A Glimpse of the World: May 2006 Archives

Found in Translation: Martin Luther King’s ‘Dream’ Plays in Beijing

May 30, 2006 6:25 PM

BEIJING � For months now, Caitrin McKiernan has gone from place to place in this city to ask Chinese people an unlikely question: What does the life of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. mean to you?

The questions don’t end there, either. In most of these gatherings, she gets far more specific, burrowing into the history and tactics of the American civil rights movement.

“Who knows what the Birmingham bus boycott was?” she asked a group of university students in May. “What is a sit-in?” “What’s the meaning of separate but equal?” At the level of language, every one of those terms presents a formidable challenge, even to a woman who has spent years in this country and speaks fluent Chinese.

But language is not the half of it. How can one translate Dr. King’s actions into the realm of ideas for an audience in a city notably hostile to protests? How does one convey to Chinese people the meaning of the life of a man who died fighting for civil rights nearly 40 years ago?

The answers may have begun to emerge since the production at the National Theater on Sunday of the play “Passages of Martin Luther King Jr.” by the noted King scholar Clayborne Carson and based on the life and words of the American civil rights leader. Ms. McKiernan, who studied under Mr. Carson at Stanford and is the play’s producer, was prepared for any kind of audience response, from deeply moved to completely stumped and anything in between.

But the responses of Ms. McKiernan’s discussion groups and the reactions of her cast suggested that Dr. King’s message would hit home here, that Chinese viewers would see parallels to divisions in their own society. That prospect poses a thorny problem for the government, which, on one hand, has endorsed Dr. King’s work as a blow for the class struggle and against American imperialism, but on the other insists that racism and discrimination are purely problems of decadent Western societies.

The government, however, gave the production its imprimatur, and permission to play at the prestigious theater.

A distinct possibility was that the universality of Dr. King’s message and the causes he fought for would completely escape Chinese viewers.

But the reactions Ms. McKiernan has heard so far suggest otherwise, and give her reason to hope that her dream of building a bridge between the societies by talking about peaceful struggle and universal rights has some hold on reality.

During one recent discussion at a Beijing university, after viewing excerpts from the PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize,” students explored their feelings on the discrimination they discern between migrant workers and more affluent residents of the country’s eastern cities. Others spoke about the inferior position of women in their society or of being treated badly during visits overseas or the predominance of American power in the world.

“The significance of Martin Luther King for me is that we have to have the courage to stand up for our legitimate benefits,” said a Chinese student who identified himself as Paul.

Ms. McKiernan has avoided lecturing her audiences, or even steering the discussions. “I don’t want this to be about what happened in the U.S. in some past year,” she said. “I want this to be about what discrimination is, and how it relates to your life.”

The talks have usually begun with an explanation of how Dr. King’s life came to mean so much to her, a Californian who first came to this city at 16 as an exchange student and had to struggle to overcome cultural differences with her host family. Then she studied Dr. King in college, and she has had him on her mind ever since.

“I realized that King was this great bridge between the United States and China,” Ms. McKiernan said. “China is an emerging superpower, and the U.S. is the superpower, and King is someone that both sides believe in, and can be the starting point for a dialogue about how we wish the world to be.”

Then she sighed, and said, “But it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

The challenges have come from every direction: persuading the National Theater to accept the production, recruiting professional actors and production people, enlisting gospel singers from the United States to join the performance, doing endless and mostly fruitless fund-raising.

The American Embassy provided a modest grant, as did Stanford. But the multinational corporations that abound in Beijing proved skittish, even more than the government.

Beijing’s unexpected stake in Dr. King’s legacy is twofold, involving both past and present. The country’s slogan for the 2008 summer Olympics is “One World, One Dream,” which officials say brings to mind Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. That address has been famous here since Mao Zedong hailed it in August 1963, and it is still taught in schools.

In such matters context is everything, and for Mao, Dr. King was first and foremost a symbol of “the sharpening of class struggle and national struggle within the United States.” In a speech some people here still recall today, Mao called on “enlightened persons of all colors in the world, white, black, yellow and brown, to unite to oppose the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism.”

Then, as now, Chinese people were ill prepared to discuss their country’s internal problems, a subject about which they were not educated, nor did Mao link Dr. King’s struggles to the problems of China’s ethnic minorities or, for that matter, human rights or inequality.

But to listen to the participants in Ms. McKiernan’s discussion groups, or the actors in her production, that is what many people confronted with Dr. King’s words today readily do.

“In today’s China it would seem that discriminatory actions are not so common,” said Yan Shikui, the narrator for the production. “But in fact, it is very serious. We talk about the difference between urban and rural citizens, the gap between the strong and the weak. All of these are very deep notions buried in people’s minds, which cannot be solved by using violence. They have to be addressed through ideas.”

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China should help Japan win a Security Council seat

May 29, 2006 10:42 PM

China has thus far been stubbornly opposed to Japan�s bid for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. However, a dispassionate examination of the issue shows that there are a number of reasons why China, for its own benefit, should support Japan becoming a permanent member.

One reason is diplomatic. If China wishes to take a leadership role in Asia, good political relations with Japan are necessary. At present China�s political system differs from those of the many democratic countries in the region and, although it is a big power, it is not in a position to provide substantial economic and technical assistance to poor countries. In these circumstances, it is particularly inadvisable for China to vie with Japan for leadership.

A second big reason for China to support Japan�s permanent Security Council membership relates to the danger of China becoming isolated in the international community. China�s high economic growth rate has attracted the attention of many countries, but at the same time there is a strong wariness of China.

In the western world, in particular, there are those who see it as a rival civilisation and many people regard it with hostility from the standpoint of democracy and human rights, some even as a potential enemy.

In order to get along in the international community under these circumstances, China needs a partner that understands it. China should bear in mind that Japan can play a role in mitigating its isolation, particularly in forums such as the UN Security Council.

The third reason relates to security. If China�s military capability becomes excessively large, not only the US but also many Asian countries will grow even more wary. Such a situation risks prompting Japan to take steps to expand its own military capability. In order to restrain militaristic elements in Japan and ensure that the combination of Japan�s military and economic strength does not exert an influence unfavourable to Chinese interests, it is important for China that Japan should be securely positioned within international frameworks. If China truly fears a resurgence of Japanese militarism, it is extremely important that Japan should hold a position of influence and respect in the UN.

The fourth reason is connected to China�s internal political situation. It is self-evident that as Chinese society becomes increasingly information-based and democratic, the question of how the country can modernise itself while making the most of the traditions of Chinese civilisation will be of paramount importance in terms of maintaining political stability. I believe that China can use Japan as a model for its own development, in reconciling the traditional and the modern. From this standpoint, projecting an image to the world of Japan and China co-operating at the UN and other multilateral forums could play a significant role in maintaining China�s stability.

The final reason relates to China�s economy. As the Chinese economy grows in size and power, increased friction between the international community and China is inevitable. Japan is the only country that will be able to understand the frictions that are sure to appear in such areas as voluntary export controls, agriculture and intellectual property, because Japan has experience of these very problems. China should not forget that it was Japan that made the greatest efforts in support of China�s accession to the World Trade Organisation. When economic friction does occur, Japan will be in a position to play an intermediary role in getting other countries to understand China�s thinking and in getting China to understand the wishes of the international community.

