a crowd to defuse things. It’s not that hard once you plunge in.

For the technophiles in the crowd, what kind of equipment do you use? Film / Digital?

I had an accident last week in which I fell into a swamp while shooting a series about municipal garbage. I lost my Canon EOS 10D body and a couple of lenses, including my prized 35 f/2. I also damaged my Yashica, one of the loves of my life. It’s being restored, but I couldn’t wait, so I went out the next day and bought a new one for about $200. Replacing the Canon, probably with a 20D, will have to wait a bit longer. I’ve recently ordered a Rolleiflex 2.8, and naturally expect to fall in love with that, too.

I’ve been shooting Olympus OM slr cameras since I was a freelance reporter in Africa in the early 1980s. I love film in general, and I love my Olympuses. I’ve got two OM4s, an OM2n, and an OM1. These cameras have very good optics, absolutely fantastic light metering, for the 2s and 4s, and best of all, considering the kind of shooting I like to do, they are remarkably small and unobtrusive.

I like Ilford black and white films, particularly their Delta type film. I shoot a bit of Velvia now and then, but have also come to love Kodak E100 VS color transparency film. I’m planning to start shooting a lot of this in the summer, when Chinese street life reaches its peak. Coming to my curios, I have a Rollei 35B, which somehow manages fantastically saturated chromes.

Finally, I’ve got a little Casio, credit card-sized digital, the E-S500. It’s a remarkably good little camera, and believe it or not, some of my favorite shots on the Flickr site were taken with it.

Do you have a favorite picture taken by someone else? Why?

I find this question too hard to answer. Really. Favorites change all the time. I’m learning too much, and am humbled by the achievements of others in this medium, including tons of anonymous people whose work I discover every week on Skype.
I’m reading a lot about photography there days, too, and am taken with the work and lives of any number of “greats.” Their styles range all over the place: Roy Decarava, Garry Winogrand, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, and on and on.

One recent book I’ve enjoyed immensely is “The Ongoing Moment,” by Geoff Dyer. It’s a broad and brilliant look at photography as an art form.

Do you have a favorite picture that you have taken? Why?

Why is it my favorite? I’ve learned a lot since I took this picture, late last year, in the far west of China, and for that reason, this was a very tough call. This trip, and the work I did on it with my Yashica Mat-124G, including this image, reawakened me to the possibilities of medium format photography, and to the power of black and white.

One can find a bit of everything here that I strive for in this format (more so than in SLR work, which even on my manual Olympuses is far quicker than a twin lens reflex): a bit of story telling, a bit of drama with the light, a strong character(s), and when it works, a sense of busy-ness or complexity in the ordering of objects. In short, this picture represents one of my first steps toward developing a style with 6x6 black and white.

What is the best part of picture making for you?

There are many terrific joys. Composing the image and then snapping it when things have lined up more or less as you wanted them to is an incomparable pleasure. So is seeing the image first pop up on the screen of my computer when I scan it.

You have traveled throughout the world, is there a place that you would like to visit (or live) that you have not been to yet?

I wasn’t taking many pictures during my most recent four year stint in Africa, and I’d love to have a chance to return, to have someone send me there on assignment, to shoot pictures. I’ve got Africa in my blood, and have been away longer now — five years or so — than any time since I first visited the continent, in 1975. I would also like to visit Eastern Europe, where I’ve never been, to Iran, to Turkey, or to just about anywhere in central Asia.

So what next?

My hope is to build a sufficient body of work on Shanghai to support a photography book about one of the world’s greatest cities and how it is being utterly transformed, almost in the blink of an eye, from a place of very distinctive and almost organic character to a place that will certainly be magnificent and may even inspire awe, but will ultimately be far less distinctive. Almost by definition, the wholesale creation of an ultra-modern city means the replacement of identity with anonymity.

Howard, thank you again for taking the time to an interview, and to make The Daily Shooter a source of inspiration for photographers worldwide. I look forward to see some more of your work on Flickr and on your website http://www.howardwfrench.com.

Good luck with you writing and your photography.

