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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By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 30, 2006 - Copyright The New York Times
To see the entire article, please refer to the NYT website:
Click to read more

SHANGHAI, June 29 — Shanghai is rightfully known as a fast-moving, hypermodern city — full of youth and vigor. But that obscures a less well-known fact: Shanghai has the oldest population in China, and it is getting older in a hurry.

Twenty percent of this city’s people are at least 60, the common retirement age for men in China, and retirees are easily the fastest growing segment of the population, with 100,000 new seniors added to the rolls each year, according to a study by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. From 2010 to 2020, the number of people 60 or older is projected to grow by 170,000 a year.

By 2020 about a third of Shanghai’s population, currently 13.6 million, will consist of people over the age of 59, remaking the city’s social fabric and placing huge new strains on its economy and finances.

The changes go far beyond Shanghai, however. Experts say the rapidly graying city is leading one of the greatest demographic changes in history, one with profound implications for the entire country.

The world’s most populous nation, which has built its economic strength on seemingly endless supplies of cheap labor, China may soon face manpower shortages. An aging population also poses difficult political issues for the Communist government, which first encouraged a population explosion in the 1950’s and then reversed course and introduced the so-called one-child policy a few years after the death of Mao in 1976.

Posted at 4:11 PM · Comments (0)

This is a wry and totally affecting novella by a nostalgic master, as much in love with life and with women as he has ever been. Easily readable in one sitting, you’ll want to take your time.

An excerpt:
The certainty of being mortal, on the other hand, had taken me by surprise a short while before my fiftieth birthday on a similar occasion, a night during carnival when I danced an apache tango with a phenomenal woman whose face I never saw, heavier than me by forty pounds and taller by a foot, yet who let herself be led like a feather in the wind. We danced so close together I could feel her blood circulating through her veins, and I was lulled by pleasure at her hard breathing, her ammoniac odor, her astronomical breasts, when I was shaken for the first time and almost knocked to the ground by the roar of death. It was like a brutal oracle in my ear: No matter what you do, this year or in the next hundred, you will be dead forever. She pulled away in fright: What’s the matter? Nothing, I said, trying to control my heart.:
“I’m trembling because of you.”
From then on I began to measure my life not by years but by decades. The decade of my fifties had been decisive because I became aware that almost everybody was younger than I. The decade of my sixties was the most intense because of the suspicion that I no longer had the time to make mistakes. My seventies were frightening because of a certain possibility that the decade might be the last. Still, when I woke alive on the first morning of my nineties in the happy bed of Delgadina, I was transfixed by the agreeable idea that life was not something that passes by like Heraclitus’ ever-changing river but a unique opportunity to turn over on the grill and keep broiling on the other side for another ninety years.

Posted at 2:18 PM · Comments (0)

I am interested in redesigning this site and would like to have a whole new look in place within the next few weeks - cleaner, easier to navigate and to comment on.

That’s all predicated on finding the right person to help me with the design. Any web-savvy person with this sort of experience is invited to contact me directly.

Meanwhile, here’s another item that ran recently on my photography

Click to read more

(http://www.flickr.com/groups/bokeh_/discuss/72157594162653638/)

At present, I am putting the finishing touches to a collection of Shanghai images that will show in Berlin in October.

Posted at 2:15 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright TCS Daily
28 Jun 2006

In the mid-1980s, India’s middle class comprised just 10 percent of the population. Today, it’s larger than the entire population of the United States and is predicted to grow to 445 million by the end of this decade. For 70 years, Mohandas Gandhi’s myopic vision of backward-looking socialism as a template for national advancement was accepted as revealed wisdom by a string of Indian prime ministers, starting with his acolyte, Nehru. Despite a plenitude of cotton, Gandhi didn’t think India should create a cotton industry, believing instead that every family should own a spinning wheel and spin its own. He didn’t believe India should develop a manufacturing base, which not only caused the dead hand of “import substitution” to smother native initiative, but the failure to develop factories meant there was also a failure to develop infrastructure like roads and ports to take goods to market.

Now at last, riding on a new surge of confidence at home and overseas, Indians have ditched austerity, the spinning wheel and the Mahatma and are spending it up like maharajas. In a recent survey, 90 percent of them cheerfully admitted that they spend their disposable income on non-essentials.

Twenty-five years ago, they had a choice of one car and one color: the Ambassador (top speed 35 mph); it was black and you had to order it years in advance. Today, the consumer chooses from among 40 models produced by 13 companies.

When Gandhi’s thinking still prevailed, Indians expected poor quality consumer goods (Gandhi’s beloved “import substitution”) and expected a dismissive attitude to complaints. Thus the more prudent held off buying. Today, reliability and competitive after-sales service are taken for granted.

The world’s top designers have discovered that the appetite for designer products, especially handbags and shoes, is as ravenous in India as it is in the West, and they’ve flooded in. An Indian lady no longer has to go overseas to buy a pair of Jimmy Choos. Vuitton, Chanel, shopping malls … all with customers with money and credit cards. Retail therapy trumps yoga for relaxing tired nerves.

Forbes Magazine’s Rich List last year placed India eighth in terms of the number of billionaires. The number of millionaires trebles every three years. Today, street peddlers pack cellphones.

The latest rage is the Raj. Middle class Indians from the cities are buying up houses in the hill stations in Himachal Pradesh that were built by British colonial officers for their families to escape the dusty summer heat. Houses in the Himalayan stations of Simla and Dalhousie are moving fast at prices as steep as the snow-capped peaks among which they nestle. A three-bedroom bungalow summer home in need of renovation will set the new Raj back $125,000. A bigger place might go for half a million dollars.

The Times of India’s Washington-based foreign editor, Chitanand Rajghatta, in a piece on the Indian diaspora, notes that there are around 20 to 30 million Indian nationals living in some 180 countries, “give or take a million or two who are in various transit lounges”.

No-frills airlines are having the same effect on travel as they have in Europe and the US — more discretionary flying. The four economy airlines had captured 30 percent of the domestic market in February of this year, which represented a 3 percent growth over January. Among the four big no-frills carriers is Kingfisher, owned by flamboyant billionaire and MP VJ Mallya. Mallya also owns a popular Indian beer — Kingfisher. Irked because India doesn’t allow advertising of alcohol on its territory, he decided to start Kingfisher Air at a cost of 1.5 billion rupees ($23 million) so his logo could be seen overhead.

It’s not just foreign producers of designer goods who are rushing in. In 2002, the government relaxed restrictions on foreign ownership of newspapers. Today, the UK’s Financial Times has acquired a stake in the Business Standard newspaper. Dow Jones took the maximum 26 percent stake in The Wall Street Journal venture in India. Henderson Global acquired a 20 percent state in The Hindustan Times. Foreign entertainment media companies are also pumping money in.

How does one account for this massive swell of confidence?

According to India’s Business Line, only 54 percent of Indians now think a rupee saved is a rupee earned. Part of the reason for the spendathon on mutual funds, consumer goods, property, clothes and foreign travel, thinks Business Line’s Amit Mitra, is, Indian consumers are also the most optimistic in the world in terms of their expectations for employment opportunities and the health of their personal finances. They top AC Nielsen’s Global Consumer Confidence index with a score of 127. The global average was 92. India has an estimated growth rate of 8 percent.

Surprisingly, losing out on all this trade is Britain, the former colonial administrator and major commercial partner for almost 300 years. It is that other developing giant, China, that does the lion’s share of trade with India, accounting for 6 percent of the whole. Next up, America and tiny Switzerland, with 5 percent each. Even Belgium and Germany, with 4 percent each beat out Britain’s Lilliputian 3 percent. As for imports, again, Britain has been inexplicably slow off the mark, taking just four percent of India’s exports, whereas the United States imports a whacking 18 percent. (China buys 6 percent, which is exactly what it exports.)

Commenting on this rush to the head, Sarang Panchal, AC Nielsen executive director for South Asia said, “Socially and economically, India is developing at a galloping pace when compared to the rest of the world.

“In India, the assessment of economic performance over the last 6 months has moved up smartly when compared to the previous six months. Seventy-nine percent of Indians felt that the economy had improved. The follow-through of this positive evaluation has obviously carried forward aggressively.”

He predicts: “For the coming 12 month period, Indians are clearly the most optimistic country in the world. With 88 percent of Indians bullish about the country’s economic performance going forward, we are even more positive than China. In the context of the global economy, this forms an important inflection point in our perception even amongst the international investment community.”

Val MacQueen is a TCS Daily contributing writer.

Posted at 6:42 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The International Herald Tribune
(For the complete article, please see use this link: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/06/28/news/letter.php)

Howard W. French The New York Times

Published: June 28, 2006
SHANGHAI Daily life in this country has persuaded me that China and America share more than is obvious at first glance.