The Security Council is by its nature a body that should act in a manner consistent with the idea of economic security in its broad sense. Given that permanent members hold important positions also in various other UN agencies, Chinese support for Japan�s permanent membership is important both for the stable development of China�s economy and for forging harmonious relations between the Chinese economy and the international economic community.

If China wishes to become a major power, it must first be able to establish a partnership with its neighbour, Japan. Japan used to be a permanent member of the council of the League of Nations, but lost its status as a major power in the international community because it failed to establish a partnership of equals with China. I hope that China will not repeat Japan�s mistake.

The writer, president of the Japan Foundation, is a former Japanese deputy minister of foreign affairs

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Clint Eastwood attacks Japan war myths

May 29, 2006 1:31 PM

Two new movies based on a bloody 1945 battle are stirring up memories and forcing both sides to re-examine their history

Sunday May 28, 2006

More than 60 years after it became one of the bloodiest battlefields of the Second World War, Iwo Jima’s tragic history retains the power to overwhelm.

As his plane prepared to land on the isolated Japanese island last month, the actor Ken Watanabe found he could not hold back the tears. Accompanying Watanabe, who shot to stardom playing a feudal warlord opposite Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai, was another hard man of Hollywood whose time on Iwo Jima would lead to something of a professional epiphany.

Article continues
When Clint Eastwood’s two films about Iwo Jima, one of the darkest periods of the Pacific War, reach cinemas this year, audiences could be excused for forgetting the man behind them was once the trigger-happy Dirty Harry.

The 75-year-old director has promised Flags Of Our Fathers and Red Sun, Black Sand will attempt to show for the first time the suffering of both sides during 36 days of fighting in early 1945 that turned the island into a flattened wasteland.

On a recent trip to Japan, Eastwood said his time on Iwo Jima had forced him to re-evaluate the one-dimensional portrayal of America’s former enemy in so many war films. ‘There were good guys on one side. Life isn’t like that,’ he said.

He describes Red Sun, shot in Japanese and with a largely Japanese cast, as his attempt to understand the country’s soldiers. ‘I think those soldiers deserve a certain amount of respect,’ he said. ‘I feel terrible for both sides in that war and in all wars. A lot of innocent people get sacrificed. It’s not about winning or losing, but mostly about the interrupted lives of young people. These men deserve to be seen, and heard from.’

Eastwood had to mount a diplomatic offensive before filming could begin. Tokyo’s ultra-conservative governor, Shintaro Ishihara, who administers the island, gave Eastwood permission to film only after he agreed he would ‘absolutely not’ trample on Japanese sensitivities.

Japanese Iwo Jima veterans who met Eastwood say they are confident the films will honour their fallen comrades. ‘I asked him to make a human drama, not a war film,’ said 83-year-old Kiyoshi Endo, of the Japanese Iwo Jima Veterans’ Association. ‘I wanted him to show how the soldiers felt when they were fighting and, having read the script, I think he has done that. Who won or lost is not the point.’

The US assault on Iwo Jima began on the morning of 19 February 1945. When fighting ended 36 days later, an estimated 7,000 US troops and more than 21,000 Japanese soldiers were dead. Fewer than 1,000 Japanese survived.

Koji Kitahara, 84, who served aboard a vessel protecting supply ships, said he hoped the film would capture the utter desperation of the Japanese troops. ‘I remember countless soldiers in smaller boats coming out to my ship and begging us for food and water,’ he said. ‘All I could give them were a few cigarettes and some sweet bean jelly I had on me. I was haunted by their appearance and certain that they would die soon.’

While Eastwood promises to avoid the jingoism of John Wayne’s 1949 film Sands of Iwo Jima, the first of his two films, Flags Of Our Fathers, promises to be more palatable to American audiences. Based on the 2000 bestselling book of the same name, it focuses on the six US soldiers captured in AP photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic and controversial photograph, as they raised the Stars and Stripes at the summit of Mt Suribachi.

But if Iwo Jima was one of the US marines’ hardest-won victories, it came at a price: nearly a third of all marines killed in the war died on the island.

These days Iwo Jima, 700 miles south of Tokyo, is populated by only a few hundred Japanese soldiers, the families of the dead having successfully lobbied against building on what they regard as sacred ground. For veterans like Kitahara, Red Sun’s release in December promises to evoke painful memories. For younger Japanese, it will be their first exposure to one of the bloodiest episodes in their country’s modern history.

Just as it was for Watanabe. ‘As we went through this film, we realised that until now we haven’t really looked at Japan’s past. We kind of looked away from it,’ he said. ‘But we have to look at it and accept the fact that this is what our fathers and grandfathers have done. Accepting the reality is the first step.’

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The China Syndrome: Why the Pentagon keeps overestimating Beijing’s military strength.

May 29, 2006 1:25 PM

May 26, 2006

Every day and night, hundreds of Air Force generals and Navy admirals must thank their lucky stars for China. Without the specter of a rising Chinese military, there would be no rationale for such a large fleet of American nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers, or for a new generation of stealth combat fighters�no rationale for about a quarter of the Pentagon’s budget. In Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s Quadrennial Defense Review, released this past February, the looming Chinese threat is the explicit justification for all the big-ticket weapons systems that have nothing to do with fighting terrorists or insurgents.

But is the threat real? In each of the last four years, Congress has required the Defense Department to issue a report titled Military Power of the People’s Republic of China. The latest edition, issued this week, starts out ominously, but as you read through its 50 double-columned pages, you gradually realize that claims of emerging Chinese superpower are way overblown.

The Chinese are hardly sluggish when it comes to modernizing their military. According to the report, they’ve been boosting their military budget by double-digit percentages every year for the past decade. They’ve been expanding their arsenals of missiles, aircraft, air-defense weapons, surface ships, and submarines. They have expanded especially aggressively near the Taiwan Strait, to the point where the balance of forces with Taiwan is now “shifting in the mainland’s favor.” They’re studying the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and are shifting their doctrine to focus on joint operations, “network-centric warfare,” and offensive maneuvers.

That’s what you get from the first half of the report. In the second half, you see that it adds up to diddly.

Take the budget. China officially says it’s spending $35 billion on its military, a 14.7 percent increase over last year’s budget, amounting to 1.5 percent of its gross national product. (The U.S. military budget is nearly 15 times as large and amounts to 4 percent of our GNP; Japan’s and South Korea’s defense budgets are larger than China’s, too.) The report says that China’s growth “sustains a trend that has persisted since the 1990s of defense budget growth rates exceeding economic growth”�but read on�”although the growth of defense expenditures has lagged behind the growth in overall government expenditures over the same period of time.” (Emphasis mine.)

In other words, by the report’s admission, the military is not the Chinese government’s No. 1 priority. (For more on the budget figures, click here.)

More to the point, let’s look at what the Chinese have bought. It’s a surprise to read that the balance of power with Taiwan is now “shifting in the mainland’s favor.” For decades, the widespread calculation has been that China could overwhelm Taiwan if it wanted to�just as the Soviet Union could have overwhelmed West Berlin or North Korea could have captured Seoul�but that it’s been deterred from doing so out of a reluctance to spark a large-scale war.