To view more of Howard French’s work, please visit A Glimpse of the World »

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Copyright The Washington Post

Friday, March 31, 2006

The romantic comedy “Failure to Launch,” which opened as the No. 1 movie in the nation this month, has substantially exceeded pre-launch predictions, taking in more than $64 million in its first three weeks.

Matthew McConaughey plays a young man who is affable, intelligent, good-looking — and completely unmotivated. He’s still living at home and seems to have no ambitions beyond playing video games, hanging out with his buddies (two young men who are also still living with their parents) and having sex. In desperation, his parents hire a professional motivation consultant, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, who pretends to fall in love with McConaughey’s character in the hope that a romantic relationship will motivate him to move out of his parents’ home and get a life.

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The movie has received mixed reviews, though The Post’s Stephen Hunter praised it as “the best comedy since I don’t know when.” But putting aside the movie’s artistic merits or lack thereof, I was struck by how well its central idea resonates with what I’m seeing in my office with greater and greater frequency. Justin goes off to college for a year or two, wastes thousands of dollars of his parents’ money, then gets bored and comes home to take up residence in his old room, the same bedroom where he lived when he was in high school. Now he’s working 16 hours a week at Kinko’s or part time at Starbucks.

His parents are pulling their hair out. “For God’s sake, Justin, you’re 26 years old. You’re not in school. You don’t have a career. You don’t even have a girlfriend. What’s the plan? When are you going to get a life?”

“What’s the problem?” Justin asks. “I haven’t gotten arrested for anything, I haven’t asked you guys for money. Why can’t you just chill?”

This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You’ll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents — a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?

My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. But those young women usually have a definite plan. They’re working toward a college degree, or they’re saving money to open their own business. And when you come back three or four years later, you’ll find that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or something like it. They’ve earned that degree. They’ve opened their business.

But not the boys. “The girls are driven; the boys have no direction,” is the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, to figure out what’s going wrong with boys. The project is only a few weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.

So far we’ve just been asking one another the question: What’s happening to boys? We’ve batted around lots of ideas. Maybe the problem has to do with the way the school curriculum has changed. Maybe it has to do with environmental toxins that affect boys differently than girls (not as crazy an idea as it sounds). Maybe it has to do with changes in the workforce, with fewer blue-collar jobs and more emphasis on the service industry. Maybe it’s some combination of all of the above, or other factors we haven’t yet identified.

In Ayn Rand’s humorless apocalyptic novel “Atlas Shrugged,” the central characters ask: What would happen if someone turned off the motor that drives the world? We may be living in such a time, a time when the motor that drives the world is running down or stuck in neutral — but only for boys.