Each believes with apparently inexhaustible optimism in the ability to change people.

For America, that often means converting the world to its values of democracy and private enterprise. For China, at least since the time of Confucius, the urge to remake people is turned inward, and since the start of the Communist era in 1949 this urge has done nothing but intensify, with campaign after campaign to make a New Man.

So it is now, too, with China’s preparations to host the 2008 Olympic Games, a political event as much a sporting event in the minds of this country’s leaders and a vast coming- out party meant to wow the world with China’s fantastic story of growth.

The Chinese government is determined to make just the right impression, and befitting an authoritarian system, is leaving little to chance, down to the manners of its citizens.

The unfolding war against the boorish, brutish and slovenly is so ambitious that it even has precise timetables, with a countdown to the Olympic Games that includes benchmarks of civility and politeness for citizens to meet. As a starter, 4.3 million copies of a new book on manners have been delivered to households in Beijing.

“There will be a breakthrough in making the basic norms of ethics known to all families, to every citizen, and the working style of government departments will improve, professional moral standards will improve in every industrial sector,” the deputy director of the Capital Spirit and Civility Office, Zhao Jinfang, wrote in a bulletin sent to all of the departments of city government earlier this year. “We shall see both the capital city and the citizens’ civility standards have been improved. There will be 100 model civility communities, 1,000 model civility villages and 10,000 model civility individuals.”

The etiquette guidebook, a kind of Emily Post with Chinese characteristics, is nothing if not ambitious, starting with sound fundamentals, like not wearing a hat in a movie theater, not slamming the receiver down at the end of a phone call, and this gem of a pointer: when paying someone a visit, knock first and “wait for the host to open the door or say enter.”

Posted at 4:19 PM · Comments (0)

Talents et compétences président donc au tri des candidats africains à l’immigration en France selon la loi Sarkozy dite de « l’immigration choisie » qui a été votée en mai 2006 par l’Assemblée nationale française. Le ministre français de l’Intérieur s’est offert le luxe de venir nous le signifier, en Afrique, en invitant nos gouvernants à jouer le rôle de geôliers de la « racaille » dont la France ne veut plus sur son sol.
Au même moment, du fait du verrouillage de l’axe Maroc/Espagne, après les événements sanglants de Ceuta et Melilla, des candidats africains à l’émigration clandestine, en majorité jeunes, qui tentent de passer par les îles Canaries meurent par centaines, dans l’indifférence générale, au large des côtes mauritaniennes et sénégalaises. L’Europe forteresse, dont la France est l’une des chevilles ouvrières, déploie, en ce moment, une véritable armada contre ces quêteurs de passerelles en vue de les éloigner le plus loin possible de ses frontières.
Les œuvres d’art, qui sont aujourd’hui à l’honneur au Musée du Quai Branly, appartiennent d’abord et avant tout aux peuples déshérités du Mali, du Bénin, de la Guinée, du Niger, du Burkina-Faso, du Cameroun, du Congo…Elles constituent une part substantielle du patrimoine culturel et artistique de ces « sans visa » dont certains sont morts par balles à Ceuta et Melilla et des « sans papiers » qui sont quotidiennement traqués au cœur de l’Europe et, quand ils sont arrêtés, rendus, menottes aux poings à leurs pays d’origine.
Dans ma « Lettre au Président des Français à propos de la Côte d’Ivoire et de l’Afrique en général », je retiens le Musée du Quai Branly comme l’une des expressions parfaites de ces contradictions, incohérences et paradoxes de la France dans ses rapports à l’Afrique. A l’heure où celui-ci ouvre ses portes au public, je continue de me demander jusqu’où iront les puissants de ce monde dans l’arrogance et le viol de notre imaginaire. Nous sommes invités, aujourd’hui, à célébrer avec l’ancienne puissance coloniale une œuvre architecturale, incontestablement belle, ainsi que notre propre déchéance et la complaisance de ceux qui, acteurs politiques et institutionnels africains, estiment que nos biens culturels sont mieux dans les beaux édifices du Nord que sous nos propres cieux.
Je conteste le fait que l’idée de créer un musée de cette importance puisse naître, non pas d’un examen rigoureux, critique et partagé des rapports entre l’Europe et l’Afrique, l’Asie, l’Amérique et l’Océanie dont les pièces sont originaires, mais de l’amitié d’un Chef d’Etat avec un collectionneur d’œuvre d’art qu’il a rencontré un jour sur une plage de l’île Maurice.
Les trois cent mille pièces que le Musée du Quai Branly abrite constituent un véritable trésor de guerre en raison du mode d’acquisition de certaines d’entre elles et le trafic d’influence auquel celui-ci donne parfois lieu entre la France et les pays dont elles sont originaires. Je ne sais pas comment les transactions se sont opérées du temps de François 1er, de Louis XIV et au XIXième siècle pour les pièces les plus anciennes. Je sais, par contre, qu’en son temps, Catherine Trautman, à l’époque ministre de la culture de la France dont j’étais l’homologue malienne, m’avait demandé d’autoriser l’achat pour le Musée du Quai Branly d’une statuette de Tial appartenant à un collectionneur belge. De peur de participer au blanchiment d’une œuvre d’art qui serait sortie frauduleusement de notre pays, j’ai proposé que la France l’achète (pour la coquette somme de deux cents millions de francs CFA), pour nous la restituer afin que nous puissions ensuite la lui prêter. Je me suis entendue dire, au niveau du Comité d’orientation dont j’étais l’un des membres que l’argent du contribuable français ne pouvait pas être utilisé dans l’acquisition d’une pièce qui reviendrait au Mali. Exclue à partir de ce moment de la négociation, j’ai appris par la suite que l’Etat malien, qui n’a pas de compte à rendre à ses contribuables, a acheté la pièce en question en vue de la prêter au Musée.
Alors, que célèbre-t-on aujourd’hui ? S’agit-il de la sanctuarisation de la passion que le Président des Français a en partage avec son ami disparu ainsi que le talent de l’architecte du Musée ou les droits culturels, économiques, politiques et sociaux des peuples d’Afrique, d’Asie, d’Amérique et d’Océanie ?

Le Musée du Quai Branly est bâti, de mon point de vue, sur un profond et douloureux paradoxe à partir du moment où la quasi totalité des Africains, des Amérindiens, des Aborigènes d’Australie, dont le talent et la créativité sont célébrés, n’en franchiront jamais le seuil compte tenu de la loi sur l’immigration choisie. Il est vrai que des dispositions sont prises pour que nous puissions consulter les archives via l’Internet. Nos œuvres ont droit de cité là où nous sommes, dans l’ensemble, interdits de séjour.
A l’intention de ceux qui voudraient voir le message politique derrière l’esthétique, le dialogue des cultures derrière la beauté des œuvres, je crains que l’on soit loin du compte. Un masque africain sur la place de la République n’est d’aucune utilité face à la honte et à l’humiliation subies par les Africains et les autres peuples pillés dans le cadre d’une certaine coopération au développement.
Bienvenue donc au Musée de l’interpellation qui contribuera - je l’espère - à édifier les opinions publiques française, africaine et mondiale sur l’une des manières dont l’Europe continue de se servir et d’asservir d’autres peuples du monde tout en prétendant le contraire.
Pour terminer je voudrais m’adresser, encore une fois, à ces œuvres de l’esprit qui sauront intercéder auprès des opinions publiques pour nous.

« Vous nous manquez terriblement. Notre pays, le Mali et l’Afrique tout entière continuent de subir bien des bouleversements. Aux Dieux des Chrétiens et des Musulmans qui vous ont contesté votre place dans nos cœurs et vos fonctions dans nos sociétés s’est ajouté le Dieu argent. Vous devez en savoir quelque chose au regard des transactions dont certaines nouvelles acquisitions de ce musée ont été l’objet. Il est le moteur du marché dit ‘’libre’’ et ‘’concurrentiel’’ qui est supposé être le paradis sur Terre alors qu’il n’est que gouffre pour l’Afrique.
Appauvris, désemparés et manipulés par des dirigeants convertis au dogme du marché, vos peuples s’en prennent les uns aux autres, s’entretuent ou fuient. Parfois, ils viennent buter contre le long mur de l’indifférence, dont Schengen. N’entendez-vous pas, de plus en plus, les lamentations de ceux et celles qui empruntent la voie terrestre, se perdre dans le Sahara ou se noyer dans les eaux de la Méditerranée ? N’entendez-vous point les cris de ces centaines de naufragés dont des femmes enceintes et des enfants en bas âge ?
Si oui, ne restez pas muettes, ne vous sentez pas impuissantes. Soyez la voix de vos peuples et témoignez pour eux. Rappelez à ceux qui vous veulent tant ici dans leurs musées et aux citoyens français et européens qui les visitent que l’annulation totale et immédiate de la dette extérieure de l’Afrique est primordiale. Dites-leur surtout que libéré de ce fardeau, du dogme du tout marché qui justifie la tutelle du FMI et de la Banque mondiale, le continent noir redressera la tête et l’échine . »

Posted at 1:34 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright Slate

Posted Monday, June 26, 2006

Warren Buffett. Click image to expand.Warren BuffettThe nation’s second-richest man, Warren Buffett, has decided to turn over most of his $44 billion fortune to the nation’s richest man, Bill Gates. Buffett is committing to give about 10 million Class B shares in his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway, to the $30 billion Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. (Here’s the Gateses’ gracious response.) He’ll start by handing over 500,000 shares this year (worth about $1.5 billion at today’s price), and will make annual donations of smaller numbers of shares. Buffett will also give billions to foundations run by his children, and to the foundation created by his late wife, Susan Thompson Buffett.