The report states: “In the near term, China’s military buildup appears focused on preparing for Taiwan Strait contingencies, including the possibility of U.S. intervention.” It claims that in the long term, the Chinese aim to widen their area of military control throughout Asia. But the report later makes clear that the People’s Liberation Army, as China’s military is formally called, is doing nothing of the sort.

It states that “Chinese military theorists” are exploring “the role of information technology as a force multiplier, enabling PLA forces to conduct relatively limited military operations with precision at greater distances from China’s borders. However, in practice,” the report continues, “the PLA remains untested. The lack of operational experience hampers outside assessment.” Military theorists are also thinking about “devising a robust ‘out of area’ offensive capability to provide effective support for joint operations.” However, again in reality, the PLA “faces a persistent lack of inter-service cooperation and a lack of actual experience in joint operations.” The language in its official studies of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “suggest(s) China continues to be surprised at the rapid pace of change in military warfare.” In other words, Chinese officers realize they’re not playing in the big leagues.

Read as far as Page 30, and you see that not just China’s capabilities but also its ambitions are far from expansive. “At present,” the report states, “China’s concept for sea-denial appears limited to sea-control in water surrounding Taiwan and its immediate periphery. If China were to shift to a broader ‘sea-control’ strategy”�in other words, if it were seeking a military presence farther away from its shores�”the principal indicators would include development of an aircraft carrier, development of robust, deep-water anti-submarine-warfare capabilities, development of a true area anti-aircraft warfare capability, acquisition of large numbers of nuclear attack submarines,” etc., etc. The point is: The Chinese aren’t doing�they’re not even close to doing�any of those things.

The report notes that Chinese naval officers began to “discuss” aircraft carriers in the late 1970s. In 1998 and 2000, they bought two Soviet carriers. However, neither was turned into a weapons platform. Instead, they were used as (these are the report’s words) “floating military theme parks.” The report notes that some analysts think China might have a single aircraft carrier by 2015, but others think they won’t until 2020 or later.

Finally, Page 40, the next-to-last page of text, contains an eye-opening sidebar that calls into question the report’s very premise:

China does not yet possess the military capability to accomplish with confidence its political objectives on the island [Taiwan], particularly when confronted with outside intervention. Beijing is also deterred by the potential political and economic repercussions of any use of force against Taiwan. China’s leaders recognize that a war could severely retard economic development. Taiwan is China’s single largest source of foreign direct investment. An extended campaign would wreck Taiwan’s economic infrastructure.

Nor, this sidebar states, does China seem physically able to pull off an invasion of Taiwan, even if it wanted: “According to the Intelligence Community, China would have difficulty protecting its vital sea lanes of communication while simultaneously supporting blockade or invasion operations.” This is the case, quite apart from the “virtual certainty of U.S. intervention, and Japanese interests, in any conflict in the Taiwan Strait.”

If you’re worried about the independence of Taiwan, this report suggests that China’s buildup is worth careful monitoring and a modest response. If you’re worried that the Chinese military might dominate Asia, the report suggests you should relax.

It’s an old, recurring story, this business of latching on to China as a rationale for big weapons or budgets that would otherwise be baseless. Back in 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, to build some kind of anti-ballistic-missile system. McNamara was opposed to an ABM system. He’d recently ordered a study that concluded an ABM would be futile because the Soviets could counter our defensive missiles by just slightly increasing the number of their offensive missiles. But an order was an order, so McNamara gave a speech in which he outlined all the reasons an ABM was a bad idea�then concluded that we needed to build one anyway to defend against an attack by Red China.

Paul Warnke, at the time an assistant secretary of defense, walked into McNamara’s office later that day and asked, “China bomb, Bob?” Warnke told me, many years later, that McNamara looked down at his desk, shuffled some papers, and muttered, “What else am I going to blame it on?”

Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate. He can be reached at war_stories@hotmail.com.

http://www.slate.com/id/2141966/

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Mao’s lost children: Sun Shuyun’s search for survivors of the Long March

May 29, 2006 2:03 AM

: In 1934, hundreds of thousands of
communists were driven from southern China by nationalists fighting
against a socialist state. Only a fifth of them survived the 8,000-
mile ‘Long March’. Sun Shuyun set out in search of the handful of
surviving veterans

Wang Quanyuan woke up on a bright morning in May feeling a moment of
happiness. She had spent a rare night with her new officer husband.
Outside the wooden house, their temporary village billet in Sichuan
province, she could see a blue lake surrounded by fields of barley with
tall, snowy mountains rising up behind; where she came from there was
no
snow and to her it looked like sugar. It was 1935, the second year of
the
Long March. Wang’s marriage was to prove unequal to the adversities
ahead.
Had she known, she might have been torn between the desire to seal
their
union more tightly by having her husband’s child, and the fear of
falling
pregnant - one of the greatest fears among women on the epic march
through
China.

The day her period came, a few weeks later, “I felt as if a millstone
had
been lifted from my neck. I promptly climbed up a mulberry tree and got
a
wad of leaves. Standing there, I wanted to shout to the world, ‘I’m not
pregnant! I’m not pregnant!’” The women, she said, “dreaded pregnancy
more
than the plague”.

Recalling those times, Wang, now 91, still had a look of pain on her
gentle face, when I tracked her down at the start of my journey
retracing
the Long March. This was the 8,000-mile trek by the fledgling Communist
party and its armed forces that was to become the founding legend of
communist China, a symbol of endurance and courage. Only a fifth of the
200,000 marchers survived the ordeal that began in 1934, when the Red
Armies had to leave their bases in southern China - where Mao Zedong
had
been the leader of a short-lived communist government - to escape
annihilation by Chiang Kai Shek’s nationalist forces. Of the 40,000 who
reached the march’s end two years later in China’s barren north-west
where
the communists regrouped, fewer than 500 are believed to be alive
today,
and they are in their 80s and 90s.

Setting out to follow the route they took, I wanted to find out about
the
realities behind the legend, searching out survivors and unlocking
their
stories. Born in China in the 1960s, I had been raised, like millions
of
young Chinese in the decades after the revolution, on heroic tales of
the
journey. Make light of our difficulties, we were told, and “think of
the
Long Marchers”.

Over 10 months, travelling mainly by bus and train through areas little
changed to this day, I found 40 of the march veterans. Talking to them,
I
learned that their suffering, and what they overcame, was actually much
greater than we had been told, especially among the women. Some of the
realities they described also sit uneasily with the myth - none more
so,
perhaps, than the fate of the children of the Long March: the children
left behind, children given over for hurried adoption after being born
along the way, the young taken on as recruits and sometimes abandoned
if
they could not keep up.

The march comprised different armed columns, following differing
routes.
Wang was one of just 30 women chosen to join 86,000 men on the march in
Mao’s First Army. Six of these women were pregnant at the start of the
march; they had to be carried on stretchers. “Imagine having a stomach
twice as big as a water melon,” Wang recalled. “How could one fight the
enemy? It was a joke.” These pregnant women could not be left behind
because they were the wives of senior party leaders, including Mao’s
wife,
He Zizhen. You could say that the others, unmarried women such as Wang
and
her comrades, were brought along to deflect criticism that leaders’
wives
were getting special treatment when the army’s rule was not to take
women.

