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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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Commentary & Reviews · Interviews

Copyright The London Review of Books

LRB | Vol. 28 No. 16 dated 17 August 2006 | Richard Lloyd Parry

ed. Leza Lowitz · Stone Bridge, 494 pp, £13.99

Foreign writers have been visiting Tokyo since the 1860s, but for such a vast, thrilling and important city it has proved barren as a place of literary exile. Among those who made Japan their home, as well as their subject, there are to be found only minor talents, chief among them the Greek-Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn, whose retellings of native ghost stories have made him more famous in Japanese translation than in English. The most interesting writing has been in sketches by those who have passed by and peered in without ever achieving intimacy with the culture: Angela Carter’s essays of the early 1970s collected in Nothing Sacred; Anthony Thwaite’s delicate and tentative poetry collection, Letter from Tokyo; and John Hersey’s great work of reportage, Hiroshima. When literary celebrities have alighted in Japan, the results have usually been disastrous.

At the peak of his Manhattan success, Jay McInerney came out to study karate and produced the dismal Ransom, full of sub-Hemingway machismo and lumbering Japonaiserie (‘he picked up his katana, made by the great swordsmith Yasukuni of the Soshu Branch of the Sagami School’). The best that Clive James – a regular visitor and student of Japanese – could come up with was the smirking comedy Brrm! Brrm! Only two novelists have filtered Japanese characters into English with any conviction, and neither of them has made a home in the country: Kazuo Ishiguro, British in all but name, has not lived in Nagasaki since he was a toddler; David Mitchell left Hiroshima four years ago. There is a certain amount of unjustly neglected travel writing, such as the work of the late Alan Booth. But Japan has never attracted the attention of a Chatwin or a Naipaul, let alone fostered a Kipling, a Somerset Maugham, a Hemingway or a Paul Bowles.

No one has had a greater yearning or been better qualified to fill this gap than Donald Richie. ‘Almost everything I do, everything that is known about me, is connected to this country,’ he wrote. ‘To be a person so intent upon describing a place not his own – isn’t this odd?’ Over sixty years in Japan, he has been a reporter, tour guide, cinema critic, film director, print-maker, novelist, travel writer, editor, teacher, subtitler, public speaker and actor. Apart from fiction, both short and long, and countless newspaper columns and reviews, he has published books about film, art, Zen, history, tattoos, gardens, temples, phallic symbols, food and bonsai. He has been a friend to famous and talented foreigners and to a cross-section of the most interesting Japanese of the second half of the 20th century. The index to The Japan Journals consists of a list of Richie’s acquaintances, followed by their professions. The first page alone includes Akihito (emperor), Akira (barboy), Tadashi Asami (tattooed man), John Ashbery (poet), Richard Avedon (photographer), Tamasaburo Bando (kabuki actor), Cecil Beaton (photographer/designer) and Truman Capote (author).

He arrived in Tokyo at a time when Mount Fuji could be seen from all over the city because the intervening buildings had recently been incinerated by American bombs; he is still going strong today, as the Japanese nervously brace themselves for their third period of postwar economic growth. Hardly a month passes in Tokyo without a public appearance by Donald, implausibly spry and dapper at 82, reading from his new book of criticism at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club or introducing a season of Ozu films at International House. Why then – outside Japan, at least – should he be so little known?

Most or many of his thirty or forty books (no one seems to know exactly how many there are) are out of print. Only his 1971 travelogue, The Inland Sea, and some of his film criticism, are read except by those with a specialist interest in Japan. ‘I wish I had an agent – I could just send it off to him or her,’ he writes in his journal in 1996, with another unpublished novel on his desk. ‘But I can’t. No agent has ever accepted me.’ A hundred pages, and seven years, later he is taking an ‘orphan manuscript’ of short stories to a vanity publisher. Both The Japan Journals and the earlier Donald Richie Reader (2001) transmit a resentment, on the part of the younger fans who have edited them, that he is not more famous and better regarded. In a self-defeating introduction to the Reader, Arturo Silva indignantly sets out the neglect suffered by his hero: ignored by ‘editors and bureaucrats’, unrecognised by the academic establishment, forced five times to rewrite a profile of Kurosawa for the New York Times magazine, only to have it spiked. ‘For all the work and decades spent on it, Richie’s view of Japan seems still to belong only to the “happy few”,’ he observes unhappily. ‘One difficulty of “placing” him is that Richie is neither an academic nor a popular writer … Indeed, Richie is doubly other: caught between two facing mirrors that no one bothers to look into.’ Wounded partisanship of this type leads one to suspect a straightforward explanation for his unsuccess: that Richie simply isn’t much of a writer. But is there more to it than this: a reflection of the times he has lived through; something inhospitable in the intellectual atmosphere of Tokyo itself?

No one has written with more concentration about the peculiar quality of exile enjoyed by the gaijin, the foreigner in Japan. Densely hierarchical, structured by invisible networks of deference, obligation and taboo, conventional Japanese society offers no formal place to the ‘outside person’. But this alienation is so absolute that it is experienced as something close to liberation, a stimulus to observation and analysis. ‘Japan has afforded him’ – the author – ‘a situation of writing,’ Roland Barthes wrote in Empire of Signs. This situation is ‘one in which a certain disturbance of the person occurs, a subversion of earlier readings, a shock of meaning lacerated, extenuated to the point of its irreplaceable void.’ Japan, to put it in drastically un-French terms, puts you on your mettle. It is an observation that Richie returns to again and again. ‘In Japan,’ he recorded in 1992, ‘I interpret, assess an action, infer a meaning.’

Every day, every hour, every minute. Life here means never taking life for granted, never not noticing. For me alone I wonder? I do not see how a foreigner can live here and construct that shroud of inattention, which in the land from whence he came is his natural right and his natural tomb … it is with this live connection that the alert foreigner here lives. The electric current is turned on during all the waking hours: he or she is always occupied in noticing, evaluating, discovering and concluding … It is the difference between just going to a movie and living it for a few hours, and going to the same film as a reviewer, taking notes, standing apart, criticising, knowing that I must make an accounting of it. The former is more comfortable; the latter is better.

This is indeed the excitement of life in Japan at its best, and it provides obvious opportunities for the writer. From a journal entry in 1998:

Smilingly excluded here in Japan, politely stigmatised, I can from my angle attempt only objectivity, since my subjective self will not fit the space I am allotted … how fortunate I am to occupy this niche with its lateral view. In America I would be denied this place. I would live on the flat surface of a plain. In Japan, from where I am sitting, the light falls just right – I can see the peaks and valleys, the crags and crevasses.

There is another lucky side effect for many expatriates: personal alienation, the inescapable sense of being different from everyone else, is cancelled out, or at least rendered invisible, by the larger, universal alienation of being a gaijin. This is the partial explanation for something else remarked on several times by Richie: as he shyly puts it, ‘the strange prevalence of people of like preferences among foreign Japanese specialists’. To be blunter, Richie and a seemingly disproportionate number of his friends and contemporaries – the formidable generation of scholars and translators of Japanese who encountered the country as young men during the US occupation – are homosexual.

‘Travellers almost by definition screw more (or want to screw more) than other people,’ Richie writes, and nowhere are they more avid in their screwing than in Japan. In the case of expat men, I would guess, at least half of those who remain in Tokyo do so for reasons connected to sex, sometimes, and sometimes not, coupled with love. It is like one of those fairytale undersea realms where the simple fisherman follows his water nymph, only to realise after a few years of bliss that he can never return to the air. Plenty of gaijin males discover with a jolt that they have become incapable of getting laid anywhere else. Richie’s Journals make explicit what is only suggested in his other writing: that, whatever the delights of Japan’s culture and the fascinating perspectives available to the writer in exile, it is sex – or Richie’s particular version of it – that has kept him tethered here for so long.

The Japan Journals, we are told by their editor, Leza Lowitz, were originally rich in detailed accounts of Richie’s ‘promiscuous encounters’ (he writes with admiration of the ‘Black Diaries’ of Roger Casement), but on the advice of a friend he edited them out, setting them aside in a separate, unpublished volume entitled ‘Vita Sexualis’. What remains may not be technically explicit, but Richie is unabashed in discussing ‘the goût de la boue’, which for sixty years has been the complement to his intellectual and artistic pursuits. By day and in the evenings, he has moved among artists, writers and academics in the circuit of seminars, dinner parties and museum receptions. By night, in parks, on street corners, in ‘accompanied’ coffee shops, in sex theatres, porno cinemas and the ‘boy brothels of Shinjuku’, he has picked up builders, scaffolders, boxers, students, cooks and soldiers. The fascination of these journals, what makes them a literary, as well as historical, document, is the way in which – almost unconsciously and over the course of a lifetime – they reveal Richie’s intellectual and erotic compulsions to be a single consistent project. ‘Even now,’ he wrote at the age of 71, ‘I still go around looking into tidal pools and turning over rocks, trying to find someone (preferably young, unformed and handsome) who can stand for Japan.’

Richie’s taste was formed early, during his childhood in the blankly uninteresting town of Lima, Ohio. He was born in 1924, the only child of quarrelsome parents who scarcely feature in his published writing. His father is unnamed in the Journals; his mother seems to have been called Jean; neither merits a line in the index. Early on, he concluded that ‘I was too different to be theirs.’ His first and defining sexual experience came at the age of six – alone in a park at night, a man in the shadows, gentle and reassuring words, ‘the soft touch of his hard hand’. ‘The intervening years have seen many dark parks and, living my dream, many hard men,’ he records fifty years later.

Richie hitch-hiked out of Lima the day after leaving high school, and spent the war criss-crossing the world in the US Merchant Marine. On New Year’s Eve 1946, his ship docked in Japan’s southernmost island, Okinawa, which had been blitzkrieged in the last appalling battle of the war. He travelled to Tokyo and became a clerk for the US occupation, then a feature writer for Pacific Stars and Stripes, the army newspaper. As the paper’s film critic, he fell in love with the cinema of Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi before he could understand Japanese. He became an aficionado of the traditional dance dramas bugaku, kabuki and noh, and spent Sundays fruitlessly studying Zen under Daisetz Suzuki. ‘You are, you know, very much of this world, very much of this flesh,’ the master told him, and this seems to have been true from the moment Richie set foot in Japan. ‘In Okinawa,’ he later said, ‘I felt my testicles descend to the earth.’