It has taken the 75-year-old Buffett a long time to decide to give away his fortune—he’s been too busy making it bigger. (The critics who have spent years nagging Buffett for his previously modest philanthropy will have to find someone else to pester.) Now that he has decided to disburse his billions, it’s fascinating to see that he is giving away his money the same way he made it: looking for value, pinching pennies, letting managers execute successful strategies, and relying on his own investing brilliance. Call it value philanthropy.

Buffett consistently ranks second on the Forbes 400, and yet he is famously frugal. As a value investor, Buffett has made a career of purchasing a dollar of assets for 50 cents. While it’s difficult to purchase a dollar of philanthropy for 50 cents, Buffett is doing his best to economize. Creating and operating a foundation to house, manage, and give away significant sums can be an expensive proposition. You have to rent office space and hire executives, accountants, program officers, and support staff. In its most recent annual survey, the Chronicle of Philanthropy found, for example, that the Rockefeller Foundation last year made $110.5 million in grants and spent $30.5 million—27 percent of that total—on administrative costs. The Gates Foundation is far more efficient, although it doesn’t appear in the Chronicle’s survey. Last year it gave out more than $1.3 billion in grants and reported management expenses of $42 million. The foundation also reports that it has made more than $60 million in investments in property and equipment. Bill and Melinda Gates are funding the construction of a new headquarters for the foundation. It costs money to give away money. Buffett hates to spend money unnecessarily. By transferring funds to the Gates Foundation, as Buffett told Fortune’s Carol Loomis, he’s avoiding the annoyance and expense of building a philanthropic infrastructure.
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When he buys a firm, Buffett frequently keeps the management on and lets them keep running the business. So far this year, Berkshire has acquired Israeli metalworking company Iscar, apparel maker Russell Corporation, and communications firm Business Wire. In each instance, Buffett retained existing management. “They do a much better job than I could in running their operations,” he told Loomis. Just so, Buffett doesn’t presume to know how best to fund AIDS-prevention programs. In effect, he’s buying a share of a successful philanthropic business (the Gates Foundation) and retaining existing management (Bill and Melinda Gates).

But while he’s willing and eager to outsource management, Buffett has proven utterly unwilling to outsource money management. Buffett is sharing his wealth but controlling it. The outside investors who manage the Gates Foundation’s $30 billion endowment are very conservative. Gates has asked the managers to target a 5 percent return each year—so that it can have enough to money to pay out 5 percent of its assets each year, as mandated by the government, without dipping into the principal. The foundation’s 2005 financial statement shows that about two-thirds of the assets are in bonds.

Buffett has effectively cut these managers out by keeping the donation in his hands for as long as possible. Buffett has little patience or use for professional money managers. Unlike Gates, he hasn’t diversified his personal holdings by selling stock in the company he created and parceling it out to outside managers. In this year’s letter to shareholders, Buffett railed against the group of parasitic professionals he dubbed “Helpers”—brokers, consultants, hedge-fund and private equity managers who help themselves to fees and shares of the profit. And Buffett has structured his donations to keep his money out of the hands of any Helpers—and to buy more philanthropy per donated buck. Instead of giving a lump sum to be managed as part of an endowment, Buffett has committed to give the Gates Foundation a chunk of Berkshire Hathaway stock each year. Based on his track record over 40 years, he believes he can do a heck of a lot better than 5 percent per year and thus generate more cash for philanthropy. As the value of his stock rises, so too will the value of his donation. Another wrinkle: Buffett has told the Gates Foundation that it has to spend the cash he donates in the same year. That way, chronically underperforming Helpers will never have their chance to get their hands on his cash.

For more than four decades, Buffett has believed that he could best serve his shareholders by managing his own money effectively, seeking value, and minding expenses. Now, he believes he can best serve the world by doing the same.

Posted at 7:20 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Australian

In a culture saturated with visual images and increasingly cynical about their manipulation, photography is losing its status as an art form.

29apr06

PHOTOGRAPHY as an art form is on the wane. There may be more photographers having their work shown in galleries, books, magazines and on the web than ever, but something inherent in the medium - something people have spent 1 1/2 centuries being beguiled by - is losing its grip on the public imagination.

Photography has finally become just another way of making images. So easy is it to produce these images that our culture has reached saturation point. Just think of all the wedding photos, baby photos, holiday snaps, news photos, fashion shots, forays into art, scientific photos, police records, studio portraits, passport photos and party snaps that come into existence every day of the year, all across the globe.

Very simply, one can’t keep up. There is barely enough time to look more than once at one’s own, supposedly precious photographs, let alone photographs by those who may have something extraordinary to show us.

But the reason for photography’s eclipse as an art form has not just to do with the astonishing superabundance of photographs; it has to do with dramatic recent changes to the medium. Thanks to the digital revolution, there is virtually nothing that can’t be done to a photograph to alter its once unique relationship to reality.

There is much to amaze in what is suddenly possible but the amazement is largely technical. In terms of art, something profound has been lost. People sense it. Art-loving audiences are fast losing interest in the medium.

After the heyday of only a few years ago, when photography seemed everywhere and Australia’s most internationally acclaimed artists (Tracey Moffatt, Bill Henson, Patricia Piccinini and Rosemary Laing) were all working in it, museums are becoming increasingly reluctant to pin much hope on photography’s capacity to keep people enthralled. Apart from the Henson retrospective in Sydney and Melbourne in 2004-05, no great photography exhibitions have been mounted in Australia’s main public galleries in years. Overseas, it’s much the same story.

The bubble of fascination in the so-called Dusseldorf school of photographers (Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Thomas Struth and their teachers Bernd and Hilla Becher), which helped their photographs fetch staggering prices at auction just a few years ago, hasburst.

Plenty of photographs appear in survey shows of contemporary art. But for the most part, that the medium is photography is incidental. All the strange idiosyncrasies that once made photography so beguiling are breezily ignored by most of today’s photographic artists (as they are called). Instead, the camera is used as a device simply to record or illustrate something else (be it an idea, a fantasy or a thin slice of reality).

So photography’s hard-won victory - its gradual acceptance as an art form during the course of more than a century - turns out to have been a pyrrhic one. The medium’s special aptitudes, described but never quite pinned down by astute practitioners and critics in 150 years, no longer seem quite so special. Instead, photography has become ubiquitous, frictionless and trivial.

The arguments about whether photography deserves to qualify as an art form may seem redundant today, but they once were complex and gnarly and never quite conclusive. Why? Because the various possible answers to the question “What makes a great photograph?” never stood in a straightforward relationship to the question “How much artistry is involved in taking a great photograph?”

This strange state of affairs is the source of almost everything interesting one can find to say about the medium. The camera, after all, is a mechanical tool and, despite its modern ubiquity, it remains a rather miraculous one. So it is not surprising that, in the decades following its invention, the question asked was: “What should we do with this thing to get the most interesting results?”

One of the most common answers had nothing to do with art. It was a conviction that photography’s great purpose was to record historical truth. Thus the documentary, or realist, strain of photography has always been strong. In recent years, it has enjoyed something of a revival in the art world, which occasionally grows ashamed of its navel-gazing tendencies and looks to photography to reconnect it with the outside world.

But in terms of the culture at large it is a faux revival. In truth, the status of documentary photography, or photojournalism, has been slowly draining away since its golden era in the 1970s. Fewer magazines and newspapers even bother to publish serious photojournalism any more. There are a variety of reasons for this, from compassion fatigue and competition from moving imagery on television and film to perceived inadequacies in the nature of the documentary photograph.

To compensate, some of the best photojournalism has shifted sideways into a cultural arena it previously spurned: the art world. Great documentary photographers such as the Brazilian Sebastiao Salgado profess thoroughgoing disdain for the art world. But they want an audience for their work and in galleries and art museums they get it.