Wang saw one woman go into labour while marching, with the baby’s head
dangling out. Another had a difficult birth with Chiang’s troops in hot
pursuit, and bombs dropping like rain. As if afraid of the violent
world,
the baby refused to come out. A whole regiment of the rearguard was
ordered to put up a fierce fight for more than two hours and lost a
dozen
men. After all their pain, however, the women were not allowed to keep
their babies. It was the rule with the First Army: a crying baby could
endanger the troops. The tiny boy whose arrival cost a dozen soldiers’s
lives was left on a bed of straw in the abandoned house where he was
born.

The same rule applied when He Zizhen gave birth in the early spring of
1935. It was the third time she was forced to abandon a child. Her
first
child with Mao, a girl, was given to a peasant woman when she and Mao
had
to flee their guerrilla base. Next came Little Mao, who looked very
much
like his father, hence the nickname. He was two years old when the
First
Army began the march. No one could bring small children along, not even
Mao.

He Zizhen wept before leaving Little Mao in the care of her sister, who
was married to Mao’s brother. Mao did not even say goodbye to his son.
He
could not know that six months later his brother would be killed in
battle, taking with him the secret of the location to which he had
moved
the boy for safety; he had not even told his wife. He Zizhen could
hardly
bring herself to do the unthinkable again, only four months after she
had
torn herself away from Little Mao.

When she was asked to give the girl a name, she shook her head: she
doubted she would see her again. Wrapped in a jacket, the baby was
handed
to an old lady, the only person who had not fled on hearing the Red
Army
was coming. At first she refused, saying she had no milk and could not
possibly look after the child. But when she saw the handful of silver
dollars and a few bowls of opium offered as payment, she changed her
mind.
Years later, He Zizhen was still tormented by her decision: “I did not
even get a good look at my baby. I wasn’t even clear where exactly she
was
born.”

In June 1935, the First Army was reunited with another column, the
Fourth
Army, in Sichuan. The handful of First Army women, including Wang
Quanyuan, were surprised - there were thousands of Fourth Army women,
even
a women’s regiment, which Wang was later to command. Opium was the main
reason: in Sichuan, every family grew opium, and most of the men were
addicts. Often children were too: when they cried or were sick, their
parents would give them a sniff to quiet them. Women smoked, but not
nearly as much as men, so the Fourth Army had no choice but to recruit
women.

Strict rules prohibiting ordinary soldiers from mixing with the women’s
unit did protect these women, but not from the enemy. Later on, many in
the women’s regiment were captured and raped by Muslim warlords’ forces
in
the north-west. Wu Qingxiang, aged 82 when I met her, still shuddered
to
recall what she had been through as a 12-year-old member of a
performing
propaganda troupe. “After they took us, we heard them saying, ‘The Red
bandits really look after their women well. Every single one of them
was a
virgin.’” Another regiment veteran and rape victim, Feng Yuxiang, who
lives in a village not far from Wu’s, told me the same story. I could
imagine them in some dark corner trembling after their ordeal, hearing
those words.

In the Fourth Army, female soldiers were able to bring their children
and
husbands from the start - they would have been lost without them. Some
men
had their entire families, because had they stayed behind they might
have
been killed by government troops. The older children were taken on as
orderlies, messengers, health assistants and buglers. “When you saw men
with children on their backs, or babies peeping out from the horses’
panniers, you wondered if we were really an army,” said Ma Haidiche, a
commander in the women’s regiment, now in her early 90s and living in a
Muslim town in Gansu province in the country’s far north-west.

She remembered a mother walking in front and holding a boy in one hand,
a
bed roll in the other; behind her a girl had her younger brother tied
to
her back. A few days later, she saw the mother again, but not the
children. “Perhaps she gave them away. Then her children were lucky,”
Ma
said quietly, because soon they were to enter the grassland in the far
west of Sichuan where they had no food, and there were no villages
where
local people might take in abandoned children. What little food they
had
was kept for the soldiers. Even so, large numbers of female troops in
Ma’s
unit died. “So many times, I was too hungry to stand up,” she said.
“Death
was easier than life. It was so tempting, just one breath away.” Still
she
was shocked to see a woman drown her baby in a swamp, unable to bear
the
child’s hungry cries.

He Jiesheng, the daughter newly born to He Long, commander of the
Second
Army, was luckier. Her father took her with him because he could not
find
a family to take the three-week-old infant. Carrying her was hard work.
Her mother said: “My baby was heavier than a machine gun! If I were a
man,
I would rather carry a gun. At least I could fight if the enemy caught
up
with us.” He Long tried to help carry her, but the child was so hungry
she
would burrow into his chest, looking for her mother’s breast. Luckily,
He
Long discovered that fish were plentiful - the Tibetan peoples who
lived
in the Sichuan grassland did not eat them. The baby girl survived, the
youngest person to complete the two-year March. Now aged about 70 and
living in Beijing, she can look back on a life that saw her become one
of
the few female generals in the Chinese army.

The Red Army also had large numbers of young recruits, the Little Red
Devils, most in their early teens. No one is sure of their number. Wang
thought it was 5,000 or 6,000 out of 100,000 in the Fourth Army, and
roughly the same number in the First Army. Li Wenying was 14 at the
time
of the march. She had been sold as child bride, and found herself
trapped
with a cruel mother-in-law. Like so many Little Red Devils, she joined
up
for a square meal and some pork now and then. “When I was small, we saw
pigs running about, but never knew what they tasted like. Only the
landlords could afford it.”

Following the Long March route, I came across a report in an archive in
Sichuan. It was compiled by Nationalist officials, detailing Red Army
stragglers abandoned in their particular county. My heart ached as I
ran
down the list, so young, half of them in their early teens, the
youngest
only nine years old. In the remote Sichuan grassland, I found one of
them,
Sangluo, now an old man in his mid-80s. He was 13 when he joined He
Long’s
army far to the east in Hunan province, but in the grassland he could
not
keep up with the marchers. One morning when he woke up, the troops were
gone. They had left behind more than a thousand sick and wounded, and
the
young. “I screamed and screamed. The Red Army was like my parents. How
could they abandon me just like that?”

His youth saved him: the Tibetan families of the grassland relished a
son,
or took pity on the children. He was taken in by a lama, whose mother
looked after him. Isolated for most of his life on the pasture with no
other Han Chinese, he can no longer speak Chinese, nor remember his
home
village. The man before me looked completely Tibetan, his wrinkled face
the same dark red as his robe, his fingers bent from the rheumatoid
arthritis that plagues the nomads. He was grateful for his life: most
of
those abandoned with him died of hunger or were killed by the local
people. As I said goodbye, I asked him whether he felt Chinese or
Tibetan.
He replied, “Does it matter?”

What of the children who were never taken on the march, left behind
when
their parents set off? They fared no better. When nationalist troops
took
the communist bases, they butchered communist sympathisers and
frequently
mutilated or hacked to bits the children entrusted to these people’s
care.
Once the families looking after left-behind children knew what was
coming,
some sold them off, or went into hiding. Yet others became attached to
the
children in their care and could not face losing them when their
parents
returned, so they moved elsewhere. As a result, very few of the Red
Army
marchers ever saw their children again.