Posted at 1:33 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New Yorker

Issue of 2006-04-03

In the summer of 1963, Mollie Orshansky, forty-eight-year-old statistician at the Socia Security Administration, in Washington, D.C. published an article in the Social Security Bulletin entitled “Children of the Poor.” “The wonders of science and technology applied to a generous endowment of natural resources have wrought a way of life our grandfathers never knew,” she wrote. “Creature comforts once the hallmark of luxury have descended to the realm of the commonplace, and the marvels of modern industry find their way into the home of the American worker as well as that of his boss. Yet there is an underlying disquietude reflected in our current social literature, an uncomfortable realization that an expanding economy has not brought gains to all in equal measure. It is reflected in the preoccupation with counting the poor—do they number 30 million, 40 million, or 50 million?”
Orshansky’s timing was propitious. In December of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had asked Walter Heller, the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, to gather statistics on poverty. In early 1963, Heller gave the President a copy of a review by Dwight Macdonald, in The New Yorker, of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America: Poverty in the United States,” in which Harrington claimed that as many as fifty million Americans were living in penury.
The federal government had never attempted to count the poor, and Orshansky’s paper proposed an ingenious and straightforward way of doing so. Orshansky had experienced poverty firsthand. Born in the South Bronx in 1915, she was one of six daughters of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants who barely spoke English. Her father, a plumber and ironworker, was often unemployed, and Orshansky and her sisters wore hand-me-downs and slept two to a bed. Sometimes the family stood in relief lines to collect food. Nevertheless, Orshansky attended Hunter College High School, which was then a school for gifted girls, and went on to Hunter College, where she majored in mathematics and statistics. In 1939, she joined the U.S. Children’s Bureau, now part of the Department of Health and Human Services, and studied children’s health and nutrition.
Orshansky never married or had children, but she was passionate about children’s welfare. From 1945 to 1958, she worked in the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Human Nutrition and Home Economics, where she worked on a series of diets designed to provide poor American families with adequate nutrition at minimal cost. In painstaking detail, the food plans laid out the amount of meat, bread, potatoes, and other staples that families needed in order to eat healthily. These were “by no means subsistence diets,” Orshansky later wrote. “But they do assume that the housewife will be a careful shopper, a skillful cook, and a good manager who will prepare all the family’s meals at home.”
In 1958, Orshansky joined the research department of the Social Security Administration, and decided to try to estimate the incidence of child poverty. “Poor people are everywhere; yet they are invisible,” she told a reporter for the Dallas Morning News in 1999. “I wanted them to be seen clearly by those who make decisions about their lives.” Building on pioneering research on diet and poverty conducted in York at the turn of the twentieth century by Seebohm Rowntree, a British social reformer, Orshansky used her food plans to calculate a subsistence budget for families of various sizes. For a mother and father with two children, she estimated the expense of a “low cost” plan at $3.60 a day, and of an even more frugal “economy plan” at $2.80 a day. Rather than trying to calculate the price of other items in the family budget, such as rent, heat, and clothing, Orshansky relied on a survey by the Agriculture Department, which showed that the typical American family spent about a third of its income on food. Thus, to determine the minimum income a family needed in order to survive, she simply multiplied the annual cost of the food plans by three. Families on the low-cost plan needed to earn at least $3,955 a year; families on the economy plan needed to earn $3,165.
Orshansky compared these figures with the Census Bureau’s records on pre-tax family incomes and concluded that twenty-six per cent of families with children earned less than the upper poverty threshold and eighteen per cent earned less than the lower poverty threshold. In total, she estimated that between fifteen million and twenty-two million children were living in poverty, a disproportionate number of them in single-parent households and minority neighborhoods. “It would be one thing if poverty hit at random, and no one group were singled out,” she wrote. “It is another thing to realize that some seem destined to poverty almost from birth—by their color or by the economic status or occupation of their parents.”
Heller and his colleagues on the Council of Economic Advisers cited Orshansky’s paper in an “Economic Report to the President” that appeared in January, 1964, shortly after Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, declared a “war on poverty” in his State of the Union address. In August of that year, Congress created the Office of Equal Opportunity, which used Orshansky’s method to determine eligibility for new anti-poverty programs, such as Head Start. Other federal agencies followed suit, and in 1969 the White House adopted a slightly modified version of Orshansky’s lower threshold—the one based on the economy food plan—as the official poverty line.