Sadly, this awkward new context has only added to the insecurities of the great photojournalists. Displayed in art galleries, their work tends to meet with popular, but rarely critical, success. Their claims to represent objective truth inflected with moral urgency have been thrown into doubt by critics and philosophers of the image. Salgado, for instance, has been repeatedly accused of falsifying and even betraying his subjects by making images of trauma and destruction too artful, too beautiful.

It is painful for those photographers who care deeply about their subjects, risk their lives in the course of doing their job and consider themselves genuine political activists.

As Salgado tells me: “People in the affluent West become very defensive and think you are doing what you do for yourself, your own prestige. But the critic has not seen what I have seen, he has not been to the places I have been, he has never planted a tree. The critic is there, I am here.” The critics Salgado refers to have argued that, by snatching a single moment from the flow of time, photographs hollow out and falsify reality. Context, they argue, is everything and when you lose it you can’t help but distort the reality of any given situation.

Photojournalists go to great lengths to counter this proposition. Some, such as Salgado or Australia’s talented Trent Parke, contextualise their photographs with overriding narratives or long, written descriptions. The best use all the artistry at their disposal to wring out meanings from their images.

One of the great models for wringing out such meanings is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s celebrated notion of “the decisive moment”, an attempt, as critic Peter Schjeldahl once put it in a marvellous essay on Henson, to capture the moment “the past, as blind preparation, pivots and becomes the future, as all-seeing consequence”. Despite Cartier-Bresson’s extraordinary success, it wasn’t long before people started to see something artificial about the doctrine of the decisive moment. It was, after all, a literary notion imported from the dramatic arts. Life wasn’t like that, some objected; it had no decisive moments. Or at least, when it did, it was decisive for reasons far deeper than a photograph could convey.

At which point along came Robert Frank, whose great book, The Americans, showed images congested with unknowns, with a sense that something was about to happen or had just happened, but one couldn’t be sure which (or even what). Rather than the decisive moment, Frank showed the moments on either side of it. The effect, as Schjeldahl observed, was trippingly poetic, sorrowing and, excruciatingly just short of fulfilment. (An exhibition starring Frank opens at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria on May 20.)

Those modernists who wanted photography to be true not just to life but to its own mechanical nature also found something satisfying in Frank’s approach. Uniquely, they realised, the random, artless snapshot could show us visual facts as our eyes never saw them, since our brains were forever editing the constant flow of information provided by our eyes and making it conform to our expectations. Snapshots could operate as a sort of optical unconscious, showing the surrealism that lurked in everyday reality.

(In even the most mundane snapshot, for instance, it is always disconcerting to see the child in the background one wasn’t aware of, the ugly electrical leads in the living room or the micro-expression of irritation on a loved one’s face.)

“There is nothing as mysterious as a fact clearly described,” says Garry Winogrand, a master of this new style. “I photograph to see what something will look like photographed.”

According to this way of seeing, it turned out that not all that much artistry did need to be involved in the making of a great photograph. It was in the nature of the medium to be interesting, if we would just let it.

A certain eye could be brought to the process of selection, certainly, but even there the random and the arbitrary could be just as fertile ground as the carefully composed, the congested with meaning. But of course, the mind easily tires of randomness.

Wolfgang Tillmans, a contemporary practitioner of this snapshot style, summed up his general approach when he called his 2003 retrospective in London If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters. It’s a philosophy that sounds attractive enough until you realise that it quietly contradicts some of our most fundamental assumptions about art.

What is art, after all, but a dream of significance, of some things mattering more than others, a concentration and distillation of the great, formless everything that surrounds us into something more meaningful?

In the end, photographers such as Tillmans convert realism into arbitrariness, life into triviality. The initial interest inevitably palls and the faint underlay of surrealism becomes a glaze of banality.

So photography today has been thrown back on itself and the question of what it must do to retain interest as art is once again freshly alive. The problem is that, thanks to the digital revolution, the frisson of excitement that used to accompany photographs (the knowledge that the image was evidence for something real, a trace of something that happened) is slowly disappearing. It’s not as if photographers haven’t been involved in fabrications and manipulations since the outset. The early days of the medium were full of trickery and theatre, cases of day being turned into night just to suit the photographer’s purposes. But today the whole context has shifted: the layers of artifice seem unending and the thread connecting photography to the real has been snapped.

Or not quite. There are photographers who are still making great art. Henson is one of them; so are American Sally Mann and New York-based British photographer Adam Fuss. What they seem to have in common is an acute sensitivity to the medium’s inherent aptitudes, its original, fragile relation to reality.

The liberties they take can be breathtaking: artificial staging, deliberate obscuring and ghostly distortion of the image. But somehow (primarily by resisting the siren call of digital manipulation) they manage to hang on to photography’s precarious connection to reality. They make something heartbreaking of the tension between a photograph’s physical presence and the unrecoverable past of which it is a trace.

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Copyright The New York Times
(For the complete article, please see: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/27/world/27china.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)

By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 27, 2006

SHANWEI, China, June 20 — When the police raked a crowd of demonstrators with gunfire last December in the seaside village of Dongzhou, a few miles from this city, Chinese human rights advocates denounced the action as the bloodiest in the country since the killings at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in 1989.

Villagers said at the time that as many as 30 people had been killed, and that many others were missing. The authorities have said little or nothing about the episode, concentrating instead on preventing any accounts of it from circulating widely in the country. In the limited coverage that was allowed, officials blamed the unrest on the villagers.

Six months later, there has been no public investigation of the shootings. Instead, the government has quietly moved to close the matter, prosecuting 19 villagers earlier this month in a little-publicized trial. Seven were given long sentences after being convicted of disturbing the public order and of using explosives to attack the police. Nowhere in the verdict is there any mention of the loss of life.

Outside court, villagers say, the authorities have privately acknowledged the death of three residents during the protest. Many say they suspect that more were killed, citing a witness account of a pile of bodies, and details about people who remain missing, but they say they have been warned not to cite a higher figure.

Indeed, residents of the village, in Guangdong Province near Hong Kong, say they have been warned not to talk to outsiders at all. Given the fact that journalists, lawyers, human rights workers and other independent observers have been kept away from Dongzhou, a definitive death toll may never be established.

Whatever the lingering uncertainty, the handling of the protest and its aftermath stand out as a prominent example of how China deals with localized unrest, which has been rising in the countryside.

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Saturday, June 24, 2006

Copyright The Japan Times
The battle over whaling has grown more acrimonious in recent years principally because Japan has become a more vociferous and belligerent advocate for a resumption of commercial whaling. In the recently concluded meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), Japan’s representative browbeat and threatened other member nations, including the United States, in an effort to get its way. As a result, the Fisheries Agency has scored the diplomatic equivalent of an own-goal. Japan continues to hunt whales — killing some 2,000 this year alone — under the cover of “scientific research.”

Its image has been further battered by allegations that it is aggressively leveraging its aid programs to island nations in the South Pacific and Caribbean to sway votes its way.

Given widespread indifference among the Japanese public about whaling and eating whale meat, why is the government pursuing such a confrontational foreign policy? It is important to bear in mind that the pro-whaling lobby in Japan does not represent a consensus view among Japanese, many of whom prefer whale-watching to nibbling on the fruits of research whaling. However, the government does favor resumption of whaling and is seeking to end the moratorium on whaling that did save the whales. Given that Japanese whaling operations nearly drove some species into extinction, its plans to resume commercial whaling have understandably drawn special scrutiny from conservationists all over the world.

Japan’s case rests on culture, science, principle and propaganda. Whale consumption is portrayed as a deeply embedded culinary tradition and anti-whaling activists are accused of cultural imperialism. To advocates, eating whale meat is an issue of national identity, an identity that is under siege on many fronts. They also argue that science is on their side, citing studies that show a strong recovery among certain whale species that would permit a resumption of managed whaling.

There is also a sense that Japan has been double-crossed by anti-whaling nations in the IWC. Japan agreed to a moratorium on whaling, not a permanent prohibition, and IWC rules specify that whaling policies should be driven by science. So there is a perception that anti-whaling nations have hijacked the IWC and made it into a vehicle to impose their views on conservation regardless of science.

Standing up for whaling is thus projected as a matter of principle. And this is where the propaganda machine kicks in, hammering home the idea that Japan is the target of double standards. Otherwise urbane and sophisticated Japanese officials can suddenly morph into sputtering jingoists over the subject of whaling, exuding self-righteous indignation.

How has whaling become a talismanic symbol of Japanese identity? The Institute of Cetacean Research (ICR), funded by the government, is in the business of promoting whaling and also orchestrates a media campaign to convince Japanese that whaling is part of their national identity. They also try to spur whale consumption, but to little avail. The major problem for advocates of whaling is that Japanese consumers are not buying even heavily subsidized whale meat; one third of the harvest of “scientific research” remains unsold. That is why whale is being processed into dog treats. The trend toward declining whale consumption preceded the moratorium on whaling and now very few Japanese are eating it even though it is widely available at reasonable prices.