As soon as the communists came to power in 1949, He Zizhen, by then no
longer Mao’s wife, and her sister and brother tried to find all three
of
Mao’s abandoned children. Her sister was killed in a car accident with
a
boy supposed to be Little Mao, although the child had been claimed by
another veteran. Her brother thought he had found the eldest daughter,
and
then another Little Mao. He Zizhen rushed to Nanjing to see the boy,
and
was convinced he was her lost son because of his oily ears and armpit
odour, which she said were common to all five of her children with Mao.
But this little boy was also claimed by someone else, with the blessing
of
the party. Rather than lose the boy, He Zizhen decided to share him
with
the parents who claimed him, keeping in close touch and showering him
with
love and gifts. But she never got over the thought that he was her only
surviving son with Mao, even though Mao had long given up on both of
them.
The anguish of pain and loss kept her in and out of mental hospital for
the rest of her life. Decades later, the search went on: in November
2003,
two young men from Britain made headlines by announcing to the world
that
they might have found Mao’s long-lost daughter from the march. The only
way to prove her identity would be by testing the DNA of Mao’s one
known
surviving daughter. But she has refused to collaborate. There have been
so
many claimants that perhaps the pain of loss can never be healed, for
Mao’s family and for all the other marchers.

And what of Wang? Children were on her mind all her life. But like two-
thirds of the women survivors I talked to, the conditions on the march
-
the perpetual hunger, the freezing cold in the mountains, the incessant
marching over rough terrain - made her infertile. She adopted seven
orphans, but one after another they deserted her, saying she was not
after
all their mother. Her only comfort is that two of them married each
other
and continue to live with her, caring for her in her old age. She
regretted being unable to bear children herself; but her last words to
me
were: “It was a small price to pay for the revolution”

The Long March by Sun Shuyun is published this week by HarperCollins at
?20. To order a copy for ?18 with free UK p&p go to
guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875

Posted at 2:03 AM · Comments (0)

‘Patriotism’ a useful tool for the government to meddle in education

May 29, 2006 12:22 AM

“I Am a Patriot” was a song released by “Little Steven” Van Zandt in 1984. In it, he sang that he loved his country because “my country is all I know.” It’s worth mentioning as the controversy over the use of “patriotism” in the revision of the Fundamental Law of Education continues to make headlines.

The Japanese government says it wants to make patriotism and “public spirit” official goals of education, since it believes that many of Japan’s social ills stem from the emphasis on individualism found in the Constitution. The government also wants to revise the Constitution, but that requires a national referendum, and since Japan has never held one before it will take a while to hammer out a method for carrying it out.

The purpose of the education law is to promote the ideals set forth in the Constitution, so it doesn’t make sense to revise the law before a new Constitution is passed. The government doesn’t need to seek the people’s permission to amend the education law, which the ruling coalition would like to do during the current Diet session.

The revision amounts to nothing less than defining a desirable form of morality. Though it contains no overt coercion with regards to moral instruction, the revision also contains new stipulations that give the central government greater control over the day-to-day execution of educational policies.

However, the media has fixated on Article 2 of the draft, which attempts to define patriotism, though the word itself (aikoku) is not used. Before and during the war, love of the nation and reverence toward the Emperor were inculcated by means of the Imperial Rescript on Education, which all schoolchildren had to memorize.

The gist of the Rescript minus any mention of the Emperor has essentially been resurrected for the revision. Conservatives have always liked the Rescript. They just thought it was implemented poorly. This time, they expect teachers to instill the values of the Rescript in tender young minds more naturally, without resorting to corporal punishment.

According to Tokyo Shimbun, one of the reasons given by the government for changing the education law is that the text written in 1947 at the order of the occupying Americans was “bad Japanese.” (This is also one of the reasons given for changing the General Headquarters of the Allied Occupation-overseen Constitution.) Still, it’s at least comprehensible. The current revision is incoherent and illogical, reflecting the babble of special interests that have contributed to its wording. The patriotism controversy is essentially a fight over terminology.

But it’s also a red herring. Article 2 is a very small section of the law. Nobuyoshi Takashima, a professor at Ryukyu University, writes in the weekly magazine Shukan Kinyobi that the national media have not bothered to explain much of the rest of the law to the public and implies that the media aren’t interested in it, or if indeed, they even understand it.

More important than the new Article 2 is the old Article 10. The current law says that “education cannot be subjected to ‘improper control’ (futo-na shihai).” This stipulation was put in place by the Americans to pre-empt the kind of indoctrination that the Rescript represented. It has been used by the Japan Teachers Union to keep the authorities from interfering in their work. In essence, it prevents the government from sticking its nose in the classroom.

The Asahi Shimbun said the ruling Liberal Democratic Party wanted to remove this stipulation but left it in, probably because teachers would protest its excision. However, the LDP added a phrase that said decisions about “improper control” could also be subject to “other laws,” which presumably means that it will become easier for the government to legally enforce directives that teachers find objectionable. The government wants to put a stop to lawsuits over its control of the curriculum and teaching methods; for instance, its approval of text books.

In order for the government to reverse what the education ministry has referred to as students’ “deteriorating morality,” which it implies was brought about by the current education law, it apparently needs to be able to dictate all aspects of education in the schools itself. And according to the new law local governments will be compelled to “make efforts” to carry out central government policies. These efforts will then be evaluated by the central government. The Tokyo Metropolitan Government, in fact, has already put such a system in place. Starting last April, teaching staff no longer have a say in directives handed down by their principals.

In a survey carried out by the Asahi, more than half the respondents said they are in favor of revising the education law. The same percentage said they didn’t see any problem with promoting patriotism in schools. These results seem to indicate that most citizens understand only the patriotism controversy and thus equate the revision with an emphasis on loving one’s country. And what’s wrong with that? As Little Steven said, it’s natural to love your country if that’s the limit of your experience.

But to politicians patriotism is a tool and means whatever they want it to mean. It’s the same with any abstraction. When the prime minister defends his visits to Yasukuni Shrine, he claims no one can dictate his conscience. But several years ago a high-school student from Miyazaki sent the government a petition protesting the deployment of Self-Defense Forces to Iraq because it violated the Constitution. When asked to comment, Koizumi said nothing about the young man’s conscience, only that his teachers had obviously not explained the deployment properly. Under the revised education bill that would never happen.

The Japan Times: Sunday, May 28, 2006
(C) All rights reserved

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/fd20060528pb.html

Posted at 12:22 AM · Comments (0)

Angry old men: ON LATE STYLE: Music and Literature Against the Grain by Edward Said

May 29, 2006 12:15 AM

May 26 2006 15:06

Edward Said used to joke that he was �the last Jewish intellectual�. For a Christian Palestinian New Yorker who made his name with Orientalism, a fierce polemic against western cultural imperialism, this was some claim. Yet four decades of book titles - The Politics of Dispossession; Out of Place: A Memoir; Reflections on Exile - indicate that his leitmotif was precisely the one that haunted the diaspora intelligentsia before the establishment of Israel.