In the nineteen-sixties, many economist believed that economic growth and governmen intervention would eliminate poverty. Betwee 1964 and 1973, as Johnson’s Great Societ programs went into effect, the poverty rate fel from nineteen per cent of the population to 11. per cent. But, while the nation’s inflation-adjusted gross domestic product has virtuall tripled since 1973, the poverty rate has hardl budged. In 2004, the most recent year fo which figures are available, it stood at 12.7 pe cent, a slight increase over the previous year and in some regions the figure is much higher The horror of Hurricane Katrina was not jus the physical destruction it wrought but th economic hardship it exposed. In New Orleans the poverty rate in 2004 was twenty-three pe cent, a fact that George W. Bush noted in hi address from New Orleans’ French Quarter o September 15th, when he said, “We have duty to confront this poverty with bold action. (Six months later, the Bush Administration ha yet to present an anti-poverty plan.) Accordin to the Census Bureau, many cities are eve poorer than New Orleans. In Detroit in 2004 the poverty rate was 33.6 per cent; in Miami, i was 28.3 per cent; and in Philadelphia it wa 24.9 per cent. (In New York, it was 20.3 pe cent.
The persistence of endemic poverty raises questions about how poverty is measured. In the past ten years or so, significant changes have been made in the way that inflation, gross domestic product, and other economic statistics are derived, but the poverty rate is still calculated using the technique that Orshansky invented. (Every twelve months, the Census Bureau raises the income cutoffs slightly to take inflation into account.)
This approach has some obvious shortcomings. To begin with, the poverty thresholds are based on pre-tax income, which means that they don’t take into account tax payments and income from anti-poverty programs, such as food stamps, housing subsidies, the Earned Income Tax Credit, and Medicaid, which cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year. In addition, families’ financial burdens have changed considerably since Orshansky conducted her research. In the late fifties, most mothers didn’t have jobs outside the home, and they cooked their families’ meals. Now that most mothers work full time and pay people to help them take care of their kids, child care and commuting consume more of a typical family budget.
Another problem is that the poverty thresholds are set at the same level all across the country. Last year, the pre-tax-income cutoff for a couple with two children was $19,806. This might be enough to support a family of four in rural Arkansas or Tennessee, but not in San Francisco, Boston, or New York, where the real-estate boom has created a shortage of affordable housing. According to Jared Bernstein and Lawrence Mishel, economists at the liberal Economic Policy Institute, in Washington, D.C., the average rent in working-class neighborhoods of Boston is about a thousand dollars a month, which for a family of four with a poverty-level income leaves just six hundred and fifty dollars a month for food, clothing, heat, and everything else. Bernstein and Mishel argue that in some cities the poverty thresholds should be twice their current level.
Such considerations suggest that the official measures understate the extent of poverty, but the opposite argument can also be made. The poverty figures fail to distinguish between temporary spells of hardship, like those caused by a job loss or a divorce, and long-term deprivation. Surveys show that as many as forty per cent of people who qualify as poor in any given year no longer do so the following year. Middle-class families that suffer a temporary loss of income can spend their savings, or take out a loan, to maintain their living standard, and they don’t belong in the same category as the chronically impoverished. One way to remedy this problem is to consider how much households spend, rather than how much they earn. If in the course of a year a household spends less than some designated amount, it is classified as poor. Daniel T. Slesnick, an economist at the University of Texas, has tested this approach using figures that he obtained from the Department of Labor’s Consumer Expenditure Survey, which tracks the buying habits of thousands of American families. Slesnick calculated that the “consumption poverty rate” for 1995—that is, the percentage of families whose spending was less than the povertyincome threshold—was 9.5 per cent, which is 4.3 per cent less than the official poverty rate. Subsequent studies have confirmed Slesnick’s findings.
In 1995, a panel of experts assembled by the National Academy of Science concluded that the Census Bureau measure “no longer provides an accurate picture of the differences in the extent of economic poverty among population groups or geographic areas of the country, nor an accurate picture of trends over time.” The panel recommended that the poverty line be revised to reflect taxes, benefits, child care, medical costs, and regional differences in prices. Statisticians at the Census Bureau have experimented with measures that incorporate some of these variables, but none of the changes have been officially adopted.
The obstacles are mainly political. “Poverty rates calculated using the experimental measures are all slightly higher than the official measure,” Kathleen Short, John Iceland, and Joseph Dalaker, statisticians at the Census Bureau, reported in a 2002 paper reviewing the academy’s recommendations. In addition to increasing the number of people officially classified as impoverished, revising the Census Bureau measure in the ways that the poverty experts suggested would mean that more elderly people and working families would be counted as poor.
Conservatives would prefer a measure that reduces the number of poor people. “The poverty rate misleads the public and our representatives, and it thereby degrades the quality of our social policies,” Nicholas Eberstadt, of the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a 2002 article. “It should be discarded for the broken tool that it is.” In February, the conservatives appeared to make some headway when the Census Bureau released a report on some new ways of measuring poverty that could cut the official rate by up to a third.