Japan’s taxpayers are paying for this mind-boggling boondoggle, subsidizing research whaling expeditions that gain international opprobrium while funding a research institute that produces little research and also markets whale meat at tax-subsidized prices that most Japanese don’t want.

The claim that resumption of whaling is based on solid science also doesn’t wash. The data is dodgy, hard to confirm and tainted for a number of reasons. DNA testing reveals mislabeling of whale meat sold in Japanese markets to hide the fact that species in danger of extinction are being killed for a research program of dubious merits. So even if it is possible to sensibly manage whaling of some species, there is little confidence that whaling won’t also involve endangered species.

Science is also inconvenient in exposing the dangers of whale consumption. There have been public health warnings that there are extremely high concentrations of toxic chemicals — PCBs and mercury — in whale meat, and pregnant women have been warned not to eat any at all. Advocates have also blamed declining fish stocks on too many hungry whales, the scientific equivalent of blaming sheep flatulence for ozone depletion. Fishery resources have been badly mismanaged, a problem of over-fishing that raises legitimate concerns over proposals to manage whale stocks.

Conservationists are relieved that Japan lost four substantive votes on whaling and only prevailed — by one vote — on a non-binding declaration that reiterates the principles of the IWC. This minor propaganda victory is already being milked for what its worth. However, given dismal prospects for overturning the moratorium — 75 percent of the votes are required to do so — Japan will continue to evade it through research whaling.

As IWC delegates prepare for the next annual meeting in Anchorage, emotions on both sides are running high, trumping science and sensible compromises. The acrimonious impasse, and harpooning, will continue.

Jeff Kingston is director of Asian studies at Temple University Japan.

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John Gray enjoys Pankaj Mishra’s thought-provoking account of European influence, Temptations of the West

Saturday June 10, 2006
Copyright - The Guardian

Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra
Buy Temptations of the West at the Guardian bookshop

Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan and Beyond
by Pankaj Mishra
247pp, Picador, £16.99

When the divisions of the cold war were still in place, communist regimes were seen as belonging to an eastern bloc that stood apart from the main body of western civilisation. Given that they were attempts to implement a quintessentially western dream, this was a curious view. Far from being anti-western, communism was hyper-western. Stalinism and Maoism were not versions of oriental despotism - as generations of western scholars have maintained. They were the result of a utopian experiment that aimed to realise the most radical ideals of the European enlightenment. The current view of Islam as being somehow anti-western is just as unreal. In terms of its basic picture of the world Islam belongs in the western tradition of monotheism, and radical Islam is in many ways a hybrid offshoot of Leninism and anarchism - also western ideologies. Like Soviet Russia and Maoist China, Islamist movements owe more to the modern west than we - or they - care to admit.

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“The west” is a ramshackle construction that changes shape along with the shifts of geopolitics, and in cultural terms it is just as unsettled. In his previous book, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra showed that the milieu in which the Buddha emerged resembled our own in many ways. Intellectual disorientation and a pervasive mood of nihilism provided fertile ground for the Buddha’s teaching, which offered a remedy for spiritual distress and acted as a catalyst of cultural renewal. In what is now Afghanistan, it created a Greco-Buddhist civilisation whose traces survived a succession of kingdoms and empires until the Taliban set about destroying them. The wheel continues to turn today, with Buddhist philosophy having a stronger resonance in the modern west than that of the ancient Greeks.

The fluidity of cultural frontiers is a recurring theme of Mishra’s work, and it is central to Temptations of the West. Like his study of the Buddha this is a genre-bending book. It begins autobiographically with an account of Mishra’s time as an unofficial student, reading voraciously in the decaying libraries of a run-down Indian university, and continues with his adventurous travels throughout India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Tibet. Today he spends part of the year in India and part in Britain, and his view of both societies is in some ways that of an outsider. His portraits of politicians and officials, business and media people struggling to make sense of their rapidly mutating and sometimes collapsing societies are sharply observed and often poignant. Deeply immersed in the history of the region, he tells the reader more about the true condition of much of Asia today than can be gleaned from any number of weighty academic tomes.

Many of the personalities and landscapes Mishra describes are richly exotic. Bollywood entrepreneurs and their mafia financiers, Kashmiri independence fighters and Tibetan nationalists are only some of the figures who stalk its pages, and his description of the lakes of Kashmir and the Himalayas is vivid and lyrical. Yet there is nothing here that smacks of romantic orientalism. The people he describes are no different from any others in their basic needs, and they have all the usual virtues and vices. Mishra is unflinchingly realistic in his account of the flaws of the societies through which he has travelled. The picture he presents is of societies whose new self-assertion conceals intractable problems. Temptations of the West will make uncomfortable reading for some in India and Pakistan.

What distinguishes this from other accounts of the problems of Asia is Mishra’s sceptical view of the west. He takes it as given that the era in which the world could look to western models is now definitively over. While American neo-conservatives and their followers in Britain dream of crusades for “western values”, the world’s centre of gravity is shifting to countries that reject the west’s universal claims. China and India differ in many ways, but they are at one in insisting on modernising on their own terms. However, as Mishra shows, there is an irony in the rise of Asia. If India and China are now able to challenge western hegemony - in the realm of culture as much as in geopolitics - it is partly because, despite themselves, they have emulated some of the west’s more dubious achievements.

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India’s 19th-century anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite simplified and remoulded India’s unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As Mishra observes, India’s anti-colonial elites “denounced British imperialism as exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the European idea of the nation - a cohesive community with a common history, culture, values and sense of purpose - which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west.” The result has been to exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

Writing of Benares as he knew it when he lived there in the 1980s, Mishra tells us that he did not know that the ancient Hindu city was also holy for Muslims as well and was unaware of the 17th-century Sufi shrine to be found behind the tea-shack where he spent his mornings reading. In late Mogul times a tolerant Indo-Persian culture flourished in which Islamic and Hindu traditions could coexist and develop without needing clear boundaries between them, but as India has become more like a western state this easy-going hybridity has been compromised. Religion has come to be a tool of the state which is used to homogenise society - just as it was in early modern Europe, and remains in parts of Europe today. In forging themselves into modern states capable of holding their own against western power, Asian countries have found themselves reproducing some of the west’s ugliest features.

Mishra sees India and Pakistan as striving for a modernity they have only partly framed for themselves, and which is still deformed by the inheritance of western colonialism. Strikingly, he is more positive about Tibet - a culture that, more than almost any other, has suffered the ravages of brutal modernisation. Since the Chinese invaded in 1950, about one million Tibetans have died by torture, execution and starvation - a fact that western opinion, anxious not to glamorise the medieval country that existed before the invasion and fearful of jeopardising trade with China, prefers to forget. Despite all the assaults on it, Tibet’s unique culture remains alive, and the Tibetan cause has some vigorous western defenders. Yet Rupert Murdoch voiced a common view when he declared: “The main problem in Tibet is that half the population still thinks the Dalai Lama is ‘the son of God’.” For Murdoch as for Mao, the enduring attachment of Tibetans to their religion only shows how backward they are. If genocide has been done in Tibet, it is all in the cause of progress.

Temptations of the West concludes with the thought that “a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, may be better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies”. This may seem a remote prospect, but it is not as far-fetched as the idea that the west is the supreme embodiment of human progress. In the end, this subtle, vivid and inexhaustibly thought-provoking book is as much about the illusions that rule the west as it is about lands that lie beyond its frontiers.

· John Gray’s Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be Modern is published by Faber. To order Temptations of the West for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.

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Copyright Slate

Friday, Oct. 1, 2004, at 2:27 PM ET

Cricket practice
In the mid-1970s, famed author V.S. Naipaul (of Indian descent but raised in Trinidad) came to India to survey the land and record his impressions. The result is a hilariously grouchy book titled India: A Wounded Civilization. Really, he should have just titled it India: Allow Me To Bitch at You for 161 Pages.

I hear you, V.S.—this place has its problems. As you point out, many of them result from the ravages of colonialism … and some are just India’s own damn fault. Still, I’ve found a lot to love about this place. For instance:

1) I love cricket. The passion for cricket is infectious. When I first got here, the sport was an utter mystery to me, but now I’ve hopped on the cricket bandwagon, big time. I’ve got the rules down, I’ve become a discerning spectator, and I’ve settled on a favorite player (spin bowler Harbhajan Singh, known as “The Turbanator”—because he wears a turban). I’ve even eaten twice at Tendulkar’s, a Mumbai restaurant owned by legendary cricketer Sachin Tendulkar. Fun fact: Sachin Tendulkar’s nicknames include “The Master Blaster” (honoring his prowess as a batsman), “The Maestro of Mumbai” (he’s a native), and “The Little Champion” (he’s wicked short). His restaurant here looks exactly like a reverse-engineered Michael Jordan’s Steak House. Instead of a glass case with autographed Air Jordans, there is a glass case with an autographed cricket bat.