The received view of Japan is of a rather prissy, buttoned-up place, but Richie found the erotic all around him: in the ‘studied expressionless faces and blank dark eyes’ of the bugaku dancers, and the drunk, sweating bearers of the portable shrine in Shinto festivals (‘two hours of naked thighs and barely masked loins, pounding buttocks, strained shoulders and faces turned skyward, chanting the rhythmic cry’). There was nakedness everywhere, from urchins in the street to ‘the fisherfolk of the further coasts of Chiba’ who ‘traditionally worked nude with only a small red ribbon tied around the member lest the goddess Benten, deity of the sea, be offended’. Much of this was a consequence of poverty and ruin, of course, but to Richie it was both erotic and romantic. ‘When you look at naked people one of two things can occur,’ he wrote. ‘You become excited, feel sexy, view the nude as desirable. Or, you see the human race, finally, as it is: innocent, vulnerable, unknowing and beautiful in that general way which discourages possessiveness. Standing on those street corners, I felt both.’ Only much later, when Japan had changed beyond recognition, did he begin to understand the political pulses which charge the relationship between the victor and the defeated.

Until the 1990s, there are frequent gaps in Richie’s diaries which have, in any case, been rewritten and edited down to half their length over the years (the original manuscripts, it turns out, were first transcribed and then destroyed by their author). Perhaps it is not surprising that Richie comes across very well in the pages that remain: earnest but witty, passionate and sometimes sentimental, but equally capable of dryness and restraint, and generous even in the face of rudeness and ignorance. Never once does he indulge in the favourite gaijin pastime: whingeing about Japan and the Japanese. ‘Why is it, I wonder, that when expatriates in Japan get together they always do this – find fault?’ he asks. ‘Do they do this in other countries? “Oh these Luxembourgians, these people!”’ Later, he is reproached by his old friend, the literary translator and scholar of Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker: ‘You will not allow yourself to be furious with these people. Yet, you know at heart you are.’ He replies that Seidensticker ‘really hated himself, not these people, and that he should acknowledge the depths of his self-loathing’. As a lover, too, Richie is loyal and responsible, and becomes a lifelong ally to several of the younger, mostly heterosexual men whom he seduces – meeting their oblivious families, helping to put them through school, attending their weddings, investing in their businesses and becoming a friend to their wives and children. But here and there are hints of a wilder, less steady and more tormented personality.

‘I had first fallen in love with him when he told me … that he loved gangsters, that he must kneel before them and drink of their manhood and that sometimes they threatened to kill him.’ This comes from a surprising source: A Romantic Education by Mary Richie, a 1970 novel dedicated to Donald and based on her four-year marriage to him during the early 1960s. Donald had a ‘slender heterosexual history’ (‘Strong women all, they knew what they wanted, saw it, took it,’ he wrote; ‘I’m a type who must be raped in order to get it up’). Still, it is difficult to understand how he and Mary believed that their marriage had a chance of lasting. She knew that he liked boys, but knowing it was not the same as having to live with it. He invited her to take other lovers, but when she did it made him ill. ‘I must admit he is intelligent, quick, gifted by nature,’ Mary wrote in her diary, ‘very affectionate, but ruined as a boy and so afraid of affection, easily unsure, so amused by the trivial, or is it that only the topical and prankish seem to him “interesting”.’ Richie too identifies the capacity for distraction as one of his chief flaws. ‘Just where do I think I am going?’ he asks, as his marriage is breaking down.

Here I am a novelist who writes few novels, a critic who usually can’t even criticise himself, a husband who prefers sleeping with men. Yes, somehow all those unwritten novels were supposed to appear; my criticism was to strike every target; and marriage was to save me … The reluctance to find oneself – the evasions. And the burden of it. No wonder I wanted someone to share it. But one does not drop one’s history any more than does the plodding turtle drop its shell.

The Inland Sea, a learned, beautifully paced elegy for one of ‘the last places on earth where men rise with the sun and where streets are dark and silent by nine at night’, is the only full-length work of Richie’s that will be remembered a generation from now. His various collections of newspaper articles and magazine essays are patchy and poorly organised, and I couldn’t get through the long-out-of-print early novels, Where Are the Victors? (1956) and Companions of the Holiday (1968), well-meaning and empathetic attempts at social observation which, even as period pieces, hold scant interest today. But for a writer with a limited attention span, the journal is the ideal medium. An overarching structure, pace, and the deployment of developing themes are unnecessary; all the successful diarist needs is a consistent tone of voice and the ability to be interesting about something, once a day. The distractions to which Richie succumbed may have wrecked his novels and his marriage, but they gave him all the diary material he needed. In a life of prolific underachievement, The Japan Journals are the masterpiece.

Up until the late 1980s, English-speaking foreigners who knew their way around Tokyo were few, and Richie’s status as tenured gaijin brought him a stream of visiting intellectuals requiring guidance and companionship. He escorted them, helped them to find boys and girls, then wrote acute little sketches of them, a chronicle of the naivety, arrogance and insensitivity which overcomes so many otherwise intelligent people in Japan. Dry and good humoured as ever, Richie is patronised by Sacheverell Sitwell and his wife, dines with a near-gaga Somerset Maugham and shops for pornographic woodblock prints with Stravinsky. He conducts a farcical tour of eminent writers, which reaches its climax in a mountain temple, where Stephen Spender and Angus Wilson look on as an enema is administered on the tatami to a haemorrhoidal Alberto Moravia. The indifference and obliviousness of these literary celebrities find their epitome in Truman Capote. ‘I have seen Japan,’ he announces in the coffee shop of the Imperial Hotel. ‘And I may just as well tell you that I do not like a country that has little cocks … Little cocks, little cocks!’ Richie’s portrait of his whining petulance is one of the best things in the book.

Among those who count as friends, rather than passing acquaintances, are Marguerite Yourcenar, Christopher Isherwood, Susan Sontag and Francis Ford Coppola (among several interesting photographs is one of Richie beside a gawky, 19-year-old Sofia Coppola, who looks thoroughly lost). He knew Ozu and Kurosawa, and wrote books about their work. Then there were the pioneers of the avant-garde of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the composer Toru Takemitsu, the kabuki actor Tamasaburo, the artist Tadanori Yokoo, and Tatsumi Hijikata, the founder of butoh dance. Richie met Yukio Mishima as a young celebrity in the 1950s; the two even went to Mishima’s gymnasium together, and a famous sequence of photographs of the novelist posing in his loincloth in the snow was shot outside Donald’s bedroom window. ‘He clowns about the things closest to him,’ Richie wrote in 1958. ‘Like killing himself … none of us ever takes this seriously.’ But when Mishima did disembowel himself, after a failed coup, in the headquarters of the Japanese Self-Defence Force, Richie found himself unsurprised and unmoved. ‘His suicide was entirely ritual,’ he writes. ‘It had few connections with and little meaning for contemporary Japan.’

These were tumultuous times, but despite Richie’s avant-garde leanings, the violent left-wing demonstrations make no appearance in the diaries. A ‘chronic non-joiner’, he actively resisted participation in anything that sniffed of politics, especially sexual politics. ‘When you do this, you invest,’ he writes. ‘You become a card-carrying Catholic, a card-carrying Communist, a card-carrying Cocksucker … I am not thinking of making life better for future queers.’ But the Journals trace Richie’s evolving and self-critical awareness of the politics inherent in his situation.

His mourning for lost beauties and suspicion of change were dramatised in The Inland Sea, but by the 1980s change was taking place at blinding speed. Japan was already an affluent society; very quickly, in the bubble economy of the late 1980s it became rich, then – on paper at least – astonishingly rich. Richie was disconcerted in several ways. For a start, there was the physical alteration in the look of Tokyo. The city of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, with which he first fell in love, had given way to a futuristic megalopolis, ‘larger and taller and – strangely – cleaner, or at any rate less cluttered … In this new postmodern capital of planned cityscapes, the lack of clutter is inhuman.’ Then there was the mounting tension and mutual contempt between Japan and the United States, caused by the huge trade imbalance. A decade of Japanese recession later, it is easy to forget how ominous all this seemed at the time, and how many people in both countries came to regard the other as an enemy. ‘Japan is an unguided missile,’ Richie writes in a rare disquisition on current affairs.

No one is in the control room. When you get the people all pointed in the same direction there is no stopping them. Where is the brake? It is not included in the model … The US, slipping, lost its great supporting enemy in the collapse of the USSR. It needs another one, quick. Japan, slithering out of control, all cool heads hot in this drive to greed, displays an enormous insensitivity to others … I don’t think anyone really believes in this animosity except the stupid. But there are so many.

The biggest and most upsetting change of all is to be found in the Japanese young. By 1988, ‘one of the reasons for spending my old age here is gone, never to return.’

This is the possibility of meeting a stranger and making a friend. Right there, right then. Forever … It is because we are not needed any more. No one has any use for us. They do not see trips abroad in our eyes. These trips are something they can themselves afford. And there are so many of us. We have become common … I am speaking of regretting imperialism, I know. I ought to rejoice that Japan is no longer subject to it, but I do not want to. It was too much fun being treated as someone quite special.

The shock of this change is the realisation, which Richie is too honest not to register, that the gaijin’s special status is unearned, a simple function of economics. In the way of these things, though, money provides its own solution to his frustrations, or at least an alternative. The bubble attracts immigrant workers – Pakistanis, Koreans, Filipinos, Chinese and Iranians – drawn to Tokyo by the mighty yen. And among them, Richie finds erotic opportunities which the natives no longer provide. ‘You seem to have deserted Japan in favour of the Third World,’ a friend tells him. ‘It was not I that deserted Japan,’ he writes, ‘but Japan that deserted the Third World … It was the Third World in Japan that so appealed to lubricious me, and now that Japan is more First World than even the USA, the appeal is no longer there. That makes me that figure of fun, the garden-variety colonial imperialistic predator.’ A gay foreign friend abandons Japan for the less affluent pastures of Thailand. ‘He’s too late,’ Richie observes. ‘We’ll both end up in a Dayak long house and even there it will be too late.’