Uniquely, Said brought themes of marginality and powerlessness in art, along with the Jewish tradition of cultural yearning, to bear on late 20th- century Palestinian experience. He believed that �the quintessential intellectual hates all systems, whether on our side or theirs, with equal distaste.� But the question of exile still courses through the posthumous, apparently apolitical On Late Style, thus confirming the story of his life�s work - that although art cannot be enlisted for political ends, nor can it be separated from political currents.

On Late Style is brilliant cultural criticism from a writer whose perfect-pitch perception across all arts and national boundaries - Euripides, Glenn Gould, Genet, Visconti are among the subjects - was always conditioned by his outsider status. Dying, of course, makes outsiders of us all. And it is the awareness of death waiting, altering the quality of time like a change in the light, which shapes both tone and subject here. In September 2003, days after telling his wife that the book was nearly complete, Said died; it has been elegantly edited by his friend Michael Wood. That On Late Style remained unfinished, however, seems somehow essential to its lovely, urgent art-meets-life truthfulness, for Said�s originality here is to explore �artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction�.

We tend to think of late style as �the reaching of a new level of expression�, as Hermann Broch put it. He cited the penetrating light dissolving human flesh and soul in late Titian; the painted metaphysics of Rembrandt and Goya; The Art of Fugue �which Bach in his old age dictated without having a concrete instrument in mind, because what he had to express was either beneath or beyond the audible surface of music�.

Broch, in exile in the US and longing for European culture, was writing in the 1940s. Said, revisiting the subject in a 21st century that courts aesthetic disharmony, focuses instead on late styles rooted in �non-serene tension�. The last plays of angry old man Ibsen �tamper irrevocably with the possibility of closure and leave the audience more perplexed and unsettled than before�. Schoenberg prolongs �the irreconcilabilities, negations and immobilities of the late Beethoven�, who exudes �a new sense of private striving and instability� after the confident, gregarious Eroica.

Said�s interpretative genius always rested on a flair for combining critical theory with passionately enthusiastic close reading. What interests him especially about the modernists is how anarchic, out-of-time artists play off late style against �the great totalising code of 20th-century western culture and cultural diffusion: the music business, publishing, film, journalism�. This subversive individuality and lingering on the old order unites figures in diverse media, from Richard Strauss (Four Last Songs represent the �theatricalisation of an old man waiting for death�) to Giuseppe di Lampedusa in The Leopard and Luchino Visconti in the screen version of that book and films redolent of historical opera such as Death in Venice. In old age in postwar Europe, each created anachronistic, widely popular modernist classics which turn on the death of tradition as well as personal mortality. Composed when Strauss was an official of the Third Reich, Capriccio is about �sustaining a traditional line and yet also allowing us to hear the interruptions of the outside world�. Without a shred of self-pity, Lampedusa and Visconti, both aristocrat-artists exiled from their own class, record degenerate old Europe disappearing within a new, crass middle-class world.

Dazzlingly, Said shows how such works depend on an emotional profligacy and glorious extravagance achieved through two privileges of maturity: an absolute refusal to be embarrassed; and a supreme, distilled mastery of form, thanks to a lifetime of technical effort. Risk, resistance and a refusal to sit easily with either mass consumer or avant-garde tastes characterise these works. For each artist it was as if �having achieved age, they want none of its serenity [or] amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and elevates their uses of language and aesthetic.� There is no better description of this gracefully unquiet, probing and wise book: Said�s own elegiac masterpiece of late style.

http://news.ft.com/cms/s/cb947f36-ebb3-11da-b3e2-0000779e2340.html

Posted at 12:15 AM · Comments (0)

Jodi

May 26, 2006 6:33 PM

The Ipod-like device at work served this up this afternoon in one of those miracle sequences, where the tunes seem to have been cued up by some superior spirit.
This song is a fat and languid blues ballad by the all-time master of the genre; a real seminar in feeling, and an essential number for anyone who loves the music of the middle of the last century.
The tune was followed by Unless on Has, by Coltrane, from his Blues Connotation recording. It is a perfect match for Dex’s mood and though full of Coltrane virtuosity, never rushed or insistent.
Two songs later, along came another Dexter masterpiece — one of my all-time favorites: “Don’t Explain”. And I won’t. this stuff has to be heard.

Posted at 6:33 PM · Comments (0)

Take a number, pal: Web etiquette goes wacky when ranking friends becomes an exercise in lifeboat ethics.

May 26, 2006 6:30 PM

May 10, 2006

LET’S begin with an exercise. First, name the eight most important people in your life � friends, family, rock stars. These are your Top 8. Now rank those people in order of importance. Finally, send a copy of this list to everybody you know, including people who didn’t make the cut. Be careful not to hurt the wrong feelings, or you may end up getting bumped from other people’s Top 8s.

Go ahead and bite your nails. Realize the magnitude of these decisions.

OK, so, you’re either lost in terrifying flashbacks of middle-school cruelty � or you’ve already made such a list, already showed it to all your friends, and since you didn’t make all their Top 8s, you’ve already deleted the offenders from your list (and prayed they noticed). In other words, you’re already on MySpace.com or one of the many other social networking websites such as Facebook.com or Friendster.com, doing your best to navigate this complex new world of friends-of-friends-of-friends-etc. with as few social casualties as possible.

If the Internet was once ungoverned by etiquette, those days are gone; MySpace and its siblings, by many accounts the future of the Net, are rife with discussions of good manners versus unforgivable faux pas. There isn’t an aristocratic class, just yet, but you can see the lines forming in the sand, renegades and bad boys posting bulletins pell-mell, uploading risque pictures, collecting “friends” as if it’s all some big popularity contest � while mannered netizens look on disapprovingly. Screw up and you just might get dumped, online and off.

J.D. Funari is hoping that clarity prevents offense. A week after logging onto MySpace, the 24-year-old TV editor from Studio City posted a disclaimer above his Top 8: “Since this ‘preferred’ listing of friends can quickly become unnecessarily political, I’d like to briefly explain my sorting technique,” he wrote.

“The first spot will always be my brother (for obvious reasons) and the second spot will always be my friend Katie (for reasons obvious to Katie and I). The third and fourth spots are reserved for music and movies of interest. Five and six are wild-cards which may be related to how well I know the person and/or if I’m dating them (opposite sex only) and/or if they’ve paid me for inclusion. The final two spots are, to be perfectly honest, the two most attractive current female photos from my list of friends.”

The posted explanation sent ripples through Funari’s 97 interconnected friends. “It’s very flattering,” says Katie Rose Houck, 23, an actress in Los Angeles who occupies slot No. 8, reserved for attractive females. “We’ve only known each other for a couple of months, and we have a flirting banter going on between the two of us. This reaffirms that he knows that I’m pretty, that I know that he thinks I’m pretty, and all of his extended friends know that he thinks I’m pretty.”

Houck admits laughingly that she has browsed through Funari’s other friends to see whom she bested. Then again, she is No. 8 on the list, while No. 7 went to Amy Vo, a 25-year-old receptionist from Maryland, who happens to be wearing a bikini in her MySpace picture. “I have an outfit on, so of course Amy is going to get the first spot,” says Houck. “Naked wins over pretty.”