And in what could turn out to be a dangerous habit, I’ve begun going to Mumbai sports bars to watch all-day cricket matches. These last like seven hours. That is a frightening amount of beer and chicken wings.

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2) I love the Indian head waggle. It’s a fantastic bit of body language, and I’m trying to add it to my repertoire. The head waggle says, in a uniquely unenthusiastic way, “OK, that’s fine.” In terms of Western gestures, its meaning is somewhere between the nod (though less affirmative) and the shrug (though not quite as neutral).

To perform the head waggle, keep your shoulders perfectly still, hold your face completely expressionless, and tilt your head side-to-side, metronome style. Make it smooth—like you’re a bobble-head doll. It’s not easy. Believe me, I’ve been practicing.

3) I love how Indians are unflappable. Nothing—I mean nothing—seems to faze them in the least. If you live here, I suppose you’ve seen your fair share of crazy/horrid/miraculous/incomprehensible/mind-blowing stuff, and it’s impractical to get too worked up over anything, good or bad.

(This is a trait I admire in the Dutch, as well. They don’t blink when some college kid tripping on mushrooms decides to leap naked into an Amsterdam canal. Likewise, were there a dead, limbless child in the canal … an Indian person might not blink. Though he might offer a head waggle.)

4) I love how they dote on children here. (I’m not talking about dead, limbless children anymore, I’m being serious now.) At our beach resort in Goa, there were all these bourgeois Indian folks down from Mumbai on vacation. These parents spoiled their children rotten in a manner that was quite charming to see. In no other country have I seen kids so obviously cherished, indulged, and loved. It’s fantastic. Perhaps my favorite thing on television (other than cricket matches) has been a quiz show called India’s Smartest Child, because I can tell the entire country derives great joy from putting these terrifyingly erudite children on display.

5) I love that this is a billion-person democracy. That is insane. Somehow the Tibetan Buddhists of Ladakh, the IT workers of Bangalore, the downtrodden poor of Bihar, and the Bollywood stars of Mumbai all fit together under this single, ramshackle umbrella. It’s astonishing and commendable that anyone would even attempt to pull this off.

6) I love the chaos (when I don’t hate it). Mumbai is a city of 18 million people—all of whom appear to be on the same block of sidewalk as you. If you enjoy the stimulation overload of a Manhattan or a Tokyo but prefer much less wealth and infrastructure … this is your spot. (Our friend Rishi, who we’ve been traveling with, has a related but slightly different take: “It’s like New York, if everyone in New York was Indian! How great is that!”) And whatever else you may feel, Mumbai will force you to consider your tiny place within humanity and the universe. That’s healthy.

There’s more good stuff I’m forgetting, but enough love for now. Let’s not go overboard. As they say in really lame travel writing: India is a land of contradictions. A lot of things to like and a lot of things (perhaps two to three times as many things) to hate.

It’s the spinach of travel destinations—you may not always (or ever) enjoy it, but it’s probably good for you. In the final reckoning, am I glad that I came here? Oh, absolutely. It’s been humbling. It’s been edifying. It’s been, on several occasions, quite wondrous. It’s even been fun, when it hasn’t been miserable.

That said, am I ready to leave? Sweet mercy, yes.

Posted at 3:23 PM · Comments (0)

This is an absolutely brilliant and spellbinding novel about dictatorship in West Africa.

I’ll post a short excerpt soon.

Posted at 3:21 PM · Comments (0)

The United States risks too much in portraying China as a threat to the rest of Asia, writes Hugh White.

FOR years, American strategists tended to underestimate the challenge that China poses to America in Asia. They put their faith in what seemed a simple and foolproof mechanism. The more China’s power grew, they assumed, the more other Asian countries would come to fear it and welcome tough US action to counterbalance China and keep it in its box. This would impose a kind of automatic limit to China’s regional influence: as its military power grew, its political and diplomatic clout relative to the US would fall.

But it has not worked that way. During the past five years, as China’s military power has grown rapidly, its political and diplomatic influence has grown even faster. Beijing has mounted a sustained diplomatic offensive aimed precisely at easing regional fears of China’s growing power.

The success of this diplomacy has been startling. Helped, of course, by the immense gravitational pull of its economic boom, Beijing has largely eliminated the negatives in its relationships with every country in the Western Pacific. Australia has been very much part of this pattern. The only exception — though a crucial one — is Japan.

As a result, Washington has woken up to the uncomfortable reality that an increasingly well-armed China might also be accepted as an economic and even political leader in Asia. That poses a real challenge to American primacy, which matters a lot in Washington. Sustaining primacy in Asia is one of America’s top long-term strategic objectives.

So America is fighting back by trying to encourage Asians to be more worried by China’s growing military power. Last year in Singapore, US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld took aim at China’s military modernisation, and this month he did it again. His line is that Beijing has not properly explained what its growing forces are for and, without such explanations, China’s Asian neighbours should be worried about them.

Is he right? Well, it is certainly true that China’s military capability is growing, and changing shape in very significant ways. Until recently, China’s military was overwhelmingly focused on big, crude land forces designed to fight the Soviet Union. Now it is focused on modern, high-tech air and naval forces. It is buying submarines with modern missiles and torpedoes, new warships with anti-aircraft radars and missiles, and combat aircraft suited to maritime strikes.

There is no doubt that all this makes China a more formidable maritime power than it has been in many centuries. And maritime power is what matters in Asia, especially for the US, whose strategic position in Asia is based on its traditional naval and air domination of the Western Pacific. It also matters to Japan, Australia and much of South-East Asia, whose security requires the protection of their island territories and seaborne trade from maritime threats.

But Rumsfeld is stretching it a lot when he says we do not know what China’s forces are for. In fact, it’s plain why China has been building up its forces, as the Pentagon itself concedes in its annual report to Congress on China’s military power, published last month. Since the US sent carriers to the waters around Taiwan in 1996, China’s military build-up has been primarily focused on ways to increase the costs and risks to Washington of doing the same again in a Taiwan crisis.

Beijing has been buying the ships, submarines, aircraft and other systems to enable it to attack the kind of forces, especially aircraft carriers, that Washington might send against China in a conflict over Taiwan. And there is not much doubt that it has succeeded, at least up to a point.

But China’s growing maritime power may make a conflict over Taiwan less likely. The most probable spark for a crisis would be a miscalculated move towards independence by Taiwan’s leaders, acting under a false assumption that American military supremacy would deter any Chinese military move. The stronger China’s forces, the less likely Taipei is to make that mistake and the less likely we are to see a conflict.

Of course, China’s maritime build-up probably has long-term aims beyond Taiwan. One is security for its trade, especially energy imports. China depends heavily on sea lines of communications to suppliers and customers and, unlike Japan, South Korea and Australia, it cannot rely on the US to help protect them. China does not yet seem to have worked out how to respond.

But again, actions by China to secure its sea lines of communication are not necessarily destabilising. China’s many trade partners — including Australia — have an interest in the security of China’s seaborne trade just as much as China does.

Is there nothing to fear, then, from China’s growing maritime power? I would not go that far. China might be building its forces to deter Taiwan and protect its trade, but those forces will, over time, provide China with a substantial capacity to intimidate and, if necessary, to attack countries throughout Asia. Nothing in China’s foreign policy gives good reason to worry that it will use its power in that way. But nothing guarantees that it will not. We simply do not know.

And it is no use for Rumsfeld to demand that China tell us their plans. They do not know what the future holds any more than we do. Like the rest of us, they are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

The only alternative is to find a way to step back from the strategic competition that is growing so relentlessly between China and the US. One good start would be for Rumsfeld to stop trying to scare America’s Asian friends with dark hints of a China threat. Washington cannot sustain its primacy in Asia by trying to make China look bad. That risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Posted at 11:33 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Wall Street Journal

June 16, 2006
It’s tough being a dad in Japan, at least as far as tucking in the kids on their futons every night. Corporate Japan conspires against their best fatherly intentions: grueling working hours, lengthy commutes, and the practice of tanshin funin — the relocation of husbands, minus their families, to distant branch offices for years at a time — have made absentee fatherhood an epidemic over the past few decades.

However, there are signs that attitudes are changing, and that a younger generation wants to adopt a more hands-on role in child-raising than their fathers did. Naturally, Japanese wives — like wives all over the world — want their husbands to do more around the home than crack a beer, watch the game, and head to bed, and they approve of this development.