I have become like those pandas that will eat only one kind of bamboo, a commodity that they have now eaten all up. Soon they will be extinct, done in by specialisation. Concerned friends counsel me to the jungle-like swamps of the sauna, or the conversation pits of the bars, or the strict and narrow confines of the public conveniences, but this is not for me. Only the street, the corner, the park is authentic to me. Only that which is fortuitously found is real.

As he enters his sixties, Richie’s old and distinguished friends begin to die off. He acquires official respectability, honoured by the emperor for his services to Japanese culture, a habitué of embassy functions. The growing self-confidence and obnoxiousness of Japan coincide with his descent into the conservatism of old age. Richie wryly recognises the irony in all this, although he is never able to forgive Japanese youths for their disinclination to be seduced by him; their fecklessness, stupidity and philistinism are a recurring and rather tiresome theme in the second half of this book. Subtlety and complexity desert him as he ventures out from his base in old-fashioned Ueno to cast his fogeyish eye over the youthful ‘hordes’ in ‘noisome’ Shibuya and Roppongi. ‘They lurch and spill on the pavement and in a group sound like a herd of elephants … Young people with their Walkmen and manga, their portable phones – not only do they not know one flower from another, they do not even see them … this generation was taught nothing … the latest gadget satisfies it; it goes to see Star Wars.’ Even masturbation is not what it used to be, as a fellow regular at Richie’s local porn cinema comments: instead of lending one another a hand, young Japanese onanists ‘buy a tape, or rent it, and take it back home and lock the door’.

‘These youthful herds await a deliverer, someone to organise them, and a country to give up everything for,’ he fulminates, in an especially barmy entry. ‘Someone like Mussolini or the Emperor Hirohito.’ Yet it was Richie’s generation, ‘that friendly, ragged, wily, beautiful, and hopeful crew’ of wartime Japanese with whom he fell in love, who submitted to fascism, who swarmed so murderously into China and South-East Asia, and who piloted the suicide planes. By almost any other standard, the young in Japan today are exemplary: a little glazed and indifferent from the outside, but politer, calmer and more law abiding than their contemporaries anywhere in the world. Richie may find it harder to seduce them as he circumambulates the park, but he is not going to be beaten up, robbed or murdered by them either.

‘Being at home means taking for granted going blind and deaf, eventually not even thinking,’ Richie wrote. ‘It means only comfort. I would hate to be at home.’ This is a common perception among long-term gaijin, as among adolescents: home as a place of old age, premature senility. But as he grows older Richie begins to panic about the cost of having no home, not for its human comforts, but its intellectual stimulations. At his most optimistic, he takes pride in his outsideness (‘undisturbed by vagaries, I can regard what I think of as eternal’). But he sees that New York friends ‘live in an element I do not. Theirs is the current of contemporary thought, and they swim – mostly against it – and grow sleek. I have no intellectual climate at all. I have no one with whom to speak of these concerns, no one to learn from, no one to teach. For fifty years I have lived alone in the library of my skull.’

Greater Tokyo contains thirty million people; it is far and away the largest city that has ever existed. And yet to the Westerner with intellectual aspirations it is a small pond. The Catholic novelist Shusaku Endo compared Japan to a tropical mud swamp: when living flowers are transplanted from elsewhere they grow vigorously for a while, put out lurid blooms, but eventually wither in the strange minerals of the new soil. In 150 years, foreigners in Japan have produced important works of history, political science, anthropology and journalism, but no lasting work of literature. Perhaps Donald Richie shows us why.

Richard Lloyd Parry is the Asia editor of the Times, based in Tokyo. His book about Indonesia and East Timor, In the Time of Madness, is out in paperback.

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Copyright Slate
Posted Wednesday, Aug. 30, 2006, at 6:22 PM ET

The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms by W. Joseph CampbellPress scholar W. Joseph Campbell recently voyaged to the late 19th century and has returned with a brilliant new book that pegs 1897 as the exceptional year in which “the contours and ethos of American journalism began to take shape.”

Campbell’s cross-century road trip, The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms, rarely leaves New York City, where three schools of journalism captained by three men in their 30s were battling for supremacy. In one corner stood Adolph Ochs, who preached an impartial, just-the-facts-ma’am approach to newspapering, and who in 1897 was enjoying his first year as the proprietor of the New York Times.

In the second corner was press lord William Randolph Hearst, who practiced the “journalism of action” that “gets things done” at his crusading New York Journal, where he had become publisher in 1895. He spent wildly on new technology, covered sporting events aggressively, and defined his paper by its activism in public affairs. Others slagged Hearst’s style as “yellow journalism.”
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In the last corner was Lincoln Steffens. Appointed city editor of the New York Commercial Advertiser in late 1897, he advocated literary journalism, an anti-journalistic model and reaction against the growing commercialism of the news. He preferred hiring young college graduates over professional journalists and urged them to report the story behind the story.

The journalistic upheavals documented in The Year That Defined American Journalism speak across the centuries because our media atmosphere is equally volatile, what with the emergence of the Web, the proliferation of cable TV news and opinion, the decline of newspapers, and the rancorous debate over standards. All this would be grist for a book that sought to define 1997 as another defining fin de siècle year for journalism.

Unlike many media critics and scholars, Campbell finds as much to admire in the yellow journalism of William Randolph Hearst as he does to censure. Hearst’s Journal “injected itself as a prominent actor in solving crime, extending charity, and thwarting suspected abuses of municipal government,” he writes. Hearst gave bylines to reporters, hired talented female journalists—unlike the Times of the day—and paid his stars very well. He also inflated social issues beyond their true importance with relentless coverage designed to concentrate public opinion on his side. Campbell can’t resist comparing Hearst’s yellow Journal to the yellowish ways of the New York Times under Executive Editor Howell Raines, who tried to shame the Augusta National Golf Club into accepting rich women as members with the paper’s news overkill in 2002.

To be sure, Hearst’s Journal ran oddball Sunday features speculating about the sun spinning out a new planet, advocated war with Spain, “was known to err badly in its daily reporting,” and was inclined not to acknowledge its errors. When Campbell cites a press observer from the time writing that Hearst could create the best English-language newspaper if he were to “cut his newspaper in two, publish the real, vital news in one part, and the sensations, rot, and nonsense in the other,” you can’t help but think how much you could improve CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC by ripping Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Rita Cosby, and other sensation-seeking ratings whores from their lineups.

Back in 1897, critics decried the “decay” of American journalism—sound familiar? Politicians sought ways to undermine the pugnacious press. Reacting to the provocations of Hearst’s Journal, the New York Senate passed a bill prohibiting publication of caricatures without first obtaining the permission of the target. The measure died, as did a law introduced to the U.S. Congress requiring newspapers to reveal the names of the writers of editorials. Advancing technology was changing the look and feel of newspapers: In 1897, the New York Tribune published the first halftone photograph in a mass-circulation newspaper; color presses were being deployed; newer models of typewriters—some as portable as today’s laptops—were coming into vogue in newsrooms.

The 1897 paradigm clash took place as newspapers reached their greatest historical popularity: 2.61 newspaper copies circulated within the average urban dwelling in 1900 compared with 0.72 copies in 2000. (Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and Hearst’s Journal cost 1 cent, which is about 22 cents in today’s money. To escape a potential circulation scandal, Ochs dropped the price of his money-losing Times from its premium price of 3 cents to 1 cent in 1898.) The household penetration of newspapers was probably even higher in the nation’s largest cities like New York. There were 2,226 daily newspapers publishing at the end of the century compared with 1,457 today. New York was home to 58 dailies, some of them in foreign languages. The Yiddish Forverts, today’s Forward, conveniently debuted in 1897.

The newspaper of 1897 was the sole purveyor of news until the advent of newsreels in the 1910s (Hearst was a pioneer, by the way) and radio in the 1920s. Its comics, fiction, and features made it the home-entertainment center. Ample advertisements made it the shopping bazaar and wish book, too, both of which explain why so many homes consumed more than one daily each day. The competition for readers in New York was intensified, writes Campbell, by the decline of the previously dominant newspapers—Pulitzer’s World, Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun, James Gordon Bennett Jr.’s New York Herald, and Whitelaw Reid’s New York Tribune. Even so, Pulitzer sensed enough of the crisis to order his business manager to recruit a spy within Hearst’s Journal to find the source of the paper’s ideas and identify what dissatisfied talent might be willing to leave Hearst and join him.

The weakness of Campbell’s fine book is that the triangular paradigm punch-out he promises to chronicle was really a one-on-one contest between Hearst and Ochs, whose newspapers openly warred. Steffens’ literary journalism appeared only in the city pages of the Commercial Advertiser, which he edited. “The experiment disintegrated in just a few years,” Campbell writes. Other New York journalists “sneered” at Steffens’ efforts, and Campbell presents no evidence that other newspapers imitated his model. Steffens gets a call-out whenever the traditions of feature writing are discussed, but his experiment doesn’t rate a half a dime, let alone a paradigm in newspaper history.

Ochs’ restraint and impartiality eventually bested Hearst’s action school as the most influential journalistic model, but his victory has less to do with the superiority of his methods than Hearst’s reckless overindulgence of his own. Campbell catalogs Hearst’s errors: Exaggerated coverage of the Spanish-American War damaged his reputation and his paper’s; his attempt to wed his political ambitions with the editorial direction of the Journal backfired; the financial demands expansion placed on his media empire starved the Journal of the resources needed to produce the “journalism of action”; and the negatives associated with Hearst swamped his positives as others accused him of encouraging correspondents to send fake news, boosting circulation with the sordid and the trivial, and of deliberately rousing the rabble.

Campbell cites as one reason behind Hearst’s downfall this 1931 observation from Walter Lippmann that yellow journalism is almost impossible to sustain:

When everything is dramatic, nothing is dramatic. When everything is highly spiced, nothing after a while has much flavor. When everything is new and startling, the human mind just ceases to be startled.

Is that really true? The Hearst tradition of making everything dramatic continues to live large on cable TV. It disgorges oceans of yellow journalism each week in both its news and opinion slots. At CNN, Lou Dobbs pushes the tabloid limits of xenophobia and on the network’s sister channel, Headline News, Nancy Grace specializes in unsolved and weird murders. At MSNBC, the recently demoted Rita Cosby mixes a dumber version of Nancy Grace with whatever trash she can fish off the wires. With the exception of Brit Hume’s program, Fox glows an incandescent yellow at most opportunities.