Vo has never actually met Funari in person; the two connected through Funari’s No. 1 friend, Katie. It went like this: Funari clicked on Katie’s picture and was whisked to her profile, where he spied Vo in spot No. 3. He clicked over to Vo’s profile and sent her a message. “He said, ‘Oh, you’re so pretty,’ ” remembers Vo. “And I said, ‘Oh, you’re so nice.’ ” Then Funari requested Vo as a friend, she accepted, and soon she rose to spot No. 7 on his page. (Alas, Funari, you’re absent from Vo’s Top 8.) These, the newfangled dances we dance.

At first it seems as if Funari’s strategy might just work. Play the honesty card, let people know where they stand, watch them celebrate or nurse their wounds and then move on. But life threatens to throw a monkey wrench into his beautiful absolutes. “The first spot will always be my brother,” his rules explain. Problem is, Funari has two younger siblings who will soon be logging on themselves. What then? And what if he gets serious with a girl � will she be happy at sixth place?

“If he was my boyfriend, and he didn’t put me in the top 5, I would be a little offended,” Houck says. “And if he kept his best girlfriend at No. 2 � and she’s pretty! � I would be a little offended. Maybe that’s why he’s still single.”

Well, he is single. It says so right on his page: “Status: Single.” MySpace profile pages are customizable in many ways; you can add pictures, music, write blogs, list your interests or skip all this entirely. You can allow friends to jot comments directly onto your page, viewable by all, or you can retain absolute control. But try as you might, you can’t avoid classifying your relationship status, which isn’t always easy to do.

After the Top 8, relationship status causes the most ire in the MySpace world.

“It gets highly dramatic,” says Danah Boyd, a doctoral student at UC Berkeley who is studying the culture of social networking. “Sometimes one person thinks they’re single while the other person thinks they’re dating�. You can’t have your status be, ‘I’m in a relationship that I’m not entirely thrilled with, I’m waiting for something better, come talk to me.’ “

What results is an inordinate amount of “swingers,” an allowed choice that’s sufficiently deviant for teens, ironic for adults (minus actual swingers) and has quickly become socially acceptable within the MySpace mainstream. Still, there remain many conventionalists who choose “single” or “in a relationship,” and watch their physical and digital worlds intertwine.

Five months ago, 27-year-old James was “in a relationship,” according to his MySpace page. Then James, a New York public relations executive who declined to provide his last name, broke up with his girlfriend and switched to “single.”

In the real world and online, James and his ex remained friends, so when James started dating another woman, he didn’t want to rub it in his ex’s face. He delicately broached the MySpace topic with the new girlfriend, and they agreed not to switch their designation to “in a relationship” just yet. So: single online, together off.

It was four months of limbo before James and his girlfriend decided the time was right. “I was at her Easter family dinner,” James remembers, “and that pretty much constitutes a relationship.”

They went online, made the change and all’s well � unless things go sour. “There’s a tension that never existed before,” James says.

In this case, James and his girlfriend were making the safe assumption that their exes engage in “MySpace stalking,” the practice of secretly keeping tabs on friends, lovers, co-workers, celebrities or complete strangers by reading their profiles.

If stalking in the real world implies some dangerous psychological imbalance, on MySpace it’s essentially the norm, although etiquette suggests that you keep your stalking to yourself. Mention so-and-so’s dating status too loudly in the wrong context or without the required I’m-just-kidding jocularity and you risk being judged a stalker in the regular sense.

Where there’s stalking, there’s reverse stalking. After all, wouldn’t you want to know who’s watching you? To watch them watch you without them knowing they’re being watched? Um, of course you would. At first. And then you realize that if you watch whoever’s watching you, then you’ll also be unveiled to everybody you’re stalking, which puts a real damper on the initial voyeuristic enterprise.

Some social networking sites, such as Friendster, allow users to view who has visited their profiles; MySpace does not. Which simply means that MySpacers are more desperate than ever to unearth a reverse-stalking technique and then hide it from everyone they know.

In February, James hit gold. He came across a website, Whospyme.com, which gave users the ability to watch the watchers. Unlike the dozens of hoaxes circulating throughout MySpace, this one actually worked. “It showed who visited my page and the exact time they visited. One girl, an old friend, checked it almost every hour.” James was omniscient for nearly two weeks until MySpace blocked Whospyme, returning him to darkness.

Tom Anderson, president of MySpace and its most beloved member � he regularly receives marriage proposals among the thousands of comments on his profile � explains: “We can’t allow somebody to create a service like that, which reveals who’s looking at your page. That’s a violation of privacy.” If MySpace were to unveil such a feature, Anderson says, each user would get to make an individual decision about whether to be traceable. Yet another decision fraught with online and offline complications.

There are plenty of other decisions to make in the meantime:

Number of friends: Too many, you’re deemed a “MySpace whore,” too few, a loser. (Caveat: If you’re in a band, or you’re a middle-school kid who lied about your age to get on MySpace and are competing with friends to see who’s most popular, “too many” is a good thing.)

Profile picture: Posing in your skivvies opens you to scorn, but, depending on your friends, it may also increase the probability that you’ll score some Top 8 spots. “I can’t stand it when people put pictures up, trying to look all sexy,” says Lori Carter, 25, a Salt Lake City office manager. More specifically, Carter can’t stand it when her husband accepts such people as his friends.

Grammar: “I am not a grammar Nazi,” says Michael Block, 23, an L.A. search engine marketer who uses MySpace and Tagworld.com. “But I do feel terrible for words like ‘probably’ and ‘someone’ that are constantly bastardized into ‘prolly’ and sumone.’ ” Etiquette here is often divided by age, with teens writing in slang that evokes fury in their twentysomething elders. Block has been unable to decipher this message, for instance, which he received from a 15-year-old stranger from Florida: “y u want people 2 look at u 4. u thinken that u looken sweet 4 da females.”

Bulletins: These are messages that users post to virtual bulletin boards. Perhaps the most common social networking pet peeve are posted versions of the chain letters of yore, the “if you don’t send this on you’ll never fall in love again and then you’ll die a horrible death” variety.

If you’ve steered clear of social networking so far, enjoy that simple existence while you’re able. Sooner or later friends will ask � then demand � that you migrate toward multidimensionality. There are more than 76 million people on MySpace (about 270,000 join daily), and Anderson wants to expand the MySpace experience until the entire Net rests within it. “Anything you do on the Internet, I want you to be able to do on MySpace,” he says. “That’s the goal and ambition. Almost all the things you can do online can be enhanced by the social structure of MySpace.”

Which suggests that the Top 8 will become only more central to the human experience, more dizzyingly complex.

“It’s the Seinfeldian Speed Dial Dilemma of our generation,” says Sarah Ciston, 22, a page designer at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. “I love it. But I think you should also get a Bottom 8, or a Bottom 20. A hall of shame of sorts.”
If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at latimes.com/archives.

http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-etiquette10may10,0,7688804.story?coll=cl-calendar

Posted at 6:30 PM · Comments (0)

Goin’ Down Slow

May 26, 2006 1:38 AM

Great Googlie-mooglie. A masterpiece from Chess Blues - 1960-1967.