Rather than trying to come up with subsistence-based poverty measure about whic everybody can agree, we should accept tha there is no definitive way to decide who i impoverished and who isn’t. Every three years researchers from the federal governmen conduct surveys about the number o appliances in the homes of American families In 2001, ninety-one per cent of poor familie owned color televisions; seventy-four per cen owned microwave ovens; fifty-five per cen owned VCRs; and forty-seven per cent owne dishwashers. Are these families poverty-stricken
Not according to W. Michael Cox, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, and Richard Alm, a reporter at the Dallas Morning News. In their book “Myths of Rich and Poor: Why We’re Better Off Than We Think” (1999), Cox and Alm argued that the poverty statistics overlook the extent to which falling prices have enabled poor families to buy consumer goods that a generation ago were considered luxury items. “By the standards of 1971, many of today’s poor families might be considered members of the middle class,” they wrote.
Consider a hypothetical single mother with two teen-age sons living in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward, a neighborhood with poor schools, high rates of crime and unemployment, and few opportunities for social advancement. The mother works four days a week in a local supermarket, where she makes eight dollars an hour. Her sons do odd jobs, earning a few hundred dollars a month, which they have used to buy stereo equipment, a DVD player, and a Nintendo. The family lives in public housing, and it qualifies for food stamps and Medicaid. Under the Earned Income Tax Credit program, the mother would receive roughly four thousand dollars from the federal government each year. Compared with the destitute in Africa and Asia, this family is unimaginably rich. Compared with a poor American family of thirty years ago, it may be slightly better off. Compared with a typical two-income family in the suburbs, it is poor.
The concept of relative deprivation was first described by Adam Smith in “The Wealth of Nations,” in a passage on the “necessaries” of daily life:
By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but what ever the customs of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably, though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-laborer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into, without extreme bad conduct. Custom, in the same manner, has rendered leather shoes a necessary of life in England.
For decades, economists overlooked Smith’s analysis, and it was left to sociologists and anthropologists to study the impact of relative deprivation. During the Second World War, Samuel A. Stouffer, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, and a team of researchers compared the levels of job satisfaction reported by members of the military police, a profession in which few people were promoted, and members of the Army Air Force, where there were frequent opportunities for advancement. To the researchers’ surprise, the policemen reported greater happiness in their jobs than the airmen. One possible explanation, the researchers speculated, is that the policemen tended to compare themselves with colleagues who hadn’t been promoted, whereas the “reference group” for the airmen was colleagues who had been promoted. “The more people a man sees promoted when he is not promoted himself,” the Cambridge University sociologist W. G. Runciman wrote in 1966, in his book “Relative Deprivation and Social Justice,” “the more people he may compare himself to in a situation where the comparison will make him feel relatively deprived.”
More recently, three economists at the University of Warwick published the results of a survey of sixteen thousand workers in a range of industries, in which they found that the workers’ reported levels of job satisfaction had less to do with their salaries than with how their salaries compared with those of co-workers. Human beings are also competitive with their neighbors. Erzo Luttmer, an economist at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, recently found that people with rich neighbors tend to be less happy than people whose neighbors earn about as much money as they do. It appears that, while money matters to people, their relative ranking matters more.

Relative deprivation is also bad for you health. In a famous study conducted betwee 1967 and 1977, a team of epidemiologists le by Sir Michael Marmot, of University Colleg London, monitored the health of more tha seventeen thousand members of Britain’s Civi Service, a highly stratified bureaucracy Marmot and his colleagues found that peopl who had been promoted to the top ranks—those who worked directly for cabinet ministers—lived longer than their colleagues in lower-ranking jobs. Mid-level civil servants wer more likely than their bosses to develop a rang of potentially deadly conditions, including hear disease, high blood pressure, lung cancer, an gastrointestinal ailments

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A “girl” punk band that was far, far more than a gimick. Listen to the lyrics on songs like “Ping Pong Affair,” “Spend, Spend, Spend,” or “Love und Romance,” or “Typical Girl.”
Listen to the vocal trills and the dynamite rhythm sections. The Slits were for real.

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