Although the cable news and opinion shows don’t draw very large numbers—The O’Reilly Factor, the most successful, attracts an average audience of 2 million—they inform the mainstream news agenda in a way that Adolph Ochs wouldn’t approve.

Campbell notes that Ochs would not approve of the “implicit advocacy”—as Times Public Editor Daniel Okrent put it in his now famous 2004 column—that appears in Times coverage of gay rights, gun control, and environmental regulation. Ochs would probably extend an “attaboy” to Executive Editor Bill Keller for his subsequent promise in a newsroom memo to reach “beyond our predominantly urban, culturally liberal orientation, to cover the full range of our national conversation.”

Campbell concludes his book by writing that the “central planks of the Times’ counteractivist model still guide American journalism.” I won’t argue with that assertion, but I’m convinced that somewhere in hell, “loser” William Randolph Hearst is suing everybody for royalties.

******

What’s the yellowist piece of journalism you’ve ever read in Slate? Send nominations to slate.pressbox@gmail.com. Also, can anyone tell me why the street boxes for the Express, the Washington Post Co.’s free daily tabloid, are incandescent yellow? (E-mail may be quoted by name unless the writer stipulates otherwise. Permanent disclosure: Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co.)

Posted at 12:35 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Nation

[from the September 11, 2006 issue]

At least 12 million people from Africa were loaded into slave ships and transported to the Americas. How do people of African descent, scattered around the world, see their relationship to their ancestral home? Do they consider themselves “the African diaspora”? If their African heritage dates back several generations, is it “nebulous atavistic yearnings,” as the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen once said, to search for their roots, to want some kind of bond with their ancestral homeland? Or is it important, in a neocolonial and still-racist world, that Africans and people of African descent see themselves as part of a transnational community? After all, the ancestors in question did not choose to leave their homeland; they arrived in the Americas in chains, and from the time they landed they were divided and dispersed, as a strategy of domination. And even though slavery has ended, people of African descent still wear its imprint on their skin, like a tattoo. Out of slavery came an ideology of racism that permeates the Western world to this day. Given the black collective memory of slavery, it is easy to understand the emotional tug of the ancestral land, the longing for Pan-African brotherhood and the desire for a community that is not racist. The trouble is, as these three books all show, Afro-diasporic solidarity is complex, and often fraught.

In Middle Passages James T. Campbell (not to be confused with James Campbell, the Baldwin biographer) looks at various African-American journeys to Africa over the past two centuries. What did Africa mean to them? asks Campbell. What did America mean to them? In the past, the number of African-Americans traveling to Africa remained small. Since the growth of the African tourist industry in the 1990s, tens of thousands of African-American tourists have made pilgrimages there each year, and it often proves a charged emotional experience.

The first story in the book, an astonishing tale of dramatic reversals of fortune worthy of a Grimm fairy tale, reminds us just how ruthless was this trade in “black gold.” In 1730 Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, a highborn Muslim man in West Africa, made a 200-mile trek to a place on the Gambia River where an English ship was anchored. He had slaves to sell, but the English captain was not prepared to pay enough, and Ayuba continued south into Mandinke territory. He exchanged his slaves for cattle and set off for home, unaware that he was being followed. He was waylaid. His captors shaved his head and beard. Back at the English ship on the Gambia, the English captain recognized him but apparently had no qualms about loading him on board as part of his human cargo. Ayuba would find himself working on a tobacco plantation in Maryland. And then came another dramatic reversal of fortune: His noble birth was discovered, and he was put on a ship to England, where he was adopted by the English gentry and met the royal family. After a year there, he boarded another slave ship, this time as a passenger, back to Africa. He spent the rest of his days working for the Royal Africa Company and facilitating the slave trade. “Viewed through the moral lenses of our own time, Ayuba seems guilty of the most appalling hypocrisy,” writes Campbell, “but he would not have seemed so to contemporaries.”

Langston Hughes was 21 in the summer of 1923, when he boarded a ship in the Brooklyn dockyards heading for West Africa. The 1920s was the Jazz Age, and the time of the black arts movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. As Hughes puts it, “The Negro was in vogue.” Caught up in the neo-Romantic “primitivism” was a new fascination with Africa, its tom-tom exoticism, its black vitality. Hughes was as prone to employ these stereotypes as everyone else; the difference was that he was one of the few who actually made the voyage to Africa. Eager to escape the humiliation of racism in America, he hoped to find a truer, freer self in the home of his ancestors. His first sight of the coastline filled him with excitement: “My Africa, Motherland of the Negro peoples!” He would respond viscerally to the beauty of the landscape and the people, but he left Africa feeling rebuffed. Africans treated him like a white man. Years later, in his memoir The Big Sea, he would mock his naïve hopes and illusions.

It is sometimes surprising to see who clings most to the African mystique. W.E.B. Du Bois grew up in New England. At school he was never taught a thing about African history. It was not until he went to Fisk University that he developed an interest in Africa, and in 1907 he embarked on what would become a lifelong project, an Encyclopedia Africana. As Campbell writes, Du Bois was “a twentieth-century social scientist, determined to rescue Africa from the fog of mythology and misprision that had long enveloped it.” In 1923 he set off for Liberia, an African-American colony established on the coast of West Africa a century earlier. (In the nineteenth century, Liberia was the most common destination for African-Americans traveling to Africa.) “The spell of Africa is upon me,” Du Bois wrote in his journal. “The ancient witchery of her medicine is burning my drowsy, dreamy blood…. It is a great black bosom where the Spirit longs to die.”

Campbell is hard on Du Bois’s “romantic effusions.” How could Du Bois remain silent about what was actually going on in Liberia? Wealth and power were concentrated in the hands of a small Americo-Liberian settler elite, who lived off a labor force made up of indigenous people who were treated like slaves. The frequent popular uprisings were brutally suppressed, with the support of the US government.

Richard Wright was another who had no time for Du Bois’s romance with Africa; Wright vowed that he would tell the truth, however difficult and painful. When he traveled in 1953 to what was then “the Gold Coast,” he felt “a vague sense of disquiet.” It was an exciting time to be going there—the Gold Coast was about to throw off the chains of British colonialism—but Wright, like many African-Americans before and after him, was there partly on a personal quest. His ancestors had come from Africa; his grandparents, all four of them, had been slaves. He had been born “free,” though it was not clear what that amounted to in Mississippi, the most impoverished and lynch-prone state in the segregated Deep South. The freedom to flee? At the age of 17 he had fled to the North, and twenty years later he had sailed out of New York Harbor (“I felt relieved when my ship sailed past the Statue of Liberty”) to France. Now he was pinning his hopes on black brotherhood. On board the Accra, from Liverpool to Takoradi, he sat at his typewriter, preparing a statement for the African press. “I am one of the lost sons of Mother Africa. There is something in me that never left this land…. I pray that you will respond to me as one of your blood brothers.”

They did not. Africans saw him as an American. The Western-educated elite did not give a damn that he was in their country. As for the Africans he met as he traveled around, Wright found himself at a complete loss. They stared at him and giggled. They evaded his questions. Even their laughter, he felt, was an evasive tactic. He was shocked that people urinated openly, in public. He was (unlike Du Bois) repelled by the women’s naked breasts. The poverty distressed him, and he blamed the heinous crime of European colonialism. But he also decided that these people, with their superstitions and ancestor worship (he described these as “rot” and “mush”), did not know how to help themselves. Soon he was writing in his journal: “Africa! Where are you? Are you a myth?… I’m in despair. I find myself longing to take a ship and go home.” The book that resulted from the trip, which, ironically enough, is titled Black Power, is honest, almost painfully so, about Wright’s complete sense of estrangement.

Campbell’s narrative is beautifully told and dense with detail. It is also singularly devoid of heroes, owing to the complex burdens of race. In this tangle of myths, contradictions and paradoxes, a visiting African-American is lucky to come away with his sanity intact. What place is there for heroes?

As Kevin Gaines points out in American Africans in Ghana, no one talks about “Pan-Africanism” anymore, though in the first half of the twentieth century black radicals eagerly embraced the concept. It was Du Bois who convened the first Pan-African Congress in 1919, with the aim of strengthening the unity and solidarity of African peoples worldwide. Paul Robeson would also espouse this anti-imperialist vision. Needless to say, the US government was highly suspicious of American blacks who showed solidarity with African people and their struggles for independence; it was viewed as disloyal, a betrayal of their essential Americanism.

When Kwame Nkrumah became prime minister of the independent nation of Ghana in March 1957, it was an exhilarating moment for Africans and African-Americans alike. (Contrary to popular belief, Ghana was not the first African nation to become independent; that honor belonged to Sudan, in 1956.) Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta King attended the independence celebrations in Accra, along with fellow African-American leaders Adam Clayton Powell, A. Philip Randolph and Ralph Bunche. King, like Nkrumah, wept with emotion as the Ghanaian flag went up and shouts of “freedom!” filled the air. Nkrumah hailed the emergence of a new “African personality,” a black subject who would finally be free, and he encouraged black people from outside Africa to come to Ghana and help make the Pan-African dream come true. During the next nine years, some 300 African-American expatriates went to live in Ghana.

The oldest and most prestigious member of the African-American community in Accra was Du Bois. Throughout the Red Scare McCarthy years, he had been relentlessly hounded and his passport had been confiscated. The US State Department had prevented him from attending Ghana’s independence ceremony. When his passport was finally restored to him, he was not going to wait around for it to be seized again. On the day he left the United States, as a final defiant gesture to his homeland, Du Bois joined the American Communist Party. Then he and his wife, Shirley Graham, went to live in Ghana. It was 1960. Du Bois was 93 years old.