Man, you know I done enjoyed things that Kings and Queens ain’t never had. In fact Kings and Queens can’t never get. Don’t even know about! And good times? Ummmmm.
I have had my fun. If I don’t never get well no more. I have had my fun. If I never get well no more. Woah, my health is fading on me. Woah yes, I’m going down slow…
Please write my mother, and tell her the shape I’m in. Please write my mother, and tell her the shape I’m in. Tell her pray for me. Forgive me for my sins.

Posted at 1:38 AM · Comments (0)

A CHINA SYNDROME THAT ONLY HURTS CHINA

May 23, 2006 1:55 PM

>
>LOS ANGELES — The relationship between the United States and China is
>the single most important bilateral entanglement in global politics
>today. Is there really any argument here? So it bears repeating � in
>fact, urgently — that the Peoples Republic of China is barking up
>exactly the wrong sort of tree in foolishly crossing swords with The New
>York Times.
>
>This prestigious daily newspaper is an American mass-media leader. On the
>mainland of China, there is absolutely no equivalent. The paper is more
>important � by far— than the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations
>Committee. It is like the South China Morning Post, the excellently
>feisty Asian English-language newspaper based in Hong Kong, times one
>hundred. No one U.S. multinational super-corporation is as influential
>as the daily put out by the boys and girls on West 43rd St. in Manhattan.
>
>Let me suggest, without being too silly, that this longstanding New York
>daily possesses the opinion-making capability of a multi-megaton nuclear
>bomb. For example, our TV networks in part take their news cues from its
>front page — as do many other newspapers the width and breadth of
>America. Should Times editors decide to drop all their destructive power
>—rightly or wrongly � on China, the effect would be not at all what
>Beijing would want. So why mess with them if you can avoid it?
>
>But China, which could have avoided this problem altogether, instead
>decided to mess with The Times anew. To make a technically and
>spiritually unedifying long story short, mainland authorities have
>recharged a former Beijing-based researcher from The New York Times for
>offenses that they had just recently dropped.
>
>The researcher in question, Zhao Yan, remains in a Chinese prison. The
>original charge, dropped and restated, claimed theft of state secrets in
>connection with a Times story revealing a power struggle in the PRC
>elite. For its part, the newspaper has stated for the record that its
>leadership-struggle story was not a product of Zhao Yans work in Beijing.
>
>That admission was large-spirited of the newspaper (which has been trying
>to get Yan from behind bars) but it should have been unnecessary: If
>Chinas authorities � and its their decision to do so, after all — are
>prepared to permit The Times to report stories from the mainland, they
>need to accept, especially in this age of information-globalization, that
>not every story that appears in the paper will, be enormously wonderful,
>appealing and pro-China (whatever this might mean).
>
>How to explain Chinas unwise conduct? Heres one thought: As backdrop,
>rumor has it that China President Hu Jintao was irritated with the U.S.
>handling of his recent official visit to Washington and thus vengeful.
>Lets not go into the well-reported details but from his perspective (and
>from almost everyone elses) he has the right to sulk. But while humanly
>understandable, sulking for any extended period of time is
>internationally ill-advised.
>
>With almost scientific precision, China, which has many problems, needs
>to maximize its national interests in every single respect and
>opportunity. Indulging in the cult of the sulk� if that is what is
>happening in this case � is no way for the adult leader of China to behave.
>
>Okay — its hard to explain to PRC friends why The New York Times is so
>important. Everyone knows it is powerful, even though everyone wishes it
>would demonstrate a lot more humility. But it doesnt, and it never will.
>In the U.S., therefore, everyone knows, for all its faults, The New York
>Times is a power to be reckoned with. This is the ways things are today.
>
>Is this column nothing more than a kind of special plea by one journalist
>not in trouble for another journalist now in trouble? On one level,
>perhaps; but this case is special. The New York Times has been
>historically reluctant to take up individual cases for fear of being
>accused of special-interest pleading. To its credit, this is not such a
>case. A major part of The Times argument for the release of Zhao Yan has
>less to do with concern for the individual (though this is sincere) than
>with the larger issue.
>
>You see, Americas leading newspaper would prefer to deal with China
>wholly objectively and seriously. But when China make issues like Zhao
>Yan so personal and ugly, its leaders look to be ones who sulk, and are,
>at the end of the day, the real losers, not The New York Times, as
>arrogant as the latter can be, too.
>
>China needs to always show to the world its peaceful rise side, not its
>testy old Mao kindergarten-brat side: because, before too long, this is
>the side the entire American news media will start to focus on and report
>to the American people about. This is not something China needs. Zhao
>Yan is a much, much hotter potato than Beijing realizes.
>
>
>UCLA Prof. Tom Plate is a member of the Pacific Council on International
>Relations and founder of the UCLA Media Center. � 2006, Tom Plate.

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In Mali, Bono Talks the Cotton Trade

May 23, 2006 12:58 PM

DAFARA VILLAGE, Mali (Reuters) - In this village about a two-hour drive from the capital Bamako, rock star Bono meets local chiefs and elders and says American cotton traded on the international market has an unfair advantage over Mali’s.
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“There are cotton farmers in America who need to meet you,” says the Irish rocker and activist. “This is my biggest desire because I think they will understand you better because I think American cotton farmers would respect how you work the land so well with little water.”

The 90-year-old chief Julien Traore, sitting opposite the rock star under a mango tree surrounded by villagers and children, nods and encourages Bono to keep talking.

“The reason you don’t get more for your cotton is because world trade talks, the people who are sitting at the table, do not respect your situation,” Bono continues. “We will try to represent you in the trade talks where they won’t let you sit.”

Mali is one of Africa’s five big cotton producers next to Chad, Benin, Burkina Faso and Senegal that are demanding the United States dramatically cuts the subsidies it pays its farmers.

In 2004-5 U.S. producers received about $4.2 billion in federal subsidies, money that impoverished West African nations say depresses world prices and ruins their economies.

The West African producers have sought for several years to give cotton special status in the
World Trade Organization talks, currently stalled over broader farm issues.

Bono, on a six-nation African tour to see how Africa is trying to transform itself amid promises by the West of increased aid, is in Mali specifically to find out how low cotton prices are directly affecting farmers.

“I think Americans would like things to be more fair. We would like to have it more fair,” he says, then asks Chief Traore: “What do you think of America?”

“We think Americans are white men but they are still farmers,” responds the chief.

In his campaigning for Africa, Bono has lobbied leaders from the largest industrialized economies for better access for Africa to the large U.S. and European markets.

On his tour, Bono has argued that the only way Africa can escape the cycle of poverty is through increased trade.

In Mali, Bono also visited a state-owned cotton ginnery where cotton is washed and bundled for export, mainly to Asia.

Issa Djire, an agronomist and senior official at the ginnery, explains that 97 percent of Mali’s cotton is exported, while the remaining three percent is processed locally and turned into yarn and thread at local factories.

Djire stresses that Mali’s cotton is among the highest quality in the world and what it needs is foreign investment.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060522/music_nm/africa_bono_cotton_dc_2

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