At Tokyo daycare centers, seeing dads dropping off and picking up their kids is now a relatively common sight, as is seeing men riding bikes with kiddy seats. Even in television dramas, the image of fathers as stern and unsmiling disciplinarians is giving way to a more nurturing and friendly father figure — one who cooks and appears concerned with the kids’ lives. At a recent graduation ceremony at our university, I saw more than a few young fathers carrying kids “papoose style.” A dad told me that baby gear is now made more appealing for guys, meaning muted colors that “don’t make me feel like a total twit.”

The sensitive Japanese dad, however, remains a largely mythical creation. European and American conceptions of a work-life balance are getting more attention in Japanese media, and a small number of corporations have developed family-friendly policies, but few men here seem to be benefiting. A recent government survey reports that one-third of men want to reduce their working hours after their first baby is born, but only 10% have done so. Two-thirds of men reply that they want to balance work and family life, but only one out of three feels that he has done so. The government has acted as a cheerleader, encouraging Japanese companies to develop policies that would raise the number of husbands taking paternity leave. But the plan has produced dismal results: less than 1% of men eligible for paternity leave take it.

It is a sad commentary on the state of Japanese fatherhood that the plague of suicides besetting Japan — more than 30,000 per year — mostly involve middle-age men, many of whom calculate that the best contribution they can make to their family’s welfare is a life-insurance payout.

Japanese women, too, have long been resigned to do-nothing dads. But as the nation’s birth rate continues to freefall — it is now 1.25 children per couple — and labor shortages emerge, corporate Japan is coming under increasing pressure from the government to help solve the problem. It is assumed that women who get some help raising kids are more likely to have more.

One of the reasons that one can see increasing numbers of young dads pitching in with parenting is that the breadwinner model — where husbands work and wives stay at home — is no longer bringing in enough bread for Japanese families. In more than two-thirds of Japanese households, both parents work. Out of necessity, husbands are taking on roles that their fathers never contemplated.

Another reason for changing this tradition is that employment growth since the mid-1990s has been concentrated in part-time jobs, reducing income but increasing flexibility for working parents. There has also been a diversification of lifestyles and greater exposure to parenting practices overseas, where being an engaged father is considered normal and desirable.

For many young men, their own childhood, involving limited contact with their fathers, is an inspiration to buck prescribed gender roles. The story of Ichiro, the widely-admired baseball player, features a strong father who adjusted his work so that he could spend time helping his son hone the skills that made him an athletic success.

Change is in the air, if only because boys know what girls want to hear and know that they better play the game or risk living in patriarchal solitude. Judging from what my students say in class and write in their journals, college-age Japanese men seem aware that much as they might yearn for the “wife as all-purpose maid” approach to marriage they saw growing up, young women want no part of this drudgery. The imagined meek and submissive Japanese wives of yore have given way to a more cosmopolitan style with much less emphasis on self-sacrifice, deference and denial. Modern women have less and less time and patience for stodgy patriarchy. Aspiring husbands and fathers know this.

Treating wives on Mother’s Day has become a new tradition in Japan. Father’s Day has not taken root to such a degree — perhaps because many women see it as superfluous in a country where men have it their way in every way. But this is not for want of reminders at stores trying to cash in on yet another imported custom.

Mr. Kingston is director of Asian Studies at Temple University in Japan.

Posted at 10:38 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright The New York Times
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: June 17, 2006
SHANGHAI, June 16 — Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, said Friday that his country was seriously considering an international proposal to resolve the dispute over its uranium enrichment program.
Mr. Ahmadinejad’s vague but conciliatory remarks, made here at the end of an Asian summit meeting, came with veiled taunts of the United States and statements of solidarity with China and Russia, the leading powers in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the regional group that convened the gathering.

“My colleagues are carefully considering the package of proposals of the six countries, and in due time they will give them a response,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. At another point in a news conference, he said, “Generally we regard the offering of this package as a step forward,” adding that his country “supports constructive talks on the basis of equality.”

The proposal was put forth this month by the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany, and offers Iran incentives to freeze its nuclear activities. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s visit here has put the spotlight on the diplomatic importance of China and Russia, Security Council members that have resisted sanctions as a means of resolving the crisis.

Although the details of their talks were not disclosed, the leaders of China and Russia are thought to have urged Iran to embrace the six-party proposal. Both China, as the host, and Russia, a co-founder of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, have appeared eager for a successful meeting here that would increase the prestige of the five-year-old body.

This may help explain the restrained, even studied language of Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose country is a candidate for membership but whose oratory can be inflammatory.

Although his repeated references to the United States were unmistakable, he never named his designated nemesis. “Some countries create problems for other countries and make the impression that these are problems for the entire international community,” Mr. Ahmadinejad said. “Actually they are making problems for themselves.”

In Washington, the State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, sought to play down Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statement. “I’m not going to try to comment on the various rhetoric coming out of Tehran or elsewhere concerning Iran’s thoughts on the proposal in public,” he said. “As I said before, we’re going to wait for the formal response.”

In his remarks Friday, Mr. Ahmadinejad repeated his denials that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, referring regularly to the “Islamic Republic of Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.”

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who has often questioned the reality of the Holocaust, said again that the history should be “investigated by impartial and independent experts,” and added that the Palestinians should not be made victims because of events in European history. He concluded his remarks on this subject, however, by saying, “There are no differences between Jews, Christians and Muslims.”

Asked if he were concerned about the possibility of an Israeli attack on his country’s uranium enrichment plants, similar to Israel’s aerial attack on the Osirak nuclear plant near Baghdad in 1981, Mr. Ahmadinejad brushed the question off with a quick “No.” Moments later, he added that Iran had the means to defend itself, but offered no details.

Iran’s status as an observer and candidate for membership poses delicate questions for the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which has six members: China, Russia and four former Soviet republics, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. China is in the midst of a carefully measured bid to increase its diplomatic clout without alarming the United States or others, from Europe to India.

At times, Mr. Ahmadinejad’s language flirted with formulations that Beijing has studiously avoided, which would cast the group as a rival or counterweight to the West and to alliances like NATO.

Mr. Ahmadinejad said pointedly that if all the observer states became members, the organization would represent more than half of the world’s population, and he urged the group to “ward off the threats of domineering powers to use their force against and interfere in the affairs of other states.”

He added, “I believe we should remove the word sanctions from the political literature of the world.”

China, too, has consistently opposed sanctions as a tool of international relations, and helped engineer a joint declaration at the end of the talks here. The declaration said, “Differences in cultural traditions, political and social systems, values and models of development formed in the course of history should not be taken as pretexts to interfere in other countries’ internal affairs.”

But if the membership swells without addressing the problem of nuclear proliferation, it could face problems on two fronts.

On the one hand, the credibility of an approach that renounces sanctions and the use of force will be severely weakened, along with China’s diplomatic prestige. On the other, if the Shanghai Cooperation Organization emerges as a group whose highest principle is the right of states to do what they wish without outside interference, China and Russia could both eventually face the nightmare of a nuclear-armed Central Asia.

“One example of our being a responsible stakeholder is speaking to Iran and asking Iran to respect I.A.E.A. commitments, to make sure that it meets its obligations,” said Shen Dingli, a specialist in international relations at Fudan University in Shanghai. He referred to the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Beyond that, while Mr. Ahmadinejad repeatedly stressed Iran’s diplomatic closeness with China and Russia, calling China’s leader, Hu Jintao, “my very good friend,” he also repeatedly invoked the importance of religion, or what he called “spirituality.” China and Russia have had problems with Muslim minorities and would be loath to see the spread of militant Islam in the region.

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Posted at 3:34 PM · Comments (0)