African-Americans went to Ghana with a dream, but as Gaines explains, their situation was “fraught with ambiguities.” They were of African descent, but they were not African. Their culture was different; even their race consciousness was different. (The Americans were generally more sensitive to white racism.) Ghana might have been trying to be a revolutionary society, but African-American women were often rebuffed by Ghanaian men, who found them too outspoken and independent. Most African-Americans were there because of their admiration for Nkrumah, yet it soon became obvious to them that Nkrumah’s government was beset by bribery, corruption and the blatant abuse of power by those they called the “big men.” When the Kings visited Ghana, they were dismayed by the submissiveness of the servants who worked for their hosts.

But it was in 1962, when Nkrumah narrowly escaped assassination, that things turned sour. Nkrumah was convinced the CIA was behind the plot against him. The Ghanaian press became obsessed with American espionage. As Nkrumah’s government became more and more besieged, by Western forces and by enemies within, there were whispers, accusations and rumors about certain black Americans who worked for American intelligence. Africans no longer trusted the expatriate community.

And then, in February 1966, came the coup. Nkrumah was visiting Beijing, and his absence gave his enemies the chance they had been waiting for. The military men struck before dawn. There were around 200 deaths; anyone close to Nkrumah was arrested or detained. The African-American expatriate community broke up, with most returning, badly disillusioned, to the United States.

Kevin Gaines has written an excellent and important book; my only complaint is the frequent use of academic jargon, which lessens the pleasure of reading it. On one page I looped five “articulates” or “articulations.” Why do editors not do their job?

It has become a genre of its own: the narrative in which a person of African descent brought up in America, Europe or the Caribbean meditates on travel, migration and exile, and grapples with his or her mixed feelings about Africa. Ekow Eshun’s Black Gold of the Sun was written half a century after Wright traveled to the Gold Coast. Born in London to Ghanaian parents in 1968 (two years after the army coup that overthrew Nkrumah and the Pan-African dream), Eshun flew to Ghana in 2002. He had no illusions about Pan-African unity. Indeed, after four more coups in Ghana and a number of unsuccessful attempts, he had no illusions at all about Ghanaian politics. His pilgrimage had to do with his fragile sense of identity. He was tired of being a black man in Britain. “I’d felt like an outsider there all my life.” He did not expect Ghana to feel like “home,” but he hoped he could “feel at home there,” he writes. “All I knew was that if Ghana didn’t live up to my hopes I’d have nothing left to hold on to.”

Surely, we might think, Eshun’s experience of the ancestral homeland was going to be very different from the African-American experience. In his childhood, his parents brought Africa into the family home: They spoke Fante (one of the seventy-five languages in Ghana); they ate African food; when they had parties, their guests arrived in Kente cloth robes. In the early 1970s, the family had moved back to Ghana for three years. In England, Eshun tried to make British friends by never talking about anything that made him different:

“Where you from, man?”
“London.”
“Cool.”
“You heard the new Public Enemy album?”

In the 1980s, when he was in his teens, Eshun was bemused by the fashionable new black consciousness in Britain. A black culture, largely imported from the United States—black TV sitcoms, Spike Lee films and rap music—gave blacks in Britain a level of popular respect they had never had before. The left-wing bookshops of Hackney were suddenly selling African pendants and statues of Nefertiti. For his part, Eshun was determined not to mystify an ancestral homeland that he knew was beset by political upheavals and the contradictions of neocolonialism.

He went to Ghana with a mental image frozen in the early 1970s, and found Accra full of SUVs, mobile phones and blaring hip-hop music. When he and his cousin went to a discothèque one night, Eshun was taken aback by the sleek young couples who emerged from Mercedes sports coupes carrying brand-name sunglasses and handbags. In restaurants, he winced at the way the “big men” barked orders and snapped their fingers for service, and the subservience of the waiters made him cringe. On his walks around the city, he noticed that people fell silent as he passed. In an inland village, a friend pointed out that everyone was talking about him; they took him for a black American with too much money. Leaving Kumasi on a bus, Eshun was disconcerted by the slogan on the seat in front of him: We’ll Get You There Alive. Tied to the roof of the bus were a flock of goats that screamed throughout the journey, while the bus driver turned up his radio. At sunset every day, Eshun was attacked by clouds of savage mosquitoes.

In a secondhand bookstall in Kumasi, he came across Black Power. “Given the confusions of my own trip I had nothing but sympathy for Wright,” he observes. After a month traveling around, Eshun had the same reaction as Wright: “I couldn’t wait to leave.”

What is this torment all about? Why does Eshun feel much the same alienation as an African-American man whose roots are far more distant from his ancestral land? It is clearly not about the country they are traveling through; it is about lost identity, feelings of exile, dashed expectations of solidarity. They were not white; the world had made that clear to them every day of their lives. In which case, they wanted to know, what does it mean to be black? In Ghana, Eshun learned for the first time that he had a Dutch ancestor who was a slave trader. The man married a chief’s daughter, and their son, Joseph, a light-skinned mulatto, would also become a Cape Coast slave trader.

You imagine that the events of history take place in some nebulous “other time” unrelated to your own life. Yet I feel the consequences of Joseph’s actions every day in Britain. It was partly because of the pervasiveness of racism there that I’d come to Ghana—only to find my ancestor had collaborated in establishing its tenets…. The shock is physical. You feel winded. The sun is too bright. Your head aches. You find yourself walking along a sand-blown highway no longer sure who you are any more.

Black Gold of the Sun is a beautifully written book, rich with colorful vignettes and astute observations. Its probing, courageous honesty reminded me of Richard Wright. Fifty years apart, both men engage in some very anguished soul-searching. Eshun is a modern, more sophisticated man, and readers will no doubt be less unsettled by his conclusions. When Wright found himself disgusted by African behavior, he resorted to somewhat racist generalizations about the “African personality.” Eshun asks himself an important question that Wright does not ask: “Europe looked down on Africa. Maybe I’d been doing the same thing?… Does living in a white country make you, in some way, white?”

What does it mean to be white? It’s time that white people asked themselves the sorts of questions with which people of African descent have wrestled for centuries. Eshun seems to be referring to that righteous complacency and sense of superiority one witnesses every day in the modern world—from the conduct of foreign policy to daily interactions between nonwhites and whites. I can’t help thinking that if we all tormented ourselves with these sorts of questions, the world might be less ignorant, less polarized, less hateful, less bellicose.

Posted at 1:03 AM · Comments (0)

Copyright DER SPIEGEL
Published August 16, 2006

Zhang Qingli, the head of the Communist Party in Tibet, talks about the role of the Dalai Lama, Beijing’s difficult relationship with the Buddhist region and China’s policies on religion.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Zhang, Tibet is traditionally a deeply religious country, whereas the Chinese Communist Party is secular. Marx called religion the opium of the masses. How do you reconcile the two?

Zhang: Nature is diverse. Different life forms coexist and the world is colorful. This also holds true when it comes to ideology. We emphasize harmony, so that different ideologies and ideas can live together in peace. The Chinese government practices religious freedom.

SPIEGEL: But since when has the Communist Party tolerated religion in its current form?

Zhang: The party and the government have a clear policy on religion. First, we have religious freedom. Second, religious communities must make their own decisions, and we cannot have interference from abroad. Third, they must be conducted and managed according to the laws. And, finally, we show them how to become integrated into socialist society. You can see the way it is in Tibet, where people make pilgrimages to the temples, turn their prayer wheels and pray to Buddha.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is one of the world’s most popular religious leaders, and he is deeply revered by the people of Tibet. But the government in Beijing sees him as a despicable separatist. Why?

Zhang: Our policy toward the Dalai Lama is clear and consistent. After the founding of the People’s Republic and the peaceful liberation of Tibet, he was elected to a leadership position in the National People’s Congress in 1954. He remained a member of that body until 1964. In 1956 he was named director of the preparation committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region. All of this was done so that religious freedom could be guaranteed, and so that Tibet could be integrated into the great family of socialist nations. He fled the country in 1959. There is no doubt that at that time he was a widely respected religious leader.

SPIEGEL: And is he no longer that today?

Zhang: He did many bad things later on that contradict the role of a religious leader. The core issue is this: Everyone must love his motherland. How can it be that he doesn’t even love his motherland? We have a saying: “No dog sees the filth in his own hut, and a son would never describe his mother as ugly.”

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama doesn’t love Tibet?

Zhang: Tibet is the home of the 14th Dalai Lama, but China is his motherland. He deceived his motherland. He rebelled in the 1950s and in the late 1980s he incited unrest in Lhasa that was directed against the people, the government and society. He destabilized Tibet.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is widely respected worldwide.

Zhang: If I remember correctly, from 1959 to the middle of this year he has made 312 visits to places all over the world, which comes to an average of six countries a year. It was even 12 in 2005. And what did he do during these visits? The goal of these so-called official visits was to form alliances with anti-Chinese forces and to engage in propaganda for his separatist views, which conflict with religion.

SPIEGEL: But much has changed in the world in the last 20 years. China has opened up and trade has become globalized. The question of power on the roof of the world has been resolved. The Dalai Lama has abandoned his claims to independence and agrees to a far-reaching autonomy for Tibet. Why isn’t China generous and self-confident enough to allow the Dalai Lama back into the country, as he would like? Does he still pose a threat to you?

Zhang: We have a clear policy. The door to negotiations will always be open to him, but only when he truly and comprehensively abandons his intentions to divide the motherland, intentions that are directed against society and the people, only when he gives up his splittist activities and only when he openly declares to the world that he has given up claims to independence for Tibet.

SPIEGEL: Didn’t he do this long ago?

Zhang: The problem is that his behavior and his statements contradict one another. He says: “I want to take a middle path and I accept that there is only one China.” But in reality he has not spent a single day not trying to split the motherland.

SPIEGEL: What do you mean by that?

Zhang: What his so-called middle path means is this: He wants to integrate Tibetan settlement areas in the provinces of Sichuan, Yunnan, Qinghai and Gansu into Tibet. He wants to be in charge of this “Greater Tibet” and he demands that the People’s Liberation Army be withdrawn from the region. Besides, he wants to see a return to an earlier, theocratic feudal realm, as dark and gruesome as it was. In those days, government officials, noblemen and monks ruled 95 percent of the population. And he wants even more autonomy for Tibet than has been given to Hong Kong and Macau. That is splittism.

SPIEGEL: But haven’t there already been talks between representatives of the Dalai Lama and Beijing?

Zhang: His government-in-exile is illegal. Our central government has never recognized it. No country in the world, including Germany, recognizes it diplomatically. There are no talks between the Chinese and his so-called government-in-exile. The current contacts merely involve a few individuals from his immediate surroundings. The talks revolve around his personal future.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama enjoys a great deal of sympathy in America, Europe and in Asia, also because the Chinese Communist Party is not particularly democratic.

Zhang: Frankly, the number of people who know the true Dalai Lama is very small. His supporters include enemies of China, but also the true faithful, who are being led astray by this false religious leader. And, finally, there are those who do not understand the real situation.

SPIEGEL: Nevertheless, the Dalai Lama is a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.

Zhang: I have never understood why a person like the Dalai Lama was honored with this prize. What has he done for peace? How much guilt does he bear toward the Tibetan people! How damaging is he for Tibet and China! I cannot understand why so many countries are interested in him.

SPIEGEL: For many Europeans, Tibet is still a country full of myths. A new railroad line to Lhasa was inaugurated a few weeks ago. What does it mean for Tibet?

Zhang: We are very pleased about this railroad. Everyone is convinced that what the Communist Party has achieved on the roof of the world is a miracle. It demonstrates China’s strength and its economic and technological progress. But, more important, the railroad shows that the Chinese Communist Party is doing everything it can to improve life for the various nationalities in the border regions. Tibet is now economically linked to other provinces and the rest of the world.

SPIEGEL: There are rumors that China has nuclear weapons stationed in Tibet. Can you confirm this?

Zhang: I can assure you with all responsibility that this is all a complete fantasy. There is no nuclear weapons factory in Tibet.

SPIEGEL: The Dalai Lama is 71. He has hinted that there may not be a successor or reincarnation. How will you react? Will you nevertheless encourage a search for a reincarnation?

Zhang: The current Dalai Lama is the 14th. We do not know how much longer he will live. We believe that good people live longer while bad people live shorter lives.

SPIEGEL: Then the Dalai Lama, at 71, must be a good person.

Zhang: It is difficult to say whether he is good or bad. But when we consider his actions, he does not appear to be a good person.

SPIEGEL: If the Dalai Lama doesn’t want a successor, will the Communist Party then say that this is a good thing? Or will it undertake its own efforts to search for a successor in Tibet?

Zhang: There has always been a specific system to search for a successor to the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama. According to the historic rules and religious rituals, monks must travel throughout the country and draw lots from the Golden Urn. But the central government has the final say.

SPIEGEL: Will there be an official and an unofficial Dalai Lama, one in Tibet and another in India? After all, since 1995 there has been a dispute over the Panchen Lama, Tibet’s second most important religious leader. The Dalai Lama recognized one Panchen Lama, but Beijing approved another.

Zhang: The reincarnation of the Panchen Lama has been regulated since the Qing dynasty, that is, since the 17th century. The search for and naming of the 11th Panchen Lama was done strictly in accordance with historic rules. This is why he was recognized by the central government. He is the legal Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama broke the historic rules during the search for the Panchen Lama. He didn’t even have the Golden Urn from which to draw lots. The Dalai Lama creates chaos. But the market for him here in Tibet is shrinking.

SPIEGEL: Religion appears to be gaining strength in many parts of the world, such as in predominantly Islamic regions and in the United States. Isn’t religion also on the rise in Tibet?

Zhang: Religion is a historic phenomenon that will continue to exist for a long time. Our religious policy is very relaxed, and it is in keeping with realities. But religion may not operate against the law and may not interfere in justice, education, production and labor. In China, people are free to believe or not. We do not become involved in this personal decision.

SPIEGEL: But you have announced plans to strengthen the so-called patriotic education campaign in the monasteries, which is also directed against supporters of the Dalai Lama.

Zhang: Every nation on earth teaches its people to love their motherland. We are organizing patriotic education everywhere, not just in the monasteries. Those who do not love their country are not qualified to be human beings. This is a matter of common sense.

SPIEGEL: Do you actually speak Tibetan?

Zhang: Just a few words. I have only been here a few months. But I do want to learn the language.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Zhang, we thank you for this interview.

Interview was conducted by editors Stefan Aust, Andreas Lorenz and Gerhard Spörl in Lhasa.

Posted at 5:44 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Financial Times August 28 2006 03:00

Will the Boat Sink the Water – the life of China’s Peasants by Chen Guidi and WU Chuntao, Public Affairs, Perseus books New York $25

China’s national audit office announced a new code of conduct after a macabre incident last week, when one of its auditors died of “excessive drinking and eating” at banquets hosted by the local electricity bureau whose books he was screening. His fellow auditors did not rush home in grief after their colleague’s death. Reportedly too upset to continue work after the bureau’s grande bouffe, they went on an all-expenses- paid trip elsewhere in China the next day to relax.

At first glance, this tragicomic scandal has little to do with China’s long-suffering farmers, even if it does have echoes in one tale of a newly translated book on the local peasantry by two Chinese researchers- cum-investigativ e reporters, Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao. In their account, a peasant demands an investigation into free-loading officials who are bankrupting the village with their banquets. Weeks later, he returns to demand the investigation be called off because the auditor had joined in the festivities.

Chen and Wu’s book is a graphic exposé of the deprivations of rural communities, told through three years of research in Anhui, one of China’s poorest and most populous provinces. A series of hair-raising case studies features a cast of brutal, bullying officials who enrich themselves by stealing land and grain, and imposing ever more ridiculous taxes on already impoverished citizens. The special imposts include collections to pay for “nutrition allowances for post-abortion operations” and charges for building a local theatre and paying the vet.

Every tax must be paid down to the last penny. People who resist are beaten, arrested and imprisoned, sometimes for months without charge. One psychotic official, who was made village chief while on probation for embezzlement and rape, savagely murders a group of peasants who refused to bend to his will.

Villagers take their complaints to the police and to more senior levels of government, at the county, prefectural or provincial level. Some even make the expensive, risky journey to Beijing to petition, in time-honoured fashion, the imperial centre.

Their efforts have little impact, which underlines the central point of the book. The horrors of the countryside are not new in China; nor are promises from on high to remedy them. But as with the drunken accountant partying himself to death on the tab of his audit target, the real failure is the absence of accountability.

In Chen and Wu’s story, Beijing comes across as a centre of relatively enlightened officialdom, struggling not just to impose its will on the rowdy countryside but even to find out what is happening there in the first place.

China’s leaders have long acknowledged the deprivation of rural communities. Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao, the present leadership duo, have made the issue a priority of their administration, abolishing with a flourish all agricultural taxes.

In this respect, Chen and Wu’s tales from the farming frontline are singularly on-message. But the accountability issue perhaps also explains how reaction to the book played out inBeijing in late 2003, when it waspublished in Chinese to great acclaim and then peremptorily banned.

After all, accountability cuts both ways. If local officials were to be held to independently enforced standards of governance and elections, the same strictures should surely apply to the higher-ups in Beijing.

China’s policymakers, however, need much more than just a dose of democracy to manage the immense challenges of the countryside. How, for example, do you peacefully and equitably move hundreds of millions of rural residents off the land and into cities, which is what China will have to do over coming decades?

About two-thirds of China’s 1.3bn people live in rural communities but for decades they have effectively been treated as second-class citizens, with their rights to move to urban areas sharply curtailed.

Then there is the issue of land ownership. Unlike in the cities, farmers cannot buy or sell their properties, only lease them. But officials can capitalise the value of rural land if they rezone it for commercial use, giving them a huge financial incentive to drive farmers from their properties.

Chen and Wu focus on another, less talked-about cause of the farmers’ woes - the multiple levels of government. They show how the decision to create township governments in the 1980s and give them the power to raise taxes has bred bloated and viciously self-interested bureaucracies.

Telling the truth about such injustices in all their horror is still not easy in today’s China. Chen and Wu recount the tale of one upright official who delivers bad news up the line about the parlous state of the local economy only to be consistently rebuffed.

Most grassroots officials survive and prosper by painting a rosy picture. They have a simple, survivalist credo - “No lies, nothing accomplished” . Chen and Wu express little optimism that the incentives that foster such chicanery will change in the near future.

The writer is the FT’s Beijing bureau chief

Copyright: The Financial Times Limited 2006

Posted at 6:36 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright The Washington Post
Sunday, August 27, 2006; Page B02

Anywhere else, it might have played out as just another low-stakes battle between policy wonks. But in Japan, a country struggling to find a brand of nationalism that it can embrace, a recent war of words between a flamboyant newspaper editorialist and an editor at a premier foreign-policy think tank was something far more alarming: the latest assault in a campaign of right-wing intimidation of public figures that is squelching free speech and threatening to roll back civil society.

On Aug. 12, Yoshihisa Komori — a Washington-based editorialist for the ultra-conservative Sankei Shimbun newspaper — attacked an article by Masaru Tamamoto, the editor of Commentary, an online journal run by the Japan Institute of International Affairs. The article expressed concern about the emergence of Japan’s strident new “hawkish nationalism,” exemplified by anti-China fear-mongering and official visits to a shrine honoring Japan’s war dead. Komori branded the piece “anti-Japanese,” and assailed the mainstream author as an “extreme leftist intellectual.”

But he didn’t stop there. Komori demanded that the institute’s president, Yukio Satoh, apologize for using taxpayer money to support a writer who dared to question Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi’s annual visits to the Yasukuni Shrine, in defiance of Chinese protests that it honors war criminals from World War II.

Remarkably, Satoh complied. Within 24 hours, he had shut down Commentary and withdrawn all of the past content on the site — including his own statement that it should be a place for candid discourse on Japan’s foreign-policy and national-identity challenges. Satoh also sent a letter last week to the Sankei editorial board asking for forgiveness and promising a complete overhaul of Commentary’s editorial management.

The capitulation was breathtaking. But in the political atmosphere that has overtaken Japan, it’s not surprising. Emboldened by the recent rise in nationalism, an increasingly militant group of extreme right-wing activists who yearn for a return to 1930s-style militarism, emperor-worship and “thought control” have begun to move into more mainstream circles — and to attack those who don’t see things their way.