By Howard W. French - Copyright The New York Times

Published: June 15, 2006

SHANGHAI Five years after its founding as an obscure regional organization with a nondescript name, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization opened its annual gathering Thursday in the city it was named after amid a flush of interest from outsiders eager to join.
As much as a sign of its own success, the growing interest in the six-member organization that groups China, Russia and four of their Central Asian neighbors - Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan - reflects the growing power and assertiveness of its two largest members.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia created a splash after the meeting’s opening sessions, saying that Iran had agreed to a proposal by the organization to enter into talks to settle the dispute over its suspected nuclear weapons development program. “The Iranian side responded positively to the six-nation proposal for a way out of the crisis,” Putin said after meeting with Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
No details of the agreement were made public, nor was any date for negotiations announced. If they result in negotiations to forswear the development of nuclear weapons, bringing Iran to the table would represent a major coup for the fledgling organization.
The group’s rise has also been strongly boosted by booming global energy markets. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization unites one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing energy consumers, China, with several of the largest producers, and the politics of the global energy market have proved a powerful draw to many nonmembers, from Iran to India and Pakistan, which are attending the meeting as observer nations.
Other countries that are attending in that capacity, or have reportedly expressed interest in the organization, range from Mongolia and Afghanistan to New Zealand.
With oil prices near historic highs, competition over supplies escalating, and rivalries over planned pipelines toward major markets in Europe and the Far East intensifying, the United States, Europe, Russia and China are all stepping up their diplomatic courtship of big producers in Central Asia. Regional analysts say the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is emerging as yet another player in a crowded web of diplomatic and military ties. For many in the region, particularly the smaller nations, this jockeying promises benefits of all sorts, whether measured in aid, security guarantees or energy investments.
The attendance of Iran, which is locked in a diplomatic confrontation with the United States and other Western nations over its nuclear program, highlights a dilemma of the organization, whose fast rise could put it on a collision course with Washington.
Countering the United States’ influence in Central Asia is an essential, if undeclared, objective of Beijing and Moscow, but China in particular seems loath to make frontal diplomatic and strategic challenges to Washington at a time when Beijing prefers to focus on building its economy and, as a consequence, it strength. Chinese officials stated as much several days before the summit began, when the organization’s secretary general, Zhang Deguang, declared that the body had no ambitions to become a military bloc, or to become an eastern version of NATO.
With Iran pressing for membership, Chinese officials and those of other nations have also made it clear that they are not ready to consider expanding the organization, although a “contact group” has been formed to explore observer status for Afghanistan, whose president, Hamid Karzai, was expected to attend the meetings as a special guest.
“This is a time of challenge and opportunity for China,” said Shen Dingli, a foreign relations expert at Fudan University in Shanghai, referring to Iran’s presence at the meeting. “The challenge is that you may not feel happy. The opportunity is that China has good reason to handle its own diplomacy, to advance its bilateral relations, and to shape Iran-China ties in a more mature direction. You encourage them to be more responsible, and if China can do this and produce a good outcome, this will advance China’s image as a responsible stakeholder.”
Shen said he expected that the summit would concentrate on issues that hark back to the organization’s origins, including the development of new energy projects and new anti-terrorism measures, including the drawing up of a list of specific groups to target.
Some close overseas observers of the organization said that for all of the interest it has generated recently, its list of achievements remained short.
“This is a very small group, whose operating budget is less than $30 million, and whose staff numbers just a few dozen people,” said Alexandre Mansourov, an expert in Asian affairs at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “There is a lot of spin surrounding it, but it’s still in its infancy, and its importance really pales compared to what’s happening in bilateral terms between China and Russia, the two big players. If anything, they are doing this to irritate us.”
In addition to Iran, Pakistan, an ally of the United States whose ties with China are strengthening, has reportedly bid to join the organization, proposing the construction of an “energy corridor” across its territory to link East Asia with the Middle East.
“If the organization expands in the future, it is more likely to consider geographical factors first,” said Zhao Huasheng, director of the Center for Russian and Central Asia Studies at Fudan University. “Neighboring countries, like Mongolia, are more likely to join. Distant countries are less likely, because their concerns are different and cooperation with them would be more complicated.”

Posted at 3:26 PM · Comments (0)

Howard W. French - Copyright The International Herald Tribune

Published: June 14, 2006
SHANGHAI Quick, what’s the biggest problem China faces? A) Whether or not to allow

films like “Mission: Impossible III” or “The Da Vinci Code” to be shown in theaters here?

B) Deciding who should lead Catholic dioceses around the country?

C) Intervening in property markets in Shanghai and other eastern cities to limit the emerging real estate bubble?

Most would guess C, because the other choices seem trivial. The correct answer, though, is that there is no correct answer. All three of these issues are tied up with what may well be the central dilemma of the Chinese state.

In a society that is growing freer by the day, China’s leadership remains obsessed with control. Control doesn’t merely mean keeping a tight grip on politics or affairs of state. Here, the ideology of control is itself out of control.

The state determines “correct” versions of history, which despite the official state sanction, or perhaps because of it, can be counted on to be fake. The state determines what kind of language is appropriate, filtering the Internet to weed out anything that does not accord with its dictates.

The state determines how many children each family can have, and even how widely they must be spaced, for those lucky enough to be granted permission for more than one.

The state regulates internal migration, controlling who can live where, and under what conditions. Although it is a function of most states, China even takes the management of time to absurd lengths, deeming that an entire country whose dimensions are roughly similar to the United States should live in one time zone, under what is announced at the top of every hour on radio stations throughout China as “Beijing Time.”

Sometimes, this preoccupation with minutiae renders the state blind to real problems that call for serious intervention. Censors busy themselves purging the Internet of pornography, while a world-class prostitution industry thrives. Industrial policy seeks to favor national champions and promote innovation amid rampant intellectual property theft. Drug dealers are executed, but fake pharmaceuticals are sold everywhere.

“Wait a minute,” you object, as many Chinese people have with me. “Isn’t it necessary in a country as large and complex as China to have a strong state that is capable of making important decisions on key matters, like population policy, or on housing?”

How glad I am that you have asked.

These two issues, which may strike readers as truly critical issues of public policy, also happen to be areas where the state, while maintaining unrelenting control, has made monumental mistakes.

With population, if it is true that China’s “one child policy,” introduced a generation ago, has spared the country an additional 392 million people, in addition to the 1.3 billion it already has, the policy has also left the country saddled with a demographic time bomb. In the space of a couple of decades, this society will age faster than European societies have in a century. Few here seem seized with the coming consequences today, but one day they stand likely to bring about a radical reappraisal of “one child’s” success.

The urban redevelopment taking place across China on a historic scale would seem to be another area for reconsideration. It is all fine and well for the government to talk about cooling excessive speculation in housing, but it is deemed improper - and in the Shanghai media banned outright - to discuss the manipulation of that market by officials working in collusion with developers and state-controlled banks, keeping prices high amid a glut and evicting millions of poor people from city centers in eastern China.

Hu Shuli, editor of the Chinese magazine Caijing, put it best when she wrote recently: “All of China’s successful economic reforms since 1978 can be summed up in one simple statement: ‘Reduce direct government intervention and increase the reign of the market.’ A profit-driven local government cannot ensure the stable development of the sector; instead it becomes an accomplice pushing up housing prices.”

But it is through the recent handling of big Hollywood hits that one can see China’s control problem most clearly, and it also in areas like this that the consequences could play themselves out earliest in frankly political ways.

The government recently recalled the latest installment of “Mission: Impossible,” offended, it is said, by depictions of the Shanghai police as slow to respond to a crime, and by images of this city, the new Asian Oz, that showed laundry hanging out to dry.

The movie is now being shown in a sanitized version, free of the kinds of scenes that are among the most normal sights of everyday life here. For “The Da Vinci Code,” the contortions grew even more absurd. For reasons that have still not been convincingly explained, the government suddenly withdrew a film that was well on its way to becoming one of the highest grossing ever here.

“We made a purely commercial decision,” said Weng Li, deputy manager of the distribution arm of the China Film Group Corp. who has clearly not mastered the Abraham Lincoln bit about the impossibility of fooling all of the people all of the time.

The issue, though, is when will enough Chinese people, zooming ahead by the minute in terms of their sophistication and thirst for real information, as opposed to newspeak, reach the limits of weariness with a bureaucracy that makes decisions for them, decisions that often involve their most private choices?

Personal freedoms are already on the rise here and cannot be stopped. How well the party and government learn how to get out of the way is the key to China’s future, and the key to their survival as well.

E-mail: pagetwo@iht.com

Posted at 1:19 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times

It is easy to be put off by the bureaucratic name, but one of the most interesting tourist trips in Shanghai is to go around the Urban Planning Exhibition Hall.

When I recommend it to visitors I often get strange looks. But my guests appreciate the advice, even if they sometimes come back with a quizzical look on their faces, unsure if they should be impressed or intimidated by what they have just seen.

The urban planning museum is Shanghai’s monument to its future. The centrepiece is a 600 sq m model - the size of two tennis courts - that shows what Shanghai will look like in 2020. The city already has about 3,000 high-rise buildings, which are each represented in the model, while the many other towers it intends to build are left white and transparent.

All the dizzying ambition is there in one room - the skyscrapers that western architects could not get built in their home cities, the planned eco-city on a nearby island and the train lines that levitate on magnets. And not a sign of air pollution or traffic jams.

Success has attracted imitators. Chongqing, a city on the Yangtze river 2,000km inland from Shanghai, recently opened its own planning museum, although Chongqing boasts that its city model is larger at 892 sq m. If Shanghai was the Chinese urban phenomenon of the 1990s, when it built a whole new city on the largely unused Pudong side of the river, Chongqing is going through the most spectacular construction boom of this decade.

Shanghai’s Pudong district was the first example of the “build it and the people will come model”, where the government invests huge amounts in construction in the hope that residents will occupy the flats - which, by and large, they have. Now Chongqing is benefiting from massive Beijing largesse to remake an entire metropolis.

The population is about 6m nowbut the city is adding some 300,000