Just last week, one of those extremists burned down the parental home of onetime prime ministerial candidate Koichi Kato, who had criticized Koizumi’s decision to visit Yasukuni this year. Several years ago, the home of Fuji Xerox chief executive and Chairman Yotaro “Tony” Kobayashi was targeted by handmade firebombs after he, too, voiced the opinion that Koizumi should stop visiting Yasukuni. The bombs were dismantled, but Kobayashi continued to receive death threats. The pressure had its effect. The large business federation that he helps lead has withdrawn its criticism of Koizumi’s hawkishness toward China and his visits to Yasukuni, and Kobayashi now travels with bodyguards.

In 2003, then-Japanese Deputy Foreign Minister Hitoshi Tanaka discovered a time bomb in his home. He was targeted for allegedly being soft on North Korea. Afterward, conservative Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara contended in a speech that Tanaka “had it coming.”

Another instance of free-thinking-meets-intimidation involved Sumiko Iwao, an internationally respected professor emeritus at Keio University. Right-wing activists threatened her last February after she published an article suggesting that much of Japan is ready to endorse female succession in the imperial line; she issued a retraction and is now reportedly lying low.

Such extremism raises disturbing echoes of the past. In May 1932, Japanese Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was assassinated by a group of right-wing activists who opposed his recognition of Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria and his staunch defense of parliamentary democracy. In the post-World War II era, right-wing fanatics have largely lurked in the shadows, but have occasionally threatened those who veer too close to or speak too openly about sensitive topics concerning Japan’s national identity, war responsibility or imperial system.

What’s alarming and significant about today’s intimidation by the right is that it’s working — and that it has found some mutualism in the media. Sankei’s Komori has no direct connection to those guilty of the most recent acts, but he’s not unaware that his words frequently animate them — and that their actions in turn lend fear-fueled power to his pronouncements, helping them silence debate. What’s worse, neither Japan’s current prime minister nor Shinzo Abe, the man likely to succeed him in next month’s elections, has said anything to denounce those trying to stifle the free speech of Japan’s leading moderates.

There are many more cases of intimidation. I have spoken to dozens of Japan’s top academics, journalists and government civil servants in the past few days; many of them pleaded with me not to disclose this or that incident because they feared violence and harassment from the right. One top political commentator in Japan wrote to me: “I know the right-wingers are monitoring what I write and waiting to give me further trouble. I simply don’t want to waste my time nor energy for these people.”

Japan needs nationalism. But it needs a healthy nationalism — not the hawkish, strident variety that is lately forcing many of the country’s best lights to dim their views.

steve@thewashingtonnote.com

Steven Clemons is director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation and co-founder of the Japan Policy Research Institute.

Posted at 6:33 PM · Comments (0)

——————————————————————————————————-
Thursday, August 24, 2006 (Copyright SF Chronicle)

Philip Hu fled Shanghai as a child after the communists took over China in
1949. After growing up in Taiwan, he went to UC Berkeley and eventually
became a Silicon Valley tech executive.
But he and his wife, Tanlie Chao, 55, have sold their house in San Jose
and plan to retire to Shanghai in September, part of a reverse migration
that reflects a turnabout among Chinese emigres.
“I’ve been living here and speak the language,” said Hu, 60. “But inside
I’m very Chinese.”
Well-to-do Chinese around the world are being drawn homeward by affordable
housing, food and recreation — as well as a sense of belonging. Driving
this trend are China’s booming market economy, improved transportation and
telecommunications, potential returns on real estate investments and the
emergence of a transnational identity for many of the emigres and their
children.
All this is despite the pollution, horrendous traffic and what Hu said are
people in Shanghai who lack the grace to stand in line or to apologize for
jostling someone.
“Everyone grabs whatever they want. You get used to it after a while. They
don’t mean to be rude, but that’s just how they were brought up,” said Hu,
who will leave behind two grown sons and a stepson.
He and Chao purchased their first Shanghai condo four years ago for
$250,000 at the urging of his brother, who was buying two units in the
same building.
“The center of gravity is shifting to China, but to be successful, you
need to be successful in the United States,” said Peggy Liu, 38,
co-founder of a venture capital firm, who moved from the Bay Area to
Shanghai with her husband and two sons — following her parents. “You need
a foot in both worlds.”
Culture and history also play a role, academics and community observers
say.
“It all comes down to one issue: the sense of belonging in America,” said
Marlon Hom, chair of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State
University. Until the 1940s, he noted, Chinese immigrants often returned
home because American society rejected them and denied them citizenship.
“In the past, it was discrimination from the white society; today, it’s
ethno-centrism among some Chinese immigrants.”
Ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Taiwan, as well as the
United States, are cashing out their investments and putting the money
into Shanghai’s real estate market, said Kenny Ho, associate research
director in the Shanghai branch of Jones Lang LaSalle, a real estate and
money management firm.
As a result of this booming demand, as well as rising incomes in China and
a lack of other local investment options, prices in Shanghai’s real estate
market have more than doubled since 2001, financial analysts say. But the
skeletons of new buildings continue to rise across the city, attracting
people buying properties as investments, future retirement homes or both.
For Bay Area residents not yet ready to move but interested in investing
in Chinese real estate, Milpitas mortgage broker and sales agent Infohome
sells shares in residential and commercial buildings in China using scale
models with miniature silver towers and broad avenues.
Since spring 2005, Infohome has sold about 240 commercial and residential
units for about $150,000 each from its showroom in a Milpitas strip mall,
where a variety of other businesses also cater to Asians.
“China is not a mature market, but a baby that will continue to grow no
matter how much it is fed,” said John Chen, founder of Infohome. Many of
the sales contracts he completes require owners to hold their property for
five to 10 years in return for a guaranteed average annual rent payment
equivalent to 8 percent of the original investment.
In China, there have been many complaints about such rental guarantees —
that developers allegedly inflate the value of the property and then pay a
slight penalty to break the lease. But Chen, a San Francisco native and
son of Taiwan immigrants, said the contracts he negotiates have penalties
of 100 percent of remaining rent they promised.
Eleanor Chang, director of marketing for United Commercial Bank, which
primarily serves Chinese American customers, has noticed an increase in
the last five years of ethnic Chinese from the Bay Area buying property in
the bustling cities of Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Beijing.
“In the U.S, the stock market is risky, going up and down, and there’s not
a huge opportunity to make a big gain in investments,” she said. “In
China, there might be a bigger upside, if they’re willing take the risk.”
In an attempt to cool down the overheating market and discourage
speculators, the Chinese government instituted new regulations last month.
Only foreign citizens who have lived in China over a year or have
representative offices in China can buy housing, but loopholes remain.
Some home-buyers considering retirement in China purchase condos to use
for business and vacation in the meanwhile. It isn’t possible to determine
how many buyers are speculating on the market and how many actually intend
to move to China.
Immigrant Michael Ngan purchased a $42,500, three-bedroom flat in
Guangzhou, in southern China, when he was working at an advertising agency
there in 2002. He moved to Newark last year, joining his wife and two
sons, 23 and 26, who had immigrated in 1994. His four brothers, sister and
mother also live the Bay Area.
When he retires, he would like to spend half the year in China and half
here. Although life in Guangzhou is more exciting, with more entertainment
and great restaurants, the tug of family in the Bay Area is too great,
said Ngan, 55. “It’s incomparable.”
Hu and Chao have three condos in Shanghai and one in Ningbao, which they
have decorated with touches such as a custom 10-foot-long copy of a famous
Chinese landscape in one condo’s dining room and ornately carved door
panels in the living room.
“The fun part is to go out to shop for all the construction materials,” Hu
said. “You think China is much more backward than here, but you go to
those markets — blocks of all kind of things.”
Hu and Chao have been spending more time in Shanghai each year — living
there in spring and fall and moving back in summer and winter, like
“migrating birds,” Hu said — but they decided maintaining two residences
was too much trouble.
In many ways, he has assimilated since he moved to the United States in
1969 — he speaks unaccented English and is tanned and fit from running,
skiing and playing golf. Yet, “it’s very natural for me in China,” he
said, “to be surrounded by my own people.”
In Shanghai, the green fees are reasonable — and include caddies. When he
and Chao play mahjong, a maid prepares food for them, Hu said. And Chao
said she can take private classes in painting or flower arranging and get
frequent massages.
If Chao and Hu have any major illness, they will fly back to the United
States. He’s canceling their health insurance and will pay out of pocket
until they are eligible for Medicare when they turn 65, just as any other
American citizen would be.
They plan to stay in touch with family — who live in Taipei, Hong Kong
and several U.S. cities — with Internet phone service, e-mail and visits.
Chao will leave behind her 90-year-old father and brothers and sisters.
Her American-born son, who works in Taiwan for his father, would rather
she stay in the Bay Area because he plans to move back here.
“I have mixed feelings,” she said. “Here it’s so pretty, and the air is
good.”
For his part, Hu is reconciling the reality he knows with his learning
from childhood that communists were the “evil empire.”
“These people are Chinese, and they’re basically the same as we are: one
of the most pragmatic people in the world. Once you have them taste money,
they never let go. Once they get used to the capitalist lifestyle, they
never go back to communism,” he said. “No way.”
Hu has reunited with relatives who never left China, though a distance
remains. “They have a totally different background and thinking,” he said.
“You feel in China, people look at you, how you dress and act differently.
They think you’re wealthy, better educated, and can speak English. You
live in a better house. You know more than they do. They give you more
respect.”
He and Chao socialize with about a dozen couples in Shanghai, many with
similar backgrounds. And Hu recently reunited with a middle-school
classmate from Taiwan at a mahjong game. That classmate in turn
re-introduced him to a high school classmate who also lived in the United
States before moving to China.
“It made me feel at home in Shanghai, that I was able to run into people.
And will continue to do so,” Hu said. “We’re all going the same way.”

New home, old home

Shanghai
Population: 20 million

Size: 2,448 square miles
Population density: Approximately 8,170 per square mile (the world’s
fourth most densely populated city, after London, Mexico City and New
York)
History: Shanghai was a small fishing village until the British colonized
it in the mid-19th century. It grew as a trading post and hub of
international culture and today is considered China’s economic and
cultural center.
Economy: A quarter of all commodities in China pass through Shanghai
ports. The average person in Shanghai makes $4,910 a year, nearly five
times the national average. The fast-growing city has nearly 2,900
skyscrapers that are 18 stories tall or taller.

San Jose
Population: 953,679 (6.7 million in nine-county Bay Area)
Size: 177.8 square miles (incorporated San Jose)
Population density: 5,394 per square mile
History: San Jose was California’s first civilian settlement. It was
incorporated in 1850 and served as the site of the first state capital.
Economy: Today it is the hub of Silicon Valley and the largest city in the
Bay Area, which has the fifth largest gross regional product in the
nation. The new, 18-floor City Hall is San Jose’s tallest building.
Sources: Bay Area marketing Partnership, City of San Jose, Frontline
World, transit.511.org

Posted at 2:28 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright Reuters

Fri Aug 25, 2006 5:53 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - While researchers have long shown that tall people earn more than their shorter counterparts, it’s not only social discrimination that accounts for this inequality — tall people are just smarter than their height-challenged peers, a new study finds.

“As early as age three — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests,” wrote Anne Case and Christina Paxson of Princeton University in a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The findings were based primarily on two British studies that followed children born in 1958 and 1970, respectively, through adulthood and a U.S. study on height and occupational choice.

Other studies have pointed to low self-esteem, better health that accompanies greater height, and social discrimination as culprits for lower pay for shorter people.

But researchers Case and Paxson believe the height advantage in the job world is more than just a question of image.

“As adults, taller individuals are more likely to select into higher paying occupations that require more advanced verbal and numerical skills and greater intelligence, for which they earn handsome returns,” they wrote.

For both men and women in the United States and the United Kingdom, a height advantage of four inches equated with a 10 percent increase in wages on average.

But the researchers said the differences in performance crop up long before the tall people enter the job force. Prenatal care and the time between birth and the age of 3 are critical periods for determining future cognitive ability and height.

“The speed of growth is more rapid during this period than at any other during the life course, and nutritional needs are greatest at this point,” the researchers wrote.

The research confirms previous studies that show that early nutrition is an important predictor of intelligence and height.

“Prenatal care and prenatal nutrition are just incredibly important, even more so than we already knew,” Case said in an interview.

Since the study’s data only included populations in the United Kingdom and the United States, the findings could not be applied to other regions, Case said.

And how tall are the researchers?

They are both about 5 feet 8 inches tall, well above the average height of 5 feet 4 inches for American women.

A copy of the paper can be found at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w12466.pdf.

Posted at 2:22 PM · Comments (0)

Copyright OhmyNews International, Seoul, South Korea, August 24, 2006

Li Dunqiu, director of the Korean Peninsula Research Center of China’s State Council. (Photo: Sunny Lee)

South Korea’s relationships with China and the U.S. have come under scrutiny recently.

Controversy surrounded America’s handover of wartime military control of South Korea to Seoul; and a recent report revealed that the South Koreans ditched a trade deal with China under U.S. pressure. South Korea is currently pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with the United States.

Li Dunqiu, a top Chinese expert on the Korean peninsula, argued in Beijing this month that Korea should make a strategic decision to come closer to China because “Korea’s future lies with China, not with the U.S.”

Dunqiu is the director of the Korean Peninsula Research Center of the State Council. The State Council is China’s cabinet of government. He makes frequent trips to Korea and the United States.

With China’s spectacular economic performance and its growing influence in East Asia, including the Korean peninsula, the U.S. is becoming wary of the change in the region’s hegemonic landscape.

Some think that the world’s current superpower and its rising competitor China, are “clashing” in the region’s hottest spot, each hoping to exercise the most influence.

Sunny Lee interviewed Li Dunqiu in Beijing on Aug. 21, 2006.

Lee: There are some lawmakers in South Korea who believe Korea should make a strategic partnership with China over America in the 21st century.

Dunqiu: They are correct. In the 21st century, Korea needs to come closer to China. First, China and Korea share common interests that are larger than those between Korea and the U.S.

In East Asia, America just wants to maintain its hegemonic order. The U.S. has little regard for stability, prosperity and common development in the region. The main reason is that essentially the U.S. itself isn’t located in the region. On the other hand, China pays closer attention to these issues than the U.S. does.

Does China want the reunification of the Korean peninsula?

In the Korean peninsula, the U.S. wants to maintain the status quo. China is different. The U.S. doesn’t want to see economic cooperation between China and North Korea, either. China, on the other hand, wants the two Koreas to improve their relationship because China believes doing so would also benefit itself. But the U.S. doesn’t want to see this [improvement].

Why?

It’s because if South and North Koreas improve their relationship, South Korea’s anti-American sentiment will get stronger.

America also doesn’t want to see the unification between South and North Korea. China on the other hand hopes to see improvement between the two Koreas, including economic cooperation and eventually reunification. A reunified and prospering Korean peninsula would bring immense economic benefits to China’s northeastern region [where China currently borders North Korea].

Could you talk of China’s regional strategy surrounding the Korean peninsula?

China’s regional strategy is essentially beneficial to Korea. America’s stance [against the unification] doesn’t benefit Korea. It is very clear which side is more beneficial to South Korea. Besides, the U.S. is behind Japan’s becoming not just an economic power, but now also its growing military might.

American support of Japan to become a military power gravely damages the interests of South Korea and China. A newly-armed Japan’s target of aggression will first be Korea, and then China. There is a clear difference of interest between China and America on it. Choosing America, South Korea will merely become its scapegoat.

In case of war, America will support Japan, not Korea?

Last Sunday, I met some lawmakers from the United States who were visiting Beijing. I asked them: “If there were a war between Korea and Japan, which side would you support?” They said they wouldn’t take a side.

“Not taking a side” fundamentally hurts Korea’s interests. Practically, Japan’s military power is number two in the world, after that of the U.S. Then, America’s “no engagement” will encourage the hawkish politicians in Japan to be more aggressive toward Korea.

If there is a dispute between China and Japan, America will also support Japan, although they wouldn’t say it publicly.

In economy, politics, security and culture, in all these areas, Korea and China have more things in common than it has with the U.S. So, my most important point is that in the 21st century, Korea’s strategic choice should be China, not America.

Posted at 2:17 PM · Comments (0)

Saturday August 5, 2006

Copyright The Guardian

If any books change the world, Republic has a good claim to first place. It is commonly regarded as the culminating achievement of Plato as a philosopher and writer, brilliantly poised between the questioning and inconclusive earlier dialogues and the less compelling cosmological speculations and doubts of the later ones. Over the centuries it has probably sustained more commentary, and been subject to more radical and impassioned disagreement, than almost any other of the great founding texts of the modern world. Indeed, the history of readings of the book is itself an academic discipline, with specialist chapters on almost every episode in the story of religion and literature for the past 2,000 years and more. To take only the major English poets, there are entire books on Platonism and Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Shelley and Coleridge, to name but a few, and there are many others on whole movements and times: Plato and Christianity, Plato and the Renaissance, Plato and the Victorians, Plato and the Nazis, Plato and us. The story of Plato’s direct influence on philosophy is another study in itself, one peppered with names such as Philo Judaeus, Macrobius, Porphyry, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, as well as the better-known Plotinus, Augustine or Dante. Sometimes the Plato in question is the author of other texts, notably the inspirational dialogue Symposium and the theologically ambitious Timaeus. But Republic is seldom far away.

Article continues

Anyone who stays very long in the vast silent mausoleums lined with works about Plato and his influence runs the risk of suffocating. Anyone writing on this topic must be conscious of an enormous and disapproving audience, dizzying ranks of ghosts overseeing and criticising omissions and simplifications. Many of these ghosts belong to the most brilliant linguists, scholars, philosophers, theologians and historians of their day. They do not take kindly to the garden to which they devoted their lives being trampled over by outsiders and infidels. And Republic is the shrine at the very centre of the sanctuary, since for centuries it has been the one compulsory subject in the philosophy syllabus, so these same scholars will have been educated with it as the centrepiece and inspiration.
Plato wrote his philosophy in dialogues, a form that requires different voices, and the ebb and flow of argument. It was already noted in antiquity that the Socrates who is the hero of these dialogues, and Plato himself, are shifting figures, readily admitting different interpretations: “It is well known that Socrates was in the habit of concealing his knowledge, or his beliefs; and Plato approved of the habit,” said Saint Augustine. One way of taking this is that Plato, and presumably Socrates, really did have doctrines to teach, but that for some irritating reason they preferred to unveil them only partially, one bit at a time, in a kind of intellectual striptease. This line has occasionally been taken by weak-minded commentators in love with the idea of hidden, esoteric mysteries penetrated only by initiates, among whom they are pleased to imagine themselves.

The right way of interpreting Augustine’s remark is that Plato felt philosophy was more a matter of an activity than of absorbing a static body of doctrine. It is a question of process, not product. Socrates remains the great educator, and those who came to him would be listeners and interrogators, participants in conversation, and would have to throw themselves into the labyrinths of thought. Passive reception of the word would count for nothing - this was one of the mistakes made by Plato’s opponents, the sophists, who charged fees for imparting what they sold as practical wisdom (one might think of the witless piles of “wisdom” and “self-help” literature that now choke bookshops). At the end of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, Socrates makes a speech despising reading philosophy as a poor second to doing it. Many people have made the same point subsequently. Schopenhauer describes reading as a mere surrogate for thinking for yourself, and in turn quotes the German polymath Goethe: “What you have inherited from your forefathers, you must first win for yourself if you are to possess it.” Robert Louis Stevenson argued that literature is but the shadow of good talk. “Talk is fluid, tentative, continually in further search and progress; while written words remain fixed, become idols even to the writer, found wooden dogmatisms, and preserve flies of obvious error in the amber of the truth.”

The insistence on engagement chimes with Plato’s adoption of the dialogue form, in which different voices get a hearing, and it is the twists and turns of the processes of argument rather than any set conclusion that help us to expand our minds as we read. Philosophy, in this view, is about discovering things in dialogue and argument (“dialectically”); anything read later could at best be a reminder of the understanding achieved in this process.

This dramatic conception of what Plato is about makes him harder to criticise. One can reject a conclusion, but it is much harder to reject a process of imaginative expansion, and if we take the link with drama seriously, it might seem as silly as “rejecting” King Lear or Ham